The Only Way To Be Successful At SEO: Take A Holistic Approach

It’s going to be 2016 soon, and if you still don’t have synergy between SEO and your other marketing channels, you are most likely not going to see solid organic traffic growth.

SEO in this day and age cannot live in its own silo anymore because we now know how much it is impacted, both directly and indirectly, by other marketing channels, such as social media, PR, offline marketing, and even email marketing. Some of these signals include brand mentions, citations, search relevancy, usage data, content and links.

In the past, SEO was just about Keywords, Links, Crawl and Rankings, but this has evolved into much more.

Having synergy between your different marketing channels will not just help SEO, but it also will boost your overall marketing efforts by allowing you to capitalize on all opportunities. It will also allow you to better tailor your marketing efforts toward building a brand that is strong regardless of how any single marketing channel performs.

Luckily, it’s never too late to cultivate a solid relationship between SEO and your other marketing channels. Here is an example of different channels working together.

Holistic Marketing In Action

Elite SEM (my company) has an upcoming client event which will be held at our office in New York City. This is a large event for existing clients and businesses within the New York City area. Here’s how our different teams worked together to promote the event:

First, all marketing channel teams met to discuss a content and promotion strategy for the event. Teams include Marketing, PR, SEO, Social, Email, Paid Search and Display.

We knew we wanted to create a page on our company website about the event, so we had the SEO and paid search teams conduct keyword research. The marketing team used this keyword research to develop content for the event page on our website, and the SEO team provided optimization recommendations for the page itself.

The marketing team then developed a video highlighting the upcoming event. This video was published on our YouTube channel, and it would soon be embedded on the event page on our website. The SEO team provided optimizations for the YouTube video.

Once ready, the event page was published on our website. Based on input from all of the teams, the page included the following:

• Detailed content outlining event schedule, speakers, benefits of attending, etc.
• Appropriate on-page optimizations.
• Structured data markup, where applicable, such as Event and Local Business markup from schema.org.
• Embedded YouTube hosted video.
• Google Map embed to help users easily find and navigate to the location.
• Social and email sharing buttons placed prominently.
• An RSVP contact form.

The SEO team advised our webmaster to add the new event page to the XML sitemap. Meanwhile, the marketing team published a blog post on the Elite SEM blog highlighting the upcoming event. Internal links were added to the blog post pointing users to the event page.

The email marketing team added an email about the event into the email marketing calendar. The event email was to be sent to all clients and newsletter subscribers.

The social team added the event to their social posting calendar for all company social profiles. Specifically on Facebook, they added the event to the Events app and the promotion video to the Videos app. A unique hashtag was also created for the event.

The PR team created a press release highlighting the event and submitted it to major PR outlets. Based on input from the SEO team, the press release included links back to the event page on the company website.

Then came paid promotion. The paid search and display teams launched campaigns targeting businesses in the New York City area, while the social team launched a Facebook Newsfeed Ad campaign to promote event.

Meanwhile, the SEO and PR teams worked together on outreach to influencers and websites to highlight the upcoming event. The marketing team advised all Elite SEM New York City employees to mention the event in their email correspondence and other company communications.

As the campaign has progressed, the SEO and social teams have tracked social signals, brand mentions, citations and inbound links to the event page.

Finally, to ensure the campaign is succeeding, all teams meet on a weekly basis to report on marketing efforts and RSVPs by channel.

Final Thoughts

As you can see from the plan above, all the channels working together can really help expand your marketing reach and have a more solid plan.

So as we start the New Year, be sure to make the necessary changes to your marketing so that you are taking a holistic approach to SEO.

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