The Fine Line Between Content Marketing And SEO

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a digital myth for many businesses, with Google updating rules and algorithms frequently, some competitors are using black hat techniques like keyword stuffing to achieve higher search engine rankings.

SEO is one of the most important factors for your website (if it isn’t, it should be) and there’s a fine line you need to understand about how it integrates with content marketing to maximise a website’s digital presence.

With two thirds of all web users never moving past the second page of Google search results and 40% of all revenue captured by organic traffic, SEO needs to be top of mind every time you’re talking about marketing strategy.

Content marketing and best practice SEO techniques work cohesively to take your website to the front page. Here’s our tips on how you can do that.

Don’t give in to black hat techniques

A staggering amount of businesses will use any possible way to push their website to the top of the search ranking list, they’ll overload their content with keywords, hidden links, spam blogs, low-quality back links and tiny text.

These black hat techniques may give you a short term temporarily boost to search engine rankings, but the complex and consistently updated Google algorithms will catch you, it’s only a matter a of time. At The Walk, we promote the high road – a purist approach to give your website an SEO boost, the one it deserves without damaging your business’s reputation or trading its integrity.

How to make content marketing work for you

Content marketing needs to be thought of as a strategy, it’s a way towards a means. It can be executed through a variety of mediums and channels like social media, video, blogs and much more. The fine line between this and SEO is that SEO is a much more narrow and technical discipline, content marketing is a diverse strategy to tell your brand story while blending in specific technical SEO strategy in broad strokes.

To think of it in simplistic terms, SEO is about making your content more easily found, content marketing is the delivery system that gets your content in front of people where they already are.

Organically integrate keywords into your content marketing strategy

SEO keywords are a vital and important part of content marketing. It’s essential for businesses to utilise keyword research to understand what users are searching for, trending topics and the types of websites they’re interacting with.

A common temptation with keywords is writing almost unreadable content with keyword-rich pieces. No audience wants to read jargon content and search engine algorithms are quick to pick on such tactics. It’s crucial that as humans, we’re writing for humans and we should be organically including keywords to guide our writing.

In the video below, Rand Fishkin is illustrating the process of creating your own content-to-keyword map to discover where to optimize, what content to build, and how to successfully target keywords when you’re auditing a site.

Creating fresh content that’s with the times

A universally accepted Google algorithm green tick of approval is to consistently create new and relevant content. New content frequently gets indexed and ranks considerably better than old and stagnant content.

A side benefit of creating interesting and relevant content is that a third-party website may decide to use your content piece as a reference point, then you can begin reaping the benefits of backlinks from authoritative websites. While there are benefits of having a constant stream of new content being published on your website, focusing on quality and relevance will ensure real, long lasting benefits.

It’s not enough to be creating fresh content all the time, it’s important to identify where your audience’s attention is and to thoughtfully provide intriguing content. Whether that’s in the form of a blog, testimonial, podcast, video or organic SEO, identifying these mediums is just as important as deciding what content we’re producing.

How The Walk can help?

The Walk is an integrated marketing agency in Melbourne, we pride ourselves on being media agnostic to find the most appropriate marketing medium and brand strategy to solve your business problem. We’ve developed a 3-step process (insights, strategy and content) to achieve results in almost everything that we do

What makes us different from other agencies is that we factor in your strategy, your problem and craft a thoughtful method that works across channels, with each supporting the other.

Multi-channel marketing is proven to work and ensures that your brand is remembered and top-of-mind as your prospect comes closer to making a purchasing decision. As with all of the work we do, we aim to directly impact your bottom line.

From conducting keyword research to creating content strategies to solve complex problems, we take your audiences on a journey through content to create a meaningful relationship. And with our deep understanding of the interchangeable dynamic between content marketing and SEO, we have a vision of how web content can be SEO optimised while still remaining meaningful, high quality and fully customised to the needs of your business.

Create a content marketing strategy with our useful content marketing guide to take your business to the next level.