Local Search and Content Marketing - Tips Need to Know

Everyday, my company helps small business be found on the internet.  The majority of our clients are mom and pop shops that only need to target local residents within a five mile radius.  When I first meet with a potential client, they occasionally think that they need to target an entire metro area.  While that might be a goal one day, the way people are trending (especially with high gas prices) is sticking to their local areas.  The high gas prices are not the only issue to factor into the equation.  These days, our younger generations just don’t care about driving.  You can see this as fewer and fewer teenagers are getting their drivers licenses.

So, if my target market is within a five mile radius, it should be obvious that my if I am located outside of a city such as Atlanta, I should not be targeting Atlanta (usually.)  If my business is service based and travels to the client, I should want to target a five mile radius even more.  It makes zero sense to travel 30 miles to go paint a house, when there are 18,000 homes that need to be painted around my office.  Still, some business owners do not see the logic in this.  They will likely be the ones that do not survive the next few years, especially as we transition into a mobile age.

Here are some basic ways to build your local market through SEO and content marketing:

Home Page SEO

As it is with any large city with a metro area, locals almost never search an entire metro area when they know what they are looking for.  If I live in Norcross, Georgia, there is no way that I would ever search for a chiropractor in Atlanta.  My returned results would be 20 miles away.  So, the first thing I want to do is establish my true local market for my client.  This should be included throughout the meta code.

• Title – Use your primary keywords towards the front of your title.  You have around 60 characters to use, so choose wisely.  If it were me, I would put the main service and local market closer towards the front.  If the market is saturated with that particular service, try winning somewhere else.  For example, if I was marketing for “apartments in Marietta, GA” (which is extremely saturated), I would win with another angle using “Pet Friendly Apartments in Marietta, GA”.  I can then position my client to win as the local pet friendly apartment community, and eventually the great content marketing and basic SEO techniques used will push my client up the rankings for “Apartments in Marietta, GA” as well.  It’s a double win.
• Description – The description should be informative, compelling, and include your local market as well.  Include keywords, but don’t awkwardly stuff keywords.  We have all come across search engine results with descriptions that literally make no sense.  Not only will I skip over this, but search engines are working on filtering through these types of tactics.  I still come across them, but this might be due to the fact that the local market just isn’t saturated with decent digital marketers.  If this is the case, your creative description can outrank these poorly written meta descriptions.
• Meta Keywords – This is an indicator that has been phased out by most major search engines, mostly due to keyword stuffing.  Matt Cutts recently addressed the issue, letting on that your time is better spent on creating a great meta description.  Move on.

Content Marketing for Small Business

I am still a firm believer that if your content sucks, your web presence will suffer.  Creating great content is not only an opportunity to increase your on page SEO, but it is also a great way to increase your natural links.  Putting thought into the content you produce is essential.  Targeting a local market offers you great opportunities with your content, especially when using a blog to build your web presence.

Here are a few things to consider when writing your content:

• Keywords – Is your content keyword rich?  A better question might be, is your content over saturated with keywords?  Google is getting better and better at penalizing those who try to game this system with stuffing keywords everywhere.  Your keywords should come naturally.  When I include keywords in titles, links, bolding, etc, they must be used with the user in mind.  Will my keywords help the user find the content they need?  Will the keyword linked take my customer to a page that will help them?  Use keywords strategically, to not only make the search engines happy, but also to help your customer.
• Blogging – Using a blog to help boost your site’s keyword density is a great way to boost your search engine rankings.  This isn’t breaking news.  However, last year especially, Google started pounding the companies who tried to game the system who were using content farms to try and boost their SEO.  This means that your content needs to be original.  It doesn’t need to be anything ground breaking, but it does need to be from you.  If you’re going to spend time writing content, you might as well make it useful to your clients.  Small businesses can use blogs to help solve problems that their customers come across.  They can even take the spotlight off of their business every now and then, and share exciting news about what is going on in the local area.  Creating great blog content will help you, your client, and even help potential clients find you when they search for something other than a “home remodeler in Norcross, GA”.  Great content also attract natural links.  These have been used as indicators of quality.  If you want to increase your search engine results, create great, keyword rich, useful content.
• Video – A staggering amount of US citizens have cut the cord to their TVs.  Around 1/3 of the US population has a connected TV. The increasing adoption of streaming video into the home should light a fire under your butt.  Start making video content yesterday!  This seems to be one of the most difficult pill for small business owners to swallow when it comes to digital marketing.  Many business owners think that they need to create video series on a high quality production level.  As mentioned above, the bells and whistles don’t really matter anymore.  All that matters is that your content rocks.  Small business in a local market could kill it with YouTube if they wanted.  For example, a plumber could make a YouTube “How To” series with his iPhone.  By focusing on easy fixes, like “How to unclog your shower drain”, a plumber could earn trust and win over the client who used the video series for easy fixes, but needed a plumber for the more technical fixes.  I would imagine that for the majority of plumbers, driving out to a customer (high gas prices…), and unclogging a drain (taking him away from working a bigger job), would end up being a waste of his time.  Helping someone in your area with an easy fix, that doesn’t really pay well for the business owner anyways, with a simple YouTube video will leverage the business’s credibly in the long run for those big jobs that they really want.  For added SEO value, you can place that video in your blog with written content.  Now, if a user lands on the blog post, they are now under the small business owner’s banner and branded site.  Worst case scenario is that the person cannot perform the task, and needs to call the business owner to help come fix it.
• Photography – Are you stumped over why Facebook would pay out $1 BILLION for Instagram?  Are you wondering why Pinterest is taking off like wild fire?  Photos, as content, are huge!  Users are no longer sending text based updates alone.  They are taking photos.  The web user is quickly jumping on with photography and video as a content source that attracts attention (natural links and social indicators).  Small businesses can make a few huge wins simply with implementing photography into their content marketing plan.  Photos pull your content marketing strategy into the mobile world like nothing else.  For your SEO needs, tagging, titling, and using content to describe your photos adds extra benefit as well.  If you’re small business client isn’t comfortable with pulling out their iPhone to create videos, take the time to train them to use mobile photo apps like Instagram.  This adds extra value to all parties involved.

If you use all of these basic local SEO tactics, you will still only be scratching the surface.  As you implement them, your client’s world dives deeper and deeper into how you can leverage SEO and content marketing into local dominance via search engines, mobile, and social media.
Written By: Kevin Ekmark Source: KevinEkmark.com

Being Realistic About Your Content Marketing Strategy - A SPN Exclusive Article

Here are 3 things I wish someone had told me when I launched my own blog seven years ago. Maybe, if I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have struggled so much in the beginning!



You Will Struggle for Topics

Most of my clients tell me that coming up with topics for their blog is the hardest part of investing in a content marketing strategy. They either think that A) their industry is boring (in which case I think it’s time to find a job you like!) or B) no one is interested in hearing what they have to say. That’s not the case! Your industry is only as boring as you make it out to be. What’s old news to you might be ground-breaking to your readers; you just have to package it the right way!

Case in point: the brilliant video by the Dollarshaveclub.com. Would you have ever ranked razors in the “cool” product category? Probably not. But this video has over 4 million views on YouTube. Clearly the audience doesn’t think it’s a boring topic! The video introduces the product (which is nothing new or special) in such a fun way that you can’t help but get engaged in the story. Dollar Shave Club found a way to make old, boring information cool and fun by putting their own spin on it.

Yes, there will be days when you think that you have nothing new to say, but just take a step back and put yourself in the shoes of your audience. If you knew nothing about your industry, what kind of information would you be searching for online? Ask your sales and customer service representatives to write down the questions they are getting from your customers – these are a great source of topics for a company blog. Slice and dice white papers, turn webinars into 2-3 minute video clips and turn static research into an engaging infographic – there are tons of topics to be had if you just get out of your own way!

Great Content Will Go Unnoticed

It’s a hard pill to swallow, but one that every marketer must learn – sometimes your brilliant content will go absolutely nowhere. Every company is always looking for that magic ingredient that makes a piece of content go “viral,” but think of the millions upon millions of pieces of content that go live every day, most of them get hardly any attention. You might pour your heart and soul into a great video marketing campaign, spend hours putting together a really useful webinar or white paper, and devote a lot of time and energy into designing a fun infographic, and it’ll barely make a blip on the scene before it gets lost amidst the clutter.

Even great content is going to need a lot of help getting found by your target audience. If you think that the idea of “if you build it, they will come” is going to work with your content marketing strategy, you’re in for an unpleasant surprise. If you want your great content to be found, read, shared and linked to, you’ll have to start the ball rolling with your own content promotion. Post it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+; submit your blog to industry sites for syndication, partner up with other companies and leverage their connections to help get your content shared.

Sometimes, even after you give it your all, your great content isn’t going to get nearly as much love as you were hoping. And that’s ok! The key to a successful content marketing campaign isn’t to “go viral” every time you publish something, it’s to provide useful information that can help educate your target audience. It doesn’t matter if it’s 100 or 1,000 views as long as the right people are finding your content.

You Need a Lot of Content to Make a Little Impact

I have been blogging for seven years (spread out over three separate blogs), produce 1 or 2 white papers each year, host several webinars with some of my business partners, upload a new SEO video lesson each week, routinely contribute to a variety of industry blogs and more – it’s a lot of content! But I learned a long time ago that you need a lot of content if you want to make any kind of impact. Think about it like this, when was the last time you made a buying decision after reading one piece of content. Even when doing something simple, like choosing where to go out to dinner, you probably read a couple of reviews on Yelp and checked out the restaurant’s website, right? Now think about the last time you made a big purchase, like buying a new computer. How much content did you consume in your quest to educate yourself before spending $800 on a new computer? You wanted to make sure you were making the right decision, so you turned to various forms of content to help you along the way.

The more times your content can come into contact with a potential customer as they move through the sales process the better. One touch point isn’t going to be enough to convince someone to buy, especially in the B2B world. You need to consistently position your brand in front of your audience in the best possible light, and seeing as how the competition is striving to do the same thing, you’ve got a lot of content to produce!

Above all else, content marketing requires consistency. This isn’t a one-and-done kind of marketing campaign. Be prepared for the long haul, because that’s the only way it works.
Written By: Nick Stamoulis Source: SiteProNews.com

7 New Key Points to Think About SEO & Converged Social Media Metrics

The costs related to a specific actions and final acquisition has always been, and always will be, the ultimate metric and goal for any marketer. However, how we get to that final acquisition metric and how we optimize our search engine optimization (SEO) and social media efforts has changed significantly.
As we adapt to the convergence of SEO, social, content, and digital media channels there has never been a better time to think about new ways to measure paths to acquisition and utilize the vast amounts of technology, analytical tools and platforms that help us measure the value of media that is "earned from consumers."

What follows are some insights and straightforward tips from my recent visit to SES New York and some food for thought as to new ways to look at measuring, not just SEO, but converged, earned, and business related metrics.

1. Match Value to Traditional SEO Metrics

While ensuring that you measure traffic from the search engines – how many pages receive visits from these search engines, and how many keywords are sending traffic to site – also try to match value to these metrics.
For example, what is the size of the actual SEO opportunity and how much traffic and conversion comes from specific landing pages? How many keywords are under management and what is the specific value, cost and return, of specific keywords?

2. Distinguish Between Reactive vs. Proactive Metrics

Sometimes it's too easy to get caught in a battle or debate with client about metrics. We all know this happens far too much, right? The reality as to why this happens it due to that fact that people often report binary metrics based on reaction to:

• A loss of rankings.
• Reduction in traffic levels.
• Reductions in actions.
• Loss of business, lower conversions, and so forth.

Now these are all essential metrics to the success of any online campaign. However, simply reporting these metrics can put you in a constant cycle of debate.
Looking and reporting proactive metrics actual helps you in this case by providing the clients with something new and also putting any reactive metrics into perspective. Such metrics to focus on are:

• Rankings in relation to competition.
• Rankings in relation to content and news and external/industry statistics.
• Influencer based metrics and future value.
• Social value and engagement.
• Attribution based metrics (more on this later).
• Action based metrics that over time influence rankings.

You can do this by utilizing a combination of:

• Advanced analytics (Google and Bing Webmaster Tools and analytics).
• SEO tools (Majestic, Moz, Screaming Frog).
• Enterprise SEO and social media technologies (later in this post).

3. Place a Value & Forecast SEO Metrics – Think Beyond Just Ranking Position

SEO is finally becoming more measurable, and by tracking the whole picture and integrating with site analytics measuring ROI has become a whole lot easier. Quantifying the value of an SEO (just like you would with PPC) project prior to its start allows clients to invest more based on these forecasts.
Always remember the following:

• Rankings mean nothing unless you put a value to them.
• To place a value on SEO use organic traffic data and PPC keyword data to project spend – just like you would PPC.
• Make sure you use this data to benchmark where you or your client are is in relation to the competition.

Image credit: BrightEdge

Being able to see where you're winning and losing becomes a whole new SEO metric in itself

4. Embrace Social Media Metrics & Objectives

Eighty-four percent of companies surveyed in a recent Facebook survey believe that social signals will be more important to SEO in 2012. The convergence of SEO and social media tactics has meant that social media metrics are becoming just as important as traditional SEO metrics.
It is now vital to measure "beyond the Like" and understand the true value of social media interactions.
As BrightEdge CEO, Jim Yu, mentioned in his panel presentation, the increased importance of social signals (e.g., Google Search Plus Your World) means it is now essential to look at how, when, and why social signals (tweets, Likes, +1’s, and Pins) influence rankings and position. Creating a Google+ page, adding social plugins (maximize engagement), interlinking deep pages with social media properties, and SEO’ing your social pages are all vital steps in optimizing for the social web and graph.
Lee Odden, Author & CEO of TopRank, makes a great point on matching KPI’s to business values.
"One important distinction to make with measuring the integrated SEO and social media efforts is the difference between KPIs and business outcomes," Odden said. "I talk about this in Optimize where KPIs are defined as the behaviors that often lead to revenue oriented outcomes. KPIS like links, rankings and search traffic as well as likes, fans, friends, followers, network size, rate of growth and such are all useful measures of progress that can lead to business outcomes."
Odden also makes an interesting point on the differences between sales and social impact.
“Obviously sales and new customers are the most often sought after outcomes but so are the social impact on increased orders, order volume and frequency,” Odden said.

Image credit: Econsultancy

"Whatever brands can do facilitate productive connections between prospects or consumers and useful brand content, the more meaningful the engagement," Odden said. "And in my experience, an engaged community is more likely to be a profitable community."

5. Utilize the Right Tools & Technologies That Get You The Right Metrics

From measuring site stats, links, value, and social media influence the development many tools and technology platforms are allowing us to segment different types of metrics and build insights and value from a numerous of different sources.


Utilizing these types of seo and social media technologies – see this article on 45 SEO and Social Media Tools for examples – helps you collaborate much more closely with clients and agencies and…

6. Report The Right Metrics to The Right Person

Metrics are pretty useless you are reporting the right metrics to the relevant people, in the relevant format and at the relevant time. There is no set formula as to how you report metrics to an agency or a client as every company has a different organization structure, political structure, and level of knowledge.
Beyond marketing and sales objectives, search and social media marketing programs can affect increases in media coverage, attracting new employees and serving as a facilitator for better online customer service. That means more than links and likes.
For Odden, this means "performance based measurements in alignment with objectives like monitoring social conversations for customer service opportunities and overlaying those trends on social / search referrals to company knowledgebase and FAQ content. Is social engagement and optimized customer service content attracting more visits to FAQ and knowledge-base pages for example? What impact does such optimized content have on brand sentiment within social channels over time?”
Depending upon your objective you can start to build and utilize dashboards and widgets to begin to segment how and to whom you report certain metrics through an organizational structure. Once you have done this you can gain ‘buy-in’ from individuals in specific roles whilst then collaborating and sharing metrics easily across various business functions.
The end result is a client that fully understands the metrics relevant to them and their role.
Ciaran Norris, director of Emerging Media, Mindshare Global, makes a great point to help keep us in check.
“What’s changed in the market is that clients and agencies were use to the simple, precise nature of search (CPC etc) but have now had to adapt to the sometimes less definitive world of social,” Norris said. “There should be different metrics used to measure the effects of different platforms. The ultimate metric should be sales”.

7. Attribute Credit and Admit That You’re a Marketer

Someone once said “It’s not SEO, it’s Marketing”. The scope of SEO has changed dramatically over recent months due to its convergence with social and content-based media.
It's only natural (pardon the pun) that now we have more effective ways of measuring success that we should think like a holistic marketer. SEO has long had an issue with its PPC peer about attribution and credit. Advancements in analytics, tools, and technology highlighted above now pave way for SEO to monetize its value while also showing how its assists in the conversion process.
Kevin Gibbons wrote a great post showing how you can treat SEO forecasting like PPC and help to attribute accordingly.
Yes, there are always going to be challenges to this such as local search (Panda) and softer metrics that muddy the waters and are hard to measure (brand metrics) but the development and rise of API’s can help you work your way to building metrics to get you nearer your goals and show how you add value in the conversion chain.

Conclusion

As we move to a converged media world we are now presented with a number of ways to attract new connections between brand and consumer. This is turn creates a number of different ways to measure interactions and value by looking at metrics in a new light.
Utilizing the right technology and reporting the relevant metric from the relevant channel to the relevant person at the relevant time is the best way to show value and get the increase in spend that you deserve.


"The only metrics that really matter are sales (or the equivalent) and the cost of driving those," Norris said. "Anything else is just dressing."

Well, what we have today is a whole new way of dressing, measuring and tracking how SEO and it’s converged media partners can become more accountable in that sales process.
Written By: Andy Betts Source: SearchEngineWatch.com

How to Increase Businesses with Starting YouTube Videos

Making videos, much like Facebooking, blogging, and tweeting, is not an end but a means. It is a means of communicating with customers and marketing your wares. And it is increasingly a means of promoting yourself more visibly via search engines. On many a Web search, Google will place videos at the top of the results. This is common for many terms, and some have suggested that Web pages that contain embedded videos place higher in Google’s search results.


For the vast majority of businesses, producing and distributing videos is probably not a natural activity. Yet, while calculating the hard ROI of online video is a fool’s errand, the data suggest that video adds real value--and potentially lots of it--because users really do watch the stuff. RevZilla, a small motorcycle gear store in Philadelphia, jumped into YouTube on a whim in 2009; since then, its videos have received over 4.1 million views.

What Kind of Video to Shoot

Once you’ve decided to get your small business into video, what kind of videos should you make? Consumers are interested in the inner workings of corporate America, as TV shows like How It’s Made, Undercover Boss, and Dirty Jobs prove. You may think your business is boring, and it very well may be. But there’s literally nothing that can’t be peeled back, expounded upon, or satirized for entertainment gold. (Consider a long-running sitcom like The Office if you don’t believe me.)

If you’re still having trouble thinking of something, remember that your video doesn’t have to be a true story. For some inspiration, check out Orabrush, which makes tongue cleaners and which has used YouTube to grow into a $10 million business.

The Key: Be Funny

If there’s a single takeaway from most companies’ success with online video, it’s that humor works: Funny videos are the biggest overnight YouTube hits. Consider your own video-viewing and -sharing habits; would you rather share a recorded PowerPoint presentation, or the commercial below, for California taxidermist Chuck Testa?

                               



So, how can you use comedy to promote your presumably serious business? A coffee shop could create a highlight reel of awful open-mic performances, or create a hoax cooking show. A jeweler could make a faux Home Shopping Network segment, complete with callers dialing in. A corporate branding expert could stage a product-name brainstorming skit in a conference room, Mad Men-style. All of these can serve as a call to action to viewers to become a real customer.

Blendtec has made a cottage industry--190 million views and counting--out of grinding up iPhones and other otherwise nonblendable objects. The recent overnight phenomenon Dollar Shave Club, below, matches laugh-out-loud comedy with a compelling business case.

asasa

Of course, you know your customers best, and how far you can push comedy, satire, and self-deprecation. Kick back over pizza with trusted colleagues and brainstorm; the ones that make you laugh most are probably the ones to pursue first.

Or Don’t Be Funny

Okay, maybe you don’t have a knack for humor. Videos don’t have to be funny to be successes. You might have legitimate reasons to explain, soberly, how a product works or to prove your company’s expertise as, perhaps, a first-aid services outfit (where too much humor might be seen as cavalier). Gary Vaynerchuk’s long-running (now inactive) Wine Library TV turned him into a worldwide sensation, despite largely featuring a guy drinking wine in front of a wall.

Making the Video: Think About the Audience

YouTube shows you who's watching.
It’s been said that you don’t choose your audience; your audience chooses you. To some degree that’s true, but you can still guide the kind of viewer that you most want to reach: your ideal customer, naturally. Have a handle on what this customer looks like, demographically speaking, and write down a customer profile: Is she a 29-year-old urban fashionista? A suburban older man facing retirement?

YouTube provides demographics about viewers, so if you find a video that you think would resonate, check out who’s watching it. To reach YouTube Analytics, on any video just click the small graph button to the right of the number of video views. You’ll see when the video has been viewed; where the traffic came from; and the age, gender, and location of the audience. Use this data on your own videos, of course, to confirm whether you are reaching the audience you intended, and to help your next production.



Writing a Script

Once you’ve conceived your video thematically, it’s time for the hardest part: Writing the script. It’s a terrible idea to take a camera and just start shooting, figuring that you’ll edit the footage together into something funny later. The best viral videos are tightly scripted productions that were agonized over until they were perfect. They may come across as spontaneous and improvised, and that’s intentional.

The good news: The best videos are short. Audiences have very limited patience for Web video, so keep yours under 90 seconds long, and the shorter the better. You’ll be able to cut in postproduction, but you’re best off planning a brief video during the writing process.

Shooting a Great Video

Need help shooting your first production? Don’t forget these tips.

First, shoot in high definition, and in widescreen if you can.
As with still photography, lighting is everything. Pay careful attention to the lighting to avoid harsh shadows and dimly lighted environments. Take test shots to get a sense of how the video will look after it's made: What might seem perfectly bright to your eyes often looks impossibly dark on video.
While lighting is everything, sound is everything else. If you can’t afford a boom microphone, try to shoot in otherwise quiet locations, and avoid shooting outdoors on windy days. Your camera’s microphone is just as important as its lens.
Don’t be afraid of multiple takes. Use a real Hollywood-style clapper, if you’d like, to mark, at the beginning of each scene, the chronological number of each take, and have someone on hand to keep notes on which takes worked best to save you time in the editing process.
Shoot with a tripod. If you don’t have to move the camera, don’t.
Leave the zoom lens alone. Zooming in and out a lot is the first sign of an amateur production and a quick way to turn viewers off. If your shot absolutely needs to move, move the camera by physically moving in and out, and leave the zoom lens out of it.
Don’t shoot your video using your phone's camera. Use a real video camera if at all possible.
Edit fast and heavy: Get your video down to the shortest possible length, and cut out every last frame that doesn’t have to be in the finished product. You want your video to move, to be urgent, and to leave your audience with a smile or a laugh, not a sigh that you’ve overstayed your welcome.
Use overlays to add information about your company at the end of the video (or throughout the clip): your website, phone number, email address, or physical address--whatever’s most appropriate for your business. Other than this, ignore all the other “special effects” your editing software or camera may offer.

Polishing Your Video

Once your video’s done, polish it for publication and consumption. First, make sure you have a Channel. All YouTube accounts automatically have a Channel associated with them, which you can customize by clicking the Edit Channel button on your Channel’s home page. Here you can promote a featured video, connect to social networks, and add links to your business’s website. You can get fancy with a corporate logo and custom background, too; the more branding, the better.

When you upload your video, use the same guidelines as you would for creating any page of content on the Web. Thoughtfully use the keywords you want to optimize for, add descriptions, and check your spelling. Don’t spam the fields with excessive keywords, but be savvy about the use of synonyms that searchers might type when searching for content like yours. YouTube suggests popular terms once you start typing inside its search box.

Adding captions or subtitles to your video is a great idea (Google explains how), not just for accessibility for the hearing impaired but for SEO purposes, too. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to caption your video if you’ve kept it short.

Also, if you’re making video an ongoing project, invite viewers to subscribe to your Channel. Subscribers get new videos sent directly to their home page, making this one of the best ways to keep fresh content in front of your audience.

Promoting Your Video

Finally, a great video is useless unless you promote it properly, so rally your other social networking connections to get the word out. By now you know the drill: Use Twitter, your Facebook pages, Google+, and even LinkedIn to tell the world to check out your creation. You’ll want to embed videos directly on your own website, too. If you’ve made your video genuinely entertaining (test it out on a few friends), you can try to take it viral through submissions to StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg, and other social news sites.

If you aren’t getting the eyeballs, you can promote your video with Google AdWords for Video (now being beta-tested and launching to the public this spring). Video ad campaigns work the same way that text ads work, by letting you bid on keywords and pay-per-view. YouTube explains how the system works here and in the video below.

Written By: Christopher Null Source: PCWorld.com

What is Content Strategy & How It Works For You?

Content strategy is more important than a lot of people think, but that’s mainly because of the hype that surrounds SEO. Don’t get me wrong, SEO is super important for your entire site, but content is the oxygen that keeps your site alive.

Think about a piece of paper that is shredded into a thousand little pieces, these pieces represent each page on your site. To help those pieces be more understandable, we’ll have to pour on some glue to mend them back together – that’s our SEO. But sometimes things get messy and we realize that we don’t actually need or want all of those thousands of pieces, because people don’t really like the dull, ugly pieces. So, we cut out the ugly pieces and we’re left with a beautiful, bright and shiny collage that even a child would appreciate (this analogy has gone too far). The point is that, that beautiful, bright and shiny collage is your content strategy. Of course there’s a lot more to it, but the results typically pay off for you and your readers/customers.

How do we make a beautiful, bright and shiny collage, a.k.a. Content Strategy?

Content InventoryOur Digital Strategy Group starts every content strategy with a full list of the existing content on a site. When this list is created it is then sorted, dissected and sectioned off into manageable tabs. I’ve done content inventory for sites with thousands, upon thousands of pages. Believe me, it’s easiest to sort content by error free content, content type and content with errors; e.g. 404 error pages and 301 redirects. Content inventory is really just the beginning of the content strategy process and shows what content currently exists on a site. Without content inventory, we couldn’t move on to the other necessary stages of content strategy.

Stakeholder InterviewsThese interviews involve key people at a company, potential/existing clients, people that may refer business to the company or people that are invested in the company in some way or another. Basically, as a content strategist, we need to know how the company operates, how they would like to operate, what their clients think about the company, why people refer business to the company (or why they don’t) and how people view the company. What the company thinks about itself is typically very, very different from what the clients and investors think about it.

In a nut shell, we need to understand the company’s brand message and brand promise from their point of view and an outsider’s point of view.

Keyword Research & Analytics ReviewKeyword research shows us common themes in things that people are searching for that surrounds a company and competing companies, and an analytics review can show us exactly how people interact with the current content on the site. Putting all of this information together begins to show us a pretty good roadmap of how the site should be laid out.

Scrumming it UpThat’s a big fancy word for an internal meet-and-greet. I’m sure there are content strategist out there that feel confident enough to take a stab at a content strategy without involving everyone on the web design team, but here at Bridgeline we like to scrum – that is, meet with the entire team that’s involved with the project so we can all look at the overall direction we think the site should go. This group meeting typically includes project managers, digital strategists, designers, developers, analysts… I know I’m forgetting someone here.

Content Analysis & TaxonomyContent analysis is the process of organizing all of those little pieces of paper. It’s finding the focus of the site, discovering how content could be grouped, what content can be deleted or compiled and making suggestions on new content. I’ve seen websites with over 20,000 pages get consolidated down to 800 pages. That may sound crazy – I mean, who gets rid of content like that – but what ends up happening is a better user experience is created and conversion rates increase.

Taxonomy takes the content analysis one step further and makes suggestions on the navigation of the site. It helps show areas of the site that should remain and opportunities for new sections – this is where keyword research is used rather heavily.

Voice DefinitionNow it’s time to understand what the company’s voice is – the brand voice. It should be consistent across the entire site and help the company discover how the content should come across to visitors of the site. We try to help the company think through all of the different personality styles that could represent their brand, but also speaks in a human voice that’s understandable to clients.

Editorial CalendarIt’s great to analyze existing content, and even better to define what it means in the future, but without a publishing process (or editorial calendar) content typically begins to go stale rather quickly. An editorial calendar can be as simple as who’s writing what and when, to as advanced as setting up monthly themes and promoting annual events.

Inbound Marketing & Social MediaOnce the content is published it needs to do more than just sit on a site unnoticed. SEO really helps with promoting content in the search engines, but companies can get faster results by leveraging inbound marketing techniques (such as email marketing and guest posting) or social media. Our team typically ends the content strategy with teaching our clients techniques on inbound marketing and social media that can help promote the content that is being created. It’s time for syndication and aggregation.

Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day

Before hitting publish, give your content some time to breathe. When we write our own personal blog posts out there, we typically don’t have a team of people to bounce our ideas off of and to help us edit our content, but here at Bridgeline we have a slew of people to help edit content before it goes live on our site. I’m not just saying for grammar mistakes, but for consistency, voice, additions, deletions, etc. There are blog posts and whitepapers written that never make it to the blog, but that’s because they needed more work. Getting constructive criticism is never a bad thing. Pass the content around to a team of editors or experts in the company and get different opinions. Or sleep on it and read it the next day to make sure it still makes sense. There’s a big difference between content written for SEO sake, and quality content that brings in qualified leads.

Lastly, monitoring results is important. Between managing analytics internally, or from a group of experts like our Digital Strategy Group, content management should include website analytics, social media analytics and keyword analytics.

For more information on content strategy, which includes 10 Steps to a Successful Content Marketing Strategy, visit our Digital Strategy pages.
Written By: Kasy Allen Source: BridgeLineDigital.com

Advanced Content Marketing Strategies - Bring Brand on TOP

You can’t be a marketing professional and NOT create content. In fact, the Content Marketing Institutionsaid so when it published this interesting statistic: “93 percent of marketing professionals create, or plan to create content marketing as part of their overall programs in the next year.”

The question is…are you creating that content in such a way that it takes your business to the next level like American Express, Mint.com and HubSpot did? And is your strategy advanced enough to handle all the changes to the content landscape?

Well, if you don’t have a strategy…or if it’s not where it needs to be…this guide will help you get up to speed.

Creating content marketing personas

The demand of delivering constant content are very real for any business, and that demand can sometimes force you to generate and push out content that is not geared to your audience.

Neil Patel

In fact, push the wrong content out and you might attract the wrong prospect and even lose high-quality prospects.

The best way to make sure that never happens is to have a plan that identifies your ideal prospect and then run all content ideas through that filter.

This is done by identifying their needs, creating behavior-based profiles and using demographics to create user personas.

Segment – To build the proper content marketing personas you need to ask yourself these questions:

    * Who is your customer?
    * What are their problems and desires?
    * What kind of content do they consume?
    * Where do they consume content?
    * How can you engage them?

From this data you can start to think about your ideal content marketing prospect…and build a representation of this individual.

To get started, simply study your current readership. Use online surveying tools to identify what they like and want.

As you uncover information you will probably start to see patterns.

For instance, if you provide content on house cleaning you might discover that you have people who read your content because they want to do the work themselves; have a crew they want to teach; or want someone else to do the cleaning for them.

Identify needs – Next, start to build an outline of the needs of each segment by asking questions like:

    * What is their number one challenge?
    * What trends are driving their industry?
    * What one need can you fulfill?
    * What’s the best way to solve those needs with content—through video, white papers, blog posts, etc.?

When it comes to identifying needs, look at the path those prospects take to get to you with your web analytics. As you study that path uncover insights about that segment.

Once you’ve rounded out your segment personas you’ll be able to create content geared to them on a fly…never having to worry about neglecting their needs or attracting low-quality prospects.

Creating a content marketing strategy for tablets

For the longest time content marketing strategies geared to desktop views dominated. That is until the iPad…which changed everything.

Just under 2 years Apple sold over 55 million iPads. Last quarter alone they sold over 15 million units.

And in the months of December 2011 to January 2012 the number of people who own an iPad doubled.

According to the Economist, because of tablets like the iPad we are moving toward a new lean back age of content consumption we haven’t seen since the book.

Jason Calacanis’ called this new age “curl-up” technology. On public transit you’ll notice less people reading books and more people using tablets. And if you are on a plane you’ll notice the same thing.

Of course, they’re not all doing the same thing. Some are playing games while others are reading and still others are listening to music.

The days of how we consume content online have changed…you have to wonder about your content marketing strategy and how it fits into this new tablet world. In fact, crack open your Google Analytics and you’ll see the number of people hitting your site with tablets is growing quickly.

So, what you create won’t change as much as how it’s distributed. For example:

1. Combine multiple channels of content into one tablet-friendly stream – If you are a content publisher that produces multiple content channels (think about all the channels like Gawker, Gizmodo, Jezebel, etc. under one masthead), you can create a unique experience by combining all of those sources.
2. Think newsreaders as modern form of SEO – People are starting to discover and consume content through news readers like Taptu, Pulse and Flipboard as if they were search engines. The bonus is content tagged gets hire rankings.
3. Team up with tech developers – If you are a content publisher, you don’t need to create a new way to consume content via the tablet. Find a startup creating the content and hook up with them. These partnerships can build both of your audiences without you having to re-invent the wheel.
4. Develop for multiple users – Until the price of tablets drops, more than one person will more than likely share a tablet. So design for a multi-person device. For example, users may not want to stay logged in [which affects passwords] and your app icons should be easily identifiable.

Another noticeable change will be the duration of content. You can now create longer videos knowing that they are more likely to get consumed than when our only option was viewing them on desktop.

This is true about longer blog posts, too. The adoption of tablets with content usability apps likeReadability makes reading a screen a better experience.

Creating a mobile content marketing strategy

Your biggest challenge to your content marketing strategy will come from people who use mobile phones to consume content. While smartphones have improved, mobile is still a pretty difficult user experience for several reasons:

    * Downloads are slow
    * No mouse for selection
    * No physical keyboard
    * Small screen and small text

Even reading comprehension suffers when it comes to mobile content consumption. So what should you do? Follow these eight steps:

    * Step 1 – Create a goal that states what you are creating (app or mobile site) why you are producing it (generate leads or produces sales) and how you plan to measure success.
    * Step 2 – Develop content for people of all ages even though the data might suggest that young people are the only users.
    * Step 3 – Remember that you will be competing in a very distracted arena. Your user will only being thinking of you for only the smallest of a fraction…so you got to make that sliver of attention count for them.
    * Step 4 – If you decide to build an app, make sure it’s not just because “everyone else is doing it.” You must have a solid business reason for creating an app…
    * Step 5 – Using the information you collected above for personas to understand your target audience…and then deliver the substance and distribution channel they want. Make them feel special and they’ll stick around.
    * Step 6 – Consider location as a key to your mobile strategy…and how your content and their location can be used to deliver even better products.
    * Step 7 – Don’t repurpose count…but recreate. Give your mobile users, especially if you’ve created an app, access to exclusive information.
    * Step 8 – Build social sharing features into your mobile content and constantly work on keeping them engaged.

Creating a content marketing social promotion strategy

Speaking of social sharing, what do your plans to spread this content look like? You are planning to promote the spread of your content, right?

Even if you are on top of your game…it’s best you understand the best strategy for social promotion.

For example, were you aware that Twitter and Google+ are both beat out by Facebook as traffic generators? And were you aware that this was the case because of Facebook’s new subscribe button?

This was based on an informal study done by Kevin Rose:

What’s important to notice about this finding is that Kevin Rose has over 1,200,000 Twitter followers at the time, but received 10 percent more clicks from Facebook.

To boot, he only got 1/7^th as many clicks over at Google+.

The lesson is this: the Facebook audience is way more engaged than the other two social media sites.

Do you think this would change your social media content marketing strategy? You bet it should!

This is not lost on major brands like Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan and National Geographic who’ve noticed that Facebook is slowly passing Google Search as the top referrer of traffic to their sites.

Conclusion

Five years ago your content marketing strategy was pretty simple: create content for the web. This meant writing posts, creating videos or building an archive of podcasts.

While those elements still apply, the landscape in which that content is consumed has changed drastically. You need to be prepared.

What other advanced strategies do content marketers need to pay attention to?

Neil Patel is the co-founder of KISSmetrics, an analytics provider that helps companies make better business decisions.
Written By: Neil Patel Source: GeekWire.com

Top 3 Strategies for SEO After Google Panda Update

Google has changed more in the past year than it did in the 12 years prior to that. Most of the changes are good for honest marketers who just want the ranking their content deserves. But taken together, they radically change search engine marketing (SEM) best practices. James Mathewson (author of Audience, Relevance, and Search: Targeting Web Audiences with Relevant Content), won’t go into every change, because they number in the dozens, but this article discusses three changes every SEM should care about.



As some of you may know, I am IBM’s representative to the Google Tech Council. For those who don’t know, the council is a place where representatives from the leading B2B tech companies sit around a table each quarter and discuss our search challenges with Google representatives. B2B Tech companies might have different ways of doing search marketing, but our challenges are common. We all need to rank well in Google for the words and user intents most relevant to our clients and prospects.

Google does its best to programmatically help us solve our challenges. They can’t always help for legal reasons I won’t get into. But where they can, they do. For example, a couple of years ago, several of us complained about the alarming increase in content farms on the search engine results pages. Whether we had organic or paid listings on those pages, content farms caused serious friction for our target audience, and diluted the results we had legitimately earned or paid for.

After that pivotal meeting (though perhaps not because of the meeting), Google began working on ground-breaking changes to its algorithm that would tend to improve the quality of search engine results incrementally over time. The first set of changes was launched in March 2011. Of course, I’m referring to Panda.

Nine months and several Panda updates later, I can confidently say that Google does a much better job with the quality of its search results. I rarely if ever see content farms anymore, and those I do see don’t last long on page 1. Those who think of SEO the way it was primarily conducted prior to these changes—keyword stuffing, buying links on content farms, and participating in commodity link exchange trading—have been left behind.

Panda is perhaps the most profound change to Google’s search engine since PageRank, which was the technology that gave Google its edge. Ironically, it was overdependence on PageRank that led to the series of algorithm changes known collectively as Panda. The practice of spoofing PageRank by swapping or buying links from low-quality sites had grown to such an extent that the results were polluted by them.

Towards an Algorithm that Rewards Quality Content
The Tech Council was not the only place where Google was hearing that it needed to change. Google’s chief competitor—Bing—had taken some of its share, to the point where Google only owned something like 70 percent of the market, down from 80 percent at its peak. The quality of the results had something to do with this.

The problem Google faced is that it had made regular changes to its algorithm over the years to stay one step ahead of the scammers, spammers, and scrapers. It had even introduced continuous A/B testing that gave pages better results if users actually engaged with them. That approach had reached its limits. The A/B tests were simply not getting rid of the pages fast enough. Scammers, spammers, and especially scrapers could publish pages faster than Google could drop them in the rankings. Google needed to undercut these activities once and for all.

How do you change the algorithm again to reward authentic, high quality content and punish low-quality spam-riddled content from scrapers? The answer was a revolutionary way of building an algorithm: with UX/editorial crowd sourcing combined with machine learning. According to Rand Fishkin, founder of SEOMoz, Google hired hundreds of quality raters—primarily editors and UX specialists—to rate a massive number of pages on the web. It then put the ratings into a machine-learning program, which recognized patterns and built the algorithm organically.

Machine learning is a technique borrowed from artificial intelligence used to enhance the analysis of complex systems such as natural language. When a computer system is said to learn in this way, it is taught to recognize complex patterns and make intelligent decisions based on the data. Watson, for example, used machine learning to train for the television game show Jeopardy!. By studying the questions and answers of past games, and practicing in live sessions with past champions, Watson was able to learn the nuances of the game well enough to play above past championship levels.

There are hundreds of patterns or signals that the Panda machine learning program recognizes in how the quality testers rate pages. Notice I used the present tense because this is an ongoing process. Google releases a new version of Panda every two months or so that reranks the entire web based on a new weighting of patterns and signals the machine learning program learns, all stemming from feedback from the quality testers.

Though the algorithm is changing in subtle ways all the time, the general trend it to favor the following three areas of digital excellence, described in the next few sections.

1. Design and UX
It is no longer advisable to build text-heavy experiences, which force users to do a lot of work just to ingest and understand the content. Clear, elegant designs that help users achieve their top tasks will tend to be rewarded by Panda. There are dozens of books and sites on user experience (UX) best practices, so I won’t rehash them here. But these principles of good UX won’t lead you astray:

NOTE

Gerry McGovern, Jerrod Spool, and Jakob Nielsen are three of the leading thinkers in web UX.

• Keep it simple. The whole experience needs to be easy to use. One thing Panda does is put new emphasis on the UX of entire sites, not just one page within the site. Do you help users navigate once they come to the page? Or does your experience drive your users in circles? Can they get back home if they click your links?

• Don’t make users work. A page needs to have most of the content “above the fold” or on the first screen view. Don’t make users scroll too much. Don’t make them click just to see more of the content you want them to see.

• Clarify. A page needs to clearly communicate what it’s about at a glance. You have six to eight seconds to give quality testers a clear idea of what the page is about, who it’s for, and what users can do on it.

• Don’t shout. You already have their attention. The temptation is to make it so blatantly clear that you use huge text and flashy graphics. Don’t insult users’ intelligence. Just elegantly clarify what the page is about.

• Don’t hide stuff. The temptation for some designers is to be too elegant, forcing users to mouse over items to make them appear. If users don’t know it’s there, chances are they won’t mouse over it.

• Emphasize interaction. Sites and pages are not passively consumed. Give users ways to interact and participate in the conversations at the core of the content.

• Answer user questions. Ask yourself what questions users might have when they come to your page. Learn these questions by analyzing the grammar of search queries they used to find your content. More and more all the time, users are phrasing their queries in the form of questions. Answer these questions clearly and concisely.

These and many other design and UX best practices are some of the strongest signals the Panda machine learning algorithm looks for.

2. Content Quality
One of the main complaints I hear about SEO is from my editorial colleagues who say it’s just a way of helping poor-quality content climb the ranking at the expense of good-quality content. Their complaint has some validity. Content quality can’t be boiled down to a simple checklist of where to put keywords. So why are these factors so important in search engine results?

The answer is, they’re not as important anymore. Panda does not primarily reward traditional SEO best practices. Panda primarily rewards clear, concise, compelling, and original content. Only if two sites are of equal quality in Panda’s eyes will it tend to reward the one that displays traditional SEO best practices. But it is easy to overdo SEO practices.

For example, keywords are strong indicators of relevance to user queries. As paragon users, quality testers look for the words they typed in their queries when they land on a test page. If they’re not clearly emphasized on a page, the page will not tend to get a good score. So having well emphasized keywords above the fold is an important positive pattern for Panda.

But having a conspicuous number of the same keyword over and over is the sign of bad quality content. So that’s a negative pattern for Panda. Matt Cutts, Google’s organic quality czar, advises page owners to read the copy aloud. If it sounds natural, it should be fine.

The point is, the rules of good quality content are much more important than any simplistic set of SEO rules for pages. Do traditional SEO practices matter? Yes, because they are patterns Panda cares about. But really good content that does not have keywords in every alt attribute or great backlinks will still tend to rank better than marginal content that has all of the attributes of traditional SEO.

Panda also tends to reward fresh content and punish duplicate content. All things being equal, a piece of content will rank higher if it is more recently published. (So pay attention to the date metatag.) One of the signals it looks for is not at the page level but at the site level. A high quality page that sits in a site full of old duplicate junk will not rank well until you clean the junk out.

In short, Panda rewards good content strategy. Content strategists such as Colleen Jones don’t trust SEO “snake oil.” And rightly so. Good SEO is good content strategy and vice versa.

Finally, one of the dilemmas that I hope gets permanently retired with this article is the false dichotomy between writing for search engines and writing for users. I argued in the book I co-authored for IBM Press that they were essentially the same. The attributes users care about are much the same as the ones search engines care about. And we can use the intelligence we glean from search engines as a proxy for intelligence about our users. Prior to Panda, this was controversial. Post Panda, it is not controversial.

The algorithm is derived from user preferences. The only reason why you need a machine to learn those preferences and do the work is because of the sheer volume of pages and sites on the web. The machine is not quite human, but it is getting closer all the time to human intelligence. And it has something that no individual human has: It has the collective intelligence of the whole crowd of quality testers. Like Watson, it is smarter than any individual human because it combines the intelligence of the collective of people feeding it data.

3. Site Metrics
As I mentioned, Google has long rewarded search engine results with high click-through rates, low bounce rates, and high engagement rates by helping them climb the rankings. But Panda rewards these even further by making search excellence metrics strong signals in each update. It also continues to raise the level of sophistication of these metrics signals, where they tend to align with pages rated highly by the quality testers.

For example, Google’s A/B testing didn’t have different standards for different types of experiences. It used a relative standard based on the bounce rates for the words in question. As a result, certain types of experiences for a given keyword tended to rank better over time (ahem, Wikipedia). Yet it makes perfect sense that portals have different bounce rates than single-offer commerce experiences. The more options users can click, the lower the bounce rate, generally speaking. Because humans understand the nuances of different experiences, Panda tends to contextualize these variable metrics values. And it will tune how it weights them over time as the quality testers provide more data.

Another example in metrics sophistication is in the levels of engagements. If a user clicks through to a page from the search engine results page, and clicks three more times, it will count for more than if she just clicked once. More generally, if a site has a high number of engagements per user, it will tend to rank better over time than one with one page that converts well and a bunch of dead pages.

Perhaps the best news of all in this is that you can improve your search rankings just by making incremental improvements to the pages on your site based on the metrics you gather.

Unfortunately, all the changes Panda makes only happen every two months or so. So once you are pushed down in the rankings by Panda, it will take a while to get back up in the rankings. Hopefully, Google will be able to make more frequent updates to Panda in the future so that those penalized by an overaggressive ad executive or an inadvertent UX faux pas can get back into Panda’s good graces more quickly.

Conclusion
Unlike past Google algorithm changes, Panda itself is not changing in any drastic way. It is just getting smarter at recognizing high-quality digital experiences. It’s also getting smarter at recognizing poor quality experiences that look good from a simplistic point of view. If you want to rank well for Google, you will need to invest in building high quality, authentic digital experiences. Given the growing confidence in the Google algorithm, it is a business imperative.
Written By: James Mathewson Source: informit.com