Top 12 Digital Marketing Tips for 2019

Digital marketing constantly changes and evolves. To ensure your business stays competitive, incorporate new digital marketing techniques with each new year.

We’ve put together our top 12 Digital Marketing Tips to help you grow your site traffic, convert more visitors to leads, and build a brand people know, like, and trust.

 

#1 – Build Citations

Your business and website receive a citation every time it’s referenced online. More citations mean more authority for your business in the eyes of search engines.

Citations can happen naturally, like when someone mentions your business in an article. But you can make a concerted effort to build citations by submitting them to citation directories.

Citation directories are websites that feature information about businesses like their names, addresses, phone numbers, hours of operation, and website URLs. These sites are very similar to link-building directories with one exception: citation directories don’t always provide links to your site.

You Need More Citations If:

  • You want more site authority and traffic
  • You want to appear in more “map-pack” search results
  • You want to rank for more competitive local keywords

Citations Will Help You:

  • Improve your rankings in local search results
  • Gain more recognition from Google’s Local Search Algorithm
  • Have a consistent business profile across the web

 

 

#2 – Use Advanced Link-Building Techniques

Backlinks remain one of the top ranking factors for search engines. In addition to using link-building directories, businesses can use the following methods to get more quality links to their site:

  • Searching for brand mentions – If your business has been around for a while, odds are there are mentions of your business that don’t link back to your website. Spotting these unlinked mentions and reaching out to site owners is an easy way to acquire backlinks.
  • Guest posts – Guests posts are blog posts that you publish on websites other than those in your niche or related niches. You offer to write a post about a subject in exchange for a link (or links) back to your website.
  • Outreach – Outreach for backlinks can help you receive very high-quality links. First, you find out who links to content similar to yours and then you “pitch” content from your website to these site owners in an attempt to get a backlink. Outreach is more time intensive and has no guarantee per pitch, but it will help you acquire more backlinks on average.

You Need Advanced Link-Building If:

  • You want to rank for very competitive keywords
  • You own a regional service area business
  • You own a national or global services area business

Advanced Link-Building Will Help You:

  • Rank for very competitive keyphrases
  • Increase site traffic significantly by ranking for competitive keyphrases
  • Gain enough site authority to compete regionally and nationally

 

 

#3 – Expand Your Content

The standards for content quality and length have changed in 2019. Whereas 300 words used to be the minimum viable word-count to rank a page on Google, that number is much higher now (500 or more for local business pages).

For competitive keywords (mainly companies with a national audience), 1,000-2,000 words of content are necessary.

For companies with a national target audience, we suggest a content marketing campaign with 2-4 posts per month of this length to significantly improve organic search traffic.

For local businesses, we suggest expanding the page content to at least 500 words per page.

You Need Content Expansion If:

  • Your site content hasn’t been updated in the past 18 months
  • Your website has thin pages with fewer than 500 words of content
  • You want to rank for more competitive keyphrases

Content Expansion Will Help You:

  • Increase your site traffic by adding more target keyphrase-rich content
  • Rank for a higher number of keywords overall
  • Meet industry standard content guidelines to outpace your competition

 

 

#4 – Improve Site Loading Speed

Slow-loading websites will hurt your search engine rankings because Google uses website performance as a ranking factor.

Your site should take no longer than three seconds to load. You can use Google’s page speed insights tool to gauge site performance as well as tools like Pingdom for load speed data and recommendations.

You Need A Site Speed Performance Boost If:

  • Your site takes three seconds or longer to load
  • Your site receives low scores on site speed tools
  • Your site was built more than five years ago with out-of-date technology

A Site Speed Performance Boost Will Help You:

  • Make your site visitors happy and more likely to become a lead or sale
  • Increase your rankings with a Google-friendly website
  • Have a website built to last and perform among Google’s changes

 

 

#5 – Secure Your Website

All websites must have an SSL certificate in 2019. Further explanation here: https://www.mltgroup.com/blog/website-security/

The main points are:

  • Google uses site security as part of the algorithm
  • Users may receive an “unsafe” warning message
  • E-commerce retailers face liabilities without SSL certificates

You Need to Secure Your Website If:

  • You don’t have an SSL security certificate
  • You want to meet Google’s security standards
  • You sell products online

An SSL Certificate Will Help You:

  • Avoid warning messages to visitors
  • Meet Google’s standards to improve rankings and traffic
  • Create a comfortable environment for website visitors

 

 

#6 – Improve Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the process of fixing common site issues that affect SEO performance. Here are a few common technical SEO issues to look for:

  • Redirects – Each time a page is deleted or a URL is changed, the URL has to be redirected elsewhere via a protocol called a “301 redirect.” If this isn’t done, your site will return a 404 error page, which harms overall performance.
  • Redirect chains – After you 301 redirect a page elsewhere, you should replace all internal links pointing to the old page and add the link to the new page. If you don’t do this, then a redirect chain is created, which means you are creating an unnecessary buffer between links. This dilutes the authority your links pass to other pages.
  • Broken links – Often, when linking to external sources, broken links can occur because the source that you linked either deleted or changed the URL of your page. Scan your site quarterly to find and replace broken links.

You Need Technical SEO Optimization If:

  • You’ve had an active website for a year or more
  • You write content that cites other sources online
  • You’ve added, deleted, or changed pages on your site

Technical SEO Will Help You:

  • Have a more SEO friendly site structure, which improves traffic and rankings
  • Avoid a negative user experience for your site visitors
  • Have a faster more user-friendly site (redirect chains can slow sites down)

 

 

#7 – Revise SEO Content With LSI Keywords

LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords are keywords that relate to the target keyword for a page. Often, a page will begin to rank for these LSI keywords without them being in the content.

Adding LSI keywords that you already rank for can increase organic search traffic.

You can also search for additional LSI keywords that your pages don’t rank for and add them to your content.

You Need to Add LSI Keywords To Your Content If:

  • You’ve been creating content for more than a year
  • You rank on page two for keywords that you want to rank on page one for
  • You want to rank for many keywords with a single page

Adding LSI Keywords Will Help You:

  • Increase your keyword footprint for more traffic
  • Rank single pages for multiple keywords, creating a compounding effect
  • Provide users better information by adding related phrases, which aids buying decision

 

 

#8 – Focus On Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion rate optimization is the process of making your website more engaging to visitors so that they “convert” by taking the desired next step.

Examples include:

  • Signing up to your e-mail list
  • Filling out an inquiry or “request a quote” form
  • Calling your business

pop up

You can make your site more conversion-friendly by:

  • Strategically placing more opt-in forms across your website
  • Writing stronger calls to action in various spots of your website
  • Emphasizing information you want users to act on (for example, changing a hyperlink to a bright colored button)
  • Adding pop-ups to your website
  • Creating free resources like whitepapers in exchange for an e-mail list

You Need Conversion Rate Optimization If:

  • You want more leads and sales
  • You want more e-mail list signups
  • You want phone calls to your business

Conversion Rate Optimization Can Help You:

  • Get higher ROI for your marketing efforts
  • Build long-term relationships with customers to increase CLV
  • Spread awareness of your brand by retaining customers on your e-mail list

 

 

# 9 – Update Your SEO Data

There are important areas of your website code and metadata sections that should be updated occasionally as your campaign progresses.

  • Title tags – Title tags contain the target keyword as well as other content meant to get visitors to click. Analyzing and re-writing tags for targeting and persuasiveness can improve organic search traffic.
  • Meta descriptions – Click through rate (CTR) is the number of times people click on your page divided by the number of times people see the page. Search engines measure click-through rate as a ranking factor. Re-writing your meta descriptions to be more compelling can increase CTR and thus traffic and rankings.
  • Image alt tags – These are tags used in photos. These tags help search engine crawlers understand what the photos are about since they can’t see them.

You Need To Update Your SEO Data If:

  • You have pages with high impressions but low click-through rates
  • You haven’t updated your SEO data within the year
  • You want to increase rankings and traffic for low performing pages

Updating Your SEO Data Will Help You:

  • Increase your click-through rate and site traffic
  • Improve traffic by fixing the targeting on low performing pages
  • Continue to be Google friendly and maintain rankings by updating data on your site

 

 

#10 – Make Your Website Responsive

If your website isn’t built to display well on mobile phones, you are going to suffer on search engines.

Since Google now bases its rankings on the mobile version of your site (or lack thereof), having a mobile-optimized site isn’t a choice anymore.

Your site needs to be mobile-optimized yesterday. Even better, you should build your site to be responsive. This means the design of your site will adjust to look great on any sized screen.

You Need to Make Your Website Responsive If:

  • You don’t have a mobile website
  • You have a mobile-only version of your website instead of a responsive website

A Responsive Website Will Help You:

  • Make sure every visitor to your site has a positive experience
  • Rank on Google’s mobile-first index and increase overall search traffic

 

 

#11 – Get More Reviews

Collecting as many reviews and testimonials as possible from customers and clients has multiple benefits:

  • Google uses reviews as a ranking signal
  • Reviews provide “social proof” that shows potential customers why they should trust you
  • According to research from Bright Local, 91 percent of people surveyed said they read reviews (at least occasionally) and 84 percent said they trust reviews as much as their own friends

You Need More Reviews If:

  • You haven’t been actively collecting them
  • You have fewer than 10 reviews for your business
  • You’re a new business

More Reviews Will Help You:

  • Increase site traffic by adapting to Google’s local search algorithm
  • Increase sales as reviews on search engine results page provide “social proof”
  • Add an element to your marketing by placing reviews on your website

 

 

#12 – Redesign Your Website

As a rule of thumb, you should redesign your website every 3-5 years for the following reasons:

  • Style – Design style and tastes change over time and you don’t want your site to look outdated
  • Google – A re-build can help you meet all of Google’s new standards in one fell swoop
  • Conversion – Many outdated sites don’t have a conversion focus, which is crucial for digital marketing in 2019

You Need A Redesign If:

  • Your website is more than 5 years old
  • Your website isn’t responsive
  • Your website doesn’t have a conversion focus, which means you’re losing out on leads

A Website Redesign Will Help You:

  • Meet all of Google’s standards, which will increase rankings
  • Have an up-to-date site, which will increase visitor trust and lead to more sales
  • Convert more casual browsers into leads with a conversion-focused design

Conclusion

These digital marketing tips are a handful of many you can use to grow your business with content marketing and SEO.

The most important step to take next? The first one.

Will this be the year you decide to fully to commit to digital marketing?

If so, let’s talk. Fill out the form below and we will send you a detailed website audit and proposal in 48 hours or less.




 

Marketing Tactics You Can Use to Grow Your Business in 2019

marketing tactics

Marketing tactics make for a double-edged sword.

One the one hand, the right marketing tactic can help you grow your business. On the other hand, marketing tactics can become a waste of time. So how do you choose the right one?

In today’s guide, we’re going to walk you through different marketing tactics to help you grow your business, but before we do that, keep this important lesson in mind.

The #1 Marketing Tactic of them All

Imagine you’re seven years old.

You just got a new bike with no training wheels.

Instead of letting you ride, fall on your face, and repeat the process until you learn how to ride, your parents give you a training manual called “How to Ride a Bike.”

It has perfect instructions. The guide breaks down the physics of riding a bike with mathematical equations about balance. It tells you how to grip the handles, gain momentum, and maintain balance. There are graphics and illustrations walking you through every step of riding the bike.

You read the manual cover to cover, taking notes, and discuss the process of riding the bike with your parents in detail.

After all of this, you know how to ride a bike, but you don’t know how to ride a bike. The only way to learn how to ride a bike is to ride one. The only way to see if certain marketing tactics work is to try them. That’s why we created a list with many options. You can choose a tactic, try it, and see if it works.

If the tactic does work, double-down. If it doesn’t work for your business, try something new. Also, don’t blame the tactic itself. Many entrepreneurs mistakenly believe that if one strategy doesn’t work, all strategies are bad.

This cynical mindset kills creativity, marketing, and ultimately profits.

Either try the tactics out for yourself or work with a smart agency to handle it for you.

Ready for the tips.

Stick with us…

Run a Content Marketing Campaign for a Year

Content marketing and SEO are the lifeblood for many businesses.

These strategies work if you give them enough time.

As you can see from this chart via Ahrefs, your website pages may need to age a little bit before they rank well on Google.

Some other benefits of giving your campaign time to grow are:

  • Insights – You can’t get good data on where your traffic is coming from, which keyword selection works best, or whether you’re creating the right content. When you can compare data quarter over quarter and year over year, you get a birds’ eye view that helps you make better content marketing decisions.
  • Branding – Brands are becoming more important to SEO. Google trusts brands more because they’re an easy way to vet the quality of information. Brands take time to build. One of the best ways to build a brand is through smart content marketing, but it requires patience to pull off.
  • Certainty – Often, business owners quit on SEO before they know whether or not it’s working. This impatience causes failure and wastes time and money.

Create an Interesting Hook to Get People to Engage

Getting attention is hard in 2019.

Getting people to take the action you want is even harder.

People are getting jaded. They’ve signed up for the email list, gotten the white papers, and end up ignoring marketing messages.

There are some fun and unique ways to get people to engage and take the action you want like signing up to your e-mail list.

Lead Quizzes

Lead quizzes are a fun and interactive way to get people to join your list. You provide a quiz based on your niche and give them the answer in exchange for your e-mail list:

Lead quiz example

Prize Wheels

Prize wheels let users ‘spin’ for a chance to win a prize you offer. To claim the prize, you have to provide an e-mail in exchange:

Prize wheel example

Giveaways

Done correctly, giveaways can build your list fast. In this case study for giveaways, WishPond displays 24 different Facebook Ad giveaways with unique offers, copy, and images:

Facebook Ad Giveaway example

 

Twist the Knife

Customers often buy products to alleviate pain and solve problems, that’s where the Problem, Agitation, Solution (P.A.S) formula comes in.

  • First, you spell out the problem they’re having.
  • Next, you make the problem worse by elaborating on the consequences of it.
  • Last, you offer your product as a solution

Here’s a great example:

pas formula

Courtesy of Copy Hackers by Ramit Sethi

Get the Most From Your E-Mail Blasts

Here’s a simple marketing tactic you can use to boost the open rate and clicks for the e-mail newsletters you send out.

What tactic, you ask? Resend your message to people who didn’t open it the first time. Wait a few days, change the subject line, and send the exact same message. Look at this example from my personal blog through my Converkit dashboard:

resend to unopens example

Spruce Up Your About Page

If we had a dollar for every boring and bland business page that uses copy that starts out like “We started our company 30 years ago from a garage in Wichita, KS […].” we could retire from having an agency.

This speaks to one of the biggest marketing mistakes businesses make. Your website and about page aren’t for you, they’re for your customers. Yes, feel free to tell your company story, but also answer the question “What’s in it for me?”

Your about page is a great place to talk about the benefits of your product or service. Take a look at this example from the about page of my writing coach website:

about page example

I open the page by talking directly to the reader. I even sprinkle some PAS formula in there as well (see if you can spot it).

As an added bonus, it’s smart to add a call to action to your about page, too:

about page call to action

Ad Upsells and Downsells to Your E-Commerce Store

Upsells work great because they engage a customer who’s already bought something. Someone who buys something from you is more likely to buy again. Adding an upsell to the checkout process of your e-commerce store can help you get extra sales.

It speaks to the thinking “I already want the product I bought. Why wouldn’t I want this extra cool added upgrade or special tool?”

upsell example

Example via E-Consultancy

If they don’t opt for your upsell offer, add a downsell offer, a discounted version of your upsell:

downsell example

Example Via Umesh P

Redesign Your Website

Redesigning your website can give your brand new life.

Haven’t an outdated website with a bad user experience is bad for your brand.

It’s also bad for your search engine performance, because search engines use user signals like load speed, mobile responsiveness, and dwell time as part of their algorithm.

Re-designing and re-building your website solves these problems and gives your brand a new look at the same time.

website redesign example

Via Elcor Consruction – A site redesign client of ours

 

SEO Question of the Day: Which Kind of Hits Does Google Analytics Track?

Which kinds of hits does Google Analytics track

Which kinds of hits does Google Analytics track?

This is a simple question on the3 surface that has many different answers.

Google Analytics is a software created by Google to track different user metrics on your website. Many marketers and business owners don’t use GA to their full benefits. Doing so can give you insights you can use to grow your traffic, build your brand, and leapfrog your competition.

If you want to talk one on one with one of our SEO experts about analytics tracking, reach out to us below:




If you’re looking for an in-depth answer to the question  “Which kinds of hits does Google Analytics track?” Keep reading.

Google Analytics Explained

The Google Analytics tool has a menu you can use to look for different metrics about your website traffic.

This is just one of the sections you can use in the tool to get useful data.

You can go into quite a bit of depth into how Google Analytics works, but for today, we’ll focus on the most important and easiest to understand metrics.

Google Analytics Acquisition Channels

Direct Traffic

Direct traffic measures people who visit your website directly by entering a page on your website into a browser. Quick example, if you shop on Amazon, you give Amazon a direct visit when you type in amazon.com.

The question is, what do you do with this data and how can you use it to improve your traffic?

When looking at direct traffic, here are some things to consider:

  • Watch growth over time – If your direct traffic is growing over time, it could mean that your brand recognition is growing. The more you promote your business, the more people will come back to your website because they already know your brand.
  • Understand your business – If you are a company that does not have repeat business, this metric might be less useful than it would be for a business that relies on brand recognition for repeat business.
  • Watch relationships – You can analyze whether or not the organic traffic you receive from Google keeps pace with your direct traffic. If it does, it means your site isn’t just attracting search traffic, but converting it into repeat visits.

Organic Search Traffic

Organic search traffic is one of the top measurements you can use to judge the success of your SEO campaign. While you can’t predict the future, it’s safe to say you want your organic traffic to grow over time. You can analyze organic search traffic in many ways.

Here are some of our best recommendations:

  • Geography – If you run a local business or a service area business, you can track which region of the country your search traffic is coming from.
  • Top pages – In Google search console, you can check which pages receive the most organic traffic and which keywords they rank for. You can use this information to improve your website pages, which will increase your overall organic search traffic over time.
  • Timelines – Data takes time to make enough sense to make smart decisions. It also takes time for pages to rank on Google. With our clients, we measure organic search traffic quarter over quarter, which is a good length to get more reliable data.

average age of page one rankings chart

 

Referral Traffic

Referral traffic measures the number of people who visit your website from other websites that link to your website.

You could use this data to find the following insights:

  • Backlink quality – Backlinks from other websites build your site authority. The best backlinks also provide referral traffic. You can analyze which backlinks drive the most traffic and copy what you did well to acquire that link when trying to acquire new ones.
  • Promotion techniques – There are many promotion techniques you can use to get referral traffic like posting a thoughtful comment on a blog in your niche. You can measure how much traffic you get back from this and other techniques to refine your promotion strategies.
  • Site behavior – If you notice the referral traffic you get doesn’t stay on your site for long, you can make the pages they land on more attractive. If you notice they do stay on your site but don’t convert to leads, you can improve the conversion rate of those pages by adding forms, calls to action, and even media

Social Media Traffic

This metric is pretty self-explanatory, but it can be analyzed in different ways:

  • Channels – Note which channels drive the most traffic. Double down on the ones that work first, then seek to improve your other platforms
  • Ad tracking – If you want to know how well your social media ads are working, you can add custom tracking codes to measure the performance of your campaign.
  • Overall traffic – If you find yourself spending a lot of time with social media promotion, but not getting the traffic you want, you can adjust your strategy or focus more on strategies that move the needle.

Paid Advertising

Google also tracks traffic from paid advertisements.

You can use insights from other portions of Google Analytics to make changes like

  • Behavior metrics on landing pages you’re sending ads to
  • Boosting new pages with Ads to increase traffic
  • Increasing the ad quality for better conversions.

Google Analytics Behavior Metrics

Google and other search engines measure behavior metrics to index and rank websites.

This makes sense. The search engines want to present the best results possible. Knowing what turns visitors on and off can help them make better decisions. With Google updates like ‘Rank Brain‘ and the fact that search engines use AI and machine learning to understand sites, these metrics will grow in importance over time.

Here are some of the behavior metrics Google Analytics measures and how they relate to the SEO success of your website.

Bounce Rate

A ‘bounce’ happens anytime someone visits a page on your website and leaves right away. Search engines use bounce rates to answer the question “Do people like and want to view the content on your site?” A high bounce rate tells them “no” which lowers the value of your website pages.

Some of the reasons for a high bounce rate are:

  • Site performance – If your site doesn’t load quickly or has other technical issues, this will increase your bounce rate and harm your SEO results.
  • Mobile friendliness – More people use Google search on their phones than desktops. If your site isn’t mobile optimized, people won’t use your site on their phone. This is a website development and SEO  best practice you must following in 2019.
  • Content – The content on your pages need to compel users to engage. To increase time spent on your site you can rewrite the content, add media, and improve design elements of your pages.

Average Session Duration (Time Spent on Site)

Each time someone visits your website, it counts as a ‘session.’ Average session duration measures how long someone stays on your website. Usually, the longer the better, but the type of page you’re trying to rank does come into play.

For example, for something like a simple service page where the visitor lands on it and does the desired action like fill out a form or call doesn’t need a long session duration.

If you’re trying to rank an in-depth blog post you wrote, you’ll want to see a decent time spent on page, at least two minutes or more.

Here are some things you can do to improve the time spent on the page:

  • Improve your copy – Omit needless words and help people find the information they need faster and earlier on
  • Site performance – Many of the site performance issues that cause high bounce rates also drag down your average session duration
  • Content – You shouldn’t just create content. You should analyze how that content performs. If you notice certain types of content create longer sessions, consider changing your strategy and writing content that relates to your top performers.

Number of Pages Visited

In general, you want to see that visitors are visiting multiple pages on your website. In Google’s eyes, this means you’re providing quality information and have a good internal link structure, which just means you’re linking between pages on your website in a way that makes sense to search engine crawlers and helps your visitors find the information they need in a simple way.

Again, if you are driving traffic to something like a sales page, you might not want visitors to view multiple pages on your site.

If you have a site that this metric matters for, here are some ways to improve it:

  • Internal linking – You should always link between relevant pages when it makes sense for the user. Adding internal links is an art. You want to create a situation where visitors want to visit multiple pages because you create content that relates to other content on your site. Check out the wiki strategy by Nat Eliason for a deep dive on this topic.
  • Link depth – Many experts say no content should be more than 3 clicks away. Some debate whether or not this is true. In general, though, you don’t want to bury pages on your site, or worse, create orphan pages — pages with no internal links to it.
  • Site navigation – Your site navigation should be simple and easy to understand. That way, visitors know where to find your most important content regardless of what page you’re on. If you have a site with a deep linking structure such as an e-commerce site, consider creating a ‘breadcrumb’ navigation that shows people the steps they took to reach the page they’re on.

Google Analytics Conversion Tracking

While traffic is a good metric, it doesn’t tell the whole story.

Getting people to visit your website is the first step. The second step is getting those visitors to do what you want.

This is where conversion tracking comes in. Google analytics allows you to track different behaviors people take on your site that matter to your business like:

  • Sales – If you have an e-commerce business, you can track how many sales you receive and from which channels. This can help you get exact ROI numbers for your marketing.
  • E-Mail List Signups – Email marketing can help you get more sales and grow your brand over the long term. Conversion tracking can help you figure out which pages drive the most sign-ups.
  • Contact/Request a Quote Forms – You can also set up conversion tracking to see what percentage of people reach out for more information after they visit your website.

So, what should you do with conversation tracking to improve your marketing?

Pay attention to the data. You want to know how well your website pages are converting. Your conversion rate is the number of times people perform the desired action divided by the total number of people who visit the page.

Take a look at this chart for conversion rates across all websites and visit this page for data based on industries:

conversion rate by industry

A two percent conversion rate is good. A five percent conversion rate is great. Conversion rates of 10 percent or more are amazing.

For an in-depth look at conversion rate optimization, some good resources are:

conversion rate optimization

Conclusion

As you can see, the answer to the question “Which kinds of hits can you track in Google Analytics?” has many different answers and insights.

The key isn’t the insights themselves, but the process of actin on them.

If you work with MLT Group, you’ll get data-driven SEO by an expert agency and team who will use those insights to not just grow your traffic, but your business as a whole.

Want a free SEO analysis and marketing proposal in 48 hours or less? Just fill out the form below:




 

Manufacturing Marketing: How to Promote Industrial Companies the Right Way

manufacturing marketing

Manufacturing marketing has a ton of room for growth and potential.

Why? Because most manufacturers, machining companies, and engineering companies aren’t great at marketing their own businesses.

This is understandable.

If you work in or own one of these types of businesses, you know this truth: time is of the essence.

You have to meet deadlines, make sure your operations are efficient, and constantly monitor the output of your facilities. Although many of the employees in your business may be knowledgable enough, they just don’t have the time to do things like create content, run PPC ads, promote the business through social media and other marketing channels, or keep track of SEO data to keep growing traffic.

So what’s the best manufacturing marketing solution?

How Agencies and Manufacturers Can Work Together

From time to time, we publish industry-specific guides like our post about real estate SEO.

We write these guides because we’ve gained expertise in working with these types of companies. In the past 18 months, we’ve worked with several companies in the manufacturing space in areas like precision machining, stud welding, and industrial services.

We’ve found that while different strategies are always needed for each individual business, manufacturing companies have some similarities when it comes to growing their business with SEO

Competition

Niches like marketing and SEO are very competitive. Often, you need to create insanely in-depth content and promote the “you know what” out of it to get your content to rank on search engines.

This isn’t the same for manufacturing companies.

We use a tool called Ahrefs to measure how competitive certain keywords are. Take a look at these screenshots from the tool showing the large difference between the keywords in our niche and the keywords in the manufacturing niche.

keyword research example

keyword research example 2

You still have to use a solid strategy to rank, but there is a pathway to getting a great amount of traffic with a little bit of persistence.

Content Depth and Quality

Often, the type of content that works well in a manufacturing marketing campaign has both depth and quality.

Studies have shown that content length is a ranking factor for SEO:

This is especially true for manufacturing companies because:

  • Many manufacturing techniques, machinery, and processes require an in-depth explanation to understand
  • Each type of term or phrase used often counts as an LSI keyword, which is a fancy way to say a secondary keyword. In-depth content x industry jargon = a keyword rich piece of content
  • Most companies who write content for their blogs in the space write thin content, meaning writing in-depth content can help you stand above and beyond the crowd

The Need for a Smart Agency

Most manufacturing companies can benefit from using an agency because of their lack of time to market the business.

Interestingly enough, many companies are convinced an agency can’t help them because they’re not technical experts. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

First, we have a staff of copywriters, many of which focus solely on writing technical content.

Second, we listen. Proper SEO discovery and studying resources can lead to a content campaign that meets SEO needs and maintains technical quality.

Last, we’ll go the extra mile to make sure we understand your business. If that means coming to take a tour of your plant, meeting key employees, and scheduling calls for content until we have the perfect content recipe, that’s what we’ll do.

In the beginning, there is usually some back and forth to get the technical terms right, but after that, our content doesn’t need much editing on your end to be worth publishing.

Want to see how we can improve your website? Fill out the form below for a FREE site audit!




So what are some of the components of a successful campaign?

On-Site SEO

On-site SEO is the process of adding keywords — words people use on Google searches — into important areas of your website like:

  • Page title
  • Page content
  • Image file names
  • Alt tags
  • Anchor text for links

The terms themselves aren’t that important.

It’s important to know that your entire website should be covered for SEO. This is especially true for manufacturing companies who run an e-commerce business.

Each product and category page on your website should have on-site SEO as well as keyword rich content on that page:

on-site SEO example

If you have a larger website, it may take time and money to create content for each and every category and product on your website. Often, we work with companies with large inventories by adding content to a handful of pages to start and gradually add it and boost their SEO with a monthly content creation package.

This way, you can dip your toe into marketing without breaking the bank and steadily grow over time.

Content Marketing For Manufacturing Companies

So why type of content should you create if you want to make a splash as a manufacturing company?

Content marketing for manufacturing companies usually follows a few simple rules of thumb:

  • Keyword researched topic – Some manufacturing topics get a high amount of traffic, some don’t. We focus on finding a balance between high-traffic keywords and competitive level.
  • Industry expertise – It’s good to establish a niche and focus on creating content in a narrow area first then going broader over time, e.g., a precision machining companies focusing on aerospace machining to start then branching out to something like medical devices.
  • Persistence – Creating a large volume of work over time leads to compound rewards. As pages get indexed by Google, they start to rank for more and more keywords.

We provide free marketing proposals and consults that walk you through just the type of content we will create and how it will benefit your site. Each proposal is custom-researched with no cookie-cutter components.

Enter your information into the form below and we’ll have a proposal to you in 48 hours or less:




 

Website Authority

Website authority factors into search engine rankings.

What is website authority?

Google uses links from other websites to yours to measure the quality of your site.

Each link to your site, called a backlink, is like that site ‘voting’ for yours.

So how do you get more votes?

There are a few different ways we’ll show you:

  • Directories
  • Outreach
  • The rich get richer strategy

Directories

Google likes links from high-quality business directories. They are also a huge part of local SEO.

Manufacturing has many quality directories you can submit your site to like Thomas Net:

manufacturer directories

 

Industry-specific directories provide the following benefits:

  • Topical relevance – Getting backlinks from strong websites matters, but so does getting backlinks from industries in the same niche.
  • Reputation – High reputation directories provide more authority than low reputation sites. Manufacturing has many high-quality directories to choose from
  • Real business – Often, you can actually get sales from these directories as customers actually use them to find products and services.

You can also use local directories and general business directories, which help build your authority by:

  • N.A.P – The more times your name, address, and phone number shows up on the web, the better. These are known as citations
  • Local signals – If you do have a local manufacturing business or a service area business, using these directories can help with local SEO
  • Reputation – Google loves industry-specific directories, but it also loves gold-standard general and local directories like chambers or commerce and websites like Localeze.

SEO Outreach

On top of adding your business to quality directories, you can use outreach to get quality backlinks.

Here’s how the process works:

  • Create stellar content – Your content needs to be worth sharing to get backlinks
  • Find related websites – Many websites in the space keep resource lists and link pages. Finding them is as simple as doing a Google search like “precision machining + resource list”
  • Pitch – Send a custom email to each site telling them why your content is great and how it will benefit their website to link to your content

The last point is key. It’s easier to land a backlink if your content adds value to other websites. Google uses outbound links as a ranking factor, too. They want to see that pages link out to other sites and get links back.

They want this because it shows your site is a “resource hub” that makes a good faith effort to give users the right information. Having this mindset when creating and pitching your content makes a huge difference.

Of course, we keep this in mind when we do outreach for you. Just talk to us and we’ll show you exactly how we work.

The Rich Get Richer

Once your pages rank higher, it’s easier for them to stay there.

Often, pieces of content on page one naturally get backlinks.

Think about it.

If you write an article and need to cite sources, you go to Google.

Then, you find the best article on page one to link to.

As your content ranks high on Google, you can improve it to get even more traffic by:

After you establish some top ranking pages, you can create more content and link between old and new pieces of content to spread around ‘link power.’

Other Manufacturing Marketing Ideas

We always consider content marketing and SEO the bread and butter for marketing any business. But after you establish yourself on Google, you can use other channels for marketing, too.

Adding more marketing channels leads to more growth.

They can also help your SEO efforts because Google measures user experience, too. A great example is having videos on your site to increase ‘dwell time.’

Here are some other great marketing channels you can use.

Video

Do you have company videos or instructional videos on how to use your technology?

They make a great addition to your campaign because data shows that people like to have more than one medium to enjoy the content.

This video is a great example a manufacturer could draw from:

Paid Advertising

Paid advertising is a bit more complicated than figuring out how much you are charged per click, but it can be a worthwhile investment if done the right way.

Often, we use PPC campaigns at the beginning of an organic SEO campaign.

This option is great for companies who want fast results and a quick way to establish ROI on their marketing efforts. Organic SEO takes time to kick in:

average age of page one rankings chart

If you want tangible results asap, try a PPC campaign.

Social Media Marketing

Is social media marketing a great route for marketing manufacturing?

It can be if done right.

You can use social media to highlight the quality and innovation of your company. It’s a great way to show how your company grows their expertise over time.

Some great social media marketing ideas in this space are:

  • Technology – Anytime you create a new technology or process, create a press release and share it on social media
  • Conferences – Sharing insights gained from attending conference works well on social media. Turn this to a video format for even better results
  • Employees – Highlight employee achievements shows you’re a forward thinking company who helps smart employees grows. It also makes your employees feel good about themselves. Win-Win.

Conclusion

The manufacturing space has a ton of SEO and marketing potential.

It’s one of the few unsaturated markets out there.

Take advantage of these opportunities and you can grow your traffic, business, and brand all at the same time.

40 Marketing Principles You Can Use to Grow Your Business

Why did we decide to write an article about marketing principles?

Because we took a look at the top results for “marketing principles” on Google and thought someone needed to do better justice to the topic.

If you’ve studied marketing before, you’ve heard of concepts like:

  • The 4 P’s
  • Unique selling proposition
  • S.W.O.T. analysis
  • Positioning

The list of dry marketing terms and concepts is endless.

And when it comes to marketing principles, you really want to know what marketing rules you should follow in order to move the needle for your business.

You don’t need a fancy business plan. You need revenue. Powerpoint presentations and boring marketing conferences aren’t going to help you build a brand, develop an audience, and find more customers who want to buy what you have to offer.

What will?

The #1 Marketing Principle You Must Follow to Successfully Grow Your Business

Take a look at this google search for “marketing advice”:

marketing advice

There are nearly a billion results.

There’s no shortage of marketing advice out there. And a lot of it works.

You know what definitely won’t work?

Sitting on your hands…

Reading blog post after blog post about marketing tips and implementing none of them

Telling yourself next week, next month or next year will finally be the time when you invest in marketing…

Execution trumps creativity every time. You can have the most creative marketing ideas in the world, but if you don’t see them through, who cares?

I don’t know you personally, but I’m guessing you’re either a business owner, marketing employee, as aspiring to do one of the above. You think about improving your marketing or hiring a smart agency to do it, but you sit on the fence and procrastinate.

Why? Because you’re afraid.

Afraid of taking risks.

Afraid of wasting time and money.

Or afraid of all the above combined.

If you want to succeed in marketing, or business in general, you have to understand that fortune favors the bold. You have to invest time, money, or both to take your marketing to the next level.

There’s more competition out there than ever before.

Fortunately, that’s a good thing.

Principle #1 – Saturated Markets Are Good (But Only if You Do This)

There are about a bajillion marketing agencies out there.

But that doesn’t bother us at all.

In fact, we love it.

Why? Because, to be honest, most of them just aren’t willing to put the same amount of work in as we are and it shows. We’ve checked our competition’s content marketing game and we are up to the challenge.

Even in hyper-competitive industries like marketing, you can pretty much cancel out 90 percent of the field right way. Why? Because pulling off a legitimate content marketing campaign is difficult. Not difficult in that you need to be a genius to do it, but difficult in the fact that it’s time-consuming.

We write a 3 to 5,000-word blog post covering topics in-depth, like advanced PPC tracking,  at least once a week. That’s on top of the landing pages we create, ads we run, videos we shoot, and designs we change.

We do this because we know our competitors won’t.

The great news for you? You’re probably not in a niche as competitive as marketing. And you’re competition likely won’t do the work.

If you did just these three things well over time, you’d destroy your competition:

The catch? You’ll have to do it for a while before it pays off in a major way.

But, if you’re in business, you should be thinking long-term.

Principle #2 – “Me Too” Marketing Doesn’t Work

Every business has competitors.

But most businesses make the same mistake when it comes to competing. They try to copy their competitors’ tactics.

Why doesn’t this work?

It doesn’t work because taking the same actions someone else will, at best, get you the same results.

But often, it won’t because you don’t know why your competitors are taking that action in the first place.

It’s important to have your own marketing strategy based on your unique insights like:

  • Audience – Have you taken the time to understand your ideal audience? Do you know their hopes, dreams, fears, and desires? Until you do, you won’t know how to create the right marketing messages.
  • Brand – Dollar Shave Club launched their company with a viral video campaign. Their videos used crass language, over the top humor, and theatrics. Another shaving company with a different brand couldn’t pull the same type of campaign off. You need to build your brand with intention and articulate what type of company you want to be then market the business itself.
  • Goals – Your goals — aside from the obvious like sales — aren’t always going to be the same s your competitors. That’s why you need to clarify what those goals are before you start a content marketing campaign

Your competitors built their own marketing campaigns using these insights; insights that you don’t fully know. Copying their tactics is both inauthentic and ineffective.

Principle #3 – The 10x Rule

Our formula for creating content is simple:

  • Study what’s out there
  • Note what the competition does well
  • Find the gaps they didn’t cover
  • Create something 10x better

This speaks to the point above about saturation.

You can beat out your competition. But to do that, you have to blow them out of the water. If you’re writing an article about a topic, it should be the best article about that topic on the internet. You should promote it unabashedly — literally send more outreach emails than your competitors.

If you believe in your product, trying to get 1,000% better results through marketing shouldn’t scare you, it should excite you!

Which brings me to our next point…

Principle # 4- No Amount of Marketing Can Solve This Problem

There are two types of products, bricks and feathers:

  • Feathers – Great products that just need a ‘lift’ from marketing
  • Bricks – Duds that no amount of marketing can “lift”

You see a lot of startup owners making this mistake.

They figure their product just needs a good marketing campaign and it’ll start flying off the shelves.

No amount of marketing will work unless you can answer these questions:

  • What does your product do and who is it for? – You’d be surprised at how many business owners can’t articulate this
  • Does anybody want your product? – Often, “revolutionary ideas” that haven’t been thought of before…haven’t been thought of before for a reason. Your product needs a market fit. Content marketing can’t create demand; it only amplifies it
  • “What’s in it for me?” – This is the question people ask anytime they read your content, learn about your product, or interact with your brand. That’s why knowing your audience on a deep level is important. If you know their problems and the solution your product offers, you can communicate that through marketing.

The number one benefit of having a great product?

You’re excited to promote it. If you know you have something amazing to offer, investing in marketing becomes a triviality.

Principle #5 – Always Lead With This

“People don’t buy drills. They buy holes.”

If you visit a random company website, you can see this mistake being made about 75% of the time.

You see it when the company rambles on about “being in business for 30 years,” or has a long list of features their products or services have.

People don’t care about features. They care about the benefits.

People don’t care about “MPG.” They care about saving money and time.

People don’t buy workout routines. They buy bodies that look good naked.

You don’t care about content marketing and SEO.

You care about getting more people who are genuinely interested in your product or service to engage with your brand, turn into leads, and become sales. As a forward-thinking business owner, you want to be seen as the go-to experts in your field with word of mouth of your brand spreading like wildfire.

Go look at your website right now.

Is it feature focused? Or benefits focused?

If it’s the former, it’s time to start creating new content or hiring someone else to do it.




 

Principle #5 – Never Do This

Michael Jordan used to visit the opposing team’s locker room before games.

He’d walk around, shake hands, smile politely, and make small talk.

Under the surface of his smile was a bit of an evil smirk.

He knew, and his competitors knew, that in his mind he was thinking, “I’m going to destroy all of you.”

See, when you know you’re the best, you don’t focus on your competition, you make them focus on you.

Every minute spent worrying about what your competition doing is a minute you could’ve used to build your own business. This attitude works especially well in content marketing and SEO. You might not have an authoritative site..yet. But you will.

And while you’re building up your authority, you’re focusing on making your product better, your content better, your marketing better.

Then, one day, out of nowhere, you’ll start rising up the rankings and get noticed in your niche. You want others in your industry to think. “Who the hell is this and where the hell did they come from?

Principle # 6 – Adopt This Attitude

Promotion and outreach are huge pieces to the SEO puzzle.

There are an endless amount of guides showing you how to pitch and promote your content, but many miss the fundamental point.

You have to have something worth sharing to promote it well. Jon Morrow, the owner of Smart Blogger, expresses this idea well in his viral blog post – On Mothers, Dying, and Fighting For Your Ideas:

“Writing isn’t about putting words on the page […] It’s about breathing life into something and then working to make sure that life becomes something beautiful.

That means spending ten hours on a post, instead of 30 minutes.

That means writing a guest post every week, instead of one every few months.

That means asking for links without any shame or reservation, not because you lack humility, but because you know down to the depths of your soul that what you’ve done is good.”

It’s much, much, much easier to promote your content when you actually believe in it. This goes back to point #2 about “me too” marketing. You’re not going to want to promote an unexceptional piece of regurgitated content because, deep down, you’re ashamed of it.

You didn’t do your best and the people you want to share it with will smell the low-quality from a mile away. The low-quality mindset you had when creating the post will leak right into the pitches you make when you’re trying to promote it.

The opposite is also true. When you “become so good you can’t be ignored,” people will have no choice but to pay attention.

Principle #7 – Find Balance When Doing This

SEO and marketing are weird in the sense that the people in your network can bounce back and forth between being competitors and colleagues at the same time.

Since getting links from other websites in your niche builds authority, you have to build relationships with people in your niche. At the same time, you also may have some overlap in the keywords you’re trying to rank for.

How do you solve this problem?

Here’s how we look at it:

  • There’s more than enough room – There are enough search terms available for you to get enough traffic to move the needle for your business.
  • Be authentic – We only reach out to or link to other sites and site owners we admire and respect. Your “competitors” also add value with the content they create. There’s nothing wrong with showing a little love.
  • Connection is needed – You need both inbound and outbound links to rank well. That means being cooperative and nice is a prerequisite for being successful at content marketing.

Principle # 8 – Kill Your Darlings

Want to know how to kill your business?

Stay stagnant, don’t innovate, and maintain the status quo.

Whenever you’re thinking about being complacent, think of all the companies who failed to switch things up when their business model or marketing effort became obsolete.

Is your business model going to work 5 years from now? How about 10?

Are you thinking far into the future about how to market your business?

Or are you still relying on your “bread and butter,” — tossing money down the drain in billboard ads and radio spots when you could get 10x better results investing in digital?

Warren Buffet has a saying:

“When the tide goes out you will see who’s swimming naked.”

Business owners who miss the boat on marketing techniques for 2019 and beyond will feel the pain eventually.

Don’t be one of these business owners.

Principle #9 – Don’t Be “Smarter Than a 5th Grader”

When you write your content, aim to write at about a 5th-grade level.

Use short sentences and simple words.

Don’t use business jargon if you don’t need to.

This goes for the copy you use on your landing pages to writing blog posts.

Simple is better:

  • If your content is hard to read, people will leave your site
  • Using jargon makes you look arrogant, not smart
  • True intelligence makes complex topics easier to understand, not the other way around

Ernest Hemingway is known for his blunt and simple style. There’s even an app named after him that helps you write your content in a simple way.

Principle #10 – Use the “D-Day Approach”

D-Day is one of the most famous moments of world war II.

The good guys sent a bunch of troops to the beaches of Normandy to attack the bad guys.

They sent a large group of soldiers into a small and concentrated area.

They won the battle and secured an important strategic advantage. Taking Normandy allowed them to expand in the right territories and win even more victories. Many say this battle was the beginning of the end of the war.

In your case, you want to concentrate your forces.

If you want to fail, try every marketing tactic in the book all at once.

Now, you do have to experiment with different marketing channels to find one that works. But when you do find one that works, double-down on it. When you’ve mastered it, move onto another tactic.

Principle #11 – Avoid the #1 Marketing Mistake 99% of Business Owners Make

We work with clients. Part of working with clients is steering their minds in the right direction.

A critical piece to this – getting them to stop thinking only about themselves.

Yes, when you build a website, it’s your website. But the website isn’t for you. It’s for your customers.

When you write an about page, the page is about you or your company. But a great about page talks about the benefits you’ll provide your customers.

It’s your business, but you won’t have a business unless you market it for, you know, other people.

Nobody cares about your vision.

They want to know your product can solve their problems.

You have to make sure your marketing speaks to that and that alone.

Go look at your company or personal website right now. Who do you talk about more — yourself or your potential customers?

If it’s the former…we should talk.

Principle #11 – Do The Little Things

Everybody wants to swing for the fences with their marketing.

It’s appealing to write ultimate guides, go viral, and get a ton of followers on social media.

It’s not appealing to do the little things that, combined, can move the needle for content marketing and SEO.

Things like:

But the little things make a world of difference.

Bill Belichick — 7-time super bowl winning coach — spent a long time as an assistant. He’d do all the grunt work the head coach and others didn’t want to do. And he did it gladly. He’s won many championships from taking advantage of little key moments where he used the experience of hours and hours of watching film.

That’s what the top SEO’s and agencies do, too. Behind the scenes, they’re working on the little things.

You’ll never see them up-front, but the effects are real.

Principle #12 – Never Stay Satisfied

We’ve talked about mastering one marketing channel before you move on to others, but once you’ve mastered that channel, move to the next, and keep doing it until you become a marketing swiss-army knife.

You have to take this omnichannel approach because online marketing continues to evolve.

Once the traffic from SEO starts to roll in, you’ll feel good about your business, but don’t stop there.

Pour gasoline on your marketing fire.

Principle #13 – Stop Believing in This

Do you ever look at your competitors and think they’re just lucky?

They had the right connections.

They built a career off of a few lucky viral hits.

The industry wasn’t saturated when they started.

Blah, blah, blah.

Yes, luck is involved in marketing success (and every other type of success for that matter).

But you can learn how to engineer luck.

The more seeds you plant, the more likely your marketing campaigns will grow. Yes, that means writing (or investing in a writer) in-depth content over and over and over again even if it doesn’t pay off right away. It means scheduling out social media posts as if you had a big following when you actually don’t.

The top players in the field are almost always there because they’ve been at it for a long time. Success, especially content marketing success, takes time, not luck.

Principle #14 – The Only Guaranteed Way to Beat Your Competition

There are no guarantees when it comes to marketing (see the point above).

But, if you want to make a splash and stand out among your competitors, there is one way to do it.

Create something no one would even think of trying to replicate. Make your competitors feel exhausted by even looking at your content and imagining having to create it.

When it comes to regional competitors in our area, other marketing agencies, we just try to take it to a level they don’t want to match. We’re playing the long game. You can, too.

String together a long enough streak of insane pieces of content, and you’ll be too far ahead to lose

Principle #15 – Stop Consuming, Start Creating

About 99% of people read marketing blogs and do nothing with the information.

Many business owners sit on the fence about hiring a marketing firm for years.

There’s a consistent theme running through all the marketing principles we’ve listed — action.

You can’t know all the answers up front.

You discover the secrets of marketing by experimenting. This goes for in-house marketers and agencies.

Too many would be marketing owners are sitting on their hands, slowly letting their businesses get phased out of the future.

Your time is now.

Go.

Principle #16 – The Rich Get Richer

The 80/20 rule states that there will be an asymmetrical relationship with the total amount of resources.

That’s a fancy way of saying a few people reap most of the rewards.

The top 20 percent of blogs get 80 percent of the traffic.

On your own website, the top 20 percent of the pages will get 80 percent of the traffic.

It’s important to stay active and experiment because once you succeed, your success will beget more success.

If you get backlinks to a blog post and it starts to rank on page 1, it will receive backlinks naturally.

If you grow your social media following, your followers will promote your page for you.

Now, at this point, you use the marketing principle above and put your foot on the gas pedal. Once the growth curve goes up, you push even harder. This is how you become a household name and have permanent success.

Principle #17 – Don’t Lie to Yourself

You know what mediocre business owners do? They hire companies that provide “affordable SEO services” and get upset when they don’t get any traffic.

You know what mediocre marketers do? They write a few blog posts with thin content, send a few tweets, do no real blog outreach, and throw their hands in the air when they’re not on the first page of Google.

It’s rare to give an honest effort at marketing and fail completely.

It’s extremely common to give half-assed attempts and fail.

Which type of marketer or business owner are you going to be?

Principle #18 – Forget Everything You Learned in Business School

There is no way to “learn business” other than actually running or working for one.

The type of marketing knowledge provided in business school is mostly worthless. These institutions are decades behind the current landscape of content marketing, digital marketing, and SEO.

Get your hands dirty and forget about the dry jargon they taught you at university.

Principle #19 – Do What Works for You

If you’re better on video than with the written word, shoot videos.

If you don’t like being on camera so much, do audio.

Outsource the work you don’t want to do yourself.

There are many different ways to market your business successfully. But it makes no sense to go against your strengths.

Principle #20 – Use Tools and Data

You can’t build a house without a blueprint and tools.

You can’t run a successful marketing campaign without data and tools to grow your business.

We’re talking more than just Google Analytics here (even though you can gain a massive amount of insights just from this tool).

Don’t be afraid to invest in software to track your marketing results.

And check the data often, but not too often to gain insights from, e.g., six times a day like most marketers do.

Principle #21 – Watch What People Do, Not What They Say

If you polled readers, they’d tell you they don’t like “listicles” or click-bait headlines. Content marketing data says otherwise.

The National Enquirer is still in business for a reason.

People have an outward image they portray and then behave differently in private.

Know the difference, and you can market to them correctly.

Principle #22 – Become a Marketer for Life

You want your career or business to last your whole life, don’t you? Well, at least you want to stay in business or work you love until you retire.

Settle in. This is a long game you’re playing. The marketing wisdom you gain over time will compound like interest in a savings account.

After you get your foot in the door and find some success, commit to developing the skills of influence for the rest of your life.

Principle #23 – Test Emerging Platforms

Around 2012, you could get a ton of organic reach from Facebook. Now, not so much.

In the early days of AdWords, clicks were so cheap the platform was like a money printing machine. Now, not so much.

Some have said LinkedIn is the platform de jour. It’s worth trying to see if you can get in at the right time.

Platforms, strategies, and techniques always come and go. It’s best to test new ones before they get too saturated.

Principle #24 – Focus on Metrics That Matter

Traffic doesn’t matter if it doesn’t convert into leads and sales.

If you’re running an SEO campaign, total organic search traffic matters more than ranking for your favorite keywords.

Having e-mail subscribers means nothing if they are just there to consume free content.

Being data-driven is great, but being insight driven is better. What you do with the data matters more than the data itself.

Principle #25 – Read Marketing Books

All marketing books aren’t created equal, but some stand head and shoulders above the rest. Here are some of our favorites:

  • Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
  • The Boron Letters
  • Contagious: Why Things Catch On
  • On Advertising

Principle #26 – Prepare for Failure in Advance

You will write content that doesn’t rank.

You will send pitches that get rejected.

Money? You’ll definitely invest at times without getting perfect ROI.

But that’s the game of marketing.

Principle #27 – Master the Basics

You can jump on the hottest trends like voice search and A.I., but it would be foolish to do so until you have a basic understanding of things like:

  • Keyword research
  • Content creation
  • Backlink outreach
  • Simple technical SEO

If you mastered those 4 things alone, you’d be in the top-tier of most marketers because…most aspiring marketers don’t even scratch the surface of those.

These marketing principles aren’t hard, per se, they are just time-consuming.

Consume the time. Do the work.

Principle #28 – Get on Google’s Good Side

Until further notice, Google is the king of online marketing.

It would be wise to use their guidelines and tools to benchmark your success.

When they make a definitive announcement, take it to heart.

When one of their employees gives you advice, take it:

 

Use their tools like page speed insights and get top grades:

Google page speed insights score

Obvious, yes, but also extremely useful.

Principle #29 – Don’t (Always) Listen to Marketing Gurus

Some marketing techniques and strategies become conventional wisdom, even if they no longer work.

Some people still think you need to add keywords in your meta description (which was never true). Same thing with ‘keyword density.’

Don’t get caught up in tropes. Take advice, yes, but implement it to see what works and try some novel strategies of your own.

Principle #30 – Use the Right Technique at the Right Time

This adds on to the point above.

Marketing rules change depending on the situation.

You’ve heard that content length is a ranking factor. It is.

But that doesn’t mean you should write a 5,000-word essay about “pizza shops in Wichita, KS.” You probably don’t need that much content to rank. A national content marketing and SEO campaign are completely different than a Local SEO campaign.

When in doubt, just study what ranks for the keyword you’re trying to target.

Studying the SERP for search intent is, again, time-consuming but worth it.

Principle #31 – Avoid Shortcuts

It’s all fun and games until your website gets hit with a penalty.

It’s easier to try and siphon money from customers quickly instead of building relationships that increase customer lifetime value.

Marketing advice and live advice have a lot in common.

Don’t try a marketing “crash diet.” Marketing is an attitude and a lifestyle. If you’re sincere about trying to do well, you will. If you’re not, you won’t.

Principle #32 – Learn How to Write Copy (or Hire a Copywriter)

The internet is flooded with bad copy.

Great copy uses simple language based on things your target audience is thinking.

They’re not thinking about how long you’ve been in business. They’re thinking about how your business can help them solve a problem. That’s it. Speaking to anything but that is waste of time, which is why it’s important to learn how to write copy.

These guides can help:

Principle #33 – Value Your Business

Too many businesses lean on discounts right away.

Unless you’re in a commodity business, your first instinct shouldn’t be to join the race to the bottom.

When you have a great product and customers believe it will solve their problem, price becomes a triviality.

Don’t lower your prices. Up your marketing.

Principle #34 – Share Your Marketing Vision With Your Team

If you can share the long-term vision and goals with your company or team members, you can get them to invest in it and communication between different departments will be much easier.

Sales and marketing should be on the same page.

SEO and content marketing often requires the help of developers. Keep them in the loop, too.

It’s worth taking time to meet with your team and review your marketing goals.

Not only does this improve tactics, but it also improves morale.

Principle #35 – Don’t be Afraid to be Crazy

Look at this ad:

And this one:

And this one:


Sometimes it pays to try something a little ‘outside the box’

Principle #36 – Talk to Your Customers

How often do you take time to talk to the people who’ve already bought your product or service?

You can get huge insights from talking to your customers.

If you’re in a recurring service based business like we are, talking with your customers more often and asking them about their needs helps them feel “top of mind” and important.

Plus, if you see improvements you can help them make that aren’t covered with your current services, you can sell them to your current customers.

The best customers are often the ones you already have.

Principle #37 – Get In Your Marketing Zone

Here’s what’s going to happen. Once you get traction, you’ll enter a state of ‘marketing flow.’ When all the cylinders are firing — great content, outreach, traffic, social shares, etc — you can stay in that groove for a long time if you actively seek to maintain the momentum.

If you’re the content creator or marketer who’s doing the work yourself, take this a step further in your day to day activities.

If you have the ‘hot hand’ while you’re writing a draft of a blog post, keep going. When doing a tedious task like conversion rate optimization, get into the flow of the monotony until you can find a way to get through that mental wall — kind of like a ‘runners high.’

Consistency and momentum matter most when it comes to marketing. Get in your zone and stay there.

Principle #39 – Have Fun

Business and marketing have a serious purpose. Mainly, to make money.

But that doesn’t mean you have to be boring, ‘corporate’, and dry all the time.

If you actually like marketing, you’ll be a better marketer. If you treat marketing like a chore or an expense instead of an investment, then that’s what it will be.

Connect with your audience more, use humor, have a loose environment with your team (but still get things done).

Yes, writing 5-000 word guides like this isn’t the most fun thing I could possibly be doing, but I love marketing and so does my company.

We can help you feel the same way.

Principle #40 – Pick One Thing Right Now

Reading this entire article would be a waste if you didn’t implement at least one tactic.

Choose the one that seems easiest to implement and go after it.

Time is ticking and the competition is only going to increase.

You’re already, you know, a little bit behind.

Start now. Heck, call 507-281-3490 and start with us!

Conclusion

We could write marketing principles for days, but these are enough to get you started.

What are some of your favorite marketing tips, lessons, and insights?

Share them in the comments below.

How to Build a Brand With These Game-Changing Content Marketing Tips

A strong brand can help you stand out from the competition, get more sales, and become a household name in your niche.

It’s also really hard to build one.

You don’t become Apple, Coca-Cola, or Geico on accident.

The good news? If you can build a brand that’s a fraction as successful as the companies above, you can dramatically grow your business.

The question is…how?

That’s what we’ll cover in today’s ultimate guide.

What is a Brand?

You can define a brand in a lot of different ways.

According to Wikipedia:

brand is an overall experience of a customer that distinguishes an organization or product from its rivals in the eyes of the customer.

When you think of a brand, the thought of visuals, logo, and the company name might come to mind.

You might think of advertising, commercials, catchphrases, and jingles.

All these definitions work, but we’re going to focus on the brand definition that can move the needle for your business in 2019.

For this guide, we’re going to look at branding through the lens of content marketing. 

Why? Because content marketing is one of the best ways to get your company in front of thousands of people and become a household name.

Branding and Content Marketing: The Perfect Marriage

The first benefit of using a content marketing campaign to build your brand is obvious – more traffic, leads, sales, and name recognition.

But did you know that strengthening your brand has positive benefits for your search engine optimization efforts? In a post titled The Future of SEO: It’s Not What You’re Expecting, Neil Patel had this to say about your brand’s impact on SEO:

The EX-CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, talked about how the Internet is becoming a place where false information is thriving. Essentially, the Internet is becoming a cesspool.

He went on to discuss how brands were becoming more important signals whether or not content can be trusted.

[…]

In other words, if you want to do well in the long run, you have to build a brand.

This makes total sense.

A few years back, SEO was pretty simple – find the right keywords, write decent content, get some backlinks, and boom, you could rank your website.

But Google’s mission has been pretty clear – they want to serve up the best possible results to searchers.

You could have a well-optimized site, but the updates to Google’s algorithm keeps making it harder to use simple techniques:

  • The Penguin Update made low-quality links irrelevant, meaning you had to put real effort into promoting your content
  • The Panda Update made low-quality content irrelevant, meaning you now have to write content that truly stands out to rank
  • The Hummingbird Update helped search engines better understand content, meaning techniques like keyword stuffing became irrelevant
  • Rank Brain ensures you need to have engagement on your website to rank

To date, Google has made thousands of updates to their algorithm. They change it all the time.

You can react to their updates in one of two ways – get frazzled and try to keep up or focus on long-term strategies that work.

The long-term strategies that help you grow your online presence fall in line with activities you should be using to build your brand:

  • Creating content people want to consume
  • Making sure your website is visually appealing and has a positive user experience
  • Being consistent with promoting your business online
  • Spending money on your marketing, like working with an agency or running PPC ads

The bottom line: anything less than in-depth, informative, and entertaining content marketing campaigns won’t work well in 2019.

It’s time to step up your content and branding game at the same time.

Here’s how you do it.

Adopt This Brand-Building Mindset First

Kevin Plank had an absurd dream.

He wanted to compete with Nike.

At the time, Nike is untouchable. To try to compete with them in the sportswear category was insane, but Kevin tried it anyway. And it worked. He also had a unique product to bring to the market – his wick wear technology undershirts. A fullback in college, he grew tired of having to changed soaked shirts during practices and games.

He chose a market segment to focus on — football. You can see Under Armour logos on gear worn in movies like Any Given Sunday and Friday Night Lights. He networked with football teams to feature his gear. Eventually, he expanded the line to feature clothing for different sports and went on to sign major athletes like Stephen Curry to endorse Under Armour products.

This is a post about content marketing, though, what does Kevin’s story have to do with creating content and running a campaign?

There are a few takeaways from his story you can use in your content marketing journey:

  • Audacity – You have to be bold and audacious to become a player in your niche because there are already entrenched brands in it. You have to believe you can become one of those brands.
  • Unique – Kevin didn’t try to sell basketball shoes right away. That wouldn’t have worked. When writing content, you need to find a unique angle. Writing “me too” content won’t work.
  • Long-term thinking – Under Armour was founded in 1996. It took a decade for the company to get real traction. Don’t attempt brand building through content marketing if you’re not in it for the long-haul.

Are you ready to get started?

Let’s move onto the brand building tips.

Build Your Audience

You can’t build a brand without an audience

Your audience is the megaphone for your brand.

When you get more people to know, like, and trust your brand, growing your influence gets easier as your audience grows bigger.

This is true for personal brands and corporate brands.

Corporate brands don’t always consider the importance of having an audience, but that’s because most corporations don’t know how to use content marketing in a creative way.

The ones who succeed, however, do. Take a look at these companies who’ve built large audiences through content marketing and used them to build their brands:

Kettle & Fire:

kettle and fire content marketing

Kettle & Fire

kettle and fire content marketing stats

Due:

due content marketing

Due: Payments Blog

due payments blog traffic stats

The Penny Hoarder:

the penny hoarder content marketing

The Penny Hoarder

the penny hoarder content marketing stats

Having your own audience has a number of SEO benefits, too:

  • Social shares – Google doesn’t outright say social shares effect rankings, but the experts are pretty sure they do. Your audience will share your content for you, sending positive signals to search engines
  • Dwell time – The longer people spend on your site, the better. If you have an audience of people who love your work, they’ll stay to read your content longer than a stranger
  • Backlinks – Oftentimes people in your audience will have blogs of their own. Building an audience is one simple way to get inbound links without even having to ask

Let’s look at some audience building tips one by one.

Guest Posting

Guest posting has been around for years.

It’s been pronounced dead more than once:

 

You can still use guest posting to grow your audience — and even for SEO purposes — but you have to do it the right way.

Here are some good pieces of guest-posting advice from the pros:

  • Choose an engaging blog – A lot of blogs don’t get great engagement. At a minimum, a guest blog you want to post on should have at least some social shares and comments
  • Write good content – You’d think this wouldn’t have to be said repeatedly. There’s a difference between a “filler content” type of guest post and an amazing one that moves the needle.
  • Promote – If you publish a guest post, you should be promoting it much harder than the guest blog itself. This builds goodwill with guest blogs and helps you build relationships in your niche

Some great guides on guest blogging are:

Build Your E-Mail List

The concept of list-building deserves an ultimate guide of its own.

If you can build an e-mail list of people in your target audience, you can make more sales, get more traffic to your website, and have a group of people willing to evangelize your brand.

You have to make sure you’re building a list for the right reasons, though.

Tim Soulo at Ahrefs talks about how their business grew without actively building  a list:

[His] philosophy:

Why focus on converting readers into leads, when you can focus on converting readers directly into customers?

The final verdict: the phrase “the money in the list,” doesn’t always ring true, but you should still consider building one if:

  • You want to become an “expert” or “thought leader” – E-mail is often the life-blood for expert businesses like authors, coaches, and online course creators
  • Your product/service takes some “warming up” before the sale – In Tim’s case, he could talk about his SaaS product and get people to sign up directly through the Ahrefs site. In our case – being an agency who comes up with custom packages – it pays to help you get to know us a little bit first 🙂
  • You run an e-commerce store – Building a large e-mail list comes in handy when marketing an e-commerce store.  You can offer special deals and hit sales volume goals with the click of a button
  • You have a long customer live time value – If your business has the ability to sell to customers over and over again, an e-mail list can help create more recurring revenue.

List Building Tips

To build your e-mail list, you need the following.

A reason for someone to sign-up that’s better than “get free updates”

e-mail pop up software example

Offering something valuable for free is still the go-to way to get people to sign-up to your e-mail list.

You’ll need to find a way to drive traffic to your website to get people to sign up to your e-mail list. Some of the best ways to do this are:

  • SEO and Content Marketing – We’ll discuss this in-depth in a bit, but increasing your organic search traffic and having a website built to convert people into e-mail subscribers is one of the best ways to get more of them
  • Guest Posting – When you publish a guest post, you should always make sure to add a special offer in your bio to get people to sign up to your list.
  • Republishing – We’ll dive into this in a second, but there are several sites that will let you republish your work on their platform (without getting spanked by Google)

SEO and Content Marketing

SEO and content marketing helps you build a brand by creating a footprint of your business online.

Every time a piece of content from your site ranks on page 1 of Google, people see your brand name next to the results.

If you rank for many different topics and keywords in your niche, you’ll brand start to become a household name.

The purpose of this section isn’t to guide you the ultimate guide to content marketing and SEO (we’ve already done this here and here).

Instead, we want to talk about some of the behaviors and mindsets you need to become a successful content creator who gets noticed.

The how-to’s and SEO steps are abundant, the willingness to follow through with them and have the following mindsets isn’t.

Be Relentless

Tim Grover trained elite athletes like Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and Dwayne Wade. In his book, Relentless: How to go From Good to Great to Unstoppable he talks about the attitude it takes to become successful in sports, business, and life in general.

The book boils down to being able to exert a ton of effort, for a long period of time, without quitting, while staying hungrier than everyone around you.

Sounds super easy right?

Now, you don’t need to have the psychopathic levels of motivation that the athletes Grover trained had, but you’re going to have to be willing to go through some pain and hardship if you want to build a brand with content marketing.

Why? Because it takes time to rank well and build organic traffic. Google is slow 🙁

average age of page one rankings chart

Your content marketing efforts won’t pay off right away. Unless you’re a relentless writer or have the guts to work with an agency — spending time and money — over the long-haul, content marketing won’t work for you.

If you’re forward thinking and have a little patience, however, you can build a brand that becomes an “overnight success.” One day, your business or brand will be everywhere.

Get Good at a Few Things (80/20 Rule)

There are a lot of ways to market your business and build your brand, but it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle and get stuck in “marketing tactical hell,” where you end up trying a whole bunch of different techniques, none of which work.

Instead, get good at the techniques that move the needle and double-down on them.

At MLT Group our few things are:

  • Content – We try to write the best article on the topic we’re covering every single time we write a blog post
  • Links/Relationships – We’re focused on getting high-quality backlinks for both ourselves and our clients. We also aim to do it the right way. Not by spamming people, but building real relationships.
  • Media – From video to infographics and other media, we realize the importance of having an “omnichannel approach,” but we’re not trying everything in the book, just a handful.

You’d probably do well to focus on these 3 things, too.

Just remember this quote from Bruce Lee when it comes to building a brand through content marketing:

“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

Watch and Revise

I listened to an episode of the marketing school podcast by Neil Patel and Eric Siu titled “The One Marketing Strategy No One Is Using.”

What was the strategy?

Going back and updating content you already wrote.

This is super unsexy, tedious, and can even be boring, but it’s also a potential game changer.

It’s fun to create new content, but it’s not as much fun to go back and review your entire content marketing campaign to see if it’s working well. These “little things” make the world of difference when it comes to increasing organic traffic. This speaks to being relentless again. Are you (or your agency) really willing to do what it takes to succeed? Sometimes grinding it out is the only way.

Some great guides at revising your work are:

Republishing

Here’s where most people fail at content marketing.

They look at it as a “one and done” process.

You can’t create your content and sit back thinking your job is done.

There are several ways to get more mileage out of the content you’ve already created.

Republishing is one of the perfect strategies for doing just that.

There are several websites who will allow you to republish their work.

Check out these great guides on finding places to republish:

The sites shown are great for republishing, but one takes the cake – Medium.

How to Republish Your Work On Medium

Medium is the most popular free publishing platform online.

Even better, it has a feature that helps you avoid a duplicate content penalty:

rel canonical import on Medium

When you import articles onto Medium, it ads a “rel-canonical” tag to it. That way, search engines know that the original article came from your website. Also, if people link to your Medium article, those links will 301 redirect to your original, giving your website an extra boost of authority.

Here are some great guides on Medium Publishing:

Build Your Brand Through Blogger Outreach

Blogger outreach is the process of reaching out to other blogs in your niche.

You can use blogger outreach to:

  • Genuinely pay a compliment to an expert you follow (highly recommended)
  • Share your content with people who might find it useful
  • Ask for social media shares
  • Ask for backlinks

Notice the first two points involve sharing and giving, not asking and begging.

The #1 Rule to Blogger Outreach (That 99% of People Break)

I’m not the first person to write about blogger outreach, but I might be one of the few people to tell you this:

Reach out to people you actually respect and appreciate their work.

This seems like standard, obvious, and basic advice, right?

Unfortunately, most who do blogger outreach don’t even know the people they reach out to. They just want a backlink. They’re not looking to make a long-term connection. They’re not offering up a resource that’s a perfect match to the blog they’re reaching out to.

The good and bad news about blogger outreach? Most people do it very poorly.

This is bad news because a lot of popular bloggers are jaded after getting so many horrible pitches. This is also good news because genuine outreach sticks out like a sore thumb.

Personally, I’ve studied many experts in content marketing because I wanted to get better at it. I don’t have to dig through their blogs and pretend to read one of their articles to reach out to them because, I, you know, actually read their blogs.

When it comes to building a brand, just being a decent person who respects other people’s time puts you in the top 10 percent of the field.

If you want to build a brand by reaching out to other bloggers, keep it simple. You’re not going to win over every person you reach out to.

You don’t have to write essay-length pitches to get noticed (actually, don’t do that.) Just use a simple process of getting to know people in your niche and reaching out to them occasionally over time.

Here are some tips to help you get started.

Write Good Content

Content marketing boils down to a lot of things that shouldn’t need to be said but bear repeating.

If you want to build a brand and become a known player in your industry, take the time to write good content. Our company is in an extremely competitive niche. We can’t write 1,000 word regurgitated articles and expect them to rank on Google. Even if you’re not in a super-competitive niche like marketing, focus on creating the best possible content on your topic.

content-length-seo

Here’s the run-down of boxes you need to check:

  • Content length – Make your content as long as it needs to be. Don’t stuff extra words to make it long and definitely avoid thin content
  • Insights – Chances are your topic has been covered before but has every single insight been given justice? Probably not. Study your competitors’ content and find angles they haven’t covered yet
  • Stories – A personal or business story is one thing no one else can copy
  • Better – A simple test can help you figure out if your content is worth sharing. Read the other posts on the topic and genuinely ask yourself if yours is better. Revise your work until the answer is “yes.”
  • Effort – Remember, most of your competitors won’t do the work it takes to succeed with content marketing, but you will, right?

Make Yourself Known

Here are some cliff notes from some of the best blog outreach posts online:

  • Leave genuine comments on other people’s blog posts that show you know what you’re talking about
  • Make a list of people you want to connect with. Not a creepy list, but a list of people you admire, respect, and want to connect with
  • Find non-pushy ways to get the attention of influencers in your niche like replying to their tweets or sending them a thank you note via email
  • If you do pitch another blog — whether for a guest post, share, or backlink –  make it succinct and find a way to show them love first
  • Again, don’t be a spammer or a pushy pitcher. It’s not that hard

Here are some of the best articles on blog outreach you can find online:

 

Conclusion

If you take these steps to build your brand with content marketing, you can expect to see increase traffic, rankings, brand mentions, and even sales.

Do the work for a long enough period of time and the results will show.

Have any other brand-building tips to add? Put them in the comments below.

Try These Creative Marketing Ideas For Small Businesses

Are you looking for creative marketing ideas for your small business?

You want to invest in marketing, but you have limited resources and want to use them properly, right?

You want ROI for your marketing.

The bottom line keeps your business afloat, so you have to keep that in mind.

We get that.

Fortunately,  a combination out of the box thinking, (some) investment, and a little savvy marketing can go along way.

Here are some quick creative marketing ideas you can use for your small business.

The Best Marketing Idea Nobody Uses

Be honest with yourself.

Is your product or service as good as it can possibly be? It is even close?

Marketing works when the product and service not only works but works well.

If you have excellent customer service, pay attention to your customers’ needs, and work on research and development, half the battle is won and it helps your SEO.

How? Having a better product improves your online presence in the following ways:

  • More brand mentions – When word of mouth spreads, more people will search for your brand on Google. More brand mentions = more brand credibility = more authority = higher rankings
  • Reviews – When you have a great product or service, you’ll naturally gain more online reviews, which is a ranking factor, especially for local SEO.
  • Content marketing – When you have a great product, you’ll have more confidence to use content marketing to promote it. Part of the reason why some small businesses fail at marketing is simply a lack of confidence in the business itself.

Find Unique Ways to Build Your E-Mail List

An e-mail list gives you a direct channel to potential customers.

What do most businesses do?

They stick a teeny tiny little box on the sidebar of their website that says “sign-up for free updates.” What a sexy and creative marketing idea that is. If you want to build your e-mail list, you have to be both creative and aggressive about how you build it.

Use a Pop Up Software

“Ugh, not pop-ups,” you say!

You don’t want to interrupt your audience and scare them away, right?

Pop-ups don’t scare people away. Poor and lazy marketing does.

A smart pop up entices the visitor to sign-up instead of trying to coerce them.

Sumo provides pop-up software that’s easy to use. They also do a great job of using it themselves.

Look at this example:

e-mail pop up software example

Note what they do well here:

  • Exclusivity – They use phrases like “peek inside” and “vault” to persuade you to get their secret content. Creating exclusive content you don’t share anywhere else speaks to our desire to be part of the “in crowd”
  • Benefits list – Notice that all three bullet points talk about aspects of the content that would benefit someone with a Shopify store
  • Word choice for the button – Using a phrase like “sign-up” makes people feel like they’re being begged to join yet-another-boring-ass-newsletter. “Get Access Now” speaks to exclusivity

Content Upgrades

Content upgrades are offers for exclusive pieces of content you add into the body of your content itself.

Like this:

content upgrade example

You give someone access to an exclusive piece of content based on the content they’re already reading.

Some great guides for making content upgrades are:

The use of content upgrades isn’t the most revolutionary creating marketing idea in the world. So why add it to the list?

Most small businesses in niches outside of marketing don’t use them.

In fact, most small businesses don’t use any of the content marketing techniques that the common agency does. If they did, they could see their traffic skyrocket.

That’s why it’s important to either become an expert at content creation or hire the (right) agency to do it for you. It doesn’t take a genius to create marketing ideas that beat out most of the competition in many niches.

Collect E-Mail Sign-Ups in Non-Obvious Ways

When you think of list-building, you think of tips like creating content, running ads, doing giveaways, etc, but there are a lot of “outside the box” ways you can build your list, too.

Here are a few that come to mind:

  • Give a speech at an industry conference and pass around a sign-up form when you’re done with your talk
  • Add a link to sign-up to your e-mail list in your e-mail signature.
  • If you’re in a service business with repeat customers, ask for an e-mail address in exchange for a future discount

The list goes on and on. In fact, there are resources that go into much more depth than this:

You can wade through those if you’d like. Our point? Be more creative when it comes to list-building. There are endless techniques. Test and experiment with them.

Don’t Try to Build Your E-Mail List (Do This Instead)

Wait, what?

We just got done telling you to build your e-mail list. And now we’re telling you not to?

Not exactly.

List-building works, but there is another to create a direct channel to your customers.

Talk about your product or service in your content. Don’t just talk about it, weave the use of it directly into your content and make the use of your product or service a core feature of it.

Credit goes to Tim Soulo — Head of Marketing at Ahrefs for promoting this creative marketing idea on his Medium blog:

Ahrefs creative marketing idea

This works better for service as a software product (SaaS) but consider how to incorporate this strategy for your own company.

In our real estate SEO guide, we detail an SEO strategy we created for a client (name omitted).

Over time, we’ll be including more case studies of our agency’s work and integrating our service into the content itself.

You can do the same.

Create Insane Marketing Campaigns

If you have the stomach and creativity for it, you can come up with unique marketing campaigns that range from outside the box to downright outrageous.

Let’s look at some of your favorite examples, starting with “boring” products…

Like razor blades:

And Blenders:

This marketing ad from Billy Gene is Marketing is one we’re even a bit jealous of:


The larger point here…

Fortune favors the bold.

Sure, you run a small business, but that doesn’t mean you have to think small.

Most small businesses don’t fail from a lack of knowledge or money. They fail from a lack of courage and creativity.

If you only thinking about what you stand to lose from going all-in on marketing, you don’t deserve marketing success.

Stay on the sidelines if you want. If, however, you’re ready to take a serious leap into marketing, feel free to reach out to us:

[add form]

Run Facebook Ads (But not for the Same Reason As Most Small Business Owners)

Facebook ads can help you grow your business.

They’re also very easy to mess up.

Don’t think of running Facebook ads the same way as those tired radio ads you’ve heard in the car for the past few decades. A jingle and a 1-800 number aren’t going to work online. You can offer discounts and sell directly to customers with ads, but that’ll only work if people are familiar with your brand.

There’s another way to attract people to your brand with Facebook ads that familiarizes them with your brand: run ads for free content.

What? Run PPC ads for free content? That is small business marketing blaspheme. Maybe, but it’s also a way to get your brand to stand out.

We noticed many SEO tool companies, like Ahrefs doing this:

facebook ad example

We couldn’t find a sponsored post in our timeline, but often some companies will run “sponsored posts,” meaning they’re creating ads for the blog content they create.

This could be a waste of money…

But it could also be a genius idea to get your name out there more.

There’s an industry saying that a potential customer has to see your brand 7 times before they buy.

Whether or not that’s true remains to be seen. The underlying sentiment makes sense.

Build brand familiarity in any way possible.

Conclusion

Winning the small business game has more to do with resourcefullnes than it does the resources themselves.

Use some of these marketing ideas to step up your game in 2019.

What are some creative marketing ideas you want to try with your small business?

Let us know in the comments!

 

22 Unique Content Marketing Tips for Business Owners

Have you heard of content marketing?

If you’re a business owner who’s been researching ways to grow your business online, you’ve heard the term before.

The questions you probably have are:

  • What is content marketing exactly? – Many publications online throw the term around a bit, but it’s important to understand the true definition of content marketing and how it works
  • How does content marketing work? – This post will dive deep into the deep ‘how-to’ and step by step methods for building an effective content marketing strategy.
  • Will it work for my business? – The short answer? Content marketing works for all businesses when it’s done right. Don’t worry, we’ll show you the light.

This post contains the most comprehensive list of content marketing tips on the entire internet. We provided this giant list to give you every option possible to make smart decisions for your business.

Before we dive into the tips, let’s answer the questions above.

What is content marketing?

Here’s the definition of content marketing from the content marketing institute:

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

Put simply, content marketing is a tool to grow your business. 

If your efforts aren’t leading to your desired outcome — engagement, leads, or sales — your strategy isn’t working.

Unsuccessful marketers focus on vanity metrics — analytics that do nothing more than boost your ego.

Successful markets focus on leading their customers through the sales process from start to finish and improve their efforts until the entire process works.

How Does Content Marketing Work?

You begin a successful campaign by answering the following questions:

  • Who is my target audience?
  • What does my target audience want?
  • How does my target audience interact with content online?
  • What types of content drive the desired behavior and results of the customer?
  • How can we create engaging content for readers that also meets digital marketing standards?
  • What is the best way to lead customers through the sales process?

And taking the following actions:

  • Perform target audience and keyword research
  • Create an initial content strategy
  • Produce content regularly
  • Iterate

When you create you create an implement your strategy, you want to track and refine it over time to optimize your results.

Stick with us…

We’ll walk you through tips to answer all these questions and act on the information as soon as possible.

Will Content Marketing Work for My Business?

This question bugs you the most, doesn’t it?

You’re a forward-thinking business owner or marketer. We know this because you’re here searching for useful information.

But, deep down, you might wonder if content marketing will produce results for your business? 

Maybe you think you’re in a ‘boring industry.’

Maybe you’re worried about return on investment — is dumping money, time, and resources into your content going to pay off? How can you truly know if it’s paying off? The ROI of content strategies is notoriously hard to track, but there are ways you can do it.

Content marketing works.

It can work for your business.

It’s nothing more than a tool. It’s up to you or the digital marketing agency you work with to use it the right way.

Side note: If you’re working with a digital marketing agency, ask them how their strategies are going to help your business improve its bottom line. Really, drill down on that question because great agencies can answer that question and bad ones can’t.

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s go over the tips. Feel free to jump around and find ones you think will work for you.

Create a Customer Avatar

Question for you — do you know who your ideal customer is? Do you know his or her hopes, fears, desires, and frustrations? Can you paint a vivid picture of them in your mind?

You need to know your target audience with pinpoint accuracy and a customer avatar can help you define your audience. With a defined audience, you can create targeted strategies.

Some questions you can use to build your customer avatar are:

  • What keeps them up at night? Finding your target audience’s deep pain points and frustrations can help you highlight them with copywriting and provide solutions
  • What are their hopes and dreams? You need to know what your client aspires to, not just in terms of your product, but their life in general. This way, you can tie in your product or service with their lifestyle, which builds trust and shows empathy
  • What end result will your product fulfill for them? There’s a classic marketing quote that goes, “When people buy a drill, they don’t want a drill. They want a hole.” Make your marketing fit that mantra
  • What other solutions may they have tried?

With this information in hand, you can create a targeted avatar. Then, you use the avatar to write content for your ideal customer. This makes the reader feel like you’re speaking to them personally.

Use This Word Often

use the word you in your writing

This subtle change can skyrocket the results of your content strategy.

The change? Use the word ‘you’ more often.

When you use the word ‘you’ instead of phrases like ‘our customers’ ‘our client’ and [xxxx], you show an investment in the person on the other side of the screen.

Most companies talk about themselves way too much.

Your customers want to know what you can do for them. Keep your content focused on their needs at all times.

Paint the Picture

Imagine you’re at your computer right now.

You receive a notification with a new lead or sale.

Your phone is ringing off the hook with customers calling after finding your company on Google.

Minutes later, you get another notification from your company blog. A reader just commented, “Wow. This is the best content I’ve ever seen. I’m bookmarking it to re-read.”

You think to yourself, “I wished I’d started sooner,” and you’re feeling the same rush of emotions you felt when you hit previous milestones in your business.

And most importantly, when tracking your revenue, you’re seeing numbers that make you wide-eyed.

These are the results you can expect from a successful content marketing campaign.

Now, read the next few sentences:

Our company provides digital marketing solutions, SEO, and web design. We can help your company reach a broader audience online, engage with them, and produce positive results.

One sentence says what the company does. The other paints a picture of how the customer will feel after you’ve transformed part of their life.

Check out the way Ramit Sethi uses the paint the picture technique on his sales page for a personal improvement course:

copywriting techniques

 

Read Your Customer’s Mind

Want an easy way to figure out exactly what your customers are thinking and make them feel like you’re reading their mind?

Here’s how you do it:

  • Research – Read product reviews on sites like Amazon, Quora, Yelp, Google reviews, and Facebook reviews.
  • Highlight – Find the phrases customers use over and over
  • Become a psychic – Use their exact words in your copy

Use These Tricks to Measure Content ROI

goal conversions

If you want to get an idea of how much revenue your campaigns drive, use these techniques:

  • Goal tracking – Most ad and analytics solutions provide goal tracking, which measures how many times users perform a desired action, e.g., buy your product, call, or enter a contact form
  • Set $ values – Create a dollar value amount per the desired action. A sale is overt, but you can also measure (on average) how much your leads are worth.
  • Compare – Using methods like customer acquisition cost (CAC) and customer lifetime value (CLV) you can measure how profitable your leads are.

Don’t be a One Trick Pony

Use different forms of media as part of your content strategy.

When it comes to content marketing, content means much more than the written word.

Other great mediums are:

  • Video
  • Infographics
  • Images
  • Audio
  • Slideshare presentations
  • Paid PPC ads

Elements of Style

Copywriting and blogging aren’t the same as academic writing.

When you write for web, use these elements of style to keep your reader moving down the page:

  • Short sentences
  • Headings (H1, H2, H3)
  • Bullet points
  • Add media in between sections to break up the copy

The Yoast SEO plugin provides a ‘readability score’ to make your content easy to read online:

yoast readablity grader

 

Use the Skyscraper Technique

The skyscraper technique is simple.

Here’s what you do:

  • Find the best piece of content about a subject
  • Write a piece of content that’s 10X better
  • Reach out to people who linked to and shared the other article and show them yours

The creator of this tactic, Brian Dean, uses it to rank for tough to beat keywords like “Google Ranking Factors.”

Optimize for Click Through Rates

When you perform on-site SEO for your website, you will create a unique meta description that will appear on search engines.

You want to add relevant key phrases to your meta description to rank highly in Google and you also want to make sure your description is compelling. 

Why? Because Google’s new Rank Brain algorithm prioritizes click-through rates, meaning they will rank a site with lower authority, but a higher click-through rate than its competitors.

In this post, Neil Patel describes techniques you can use to research your current site pages and optimize them for CTR.

Map Your Content to Lead Customers to the Sales Process

Each customer is at a different awareness stage when they discover your business. They may be unaware of their problem, aware of their problem and wondering if you can solve it, aware of your problem and believe you can solve it, or ready to do business with you because they’re convinced you can solve it.

Leading your customers from lead to customer involves guiding them through the process step-by-step with different pieces of content:

  • Whitepapers
  • Blog posts
  • Videos
  • Infographics
  • Landing pages
  • Service pages

content marketing funnel

To create an effective content funnel, anticipate which stage of awareness your customer will be at when you create a piece of content and use that content to guide them through to the next step.

Write For Humans, Not Search Engines

While you do want to create content search engines love, you must create content people love too. Google is trending toward prioritizing the user’s experience over the standard SEO techniques.

Writing content people want to read also provides these SEO and digital marketing benefits:

  • Longer ‘time spent’ on page (a positive ranking factor)
  • Lower bounce rates (a negative ranking factor)
  • Social sharing
  • Higher engagement
  • Better conversions
  • Brand awareness through word of mouth

Find Your Citations

If your business has been around for a while, chances are people have mentioned it online. When someone mentions your business online, it counts as a citation for your business. Consider a citation a vote of confidence.

You can search for your citations online and reach out to those who have mentioned you and ask them for a link.

Moz created a detailed guide for finding your citations and getting links from people who already love your business.

Create a Welcome Series for Your Company

Email marketing is still one of the top tools you can use to grow your business with content marketing.

To bond with your customer and lead them through the funnel of education to sale, you can create a welcome series. 

A welcome series provides automated emails that send out in sequence based on when a new lead signs up for your email list.

Sending them an introductory welcome email creates an instant connection, helps customers remember your brand, and creates familiarity when you send them new messages:

This infographic from Spark Page shares excellent details and step for creating the perfect welcome series:

welcome series

Beef Up Your Content

Numbers don’t lie. And the numbers say long-form content ranks best on Google.

Industry standards used to say the key length per page was 300-500 words, but new data shows the top-ranked content online usually has 1800-2000 words:

w

When you create long form content, aim to make it the best content about the chosen topic period. You also want to choose an evergreen topic, meaning the topic will be relevant for years to come.

Epic content takes time and effort, which is why it works so well. Few people are willing to put that much effort into their content and the ones who do run laps around the competition.

Use Search Display and Facebook Ads to Gain New Leads

Most companies think about ads the wrong way. Ads aren’t just a tool to get users to buy right away. You can also use ads to draw in casual readers and move them through the stages of awareness we mentioned earlier.

If a customer doesn’t know or trust you, they won’t click on an ad to buy your product or service right away. If, however, you use ads to provide them with something useful, interesting, and free to get their attention, you can build the trust you’ll need to market to them later. Check out these awesome examples of companies using ads to connect with users:

Emma

 

facebook-ads

Hubspot

Think Long Term

Content marketing requires patience to see the fruits of your efforts.

It may take several months to a year for your post or page to rank on page #1 for Google.

An SEO campaign isn’t considered mature until the one year mark. When you work on a content strategy, think about your long term engagement, sales, and traffic goals then work backward to create a strategy that fits.

When creating a content marketing strategy, think of how you can not only gain a customer but keep them for life. An effective content marketing strategy not only lands new customers but continues to remind them why they purchased in the first place.

Ways to increase engagement for the long with customers and prospects are:

  • Blogging consistently
  • Email marketing (both sales and engagement-oriented)
  • Remarketing ads
  • Special offers
  • Active social media

Use This Powerful Ranking Signal

online reviews

Collecting as many reviews and testimonials from customers and clients has multiple benefits:

  • Google uses reviews as a ranking signal
  • Reviews provide ‘social proof’ which show potential customers why they should trust you.

According to research from Bright Local, 91 percent of people surveyed said they read reviews (at least occasionally) and 84 percent say they trust reviews as much as their own friends.

Republish Your Content

You may have heard that duplicate content is a definite no-no. As it turns out, that’s not exactly true.

You can republish your content on other websites as long as you identify the original piece of content with a rel: canonical tag.

Some platforms, like Medium, have this import function built right into the platform:

Even top Google engineer, Matt Cutts, explains how many forms of duplicate content don’t harm your SEO:

Harness the Power of Guest Blogging

guest post example

Guest blogging on authoritative websites helps you gain quality backlinks, send traffic back to your website, build your email list, and increase your brand awareness.

That is if you do it right.

The aforementioned Google engineer once declared that guest blogging was dead, but he meant that spammy guest blogging was dead.

Given you find a reputable website and create legitimate and useful content, guest blogging is still a top white hat technique businesses can use.

Some great articles on guest blogging are:

Guest Blogging – The Definitive Guide

The Essentials of Guest Blogging Strategy for SEO 

Don’t Build on Rented Land

There are many great third party tools and websites you can use to aid your content marketing efforts.

You don’t, however, want to build your business on someone else’s property. This is called digital sharecropping.

Let’s say you decided to add all of your content only to Facebook instead of your own website. If Facebook decides to change its terms of service or delete your page, there’s nothing you can do about it.

Companies like Facebook change their rules all the time. Relying on third parties alone is a dangerous strategy.

Having your own dedicated online real estate and using long term strategies like SEO and email marketing will ensure your content efforts don’t go to waste.

 

Use Influencer Marketing to Build Your Brand

influencer marketing example

Influencer marketing is the process of leveraging the fame of celebrities to promote your product. This extends further beyond typical “A-List” celebrities like actors, rock stars, and comedians. There is a large number of social media influencers out there — people who are only famous through their social media platforms — that you can work with to promote your product. Neil Patel has a great guide on launching an influencer marketing campaign.

Spy on Your Competition

There’s a simple recipe you can use to beat out your competition on search engines:

  • Find out what your competitors are doing well
  • Do it much better than them

You can use tools like Ahrefs and Buzz Sumo to figure out how your competitors use content marketing. Once you have data on the type of content they create, where their links and engagement come from, and the level of depth they put into their content, you can create better content on the same topics and reach out to everyone who engaged with their content.

It’s that simple.

Create a Maze to Keep Your Readers on Your Website

You can use what’s known as the Wiki Strategy to improve our SEO and keep readers on your website longer.

Here’s a condensed version of the strategy (follow the link to see full):

  • Create the best content online
  • Link to reputable sources in your content – Wikipedia is a heavily cited and linked website. Meaning that you never have to leave Wikipedia to find more information. You want to create the same effect with your linking strategy
  • Find experts to contribute to your site to build the catalog
  • Promote your content
  • Track your progress
  • Repeat

Conclusion

These are just a few of the many content marketing tips you can use to grow your business.

What are some of your favorites?

What have you tried?

Tell us what has worked (or what hasn’t)/

 

 

 

Content Creation : How to Create Quality SEO Content to Grow Your Business

Content creation is the life-blood of any content marketing campaign.

The problem? Content creation can be difficult.

If you don’t use the right strategies, you can waste time and money.

There’s no shortage of companies who’ve tried to do content marketing themselves or hired someone to do it that didn’t get great results.

The question is – how can you make content marketing and SEO work for your business?

How do you know what content to create?

How can you invest in content creation and ensure you get a return on investment (ROI) — even though this is harder to track than metrics like cost per click?

If you’re opting to work with an agency, how can you be sure they’ll deliver?

This guide is meant to be the end-all-be-all when it comes to creating content for your business.

Before we go deep into strategy, you have to get this next part right. In fact, the next section alone will make or break your success.

The Mindset You Need to Become a Content Creation Expert

People don’t talk about this often.

It’s easy enough to read blogs about content marketing.

Doing it and doing it well is a different story.

The funny thing? Content marketing isn’t hard, per se. It’s time-consuming, requires consistency, and only works after you spend a lot of time, effort, and money creating content.

Even if you don’t write the content yourself and hire an agency do to it, realize that not all agencies are created equal.

In fact, the sad truth is that many of them will write “me too” content that doesn’t move the needle. Agencies can be just as guilty at failing to live by the rules of successful content creators.

Rule # 1 – Write 10x, World-Dominating, Head And Shoulders Above the Competition Content

Here’s a guaranteed hack that’ll help you rank better on search engines:

Write content that’s 10x better than your competition.

How can you do this?

Make your content longer and more in-depth:

word count and google rankings chart

Add media to your blog posts to make them stand out:

Add novel insights and contradict the advice of your competitors:

how to write unique content

Use this Simple Framework to Beat Your Competition:

  • Study all the competitor results on the search engine results page (SERP)
  • Note what the ranking pages do well and implement the same techniques in your content
  • Note what’s missing from your competitor’s content and add it to your content
  • Aim to create a piece of content that’s 10x better than your competition

This technique is known as the Skyscraper Technique.

Again, this is about the mindset behind SEO. You can think all you want about using a strategy like the Skyscraper Technique, but actually doing it is about 100x harder than reading a blog post about it.

Rule # 2 – Prepare For Obstacles in Advance

Roadblocks are inevitable.

You’ll write content constantly without getting the results you expected.

You’ll invest money that doesn’t pay off in rankings and traffic right away.

At a certain point, you’ll wonder if content marketing is right for your business.

Spoiler alert: it is, but you need the right mindset to make it work.

Here are some simple ways to prepare for these roadblocks in advance:

  • Plan, plan, plan – From keyword research to creating a content strategy, to adding time-blocks on your calendar to work on content, the more you prepare, the easier content creation will be.
  • Wait – If you decided to commit to content marketing for a year, wait a year before you judge the success of the campaign. Sure, make adjustments along the way, but commit to seeing the strategy out first before you throw in the towel.
  • Why – Remember why you started creating content (or hired someone) in the first place. You wanted to grow your business, build your brand, and connect with more people. Focusing on your “why” can help you persist when times get tough.

Rule #3 – Quality and Quantity

As mentioned in Ahrefs guide about the top SEO creators, they had this to say about Natan Gotch with Gotch SEO:

He consistently puts out HUGE, in‐depth guides. Some are even custom designed.

I’ve seen at least one of his posts garner 750+ comments.

The downside? Putting together such massive guides clearly isn’t the easiest job ever, as Nathan only publishes one post per month on average. Regardless, Nathan is undoubtedly one to watch.

On the flipside, blogs like Search Engine Journal produce multiple blog posts per day.

Both strategies work. Not only that, but quality and quantity don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

A few dozen posts per year provide excellent quantity if all the posts make up for it in quality. Also, you can create great-but-not-insanely-long guides at a faster pace and rank well, too.

There are no one-size fits all solutions.

Use these benchmarks instead:

  • The harder it is to rank for a keyword, the longer and more in-depth your content should be
  • The higher your site authority, the more chance you have of ranking for competitive keywords
  • The lower your site authority, the more you want to focus on creating lots of content that target low to medium competition keywords

Don’t “Try to Become a Thought Leader” Do This Instead

Thought leadership is a hot topic. 

What does it mean?

If you’re a thought leader, it means you’re one of the “go-to experts” in your space.

Content creation is a great way to establish yourself as a thought leader, but not if you focus on becoming one.

Right now, you should focus on creating the best content you possibly can.

You should promote your content and connect with people in your niche.

Do this for a long enough time, and you’ll earn the right to be called a thought leader. It will be self-evident.

Content marketing has created an awesome path for anyone to demonstrate their expertise.

Sadly, the majority of content creators focus on the prize instead of just doing the work.

Just do the work. Do it often.

The traffic, sales, and admiration will come later.

Don’t worry about those for now.

Now, stick with us to learn about the nuts and bolts of a solid content creation strategy.

Keyword Research 101

Keywords are the life-blood of a content creation campaign.

Have you ever typed something into Google looking for an answer, a location, a service, etc? Those phrases you type in are keywords.

When you do keyword research, you’re looking to find the right phrases to use in the content you create.

So what qualifies as a good keyword?

Here are some good benchmarks to follow:

Search Intent

The keywords you target your content around should match a goal you have for your business. You want to make sure that someone who types in that keyword will be happy to find your site and you’ll be happy they landed there.

We’ll use an example from our industry. We could create content around the keyword “SEO” but it’s a broad and vague keyword. Someone searching for the keyword SEO might be a curious browser, not someone who’s serious about working with an SEO agency.

Something like “content marketing services” matches our goals better. A person searching for that is at least interested in learning about a service we provide.

Or take this blog post, which we targeted around words like “content creation” and “quality SEO content.” Not everybody who reads this post will want to work with us, but that’s not the point. We provide education about SEO and content marketing so that you either:

  • Decide to work with us
  • Decide to take our recommendations and use them on your own

Both are good options because they meet our overall goal: being a leader in content marketing and SEO. Helping people for free is a big part of reaching that goal, so creating quality content for free is part of our strategy (and will likely be part of yours too)

Competition

Different niches have different levels of competition.

Marketing is, to say the least, a very competitive space. We’re competing with all the marketing blogs in the world.

If you’re a local plumber in, say, Wichita Kansas, your strategy will be different because your competition will be different.

We will talk about the steps to keyword research shortly, but let’s look at some of the ways you can size up the competition as part of your content creation efforts.

Site Authority

Google doesn’t outright tell us who’s site is the most authoritative.

There are third-party tools that give you a pretty good idea though.

Here’s a screenshot from a tool we like to use, Ahrefs:

ahrefs site authority tool

Authority Score 101

Take a look at the two numbers on the right, UR and DR. Here is the explanation of what these scores measure directly from Ahrefs:

Domain Rating is a proprietary Ahrefs’ metric that shows the strength of a target website’s total backlink profile (in terms of its size and quality).

URL Rating (UR) shows the strength of a target page’s backlink profile on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 100, with latter being the strongest. Both internal and external links are taken into account when calculating this metric

Domain Rating

Every page on your website has the same Domain Rating (DR) that are based on a few things:

  • Linking root domains – This just means the total number of websites that link to you. 3 links from three different websites are better than 3 links from the same website. Make sense? Ok good.
  • Authority of the linking root domains – Quality beats quantity here. 1 link from a high authority domain can be more important than many links from low-quality websites
  • Link profile – A link profile is all the links you have on your website + how they are linked. A good example to help you understand: a link from a medium authority domain that links out to a handful of other websites can be better than a high authority domain that links out to a ton of other sites. The authority of the whole site, in a way, gets split up by the total number of links. This concept is called “link juice.”

URL Rating

Each page on your website has its own unique URL rating (UR).

Here’s how to think about this. Website pages show up on Google, not entire websites.

Here’s a page on our website that ranks on page one in the search engine results page (SERP):page 1 ranking on the SERP

Google wants the best pages to show up on the SERP for a query (what people type into the search bar). In this case, it’s providing results for people who search for things like “Minneapolis SEO” “Minneapolis SEO company” “Minneapolis SEO agency” etc.

So instead of looking for which websites have the best information about these topics, Google chooses individual pages to show up on the results page.

One of the factors it uses is the authority of individual pages that are targeted for “Minneapolis SEO.”

This authority is measured by UR.

Some of the factors that affect UR are:

  • Linking root domains to the page – Each website that links to this exact page – https:/www.mltgroup.com/minneapolis-seo.php boosts the authority of the page itself
  • Linking root domain authority – You want to get links from pages with high DR and UR pointing to pages you want to rank on Google
  • Internal links – Internal links are links from one page of a website to another page of a website. Why is this important? Internal linking tells Google, “Hey, this page is important!” When you create a page you want to rank, you should link to it from lots of other pages on your website. This screenshot shows how this structure can work

internal link site architecture

Via – Moz

 

How to Use These Scores

When you’re doing keyword research, you want to think about the authority of the pages who rank for the keywords you’re trying to target.

It’s not an exact science, but here are some rough guidelines:

  • Low authority sites/pages – If you have a newer website that doesn’t have much authority yet, you want to first focus on keywords that have low to medium authority themselves (low = 10-30)
  • Medium authority sites/pages – As you create and promote content over time, your site authority increases, making it easier to rank for more competitive keywords (medium = 30-50)
  • High authority sites/pages – If you publish and promote great content over a long period of time, you can start to rank for highly competitive keywords. High competitive keywords usually get more total traffic volume, which means the number of people who search for that keyword in a month. You will need to write the best quality content possible to rank for these terms (high = 50+).

Other Site Authority Considerations and Tools

Site authority is just one of many metrics you can use to gauge your chances of ranking a page on Google.

Just because your site pages have lower authority than others doesn’t mean you can’t rank them. You just have to go the extra mile to beat out the others.

Here are some ways you can do that:

  • Write 10x content
  • Get a handful of top quality backlinks. Nathan Gotch has an excellent backlink guide you can use to get started
  • Use smart outbound links. We will talk about this in more depth, but the quality of the links you put on your pages that link to other sources can help your page rank, too
  • Be bold. You won’t succeed in content marketing unless you’re willing to do what others won’t. Sometimes you have to think outside of the box and over deliver. A great example of this: Neil Patel spent tens of thousands of dollars and essentially wrote a book worth of content to rank for “online marketing

Keyword Research Essentials

Keyword research is a topic that can go into great depth. Here are the cliff notes of a great keyword strategy and some excellent resources you can use to learn more:

  • Steal your competitor’s keywords – With tools like Ahrefs, Moz, and SEM Rush you can plug your competitor’s URLs into their dashboards to see what keywords they already rank for. Then, you can create better versions of their content to outrank them 🙂
  • Good old fashioned brainstorming – You know what products and services you sell. You also have an idea of what words people might use to search for products and services in your niche. Start with those as a baseline. Take a pen and pad, write ideas down, and cross-check with keyword research tools
  • Make up your own damn keywords – If you have a unique strategy or insight that helps people in your niche, create content about it and make up a name for your strategy. It’s a nice hack you can use to get on page 1 fast. Some people go as far as to give their companies a unique name. As their brand gets recognized, they create a total keyword volume out of thin air! Remember earlier when we said to be creative? This is an example of what we meant.

Keyword Research Resources and Tools

The basics are enough to get you started, but if you’re looking for more in-depth resources to start your content creation campaign, these guides will be a ton of help:

Here are some keyword research tools that we didn’t already mention:

Remember those unique ‘thin air’ keywords we talked about earlier? Here are some cool examples you can model:

Market Research 101

On top of doing keyword research, you can perform market research to make your content even better.

Part of this research involves studying your competition.

The other part involves studying your potential customers and people in your target audience.

Study the SERP

We wanted to rank this post for keywords like “quality content” and “SEO” content.

When studying the SERP and the blog posts we found, we noticed a few things in common between the posts and saw ways to create something better.

First, we noticed most of the posts used short tips and tidbits on how to create quality content that was a bit vague:

competitor analysis example

 

If you wanted to create content using these tips, you’d have a general idea, but not a step by step process or useful resources.

That’s why we put together step by step information with screenshots, resources,  and concrete processes you can use right now to create quality content yourself (and if you don’t have the time, our company will use this exact process for your business.)

We also noticed the posts talked (mostly) about ways to impress Google. 

Yes, you have to optimize your content for search engines, but your number one goal is creating content your visitors find useful.

In a later section, you’ll see our step by step process for creating user-focused content.

 

A final, and really important item, we saw missing was a lack of focus on the content creators themselves.

Nowhere did we find tips on the mindset and tools you need to be a successful content creator.

Or, for business owners looking for content creation help, we didn’t see any tips on finding the right type of agency or content marketer to work with. We included sections on both in our guide.

Studying the SERPs is just one of a few important tasks for content creation.

Stick with us to discover the true keys to content marketing success…

 

Use The World’s Largest Customer Research Center

If your business doesn’t have a product, service, or content related to something on Amazon, you have a very obscure niche.

Amazon reviews offer great insights you can use to create content.

We looked at some books on content marketing to see what readers thought about books on creating quality content:

Image from Gyazo

 

Even though we’re writing a single post, we can use insights from book reviews to help make our post more useful.

We looked for 3-star reviews, which usually have a good mix of praise and criticism. We found some interesting insights.

Some readers were looking for relatable ideas for their kind of business instead of the “create epic content to grow a massive company” style content you often see:

customer research example

This led to us creating a section with examples and scenarios for normal small and medium-sized business owners.

We also noticed many comments about formatting and ease of use for finding information:

content marketing research

We added a table of contents, FAQ section, and worked to make our in-depth guide as simple to read as possible.

We also noticed a theme where readers didn’t feel the content was catered to their experience level:

research for content creation

In our tips section, you’ll see sections for different skill levels.

Customer Research With Quora

Quora is a question and answer platform. Users ask questions about a wide range of subjects. You can plug keywords into Quora to see what questions people are aking in your niche. You can use these insights to create content that answers people’s questions, which can help your posts rank better on Google (remember Google likes user-focused content).

Digging through Quora, we found this question, which led to us creating a section with our top recommended tools:

customer research example on Quora

 

With the keywords and insights in hand, you can start to plan for the different types of content you can create for your business’s website.

Different Types of Content You Can Create

Different types of content require different strategies to be successful.

If you’re a content marketer (or you’ve hired an SEO agency to help you out), it’s important to know what goal each type of content serves.

If you want to get technical about it, there are lots and lots of different categories content can fit into.

For this guide, we’ll focus on the basics (pro tip: mastering the basics is often better than trying all techniques at once.)

Blog Posts

You’re reading a blog post right now.

Why? Probably because you’re looking for information to help you create your own content or insights you can use to get somebody to do it for you.

Either way, you’re here because you need or want information.

If you don’t think this post is going to deliver what you want, you’ll leave.

If you think the post does deliver want, you’ll read through the whole post, maybe sign up to get even more marketing tips, or reach out to us directly because you want our help.

We write blog posts to educate people about content marketing and SEO.

We want our content to be so in-depth and useful that you can implement the strategies on your own.

Why? Because we’re building our brand as content experts. Getting every single person who reads our posts to buy our services would be nice, but that’s not our goal. Done strategically, creating a company blog can help your business stand out as an industry leader.

Blog Post Best Practices

If you want your blog to be successful, it has to hit certain benchmarks like:

  • Content length – Studies show a correlation between blog post length and rankings. The longer your post the better – as long as the content is useful. (As Rand Fishkin points out in his Whiteboard Friday Episode there is no *perfect* content length)
  • Intent – Search intent means people who visit your blog post get what they’re expecting. Study the posts that rank well for your target keyword to get insights on intent.
  • Optimized – Each blog post you write must be optimized for a certain topic or keyword to rank on Google.
  • Media – Pictures, videos, infographics, and other forms of media keep readers on the page longer. “Dwell time” is a ranking factor search engines use.

With these benchmarks in mind, focus on the content marketing done in your industry. Blog styles and formats vary from industry to industry.

A simple recipe that works for any industry, though: study the blog posts your competitors create and make your content undeniably better.

Service/Product Pages

Services and product pages have a simple goal: get people to buy or request more information.

Your service and product pages should be more focused and, for lack of a better word, aggressive than your blog posts.

Each services page should include:

A Unique Selling Proposition or Tag Line

You have to provide reasons why your product or service is better than the others and communicate it well.

Look at content marketing expert Neil Patel’s service page for his agency, Neil Patel Digital:

Landing page example

He does a couple things well here. The call to action at the top of the page is simple, straightforward, and compelling at the same time. Who doesn’t want more traffic?

On top of that, he displays logos of the companies he’s worked with. Why? Two persuasion techniques are used here: social proof and the power of association.

Social proof is basically evidence of why something is good, e.g., positive book reviews. Us humans like to know other people trust a brand or product before we purchase it. Then there’s the association bias.

Whenever you can, it’s smart to associate yourself with other trusted brands. Who doesn’t know Facebook, Google, and eBay? Neil leverages his partnerships with these companies and it’s persuasive because they’re so well known.

Highlight the Benefits of Your Product/Service

Content creation often boils down to one question:

What’s in it for me?

All the content on your product and services pages should answer that question.

Put yourself in the customer’s shoes for a second. Say they visit one of your services pages and the first paragraph they see is something boring about how your company “was founded in 1965 in a one-room shack” or whatever.

Does that information really drive decision-making? Perhaps, but more often than not business owners use their service and product pages the wrong way – to talk about themselves and talk about the features of their services instead of the benefits.

Nobody cares about the fact your riding mower has x, y, and z capabilities. They care that your lawn mower mows lawns faster!

Focus on the benefits your product or service provides.

As the famous saying goes, “People don’t buy drills, they buy holes.”

Look at this example from Legion Athletics. On a product page for one of their supplements, they start the page by addressing the problem and providing solutions in the form of benefits:

product page example

They list all the features of the product on the bottom of the page. Much more time is spent on highlighting the benefits of the product and the transformation it will provide people who buy it.

This is how smart marketing works.

Other Considerations

Many of the guidelines for creating great blog content apply to creating product/service pages:

  • Content length – Your content has to be as long or longer than the competition to rank. For product/service pages, use images to “break up” the words on the page
  • Media – See how the video was used in the example above? Adding media to your product/service pages can make them more persuasive and keep people on your pages longer.
  • Optimization – You’ll need to do keyword research and optimize your product/service pages, too. You can use modifiers to get more clicks like “Buy” “Discount” “20% off” “Free Trial” etc.
  • Calls to Action – Make sure to prompt readers to either buy or learn more about your product/service in an overt way (see screenshot below)

call to action example

Landing Pages

When we use the phrase landing pages, we’re talking about highly-target pages that provide readers two options:

  • Engage by signing up or buying
  • Leave

You won’t see menus on these pages. You won’t see any links pointing you somewhere else.

These pages are focused.

Landing pages are often used to get e-mail subscribers.

Let’s say you’re running Facebook Ads to get more customers. The last thing you want is to spend money, have them click on your ad, and then leave without subscribing.

This is why most landing pages make it crystal clear what they want you to do next:

landing page for email subscribers

This is a landing page Leanne Regalla used to get more subscribers from her guest post.

She used this call to action at the end of the post, which directed people to the landing page shown above:

guest post call to action

The page itself displays benefits and has a dead-obvious call to action.

How to Write Copy for Landing Pages

You only have a split-second to get someone’s attention when they visit your landing page. If your offer doesn’t compel them fast, they will leave.

How do you get them to convert?

You have to make an offer so good they can’t refuse it.

You can do this in a few ways.

Create a Compelling Headline

This example uses the word “free” highlights how valuable the offer is (16 parts) and speaks to the results you’ll get from signing up and using it:

landing page headline example

Via Henneke Duistermaat at Enchanting Marketing

Use Bullet-Points to feature the persuasive benefits your offer provides:

landing page offer example

Via Meera Kothand 

And Make Sure You Make it Clear What to Do Next:

Landing page call to action

Other (Optional) Forms of Content

Content means more than the written word.

Other forms of content exist and are useful. We focused on written content creation for this post because it’s a core type of content you must master.

Once your content marketing campaign is in full swing, you can try other formats to pour gasoline on the fire.

Video

Video can be an excellent content marketing tool. Some people prefer visual content to written because…they don’t like to read all that much! No worries, video is a great way to repurpose your content. Each blog post you publish can be transformed into a video. Each video can be broken up into smaller pieces and shared on platforms like Instagram. You can take one video and feature it across multiple platforms like Youtube, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Some great in-depth guides on using video are:

Social Media

One blog post can be turned into several content pieces you can use on social media.

Some examples are:

  • Sharing links to your post across all social channels
  • Making quote-cards with visual displays of quotes from your content
  • Sharing video content across social media platforms
  • Adding click-to-tweet buttons from your content that share highlighted quotes instantly

There is a lot you can do with social media and content marketing. So much so that there are awesome guides solely dedicated to that process. Check them out:

Conclusion

Content creation can help you grow your business, but only with the right strategies, tools, insights, and effort.

What do you think?

Leave your most “important keys” to content creation, promotion, and marketing below.

 

 

 

SEO Best Practices for 2019

Most SEO best practices posts don’t tell you anything new.

The posts usually contain the same old SEO information and the writers simply add the current year to the title.

We want to be different.

This post is going to cover the SEO best practices you won’t hear anywhere else.

Above and beyond the normal advice like “create epic content or use the Skyscraper technique” we’re going to look at SEO insights that really move the needle. 

Let’s dive in.

The Most Important SEO Best Practice of Them All

The SEO industry has a lot in common with the weight loss, self-help, and finance industries.

Every year, millions of articles come out in these spaces with either the same old advice:

“Count calories”

“Write down your goals”

“Save 20% of your income”

Or there’s a hot new fad everyone wants to jump on:

“Do the Keto diet”

“Wake up at 5 a.m. and meditate”

“Buy cryptocurrencies”

In the case of SEO, the common advice would be something like “perform outreach to get backlinks” and the advice of the day might be in relation to the latest algorithm change.

In all cases, you’re choosing the wrong strategy if you dwell too long on either type of advice.

The most important SEO best practice is simple:

  • Experiment with new strategies
  • Analyze your findings
  • Double down on what works

Instead of reading articles about writing epic content, write epic content (or hire someone to do it) and measure the results.

Instead of watching videos about blogger outreach, take the last piece of content you wrote and promote it as hard as you possibly can.

If you’re a business owner who’s on the fence about working with an agency or getting marketing help, stop reading blog posts about “finding the right agency,” pick one and give them 12 months to build a successful campaign.

SEO has much more to do with implementing sound advice than it does being an expert.

Someone with less SEO knowledge but more commitment can rank their websites higher than the competition. Speaking of…

The Easiest Way to Outshine Your Competition

Imagine you’re a local business owner in Cleveland, Ohio who sells plumbing services.

You think you’re in a “boring” business.

With that belief in mind, you don’t go the extra mile when it comes to marketing. Maybe you try writing some SEO content, but you don’t take it any further.

You can’t see past ranking #1 for “Plumbing services in Ohio.” You have modest goals because you run a modest business in a modest industry.

Instead of doing what every other plumber in the city does and wishing for the best, why not go above and beyond your competition — not just in SEO, but building a brand that stands out in your entire industry. 

For local SEO, here are some techniques you can use that most of your competitors won’t:

  • Write detailed blog posts about interesting ways your business connects with related topics, e.g., your new green plumbing system/fighting climate change
  • Add humor and personality to your content marketing like Dollar shave club and Blendtec
  • Create an animated infographic showing how easy it is for normal objects to clog a drain
  • Ad humor and flair to your PPC ads

In your case, look for these two simple and easy ways to differentiate yourself from the competition:

  • Break one of your industries “norms”
  • Use a content marketing technique that requires either too much money or effort for your competitors to even think of copying

Don’t Start with SEO in mind at all

You’ve heard that backlinking is a key piece of the SEO pie, but what if I told you there were websites earning tens to hundreds of thousands of visitors per month without actively backlinking at all?

Enter the Cup and Leaf Blog.

Nat Eliason, owner of Cup and Leaf, Growth Machine, and a fascinating personal blog, has been growing his tea blog by using something called the wiki strategy.

Here’s an excerpt from the post discussing the strategy:

The first principle of the strategy is that you should only write something if it’s going to be the best article on that topic on the Internet. Anything less than that is a waste of time. If there is already a better article on the topic out there, then you’re only adding to the infomania pollution of the Internet by publishing yours, so you must only publish something if it is truly the best article on the topic.

Why does this strategy work?

Because it focuses on the user first and SEO second.

Google is not (just) interested in your website’s authority score. It’s interested in whether or not your website — and business as a whole — serves the needs of searchers.

When it comes to creating content, designing your website, creating a site structure, and more, start with the premise that you want to provide the best user experience possible.

This means:

  • Writing in-depth content that answers readers questions
  • Having a great user experience
  • Adding entertaining elements like media

After you’re done, go back in and use the core SEO techniques.

Understand this Core Behavioral SEO Best Practice

Remember when I said SEO and marketing are a lot like finance, weight-loss, and self-improvement?

These industries have another thing in common:

The need to commit to goals.

Consider adding the commitment to your company’s marketing to your list of goals for 2019 and follow through with it.

SEO can take up to a year before it really starts to kick in  — just like losing weight or saving money.

This year, consider suspending your judgment and spending a full 12 months — either on your own or with the help of an agency — doing a full scale 100% effort digital marketing campaign.

What would that look like?

Research Keywords to Create Content for a Full Calendar Year

You want to have enough keywords to create as many new pieces of content you decide you need for the next 12 months.

How do you decide how many pieces of content to create? Some useful guides are:

Keep these thoughts in mind while you research.

Go In Through the Side Door

In our article about real estate SEO, we talked about how hard it would be to rank on the first page for a key phrase like “Homes for Sale in Minneapolis,” without a big brand with a lot of authority.

We suggested focusing on less competitive long-tail keywords like “Condos for sale in Stillwater, MN. (Stillwater is a suburb of Minneapolis.

Creating unique pages for these types of key phrases can help you grow your organic traffic as a whole over time.

Use This Obvious But Under-Utilized Technique

There are a ton of articles about ways to verify the quality of your keywords.

One piece of advice many business owners — and even SEOs miss — is taking the time to read and analyze the content that appears on page one.

It seems simple and obvious, but reading and analyzing 10 blog posts or website pages requires time, patience, and effort.

Our analysis found the following.

All the posts in the top 10 results talked about what to do, but not the mindset you need to follow through with SEO best practices:

SEO best practice example

 

This led to us creating tips not just about SEO best practices, but the behavior and mindset you need to pull them off.

We also noticed the #1 result came in at about ~1,100 words. Is that really enough word count to explain SEO in detail. We don’t think so, so we doubled the word count with useful information.

Remember the standard best practice that content length matters for SEO:

word count and google rankings chart

 

Follow this Rule When it Comes to Choosing Topics

How do you become an industry thought leader?

How do you build an audience that respects your opinion?

You only talk about topics you know inside and out and avoid everything else.

Artificial intelligence and voice search are hot SEO topics — ones we’re fascinated about and plan on focusing on more in the future.

But, as of this moment, we’re not trying to become the go-to experts about these topics.

Why?

First, because we focus on providing useful content for business owners and marketing employees, we want to write about topics that are the most actionable for our audience.

We’re not discussing A.I. in strategy meetings with potential clients, so why write about it?

Second, as of this moment, we simply can’t write about those topics with a level of authority we’d feel comfortable with.

This is the exact opposite attitude of many other SEO companies and digital marketing agencies.

They might write a paragraph about artificial intelligence in their blog post, but if you reached out to ask them to build a custom A.I. based digital marketing strategy for you, they wouldn’t be able to do it.

SEO is at the peak of competitiveness in 2019. Writing “me-too” content isn’t going to work. Mentioning topics that are hot and trendy, but you know nothing about, won’t work either.

Focus on becoming the best at what you know and sharing it with your audience. This 80/20 approach will reap massive rewards.

Run Your Content Marketing Campaign, Add Experiments Along the Way, and Double Down on What Works

You have your content planned out for the year, but written content can’t be your only content marketing channel.

You’ll have to use a combination of these channels:

  • Social Media
  • Video
  • Audio
  • Visual/Graphic content

The goal and steps are simple — test marketing channels and run experiments until you find a channel worth mastering.

You don’t want to throw spaghetti at the wall forever. When you find a channel that works, do it again.

Model your thinking after this excerpt from a blog post about making $2.5 million dollars with an online course:

“Everyone who’s ever launched a product—a book, an event, a course—has asked this question. It’s the number-one question every amateur entrepreneur wants answers to. It’s the question I asked after launching my first product.

And it is absolutely the wrong question to ask.

I made the mistake of asking this question to Derek Halpern right after my first successful course launch.

I had released a brand-new course for writers called Tribe Writers. Even though I launched it to a list of less than 2,000 people, I sold over 400 courses and made $25,000… in a week

“What should I build next?” I asked Derek.

“Whaddya, stupid?!” Derek said in his most wonderful New Yorker accent.

“Uh, no?” I said.

“Why would you go build something new when you have a product that is selling?”

“…”

“Let me ask you something,” he continued. “Do you really think everyone who needs this product has heard about it yet?”

“Oh, definitely not.”

“Good. And do you think everyone who has heard about it and is going to buy it has bought it? Or do you think more people on your list will eventually buy it?”

“I think more people will buy it.”

“Ok. So why are you talking about another product? Why don’t you just keep launching this product and learning how to sell it better and better?”

Once you find a marketing channel that works for you – double, triple, or quadruple down on it.

Here are some excellent examples of people doing just that.

Neil Patel and Eric Siu

Neil Patel owns an agency called Neil Patel Digital and runs a popular marketing blog.

Eric Siu owns Single Grain, Growth Everywhere, and a SaaS product called Click Flow.

Together, they both host the Marketing School podcast where they create a short daily episode about marketing.

At the end of each episode, they use the same call to action – help them reach 1,000,000 subscribers:

 

marketing school podcast

They’re building towards an end goal.

They started the podcast as an experiment and doubled-down on it when it worked.

What do other marketers do? They either rest on their laurels or try a new strategy.

You should try new strategies – Eric and Neil both use many other marketing channels – but only after you’ve mastered and optimized a channel or technique that’s working.

Track Everything (And Don’t Forget to Do What I’m About to Tell You)

You want to track the success of your marketing efforts, but that’s not the most important part of a successful campaign.

What is?

Let’s (for the last time) take a look at one of the related industries we talked about earlier — finance.

Take a Look at this excerpt from a post titled The Psychology of Money:

[…] managing money isn’t necessarily about what you know; it’s how you behave. But that’s not how finance is typically taught or discussed. The finance industry talks too much about what to do, and not enough about what happens in your head when you try to do it.

This quote doesn’t just describe finance, but many other industries including SEO.

Add Sub-Head Here

See, it’s easy to nod your head when you work with an agency and they tell you that SEO takes 12 months.

It’s hard to stick with the campaign after you’re 6 months in, spent $15,000 on the campaign, and haven’t got the flood of traffic you hoped for yet.

Facebook ads seem like a great way to promote your content.

But sticking with them when your ads are bleeding money could mean the difference between disappointment and marketing pay dirt.

Our SEO best practices guide contains much less tactical information and much more behavior-oriented and psychological information.

Why? Because winning the SEO game is about what goes on between your ears, not the techniques themselves.

Trust the process long enough to get real insights.

Conclusion

The SEO best practices that work have nothing to do with simple techniques and strategies. Often, they have more to do with comittment, persistence, and long-term thinking.

What do you think?

Are there any SEO best practices you’d like to add?

Have questions about SEO?

Let us know in the comments.