4 Reasons Why Every Content Marketing Strategy Needs SEO

While there are many concepts with the digital marketing world that have triggered widespread discussion and debate over the years, arguably none has earned as much coverage as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

What’s more, there likely isn’t a business around that hasn’t attempted to reap the glorious rewards of SEO, only to find that it didn’t work – and that they wound up wasting their time and money. Alas, instead of making it to the search engine promised land (a.k.a. Page 1 of Google), they found themselves buried on page 14.

In fact, for a little while, some digital marketing pundits even went as far to declare that “SEO was dead”, and that it had been replaced by its much more customer-centric predecessor: content marketing.

And while it’s true that great content marketing IS vital and, frankly, invaluable when it comes to reaching customers and out-pacing competitors, it hasn’t replaced SEO. Rather, it has evolved and matured SEO so that it’s much more about long-term strategy, and much less about short-term tactics.

Specifically, here are the 4 reasons why every content marketing strategy needs SEO, and why all of the campaigns that we build and executive for our clients have a significant, ongoing SEO component:

1. SEO Enables Visibility

SEO helps ensure that great content is seen by target markets who utilize search engines (usually but not exclusively Google) to help launch or direct their shopping process, whether it’s B2C or B2B.

2. SEO Delivers Research

SEO keyword research delivers insights into what target markets are searching for, as well as what questions they’re asking, what problems or complaints they have, and so on. All of this intelligence can and should be used to generate relevant content.

3. SEO Drives Targeted Traffic

SEO isn’t just about driving generic traffic a website anymore: it’s about attracting targeted traffic (i.e. buyer personas) to certain pages or offers, so that a relationship can be built that ideally and ultimately ends in a transaction – whether that’s within minutes with some B2C solutions, or within weeks or months with some B2B solutions. Again, SEO has to work with content (and vice versa) to make this system work.

4. SEO Boosts Content, which Boosts SEO

The last key reason why SEO must be part of a winning content marketing strategy is arguably the most important, and the one that we emphasize the most here at Leap Clixx: great content is the ONLY kind of content that earns links from third parties (including customers), and these earned links are the fuel that boosts SEO.

Another way of looking at this is to note that, whereas in the past SEO led the way and drove customers to content, today things are the other way around: great content drives SEO (which in turn elevates great content). Remember: search engines are all about relevance and user experience. The more aligned a business is with this objective, the more SEO rewards they’ll reap.

The Bottom Line

As you can see, SEO and content marketing are integrated and must support each other. When they do, businesses spend less money to attract more high quality customers – which leads to more mindshare, marketshare, sales and profits.

To learn more about making SEO a core part of your content strategy, contact us today for your free no obligation consultation.