Why Engagement Matters
These days there’s a lot more to marketing than coming up with a product, a tag line, some messaging, and publishing the information, especially when it comes to the web. These days, decisions are made through conversations and engagement rather than sales and flyers. While sales and promotions can boost revenue, there’s a lot more to being a brand that everyone recognizes and trusts than just having some promotions and making sure your website is SEO friendly, and linked to your Facebook and Twitter.
Nothing operates in a silo anymore, and everything travels at the speed of the web – superfast. Navigating this territory can be challenging for any brand, and understanding who and what to believe when it comes to search engine optimization can be a challenge in and of itself. Link building is dead! Content is king! Pintrest drives revenue! With all the news and headlines out there, it’s hard to know which way is up, and how to get the most bandwidth for the marketing buck. But there are answers. You just need to know where to look for them.
One place we go to for news and updates (aside from Google of course), is Search Engine Land. It’s the quintessential resource for news that’s been reviewed and vetted by the experts, and always up to date. One of my favorite recent reads was about Amping Up User Engagement – something that is a core belief in all that we do here at Horsefly and key to digital success. Gone are the days of operating in a silo, where your PPC drove direct revenue, your SEO drove organic results, your Social shared promos and sales and got customers to follow you for exclusive offers, and your email campaign helped retain the customers you’d won over. Nope, those days are long gone, my friend. Today people interact with the web in so many ways and places, through so many devices, that as marketers, we need to take a step back and look at things from above. Social profiles now can rank on their own in search engines and reinforce your brand message. Customers engaging with your brand can include links, and share links both to and from your site. Google looks at those links and determines who your “neighborhood” is and how relevant you are to your audience. And conversations are ever liquid, shifting how we talk, think, and interact with each other on a moment by moment basis – meaning as marketers, we need to be nimble and liquid too.
One of my favorite parts about the Search Engine Land article about user engagement was the mention of blog comments. Blogs are great for content, making search engines realize you put a lot of time and thought into your site. When you deliver relevant information to your readers on a regular basis, and link them to the tools and resources that make sense for the information you are sharing, search engines love you. Beyond just the blog, getting users to comment, through social or on the blog itself, can attract more visits to your site or page, keep users coming back to read more, and keep the search engines informed that you really are delivering engaging content.
We write for a lot of blogs, and help our clients with strategies and ideas, and always focus on both the engagement value as well as the SEO factors that come into play when posting, so it was nice to read this belief reinforced by Search Engine Land. More so, we’d like to hear your thoughts on blogging, and comments. What do you do to encourage users to interact with your posts and content? Have you found anything to be more engaging than other tactics you’ve tried? Share your thoughts in the comments here or on Facebook, or drop us a line, and you could also win a free Google Analytics digital audit! Who doesn’t love free? Even more so, who doesn’t love comments? So keep ’em coming, we’re looking forward to hearing from you.
