Differences Between SEO and Content Marketing

Differences Between SEO and Content Marketing  Let’s start with the differences between SEO and content marketing.

Google’s site quality algorithms have been aimed at helping people find “high‐quality” sites by reducing the rankings of low‐quality content since the first of 28 “Panda” algorithm updates rolled out in February 2011. This explains why interest in content marketing took off that year and is now essential to getting found in all the right places.

For example, content marketers should read the entire post entitled, “What site owners should know about Google’s core updates,” which was written by Danny Sullivan, Google’s Public Liaison for Search, on August 1, 2019.

Sullivan provides a set of questions to ask yourself to ensure that “you’re offering the best content you can. That’s what our algorithms seek to reward.”

His content and quality questions included the following:

• Does the content provide original information, reporting, research, or analysis?
• Does the content provide a substantial, complete, or comprehensive description of the topic?
• Does the content provide insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
• If the content draws on other sources, does it avoid simply copying or rewriting those sources and instead provide substantial additional value and originality?
• Does the headline and/or page title provide a descriptive, helpful summary of the content?
• Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
• Would you expect to see this content in or referenced by a printed magazine, encyclopedia, or book?

Ask yourself, “Who is more likely to have the skills, education, and experience that’s necessary to create quality content? The people in my organization’s SEO department or the people on my content marketing team?”

Sullivan also said, “Beyond asking yourself these questions, consider having others you trust but who are unaffiliated with your site provide an honest assessment.”

In addition, the various types of the universal or blended search integrations have created a variety of traffic‐generating options for SEOs since May 2007. But, the vast majority of SEOs act like they’re still living in the era of “10 blue links.”

For example, most SEOs don’t know how to optimize YouTube videos despite the fact that an analysis of Google Universal Search results by Searchmetrics in March 2018 found that at least one video integration was displayed for 22 percent of desktop and 23 percent of mobile search results. Oh, and YouTube had 92 percent of those video integrations.

And, according to other data from Searchmetrics, YouTube has steadily (and stealthily) increased its organic visibility in Google’s SERPs over the past several years and surpassed Wikipedia for the number 1 spot at the end of 2019.

This knowledge should enable content marketers to get a seat at the table—and a larger share of their organization’s small, but growing digital marketing budget.

Differences Between Social Media Marketing and Content Marketing  Let’s now look at the differences between social media marketing and content marketing.

After the algorithm update known as the “Facebook Apocalypse” hit in January 2018, Adam Mosseri, who was then the head of Facebook’s News Feed, explained, “Today we use signals like how many people react to, comment on, or share posts to determine how high they appear in News Feed. With this update, we will also prioritize posts that spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people. To do this, we will predict which posts you might want to interact with your friends about, and show these posts higher in feed. These are posts that inspire back‐and‐forth discussion in the comments and posts that you might want to share and react to—whether that’s a post from a friend seeking advice, a friend asking for recommendations for a trip, or a news article or video prompting lots of discussion.”

He added, “Because space in News Feed is limited, showing more posts from friends and family and updates that spark conversation means we’ll show less public content, including videos and other posts from publishers or businesses.”

Later that summer, Buffer and BuzzSumo teamed up to analyze more than 43 million posts from the top 20,000 brands on Facebook. They found that top business pages had increased their output from 72,000 posts per day in Q1 2017 to 90,032 posts per day in Q2 2018.

At the same time, the average engagement per post for the world’s top brands had dropped from 4,490 engagements per post to 1,582 engagements per post. And it’s worth noting that engagement on Facebook posts had dropped for all types of content.

• The average engagement per image had dropped from 9,370 per post in Q1 2017 to just 3,454 per post in Q2 2018.
• The average engagement per video had fallen from 5,486 to 2,867.
• The average engagement for links had plummeted from 2,577 to 763.

So, if you were the average social media marketer, then you were facing an existential crisis. (We talk about how to become an exceptional social media marketer in Chapter 6.)

That same summer, CMI and MarketingProfs surveyed content marketers for the 2019 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends—North America report. And among the key findings were 15 noticeable differences between the most successful and least successful B2B content marketers. Following were among the differences:

• Ninety‐two percent of the most successful content marketers (aka “top performers”) agreed there was content marketing buy‐in from highest levels in their organization versus 55 percent of the least successful.
• Ninety percent of the most successful B2B content marketers always/frequently prioritized their audience’s informational needs over their organization’s sales/promotional message versus 56 percent of the least successful.
• Seventy‐seven percent of the most successful used personas for content marketing purposes versus 36 percent of the least successful.
• Seventy‐three percent of the most successful gleaned better insight from technology into audience behavior/preferences versus 40 percent of the least successful.
• Seventy‐two percent of the most successful measured content marketing ROI versus 22 percent of the least successful.
• Sixty‐five percent of the most successful had a documented content marketing strategy versus 14 percent of the least successful.

So, even if you were just an average content marketer back then, you had a pretty good idea of how to become more successful the following year.

Before we dive deeper into how you can become more successful in content marketing, let’s make sure that you’re prepared for the OMCA exam.