Some online marketing pundits lend the impressions that content marketing has effectively replaced search engine optimization (SEO)—that you can do one but not both, and that content marketing has basically killed SEO, or at least exhausted its usefulness.
A Complex Relationship
There is a grain of truth in this, of course. Changes to search engine algorithms have made content quality the key metric for search engine success, whereas many of the older, exploitative SEO strategies have been heavily penalized. If you want to boost your search rankings, then, writing compelling content works way better than keyword-stuffing or other questionable SEO tricks.
But even this statement points to the complex relationship that content marketing and SEO have: They are not as easy to separate or to consider on their own merits as some would have us believe. Ultimately, content marketing and SEO can be used together, working toward the same end. So long as your focus is on content quality—on delivering value to the user—there is no reason why you cannot also incorporate some thoughtful, well-balanced elements of SEO strategy, including some judicious SEO keywords.
