Search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing are both incredibly important for any internet marketing campaign — and many businesses don’t realize that they’re actually two separate concepts in terms of digital marketing.

The best way to think about the difference is to look at the target audience of SEO versus the audience of content marketing:

When you’re working with SEO services, you’re focusing on creating content and optimizing your website so that Google’s algorithm will pay attention to your page and give you a good ranking. You need focus on things like website development, link building, and filling out page tags.

When you’re working on content marketing, you’re creating content for actual people rather than a search engine. You need engaging content that people will want to interact with, and ideally you’ll have content that your audience will share via social media sites.

So how exactly can you make sure that your internet marketing strategy is addressing both SEO and content marketing? Here are a few tips:

• Create content that’s optimized right from the start. This means you’ll want a variety of media (pictures, videos, and written blogs) and you’ll want to be able to tag and index each of the pages.

• Remember that quality is absolutely important. You probably know already that need to create content your audience actually wants to engage with, but you might not know that Google is just as picky with quality as a real person. Low-quality content is penalized more and more, so stay far away from it!

• Don’t forget about social media. This is a great way to build up your brand and share your content, and it’s also a good way for Google to see that your business is active and people are interested in it. This is also a great opportunity to benefit from visual media, like infographics and videos; it’s estimated that content videos get about 50 billion views each month, so these can be great investments for your business.

• Do your keyword research before creating content. If you’re writing a blog post, look for popular keywords that your target audience is searching for and make sure to include them. Just remember that moderation is always key — no one wants to read a keyword-stuffed post, and Google doesn’t like that either!

• When in doubt, keep your content clean and simple. Since most internet users only read about 25% of a webpage, if you use bullet points for your content, you’ll get about 70% of site visitors to read the page (compared to only 55% if you write super-long paragraphs).

Now we want to hear what you think — are there any other ways to make SEO and content marketing work together even better? Let us know!