Content Marketing VS SEO // Which One Drives More Traffic?
– If you had to pick SEO
or content marketing, and you could only pick one,
which one would you choose? Hey everyone, I'm Neil Patel, and today I'm going to break down
content marketing versus SEO. Which one drives more traffic? (upbeat music) Before I get started, make sure you subscribe to this channel, and if you're on YouTube,
click the alert notification. Now question for you. In the comments below, tell me what you think
will drive more traffic, SEO or content marketing? I'm waiting. What do you think? Is it SEO? Is it content marketing? Well, you're about to find out. A lot of people actually say, "This is a false debate since SEO and content marketing
should work together." And that's definitely true when it comes to generating
traffic in your own website. If SEO's about optimizing
pages on your website, ultimately you'll be optimizing the pages that at least have some content, whether it's your title,
maybe a description, it doesn't have to be a blog post. So there is truth to it in
which it's really hard to do SEO if you don't have content.
And a lot of people who watch
my channel already know SEO to some degree, but
with content marketing, most people don't. So if you want to learn content marketing from the beginning, there's
a video for you to watch. It's a beginner's guide
to content marketing. But content marketing isn't
just about pushing content on your own website, you can
actually do content marketing on several different platforms, video content like YouTube, Facebook, social media content,
podcast content, live events. So we could say that content marketing has more potential to
generate traffic than SEO if you think about it
in more holistically. Beyond just visitors, you could be getting views
to your YouTube videos, engagement, followers, even
clicks on social media channels, people listening and
subscribing to your podcast, viewers in your live event. Now most of my audience
is focused pretty heavily on generating traffic
to their own websites. So let's dive in to how content marketing and SEO should work together.
First off, it's all about
targeting the right keywords and offering amazing content that gives searches
what they're looking for when they search on Google. This involves both SEO and
content marketing skills. Just think about it. Whenever you search on Google and you land on a website
that you don't like, what do you do? You click the back button. That's why content marketing is important. Yes, you want the ranking, but you want to make sure
that the content matches what the intent is of the searcher.
Now writing great headlines
and meta descriptions for your content really can help. No matter how great your content is, if it doesn't get clicked on,
it won't generate traffic. This is another way that
they work hand in hand, knowing how to write and test headlines is an SEO skill by nature, and it supports your
content marketing efforts. Another thing that you should be doing is optimizing your content for readability and that not only
involves creating content, but also knowing how to
serve that content piece in a way that's easier
to read by your visitors. Again, this skill both involves
content marketing and SEO.
Structured data. This one helps search engines understand what your content's all about and serving it to them
among the search results in the most relevant way. And that way, when someone's searching for let's say something like a restaurant, they can just see the
star rating right there, or the review rating right there. That's an example of what
structured markups can do, because remember all of
those people leaving reviews, that's content marketing. And those reviews can help
people better understand if they want to go to
that restaurant or a store or work with that business.
Another strategy that I
love is internal linking. Think about this. If you're the one writing your content, you can improve the user experience by linking to other
related pieces of content. And this helps with
SEO because those pages are going to rank higher. And speaking of user experience, there's also improvements you can make from mobile load time to
optimizing Core Web Vitals. There are lots of technical measures that you can implant
for the best experience when consuming your
content, such as lazy load. As people scroll more
images and content load. As they don't scroll it doesn't load. That way, the page loads faster, especially when they're on mobile devices. The bottom line is your
content won't perform well unless you do SEO as well.
Sure, you make it a social
boost from it in the short run but if you want long-lasting traffic, you need a focus on SEO
and content marketing. And of course, content
marketing can drive you traffic without SEO, like YouTube, podcasts, that are all examples of content marketing but if you combine both,
you'll do even better. Now, if you need help combining
your content marketing with your SEO, check on
my ad agency, NP Digital. If you just need help,
leave a comment below. We're here to help you. I'll answer each and every
single question or try to. And I wish you the best of luck to getting more traffic from
SEO and content marketing..
