The Vanishing Line between Social Media, SEO and Content Marketing

As SEO has evolved with time, its identity and application have undergone a complete change. Perhaps this is the reason that often we hear people asking— is SEO dead? One thing is for sure that it is far from being dead. SEO has re-invented itself, thanks to the changing attitude of Google in recognizing content as king. In the process, not only has SEO changed, but it has also found new buddies in the form of social media. The powers of SEO have greatly been enhanced by the social media promoting content that it finds useful and relevant. This has changed the entire gamut of online marketing with SEO, content marketing, and social media being its cornerstones.

This change has put to rest the debate about the usefulness of SEO. People used to view social media and search engine optimization as two distinct entities that had its own agendas of reaching out to people. In today’s context, both social media and SEO are closely linked with content that is used aggressively for content marketing.  There is nothing conflicting between the two media. Rather, these are seen as working hand in hand to take forward and strengthen online marketing initiatives. How this has happened has been discussed in this post.

SEO Marketing

Discovering the link

Admitting the fact that the line that separated content marketing, social media, and SEO does not exist anymore, let us look at the link that bonds the three. Content marketing involves presenting the most relevant and useful content to users that would make them happy. Social media is a vehicle for promoting the content, and SEO works in making the content likable to search engines. Therefore, content is the live link between the three that brings these closer as they share the common objective of presenting relevant content to the audience. With the customers’ penchant for quality content, the three media work in close conjunction with each other to achieve the common goal.

Under one umbrella

It is thus imperative that social media, SEO and content marketing are now under the same umbrella. Recognizing this fact, online marketing strategies are now developed by devising a single strategy that fits all three. Only the methods of implementation are different.  Read on to know more about the ways how the teamwork of content marketing, social media, and SEO takes forward the online marketing activities towards a fruitful conclusion.

Social shares contribute to link building

Professionals in the field of SEOmarketing depend heavily on social media to augment their SEO initiatives. If it sounds a bit confusing, then just turn to Google to understand the importance it attaches to social media. Google now uses social media signals as indicators for determining the true worth of links that any website receives. It is assumed that the social media circulates and shares only quality content in the most unbiased manner hence the links gathered through it are genuine. This puts an end to the suspicious black hat activities that used to the way of increasing the number of links to garner the attention of search engines. Thus social media now works in tandem with SEO and helps to improve SEO performance.

Twitter acts as a filter

Popular and valuable content are likely to be tweeted and re-tweeted a number of times. Accepting this fact, Google now depends on Twitter leads to identify content that is worth paying attention to. This makes the task of search engines quite easy as it does not have to crawl through countless low-value content that would have to be discarded ultimately.  The process of indexing has now been sped up as high traction content from Twitter has helped to weed out unqualified content from the purview of search engine indexing.

Be there on Google plus

Although it may sound obvious, it needs to be reiterated that the faith imposed by Goggle in the social media has been aptly reflected in its liking for Google Plus. This means that you need to be there on Google Plus by posting content as it is a proven way of being liked by Google. This, in turn, would influence the search rankings positively which is so essential for SEO better performance.  The introduction of the social media has widened the reach of SEO as you are able to reach out to a new audience in new areas that you had not thought of earlier.

Social media influence enhances authority

Being present of the social media is an indicator of the credibility a website has. Thus website pages are likely to be better ranked in search results if search engines find it originating from credible sources. While back links that the website earns is an indicator of its prowess, another aspect that Google takes into consideration during ranking is the extent of social media influence of websites. The influence that websites enjoy on the social media is measured by the extent of its reach, how much relevant it is and how much resonating is its appeal to the audience. The more influential brands and bloggers get associated with your website, the more influence you can have on the social media.

The human touch to SEO

Gone are the days when SEO was looked upon as an out and out technical stuff that needed crafty manipulation to earn good rankings in search results. The dark days of black and grey hat techniques that have earned SEO a bad name are now left behind. Google has shown the way to place content above all other aspects of SEO. Thus shedding its technical garb, SEO has now turned more humane with the focus on quality content. Although keywords and links are still as much relevant as it used to be, content has been placed above all.  How keywords are utilized to engage the audience is what really counts.

The stage has been set and it is up to you to make the best use of synchronizing content marketing with social media to get the best results in SEO.

This guest post was written by Andrew Evans, a specialist in content marketing. He has closely watched SEO evolve and is a practitioner of the trade being engaged in a USA SEO Company. He is also a sports enthusiast and loves to watch a variety of sporting activities. Writing comes to him naturally and he loves to write about the subject that he is so passionate about.