When you are designing a website or media campaign, you may hear a lot about search engine optimization (SEO) as a strategy to focus on. What you may not realize is that the content of your website is equally important to what keywords you are using and how many times they pop up in your articles and blogs. You can compare content marketing and SEO to butter melting on a toasted piece of bread, and you can compare a Kansas City SEO company such as Salt Manage to the toaster.
Some people may say that you cannot use both strategies and still have an effective campaign, but the opposite is true. SEO may have a narrower focus and a more technical application, but the best way to employ an effective SEO strategy is to channel its specific technical endeavors into content marketing. In the same way, content marketing has a broad, more holistic application, and the best way to capture its success is to apply SEO techniques in its implementation.
While the bread and butter are two separate things, they all work together and blend seamlessly to create a golden, delicious and balanced bite.
Another way to look at it is to think of SEO as a user making demands with content marketing fulfilling those demands. There is no such thing as SEO without content. You need to have words, articles, blogs, substance, keywords, and verbiage. Content makes SEO.
All about content.
The practical application of content marketing is using keywords in ways that would make an effective SEO campaign.
If a fundamental component of SEO is keywords (researching, utilizing and tracking your ranking of them in the SERPs), then how would you be successful in using keywords if your content is lacking? The only way to effectively use those valuable SEO keywords is to employ them strategically throughout your content. Content marketing is about substance, written by humans for humans, and using keywords that your research has determined you should target. If your content is lacking, then traffic and time spent on the page will decrease, your reputation will follow, and eventually clicks and ranking will drop drastically. If one of your marketing campaign’s key goals is to gain a lot of link backs to your site, then you need to ensure that you have quality content. If people like what they see or find it useful in some way, then they are more likely to share. Websites must have good content to have good rankings. Salt Rank is a Kansas City SEO company that builds for the good of the user. Whether searching, selecting, or reading content; the information found must be valuable and time-sensitive.
What does a Kansas City SEO company do?
Think of the user when designing your site strategy. Think about why you want to provide a good sitemap on your site. Users need find what they are searching for more easily. Why would you want an optimized robots.txt? So search engines can better crawl your site and readers can see your content. Why do you want all your tags to be in the right place? So your content can be easily found, produces accurate search results, and more readers are drawn to the material. If you are creating a site for a company in Kansas City, then posting about the best fish tacos in California may not answer the questions of users with a Midwest destination.
Don’t just set it and forget it!
Another important factor to remember is that your content needs to be kept continuously up to date. If you know SEO, you know that fresh content gets rapidly indexed and registers higher in SERPs than older content with lower value. When this fresh content appears on a site with historic authority, you can be sure that you are going to get a good SERP boost. Good SEO means consistent output of content. Consistent output means that you are doing content marketing correctly. Marketing is an active verb. So, when using it to describe content marketing, you are talking about a consistent action. It’s not something that you can do and then just leave. This requires you to begin doing it, and then keep on doing it. Set aside a regular time-frame to sit down and go through your content, adding, changing, enhancing and deleting things as necessary.
Seek out help.
Whether you are new to the online marketing game in Kansas City, or whether you are an old pro, seek out a marketing agency that specializes in online marketing. They may be able to meet with you as an advisor to help you with putting together your own marketing strategy campaign, or you may want them to take over and use their expertise. Their knowledge and expertise will likely be a valuable asset for a successful online marketing campaign.
Final thoughts.
There are two points to make in conclusion. The first being that you’re not an SEO expert unless you’re also a content marketer. Likewise, you’re not a content marketer unless you’re also an SEO expert. While some may call themselves exclusively content marketers or saying they specialize only in SEO, they likely don’t even realize how integrated their approach actually is and, in reality, must be to be truly effective. Secondly, your SEO campaign will never be as successful as it would be if you integrated content marketing. In the same breath, your content marketing campaign cannot be as successful unless you are integrating SEO. Your content goes nowhere unless people search and find it. In order to make your content found you need SEO.
