It could be one of those billion dollars question: Which is the Best Strategy for 2018-2019: SEO or Content Marketing?
Since all the major search algorithms are focusing more on content (The Good Quality Content to be Exact) have changed the way to practice digital/online marketing and the promotions for products and services online.
Now, it’s not like just Link Building or optimizing web pages for all the major On-Pag SEO practices anymore, things depend majorly on Page Authority and Domain authority, and the fact is – the more the better.
A quick guide: How to Increase Page Authority and Domain Authority
So, what you think? Which could be the best strategy when it is all about increasing website rankings on major search engines and increasing relevant website traffic that brings more customers. SEO or Content Marketing?
Still hard to guess? Let’s discuss the topic with our recent findings that prove if SEO is effective or Content Marketing.
Before that, let’s see some core importance of SEO practices and Content Marketing practices.
Importance of SEO Practices and How it help Websites for Better Search Visibility:
- SEO practices help websites to become more user-friendly
- It helps with the fast loadings of different files like images, js, CSS, etc
- With SEO you can easily reach to your locally targeted customers with the help of several local business listing portals and platforms like Google my Business
- It also helps in improving conversion rates from web pages
- Creates contextual internal-linking within the web pages
- Helps in creating brand profiles on several good authority domains
But, does SEO really help in improving the search rankings of a website?
Keep reading, you’ll get the answer.
Importance of Content Marketing and How it help Websites for Better Search Visibility:
- Content marketing focuses on delivering the content a user demands,
- It helps in creating a brand strength through search and social media
- Content marketing makes it easy for the crawlers to recognize a domain name that talks about on some specific topics
- Regular posting of blogs on domain improved website page and domain authority
- It helps in targeting both type of audiences: The Service Seekers and Knowledge Seekers
- Helps in generating higher website traffic
Again! Does it help with the search rankings? Be patience! You are near 🙂
To check whether SEO is powerful or content marketing. I have one research to share. That will help in proving which practice we should focus more on to achieve the desired result.
A Case Study: GVCPS a Real Estate Investment Company in Vancouver, BC
This company deals with all the mortgage problems in the Lower Mainland and Fraser Valley, BC and also deals in direct houses/home purchasing.
The domain was registered on:
and was not having any domain authority, search visibility or rankings.
The challenge was to bring the maximum number of the keywords in top 3 places of Google search within 6 months period. But,
Major Challenges Were:
- Lack of content on the domain
- Un-optimized content
- The website was just having 8-10 pages to market and there was a set of 80 keywords provided by the client for all different 18 cities in Canada
- Most of the keywords were short tail
And what not…
Like always, we started implementing the same SEO strategies to make the website user-friendly and created good quality backlinks from good authority domains that allow brands and businesses to list themselves on their platform.
Not only this, we even took backlinks from real estate domains because same industry backlinks are always more valuable. – Like as always said.
We implemented this practice continuously for up to 3 months and created tremendous & very strong backlink profile for the domain and strictly avoided any kind of directory website.
But, the results were: 🙁
After giving efforts continuously for 3 months in creating backlinks, the results were not so good. Although, we could see some good brandings for the domain in search most of the times only search branding does not help with the desired results – Rankings on the Top Keywords I mean.
It was all disappointing for us and even for the client.
After that, we decided to start with the content marketing on for GVCPS. The strategy was to promote the website with all the 18 targeted cities in the content along with the set of 80 business keywords provided by the client.
We published around 3-4 unique and good quality contents in the blog section of GVCPS on a daily basis with a mix of promotional and well as informative articles.
Promotions Articles: The contents that were written only to promote the services GVCPS offer
Informative Articles: The industry-specific content that real estate knowledge seekers could search for – again it all was related to the terms and words we had to promote the domain for.
We implemented this practice continuously for 2-3 months and then the results we generated were tremendous.
And guess what? There was an overnight boost in the rankings for more than 25 keywords and most of some of them even got ranked in the top 5 places of Google search.
We decided to continue with this Content Marketing practice. And today, the results we have achieved for GVCPS are speaking by themselves. #Content_Marketing
In a Total: Around 44-50 Keywords rank in Google’s first page of GVCPS as per the today’s rankin stats.
That was a clear sign that proves the statement “Content is the King” and also proves that Content Marketing helps in a far better way in today’s SEO and Digital Marketing practices as compared to JUST SEO.
Important Note:
It does not mean SEO is a useless or unworthy practice to spend time with, as you know everything is unexpected when it comes to improving results in the search.
And, there could be a big supporter of the backlinks we created earlier because we were able to create at least good search branding for the domain and its online name.
Apart from this, we also practiced some backlinks activities like curating content that we published on the blog section, sharing them on social media and regular creation of brand profiles and local listings.
Overall, Just SEO practices can never be helpful if you really wish to be on top, But, content Marketing has a very big role to play in the entire scenario. Ignoring this major role played could restrict you to improve your search visibility.
Hence,
Which is the Best Strategy for 2018-2019: SEO or Content Marketing? – I would say, it’s 40% of SEO and 60% of Content Marketing
Have some thoughts to share? The below comment section is open for all 🙂