Strategy

How do SEO and content marketing work together?

Written by:

Eleanore Nash

April 19, 2025

SEO and content marketing go hand-in-hand. There’s no point in writing great content if no one can find it on Google and read it. On the flip side, there’s no way a B2B site can rank in Google search engine result pages (SERPs) without high-quality content.

In this blog post, we explore how SEO and content marketing work together to help B2B websites grow their keyword profile and rank higher in SERPs to attract and engage prospective customers.

6 benefits of content marketing for SEO

Content marketing is a strategic approach to creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and high-quality content that attracts and engages a clearly defined audience. SEO is the practice of optimizing that content to improve your website’s visibility in SERPs and drive organic (non-paid) traffic from Google to your website. Content marketing and SEO are mutually beneficial, so let’s look at the benefits of content marketing for SEO in more detail.

1. Content marketing increases your SEO keyword profile

When you’re looking to boost your SEO ranking, keywords — the words and phrases in your content that match what a user searches for on Google — are king.

The basic premise of SEO is that the more relevant keywords you strategically target across your website, the more likely Google is to rank your site higher on SERPs for those targeted keywords.

Content marketing for SEO helps you identify:

Which keywords to target
Where the customers searching for those keywords are in the sales funnel, and what their pain points are
What type of content to create to target the keywords and meet the needs of the customer
How to write and structure the content to meet Google’s EEAT and SEO criteria to rank highly in SERPs

Yes, content marketing is designed to inform and build trust with decision-makers, but it also plays a huge role in boosting your SEO performance.

How Scribly’s smart targeting won 101 keywords

At Scribly, we specialize in helping small to medium-sized businesses that have done little to no content marketing or are struggling to see results from their current strategy. When we first start working with a new client, we don’t focus on top-of-funnel keywords like most agencies. Instead, we target high-conversion-intent keywords to drive relevant traffic that will actually be interested in your offering and convert.

In August last year, we started working with a company that ranked for just five keywords. Their goal was to increase their organic traffic and get more leads. Using our Middle Ground Keyword Framework, we identified high-conversion keywords that target prospects in the middle and bottom of the funnel. Rather than focusing on top-of-funnel and difficult-to-convert prospects, this approach allowed us to attract customers who are actively looking for our client’s services and can be converted — fast.

Eight months later, that client now ranks for 101 highly relevant, highly targeted keywords, driving leads to their site.

2. Google values long, unique content

Though our attention spans are getting shorter, Google actually prefers longer content. A study found that the highest-ranking pages on Google SERPs have the longest, most detailed content.

While this doesn’t mean that blog posts should waffle on or cram thousands of words on the page just for the sake of making it long, it is true that detailed, informative, and entertaining content statistically overperforms in SEO.

To create long, unique content that is genuinely useful to and enjoyed by your target audience, you first need to:

Know their pain points
Identify a topic that will interest them because it responds to or addresses one of those pain points
Research all related questions a customer might have on the topic
Write an in-depth blog that addresses those questions and pain points, is true to your brand voice, draws on your unique offering, and follows SEO best practices

If you can get users to click through to your site — and stay there — it signifies to Google that the content is valuable and should rank high in SERPs. More on this in a minute!

How content consolidation fixed content cannibalization

We recently onboarded a client who experienced a sudden drop in rankings and couldn’t understand why. During our content audit, we found that they had up to six blogs on the same topic, causing content cannibalization.

These duplicate articles were competing against each other for the same keywords, confusing Google about which blog should rank for the target terms. As a result, none of the blogs performed well in SERPs.

So, we’re consolidating them into a single, in-depth, authoritative guide that adequately covers the topic. This will improve its chances of ranking in SERPs and provide a better user experience because all the relevant information is now in one article.

We’ve done similar projects like this in the past with great results, so we expect to see improvements from these optimizations within the next 6 to 12 weeks. More on that soon!

3. Optimized content helps your site rank higher in SERPs

Content “optimization” isn’t just about dropping keywords into a blog and calling it a day (in fact, that could be considered keyword stuffing, which is a major SEO red flag). There is a “checklist” of best practices to follow to ensure a blog meets Google’s SEO ranking factors.

These include:

Using the primary keyword in the meta title, which should be less than 60 characters
Using the primary keyword in the slug, H1, introduction, at least one subheading, and throughout the body of the text
Using secondary keywords that relate to the primary keyword throughout
Using related informational and query keywords to structure the article
Ensuring you break up the copy with correctly formatted subheadings, like H2s and H3s
Using bullet points and lists to deliver the content in an easily readable format
Adding internal links and external links to related and authoritative sources
Adding visuals with alt text to keep the user engaged
Adding schema markup where relevant

Check all these boxes and your blog is a lot more likely to rank for your target keywords. Create content that doesn’t hit the mark, and you don’t stand a chance. We warned you that content marketing for SEO is a harsh mistress!

How 1 blog became 15,000+ prospects

At Scribly, we take on a lot of optimization projects. Sometimes, we perform a content audit and identify existing blog content that has the potential to benefit a client but isn’t executed correctly. In these cases, we recommend optimizations.

On the other hand, some customers come to us knowing what they need but don’t know how to action it.

In one of our most recent optimization projects, we reworked a series of 58 blogs that were too short, poorly structured, and outdated — but they had potential. We saw great results using the above principles (with an extra dusting of Scribly magic.) Our proudest achievement? Turning a blog that attracted 1,590 users over 10 months into a blog that attracted 15,187 new customers in the following 10 months — that’s an 855% increase in prospects.

4. Great content improves the user — and crawler — experience

Optimizing your content following the guidelines above also helps your site look more polished, cohesive, and attractive to users.

When your content is correctly structured, with the right formatting and markups, it’s much easier to read — and not just for people. Google’s web crawlers can more easily understand what your page is about and how relevant it is to the targeted keyword. This means better indexing, a higher chance of appearing in rich results like featured snippets, and improved rankings.

Ultimately, great content and SEO don’t just impress your audience. They signal value and clarity to search engines, too.

How better formatting drove 885% more traffic

We hate to double down on a point, but that blog that had an 855% increase in prospects? It had an 885% increase in traffic, too.* We could never have achieved those results without updating the formatting to include crawlable headings and subheadings, reader-friendly bullet point lists, eye-catching imagery, clear call-to-action buttons, and more.The page’s sudden jump in rankings from page three to page one of SERPs shows that crawlers really do reward clarity and structure with better rankings.

*As an FYI, prospects=number of new users who visit a page, traffic = total number of times a page has been visited

5. Quality content engages customers for longer, lowering your bounce rate, and increasing your SEO score

Let’s go back to some SEO and content basics. When someone comes to your page from SERPs, finds that the content isn’t relevant, and promptly leaves the page, this is called a “bounce.” The number of people who do this contributes to your bounce rate. For example, publishing content that’s filled with keywords to get clicks but doesn’t offer any value to users could increase your bounce rate.

If your website has a high bounce rate, it signals to Google that your content is irrelevant. This will, in turn, cause these pages to rank lower in SERPs, negatively impacting the SEO value of your site.

On the flip side, high-quality content encourages readers to stick around, simultaneously lowering your bounce rate, increasing your SEO score, and gaining you new customers.

How a blog makeover turned into a 326% engagement win

You know that optimization project we tooted our own horn about earlier? One optimized blog saw a 326% increase in engagement, with the average reader now spending 145 seconds on the pages, rather than just 34 seconds. That’s a surefire signal to Google that the content is valuable and engaging.

6. High-quality content earns your site backlinks

Backlinks are links from one website to another. They play a crucial role in content marketing and SEO because search engines view them as votes of confidence and authority. When high-quality websites link to your content, it signals to search engines that your content is valuable and relevant, ultimately improving your site’s search engine rankings.

High-quality content marketing for SEO offers an excellent opportunity to earn backlinks. When you create valuable, informative, and shareable content, other websites are more likely to link to it. These backlinks drive traffic and validate your content’s quality and authority, making your site more appealing to search engines and users.

How to start a link-building strategy from within

At Scribly, we don’t offer a Digital PR service, so we won’t earn you backlinks through news coverage. However, we promise to deliver expertly crafted content that is worthy of earning links naturally. Our team has the experience and know-how to write blogs users love to share.

We do still have a link-building strategy, of course. It’s just an internal one.

Wherever relevant and possible, we always add links to existing blogs and web pages to a new blog. We also retrospectively add links to new blogs into old ones.

From an SEO perspective, this allows us to distribute link equity across your site and help Google’s crawlers find new pages. The more internal links a page has, the more important it is in Google’s eyes. So, adding links helps increase a page’s authority and, by extension, its position in SERPs.

From a user experience perspective, internal links help guide users to other relevant content, reducing your site bounce rate (which, as you know, helps your SEO). It also helps prospects learn more about your company, enhancing brand awareness.

Try our SEO and content marketing services

Now that you know how SEO and content marketing work together, are you ready to kickstart a killer content marketing strategy and boost your website’s SEO? Scribly is the one-stop shop for B2B businesses looking to step up their web presence.

We’re a content marketing for SEO agency dedicated to helping brands boost traffic, generate leads, and increase sales across the board. Partner with us for an end-to-end service that takes care of everything from keyword research to data analytics.

Together, we can develop the perfectly tailored content creation and management strategy. Book a free strategy call today to discuss our SEO and content marketing services.

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