3 Digital Marketing Strategies you Should Not Ignore

1. Search is Changing

There are two ways people find your blog or website when searching online. They either click on the paid Google Adwords that are placed on the side or the top of the search results page  (that someone has paid Google to put there) or they clicked on the other links that are called “Organic Search Results”. These are earned through optimizing your website and blog for search engines.

Five years ago SEO consultants were all the rage. You hired them and put them in a dark room, fed them pizza and pasta and soon your site was ranking on the first page of Google. It was like magic. If you dug a little deeper they were doing things like buying links, setting up domains with the keywords in the URL that were important for your business and other tactics that gamed the search system.

But Google has started changing the rules. Strange sounding updates for Google that include the words “Panda” and “Penguin” are really code words for “watch out your site is about to drop from page one to page ten”

Plumbers, painters and podiatrists that were ranking on the first page of Google and had built booming businesses based on old school search engine optimization (SEO) tactics had dropped off page one and the inquiries and leads had dried up. This type of SEO didn’t require creating great unique content that the web needs and loves but just involved playing the SEO game.

The search game is changing with Google now putting major emphasis on content and social signals such as Retweets, likes, shares and the Google Plus one platform’s +1′s.

It is no longer about gaming the sytem but adding real value to the web through regular publishing of content that people love to share, link to and embed.

2. Content is the New SEO

Google’s updates have made content marketing the hottest trend since “planking”.

Create, publish and promote great content and Google (read search engines) will start to love you. That content can be a YouTube video, a blog post or a Slideshare presentation or any type of multi-media content.   eCommerce stores are hiring magazine editors to lead the creation of content that is visual, viral and valued by readers and viewers.

A word of warning here. Google does not like duplicate content (it has new ways of detecting that) so just copying and pasting someone else’s content into your website or blog is frowned upon. It needs to be unique.

The challenge is to make the content so enticing that people will share it with their friends, family and colleagues. This does take some thought, skill and creativity.

Content with a good headline or a captivating image will be shared much more on Twitter or Facebook than a bland bit of poorly written  text. You need to think about what sort of content captures your attention and then create that for your customers that is relevant and tempting.

3. Social is the Turbo Charger for Content

Social networks (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) and social media (YouTube, Slideshare and Pinterest) provide the platforms to turbo charge your content. It is how people share content.

Social accelerates the discovery of your content. Before the rise of social web, content was locked up in filing cabinets, hard disks and printed offline articles. Sharing online was limited to sending an attachment via email. This limited its spread as it was private.

Content needs to be re-purposed (Make a blog post into a Powerpoint presentation and put it on Slideshare or take a printed press release and turn it into a blog post), published online and it then needs to be set free. It needs to be built for sharing.

Google has created Google+ to measure these social signals of sharing and is embedding and weaving social into search results.

Read more at Jeff Bullas

Agencia 365