Nick Stamoulis

A lot of site owners and marketers, especially B2B marketers, have a hard time developing a consistent content marketing strategy. Many feel that they have nothing to say or that their audience isn’t interested in hearing from them—this is not the case! Your target audience, regardless of industry, is looking for more information. They want best practice tips and guidelines, product reviews and demos, industry trends and more. Every business exists to solve a problem (otherwise they don’t stay in business for very long!) and your content shows potential customers that your brand is the best solution. That being said, stop worrying about what you’re going to say and start publishing!

While it’s important to publish quality, relevant content, many site owners get so bogged down in their writing that no content actually ends up going live. They agonize over every word choice (and word count) for so long that it stalls their content marketing strategy. In my opinion, there is...

Even small businesses can benefit from a strong SEO program. We live in an online world, and even 50 year old mom-and-pop pizza joints have a basic web presence nowadays, even if it’s just a one page website with their address and phone number. If you are looking to take your small business SEO to the next level, here are three pieces of advice:

Try to learn the basics of SEO for yourself.
In my opinion, small business owners shouldn’t be so quick to outsource their SEO the minute their website is live. Take a year (which gives your site time to age and gain trust) and learn the basics of SEO for yourself! Maybe signup for a local SEO workshop or download a few SEO 101 webinars so you learn what goes into creating an executing a successful small business SEO strategy. Even if you just start reading a few SEO blogs each day (spend a ½ hour in the morning), you’ll slowly learn what is and isn’t white hat SEO, best practice SEO tips and other valuable...

When beginning your SEO campaign, it’s important to get a good idea of the playing field you are about to walk onto. If you don’t have a good idea of what your competition is doing or how they are going about their own SEO you might miss the opportunity to beat them at their own game.

Here are 4 things you can look at when evaluating your online competition to see how your SEO campaign measure up:

Backlinks
If the top three ranking sites for your most important keywords have 10,000 links a piece and your site only has 6, well, you’ve got a long link building road ahead of you. Generally, the more links a site has pointing to it the more valuable it becomes in the eyes of the search engines. This also includes social signals (links from social sharing and social networking sites). To the search engine algorithm, a site with a lot of backlinks is more valuable because more people are linking to it.

However, when looking at a competitor’s...

A non-branded visitor is someone that finds your site by searching for a general keyword in the search engines, as opposed to searching for your brand or products by name. Depending on your industry and niche, someone that finds your site via a non-branded keyword might not be ready to convert the moment they land on your site. Especially in the B2B world, it’s hard to build that consumer confidence from one interaction with a potential customer. However, just because it might take a while to turn that visitor into a lead and then into a paying customer, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to drive more non-branded traffic to your website!