Digital marketing in 2020 is going to be very different from digital marketing in 2019 and earlier years. Back in those days, it’s very easy to basically just put up a blog and write blog posts based on target keywords and target questions.
This worked like a charm because even after Google released update after update, they were pretty much constrained by what you choose to write about, the keywords that you target, and the topics that you raise. Well, the problem is Google has come up with the EAT update, as well as enhancements to its RankBrain updates.
I’m not going to bore you with the updates, but you need to be aware of the bottom line. The combined effect of these and previous updates is that Google is not able to tell the context of your blog. So it would know, roughly speaking, what you’re talking about.
A lot of marketers screw this up. They think that they just need to hit keyword targets all day, every day and they think that they just have to get backlinks that have the same anchors and with enough diversity, so they can basically get Google to do what they want them to do.
It doesn’t work that way anymore. You have to understand that there are other sources of traffic and your job doing digital marketing in 2020, is to reconcile or make sense of all these different marketing channels and come up with a unified approach.
I know that this is going to be controversial because a lot of people are under the impression that digital marketing in 2020 is the same as digital marketing in 2019. Meaning, traffic comes in many different channels and you have to just position the same content in these different channels to get as much traffic from different places as possible. That’s what I call the smorgasbord or mixed salad approach.
Unfortunately, that no longer works because a lot of these places are cutting down. For example, you need to look at Pinterest. Pinterest used to be a very easy place to get traffic from if your blog is very graphic friendly. If your content can easily be reduced to images or goes well with pictures, you can pretty much get a lot of traffic from Pinterest.
Well, those days are gone because your stuff has to be engaging. Now, you may be thinking to yourself, engagement? Where did I hear that word before? Well, think about Facebook. Think about Google. Think about Twitter. Do you see the pattern?
By focusing on high engagement content, you are able to rank on the many different traffic sources you are planning to optimize. If you use the right headlines, you can get more clicks from Facebook. This is not an isolated incident nor is it a channel-specific strategy.
Because if you master getting eyeballs on Facebook, you will be able to also write the kind of headlines that get re-Tweeted on Twitter. If you want your post to get a lot of likes and re-Tweets, you better know how to write your headlines. This way, you will be able to get the people’s attention and interest them enough to actually want to click your link and read your content.
As you probably already know, this is not very easy to do on Twitter because there’s just so much content in such a period of time. It’s pretty much like drinking from a fire hydrant. Similarly, your graphics have to be on point as well.
This is where Pinterest comes in. So you have your picture. It has to have a caption and you have to have a description. If you do this right, you would do well on Instagram. Because you have to use the same kind of positioning. Throughout all of this process, you have to pick the right hashtags.
Now, you may be thinking to yourself, okay I’m able to write the right headlines and I’m able to get people to read my article and get them to engage. So what?
Well, that is the victory. Because if you get people to your site because they wanted to click the title that appears on the social media platforms, what do you think happens when Google lists your site? That’s right. People would want to click on the link that appears in the search results.
When they’re on your site, since you’ve made it so engaging, thanks to the combination of pictures, as well as the trigger words in the body of your content, they’d want to stay. Why is this important?
Well, as I’ve mentioned earlier, Google released RankBrain. RankBrain pays close attention to user experience. It penalizes websites that basically bounce people up.
In other words, people see a result, they click, they don’t see what they’re looking for, and they click the back button. That’s a bounce if it happens very quickly. If your page gets too many bounces, Google would drop you like a bad habit.
On the other hand, when people click on your link in the results and they stay for a long time, that’s a signal to Google that they’ve found what they’re looking for. Google will then reward you by increasing your rankings until you get to the top.
Please understand that paying close attention to digital marketing in 2020 means you have to master all the different traffic channels your brand is on. That is the long and short of it.
If you’re able to do this, you will be able to get a lot of traffic from many different places and this can create an upward spiral of traffic. You can then build a solid enough brand where people would search you out instead of the other way around.