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SEO & Marketing: Two Sides of the Same Coin?

It used to be, a year or so ago, that SEO and Marketing were, to coin a phrase, the same side of two different coins. You used each one for the same basic purpose — to get people to buy things from you — but they rarely interacted. Today, however, with Panda and Penguin having thrown “normal” SEO under the bus, almost all truly good SEO is marketing — specifically, Content Marketing.

In other words, the best search engine optimization companies around offer marketing as an SEO service.

Every advertisement you create is, in the eyes of an SEO company, a piece of content. And every piece of content you create can, in the eyes of a marketing company, act as advertising. Panda and Penguin obliterated a vast swath of non-content-oriented SEO practices, and among the leaders in content-based SEO, Content Marketing is the obvious choice.

Seriously, the other option (having someone create content that is used strictly for backlinks without any consideration to whether or not people actually want to read) is insanity. If you’re going to put the time and effort into having content created in the first place, why would you pay $.01/word to someone who burly speak English and get just the backlinks when you could double that, pay for a native English writer, and get content that will motivate people to buy in addition to the backlink?

Yes, SEO and marketing today are in fact largely one and the same. Well, there are clearly still lots of offline marketing firms who know nothing of SEO, but trying to find a high-quality SEO company that doesn’t also have a few marketing experts on staff is becoming an increasingly unlikely task.

In the eyes of the consumer, this should be considered a good change, for one simple reason: great content never gets Google slapped by some minor algorithm change. It never gets sandboxed. It will never become ‘grey hat’. Great content is the ultimate evergreen resource; chase it or eventually, whatever else you’re