There are two main strategies online marketers use when trying to develop new strategies for digital marketing and online reputation management. First, SEO experts and marketers work on creating preemptive campaigns that are intended to get content to the audience and solicit an immediate reaction. Second, they develop responsive campaigns by creating content based on some specific concept or event, or simply to increase brand and product awareness.
SEO strategists often work with the former approach, as they are concerned with reviewing upcoming trends and determining how such opportunities can be maximized for good results in a few months.
Some opportunities, however, allow strategists to bring together both approaches to elicit consumer reaction as well as raise brand awareness. This article highlights such opportunities in order that SEOs should consider when designing their SEO initiatives.
- Take advantage of internal events
If your business is just about to launch a new product or service, about to bring in a renowned executive from a competing business or expanding into new regions/markets/territories, you have a perfect opportunity to let the world know all about you without looking like you’re advertising.
Small to medium sized businesses don’t often know how to capitalize on such pivotal opportunities, and hence miss out on these opportunities to raise brand awareness and solicit immediate consumer action, as well as generate a buzz in their audience and increase traffic to online sites.
Important internal events provide an opportunity to create optimized press releases, which can result in media coverage locally or nationally depending on the magnitude of event. Bear in mind that certain press release distribution schemes are considered link schemes by Google, and may result in penalties and even de indexing. Choose your news networks carefully. In so doing, you could also create a spike of backlinks and consumer citations that could improve your rankings.
- Make internal events opportunities for guest authorship
If you have an internal event that could capture significant attention, you may be able to leverage the created attention to raise brand credibility in the industry. This places you in a unique position to author content to post in high-authority websites, publications and for notable non-competing but related brands. Each item of content contributed to in industry publications by your business executives can raise your organic authority. It also provides an opportunity to increase referral traffic from related third-party sites as well as building your link profile.
If this is something you want to follow up on, ensure that you only work with industry authorities that have already amassed organic equity within the markets that your business is targeting.Be wary of low-authority sources or social media influencers that target foreign audiences. These will not result in any transactional or organic growth for you.
- Pick new, interesting subjects to get ahead of
Run a simple Google search on any concept and you’ll see how difficult it is to come up with original content. Every business the world over has content creators working to develop how-to guides, lists, white papers among other content forms so that any subject will likely have more than one source.
As such, businesses need to find unique opportunities to inform consumers as well as be on the forefront in discovering and exposing fresh concepts within their industries. This will not only increase organic authority but also increase brand awareness, brand visibility and industry authority. You will also attract new prospective clients and build your online reputation as well as your link portfolio.
- Find new keywords
Keyword research is still a big part of SEO today, despite Google’s attack on black-hat keyword usage for SEO. The only thing that’s different is the type and methodologies employed for keyword research. Businesses should therefore be keen to find any emerging keywords and optimize for them before their competitors in order to increase organic equity.
You can use tools such as Google Keyword Planner and Soovle to carry out continuous keyword and consumer query research to identify emerging keywords used by consumers looking for your products and/or services.
In the most ideal circumstances, you’ll be able to unearth keywords with significant search volume or potential for it and then create meaningful content for them before competitors. Once you have done this, you will raise your own industry authority even if your competitors eventually catch up to you a little later. This can also increase traffic and earn social connections, mentions and backlinks for you.
