If you want your business to succeed, it is imperative that you put substantial efforts into marketing your brand. That seems like a no brainer, right? Especially in today’s increasingly digital landscape, you will find it virtually impossible to stay relevant without having a substantial digital footprint.
Being visible online is one of the biggest challenges facing business owners these days. But, which digital marketing platform should you choose? Should you target just organic search engine rankings through SEO or do you want to boast a strong profile and following through social media? Or perhaps you’ve started to wonder whether you have to choose between the two at all.
SEO is about making sure that you package all your website related efforts in a way that enables Google’s algorithms to just gobble it up without making substantial efforts. Content marketing is an important aspect of SEO as it involves the creation of entertaining and informational content that aims to drive in a greater audience and finally social media is the ideal platform for you to promote your content. The presence of specialists in digital marketing can really be confusing to business owners. Social media specialists will extoll the virtues of targeting social media channels whereas SEO specialists will do the same for their own process.
The reality is that all three SEO, content marketing and Social media strives to attain the same objective that is, making sure your brand remains relevant to your audience.
As digital marketing evolves, we are now finding out that it is hard for business owners to achieve the desired level of visibility without incorporating both SEO and Social Media into their digital marketing armory. More importantly if you can find the right strategy that gets all three working in sync, you will meet all your targets and then some.
But, how can you come up with an organic marketing plan that ensures the seamless incorporation of all the three elements? To be able to do so, you will need to have a better basic understanding of how you can fit content marketing, social media and SEO under the same umbrella.
Twitter is Google’s Go To Tool To Find New Content
Think of the World Wide Web as perhaps the world’s biggest library, one where you can find information about almost anything and where you are not required to sign in and return the information after a particular period of time. This library is filled with swathes of content, but no filing system to differentiate between these vast multitudes of information.
So, when Google bots ‘crawl’ the web they gather pages and at the same time they create an index. This index is how we find information online when we are looking for something. This process of indexing can become quite tedious as there is so much content being created these days. To cut down on the effort, Google looks for content that has gained a lot of traction on Twitter to distinguish the useful content from ones that are not so useful or relevant.
Factor’s such as likes, retweets and the time interval within which the content is shared is given important consideration when Google is indexing the content. Content indexation is a crucial aspect of your SEO efforts, as the faster your content is indexed, the quicker will be the benefits you receive as a result of it on Google Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs)
Introducing the Future of Link Building-Social Sharing
At the end of the day all that matters in your quest for online visibility is the type of links you acquire and build over a period of time, especially the number of relevant and authoritative links your website is attached to online. Gone are the days when you could easily build links to your website with the use of Black Hat SEO tactics.
Google has clamped down on them ruthlessly with the implementation of their Panda and Penguin algorithm updates. So, if you are still using keyword stuffing, invisible text or are creating fake websites to gain links, you might as well be prepared to kiss your hard earned SERP rankings goodbye as they can now disappear overnight if you are caught by Google’s web spam team.
Instead, look to base your SEO strategy around creating quality content that can get you as many likes, retweets and+1s as possible in exchange. This way you build organic and high authority links back to your website. Today, social media gives you a great platform to build organic links back to your website with the help of SEO.
Your Social Media Following Can Give you Authority in Your Niche
Put simply, Google ranks you based on how credible it considers your website as a source. If you are established as a credible source of information and content, you will be ranked higher and rewarded accordingly in Google SERPs.
How does Google evaluate if you are a credible source or not? Two important factors are taken into consideration. Firstly, the quality of links you have pointing towards your site from other sites plays an important role in determining how trustworthy you are as a source.
If you are located in a ‘good neighbourhood’ along with relevant and high domain authority sites, you will be considered a good, credible source. However, if your situated in a bad neighbourhood with unrelated, low domain authority or spammy websites your trustworthiness plunges in the eyes of Google. Secondly, your social media presence and standing plays an import
ant role in deciding whether your site can be considered a credible one or not.
How will you know if your social media presence is considered favourable to your SEO efforts? Simple really, just ask yourself the following questions:
- Are you developing content that is relevant to your brand?
- Is the content having the desired reach with your intended target audience?
- Who is engaging with your brand and are they valuable to you? For example are influential bloggers or brands aligning with the content you have created.
If the answer to the above mentioned questions is yes, you can rest easy as your site is considered as a credible source and will be rewarded by Google for being one. However, if the answer to any of the above questions is no, you have work on your hands to attain all your digital marketing objectives.
Learn To Embrace Google+
Like any proud parent Google loves Google+ dearly and your presence on this platform can have a considerable impact on your organic rankings. Therefore, take the time and put in the effort to work on your brand’s Google+ page. It does not really matter if you are posting some new content or you are working on your business profile.
One caveat is that you should make sure that you are posting the kind of content on Google+, which you want to rank highly for on Google SERPs. Spend some time in creating the content that you will be posting. In essence you are trying to demonstrate to Google that you are worthy of being ranked highly on its SERPs.
Over the many algorithm changes that Google has implemented in recent years one thing is clear, they want their search engine to be more human friendly and less spammy. So, in todays SEO landscape the ‘Content is King’ motto truly applies. To rank highly you need to give Google content that is relevant, authoritative and of a high level of quality. Google is now looking at rewarding content that can be shared over social medial channels.
Yes, it does matter that you use the right keywords in your content or that your H1, URL and meta description are properly optimised, so that it gives you the most traction on Google SERPs.
But, what’s more important is that you use your keywords to answer questions or grievances that your target audience already has.
If you develop content that really makes a difference to your target audience, it will be easier for you to rank highly for it. Once you have created the relevant, SEO optimised, question-answering content for your audience, you know where to go to promote it, don’t you?