Understand and leverage the Holy Trinity of Online Marketing
In Christianity, the Holy Trinity is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In Cajun cooking the Holy Trinity is onion, celery, and green bell pepper.
In Internet marketing, the Holy Trinity is SEO, content marketing, and social media marketing. When these three elements are mixed together in the right proportions, the result is a delicious dish that will keep visitors coming back to your website for more servings!
Let’s look at how this works. I’ll start with the different elements in this trinity and give you examples illustrating how they promote or amplify each other.
SEO. Search engine optimization comes in two flavors: on page and off page. Off-page SEO includes items like the number of backlinks to your site. When you have more quality backlinks, your site ranks higher in search results. That causes more people to come to your site, where they will discover your content marketing. They may like it so much that they share the content in their social media and perhaps even start to follow one or more of your social media accounts. SEO causes people to discover content and the content encourages social media sharing and following.
Content marketing. Here we’re talking about the creation of blogs, videos, podcasts, and infographics. When these are used as website content they reach out and boost your SEO and social media marketing campaigns. They help SEO because you build content around your keywords – and the search engines discover that. You also work to create content that other sites will want to link to, and this results in the all-important backlinks. This content also gives you things to promote via your social media, so it keeps your followers engaged, informed, and interested.
Social media marketing. In the last paragraph, I described how your content “feeds” your social media posts. The other side of that coin is that your social media posts “drive” visitors to your content. It’s the perfect symbiotic relationship. (Remember your high school biology?) Social media marketing will, in general, create interest in your small business website and that creates traffic. Traffic and the resultant visitor engagement lifts the status of your website in search engine rankings. Also, more visitors will result in more sharing of your content, which encourages backlinks…and we know how important they are for SEO.
The lesson here is that you can’t focus on one of these and let the others fall to the wayside. They are dependent on each other. For example, I’ve seen some small business owners get “sold” on SEO by a developer or supposed SEO guru and think that SEO will be the magic formula for incredible website traffic – sometimes even falling for “black hat SEO” strategies that will ultimately backfire. Other website owners open three social media accounts and think that’s all it takes. It just doesn’t work that way.
Success comes in the long term with a consistent program that coordinates SEO, content marketing, and social media marketing.