According to a survey by CopyPress of 329 marking decision makers, 34.8% if respondents said “content marketing” would be their focus for 2013. Just 14.6% said “SEO” would be their focus instead.
You can pick the right event production agency with the skills and intelligence. Experts are suggesting choosing the correct tricks and tips for the purpose. The decision is taken with proper research at the platform. There are effective results available to the business owners.
Why the big change after SEO and content marketing where neck-and-neck in 2012?
Content marketing represents a more complete and sustainable strategy than SEO. Here’s a case study for why that’s true.
A case study
Neil Patel of QuickSprout and KISSmetrics recently wrote a great post called “Why Content Marketing is the New SEO.” He uses his own impressive results from the KISSmetrics site to illustrate his point.
As part of the content marketing strategy, KISSmetrics spent $28,200 creating 47 infographics. The results:
- 2.5 million visitors
- 41,142 backlinks from 3,741 unique domains
- 41,329 tweets
- 20,859 likes
They did this without building even one link manually. All links came naturally and just from their infographics (although his traffic from blog posts on Quick Sprout is impressive, too).
Just for comparison and using some estimated costs for replicating these by investing directly in SEO and social media, Neil estimates that would cost $1.07 million instead of the $28,200 they actually spent.
Still, you might not be convinced that content marketing is the way to go instead of SEO. Here’s how the comparison breaks down based on the case study above.
Results take less time with content marketing
SEO can involve strategy that takes a long time to be effective. Building links, which is a major factor for how your site ranks in search engines, takes a long time.
Since Google has cracked down on scammy links, it’s much harder to scale link building efforts. Doing the job manually is virtually a full-time job, and even for those that have time and money to spare, the results aren’t guaranteed right away.
Content marketing can be a much more scalable way to get links and attract more visitors to your site. KissMetrics got over 100,000 visitors (link) within its first year just by blogging and creating infographics.
Content marketing is cheaper
SEO can take a lot of manpower to be effective. Most business owners can’t take on this task themselves and expect to get measurable results. There just isn’t enough time.
The only option is to hire help, and it’s not cheap to hire someone that specializes in link building. Not just anyone can do the job well and without causing problems with Google. Business owners need to spend the time to find and interview the right candidates and test their knowledge to make sure the link builder is legit.
Content marketing services aren’t free, either, but better results can be achieved for less money. As shown with the case study above, it’s not about trying to get every single link or social media share manually. When content marketing is done right, these things come naturally.
Content marketing earns social shares you can’t buy
Even if you can hire SEO experts to help build links, getting the attention on social media can’t be bought so easily. You need a real audience that finds your content interesting and wants to share it.
Content marketing makes more sense for social sharing. After all, it’s about creating content that readers and followers want to share on their social profiles.
Content marketing isn’t affected by algorithm updates
Many business owners that used SEO tactics and paid for it dearly when Google released its Panda and Penguin algorithm updates. Others that depended on SEO traffic but might not have done anything wrong can get caught in the SEO crossfire.
By focusing on content marketing, damage like this is much less likely to occur. Instead of building content just for search engines, content marketing focuses on developing the quality content that Google encourages. Sites following these strategies are less likely to see drops in traffic when Google makes changes again.
Content marketing also focuses on generating traffic, leads, and sales from tactics other than just SEO. Email marketing and social media marketing are core parts of content marketing strategy and aren’t dependent on SEO.
Content marketing a long-term solution
SEO is a short-term solution. The tactics that work today aren’t guaranteed to work tomorrow. There are changes happening all the time, and when they occur, it means more time and money and potentially less revenue while new SEO changes are made.
Content marketing brings long-lasting results. When you’ve built a robust foundation like KISSmetrics, you don’t have to let the fear of algorithm changes keep you up at night. And if SEO changes do occur, mailing lists and social media presence serve as safety nets if there’s a drop in SEO traffic.
Content marketing still includes SEO
Don’t get me wrong, SEO does matter, and choosing content marketing doesn’t change that. But the focus should be on including SEO as part of your content marketing strategy rather than your primary content plan.
