How Online Marketing Trends Are Influencing Traditional Businesses

The fairly recent wholesale migration of companies to the online forum has generally been met with results that far outstrip the more traditional methods of advertising that were so popular just a decade ago, when the internet was seen mostly as a novelty. Clearly, that's no longer the case. Your business simply doesn't stand much of a chance in most niches if it doesn't have a web presence; from which it can gain significant benefits from all the platforms intermingled with the internet - Web 2.0, social media, and other forms of online marketing.

As with most dynamic institutions, although employing the general techniques of search engine optimization (SEO) remain robust and very healthy, the web goes through online marketing trends, fluctuating between the platforms where you can get the most bang for your buck; in addition to latching furiously onto new platforms altogether. Basic SEO, targeting long-tail keywords, was easily the most popular - and stills works very, very well - and dominated the market share for helping a business rank high up in the search engine results pages. Shortly thereafter, the social media storm landed; and traditional businesses essentially digitized their ages-old understanding of the need to maintain an ever-widening circle of consumers, by making great products and hoping that word-of-mouth spreads favorable news about their products. It is accepted by knowledgeable SEO experts that today; your business will need a suite of different methods to maximize your success online.

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The search engine algorithm changes of Google have shifted the emphasis of optimization - in large part - to content marketing, and guest blogging. This isn't to say that you wouldn't be able to rank by using article marketing, blog commenting or hosting banner advertisements, because they play an important part in a marketing strategy; it's just that your emphasis should be placed on better keyword research, filling your websites with useful, explanatory content geared towards benefitting the human reader (and not the search engine spiders as much), and contributing guest posts within your niche to enhance the web community. Google's so-called Panda update has all but erased the content farms, which were sites filled with barely-readable text stuffed with keywords, for the purposes of essentially duping the search engines into ranking them higher. The very next update, Google Penguin, solidified Panda's effect by specifically endowing sites with original, well-written content with generously high PageRank values, a metric which says that your site will be seen as having greater authority than a business in the same niche with similar content but worse SEO. This, of course, translates to a larger marketing presence for your site for the same keywords.

Lastly, as another addition to your suite of SEO tactics, social media is a revolution in progress. Having your business become a prominent member of significant social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and Twitter is one of the best, proven long-term strategies out there for allowing a brand to propagate. When you consider the new and exploding avenue of mobile marketing - inevitability, given the number of new Smartphones and Tablet PCs cropping up seemingly every month - and how well it meshes with social media, it's a trend that your business will need to follow to stay competitive.

By Mark Kandinov