The concepts and techniques of content marketers are now being applied by many SEO practitioners as well. The same thing goes for strategic thinkers, they are being named now as tactical or technical website implementers.
Since Panda and Penguin updates occurred in Google’s algorithm, there were major shifts in the way SEO people work with search engines. They started to focus on content marketing and getting visitors from social media.
Content publishing is very old; it has been there since 4200 BC, when people used to carve their content on caves’ walls until nowadays, when we can easily publish our content online by a click of a button. It’s so easy for us today, because of the search and digital agencies, to reach almost anything that we are looking for.
Content Management Institute in 2011 conducted a study and they found that almost 90% of marketers work on content marketing. On the other hand, Outbrain and Econsultancy surveys report that 90% of companies believe that in the next 12 months, content marketing might be the next big thing.
What really changed are the SEO industry, the concept of content marketing, as well as the changes that occurred between links, social media and search engine results. All of these changes greatly altered the approach for content marketing.
1. Google algorithm updates (Panda and Penguin)
Google updates made lots of internet marketers rethink about the way they work and pushed them to change their strategies – focusing more on producing quality content for their websites.
The purpose of Panda update is to reduce the low quality websites and improve the rankings of websites with great content. The Penguin update, on the other hand, focused on web spam and link tactics that were used as black hat for SEO.
Google made it virtually difficult for anyone who uses black hat techniques to appear on top of the search results. This is another thing that lead most of the internet marketers to focus on content quality. Some websites were really affected by these updates – not only small but big, popular websites for big companies as well like about.com.
2. Paid, Owned and Earned Media
Advertising and publishing aren’t new, so as content marketing. There’s a debate on pitching SEO because of collecting paid, owned and earned media together. When it comes to name conventions and debates that talk about inbound and outbound techniques, it won’t matter if you look at the bigger marketing picture.
3. Connected consumer growth
If one customer is loyal to your company and started to share and like your content on several social media platforms, this can result to an increase of others’ awareness of your brand. It’s quite challenging to focus on an in demand content if your priority is producing quality content.
4. Strategies Vs. Tactics
As the Internet and websites keep growing, Google found a way to somehow force SEO professionals to re-think about their tactics (tricking and manipulating Google’s algorithm) and do the right thing. Indeed, they need to focus on new strategies that will keep them ahead.
SEO professionals should really work as content marketers, adding much effort to their strategic approach. If they really want a website that’s search engine friendly, they need to start optimizing for people by providing good quality content rather than optimizing for search engines.
Content marketing is far from SEO if you look at how search engine results changed from video, mobile and social rankings. All of these media require more focus on content marketing than SEO technical side.
Clarity
Content production can be done by anyone; people are publishing tons of content every day. But producing content alone does not instantly make you a content marketer. If your marketing strategy is just to reorganize your SEO strategy then you’re not a content marketer.
Of course this will lead to a debate about real content marketers and SEO content marketers because there are people who create content for people while others just optimize their website’s content for search engines.
If you want to do some real content marketing, then you need to create a detailed and accurate plan using all different kind of channels. If this plan doesn’t exist, you’ll probably win some at the beginning, but you’ll lose a lot and it will just lead to useless content and spam in the end.
Strategy
A high quality marketing plan is a result of high quality content; if you started your plan this way, then you’re on the right track.
Reproducing and recycling content and turning it into an infographic list isn’t content marketing. Using content marketing for the purpose of being a content bait to attract the search engine to add your link by surrounding your content with some of your keywords isn’t going to work either.
Being on top of SERPs using quality content will gain positive results in the long term compared to some short-term tactics that some people do. The more unique and quality content you create, the more chances of increasing your rankings in the SERPs.
Audit
Auditing is an just as an important process as content creation. Auditing is more than just looking at online rankings, traffic and social media insights. Auditing means focusing on certain aspects of content creation. The art of auditing and optimizing are essential to ensure a high quality of content. This is a challenging process that spans all areas in an organization.
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