Still think SEO takes priority over your content? Not according to a Nielsen//Netratings study:

The four-year study, conducted by Nielsen/NetRatings, tracked a 37 percent increase in amount of time spent viewing content such as online videos or news, surpassing a 35 percent rise in using search engines like Google Inc.. […]

Overall, viewing content accounts for 47 percent of time spent online in 2007, up from 34 percent in 2003. Web search accounted for 5 percent of time spent online in 2007 from 3 percent in 2003. Source: Reuters

In addition to viewing content and searching, folks spend about 15% of their time shopping online and 33% of their time communicating (email, IM, etc).

If you think about these numbers from an internet marketing perspective, people spend 62% of their time online interacting with the stuff we market (content + shopping). That 5% spent searching only underscores the SEO-Content relationship:

It is important to grab people’s attention in the search engines, especially since they spend so little time looking. But once you’ve got them at your site, they could potentially spend half of their online time looking at your content.

Which would you prefer: spending 1/20 of their time looking at your search engine results… or 1/2 of their time looking at your site?

But why stop there? A big chunk of that time spend “communicating” involves email. Some folks will tell you email marketing is dead. But if people spend 1/3 of their online time interacting with digital communications, how many opportunities are you missing by writing email off as old school?

Look at it this way:

You’ve got 38% of a person’s time to get them to your site. Once there, you could potentially have the rest of their time.

Are your marketing and content efforts maximizing that potential?