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Content marketers seek to answer peoples’ questions. And when people have questions, they turn to Google. Which means that our content must appear prominently in search. As an Account Manager at NewsCred, I’ve had the pleasure of working with some of the most innovative and advanced content marketers in the business. Despite them leading the content marketing space, many still struggle to get their content in the top spaces of Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs), unless they invest in paid search. The good news is that there’s a fairly untapped opportunity to rank even higher than the first result on the page: Google answer boxes....
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....
DA (domain authority) is measured on a scale of 1 to 100. The closer you are to 100, the more traffic and better ranking you’ll have. But––you guessed it––a low DA can result in huge losses of traffic and ranking. That’s why it’s important to have a good DA. I see lots of people having trouble changing their DA and that’s because it’s somewhat of a long-term process. You can’t just make a couple of changes and expect your DA to skyrocket. However, there are actionable steps you can take to improve your DA. It won’t happen overnight, but it’ll happen faster than you think. I’ve put together this plan that helped one of my clients increase their DA by 5 points in just 2 weeks. Take it from me. This plan works....
The way that search marketing has evolved over the last few years has brought content marketing and SEO ever closer together.
Content creation and SEO used to be very separate disciplines in the past, but now it’s hard to see how either can be practiced effectively without at least some knowledge of the other.
Which brings me to the question: what do content marketers need to know about SEO (and vice versa) to achieve the best results?
In this post I’ll make an attempt to answer that question, with the help of Kevin Gibbons, MD at Blueglass and Sticky Content’s Content Director Dan Brotzel.
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.
XSEO strategies have to be at the heart of any business that wants to succeed in the online world in 2014. But SEO strategy means something different than it did one decade ago, five years ago, or even last year. If your SEO strategy places a great emphasis on link building, you may find that your SEO influence has waned recently.
While links connecting to your content are important, it is content itself that is becoming the most important aspect of an SEO strategy and what pleases Google the most. Here are a few things that you can do in 2014 to improve your content offering and make Google happy....
Reading “No, SEO isn’t dead,” or some form thereof, from the search pundits is almost as annoying as reading that it is dead from people who don’t know any better. But over a month ago, Google released its latest algorithm, Hummingbird, and that’s stirred the SEO pot just a bit.
What makes the announcement of this change last month so important is that this isn’t just an update, like Panda or Penguin. This is an actual algorithm change, and we haven’t seen one of those since 2010 when Google launched Caffeine. There haven’t been a lot of details released by Google, except to say that this latest change was designed to serve the way we search now, instead of the way we searched ten years ago.
So what does this mean for search? It’s means it’s evolving into another creature. This post serves as a comprehensive, one-stop-shop for the best Google Hummingbird information available on the web. We’ve curated news, blog posts, opinion pieces and more from industry experts and trusted resources, and broken it down for you into an easily absorbable digest...
Every 24 hours, 2 million unique blog posts are published. In light of this statistic, the quest to claim the #1 spot on Google’s search results for key terms in your industry suddenly seems harder than ever, doesn’t it?
Google’s search algorithm uses myriad different factors, known as “signals,” to determine quality of content. The factors and their relative weights are all a closely-guarded secret, but you’ll be pleased to know that content creators aren’t completely left out in the cold. It’s critical to not just acknowledge Google’s quality guidelines, but to also make them an integral part of how you approach the production of web content.
What Are the Quality Guidelines? Matt Cutts and the rest of the web-spam team offer webmaster guidelines, with a stated intention to “help Google find, index, and rank your site.” The site covers technical and user experience tips before delving into content quality, with a clear caveat that the guidelines aren’t intended to be comprehensive. It’s definitely in your brand’s best interest to avoid using deceptive principles just because they’re not illustrated on the list, and uphold “the spirit of the basic principles.” There’s no substitute for reading the guidelines, but the points consist primarily of the following...
... Content marketing has killed SEO; Content marketing overtakes SEO. The word "versus" often appears between these two purported rivals. Shoot me now. Or, wait just a minute and shoot me after you’ve read (and have disagreed with) my strong point of view on the hyper-hyped topic du jour that’s come to be a showdown between content marketing and SEO....
Heard this one before? “If you create great content you will find a large audience.” It’s nonsense. Or at the very least, it’s idealistic. It’s like if you make great music you’ll become a rock star. The number of great bands that are painfully undiscovered is, well, painful. You need to create something great and be discovered. In my articles I tend to focus on the “create something great” half of the formula. Today I’ll focus on the “be discovered” part, which is largely a mechanical exercise you may not understand—or have never considered....
A good SEO strategy is the difference between your business easily being found online and getting lost in the noise of thousands of other businesses trying to stand out. With Google’s ever-changing algorithm, it can be difficult to know what’s effective here and now. In 2013, success in SEO hinges on businesses putting together a robust combination strategy that brings together an integrated web of great content, credible links, and social signals. Each of these pieces supports the other, providing tremendous value to readers, building your authority and brand value, and distributing your content across new channels. Here are the highlights of what to think about in terms of each of the three pillars of great SEO....
Semantic search is changing everything. From the way traditional marketing is done to the way social media connections are now forged, the web is forcing us to create more transparent, honest connections than ever before. In the digital marketing world the words “game changer” rank right alongside “awesome” in terms of overuse. Yet, when it comes to semantic search nothing less can adequately prepare the marketer for the seismic change that’s coming. The reason for this lies more in the way digital marketing has operated to date and less on how search works. Interestingly it is the practices of the former that are forcing changes in the latter. Put a bit more simply, if your online digital marketing strategy is based upon the creation of content that is keyword stuffed, contained tightly within a website and relying solely upon the usual link spamming to help search engines discover it, you are setting yourself up to fail. The reason lies in the way search now grades websites. In the semantic web the content contained in a website, regardless of uniqueness, quality or ‘cleverness’ will fail to do much in search if it does not also engage its intended online audience. In Google’s semantic world ‘sentiment mining’ (what is being said about you), engagement (how your content is received), citation (where your website and brand are mentioned) and interaction (how your website is linked to) form the four pillars upon which your new marketing needs to be based on. The good news is that gaming search and creating ‘shortcuts’ in marketing is now so effort-intensive that it makes no real economic search any more, so you may as well do the right thing and create a digital presence that delivers real value to the online visitor, is completely engaging and works hard to clarify the character and identity of your business. ...
For the last year we’ve written about 2 blog posts each week on our blog LogMyCalls. We said we had a content strategy, but we really didn’t. Our blogs were read, but not all that much. It sort of felt like we were writing into an empty box. Then I came across a blog post by a guy who had written 50 blog posts in 25 days. His traffic went up, his organic traffic went up, his referral traffic went up. Everything went up. So, we decided to do something similar at LogMyCalls. We decided to write 150 blog posts in 50 days. We did this from Feb 3 until April 13. We only published blogs on weekdays, so the experiment lasted 10 weeks. Three blogs a day, 5 days a week. We wrote on marketing and call tracking related topics. The results of this test speak for themselves...
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Here’s why I mentioned it. The principle I pointed out––social proof––is important to Google.
Google wants only the most naturally popular sites to show up in the SERPs. And that’s why it is extremely necessary to have brand mentions.
If people are talking about your brand, Google will see those mentions as implied links and enhance your SEO.
But enough about why brand mentions matter. Let’s talk about how.
It’s no secret that content marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach new customers. It drives traffic to your site, helps establish you as a leading voice in your industry, and gives audiences useful, actionable content that they need to solve their problems. But did you know there are plenty of other, not-so-obvious benefits to content marketing as well? Today we’ll be taking a look at four unexpected benefits of content marketing. We’ll go over how these tangential content benefits can help you grow your business, and outline some things you may want to consider before launching your next content marketing campaign....
2016 has been a crazy year for social media. A near three-fourths of users are getting their social media fixes via mobile, Twitter is making moves to sell, and Snapchat has unleashed bots that want to use your eyes to create content. But considering the other social media storms we’ve seen over the past year, the fake news story is perhaps the least understood. Critics have spent hours debating the effect these sites had on voters during the election, while Facebook scrambles to filter out these stories under pressure from its users. What few people are talking about, however, is how impressive it is that these websites were able to appear out of utter obscurity, take over newsfeeds, and drive enormous traffic while competing with considerably larger, better funded, and comparatively more reputable media giants. This is a technical feat that many marketers would love to emulate, but it comes wrapped in unethical practices and short-sighted tactics that don’t fit for the overwhelming majority of brands. If we’re able to peel back the layers of deceit, is there anything left for respectable marketers to take away?...
isual Content Marketing Optimization for social media and blog will be shared in a two-part series.
Part 1 is on why visual content marketing is important for your B2B business, tools that you can use and tips from other businesses.
Part 2 of visual content marketing optimization is on how to optimize for search (engine) and experience (your audience).
Over the course of nearly eight years of doing social media for B2B companies, I have observed the transition of types of contents that are being consumed online. And in response, the media evolved as a response.
So here’s my cursory observation.
There was a time when text content was popular; thus, blogging was the rage.
Then.
Infographics became the rage.
But now.
Videos are the rage. And very much so.
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....
After enhancing their Google+ profiles, the businesses increased the instances in which they ranked in the top seven local positions by 179 percent, in the top two positions by 399 percent, and in the third through fifth positions by 97 percent.
The opportunity to boost local rankings and visibility by focusing local SEO tactics on Google+ continues to prove itself out as a winning strategy that can pay big dividends, according to a new aggregate case study from SIM Partners (disclosure: I work for SIM Partners), "How Your Competition is Beating You With Google+ Local Optimization".
Keep in mind just how local consumers' use of Google has become; according to a report from MDG Advertising: - 59 percent of consumers use Google every month to find a reputable, local business. - 50 percent of all mobile searches are conducted in hopes of finding local results, and - 61 percent of those searches result in a purchase....
If you want to know what will Google penalize you for or how to tell if your site has received a Google penalty then this is the perfect post for you. Read on!...
In keeping with Google’s commitment to providing a great search experience, it has recently released a new upgrade called Hummingbird. Hummingbird is Google’s largest search algorithm upgrade since 2001.Whereas Penguin and Panda were like new parts to make the existing “engine” run more smoothly,
Hummingbird is more like a new engine. It allows users to enjoy a more natural, “human” search experience. But, according to this article on Forbes.com, Hummingbird has no effect on SEO.
What Actions Does Google Penalize For?
So what will Google penalize you for? There are many rules and possible infractions, and a comprehensive answer to this question is way beyond the scope of this article. But we will cover a few of the basic violations you’ll want to be aware of. Avoid these to reduce the likelihood you’ll get penalized in the first place....
Companies rely on PR firms for a variety of services and consulting ranging from strategy and message development to media relations and social media outreach to monitoring and reporting. Product launches, press conferences, event management and promotion, reputation and crisis management, media training, investor relations and of course content creation are all services provided by different PR agencies.
Press releases are most often at the top of the list of public relations content along with reports, white papers, newsletters, case studies, corporate website pages, newsrooms, blog posts, short form social media content and media from images to audio to video. To suggest that overly optimized press releases and other content will bring down the PR industry is simply a sensational headline.
It’s true, there are a lot of changes happening in the PR world right now and one area in particular that’s worth exploring risks and rewards involves the shift to native ads or as Google calls it, “commerce journalism”. I talked with Cara Posey about this recently and will likely post more about it here. But back to this business of optimized press releases killing PR agencies. Really?...
While 'creating great content' is important, it's not enough. Promotion is critical to content marketing success. In this post, Paul May shows you how to improve your content promotion. NEWSFLASH! Despite what you’ve read, your “epic content” isn’t going to magically go viral seconds after you click the publish button. There is no content marketing fairy. Like it or not, you’re going to have to work hard to promote your content. I mean really hard. “Well, Hi Paul….Bad Start to the Day?” Why the rant? Well, Cyrus Shepard wrote a fantastic “blueprint for ranking” post recently on the Moz blog (one of the best posts of the year, IMO). I found myself nodding in agreement throughout it…until I got to the end and read this: “This blueprint contains 25 steps to rank your content, but only the last three address link building. Why so few? Because 90% of your effort should go into creating great content, and 10% into link building.” In fairness to Cyrus, there’s more nuance to his thoughts than this quote conveys, but this fits into a theme that seems to be gaining momentum in some circles. I first saw Rand propose this at a Distilled conference I attended last year. The presentation was titled “F*** Link Building, Content Marketing FTW!” I’m paraphrasing, but in this presentation he said something to the effect of: “I have this awesome link building tool…you should totally get it. Every time I use it, I get links from 400 unique domains. It’s called the publish button.”...
Attracting buyers to your site through SEO is becoming harder, thanks to search ranking getting way smarter and more and more personalized to the searcher. So the question for B2B marketers is: How can you measure rank accurately if you know it’s going to be different for each person – based on where they are, their search history, and their activity on various Google apps? For example, factors like your location if you have location services on (eg. by using Google Maps) and usage history (Google uses hints to your location even if you have disabled location services by looking at your past searches) can directly impact your search results. For many marketers keeping up with SEO best practices is hard and confusing. But there are some things you can do that do work. In fact, Google look favorably upon them (hint: they are NOT dodgy link buying tactics)….
The Customer Journey to Online Purchase: an interactive infographic that explores typical customer behavior to improve marketing programs. These days, the customer journey has grown more complex. Before making an online purchase decision, a customer may engage with your brand through many different media channels over several days. This tool helps you explore and understand the customer journey to improve your marketing programs....
Quick & Easy Keyword Placement Checklist This SEO Guide is for the small business owner or SEO (search engine optimization) beginner that is in the initial stages of website creation or optimization. Search engine optimization is a great marketing tactic for any type of business, but many business owners or traditional marketers are apprehensive about optimizing their company’s website. As a digital strategist who has been leading SEO campaigns for the last 7 years, I have heard a lot of excuses… “I just don’t understand” “I don’t have time” “It is too much work” “I tried for a little while, but didn’t see anything happen, so ….” Don’t worry, I am not here to chastise, just provide you with a Quick and Easy Keyword Placement Checklist for your company’s website....
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If you’re a content marketer, you should be talking about Google answer boxes. Here's what they are and how to optimize your content to rank in them.