Search engine optimization was always about content. It was never about stuffing every webpage with keywords and hoping that the crawlers of search engines will place the website at the upper echelons of their result pages. Many people have done precisely that and are now wondering how they can actually rank their website higher than where it is placed now. Low quality contents overloaded with keywords are no longer impressing the algorithms of search engines. The search engines have gotten smarter and they are prioritizing quality. It is hence imperative to improve the content on your website. It is also quintessential to implement content marketing in your SEO strategy.

Some people are predicting content marketing to replace SEO. This is not going to happen. As long as there are search engines, they will use algorithms and the crawlers will have to use keywords to index pages and subsequently rank them in respective categories. Even images and videos require relevant tags and descriptions to be properly indexed and then ranked. Popularity of contents, such as traffic, activity on a webpage, likes or shares and comments on posts will influence the likes of Google to improve the rank of a website. But SEO will still continue to use content as the primary influencing factor.

Content marketing is no longer about blogs. It is not sufficient to have new posts on your website. You cannot expect to improve your SEO strategy by adding a new webpage with fresh content once a week or even every day unless you market the same. You have to come up with a content marketing strategy that will improve your overall optimization. This includes internal links, backlinks, link wheels, how the contents are promoted across platforms, if they are generating enough traffic and are being shared by the people. The more a particular piece of content is shared, referenced, cited and accessed, the higher it shall rank on search engine result pages. It is fair to say that marketing matters more than just the act of coming up with fresh content, no matter how informative and useful it is for readers. If there is no growth in readership, the authority of the content means little and offers no measurable outcome.

Content marketing is as important as optimizing every piece to target specific keywords. SEO and content marketing go hand in hand. It is not enough to use textual contents such as blog posts. Companies need images, info-graphics, videos and multimedia presentations. Content marketing should aim for more traffic, greater engagement, better conversion rate and subsequently higher rank. Search engines need content to keep maintaining their ranking system relevant. Hence, they are looking for websites with new content. These may be new or old websites. The content has to be new and relevant, authoritative and useful.

Content marketing is still dependent on keywords as search engine optimization will continue to use the words and phrases for indexation and relevance. However, using keywords in contents is not enough to get them properly indexed. Links, both internal and external, are used by search engines to appropriately index and classify a webpage or a piece of content. Search engines are continuously trying to make sense of everything they crawl and find. They want a more lucid understanding of every piece of content and how it is linked to the rest of the virtual world says a lot about its specificity. Hence, content marketing has to be carefully planned so as to not provide any misleading signals to search engines. The SEO strategy will fail to achieve its preset objective and even might backfire if that happens.