Content Marketing… what does it have to do with SEO?
At PubCon Vegas 2014 (last week), I gave a talk on the relationship between SEO and content marketing and examined how the Tribune Content Agency uses SEO to influence and inform the overall content strategy on behalf of its clients. The content strategy encompasses the topic selection, content creation itself, the placement of branded content, and also how SEO sells branded content.
Yeah, so?
So, there had to be a reason there was a whole session devoted to the relationship between SEO and content marketing… the reason is that there are a great many unwashed heathens who believe that simply writing amazing content will — by itself, in the vacuum of space — magically morph into fat stacks of cash. This is simply not the case.
In order for you to accomplish any of your content marketing goals (build brand awareness, generate goodwill/warm fuzzy feelings toward your brand, bait some links, or help beef up your own site’s content inventory), you HAVE to use some SEO. You can’t not.
You need SEO in content marketing to:
- Identify your goals and benchmark performance
(So you know what you’re aiming for and can prove that the needle moved) - Select your themes and topics
(Good ol’ fashioned keyword research!) - Help you write that ehrmazing content!
- Help you decide where to distribute and promote your amazing content…
(You wouldn’t run a piece about estate planning on the newssite targeted to 20-somethings… you need to know where you’re target audience hangs out and distribute/promote your content *there*) - Run reports to show ROI
(Most of these reports look suspiciously like the other SEO reporting you do… except maybe filtered to focus on the specific pieces of content in question, or to look at referral/organic traffic to specific landing pages…)
