Digital Marketing: Strategies & Tactics To Grow Your Website

Traditional keyword research has a tragedy of the commons problem. The more people that use a common keyword research sources, the less valuable those sources become.

So you have a rapidly growing local business, and you are looking to expand. You have the brand, the capital, and the processes to open a second or even third location.

You’re in a growing metro area with lots of opportunity and open real estate.

And yet, you know that every real estate agent and business analyst will tell you that long-term success depends on “location, location, location.”

Now, if you were a national retail chain or a franchise owner, you could hire a location consultant to comb through census data and expensive proprietary business intelligence.

But you aren’t sure it’s truly worth the price. After all, your local real estate agent knows most of the metro market. And you generally know what the Census data says…even though the Census data is almost 10 years old.

So what can you use to gather hard data about what locations are most likely to succeed?

Creating content for your website requires a ton of time, money & resources to do well. But when it doesn’t generate visitors or sales – it’s a huge waste.

There are a lot of reasons why a piece of content might not perform well, but you can dramatically increase your odds of success by prequalifying your content idea.

In the offline world, companies use focus groups or sampling to prequalify the market. They use resumes and cover letters to prequalify candidates before committing to an interview (or much less a hire).

And the incredible beauty of the Internet is that you can prequalify your content ideas as well with the right tools and a bit of research.

Here’s how to use a range of tactics from keyword research to mining platforms to exploring past successes to find, inform & guide your content marketing ideas.

*Note – if you are interested in finding trending topics for social-optimized posts, also check out my Trending Topics guide here.

Anyone who owns a website and recognizes the opportunity to get visitors from Google organic search suspects the importance of keywords.

If you can appear in those results when someone types in a certain keyword – that’s not only a visitor…but a highly qualified, free visitor.

But how do you use those keywords on your website to actually get traffic?

Put them in the meta=”keywords”? Use them over and over on your site?

Note: nothing against Bing, but I’ll be using “search engine” and “Google” interchangeably in this post

It’s been more than 15 years since simply using keywords on your website was the only way for search engines to understand the relevance of your website. It’s no longer about just stuffing keywords all over your site. Search engines have gotten much smarter.

Google and Bing use hundreds of signals to try to decipher and rank the relevance of your website. They factor in what other people say about your site; they try to place your content in a graph of topics and entities, and perform all sorts of semantic analysis.

But keywords are still part of the foundation of how search engines understand your website.

Using keywords effectively on your website will help you tell a better story to both your visitors and search engines, and it will help communicate what searches your website is relevant for…so that you can get more visitors from search engines.

Here’s how to use keywords on your website with what is known in the SEO industry as a “keyword map.”

Wikipedia is the 800 lb gorilla in the Google search results. It ranks for almost half of all searches. It is the online resource. Google has even built large portions of its Knowledge Graph off the back of Wikipedia.

It’s also a motherlode of SEO resources – right behind Google Keyword Planner, Google Search, and Google Analytics. It’s useful for both on-page & off-page SEO for 2 reasons –

• Wikipedia is human knowledge. It uses language the way humans use it, because it’s written by humans. It connects topics and keywords in ways that only humans can.
• Wikipedia is the online resource. People trust it, use it, and reference it.

So whether you are just starting out planning your website’s keyword strategy, looking for new content ideas, or looking for ways to build trust for your website, here’s how to use Wikipedia for SEO and content marketing.

Quora is the largest question and answer website on the internet. It has been around since 2009.

While Quora never achieved the cultural prominence that it was hyped up to be in the mid-2000s, it has become a staple of the internet.

Quora allows you to get answers from real experts or at least people in relevant industries. Unlike Google, Facebook or Twitter, it allows you to get more nuanced answers.

But like any giant website with lots of user-generated content like Wikipedia, Pinterest or Reddit, it’s an absolute gold mine for SEO and content strategy.

Here are some ways that I use Quora for SEO, content development and link building.

LinkedIn has been one of the continually growing social networks on the Internet for years. But like Pinterest and Reddit, it has such a deep internal culture focused on recruiting & jobs that it gets written off by small & large content marketers alike.

SlideShare is an unsung staple of the Internet. It’s the place that’s all too familiar to conference goers, trade show attendees, and corporate pitch decks.

SlideShare is simply a website where anyone can upload and share a presentation. It’s owned by LinkedIn and it’s free and open to all, and promises to help you “share what you know and love through presentations, infographics, documents and more.”

And like other massive user-generated content websites like Quora, Wikipedia, and Reddit, it is a absolute goldmine for SEO and content strategy.

Here’s how to use SlideShare for keyword research, content development, and link building.

Google Keyword Planner is a fundamental tool for planning SEO and content marketing campaigns. It’s the only place to get search data such as keyword ideas, trends and search volume directly from Google.

And for most non-professional SEOs, it’s the beginning and end of keyword research efforts. There are plenty of beginner guides for Keyword Planner, but this post will focus on ways to use Keyword Planner more effectively with advanced techniques.

Since Keyword Planner replaced the old Keyword Tool in 2013, well-known SEOs have criticized it for hiding keywords and having a laundry list of “dirty secrets.” The general sentiment is that it’s flawed, but it’s the best we have right now.

Some of the criticism is justified, but like criticism of Search Console, it covers up some useful functionality that is much better than Keyword Tool ever could have been.

Before looking at specific ways to use Keyword Planner better, keep in mind two principles –

1. Keyword Planner is not meant for SEOs and Content Marketers. It is meant for PPC professionals looking to spend money on search & display ads. You have to be able to correct that bias with complementary tools, techniques and filters.

2. Keyword Planner is a tool – not a consultant. It’s only as good as how you use it. You have to coach and coax it to provide the information you need based on your objectives.

With that in mind – here are a few ways to make Keyword Planner work for you. [Read more…] about 13+ More Effective Ways To Use Keyword Planner for SEO

I get a lot of hyper-specific eCommerce marketing questions, e.g. “should I advertise on Reddit?” or “how do I hire someone to do link building?” or “I just chose my eCommerce store platform and want to try OutBrain or maybe Snapchat or Instagram to get started.” They are great in a way – I’m a huge fan of experimentation and improvement.

But most online store owners haven’t developed an effective inbound* marketing strategy at all. It’s all ad hoc and “shooting from the hip”. They miss the forest (how everything works) for the trees (tactics), so to speak.

*Inbound = the industry jargon for marketing that focuses on being where your customers are so that they buy from you “naturally.” Inbound marketing contrasts with outbound marketing, which focuses on finding, interrupting, and cold-pitching potential customers.

Here’s the exact inbound marketing strategy for eCommerce that I recommend to every reader and client I’ve ever worked with. The specific details vary, but it’s a pretty tried and true path for nearly every online store. I’m focusing on eCommerce but 80% of this applies to every business. [Read more…] about How To Plan An Inbound Marketing Strategy For Ecommerce

Google built both the Keyword Planner and Display Planner for Pay-Per-Click (PPC) research – not for SEO & Content Marketing

And yet, Keyword Planner is a fundamental tool for all SEOs. Keyword Planner provides a wealth of data directly from Google that you cannot get anywhere else. In a way SEOs love Keyword Planner as much as PPCers.

But what about Display Planner – the other research tool in Google Ads?

If you are building an organic / SEO campaign – you probably think of Display Planner like it’s a desolate, uninteresting land of PPC terms like “viewable CPM, “impressions” and “IAB ad sizes” – all meant for PPCers who run those awful banner ads.

In fact, it’s so focused on PPC campaigns, that you can no longer access it directly. You have to launch a “campaign” to access the data.

That’s all true. But like Keyword Planner, Display Planner has a ton of useful data when you hack it for SEO & content campaigns. Here’s how.

Pinterest has been the rapidly growing, “good” social network for several years now. But like Reddit, it has just enough quirks that many small business marketers have not fully embraced it.

What makes Pinterest very interesting to me is that, like YouTube, it has this hybrid role.

Pinterest is known as a social network, but it’s increasingly also a search engine and bookmarking service.

This 3 play opens up many unique opportunities for a creative content marketer.

It has a lot of potential to benefit your marketing efforts – here are the lessons I’ve learned helping clients use Pinterest for SEO and content marketing efforts. [Read more…] about How To Use Pinterest for SEO & Content Marketing

Amazon is the world’s largest online store. They sell more than the next 12 largest online stores…combined.

If you run an online store, it’s senseless to view Amazon as a competitor (even though they are).

Instead, it is more productive to use Amazon as a platform to make your store as profitable as it can be.

Listing your products on Amazon is the most straightforward method. You can even use Amazon’s PPC platform to make these listing successful.

But Amazon takes a cut from every listing that erodes your margins. For many store owners, it makes sense to invest more in your own store (same as Etsy and eBay).

But if you are going to invest in your own store, you can (and should) use Amazon…but not for what you’d expect.

Amazon is the largest source of eCommerce data on the Internet.

And a lot of that data is public-facing. You can gather it via Amazon’s API, via simple scraping or via manually browsing their store.

You can use this data to inform your SEO & content efforts to get customers before they even start their search.

Here’s a few ideas on using Amazon as a data gold mine for your SEO & content marketing efforts.

Writing an effective title tag for SEO & branding should be the first on-page SEO website improvement you make after you map your site’s keywords.

The humble title tag is still the primary element on your site that search engines use to understand the content of a page. The title tag is also the element from your website that actually shows up in search results & your customers’ bookmarks & social posts by default. It’s what your potential visitors click on to navigate to your site.

And yet, writing a custom title tag for SEO is all too often ignored, skipped over, or not given enough time.

There’s no formula to writing a title tag for SEO – but there are plenty of parameters and best practices. Here’s how you can craft an effective title tag to explain your relevance to the Googlebot while still enticing clicks from potential customers. [Read more…] about How To Write A Title Tag For SEO

Keyword research is possibly the most important part of search engine optimization. How you decide to use & target keywords helps guide how your content is written, how you approach your audience, and how you approach your content strategy.

Many non-specialists in search engine optimization are just familiar enough with keyword research to be dangerous. In other words, they know enough to start or stumble into either total success or total failure).

That’s a good thing though – SEO keyword research for beginners should not be such a complicated process that DIYers view it as a magical black box.

Keyword research for SEO is finding the specific words and phrases that people use to search for information. Then figuring out relative search volume and competition among your target keywords so that you can rank for a theme of keywords.

Doing keyword research isn’t so much a single step or action as it is a process where each step informs the previous and the next step in the process.

Here’s an overview of my SEO keyword research process for total beginners, which itself is part of the process of keyword mapping.

Imagine a friend has picked out 2 books that might interest you. They both have the same cover. They both have basically the same title. But Book A has a blurb about the book on the back cover while Book B has a random grouping of words.

Which one would you choose to read? Probably the one with a blurb on the back of the book. After all, you know for sure what is going to be inside, and what kind of tone and content to really expect. It’s not that Book B would be any less relevant, it’s just that you’re sure about Book A.

Meta descriptions are the lowly, ignored marketing tool that make a difference, but all too often gets ignored. And even though they are not a direct ranking factor in any search engine, here’s how to use meta descriptions for search engine optimization (SEO) to increase qualified visitors coming from search engines. [Read more…] about How To Write A Meta Description For SEO & More Visitors

I get a lot of hyper-specific local marketing questions, e.g. “Should I get more links?” “How do I rank #1 on Google in my area?” or “I just launched website and want to try Twitter ads.” They are great in a way – I’m a huge fan of experimentation.

But most local store owners haven’t developed an effective inbound* marketing strategy at all. They miss the forest (how everything works together) for the trees (specific tactics) so to speak.

*Inbound = the industry jargon for marketing that focuses on being where your customers are so that they buy from you “naturally.” Inbound contrasts with outbound marketing, which focuses on finding, interrupting and cold pitching potential customers.

The exciting opportunity about local marketing is that even in major metros – few businesses have a consistent idea about what they are doing.

And unfortunately, the local agencies they hire either have no idea what they are doing either…or they remain focused on a single (billable) tactic.

So – if you are a local business owner and can take the time to develop a single comprehensive marketing strategy (don’t worry – it’s not as complicated as it sounds), you can take all in a winner-take-all-world of digital marketing for not that much money.

I’m going to outline the the exact inbound marketing strategy for local business that I recommend to every reader and client I’ve ever worked with (example case study). I’m focusing on local but 80% of this applies to every business (I even wrote a similar post for eCommerce here).

This post is 4400 words. It’s meant for reference as you tackle each part. The 5 step short version of the strategy is –

1. Decide exactly who you are selling to (e.g., “hotel managers in the Charlotte metro region” or “high-income women in Buckhead, Atlanta” or “people stranded in a grocery store parking lot around Los Angeles”).
2. Build a website with Analytics enabled with pages that address problems & services your target market will need.
3. Systematically claim & build out local profiles that your target market is likely to look at.
4. Launch small ad campaigns on Google Ads and Facebook Ads to get data & feedback on your site.
5. Systematically build out new content & new promotional channels based on what you are good at & your market wants.