3 Pillars of Digital Marketing That Never Go out of Style

Online marketing encompasses many fields. There is email marketing, content marketing, pay per click, video marketing, social media and many others.

Some gain popularity like video and podcasting and others tend to fade away and become less relevant over time. Much of it is determined by Google and its many algorithm changes. Since most internet searches are done through Google, marketers must consistently keep on top of the changes and adjust their marketing efforts accordingly.

Even though trends come and go, some type of marketing strategies never go out of style. In this article, you’ll learn the 3 pillars of online marketing that are just as important today as they were 20 years ago, when Google first came onto the scene.

The 3 important pillars of digital marketing are:

1. Content Marketing
2. SEO & Keyword Research
3. Backlinks

1. Content Marketing

Content marketing has exploded in the last few years. Any small business needs to create relevant and interesting content if they want to bring in traffic and show up in Google’s search results.

The more content you have, the more likely your audience will find you. Google rewards small businesses and websites that consistently publish quality content.

Content Marketing Definition

“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

So why do so many small businesses rely on content marketing? Simply because content marketing works.

No one likes to be marketed to, but almost everyone likes to read relevant, interesting content. That’s why there are so many popular thriving blogs.

With content marketing becoming more popular, it’s also becoming more competitive. This means you need to create amazing content that will generate interest, shares and user engagement.

Content marketing has many incredible benefits. It boosts traffic, generates leads, and converts leads to customers. It can help build newsletter lists and educate your potential and current clients.
The most popular type of content includes infographics, podcasts, videos, ebooks, how-to guides and faq pages.

There is absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t create content for your website.  If you want to drive traffic and grow your business online, you must dedicate time to create content—whether it’s blogging or making videos.

Tip: To get started, take a look at content marketing tips from sites, like Copyblogger. They have several guides and tutorials to teach you how to create quality content for your website.

2. SEO & Keyword Research

Having high-quality content is a crucial part of any marketing strategy. But if you want others to find it you need to optimize it.

That’s where SEO, or search engine optimization, comes in. SEO has always played an important role in digital marketing, but when Google came along it became even more significant.

SEO helps search engines like Google better understand the content on each page and discover what each website is about.

SEO can get be split into two main categories: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO pertains to optimizing your web pages for specific keywords, while off-page SEO involves building links to improve ranking.

Keyword research is at the core of SEO strategy. Before you optimize your website, first you need to find the right keywords to use. Visitors use keywords to locate your website through search engines. If you want the right people to find your website, you need to find and use the right keywords specific to your business.

In the past, it was much easier to rank for many popular keywords. Once people understood how crucial it is to rank for popular keywords, it became much more difficult to rank.

Now the competition is fierce and many top results are dominated by big players who have both the money and resources to dominate search engine results.

The main goal of any SEO is to get your website to appear in the top position of search engine results when people perform searches.

The better your website is optimized for the right keywords, the higher it will show up in search engine results, bringing invaluable organic traffic which is vital to the success of any website.

Despite the fact that SEO continues to evolve, both keyword research and search engine optimization will remain to play a crucial role when it comes to digital marketing.

3. Backlinking

Online marketing is constantly changing, but one factor that has always been constant is the role that links play in overall marketing strategy.

Links have a direct impact on the authority of the website. Authority of a website is mainly determined by the number and quality of links. This is why you see big brands dominating search engine results. It’s mainly due to the number of links pointing to them. Since they’re so well recognized, they tend to attract more links and thus show up on top.
From the very beginning, Google used backlinks to determine how important websites are. At one time it was easy to get a website to show up on the first page of Google’s search results. All you needed to do was create a bunch of links pointing to your website, no matter how “spammy” they were. However, over time Google got smarter and now backlinking became more about quality rather than quantity. These days, the links that matter must be from high-authority, quality websites.

Backlinking continues to be one of the major factors in determining the ranking and search engine positioning.

The world of online marketing is in constant flux. Despite many changes, these 3 marketing strategies have always been around and will likely continue to be extremely important. If you’re a small-business owner who is looking to succeed in attracting organic traffic and boosting its growth, you need to learn how to use and apply them.

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