The Definitive Guide to Marketing Your Business Online

Table of Contents

+ Introduction
+ Chapter 1: Introduction to SEO
+ Chapter 2: Structural On-site SEO
+ Chapter 3: Content Marketing
+ Chapter 4: Off-site Authority Building
+ Chapter 5: Social Media Marketing
+ Chapter 6: Local SEO
+ Chapter 7: Google Updates
+ Chapter 8: New Forms of Online User Experience
+ Chapter 9: Your Getting Started Checklist
+ Conclusion

Introduction

If you’re reading this, you’re probably looking for ideas, tactics, and strategies for marketing your business online. While online marketing has changed significantly over the course of just the last few years, the industry is moving in a clear direction: user experience matters more than anything.

But what constitutes a great user experience? If you’d asked any online marketing professional this question 5 years ago, their answer would be markedly different from that of today. This eBook is designed to give you an overview of current best practices by retracing the steps the industry has taken over the last several years, while looking ahead to predict the future trends of the industry.

You’ll notice that this guide focuses heavily on SEO (search engine optimization) and essentially ignores paid advertising. Online marketing is certainly more than SEO, and certainly includes paid advertising, but I chose to focus on SEO because every element of online marketing (aside from paid advertising) affects SEO. Paid advertising, meanwhile, is more of a science than an art; there’s a definite relationship between advertising dollars spent and ROI. There is skill, strategy, and nuance required to manage an effective PPC (pay-per-click) campaign, but those details are well-defined and easily available for any business owner who chooses to learn them. Furthermore, paid advertising has nothing to do with user experience; it’s just a transaction between you and the ad inventory vendor.

Organic (non-paid) advertising, on the other hand, requires strategy that isn’t well-defined. It requires a deep knowledge of your target market, educated guessing, and a fair amount of luck. Most importantly, it’s entirely reliant on user experience. That’s why I wrote this eBook; business owners deserve an easy-to-read, simplified breakdown of organic online marketing with clear tactics they can implement on their own.

Without further ado, venture forth and start learning how to market your business online.

Chapter 1: Introduction to SEO

SEO, or search engine optimization, is important to every business. It doesn’t matter if you run a small, local mom-n-pop business or a large corporation. But what exactly is it? SEO is simply the process of setting up and optimizing your site so that it’s easily found (and favored) by search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Most people, today, aren’t going to pick up a phone book when they need something. Instead, they’ll go online to search for it. If your business isn’t showing up in search results, you’re almost certainly losing valuable business to your competitors that do. Furthermore, users that find your website via organic search tend to be highly targeted, making them more likely to convert to customers.

Most businesses realize they should have a website, but simply having a website is only the first step, and doesn’t guarantee that you’ll receive any significant traffic. Building an effective website that will provide a strong, consistent flow of leads or sales requires marketing.

For the purpose of online marketing, the phrase “if you build it, they will come” does not apply. Building a website without marketing it is akin to building a brick-and-mortar store in the middle of the Sahara desert. There are no roads that lead to it, no traffic driving by and seeing it. Even people who need your products or services can’t buy from you because they’ll never know about you.

That’s where SEO comes in. SEO is like transplanting your brick-and-mortar store from the Sahara desert to a busy street in downtown New York. SEO makes your website visible to potential customers so that you can make sales.

Take a moment to think about what someone might search for when looking for your business. If you’re a dentist that specializes in sedation dentistry, possibilities could include:

• sedation dentist
• dentist that puts you to sleep
• Houston sedation dentist (replace Houston with your town’s name)

Now, search Google for those terms. Does your business show up? If not, an SEO campaign is how you get there. Think about it… if you have a website and it’s not showing up in search results, it’s just the same as having customers drive right by your business while looking for what you offer, and not even know you’re there.

Website Design and SEO

Just as building a beautiful storefront isn’t the only factor that will result in sales, online marketing isn’t as simple as building a beautiful website. Sure, having a well-designed site is important; If visitors to your website don’t feel comfortable (perhaps, for instance, because there are too many ads), get frustrated trying to find what they need (due to a poor navigation structure) or any number of other factors that drive visitors away, then you probably won’t make the sale.

But design is only the beginning. There are hundreds of factors that can affect your search rank, generally categorized as “on-site” factors (like design, UX, and content), and “off-site” factors (like external links, brand mentions, and social signals).

In order for your website to be effective from an SEO perspective, both on-site and off-site SEO factors have to be included in your strategy. Ready to learn more? Read on.

On-site SEO

SEO is divided into two main categories: On-site and off-site. On-site SEO consists of the elements (such as text and meta data) that exist on your website, and in your website’s HTML code, over which you have control. Here are the three main things that this consists of:

Structure

The structure of your website is very important, not just from an SEO perspective, but also a user experience perspective. When building your website, ensure that your web designer is knowledgeable in SEO best practices or works in conjunction with an SEO professional. Structure includes:

• Optimization for mobile devices
• UI/UX Design
• URL structure
• Navigation (menu) structure
• Search functionality
• Page layout
• Internal linking
• Website Speed
• HTML & XML sitemaps

Coding

The code, the backbone of your website, needs to be clean and efficient. Messy code will bring your website’s rankings down and result in slower load times for your visitors. Usually, your website visitors won’t see the code, but it’s the only thing search engine crawlers will see. So, don’t cut corners with messy code. Ensure the code is up to date, and includes proper meta tags, headers, and descriptions.

Using a template website, such as through the WordPress CMS, can almost guarantee that your code will be clean and efficient. However, you’ll still need to make occasional tweaks and conduct periodic audits to ensure your site is running smoothly. Such tasks may include deleting old content, updating your plugins, and optimizing images.

Content

This is what your customers will see; the front-end text copy, images, and videos that are on your website. The content of your website is the most important part of proper SEO, because search engines are constantly tweaking their algorithms to ensure they’re delivering search results with the most helpful and accurate content.

Your content should be fresh and engaging. Don’t make the mistake of writing purely “for the search engines” by stuffing unnatural keywords into the content and other old tricks that no longer work.

Content should target topics you want to rank for, but it needs to be natural and fresh. Furthermore, it needs to be original, detailed, and useful. Algorithms are so advanced now that they’re able to analyze a user’s intention with a search query and produce the results that will most closely meet his/her needs. If your content is hastily written, poorly structured, or lacking in detail, you won’t be considered helpful, and you won’t be visible in search results.

Of course, content has a variety of other uses, but we’ll be digging deeper into this in Chapter 3.

Off-site SEO

Once your website is structured and coded correctly and contains excellent content, it’s time to develop and execute a solid off-site SEO strategy. Offsite SEO consists of factors that affect your search engine rankings which are not on your website itself. Here’s a quick look at the main factors of off-site SEO.

Inbound Links and Brand Mentions

Links from other sites on the Internet come in many different shapes and sizes. A link is simply a clickable word, phrase, image, or button that directs you to another URL. Think of each link as a vote for your website’s credibility, vouching for your website’s worthiness to rank highly in search results.

But not all links are created equal. Just as you’d trust your best friend’s opinion about something more than you’d trust a random stranger’s, links from well-known and highly trusted, authoritative websites count for much more than links from unknown or untrusted websites. Google is also getting better at detecting “natural” links from those built purely to increase search rankings—so much so that the entire process of link building has changed. Quantity matters little; instead, it’s the quality of links that matter, and attaining those high-quality links is a time-consuming process. I’ll dig deeper into this idea in Chapter 4.

Besides giving you ‘votes’ to help your site rank better, good inbound links will also drive free, high-quality referral traffic to your website. A link to your website that’s created today, if on a relevant site with the right audience, will still be delivering you targeted customers well into the future without any work or effort on your part. It doesn’t get any better than that!

Brand mentions are simply mentions of your brand – linked or unlinked – that appear in published articles or other content across the web. The sophistication of Google’s algorithm has advanced such that even un-linked mentions of a brand name are now counted, much like links, as a ranking factor in the algorithm. This evolution of the algorithm has shown that Google is moving toward identifying and rewarding “brand signals” in the rankings. Strong, recognizable brands will, as a result, have an easier time ranking in organic search results. This means that an SEO campaign isn’t just about traditional SEO tactics – it’s truly about building your brand.

Social Signals

Engagements on social media have increased in importance as signals of authority, and with every year, they seem to increase further. Google and other search engines take into account (pretty highly) your social media influence. Not only does your activity in social media improve your search engine rankings, but social media itself can be an excellent way to build your brand, reach new audiences, and drive potential customers.

Google and Bing both look for what we call social media signals, which are user-initiated actions like Twitter retweets, Facebook likes and shares, social bookmarks, and much more. Each signal is an indication to search engines that your content is high-quality and deserves to appear highly in search results.

Let’s take an example. If you publish an exceptionally well-designed infographic highlighting some interesting data, you want people to know about it, and you want search engines to think that they should rank it highly in search results. If you tweet a link to it from your company Twitter account, and 100 of your followers retweet it, then 100 of each of their followers retweet the link, you have a wave of retweets that search engines notice. All those retweets are signals (social signals) that your infographic must be exceptionally awesome, or else all these people wouldn’t be tweeting about it. It’s “social proof” that your infographic is helpful and useful, and search engines only want to display really great pages in their search results. This social proof is a reassurance to the search engines that your infographic will deliver a positive user experience.

Reviews

Reviews of your business will affect your search engine rankings, particularly reviews on Yelp and other third-party local directories. Good reviews will affect your rankings positively, and bad reviews will affect them negatively. It’s important to note that reviews only affect your rankings in local search results. We’ll get more into this in Chapter 6, but suffice it to say that if you want to rank well in local search results, you should do your best to ask your clients for positive reviews on off-site authorities.

With the introduction out of the way, let’s take a deeper look at some of the strategies that can increase your search rankings (and simultaneously bring advantages to your general online presence).

Chapter 2: Structural On-site SEO

As I mentioned in the preceding chapter, structural on-site SEO is one of the most important on-site factors for attaining a high domain authority, and therefore a higher search rank. Understanding the core elements of a solid on-site program is essential to building the foundation of your SEO campaign.

6 Structural User Experience Factors That Affect Your Search Rankings

On-site SEO isn’t just about the cleanliness of your code (which should be addressed during the development process). There are also user experience factors, and because Google wants its users to have the best possible online experience, these factors play a major role in determining your rankings.

1. Site Speed

Site speed isn’t going to make or break your search visibility, but it is an important factor worth optimizing. The speed at which your page loads plays a significant role in whether or not a user feels satisfied with his/her chosen search result, so Google takes it seriously. Because the majority of searches are now performed on mobile devices, site speed is even more important; mobile devices tend to be slower than their desktop counterparts, so every second counts. Take the time to regularly clean up your site and run speed tests to make sure nothing is interfering with your load times. Install a good caching plugin, make sure your hosting is in order, delete any old unused drafts or images, and compress the images you do have to take up as little space as possible.

2. Site Security

The security of your site is also important. When people think of site security, they usually think of e-commerce platforms, which regularly collect credit card and payment information from their users, but this isn’t the only type of site that needs some level of security. In fact, Google currently gives a small ranking boost to sites with SSL encryption, denoted by that “S” in “https” URLs. If you want to get the most visibility for your site, it’s an easy, one-time change that can help you ensure the greatest possible domain authority.

3. Intuitive Navigation

The navigation of your site also matters. Every page in your site should be easily accessible through an intelligently structured system of menus and submenus. In your main nav, you should have four to six different main categories, including a contact page so people can get ahold of you, each broken down into submenus or subpages as appropriate. These should all be logically organized in a way that any unfamiliar user should immediately know where to go for his/her needs. Google analyzes the organization of your site and tracks user activity to determine how easy your site is to use. The easier it is to navigate your site, the better, so run user experience tests to improve your structure and provide the best layout for your visitors.

4. Internal linking

In Google’s eyes, the fewer number of clicks it takes for a user to get to any page on your site, the better. If there’s any page that requires more than three clicks to navigate to it, it could be a strike against your user experience, or simply a designation that the page isn’t important to you, and thus doesn’t deserve exposure in Google search results. This is because users need freedom and intuitive navigation to have a good experience, and Google is committed to providing those. The best way to ensure your site is tightly interlinked is to use internal links in your own articles and pages. Whenever you post a new article or create a new page, consider it an opportunity to fortify your existing interlinking strategy.

5. Mobile Optimization

Mobile optimization can be considered a part of your user experience, though at this point, it’s a bare-minimum quality your site needs to have if you want any chance of ranking significantly in mobile searches. Because mobile searches are so popular, Google has now made it mandatory for sites to be mobile-friendly—any site that isn’t has already been hit by the nicknamed “Mobilegeddon” update which occurred on April 21, 2015. Hopefully by now, every page on your site is optimized for mobile—if not, now is the time to take action. Whether you use a responsive design or a separate mobile domain is up to you, but your site must be compatible with mobile devices. I’ll touch on this more in the next section.

And while you’re at it, make sure your site is optimized for all web browsers, as well.

6. Bounce Rates

Finally, remember that bounce rates are taken into consideration for your search visibility as well. If a user comes to your site through Google and leaves right away (such as by clicking the “back” button), Google knows about it and takes it as a subjective sign that your site didn’t offer the user what they were looking for, or a good user experience. It’s a way for the search giant to measure the factors of your site that Googlebot can’t see—for example, is your site entertaining? Is your site well-designed? Do you let your users know who you are and what you do immediately in a pleasing or intriguing way? These qualities can’t be objectively measured, but they can be optimized to ensure the greatest possible user experience, and they can play a role in determining your rank.

User experience should be your top priority, and not just for SEO. Yes, implementing new designs, features, and structures that give your users a great experience will help your site rank higher—but more importantly, it will make sure the users that do come to your site have the highest likelihood of converting or otherwise engaging with your brand. Ultimately, you want to build long-lasting relationships with your potential customers, and providing a great online experience will do just that.

How to Perform a Mobile Usability Audit of Your Website

In the wake of Mobilegeddon, Google’s major algorithm update in April 2015 which emphasized the importance of mobile-optimization, ensuring a good experience for your mobile users is more important than ever. With Google now giving preference to mobile-friendly sites in the search rankings, now is the time to ensure optimal mobile performance by conducting a mobile usability audit.

Ensuring your site is performing optimally on all devices and screen sizes will help you meet the needs of your mobile users, and will prevent your site from experiencing common usability issues.

6 Potential Mobile Usability Issues

According to Google Webmaster’s mobile usability help page, there are six potential issues that could cause a site to render poorly on mobile devices. When performing a mobile usability audit, it’s important to understand what each of these potential issues is, as well as how to fix them.

Note: When using Google’s tools to evaluate your site, you’ll notice that all warnings and error messages use the verbiage below, making it easy to understand and implement any necessary changes.

1. Flash usage

Since Flash isn’t rendered on many mobile browsers, most of your mobile visitors won’t be able to properly access Flash-based content. If you receive this error message, convert your content to HTML5 to keep in line with newer, more mobile-friendly standards.

2. Viewport not configured

Source: Hubspot

Due to the variety of screen sizes used to access the web, sites should indicate a viewport in the meta viewport tag. This will ensure the site will scale to whatever device is being used – whether that’s a smartphone, tablet or computer. Using a responsive design will help ensure your viewport is configured properly and your site is scaled to accommodate all screen sizes.

3. Fixed-width viewport

This is sometimes used in order to make a non mobile-friendly page adjust to fit mobile screens. While this can be a temporary fix for some pages, Google does not recommend this practice be used long term. A responsive design should be implemented instead.

4. Content not sized to viewport

If a page requires horizontal scrolling in order to access content, you may receive this error message. Google recommends using relative width and position values and scalable images.

5. Small font size

Google recommends a font size of 16 CSS pixels. This ensures your text is easily viewable on mobile, and that mobile users don’t need to pinch to zoom in on your text.

6. Touch elements too close

When buttons and links are too close, your mobile users may have trouble accurately tapping on them. Tap targets should be placed far enough apart that mobile users don’t accidentally click on nearby elements. Google recommends that the main tap targets on your page be 48 CSS pixels tall and wide, while targets that are used less frequently can be smaller.

How To Perform a Mobile Usability Audit

Any kind of a website usability audit aims to identify how a site is performing in a particular area. In essence, it looks at a site from a user perspective in order to identify elements that need to be fixed or improved. In the case of a mobile usability audit, we want to identify any potential issues that may be hindering a mobile-friendly user experience.

Google has provided webmasters with two primary methods of analyzing the mobile-usability of their sites. These will help you to identify any potential usability issues based specifically on the six elements outlined above. Google has also provided detailed instructions to assist site owners in fixing these issues and providing a sound mobile experience.

Method One: Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool

Google’s Mobile-Friendly test tool assesses whether a particular page is mobile-friendly or not. This is a great starting point for your mobile usability audit as it will help you identify key issues that could be impacting not only the usability of your site, but your search rankings as well.

Using the six factors outlined above, the tool gives an overall rating of ‘mobile-friendly’ or ‘not mobile-friendly’, a breakdown of potential issues, an overview of how Googlebot views the page, as well as specific guidance for making the page mobile-friendly.

Method Two: Access The Mobile Usability Report in Google Webmaster Tools

If you have a Google Webmaster Tools account, the process of analyzing your site is even simpler. Simply log into your GWT account, and navigate to Mobile Usability under Search Traffic. You can also access the report for multiple web properties you own via this link. If there are any usability issues with your site, they will be identified in the Mobile Usability Report.

Any issues are clearly identified in terms of the number of pages impacted, as well as which specific elements need work on which specific pages. After you’ve fixed each page to comply with Google’s recommendations (and after Google has had a chance to crawl your site), you should see the warnings disappear.

Final Thoughts

Google has provided a wealth of information to help webmasters create responsive, mobile-friendly sites. Besides their mobile-usability help page, they also offer a detailed guide to multi-device layouts. I’d encourage you to take advantage of these various tools and guides to help you identify potential mobile usability issues. The importance of having a mobile-friendly site is only going to grow, so getting your site up to speed now should be high on your priority list.

Your Fundamental Onsite Audit Checklist For SEO

Before you get too deep into an SEO campaign, it’s important to run a one-time audit of your site to proactively detect and correct any issues that could interfere with your domain authority. For example, a flaw in your site architecture or an improperly structured navigation could compromise the power or visibility of your site to search engines before you even begin. Running an audit can identify those problems and give you the chance to start off on the right foot.

This audit checklist will help you look for the most important elements that affect search visibility, and correct some of the most common problems you might encounter along the way.

Ensuring Accessibility and Search Index Presence

First, you need to make sure that the pages of your site can be seen by search engine crawlers and accessed by individual users. Otherwise, you won’t rank highly, and you won’t be getting any organic search traffic.

• Check your robots.txt file. Found in your source code, this file can prevent search engine bots from crawling part, or all, of your site. Make sure it’s configured properly.
• Check for any robots meta tags. These meta tags tell crawlers whether they are allowed to view a specific page—if you see a “noindex” tag associated with the meta name “robots,” you’re essentially blocking that page from view.
• Check for 404s and broken links. First, log into Google Webmaster Tools. Here, head to “Crawl” and then “Crawl Errors.” This should generate a list of all site errors that the Google bots encounter, which you can then fix with 301 redirects or proper structuring.
• Check your XML sitemap. The XML sitemap on your site is going to serve as a map for search engine bots. It should follow proper protocols and be uploaded to your Webmaster Tools Account.
• Compare your XML sitemap to your Site Crawl. Are there any pages that appear in one and not the other? Double-check these lists for consistency.
• Eliminate Flash and JavaScript. Unless absolutely necessary, your site should not include Flash or JavaScript features, which are difficult for search engines to read and index, and are sometimes incompatible with mobile devices.

Improving Onsite Authority Factors

Next, look at the smaller factors that influence whether Google sees your site as authoritative or not authoritative.

• Evaluate your site navigation. Is your site easy to navigate? How easy is it for a user to find what he/she is looking for? Your pages should be vertically linked, with broad categories, subcategories, and individual pages within. In a related note, how many clicks does it take to get to any page on your site—the lower the better, and you can use internal linking to lower this figure.
• Measure your site speed. Use a tool like Pingdom to see how fast your site loads—the faster it loads, the better. You can improve your site speed by fixing any hosting issues, shrinking the images on your site, and clearing out any unnecessary plugins or meta information that could slow information transfers down.
• Ensure your site is secure. Though it’s only going to give you a slight ranking boost, it’s worth upgrading your site to SSL encryption.
• Fix your URLs. Each URL in your site should be short, easy to read with words instead of numbers, and inclusive of relevant keywords. Avoid any excesses here, whenever possible.
• Check for broken links. Review all your internal links to make sure they are all pointing to proper pages within your site.
• Eliminate bad redirects. 302, 307, and JavaScript redirects are inadvisable, as they don’t pass any value to the new page. Instead, use 301 redirects.
• Test for compatibility. By now, your site should be optimized for mobile and be compatible with multiple browsers. You can check for this in Webmaster Tools or manually review your page displays by experimenting on multiple devices and browsers.
• Set up Google Analytics. Double-check to ensure your script is installed properly and that you’re pulling information for every page.

Improving Content Factors

Finally, you’ll want to ensure that your current onsite content is executed properly. We’ll dig deeper into the content side of things in Chapter 3.

• Review your title tags and meta tags. Each of your titles and descriptions should be unique, with keywords relevant to your company. Your descriptions should also be catchy, in order to improve click-through rates. You can test for improper titles and descriptions by heading to Webmaster Tools under Search Appearance and HTML Improvements.
• Ensure content on every page. Each page on your site should have at least a paragraph or two of unique, indexable content.
• Review your images and multimedia content. All images on your site, as well as other forms of content, should have alt tags or meta information that presents them to Google properly.
• Check your content for quality. This is often underestimated. Is your content valuable, easy to read, and free of spelling and grammatical errors? Any violations here could compromise your site’s authority.

This checklist should get you going in the right direction when you’re initiating or rebooting an SEO campaign for your business. Just remember that while the onsite audit is a one-time process, SEO requires months of ongoing commitment to be successful. Cleaning up these on-site errors won’t immediately send you to a higher position in search engines, but it will make it easier for you to do so once you implement a long-term strategy of recurring content, off-site links, and social media activity; which we’ll now start to explore.

Chapter 3: Content Marketing

Content strategy is at the heart of SEO; it results in inbound links, social signals, and brand trust, and provides fuel to search engines in the form of organized, informative material. But how do you know where to start? How do you create and publish content that will result in positive ROI?

To start, you need to have a good understanding of who your target market is, what they like, and what they tend to share. This will give you the insight you need to create the most effective and engaging content.

Begin by taking some time to look at what’s working for your competitors. Take note of what your customers and target audience tend to share the most. What gets the most tweets, likes, and shares within your industry? Is it breaking news? How-to guides? Industry expertise? Simple little tips?

Content Types & Planning

Once you have some basic topic ideas, it’s time to start planning. There are many different types of content that you can create, depending on what your goal is. Here’s a simple guide to some different types of content and what they’re best used for.

Best for entertainment

• Quizzes
• Games
• Branded videos

Best used to educate

• Press releases
• Infographics
• Trend reports

Best to inspire your audience

• Reviews
• Celebrity endorsements
• Community forums

Best used to convince your audience of something

• Case studies
• Interactive demo’s
• Webinars
• Checklists
• Product features
• Data sheets and price guides

Good for both convincing and inspiring

Good for both entertainment & education

Good for both convincing and education

As you can see, there are many types of content – blog posts are not the only option. Your goal should be to develop content that engages your audience while providing useful, helpful, or entertaining information. Aim to become the go-to resource for your industry and your brand, along with your audience, will bloom.

The easiest and most effective way to plan your content strategy is to use an editorial calendar. Plan when you’re going to publish blog posts, videos, and white papers, and adhere to the schedule. The more consistently and the more frequently you post, the better—but remember, quality needs to be your top concern.

Content Marketing

Now that your website is set up and you’re publishing amazing content, it’s time to start using it to generate more business; this is called content marketing. Content marketing accomplishes several things:

• Attracts inbound links to your website, strengthening your domain authority and improving your search engine rankings
• Adds to the wealth of content on your website, effectively dropping another “hook in the water” every time you publish a new page of content, which increases the likelihood of being found by potential customers in the search engines
• Establishes your brand as a thought-leader and industry authority, building trust with your readers and resulting in increased conversion rates, leads, and sales

Every link pointing to your website does more than just improve your search engine rankings; they can also become a free, long-term, passive source of highly targeted referral traffic– the best kind.

Getting Started with Content Marketing

Before you can get started with content marketing, you need a plan, and before you can create a plan you need to understand your audience. Here are a few things to ask yourself when beginning your content marketing strategy:

• Do you have true thought leaders that have original insights or opinions?
• Do you have unique research on new industry trends you can share?
• Do you have services or products unique to your industry?
• Who are you trying to reach through content marketing?
• What challenges are they trying to overcome?

Frequency and Volume

How dedicated are you going to be to content marketing? Some companies prefer to do a few in-depth, industry-leading white papers each year and focus all their efforts on them. Other companies will choose an ongoing flow of consistent content marketing in the form of videos, blog posts, infographics and more. The more the merrier, so long as the quality of the content doesn’t suffer.

Capabilities

If you’re going to focus on white papers, articles, blog posts and other types of content that are text-based, you’ll need a strong writer on your team with subject matter expertise.

If you’d like to focus your effort on videos, do you have professional recording equipment or someone who can create professional animations?

If not, please realize that sub-par content will do you no good. In fact, it will reflect poorly on your company, potentially harming your brand and conversion rates.

The 3 C’s of Content Marketing

There are three big factors that you need to keep in mind while creating your content marketing plan. They’ve become known as the three C’s of content marketing:

• Creativity
• Consistency
• Capturing

Creativity: Create content that’s unique and memorable, and you’ll receive more recognition. Be creative and leave room for flexibility. You never know when something might come up in the news you could put a spin on or a new trend might emerge. One of my favorite ways to be creative is to tie in popular holiday themes with content when those holidays are near.

Consistency: If you want your content marketing strategy to yield maximum benefit, it’s important to be consistent. Whether you maintain 4 blog posts per month or 4 blog posts per week, stay consistent so customers and followers learn what they can expect.

Capturing: I’m not sure why this term has been coined, as I would have called it ‘optimization’. ‘Capturing’ simply refers to measuring and understanding information with regard to how well your content is performing. Measuring allows you to track which efforts tend to drive the most traffic, and attract the most interest, leads, and sales. As you start to narrow down the best-performing content types, then you’ll know where to focus for future content to achieve the best ROI.

How Reader Demand For Content Is Shifting

In some ways, content always stays the same; users will seek information and entertainment from authoritative sources, and the most successful sources will be rewarded with more visibility (and probably more revenue). This hallmark will ensure that content marketing continues to be a worthwhile and sought-after strategy for businesses well into the next decade.

But the applications and vehicles through which this content is developed, syndicated, and consumed are always changing, and as a result, users today have different demands than the users of, say, 2012. In the span of a year, the emergence of new technologies and obsolescence of old ones can completely change the average user’s expectations for a given institution.

In order to maintain relevance in the content world, brands will have to anticipate these changes in user expectations. While it’s impossible to predict any technological or cultural shifts with complete accuracy, I do believe there are at least a handful of changes that will inevitably take hold in the coming years.

More, Better, Faster

This might go without saying since it applies to all products and services in all industries, but consumers are always after things that are bigger, better, and faster. Content is no exception. In the coming years, user appetites for content will be more discerning, and users will demand information that is provided to them in more concise, accessible, high-quality ways. That means general listicle-style articles and clickbait articles will start to disappear entirely.

Publishers aren’t the only ones supporting this shift toward better content. Social media platforms and search engines, too, are getting better at identifying low-quality content, and are doing a better job at filtering that content out. Soon, in order to survive in the already saturated world of content marketing, you’ll need to constantly write and syndicate some of the best material on the web.

Real-Time Reporting

Following this demand, users will require more instant updates when it comes to news and current events. Gone are the days where you’d first hear about a news event several hours after it first occurred. Thanks to social media, users can instantly inform other users of what’s happening, rendering any “official” report as delayed information. This demand will only increase as social platforms introduce more ways to connect users instantaneously to unfolding events—for example, take Twitter’s Project Lightning (Moments), which gathers information from millions of users to create a cloud-like newsfeed that captures a news event as it develops from user images, videos, and tweets.

In 2016, if you want to report on new or emerging information, you’ll have to do so instantaneously. Use short snippets of social updates, live feeds like Periscope, or similar tech developments to connect your users instantly to real-time events.

In-App Functionality

Every time our technology gets a little better, users get a little lazier. Individual apps are favored over browser-based apps because they require only one click to access instead of three or four. But there’s often still a problem when users attempt to access content that’s hosted outside of the app—they’re forced to leave, and possibly enter a separate app. In a few years, users will have lost all tolerance for this, and social media apps will have paved the way for a much more integrated experience. Users will be able to read content exclusively within their social apps of choice, and may even be able to search the web and perform other functions without ever leaving.

Take, for example, Facebook’s Instant Articles, which allows publishers to release work on Facebook (rather than their external sites), and Facebook’s in-app search engine. This is only the beginning, so expect more changes in the coming years.

Individualized Results

We live in a highly customizable world already, but the next year is going to amp it up to the next level. Social media apps and publishers alike are going to great lengths to ensure that users have full control over the types of content they see every day, from granting them advanced newsfeed filters to developing algorithms that can learn from repeated user behaviors. In the years to come, users will become so accustomed to this individualized treatment, they’ll seldom venture outside their designated domes of personal experience, and content marketers will have to cater to them directly by learning user behavior patterns.

Multimedia Experiences

Last but not least, the mediums people use to consume content are changing. By 2011, people were so used to images being associated with content that image-less content received almost no clicks by comparison. Today, users are accustomed to seeing embedded short videos, live video feeds, and multiple forms of the same content piece (i.e., article, infographic, video, etc.). In the next few years, the average user will demand more diverse and more flexible media experiences from every angle, requiring multiple formats before clicking or even excluding some mediums entirely.

Plan for these user experience changes to become the new norm by the middle of next year, and of course, always keep your eyes and ears open for emerging technologies and other disruptors that could change the course of content development. The further ahead you plan, and the more flexibly you adapt to changing circumstances, the better you’ll fare—at least compared to your competitors, and that’s what really counts, right?

The Top 10 Benefits Of Blogging On Your Website

I’m often asked whether blogging is really a necessary part of running a business. This question is most often asked by small business owners who simply don’t have the time or skills to regularly create high-quality content. And even if they did? They wouldn’t have a clue what to write about.

As a business owner who has built a successful business in large part thanks to blogging and content publication, I’ve seen firsthand the difference it can make in terms of search visibility, leads, and sales. I’m a huge advocate of investing heavily in a content publication strategy, and that strategy begins with the company blog.

Still on the fence about blogging for your business? This article will consider 10 of the top benefits of blogging on your website. But before we dig in, I wanted to address an important question at the outset:

Does my blog have to be hosted on my business website?

In short, yes. As you’ll see as we cover the top benefits below, hosting your blog on your business site is important, as hosting it elsewhere eliminates many of the benefits of blogging. Some businesses prefer, either because of cost or for simplicity’s sake, to use a free blogging platform like WordPress.com or Weebly.com. This often results in blog domains such as [companyname].wordpress.com. While hosting a blog independent of your business site is better than not having one at all, you’ll see that many of the benefits below can only be achieved if your blog is hosted on your primary domain (i.e., www.yoursite.com/blog).

Now, without further ado, the top 10 benefits of blogging on your website!

1. Increases search engine traffic

In terms of search engine rankings, I like to think of blogging as fishing. The more hooks you have in the water, the more likely you are to catch a fish. In the same way, as you add more content to your site, more pages from your domain become indexed in search engines. This improves organic search visibility and increases website traffic.

Every new page you publish is like dropping another hook in the water. With more opportunities for your target market to find your bait, the more bites you’ll get. The more blog posts you have, the more chances you have to rank for various keywords.

2. Humanizes your brand

Carefully crafted website content (e.g., a homepage or about page) can’t hold a candle to a blog post when it comes to showing the personal side of your business. Blogging gives your business a way to touch on issues and concerns of interest to your prospects, while also sharing what you and your employees are passionate about. Your blog posts give you a unique opportunity to share your voice and personality, building up trust and increasing your brand’s likeability quotient.

3. Supports your social media initiatives

It’s difficult to maintain an active social media presence without access to unique, high-quality content. Sharing other people’s content on social media is great, but at some point, you want to be directing those leads to your own site. As you share your blog posts on social media, you increase traffic to your business website – a feat that would be much more difficult without highly-relevant, topical information such as that found in blog posts.

In addition, blog posts provide content for email newsletters. If you’ve got an email newsletter, you’ve probably wondered what content should go in it. A simple top-10 list that highlights your best blog content over the last 2-4 weeks is valuable content that’s likely to be appreciated by your readers.

4. Builds authority in your industry

A blog is one of the best ways to establish yourself or your brand as an expert in your field, as it gives you a platform for sharing important industry-related information and insights. As you build up authority in your niche, this breeds trust and familiarity, keeping you top-of-mind when your prospects are ready to buy, and increasing conversion rates, which brings us to our next benefit…

5. Improves conversion rates

An active blog sends a signal that your business is alive and well, loved and maintained. This is why I often tell business owners that if they can’t update their blog regularly, it may be better not to have one at all. A blog with high-quality content also helps build brand loyalty, further increasing your conversion rates. According to Hubspot, overall ROI is also more likely to increase for companies who blog; in fact, businesses who prioritize blogging experience a 13X increase in ROI, year after year.

6. Helps generate inbound links

Having high-quality inbound links to your site is one of the three pillars of SEO. However, without a blog, it can be extremely difficult to attract authoritative links to your business website. When you add new content that serves as a resource for other bloggers and media, you start to naturally accumulate inbound links as other authors, columnists, journalists, bloggers, and contributors reference and cite that content in their own articles. These links are important for SEO, but can also generate significant referral traffic back to your site.

7. Helps you rank for long-tail search queries

A site without a blog will have a hard time ranking for long-tail search queries. A typical business website can often successfully rank for business-specific keywords (e.g., “Joe’s Drycleaners”), but will have a more difficult time ranking for highly-specific phrases like “How to get red wine out of silk”. Having more content is the best way to rank for long-tail queries; the more content you add, the more chances you have to rank for less common, but ultimately higher-converting keyword phrases.

8. Increases leads

Research shows that the more pages a site has, the more leads it gets. According to Hubspot, businesses with 401-1000 pages of content get 6x more leads than those with 51-100. In simple terms, the more you blog, the more leads you generate. More content means more form submissions, more email opt-ins, more quote requests, and ultimately, more sales.

9. Facilitates valuable discussion

Blogging gives businesses the opportunity to connect with customers and prospects through a two-way conversation. It signals to visitors that you’re open to comments, feedback and even criticisms. And from a business perspective, learning what’s on the minds of prospects is marketing gold. You can use this dialogue to ask further questions, gain new insights into your customers’ needs and structure your content and marketing initiatives based on what you’ve learned.

10. Allows you to achieve ‘freshness’

The freshness factor is also significant; Google loves to see new content being added on a regular basis, and rewards sites that do so with better visibility. Fresh content is also more likely to be timely or news-related, which means it’s more likely to get exposure for trending searches.

More content also means more opportunities for adding internal links. This creates more pathways for search engine crawlers, which more effectively spreads PageRank throughout your site.

Final Thoughts

Blogging on your company’s website is one of the best ways to differentiate yourself from your competitors. By providing your own unique thoughts and insights, you naturally grow your search traffic, customer trust and ultimately, sales. To some extent, blogging also levels the playing field with big brands, giving small businesses the unprecedented opportunity to compete with big businesses with big budgets.

The 12 Essential Elements Of High-Quality Content

“Quality content” is far more than just a buzzword marketers throw around for fun.

It’s what savvy marketers strive for, and what Google and people look for. It’s what separates the winners from the losers online; it’s what will help your site rank well in the search engines, what will naturally attract high-quality inbound links, and what will help you build trust, credibility, and authority with your audience. And yet, many business owners still aren’t aware of what “high-quality content” actually means. I’m consistently asked by my clients, “How do I know if my content is high-quality?”

While the definition of “quality” changes depending on niche, industry, type, or target audience, there are many common elements that are reliable, consistent indicators of quality. Following is a checklist you can use to determine whether your content is ‘quality’ or not.

You can use this checklist to determine how Google and your visitors perceive and evaluate your content, or to determine how reliable and authoritative someone else’s content is.

Sources used for this post include Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, Google’s leaked Quality Rating Guide, and various other sources as cited below.

I’ve also put together a handy list of 10 hidden gems from Google’s leaked Quality Raters Guidelines. You can check out the infographic at the bottom of this article.

1. Are You Using the Appropriate Length of Content?

We’re currently living in tricky times when it comes to determining the ideal word count for content. On the one hand, we know that Google certainly shows a preference for long form, ‘meaty’ content that covers all aspects of a topic. On the other hand, our mobile users are showing a preference for shorter, more succinct content they can read on the go.

With mobile having now overtaken desktop for going online, (60% of mobile web users use their phone as their primary or exclusive means of going online), this struggle is only going to continue.

When creating content, focus on your goals and on the intent of your audience: If you want the content to rank highly in the search engines and to attract links, go for longer, 1000+ word content. If you want your content to be easily accessible to mobile users, cut out anything unnecessary and format your content so mobile users can get the information they need, fast. Some ways to do this include using a lower word count, focusing on long-tail keywords that mobile users would be more likely to search for, the proper use of headings, bullet points, lists, and linking to other mobile-friendly content.

2. Are You Supplementing with Images, Video Embeds, Infographics or Other Media?

It’s possible to have high-quality content without using images or other forms of media, but we know that visual content outperforms text-only content in terms of attracting inbound links, social media shares, time spent on page, and engagement. In fact, we know that 40% of people will respond better to visual information than to plain text. It’s likely that Google factors in the use of multimedia when scoring pages for its ranking algorithm. Even if that’s not the case, it’s a fact that Google considers inbound links to a page as one of the heaviest factors in its ranking algorithm, and multimedia-based content has been shown to be shared up to 12X more than text content.

Some questions to ask yourself about your use of media include:

• Do my images or videos support claims or facts within the content?
• Do they meet quality standards from a technical perspective?
• Are they aesthetically pleasing?
• Are my infographics or other original visual content of the quality that others will want to share them or link to them?

3. Are You Using Proper Grammar and Spelling, and is Your Content Coherent?

Google has placed a huge emphasis on the trustworthiness of pages and sites, and a page with poor spelling, grammar or typos is much less likely to be seen as trustworthy. Even if Google were irrelevant (which, of course, it isn’t), your website visitors are far less likely to trust and rely on information that isn’t written professionally. Some questions to ask yourself include:

• Is my content factually correct?
• Is the content organized in a logical way?
• Is my grammar and spelling correct?

4. Are You Using Proper Page and Text Formatting?

e for scanning and skimming (which is how the majority of your website visitors will consume your content). Google’s algorithm has become sophisticated enough that it can detect page and content layout, and you may be penalized in the rankings for poor content formatting. Again, even if Google doesn’t penalize you for it, your human readers will.

Optimal formatting includes the appropriate use of:

• bolds and italics;
• short, concise sentences and paragraphs;
• bullet points and numbered lists;
• appropriate use of white space; and
• headers and sub-headers to break up long chunks of text.

5. Are You Achieving An Appropriate Readability Score?

Quality content is easy to read and understand, and matches the preferences of the audience for which it’s intended. Using a tool like the Readability-Score, which is based on the Flesch-Kincaid readability tests, will help you ensure your content matches the reading level, expectations and preferences of your audience. This is particularly important when creating content aimed at kids or teens or those who have a primary language other than English.

6. Is it Written By Someone With the Necessary Level of Expertise?

According to Google’s leaked Quality Rater Guidelines, author expertise is a critical factor when it comes to determining the quality and authority of a particular piece of content: “High quality pages and websites need enough expertise to be authoritative and trustworthy on their topic”.

For academic topics, what credentials or degrees does your author hold? For content that may have an impact on a person’s well-being, what on-page or on-site proof do you have of the author’s credibility? This is particularly important for pages Google which Google refers to as “Your Money Your Life” (YMYL): “There are some pages for which PQ [page quality] is particularly important. We call these pages Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) pages. They are pages that can have an impact on your current or future well being (physical, financial, safety, etc.). YMYL pages should come from reputable websites and the content should be created with a high level of expertise and authority.”

7. What Else has this Author Written?

Although the term ‘Author Rank’ isn’t one that’s officially used by Google, it’s well known concept among the Internet marketing community that holds that the more content an author publishes, the higher that author’s content will rank in Google search results. We know that Google is trying to decrease anonymity when it comes to online content. The credibility and reputation of an author increases and improves as he or she creates and publishes more (high-quality) content on trusted, authoritative publishers. Authors can achieve this through guest blogging.

As you choose writers or vet guest authors for your own website, keep in mind what else he or she has written, and where that content has been published. Have they been published on other trusted, high-quality publishers like Forbes, Huffington Post or leading industry websites? Take a look at how their other content ranks in the search engines; if it tends to rank well, this is a good indication that Google already sees them as a credible and reliable source of information.

8. Does the Content Have Social Media Shares?

While Google has claimed that social signals from Facebook and Twitter aren’t part of their ranking algorithms, there is evidence to the contrary; multiple correlation studies have shown clear ties between higher amounts of social shares and higher search engine rankings. Even though correlation is not causation, it’s logical that the more a particular piece of content is shared, the more awareness and inbound links it will generate; and inbound links are absolutely a core ranking factor in Google’s algorithm.

Another indication of quality content is whether social media share buttons and counters are present. Not having them may simply be an indication that the website owner isn’t technically savvy or doesn’t realize the importance of social media. The lack of social counters may also indicate that the content isn’t being shared…and this may be a sign of poor-quality content.

Google’s reason for claiming that they don’t use social signals in the ranking algorithm is that their crawler can’t access Facebook and Twitter. However, they have not addressed the fact that their crawler can easily access the social share counts present on social share counters. Additionally, their crawler is not limited to crawling their own social media channel, Google+, which has repeatedly shown the highest correlation to rankings. For these reasons, the smart bet is to integrate your content with social media channels by sharing it across your own, and encouraging your readers to share it as well.

9. Does it Have Good Internal and External Links?

One of the most important indicators of the credibility of a site or a piece of content is its inbound and outbound link profile. We know that links to bad neighborhoods or known spam sites will kill the credibility of the article or site in Google’s eyes. We also know that Google frowns on the excessive use of internal linking; particularly unnatural internal linking or the overuse of exact-match anchor text.

Likely the most important indicator of the quality of a page is the number and quality of inbound links to that page. Who is linking to the page? If well-known, reputable sites are linking to it, that’s a good indication to Google that the content is trustworthy and credible. If there are no links to the page, or if the links are from small, unknown, or spammy sites, this can a good indication that the content is low quality or untrustworthy.

10. What Domain is it Published on?

A piece of content can potentially meet all the criteria for being high quality, but if other pages on the site are deemed to be poor quality, this can negatively impact the rankings of even the high-quality content. When determining the quality of a piece of content, look at the surrounding content as well: the pages it links to (as mentioned previously), as well as the homepage, root domain, and other articles on the site.

11. Are Comments Enabled, and What is the Quality of the Comments?

Sites or pieces of content that have commenting enabled, and that have a high number of thoughtful comments may be deemed as higher quality than those that don’t. Sites that have commenting enabled, but that allow spammy, link-filled comments to go unchecked are likely to be seen as negligent or unconcerned with the quality of the site (thus lowering the overall credibility of the site).

If you have a healthy number of comments on your site, don’t be afraid to draw attention to the fact by increasing the size of your comment counter, or by moving the counter to the top of your blog post. When people see that others liked your content enough to comment on it, they’ll be more likely to do the same.

12. Does the Content Provide Value?

While it’s difficult for search engines to determine whether content provides value, it is, ultimately, the only thing that matters for human readers. Value can be derived in a number of different ways, but the most common include:

• Does this content solve a problem?
• Does it answer a question?
• Does it provide entertainment?
• Does it make people laugh?
• Does it provide unique, expert insight?

Search engines want to only rank content that provides value for human readers. But since search engines don’t have the ability to comprehend content like humans do, they rely on the rest of these signals to determine whether content provides value, and thus, whether it’s truly “quality.” Content that provides value tends to have the other elements in common.

Conclusion

If you’re publishing content for the sake of search engines, without providing real value to readers, it’s time to re-think your content strategy. As you review the content you’ve published thus far, as well as the content you plan to publish, refer to the above elements to determine whether your content can truly be considered “quality.” Here’s an infographic that illustrates specific elements of quality, based on Google’s leaked Quality Rater Guidelines.

Why Your Company Blog Shouldn’t Be About Your Company

Ask yourself a few questions: What are your favorite types of blogs? Which ones do you subscribe to and look forward to reading? Which ones do you consider a good use of your valuable time?

Although I can’t guess which specific blogs are your favorites, I think I can predict, with a good deal of accuracy, which types of blogs aren’t on your list:

• Those that are exclusively about products or services
• Those that are constantly and explicitly trying to sell you something
• Those that are essentially a platform for the business or blogger to broadcast their marketing message

Unfortunately, many businesses publish this type of content to their company blog on a regular basis. And while they may achieve results from time to time using this strategy, these types of businesses are much more likely to report that blogging simply hasn’t been worth the investment.

And this is a shame, given the enormous potential blogging has for businesses in nearly every niche and industry. For instance, did you know that 43% of marketers received a customer from their blog in 2013? High-quality, frequently-published content is also necessary for a successful SEO initiative and offers many more far-reaching benefits, such as brand building, audience growth, improved conversion rates, and more.

So, if your company blog shouldn’t really be about your company, what should it be about? Isn’t blogging about your business kind of the whole point of ‘business blogging’?

I would argue: absolutely, definitely not.

I like how online marketing strategist David Meerman Scott puts it: “Stop talking about your products and services. People don’t care about products and services; they care about themselves.”

Much of the advice you’ll read online about how to blog for business will give you tips which essentially boil down to one thing: how to make your blog as palatable as possible.

But is that what you really want? For your blog to be palatable? To be able to write in such a way that people won’t mind or perhaps won’t notice that you’re talking about your business or products?

I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather my customers want to come to my company blog. And yes, believe it or not, this is possible. All it takes is one simple strategy, and I guarantee your customers and clients will actually want to read your blog.

Here it is: Your blog should be a resource to your readers and to other bloggers.

When it comes down to it, people don’t read your blog for information about your products or services; that’s what your product pages are for. They don’t read your blog as a favor to you, and they won’t continue reading it just because they like your products or feel some sense of loyalty to your business.

People will read your blog because it provides relevant and valuable information they can’t find anywhere else.

It’s well-known that attracting inbound links is one of the best ways to build up your blog’s authority and visibility in the search engines. But how many bloggers do you think are going to link to your site if all you do is talk about your business?

Using your blog to become a trusted (link-worthy) resource is a strategy that works in nearly every industry. For instance:

• A home renovation company could blog about ‘how to retile a bathroom floor’ or ‘questions to ask before you hire a contractor’.
• A digital marketing company could blog about the latest SEO and social media trends and strategies.
• A realtor could blog about ‘the top 10 family-friendly neighborhoods in Seattle’ or ‘the best times of the year to sell your home’.
• A local coffee shop could aim to become a trusted resource for consumers when it comes to roasting beans or finding ethically sourced coffee.

In each of these examples, the blogs are focused not on themselves or on their business, but on how their content addresses the questions and issues faced by their readers and customers.

And the benefits of this strategy go beyond simply acting as a resource for your readers; it’s equally important that other bloggers come to trust and rely on your content. Here’s why: Bloggers and journalists will link to resources, not to content that’s self-promotional in nature. If you ever hope to increase your influence and search engine rankings, you simply must produce content others will want to link to.

50 Content Marketing Ideas For Your Website Or Blog

Do you ever feel like you’re running out of content ideas for your website or blog?

With almost nine out of 10 companies now using some form of content marketing to attract leads, just try to visualize the sheer volume of content that needs to be produced on a daily basis.

Following is a list of 50 content marketing tips you can use to ensure you’re never without a great idea again. Some of these you’ll have heard before, but there are likely to be some you’ve never thought of.

1. Invest in quality over quantity: Focus on creating fewer, but higher-quality pieces. If you’re currently writing three to five short posts on your blog, consider switching to one to two long form, more “meaty” posts.
2. Define your ideal persona: If you haven’t already done so, figure out exactly who you’re writing your content for.
3. Find new sources for high-quality images for your blog (hint: using cheesy stock photos can make your blog look cheap).
4. Compile a comprehensive list of industry statistics and research. These types of posts are great for getting inbound links.
5. Write a top 100+ post on a relevant topic in your niche.
6. Write a blog post responding to a controversial article or video in your niche.
7. Write a post predicting trends in your niche or industry.
8. Audit your existing posts and make sure each has only one call to action.
9. Dig through your files for old decks you can put on Slideshare, then embed them on your blog.
10. Create a decision guide: This can be text-only, an image, or an interactive tool.
11. Test a pop up opt-in list to see how it affects conversion rates.
12. Use Ubersuggest to find tons of possible keywords or phrases for your next blog post.
13. Ask your readers to submit a story of their experience with your product or service.
14. Find out what’s hot in your industry and create a viral infographic about it.
15. Install ProBlogger’s new Sticky Top Bar Plugin to display an opt-in box or other call to action at the top of every page of your site.
16. Look through your analytics to see your top three blog posts, then write a follow up post for each one.
17. Contact three key figures in your industry to talk about opportunities for cross promoting content via your email lists, guest posts and social media sharing.
18. Recycle some of your old newsletters by turning them into blog posts.
19. Recycle some of your old blog posts by turning them into newsletter content.
20. Use Portent’s Content Idea Generator to find new ideas and headlines for your next blog post.
21. Contact leaders in your field and have them answer a question: Take all the answers and turn them into one awesome blog post.
22. Do a poll or survey of your audience and publish a post with your findings.
23. Ask your readers, subscribers and social media followers to submit videos, ideas, or images: Choose the best ones and create blog content around them.
24. Use Hootsuite to engage in social listening; and then create content based on trending topics or questions.
25. Create a simple spreadsheet where you can jot down content ideas as they come to you (or your smartphone’s notepad application works fine too); this will ensure you never run out of things to write about.
26. Subscribe to relevant subbredits to see what topics are trending in your industry.
27. Join three private Facebook groups in your niche to see what topics your audience is really interested in.
28. Create category pages on your website or blog that can make finding your content easier for your visitors: These will be pages that are optimized around specific themes or topics, and that can help your visitors quickly find relevant content on your site.
29. Create landmark articles that act as an ultimate resource or guide about particular topics.
30. Plan to incorporate content curation into your marketing mix. For best results in terms of SEO, be sure to add your own ideas and thoughts to the content you’re curating.
31. Create a blog post that includes an excerpt of your eBook; then encourage your readers to download the rest.
32. Try using Quora to find questions people are asking in your niche or industry.
33. Compile Top 10 resource lists for your niche: Top 10 blogs; top 10 companies; top 10 tools, etc.
34. Create a ‘hack’ post: A list of workarounds for a common problem or issue in your niche.
35. Write a blog post about a conversation that’s taking place on social media: For instance, if your Facebook fans are having a particularly lively debate, write a post summarizing the main arguments and offering a solution or answer.
36. Put your URL or website name on all the original photos you use on your blog; this way, if they get pinned or shared, you’ll be sure to retain credit.
37. Take some time to learn about user-focused content strategies; it will pay off big time in the long term.
38. Create at least one info product (such as an eBook) you can publish on your website to grow your email list.
39. Dig down to find relevant sub-topics your visitors will want to read about: Choose a general topic and then commit to coming up with at least five to 10 subtopics related to that theme.
40. Create a beginner’s guide with helpful, actionable information and tips.
41. Write a blog post about a popular movie, relating it to your specific audience or industry.
42. Write a post inspired by a comment left on your blog (the more controversial, the better).
43. Write about a hypothetical situation, and ask your visitors what they do in the same situation.
44. Review a recent book that would be relevant to your audience.
45. Write a blog post but don’t finish it: Ask your readers to finish it for you in the comments or via an email submission (contest, anyone?)
46. Compile a list of inspirational or motivational quotes your readers would enjoy.
47. Create a blog post that lists all the most useful articles or resources on a particular topic (not just your own).
48. Make a video where you recount something that’s happened to you; it doesn’t even have to relate to your business. Sometimes your readers just want to be able to relate to you in a humanized sense!
49. Go through your old, outdated, potentially Penguin and Panda-penalized content and improve it: Combine short pieces into longer, more “meaty” content, or get rid of poor-quality content altogether.
50. Write a post listing and linking to all your articles on a particular topic or theme. This is great for SEO and for increasing readers’ time-on-site.

Email marketing

Email marketing complements a content marketing campaign by allowing you to develop a relationship with your prospects right in their inbox. Email list subscribers are much more likely to convert, review your company, and recommend you via word of mouth to their friends, so it’s extremely valuable to build and nurture your email list.

If you haven’t yet started building an email list (but know you need to), this article is for you. You may have heard that a strong email list is one of the most valuable assets you can have, but when you’re starting from scratch, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. This is partly because many business owners have a hard time envisioning the long-term payoff for the hard work they need to do now.

If you’re serious about growing your business, building a healthy email list should be one of your top priorities. When it comes down to it, your list is one of the only online assets that you have 100% control over. Having a solid social media presence is absolutely essential, but you’ll always be at the mercy of new and changing algorithms. And achieving high search engine rankings is great too, but again, you’re at the mercy of changing algorithms and updates.

Your email list, on the other hand, is yours, free and clear. Using your website and social media to attract visitors and followers, and then encouraging them to sign up for your email list gives you the opportunity to contact your prospects at any point in the future, with any kind of messaging you want; and you’re not bound by search engine rankings or social media algorithms.

Getting Started: The Basics

1. Sign up with an email marketing service.

Since we’re starting at the beginning, I’m going to assume you haven’t yet chosen an email service provider (ESP). An ESP will provide you with all the tools, templates and services you need to get subscribers, test your campaigns, and manage the day-to-day requirements of your list.

Different email services will use different pricing models, so be sure to choose the one that best suits your list size and expectations for growth. Some ESP’s will charge a flat monthly fee based on list size, while others will charge per number of emails sent.

A good, basic (free) service if you’re just starting out is MailChimp. Other popular options include AWeber, GetResponse, and ConstantContact.

2. Create a compelling offer or asset.

Before people hand over their email address, you’re going to have to offer them something enticing in exchange. This could be a free eBook, access to a Webinar, or the promise of discounts or deals exclusively for your subscribers. You could even repurpose some of your existing blog content and turn it into a guide or resource list. Whatever you decide to offer, just make sure it’s something people will recognize as holding true value!

3. Create an opt-in form.

Every ESP will give you the tools to create an opt-in form for your site. Generally speaking, the less information you ask for (at this initial stage, at least), the better. The more information you ask for, the less likely your prospect is to complete the process. You’ll obviously need to ask for an email address, and I also highly recommended that you ask for a first name so you can personalize your emails. However, asking for any information beyond these two fields can decrease conversion rates significantly without adding much valuable data.

4. Put the opt-in form on your site.

Placing your form on your site is usually as easy as copying and pasting a snippet of code provided by your email marketing service. Most website owners put their form in their right sidebar, which has been shown as one of the highest-converting locations. However, this certainly isn’t the only option.

According to Derek Halpern of Social Triggers, there are 7 high-converting places you should consider putting it:

1. In a feature box (see Social Triggers feature box above)
2. At the top of your sidebar
3. After each blog post
4. In your site’s footer
5. On your About page
6. In a little bar across the top of your page (If you’re using WordPress, you can download the Attention Grabber plugin for free).
7. In a popup box

Each placement will perform differently depending on your site, niche and audience, so be sure to test out various locations as you go along.

You’ll also want to make sure you’re giving your new subscribers easy access to that compelling offer you created in #2 above. Typically, this is done by including a download link on the page that subscribers are directed to after confirming their email.

The Fun Part: Getting Subscribers

Now that you’re all set up to starting collecting emails, the fun part begins (when I say ‘fun’, I actually mean ‘hard’). If your site receives a good amount of traffic and you have a truly compelling offer, this shouldn’t be too difficult. However, if you’re like most business owners, you’ll need to look outside your own audience to start building your list.

That’s the topic of the next section.

50 Ways To Grow Your Email List

You may have already noticed that your website visitors aren’t automatically going to sign up for your list just because you have an opt-in box in your sidebar. Marketers are beginning to face the realities of an online environment that’s oversaturated with generic, low-value offers:

“Click here to receive my newsletter.”

“Join our list.”

“Enter your email and you’ll receive weekly updates.”

Opt-in incentives need to be more enticing and more valuable, and this value needs to be clear. Your opt-in links and sign-up boxes need to be obvious, without being pushy or distracting. An opt-in box isn’t enough; you need to incorporate sign-ups into all of your content marketing and social media strategies.

Following are 50 proven ways to entice and attract new subscribers in order to grow your email list.

1. Add a lightbox form to your site: One company experienced a 99% increase in subscriber growth after adding a pop-over opt-in form.
2. Create an amazing, value-packed opt-in incentive: A 1-page report just won’t cut it anymore; try a full-length eBook or white paper.
3. Host a free webinar, and make signing up a requirement for registration.
4. Offer the webinar recording as an opt-in incentive: Make signing up a requirement for downloading or viewing the recording.
5. Create multiple offers on your site to improve your segmentation: Offer several different opt-in incentives for different segments of your audience. This will increase the number of people who sign up, and improve the relevance of the emails you send to your subscribers.
6. Add a call to action at the end of your YouTube videos.
7. Link to an old newsletter on social media: Show your fans and followers what they’re missing out on by not subscribing to your emails.
8. Offer an exclusive subscriber-only discount and promote it on social media.
9. Mention an influential Twitter user in your newsletter, and then tweet about it: Hopefully that influencer will then retweet it to his or her followers.
10. Amazing blog content + clear call to action = massive email list
11. Include a subscriber testimonial alongside your opt-in box.
12. Add a sign-up form to your Facebook page.
13. Mention the benefit of joining your list: Make it clear what’s ‘in it for them’.
14. Hold a contest, and make joining your list a contest requirement.
15. Make your opt-in box a feature, not an add-on: Don’t hide your opt-in box in your sidebar…put it in a prominent place so your visitors can’t miss it.
16. Collect emails at offline events like tradeshows: Hold an on-site contest and make providing an email a contest requirement.
17. Include a call to action to join your list in your guest post author bios.
18. Cross-promote with a complimentary business in your niche: Agree to promote each other’s newsletters.
19. Offer must-have content via your newsletter: Be sure to offer exclusive, ‘hot’ content in your newsletter, and then let your social media audience know about it.
20. Ask your social media followers to join: Asking nicely never hurts!
21. Ask for as little info as possible: Include as few fields as possible on your sign-up form. This will increase the chances of someone actually signing up.
22. Be regular in how often you send out emails to your list: When people see that you regularly send out great content, they’re more likely to recommend your emails to their friends and colleagues.
23. Use a sponsor offer to entice people to join your list: If you offer advertising on your site, kill two birds with one stone…Promote a sponsor offer (like a discount or giveaway) in your newsletter, and let your followers and website visitors know about it.
24. Use a call to action after blog posts: Using a plugin like WordPress Calls to Action can help with this.
25. Offer an email course: Offer a multi-day email course like ’10 days to rock hard abs’.
26. Add a QR code to offline media like business cards and tradeshow posters.
27. Use a plugin like WP-TopBar to show a special opt-in message at the top (or bottom) of every page of your site.
28. Make your homepage all about the opt-in: Your homepage likely gets more traffic than the rest of your site, so make sure you showcase your sign up form in a prominent place.
29. Use the new Facebook call to action button to drive email sign-ups: According to Marketing Land, using this button has increased conversions for Dollar Shave Club by 2.5x.
30. Offer transparent segmenting: Let your subscribers choose what types of content they want to receive from you.
31. Create opt-in landing pages for social media referral traffic.
32. Include an opt-in radio button (checkbox) on your website’s contact form and About Us page.
33. Offer customers a discount on their next purchase with email sign-up.
34. Provide social proof alongside your opt-in box: “Join the # subscribers who already enjoy this newsletter”.
35. Incorporate social sharing buttons alongside your newsletter content, not just at the top or side of your site.
36. Gate some of your content: Show excerpts of this content, and then require email sign-up in order to view the whole article.
37. Offer PDF versions of popular blog content in exchange for email sign-up.
38. Provide your credentials when asking for opt-ins: What qualifies you as an expert in your field? Why should people trust you?
39. Offer flash discounts for new subscribers: This is a common tactic used by online fashion retailers. Offer a % discount for new, first-time subscribers.
40. Offer bonus information at the end of popular blog posts with email sign-up: For instance, if you have a blog post of the Top 10 Ways to Find New Clients, offer an additional 10 tips with email sign-up.
41. Offer the first 50, 100, 200, etc. subscribers a bonus gift or discount, and promote this offer to your social media followers.
42. Be relatable: Let potential subscribers know you’re a real person, not a nameless, faceless brand. This will instill trust and increase the likelihood they’ll hand over their email.
43. Make the sign-up as quick and painless as possible: Use a sign-up form rather than a link to a sign-up form, wherever possible. Every additional step you incorporate into the process is one more chance to lose your subscriber.
44. Add a sign-up radio box if you require blog commenters to sign in: This is risky as it may detract some visitors from commenting, but the payoff may be worth it.
45. Give potential subscribers a sneak peek of what they’ll be getting: Offer a sample newsletter or a screenshot of a typical email you send to subscribers.
46. Add an opt-in radio box in your e-commerce checkout.
47. Let potential subscribers know exactly what they’ll be getting and how often they’ll be getting it.
48. Ask…again and again: Buffer doubled their email list in 30 days by adding 9 additional opportunities to sign up. Before, they asked for sign-ups in a slideup form; after they also asked for it in a HelloBar, on their homepage, in a postscript, in their sidebar, on Twitter, on their SlideShares, on Facebook and Qzzr.
49. Include an anti-spam policy: Assure potential subscribers you’ll only send relevant info, and will never sell or share their personal info.
50. Run a survey, and gate the results: Pull the results together, add some graphs and charts, and then release it to your audience…with email sign up, of course!

I hope this list gives you some fresh ideas for growing your email list!

Why Email Marketing is Important

Email marketing has undergone many shifts in the past two decades. It exploded onto the scene when email started becoming a more popular medium, and businesses everywhere scrambled to send, seemingly, as many emails as possible to their audience. Then, spam filters and legal email regulations started throttling back the “quantity over quality” mentality, and email marketers were forced to use more creative, appealing tactics in their campaigns.

The arrival of social media marketing and mobile smart devices changed the landscape of email marketing once again. People started using social platforms like Facebook and Twitter to do the majority of their communicating, leaving email as a backup or as a reserve for only business communications. They also started relying on their mobile devices more and more, working on the go with a small screen size instead of using the more convenient desktop setup. Many marketers projected this to be the end of email marketing altogether; since people were using email less often and email marketing tactics were beginning to wear thin on an uninterested audience, it seemed reasonable to think that the medium was a dry well.

However, the numbers are indicating that email marketing is alive and well, and companies are seeing substantial returns on their investment in the marketing medium. Almost any business in any industry can reap the benefits of a strong email marketing campaign. Consider the following reasons you should engage in email marketing as part of your online marketing campaign:

1. Email Marketing Is Alive and Growing. The statistics don’t lie. At the end of 2014, 73 percent of marketers claimed that email marketing was a core strategy for their business. Additionally, 59 percent of marketers planned to increase their email budgets in 2015 and beyond. Of course, it’s not always a good idea to go with the crowd and make decisions based on popularity, but these marketers have had experience with email marketing, and it looks like it’s been a positive one. It’s not entirely clear why email marketing is seeing a bit of a renaissance; it could be because people are more used to checking emails on their mobile devices and open rates are increasing, or it could be that the options available to email marketers are more diverse now than ever. Either way, email marketing is on its way up again, and it’s a trend you should get behind.
2. Email Marketing Feeds Your Other Campaigns. Email marketing isn’t just about email marketing, at least not anymore. Email marketing is simultaneously your gateway drug—which leads new customers to your other, more substantial marketing efforts—and your mortar—which ties all your other campaigns together. Through an email marketing initiative, you can draw people to your blog by offering snippets of content, or you can drive up your following numbers by inviting people to share deals on social media. You can also use your other marketing channels to invite people to sign up for your email blasts, resulting in a closed, cohesive system that nurtures your overall customer base as one unit.
3. Small Increases Lead to Big Returns. Email marketing doesn’t take much to get going. You can get a MailChimp account for free, and if you already have a list of customers, you can use that as the basis for your initial email blasts. After that, even small, low-budget upgrades can give you a massive return. Spending a few hundred dollars on a list of emails can net you hundreds of potential new customers. Spending some extra money on your email designs can present your brand in radically new ways to unfamiliar customers and increase both brand loyalty and engagement.
4. You Can Objectively Measure Your Results. There’s not much to lose by increasing your email marketing budget. If things go bad, you can always reduce your budget back to where it was or eliminate the campaign entirely. One of the greatest benefits of email marketing is that you’ll be able to objectively measure your results. With every email blast you send out, you’ll be able to monitor your delivery rates, your open rates, and the total number of click-throughs you receive. As long as you know your conversion rates, from there, you’ll be able to objectively determine whether your email marketing budget is enabling a profitable return. If not, you can make a change, but if it is, you can throw more fuel on the fire with an even greater budget.
5. People Are Demanding More. It isn’t enough to send a simple promotional email or a short list of new content on your site. People need more from email campaigns, and in order to give the people what they want, you’ll have to step up your overall budget. Serve them well with better designs, more appealing copy, and better offers—free giveaways, discounts, and special deals are all winners, but they take an upfront investment to be successful.

Remember that email marketing is about more than just sending as many emails as you can. You need to find an audience and get to know that audience first. Only then will you be able to anticipate your audience’s needs and create emails that actually have value to them. Modern email marketing isn’t about making a sales pitch or attracting as many clicks as possible; it’s about providing value to your users, and you’ll have to work hard to hold up your end of the bargain.

Chapter 4: Off-site Authority Building

I’ve spent the last two chapters talking about on-site SEO factors and things that are under your direct control (such as your content marketing strategy). Now it’s time to dig deeper into the off-site side of things. I’m calling this “ authority building” instead of “ link building” because links aren’t the only way to build authority these days. In fact, some people have referred to link building as a “dead” strategy, but this is more of a result of terminological semantics than any real shift in the SEO paradigm.

Link Building

In a recent Google+ live hangout, Google’s webmaster trends analyst, John Mueller, answered a common question: “Is link building in any way good?”

His answer was somewhat surprising.

“In general, I’d try to avoid that,” he said, indicating that link building, long believed to be an essential process in SEO, is no longer advisable.

Mueller elaborated on his answer, saying that Google does take links into consideration as part of its ranking algorithm, but that building links directly isn’t the right way to go about it. He stated that your goal should be to make sure your content “stands on its own” and easy for your users to share on their own blogs and websites.

He also downplayed the importance of links, insisting that the ranking algorithm takes many factors into consideration, and building links might ultimately do more harm than good for your site.

Links Doing More Harm Than Good?

The short version of Mueller’s response is only somewhat surprising. Google, as a whole, has long viewed link building as a form of soft link manipulation.

Google’s job is to find the most relevant pages on the web for a user query and rank them based on quality and authority. Any inorganically gained signals of quality/authority (including links) could interfere with the accuracy of those rankings. For Mueller to dismiss link building is in line with that position.

Google has addressed this via Google Penguin, an update to its ranking algorithm which discounts what it considers to be spammy or low-quality links. Acquiring too many “spammy” or “manipulative” links, or too many of the same kind of link, or links on irrelevant or low-quality sources, can all potentially lead to an algorithmic or manual penalty — so it’s no wonder why Mueller says that link building can do more harm than good!

However, the fact that link building can be dangerous doesn’t mean it always is. If you approach link building carefully, with an understanding of the factors that will lead you to success instead of penalty, you should be able to avoid any resulting unpleasantness.

This is the mindset of pragmatic SEO professionals. We know that links are one of the most significant factors in the ranking algorithm, so making no effort to acquire them isn’t a good strategy — especially when it’s a safe bet that your competitors are building links.

The “Right” Way To Build Links

What John Mueller describes as the right (natural) way to build links actually is the right way. It’s the best, most efficient method you have of building links, but it takes some extra time and money to get the job done.

Google considers links valuable in its ranking algorithm because they’re an indication of trust, credibility, and authority. When another website links to yours, it means they found something valuable on your site, and that makes you more valuable by proxy.

Building links on your own mimics this status, but doesn’t convey any actual credibility because you’re the one building them — and Google doesn’t want you to be able to vote for yourself. Instead, work on developing high-quality content that is valuable and likely to be shared.

Very detailed blog posts, infographics, and videos are among some of the most shared types of content. Take your time, and don’t be afraid to use extra money or resources to get the job done — the higher your content quality is, the more links it’ll naturally attract or earn.

Syndicate your content through social media, and hopefully, the rest will take care of itself — the highest quality content can earn thousands of new links on its own, and none of those links will be at risk of earning a penalty. Executing and syndicating this type of content on a consistent basis can be tough since you need to produce original, entertaining, informative material every time, but it’s worth it if higher authority is your ultimate goal.

There’s another, arguably more powerful way to build links without being entirely passive about outreach efforts, though: guest blogging.

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is the process of establishing relationships with other blog owners, editors, and journalists in order to earn the right to contribute to their publications. Anything you contribute will have editorial approval because it generally must be approved by the owner of the publication.

Let’s get into some more detail here about guest blogging. It’s a somewhat straightforward process, but you need to know what you’re getting into before you begin:

Step 1. First, you need to find blogs and publishers that have an audience and following that would be interested in your product/service. For example, let’s say your business sells lawn mowers. Sure, online publications related to lawn mowers would be great. But you have to think vertically, horizontally and every other way but straight forward.

A homeowners’ blog might be a good fit; wouldn’t homeowners be interested in purchasing a lawn mower? Your guest blog post could be “6 Reasons Your Lawn Looks Like Crap” – gasp. That’s okay. It gets your attention, right? Most homeowners are very proud of their land and their lawn. They will likely want to know!

Think about the categories of publishers that would fit with your audience. Home & Garden, Home Improvement, and even Real Estate might be good fits. After all, in order to make the sale, that real estate agent is going to need the lawn looking spiffy.

Step 2. Go to Google and start searching for blogs related to these categories. You could try searching for “home improvement blog” as a good starting point. The search results will likely be a mix of actual home improvement blogs, and lists of the top home improvement blogs. Visit all of these and make a list of the ones you think would be most appropriate.

Step 3. Find the contact information for each blog. You can usually do this by visiting the “contact us” page on the blog, or by doing a “Whois” lookup on the domain to view the domain registry information. To perform a “Whois” lookup, simply visit Google and search for “whois lookup” and you’ll find plenty of websites that will facilitate the process for you.

Step 4. Contact each blog owner and politely introduce yourself, explain why you’re reaching out, and request the opportunity to contribute to their blog as a guest contributor.

Here’s a sample email template you can use for this process:

Subject: You should blog about [insert your guest blog post topic]

[Insert their first name], as an avid reader of [insert their site name], I would love to read about [insert guest blog post topic], and I think your other readers would as well.

Your articles on [insert existing post from their website #1, insert existing post from their website #2, and insert existing post from their website #3] are great, but I think you can tie it all together by blogging on [insert guest blog post topic].

I know you are probably busy and won’t have time to write about it, so I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse. 😉 How about I write it for you? Don’t worry, I’m a great blogger and have had my posts featured on [insert previous guest post URL #1] and [insert previous guest post URL #2].

Let me know if you are interested! I already know your blogging style, plus I understand what your readers love… as I am one. 😉

Look forward to hearing from you,
[Insert your name]

Step 5. Hopefully, you’ll get some positive replies from website owners or editors. When you do, start writing a super-awesome, insightful, helpful article. Once you’re finished and proud of it, send it to the publisher for review and approval.

Depending on the publisher, they will allow you to include a link to your website in your author bio (sometimes called a resource box) either at the end or beginning of the article. It’s also usually acceptable to link to your website from the body of your article if it’s contextually relevant and useful, which is ideal, as this type of link carries more weight than an author bio link.

Link building is a highly important online marketing strategy because search engines place very high value on external links. However, you might want to consider modernizing your strategy.

Hedging your bets with a bit of traditional link building (such as through guest blogging, broken link building, and competitor link acquisition) and a focus on earning links through quality content published on your own website (essentially attracting inbound links like a magnet through the merits of its quality) can get you the best of both worlds — you’ll get the value and low risk of content-based links, along with the stability and predictability of lower-cost traditional links.

With that blend, you can stay comfortably within budget while incrementally and reliably building your authority and trust in search engines.

Press Releases

Press releases yield many benefits for businesses:

• Inbound links
• Increased brand awareness
• Media exposure
• Positive branding
• Social media buzz
• Referral traffic to your website

Some marketers try to abuse press release distribution as a link building tactic, and as a result, many online publishers have gotten pickier about what types of topics they accept.

Matt Cutts, Google’s former head of the webspam team, once commented in a forum discussion that people shouldn’t expect links from press releases to help with rankings. Shortly thereafter, several case studies were released by independent bloggers that suggested Cutts was wrong. In the end, it just doesn’t really matter whether he’s right or not; press releases yield benefits in many ways other than just inbound links.

A well-written press release that announces something interesting and news-worthy can do wonders. If interesting enough, it could even get picked up by mainstream media and news publishers. The brand mentions, inbound links, and social buzz this would generate could be valuable for your business.

Brand Mentions

“Links” used to mean explicitly posted URLs that lead back to a page on your website. They could be posted in full, like https://www.google.com/, or be embedded as hyperlink anchor text, like Google. Either way, a link was a link, and the more links you had, the better. As you can imagine, this led to a lot of people spamming links to their own pages with reckless abandon, polluting the web with self-serving fluff and compromising the entire authority system used by Google’s algorithm.

Now, Google is differentiating between what it identifies as “express links,” or conventional links, and “implied links.” Implied links are references or mentions of a brand and/or website without an explicit link. These references could be in the body of a blog post, citing out another brand’s expertise on a specific subject, in a comment referring to another brand’s coverage of a topic, or in some other form so long as the site’s name is specifically mentioned.

Implied links, also called “brand mentions” or simply “mentions,” are becoming relevant to brand authority in new ways, calling the entire link building system into question and demonstrating another major technological breakthrough in the sophistication of Google’s measurement of authority.

Adding to this complexity in calculating authority, Google appears to also be placing a higher emphasis on what it identifies as “reference queries.” Reference queries are historical instances of individuals using a specific query and ending up in a specific location—giving Google some indication of whether a given site offers what a user is searching for. Reference queries help build an understanding of a site’s popularity (or authority) compared to similar results for a given query. In other words, the better your site is at giving people what they’re looking for, the better you’ll rank for relevant searches.

Links to Mentions

It’s clear that brand mentions are becoming very important to a site’s authority, but it appears as though traditional links are not obsolete. Both express links and implied links are now used to calculate authority, so it’s important to include both in your link building strategy. Even though, as of now, there is no precise ratio of links to mentions that has been demonstrated to be ideal for building your authority, here are a few thoughts to consider as you split your link building strategy between express links and implied links:

• Having a high link-to-mention ratio could imply a level of spamminess, possibly reducing your authority
• Viral content, especially through visual pieces of content like infographics, could be an easy way to facilitate a natural ratio of links to mentions, and natural is always better in the eyes of Google
• Guest blogs are a perfect opportunity to build your mentions (but we already covered those).

While it would be easy to purchase brand mentions the same way many companies purchase external links now, the better long-term strategy looks to be producing high-quality content that can facilitate both links and mentions on its own. But a solid content strategy has far more long-term potential and immediate value than any gimmick that relies on taking advantage of a perceived hole in the system.

Chapter 5: Social Media Marketing

Now that you have a good understanding of the basics of SEO, website structure and design, let’s discuss one of the newer institutions of the online marketing world: Social media.

Modern entrepreneurs are scrambling to get involved with social media marketing—it’s a buzzworthy topic that’s captivated the business world since the explosive popularity of Facebook and Twitter first caught international attention. But before you can take advantage of the huge benefits of social media marketing, you have to understand the basics. Social media marketing, at its core, is the process of building your brand equity and awareness via social media channels, including (but not limited to):

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Youtube
• Pinterest
• Social Bookmarking sites (Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious)
• Interactive blogs

What’s the point of social media marketing?

Social media marketing isn’t a magical remedy for your marketing woes, nor is it an overblown sensation. It is a real, measurable solution that, if executed properly, will:

• Increase brand awareness
• Give your brand an organic, human feel
• Allow you to tune in to what’s being said about your brand
• Facilitate word-of-mouth marketing
• Give you an immediate medium for customer and potential customer communication
• Increase customer loyalty
• Build consumer trust

Let’s explore each goal in detail.

Increase brand awareness

When you enter social media channels, your brand will appear in search results across the Web, not just in search engines. Many social media channels, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, feature “group” functionality which allows users to search for topics in which they are interested and opt-in to updates for those topics. Furthermore, social media channels facilitate the process of instantly sharing information with a large number of contacts. If a reader finds your content useful or interesting, they can share it with their contacts quickly and easily, creating organic exposure for your brand.

Give your brand an organic, human feel

Participating in social media channels brings your brand closer to your customers and potential customers. Your social media “voice” defines your brand image and separates it from a distant entity to a hip, trendy, “in-the-know” brand. Think about what Apple did with its famous “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” commercials.

Tune into what’s being said about your brand

You may not know it, but your customers are saying lots of things about your brand. But do you know what they’re saying? Social media channels like Twitter and Facebook make that sort of “brand buzz” readily available. If you’re not tuned in, you could be missing out on crucial information about your target market.

Facilitate word-of-mouth marketing

There’s no stronger marketing message than an endorsement from a friend. Social media facilitates word-of-mouth marketing by making it quick and easy to tell your friends about your positive experience with a brand. But social media doesn’t just make it easy to tell a single friend; it’s just as easy to tell all your friends what’s on your mind.

Use it as a medium to communicate with your customers

Twitter and Facebook have become the default customer service media for many companies, and more companies are hopping on the bandwagon each day. By using these channels to communicate with your customers, you project a transparent, trustworthy image which also shows that not only do you listen, but you care.

Increase customer loyalty

One independent study, which appeared in the March 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review found that Facebook pages can increase customer loyalty by 36%. The study also found that customers connected with the brand’s Facebook page had higher emotional attachment and greater psychological loyalty toward the brand.

Build Customer Trust

The transparency inherent in social media builds trust with potential consumers. People want to deal with people, not with corporations, and communicating through social media builds that level of personal trust.

The Top Ten Benefits of Social Media Marketing

Because it appeared quickly, social media has developed a reputation by some for being a passing marketing interest, and therefore, an unprofitable one. The statistics, however, illustrate a different picture. According to Hubspot, 92% of marketers in 2014 claimed that social media marketing was important for their business, with 80% indicating their efforts increased traffic to their websites. And according to Social Media Examiner, 97% of marketers are currently participating in social media—but 85% of participants aren’t sure what social media tools are the best to use.

1. Increased brand recognition.

Every opportunity you have to syndicate your content and increase your visibility is valuable. Your social media networks are just new channels for your brand’s voice and content. This is important because it simultaneously makes you easier and more accessible for new customers, and makes you more familiar and recognizable for existing customers. For example, a frequent Twitter user could hear about your company for the first time only after stumbling upon it in a newsfeed. Or, an otherwise apathetic customer might become better acquainted with your brand after seeing your presence on multiple networks.

2. Improved brand loyalty.

According to a report published by Texas Tech University, brands who engage on social media channels enjoy higher loyalty from their customers. The report concludes “Companies should take advantage of the tools social media gives them when it comes to connecting with their audience. A strategic and open social media plan could prove influential in morphing consumers into being brand loyal.” Another study published by Convince&Convert found that 53% of Americans who follow brands in social are more loyal to those brands.

3. More opportunities to convert.

Every post you make on a social media platform is an opportunity for customers to convert. When you build a following, you’ll simultaneously have access to new customers, recent customers, and old customers, and you’ll be able to interact with all of them. Every blog post, image, video, or comment you share is a chance for someone to react, and every reaction could lead to a site visit, and eventually a conversion. Not every interaction with your brand results in a conversion, but every positive interaction increases the likelihood of an eventual conversion. Even if your click-through rates are low, the sheer number of opportunities you have on social media is significant. And as I pointed out in my article, “The Four Elements of Any Action, And How To Use Them In Your Online Marketing Initiative,” “opportunity” is the first element of any action.

4. Higher conversion rates.

Social media marketing results in higher conversion rates in a few distinct ways. Perhaps the most significant is its humanization element; the fact that brands become more humanized by interacting in social media channels. Social media is a place where brands can act like people do, and this is important because people like doing business with other people; not with companies.

Additionally, studies have shown that social media has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing, and a higher number of social media followers tends to improve trust and credibility in your brand, representing social proof. As such, simply building your audience in social media can improve conversion rates on your existing traffic.

5. Higher brand authority.

Interacting with your customers regularly is a show of good faith for other customers. When people go to compliment or brag about a product or service, they turn to social media. And when they post your brand name, new audience members will want to follow you for updates. The more people that are talking about you on social media, the more valuable and authoritative your brand will seem to new users. Not to mention, if you can interact with major influencers on Twitter or other social networks, your visible authority and reach will skyrocket.

6. Increased inbound traffic.

Without social media, your inbound traffic is limited to people already familiar with your brand and individuals searching for keywords you currently rank for. Every social media profile you add is another path leading back to your site, and every piece of content you syndicate on those profiles is another opportunity for a new visitor. The more quality content you syndicate on social media, the more inbound traffic you’ll generate, and more traffic means more leads and more conversions.

7. Decreaed marketing costs.

According to Hubspot, 84% of marketers found as little as six hours of effort per week was enough to generate increased traffic. Six hours is not a significant investment for a channel as large as social media. If you can lend just one hour a day to developing your content and syndication strategy, you could start seeing the results of your efforts. Even paid advertising through Facebook and Twitter is relatively cheap (depending on your goals, of course). Start small and you’ll never have to worry about going over budget—once you get a better feel for what to expect, you can increase your budget and increase your conversions correspondingly.

8. Better search engine rankings.

SEO is the best way to capture relevant traffic from search engines, but the requirements for success are always changing. It’s no longer enough to regularly update your blog, ensure optimized title tags and meta descriptions, and distribute links pointing back to your site. Google and other search engines may be calculating their rankings using social media presence as a significant factor, because of the fact that strong brands almost always use social media. As such, being active on social media could act as a “brand signal” to search engines that your brand is legitimate, credible, and trustworthy. That means, if you want to rank for a given set of keywords, having a strong social media presence could be almost mandatory.

9. Richer customer experiences.

Social media, at its core, is a communication channel like email or phone calls. Every customer interaction you have on social media is an opportunity to publicly demonstrate your customer service level and enrich your relationship with your customers. For example, if a customer complains about your product on Twitter, you can immediately address the comment, apologize publicly, and take action to make it right. Or, if a customer compliments you, you can thank them and recommend additional products. It’s a personal experience that lets customers know you care about them.

10. Improved customer insights.

Social media also gives you an opportunity to gain valuable information about what your customers are interested in and how they behave, via social listening. For example, you can monitor user comments to see what people think of your business directly. You can segment your content syndication lists based on topic and see which types of content generate the most interest—and then produce more of that type of content. You can measure conversions based on different promotions posted on various social media channels and eventually find a perfect combination to generate revenue.

These are the benefits of sustaining a long-term social media campaign, but if you’re still apprehensive about getting started, consider these points:

• Your Competition Is Already Involved. Your competitors are already involved on social media, which means your potential social media traffic and conversions are being poached. Don’t let your competitors reap all the benefits while you stand idly by. If, somehow, your competition is not involved on social media, there’s even more of a reason to get started—the field is open.
• The Sooner You Start, the Sooner You Reap the Benefits. Social media is all about relationship building, and it tends to grow exponentially as your followers tell their friends, and their friends tell their friends, and so on. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll be able to start growing that audience.

Potential Losses Are Insignificant. Realistically, you don’t have anything to lose by getting involved in social media. The amount of time and money it takes to create your profiles and start posting is usually minimal, compared to other marketing channels. Just six hours a week or a few hundred dollars is all it takes to establish your presence.

Top 7 Characteristics of Successful Brands on Social Media

With the volume of competition that businesses face in the world of social media, it’s never been more important to stand out and develop a unique identity and value proposition through strategic branding. While it’s obviously important to offer a quality product or service, effective branding is often at the heart of the companies that thrive.

According to Jerry McLaughlin, “brand is the perception someone holds in their head about you, a product, a service, an organization, a cause, or an idea. Brand building is the deliberate and skillful application of effort to create a desired perception in someone else’s mind.”

Let’s explore the common characteristics of successful brands, so you can build your social brand strategy accordingly:

1. Audience knowledge

The best brands have a thorough understanding of the demographics of their target market, what their interests are, and how they communicate. Unless it’s a mega chain like Wal-Mart, most businesses have a specific target audience they’re pursuing. Understanding the target market is critical because it provides direction for the tone and reach of a social media marketing campaign, along with the overall identity of a brand, while helping to create an organic, human connection between a business and its audience.

Trying to appeal to everyone (ie, ignoring the concept of a target market) can be counterproductive, causing a company’s brand to become diluted. Finding the right branding approach requires first understanding the target market.

2. Uniqueness

Establishing a brand identity requires something distinctive. For instance, Apple has become known worldwide for their innovative products and minimalistic, aesthetic appeal. When it comes to service companies, Domino’s Pizza used to guarantee that their pizza would arrive in 30 minutes or it’d be free. In terms of a selling point, TOMS shoes donates a free pair of shoes to a child in need for every pair of shoes that are bought.

Creating an identity on social media doesn’t demand a revolutionary idea. It simply needs to have one special thing that separates it from the competition. In reality, it’s possible to be “a one trick pony” as long as that trick is really good. Once a company figures out what that is, it can concentrate on it and should gain recognition on social platforms.

Do you know what your unique product, service, or selling point is within your niche? If not, start there when building your branding strategy.

3. Passion

While it’s certainly possible to build a social following in the short-term without passion, it’s almost impossible to sustain it in the long run. When you examine massively successful people like Steve Jobs, they all have a serious passion that keeps propelling them to work hard and continually deliver greatness. That passion leads to enthusiasm and genuine joy, which is infectious.

Consumers often become just as enthusiastic about a product or service, leading to word of mouth advertising and referrals. Passion also helps businesses persevere through inevitable setbacks.

4. Consitency

When consumers come back to a business for repeat sales, they usually expect to receive the same level of quality as they did the first time. Restaurants and their food and service quality are a great example of this.

No one wants to deal with a social brand they can’t rely on for consistency. Otherwise, why would they follow that brand in the first place? With so many industries being saturated with competitors, inconsistency is often enough of a reason for consumers to take their business elsewhere.

That’s why it’s so important to adhere to a certain quality standard with a product or service. An example of a brand who offers amazing consistency is McDonald’s. This powerhouse of the fast-food world provides patrons with a menu that’s consistent across the world. Whether someone orders in Florida or China, they know that a Big Mac is going to taste the same. Take that level of consistent quality to your social media posts, and you’ll endear your customers to your brand.

5. Competitiveness

Gaining an edge in today’s social media world isn’t easy. For a brand to make a name for itself, team members should thrive on competition and constantly strive to improve. This is the main principle behind Seahawks Coach Pete Carroll’s book, Win Forever, as well as the way he runs the team.

When it comes to the major players in any industry, none simply sit back and hope that their consumers will do the work for them. Instead, they tend to be the movers and shakers who work tirelessly toward building and optimizing their brand, going above and beyond consumer expectations. The end result tends to be a brand that is continually on the cutting edge of its industry.

6. Exposure

Another big part of being recognized as a distinctive, successful brand is the ability to reach consumers through multiple social channels simultaneously. Not everyone uses the same social platforms, so it’s key to expose yourself on as many different venues as possible. Most of the major platforms allow you to create a business page for free, so take advantage of as many as you can.

7. Leadership

Just like any thriving community or sports team, there’s typically an influential leader behind every successful brand. For large companies, this may be the CEO. For smaller ones, it’s usually the owner.

To coordinate the efforts of team members and guide a strategic vision for a brand, someone has to step up and steer the ship. The leader resolves complications and acts as a liaison between different departments to keep everyone on the same page. They are also expert motivators and know how to maximize the strengths of different team members.

100 Killer Ideas for Your Social Media Content

Let’s roll with 100 ideas for great social media content. Consult this list any time you have difficulty coming up with something to post:

1. Quotes: Humorous, inspiring or motivational quotes always perform well.
2. Fill-in-the-blank posts (e.g. “If I had $1 million I would _________”)
3. Polls: While Facebook offers built-in polls, I find running them manually works best for boosting engagement (e.g. “Which of these books is your favorite?”)
4. Behind-the-scenes photos: Take candid shots of yourself, your employees, or snap a shot of your office or workspace.
5. Statistics or data: Share new, relevant industry statistics (these perform great in terms of retweets and shares)
6. Post a link to an old blog post: There’s nothing wrong with recycling, and old posts will gain new engagement, extending their life.
7. Questions: Pose simple, basic questions that your followers can answer quickly.
8. Link to a guest post: Share (or re-share) a link to a post you contributed to another site.
9. Post a branded image: Post a funny or inspirational image with your logo or website URL on it.
10. Infographics: Find an infographic your followers would appreciate. Check out Daily Infographic for ideas, or better yet, create your own.
11. Product photos: Work best on sites like Pinterest or Instagram. Think about how you can add a unique angle to the shots (e.g. an employee actually using the product, a customer-submitted photo, etc.).
12. Photos that have nothing to do with your products or business: Instead, they convey the feeling behind your brand. For instance, how Starbucks shares photos on Instagram to associate their brand with sunshine, warmth, and good friends (not just coffee).
13. Behind-the-scenes product shots: Photos of your products being manufactured or sourced.
14. Link to a controversial blog post: There’s nothing better for eliciting engagement than a little controversy.
15. Ask for input on your products: Your followers will love giving their thoughts on how to improve your products.
16. Let Pinterest inspire you: Pinterest is a goldmine in terms of finding beautiful images you can share (particularly images with quotes). Just be sure to give proper credit.
17. Share a helpful resource: If you’re truly concerned about sharing the most useful info with your followers, don’t be afraid to direct them to other people’s valuable content (not just your own).
18. Post a Slideshare presentation: If you want to find one that’s already proven itself to be popular, go to the ‘Trending in Social Media’ section at the bottom of the Slideshare homepage.
19. Link to a case study: Case studies are great for delivering useful info in a way that’s often more palatable and actionable than a standard blog post.
20. Link to an industry-related IFTTT recipe: Haven’t heard of IFTTT (short for If This Then That)? You need to check it out. Then share a link to a recipe your followers would find useful.
21. Ask for reviews or testimonials: Eliciting reviews from fans or followers is one of the best ways to get testimonials you can use as social proof on your website.
22. Fan photos: Search for hashtags related to your business or products, and share a customer photo on Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest.
23. Recommend a tool: Share a (preferably free) tool or resource you think your followers would find useful.
24. Share a favorite book: Similar to #23, share a book recommendation your fans or followers would appreciate.
25. A day in the life post: Give a recap of a typical day in the life of a graphic designer, author, CEO, etc.
26. Recommend your favorite products: If you’re an e-commerce site, share a list of your top sellers or highest-rated products. If you’re a service provider, share a list of the products that help you succeed in your business.
27. Share random tips: Periodically post a random tip or trick your followers would find useful. Hint: using random tip numbers adds interest to your post (e.g. Tip #256: __________)
28. Link to your most popular blog post: Give a brief intro to the post and explain why it’s your most read and shared post.
29. Provide a recommendation: Share the love by recommending a business you’ve worked with successfully in the past.
30. Share a work/life balance tip: Your social media followers want to know you’re a real person with the same struggles as them. Share a tip you’ve learned for balancing work, life and family.
31. Ask for advice: Pose a hypothetical question and ask your followers what they would do in that situation.
32. Take a trip down memory lane: Share photos of old logos, websites or your very first product.
33. Random posts that show you’re a real person: For instance, what you had for dinner last night or what you’re doing this weekend.
34. Share popular Reddit topic: Visit Reddit’s Trending Subreddit page to find popular and trending topics to post about.
35. Recommend someone else to follow on social media: Share a link to someone else’s social media profile and encourage your fans to ‘like’ or follow them.
36. Share a Pinterest board: If your customers are on Pinterest (hint: if your demographic is educated, high-income females, they probably are), share a Pinterest board via Facebook or Twitter.
37. Share a comic or meme: Getting your customers to laugh with you is a great way to start building relationships.
38. Post a video testimonial: Share a video review; or better yet, ask your social media followers to submit their own video testimonials.
39. Recommend a colleague on LinkedIn: Encourage your connections to reach out to someone who acts as a valuable resource for your business.
40. Hold a photo contest: Ask for photo submissions and then get your fans to vote. Share the winning photos, too!
41. Share a trending Twitter topic: Use Topsy to find content that’s popular and trending on Twitter.
42. Hold a debate on social media: This can go downhill pretty quickly, so be sure to stay on top of it!
43. ‘Caption this’: Post a photo and ask your fans to come up with creative or funny captions.
44. YouTube video: Find a cute or inspirational video and promote it to your fans or followers.
45. Tag another Facebook page: Generate some good karma by helping to promote another business.
46. Share breaking industry news: Stay on stop of what’s going on in your industry or niche by using Google Alerts.
47. Share country-specific holidays: Wish your followers from around the world happy holidays (a full list of worldwide holidays can be found here).
48. Share (and ask for) predictions: For instance, “I predict that Germany will win the World Cup. Who do you think will win?”.
49. Offer a free e-book: Build your email list while generating some goodwill with your fans.
50. Ask for questions: Let your fans ask you anything.
51. Post a controversial view: Play devil’s advocate, but tread carefully.
52. Use Facebook Interest lists for content ideas: See what topics are trending and share them with your fans or use them to generate your own content.
53. Profile an employee: Let your followers know they’re dealing with real people.
54. Post product recall notices: Keep your ear to the ground so you can be the first to share important safety information with your followers.
55. Post a ‘truth or fiction’ question: Let your fans guess whether it’s the truth or a myth.
56. Share a trending Google search: Visit Google’s Top Charts to find out what people are currently searching for; give your own spin on one of these topics.
57. Fan of the month: Acknowledge your brand ambassadors and let them know they’re appreciated.
58. Share industry research: Post a link to and synopsis of research your fans would find useful.
59. Hold a flash sale: Use Snapchat to offer a limited-time coupon.
60. Celebrate odd holidays: For instance, did you know June 17 is Apple Strudel Day? Use a tool like Days of the Year to find out what today’s holiday is.
61. Awards or accolades you’ve received: Just do this carefully…the idea is to build trust, not to brag.
62. Promote someone else’s sale: Share a link to a coupon or sale from a complimentary (not competing) business.
63. Latest company news: Anything changing in your business? New employee? New hours of operation? New product offering?
64. Share pictures from a recent industry event: Don’t forget to use the event hashtag for maximum exposure.
65. Promote a free download: This could be a plugin, white paper, e-book or anything else that would be useful for your audience.
66. Thank your fans: A simple thank you can go a long way to building connections with your fans.
67. Offer expert insights into a topic: This helps establish you as a thought leader in your field.
68. Do a post series: We do this on our blogs, why not on social media? Share a series of similar posts over a certain number of days.
69. Weekly round up: Post a list of the ‘must read’ articles for the week.
70. Get your employees to guest post: Have your employees take turns posting a ‘fun fact’ on Facebook or Twitter.
71. Create and share a compilation of industry news stories: Flipboard is a great way to do this.
72. Host a Google+ hangout: Promote it through all your social media channels.
73. Encourage your followers to support a cause: Post a link to an online fundraiser (and contribute to it yourself).
74. Post an expert quote: Ask an industry expert a question and post their answer on social media. This is great for getting retweets and shares.
75. Hold a giveaway: This can be as simple as asking your fans or followers to comment to enter.
76. Offer a sneak peek: Whet your fans’ appetites by showing a sneak peek of an upcoming blog post, contest or product launch.
77. Start a conversation with an industry leader: Tag or mention an industry guru in a post (just be aware you might be left hanging!).
78. Post a photo collage: A tool like PicMonkey can help you create one.
79. Teaser content: Posting a link to a blog post? Don’t reveal the punch line. This will usually increase your clickthroughs.
80. Make an industry prediction: Speculate on what’s in store for your niche or industry.
81. Post a creative or unexpected use for your product: Be sure to also ask your fans for ideas.
82. Link to a blog comment: Have a particularly helpful or controversial comment on your blog? Post a link and get your fans and followers to weigh in.
83. Answer an FAQ: Have a question you get asked a lot? Answer it on social media.
84. Post a link to old newsletters: Recycle your newsletters and gain new subscribers at the same time.
85. Ask your fans for content ideas: Find out which issues or problems your fans need help with.
86. Post a link to a helpful Facebook or LinkedIn group: If you know of a helpful resource on Facebook or LinkedIn, share a link with your fans.
87. Tell a story: Share a funny or interesting anecdote from your life.
88. Find out what your competitors are sharing, and do it better: An easy way to do this is by using a tool like Social Crawlytics.
89. Use your website analytics to find content ideas: Take a quick look through your analytics to find out which topics generate the most interest from your audience.
90. Hold a Q&A session: Promote a live Q&A period where you’ll answer fan questions.
91. Share an opinion: Your followers want to know you stand for something; don’t be afraid to take sides on an issue (as long as you can and do stand behind your views).
92. Post a link to an employee bio: If you have bios on your site, post a link to help your fans get to know the brains behind your company.
93. Answer a question from Quora: Find a relevant question on Quora and answer it on social media.
94. Respond to a tag or mention: See who’s been trying to get your attention and respond to them in a post.
95. Post an excerpt from a blog post: Rather than just posting a link and summary of the post, cut and paste a particularly intriguing excerpt to pique your readers’ interest.
96. Share a chart: Share an interesting chart or graph that’s relevant to your audience.
97. Post a screenshot of a social media conversation (with permission): Add your own thoughts to the conversation.
98. Promote an industry-related event: This can either be a live or online event.
99. Share a funny commercial: Post a commercial that would be appeal to your fans or followers.
100. Promote your products or services: There’s a reason this one is last on the list. There’s a time and a place for self-promotion on social media, but first and foremost, use social media to build relationships, establish trust, and build your reputation as an industry expert. When people do want to buy, who do you think they’ll come to first?

10 Ways to Grow Your Followers on Social Media

It’s a fact: your social media marketing strategy is only as good as the work you put into it. If you set up profiles on a handful of channels months ago and haven’t done much since to increase your followers, you can’t expect to drive much traffic back to your site or find leads for your business. Many business owners do exactly that, then assume that social media doesn’t work to increase sales.

That’s simply not the case. A successful social media campaign requires constant nurturing and patience. And as I outlined in chapter one, even businesses in “unsexy” industries can achieve positive ROI from social media marketing. A strategic plan of attack is the key to growing your follower base, which tends to snowball over time. Here are 10 ways to grow your following on social media channels.

1. Follow people in your target audience.

How many followers would you like to have in the next six months? Pick a number and then work backwards to figure out how much effort you need to put in to achieve that goal. If you don’t have many followers currently, simply following people in your target audience is a great way to accrue new followers. Many people automatically follow-back anyone who follows them, and many others will receive a notification that you’ve followed them, which can be a great way to raise awareness and attract the attention of people who you’d like to follow you.

There’s no sense reinventing the wheel to find followers. Tools like TweetAdder, which helps you find people to follow based on keywords and search criteria can automate some of the process of following people, which in turn will bump up your follower numbers. Social Buzz Club lets you post updates for others to share in exchange for points. Find tools that make it easier to connect with others, then maximize them to grow your network.

Be sure not to abuse this tactic, though. Doing it too much could get your account suspended or banned if moderators deem you’re being spammy. Most social media channels have a daily limit of people you can follow within their terms of service; be mindful of these limits and respect them.

Over time as you build your reputation as a thought leader within your industry, more people will naturally follow you, as well as follow you back.

2. Share other people’s content.

This works on pretty much every social platform: when you start to share others’ content, they start paying attention to you. Put more attention on the smaller players; you’re more likely to get reciprocal attention if you share another small business owner’s content than a high-profile influencer who already has tons of people sharing their content.

When it comes to social media marketing, you must first give before you receive. Build a reputation for generosity and you’ll see reciprocation by other players in your industry.

3. Focus your content.

If someone were to look at your Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter profile, would they see a theme in the content you share? Or is it all over the place? The more you zero-in on a subject, the more target followers you’ll attract. If you run a software company for the HR industry, your content should focus on topics HR managers and small business owners care about. Write about hiring, management, scheduling, and training.

There are a few reasons to do this:

1. Twitter and LinkedIn use your content to make recommendations for who should follow you. If you’re targeting HR managers, they’ll be told they should follow you.
2. When people search specific keywords, you want your content to appear. Look into what hashtags you can include to appear in those searches as well.
3. People start to associate you with content on those topics, and will re-share it.

4. Leverage Google authorship.

Google is a behemoth when it comes to social media. It’s even surpassed Twitter’s average monthly users (255 million) by about 45 million. One reason for this is that marketers realize that they get better exposure in Google search results by participating in Google+ and implementing Google Authorship.

Google Authorship can not only boost your presence in search results, but also builds your personal brand and makes it easy for people to add you to their circles from search results. Just make sure that for any site you to which you contribute content, you link to it from your Google+ profile so your avatar and link to your profile appear next to your content in search results. This helps boost search visibility by expanding the vertical space of your search result, and also adding your Google+ avatar next to your content in search results, drawing the user’s eye and attracting more clicks.

5. Keep your updates consistent.

The more frequently you update your social channels, the more people will see your content and follow you. You never know what will catch people’s eye in their streams, so it’s imperative that you’re consistently delivering valuable content and links so that you not only land in their stream but they also want to follow you to get more.

More social media updates will help you get more exposure in people’s social media streams, which will also help increase the number of shares you get, further broadening your reach. Just make sure you don’t sacrifice quality for quantity; useless or boring updates will get your brand ignored or blocked eventually.

6. Build your Facebook profile to attract more users to your page.

Facebook’s tricky in that you can add friends through your personal profile, but not to your business page. So you can use your profile as a sort of funnel to get people to Like your page. Friend people that fit your target demographic, just like you would on any other channel. Then after you’ve built up a relationship with them, invite them to Like your page.

7. Make your social icons prominent on your website.

This is the simplest way to get more followers, and yet so many business owners overlook it. People expect to see those social icons at the top of a website page, so make sure yours are obvious and that the links work. There’s nothing worse than when people click on icons with dead links.

8. Include your profiles in your email signature.

Another way to make it easy for anyone who emails you to connect socially is to include the links to each of your social channels right in your email. Also include them in your company newsletter.

9. Join LinkedIn groups.

Groups help people with common interests gather together. Find the ones your target audience spends time in, and start contributing valuable insight and content there. You can link to other members, and will likely see others do the same to you if you’re truly providing valuable information.

10. Build relationships with industry influencers.

Finding and building relationships with industry influencers is an excellent way to quickly expand your reach, brand awareness, and audience. Tools like WeFollow are great for helping your identify key influencers by keywords.

Follow these influencers and interact with them; build a relationship and soon they’ll start helping you achieve your social media goals. Remember, social media is all about being social; don’t be afraid to reach out and build relationships!

Platforms and Demographics

There are many social media sites, including the ones you likely already know about: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Before you start creating content for your content marketing strategy to syndicate across social media channels, you should identify which social media channels will be most appropriate for your product or service.

For example, consider Pinterest, on which the demographics are mostly women. Half of them are moms. If your business is in tailor-made tuxedos and sports jackets, Pinterest probably doesn’t contain the right demographic for you.

Sure, there’s always a way to make it work, if you plan your strategy just right. Women might fall all over your amazing threads and order for their husbands, sons, dads, brothers and friends. But you’d probably have to get lucky for that to happen.

A better option might be to find a social network that fits your demographic. So, start by selecting a few appropriate social media sites. Almost all businesses should have a Facebook and Twitter account, but don’t forget about Instagram, Youtube, Pinterest, and LinkedIn (especially if you have a B2B business).

Grow and develop those first, then you can start including others. Don’t overdo it, either; you should have the resources in place to manage the accounts. Social profiles for your business that aren’t fully set up, don’t interact and engage, or just sit idly can reflect poorly on your business. In short, it’s better to have a strong presence on a few platforms than a weak presence on many.

If you truly don’t have the time or budget for some solid demographic research, then at least try to get feedback from your current customers as to which social media sites they often use.

A brief look at demographics on social media (http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/01/09/demographics-of-key-social-networking-platforms-2/ )

Please see the charts in the link provided—we can possibly update these with design elements to replace the old graphics

Social Media Setup and Integration

After you’ve chosen which social media channels you’re going to use, you need to create accounts on them. One of the first things you should do is go to Knowem.com and input a username you’d like to use on your social profiles. Ideally, this should be your brand or company name. Knowem will then search over 500 different social sites, checking if that username is available on each one. Why is this important?

Well, you don’t want to become known as StevesAutoRepair on several sites, only to have to use AutoRepairBySteve on others. A consistent username helps you achieve brand consistency, so that you’re easily recognizable and findable—plus, any hiccup in consistency in your name could trigger a dip in domain authority that could lead to lower search ranks (but I’ll touch on this more in Chapter 6).

Get Social on Your Website

The goal should be for your readers, fans and customers to be able to easily share your content, and interact with you in social media channels. To achieve this, include social “follow us” icons to allow your visitors to easily connect with your brand. Ideally, these icons should be displayed on every page of your website, and they are commonly found in the upper right sidebar or header.

Additionally, include “share” buttons on your blog posts to allow readers to easily and instantly share your content with others.

Create a Brand Strategy and ERT (Emergency Response Team)

No company is 100% safe from being attacked in social media channels, so prepare for it before it happens. Whether it’s a customer complaint or someone making false claims about your company, there should be a plan for how to handle it. Who will be the voice for your company? Make sure they understand how to handle such situations professionally. Poor, unprofessional responses in social media can lead to huge damage to your brand image.

Industry Research

Before interacting in social media, do your homework. What do I mean by that? Find some authority figures in your industry on the social sites you’re going to use. Who are the influencers in your industry? Who has the most reach? Who are the thought leaders?

Here are a few free tools to help you figure out the answers to these questions:

FollowerWonk – Allows you to analyze your own Twitter account and find detailed information on potential influencers

TweetReach – Enter a Twitter name, URL or hashtag and get information about their reach on Twitter

SocialMention – Get regular updates when a person, company or topic is mentioned

Ok, so why are you gathering this information? Using tools like the ones above can help you get off the ground with your strategy. By monitoring what they do, when they do it, and what gets the most response or attention, you’ll be able to model some of your social media action plan after their example. Obviously what they’re doing is working!

Chapter 6: Local SEO

If your business services a local area with a physical (brick and mortar) address, then you’ll need to understand local SEO and how it’s unique from national SEO.

Local SEO is different from national SEO; search engines even display search results differently based on whether they consider the query to be local or not. Most of the time, Google will auto-detect your location (even if you don’t have one set by default) and will automatically display local results relevant to your query.

How Google displays these “local” results changes often—in fact, they’ve been tinkering around with these displays several times a year for the past few years. Currently, most results are accompanied by an interactive map with three to five entries for the most relevant suppliers or businesses, with clickable “website” and “directions” buttons, and a “call” button if you’re searching using a mobile phone.

Local search results are automatically triggered when a geographic region is included in the search query, but local keywords don’t have to be a part of the query to generate local results.

Local SEO has a number of advantages, especially for small businesses, because it holds lower levels of competition, faster paths to the top of the results, and of course, more locally relevant traffic.

In addition to traditional on-site and off-site SEO tactics, local SEO requires a few additional points of attention. Thanks to Google’s Pigeon algorithm update, the algorithm now uses third party directories as a major source of information (and authority) for local businesses. Basically, the more consistently you’re listed and mentioned in local directories, and the greater number of positive reviews your company earns, the higher you’ll rank in local results.

How to Analyze and Clean Up Your Online Local Citations for Free

There’s one big problem that most local businesses face in the local scene, especially when first starting out. Google likes to see information accuracy and consistency; if it’s going to give its users the best possible results, it wants to have a clear picture of the businesses it indexes in its search. For local information, Google scours the web looking for clues to a business’s NAP—name, address, and phone number information. It checks your site, naturally, but it also checks third party apps and local directories like Yelp across the web for their most recent company information.

If any pieces of this information are inaccurate, even if it’s only a small discrepancy like the spelling of your road or the formatting of your address, it could wreak havoc on your local authority and compromise the results of your campaign.

Because of this, the first step for any successful local SEO campaign is to clean up your local citations. Under this process, you’ll be hunting down every instance of your business’s NAP information on the web, ensuring its accuracy, and making corrections wherever possible. Because this process is long, tedious, and difficult, there are many companies who offer to do it automatically for a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. Not every entrepreneur has the budget to afford this kind of service, but everyone needs to ensure the accuracy of their business information on the web.

Fortunately, it’s possible to clean up all your local citations for free. Here’s how:

Step 1: Find Where Your Company Is Listed

There are dozens of services willing to list all the places where your local information is listed—in fact, it’s a sales tool for companies offering to fix your discrepancies for a fee. But you can use these tools without necessarily paying for the service.

For example, Moz will show you how your business appears in Bing, Google, and 15 other popular local citation sources. Yext offers a tool to check even more well-known directories. Many of these citation locations are interdependent, meaning if you update your information in the most significant sources, eventually the stragglers will find their discrepancies and update themselves accordingly. If you’re in a hurry or you have a bigger budget, it’s probably worth looking at every citation location you can. Otherwise, look at the top sources.

As part of this step, be sure to check your own website. It’s generally considered best practice to include your NAP information in the footer of each page of your website, as well as on your contact page.

Step 2: Set a Standard and Isolate Conflicting Entries

First, make a firm decision about the formatting of your NAP information, and how you want your company to be categorized. The more specific you are with this category, the better—it will eliminate a lot of the competition. If you aren’t sure how to go about this, just pick the format that’s currently listed on your site and run with that. Make sure everyone in your company is using that format when presenting or using information on your company, and use that information in your citation audit moving forward.

Check your results listings and separate out any entries where you see a piece of conflicting information. The rest of the entries belong in a separate pile.

Step 3: Individually Petition to Update Your Profiles or Update Your Accounts

For each major entry in both piles, you’ll want to set up a profile (if possible, and if you haven’t already). Most of these third party information apps allow you to create a profile for your business so you can update your information and respond to local reviews at your discretion.

For any entries with conflicting information, simply create your profile and correct any errors you find. Other sources require a more intensive process; for example, you might have to draft a letter explaining the discrepancy and personally requesting the removal or update of the entry.

Step 4: Follow Up

Keep in mind that Google, along with most third-party apps, does not act quickly. Once you’ve updated your information or made a request, it could still take several weeks before action is taken on your behalf. Be patient and set a date to follow up in the future—in my experience, six weeks is enough time to see consistent results. When that time comes, run another citation audit and see where you stand. Follow up on any sources that haven’t already updated your information.

Local SEO for Multiple Locations in 4 Steps

Most of these strategies are based around your business’s specific location. For example, one step of the process is ensuring that your name and address are appearing accurately and consistently across the web, and one ongoing strategy is to use your city and state in the context of your written content. This presents a major problem for businesses with multiple locations: how do you locally optimize your site?

1. Consolidate Everything in One Domain.

It may be tempting to split your locations up into multiple domains, and some businesses have tried this as an ongoing strategy. On one hand, it makes logical sense—if each location is different, why not try to rank on each site individually?

However, in practice, this segmented strategy is ineffective. Google’s search bots and individual users may be confused when they see multiple domains for what appears to be one master brand. Even if you need separate information, like different menus, using a single root domain to consolidate all that information still gives you the chance to present those in a segmented format. Using one domain gathers all the authority you would have built in your individual presences and places it into one master hub. Otherwise, you’ll be forced to split your domain authority; for example, if you have five locations, each location would only get 20 percent of its potential visibility if you split them into separate domains.

2. Create Specific Pages for Each Location.

Even though you’ve consolidated all your locations under one domain, it’s important to differentiate between your locations. Otherwise, Google won’t know that you have multiple locations and your users might have a hard time figuring out the nearest one to them.

The best way to do this is to create a separate page for each of your locations, usually listed in the navigation under “Locations” or something similar. Create a page title that includes each city or neighborhood (as relevant), and write a full body of content that elaborates on the unique features of each location. Be sure to also include the address and phone number of each location on these individual pages. This will clearly demonstrate to Google how your locations are set up, and how they all relate to your master brand.

It’s also important to list all of your locations on your “Contact” page, with the address and phone number for each reiterated.

3. Start Writing Locally for Each Location.

This can be tricky, especially if you’re consolidating everything into one master blog, but it’s important to include content based around each of your individual locations. That means featuring the city or neighborhood of the location in the title and body of each relevant piece.

If you’re having trouble generating topic ideas, look to each location’s recent events. Have they celebrated an anniversary? Have they made new hires? Have they hit a new landmark achievement? Obviously, your content marketing campaign can’t solely focus on your office, but posting these kinds of topics occasionally can seriously help your local ranks when you have multiple locations.

4. Have Each Location Cultivate and Manage Online Reviews.

Reviews are critically important for local businesses—the more you have and the more positive they are, the higher you’re going to rank. And, since each of your locations is going to be listed separately on review sites, it’s up to your individual locations to actively cultivate and manage those online reviews. Make sure each of your employees know to encourage your customers to post reviews about their experience. Then, designate a contact at each of your locations to take point on actively monitoring and responding to those reviews. Commenting on positive reviews is a show of customer appreciation, while proactively responding to negative reviews (which will come up from time to time) can help mitigate the situation and show you’re willing to step in and make things right.

Like with any optimization strategy, the setup phase is important but it’s the ongoing work that will make or break your campaign. Make sure you implement a plan that allows for each of your locations to actively encourage and respond to online reviews, and keep your content strategy as present and relevant as possible. Over time, each of your individual locations will rise through local-specific searches, and the authority of your master domain will skyrocket as your individual locations all feed into it.

Conduct ongoing local SEO optimization by encouraging your own customers to post reviews when they can, write about local information and local events, and get yourself some press in local online newspapers. Your goals should revolve around making your local presence known and keeping your customers happy. If you can do that with a clean NAP profile online, your local rankings will come naturally in time.

How to Get Online Reviews for Your Business

Think you don’t need to be actively encouraging online reviews for your business? Then picture this far-too-common situation: You’re plugging along in your business, and have just happened to have accumulated a handful of positive or neutral reviews from past customers on Yelp and Angie’s List. Smooth sailing, right?

Now imagine that a disgruntled customer posts a scathing review on Google+ – a review site you haven’t focused on – and one on which you have very few reviews. That single negative review now shows up at the top of the search rankings for your business name, and gives your business an overall rating of 1 star out of 5. Had you taken steps to encourage reviews, a single negative review wouldn’t have jeopardized the online reputation of your brand. But as it stands, you’re now left scurrying to encourage positive reviews to dilute the impact of that single negative one.

This is why it’s so important to be proactive when it comes to online reputation management. Encouraging customers to leave reviews on popular online review sites can not only improve your reputation online, it can help buffer your business from the occasional negative review. Furthermore, one Harvard Business School study found that “a restaurant that boosts its Yelp score by one full star can see revenues increase 5 to 9 percent.” Clearly, online reviews can make a big impact on a business’s profit.

In this article, we’ll consider three of the most popular online review sites, as well as which types of businesses should be using each. I’ll conclude each section with an overview of strategies you can use to get customers to leave reviews on each site.

Yelp

With 135 million unique monthly visitors and more than 71 million reviews, Yelp is the largest review site for local businesses.

Who Should Use Yelp: Pretty much every local, service-based business, but particularly those targeting consumers in the 25-34 age category. A significant percentage of Yelp users are college-educated (71.8%), and over half (54.5%) have a household income of $75,000 or more; so businesses targeting a middle-upper class demographic should have a strong presence on the platform.

How to Get Yelp Reviews: While some review sites encourage businesses to ask their customers to leave reviews, Yelp discourages this practice. They believe that providing excellent customer service is a better strategy than asking for reviews. They write: “[M]ost business owners are only going to ask for reviews from their happy customers, not the unhappy ones. Over time, these self-selected reviews create bias in the business listing — a bias that savvy consumers can smell from a mile away.”

Business owners may be tempted to offer discounts for customers that prove they wrote a review on Yelp, but according to this blog post by Yelp, “this isn’t a great idea,” and “As a general rule, Yelp has advised business owners not to offer incentives for reviews.”

Yelp does, however, encourage business owners to let their customers know they can be found on the site. While Yelp discourages business from soliciting reviews, Yelp advises several ways to direct your customers to the site:

• Find and claim your Yelp business page
• Put a Yelp badge on your site; this is automatically updated when customers leave a new review
• Put a “Find us on Yelp” sign in your brick and mortar establishment
• Print and display positive Yelp reviews in your store or office
• Add a Yelp link in your email signature, contact forms and/or newsletter

Angie’s List

Angie’s List is a user-pay review service, but is free for businesses. At a cost of up to $40/year just to access the reviews, Angie’s List has come under fire over the past couple of years. In fact, listed businesses can even pay to receive prominent placement on the site; obviously many critics find this seriously comprises the site’s claim of providing unbiased reviews.

Who should use Angie’s List: Angie’s List accepts reviews for service-based businesses such as plumbers, realtors and mechanics, as well as health care professionals like massage therapists, doctors and physiotherapists. What sets Angie’s List apart from some other review sites is the lack of anonymity; because users must pay to leave a review, the occurrence of fake accounts or fixed reviews is likely to be far lower than on free sites.

How to get Angie’s List Reviews: The first time a customer leaves a review for you on Angie’s List, the site will automatically generate a page for your business. If you’d like your business to receive prominent placement in the listings and you’ve achieved an ‘A’ or ‘B’ rating on the site, you may choose to pay to offer discounts to Angie’s List users.

Angie’s List encourages businesses to ask customers to leave reviews on the site. The site also offers the Fetch program as a way to collect reviews from your customers. After submitting your customer list, the Angie’s List team will phone those who are also Angie’s List users to request feedback on your business.

As with most other review sites, you can request reviews via email, your website or social media. Angie’s List also gives businesses the option to print out hard copy review forms to hand out to customers.

Google+ Local

Google+ Local users can post reviews and photos of local businesses, and the results of these reviews impact the search results of those whom they’re connected to. For instance, if I give a positive rating to my favorite restaurant on Google+ Local, my friends may see these reviews when they perform a relevant search.

Who should use Google+ Local: Local businesses, particularly brick and mortar ones, should absolutely have a Google+ Local listing. Listing your business is free, and listings tend to (understandably) rank very highly in search results. In fact, I tested a search for “SEO.co” on my iPhone, and the Google+ Local result filled the entire screen.

After testing the same search in Google.com from a desktop PC, I found the Google+ local listing prominently displayed in the right sidebar of Google’s search results:

Testing similar searches for other businesses had similar results. Clearly, Google+ local profiles have huge visibility in Google search.

The downside is that users must have a Google account in order to leave a review; the upside is that reviews populate across other Google products like Maps and Search, giving you maximum exposure.

How to Get Google+ Local Reviews

Asking your customers to leave a positive review will be your best bet. Regardless of the medium you use to do this – email, social media, your website, etc. – make sure you link to your actual review page, not just your Google+ page. You may also want to include a “Review us on Google+” button on your site.

It goes without saying that providing outstanding customer service is the #1 way to get great online reviews. However, a little extra legwork to encourage positive reviews can go a long way to protecting your brand’s reputation online.

Chapter 7: Google Updates

In the online marketing world, things change constantly. SEO professionals have to be on their toes 24/7, always watching, listening, reading, and preparing for potential changes that could occur.

The past decade has been a roller coaster ride for SEO professionals, but over the last year or two, things have finally leveled off. Some were ready for the algorithm changes that occurred over that timespan which changed the industry, while many were completely caught off guard.

While the sudden apocalyptic updates are all but over with, it’s still important to make time to keep up with changes in the industry, or hire someone who specializes in it. Here, I briefly recount some of the massive algorithm changes that have shaken the industry in the past:

Google Panda

Google’s “Panda” algorithm update (from 2011, but still occasionally refreshing) targeted sites with low quality on-site content; even huge sites with thousands of pages that long enjoyed top rankings were severely affected.

Business sites weren’t exempt, either. In fact, there was one furniture store that offered a $25,000 reward for anyone who could recover their site’s rankings and traffic to their pre-Panda levels.

Since Panda’s original launch in February of 2011, there have been numerous updates to the algorithm. The most recent update as of the writing of this book was Panda 4.2 on July 17, 2015. As the years have passed, the updates have made smaller ripples, and have rolled out with greater distances between iterations.

How to Avoid the Panda Algorithm

Google doesn’t give definite answers very often; as a result, much of what an SEO professional does is research and testing. This is the only way to get real answers. With that said, here are some tips that will help you stay out of Panda’s way:

• Avoid duplicate content (ie, textual content that is exactly the same on one page of your website as another page on your website).
• Avoid thin content (ie, content that is incomplete, too brief, or otherwise not useful or valuable to readers).
• Include original, unique, valuable content on every page of your website.
• Limit advertisements on your website, especially if they are located “above the fold” of the page or not very relevant to the content of the page.
• Don’t unnaturally stuff keywords into your page content.
• Publish interactive, engaging content to keep visitors on your website longer.
• Use attention-grabbing, but truthful and succinct meta descriptions
• Get lots of real social signals by engaging and interacting in social media
• Get high quality inbound links from other websites

Google Penguin

While Panda focused more on on-site factors and content, the Penguin algorithm was designed to look for unnatural manipulation of search engine rankings occurring offsite.

This algorithm was released in April of 2012, and significantly affected hundreds of thousands of websites. Inbound links used to play an even greater role in search engine rankings than they do now. This fact was abused and manipulated to the point that Google had to figure out a way to fix it. Penguin was Google’s answer that tried to fix it.

How to Avoid the Penguin Algorithm:

• Don’t pay other websites or webmasters for links. Earn them.
• Don’t participate in link exchanges. This is when you and another website agree to link to each other, even without exchanging money.
• Don’t use social comments, blog comments and forum posts purely for linking purposes. On the same token, don’t be afraid of them either. Simply use them for what they’re meant to be… social interaction and networking.
• Don’t hire an SEO company that promises to build hundreds or thousands of inbound links. There’s simply no way to accomplish that without engaging in spammy, manipulative tactics that will almost certainly come back to haunt you.
• Avoid over-optimization of anchor text. Any more than 2% of your inbound links having the same anchor text, especially if that anchor text happens to be a high-value keyword, is a red flag to Google of unnatural anchor text manipulation.
• Think quality, not quantity, when it comes to link building.

Other Google Updates

There have been a handful of other landmark Google updates that have redefined how search marketers optimize their sites, but none as significant as Penguin or Panda. Here are a few of them:

• Google Hummingbird. Released in 2013, this update made keyword-based strategies completely obsolete. It introduced “semantic search” to the algorithm, which analyzes the intent behind a user’s query rather than dissecting its keyword contents.
• Google Pigeon. Though unofficially named, the Pigeon update of 2014 completely overhauled how Google determined local rankings. Most noteworthy is the greatly increased reliance on Yelp and other third-party directories to feed information about domain authority.
• Mobilegeddon. Also unofficially named, the Mobilegeddon update hit in April of 2015 and penalized any site that wasn’t optimized for mobile devices.
• The “Quality” update. In May 2015, Google released a “phantom,” unannounced update that refined how Google determines the authoritative strength of an article. It did not result in much volatility in search ranks.

Why You’ll Never Have To Worry About Another Killer Google Algorithm Update

SEO used to be a race between Google and search marketers. Search marketers would come up with some new quick trick to rank higher and, invariably, Google would come up with a new update that prevented quick, manipulative tactics from working, while changing the landscape of search rankings from the ground up. As I just explained, Panda and Penguin led the way for these changes and for years, this almost rapid-fire series of algorithm shifts made search marketers paranoid.

SEO experts were constantly hypothesizing and predicting which updates would come next, and when, though Google never offered up any clues as to what was coming down the pipeline. Even today, in the wake of sensationalized updates like the “Mobilegeddon” change, search marketers are on edge about the next update that will throw the search world into chaos.

However, there’s been a critical development. You may never have to worry about another Google update again.

The Foundation Is Ready

When Google first released Panda, it viewed its main search algorithm as an inferior product, or as one that needed substantial improvements. Because it used many quantifiable ranking factors, it was open to manipulation and was subject to a number of ranking inconsistencies and hiccups. But after Penguin and Panda, the core evaluation system of the algorithm was firmly in place. Sites with high-quality content, great user experience records, and a great reputation in the online community reliably rank higher than others.

This fundamental quality standard has not changed in the past four years. Google still ranks companies based on how well they treat their users and how much respect they command from other online sources. As a result, there haven’t been any major algorithm shifts. Google is satisfied with the current state of its algorithm, and most subsequent updates have been aimed at tweaking existing features or adding small new ones.

Smaller Changeske

As evidence of this approach, we can turn to the type of updates that have rolled out since 2012. There was the Hummingbird update of 2013, which introduced “semantic search” functionality to Google. Through semantic search, Google became better able to interpret the intent behind a user’s query, rather than the keywords of the query itself. Nevertheless, the fundamental ranking factors—quality of content, etc.—didn’t change, so the update didn’t affect many queries.

Similarly, the Pigeon update (which is the unofficial name for it) of 2014 didn’t shake things up much. It introduced a handful of new ranking factors—such as reviews on Yelp and other third party directory sites—but the core ranking factors remained unaffected. Even Mobilegeddon, which was largely hyped and overblown by the paranoid search marketing community, ended up falling flat—only a handful of sites were affected because Google was already using mobile optimization as a ranking signal.

Each of these updates bore some significant change to Google’s ranking process, but none of them overhauled the algorithm the way Panda and Penguin did. Only a tiny fraction of business owners saw any movement at all because of these updates.

Streamlined Updates

It’s also worth noting that the way Google iterates its landmark algorithm changes has evolved over the past few years. Both Panda and Penguin were followed up with 2.0 updates, which carried almost as much weight as the original. A 3.0 and 4.0 update came after Panda, and for some time, monthly refreshes were the norm—once a month, a significant yet barely noticeable jolt in rankings would indicate that Google was pushing some new data through its system.

These days, Google is still pushing regular data refreshes and algorithm tweaks, but you won’t notice them. That’s because they are gradually rolled out, on an almost constant basis, so there’s almost no visible volatility in rank (unless you’re specifically hunting for it).

The Bottom Line

There are three factors to consider here. First, Google isn’t going to change its core values anytime soon. The fundamentals that make a “good” website are likely to remain consistent for the foreseeable future, and the search algorithm as it exists today does a great job of evaluating this. Second, updates are getting smaller and less impactful. The few “major” updates that have rolled out in recent years have had almost no impact on preexisting rankings that were already abiding by Google’s quality guidelines, while those that were gaming the system through manipulative tactics saw their rankings fall. Finally, Google is trying to push updates and data refreshes in new, more subtle ways, which barely affect search rankings in the short term.

The conclusion I’ve reached from these facts is that the era of scary Google updates is over. You no longer have to worry about being blindsided by some strange revolutionary algorithm change; as long as you continue to follow best practices and keep your users happy, you can rest easy knowing your search visibility is safe.

Chapter 8: New Forms of Online User Experience

As I’ve mentioned several times already, things in the world of online marketing change quickly. Search engines are undergoing radical new evolutions, Internet access through mobile devices is more functional and more relied on than ever before, and people are getting more demanding in terms of wants and needs from businesses online.

I want to touch on a few emerging trends here that have the potential to completely upend online marketing as we know it—especially traditional SEO.

How Google Search Results Will Change in the Next Few Years

Search engine results pages (SERPs), much to the irritation of search marketers who count on them, change constantly. Google is constantly making tiny, hardly-noticeable tweaks to the familiar layout of its signature creation, leading to gradual changes in user behavior and disrupting the expectations of optimizers who were counting on previous information.

Up until now, these changes have been relatively minor, even unnoticeable to most users outside the SEO community. Google removed the underlines marking the hyperlinks that made the list. The length of each entry and the numbers of entries per page have both changed over time. Various listing modifications have allowed sub-pages to be viewed in different ways based on the context of the search. But none of these changes has completely disrupted the status quo of the SERP: earn high authority, rank high, and you’ll get the most visibility.

Now, with the onslaught of new technology from wearable devices to far more sophisticated search algorithms, the SERPs are evolving faster than ever and in far more complicated ways. It’s hard to predict exactly how Google will develop these, since it intentionally cloaks its plans, but here are five changes I predict will take place in just a few years:

1. The Knowledge Graph Will Take Over.

Already, the Google Knowledge Graph has gained a ton of momentum. If you’re not sure what the Knowledge Graph is, perform a search for a movie or a famous politician. The box on the right you see with a run-down of basic information related to your query is the Knowledge Graph. It exists to answer user queries with commonly sought information, to spare users the trouble of hunting through traditional ranks and SERP entries.

Right now, this information is housed in a box off to the side, but over the next two years, you can expect this presence to grow. The Knowledge Graph will collect more information on a more diverse range of subjects, appearing for far more types of user queries, and its prominence will likely grow to overtake the top entries. One day soon, I predict that any general query will be met with a massive Knowledge Graph entry, with external links only listed as a footer—meaning there’s little use trying to rank for queries related to general information or topics.

2. Social Results Will Be More Prominent.

Now that Google has practically abandoned Google+, it seems more interested in forming close partnerships with other social media platforms. The search giant has had a deal with Facebook for years, scanning the platform for information and posts from major brands. Recently, it has forged an alliance with Twitter, allowing Google to index tweet information and withdraw it at will.

In the next two years, I anticipate Google making more of these deals with more social media platforms, and integrating more social results into its SERPs. It seems likely that news-worthy or socially important queries will be met with a brief listing of popular social posts—and I expect to see these above the fold, replacing traditional top rankings with a separate “social” section.

3. Traditional Listings Will Sharply Decline.

Partially in response to the rising importance of the Knowledge Graph and social entries, and partially just a user experience change, you can expect to see the number of listings on each of Google’s pages gradually decline. While you could once count on a reliable 10 entries per page, already you can see as few as 4 entries per page, based on the type of query you enter and the type of listings that appear near the top. New functionality will make this range fluctuate even more, though the majority of queries will have fewer entries on page one. That means higher competition and lower visibility for traditional, rank-based SEO strategies.

4. Indexed Apps Will Make an Appearance.

Already, Google is making moves to index apps for smartphones and tablets much in the way that it currently indexes websites. As apps and wearable devices become even more important and more popular, I anticipate Google integrating more app-related information into its SERPs. Soon, users making queries will be met with a list of popular apps for that particular topic. For example, if a person searches for a certain type of recipe, a handful of recipe or cooking apps may come up in place of the top two or three traditional ranks.

5. More Interactive Elements Will Develop.

Wearable devices are tough to predict, since it’s unknown how much functionality they’ll gain in the next two years or how popular they’ll remain once the initial hype dies down. In any case, it’s likely that users will demand more interactivity in their online experiences, meaning a fainter line between digital information and objective reality. Google’s location based search is an example of how the search giant can use real, location-based information to alter digital results and displays. As wearable devices draw more information about their users in real time, it’s not unreasonable to think that Google may start altering its SERPs in response to this information. For example, it could display local business results in ascending order of distance or display different results based on the weather.

While these changes will likely roll out gradually over the next couple of years, the time to start preparing is now. As with all things SEO, it takes time to make improvements, and if you spend the next two years preparing your site and your online presence for the future, you’ll be two years ahead of the competition.

Get more active and more directly involved on social media, develop an app for your business, and keep your eyes peeled for new ways to engage with your local audience—especially users who adopt new forms of technology. Aside from that, stop focusing too much energy on individual keyword rankings. Eventually, traditional rankings won’t matter. Instead, work on improving your overall reputation and expand the number of places where your brand can be found on the web.

Is Google Trying To Become A One-Stop Shop For Everything Online?

For more than a decade, online marketers have joked that Google is trying to take over the world. Now, it looks like they might actually do it—the online world, at least. Based on some of the recent moves we’ve seen Google making, it appears that the search engine giant is extending its boundaries further than ever before, offering new functionality and new capabilities that improve online user experience, but also eclipse the functions of many of its competitors and contemporaries.

It’s impossible to know Google’s motivation for sure, but as these pieces move closer to their final destination, it appears that the tech giant could quickly become a complete “one-stop shop” for everything a user needs online—and I mean everything—potentially completely eliminating the need for users to visit individual websites.

Information

First, we have to look at the evolution of Google’s presentation of information. The entire reason Google was able to grow to its current size was because it connected users with their requested information, faster and more accurately than its competitors, but it still did so as a third party. It generated a list of other sites that could provide users with that information.

Today, Google is refining what it calls the Knowledge Graph, a system of information that provides quick answers to common user queries. For example, if you search for a specific film, the Knowledge Graph will display immediate information about that film to the right of the typical search results, such as the year it was produced and the main cast. The Knowledge Graph is gradually evolving, providing more detailed and more accurate information for a wider spectrum of possible queries.

It’s not unreasonable to think that the Knowledge Graph will, in a few years, evolve to the point where it can provide direct answers to the vast majority of inbound user queries. If that becomes the case, users would no longer have any need to venture to other sites—instead, Google would be the host of all direct information, and users would never have a reason to leave.

Embedded Functionality

Answers aren’t the only thing Google is trying to provide its users. It’s also embedding various functions into its search results pages. Most users are already familiar with some of these basic services, such as automatic measurement conversions or language translations. But Google isn’t going to stop there—it’s also embedding its own Maps functionality, tweets and information from Twitter (along with other social platforms), and various other types of functions from other applications. All Google needs is permission, and it can theoretically integrate practically any type of function into its main SERPs.

App Partnerships

Google is also shopping around to different apps, looking to expand its functional capabilities without venturing into new territory or allowing its users to leave the convenience of its own applications. For example, Google recently signed a deal with both Uber and OpenTable to include their functions within the context of its Google Maps app. When a user sets a given route, she can now estimate the Uber fare for such a trip, and when she looks for a restaurant, she can make a reservation within the Google Maps app using OpenTable. Google also relies on other apps, like Yelp and TripAdvisor, to send ranking signals for its search algorithm.

This desire to form new partnerships with other applications shows that Google knows it can’t be the best at everything—but it can be the one place people turn to for all their needs.

The Buy Button and Google Shopping

Google Shopping originated as a way for online shoppers to quickly and easily compare similar products offered by competing online stores. Operating within AdWords for the first few years of its life, Google Shopping now functions as an independent product that online brands can use to pay Google for some additional referral traffic and online visibility. Already, this positions Google well; users can basically do their preliminary shopping on different stores, all within the Google platform.

Now, Google is adding an extra bit of functionality that positions them even better: it’s called the “Buy Button” and it’s actually attracting its fair share of controversy. On mobile devices, users would be able to use Google Shopping like normal, but they’ll also have the option of clicking a “Buy” button that takes them to a company-specific landing page within the Google platform. If the user checks out using that platform, the store would process the order and the user would get the product without ever visiting the website.

It would certainly be a major step in the direction of Google being a complete one-stop shop. If the functionality proves successful and enough online businesses sign on as participants, any user would theoretically be able to buy anything they need without ever leaving Google—giving Google fundamental control of the online buying process from ideation to price comparison all the way through to final purchase.

If Google’s plan succeeds and it becomes a true one-stop shop for everything we need online, it could change the entire economic dynamics of the Internet. Online shops would need to completely rethink their marketing strategies. Apps would need to focus on serving Google users’ needs above anything else. SEO would die, and small business owners would instead need to work on how to gain visibility through alternative means.

It wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, but it would be a major paradigm shift. Online marketing wouldn’t be ruined, but it would change, and businesses would need to adapt to survive. Of course, it will still take years for this to become a reality—if it is Google’s goal in the first place—so keep watch for developments, and hedge your bets.

What’s really interesting is that Google isn’t alone in this pursuit. Even social media platforms, with far less power and reach than Google are attempting to create their own mini online empires—just take a look at Pinterest’s new Buy Button or Facebook’s vested interest in Instant Articles and developing its own search functionality. These developments could collectively change the landscape of online marketing on a fundamental level.

How Personal Digital Assistants Could Start a Search Revolution

The term “personal digital assistant” is still relatively new, but PDAs have grown to be quite integrated in mainstream society. These programs, forms of artificial intelligence, rely on speech recognition and complex algorithms to fetch various pieces of information on a device or online. Of particular note here is Windows 10’s Cortana—Cortana isn’t exactly revolutionary in its range of functionality, but its expansions, improvements, and unique position make it capable of heralding in some significant changes in user search behavior.

Universal Search

The term “universal search” here refers to a combination of previously separate functionalities—searching a device for a specific file or app, and searching the Internet for information or for a specific website. Siri introduced this universal functionality with the iPhone 4S back in 2011, enabling users to conduct web searches with just vocal inputs and launch certain phone functions, like calling a specific contact. For its first few years, however, Siri was limited both in terms of the number of functions capable of being understood and executed and in terms of the app’s understanding of natural language.

Cortana takes the universal search aspect to a new level, since it’s prominently featured on laptop devices with often complex systems of programs, apps, and files. While some critics claim that Siri is still superior when it comes to language recognition, what’s more important here is that Cortana is the default search format on all new Windows devices. That signals that “universal search” is no longer just a novelty. It’s not a rogue, occasional feature that can be used in some circumstances. It’s becoming the new normal, and users are growing more accustomed to a universal style of search.

Integration With Bing

Microsoft has been pushing Bing since the search engine’s first launch, to varying levels of amusement from Google’s billions of loyalists, so it’s no surprise to learn that Bing is the algorithm that powers Cortana’s search functionality. On the surface, this seems like a simple case of a corporation subverting the alignment of its own products for its users, but there’s a deeper motivation and a deeper significance that is structuring the course of user search behavior.

Bing has come a long way. Originally treated as a joke (because how could any search engine ever be as good as Google?), Bing has iteratively developed to a point where its results are virtually indistinguishable from the ubiquitous search juggernaut. Take the challenge for yourself—try a handful of searches in both engines and see which ones are objectively better (if there are any significant differences at all).

On one level, this will be a boon for Bing search. Users won’t think much of what search engine is operating behind the scenes of Cortana as long as they’re getting decent results (and they will be). Correspondingly, the percentage of searches performed on Bing will increase.

But more importantly, the very fact that Bing is operating in the background is helping to shape user expectations and behaviors with search. We’re now to a point where most “core” algorithms are more or less the same. It doesn’t matter whether you use Bing or Google; instead, users are more focused on what device or fancy program is deciphering their audible commands.

Behavior Recognition

It’s also worth noting that Cortana offers more advanced systems of learning user behavior. While custom search results based on previous searches has been a staple on Google for years, Cortana is taking this customizability in new directions. For example, the program can learn your favorite bands and make recommendations for similar artists. It can learn what you mean when you use certain phrases in certain contexts, adjusting the type of search results (such as desktop vs. online) based on your feedback from previous similar queries.

This is leading us into a generation of individuality and customizability. Users are demanding more personalized, more unique results, and as more digital assistants emerge to offer it, eventually the idea of a “standard” list of results will fade away entirely.

Existence on Other Devices

Until now, most digital assistants have been confined to their native devices. Siri remains on Apple products, and Google Now remains on Google devices. But Cortana is trying to break that custom; Microsoft is offering its assistant on both Android and iPhone devices in the form of a separate dedicated app. This further suggests a blurring of the lines between search algorithms, corporate providers, devices, and assistants.

Future Digital Assistants

“Online” search is quickly becoming an irrelevant term. We’re online all the time, and the default “standard” search is starting to become accepted as simultaneously local and online. Similarly, the major players of online search, like Google and Bing, are starting to become indistinguishable, serving only as generic engines for the more robust and characteristically unique digital assistants that are now driving future search trends.

As user search behavior changes, companies and organizations will have to update their marketing and customer service strategies accordingly. SEO may not fade away entirely, but if you want to stay relevant in digital assistant-based search results, you’ll have to do more to cater toward user preferences.

Chapter 9: Your Getting Started Checklist

Basic Site Setup

• Ensure there’s a blog section for your site (if it isn’t a blog)
• Offer a mobile-optimized site or version of your site
• Ensure your website designer is knowledgeable in SEO or bring in a professional they’ll work with
• Check off each of the technical requirements for on-site SEO and user experience listed in Chapter 2
• Create a content marketing plan & calendar

Advanced Site Setup Details

• Determine the industry and topics you want to use for your website
• Develop an editorial calendar or equivalent
• Ensure each page/post links to other relevant pages
• Ensure each file name (URL) is short, relevant and appropriate for your industry
• Ensure images use descriptive alt tags and file names
• Ensure each page is given a unique, short, descriptive title and description
• Use h2 tags for sub-headlines

Off-site Strategy Setup

• Create a social media marketing plan, including targeted platforms and posting schedules
• Identify key opportunities for guest posting and start building relationships with those publishers
• Claim your local profiles with third party directories and begin cultivating positive reviews
• Clean up your local citations if necessary

Helpful Tools & Resources

WordPress Plugins:

Keyword research and content topic research:

Other:

Tools like QuickSprout can be helpful to get a very basic idea of your website’s optimization level, along with a quick overview of any easy-to-fix problems. For instance, they’ll usually give you a warning or caution (or suggestion) if you aren’t using h1, h2 and h3 tags. But there’s much more to a professional SEO audit than what these tools will normally tell you. Ask us at SEO.co.com if your website needs a full, professional audit.

Conclusion

I hope you’ve found this information helpful, and given you the tools and knowledge necessary to optimize your website, design a strategic online marketing campaign, and grow your business’ visibility online. If you need help or would like to discuss how SEO.co can help you in your business, contact us today!

Sam Edwards

Chief Marketing Officer at SEO.co

In his 9+ years as a digital marketer, Sam has worked with countless small businesses and enterprise Fortune 500 companies and organizations including NASDAQ OMX, eBay, Duncan Hines, Drew Barrymore, Washington, DC based law firm Price Benowitz LLP and human rights organization Amnesty International.

He is a recurring speaker at the Search Marketing Expo conference series and a TEDx Talker. Today he works directly with high-end clients across all verticals to maximize on and off-site SEO ROI through content marketing and link building.

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