Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Search is the #1 driver of traffic to content web pages, beating social media by more than 300%. According to an experiment conducted by the Groupon marketing team, 60% of direct traffic is actually organic search traffic.

These statistics are pretty exciting, right?

But what if you’re unable to rank highly in Google’s results? Does it mean that you have no hope of generating organic traffic from it? You’ll learn the truth about search engine optimization in this article.
How was I able to rank in Google’s top 10 results for several high-volume keywords? Well, it didn’t happen overnight. I’ve been actively blogging since 2007....

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.

Content marketing effectiveness is a common concern among marketers, according to CMI research in North America, Australia and the UK. Think about these 13 reasons why your content marketing might fail ...

...While each of us has our own challenges that we need to bear and break through, here are a few particularly troubling ones that have been on my mind:

1. Your content is all about you: Remember, customers don’t care about you; they care about themselves and their problems. We often forget that point when we describe how wonderful our widget is (which no one cares about).

2. Your fear of failing paralyzes you: Taking chances with your content and experimenting a bit reveals the possibilities for your content marketing, and uncovers new and valuable customer stories.

3. You’re setting the bar too low: Your content marketing should be the best in your industry — better than all your competition, and better than the media and the other publishers in your space. How can you be the most trusted expert in your industry if your content marketing doesn’t reflect these high standards?...

Are you creating content to help your buyers? If not, you need to build a content marketing hub. Here are 8 steps to build a content hub that converts....

Before you can begin building your content marketing destination, you need to understand (and be able to articulate) that your role as a B2B Marketer is not to explain to the world what it is that you sell. But to show the world how what you sell helps your buyers. That’s right, B2B Marketing is not about promotion. It is about telling stories. Stories from your customer’s point of view on how what you sell has helped them.

In my presentation I present a brief history of how the world has changed for marketers. And yet, stories remain a critical component of marketing. Stories present an opportunity for B2B Marketers to not just meet the needs of our buyers, but to delight them as we enable them during the buying journey.

The Content Hub Business Case

The next step is to present your business case. To build a content marketing hub, you need to show how your current content marketing efforts fail to meet the needs of your buyers. A couple of ideas: Search metrics: show how your business is missing out on vital conversations happening in the earliest stages of the buying process. Web analytics: show how most visitors to your site already know who you are. Content analytics: show how the content you create is mostly late stage or isn’t being downloaded by anyone. Calculate the costs of this waste....