Search fuels traffic, but content fuels search. Consider the rise and rise of social media and all the user generated content out there. With advertisers trying to impress an increasingly hard to please digital audience, they too have had to start creating content that is not only engaging or funny, but transient.
As a result search engines are working overtime to redirect curious users to branded, unbranded, co-created, spoofed, mashed, tagged and presumably deleted content that lives all over the social web space. So instead of users being directed to a ‘destination page’ that has been carefully crafted by one proud advertiser; search is now sending them off in all different directions to find a much talked about content jaw-dropper (or food for thought document, or coupon, or competition…need we go on).
By providing new traffic driving opportunities, eg to Facebook fan pages, popular Diggs or embedded widget banners, we need to be cognisant of the need to spread the branded word in areas outside of our destination site. It takes time and effort and of course great content (get a copy of my Digital Thought Report on ‘Content is King’, for deeper thinking on that subject), but it can do wonders for our natural search appearances. The positive knock on effect is to open the brand up to a wider more in-tune audience, who may not be ready for/aware of the product or service yet, but will start to shift their perception of the brand if the content, placement, sentiment and tonality are right up their street.
And here’s the fun bit: if the audience like you and your clever content, then they will talk about you. This is the biggest change to the internet landscape - the emergence of 'The Conversation.' Web 1.0 was a one way street. The Social Web (or Sweb!) is a virtual spagehetti junction.
As a result search engines are working overtime to redirect curious users to branded, unbranded, co-created, spoofed, mashed, tagged and presumably deleted content that lives all over the social web space. So instead of users being directed to a ‘destination page’ that has been carefully crafted by one proud advertiser; search is now sending them off in all different directions to find a much talked about content jaw-dropper (or food for thought document, or coupon, or competition…need we go on).
By providing new traffic driving opportunities, eg to Facebook fan pages, popular Diggs or embedded widget banners, we need to be cognisant of the need to spread the branded word in areas outside of our destination site. It takes time and effort and of course great content (get a copy of my Digital Thought Report on ‘Content is King’, for deeper thinking on that subject), but it can do wonders for our natural search appearances. The positive knock on effect is to open the brand up to a wider more in-tune audience, who may not be ready for/aware of the product or service yet, but will start to shift their perception of the brand if the content, placement, sentiment and tonality are right up their street.
And here’s the fun bit: if the audience like you and your clever content, then they will talk about you. This is the biggest change to the internet landscape - the emergence of 'The Conversation.' Web 1.0 was a one way street. The Social Web (or Sweb!) is a virtual spagehetti junction.
That means if conversations are happening people will be looking for more of the same via their search engines. Or free advertising to you and me. So why not capitalise on it. A good digital marketer will sync their social SEO with their onsite SEO and PPC efforts. This is done easily enough buy investing in a good social listening tool and tapping into the postive and negative keyword clouds. Et volia! You have a collection of terms that you can plug into your sites editorial optimisation routine, and start putting your destination site among the list of natural search results that you would otherwise miss.
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