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Weighting an online strategy too much towards one or two aspects of digital marketing is a mistake.

For whatever reason, a lack of resource or budget might mean that you are willing to sacrifice some areas of a digital marketing strategy. We are going to explain how this is a mistake and putting your eggs in one basket may damage brand presence in the long run.

There is lots of misguided thinking around of content marketing, social media and SEO. They are sometimes seen as different things that don’t relate to each other. This view is unfortunately mistaken and is not the right way to approach SEO.

Perhaps it is the title SEO that is misleading, people believe that ‘SEO’ is a wonderful thing that, as long as you are doing it, your website will be ok. SEO has become more integral, while it does relate to the technical aspects of your site (on page optimisation etc), it also includes content marketing, social media and so on.

If you are thinking of pausing one or more of these aspects of work, think again! This could actually harm your brand as no digital marketing strategy is complete without all of these areas.

Why is social media so important?

Social media generates mentions and links to your website. The more brand presence a site has the higher Google is likely to rank a website. While social media is used to promote content, Google is now looking at social signals, tweets, facebook posts, +1s etc.

Social shares are now the new link building. Gone are the days of struggling to gain links, social media and SEO together can contribute to gaining backlinks without having to resort to Black Hat SEO techniques.

Another way Google determines how relevant a website is, is by using social media to determine how much influence a website has. This will depend on reach and how well content then resonates with an audience.

How does content affect overall rank and popularity?

The much overused phrase ‘content is king’ is unfortunately very accurate, as searchers get more savvy they have begun phrasing questions differently. Google’s algorithms have evolved to use long tail keywords more, which means that your website doesn’t necessarily need to use the exact keywords to be relevant to that search query, just as long as the language is relevant.

What does ‘SEO’ actually mean then?

SEO generally refers to the technical details of a website that make them search friendly, or appear to, on Google. Although essential to your digital marketing strategy, it is really important that we don’t only consider the technical details of a website and assume Google will recognise its legitimacy from that alone.

Together content, social media and SEO increase the relevancy of your website. Google determines how relevant a site is and how it should rank from a list of signals. Those signals have differing levels of importance and weighting when determining the rank of your website. Each aspect of the above will only form a small section of this ‘checklist’ and this is crucial in understanding how important each aspect of digital marketing is.

The issue with pausing any one of these tasks – social media marketing, content marketing or SEO – is that your websites relevancy, although will be maintained for a small amount of time, will gradually begin to deteriorate. This is because Google will no longer be receiving signals that either: fresh content is being posted, social media mentions are happening or that the website complies with Google’s regulations for a good website.