Hello and welcome to episode six of the Web3 marketing debate show. Todays agenda is content marketing vs SEO. Which one is better for your business and which one will produce the better ROI for your business.

Joseph Chesterton and James Banks go head to head with a (maybe not so surprising) twist at the end. James will be taking the Search Engine Optimisation side of the ring and Joseph will be taking the Content Marketing side.

Who do you think wins this debate? Let us know in the comments below. Also, which is better for your business? Content marketing or SEO?

Podcast: Ep 06 – Content Marketing Vs SEO

James: Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Web3 marking debate show. Today we will be debating content marketing versus SEO.

I’m your co-host, James Banks, and I will be taking the SEO side of the ring.

Joseph: And I’m Joseph Chesterton and I will be taking the content marketing side.

James: All righty, well, let’s get the show and debate started. So, Joseph, why does content marketing work better than SEO?

Joseph: Content marketing is focused around creating, publishing and distributing content for a targeted audience online. With SEO, SEO actually can’t happen without content marketing. So content marketing is the core for marketing to your audience. You could have the perfectly optimised SEO friendly website, but without content marketing, then what’s the point? You’re not reaching the people that you want to reach.

So content marketing is clearly the better option.

And on top of that, with content marketing, it’s one of the ways to build your brand and to be able to, resonate and grow your audience. And finally on top of that, content marketing, you can see actionable results sooner getting in front of the people where your target market are. Whereas with SEO you have to wait until you’ve created the content then you can do the optimisations. That’s my opinion on it. What’s yours, James?

James: Well thanks for concluding the show Joseph, we’ll see you all in the next episode. Nah i’m kidding.

Look. Yes content marketing and SEO are similar, but they’re not exactly the same thing. They are different. SEO, ok let’s say for example, why will you be doing both of these to begin with? Well, you probably the sole purpose is you want to be discovered. You want your target audience to discover you. Discover your website more than what is currently happening. That’s why you would do either one of these two exercises.

But here’s the thing. You know, content marketing you could be doing videos, audio’s, blogging and doing all this stuff and getting it on your website. But if your website is not set up, I.E. the backend, the frontend, the strategy of how your audience is searching to find and discover all of this great content that you’re producing If you haven’t considered this as part of your traditional SEO strategy, then your content marketing strategy can miss the point. Or you get your content bang on, but because you haven’t actually looked and probably audited it and assessed your website from a technical functional UI/UX (User Interface/User Experience) perspective. All of this effort and energy and resources that’s going into content marketing gets subdued because of these issues that would of been fixed and solved if you looked at your website from the lens of a traditional SEO campaign.

That’s why I believe that SEO is the one that should prelude content marketing because of the fact that, if done correctly, will solve these foundational issues that, once solved, will amplify the results of your content marketing efforts.

Speaking about results Joseph, why would you say? Content marketing produces better results than SEO.

Joseph: I kind of think we’re comparing apples with oranges here. One typically starts on the website, then moves into social platforms, whereas the other one is predominantly on your website and moves into other areas. The ROI (Return on investment) is two different things, depending on what your ROI you’re targeting.

So content marketing works better when you’re building a brand and you’re trying to reach an audience that is in a certain location not on your website. So really, we need to determine what the ROI is if it is to grow your business than honestly, I think we can draw on this one.

James: Well, I’m pretty sure this is the marketing debate Show Joseph. So there will be no fence sitting. There will be no drawing. Ha Ha Ha. Because here’s the thing, because. Alright, when we talk about results, all right, let me bring back my original point. If content marking was aligned and precluded by an SEO search and strategy, you can then start attributing an ROI to your content marketing efforts.

Because I’ll give you an example. Really, really simple example. You create a blog post that blog post ranks well in organic search, the traffic from organic search to that blog post turns into a tangible conversion action such as someone reads it. They then opt in to read more. Perhaps they contact, perhaps they enquire. Perhaps they call, depending on what are the metrics of success that you are measuring for your business when you actually bring these two together, you can actually track and manage a tangible ROI from content marketing.

If content marketing is purely just for brand building, then that’s a different storey. The return on the ROI isn’t necessarily directly lead-gen, it’s different. The metrics are different. However, when we talk about results for small to medium businesses for driving growth by combining content marketing together with SEO. That allows you to then track the returns of your content marketing efforts, which can then be attributed to things such as return on an investment so on and so forth. Whatever marketing metric that you are using to gauge the success of your digital marketing strategy.

So with that said, Joseph, which one’s better for long term success?

Joseph: I honestly believe that you actually need to do both to succeed online and to grow your business. I think the better long term strategy is content market and make sure that you’re doing SEO. Probably not going to debate this one James.

James: Well, it isn’t really much of a debate because our point, we’ve been making this point for years is content marking Is SEO and SEO is content marketing. There really is no point in splitting hairs between these two things because they are in two of the same thing. Similar to what we said on our Google Ads versus SEO debate earlier on in the show.

These play on each other. They can amplify and magnitude the results of each other if you combine the strategy together under the one centralist digital marketing campaign strategy.

This is what we do for our clients, by the way, because we know that the magnitude of success is so much greater when you bring content marketing together with SEO. And this is what we recommend if you’re considering going down either or options, why not do both? Both will allow you to improve your chances of succeeding and reaching your goals and objectives online through digital marketing.

So that’s a conclusion for the marketing debate show.

Again, we will be discussing a really cool topic for the next episode which will be around the whole subject of Brand versus lead generation. So say tuned for that. But without further ado, thank you again for tuning into another marking debate show.

We’ll talk to you all real soon.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of the Marketing Debate show. If you liked it, please give us a positive rating on your preferred podcasting platform.

Here’s the previous episodes:

And here’s the next episode: Content Vs Design: Which One is More Valuable for Your Business?