In times when paying to enjoy visibility seems to be the only option for many brands, maintaining a strong and diversified presence on the net continues to be very important for many of them.

More specifically, traditional areas such as search engine optimization (SEO), social media and content marketing, continue to be considered as priority activities this year, according to August data from the study conducted by SEOmoz software company.

SEOmoz has found that SEO is still the most time-consuming activity in the world and the most used, in the so-called inbound marketing, with 23.9% of companies that spent more than half of their time. Only 7.8% invested similar amount of time in social media marketing, and 6.3% in content marketing.

Many of the responses to the study said they performed all three activities simultaneously. More than half of them admitted to working on SEO daily, a slightly lower figure doing social media actions daily and, in turn, 23.7% did content marketing actions. Of the remaining responses, only 20% performed one of three tactics between 2 and 4 times a week.

The study divided the three marketing areas into different tactics, but SEO, social media and content marketing were not mutually exclusive. The three activities were based primarily on the production and distribution of content, both written and visual.

SEOmoz also found that nearly two-thirds of companies’ online actions included some kind of brief asset, such as blog posts, status updates on social media, articles and guides, all of which are used in SEO, social media and content marketing.

Images, videos and infographics were also used in percentages of 38.2%, 35.9% and 25.7% respectively. 66% of companies used YouTube for content marketing, compared with 49.1% who commented using YouTube for SEO. Image and video sharing websites such as Vimeo, Pinterest and Flickr were also used more in content marketing than SEO actions.

The use of platforms and visual webs is still less than that of social networks that offer video and images, specifically Twitter and Facebook. Approximately half of the companies (48.9%) use YouTube, and 20.6% are present in Pinterest, compared to 82.7% on Twitter and 87.7% on Facebook.

Looking to the future, 69.1% of respondents commented that they expected Facebook to become the dominant social media platform. Also, 85.9% said that they predicted that ownership of online marketing content would become increasingly important as a response to Google Panda and the influence of Google+.