Working with an internet marketing company is a great idea for small businesses today, especially if your business can benefit from a variety of different online marketing strategies. Maybe you’re looking for immediate conversions but also want a long-term strategy, but you don’t have the time or the resources to operate a pay-per-click campaign (PPC) and a search engine optimization campaign (SEO) all on your own.

Maybe you’re interested in creating a responsive website design for mobile device users, since four out of five smartphone users have shopped online with their devices, and at least 50% of all mobile device searches are intended to find local search results.

Whatever your goals may be, a good internet marketing company will help you get there. But it’s important to remember one thing: content really is the foundation of internet marketing, so it’s important to implement a really solid content marketing strategy into your business’s overall SEO strategy.

“But wait a minute,” you’re saying to your unresponsive and inanimate computer screen (or maybe your smartphonescreen), “I thought content marketing and SEO are the same thing? I see them used interchangeably all the time…”

Indeed, these terms are used interchangeably quite often — but they don’t mean the same thing. Here’s a brief breakdown for you:

• Content marketing refers to the actual content you’re creating, and also distributing that content across multiple platforms (usually social media sites) to build your audience and brand awareness.

• SEO requires content marketing, but it also requires technical stuff: doing keyword research, building links, and optimizing individual pages with correct tags and descriptions… This stuff is all essential for SEO but not necessarily for creating content.

• Did you notice though that we mentioned how important content is within SEO? That’s because writing up a bunch of wordy blobs, instead of informative and engaging blogs, isn’t going to help you very much. The Googlebots pay attention to correct grammar and spelling, and readers often pay attention to how a blog post is organized, so it’s important to have a great content writer on your team.

• Or, more accurately, readers don’t pay attention. Only 55% of readers will bother to look at an article that doesn’t have bullet points, and they actually prefer visual content like photos, infographics, and videos. The average visitor will only read about 28% of what’s actually on your page, and they’ll subconsciously decide whether or not to stay on the site within about 10 seconds of arriving. This is where a good internet marketing company really helps because they can cover the writing, the graphics, and the organization in one fell swoop.

So what’s the takeaway here? Well, your internet marketing company has probably already tried to get you on board with content and SEO marketing — and now you know why!