We all love PB&J, at least I do, and what I also love is combining the power of both SEO and content marketing for the best tasting digital marketing sandwich ever.

Let’s look at it this way, SEO is the peanut butter to your content marketing jelly.

Carefully applied first layer of SEO peanut butter helps prevent your jelly spread from seeping into the bread. Saving you from a soggy sandwich disaster. At the same time, they taste pretty damn fantastic together. I call it a WIN-WIN situation.

Like peanut butter and jelly, SEO and content marketing are both unique in their own ways.

Content marketing is the soft flow of creativity sparks.

Like sweet sticky jelly, it attracts potential customers with colorful and varying contents ranging from photos to blog posts.

It helps to catch attention and interest from the public. Sparking public curiosity about the brand and its product. Striking the strongest when the itch of a sweet tooth is the strongest by giving them a timely feed of sweet content.

SEO, on the other hand, is technical. It is best when utilizing the whole network of websites instead of on a single content page. It requires a chunky load of data research and tracking.

Users looking at your website might not even know that it exists. But they do.

They exist in the lightning-fast loading speed, perfectly responsive design even on different mobile devices, easy-on-the-eye font size, appropriately highlighted titles and more.

First of all, SEO and content marketing work well each on their own. They are both fantastic digital marketing strategies that attract customers and converts.

But, pairing them up together makes it work even better. There are so many aspects overlapping that you might as well do them both together and get double the result instead of just one.

SEO makes your content easier to navigate.

First and foremost, if you ask me what makes or breaks a website for me. I would say how comfortable the browsing experience is.

Does it load fast enough? Are the paragraphs too chunky to read? Does the video loads smoothly and ends promptly? Are there annoying pop-ups covering content that I actually want to read? I can go on for a few more lines but you get the gist.

SEO as per Google’s guideline actually helps to make the whole browsing experience much smoother and more comfortable for users.

A well-optimized website and content are easy to navigate to both crawlers and readers.

It gives you a clear view of what it offers and what it is about. From the title, URL, description, down to image ALT.

Easy navigation to what the website has to offer from one drop-down menu.

No matter how good your content is, it won’t matter to the potential customers if they can’t even access it comfortably.

What’s worse, a good piece of content may risk never reaching the audience it deserves. Because your website is littered with bad code that gives out the wrong signal to Google. Thus users are never directed to your content.

Pumping out good content is important, but your hard work will have a harder time to pay off if your website is not optimized.

SEO wants good boosts good content.

SEO stands for search engine optimization, to put it simply, it helps you get to that number 1 spot on a search page.

What do people search for? Best Italian restaurant in Denver. The difference between affect and effect. How to unclog a kitchen sink. The list goes on.

I tried searching “How to unclog a kitchen sink” on Google. Right after two results from wikihow, ranked third is an article from “ahs”. Which is a company website that sells home warranty plans.

The search result for “how to unclog a kitchen sink”, on no. 3 is an article from a home warranty company.

Selling home warranty plans to those looking to unclog a kitchen sink. Smart move right?

Imagine the website has only three pages, one about us, second contact us, third plans and pricing. What will the users need to type into the search bar to reach their homepage if they don’t already know of its existence before?

Optimizing their website might boost them to the first position when users are looking for home warranty plans. But other than that there’s not much more help to offer.

By building a blog, the website is updating constantly with blog posts that cater to their potential customers’ interest. Be it unclogging a sink, how to properly clean a clothes dryer or landscaping ideas, there’s so much more that can be optimized and help put the website out there.

The same website ranking number 1 on the query “home warranty” thanks to their page titled “What is a Home Warranty”. Clever SEO paired up with good content boosts their visibility to the top to potential customers.

With some SEO keyword research, you get more ideas on what kind of content to push in order to reach out to your targeted audience.

With these constant update of relevant content, all of them armored with good optimization. The website as a whole has a much wider spectrum to be discovered by potential customers.

SEO needs backlinks, good content marketing helps create backlinks.

One of the factors that are considered to rank a page is backlink. Building backlink is one major element of SEO. Any incoming links from other web pages are considered backlinks.

Now, let’s sit down and think for me. When would I want to link an article?

• When it’s relevant to what I want to talk about.
• When it has good quality content that I want to share with my readers.
• When it’s reliable data.
• When it inspired my own writing.

That’s what your website and your content should aim to be.

Relevant, quality, reliable, inspiring posts will get a constant steady flow of backlinks.

Take HubSpot’s blog as an example. They sell marketing and sales software. They also run a blog, a quality blog where people constantly look up to to learn new stuff about marketing, sales and customer service.

This is their page autority and amount of backlinks that they have received.

To put it down.

The more quality posts you put out, the more backlinks you will get. The more quality backlinks you got, the higher chance you will have to be ranked on that sweet first page of SERP. The higher you are ranked, the more visitors you will get. The more visitors you get, the more chance you get to lead-gen.

Now you see the core of why content marketing and SEO go hand in hand.

SEO thrives on fresh content, content marketing creates a constant flow of content.

For SEO consistency is key, fresh content is king.

Google favors up-to-date contents, you very rarely get a result from a Google query that is from 5 years ago.

Imagine searching for SEO tactics and the first result page tells you to stuff in as many keywords as you can in a single article. That is so 10 years ago.

What is preferred now instead of keyword stuffing, is having your targeted keyword consistently placed across the website. With every new piece of relevant content being published, crawlers will index it.

When a website has a lot of pages sharing similar keywords, Google will assume that the website has a certain authority on the topic. Thus slowly increasing its rank.

Up-to-date contents are not only favored by Google, it is favored by users too.

Like the example I mentioned above, you wouldn’t want to be given out a dated technique to apply on your website only to be penalized by Google.

Not only that, via regular updates it builds a sense of anticipation for the readers. They got curious about the next piece of content that will be published. They start looking forward to updates.

You build yourself a group of loyal readers. That, in turn, give you consistent visits. With a higher level of trust and loyalty, they are more likely to turn into customers.

I, myself am a loyal fan of the HubSpot blog. I check on the site once a week to pick up some new articles to read. And to be honest, if I ever run a commerce site I might just pick up their service.

So by giving out constant relevant fresh contents, it not only pleases the potential customers, it also gives you an edge to be ranked higher.

So my two cents are…

Both SEO and content marketing works great on its own, but why have a jelly sandwich or peanut butter sandwich when you can have a PB&J?

The internet is crowded, if you want to stand out from the crowd, utilizing one technique is not going to be sufficient. By combining both SEO and content marketing you’re boosting the best sides of each technique and making them even better.

Without good content, SEO techniques can only carry you that far. Like an amplifier, SEO helps your content shine. Both of them together bring you one step nearer to the shiny throne of success.

What are your thoughts on SEO and content marketing? Do you think they jam well? Share your thoughts below.

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Updated: 25 April 2024

About Lo Jia Thong

A polyglot plummeted into the deep blue world of SEO and inbound marketing armed with a burning passion on letters and a fascination on how thing rolls in the world wide web.

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