The Content-SEO Strategy Overlap
Owners of SME looking to dip their respective toes (don’t go dipping other people’s toes, people) into digital marketing may have come across strategy for Search Engine Optimisation and Content Marketing. Both are extremely effective avenues for SMEs looking for relevant exposure, and both can be done on a pretty tight budget. Both SEO and content overlap to some extent too, which means you can tackle both at the same time. Today I’m going to outline both strategies briefly, then I’ll talk about that overlap to help you save time and money on your digital marketing.
SEO Strategy
Keywords: what your audience is searching for
Metadata: information for search engines
Link-building: external links pointing to your site; internal links pointing to other sites; internal linking within your site
Back-end SEO: site load speeds; information architecture (IA); optimised for mobile etc.
SEO is the Dewey Decimal System of content marketing; think of the web as a great library of content and Google (or Bing) as the librarian. Each piece of content is assessed and placed on its shelf with similar topics. In practical terms, SEO is essentially about labelling your content in a way that Google (et. al) understands. That includes selecting appropriate keywords (+ synonyms) and using them in important places in your text (title tag, heading 1 tag etc.). An SEO strategy defines how you label and organise content on your site. (SEO strategy also encompasses backlinks, which is the sites that link to you, and the sites you link to, and things such as site architecture and site speed).
Content Marketing Strategy
Content Substance: what you produce; messaging
Content Structure: how your content is organised, formatted, displayed
Content Workflow: the processes, tools, people needed to produce and maintain quality content
Content governance: policies guiding content production, publication approval
Core Strategy: how to meet users’ needs and fulfil business objectives
Content marketing is akin to publishing houses that produce stuff for our metaphorical library. In strategic terms, it’s the blogs, videos, podcasts, infographics (etc.) you publish that meet your users’ needs and support your business’s goals; it’s also the organisation of content, and the documentation guiding key decisions about the things you produce. A content strategy defines the how, what, when, why, and who of your company’s content output. It also includes maintaining and updating content when things change, along with producing content that’s appropriate to your business in topic and tone.
The Content-SEO Strategy Overlap
The first and most obvious overlap is audience research; whether you’re looking at SEO keywords or running a focus group, the aim is to find out topics of interest for your audience. One approach isn’t necessarily more valuable than the other, but audience research that uses both strategic POVs is always better.
Our second overlap is structure; how we organise information has a huge impact on both usability and searchability. Whoever is responsible for IA from an SEO perspective should also be responsible, at least to some extent, for your Content Structure. Again, when you look at content structure from both a usability and technical perspective, you get the most value; we’re making content user and search-engine friendly. This role-sharing also leads to our third crossover — workflow.
Whenever I’m advising on content strategy, I always suggest including SEO pros on the main content strategy team. They will provide valuable advice on where new content fits in the IA and can assist with content maintenance, which will include SEO updates (backlinking, and best practice when search algorithms are updated). You may even want some SEOers in your content governance team to ensure content is appropriately labelled before its published.
SEO pros love good content — it reflects well on their bottom line: getting relevant people on the website. And content teams love great SEO — it ensures the right people are seeing the things they’ve produced. The main message here is that they are separate functions but both SEO and content have loooooads of room for collaboration.
I hope this helped clear up the overlap between content and SEO strategies. Be sure to check out my four-part series on creating a content strategy — getting started with content is easier than you might think.