The Dark Side of Content Marketing

I sometimes blog about the more shady side of Internet Marketing and how you should avoid this sort of stuff (if at all possible).
Buying email lists, Black Hat SEO and other nefarious activities are still used though... primarily for short-term gains and only by some digital folk. Despite all the guidance of search engines, advice from reputable online agencies and contributions from best-practice consultants, there is still a fair bit of shadiness still used (and some clients even encourage it).

Content Marketing on the other hand is the discipline of creating and sharing content for the purpose of communicating, educating and informing prospect, customers and anyone else really. The art of great copy writing, coupled with great UX skills and fantastic creativity is rewarded in engaged eyeballs and influenced sales.

But I have been considering recently whether there a dark side to Content Marketing. Activity that isn't entirely legitimate, but that has yet to be defined as dodgy.... yet

Here's some examples I can quickly think of:

1. Writing blog posts with very similar titles & subjects (purely to try and cover a range of search terms for SEO or internal search)
2. Writing unnaturally (either to force a call-to-action or to appeal to search engines with keyword stuffing, repetition, etc.)
3. Creating meaningless (or even completely off-topic) infographics just to encourage their sharing
4. Creating numerous videos from a single original clip and posting them online under different titles and keywords.

Can you think of anything else?

Think Search Engine Optimisation is easy?

We often get new digital marketing clients come to us after hearing a lot of inaccuracies (or just plain lies) from others, so I thought it best to set down a points about SEO that might come as a surprise to those looking to hire a decent search engine optimisation company:

1. The improved placement of your site in search engines can’t be guaranteed. There are certain SEO things within our control such as on-site content, the code of your website and some in-bound links (e.g. from partners, etc.). But there is a lot beyond our control, such as how the search engines index & display sites, plus what the competition does… all of which may affect the positions of your site in the organic search engine result s (SERPs)
2. Reputable SEO agencies should not use any underhand or short-term 'black hat' SEO activity to gain an improvement, no matter how tempting this may be to the agency or the client. There's no instant way to get a significant lift in your site rankings without a lot of hard & genuine work. So don’t keep asking us to do it, or we will resign the account.
3. We are (to a certain extent) at the mercy of your web development agency to make code & configuration changes for the benefit of SEO. By the way, if that’s also us, then don’t worry. Your web developers may have their own opinions on what is good for SEO, we may have another...  we’re not saying we’re always right, but we may have the bigger perspective here.
4. SEO & PR now have to work together to be truly successful. We’ll therefore need access to either your in-house PR person or your PR agency. If you don’t have either then we can still do loads of great stuff, but our link-building activity may take longer.
5. We can't optimise your site without content... decent, credible, interesting, readable and shareable content. If you have no intention of producing it yourself, then we can suggest people for this job. But if you don’t want to use them… then the scope of how we can optimise your site is then limited.

In short, I don’t think Search Engine Optimisation is easy, although the positives of working in such an interesting and dynamic industry more than makes up for this.

SEO, paying for links, bloggers and Google

There is sometimes a fine line between ethical and non-ethic online promotion, particularly when it comes to search engine optimisation. The rules can often be confusing and even possibly counter-productive to your needs.

As an example, let's look at the efforts any diligent, modern and professional PR company these days might look at bloggers as a way to promote their client's new product or service. They might send out information in the form of a press release and possibly a product sample if there was one.... and maybe the blogger might charge for writing this piece and linking to the client's site.

However, according to Google's rules, this is a paid for link and must include the "no follow" code. If it doesn't it could fall foul of Google's rules and be degraded in its search results.

Bu that would never happen to a big company right?
Wrong!

But that wouldn't happen to an SEO-aware company right?
Wrong

But this couldn't possibly happen to savvy Internet companies like Google could it?

Wrong!

You see a story has come out that Google has demoted itself in Google search for (indirectly via an online marketing network) paying for bloggers to write & link stuff about its own Chrome browser.

"So, if Google can make a mistake like this, what chance have the rest of us got?" I hear you cry.

Well potentially this means that any online marketing campaign could have a negative effect on the profile, traffic and revenue of a client's website.

Food for thought.....

Dilbert gets SEO - shame about his boss

Today's Dilbert comic strip highlights the regular problem where clients (internal as well as external) misunderstand the benefits that 'black hat' SEO can have.

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-06-23/

Unfortunately this sort of situation can happen in real life as well as in comic strips. It can even take longer to explain why black hat activities are not appropriate as it can to explain why your search engine optimisation services are of benefit.