Content Marketing is not SEO

The “Content marketing vs. SEO” battle opportunists are so eager to pit the two against each other. They want you to pick a side.

The implication seems to be that, to be smart about your digital marketing spend, you need to choose to hire one type of specialist over the other. Maybe you have $3,000 to allocate per month. The dilemma: Do you put it into content marketing or into SEO?

I can only make sense of this if the SEO effort in contention here is of the black hat variety. In other words, if SEO wins your dollars, it would go into hiring a shop to go on a voracious back-link-building mission. This was indeed a booming, yet questionable, business for years. Today, it’s unethical and ineffective — dangerous even. Search engines penalize the practitioners they find guilty of these crimes.