The shifting face of internet marketing has produced many challenging obstacles for the modern digital marketer. First came the democratic and conceptually laudable practice of SEO. This shifted to paid search as spam and increasingly mysterious Google algorithm updates muddied the waters of optimisation. The period was interspersed with sometimes cunning, although mostly ill thought out, ventures into the seemingly fertile ground of social media marketing.
While the variety of emerging marketing channels has ensured that none of the above methods of online marketing will ever experience the same value or popularity they once had, the inherent intelligence in these mediums has allowed digital marketers to effectively integrate their various online strategies into one integrated marketing strategy that creates greater benefits than any single effort would have before.
Creating SEO Conscious Social Content
The stock strategy for social media marketing is engagement. The goal is to get as many followers as possible and to get those followers to interact with the content you post as much as possible. This increases your social presence and builds brand equity, but it doesn’t directly create profit.
The common core ingredient in both SEO and social engagement is quality content. Google is becoming as good as human beings at spotting it and attracting backlinks in both channels requires that the content is not only compelling, but also contains the kind of keywords users would search for.
Targeted Content in Social Media
Social media recommendations and likes achieve what links were originally trying to: a reliable and relevant endorsement of web content. This is because it comes from people within your social group, or is at least based on your own apparent individual interests.
People are now able to refine their search parameters down to what their friends have interacted with, thanks to features like the Facebook Knowledge Graph and the website Pinterest. It can be a tricky factor to properly capitalise on but things like this should affect how precisely you target your content rather than mass-marketing it.
Algorithms vs. People
Google seeks to see content in the same way people do. It fails miserably most of the time, but each algorithm update brings it closer to that goal and blurs the lines between the two more. Google even tailors its results to each of its individual users, based on how they’ve searched and behaved in the past.
It’s easy to see how the window is quickly closing on SEO as the perplexing puzzle, in favour of the Search Marketing Integration (SMI), a practice of appealing to users based on their needs and individual interests. It’s bad news for half-hearted pop-up websites trying to create profit from thin air online but good news for serious businesses trying to expand their marketing channels and connect with their potential and existing clients in a meaningful way.