Question

Your software consulting company, with offices in 3 major U.S. cities as well as London and Frankfurt, has budgeted $300,000 to grow its customer base via digital marketing/advertising. From among SEO, Search Advertising, Email and content marketing, what do you recommend and why?

Answer 1

Ans: If you do content marketing the right way, you’ll actually be doing some key aspects of SEO just by virtue of the fact that you’re producing quality content. Here are a few ways this can happen:

• Relevant content has value to your existing followers. The people who follow you on social, who subscribe to your newsletter, your podcast, and your RSS feed, all of them will be attracted to good content, and some of them will share that content with their own networks. This is an organic phenomenon, and SEO plays a small part in that process.
  
  The bigger your set of followers, the more powerfully this will work for you. Of course, if you want to grow your follower base, you’re going to need traffic to your site, which means your back to search.

• Paid advertisements can go a long way to drive traffic to your pages. You can certainly pay to get your content found, and a good online marketing strategy includes paid advertising. (You still have to optimize your ads, which follows some of the same rules as SEO.)

• Search engines work for humans. If your content is relevant to a human audience, it will get found in search. There’s truth to this. Search engine algorithms are just trying to understand the fundamental connection between what humans ask for (in search) and what they expect to get. Therefore, if you make your content relevant to humans, it will inherently line up with some the factors search engines use to understand relevance. You’ll naturally use keywords; you’ll have useful titles; you’ll link to other content that helps reinforce your message. The things that demonstrate relevance will naturally be present in good content.

• Fresh content matters. Great content marketing strategies tend to put out lots of great content. Whether it’s regular blog posting, updated product pages, or new customer stories, there’s always something new to make in order to share and promote. Guess what? It turns out that search engines look at sites that are constantly producing new content and rank their pages higher. The logic is that if you’re making great stuff and keeping up to date, there’s a good chance that what you have to offer is what people really need.

All this is great, but it’s not quite enough.

The long and the short of it: If you don’t focus on SEO as part of your content marketing strategy, you’ll be doing much more harm than good. Content marketing strategy and SEO actually go hand in hand.

First and foremost, the content you create must actually be relevant (read useful, entertaining, helpful, valuable) to your audience if it’s ever going to be link-worthy or share-worthy, or even click-thru-worthy (if that wasn’t a thing, it is now). Nevermind your call to action. And you have to follow that up by ensuring your distribution channels are in full swing. This is why there’s so much emphasis on great content marketing. It’s foundational.

But search engine optimization should never be an afterthought any more than turning on the oven is an afterthought when baking a cake. You can have all the ingredients, but they won’t be much value until they’re fully baked.

Search engine optimization isn’t just for search engines. It’s for your audience, too. And you can’t ignore them.