These days, it seems content marketing is often touted as an alternative to SEO. However, it is possible to create content that not only creates value for users, but also build and improve on SEO.

SEO used to be as easy as throwing keywords in the meta tags, and you could rank for anything, regardless of whether the content on your website matched the keywords in the meta tags. But as the web has evolved and search engines have discovered it’s important to treat their users as customers, the way you build rank has changed significantly. And the competition for that ranking has greatly increased. The problem was, most of the content out there wasn’t designed to help people looking for information.

Content marketing became a way to provide the search engines with the quality content they wanted to serve to their users. It also became a way to educate your prospects about the products and services you offer, without directly being a sales pitch.
Content marketing and SEO became linked the moment we started turning to search engines to solve our problems, and the search engines started weeding out the poor content in favor of well written, informative content.

Keywords
The essential element of SEO is about researching and finding relevant keywords and making use of them in your content so they rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs). It’s important to use keywords in an appropriate manner and follow a strategic approach. You should never stuff a page with keywords and over optimize. SEO and content work in balance.

Keyword strategies are imperative for effective search engine marketing (SEM). At our organization, we hunt for the top websites and competitive keywords that are closely associated with the specific business or industry we’re working with. We follow a logical approach and use Google’s Keyword Planner, a keyword analysis tool, to analyze the most popular keyword volume and competition (high, medium or low). We use the long-established AdWords database of diverse industries including health, technology, entertainment and much more.

Embedding target keywords is essential to rank well and boost traffic. But again, follow a strategy and do not stuff them in the content. Repeating keywords has a negative impact on SEO. Follow a reasonable approach and use the main keywords in the title and body section.

Quality Content
SEO and content marketing require consistency. Fresh, unique and creative content gets rapidly indexed and ranks higher than low-value and repetitive content.

Content must be able to lure your clients as well as solve a particular issue. One can write influential content by using important keywords and targeting visitors. This is the most important factor through which Google determines the relevance of a page and ranks a piece of content. Brainstorming creative ideas and embedding the most important keywords is the key to acknowledged content.

User Experience
SEO is not just about blogs, articles, keywords and linkbacks but also about optimizing robots.txt, enhancing metadata and using tags appropriately.

Technical optimization makes a web page appealing to the search engine and ensures that the site has no broken links with any error codes (like 404s). Otherwise, the source will be poorly ranked by the search engine. Optimizing URLs and making the slug — everything after the .com — concise drives the search engine to find the relevant subpages and categorize the different parts of your site. This is vital to the success of any SEO campaign. The technical SEO elements benefit the UX and are present so as to publicize the content.

A good sitemap ensures an easy approach to content for users, and optimized robots.txt crawls the site so that viewers can access the content. The appropriate tag provides outstanding and superior indexing and authentic search results. Tags like header tags and title tags benefit the user by strategizing the content in a way that is useful for readers and simple for the search engine to understand.

A good title tag ensures a great user experience as the visitor can recognize the information from the page before they actually click on it. Header tags (H1-H6) hold great importance to differentiate headings and subheadings within the content to make it well-organized.

Traffic
Linkback, link-building or inbound linking is another major factor of SEO. Connecting your links with high-domain authority sites like .edu and .org drastically increases traffic. Though developing links is possible by connecting with link-building agencies, the best method is to
create expert content. To get a link back and boost traffic, stellar content is worth it.

Conclusion
SEO and content marketing are not disparate departments. In fact, both need each other. Content marketing is only successful if it has appropriate SEO. Together, SEO and content marketing are explosive.

Source:
https://www.business2community.com/brandviews/shelley-media-arts/how-seo-content-marketing-work-together-02055137
https://www.seoinc.com/seo-blog/content-marketing-seo-work-together/