Better SEO & Content Strategy

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.

If you are creating a page to generate organic traffic – there is no point in fighting a losing battle by targeting keywords that you have no chance in ranking for.

Let’s face it, everyone has limited resources. You should spend your limited resources creating content/pages that can “win” (aka “prequalified”).

In fact, the most common beginner SEO mistake I see is not choosing which keywords to target – that’s usually fairly straightforward. Instead, it’s choosing which keywords / content topics to avoid.

Many SEOs over-simplify judging keyword difficulty to –

• How difficult would it be to rank for this keyword?
• How strong are the pages that already rank on the front page of Google?

Those questions are redundant and not helpful.

Instead, let’s break down some of the nuances of keyword difficulty, so that you can rely less on guess-work and automated tools – and more on professional judgement & process.

It’s professional judgement & good process that will put you ahead of the competition rather than simply copying tactics that anyone can use.

*Note – all images in this post should be clickable so that you can see the full-size image.

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Content marketing is a marketing strategy that uses content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience, and to convince them to take some sort of profitable action (also called a conversion).

I’ll be explaining why you should explore investing in content marketing (as part of your general marketing strategy) and breaking down 3 ways you can do it to increase your site traffic and your sales.

Why Content Marketing?

People are over ads. Just think of your own online behavior. When is the last time you clicked on an ad on Google or saw a billboard that you thought was cool?

Enter content marketing. Content marketing isn’t exactly new… in fact, it’s positively ancient.

A century ago, seed companies and farm suppliers like John Deere gave out almanacs to farmers. It was how they established relationships with their customers, found out their needs, and did long-term sales.

It’s 2016 and things haven’t really changed, except for the fact that content marketing is actually more suited to our digital age. The Internet is awash with attention grabbing headlines, which means no one even sees your ad unless they are looking for it (which is where Google AdWords comes in), or if it provides real value, which is what content marketing is all about.

Content marketing is also incredibly versatile. You can build an entire business around your content marketing efforts because it hits each stage of the funnel. It also integrates with nearly every type of advertising, from paid media to SEO, meaning you get more bang for your buck by creating great content to support your other marketing efforts.

So how can you put it to use? Here are three broad ways to approach content marketing:

Increase Reach & Awareness

One of the primary ways to use content marketing is to create content that gets you in front of new audiences. Basically, this boils down to creating unique and valuable content that’s broad enough to reach those who aren’t familiar with your brand.

Take this YouTube Channel by Jas. Townsend and Son, Inc. This content is broad enough that even someone who doesn’t know the brand can find it and even appreciate it. It fuels the “awareness stage” of the funnel (AKA, when someone learns about a brand).

When you’re using content marketing to increase reach and awareness, consider utilizing these three primary methods to achieve your goal:

Social

By creating content that people are happy to share with friends on social media, you can expand your reach exponentially. Take the “This Girl Can” video from Sport England. This video went viral as thousands of people shared it across social media. Chances are, most of the people who came across the video had never heard of Sport England.

SEO

If you create content that ranks for broad topics that solve issues that correspond with your project, you’re reaching people that may not know you, but definitely have issues your business can solve. REI does a great job of this. They site provides resourceful content that addresses issues their target audience are trying to solve. So, when a hiker searches for “backpacking trips in the US” on Google, the top ranked content comes from REI – a brand.



Advertising

By creating ads that are broad and applicable to a large audience, a brand can utilize advertising to expand their reach and audience scope. Think about Buzzfeed, which is funded solely with this business. They create epic content that goes viral on a regular basis, reaching a HUGE audience for their content and advertiser’s content, which exposes even more customers to brands (and Buzzfeed).


Increase Inbound Traffic

Content marketing it also useful for increasing inbound traffic. Inbound is just marketing jargon for being where your customers are. In terms of content marketing, it means putting content out there that brings people to your website, instead of throwing ads at them and interrupting whatever they’re doing (like YouTube video ads…). Let’s take a look at REI again and see how they do this through social, SEO, and advertising.

Social

REI creates interesting and clickable stories that they share via their social media channels. This post about duct-tape hacks is a great example of interesting educational content that is applicable to REI’s outdoor enthusiast audience.

SEO

We’ve already seen how REI excels using SEO to find other audiences, but the brand has a host of useful educational content that can both be linked and that shows up in search engines. 

Advertising

When it comes to advertising, REI uses content marketing exceptionally well. The brand was featured in AdWeek for sharing inspirational stories of dedicated campaigns as a new advertising campaign called “Every Trail Connects”.

The campaign highlights the strategic difference between inbound and outbound marketing: the inbound style here uses emotional content in order to connect with an audience, instead of making a cold sale to a potential customer through a paid media ad focusing on a big sale.

Increase Conversions

A third quick way to use content marketing is to create content that you can use to sell, reassure, or educate existing customers and visitors. This can come to life in three ways: through using retargeting, using on-site content, or using email.

Retargeting

When you retarget a customer, you’re reaching back out to someone who visited your site but did not convert. In terms of content marketing, this means using content to draw existing fans back. The content should be interesting and educational, and provide additional value that the customer didn’t originally find on your site. Perhaps you offer a special PDF download guide, or a webinar course that only few have access too. Whatever it is, make it valuable.

On-site

Getting customers to convert isn’t just something that happens outside of your site. You can actually use on-site content that educates or reassure high consideration visitors that they are making the right decision in doing business with you. This content can be customer testimonials, reviews, or third party references about your products and services.

Email

Content marketing through email looks similar to retargeting in that you’re using it to serve content that brings customers back to your website. This email content can be anything — exclusive discounts for email list, advanced-access to a tool or educational video, or even a pre-sale announcement for a new product. The ultimate goal here is to get customers back on the site and to convert.

Next Steps

Whether your are a business owner or work for an agency, marketing in 2016 means that you understand the importance of content marketing.

To get started, decide which of the above approaches has the most immediate and significant impact on your business. Then, start building that by creating educational, entertaining, and thoughtful content that aligns with your end goal.

 

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 2016, 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.[Continue Reading]

Google built both the AdWords 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 AdWords?

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.

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.[Continue Reading]

Keyword research is possibly the most important part of search engine optimization. It 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 (ie, they know enough to start and 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, along with figuring out relative search volume and competition among your target 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.[Continue Reading]

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.

So 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.[Continue Reading]

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 / Webmaster Tools, 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 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.[Continue Reading]

Pinterest has been the hot new 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. It’s known as a social network, but it’s increasingly also a search engine and bookmarking service.

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.[Continue Reading]

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.[Continue Reading]

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 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 outreach. Here’s how to prospect & do outreach much more efficiently & effectively. [Continue Reading]

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

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 what 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 share of total volume. All terms are relative to each other. You still need to use Keyword Planner 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 best judgement.

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

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.[Continue Reading]

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 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.[Continue Reading]

On March 19th, Google manually penalized one of the most well-known guest blog communities online – MyBlogGuest – for engaging in a link scheme and violating Google’s guidelines. They also announced that users of MyBlogGuest could be receiving penalties.

It seems unfair to penalize guest blogging. Google cannot manually judge the intent of every guest post on the Internet. Not all guest posts are intended for link manipulation. After all, guest blogging is done for very legitimate reasons, such as sharing expertise or opinion in front of a new or larger audience. Even Google’s blogs accept guest posts.

Regardless of what Matt Cutts or the SEO community says, here’s the real reason MyBlogGuest was penalized.

EDIT: As of August 2015, Google has used this same process to set expectations and trigger behavior for mobile, doorway pages, furthering HTTPS, and more. It’s an important concept to understand so that you are neither cynical of Google nor paranoid of Google’s changes.

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Congratulations! You have a new website or blog. Now how do you get your first website visitors to it?

You totally understand this is a long-term effort, and you don’t expect 30,000 visitors to show up on your new site within 2 weeks (not that that wouldn’t be nice). However – you don’t want to be building something for the void either – and you want some sort of positive feedback to keep you writing and building.

There’s been a ton of information spilled on this topic – and frankly there are entire websites/experts/industries dedicated to helping you do just that (and newsletters).

But from what I’ve found for myself and for friends is that 90% of it is really quite worthless. It’s either –

• Too advanced (ie, just create a solid keyword map and go 100% SEO!)
• Too vague (ie, just find your audience and get in on the conversation)
• Too expensive (ie, just buy this course for $197!…)
• Too much cart before the horse (ie, just build your Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, and email list first!)

Not that any of those aren’t true eventually, but they are quite daunting and require learning extra skills or spending valuable time when your #1 focus should be simply reading, writing, and promoting.

Even though social media is hot, and SEO sounds sexy and complicated – here’s 3 old school ways to get your first website visitors that don’t get nearly enough attention, but still work wonders to get your snowball rolling.[Continue Reading]

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.

The basic concept is that search engines – no matter how smart – still need a little help understanding what a website is about and how relevant the website is to what people search for.

That’s the basic definition – but here’s a better way to really understand the concept, the process, and why your business or organization needs SEO – and how to be a smart consumer of it.[Continue Reading]

3 weeks ago Google did a regular update to their algorithm. No news there.

However buried deep in the update list, Google mentioned the Venice Update.

Over the past 3 weeks – it’s been all the news in local search engine optimization circles.

Here’s how it’s going to help local businesses and what is going to change…[Continue Reading]

Have you ever heard a claim that you can “Be #1 on Google – Guaranteed?”

Have you ever wondered if your small business SEO guy is just taking your money?

Have you ever wondered why some SEO agencies sound like used-car salesmen?

Because even though Search Engine Optimization for small businesses is absolutely essential… the process is very technical and the inputs don’t lead to exact outputs.

Here’s 7 things to watch out for [Continue Reading]