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July 2, 2015

On the Brink: The Case for a Cohesive Cross-Channel Keyword Strategy

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This is the latest installment of our  Delucchi Plus blog feature, On The Brink, in which our Digital Analyst Manager and resident Batman expert Jonathan Brinksman breaks down the latest and greatest trends in digital marketing. Whether you’re a seasoned expert or total newbie, Jonathan will be offering expert, accessible insight into the ever-changing digital world.

In SEO – and in life – the harder something is to get, the more valuable it tends to be. I’m, of course, referring to link building.

Before I get into the blog post, though, a story: Back in the dark days of 2008, I was a budding young digital marketer. At my first job in the digital agency world, contracts were written that promised “link building” for our clients, which in turn required me to research potentially valuable websites, discover who was in charge of these websites, and reach out to those people via phone or email and ask them to place a link on their site to my client’s site.

If that sounds exhausting and inefficient, it’s because it was and is. But in those days, that was the only way to do link building. Today, that’s a waste of everybody’s time.

Link Building in 2015

But how do you grow your external linking in today’s world?

My friends, look no further than your Twitter Feed. Link building is about building relationships online. There’s no better way to build relationships online today than through social media. So. Yeah. Do that.

Ok, great. End of blog post.

But wait – from an SEO standpoint, what’s the real aim here? All of SEO, broadly speaking, is about increasing your website’s organic search traffic. Tangibly, though, it’s about increasing your ranking for specific, relevant keywords. Link building is a really important aspect of this since domain authority, a measure of the strength of your website’s external linking, is a ranking factor.

SEO as a Part of a Social Content Strategy

In any kind of marketing, the most successful campaigns are ones that are in parity across all channels. This should be a no-brainer: Your marketing efforts will be more successful when working in concert rather than in silos. For SEO and social content, it’s not just about knowing which content speaks to your audience, it’s also about tying that content to your relevant keywords.

This is hard to tie directly back to offline and social channel content, but we’re seeing offline and social channels play a larger role in direct SEO ranking already. Check out this really great video from MOZ for a far better breakdown on how this is happening than I am capable of providing.

More than that, though, the data that SEO professionals look at every day is also a great jumping off point for other offline and social marketers to look for content or messaging insight.

Remember, analytics is your friend. Don’t be afraid to look at your data. What website content is already ranking highly? How are users interacting with this content? What competitor content is outranking yours in the SERPs? These are all questions that all members of a marketing team should be asking.

Ultimately, there’s usually no such thing as a bad link. I mean, there is. But it won’t be from the associations that you’re able to build from your multi-channel messaging. Given that, it’s imperative to make sure that your messaging, and by extension the content your domain is being associated with, is strategic, and not just cat videos.