Benefits. They’re great. Whether you’re talking about health, wealth, or business, people love benefits. So, I’m going to talk about them here too. The benefits of content marketing that is.

This is the first dish of our three-course meal explaining the advantages of content marketing and why you need to use it in your business. 

Enjoy the meal I have so lovingly prepared for you.

Picture yourself enjoying a delicious sandwich on a cool spring day. That sandwich wouldn’t be complete without a drink in hand and a complimentary side. You could choose fruit, but it’s a bit too cold outside. You could choose soup, but that’s a bit too warm. Instead, you settle for a bag of crunchy chips.

Good food

The sandwich you are eating is content marketing. It’s meaty, it has great substance, it has just the right sauce, and it’s comprised of many ingredients. Your sandwich delivers a broad range of nutritional benefits to your body (campaign). It’s more holistic than a lot of other things you could eat (try).

The benefits of content marketing are numerous. It builds brand awareness and impression, raises trust and loyalty with your consumers, increases traffic and conversions, and more. When you create content, it’s consumer-friendly, consumer-focused, and digestible. It really satiates the reader’s hunger pains. And, like your sandwich, is vital to your well-being (business strategy).

Good for You food

SEO is like that bag of chips we were talking about. Except, they’re kale chips. I know, you really can’t get excited about the idea of kale in the form of a chip. At first. You would rather stick to your usual order, but once you take your first bite, you’re hooked. They provide that specific flavor profile to your meal that plain potatoes can’t deliver. And they’re good for you!

Writing in SEO lingo would make your content hard to consume. It's more narrow and focused, so on its own, it wouldn’t be appetizing. Instead, SEO is about giving the right answers to the right users so they click your content when they're searching. SEO ensures that your page will load faster and compete well with other sites using the same key terms. The better your SEO, the more shareable it is, and with it comes improved search rankings and backlinks. By combining your content marketing efforts with keywords and phrases, you create a gourmet meal that restaurant critics and food enthusiasts can rave about. 

The Perfect Pairing

If you haven't caught my drift, content marketing and SEO complement one another. You wouldn’t just eat a sandwich without chips because the meal wouldn’t be complete. You wouldn't eat the chips alone because they wouldn't satisfy your hunger. They both serve a purpose, together. The sandwich gives overall satiation, while the kale chips add nutritional benefits.

Content marketing fulfills a need while SEO makes that need searchable. Doing keyword research would be useless if you didn't add those keywords to your content. Creating content without knowing what your audience hungers for won't drive significant traffic. Paired together, though, you can create mouth-watering, engaging content that rank's high and that people love. 

Simply put, SEO wouldn’t exist without content and content would be extremely hard to find without SEO. You need both. And you need them done well. Feel like you're a kitchen porter when it comes to content marketing and SEO? Learn from the executive chefs on how to improve your skills.