SEO Without Content is Like a Car Without Gas -Time to Invest in Content

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Time for a controversial opinion: it’s time to stop investing in SEO.

Wait, what?

Let’s revise that. It’s time to stop investing in SEO services and start investing in SEO content services. Because if you’re investing in SEO services without the content, you’re buying a car without any wheels.

Here’s why that is.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Content

What do we actually mean when we talk about content? Hint: content is not magic, it’s not crossed fingers, and it’s not a winning lottery ticket (well, not at first).

Getting a definition of content every marketer can agree on is impossible. We’re not here to discover gravity. But a basic understanding of content is helpful in establishing why your website needs content, not just SEO.

To boil it down to simple terms, content is high-quality, useful information presented in a narratively relevant manner for a consumer. We can squabble about the relative quality of website content and social media (a lot of it is bad) but we’re here to talk about the power of good content for marketing.

Basically, it’s useful and relevant to the viewer. Other factors may vary, but those stay the same.

What is SEO Content?

Of course, it’s not enough to create stuff and throw stuff into the world like a bird shoved out of the nest. If you want that bird to fly (translation: attract viewers and generate sales) you’re going to need to optimize it.

For those late to the party, search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing a website so that it can be found on search engines (thus generating views and sales). Think marketing, but for search engines (and even social media. But what is optimized?

That would be content.

So, to put it together, SEO content is basically any content created and optimized with the goal of attracting organic traffic through search engines. SEO content writing is the process of making website writing visible to search engines through writing best practices.

Types of Content

Happily, SEO content (and SEO content writing) isn’t a cut and dry affair. It can be almost any form of content. It’s not even limited to website content. For example, it can include:

  • Blog posts
  • Articles
  • Product pages
  • About pages
  • Lists
  • Guides
  • Infographics
  • Slideshows
  • Directories (if you’re creative enough)
  • Social media

If you’ve got all this stuff, why would you need to optimize it?

Well, a search engine doesn’t browse the web like a human browses a library, finding items at random. It uses web crawlers to run through a list of publicly available sites and jumps from link to link to discover new pages. While a web crawler is on a site, it renders content for the search engine by tagging key signals and indexing them in the search index, like the index at the back of a textbook.

When a user types a search into a search engine, the search engine uses the index to deliver the most relevant website content for the search, rather than trawling the whole web. From your side, it’s all about marketing.

SEO and Content=Peanut Butter and Jelly

So, in order for your content to be discoverable by web crawlers (and eventually, by actual human beings) it has to be optimized so that the crawlers know what to look for. That’s the work of SEO, SEO writers, SEO content writing services, and, of course, marketing.

But in order for SEO to have any materials to work with, you have to have content, whether that’s on your website or on social media. Otherwise, the web crawlers won’t have any information available to render and index.

In this way, SEO and content are like peanut butter and jelly, but on a deeper level. You can’t have SEO without also having content, and your content won’t get you very far without SEO.

A more appropriate analogy, then, is a car engine and gasoline. Both are useful components, but they won’t get you to work unless you put them together in the right way.

The Problem: Lack of Integration

The issue, for many sites, is not lack of investment but lack of integration.

Many site owners, new to SEO and unfamiliar with how it fits into the finer workings of their site and their social media, think of SEO and content as two distinct concepts. But SEO demands content, and content demands SEO.

An SEO strategy, even one with strong best practices, won’t help you go any farther than incremental improvements without the content to back it up. And content won’t help you unless you also have SEO.

The question, then, is why you would invest in an SEO service that doesn’t also do content. That’s like turning on your car in the morning with an empty tank and being surprised when you can’t leave the garage.

The good news? SEO content writers are out there, writing fantastic website content using best practices designed to ensure your website gets noticed. Better still, there are SEO content services that can get the hard work of content handled for you.

The Solution: Two Pieces of a Puzzle

The solution is to stop thinking about content and SEO as two different things because they simply aren’t.

There is no SEO without content, and there is no content without SEO. You can’t optimize keywords if you don’t have any content containing those keywords–there’s nothing there for crawlers to index and nothing for an actual human to read. A keyword rank checker is handy, but it only works if you actually, you know, have keywords.

The Struggle for Optimized Content

Unfortunately, many business owners are behind the curve on their own SEO, content, and SEO content simply because they don’t understand how to make optimized content.

Stop us if this sounds familiar: you try to write blog posts. You write one, eventually (like a month from now). You post it. Nothing happens. You post again in two months. Still nothing. No hits. Nada. And when you hire an SEO content writer or SEO content services, they tell you that you need content to thrive.

Which brings you back to the problem of content.

A helpful SEO service, for businesses like this, is a service that also provides the content writing services that business needs to thrive. If you can’t write the content yourself, why waste time with SEO content writing services that can’t give it to you?

The SEO Content Services You’ve Been Looking For

We’re here to provide the SEO content services and SEO content writers that your business needs to deliver real results. We know that content is your most powerful marketing tool, and when it comes to the health of your business, you shouldn’t leave anything up to chance.

That’s why we offer professional writers, all trained in marketing under the supervision of SEO specialists. We know SEO for writers, we know what makes an outstanding SEO writer, and we know how to provide writing services that take your website and your marketing to the next level. That way, you know you’re getting content optimized for your success.

Sound like the right fit for your business and your website? Then let’s talk about writing a new narrative for your marketing efforts. Click here to get in touch.