Taking a Holistic View on SEO, SEM and Social Media Marketing

If you’re here looking for Search Engine Optimization advice you’re probably aware that, over the last year to 18 months, Google has been making changes to its SEO and page ranking algorithms. We receive news of a Penguin, Panda, Hummingbird updates. Well through this menagerie of confusion, and change there are still some cornerstones to cling to.

Here at E-Improvement Consulting, we think the key to a firm’s online presence is to take a holistic approach using SEO, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Social Media Marketing (SMM), combined with Pay Per Click (PPC) and Social Media advertising. Think 3 letter acronyms and Social Media. Without bombarding and flooding your customers directly on one medium, like a digital door to door salesman, a more well-rounded and subtle approach can boost your page ranking.

The strangest, and largest shift has been the no holds barred run towards content marketing. It seems bizarre now that everyone hasn’t been doing this all along, yet once again, content is king. There is now a thirst for quality content, content your social following will want to read, share and show. This kind of content is gold for most SEOs and internet marketers, and should be the basis for you internet marketing strategy. Start with the creation of high quality, relevant content, this can then be pumped full of relevant keywords to satisfy Google’s algorithmic robots.

We’ve already mentioned the much maligned Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, and many internet marketers will leap immediately onto their high horse to quote Google and other authorities on the topic that suggest that PPC and Social Media Advertising have little impact on page rank. Well there are many recent studies that suggest that mobile PPC ads do not cannibalise organic traffic. Whilst PPC advertising has little to no influence on organic page rank, it does bring people to your page. Pay Per Click advertising also offers some very interesting data that are no longer visible via your Google Analytics account. The first being keyword traffic data, which is now almost 100% invisible via Google Analytics. Without any keyword data for your organic traffic from Google, keyword analysis and SEO have become significantly more difficult. However using your Google Adwords data can give you some indication of which keywords are providing qualified, quality traffic to your website. This is not a perfect system by any means but it can give you an insight into which keywords you should be focussing on.

We recently discovered a second advantage of incorporating PPC within your SEO strategy when optimising an XML feed for Google Merchant/Shopping for a major client. This work was initially intended to optimise their PPC campaigns (both normal display and re-targeting), but we found significant organic search and traffic improvements. Ranking and traffic on both an individual and product level grew significantly almost immediately. This is almost certainly because Google can now see the client’s. Entire online range sorted by variants such as size, colour, shipping details and price.

Our final suggestion is in some ways the most surprising but after a few seconds thought, was actually very predictable, and that is the affect of Google+1s and page ranking. This recent blog on Moz is of particular interest. They actually suggest that after Page Authority the number of Google +1s has the highest correlation to page rank. Unsurprising as Google + try to launch their new social media site that may take advantage of this their unyielding hold on the internet marketing landscape.

The above are only very brief explanations of our our holistic approach to this game we constantly play with Google. We base our business philosophy on constant improvement  so we constantly look for new ways to optimise and boost your web presence.  Contact us today if you would like to know more.