Digital marketing has evolved not just over the years, but in the last 6 months. A few common themes ring true as far as what’s an appropriate strategy, and what mistakes should be avoided. Oftentimes our clients come to us to help them with inbound marketing concerning blogging, press release distribution and search engine optimization. Through our experience, we've gathered 3 digital marketing mistakes to avoid:
1. Blogging Just to Blog
So you’ve learned that blogging is an important tool in your marketing plan to drive traffic to your website, increase your engagement opportunity and improve your search engine optimization results. Great job! But…are you losing your blogging focus?
Blogs are an excellent way to establish your brand value proposition. What makes you unique compared to your competitors? The content of your blog can solidify your brand positioning and build trust among your readers. However, if you’re focusing your blogging efforts solely on SEO credit, you’ve got it all wrong. There’s a fine balance between improving your search results through valuable content, and flat out churning out blogs just to throw some keywords out there.
Good, quality blogs will always trump keyword-stuffed, SEO-driven content. If this strategy has worked for you in the past…well, that was the past! Write first for humans. Sprinkle in a focus keyword to help your rankings, but at the end of the day, the people reading your blog should be your end result. The search rankings will follow suit.
2. Poor Quality Press Releases
Press release distribution can be a nice way to build inbound links to your website. Where most businesses get tripped up is the minor detail that in order for press releases to be picked up by major new syndications they need to be newsworthy. Press releases were intended to be non-partisan news items newspapers or broadcast news stations could use to fill space on a slow news day. The content was still newsworthy and informational.
Because of today’s link building hoopla, businesses have been advised to create keyworded press releases with plenty of links back to their website. They’re distributed to low quality websites, and the links mean very little to the search engines. The added time and labor costs of producing and distributing a press release is not a valuable return on investment.
Producing quality, newsworthy press releases and distributing through quality distribution networks is the only way to see results.
3. Questionable SEO Practices
We’re going to come right out and say it: search engine optimization is over-rated. Too much emphasis is spent on search engine optimization, both on-page and off, when the time and resources could have been spent building quality content that people actually care about. Search engines have wised up to SEO trickery and it simply won’t work anymore. Sure, we believe your website should have proper SEO titles, keywords and descriptions so search engines can comprehend the content on your website, but obsessing about it will not make much difference.
Instead, businesses should set benchmarks and timelines for when they should re-evaluate their on-page and off-site SEO. Based on your marketing plan or any seasonal marketing, adjust accordingly.
Conclusion
Bottom line, search engines are businesses. If they don’t produce relevant, authoritative results for their customers (the searchers of the internet), they’re out of business. They don’t like being tricked into thinking something is a good website to pull up, so any questionable SEO practices are being phased out. Reframe your digital marketing mindset as not a foe to search engines, but a partner. Search engines want to display good, relevant search results. You want to be seen, so produce good, relevant content and the benefits will soon follow.
About Digital Impact Agency
Digital Impact Agency is a creative firm specializing in interactive media and inbound marketing strategies for manufacturing and technology companies, professional service firms (architectural, engineering, construction, legal and consulting), nonprofits and technology companies. We are a team of innovative entrepreneurs focused on creating the most strategic and effective communication channels for our clients.
