SEO Blog

They might appear to be polar opposites; however, both the creation of site content and marketing take time and both are hugely important in attracting visitors. However, what marketing – whether through professional PR or social media – can’t do is maintain their attention.

It’s the eternal problem of the Internet. Lots of sites do it, but in order to market something effectively, you need something to market in the first place. Content, therefore, is still the most important part of the creation and development of a website. By creating original copy and an eye-catching design, your site already has the characteristics to ensure that visitors will have something engaging to meet them when they arrive on your pages.

Content of course has a double benefit thanks to its SEO boosting properties. By having pages full of informative, optimised copy, search engines will be able to pick your site up far easier and may well rank it higher as a consequence. This of course then has the ultimate marketing property, providing free 24/7 coverage on Google and the other search engines. There isn’t a price that can be put on the value of a top ranking, which is a very good reason for investing in your content and SEO.

From the marketing perspective, new avenues for advertising services and new pages, including blog posts and fresh products, have opened up in recent years. Social media and bookmarking have become a highly successful and hugely popular marketing avenue in the past couple of years. The ease with which you can post links and interact amongst the community has encouraged a far freer movement of traffic.

Unfortunately though, marketing is only truly successful when it is properly targeted. With the likes of social media, just as with television, newspaper and other forms of offline advertising, there’s no guarantee that the people visiting your site are even remotely interested in it. Getting traffic just for traffic’s sake is unlikely to gain the rewards of a targeted SEO campaign.

So, whilst it may seem a little one-sided and biased, there really is no substitute for good quality content. Marketing should be done as a subsidiary, not a replacement for your copy. Yes, it is important, extremely important in fact, to give your site all the exposure you can, but that shouldn’t be to the detriment of the site itself. Content should come first, all else follows.