Obviously the first part of any content marketing strategy (and arguably the hardest) is actually creating the content. Content could really be anything including a blog post, article or white paper, video, podcast, infographic, case study and more. Each piece of content comes with its own challenges and rewards and can be used to target a different segment of your overall audience. For instance, a product demo video is great for a visitor that is farther along in their buying cycle while an informational blog post might be better for someone just starting to research your products/services. Once you have all the content in place (and a good content marketing strategy is always coming up with fresh content) the issue then becomes, how do you promote it? Having it is great, getting people to read/see it is better. Who will help you with your content promotion?
In addition to your own promotional outlets like company social media accounts, social bookmarking sites, blogs that...
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0 comments 1,125 readsPosted on 2012-07-31
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0 comments 1,056 readsPosted on 2012-07-26
A few years ago I was working with one of those lucky startups. By lucky I mean they had a decent amount of VC funding and weren’t completely bootstrapped for a budget. They even had allocated a set amount of their marketing budget for a startup SEO campaign because they wanted the full SEO/social media marketing/online advertising enchilada. They wanted everything, and luckily for them they had the money to get what they wanted. Most startups aren’t in such a good place.
However, just because your startup might have the funding for an SEO campaign, that doesn’t mean you should just throw money at it and expect great things to happen. This former client, in my opinion, wasn’t doing enough to differentiate their brand in an already competitive market. All the startup SEO help in the world is only going to take your business so far if you don’t have a solid brand to fall back on and build the rest of your marketing from. The startup eventually folded and their site is...
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2 comments 1,599 readsPosted on 2012-07-24
I was speaking with a potential new local SEO client a few weeks ago, about developing and implementing a white hat link building campaign for his website. Things were going pretty well on the call until he mentioned that he really only wanted 500 inbound links created throughout the course of the link building campaign. I have to admit, I found that hard line to be a little odd. Why would any site owner want to limit their link building like that? Was he worried we’d build too many links too quickly? Did he not trust they’d be quality inbound links? Usually prospects are asking me how many links they can expect to see each month (I can’t really give a hard and fast number since the whole point of white hat link building is to make it look natural) and here was one telling me that he didn’t want us to go past a certain point with his link building.
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0 comments 936 readsPosted on 2012-07-19
A recent interview by Eric Enge with Matt Cutts is causing a bit of a stir in the SEO community. In his recent interview Cutts is quoted as saying, “I would not be surprised if at some point in the future we did not start to discount these infographic-type links to a degree…The link is often embedded in the infographic in a way that people don’t realize, vs. a true endorsement of your site.” Basically, Cutts is saying Google might not count any links a site has earned from an infographic.
His reasoning is this: since infographics have become a very popular form of link bait in the past few years, many site owners have started creating essentially useless infographics. They don’t offer any real value or new information, and oftentimes many of them just get the facts plain wrong. Much like Google doesn’t like rewarding sites that publish misleading static...
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0 comments 1,101 readsPosted on 2012-07-17
Many B2B companies are faced with the same problems when it comes to their SEO. They do a great job with their keyword research and onsite SEO, they build and execute a solid link building plan and things seem to be trending upward. But then somewhere around month six it feels like their B2B SEO has hit a wall—visitor growth isn’t where it should be, nothing too dramatic is happening with lead generation and so forth. What’s the problem? Is their B2B SEO campaign suddenly failing?
If your B2B SEO campaign has hit a similar wall, it usually boils down to one thing—content, or a lack thereof. SEO is an ever evolving world, and tactics that used to work great on their own five years ago aren’t as powerful today. Many website owners struggle with this, like any business does, when what you’ve been doing suddenly isn’t as successful. It’s not to say that traditional link building tactics don’t work or are no longer important, but without a great content marketing campaign pushing...
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0 comments 1,133 readsPosted on 2012-07-12
Some site owners have a hard time understanding that when it comes to social media marketing and SEO, it doesn’t have to be one or the other. In fact, the best online marketing campaigns leverage social media WITH SEO in order to be successful. However, every now and I then I hear a blogger recommending that a company dump all their time/money/energy into social media marketing and forget about SEO. (SEO is dead after all, right?) But forgoing your SEO in favor of social media marketing isn’t the way to go and puts your whole online presence at risk.
Here are 3 reasons why social media marketing can’t replace your SEO:
1. You don’t own your social profiles.
I’ve made the comparison before, but I think it’s important to mention again. Think of Facebook... -
0 comments 1,637 readsPosted on 2012-07-10
Traditional link building, things like blog commenting, online PR, creating business profiles and so forth, are all critical elements to any well-rounded SEO campaign. The search engines like to see a diverse approach to link building, so the more link sources in your link portfolio the better. You want your link building to appear as natural as possible so as to not raise any red flags, especially since the Penguin update came down hard on web spam tactics like the over use of exact match anchor text. However, SEO is constantly evolving and traditional link building alone, while still important, might not always be enough to catapult your website to long-term online success. A strong content marketing campaign is what is going to propel your SEO campaign forward and keep the momentum going strong.
How does a content marketing campaign create valuable links for your website?
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0 comments 1,283 readsPosted on 2012-07-05
An e-commerce SEO client recently asked me how their SEO campaign could drive physical traffic to their stores. While their e-commerce site was holding strong in terms of sales, actual in-store sales had been trending downward. They wanted to know if there was anything their SEO could do to help drive in-store traffic. Here’s what I told them:
1. Create store pages for each location with a map and directions, phone number, call-to-actions and a short paragraph of unique content.
You want to make sure each of your store locations have a unique page on your site that can be properly crawled and indexed by the search engines. Those pages need to be optimized for hyper local keywords; there may not be a ton of search volume, but you want those pages positioned well for anyone that searches.... -
1 comments 1,488 readsPosted on 2012-06-12
“Insurance” gets almost 25 million searches each month in the US alone (according to the Google Keyword Research Tool). “Small business insurance” only gets a measly 60,500 searches in comparison and “small business insurance agency” only has a monthly search volume of 320. Clearly “insurance” is the best keyword right? After all, it has the largest search volume by several orders of magnitude and that’s what counts—more searches mean more visitors. And in a perfect world, that’s exactly what should happen. But we don’t live in a perfect SEO world and search volume is not the most important thing when choosing which keywords to target with your organic SEO.
It’s very easy for DIY SEO site owners to get blinded by the search volume of various keywords while they are conducting keyword research, but ...
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0 comments 1,376 readsPosted on 2012-05-29
For many marketers and website owners, our daily to-do list is already taking up the majority of our day. However, all you need is 15 minutes each day (I like to do it first thing in the morning or while eating lunch) to read a few other industry blogs. Why waste your time reading other peoples’ blogs? Well, aside from using their experiences and expertise to further your own knowledge and keep up with industry trends, reading other blogs can actually end up helping your own SEO.