Traditional Online Marketing In the Multichannel Age

Jan. 11, 2012 - PRLog -- If there’s one vital message coming across loud and clear over the last twelve months, it’s that simply sticking with traditional best online marketing practices for website optimisation and traffic driving may no longer be enough to sustain long term Pagerank and overall Google ranking.

All site owners, from SME to corporate, must eventually face the seismic shift that search and social has helped reshape a new multichannel and platform landscape. In a short period of time, Google has made significant changes to it’s search criteria that enables the algorithms to more succinctly evaluate site page content from a more enhanced human search perspective.

At the same time, the appearance of the Google+ button alongside Facebook Like and Retweet firmly declares that the global search engine is now universally social. Drawing 10 million users in just two weeks from the July launch to reach 40 million by October, the Google + network user figure still trails Facebook with 800 million and Twitter at 225 million users.

The necessity for online presence to become socially active and provide rich, valuable ‘customer experience’ stands alongside the basic mechanics of PPC ad paid search, organic link building and SEO keywords dropped into key site pages. The fundamental principles of relevant, valuable and above all, shareable quality content is now more crucial to social profiling and site authority than the days of basic search engine voting to gain trust in a brand identity.

However, for the majority of eCommerce and businesses online, the main goal is to drive site traffic to visitor conversion. SEO is still seen as having the most significant impact - by up to 50 per cent -  when measuring a successful campaign, while paid search accounts for around a quarter to a third of traffic and social media marketing performing at just below 25 per cent.

Studies continue to show that companies are keen to increase their SEO budgets to maximise their online presence. However, increased competition focused very narrowly upon the most popular and used search terms within an industry sector was always a tough challenge to be able to rank. It’s likely to provide diminishing returns as consumer search behaviours change under the influence of search and social networking in the mobile and tablet age.

In addition, the repeated outings of the Google Panda algorithm updates to eliminate low quality content sites and spam link farms are intended to reduce the temptation for site owners to take the ‘blackhat’ route to gaming Google to gain PageRank. In other words, the message is reinforced  that human traffic must be drawn by real human engagement via genuine human content!

Human rating combined  with user data gathered by Google's automated search technology now sets the agenda more than ever as to whether a website is genuine, credible, trustworthy - and most relevant and vital to human search criteria and content sharing.

Ultimately, this means that eCommerce must ensure their entire approach to being online in the social space is integrated and reinforces website presence or lose visibility and relevance amid the multichannel noise.

Visit http://www.weprovoke.co.uk for more information and advice.

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