SEO used to be the only thing flying in Internet Marketing.
Find tons more traffic through search engine ranking and you’ll get tons more sales.
Google’s Penguin update in April 2012, and several important subsequent updates to the way that Google ranks and displays search results put a huge damper on all that SEO hysteria. It wasn’t an Earthquake that was immediately apparent, but the devastation to SEO practices has been near total.
Amateur SEO buffs have still not recovered and probably some half of all the people working in SEO still do not quite know what a post-Penguin SEO strategy should look like.
For folks whose only strategy was optimizing with ample keywords and keywords in just the right places, SEO may very well be dead. It simply stopped working. But…
SEO is NOT Dead.
In that overly-simplistic keyword-focused definition above, though, it’s simply not enough. Using the right keywords in the right place is not an adequate online strategy any more than is Cost-Per-Click ads or newspaper ads for that matter.
Any successful online strategy is going to involve a mix of communications that involve multiple channels and the delivery of high-quality, valuable content that Internet visitors want to share. It could also involve email marketing, incentive marketing, and more technological solutions for putting the right content in front of your visitors, but at a bare minimum, the Internet is a communications medium, and Google’s Penguin updates have probably made it a better one!
Imagine if you were searching for a good Pre-school in Peoria and all you could find were pages and pages of websites that read “a good Pre-school in Peoria” over and over and over. That was the logic of the old SEO strategy. Those pages should have won the search race, and thanks to Google, they didn’t and the Internet is a lot more interesting place.
What A Multi-Prong Internet Marketing Strategy Should Look Like
Though we’ve really only concentrated on the ONE BIG Internet marketing strategy, the one that’s really not enough, your marketing strategy should include a good helping from each of the strategies listed below. To start, one we’ve already mentioned:
1) Email Marketing
This can include newsletters, drip campaigns, optimized transactional emails, thank you and multiple opt-in lists.
2) Social Media Marketing
Where ever your customers are. But importantly, whatever your sharing needs to be a part of a well thought-out campaign of…
3) Content Marketing
Don’t get too alarmed. Blog posts and articles are not expensive and writing them – even hiring someone to write them – makes you smarter. As mentioned, it also helps you to do better Email Marketing and Social Media Marketing.
These three are the real heavyweights on the content.
4) Lead Generation and Conversion Optimization
This can fall into areas of work that concern design and technology, and for that, you’ve got to really know your product, your customers and your industry first. (Hence the content marketing side of things) Some industries will require a lot of keen insight. Others, not so much. In every case, really optimizing means understanding the delivery of content, purchase info and processes so that they really deliver in the best fashion.
5) PPC and Other Advertising
Those who don’t get scared off by the cost will sometimes sink their whole marketing budget into ads. This is a bad strategy too, because your customers ultimate “get” what ads are and why they are, and that’s a very limited understanding of what you want. Still ads can and do play a role, so don’t discount them entirely and don’t keep all your eggs in that basket.
NettSolutions will be happy to discuss your next move. Just let us know if your current online strategy is working for you or how you think it might be better.