Content is king. And SEO is the king’s right hand man. 

We cannot emphasize the importance of content in the world of marketing. The type of content we consume has evolved over the years but the definition of content marketing has more or less remained traditionally and digitally relevant. Content marketing is the process of creating valuable content for an audience with the aim of generating leads. It is aimed to relate to your target market, improve the brand perception, image, drive sales, traffic and gain traction in the digital world.  As for SEO, search engine optimization, is also a form of marketing that involves gaining traffic, increasing visibility, and improving content.

Both forms of marketing are part of digital marketing plans and they are both often misunderstood. So let’s get our facts right!

What’s Content Marketing? 

Content marketing is a form of inbound marketing. It drives people towards you, brings them in, reels them, instead of having to push it towards people. Relevant traffic is obtained with the help of relevant content.  There are so many benefits to a powerful content marketing strategy in a business. A good content marketing strategy will improve the brand image, increase brand awareness, help your business gain a competitive advantage, turn your leads into sales, increase web traffic, improve visibility on social media and so many more. 

Like I said, the type of content has evolved. But there are some basics and elements of any content that makes it relevant to your digital marketing strategy. Content marketing whether it is in the video format or a blog, it is never focused on selling or pushing a product to someone. The end goal of content marketing is to gain maximum visibility among people. Maximum awareness, visibility and education is obtained when people actually see your content. And You cannot make people see your content, even for the sake of entertainment without optimizing your content.

This is often where many get confused with SEO and content marketing. SEO. People often think of the two as the same thing. In hindsight, we understand why people assume it is the same thing. Google tells us it’s the same, so do the big news media agencies. But good marketers know how to identify the distinctive difference between the two. 

What Is SEO?

SEO, short for search engine optimization, is the process of maximizing the visibility of your business on search engines. The search engine refers to big names such as Google and Bing. A good SEO strategy helps increase the relevancy of your web pages on the google search engine. The increased relevance increases the visibility, hence the boost in the web traffic to your site. 

SEO is quite a simple process. As complicated as people make it sound, SEO practices are not complex or difficult. But they do require a bit of experience and technical skills which are not as difficult to master. SEO depends on the algorithm of Google and keyword relevancy. The crawlers in google literally crawl through thousands of pages of the web, collect their information, analyze them according to the algorithm and determine the order of appearance on the search engine. Popping up on the first page sounds intimidating but with the money and time for SEO, this is a possible feat. 

There is again another misconception that digital marketing is all about SEO just as people believe content marketing is the same as SEO. Before clearing the misperception of content marketing and SEO, it is important to understand that SEO is only a strategy and a tactic in a holistic digital marketing strategy. SEO marketing determines the success of your digital marketing as it is responsible for increasing your site’s maximum visibility. People do millions of searches every year. How well you did your SEO, determines how many times people come across you upon a search query. 

Content Marketing Versus SEO 

You cannot do content marketing without SEO. And you cannot do SEO without content. Perhaps this is the reason why so many people believe SEO is taking over content marketing. We have been hearing about SEO content so much lately that we are unable to differentiate them both at this point.

The words you write, the video you create, the description, the plot, the story, and even the keywords you use are relevant to search engines. How do you optimize each and every one of these in the overall content to rank first on google? Of course, SEO is your answer. 

SEO demands more relevant content from businesses and marketers. No matter how exciting and unique your content is, google won’t recognize it unless you make the content seem relevant to its algorithm. The digital marketing channels you use to promote your business mean nothing without the content and the content means nothing without SEO practices. 

SEO improves and increases your chances of being right in front of your target audience. This seo specialist in Malaysia does a great job in telling your customers to “go to this website”. You certainly cannot improve SEO without good content too. While these two may seem like the same thing and serve the same purpose, they only are mere overlaps of similar people. We would not say it is the two sides of the same coin, but rather the opposite sets on the Venn diagram. Both combine and overlap, but they don’t integrate. They are separate entities that join forces to create quality, engaging content that ranks high drives traffic, and boosts your chances of being seen by your customers. 

Many make the mistake of choosing one or the other. You cannot choose to have a content marketing strategy without thinking about ways to improve your SEO strategy. Your SEO strategy consists of analyzing google analytics like crazy, searching for rich highly ranked keywords, reading the behavior of people, making your content easy to read, optimizing the title tags, understanding your competition and their sites, and obtaining backlinks. Backlinks along with keywords might make the biggest difference in your content. But you cannot include relevant keywords without content. Nor can you get a link back without engaging content. 

Is your content written or in the video format? Make it SEO relevant. Is it just a podcast? Make your description highly relevant and obtain links from big names or other pages that Google deems relevant. For instance, imagine this article or blogpost getting a backlink from the MOZ, a world-famous SEO software suite backed by leading SEO experts. They rank high in the google pages for any search query related to SEO. Getting a backlink from a relevant site on the search engine is pretty invaluable in the world of both SEO and content. You gain exposure, awareness and improve your overall digital marketing plan. 

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