SEO Vs. Content Marketing: Differences and Strategy

Content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) are the modern marketing giants. Before we proceed towards comparison of the both, for the people who are not acquainted with these terms shall be introduced to them.

Search Engine Optimization is the process of getting traffic from the free, organic or natural search results on search engines.

It is done by gaining higher ranking, i.e. more visual presence when someone searches for your keywords or something related to your brand, your product or the nature of the product you deal in.

Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience, with the objective of driving profitable customer action through interest generation and information publication.

The relationship between SEO and content marketing

These two strategies are often confused since there is a bit of overlap between the two. However, they have a mutual relationship in fact. This relationship is explained as follows—

Including keywords in the content created by you, helps improve its rank in search engines, leading more traffic’s attention towards your brand, which in turn will be and effective measure in reaching your content marketing goals.

Conversely, adding strong content to your site will improve its authority, which will give a boost to your overall SEO. Essentially, the better your SEO, the better your content will perform—and vice versa.

SEO vs Content Marketing: Major Differences

Now that we have established an understanding of an existent relationship between the two, let us now move towards the differences between the two.

While SEO focuses on attracting users by initially facilitating visibility to search engines and reaching higher ranks, content marketing focuses on engaging users directly, which, in turn, affects the SEO.

It is arguable that the primary goal of SEO is facilitating users, and the real focus for content marketing is enhancing user experience.

Following are the significant differences between SEO and Content Marketing—

1) Technical SEO

Technical SEO is a specific area of SEO that has nothing to do with content marketing. It includes things like optimizing your site for mobile devices, improving site speed, organizing and optimizing your site navigation structure, and finding crawl errors and duplicate content.

All these are computer application based activities and have nothing to do with content marketing.

2) Reader Experience

User experience has no effect on rankings, optimization (SEO), because reader experience is the realm of content marketing.

If your users are the focus of your content creation, and not what rankings are you getting on the search engines, you are tilted towards the team content marketing.

3) Conversions

SEO will get traffic to your site, but it doesn’t promise immediate conversions.

Content marketing does more for your campaign once visitors are actually on your site, learning about your brand, and potentially reaching out or buying something, thus promising better conversion rates.

4) Audience

Whenever you are creating content, you should keep your target audience in consideration. This means that your content (of any sort) shall be designed in such a manner that it is suitable for your human visitors.

SEO, conversely, requires much more knowledge about search engines and their crawlers. The fact is that search engines themselves weigh keywords, title tags, headers, and other code-related elements much more heavily than your average visitor.

5) Approach

Due to difference in audiences, it inevitably becomes mandatory for youto have different approaches to these both. For SEO, you take an analytical approach to all of the changes you make.

You dig into the hard data, and research keywords to determine new opportunities for growing your traffic and rankings. Considering that search engines use algorithms to deliver their results, a data-based strategy is essential.

But since, your human visitors aren’t nearly this scientific, your success depends on creativity to a certain degree. Attracting the attention of potential customers requires the ability to do something completely unique.

6) Value

SEO and Content marketing have a value addition effect on your site and marketing strategy. While, SEO primarily serves to attract qualified traffic to your site, and directs the ways to reach new visitors.

Content marketing has more to do with keeping those visitors interested once they arrive on your site and persuading to become customers.

Conclusion

From the short explanations given above, it should be clear that the main difference between SEO and content marketing is that SEO is more technical and has to do with the website design, structure and behavior while content marketing is how to get more exposure online with the use of content.

With SEO you will make sure that your website has the proper titles, URLs and descriptions, fast loading, has an easy to use menu, images have the proper alt tags and many more.

With content marketing you need to decide what content to publish, how to present it and how to promote it online so that it is appears in front of your target audience.

We sure have established differences between the two for better understanding of the two processes, but we cannot ignore the fact that these two co-exist. You need to implement the elements of both the strategies to excel in your venture.