How Content Marketing and SEO Create Online Business Success

Digital marketing has grown to become the centerpiece of most marketing campaigns for both small and large businesses. In real estate, digital marketing accounts for a considerable number of leads, especially considering more and more people are looking for homes online. To succeed in this area, it is important to understand the foundations of digital marketing and what makes it so effective. SEO and content marketing have become common parlance in the digital marketing world and rightly so. They refer to two important marketing techniques that can transform your digital marketing fortunes. To begin, let’s look at some definitions.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

This is the act of optimizing content to make it easy to index and rank by search engines. As search engines use certain rules and conventions to do this, SEO is the practice of ensuring content conforms to these conventions. Why is this important? Because when people use a search engine they want to find the most relevant results for their search query. So, you could say SEO is a publisher working with a search engine to provide relevant search results for web users.

Content Marketing

This refers to the use of several types of content (text, images, video, gifs, etc.) to promote a brand. If you have watched a sponsored video or read a blog on a company website or follow an Instagram account with amazing branded images, you have experienced content marketing. The real power of content marketing lies in the fact that the very fabric of the web is made up of content.

How SEO and Content Marketing Work Together

SEO and content marketing are frequently used as separate and distinct terms while they are related terms. When you run a content marketing campaign, the content you create must be optimized for search engines. You could say that they are two steps in a process of using content for marketing purposes. So how do you make sure both work for you? Start with content marketing. When crafting a CM strategy, you will decide what content types to go with and whether this will be organic or paid content. After this, you can use SEO to optimize this content, so it is properly indexed and ranked by search engines. Picking one strategy over another is, however, unadvisable as it will end up shortchanging your efforts.

Don’t Only Focus on Search Engines

It’s all too easy to focus on what search engines want at the expense of the actual consumers of the content. Of course, there are people who may not care about this but if you want to build a marketing strategy that stands the test of time, you need to focus on both search engines and people. Making your content human-usable means you create content that serves a purpose higher than SEO. This is content that is intelligent, focused, useful, and problem-solving.

Rules of the Game

Google is notorious for changing the rules of the game every now and then, resulting in a change in ranking factors and a subsequent demotion of many leading sites. While they always do this to make the web better, it can catch you flat-footed. Of late, their focus has been on high-quality content. While keywords and other ranking factors are still important, Google’s algorithms have been getting better at identifying high-quality content and ranking it higher than poor-quality highly-optimized content. To safeguard your efforts, focus first on creating high-quality content, then include SEO and other content marketing principles later.