Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Today I want to talk about two of my favorite online marketing disciplines: SEO and content marketing.

I’ve had a breadth of experience in both, as I spent years as an SEO before I transitioned into content marketing.

Let’s look at three specific examples of how SEO can improve content marketing, across all stages of a campaign....

The perceived quality of a web page or piece of content isn't based solely upon words. There are a lot of other factors to take into account, like load time, interface design, image quality, formatting, and so on.

Of course, "quality" means different things to different people, but I'd argue that at a basic level, focusing too much on keywords is a bad thing -- it can actually cause quality to suffer.

The goal of creating content shouldn't be to come up with a bunch of great keywords; it should be to come up with great content. Call it whatever you want, but if it's good, it's good -- just like Shakespeare said. The search engines of the future aren't going to punish folks for underusing keywords or failing to have an expertly crafted, keyword-optimized page title ... but they will continue to punish folks for overusing keywords....

“The content marketing industry will be a $300 billion industry by 2019, and SEO is forecasted to be an $80 billion industry by 2020,” said Betts.

SEO is the voice of the consumer and it delivers marketers powerful insights, according to Betts. But unless it’s paired with content, marketers won’t realize its full potential.“SEO, alone, is not enough to guarantee success.

Content marketing, alone, is not enough to guarantee success,” said Betts. “Together, they build a better customer experience. There’s a massive opportunity for people who are connecting the dots.”

Here are the group’s top takeaways for doing so....

I’ve been building SEO-driven, Adsense/Affiliate monetized sites for 4 years now. I’ve been through every Panda update and Penguin update. I've survived a lot of them, but I've been absolutely crushed by some of them as well. If getting crushed is how you learn, then I've learned a lot.

I started out building hundreds of microniche sites with content as cheap as $3/500 word article, to creating sites that received thousands of FB, Twitter, Reddit, and Stumble upon shares - even though my goal was solely to drive organic search traffic.

One article got over 100,000 likes on Facebook and millions of visitors. It cost me $30 to outsource and I made no effort to optimize it for social.

I don’t claim to be a content creation expert, but I’ve picked up a thing or two over the years, and this is the guide to SEO content creation I wish I had when I started....