How SEO Has Evolved Into Real Marketing

By Chris J. Everett, Principal & Founder Captivate Search Marketing

For years, the online marketing practice of search engine optimization (SEO) has been influencing consumers to click onto websites in hopes of finding the information they're looking for.

The problem surrounding SEO, as a legitimate and ethical marketing practice since it hit the mainstream, is the abusive strategies that less-than-ethical SEOs have implemented in order to manipulate the search engine algorithms into ranking their clients' sites higher.

The bad wrap put on SEO as a real marketing strategy came from SEOs who used black hat strategies like keyword stuffing, link wheels, and content spinners coupled with syndicated link building networks that spammed the Internet with useless content riddled with back links to their clients' websites.

SO WHY HAS SEO EVOLVED INTO REAL MARKETING?

Here are some of the main reasons:

It's always been Google's desire to serve users with quality and useful search results. But the sad truth about these black hat strategies is that, for a short time, they worked. However, it didn't do much for users searching for information, either, as the results became less useful.

Google, though, laid down the hammer , penalizing websites that participated in these strategies. That caused a major shift in the SEO marketing industry, and it's definitely for the better. Today, SEO has evolved into the real marketing of businesses online.

Google's Relentless Push for Quality Control

The American Marketing Association (AMA) define marketing as:

“The activity, set of institutions and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”

Successful SEO campaigns today adhere to this standard.

Creating a process for communicating the value of a brand and products or services to existing and potential consumers online is what wins for businesses investing in SEO.

Now more than ever, your SEO strategy can have a direct impact on how your brand is perceived by consumers online. One of the fundamental strategies of SEO today is putting together a diverse content marketing strategy that communicates valuable information to potential customers on a variety of online platforms.

Content Marketing's Focus on Quality Over Bulk Link Building

Marketing quality content to online users to educate them on how your products or services work, how to properly implement/utilize your products/services, and what you have to offer provides a solution to a problem, or benefit a potential customer can impact your rankings significantly.

If a piece of content that you produce and deliver – whether that be in the form of a tutorial video, educational white paper or eBook, or a simple blog post – has value for users and service-oriented, they're far more likely to share it socially or link to it naturally, which we know promotes higher organic rankings.

Promoting Value with Your Content

Quality content marketing also helps establish credibility and trust for your company and its brand with consumers who are interested in what you have to offer. So, SEO really has evolved into marketing the value of what your company provides, rather than spamming the Internet with useless content riddled with links to your website.

Social Media's Impact on Local & Organic Search

It's a well-known topic in SEO today that social media plays a vital role in the success of your campaign.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, there are strong indications that the social element (factoring in how many likes, +1s, shares, retweets, etc.) of the Google algorithm impacts how well content ranks organically.

Sharing your content on social sites and integrating social sharing mechanisms on your company's website so that your content is easily shared and recommended by others is important. Furthermore, it's important that as you market your content on social networking pages such as your company Facebook page, Google+ page, etc., that you do it in a way that evokes a response from your followers.

Social Sharing & Engagement

Engage them by asking them questions, posting and interacting with customer reviews and comments on your social pages, and marketing to them by offering incentives and promotions, etc., are ways to increase your brand's social signals.

Google+'s impact on search is even more profound, with personalized search results for Google users who can see posts and recommendations from other users in their social circles right in their search results.

Google+ and Personalized Search

For business, these recommendations and shares that show up in personalized search is a type of “word of mouth” marketing from people users trust. As most any business owner will tell you, word of mouth marketing and “referrals” are huge sources of lead generation and revenue.

The type of “word of mouth” marketing that comes from users leaving reviews on your company's Google+ pages also has an impact on your local search placement – mainly playing a role in how well your Google+ listing might rank next to the local map results.

Successful SEO companies of today should understand how the industry has shifted from manipulating algorithms to building a client's online reputation by marketing them effectively to users who want what they have to offer.