Digital Marketing Strategies: Beware of Black Hat Tactics

In the spirit of the recent presidential debates, I thought it might be interesting to share my views on some of the most common digital marketing strategies.

I am interested in your feedback and questions as you read through these items and my thoughts.

Link Building

There are many companies that stress using a link-building strategy to increase search rankings. The idea makes sense because the more links you have to your website the more “popular” your website must be and therefore the quality of the website must be worthy of high rankings.

The problem I have is that when you practice a link-building strategy you’ll be artificially creating links to websites that may or may not improve your search results. For every “honest” link company there are at least 100 companies that use black hat tactics.

Consider this real-life situation I encountered with a client. The client had lost search rankings after employing a company that promised to build links to improve his search rankings. They did, in fact, build links. They gave him 30,000 links to his website. Yes, you read that number correctly. And you would think that would increase not only his search rankings but his visits. If you have 30,000 websites linking to yours you should get at least 1 visit per website per month from each of those websites. But the links “built” were on link farms and pages built just to link to the main website so not only did his search rankings plummet the number of visits to the website was down to under 2000 per month.

Don’t get me wrong, you want to have other quality websites link back to yours but instead of trying to force the links to happen, provide solid content on your website that other websites want to link to naturally. These have proven to be the best types of links for search rankings.

Social Media Fans & Followers

Social media has very quickly grown to be a leading method of generating website traffic and leads. I know, I’ve had several leads come directly from social media and I’ve watched my clients gain business from social channels. Aside from the obvious key component of getting to know your followers and fans, there are people who would want to sell you the service of gaining hundreds of thousands of fans or followers.

Here’s the problem with that strategy – if you are buying people to follow you or become fans are they really interested in what you have to offer? Are they qualified prospects or networking connections? If you “bought” their attention will it generate business? I just don’t see how buying followers will do anything more than give the illusion that you are popular. You can be perceived as popular and still be full of manure. Unfortunately, people are pretty smart and no matter how “popular” you look, manure still smells bad.

Social Media Channels

Do you need to be everywhere? Not necessarily. My thought is that certain social channels are better for certain businesses. For example, LinkedIn is a great professional networking site and is geared well toward service businesses. Pinterest is awesome for retail businesses trying to reach consumers. Does it hurt to be everywhere? No, if you have the time and resources to work every social channel by all means do it. But in the real world, the majority of business owners don’t have unlimited time and resources so a more directed plan will have the best chances of reaching your customer base.

Email Marketing

Some people are saying that email marketing is dying off because of the sheer amount of email people receive each day. I disagree. Email is still the number one reason people log on to the internet every day. If you want to be successful with email marketing you have to respect the permission given when someone agrees to receive your email. Obviously, you don’t want to share that email address outside your organization and you must let people opt out as easily as they opted in.

To be successful with email marketing the messages you send must be pertinent to the people who are receiving the messages. Give value along with the current “sale” you’re promoting by adding how-to articles and etc. Instead of just pushing the sale, try creating the desire to visit your website for additional information. This not only increases time on your website it will also expose visitors to your unique value proposition. The value add is what makes the newsletters worth re-reading and sharing.

Speaking of sharing, be sure to share your email across social channels to help bring your marketing strategy full circle.

Number 1 Search Rank

This is a myth. First, any company that offers you a guaranteed number 1 spot for a search term isn’t going to give you the term you need to get the traffic you want. There are millions of companies with the number 1 search ranking for many, many terms. But the number of frequently searched terms that will actually generate high amounts of traffic is much fewer.

For example, you can get a top rank for “brown dirt” but how many people search for that term? Very few. How many searches for that term would be in the market to buy what you’re selling? Even less. If that’s the case, how do you get the traffic you need from search engines? It’s simple, have quality content on your website that will provide many opportunities for high keyword rankings across a variety of terms that are related to your business. Read more about how to do that in my article about how search engine optimization is supposed to work.

While a shortcut may get you quick results in the near term, in the long term those tactics ultimately fail and you’ll spend more time and money trying to undo the damage to regain footing. Through each of the items above the central theme is to give people something of value through honest marketing means. By using quality content, taking the time to trudge through each item the “right” way is undeniably the most effective, the best way to carry out any digital marketing plan.