Winning the affection of strangers is hard, and well, daunting. You can go into a job interview with all of your points ready (where you’re from, your former responsibilities, your goals, etc), but you can’t just sit there reciting all of your points like a robot; it’s about conveying these fine aspects in a meaningful way that naturally fits the context and personalities involved. Combining your key points with authentic conversations is what really locks down an impactful impression and long-term connection.
In digital marketing, the same rules apply with SEO & content marketing. SEO alone won’t get you the traction you need to acquire lasting connections with your visitors—you need content marketing to fulfill this. And content marketing alone won’t attract new customers and boost organic reach—you need SEO to execute this.
SEO and content marketing are often discussed as separate entities, but they’re interrelated and more important than ever in driving relationships and brand awareness. As times and trends change, these strategies will help you deliver new and innovative ways to attract and maintain meaningful connections with your customers.
Here at Big Leap, we value trust above all else and this combo is the perfect recipe to foster trust and community with your followers. So keep reading, as we delve into all the key components of content marketing, and why you need both SEO and content marketing to be the cool kid on the block.
For more help converting the right traffic, check out the following:
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is about connecting with your target audience and maintaining them to drive brand awareness and revenue. How do you do this? By creating and distributing valuable and consistent content.
Content marketing levels up your game by producing innovative displays of affection. It helps you stand out with compelling and creative content that attracts potential leads. Producing such high-caliber material requires investing time to research your audience and set up clear goals. Our marketing experts at Big Leap are proud to offer content marketing services that will maximize:
- Your ROI with greater lead flow.
- Your brand awareness.
- Your thought leadership.
Benefits of Content Marketing
Content marketing entails a variety of formats such as blog posts, videos, eBooks, infographics, and courses. This diversity grants you the creative freedom to share powerful stories and channel your content into unique campaigns that:
- Establish trust with your visitors and customers.
- Build authority in your industry.
- Gain natural and meaningful exposure.
- Educate your audience about the products/services you offer.
- Supply your visitors with the guidance they need to mosey their way down the sales funnel.
Attracting your target audience with compelling and personalized content is just one part of the equation in driving engagement and sales—you need the technical components of SEO woven into your content to build a positive user experience. And a great experience combined with powerful content brings great rewards.
What Are the Differences Between SEO & Content Marketing?
Before we dive into the fine details of why your SEO needs content marketing, you need to understand their differences.
SEO Begins with Keywords
SEO is about gaining visibility online. SEO services often involve researching keywords to identify areas of your site/web page to optimize and, ultimately, garner more traffic.
This focus on driving visitors to your site feeds into the awareness stage of the marketing funnel; you’re bringing in people who will potentially (and hopefully!) turn into customers. But these search optimization efforts alone can’t do this. You need to find ways to maintain the interest and trust of your visitors by producing consistent content.
Content Marketing Begins with a High-Priority Initiative
Content marketing starts with a strategic goal that’s centered on heightening brand recognition. Maybe your company wants to build a subscriber base or pull their social media traffic to their site.
This focus on fulfilling company initiatives feeds into the awareness, consideration, and/or decision-making stages of the marketing funnel. It works on converting your visitors (all thanks to your SEO efforts) into leads by encouraging return visits and increasing brand loyalty.
Content marketing is critical to SEO because the content you create is often the same content you hope to have ranked in Google, and this content is what will encourage users to parade through your funnel.
Two Peas in a Pod: 4 Reasons You Need Both SEO & Content Marketing
Simply put, SEO orders, and content marketing delivers. They’re two peas in a marketing pod. They work together to drive traffic and convert that traffic.
And in case this isn’t convincing enough, we’re providing you an entire vine of reasons why you need both for a successful campaign:
1. Google Ranks High-Quality Content
Establishing a robust content marketing strategy is one of the 10 most important Google ranking factors. Google understands what high-quality content is; it isn’t just content that is easily indexable but content that provides in-depth and useful content for its readers. What can we say? Content is king, and SEO can’t exist without it.
Content marketing offers a comprehensive approach to SEO that helps businesses:
- House relevant keywords in compelling content that drives customer engagement and higher SERP rankings.
- Earn backlinks through stellar content. Inbound links play a crucial role in increasing traffic and the domain. When sites with high domain authority link to yours, this proves to Google that your site is relevant and trustworthy.
- Avoid falling into the pits of keyword stuffing. Content marketing tells you that you’re better than this, and focuses on delivering value to audiences.
2. Both Establish a Positive User Experience
Say you have the most stellar content for all to see, but there isn’t any SEO done on it; you didn’t optimize your metadata and robots.txt file. Chances are, your title and description will be cut off in the SERPs, and your web page will carry broken links that’ll make your site navigation a living nightmare to the average user.
The user experience is everything, and Google knows this. If you have a high bounce rate, Google will notice and drop your site at the bottom of the barrel. Thus, applying SEO into your content marketing strategy and vice versa enhances the user experience by:
- Conducting technical optimizations to help your content look appealing and coherent enough for visitors to navigate through the customer journey.
- Creating consistent content that feeds into the marketing funnel and creates a sense of community around your brand.
3. More Holistic Content That Delivers
By having all of the benefits listed above, what you’ll have is holistic content that entails critical components of search, conversion, customer journey, and brand. It’s the whole shebang that’ll get you well-rounded and all eyes on you in the digital landscape. More importantly, these elements will drive performance in:
- Keyword rankings
- Search engine traffic
- Conversions
- Delivering value to customers
- Visits and loyalty
4. Greater Content ROI
Last but not least, when you’re creating content with search, conversions, and the customer journey in mind, you’ll be able to receive more value per content piece that brings deeper insight into your ROI. For example, you’ll have metrics such as SEO success, lead quality, sales, web traffic, and onsite engagement to help measure each content’s contribution and value.
Garner the Attention You Deserve with SEO & Content Marketing
Trying to win the affection of search engines isn’t going to get you more revenue. Ultimately, you have to win the affection of people to feed your bottom line—and a robust content marketing strategy will help you get there.
The key is crafting valuable content with critical SEO components woven into them plus a solid dose of humanness to actually speak to your audience. And remember to have fun with it! Educate but be innovative. There are always new and entertaining ways to connect with your audience. And with SEO embedded in your content marketing strategy, you’ll have all vital bases covered to win the affection of your audience.
Contact Us Today for Quality Content
We get it—launching a new campaign is daunting, and it can be hard to understand where to even start. Well, look no further. Here at Big Leap, we understand that each business is unique. That’s why we specialize in crafting custom-tailored strategies that will give you a competitive edge in the digital landscape. So contact us. We don’t waste time on meaningless content; we’re in it to fuel genuine connections and help feed your bottom line.