Thinking of the two as different strategies is like keeping product development and marketing in separate silos. Good marketing is when the product is the marketing. Making a crap product and then trying to position it as something very cool and needed is an expensive and uphill battle, likewise making a site and then working on the SEO strategy is also very short sighted. If you’ve ever done an SEO audit before you know its pretty much like saying, “let me evaluate how well your online marketing is done”.

Is the purpose of SEO to get more traffic or get more customers? The two don’t necessarily co-inside. If you build your SEO strategy as an afterthought instead of it being your marketing strategy, you’ll probably get more traffic but not more customers. A separate SEO strategy usually sounds like, “I want to rank high for this keyword.” To which the answer is usually, “what makes you think you deserve to rank high for that keyword?” If your site is built to offer the best information, service, resource and user experience then it will rank high for that keyword. If your site doesn’t meet that criteria then doing a bunch of “link building” will just cause more people to come to your site and quickly leave again because you don’t offer what they are looking for.

So when designing a marketing strategy online think of it as an SEO strategy and results are bound to be more effective.