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:
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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
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:
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
If you want to get an idea of how much revenue your campaigns drive, use these techniques:
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.
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:
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
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.
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:
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:
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:
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
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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:
Add media to your blog posts to make them stand out:
Add novel insights and contradict the advice of your competitors:
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
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.
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.
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:
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):
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
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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 businessstand out as an industry leader.
Blog Post Best Practices
If you want your blog to be successful, it has to hit certain benchmarks like:
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:
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:
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)
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:
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.
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:
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
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?
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:
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:
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.
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.
“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.
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:
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.
[…] 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?
If I had a dollar for every time I heard “content is king,” I could retire.
Content marketing works, but it doesn’t work for everyone. The same can be said for SEO, pay per click advertising, and social media marketing.
Marketing channels work, but you have to make them work. It’s easy to throw money at something like PPC ads, but it’s hard to figure out how to get ROI from them.
The good news? You can always fix your content marketing strategy and sometimes it doesn’t take an overhaul — a few simple changes can make all the difference.
Let’s dive into the tips.
The #1 Content Marketing Strategy Mistake 99 Percent of Business Owners Make
Here’s what will happen when you start a content marketing campaign (or hire someone to do it).
At first, your traffic and rankings won’t move much, but after time, they’ll rise up the rankings. Higher rankings mean more traffic and more authority for your website.
When some of your pages start to rank high, they’ll attract backlinks and gain authority on their own.
Why? Because people often Google information to use in their own content and tend to cite results that show up on page 1.
If you write evergreen, in-depth, and useful content, people will link to you naturally, which gives your entire site more authority.
When a single page ranks for one keyword, it will start to rank for other related keywords — these are called LSI keywords.
A single page can rank for dozens, hundreds, or thousands of keywords.
You can go back in and sprinkle these LSI keywords into your content, which will help it rank better overall.
Stop Doing This Immediately
Marketing experts are aplenty in 2019.
They’re all giving the same advice.
People who take that advice give the same advice so on and so forth.
This becomes a content marketing pyramid scheme.
Everyone copies each other, meaning no one is original or has anything truly useful to share.
Did you develop a strategy based on copying your competitors? It’s time to rethink that.
How? Figure out ways to differentiate yourself from the competition.
One Strategy No One Can Copy
Ayetkin Tank, founder of Jotform, writes a blog on Medium.com
What separates him from other people in the space? He tells personal stories. Look at the story he used to open a blog post about the taste of customers:
You can’t replicate someone else’s personal experience. Stories shape the world and humans love learning through stories.
Try to think of ways to inject more narrative into your content strategy.
Do you have unique testimonials and case studies from people who’ve bought your products or services? Use them.
Do you have industry insights you gained from unique experiences? Sprinkle these stories into your content.
Zig When They Zag
Is everyone in your niche writing blog posts? Do more videos.
Are all your competitors on Facebook? Try LinkedIn.
An innovator is simply someone who has tried something other people haven’t.
Always think…what’s the opposite of what your competition is doing. Do that.
It won’t always work, but it helps you think outside the box. With so many businesses creating content, creativity is at a premium.
Kill the Sacred Cows
Fun fact: a lot of conventional wisdom is completely wrong.
People just repeat mantras over and over again until they become accepted.
If you can discredit the “sacred cows” in your industry and provide better solutions, you’ll stand out.
Nat Eliason is a great example of this. In his post about the Wiki Strategy — which includes creating a ton of content with a heavy internal link structure like Wikipedia –, he called out the sacred cow.
He said backlinks and typical SEO optimization aren’t all that important.
According to Nat, as long as you write the best content possible and cite credible sources, you can rank your posts without any backlinks.
Not only does this fly in the face of typical SEO advice. It’s useful and it works.
Here’s the problem, though: some of them just aren’t that good.
The marketing waters are…murky to say the least.
Some agencies have good intentions but can’t execute.
Some are flat out incompetent.
Agencies who can help you create stellar content are the exception, not the rule.
Business owners know this, as many of them have been burned by shoddy SEO and content marketing companies.
Fortunately, there are a few simple ways to find out if you’re working with the right agency.
Check Their Own Content Marketing Skills
We kid you not, there are some content marketing companies who don’t do it very well, or often, for themselves.
Would you take workout advice from someone who is out of shape?
Here are a few tells the agency you’re working with isn’t cut out for the job:
Thin content – content length is a ranking factor. If the company you want to work with doesn’t write 1800+ word long guides and posts, run.
Unoriginal content – read and analyze the style and voice of the content on agency websites. If theirs is dry and drab, why would yours be different?
No proof – if you don’t see reviews, testimonials, and case studies, there’s a good chance there aren’t any
Choosing an agency to help with content marketing is a big decision, don’t make it lightly.
Want to ‘feel us out’? Fill out the form below and get one of our marketing proposals, 100% free:
Your Content Marketing Strategy is Off Target
Everything in your content campaign should strive toward an ultimate goal.
This could be traffic.
Or leads.
Or sales.
Figure out the metrics that make sense and measure the success of your campaign by them.
If you notice the strategy is working, consider this: you’re targeting the wrong people, writing the wrong content, or sending out content at the wrong time.
Targeting the Wrong People
We’re an SEO company.
Naturally, we’d love to rank on the first page of Google for the phrase “SEO.”
But if we did, would it be worth the effort to get there?
Someone searching the phrase “SEO” could be doing so for a number of reasons, many of which have nothing to do with becoming a lead or a sale for you (not that this always matters, but still).
Instead of trying to rank for broad keywords with many different types of search intent, we focus on keywords that complement broader topics like SEO and content marketing.
Long-tail keywords are more targeted and have a narrower audience, meaning you can create content that better matches what searchers are looking for.
Writing the Wrong Content
Each industry has its own standards for content marketing.
If you’re running a Pizza shop in Boise Idaho, you don’t need to write a 3,000-word treatise on pizza toppings to rank well.
If you’re in a competitive and information heavy industry like we are, you’ll have to write 10x content to rank.
Either way – the lesson is the same. See what content is already doing well, emulate what works, and add more to make yours stand out.
Sending Out Content at the Wrong Time
An awareness funnel shows the process people go through before they trust you enough to become a lead or buy your product/service:
If you sent the right content at the wrong stage, it won’t have the effect you want it to have.
This is why it’s important to create a digital marketing strategy from start to finish before you start creating content.
You need each stage of the funnel ready to go when the time comes with the right content for each stage.
Your 1 Track Mind Gets You in Trouble
Creating more content isn’t the solution to all your woes.
Some people think creating a bunch of content will magically make their site explode with traffic and get more sales and customers.
This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Content marketing isn’t just about writing content. It’s about experimenting with different strategies and iterating over time.
Too many marketers and business owners are running on the content treadmill.
It’s time to step away and analyze your results.
Here are some useful tips.
Use This Technique Improve Your Rankings Fast
The easiest way to get more out of your content marketing strategy?
Improve the content you already have.
If you’ve been creating content for a while, odds are you have pages that are ranking well.
Why not just make those pages better?
“Because marketers keep yelling at me to create more content!”
Ok, don’t listen to them. Listen to me.
Make Your Content Visually Stunning and 10x Your UX
Design and user experience play a huge role in SEO and content marketing.
Make sure your website loads lighting fast, has interesting media and use different techniques to make your content appealing.
Look at this example by Ramit Sethi at I Will Teach You to be Rich.
His personal finance ultimate guide goes from bland and boring to exciting, not just with content, but design:
Notice the unique way he breaks up with words with design and adds calls to actions:
If you can think of ways to go above and beyond with design, you can outshine the competition.
Harness the Power of LSI Keywords
Remember earlier when we told you that your blog posts and content pages can rank for more than one keyword at once?
You can take those secondary – LSI Keywords – and add them back into your content.
If you use a tool like Ahrefs, the process is simple.
Enter the URL for a piece of content into the Ahrefs dashboard and click on organic keywords:
Then, find the keywords ranking from positions 4-20 for that keyword (keywords on page 1 and 2 excluding the top 3 positions):
Use the keywords you see and:
Add them to your body content
Add them to headings
Create entire new sections based off of LSI keywords
Remix, Rematch, Combine, Create
You can get a lot more mileage from your content by simply…being more creative.
Content marketing is frustrating when you continue to use the same tired strategies and content over and over again.
The good news? There are plenty of ways to reinvent your content marketing strategy, techniques, and the content itself.
Combine Content
Often, you have too many pieces of content competing for attention because they’re too similar.
Better to just combine them. Nathan Gotch with Gotch SEO calls this The Cake Technique:
Find similar content assets
Choose the most authoritative one
Combine the content and 301 redirect the old URLs to the new, monster-sized content asset
Recycle Content
There’s no rule saying you only have to publish content on your own website.
There are other websites who will let you republish your work on their platform.
Medium is an example of this. It has an important tool that lets you publish your content on Medium without suffering a duplicate content penalty.
The import feature automatically adds a “rel canonical” tag to the republished version of your post, which lets the search engines know which piece of content to rank.
Remix Content
A single blog post can be turned into…
A video:
Several visuals for social media:
An infographic:
And more.
You can use one single piece of content in a variety of ways.
Conclusion
Content marketing is a long game.
You need patience, skills, and lots effort to succeed.
But it can be done. Make these fixes to your content and watch the ranking and traffic roll in over time.
What is your biggest challenge when it comes to creating content for your business?
When you build a well-designed and user-friendly website because you want your visitors to have a great experience, you get “SEO-credit” in the form of “dwell time” and a low “bounce-rate.”
When you create content people want to share and link to, your site builds authority naturally.
The better your product itself, the easier it is to get positive engagement both online and word of mouth, which helps boost the “engagement signals” Google uses to rank websites.
All of our tips on how to promote your business revolve around putting your customers first.
…But Your Product Has to Follow Through
Here is an aspect of business promotion that goes overlooked — improving your product or service.
Have you been going the extra mile with customer service?
Are you actively listening to customer discussion and feedback?
When was the last time you did a deep analysis of product development?
When you start to hear back from customers online, listen to them. Engage with them.
Take their experiences to heart when they discuss your product, for good or bad.
And when you do improve your product or service, promote the heck out of it. Get that message out. Let the customers know you listened and you acted.
Nothing compares to the reputation of a business that’s sincerely tuned into its customer base. That good sentiment is invaluable in a market that increasingly rewards companies with transparent operations.
Smart digital marketing will take that sentiment, amplify it, and share it with as many potential customers as possible.
#1 – Invest in Your Website
When it comes to promoting your business online, all roads should lead to your website.
Why?
Your website is the one piece of the internet you totally control. You own it.*
Social media can drive engagement with your business, but you’ll never have 100% control of those spaces.
When you invest in your website, you build equity for the long-term. You develop an asset that never stops working for you. You build a home base for your customers.
Build a beautiful, easy-to-use website, and fill it with content that’s useful for your customers.
*(Or you should own it. All too often we’ve seen small businesses pay a monthly fee to a web development company for a custom website. NEVER do this! If you decide to engage an agency for a custom web site, make sure you 100% own it.)
#2 – Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This is an example from one of our clients, demonstrating about a 3x increase in organic traffic. Organic SEO will still work well in 2020, but it’s going to get harder as Google (likely) exerts more influence on its results.
SEO continues to be relevant in 2020, and you should still (mostly) care about Google, whose sites receive over 90% of search queries.
Many people nowadays use Google search and then find their answer without actually visiting a website.
Google continues to grow as an answer service rather than as a simple (but massive) index.
Still, organic SEO drives traffic to your site—but your SEO has to be smart. You must be able to identify relevant keyphrases with strong click-through rates.
Organic SEO will build equity in your site, keeping it working for you in the long-haul. That’s why we recommend organic SEO over pay-per-click ads in many cases.
A couple of factors to keep in mind:
Your market – what keywords do your customers use when searching for services or products you offer?
Competition – Who else is ranking high for your best keywords?
ROI – Some industries have searches with more “buyer intent” than others, meaning people use search to make purchasing decisions more in some industries than others
Organic SEO is STILL a great way to promote your business online, but it’s getting harder in 2020 and will continue to do so.
#3 – Reviews
Google and other search engines use online reviews as a ranking signal.
You should seek reviews on these platforms from your customers.
Also, reviews are a basic kind of social proof, demonstrating your quality.
To get those reviews, you have to have an awesome product or service.
Here are some quick tips for improving your product/service to get more reviews:
Actively seek feedback from your customers and use it to improve your product/service
Make sure to ask for reviews after your service has been performed or product delivered
Follow up with customers regularly (for long-term customers)
Aim to have the best customer service possible (this is not a trivial insight)
#4 – Brand-Building
Marketing expert Neil Patel wrote an article about the future of SEO. In it, he mentioned brand building as one of the top ways to promote your business.
Why is brand building important?
Google trusts established brands.
If you have an established brand, your website has a better chance to rank.
If you create a product or service people rave about, more people will search for your business online by name.
The more searches your business gets by name, the more brand credibility it has.
Focus on putting yourself on the map in your industry with both product/service quality and digital marketing.
#5 – Content Marketing
“Content marketing” means producing content (blogs, videos, graphics, memes, etc.) that resonates with your customer base.
Content marketing is NOT writing a blog post about the 10 reasons someone should buy your product. That’s an advertisement (and a bad one, too).
Content marketing is the long game. Imagine it like you’re building a fanbase for your business. You’re building a following of people who are interested in what you say and do.
You build that fanbase using consistent, engaging content.
And remember: “engaging” is determined by your audience!
Content marketing from a CNC manufacturer might mean white papers and case studies. Something a purchasing manager at an OEM would like.
Content marketing for a B2C company like Casper, who sells mattresses and sleep products, looks like this:
An instructional “how-to” video like this is useful content that adds value for your customer. It’s not a straight-up advertisement. It makes your business look good, establishes authority, and keeps customers tuned in.
Content marketing has mixed results for different companies.
You need to plan your content around your business as a whole.
You need to keep the following in mind when creating your content:
How familiar is the visitor with you when interacting with a certain piece of content?
What type of content is needed to build more awareness so visitors know, like, and trust your company?
What are the goals of your campaign – building an email list, increasing brand awareness, increasing conversions for a particular service or product?
What problems, pain points, aspirations, and desires are your content addressing?
Who does your content need to target (this changes based on the stages of awareness)?
Content marketing is a topic worthy of an ultimate guide of its own.
The bottom line – content marketing is a tool that works for any business when done the right way.Top of Form
Next we’ll look at some specific forms of content – especially what will be most relevant in 2020.
#6 – Optimized Blog
Blogs will continue to be a relevant way to promote your business in 2020.
An optimized, consistent blog is the backbone of your website’s organic SEO.
A solid blog takes time and a regular commitment to research, writing, and revising successful posts.
Here’s what an optimized blog can do to promote your business online:
Generate traffic. Blog posts should target keywords that relate to your business and that are frequently searched. Blog posts can be great ways to target longtail keywords.
Build an email list for email marketing (see more below). Write engaging and useful content for your audience, and they’ll be more willing to sign up for email communications.
Drive conversions. Blog posts cannot simply be advertisements for your business. However, they can drive good traffic to the parts of your website that are designed to convert visitors.
#7 – Video
There are two great frontiers in digital marketing in 2020: video and podcasts. Let’s talk video first.
Look at these video marketing statistics:
The 25-34 (millennial) age group watches the most online videos and men spend 40% more time watching videos on the internet than women. (Wordsteam)
Cisco has projected that more than 80% of all Internet traffic will be video by 2021. (Impact)
45% of people watch an hour or more of video per day (Hubspot)
There are many different ways to promote through video.
You can add a humorous twist and make creative commercials like Dollar Shave Club:
You can make “how-to” videos for using your product:
Or, you can leverage video in paid ads to grab people’s attention:
#8 – Podcasts
Podcasts are becoming the next big frontier in online promotion.
The audience for podcasting is growing significantly.
32% of Americans over 12 listened to a podcast monthly
41% of Americans say they’re listening to podcasts more than they did last year
Americans averaged SEVEN podcasts per week during the period studied
What does this tell us?
There is surging demand for podcast content.
Podcasts are becoming the new radio – but much cheaper, easier, and with far greater reach.
If your company can pull it off, a regular podcast can be the center of your content marketing strategy. A good podcast will build an audience and establish your brand’s authority.
Don’t have the resources to do a good podcast regularly?
Few do.
However, you can still promote your business with podcast advertisements.
Many podcasters include advertisements in their regular shows.
If you can identify niche podcasters with audiences relevant to your business, they can be a goldmine for targeted advertising.
#9 – Infographics
Infographics are another engaging medium. Here’s an example from a demo version of our employee referral tool – Referral Factory Pro:
Like all your content, a good infographic should add value for your audience. Teach them something. Show them something useful. Don’t simply advertise your business with an infographic.
Share a good infographic through your online channels – blogs, social media – to engage with your audience and link back to your website.
The bottom line – the more relevant and engaging media you can use the better.
Each of these content marketing channels should lead back to your home base, your website.
Not only is it informative and entertaining for your visitors, but it helps improve important SEO metrics like:
Dwell time
Bounce rate
Total time spent on site
#10 – Email Marketing
If you don’t already do it, you might not think about emails when you think of how to promote your business.
But why should you do it?
For the same reason you should invest in your website:
When you invest in building email lists, you create a long-lasting asset for your business.
“More than 50 percent of U.S. respondents check their personal email account more than 10 times a day, and it is by far their preferred way to receive updates from brands.”
“59% of respondents say marketing emails influence their purchase decisions.”
“>59% of marketers say email is their biggest source of ROI.”
These stats are HUGE—and only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to email promotion.
Just about everyone today has an email and pays attention to it.
If you can get them to trust and value your brand, they’ll be more than willing to share their email address.
Implement smart (read: not annoying spam emails) marketing, and this list can generate leads and repeat sales.
To build this list, you need compelling, useful content. You need to demonstrate to your audience that you’re worth listening to.
The takeaway: email marketing is one of the best ways to promote your business. It’s not going away anytime soon. Invest in it–though it’ll take time to create an email list, it’ll be worth it.
#11 – Social Media Marketing (duh)
Yeah, of course social media plays a big part in promoting your business online.
It IS useful, but don’t come to wholly rely on it and expect it to do all the heavy lifting.
Again, invest in your website first — the piece of the internet you do own.
You can spend a lot of money on social media channels, but you’re not building a long-term asset like you would for a website.
That said….
Instagram is top-notch for visual marketing, so make-up would look great there.
For B2B companies, LinkedIn is your place to be.
You’ve probably said to yourself “I need to promote my business on social media more.”
But which platforms are right for you?
Each comes with its own pros and cons.
Let’s take a look.
#12 – Facebook
Facebook has excellent audience targeting features for paid advertisements.
It’s still wise to have a Facebook page for your business to get likes and reviews, which count as a ranking signal for Google.
Bottom line: You should probably have an active Facebook page for your business.
The best organic activities on Facebook are:
Sharing content and media – blog posts, videos, and other forms of content should be shared on Facebook
Reviews – encourage people to leave reviews on Facebook and respond to them
Engagement – if you have a community based-product, e.g., an education business for parents and children, answering questions and interacting with users works well on the platform
Facebook does tout one of the top social media paid advertising platforms.
Here are some excellent articles on creating Facebook ads the right way:
If you have a B2B business, you should be promoting it on LinkedIn.
Over the years, LinkedIn has improved its features in both paid advertisements and organic reach.
The trend shows LinkedIn is gearing up to become a much more user-friendly and community-oriented platform, shifting away from its old identity as a dry B2b social media company.
While companies like Facebook and Instagram had explosive growth, LinkedIn has played the long game.
LinkedIn has been steadily building its userbase and functionality for years. It’s getting more solid as time goes on. That makes LinkedIn more than worthwhile to continue using in 2020.
Marketing expert, Neil Patel, has been doing a ton of videos on LinkedIn. Always pay attention to the early adopters in marketing trends:
Notice the engagement on a simple and short video.
If you can create bite-sized content:
Short videos
Short excerpts of posts
Shared posts with insights
You can reap the rewards of LinkedIn’s algorithms.
Look at the insane amount of reach from one shared article:
All B2B brands should utilize sharing, curating, and storytelling to promote their business on LinkedIn in 2019.
#15 – Twitter
Twitter engagement varies from industry to industry.
In the content marketing and SEO space, Twitter is a great tool for promoting content about marketing because users engage with it.
Businesses with a heavy focus on media do well on Twitter:
Online magazines, public figures, marketing companies, authors, news outlets, and personal finance experts are all examples of businesses who can benefit from Twitter.
Local carpet cleaning companies? Not so much.
If your business uses content marketing as the main tool, Twitter is a great place to promote your work.
Think Long-Term
If you can’t think long-term, digital marketing won’t work for you.
Neither will marketing in general.
Digital marketing isn’t a cookie cutter solution.
You have to learn what works — and what doesn’t — after a long period of time.
How long, you ask?
Well, when we work with companies, we tell them SEO and Content marketing takes 12 months before the campaign fully kicks in.
It can take even longer to build a stellar brand and reputation that stands out above all the competition.
It’s counterintuitive. Some of the most important aspects of marketing have nothing to do with the marketing tactics.
They have everything to with your vision, outlook, tenacity, persistence, and willingness to collaborate with other smart companies like digital marketing agencies.
That’s why we call ourselves “strategic partners” to our clients.
It takes more than tactics to succeed online. It takes a level of dedication and patience that doesn’t come easily for everyone.
This also makes digital marketing easy, in the sense that most companies aren’t willing to invest the right time and resources into their marketing.
If you differentiate yourself, you can win in 2019.
Commit to Promoting Your Business in 2019
Above all else, you need to commit to promoting your business online to succeed in 2019.
The biggest marketing secret isn’t a secret at all.
Either on your own or with the help of a smart digital marketing agency like MLT Group, make this your year to invest more in marketing than any year previous.
If you are in a competitive niche, like real estate, it is going to be difficult to rank highly and get traffic for the common and competitive search terms in your niche (unless you run PPC ads). You can get around this, however, with useful tools and the right real estate SEO strategy.
Allow us to explain how this ties into SEO for real estate.
Google uses a variety of factors to rank website pages and there are a few key factors they use that make it hard for smaller businesses to rank for competitive search terms as part of the realtor SEO process.
Some of those factors are:
Authority – SEO authority is measured by many factors including backlinks, citations, content, site architecture, and much more. Big brands check the boxes across the board.
Brand recognition – Google shows preferences for businesses and websites with high brand recognition
Service and product type – Certain types of services and businesses make it difficult for small businesses to rank because of the way they choose to display listings on the search engines results page (SERP)
Let’s take a look at each factor one by one.
Authority
While Google doesn’t share its ranking recipe with us, many smart SEOs have created useful metrics. Moz uses domain authority and page authority to help show which sites have more authority than others.
Domain authority – This measure calculates the authority of your domain name (your website as a whole.) They use the number of inbound links, otherwise known as backlinks, the age of your domain name, your internal linking profile, and more to create this score.
Page authority – This measure calculates the authority of a single page on your website. They use the same factors above to calculate your score, but on a page by page basis.
Let’s take a look at the DA and PA of some of the websites that rank well for competitive search terms like “Homes for sale in Minneapolis” and “Homes for sale in Minnesota.”
These are very valuable terms, as they receive a combined total of 15,000 searches per month.
Here is a screenshot from the Moz analysis tool that shows the DA and PA for a website page that ranks highly for these terms:
Zillow.com
Domain Authority and Page Authority
The website example has a high domain authority score.
Scores of 90 and above are reserved for major brands like the companies above, CNN, Facebook, Twitter, and Google itself.
Page authority scores of 50 and above are also very difficult to achieve
The odds of a smaller real estate company achieving those scores are slim to none.
Linking Domains
The website page example shows hundreds of different linking domains to the page. The more sites that link to an individual page, the better. Big brand website pages have no problem receiving links from various domains because they’re well known and established.
The website also has a high number of individual links pointing to each page.
In our example, we’ll use a score pulled from a realtor website in the area (that doesn’t have proper SEO yet):
This score is typical for an individual realtor website and it’s no match for the big brands who rank for these terms.
In fact, the entire first page of the search engine results page for these terms feature big brand companies with very high scores:
According to most SEO data, if you’re not in the top 3 results on a SERP, you won’t receive much traffic:
While ranking on page one for these terms would help you gain a large amount of traffic, you’d need to spend the same amount of money, time, and resources as these big brands and it would take a very, very long time to do so. These brands have been established on Google and other search engines for decades.
Real estate SEO requires you to find unique opportunities to rank in search through long-tail keywords, which we’ll discuss later on in the post.
Other search engine results page factors
By looking at these results page examples, you’ll notice the following:
Brand recognition – For competitive terms, big brands get special treatment. Why? Because they know they can trust the credibility of big brands. Oftentimes, their name recognition alone will push them to the top of search results, even if they’re not actively using the type of real estate SEO techniques we’ll show you.
Service and product type – Google also knows people searching for homes in large metro areas want to browse lots of listings. Industries that exhibit this behavior from searches, like real estate, will always show preference to aggregates like these.
Fortunately, there are techniques to help you rank highly for a number of medium and lower competition phrases.
For small businesses in competitive industries, targeting a large number of medium and low competition phrases gives you a better chance of gaining more traffic as a whole.
A real estate SEO expert realizes a little extra thinking is needed and the right techniques can help any real estate website get the traffic it needs to grow their business.
Let’s take a look at some of our best real estate SEO hacks.
Realtor SEO Step 1 – Find Long Tail Key Phrases
The question is, if you can’t rank for the phrases you think are best suited to your business, what do you try to rank for?
If you think outside the box, you can find dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of keywords with decent traffic volume.
First, you want to find key phrases related to your business based on the main topic, but not directly targeting it.
Here are some low to medium competition real estate SEO keywords we found based on the topic “Homes for sale in Minneapolis”
Twin Cities real estate (220 searches per month)
Central MN homes for sale (220 searches per month)
Minneapolis lots for sale (800 searches per month)
Northern mn lake homes for sale (170 searches per month)
Lake homes for sale MN (4400 searches per month)
Lake homes for sale southern MN (170 searches per month)
Lakefront homes for sale MN (320 searches per month)
Lake property MN (320 searches per month)
Houses for sale south Minneapolis (480 searches per month)
Lake cabins for sale in Minneapolis (1000 searches per month)
Notice how each term listed above didn’t attempt to compete for direct variations of the main term “homes for sale in Minneapolis,” like “homes for sale in Eagan, MN”
Why? Because these variations [competitive keyword] + [suburb] are all dominated in real estate SEO by the same big brands above. They have an infinite number of listings and variables to create pages that rank.
What you’re looking for are terms that feature individual small business on page one.
Type each researched phrase into Google. If you see an individual small business appear, you have a shot at ranking.
Notice the insights from our research. The low to medium competition phrases we found didn’t mention the main phrase head on, but rather niche topics surrounding the phrases like:
Home types
Regions of the state instead of the exact city names
Nicknames in the industry/state people are familiar with like Twin Cities
The big brands usually focus on competitive terms only, because they can. They dump tons of data onto their websites and, voila, they rank.
The lower to medium competition phrases contain topics as opposed to overt key phrases.
Bonus SEO Techniques
If you get even more outside the box and double down on your research, you can find tons of awesome related topics people are searching for on Google.
Think outside the box. What are some topics people might search that aren’t competitive keywords?
Look at more of our research findings:
Best neighborhoods in Minneapolis (880 searches per month)
Best schools in Minnesota (880 searches per month)
Best neighborhoods in St. Paul (140 searches per month)
Best places to live in Minnesota (1300 searches per month)
Cost of living in Minnesota (1300 searches per month)
Benefits of Using Long Tail Real Estate SEO ‘Topics’ over High Competition Keywords
When you create content around long-tail topics instead of high competition keywords, you stand a much higher chance of getting traffic from search engines.
Also, you are getting a much more targeted and qualified searcher.
Think of someone looking for “homes for sale in Minneapolis.”
They could be ready to buy a home or they could just be casually browsing. They’re also reaching results pages with tons of results, which can be too overwhelming for some.
Now, imagine you’re the person searching for phrases like “Minnesota lake homes” “best neighborhoods in Minnesota,” and “best schools in Minnesota”
Someone who performs all these searches might be seriously thinking about buying a home in the area.
If your website pages rank for these topics, you’re giving the searcher exactly what they want.
They don’t have to sift through mountains of data and content to get the answer they’re looking for.
These topics also signal a very valuable factor — search intent. Search intent is the reason behind the user’s search. Targeted searches mean a higher level of search intent, which means you’re getting a more qualified lead.
Imagine this same user not only searching for multiple topics but continuing to find your business at the top of the results pages for each topic.
Supply them with very targeted, informative, and useful content and your business will be top of mind.
Even if they don’t engage with you right away, where do you think they’ll visit when they’re really ready to buy?
The big, bland, uninformative aggregate which may or may not have a Minnesota lake home in a great neighborhood with a good school — where even if they do find this perfect home it will be a needle in a haystack — or your website that’s already proven to give them the exact answers they were looking for?
Step 3 – Create Content that’s 10x Better than the Competition
Long tail key phrases, or topics, aren’t anything new.
Hundreds of SEO’s, marketers, and agencies talk about using them.
Many people do try ranking for long tail key phrases, but they stop short of what they need to do to reach the top of the results.
Here’s what a typical marketer would do:
Find a long tail key phrase
Create a piece of content around that key phrase
Wait for the rankings to skyrocket and traffic to roll in
A real estate SEO expert would take it further. These techniques might work for non-competitive industries, but to do well in competitive industries, you need to do more.
This is where the power of content marketing comes in.
Content marketing is the process of creating content to engage, educate, and persuade readers..
The rules for success are the same in content marketing as they are for … anything else.
You have to work harder than your competition and provide more value. The idea of content marketing sounds nice, but when it comes to doing it well, most won’t put in the required effort.
This is why this real estate SEO technique works so well. Most people aren’t willing to do it. The competition for low-hanging fruit — results anyone can get — is ten times higher than the competition for results that require effort.
This is the most counterintuitive aspect of content marketing, the higher you aim, the easier it is to compete.
At MLT Group, we provide realtor SEO services and can create a real estate SEO strategy just like this. If you’re curious to learn more, send us a note.
Here are the steps you can take to create ‘10x’ content to blow your competition out of the water.
Visit your competitors’ pages and analyze them
Let’s look at the top result for “Lake Homes in Minnesota.”
It has strong authority scores, but these can be overcome:
Here’s a screenshot of the top ranking web page:
Let’s analyze what it does well:
Focus – you can tell the entire site is focused on one subject
Search filter – while they list thousands of results, they provide an easy to use search feature
Authority factors – as stated above, the site is pretty authoritative
To outdo this result, do everything it does well and then add to it. Fill in the gaps and do what your competition isn’t doing.
Some ideas for this are:
Homepage results – This result is a homepage. As it stands, many home pages still rank well, but topic-focused pages with great content marketing are trending up
Lack of related topics – This website mostly shows listings. It doesn’t contain much of the useful and informative topic information we discussed earlier
In the next step, we’ll show you how to create a page that Google loves to compete with this result.
Create 10x Content With Tons of Rankings Signals
Let’s say we’re creating a page for “Minnesota Lake Homes.”
How can we create a page Google loves?
Increase Content Length
Studies show Google prefers long-form content. One study showed the average page one results have 1,800 + words of content.
One way to outrank your competitors is to simply double or triple the amount of content they have on their page.
You don’t just want to create content that rambles on. You want to make it both useful and relevant to the search engines. The next step will show you how to do just that.
Find Related Phrases
Take the main topic you’re creating the page on and type it into Google. Scroll to the bottom of the results page to the ‘people also searched for’ section:
These related searches are known as LSI keywords. If you add these keywords to your content, it helps Google better understand what the page is about.
Bonus tip: take each of these LSI keywords and put them into a keyword suggestion tool like Ubersuggest to find even more related keywords to your related keywords. Then, you can map out the LSI keywords as topic headings and use their related keywords for the content within those headings.
Create a Page With Solid SEO Structure
The main topic of your page is “Lake homes in Minnesota.” You’ll want to mention this phrase a few times in your content.
Then, you can use the LSI keywords to create an outline for your 10x content page. Here’s an example of how we might do it.
Page Title – Lake Homes in Minnesota
In the opening section, you can create an introduction for the entire page. Make sure to use the main target keyword in the first sentence of the page because it is a ranking factor for Google.
Add heading – Lake Homes by Region
In this section, you can mention that you service regions across the state of Minnesota. Then, you can add subheadings for each major region.
Examples:
Lake Homes in North Central MN
Lake Homes in the Twin Cities
Lake Homes in Southern MN
Each of these regional sections could include featured listings from the are and a brief introduction for each region discussing what’s awesome about living there.
Then, for each regional listing, you can display all the individual cities within the region. You can add links to each city that takes users to a page displaying listings narrowed down to each city.
Example:
Lake homes in Wayzata
Lake homes in Minnetonka
Lake homes in Wabasha
Bonus tip: when users click on each individual city, what should they find? Another page with awesome content, featured listings and sub-topics. In the future, when your site is more authoritative, each page could rank for a long tail keyword.
Add heading – Lake Homes by Type
In this section, you can write a paragraph about the different types of lake homes you provide. You can show a featured listings section with one home of each type to explore
Also, you can create sub-topics based on your research, list them, and link them to pages with full listings for each type of lake home. Again, these pages will feature their own detailed, informative, and useful content.
You can repeat this process for every variable of region or type based on “lake homes in Minnesota.” Also, you can create headings around other useful and relevant topics like “best Minnesota neighborhoods” “best Minnesota schools” and “cost of living in Minnesota.” Each of these sections will have content tailored to areas near Lake homes.
Doing this will create a ‘resource hub.’
See this video from Moz for an explanation:
Google likes pages that layout information neatly and tell users exactly where they need to go for more detailed information.
Also, Google’s robots ‘crawl’, or scan, the pages of their website. If your content and link structure is too confusing, Google will stop crawling your pages, meaning your results won’t get indexed and rank on Google.
You can create these ‘resource hub’ pages for medium competition topics like “Lake Homes in Minnesota.”
Double Down
Over time, you can add unique individual pages for each LSI keyword and subtopic, giving you many opportunities to rank.
Again, even for these little niche pages, you want to 10x the content on those pages compared to your competition.
Underneath each of these niche topics, you can repeat the process and add more useful content, e.g., writing unique blog posts and linking to them from your niche page.
Here are some examples of real estate blog topics you could write about:
Best neighborhoods in the area
Top school districts
Tips on moving to a new city
This entire process will help your website cover a broad range of topics.
The cool part? The more you do this, the more opportunity each page of your website has to rank for dozens or even hundreds of keywords.
For real estate SEO, creating topic-based pages and subpages works much better than trying to rank for competitive terms. And, it creates a multiplier effect. Once Google crawls your page enough times, it’ll realize you’re a go-to resource, and it will start giving you preference over other websites.
Instead of wishing you could capture a share of the 15,000 searches for “homes in Minnesota,” you can get double the traffic by avoiding the strategy altogether.
Optimize Your Content on Each Page
After you’ve created your ‘resource hub’ page, make sure you still follow the basic on-site optimization steps:
Use your target keyword in the content
Use your target keyword in the meta description
Use your target keyword in headings
Save all images you add to the page under names that have keywords in them (Google can’t read images)
Link to other credible resources from your page, e.g., local newspapers, trusted local bloggers, Wikipedia, .gov and .edu websites.
Bonus Tips
You can use media, tools, and content structure to make your pages more useful and entertaining. This serves a major benefit.
These strategies keep users on your site longer and Google tracks time spent on your site as a factor.
It also helps you avoid a ‘bounce’ – when a user visits your site and leaves quickly – which is a negative ranking factor.
Use the following strategies:
Write short sentences
Use headings and bullet points to make your content easier to follow
If your page is very long, create a hyperlinked menu so users can pick and choose which sections to read without having to read
Add Google maps to your page
Add videos from your Youtube channel to your page (Google owns Youtube and prefers sites who display Youtube Videos)
Add visuals like images and infographics
Step 4 – Promote Your Content
This is the last leg of the race.
If you want to guarantee your pages will rank high, you want to promote your content and build relevant links from high-quality sources back to your pages.
Although backlinking isn’t the only SEO strategy you need in 2018, it’s still important
If you want high-quality links, you have to reach out to other websites and ask for them.
There are a few ways to find quality links.
Get Links from Your Competitors
You can enter your competitors’ website URLs into backlink research tools from companies like Moz, Ahrefs, and SEM rush. Find the websites who link to your competitors’ websites and present them your new, improved, 10x better version of content on the same subject.
A few of the sites you reach out to will link back to you.
You can repeat the process for each of the pages that rank on the first page.
Source Local Bloggers
You can reach out to local bloggers in the area and reach out to them.
Some good examples of types of local blogs you could reach out to:
mom blogs
tourist blogs
teaching blogs
You can reach out to each blog and attempt to get links in the following ways:
Find a related blog post and suggest one of your pages to link to as a bonus resource
Offer to write a guest post that relates to their blog topic and link it back to your website
Offer to pay for a sponsored post by the blogger themselves for a link back to your website
Use Google Alerts to Find Easy Linking Opportunities
Google Alerts is a tool you can use to get notifications whenever a site mentions a certain phrase.
You want to set Google alerts for your business time to get a link whenever someone mentions your business.
Also, you can enter some of your topics and related phrases. Whenever someone mentions the topics as part of their content, you can reach out with your useful resource to link to.
Promote Your Work On Social Media and Forums
You’ll want to share each piece of content you create on all your social media platforms. You can also use tools like Buffer to schedule multiple posts at once and share them repeatedly.
Find relevant forums surrounding your topic and post your content there as well.
Use Retargeting Facebook Ads to Follow Up With Visitors
If you install a tracking code on each of your ‘resource hub’ pages, individual topic pages, and blog posts, you can send them retargeting ads to bring them back to the site.
Step 5 – Wash, Rinse, Repeat
If you perform this process repeatedly you can start to rank for many topics and keywords in a matter of a few months.
If you continue to do it, your site will start to become more authoritative as a whole, making it possible for you to start ranking for competitive key phrases.
This strategy takes a lot of work. As a real estate business owner, you might not have the time to do it yourself.
That’s where our digital marketing agency comes in. We can implement the entire strategy we just showed you to help you dominate real estate SEO and SEM in your market and location.
Call us at 507-281-3490 or fill out this form and we’ll get back to you right away.
Instead of thinking of how much online marketing costs, think of how much it’s costing you not to market your business effectively online. Even if you have a steady client base, good service, or healthy revenue, chances are you’re leaving money on the table if you don’t get the most out of your web presence.
Here’s something we can agree on…
We live in a digital world. Keeping up with the trends in the marketplace won’t be optional much longer. Deep down, you know this, but we have some facts and data to back our findings.
Are you making one of these 5 online marketing mistakes?
Online Marketing Mistake # 1 – Not Having and Search Engine Optimized Website
Put yourself in your customer’s shoes for a second.
He or she is looking for a product or service you offer.
What do they do next?
Do they grab the nearest phone book? Look in the newspaper?
No. Either on their desktop or phone, they go to searching for information online.
They go to google and enter the service or product you buy into the search box — both paid and organic.. When they see the results, do they find your business?
This is someone with either the curiosity or intent to buy your product or service.
From a logical standpoint, it seems like a no-brainer to display your business in front of people who are already looking for what you have to offer, right?
If the idea of putting your products and services in front of people who are actively searching for them isn’t enough, consider some startling pieces of data:
How many leads and customers are you missing out on by not having an optimized site?
For example:
Let’s say you sell a product that costs $100. Let’s also say an average of 500 people searches for that product in your area.
The number one result receives 33 percent of all traffic to a results page. If you were the number one spot, you’d have 165 leads coming in every month. If you converted 10 percent of those leads into sales, you’re looking at $1,650/month and roughly $20k /year of extra sales and that’s from an optimized page for one product. Think of numbers like those with multiple products and/or services.
This example illustrates what we’ve been able to do for clients in various industries. Do the math. Think about how putting your business in front of hundreds or thousands of people will do for your revenue.
Online Marketing Mistake # 2 – Not Blogging
If you thought the search engine optimization statistics were startling, take a look at the data behind the magic powers of blogging:
First, search engines want to know you’re regularly updating the content on your website. Search engines use this as a ranking factor because they want help users to find businesses who are proactive about keeping their site information up to date.
Second, people want to know you’re proactive about keeping your site information up to date. If they visit your blog to find you haven’t posted anything new since 2012, what will they think about your business?
We know what you’re thinking. You don’t have time to write a new blog post once a week or once a month.
That’s where MLT Group comes in. We provide blogging and other content marketing services to help you work on your business instead of in your business.
Online Marketing Mistake # 3 – Having a Slow Website
Did you know your website loading speed directly affects where your website ranks on Google and other search engines?
Think about it.
Doesn’t it annoy you when a site loads slowly? Haven’t you clicked away from a slow loading site to find a faster one?
Google uses certain measures as clues to how fast your site loads including:
Bounce rate – A bounce means someone visits your site and leaves quickly. Slow loading websites cause bounces. Google penalizes your site for having a high bounce rate.
Time spent on site – Google and the other engines also monitor how long people stay on your website. The longer they stay the better. Having too many bounces reduces the average time spent on your site.
According to a study analyzing 143,827 different websites, there is a significant drop off in site loading speed after the top five ranking results. What does this mean? To compete with other businesses trying to rank highly in Google, your site must be coded for fast loading speeds.
At MLT group, we use proven hosting technology and code all of our websites to load quickly. This creates a positive user experience and a site Google goes gaga for.
Online Marketing Mistake # 4 – Treating Your Site Content As An Afterthought
Words are so prevalent they almost go unnoticed.
You see them in emails, ads, on websites, and seemingly everywhere you turn.
What if we told you the words you used on your site could mean the difference between a sale and a customer clicking away from your site?
Far too often, business owners treat website content as an afterthought instead of a core piece of their marketing. This is a mistake because words have power.
Does our team use a few of these remarkably effective and authoritative psychological content techniques? Maybe 😉
The point is this — unless you’ve dove deeply into the untapped power of content marketing, you have no idea how powerful it can be for your business.
Think about it.
While your competitors use the same old cliches and buzzwords to describe their business — words every business uses — like quality, efficiency, and customer service, you can shock and awe your site visitors with stellar content.
Maybe you’re no Hemingway. No worries. We employ a tightly knit group of a few dozen copywriters with expert digital marketing knowledge who can help your business attract and engage customers.
Here’s how it works. You sit down with our head editor. She interviews you. We take your answers and spin them into content gold.
Noticing a trend here? Working with a smart digital marketing company fills the gap between the results you want and the methods needed to achieve them.
Online Marketing Mistake # 5 – Ignoring Design and Multi-Media
Maybe you have a website, but it’s — to put it nicely — outdated.
If you think you can just get around to redesigning your site, think again.
Remember those two important metrics we mentioned earlier — bounce rate and time on site? Your website design affects both metrics in various ways.
If your design isn’t appealing, some visitors will visit it and leave creating a bounce. If on the other hand, you have an attractive website, visitors will stay longer and increase your average time on site statistics.
In addition to having an appealing design, you can incorporate other multi-media elements to keep your visitors’ eyes glued to your website:
Video – From commercials to product tutorials, video helps inform your users and gives them another option to learn more about your business aside from reading
Infographics – Infographics provide an effective way to display your companies benefits. For example, sharing an infographic about the benefits of working for your company can increase employee referrals
Images – Images on pages, in blog posts, and in photo galleries add another visually appealing element and can also show your product or services benefits. For example, you can display before and after pictures of a service you provide for homes.
The Bottom Line
Online marketing matters.
Investing in online marketing will provide the return you’re looking for as long as you do it the right way.
You have to work with a company you can trust. One who has intimate knowledge of the space.
How can you know who to trust? Take a look at the companies’ own online marketing.
With each update, business owners like you must alter your strategies to keep getting traffic, leads, and sales to your website through Google.
What’s the SEO focus in 2018? Google wants quality content and not just written content, either. Video and multimedia are now cornerstones of both SEO, paid marketing, and content marketing. Just take a look at the numbers.
59% of those surveyed in this study agree that if both text and video are available on the same topic, they are more likely to choose video.
Social video generates 1200% more shares than written content and images combined.
Video on a landing page can increase conversions by 80% or more.
Landing pages with videos are 53% more likely to show up on page 1 of the SERP.
Blog posts with videos receive triple the number of backlinks as blog posts without video.
Are you missing out on web visits and leads if you’re not using video? The numbers say ‘yes’ emphatically.
You can use Video in two different ways — as an SEO tool or as part of your content marketing.
How to Use Video SEO to Drive Traffic to Your Website
You’d have to be living under a rock to ignore the fact that ranking highly on Google can send visitors to your website.
What many business owners don’t know, however, is that Youtube – a company owned by Google – has its own unique ecosystem and search function with comparable power to send new leads to your website.
Imagine the following scenario. You’re an e-commerce store selling uniquely branded makeup. The makeup industry is one where video search makes a huge impact. Just look at these results for the query ‘makeup tutorial’:
The top search results for this query have millions of views. If your company creates makeup tutorials, ranks them highly, and siphons some traffic from your videos to your e-commerce store, you have the potential to dramatically increase your sales.
Even better videos for certain subjects — mainly how to material — ranks at the top of search results themselves:
Here’s an example of video potential for a healthy snack company:
1 million views for top results
And one for a fish and tackle company:
The bottom line is this — if you have creative videos to share, you can use them to drive traffic with video SEO.
Some key points to understand about Video SEO using Youtube are:
Videos can be optimized – Videos on Youtube utilize titles, descriptions, and tags for SEO purposes. The same methods of keyword research and use of key phrase rich content derived from website SEO apply to Video SEO.
Youtube uses similar ranking factors – Google uses time spent on page as a ranking factor for websites. Youtube uses time spent watching videos as a ranking factor. Google measures click-through rates of search engine results pages as a ranking factor. Youtube does the same. Google measures engagement as a ranking factor and experts say social sharing matters. Youtube ranks videos using similar metrics like comments per video.
Content is king – When it comes to ranking highly on Google, nothing is more important than the quality of the content itself, especially with new Google updates like Rank Brain suggesting depth and quality of content will soon become the top ranking factor. Conversely, your videos must also provide content that informs your audience about the topic you optimize your videos for. Yes, Youtube can track the content of your videos just like Google tracks keywords in your content.
The steps to building a traffic engine using Youtube and Video SEO are:
Do your research – In search engine optimization, keyword research is the cornerstone of a successful SEO campaign. You must know how many people are searching for certain terms to decide how to optimize the pages on your site. For Video SEO, follow tried and true methods like brainstorming, using the Google keyword planner and following suggested results on Google search engine results pages. After you have your list of words, take them to Youtube and test your results by typing the researched phrases into Youtube search box. Youtube has a different results page and the words you research won’t have the exact number of viewers as they do searches on Google. Using the results strategy helps you see if there are viable numbers of viewers for your topic.
Leverage existing videos – If you have company videos available that match researched topics, use them! Make sure the video title, descriptions, and tags include an optimized keyword. For each video, you’re allowed to enter a URL in the description – this is where you want to add your site’s URL. You can also add calls to action within the video itself. You can find a guide for doing that here.
Create new videos – If after doing your research you discover a huge potential for site traffic and views, consider shooting new professional quality videos. Using a video production company like MLT group will help your videos rank higher on both Google and Youtube because high-quality videos increase viewer engagement and retention.
Promote your videos – Share your videos on social media repeatedly, send them to your email list if you have one, and embed them into the content on your website. Speaking of the last point, there are more benefits to video than ranking on Youtube and Google.
How Video Has Become a Content Marketing and SEO Staple
We’re long past the days of newspapers. Even “newer” methods of content creation like blogging are seeing rapid changes. Video has become a major part of the content marketing conversation and will only grow from here.
Let’s just take a look at a few of the goals of content marketing and SEO:
Engage your target audience – You want your target audience to know, like, and trust you. What better way to build a relationship with them than provide your content in a medium that’s both easy to digest and fun to use?
Keep visitors on your website – You want visitors to stay on your website for long periods because Google uses this as a ranking factor. Users have been known to visit sites and leave quickly. If however, while reading your content a user discovers a video in the middle of the page, they may find themselves staying on your site well past the industry standard two to three-minute mark for effective SEO.
Give the people want they want – The easiest way to turn off site visitors is to give them content in a way they don’t want to receive it – think providing a written manual where a video could be much more informative. Some people simply don’t enjoy reading, so video provides all-inclusive option to attract new visitors, leads, and customers.
Blendtec provides a great example of video content marketing.
How do you market something as simple as a blender?
Blendtec thought outside the box and created a video of their blender shredding different items like iPhones. The campaign went viral.
When you think of marketing your business, don’t look for the obvious only. Be creative with your marketing because it’s more fun for customers and ‘Mother Google’ wants you to as well.
Let MLT Group Take Your Digital Marketing to the Next Level
If this post made you interested in the power of video production, let’s talk about creating amazing video together.
Thinking of putting together a cool campaign to build buzz for your business? We offer full marketing strategy, social media management, and an entire suite of services to draw eyeballs to your business.
Does the thought of keyword research and SEO make your head spin a little? No worries, that’s what the pros are for. From start to finish, we can help you achieve results that help you grow your business.
When you’re looking for a digital marketing company to work with, check their digital marketing strategy.
With literally thousands of pieces of content, we aim to prove we’re the cutting edge and go to option in Rochester, Minneapolis, the Twin Cities, and across the U.S.
You’ve made it to the end of this post, which means you’re interested. If you’re interested, what you do next is simple. Pick up the phone, call 507-281-3490 and learn how to skyrocket your business’s marketing.
The process can be complex, but there are a few simple steps you must follow.
In today’s post, we’ll walk through each step and provide tips and insights you can use for your business right away.
Organic SEO Step 1: Keyword Research – What are people searching for?
If you’re like most people you get excited about a project and jump into it before doing all of the prep-work necessary to make it a success. The same rule applies to organic SEO. You need to do the right prep work before optimizing your website.
You need to first determine if:
people are actually searching for the phrase
how much competition you have for that chosen phrase.
Thankfully there are many tools to help you find great keyword information.
Say you are a website design company in Minneapolis, you probably want to people to find your website by searching “Minneapolis website design.”
Putting this phrase into Google AdWords returns some interesting data. The competition for that phrase is stated as “High” with around 5,000 searches a month. Competing for this phrase directly will take a considerable amount of time (and money).
What to Look For
Most businesses should look at the keyword ideas section and find keyword phrases that are either “Medium” or “Low” in the competition column. You can also take phrases from the keyword ideas section and add a geographic location to them, such as “corporate website design Minneapolis”. You can see that the competition drops considerably, however so does the number of searches. This is something in which you’ll have to weigh the return on investment.
These long-tail niche phrases can drive a considerable amount of traffic compared to the high-level key phrases and can be much easier to rank well with.
Before committing to a list of keywords for your website you should do some first-hand research and run the searches through Google to see who you are competing with online. Review their websites to see what they are doing in terms of keyword targeting, website structure, and on-site optimization to achieve the rankings.
After determining a list of phrases that fit your business you need to figure out how you want to work these keywords into your website content.
Each page of your website should cover a specific topic or keyword / key-phrase. Use natural language and sprinkle in the keyword. There’s no need to overdo it because Google wants you to write content for people, not search engines.
To recap, before optimizing your website you need to do some prep-work. Research your target keywords to see what the competition is and if people are actually searching for that phrase. Remember to be patient with your search engine results as they can take time to increase.
Organic SEO Step 2: Improve Your Website Structure
If you are starting with a brand new website, making sure you build your website with a friendly organic SEO structure. Make sure your code is clean and concise.
Google, just like people, will read and follow your thehttps://www.mltgroup.com/local-seo-services.php information on your website more often if the content is laid out in a straightforward manner.
An SEO friendly site structure follows a logical path and organization. From the main pages to sub-topics, and more, the site should be easy to navigate:
Your website should validate at W3C (http://validator.w3.org/) although this is not completely necessary for good rankings, it does help with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance and ensuring your code is well formatted.
Give Your Webmaster These Guidelines
Keep this note in handy if you work with a developer. Often, developers tend to overlook the website “head” (<head>…</head>). The head tags often contain Javascript, CSS and META tags for the page. Since the data in these tags doesn’t show up on the actual display of the website this area tends to get ignored and can become unnecessarily large. All CSS and Javascript code should be referencing external files. This not only speeds up the load time of the website (which is becoming more important to Google’s algorithms) it also makes editing the code later easier.
Finally, we come to the meat of the website, the body tag <body>…</body>. Between these two tags is what your visitors will see on screen. This is also where the majority of your on-site SEO will take place. In keeping with an organic SEO friendly architecture, your site should make proper use of the HTML tags.
Don’t build your website with tables. Instead, use div tags modified with CSS (CSS based layouts). Although tables can produce a similar result on screen as a CSS based layout, the code to create the same functionality with a table can be 3-4 times as large. Remember: the more code a page has the longer it will take to load, affecting its results in the search engines.
Organic SEO Step 3: Your On-Site Optimization
On-site optimization is still crucial to help search engines and people find your products and services. Think of it this way: if you don’t put the right information on your website how will the search engines know what you do?
Your on-site website optimization goes hand-in-hand with a search engine friendly website architecture. If your site has a poor architecture, your on-page efforts won’t work as well. There are a few HTML tags to optimize properly that is a must for every page on your website, they include the “title” tag, “meta description” tag and “h1” tag.I’ll go into detail about each one below.
Title Tags
Search engines use your title tag to understand what that specific page is about. The title tag shows up at the very top of your browser window. Having a well-written title tag should be common sense if you are wanting your page to come up for that keyword, however many people overlook this and leave the default “Untitled Page” text in it.
This is great if you want to rank for “untitled page” however I doubt that is what you want.
Here are a few title tag rules to follow:
First: Be Concise. You only have 70 characters that the search engines will respond to, so make them count.
Second: Include Your Keyword. I can’t stress this enough: if you want to come up for “blue rolling widgets”, by all means, put “blue rolling widgets” in your title tag.
Third: Include Synonyms. If people search for “blue rolling widgets” you can also try variations on those words such as “rolling widgets” “blue widgets” etc. Each of those is words that your potential customers may search for.
Fourth: Be Local. Local business should include their location. Most people that are searching for a local service or product will put in the region they want to find it in. Adding a local identifier to your title tag greatly increases your chances of getting found locally.
Fifth: Don’t Duplicate. If at all possible never duplicate a title tag on your website. This confuses the search engines when serving up searches to your website.
Meta Description Tag
You can find this tag in the head of the website. This tag doesn’t directly affect your page ranking, but you want to have a compelling title tag to get people to click through to your website.
Here are some good guidelines for writing meta descriptions:
First: Be Concise. Again you have a limited amount of characters to use, about 150 for the description tag.
Second: Be Informational. Be sure to describe what someone would see on the page. For our blue widget example above our meta description tag could look something like this: “Buy blue widgets from ABC company, a provider of blue widgets to Anytown USA since 1988”.
Third: Don’t Duplicate. If at all possible write a unique description tag for every page on your website. This helps to tell Google what each page is about and gives them the ability to offer your customers the correct information.
Organic SEO Headings
Think of the H1 tag like a chapter heading in a book. It tells you what the entire section is about. H2 – H6 tags are for sub-headings and breaking up content logically on the page. The H1 tag has similar power as the title tag in the ranking algorithms of Google and other search engines.
Check out our rules for writing great headings:
First: Only One Time. Each page on your site must contain only one H1 tag. Use sub-headings to give directions for sub-topics
Second: Be Concise. The H1 doesn’t have a limit, but people should easily be able to tell what the page is about by reading it
Third: Include Your Keyword
Fourth: Don’t Duplicate. This actually is important for two reasons, you don’t want to have the same H1 tag across multiple pages and you don’t want to just copy your web page title tag. The H1 tag should compliment your title tag.
So to recap, your on-site website optimization is a critical step in making sure you are well optimized. Having well-written title, description and H1 tags give Google a good understanding of what your website is about, making it easier for them to give your users the correct page on your website.
Organic SEO Step 4: Off-site Optimization
On-site optimization is done at the front-end of an SEO campaign. Off-site optimization moves you up the ranks.
While the off-site optimization can be the most difficult and tricky part of the search engine optimization campaign, I will help you through some of the most common issues.
Let’s discuss some techniques and tips on the best (and worst) off-site organic SEO tactics.
Link Exchanges
Most people think that a link exchange (where I put a link on my website to yours and you put a link on your website to mine) works well for improving SEO authority. They can be helpful if you’re getting a link from a well-respected site (ex: technorati.com).
However if both sites have a low page rank this can actually hurt as your links will “bleed page-rank”, basically meaning that you are passing page-rank from your site to someone else and canceling out the effect.
You want one-way incoming links to your website. These are much more effective because they tell Google “I am a good quality resource on this topic. Others have linked to me because of it.” The more one-way incoming links you can get to your site the better.
Poor Quality Links to Avoid
If you have been researching how to generate links back to your website you may have seen links or ads directory submission services. While you can get a ton of back-links to your site quickly, they are generally of lower quality and Google won’t pay as much attention to them.
If your link profile (the break down of links on your site) skews heavily towards the low-quality sites it will take considerably more links to compete with someone who has a better link profile.
Good Quality Back-links
A good quality back-link can be priceless to a search engine campaign. These high-quality back-links require work on your end to foster a relationship with the website owner. These types of links can come from industry-specific journals or blogs, distributors or educational resources. You generally cannot simply ask the website owner to link to you (unless you are a well-known company), you will need to become an active member on their website. Show that you are an expert in a field and you may receive a link.
Write GREAT Content
This goes without saying for anything you do online. Writing good quality content helps you gain links to your website. If you have a blog, people may put a link to it naturally on their site as your information explains a subject they reference. You can become a guest contributor on authority websites to build your influence and link back to your website. These websites are usually looking for great content and having an experts view on the topics they cover can give you a lot of exposure.
Be Social
Social media and social networking is here to stay. Be sure that you fully utilize your online profiles. Be sure that what you are posting to these places is interesting and informative, not a sales pitch. Your social followers are much more fickle than the general website searcher as they are inviting you into their profile. Be respectful and don’t bombard them with posts. Unless your company has a lot of news, posting once a week or so would be ideal. You want to keep your users aware of your business but not get annoyed with you.
Press Releases and Articles
Both press releases and articles have their place in a well-rounded organic search engine optimization campaign. You can describe your company, services, and offerings all you want in them, just make sure it is newsworthy. Most press release services will charge a fee for submitting your release but for this fee, your press release is getting submitted to actual news organizations such as the AP, large market newspapers and high profile bloggers.
So to recap, your off-site optimization should be done on a consistent basis. Gathering a ton of back-links at once and then never looking at it again will give you a short boost but you won’t maintain your rankings. Always write good content. Be a good online neighbor and social friend. Link to people who you feel do a good job and you will tend to receive the same. As for social media don’t over post. You don’t want to be de-friended.
Organic SEO Step 5: Analytics (Measuring your results)
After you have made your website live the first thing you should to do is install Google Analytics www.google.com/analytics (or a similar program). I like Google Analytics for a few reasons. First, it’s completely free and second, you can gather a ton a data on the traffic to your website.
When you log into Google Analytics you’ll see a graph showing the traffic for each day. This is great to get a brief overview of how much traffic your website is receiving, but doesn’t give you a ton of data as to where people are coming from or what they are viewing.
Click on the Visitor’s Tab
This tab provides moredetail about your viewers on the site including the number of unique visitors, bounce rate, time on site and new visits. Each of these sections can be clicked on to get additional data.
Next, look at the Traffic Sources tab.
This tab gives me a quick overview of where people are coming to my site from, whether it be search engines, direct traffic or referring sites. As with the visitor’s tab you can click on each of the sections to gather more detail about each site or search engine. If you drill down into a specific website you can see how many visits came to your site for a particular day.
Last, let’s review the Content tab.
This section shows you the amount of traffic that each specific page on the site is driving. If you are using a landing page for an advertising campaign you can see from this section if your ads are working.
You can also see if people are not following to a certain point on your site, such as a check-out page. If your customers are not flowing to where you want them you may need to revise your on-site content to help drive them to the correct locations.
As you can see Google Analytics can supply a ton of information about your website. Even just scratching the surface you can gather powerful information about your company’s website and find places to make improvements. Google Analytics has a great help section as well if you have additional questions on what you are looking at.
Conclusion
You’ve learned the basic steps of creating a successful organic SEO campaign.
Now you have two choices.
One, try it out for yourself.
Two, work with an expert to get “done for you” results. If you want to try the latter, fill out the form below to get a free marketing proposal.
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