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We’ve managed to outrank competitors in Google that have $9+ million in outside funding with our little self-funded, 40-person content creation agency, by an immense 3 percent. We rank organically for more than 11,000 key terms, with organic search visibility worth $57,000+ monthly. And we haven’t paid a penny in ads — across six years — to gain the majority of our leads and clientele. They’ve come straight from these rankings. How well do they convert? Very well. After optimizing my strategy and increasing my content investment, we had the best sales month we’ve ever had and now my agency is on track to break our first seven figure year. 99 percent of our leads come through organic content marketing. I’ve never invested a single dollar in PPC....
You have a content calendar. You have a blog. You have a social media strategy. All you’re missing is, well, the big kahuna: audience share that reflects the value of all the fantastic content you’ve created to promote your brand and your services to the big wide world.
When it comes to content marketing, it’s imperative to stay current with SEO best practices to ensure that your content has the best shot of appearing high on search engine results pages. That means getting crazy smart about how search engines view your content, and how they prioritize rankings based on how helpful your content is at answering the question asked in a search.
How should you incorporate the best SEO practices so your content drives users to your site, and ultimately into those precious conversions you’re after? Here’s a best-practice guide to incorporating today’s SEO principles into your content marketing....
Google's algorithms are better-focused than ever, according to a new study from Searchmetrics.
In its fourth annual Google ranking factors study, the enterprise platform looked at the top 30 search results for 10,000 keywords and 300,000 websites on Google. According to Marcus Tober, founder and chief technology officer at Searchmetrics, the findings simply confirm the current trends.
"Understanding user intention and creating unique, relevant content is more vital than ever before," Tober says. "It is also visible that backlinks are continuing to decrease in relevance. Looking ahead, as the proportion of search queries from mobile devices continues to grow, it will be interesting to see what effect this has on the rankings.
"Some factors Searchmetrics saw positively affecting the rankings include mobile-friendliness; social signals, such as Facebook likes and Tweets; and backlinks, though the latter will likely decrease in importance. The study focuses on three other main areas...
Today I want to talk about two of my favorite online marketing disciplines: SEO and content marketing.
I’ve had a breadth of experience in both, as I spent years as an SEO before I transitioned into content marketing.
Let’s look at three specific examples of how SEO can improve content marketing, across all stages of a campaign....
You know how you’ve been building links to your website for years, trying to get Google look upon it more favorably? Well, according to Google, you shouldn’t bother doing that.
Nearly an hour into a Google Webmaster Central Office Hours hangout on Friday, Google’s John Mueller was asked whether or not link building, in any way, is good for webmasters.
Mueller’s response (via Search Engine Roundtable) was, “That is a good question. In general, I’d try to avoid that. So that you are really sure that your content kind of stands on its own and make it possible for other people of course to link to your content. Make it easy, maybe, put a little widget on your page, if you like this, this is how you can link to it. Make sure that the URLs on your web site are easy to copy and paste. All of those things make it a little bit easier. We do use links as part of our algorithms but we use lots and lots of other factors as well. So only focusing on links is probably going to cause more problems for your web site that actually helps.” Emphasis added.
Basically, content marketing is the art of communicating with your customers and prospects without selling. It is non-interruption marketing. Instead of pitching your products or services, you are delivering information that makes your buyer more intelligent. The essence of this content strategy is the belief that if we, as businesses, deliver consistent, ongoing valuable information to buyers, they ultimately reward us with their business and loyalty. Nowadays people also look for the facts and useful information about the products and services that they find interesting instead of ads.
So engage your audience with unique & useful story/ information of your services or product. Provide your information precisely not with bag of unnecessary stuffing of keywords. Make your content king in the marketing world and become a great Marketer....
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“The content marketing industry will be a $300 billion industry by 2019, and SEO is forecasted to be an $80 billion industry by 2020,” said Betts. SEO is the voice of the consumer and it delivers marketers powerful insights, according to Betts. But unless it’s paired with content, marketers won’t realize its full potential.“SEO, alone, is not enough to guarantee success. Content marketing, alone, is not enough to guarantee success,” said Betts. “Together, they build a better customer experience. There’s a massive opportunity for people who are connecting the dots.” Here are the group’s top takeaways for doing so....
If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me if I could get them a No. 1 Google ranking for a specific non-branded, hyper-competitive keyword, I would be rich. If I had a dollar for the number of times the people asking me that question actually had the content to warrant such a listing, I would be poor.
Many digital marketing folks, especially in enterprise B2B companies, don't quite understand the relationship between content and SEO. It's long been said in SEO circles that content is king. However, some SEO folks would argue that links or social engagement is king, and that content is the primary driver of links and social success. There are valid arguments on all sides of that meaningless debate, but the point that often gets lost is that creating the best user experience for the vast majority of people searching for a specific keyword is probably what's going to get you ranked consistently for that keyword.
A content strategy that supports that bigger vision is typically different than the customer-focused strategies most B2B companies use. Many people over the years have told me, "Our company is the market leader for this term! We should be No. 1!" That is often true for products or services that are relevant to the keyword phrase they are targeting. It is true that brand recognition - and certainly the links that typically accompany successful brands - make it more likely that a company will rank well for relevant terms, but the fact remains that brand authority is not always enough to guarantee a top ranking for a particular keyword....
Original research means you’re doing all the work yourself, which makes it both a strength and a weakness of the strategy. It’s a strength because no other companies or individuals have sought to engage in this research before, but it’s a weakness because it takes significant time (or money, or both) to conduct this research. Some research ventures take months of careful planning and execution and hours of compiling to generate meaningful statistics.
Fortunately, you don’t have to commit to that level in order to create a solid, well-researched whitepaper. There are alternatives you can use to conduct the research necessary for a reasonable whitepaper without spending all your marketing budget or wasting countless hours of time...
There’s a bit of confusion over SEO and content marketing. The confusion comes over how SEO and content marketing fit together. Do they fit together? Are they at odds with each other? If so, is it possible to force them together?
In a previous post, I explained why SEO and content marketing are like PB&J. They go together. They just fit. They work well together.
Now, I want to share exactly why that is — why SEO is actually all about content marketing, and vice versa.
There are literally hundreds of social networks to choose from. We all know the big players: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+, Snapchat... oh, well, that list can go on for awhile, too. How can anyone actively engage in all of the social networks, even just sticking to the main players? The truth is, you can't.
Every business has to determine which social networks are most valuable to them. Where is your target audience engaging? Which network is most friendly to your type of business? Which offers you the best reach? Not all social networks are equal, and a network that does great for one business might be a bust for another.
I usually tell businesses that are just starting out in social media to choose one network at a time. Build that up sufficiently before jumping into another network. By focusing on one network initially, your efforts will be far more effective (we only have so many hours in the day!) and you'll more quickly be able to determine if your efforts there are producing fruit....
...How to Write Ridiculously Persuasive Landing Pages is one of our best performing blog posts this year. (And it was published this month!)
Once again, popularity is no indication of user engagement. In fact, because this was a longer post, fewer people made it to the bottom than our previous example. This makes the slide-in CTA even more important, as if we’re not capitalizing on our best performing content, our strategy would have major holes in it....
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A personal how-to on content strategy from a CEO who has sold over $4 million worth of content services.