Content marketing is about informing and
entertaining your audience, social media
is about promoting your content, and SEO is about making sure the technical t’s are crossed and i’s are dotted
so search engines can find your content,
right? Wrong. … All three work toward the same
thing: achieving relevance for your
audience.
With the organic online marketing ecosystem growing, it’s no
surprise that SEO,
social media, and content marketing are finding themselves under the same umbrella. When the three are working in
sync, they help acquire customers and
increase website traffic through valuable content.
This is in part due to the changes to Google algorithms, which now factor social signals as an indicator in
search rankings. To make an organic
marketing plan that works towards your company’s goals, it’s important to know how content marketing, social media and
SEO all fit into the same strategy.
Here are ways content marketing, social media and SEO work
together to improve
organic marketing:
Google uses Twitter to discover new content The world wide web is an
ever-growing public library filled with content
and no central filing system. Google gathers pages during its crawl process and then creates an index, so we know
where to find things when we’re searching
for it. This process can be quite tedious with
the amount of content being produced each day and every hour.
With the help of Twitter, content that has generated a lot of traction on Twitter can cut the time it takes Google to find your content. Factors such as how many retweets, how many people tweeted the content, and the time frame of when the content was shared are all taken into consideration when indexing the content. Content indexation is important for SEO because the faster you can get your content indexed, the faster you’ll get rewarded through organic traffic to your site.
One of the many factors that contributes to a high ranking in Google’s SERPs is how many linkbacks your website receives. Unfortunately, this factor is easily manipulated through black-hat SEO techniques, such as keyword stuffing, invisible text, and creating “fake” websites that link back to the website you’re trying to optimize. As a result, Google has instead chosen to look into social signals like Tweets, Facebook posts, +1s and so on, as a non-manipulated way of getting links. Gone are the days where you had to work hard on creating “link juice”—now, social media and SEO can work together to give your website the link backs it needs.
Boost authority with your social media influence
In simple terms, Google will rank your blog posts and website
higher if it sees
that you are a credible source. In addition to determining your credibility based on how many people link back to
you, Google also considers your social
media influence. How this is determined is based
on many different factors that include relevance, reach, and resonance. To see how you rank on these factors, ask
yourself these questions: is your content
relevant to your brand, how many people are you able to reach with the content you’re sharing on your social profiles, and are the people engaging with your
content valuable to you, i.e. whether
they are influential bloggers and brands.
Content Marketing as “creating or distributing relevant and
valuable content to
attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience with the objective of
driving profitable customer action.
The future of content marketing is personalization.
Marketers need to be focusing their efforts on creating content that is
highly personalized, relevant,
entertaining and informative based on where the customer is during their purchase journey.
Content should build on itself. And by aligning it with your
sales funnel, you
see a natural progression that teaches at the beginning and then involves the customer as they move through
their journey.
Brands have learned that promoting themselves doesn’t work.
Ultimately it’s the
stories that allow brands to connect with their audience. The future of marketing is extreme customer-centricity.
Brands have to stop promoting themselves and
create content that people actually want
to consume. The future of marketing will see more brands acting like publishers.
This is more than a cliche. It means brands
will start delivering content people want. And driving engagement and conversions.
Brands cannot determine when and where lightning will strike.
And so the future of
marketing will see marketing leaders creating a culture of continuous content - always-on content production.
Social media is not a strategy. It is one of the
channels we use to consume content and connect with people. It is the
evolution of what started with the dawn
of the internet and the move to digital, mobile and cloud-based systems of communications. These are just the
pipes. Content is the fuel.
Therefore the question: What are you doing to establish
authority in our niche with what type of content?
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