You’ve probably heard the terms “SEO” and “content marketing” get thrown around within a few sentences of each other. That’s because the two are closely related and often work in tandem to create a successful content strategy.

Now, what they don’t tell you is exactly how you can leverage a partnership between the two to ensure you’re getting the most return for your investment. Both search engine optimization and content marketing’s end goal is to bring more traffic to your website, let people know your brand exists, and ultimately increase revenue. 

What Is the Connection Between SEO and Content Marketing?

SEO depends on high-quality content. High-quality content depends on SEO to get search traffic. One hardly functions well without the other. 

In a nutshell, this is the main connection between the two. They each help each other perform their “jobs” well. 

For example, say we’re a social media marketer searching for “Instagram post ideas.” The first Google search result by Sprout Social is a perfect example of content marketing and SEO in action. 

The blog post, which ranks as the first result on Google, gets tons of organic search traffic, some of which will convert into customers of their SaaS product. Notice how the post is well written and uses SEO best practices such as:

• Including the keyword in its URL
• Naturally Including the keyword in its title
• Formatting its content with headings, subheadings, and relevant images
• Creating a strong title that entices clicks 

Creating great content takes using SEO and content marketing together. However, you can’t skimp on the granular details that make this duo work. 

How to use SEO and content marketing together

To use SEO and content marketing together, you need to incorporate your SEO strategy into your content marketing strategy—regardless of the types of content you plan on creating. As you create your content, it’s key to make sure you’re following SEO best practices. 

This might look like creating an SEO checklist or template that you use to audit your content before publishing it. This means making sure you include tasks like:

• Conducting keyword research to determine the type of relevant content you should create
• Creating content with user experience in mind by optimizing your website’s UX and technical SEO
• Implement structured data like FAQ schema markup
• Implementing an internal linking strategy for better SEO gains
• Creating meta descriptions for each piece of content you’ve published
• Aiming to rank for long-tail keywords with lower search volume but less competition to gain more search traffic faster
• Investing in gaining backlinks to increase domain authority
• Using Google Analytics to track and improve metrics like page views and bounce rate

On the other hand, SEO depends on being both meticulous and consistent about applying best practices to improve ranking factors. 

The last thing you want to do is to create spammy, half-written content that doesn’t answer a search query or give any value to users. Even if you add SEO practices to poorly crafted content, it won’t do much for your rankings. The Google algorithm has grown advanced enough to recognize when content is spammy or only created for the sake of linking to a ton of other web pages. 

Once you create great content and incorporate SEO for a consistent period of time, you increase your chances of seeing more organic traffic and beating the competition. If done well enough, some of your content could even rank as the number one result for its target keyword.  

How to Combine And Scale SEO Content Marketing With AI

Taking it a step further by adding AI to the SEO and content marketing mix is where the magic can happen. An AI writing assistant like Jasper enables you to:

• Create high-quality content in half the time
• Automatically incorporate your preferred keywords 
• Check for plagiarism and spelling mistakes
• Automatically rephrase sentences for clarity
• Create content outlines
• Improve your existing content with a content improver template

Imagine having a tool in your back pocket that helps you generate a search-optimized introduction and conclusion for a post. 

That’s exactly what Jasper does. Let’s walk through an example together. 

Once you’re logged in to your Jasper dashboard:

1. Navigate to documents and click on the plus icon
2. Click on either Start from scratch or Blog post workflow
3. Insert all your content information, including the keywords you want to rank for in the left-hand menu
4. Click on Compose and let Jasper do the rest

Once Jasper generates the content for you, you can check it for plagiarism and spelling mistakes, or you can choose to rephrase sentences you don’t quite like. 

Let’s say you wanted to create a beginner’s guide to email marketing and you wanted to rank for the following keywords:

• How to choose an ESP
• How to send marketing emails
• What is email marketing

Once we plug those keywords into our Jasper dashboard, along with specifics on your preferred tone and language as well as a quick summary on what your content is about, here’s what we get:

The ease with which Jasper allows you to create original content makes it so that you can scale your content creation process relatively easy. 

For example, you might not need to onboard as many writers as you initially thought for content creation when you have AI in your back pocket that helps you generate content with a click of a button.

Content creation becomes faster, with minimal errors and you maintain the quality by generating content created for humans and not just web crawlers. Genius. 

Plus, Jasper integrates with Surfer SEO, a robust tool marketers can use to ensure their content is optimized effectively. 

Pro tip: Want to supercharge your SEO and content marketing efforts? Take Jasper’s free SEO course to learn how to create a strategy that gets results. 

Do more with SEO content marketing and AI

Without a doubt, SEO and content marketing make a dream duo once you know how to leverage them together to reach your target audience. However, only creating good content doesn’t cut it anymore. Creating content that ranks on search engine results pages takes working hand in hand with quality and strategy. 

Admittedly, content creation is a time-consuming piece of the puzzle. There are many content marketing platforms and even various Chrome extensions for digital marketing in general that can make it easier. But AI-powered writing assistant tools like Jasper are especially helpful for speeding up the content creation process. 

The best part is that you don’t even have to worry about going back and adding your keywords to your AI-generated content. It includes them naturally for you once you tell it what they are. 

Join the Jasper community to learn how other marketers are creating content, driving organic traffic, and growing their revenue.  

Better yet, dive right in and try out Jasper here to start creating your own content.