Content marketing and SEO: Creating an integrated SEO plan

SEO often finds itself siloed away from other marketing tactics when the best results come from tight integration.

Two tactics that should absolutely be integrated for the best results are SEO and content marketing. 

This article examines how to combine your SEO strategy with your content marketing efforts to create an integrated SEO plan. 

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is defined here on Search Engine Land by Julia McCoy as follows:

“Content marketing is the process of planning, creating, and distributing relevant, valuable content (like blogs, videos, podcast episodes, ebooks, guides, and more) with the intent of attracting and engaging a specific audience.”

What is content marketing? Defining marketing’s present and future

Typically, content created and promoted will help the reader in some way and, in some instances, it will be purely for entertainment.

Red Bull does a great job with entertaining content marketing by aligning themselves with lots of high-octane sports.

A great example is Red Bull Stratos, where Felix Baumgartner parachuted to Earth from space. This is pure entertainment, yet it is well aligned with the brand.

For the average business, the content you publish is likely to be a little more practical and related to the pains, gains and jobs that your target customer struggles with

For instance, if you are a kitchen company, you may publish content about measuring the kitchen or the types of units you could install. Ultimately, you want to get in front of the customer early in the purchase process to start a dialogue with them. 

On the other hand, my agency works with businesses on SEO and digital marketing, so we tend to publish content that helps people improve their SEO. We mainly talk to business owners and in-house SEOs who need help with more technical or heavy-duty strategies.

This exposure helps us demonstrate our expertise and build relationships with companies we can help. It’s marketing but in a nice, non-sales-focused way. Content, done well, is marketing that feels good and is not sleazy or pushy.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Land defines SEO as follows:

“SEO stands for ‘search engine optimization.’ In simple terms, SEO means the process of improving your website to increase its visibility in Google, Microsoft Bing, and other search engines whenever people search for:

• Products you sell.
• Services you provide.
• Information on topics in which you have deep expertise and/or experience.”

I assume that most Search Engine Land readers will be satisfied with that, as they are probably quite familiar with SEO, but there is a more detailed definition here if you’d like one.

In 2024, SEO is quite an umbrella term and there are different tactics within SEO. What is right will depend upon your audience, business and goals, but the general summary above works for our purposes here. 

Content marketing and SEO

Marketing is about being in the right place at the right time. This often means being on search engines when your potential customers seek help or guidance.

Using content marketing and SEO together can help you create useful content for your prospective customers and make that content available at exactly the right moment as the user searches.

We can contrast this to promoting content via other means. The usual suspects are social media, email and native advertising.

Sure, your prospects are scrolling and looking for something to grab their attention, but this is “a needle in a haystack” scenario, and we rarely see engagement on the same levels as we do with content that a user searches for and clicks on. 

Having your content found by prospective customers on Google is the holy grail. It is your content that is at the right place and at the right time. 

How to get your content found on Google

You have two basic options here:

• Publish on a highly authoritative site where the content will naturally rank well due to the authority of the host site. 
• Build the authority of your own site and individual published content. 

Option 1 is fairly self-explanatory.

For example, I published an article comparing SEO vs. PPC here on Search Engine Land. I focused on keywords that were variations on “SEO or PPC” and “SEO vs. PPC,” and the article naturally ranked from first to third for the majority of the target terms.

Now, it was an informative and well-researched article (blowing my own trumpet here) that I felt was better than anything else out there. It was also published on an authoritative and highly relevant site. 

No additional link building or anything else was needed. The content itself and the authority of the site it was placed on were enough for that article to rank well.

Option 2 is a little trickier, as your site isn’t likely to be nearly as authoritative as an established site in its niche. So, you have a few jobs to do here before you can get content on your site to rank.

Firstly, you need to create something that deserves to rank and will radically engage your audience. You can use the Value Proposition Canvas and SCAMPER framework to help you come up with content ideas and formats that will grab your audience by the scruff of the neck and demand their attention. 

Next, you absolutely positively need to have a well-optimized and SEO-friendly website so that clicks on your content drive engagement and build those signals. 

Finally, you will likely need to build authority for your site and the individual piece of content. 

Both approaches have merit. Publishing on third-party sites is faster and easier and lends credibility. Driving people to your site is powerful for brand awareness, and you have more control over the next steps (remarketing, lead generation, email, social media and so forth).

Both approaches require you to make an investment and to be consistent – but what worthwhile marketing does not?

How SEO supercharges content marketing

This is pretty obvious. When your content ranks well organically, you get free exposure in the natural search results. 

This improves brand awareness, drives engagement with your business and helps set more people on the path to profitable customer actions.

Your content appears in the right place at the right time with no associated cost per click. That’s some marketing gold right there.

How content marketing supercharges SEO

What kind of outbound links do you personally click? I am not talking about internal navigation but rather the links that take you from one site to another.

Typically, these are links within the body of an article. If I were talking about Google PageRank, I would likely link to the Wikipedia PageRank page to provide more detail. 

This link enriches and improves the linking page and provides a useful resource and direction for the reader. Sure enough, informational resources like Wikipedia have millions of link – all without doing any link building or off-page SEO.

Most businesses are not on Wikipedia, so we can’t just build it and wait for the links. We must promote the content when it is created. 

Outreach, guest posts and digital PR are your allies here and you can supplement these efforts with paid promotion and content amplification.

The best approach here is to identify well-linked content in your sector and then create an improved version of that content (using SCAMPER and The Value Proposition Canvas). 

This way, if you keep a list of who linked to the original content, you have a great place to start for initial outreach. You are also armed with the knowledge that what you are promoting is worthy of those links, which is central to this whole approach.

Links are still crucial, and content marketing integrated with SEO supercharges your SEO by making link building far easier.

SEO vs. content marketing

We see this antagonistic mentality all the time in digital marketing: SEO vs. PPC, local SEO vs. organic, SEO vs. content marketing, SEO vs. social, etc.

Smart digital marketers don’t think like this. All channels have a role to play, and the best strategies often integrate channels strategically to support each other.

This is certainly the case with SEO and content.

• SEO helps get your content and business in front of more people.
• Content marketing helps you build authority and improves your SEO.

Think integration rather than silos, and all your marketing will thank you for it.

SEO and content marketing strategy

So, to quickly summarize, we have the following strategy to help drive more traffic to your site’s content.

• Promote that content with:
  • Outreach.
  • Digital PR.
  • Guest blogging.

Strategically, this is relatively simple. You need to be realistic and patient. If your content ranks well in organic search, it can be a huge win – but it won’t be quick or easy. This is marketing that shoots for the moon!

SEO and content marketing caveats

This approach will not be suitable for every business or every situation.

If you are a small local plumber looking to pick up several new customers each week, the effort to produce plumbing content that ranks highly in Google is likely not worth your time. 

You would be better served by doing some PPC, SEO and local SEO. You may also be able to use a more targeted approach to content marketing using social media advertising or some other form of paid promotion. 

If you have a scalable business model and are not geographically bound, nothing will be more scalable than a combined content marketing and SEO strategy. As you reach a more diverse and geographically broad audience, you will be able to drive more awareness and engagement without rapidly scaling costs.

Remember that SEO is not always the right approach if the objectives, budget or time scales say otherwise. But if you don’t get started now, you will fall even farther behind.

When SEO and content are a good fit, they are hard to beat.

Shoot for the moon

The strategies I’m describing here represent the holy grail of digital marketing. Not easy. Not quick. But if you are willing to do the work, the results will often outperform any other strategy.