Creating and then distributing content is a great way to boost your search engine rankings. However, before you attempt to distribute this content, you need to be as specific as possible and define your target audience. Then you can place that content in places your targeted demographic is more likely to visit. You don’t want to just increase traffic; you want to attract the right visitors who are more likely to convert into leads or customers.
Blog
There are so many reasons to blog: building trust among your buyers, positioning yourself as an expert or simply sharing news with your company’s followers. But another important reason is that a well-executed blog can help boost your SEO rankings. When your blogs are shared and consequently clicked on, they move up in the search rankings.
Search engines love fresh, unique content. How often do the pages on your website change? Probably not very often at all. That’s why you must keep a steady blog filled with new information every week. Search engines reward higher rankings to websites that consistently add fresh content and these higher rankings translate into new visitors and leads for your business. By blogging, you build relationships with your readers, position yourself as an expert in the field and perhaps most importantly, provide new content for Google to index. Putting some relevant keywords into your blog article is important, but don’t get carried away. Instead of focusing too much on keyword placement and making sure you include the words a certain number of times, concentrate on simply answering questions. Provide knowledge for those who reach your site. They don’t need a million keywords; they need answers.
Be sure to include social networking links in all your blog posts (including Facebook like button) and an easy way to like your Facebook page. Also be sure to provide some sort of call-to-action (such as this e-book) to be able to foster conversions like email addresses or phone numbers.
Social Media
Social media provides a platform for direct communication between your customers, prospects, and employees. What’s more, it is a key driver of content distribution and brand visibility online. Keep your company Page fresh with rich cover images that reflect your company’s accomplishments, events, and offerings and share updates regularly.
Here are some impressive stats that illuminate just how much people are using social media to search:
• As of 2010, Twitter handled 19 billion search queries a month (that’s more than 5x the queries handled by Bing)
• In 2012 Facebook said it got around one billion search queries per day.
• As of March 2010, YouTube got roughly 3.7 billion search queries a month. 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every
minute, making it one of the largest content repositories on the web.
Companies should expand their concept of SEO to include not just the traditional search engines––Google and Bing––but also social search engines. Building authority in key social channels is important and so is thinking about social media when designing your SEO strategy.
