CONTENT MARKETING! DO IT! It's the NEW SEO

In fact, it's so awesome you don't need anything else! Just produce awesome content and you will be in SEO nirvana! It's like double rainbows and Matt Cutts got together and had baby NyanCats!

Old SEO is dead. This is the new SEO and it's beautiful!

Sound too good to be true? That's because it is.

Content marketing isn't new. It's just a new buzzword picked up by other industries that suddenly found out they could to "do SEO", but they didn't want to "do SEO", so they tried to make it more special. It isn't.

Content marketing has been around since SEO on Google has been called SEO. To not understand this is to not understand what Google and its algorithms measure and how this might affect your site.

Now with the arrival of Penguin 2.0, you might be just setting yourself up for a fall – right out of the rankings. And yes despite all our talk of rankings not mattering, they do, because if you go from somewhere on Page 1 (with personalization) to nowhere on page 51, you will suddenly say, "Oh no! My rankings!"

Rankings matter. SEO matters. And content marketing is SEO. It always has been, and always will be – well, at least until the search engines don't use algorithms and content, but that's a long way off.

Need more proof of the power of content? Back in 2008, I ranked a website in the top 15 for a one-word term in competitive vertical with no links, a domain that was less than a year old, four weeks from launch, with 1,500 pages of unique, solid, quality content. Every word on the site was original, even the Contact Us.

How do I know content was the reason for getting the site ranked in the top 15? Content! To be fair, I can only be 99 percent sure that content, thanks to a Google engineer at a party at an SES Conference who confirmed it was "most likely the reason".

Like I said, the importance of unique, quality content isn't a new concept.

Just What is "Content Marketing"?



If you want the best literal explanation, this quote from Quora (found via Ann Smarty and Authority Labs) works very well:

"Content marketing is the umbrella of all techniques that are used to generate traffic, leads, online visibility, and brand awareness/fidelity."
If you want the one that really gets it, then this one from Sugar Rae says it best:

"Content marketing isn't a new strategy, it's merely a new word.

Why ... do we as an industry feel the need to invent a new buzzword for the same services every few years? We've been doing "content marketing" forever.

Website = content
Promotion of that website = marketing
Website + promotion of said website = content marketing."

And there you go. It is content that you put on your website and promote. That can be text, video, infographics, images, whatever you think of and put on your site. When you release it as part of your site marketed materials, then it is "content marketing".

It's really that simple. Again, it's not new, it's just a new buzzword.



Now that we have that straightened out, what does content marketing have to do with Penguin, SEO, future penalties, and you?

Content marketing is not the new SEO. It is SEO and so are a lot of other things.

It's All SEO Now

One client's site I recently reviewed was brilliant. The company had never bought a link, was completely legit, and worked feverishly on their content marketing – yet they had 16 warnings and penalties. Why? Because while content is great and certainly a very important part of any SEO strategy, it isn't all or even most of what you need to be concerned about when thinking about the algorithm.

Taking Your Eyes Off The Ball



So while you were spending all that time concentrating on your content marketing, what were you doing about making sure you met the rest of the 200+ points on the algorithm? What about the other things that Penguin was meant to control?

How is your internal linking? Your anchor text either coming in or internally?

How about where your sites are linking externally? Where are you linking to and are you linking to other sites you own? (triangulation - crosslinking)

What about the other changes Google announced are coming this summer (which I will just term, the "no one is home" penalties for lack of a better term)? You know, like spam comment in your forums or blogs? Or your page speed and usability?

How about your page crawls? Sitemaps? Are you showing Google no one is at the helm while you spend all your time focused on cultivating the latest viral video or super infographic?

Starting to see the issue?

Content marketing isn't separate from SEO and isn't the new SEO. It doesn't replace SEO. It is SEO just like all the other items mentioned are SEO.