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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 5 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.
Social shares is the new link building
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.
Google loves Google+
This one is pretty obvious: Google factors in your presence on Google+. Take 10 minutes each day to spend on your brand’s Google+ page, whether it’s to post something on your business profile, or posting your content into Google+ communities. Be sure to post the content you want to be ranking for on Google+ to prove to Google that you are worthy of positioning high in their search engine.
SEO isn’t all technical anymore
With the many algorithm changes Google has gone through, now more than ever, content is King. Google wants the best, most relevant content to rank highly, and the result is that SEO has become more human-friendly. Google is looking more at the kind of content you’re sharing with people, instead of the number of keywords you can shove into a blog post or website. Yes, technical stuff like where you place your keyword in your H1, URL, meta description, and title tag still matters. But, more importantly, it’s how you use those keywords to answer questions people are genuinely asking. Rather than just entering a stand-alone keyword like “hair dye”, optimize for phrases such as “how to use hair dye?” This will help you create content that really matters to people.
Written by Kristina Cisnero. To read the full article, click here. For more information on creating your own online brand, custom WordPress website and social media strategy, please visit us at www.mydigibrand.com and follow us everywhere @mydigitalbrand.