Digital Marketing: Strategies & Tactics To Grow Your Website

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.

[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.

[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.

[Read more…] about Hacking Google Display Planner for SEO & Content Marketing

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).

[Read more…] about How To Use Amazon for SEO & Content Marketing

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).

[Read more…] about How To Decide Which Keywords To Use: Keyword Research for Beginners

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.

[Read more…] about How To Plan A Local Business Marketing Strategy (for free!)

Google has scanned more than 30 million titles for its Google Books project, and will scan more than 130+ million in coming years.

That is a ton of content. More importantly, that’s a ton of high quality, unique, expert content. For any other giant treasure trove of content (and links!) – SEOs and website owners are all over it. I know I’ve written guides to using content treasure troves like Wikipedia, Reddit, Quora, Display Planner, Pinterest, Slideshare, Amazon, YouTube, and others for SEO & content marketing before. Surely there has to be a way to use Google Books for SEO and content marketing, right?

The problem with books, though, is that they are…books. And before Google Books, books were hard to search through. And even with Google Books, they are still hard to scrape & search relative to HTML.

But Google has made it easy enough that, with a few tricks, Google Books can be an invaluable tool for your SEO and content marketing strategy. Here’s how to use Google Books for SEO (specifically link building & keyword research) and content marketing. [Read more…] about How To Use Google Books for SEO & Content Marketing

YouTube is well-known as one of the world’s largest social networks, the world’s 2nd largest search engine (by queries processed) and the world’s largest videos hosting platform.

However, most YouTube marketing advice is about optimizing for YouTube. There are plenty of guides to setting up your channel and optimizing your videos. There are podcast episodes and long-form guides to YouTube SEO and YouTube Analytics. But what about optimizing your YouTube presence to benefit your actual website?

Whenever you are marketing on a platform, you have to avoid the practice of “digital sharecropping” – where your active presence benefits the platform’s business more than your business.

Whether YouTube is a priority, a small side project, or you’re just using it to host videos right now, here’s how you can use YouTube to directly benefit your website’s marketing and SEO efforts. [Read more…] about 8+ Tips On Using YouTube For Your Website Marketing & SEO

Getting quality links to point to your site are a key part of ranking in organic search – and will be for the foreseeable future. But getting links for links sake will often do more harm than good.

Real, quality links that represent real people endorsing your website requires some legit marketing, hours invested in planning & outreach plus a bit of risk – something not a lot of businesses or agencies can afford.

Aside – Seasoned SEO? Skip down to the ideas here.

Broken link building is a link building strategy that aims to at least reduce the risk of lost investment. The general idea is straightforward:

• Find links on a website to pages that no longer exist
• Point out the dead links to the website owner
• Have a similar or complementary page that can replace the broken URL

It’s a win all around. You get an editorially placed link, the website owner saves some time researching replacements, and the website’s users are no longer frustrated by 404 pages.

Broken link building reduces the risk of creating an unwanted content asset or page since you are replacing dead pages that already succeeded in getting links.

However, it can still be time-intensive to find the dead links & do smart, thoughtful, non-spammy outreach. Here’s how to prospect & do outreach much more efficiently & effectively.

[Read more…] about Broken Link Building Guide: 6+ Tactics for Better Prospecting, Outreach & Links

One amazing, but underestimated, feature of WordPress are Category and Tag pages. Whenever you write a new post, you have the option to add that post to a category or tag the post.

When you add you post to the category/tag, WordPress creates an archive of all the posts in that category or with that tag. You can find them under Posts –> Tag or Posts –> Category on the WordPress Dashboard.

These category and tag pages are blank and are simply a list of posts by default. For people browsing your site, they can be useful if you’re consistent with your categorization & tagging…but for anyone not familiar with your site, they can be pretty useless.

In fact, if you have lots of random categories and tags – it can create a low quality/duplicate content issue & appear spammy to search engines. In my post on how to use Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin, I recommended NOINDEX, FOLLOW category & tag pages to prevent any SEO-related penalties (ie, that tells search engines to click through to your posts, but not to serve them in search results).

But category & tag pages can be so much more for both your readers & search engines. And really, they just need some unique content explaining the category or tag. Here’s why you should build out your category & tag pages – and exactly how to use WordPress category & tag pages for SEO…

[Read more…] about How To Use WordPress Category & Tag Pages for SEO

Like I mentioned in How To Decide Which Keywords To Use: Keyword Research for Beginners – a key part of keyword research is judging keyword difficulty.

[Read more…] about How To Judge Keyword Difficulty (aka “Can I Rank for [Keyword]?”)

Search Performance (formerly ‘Search Analytics’) is one of the most useful tools in Google Search Console’s suite of tools. It provides a lot of data about how your website is performing in Google’s organic search results.

But like any data source – it is useless…unless you know how to put the data into action. Even though the best ways to use Search Console are specific to your website, there is a myriad of ways to put the data into action.

As of 2019, Google moved an all-new Google Search Console out of Beta. You can get access at search.google.com. It is different on multiple levels from the old Webmaster Tools / Search Console. I’ve reworked all the screenshots below to reflect the current Search Console (which also renamed the Search Analytics Report to the ‘Performance’ tab.

Either way, here are 15+ ways that I like to use Search Console to solve SEO problems. Hopefully, you’ll be find something to use or build on to put your own data into action. [Read more…] about 15+ Ideas for Using Search Performance More Effectively

Search engine optimization is a process of making your website as relevant (ie, detailed and descriptive website content) & trustworthy (links from relevant and trustworthy websites) as possible so that search engines rank your site when people are searching for relevant keywords.

Hiring someone to help with marketing – specifically an SEO marketing campaign – can, unfortunately, be tough & confusing. But here are the Do’s & Don’ts along with processes I recommend when hiring an SEO consultant or agency:

[Read more…] about How To Hire an SEO Consultant or Agency: Dos, Don’ts & Processes

A colleague once told me that they “just wanted an easy way to get more SEO / organic traffic” for a client.

“So, do you really want more organic traffic or do you want more sales?” I asked.

“Right now, I just want more organic traffic. We need a good month for SEO.” he replied.

I said, “Well if you really want more raw organic traffic, there are three topic areas we can cover right now that will bring in thousands and thousands of new visits within the month.”

I continued saying that – “First, you need several content pieces about Xbox games – preferably with cheat codes. Second, you should write about TV show characters. Third, if you are truly desperate for raw traffic, just write quality articles about sex problems, pornography and/or religious issues.”

Of course, the point of this conversation wasn’t to actually come up specific articles covering those topics.

The point is that raw traffic is useless if you can’t turn it into sales.*

*Aside – I’m assuming that your primary goal is profit, not spreading of ideas. I’m also assuming that you’re not running some spammy ad arbitrage scheme.

Now there are plenty of ways to turn organic traffic into sales – even if your visitors don’t buy on the first click.

Brand-building, retargeting, and “top of funnel” conversions (aka, email list signups) that are part of a broader inbound marketing strategy are all great.

But what if you need to find & target keywords that will actually lead directly to sales?

That route is tough because when someone does a search, they don’t necessarily intend to buy at that moment.

There are plenty of excellent posts from SEOs on categorizing keywords according to the traditional marketing funnel (ie, research → consideration → purchase).

For example, “running shoes” might be a research keyword while “New Balance Vazee review” might be a consideration and “buy New Balance Vazee Size 11” might be a purchase keyword.

That framework is useful, but also quite rigid. It can create false positives and misses. And ever since Google took away keyword level data from Google Analytics, there’s also no way to make a direct, proven connection.

Instead, I like to use flexible rules to sift & sort potential keywords. If a keyword passes all 3 rules, then I can expand it to a theme of keywords to target with an existing or new page.

Here are the 3 rules that I use with clients when we’re selecting the highest-impact keyword themes that have the shortest route to a sale.

[Read more…] about 3 Rules For Finding Useful Keywords That Lead To Sales

Whether you are trying to increase referral traffic or organic traffic, links from other websites matter. But it’s also hard to generate links from lots of good websites passively or “at scale.”

Plenty of writers in the industry have written about how well building links with images can work.

The caveat is having link-worthy images in the first place. Website owners read these tactics and think – “my business doesn’t have any images to use for link-building! That’s a ton of work!”

But here’s the thing – you don’t need to create separate marketing assets for a separate SEO campaign. The key is to take marketing assets that you already have and efficiently re-purpose them for SEO and referral links.

And here’s how to create & automate more image link opportunities using images your business is creating anyway for social media, internal use or offline use.

[Read more…] about How To Create & Automate More Image Link Building Opportunities

Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) is Google’s suite of tools, data & diagnostics to “help you have a healthy, Google-friendly site.”

It’s the only place to get search engine optimization information about your website directly from Google.

Side note – Bing has a separate but similar tool suite at Bing Webmaster Tools.

Google Search Console (Webmaster Tools) is free. Any website can use it. But, simply installing it will not improve your SEO, or your organic traffic. It’s a toolset – which means you have to understand how to use Google Search Console effectively to make any difference on your website.

In 2018, Google has launched an all-new Google Search Console. It’s out of Beta and open to the public. If you are used to the old Webmaster Tools, much of the data & structure might be familiar. Many pieces were removed, but overall your access to data is much improved. There is way more data that is way more accessible than the old Webmaster Tools.

That said, it is still bit daunting to understand. This tutorial will go through what each feature is, what you should be using it for, and some ideas on being creative with it.

[Read more…] about How To Use Google Search Console (Webmaster Tools) Effectively

This post was originally published in 2012 – and the three trends that I said “killed” keyword rankings then have now been overshadowed by even larger trends. I’m going to update you on what has changed and what actually matters to you now.

In 2018, organic traffic & search engine optimization is a completely different world. Google’s Search Results Pages (SERPs) look different. Google Search has more features. More people are searching on mobile than desktop.

*Aside – throughout this piece, I will use “Google” in place of “search engine.” Bing, Yahoo! and other search engines matter, but Google has consistently driven the trends that I discuss – in addition to owning most of the marketshare.

And yet – “where does my website rank in Google” still feels like the right question to ask.

That’s because your keyword ranking does matter as a tool more than ever. But it matters less as a metric than it has since the late 2000s. [Read more…] about Why Your Keyword Rank Doesn’t Matter…and what actually does

Finding & reading the best posts around the Internet is the primary way to learn and stay up to date. But sometimes nothing there’s nothing like a great book to put things in context and fully explain a topic.

[Read more…] about Best Books in Marketing, SEO & Content Strategy

Google might be the ultimate search engine. But it’s still a search engine. It’s only as good as the instructions you give it.

Did you know that Google has a plethora of search operators that make it easy for you to find exactly what they’re looking for?

Whether you’re doing research for a content strategy, trying to grow your personal brand, or even looking for linking opportunities for your business’ website, search operators are here to make your searches more effective. But first, you have to know how they work.

I’ve compiled a list of Google’s search operators, as well as examples of how to use them. Then, I dive into how to combine these operators to get the most out of your search. [Read more…] about How to Search On Google More Effectively

If you’ve done any research on how to grow your website online, you’ve likely run into articles about SEO talking about organic traffic, ranking, and a whole bunch of other marketing jargon.

Which leaves just one question… what the heck is SEO anyway, and why do you need it?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the process of optimizing your website’s technical setup & content, and your marketing so that search engines can properly crawl, index & judge the relevance of your website…so that your website’s page will appear more visibly and more often for search queries related to your website.

So, I’m going to break it way down. Here’s exactly what SEO is and why you need it.

[Read more…] about What Is SEO and Why Do I Need It?

Google Correlate is a tool that Google rolled out in 2011. It’s a close cousin to Google Trends – well, it’s actually Google Trends in reverse (and just as powerful).

Google has announced that it will shut down Correlate on December 15th 2019 due to low usage. Be sure to get your data while you can! I’ll leave this post up because I think the approach is useful – even if you have to “hack” new tools (like Trends & Ahrefs) to get similar-ish data that Google Correlate provides.

Since it’s launch it has received some buzz and become a useful tool among academics, but it’s never become a part of the standard toolset among marketers the way Google Trends has.

There are a lot of reasons for that. Google hasn’t publicized Correlate the way it has the general Trends toolset. Correlate even has features that sporadically break. But I think the slow adoption is because marketers don’t realize the potential of Google Correlate – or even how it works.

According to Google, it is –

a tool on Google Trends which enables you to find queries with a similar pattern to a target data series. The target can either be a real-world trend that you provide (e.g., a data set of event counts over time) or a query that you enter.

In other words, the pattern generates the keywords rather than the keywords generating the pattern. So you do have to think in reverse.

Before we go into specific use cases for Google Correlate – a couple notes on caveats.

First, Google Correlate does not pull absolute search volume. Just like Trends, it is based on the share of total volume. All terms are relative to each other. You still need to use Keyword Planner or another keyword research tool to find search volume.

Second, correlation does not equal causation. Just because terms correlate with each other does not mean they share a causal relationship. There’s a lot of noise in the Correlate data, but plenty of hidden gems too. You’ll have to use your best judgment.

Here are five ways to use Google Correlate and integrate it into your marketing research toolset.

[Read more…] about Google Correlate: How To Use It For Marketing, SEO & Content

You won’t get ahead in any industry if you simply copy your competitors. And this is especially true in SEO & content marketing.

Competitor research for SEO is really tough because…

• Nobody truly knows what they are doing.
• Confirmation bias is the default.
• Being different has a bigger payoff than being better.
• Your competitors are probably copying you.
• And a myriad other reasons.

But – you’re probably going to do it anyway so here’s a few things I do to make it a little more useful. [Read more…] about 7+ Ways To Do Better Competitor Research for SEO & Content Marketing