What You Need To Know About Digital Marketing

One of the major shifts in online marketing over the past few years has been the perception of business owners about the industry. Just a few years ago, digital marketing was all about SEO. People were in a tizzy over keyword density, meta tags and a myriad of other elements, many of which are considered obsolete today.

What’s the New Digital Marketing?

With so many critical updates from Google, the face of digital marketing trends keeps changing. One thing that has remained the same is the value of backlinks. Another major element is content value, which no one has been able to put a finite value on yet. Let’s look at both of them in more detail.

Backlinks

Backlinks are as relevant to today’s websites as they were five or ten years ago. However, now it is not the number of links that matter but the quality of those links. When your site is linked back from other websites that Google has deemed “high-authority” ones, that’s the best kind of link to have. If your website talks about weight loss, for example, then links from academic or scientific sources will give you the best kind of “link juice” you can hope for.

Quality of Content

The other major factor in digital marketing is Content Marketing. Your content should be unique. No longer is ‘unique’ the operative word; today, it’s ‘value’ that’s most sought-after. But value is a subjective quality, so how do you define and capture it so you can use it on your website?

Here’s a simple test to see if your content is something that Google will consider “high quality”. Ask yourself the following questions about your content:

1. Does my content give the reader new information, or existing information in a new way that can be used to their benefit?

2. Are other influencers in my industry going to find this information equally useful and, therefore, link back to it?

3. Does my content contain enough actionable data based on fact rather than assumptions?

If the answer is YES to all of the above questions, then what you have is a piece of content that Google will be proud to display on their results page. Of course, you still have to use the right keywords so people can find your content, but that’s probably the easy part. The hard part is creating the content itself.

Summary

If you can create content that lets you answer all the above questions in the affirmative, then you’ve pretty much cracked the digital marketing code for this decade. Content value and authority backlinks are probably going to be around for a while so, if you get those down properly, the other pieces will eventually fall into place.

There’s obviously much more to digital marketing that advanced users use to their advantage, but get these two right and you’ll see your website ranking, conversion rate optimization and other metrics improve over time.