What Is The Difference Between SEO And Content Marketing? — a profane-yet-accurate guide

Every field has a few “dumbass” questions (sorry, but it’s true!). These are the questions that people who work in the field get, all the time, from people who don’t — and they often feel like “dumbass” questions to the people on the receiving end because they are questions that nobody would ask if they knew anything about the topic.

Here’s the thing:

If they knew about the topic, they wouldn’t be asking.

Nobody knows anything until they find it out for the first time, and generally speaking one of the best ways to learn more about a topic is to ask questions of somebody who works in a field in which that topic comes up a lot.

ANOTHER very good way of learning more about a topic is to Google it.

Googling, as opposed to asking an actual human, has two main advantages that hold a lot of appeal for a lot of people:

1. You can usually get an answer, or at least search results in which to continue your quest for an answer, fairly quickly. That cuts out the “lag time” that frequently occurs when you are asking a real, live, human being who has to do things like pack the kids’ lunches and put away the laundry (plus whatever it is they do for a living).
2. Google basically never calls you a dumbass — not so you’d notice, anyway.

Given a choice between instant gratification and being treated like they haven’t got sense enough to come in out of the rain, most people tend to pick instant gratification.

Google will tattle-tell on the dumbass questions “people also ask” … about (almost) anything.

The results will sometimes make you weep for humanity, but that’s mostly a function of how familiar you personally are with the topic divided by what kind of expectations you had for humanity in the first place.

(Sidenote: My expectations have been low for years, but somehow people keep exceeding them in the wrong direction — about the best that can be said for the situation is that I do get a lot of mileage out of the famous Carrie Fisher quote: “Things were getting worse faster than we could lower our standards.”)

Anyway, for “SEO vs. content marketing,” I get:

“People also ask” results for “seo vs content marketing” (Google)

I’m not going to tackle ALL of those questions here, but you can presumably tell that ONE of them forms our organizing theme (I knew I wanted to write something about content marketing and SEO; that set of questions was how I decided on a framing).

BECAUSE this is a piece for people who don’t already know all about content marketing and SEO, the rest of the article will probably make more sense if we “define our terms” a little — whether people have been asking for the definitions or not. So:

SEO = Search Engine Optimization. Basically it’s a set of techniques used to make a website (or page) look clearly “relevant” to search engines as they scour the web for results to show users in response to a query. Relevance is calibrated by topic (e.g., web pages with a lot of mentions of motorcycles and no mentions of water filtrations systems are likely to appear highly relevant to search queries on motorcycle safety, and not relevant at all to search queries on reverse osmosis water purifiers).

Content marketing = the use of “content,” usually digital, to sell stuff. This basic marketing strategy has a very long history that considerably pre-dates the digital era; in the 2020s, however, the paradigmatic example is “content writing,” most often to develop blog articles, or sometimes videos or graphics. Recent trends have also seen a push toward repurposing organic social media posts as marketing content.

SEO and content marketing coincide at the point where a smart business team realizes there’s money to be made by showing up in people’s search results with the answers to their dumbass questions.

If you are reading this article because you wanted to know what might be the difference between SEO and content marketing, then what you are experiencing is an example of SEO content writing — a subset of both SEO and content marketing that consists, basically, of finding out what the “dumbass” questions on a particular topic are, and then answering them in a way that:

(a) makes your answers likely to be among the first few results Google (or Bing, or your search engine of choice) shows to the people asking them

and

(b) provides some evidence, implicit or explicit, for why somebody asking a particular question might want to buy your product/hire your service/do XYZ other thing you want to put in your CTA (call to action)

Theoretically, the questions you pick to answer don’t HAVE to be the dumbass questions; sometimes there are very astute questions tucked into the general slush. Answer those if you want! However, in a lot of cases there’s a strategic choice you may want to make, to answer questions for the people who are asking because they are NOT already experts, as opposed to writing for the people who don’t need to ask because they already have the answers. Not always, but often, the first group of people needs your answers (and the product or service you are selling), much more than the other.

Medium persists in the belief that all articles need images; this is here in case the screenshot of Google results didn’t cut it.

You can also get some bonus points for goodwill here if, in the process of answering the dumbass question, you do not make your readers (or viewers, or listeners) feel like idiots. “Don’t be an arrogant ass,” is an underrated marketing ploy.

“Good” content marketing answers questions people actually ask.

Sometimes this is harder than others, but remember:

No matter what question you are answering, there absolutely was some point at which you, also, did not have the answer.

The fact that you have it now and may have had it for years doesn’t inherently make you any smarter than the person Googling to find the information already in your possession.

I have to admit I struggle with the person who evidently asked Google, “Is a way to tie SEO and content marketing together?” because … I feel like asking in complete sentences is a pretty low bar to clear. I do not, however, have any aspersions to cast on the people who are totally ignorant about whether you can in fact “tie SEO and content marketing together,” because there is no reason on God’s good earth why anyone should know the answer to that question unless they have been spending an awful lot of time in optimizing websites for search engines or developing content to use in (digital) marketing, or both.

I once spent over an hour struggling to read my car’s battery charge — not because I had any difficulty understanding how a voltmeter works or even how to read the one I’d purchased, but because none of the instructions explained how to connect the metal points of the tester to the battery to get a reading. They didn’t explain because whoever wrote the manual assumed that was something anybody trying to use a voltmeter would already know; I didn’t, so I had to ask the dumbass question in order to stop staring under my car’s hood (like a dumbass) and start running diagnostics with the voltmeter (like a badass).

Everybody out here Googling for the answers you have is doing pretty much some flavor of the same thing.

So:

Is there a way to tie SEO and content marketing together?

YOU BET YOUR ASS THERE IS.

SEO and content marketing can operate separately, in which case one of the “dumbass” questions digital marketing professionals get a lot is “What is the difference between SEO and content marketing?” (the title of this article, and the question I am answering) — or they can work together, which gives you “SEO content marketing.”

What SEO content marketing usually means is that you are creating content you hope will appeal to your target audience (or persuade them to make a purchase; not necessarily the same thing) and “optimizing” the way you present that content in hopes that it will show up in search results for the people who are likely to be interested in what you’re selling.

Ideally, SEO and content marketing work together in a symbiotic relationship, with SEO informing content marketing, which in turn provides more and more material to for search engines to crawl, index, and return in response to user queries. That’s “SEO content marketing” — blog articles are probably the most common example (and the one with the lowest production overhead), but you could theoretically make it work with other types of material, as well (just as long as the material you come up with can fit into a “<div>” section on a webpage somewhere — that’s what the “content” part is all about!).

Are SEO and content marketing the same thing?

Because search engines return web pages based on their “content,” one of the most efficient ways to “optimize” a website for search engines is to create a bunch of content that contains keywords relevant to whatever you hope people will find you for, and then post them online using code and settings that conform to the “best practices” guidelines of the various search engines.

Content marketing could theoretically be made up of anything that featured your product or service (from the radio dramas of the 1930s that gave us the entire “soap opera” genre, to the “coconut tree” meme that went viral in Summer 2024). There are a lot of effective ways to do content marketing — but ONE of them is to put build your content marketing strategy on strong SEO research (usually in keywords; sometimes other elements come into play), then put SEO techniques to good use helping you deliver the content you’ve just carefully crafted in such a way that search engines will go, “Ooooh! Nice find!! Here you are, bestie!!!!” when they trawl the internet for material in response to a user query.

In other words …

How do you combine SEO and content marketing?

You theoretically COULD go about this in at least a few different ways, but it’s hard to beat the elegance of simplicity in a workflow. Ergo, your process for connecting SEO and content marketing to get the most bang for your buck from each is:

1. Content marketing strategy: Pick a handful of words or phrases that have some relevance to your products and/or services. I find it’s helpful to start by asking somebody who is NOT working with me to describe what I do, and start with THEIR words instead of my own (if I try marketing my analytics services under “linguistic anthropology,” I’m going to find a bunch of other linguistic anthropologists — a group of people pretty much self-selected for the fact that they do not need my services).
2. SEO research: Run those words/phrases through a Google search to find out what questions people are actually asking with them. If you want to get fancy, at this stage you can test your keywords through one of the free keyword research tools to see which ones get the most searches per month — but keep in mind that more searches usually means more competition for the top search results spots, whereas fewer searches typically means not as many people looking in the first place; like so many things in life, this one is all about finding a balance.
3. Content marketing development: Create some content (blog articles, video explainers, etc.) that answers the questions people have been asking, using the keywords you’ve researched & tested.
4. SEO techniques: Deliver your content online by sharing it to your website (or website + socials!) in accordance with current “best practices” for improving SERP (Search Engine Results Page) rankings. These change periodically, but Google’s “Starter Guide” offers a nice roundup of the highlights.

SEO content marketing is basically the art of structuring marketing content, during development, so that it will be easier to find for the people who might be “sold” after viewing it … and then putting that content online in such a way that it is highly visible to the search engines that will be responsible for doing the bulk of the retrieval and display.

(As a writing style, it’s also fairly repetitive, because you are giving search engines multiple phrasings of the same idea to latch onto — notice how the paragraph immediately above this one restates a point I made earlier?? The nice thing about SEO content writing, in comparison to other types of prose-craft, is that if you come up with a couple of explanations that you think work about equally well, you can often keep both of them instead of having to sacrifice one on the altar of editing. As a genre, it has its perks!)

SEO content marketing = answering the dumbass questions, for humans and search engines.

You can have SEO without content marketing, in the sense that you don’t have to run a fully-fledged content creation campaign just to make some tweaks to your website that might improve your visibility to search engines. You can absolutely have content marketing without SEO (not a lot of search engine optimization in those old radio dramas!). But kind of like you can do cardio without strength training, and you can lift weights without taking up jogging — you can get more from both, and often achieve better results overall, by using them in combination.

Sometimes people think that “SEO content marketing” — especially the written version, like blog posts and the like — is spammy hard-sell verbiage, the kind of thing that becomes voiceovers on everybody’s least favorite television ads. You can absolutely put SEO and content marketing together and get the local-keywords version of the infamous mesothelioma personal injury ads. But I would argue that pretty much any technique can be applied well or poorly.

For better or worse, SEO content marketing usually gives you something that looks pretty much like this article you’re reading right now.

I don’t actually have a pitch to make in this piece (I’m not going to end with the freelance writer’s version of “Call the Law Offices of …” or whatever_ — but I needed a handy demonstration, so I developed the draft for this Medium post in pretty much the same way I would develop a piece of (written) SEO content marketing: I picked a couple of keywords that seemed like they might be related to my area of expertise, I ran them through one of the many free SEO tools floating around in the digisphere these days, and then I sifted through Google’s “People Also Ask” feature (it’s a gold mine) to see what kinds of questions I might reasonably answer using those keywords.

And then I answered the dumbass question, that isn’t a dumbass question at all unless you’re somebody who already knows the answer — and everybody, at some point, was somebody who did not yet know the answer.