Ann Smarty is the brand and community manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas, founder of MyBlogU.com and co-founder of Viral Content Buzz . Ann is the regular contributor at Entrepreneur, Small Biz Trends, and other huge publications. Ann blogs about search and social media industry trends and content marketing tools. Please follow Ann on Twitter @seosmarty.
Editor’s note: Given the continued importance of keyword research, we updated this post from 2018.
No matter what your content marketing strategy is, keyword research is the fuel.
Keywords inform marketers as to what their audience strives to know, let them monitor their competition, and offer a constant source of content ideas.
Have you ever built links?
For years, link building has been the most contradictory and difficult digital marketing tactic for a simple reason: Without links, your content has few – if not zero – Google rankings.
In this article, let’s not talk about SEO value of links at all. Let’s build links as if Google didn’t exist. Let’s build links to focus on getting traffic. We don’t care about any other aspect of links acquisition.
Every digital publisher strives to build organic search traffic.
While higher rankings are the most obvious way to increase traffic, another valuable method is usually neglected – making your mobile search results more clickable in Google.
Is your content ready for the increasingly visual results on search?
As Google shifts emphasis to mobile search, visibility is crucial. More and more, search results feature an image along with the meta description:
Back in 2010, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that one in five people in the United States was considered disabled to some extent.
That means 20% of your audience on average may need assistance using the internet from either assistive technology or other people. These disabilities could include:
Is getting clicks your ultimate marketing goal?
Of course not, you want your site users to perform an action instead of just landing and moving on.
When it comes to informational content marketing, converting readers is not that easy. Site visitors came for answers, found them, and don’t have a point to stick around any longer.
An article doing well in terms of attracting (organic) traffic may still fail to make any difference to the business’s bottom line. In other words, you see clicks but few-to-no conversions (opt-ins, clicks-through to your product page, etc.) from your content.
Now, I love planning, but I love action even more. To create a successful content marketing program, you need to have both.
Most companies struggle to see ROI from content marketing strategy because they fail to do both.
Using tools is what helps you go from planning to implementing. Tools make any plan actionable, so here are three to help your content marketing strategy find success.
As web users get harder and harder to engage, search intent as a marketing concept has become a hotter topic.
Yet, in most cases, search intent is mentioned in e-commerce context, where you need to match your landing page to your target customer’s expectation.
But where does the concept of search intent stand in content marketing context? Should you account for it in your content marketing strategy?
You surely should. The thing is, with mobile and voice search, your reader’s attention span is short because today’s consumer searches and decides on the go.
What does it mean for content marketing?
Timing a content marketing campaign to a special day often is a good idea. You catch the peak of the interest in a topic and amplify your content assets in a more effective way.
But how do you organize and scale the process? How do you plan seasonal and well-timed content to make the most of each trend?
Here are the five tricks I use.
A few short years ago, simply writing useful articles regularly was enough to keep your audience engaged and see your SEO rankings steadily grow.
Now, consumers are more demanding and the Google algorithm is more advanced. To accommodate both, you need to be always testing new tools and tactics.
With content marketing becoming more complicated and integrated, your editorial calendar should grow up too. It’s no longer enough to document your planned content assets. Today’s editorial calendar should involve team collaboration aspects and advanced analytics steps to make higher-level content management possible.
