In digital marketing, many talk about how content marketing and technical SEO are 2 distinct sections of marketing. However, you don’t need to choose one over the other. They work hand-in-hand on a website to help support its organic success. But which one is more important? Where should you focus more of your time and efforts? Below, we will break down technical SEO versus content marketing to help you better understand.
What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO is basically the way that your website is set up to help search engines read and interpret your page content. It also provides humans with a great user experience. It includes, but is not limited to:
- Robots.txt: Text files that live in your websites root directory. Robots.txt is a set of instructions that tells crawlers what they can and can’t crawl. It disallows low value pages, duplicate pages, and other content you don’t want indexed.
- XML sitemap: Sitemaps contain a list of every page on a website, along with other important details about those pages. Search engines use them to find pages and find out how often it should crawl a site. Any page you want to appear in SERPs should be included in your sitemap.
- Page speed: Page speed and load time are important for your user experience and SEO. It helps optimize your images, caching and redirects.
Technical SEO is important because it can have a huge indirect impact on your ranking and ability to get indexed in the first place. Without it, your website won’t go very far with Google.
What is content marketing?
Content is king. Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach that is focused on creating and distributing valuable and relevant content to attract and retain your audience. It ultimately helps drive profitable customer action. Content is the whole reason that people go to your website from search results. Content has many SEO benefits, such as:
- Linkbait: Content can work as natural linkbait. People want to share high quality content, and your content can help build quality and natural links.
- On-page: Great content is also a great on-page SEO tool. Articles give you an opportunity to use keywords consistently throughout your pages. They also let you put them in the most valuable places like HTML headers, URLs, and at every level in the body content.
Good content marketing can be effective for your website’s conversion rate. Whether it’s an article, infographic or video, you can create an emotional tie with your audience and build trust with them.
Using them together?
Yes, you can use technical SEO and content marketing together. In fact, it’s best if you do. However, you’ll most likely spend more time on content marketing than technical SEO. Like stated above, you need to give your audience relevant and valuable content. This content also needs to be consistent. Here are the best techniques when first getting started:
- Start with technical SEO. This helps the foundation of your pages. If you get it all set up in the beginning, you’ll save yourself a lot of time going forward.
- Publish your content after you’ve checked all of your technical boxes. However, make sure that your content marketing is a continuous process. You should be consistently publishing new content on your website. Also, you should be promoting it through your social media accounts and emails.