Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has come full circle back to its roots of being just another term to describe what was known as Integrated Marketing before the Internet.
When we first started “optimizing” websites a dozen years ago, SEO was a method of trying to make web page content more noticeable to the many different search engines and directories that were trying to become a household brand and eventually lost out to Google.
At that time, a few techniques of tweaking the content and code were employed to make pages stand out on the search engines, though sometimes several different versions of the same page needed to be created to cater to each search engine’s specific algorithms.
While many professional webmasters at that time were focused on flooding pages with keywords and selling clients needless bells & whistles, because they and the client did not know any better, a group of web developers and marketers starting understand that what really differentiated web pages from one another and made them desirable to both the search engines and the people who visited them was and still is unique and great content.
We get a good chuckle these days when we hear the so-called social networking experts now preaching content marketing, because that has been and always will be the only way to sell, whether it is on the web or in a the retail marketplace.
If you think of your products and services as content (think iPhone or Bugatti Veyron or luxury suites in a sports arena), you can understand how the buying public will wait in line to pay top dollars if your offering is worthy of the attention.
If your marketing promotional content – your website, Facebook page, e-newsletter, Google+ Local page, tweets, blogs, etc. – is more creative than the competition and it reaches me in the right place with the right price at the right time, then I am much more likely to buy your stuff than your competitors’ stuff.
From Google’s perspective, they are much more likely to rank my content at the top if it is more unique than my competitors’ content and if they can find it in the right places (mentioned above) at the right time (the next time someone searches for what I sell – even if they don’t know my brand or that my product exists).
Content marketing has always been the way to sell, it has just been referred to by various names throughout the ages. Though the tried and true concept of the Four P’s of Marketing – product, price, place and promotion – has been adjusted for the current age to the Seven C’s, it always come down to content ruling the mind of the buyer.
The Seven C’s will someday evolve into another marketing mix concept, but it will be based on the old-fashioned but still relevant and effective notion that Content is King.
