What is SEO content in digital marketing?

If you’re interested in digital marketing for your business, then you’ve probably read about ‘SEO’.

And you’ve probably seen that content is mentioned a lot on the topic of SEO. Most people will call it “SEO content”. 

You might, however, not understand how the two connect.

Digital marketing today

Digital marketing is about staying on the pulse; you use the latest trends to capture the market’s attention, digitally. It could be on a website or social media. 

SEO and content today

SEO content used to mean content that sits on your website. Today, it’s more than that. 

It’s still your website content, but it’s content on all digital channels; social media, online listings, business directories, forums, and more. 

SEO content sits within your content marketing. And with content marketing, content is more than the written word. It’s videos, it’s infographic, it’s memes. All the content you create can be discovered on search engines.

Anywhere your business features online, there’s SEO content potential.  

What remains the same is that SEO content is the mechanism for getting your brand to show up for people’s (customer) searches. And turn your visitors into customers.

What is SEO content in digital marketing?

SEO content is content you create for any of your digital channels and platforms, with the aim to engage people.

Your digital marketing goal will likely be to get more eyes on your brand and grow/retain your customer base.

Content creation can play a big part in this, particularly if you have an SEO mindset when you create your website, video or visual content.

SEO content is the core of digital marketing

Content more generally plays a huge part in marketing. Whether it’s a TV ad or an ad at a bus stop, the messaging either behind or literally on the ad either makes it sink or float. 

It’s the same for digital marketing. The only added benefit of the content is it can help you to show up online for customers when they’re searching for whatever it is they need. 

For now, let’s focus on SEO content for your website. A lot of the same values still apply even if you’re creating content for social media.

How SEO website content benefits digital marketing

Creates enjoyable user/customer experience

SEO has technical aspects that make it much easier for a search engine to find your website and rank you according to the quality of your content. 

Technical optimisation will also improve the user experience. If your website is easy to use, your audience is going to use it! 

Technical SEO tactics include: 

• Structuring your content
• Link building
• Decreasing page load speed
• Refining URL slugs
• Making your website mobile friendly

More people coming to your website and finding out about your brand

SEO content makes a website visible. Optimised content leads to search bots choosing to rank your website. 

If you rank well for searches that your customers are typing in, you’ll have customers coming to you rather than you chasing them.

Short, and most importantly, long term return on investment

What you pay now and for the next 6-12 months of SEO you will make back in no time – so long as the SEO works.

The SEO we have done for our own website and for our clients’ sites, even after they finish their SEO, are still getting people to their website from the content we created.

Here’s an example of SEO long term ROI for you: A blog that we wrote 3 years ago has single handedly brought in over 50 sales leads and secured us our biggest contracts we’ve ever had as a business.

So far, one of the clients we secured from that blog has generated us over £20,000. The cost to write that blog was £250.

Best of all, it will keep getting people onto our website and enquiring about our content services for years to come.

Creating SEO website content that helps answer a question or solves your customer’s predicament is the way to go. And best of all, it’ll help many customers now and well into the future. 

Examples of SEO content in digital marketing

Content marketing

Content marketing involves creating content and promoting content to market your brand. 

We used the example of blogging above, which is a reliable form of content marketing, but this definition also covers your social media posts, any videos and images you create, and audio content, like podcasts. 

You’ll probably use all of these in your digital marketing, and SEO can have an influence on each. 

Aside from using keywords in the body of any text, you can also be creative with elements like:

• Post headlines
• Social media captions
• Video captions and subtitles
• Image alt text
• Podcast scripts and transcripts

If you’re making something to improve your online visibility or streamline your marketing funnel, refine it with SEO best practices. 

Paid advertisement on search engines (PPC)

SEO content is important for paid ads on search engines (like Google and Bing) and users. 

First step is to write ad copy to entice users – you want them to click your ad over anyone else’s. 

Second step is to send them to a website page that will give them what they’re looking for. Of course, you content will play a part in keeping them on your website. 

However, there’s more at play here, and this is where SEO content is fundamental to your ads’ success: 

One, the ad and the link are more likely to perform better with quality SEO content. Users are clicking more often (relevance) and landing on a page they want to stay on (retention). 

Relevance and retention is a positive sign in the eyes of the search engine, and your website is likely to receive a higher page/ad score. This means your ad shown more than your competitors.

Two, the SEO and PPC keyword targeting can work together to show the most relevant search results for the user. You can use the results of a PPC campaign to track what your audience is doing when they come across your content. 

From here you can test keywords and content to see how effective your marketing is. 

Email marketing

There’s a lot of ways to combine your SEO and email marketing to work together. 

SEO data (like search trends, keywords, and data on your website content) can help you to decide on what content to send out to your subscribers, and when. You may have a blog that’s extremely popular at a certain time of the year. If there’s a correlation, you can time it to send out to your subscribers. 

Similarly, email content can be repurposed into a blog post or link directly to one, which won’t be effective without the presence of your keywords. 

FAQs about SEO content in digital marketing

Are SEO and digital marketing different?

Yes, but no. Imagine that digital marketing is the parent of SEO. SEO is just one of digital marketing’s many children. They also have a child called social media, paid advertising and email marketing.

And yes, digital marketing loves them all the same!

SEO is a form of digital marketing. If you want your online marketing efforts to bring in value for money, it’s best to use SEO best practices throughout your content on your website, social media, paid ads and email marketing. 

Can you create digital marketing content without SEO?

Of course, but you’ll likely be doing SEO without knowing it! 

You may be creating a video for social media for example. You may post that video with support post copy. Within that post copy, you’ll likely be writing copy relevant to the video, but also copy that your users will be searching on social media. 

Well, I hate to break it to you, that’s SEO on social media.

How long does it take for SEO content to benefit digital marketing?

How long’s a piece of string!? It really depends on how much SEO you’re doing and how much content you’re creating.

You can see results as fast as within a month. But in my experience, you can usually start to see an impact after 3-6 months. At 12 months of full on SEO, it’s in full swing and you’re getting a nice flow of people discovering your brand, and enquiring/buying from you.

How much does SEO cost?

In the UK, most businesses will spend anywhere between £500 and £2000 a month on SEO services, with the average spend at around £800 (just for website SEO). 

Paying an experienced content marketer and copywriter to write SEO content means you get at least 2 pieces per month, as well as monthly reporting and routine web page optimisation. 

We’ve covered more SEO costs in our blog.