This is an unusually short post because I feel a rant coming on.
Content marketing is killing search engine optimisation – some would like you to believe that, but I’m not falling for it.
You have a limited marketing budget. On the one hand you have the content marketing camp telling you the smart money goes on high quality content because that will draw in those all important links. One the other is the SEO marketer that tells you the only way people will be able to find you in order to link to your content is through a robust SEO strategy.
So who is right?
They both are.
As far as I’m concerned, you can’t have one without the other.
SEO won’t work without high quality content (if anyone tries to tell you otherwise they are probably practising some dodgy black hat techniques) and, surprise surprise, high quality content is useless without SEO.
SEO and content go hand in hand
A website with loads of content, but no SEO is a dusty online library that no one ever enters.
A website with a strong SEO strategy and high quality content is a popular and well-visited knowledge repository that attracts links like there’s no tomorrow.
That means it’s time for the SEO and content marketing industries to stop squabbling and pull together.
Online marketing is all about the user experience. That means offering great information that will help your customers, make their lives easier and generally help them solve the issues they are facing. In doing so they’ll see you as a company that cares and has their best interests at heart – win win.
So, is content killing off SEO?
No, it isn’t.
They should be working together, so if you want to succeed you must have both.