Content marketing and SEO get a lot of buzz, but not always together. The content marketing team churns out white papers, case studies, blog posts, infographics, videos, and webinars. The SEO team hunts down the best keywords for everything else. Rarely do the two meet, unless lured into a conference room with the promise of bagels.
It’s time to change that. Let’s make content marketing and SEO teams each other’s besties, collaborating on the best strategies for your marketing.
The single biggest reason why content marketing and SEO need to come together is because content needs to be found. Content marketers, we all know SEO has come a long way from the black hat days of keyword stuffing. Now, it’s about choosing the right keywords and using them appropriately in our collateral. If we’re writing blog posts regularly, we know this. Hopefully, we’re already providing our writers with a list of keywords that our SEO team provided.
If not, blog posts are a great starting point. Shoot an email to someone on the SEO team. Ask her what keywords you should be using in your next few blog posts. Then, check your KPIs. See the difference?
So what about the rest of your content? Your SEO team may have valuable insight about the metadata you can embed in ungated content. They can provide the keywords to use on landing pages for gated content.
Basically, your company’s SEO team are your ultimate craftsmen. As content marketers, we think in big pictures: ebooks and videos. We drill down into smaller pieces with our army of writers: blog posts, webinars, and infographics. But we rarely dig deeper into the SEO-friendly keywords we need to use. They’re easy to overlook when we’re excited about our latest campaign, but they’re critical. The SEO team takes these seemingly tiny parts of our content and draws in eyeballs.
Content Marketing and SEO: Behind the Scenes
But your SEO team does more than just put together pretty keywords. Behind the scenes, they’re working tirelessly on highly technical pieces of your content marketing strategy. They’re also making sure pages redirect properly and cleansing the site of dead links. They write meta descriptions optimized for various search engines. They also add title tags to help content rank in searches.
And believe it or not, the SEO team needs the content marketing team. Without content, they have nothing to optimize.
Imagine if you joined forces with them. Imagine the content marketing and SEO teams exchanging ideas and sharing keywords. They spend time coming up with long tail keywords and see what performs well. If they lobbed those over to the content marketing team, imagine the rankings and boosts your site could get in search engines.
In short: work together. You both have valuable knowledge to share, like where to get discovered and the content that can be optimized. Get together, create findable content, and hit those KPIs.