In my career as the online marketer, I have been asked at various instances “Are SEO and Content Marketing two exclusive competing forces in the world of digital marketing?”, “Can the success of one tool means the death of the other?” Or whenever there is a question about the future of SEO, it always appears as if the SEO is going to die making way for the emergence of Content Marketing as the sole winner of online marketing race. In your career as the SEO expert and Content Marketer, you may have come across a situation where you were required to defend your position as one against other. But, is it the case? I believe no! When things as distinct as SEO and Pay Per Click can go hand in hand, boosting your website and its ranking, how can things as mutually dependent as SEO and Content Marketing be at odds with each other? They are simply not. In fact, they are two sides of the same coin which cannot exist without each other’s back.

What is SEO & Content Marketing?

To make things simple, I will go through the definitions of both SEO and Content Marketing to highlight what look like the apparent similarities and differences. According to the world’s top rated online marketer Neil Patel:

“SEO is the process of optimizing your online content, so that a search engine likes to show it as a top result for searches of a certain keyword.”

So, if is SEO is optimization of online content, what exactly is Content Marketing? Let’s have a look at the definition of Content Marketing from Content Marketing Institute.

“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

What Overlaps?

Okay! Right from the definition of these terms, few of the similarities are evident.

• SEO and Content Marketing are both about online content.
• SEO and Content Marketing both have clearly defined marketing goals.
• SEO and Content Marketing are both focused on website conversions.

Now, coming to an implicit similarity between Content Marketing and SEO, it is the “customer-focus.” While, in the case of SEO, the customer focus is often projected as producing technically sound content experience, in the content marketing, it is advertised as ‘humanizing the content.’ At the end of the day, both are for Humans, and both are Technical! There is no successful SEO strategy without a content designed for humans, and there is no successful content marketing campaign without technical correctness. The similarity is uncanny.

So, the next question may be “are SEO and Content Marketing the similar things?” No!

The SEO and Content Marketing are two distinct marketing strategies which overlap, collaborate, and work together to create successful online campaigns. Now, from this point on, I will be talking about how SEO and Content Marketing collaborate and work together?

There is NO such thing as Content Marketing OR SEO: (This should be changed. I got your point but still it needs to be changed)

Let’s keep this straight; there is no such thing as content marketing or SEO, it is always SEO AND Content Marketing. Either you do both, or you do none. Just like there is no apple pie without apple or crust, there is no successful online campaign without SEO or online marketing. It shows that not only both of these strategies get along well, but they are a perfect fit.

Borrowing an analogy from the Kissmetrics blog, I can safely say that the person named “Online Marketing” does not have any Dissociative Personality Disorder and both his personalities SEO and Content Marketing live in harmony, driving his success. Enough of the word games, let’s focus on how the two collaborate.

SEO demands, Content Marketing Supplies:

Boasting about the magic of SEO, there is already information about how SEO drives crazy traffic to your website. But, what one needs to understand, and it is not so difficult if you are an SEO expert yourself, is that SEO has certain requirements. SEO integrates both On-page and off-page techniques resulting in a holistic approach to marketing, and the bottom line of these techniques is ‘content, the freshly written, crawler friendly and interesting content that can entice the audience. So, the SEO demands content and Content Marketing supplies freshly written, crawler friendly and interesting content.

SEO is about Keywords Optimization; Content Marketing is about Keywords Utilization:

            SEO is all about keyword optimization so that the content begins to show in the top Search Engine Page Results (SEPRs). But, can there be optimization without the strategic utilization of keywords in the content. If you have been penalized by Google Panda for over stuffing your content with keywords or for keyword scarcity, you would already know that a good content has a proper utilization of the keywords. And Content Marketing fulfills the requirement for creating a coherent content with a right number of keywords adjusted to maximum effectiveness. For example, if you are a local Los Angeles SEO Company and all you do is to stuff few words between the repetition of Los Angeles keyword, it will not make sense to any of Los Angeles dwellers neither the local web crawlers.

SEO + Content Marketing = Technical Correctness + Humanized UX

It may appear that SEO is there only to attract search engine crawler through the right tags, metadata, and URLs. But, no! as much as SEO is about technical soundness of the website, its ultimate receptors are customers that are human beings. The search engine crawlers appreciate the content which is written for human beings and is read, shared and talked by human beings. The part about humanizing the User Experience of the content is funneled through the content marketing. With right tags, metadata, infographics and a piece of compelling writing, the two parts of a great online marketing campaign, technical correctness and humanized UX come together.

When SEO is local, Content Marketing is Local:

The Online Marketers including Neil Patel, Moz, Search Engine Land emphasize on the success of Local SEO strategies. The SEO right from the keywords to other meta tags, have become local and content marketing is speedily catching up the trend. If there is something needs to be written on SEO Los Angeles, the content marketing would not be focused on audience in Missouri. It will be focused on readers in Los Angeles.

Content Marketing is the Input; SEO is the Output:

Thankfully, I do not think there is any controversy surrounding the consistent nature of SEO or Content Marketing. There is no such thing as enough of optimization, now let’s sit back and earn. If your content is old, it is stale, and no one is reading it. If no one is reading it, there is no optimization. Mind me, even though crawler is a robot, it still loves the same content which humans do. So, what fills the gap in SEO output? Content marketing! Content Marketing consistently provides the fresh, relevant and valuable content for the defined audience. And when humans are reading you and sharing your content, Google or be it Bing or Yahoo keep loving your blog or website. What is the result? Consistent SEO output.

Take Home?

SEO and Content Marketing, the two sides of the same coin:

What is the take-home lesson from all of this rant about SEO and Content Marketing? I hope you have already understood it by now. But, there is no harm in reiterating it again, SEO and Content Marketing are the two sides of the Online Marketing Campaign. As there is no coin with one side, there is no successful campaign, without each of them.

So, what should you do the next time someone asks you if you are the content marketer or an SEO expert? Or more annoyingly, which of these is going to win the online marketing battle? You do one of the two things,

You ask them to read this article and know it themselves.

Or

You stay put and let them learn the online success hard way.