Updated Feb. 28, 2022

Consuming great writing is like listening to a singer. If the performer makes an emotional connection with me – even though they miss a few notes – I eagerly lock into the rest of the song and anticipate the next performance.

Your words must be powerful and effective as well if you want to captivate as many of your readers as possible.

Content writing isn’t an easy task. Whether you craft words for B2B or B2C audiences, the challenges can be many. I’ve created a diverse set of tips, tools, and resources to aid in shaping and modifying your work. It’s not an exhaustive collection. Some ideas may seem familiar. Others will be fresh.

My hope is that you’ll walk away with some insights or new tools to help address or minimize the content creation challenges you face.Continue Reading

Heading into the new year, I’m usually full of cautionary notes about SEO, keywords, rankings, and organic traffic, all tied to search engines like Google.

These days, I’m optimistic because technological advances could be a real win for companies that keep up with SEO best practices.

The work will be more time-consuming than difficult. You (and your team) will need to focus on multiple types of content, from blog posts to podcasts. Yes, you need to work on page load speed and secure featured snippets. But expect your content – website pages, videos, images, and audio – to work for you to a greater degree as long as you’re creating it to meet strategic goals.

Google seems relentless in unearthing the best results for searchers. Enter the Google Multitask Unified Model (MUM) update, an AI-based algorithm designed to streamline searching.

MUM compares complex queries to give people what they want the first time they search. For content marketers, MUM will increase the odds that your content (not necessarily a text-heavy page) will be selected for a search result.

Keep these quick tips and reminders at the ready as you make your SEO plans for 2022. (As always, make sure to test any changes with your own data.)

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The world’s most popular search engine caused a stir in August when it published guidance on when and how it modifies or replaces page titles.

SEOs on Twitter complained about changes they’d noticed to the way their page titles get displayed in search results. In some cases, Google replaced page titles with H1 header elements. In others, it dropped words from the page title or appended new ones (often the company name) to it.Continue Reading

It’s easy to get rid of outdated website content. You can redirect it or delete it.

But, if the outdated blog post still brings in website traffic – do you really want to get rid of it? The decision could be costly in terms of leads, sales, and the bottom line if you don’t check a few key metrics before you decide.Continue Reading

You can think of link building in many ways. I like to call it tedious, painful, and a test of patience.

It’s also necessary to compete. Can your business survive without getting one new link in the next year or even five years? Sure. Will your brand miss out on leads, sales, and increased profitability? Probably.Continue Reading

SEO can seem like a complicated puzzle for digital marketers. But you need to put it together to create a better picture for your website traffic.

Explore these key tactics, tools, and time savers to make putting together the puzzle easier and help you shine when it comes to sharing your performance data.Continue Reading

Will Google turn the natural search landscape upside down in 2021? I doubt it. Although change is inevitable, you can survive or even gain an edge with a little vigilance.

But don’t expect any relief from the merciless trend of organic results moving way down the search engine results pages (SERPs).  Like any good content marketer, Google is focused on the needs of its audience – searchers.

Eager to produce relevant results, the search engine constantly enhances its technology and relies on artificial intelligence to support results. Google’s BERT, for example, focuses on natural language processing (NLP), including searcher intent and the context of search queries.

Fortunately, marketers still see traffic from Google and other major search engines. Organic searches accounted for 53% of website traffic in 2019, according to BrightEdge data. I don’t expect that number has changed much since 2019.

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The world’s most popular search engine has affected the marketing psyche. Yes, quality matters.

Marketers believe exceptional content ensures SEO rewards because Google emphasizes quality. But for every success story among enterprises, there’s another that fails in a dramatic way.

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