Content Marketing, SEO, and Social Media: Trifecta for Digital Marketing Success
Content marketing is about making the voice of your brand be heard through entertaining and informative content pieces. Social media is the best platform to share and promote your content. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of modifying a website’s elements and building inbound links to boost the site’s visibility on search engine’s results pages (SERPs). Being well versed in these three will pave your way towards digital marketing success.
With the ongoing growth of the digital marketing landscape, it not surprising that content marketing, SEO, and social media need to work hand in hand for you to dominate your niche. When these three are to work in sync, they can help acquire more customers and boost web traffic through engaging content. This is due to Google’s algorithm updates where they prioritize high quality content and social signals to weed out spammers.
While Google’s ranking algorithm is far from perfect, it has become smarter that the competition to get the topmost rank is becoming more and more cutthroat. For you to make your digital marketing plan to work, and for it to reach your goals, it is important that you know how content marketing, SEO, social media should be incorporated into your marketing mix.
Below are 5 ways content marketing, social media and SEO work hand in hand for you to be successful in your digital marketing endeavors.
- Google discover fresh content through Twitter
Tons and tons of contents are being published on the internet every day and this is not showing any signs of slowing down anytime soon. Google aims to give searchers the best search experience so they sort content based on source, relevance and other factors. This, however, can be extremely difficult considering the amount of content being published all throughout the day. With Twitter, content that has created a lot of buzz can help Google discover the contents that appeal to people.
Sharing your content on twitter and encouraging your followers to share and engage with it can help expedite Google finding your content. Social shares and engagement like the number of retweets the content got, the number of users that tweeted about it, and the time frame of when the content was published are all taken into consideration when the search giant index the content. Getting the content indexed is vital for SEO because the faster you get your posted crawled and indexed, the faster you’ll get rewarded through ranking improvements and spiking your site’s organic traffic.
- Social shares are now deemed to be the new link building
One the major factor in Google’s ranking algorithm is number of backlinks your site has, especially when these backlinks came of trusted and authoritative websites. However, the number of referring links can be easily manipulated by shady SEO schemes or black hat SEO strategies, like automated link blast, public blog networks (PBNs), link wheels etc. While some still manage to make black hat SEO strategies to work, it is not ideal to incorporate in your marketing tactics when you are building a brand.
Google still put into consideration however, they don’t hold that much weight as they used to have before. Google now also consider social signals as one of the major factors in their ranking algorithm. Social signals like Tweets, Facebook likes, +1s, and upvotes can give your website a lot of exposure for other websites or bloggers to pick up your content. They will then link back to you once they reference your content. Hence, it is a must to always craft high quality content for it does really well on social media and search engine’s results pages.
- Establish your authority through social media
With social media, you can build a community where your followers see you as an authoritative figure. The name they can trust. Google not only consider the number of back links your website has, it also consider how influential you are on social media. Google determines social influence based on various factors like relevance, resonance, and reach. So it is a must to keep them engage, informed and entertained as much as possible.
For you to know how influential you are on social media ask yourself these:
- Are the posts you are publishing and sharing relevant to your brand?
- How many people were you able to reach with your posts?
- How do your posts resonate with your followers?
- Does your audience find interact with your brand?
- Were you able to convert leads with your posts?
- Google’s Beloved Google+
Obviously, Google will love their own. And thus, will factor in the links and content shared on their social media platform. Google+ may seem stagnant but it is still worth it to have your business profile in there and share your content. Managing a business profile on Google+ is not really time consuming, dedicate at least five minutes into posting and sharing your links and you’re good. This shows the search giant that you are worthy of the top positions on their search listings. However, make sure to post contents you want to boost the rankings, not just random stuff you find on the internet.
- SEO isn’t as technical as before
As mentioned before, Google has gone through a lot of algorithm updates, that old school SEO tactics barely work. From here on out, it’s all about quality content. As the saying goes, “content is king.” Since Google wants searchers to have the best experience. That is why they prioritize websites with the most relevant content on the top of their list, encouraging website owners to produce quality content rather spamming their website with links which will hurt them in the long run. Google wants your website to “searcher-friendly” rather than “search engine-friendly.”
Yes, there are technical things that need to be done like keyword placement on the URL, headers, description and title tags. However, it is important to use these keywords to offer solutions on people’s queries as much as possible. It is ideal to target long tail search phrases since they are relatively easy to rank and have a decent amount of monthly searches since they are usually the ones searchers use in finding information online.
Many business owner know how important it is to have an online presence, however not all of them see the point in investing time, energy and money into having their own blog page – the most useful content marketing medium that will pave their way into digital marketing success.
If you still have doubts on blogs’ value or unsure of how to start a blog, here are the hard-hitting reasons why you consider building a blog page and start blogging:
- Blogs serve as your brand’s voice
Considering customers are buying into the 1% that makes your business unique rather than the 99% that makes you identical to your competitors, blogs help you showcase your brand’s voice and your identity your writing style and topics you tackle. By writing content pieces that are relevant to what your business and staff are passionate about, you are “humanizing” your brand, making it more appealing to your target audience.
- Blogs connect the business and the customers
Customers can find your blogs very valuable, especially when they are informative, and are discussing current issues or offerings solutions to their problems. Aside from giving you the chance to interact with your current customers, they can also serve as medium for reaching and building new relationships with prospective clients. The authority and eloquence you show on certain topics is identical to showcasing credibility and trust in the eyes of your audience.
- Blogs boost your SEO
Publishing blogs regularly will keep your website up to date and contribute to your overall search engine rankings, since search engines like Google give websites with fresh and relevant content an edge over websites content is pretty much stagnant. You can also incorporate search phrases that your target audience uses into your blog, helping your brand to be discovered easily by the right people at the right time.
- Blogs increase exposure
Since each new published article adds a new page, blogs can increase the site’s number of indexed pages and chances of getting decent spots in search engines results pages. Blogs can also be shared all throughout the internet via RSS feeds and social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. The ease of sharing blogs basically gives you a fairly simply and cost efficient way to expose your brand to people who may not heard what your business is about.
- Blogs support your social media strategies
If your brand is active on social media and has a large follower base, blogs can serve as a vital part of your content marketing strategy by providing you with more relevant, informative and interesting content to share and spark conversations with your followers. They can also persuade readers to go visit your website.
Business owners are usually very busy and barely have the time to dip their toes into other marketing endeavors. However, investing on content marketing, SEO, and social media will worth all the time and effort, especially when everything is going digital.
