You Ask, I Answer: The Difference Between SEO and Content Marketing?

In today's episode, Asaf asks, do you look at content marketing differently than in regular content marketing? Should all content be SEO oriented content? When would you make the distinction? That's a good question. Today, in today's modern SEO environment, with the way search engines use artificial intelligence and machine learning, there really isn't a difference anymore.

All content that you create should be about your key topics. It should be relevant. It should be timely, it should be diverse in content type, it should have expertise, it should be from an authority in the space or uh be authoritative in nature, and it should be trustworthy. And those are the major factors that go into content marketing anyway. Uh and go into SEO anyway.

A few years ago, yes, there was a difference. Uh as the old, uh very, very old joke at this point goes, an SEO expert walks into a pub, bar, tavern, and so on and so forth. And you ended up with this very stilted language that was trying to check the box on specific keywords and things. But again, as artificial intelligence has taken over the way search engines do their analysis, that no longer applies. Now search engines are looking for things that we would write naturally to each other, right?

So if we were talking about, you know, a bar, yes, you might use the word tavern, but you're probably not going to use all the other words. And you're gonna talk about your food, your drinks, your service, the atmosphere, uh specials, entertainment, all the things that you would expect to see on a website about a bar. That's today's modern SEO. It is about what do the leading pages in a category like yours have about the topic of your choice. What instead of words or even phrases, what topics do you talk about?

And how well and how thoroughly do you discuss them? That proves that you have that expertise, that you are an authority, that your content is uh trustworthy in nature. Now, where you're going to run into some trouble is that uh there are a lot, a lot of SEO practitioners out there who are still working with very outdated knowledge. Um really anyone who has not brushed up on their uh on their skills, on what the tools do, and how search engines work. If they've not been keeping current in the last six months, they're really, really, really behind.

Um you hear people talking about oh, you know, modify the H1 tag and put these words in bold on your page, like that's about a decade old. Uh and some of those practices don't cause harm, some of them do, uh, but almost all of them will not help anymore compared to the modern basics of topic-centered content creation and the timeless get more people to link to your page and talk about you and send you traffic. Um, those two things really are uh the bedrock of modern SEO. Now, in terms of other differences, if you are doing SEO-focused content marketing, you will spend more time probably on the research about the topics and the the technology you use to identify what words should be in your content than you would with just a straight piece of content marketing where you just go in uh and just create something for the the sake of creating it, uh knowing what topics you should be creating that, knowing what should be in the page, knowing what similar pages that rank well uh have on them, knowing what the category overall has, that does take time, and it requires a lot of research because uh I was digging around yesterday on one of the industry leading SEO tools, and even there it's it's struggling, it's struggling to keep up. You can see that it's not uh I typed in this keyword for uh a very, very broad topic, and yeah it should have come up with other things that it didn't.

I typed in as an example, I typed in you know, coffee house and coffee shop. Now, when I type that in, what words should be on the page? What words would you expect to be in that content? Well, sure, the coffee, right? But this thing kept coming up with you know, coffee shop, coffee shop near me, coffee house near me.

But at no point did it say espresso or lattes or music available or seating area. And again, those are things that you would expect in a coffee shop business, but this SEO tool, one of the industry leading ones, one of the biggest names out there, just couldn't do it. It couldn't find those related terms uh that were semantically related, but not exactly what the the customer typed into the tool. So that's where you're gonna run into the most difficulty is when you're working with these tools, they are not keeping up the way they should be. And you will have to invest more time investigating on your own, maybe even building some of your own software just to get to the point of getting those keywords.

Certainly interviewing your own subject matter experts to get the natural language that people use to describe something in your industry is the easiest way to get some of those words. So a good question. Compared to the way that, of course, search engines with multi billion dollar RD development budgets can do. So as always, please leave your comments in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter.

I'll talk to you soon. Take care.