For a little while now I have been talking to clients (and anyone that will listen really) about how important social media is as part of your content marketing strategy. Unfortunately, a lot of people still view social media in isolation, as it’s the one element of a digital marketing strategy they think they understand and have got their head round. After all, they use Facebook, so how hard can it be right?
The first issue, is that social media is a whole lot bigger than Facebook. Secondly, social media now has a much bigger relationships with SEO than it has done previously. This is why you hear many SEO companies now talking about content strategy as the ‘new SEO’. They are right, content marketing and perhaps more specifically visual content marketing is where you should be focusing for the remainder of 2014 and onwards. That doesn’t take away completely from the link building aspect of SEO, just please don’t every buy links! Link building is still an integral part of SEO, which itself, when broken down into it’s constituent parts is all about authority and credibility.
Just like at school
I liken it to the academic world, when you are writing a thesis or paper, you always have to reference those people that you mention, usually you are mentioning them because they have previously undertaken some work that helps support what you are saying, or prove your hypothesis correct. So you mention them in your paper to show whoever is reading it, that you aren’t just making stuff up, there is actually someone else that says a similar thing. Link building in SEO are those ‘other’ people backing you up, and basically agreeing that you are genuine; that if you say you sell coffee, they are in essence agreeing that you do indeed sell ‘coffee’, and do so by putting a link on their site to yours, probably with an anchor text that says something about coffee.
What’s happened is that social media has joined the party and now there is another way to show that you actually sell ‘coffee’, you can get people, lots of people talking about the fact that not only do you sell ‘coffee’, it’s the best ‘coffee’ they’ve every tasted and the fact that you also give a proportion of your profits to charity and do lots of good community stuff too. The best bit is that it’s not you saying all this, it’s your customers and fans and followers, so it holds more weight in people’s minds. From a search perspective, if you are being talked about, then you are being relevant to something, if you are being relevant and people are interested, then there is a high probability chance that you are an authority in your market space.
Google’s long term goal is to measure authority of sites, so if you’re setup is correct and they can see the social conversations going on, then Google has no choice but to show your virtual real estate; a) because it’s relevant and b) because you appear to the authority on ‘coffee.’