Content Marketing VS SEO // Which One Drives More Traffic?

- If you had to pick SEO or content marketing,
and you could only pick one, which one would you choose?
Hey everyone, I'm Neil Patel,
and today I'm going to break down content marketing versus SEO.
Which one drives more traffic?
(upbeat music)
Before I get started,
make sure you subscribe to this channel,
and if you're on YouTube, click the alert notification.
Now question for you.
In the comments below,
tell me what you think will drive more traffic,
SEO or content marketing?
I'm waiting.
What do you think?
Is it SEO? Is it content marketing?
Well, you're about to find out.
A lot of people actually say,
"This is a false debate since SEO
and content marketing should work together."
And that's definitely true
when it comes to generating traffic in your own website.
If SEO's about optimizing pages on your website,
ultimately you'll be optimizing the pages
that at least have some content,
whether it's your title, maybe a description,
it doesn't have to be a blog post.
So there is truth to it in which it's really hard to do SEO
if you don't have content.
And a lot of people who watch my channel already know SEO
to some degree, but with content marketing,
most people don't.
So if you want to learn content marketing
from the beginning, there's a video for you to watch.
It's a beginner's guide to content marketing.
But content marketing isn't just about pushing content
on your own website, you can actually do content marketing
on several different platforms,
video content like YouTube, Facebook,
social media content, podcast content, live events.
So we could say that content marketing
has more potential to generate traffic than SEO
if you think about it in more holistically.
Beyond just visitors,
you could be getting views to your YouTube videos,
engagement, followers, even clicks on social media channels,
people listening and subscribing to your podcast,
viewers in your live event.
Now most of my audience is focused pretty heavily
on generating traffic to their own websites.
So let's dive in to how content marketing
and SEO should work together.
First off, it's all about targeting the right keywords
and offering amazing content
that gives searches what they're looking for
when they search on Google.
This involves both SEO and content marketing skills.
Just think about it.
Whenever you search on Google
and you land on a website that you don't like,
what do you do?
You click the back button.
That's why content marketing is important.
Yes, you want the ranking,
but you want to make sure that the content matches
what the intent is of the searcher.
Now writing great headlines and meta descriptions
for your content really can help.
No matter how great your content is,
if it doesn't get clicked on, it won't generate traffic.
This is another way that they work hand in hand,
knowing how to write and test headlines
is an SEO skill by nature,
and it supports your content marketing efforts.
Another thing that you should be doing
is optimizing your content for readability
and that not only involves creating content,
but also knowing how to serve that content piece
in a way that's easier to read by your visitors.
Again, this skill both involves content marketing and SEO.
Structured data.
This one helps search engines understand
what your content's all about
and serving it to them among the search results
in the most relevant way.
And that way, when someone's searching
for let's say something like a restaurant,
they can just see the star rating right there,
or the review rating right there.
That's an example of what structured markups can do,
because remember all of those people leaving reviews,
that's content marketing.
And those reviews can help people better understand
if they want to go to that restaurant or a store
or work with that business.
Another strategy that I love is internal linking.
Think about this.
If you're the one writing your content,
you can improve the user experience
by linking to other related pieces of content.
And this helps with SEO because those pages
are going to rank higher.
And speaking of user experience,
there's also improvements you can make
from mobile load time to optimizing Core Web Vitals.
There are lots of technical measures
that you can implant for the best experience
when consuming your content, such as lazy load.
As people scroll more images and content load.
As they don't scroll it doesn't load.
That way, the page loads faster,
especially when they're on mobile devices.
The bottom line is your content won't perform well
unless you do SEO as well.
Sure, you make it a social boost from it in the short run
but if you want long-lasting traffic,
you need a focus on SEO and content marketing.
And of course, content marketing can drive you traffic
without SEO, like YouTube, podcasts,
that are all examples of content marketing
but if you combine both, you'll do even better.
Now, if you need help combining your content marketing
with your SEO, check on my ad agency, NP Digital.
If you just need help, leave a comment below.
We're here to help you.
I'll answer each and every single question or try to.
And I wish you the best of luck
to getting more traffic from SEO and content marketing.