Use These 4 Strategies to Jump-Start Your Content Marketing

You’ve probably heard this before: “Content marketing is hard…Content marketing takes a long time.”

Sorry to say, I’m not here to tell you that’s wrong: It is hard, and it does take time.

But that doesn’t mean content marketing doesn’t work. It does. It just takes consistency, dedication and yes, time, before you see results.

In the meantime, however, you’re going to be sad. You might even get mad. Hell, you may even be full-on depressed. You might offer a cry up to the heavens: “Why is my content not working!!!” And you hear no booming answers in return.

This, my friend, is called the content slog, as coined by Chris Bird of Vertical Measures (my employer) here. It’s that gap of disappointment where you’ve put in a good amount of time and effort into your content marketing strategy, and you aren’t seeing a return on your investment.

This principle rings true for other digital media, too, and is where this content slog idea originated. In particular, Moz’s Rand Fishkin and BuzzMaven Labs’ Scott Clark both talk about this idea in terms of SEO and its “lengthy period of diminishing returns” (per Fishkin).

Content marketing takes consistency, dedication and yes, time, before you see results.

Email Marketing

The oldest digital strategy in the playbook: email marketing. We’ve all been building lists since the dawn of the interwebs, so it makes sense this is where you should start while you’re waiting for your content marketing to kick in.

Take advantage of the list you already have, and start or amp up your email marketing strategies. You may need to prune your list or clean it up if it has been sitting there for a while, but these are people who have expressed interest in wanting to hear from you, so let them!

Here are some email types you can start creating right away: 

• Monthly newsletter
• Product or service updates
• Point of view/opinion pieces
• Special promotions or discounts
• Repurposed content 

Take advantage of the list you already have, and start or amp up your email marketing strategies.

Pay Per Click

PPC isn’t always uttered in the same breath as content marketing, but they can work well together. Whereas much of content development is targeted at organic traffic and rankings, PPC is a direct line to drawing in traffic, leads and possibly more business.

Plus, it’s predictable. You know how much you want to spend, where you want to spend it, and exactly what results you need for a positive ROI.

Don’t shy away from PPC; embrace it during the slog! Take advantage of AdWords if you have some keywords you can competitively bid on, and even more importantly, start to increase your budget for content promotion on social networks.

I’ve seen companies get major returns through Facebook Ads or Sponsored Tweets, so get your feet wet with optimizing your ads and audiences while you’re churning out great content that will soon be published. 

Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion Rate Optimization, otherwise known as CRO, is a form of testing and tweaking until you see the results you want. CRO can often go hand-in-hand with your active PPC campaigns, as mentioned above, where you are optimizing your landing pages for the most completions.

Hub and Spoke Content

If you haven’t jumped on the hub-and-spoke train, welcome aboard. This is probably my favorite type of content model for a few reasons:

• Hubs drive traffic.
• Hubs drive leads.
• Hubs are great pieces of evergreen content.

This is especially true when you’re new to content marketing and working on many projects in the background, but you have yet to publish much content. If you shift your mindset to creating a hub right off the bat, you’ll see results quickly.

So what’s a hub? A hub is a larger piece of content that usually hides behind a gated form. It requires the interested visitor to provide some information to obtain that piece of content — maybe it’s a PDF download or multiple files. The visitor shows intent and interest, and you get some of his or her personal information in exchange.

And what’s a spoke? Spokes are pieces of content that point back to your hub. Oftentimes, they can be repurposed sections of your hub content or something related to the topic you cover. Spokes always link back to the hub or integrate a strong CTA.

Spokes can take the form of blog posts, press releases, videos, graphics, emails, on and on. Spokes have one singular goal: to point the content consumers back to your hub so they will then convert.

(Check Full Article @ MarketingLand)

(Source: MarketingLand)

 

Wikipedia Is Losing Traffic From Google

Google is sending less and less traffic to Wikipedia, calls this a "long-term issue."

There have been a lot of rumors about the decline in traffic Google is sending Wikipedia’s way. There have been reports from SimilarWeb that Wikipedia has shown a “sudden” and “massive” decline in traffic from Google’s organic search results.

But Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, said this week that this is not a sudden or drastic drop in traffic from Google, but rather a “long-term issue with decreasing traffic from Google.”

Wales added that the SimilarWeb article also misrepresents how Wikipedia needs those clicks from Google:

“It is also false that ‘Wikipedia thrives on clicks,’ at least as compared to ad-revenue driven sites… The relationship between ‘clicks’ and the things we care about: community health and encyclopedia quality is not nothing, but it’s not as direct as some think.”

Wales seems to be correct. Wikipedia is noticing a long-term and gradual decline from Google. SearchMetrics shows this in their “SEO visibility” charts, which don’t measure traffic, but measure how visible a website is in search results.

He noticed this decline back in March, so this has been happening for a long time now.

Back in the day, Wikipedia dominated Google’s search results. It was likely the most visible site in the Google search results.

The question is, why is there a decline in Wikipedia’s traffic from Google? Some have theorized it might have to do with the Google Answer box, others say the algorithm has changed. It is hard to say for sure, but overall, it’s clear that Wikipedia is noticing a steady decline in traffic from Google.

Postscript: Based on all the news around this, Wikipedia released a PDF document discussing the reports on their Google traffic lose. The paper tries to downplay the news, saying there is no decrease in Google traffic, depending on how you look at it. Here is what they wrote:

• Based on the data we have we can establish that the most obvious avenues for verifying or dismissing SimilarWeb’s claim show no evidence that Google traffic has declined. However, we do not have the data at our end to eliminate all avenues of possibility.
   
• Our next work should be to reach out to Google themselves and talk to them about the data we’re seeing, and to build out infrastructure to begin tracking metrics like this on a consistent and automated basis, rather than relying on costly ad-hoc analysis.

 (Original Source: SearchEngineLand)

 

Google Panda 4.2 Is Here; Slowly Rolling Out After Waiting Almost 10 Months

Google says a Panda refresh began this weekend but will take months to fully roll out.

Google tells Search Engine Land that it pushed out a Google Panda refresh this weekend.

Many of you may not have noticed because this rollout is happening incredibly slowly. In fact, Google says the update can take months to fully roll out. That means that although the Panda algorithm is still site-wide, some of your Web pages might not see a change immediately.

The last time we had an official Panda refresh was almost 10 months ago: Panda 4.1 happened on September 25, 2014. That was the 28th update, but I would coin this the 29th or 30th update, since we saw small fluctuations in October 2014.

As far as I know, very few webmasters noticed a Google update this weekend. That is how it should be, since this Panda refresh is rolling out very slowly.

Google said this affected about 2%–3% of English language queries.

New Chance For Some, New Penalty For Others

The rollout means anyone who was penalized by Panda in the last update has a chance to emerge if they made the right changes. So if you were hit by Panda, you unfortunately won’t notice the full impact immediately but you should see changes in your organic rankings gradually over time.

This is not how many of the past Panda updates rolled out, where typically you’d see a significant increase or decline in your Google traffic more quickly.

For the record, here’s the list of confirmed Panda Updates, with some of the major changes called out with their AKA (also known as) names:

1. Panda Update 1, AKA Panda 1.0, Feb. 24, 2011 (11.8% of queries; announced; English in US only)
2. Panda Update 2, AKA Panda 2.0, April 11, 2011 (2% of queries; announced; rolled out in English internationally)
3. Panda Update 3, May 10, 2011 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
4. Panda Update 4, June 16, 2011 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
5. Panda Update 5, July 23, 2011 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
6. Panda Update 6, Aug. 12, 2011 (6–9% of queries in many non-English languages; announced)
7. Panda Update 7, Sept. 28, 2011 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
8. Panda Update 8 AKA Panda 3.0, Oct. 19, 2011 (about 2% of queries; belatedly confirmed)
9. Panda Update 9, Nov. 18, 2011: (less than 1% of queries; announced)
10. Panda Update 10, Jan. 18, 2012 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
11. Panda Update 11, Feb. 27, 2012 (no change given; announced)
12. Panda Update 12, March 23, 2012 (about 1.6% of queries impacted; announced)
13. Panda Update 13, April 19, 2012 (no change given; belatedly revealed)
14. Panda Update 14, April 27, 2012: (no change given; confirmed; first update within days of another)
15. Panda Update 15, June 9, 2012: (1% of queries; belatedly announced)
16. Panda Update 16, June 25, 2012: (about 1% of queries; announced)
17. Panda Update 17, July 24, 2012:(about 1% of queries; announced)
18. Panda Update 18, Aug. 20, 2012: (about 1% of queries; belatedly announced)
19. Panda Update 19, Sept. 18, 2012: (less than 0.7% of queries; announced)
20. Panda Update 20 , Sept. 27, 2012 (2.4% English queries, impacted, belatedly announced
21. Panda Update 21, Nov. 5, 2012 (1.1% of English-language queries in US; 0.4% worldwide; confirmed, not announced)
22. Panda Update 22, Nov. 21, 2012 (0.8% of English queries were affected; confirmed, not announced)
23. Panda Update 23, Dec. 21, 2012 (1.3% of English queries were affected; confirmed, announced)
24. Panda Update 24, Jan. 22, 2013 (1.2% of English queries were affected; confirmed, announced)
25. Panda Update 25, March 15, 2013 (confirmed as coming; not confirmed as having happened)
26. Panda Update 26, July 18, 2013 (confirmed, announced)
27. Panda Update 27 AKA Panda 4.0, May 20, 2014 (7.5% of English queries were affected; confirmed, announced)
28. Panda Update 28 AKA Panda 4.1, Sept. 25, 2014 (3–5% of queries were affected; confirmed, announced)
29. Panda Update 30 AKA Panda 4.2, July 18, 2015 (2–3% of queries were affected; confirmed, announced)

(Original Content by: SearchEngineLand)

5 SEO Problems Plaguing E-Commerce Websites

Search engine optimization (SEO) is challenging, but SEO for large e-commerce websites is a different kind of beast.

Not only are you dealing product inventory and adding new pages constantly, but you’re also not the only one responsible for the website.

The larger the site, the more hands you have on it — and most of those hands will have little to no SEO knowledge. This means they won’t understand how their changes could impact organic search performance.

Even the small changes can have a big impact. Large sites are fighting tooth and nail for visibility on search engine results pages, and the minor things that help SEO — adding in ALT tags, proper structuring of your header tags, etc. — could be the difference between a No. 2 and a No. 1 ranking, which could easily be worth an extra $100,000 in revenue.

Let’s take a look at some common SEO problems plaguing e-commerce websites and how we can fix them.

Poor Product Descriptions:

Product descriptions are the bane of every e-commerce site’s existence. It’s time-consuming to create unique descriptions for each item you sell, but this is necessary if you expect your products to rank.

Users also rely on these descriptions before purchasing said product. A product image alone isn’t going to cut it for getting your users to buy a product, and search engines can’t see that image anyway.

The problem: Lots of things could be causing problems with your product descriptions. 

For example:

• You’re using the manufacturer’s product description (which is given to every retailer who sells that product).
• There is duplicate content where you have different versions of the same product.
• Your product pages have no content or very thin content.

The solution: There’s no easy way to say this, folks. Write unique product descriptions. Yes, that’s right — for every single product you carry.

Un-optimized Product Pages:

SEO is largely a top-of-funnel marketing channel. Users are still in the research phase of their purchasing cycle and tend to search as such, relying on more broad keywords (such as “TVs” or even “LED TVs”) to help them determine what specific product they want.

That means most SEOs want to drive traffic to the category or product listing pages rather than individual product pages.

While the broader terms will drive most of your traffic, you can’t forget about the users who already know what specific product they want — for example, “Samsung 55in LED TV” or even just the model number, “FH6030.”

The problem: Not only are you cutting off your traffic potential by neglecting these long-tail keywords, but you’re missing out on what could likely be an immediate conversion point. What makes an unoptimized product page:

• No product reviews
• Poor keyword targeting
• Missing image ALT tags
• Thin content

The solution: Thin content can easily be remedied by including product reviews, unique product descriptions, and detailed product specifications.

Product reviews are key here — not only do they better optimize your product pages, they also help visitors to make a purchase decision. Make sure your product reviews are SEO-friendly and can be indexed.

With your keyword targeting, make sure you frame your product pages around the specific product your users could be searching for. This means including brand name, model number, color (if applicable) and size (if applicable) in your product names.

Placement of each of these attributes matter. There’s a big search difference between “Samsung 55 inch LED TV” and “55 inch Samsung LED TV.”

Improper Internal Linking:

With so many people making changes, large e-commerce websites often have inconsistent internal linking. Copywriters, designers, project managers and social media marketers all will be grabbing site links to use in their respective projects, and they’re likely not pulling the same ones (or even the right ones).

The problem: Instead of going through the main navigation to pull a product listing link, they’ll just search for that product via internal search and pull that link, which is likely noindexed and nofollowed.

Not only are you not getting value from that internal search page, but you’re giving search engines mixed signals on the best URLs to rank.

The solution: Educate your respective teams on the importance of consistent linking and explain why it’s necessary to link to the URL that we want to rank in search engines (most of the time, the main navigation link).

If your canonical tags are set up properly, have them pull the canonical rather than the front-facing link.

Not Managing Your URL Parameters:

URL cleanliness is an overarching problem with e-commerce sites, as most have dynamically generated URLs rather than (or in addition to) static, keyword-relevant URLs.

While SEOs try to limit the URL parameters in their strings, it’s a necessary evil on large e-commerce sites. Parameters will exist, but you have to manage them correctly.

The problem: Relying solely on Google Webmaster Tools Google Search Console to configure your URL parameters, which could create handfuls of duplicate content without you even realizing it.

The solution: Google has come a long way in reading and parsing URL information, and they do it get it right sometimes, but the fact of the matter is that you know your URL structure better than a bot.

Make sure you’re configuring these parameters correctly by telling Google which parameters they need to crawl and which to ignore.

No SEO & SEM Collaboration

SEO and SEM teams just aren’t playing nicely. This isn’t just an e-commerce problem; it’s happening everywhere.

However, e-commerce websites have a lot more money on the line to lose when these two marketing channels are going at each other with battle axes rather than sharing their data and collaborating.

The problem: There are two big things happening when SEO and PPC don’t talk to each other.

• You’re missing out on a huge remarketing opportunity.
• You’re probably losing money from bidding on the wrong terms.

The solution: Simply put, make an effort to better integrate your SEO and SEM teams. SEO teams can rely on SEM teams for the keyword data that Google secure search took away. SEM teams can better spend their budgets by knowing what research-based keywords we’re already organically ranking for that have a low PPC conversion rate.

If you see you’re losing money on a particular keyword because it’s just not converting, stop bidding on that term and funnel efforts into organic search.

This by no means is an extensive list — you’ve still got duplicate content, slow crawl rate, and local listing management issues to deal with — but this should give you a good start on getting your site optimized.

What are some of the other problems that e-commerce websites are prone to, and how can we fix them?

Content By: SearchEngineLand

Google Panda: Update is Coming in Next Few Weeks

Google says webmasters can expect a Panda refresh within the upcoming weeks.

Google’s Gary Illyes announced that the next Panda update will happen in the upcoming weeks. He said maybe in the next two, or three, or four weeks. But the Panda algorithm will be updated in the near future.

Gary said the algorithm isn’t necessarily changing but rather the data will be refreshed.

So sites that have been suffering from this algorithm may see a recovery in the near future. However, not all sites will see a recovery, some may not recover, new sites may also be hit by this data refresh.

When the data refresh is updated, we will make sure to notify you right here.

Gary also explained that it is to Google’s best interest to keep this data fresh, so the they want to keep it updates as frequently as possible. But they do require manual updates and will currently not run by itself like some of their other algorithms.

SearchEngineLand

Google are Working on Making the Penguin Updated Continuously

Penguin Update:

Google says they hope to release a new Penguin update that is updated by itself in the next several months.

Google’s Gary Illyes announced that their Penguin does currently run slowly but they are working hard to make it update literally in real time. Meaning that the algorithm will get data that is refreshed all the time, continuously. Currently, the data has to be manually refreshed to see any ranking changes for sites impacted by Penguin.

Gary explained it is hard for Google to do this right now because it requires a lot of reworking the algorithm. But that is their goal, to make the Penguin algorithm run by itself, without manually refreshing any data. Gary also said that this is not the case with Panda, they don’t see it running continuously but rather requiring a manual data refresh.

Gary said this is months and months away and didn’t give us a date for when webmasters can expect this change.

SearchEngineLand

Mobile Optimization Checklist for the Digital Marketer

Every good marketer knows that one of the key elements to success is making it as easy as possible for your audience to consume and share information. Part of creating ease of use is keeping in mind where and how your audience is spending their time.

What degree of success do you think a marketer would have if they were to plaster flyers at every Red Robin around the country, when the vast majority of their customers eat at In-N-Out in California?

So now we’re all hungry, but what does this have to do with mobile optimization? I hate to be the one to tell you, but mobile internet usage is something we need to be strategizing for now, not in the future.

According to comScore, 60% of all internet usage is made up by smartphones and tablets. Additionally, over 20% of millennials no longer even use a desktop to access information online. You read that right, they are 100% mobile.

Mobile optimization affects everything from creating a responsive website to making tweaks to your content marketing program to serve mobile users. The checklist below provides some helpful tips for staying on top of the mechanics and engagement strategies necessary for mobile optimization.

SEO

Responsive Design: Most savvy web developers and many new website templates are now including responsive website design as a standard offering. If you’ve recently updated your website and don’t want to invest in a complete overhaul to create a responsive website, you can setup a separate mobile site. However, always keep in mind that there are benefits and drawbacks to taking this path.

PageSpeed: Mobile users are searching for content on-the-go. There are some fairly simple best practices that you can implement to improve page load speed including:

• Optimize your images so that they are smaller, and therefore load faster
• Implement caching plugins
• Use JavaScript sparingly

Use the PageSpeed Insights tool to test your website’s current performance.

Local Optimization: To ensure that your business surfaces in local results, be diligent about making sure that all of your contact information is consistent across the web.

Title Tags & Meta Descriptions: Your mobile audience is working with a lot less screen than desktop users. Try to be as concise as possible when drafting title tags and meta descriptions.

Content Marketing

Think Concise, Not Shorter: Mobile users need content that is scanable and impactful. Remove the clutter and format your content in a way that makes sense for your audience. This doesn’t mean that marketers need to cut down on the length of the content that is being published, but content should be presented in bite-sized chunks that are easy to consume.

Provide Great Imagery: Visual content performs very well on mobile devices. While you may not have given much consideration to blog or long-form content images in the past, here is your opportunity. A well selected image can be the difference between a consumer engaging with your content, or quickly moving on.

Incorporate Videos: Forrester found that when marketers included a video in an email, the click-through rate increased by 200% – 300%. Additionally, eMarketer uncovered that consumers are actually spending more time watching video on mobile devices than on desktops.

Social Media

Mobile Usage: In 2015, there are approximately 1.69 billion social media accounts that are accessed via mobile. When creating and publishing social media content keep your mobile audience in mind.

Mobile Friendly Apps: Many social media platforms offer mobile friendly applications and add-ons that can be easily integrated into brand profiles.

Get Visual: Incorporate visual elements as much as possible into social media campaigns across all platforms. Also, if it makes sense, utilize platforms like Instagram which present a great opportunity to incorporate images and videos into social media content.

Put Your Website to the Test!

Google provides a couple different tools that can help you determine if your website is mobile friendly, and provide access to some  applications that can help you become mobile if you aren’t currently.

• Mobile Friendly Tester
• Google Search Console

The opportunities above only scratch the surface of mobile optimization. If you can currently check five or more of the items above off your list, you’re on the right track. If not, consider it an opportunity to increase your reach and better serve your mobile audience.

What do you find most difficult about implementing digital marketing programs that are mobile friendly?

Content By: TopRankBlog