How Can Content Marketing and SEO Co-Exist?
Here’s a true story, brought to us — and now to you — by one of our new clients. We won’t mention any names to protect everyone’s privacy. Since the story relates to all businesses, our client’s industry, location and size don’t even matter.
Every business needs to attract new customers, and many use content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) to achieve results online. Content marketing can’t replace SEO, but SEO can’t be effective without content marketing. While they have to co-exist, your business has to find a workable balance between them.
Differences and Similarities
Both content marketing and SEO are inexact sciences. Both take some time to take effect and pay off. Both use the power of internet searches to prove that your business is the best option to the potential customers searching for products or services like yours. Yet each serves a slightly different purpose:
- SEO uses various techniques to bring visitors to your website. It delivers visibility, so people can actually find your website. And a good SEO expert or firm makes sure your website attracts the right kind of people: those who may buy from you.
- Content marketing, on the other hand, provides relevant information in a way that website visitors can understand and digest. It answers questions and builds trust. It’s content marketing that persuades visitors to actually take action and contact your business.
SEO Services Can’t Do Everything
Content marketing and SEO relate to each other, but neither can ignore the other, and that’s the crux of this story. In this case, the client was working with an SEO expert, who was doing everything he knew to perfect the visibility of the client’s website. Some of these techniques included:
- Doing keyword research to pick the most appropriate phrases to target
- Providing backlinks, linking to the company site from other reputable websites
- Identifying website pages to ensure that the site covers all the necessary bases
The issues began when the client questioned the SEO expert. It wasn’t about the results, as they hadn’t even progressed that far. The SEO expert was only concerned with optimizing the site, as that’s the focus of SEO. But the client wanted an appealing site, too, one the company could be proud of.
When the SEO expert claimed the look and feel of the website wasn’t important, the client felt offended, and the relationship spiraled downhill from there. Now, we’re not stating that all SEO experts act this way. Most base their techniques on solid research. But even SEO experts disagree on strategy among themselves.
Business Requires Trust as Well as Results
The client made the painful (and expensive) decision to release the SEO expert. It meant admitting the relationship was irreparably damaged. It meant acknowledging that the money already paid was spent in vain. It meant that the client still had to find a way to market the business, somehow bringing content marketing and SEO into harmony.
Enter Ray Access. The client contacted us and presented the dilemma. While a content marketing firm like Ray Access can produce website and blog content to get the business noticed, we’re not in the SEO business. We don’t provide backlinks or track traffic.
How Content Marketing and SEO Work Together
So the client wanted to be sure that we could help the business move toward its goals of growth. Can content marketing replace SEO? No. But content marketing builds long-lasting, organic value, meaning that once it’s in place, the value of the content stays high for a long period of time. If it’s done correctly, content marketing answers the questions potential customers are typing into their search engines.
Every business website needs compelling content to present its case to motivate visitors to respond with a call or email message. Content marketing and SEO both work to bring visitors to the site, although content marketing’s strategy is more inbound-focused than outbound-focused. But SEO alone can’t help visitors once they arrive on the site. Content marketing creates the environment that turns visitors into customers.
Contact Ray Access today to discover how content marketing can help your business.
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.