Content Marketing in SEO

Published on 28.02.2025 by Chizoba T

The key to building a strong online presence depends on being able to drive people to your content.

The two main pillars or strategies that need to be followed to help brands and creators bring new audiences are Search Engine Optimization mixed with Content Marketing. But what are these?

That’s what you’re here to find out!

Content marketing is all about content creation. It focuses on the basic aspects of content creation which is making sure that your content is valuable, engaging, and able to keep eyes hooked. 

On the other hand, you have SEO, which is more focused toward making your content visible on platforms like Google and Bing. Paired together, these two strategies can form a powerful partnership that takes your content visibility to the next level.

In this article, we’ll see the relation between content marketing and SEO. As you read on, you’ll find ways to combine the strategies to make the most of the benefits that you can get from both of them. 

Understand Content Marketing and SEO

As we mentioned in the intro, content marketing includes basically just creating the things you want to share. It answers the questions about: Is your content going to be liked? Are people going to find it helpful? Will it continue to bring in new audiences?

The simplest way to picture content marketing is to think of the background process that goes on when content is created. There’s got to be a plan, and that plan is your content marketing.

Then, you have SEO.

SEO focuses on editing and designing your content in a way that gets it to “rank higher” on search engines. By rank higher, all we mean is becoming the top result when something is searched on Google. The higher your result is to that search bar, the better your ranking!

Through SEO, brands aim to bring in a continuous flow of new audiences, just like evergreen content—the type of content that’ll work for you all year round.

When combined, both of these strategies ensure high quality content that’s super easy to find.

They can work together in many ways. For example:

SEO Needs Content

The whole point of SEO is for your content to end up as one of the search results. But search results for what? That’s where content marketing comes in.

Remember that content marketing means to make the content. This content is then taken up by the SEO process to ensure that it reaches the right people. 

Your search engines rely on content to understand the context and relevance of a webpage. Without content, you can’t have SEO. And without SEO (or content for that matter), it’s impossible to get ranked.

Content Needs SEO

Now, you can go on and on creating all kinds of content. But there’s no guarantee it’ll get the traffic you want. 

You see, even the best content can get lost on the Internet.

The whole point of creating content is that it reaches the audience it’s supposed to. To help that happen, you have SEO, which takes the content you create and ensures it reaches where it’s supposed to go. If done properly, of course!

User Experience

Now, let’s combine the two in the eyes of a customer. The thing about search engines is that they prioritize the searcher. 

Search engines are essentially designed to be a one-stop solution. You hop on, put in your search, get your answer, and you can leave. Thus, you’ll find that search engines only value content that has both content marketing and SEO.

With content marketing, you’ve got all the necessary info down, and combining that with SEO means you’ve set it up perfectly to be a one-stop fix! As a result, you’ve got the search engine promoting your content above everyone else’s.

How To Mix Content Marketing  With SEO

Step 1 – Figuring Out What Your Audience’s Searching For

To make useful content, you’ve got to know the problem. That’s where search intent matters. 

Simply put, through search intent you figure out what people are looking for and why. When you get a good understanding of that, you can create content that solves their issues.

While search intent is very subjective, it can be split up into 4 broad categories:

  • Informational Intent: Users looking for info regarding a certain topic, which usually includes “What” or “How” questions. Think of it as someone having a problem, then searching for info that’ll help them fix it.
  • Navigational Intent: Users looking for info about specific pages/brands/locations. Consists of “Where” type questions.
  • Commercial Intent: Users looking for comparisons. This is mostly when people are considering making a purchase but deciding on a couple of things. It’s basically the research process before purchasing something.
  • Transactional Intent: Users looking to make that final purchase. It consists of questions like where people can buy a certain product or how much it costs.

But the main question still remains: How do you find that intent?

Finding intent is relatively easy. Consider the niche you work in. Immediately, you can come up with a bunch of questions that beginners in your niche may have, that can count as “intent. “

Similarly, there’s also keyword research. This is something you’ll see in the next section.

Now figuring out search intent is one thing, knowing what to do with that information is completely different.

You can start off by checking out the SERP (search engine results) regarding something you found from your audience’s search intent. From here, you can analyze the type of content people have already made about the queries. You can then use that to create your own.

Step 2 – Conducting Keyword Research

This is where you’re starting to mix content marketing with SEO. 

SEO mainly depends on keyword research because that’s how search engines work. Search engines take a look at a search, pick out keywords from it, and then scan the internet to find the best possible answers for that keyword.

But what are the keywords?

The best place to find your answer is where you’re trying to get your content to be. The search results page. You can start by asking questions regarding your niche. 

Then wait!

Automatically, you’ll start getting some search suggestions. This is a good indicator of which keywords are being used a lot. From here, you can also use one of these keywords to check the results page. The results page further includes similar suggestions which can give you an idea about other useful keywords.

Brands also make use of tools. Platforms like Google Keyword Planner and SEMrush help to find and track useful keywords.

Then, it’s also important to keep track of keywords that are useful during certain times of the year. This refers to seasonal keywords that can be worked on through latent semantic indexing. Through LSI, you include these keywords in your content as it ends up making the material more relevant to search engines.

Step 3 – Setting Up On-Page SEO Components

Once you’ve got content, you need SEO. To ensure your content reaches people, you’ll need to work on:

  • Title Tag
  • Meta Description
  • Headings
  • URL Structure
  • Internal Linking

Through these, you can work on ensuring that audiences are guided to your page. From your title tag, viewers get a summary of what they’re about to read. This is where your keywords matter.

Adding your primary keywords to the title can ensure that it ranks high on search engines. Similarly, the meta description is the place to add in your primary+secondary keywords. Here, a brief summary of the content ensures that readers know what they’re going to find.

Additionally, when you start adding keywords to your headings, it makes sure that your content is structured in a way that performs well for SEO. 

Through internal linking, you can keep people on your content for longer. This also helps pass on those SEO efforts to other content. Internal linking is simply adding a link in one material that guides users to a different article still made by you.

Step 4 – Focusing on Backlinks

Internal linking is one thing, but getting backlinks is even better. Backlinks refer to when links guide users to a specific part of your content. This helps provide quick answers for curious users.

You can do this by:

  • Guest Blogging: Includes writing content for other sites. From that content, you can add links to your material which exists elsewhere.
  • Content Promotion: Simply promote your content on different forums and social media.
  • Broken Link Building: Look for links on high ranking articles that don’t lead anywhere. Offer links to your articles as replacements.
  • Networking: Collaborate with popular figures to build credibility. Get your content promoted through these collabs.

Step 5 – Improving Your Content For Voice Searches

Nowadays, a lot of people are using voice search. Think of how useful Alexa, Siri, or Gemini are.

It’s important to set up content that ensures it’ll be picked up by these assistants. This can be done by adding alt text to your content. Alt text refers to a brief description that’s given about a picture. Usually, this is meant for visually impaired people as it provides an overview of what’s shown in the picture.

The Bottom Line

By now, you’ve probably seen how far content marketing and SEO go hand in hand. Through one, you can improve the other. Together, they can boost your content’s visibility.

By going over what’s been discussed, businesses can work on boosting engagement and creating content that ranks higher on all search engines. From that, they can ensure that content reaches their target audiences and they actually have a strong online presence. 

So, start mixing and combining SEO with content marketing today. Your strong online presence awaits you!