Content Trends

Content Marketing, SEO and Digital Marketing

The Future of SEO: SMX East 2013

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This year’s Search Marketing Expo was one of the most productive and informative conferences I have attended in a long time. Danny Sullivan and the folks at Third Door Media put on an excellent show. I received the latest industry news from sources that I trust and respect, got an opportunity to network with my peers and also came back with several ideas for blog posts. The best part is that I also managed to get a number of interviews lined up with some of the leading experts in our field and will share them with you in the coming weeks.
Search Marketing Expo
Danny Sullivan addressing the audience at SMX East, 2013 in Manhattan, earlier this week.

As digital marketers, we are used to the constantly evolving world of online marketing. However, as far as SEO is concerned things seem to be evolving every day. Listening to industry leaders talk about Search, the future of SEO, current and future trends is really about understanding where the future of intenet marketing lies.

We’ll examine the future of SEO by looking at 5 important threads running through the entire conference.

#1. Local SEO

A common theme seemed to be the importance of local optimization for local businesses. One of the best presentations that I attended was on local SEO. There were several panelists and I really enjoyed the presentation by David Mihm, Director of Local Search Strategy at Moz and founder of getlisted.org.

Here are some key points that he covered:

  • Every local business should be optimizing their sites for local Search . In addition to being on all the local directories, optimize your site for local SEO with structured data.
  • Your NAPW (Name, Address, Phone Number, website) citations need to be accurate, across the online world.
  • Be where your competitors (often referred to as the “7 pack” of local listings in Google) are. Use their exact NAPW and copy it into the Google search box to see where they are listed.
  • Make sure you are listed with tier 1 and tier 2 providers. Tier 1 providers are local search data providers such as Neustar Localese, Infogroup and Acxiom. Tier 2 providers are local directories such as Yellow Pages, Kudzo, Mojopages. Listings in local directories count as local links.
  • Links from local, high authority sites is also a good signal for search engines, as it proves you to be a legitimate business and an authority in your community.

#2. Semantic Search

Not surprisingly, there were several discussions and a separate track for semantic search. Google and other search engines are using semantic search to bring the searcher the most relevant results.
Semantic search systems try to understand the context of the search and use many factors such as location, intent, variations of words, synonyms, natural language queries to produce results.

Knowledge Graph

With Google’s Knowledge Graph and last month’s announcement of the Hummingbird update, the search world is changing from single keywords to relevancy of content. Information in the knowledge graph is derived from several sources that include Wikipedia, Freebase and CIA World factbook.

Hummingbird Update

The Hummingbird update algorithm is also based on semantic search, focusing on user intent versus individual search terms. According to Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, in his article, FAQ: All About The New Google “Hummingbird” Algorithm, “Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query – the whole sentence or conversation or meaning – is taken into account, rather than particular words. The goal is that pages matching the meaning do better, rather than pages matching just a few words.”

Entity Search

Another excellent presentation was all about entity search in SMX’s semantic track. Entity search and the entire subject of semantic search are the topic for an upcoming blog post as we will delve deeper into the concepts and what it means for us and the future of internet marketing.

This is a major shift away from traditional SEO practices where the focus was on a single keyword. SEO’s today need even more to work closely with their clients to come up with different queries the user would type in to come into the site. Long tail keywords, focus terms all give your content more relevancy. It’s not a single keyword, but having search terms that search engines would expect to find about in your document. It’s also about long tail queries and their relevancy to your content.

#3. Structured Data Mark-Up

I heard time and time again about the importance of structured data. There were several presentations on preparing your site for structured data. Since structured data is a joint initiative by Google, Bing and Yahoo you will score big with all search engines if you use structured data.
Local businesses, customer reviews, medical information such as drug types, disease types, events are just some of the types of content that will largely benefit with structured data mark-up. You can find all you need to learn abut structured data at schema.org. This site provides a collection of schemas, i.e., html tags, that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers.

#4. Importance of Google Authorship and Google+

Here’s what I learned about Google authorship and growing your Google+ account

  • Not having Google Authorship is only going to hurt you. It’s also time to start taking author rank seriously. Even though Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, said that they have not yet incorporated author rank in their algorithm, many presenters talked about author rank and how this influences rankings. Currently, author rank is loosely determined by your engagement level on Google+, the number of +1’s you get, your number of circlers, comments per post and authority on non-Google networks.
  • I also found out that Google+ profiles have page rank and having a Google+ profile establishes trust with Google.
  • Also, if influencers have you in their circles, that boosts up your author rank.
  • Google+ profiles have page rank and the more links you have to your Google+ profile, the better the page performs.
  • Make sure that you have a link back to your Google+ profile from all the blogs that you write and guest-post on.

#5. Social Signals and Search Results

There were several mentions throughout the session of the current search and social integration. In the Top Social Tactics for Search Marketers session, Debra Mastaler offered these tips:

  • Finding influencers in your niche can really help your marketing efforts.
  • There are several tools that you will help you identify your influencers such as Klout, Facebook, LinkedIn, Followerwonk, Alltop and G+Data.

All panelists agreed that social is playing a bigger part in search results because it offers fresh content, personalization and it’s real information from real people… all things the search engines want to provide.

To sum it up, SEO is now more than ever before, part of an integrated marketing mix. With Google authorship so big, SEO specialists need to be content marketers and bloggers to build up their authority. They need to align themselves closer with social media. They need to know the technical aspects of the web and they also need to be good sales people. Clients need to work closer with SEO specialists to figure out the goals of the users. While SEO specialists cannot be expected to be experts in all these fields, the more knowledge they have of these fields the more they will be able to help their clients achieve engagement, conversions and traffic.

Filed Under: Seo

Twitter Analytics: 3 Tools that Track and Measure Your Success

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Every business should be tapping into Twitter’s enormous potential for increasing brand authority and gaining qualified leads, especially of people with a need for your product or service.
There are currently more than 1 million Twitter apps and using the right ones will increase your chances of success with this unique social network. There are Twitter tools that help promote your blog, other tools that manage your time on Twitter and of-course tools for measurement and metrics.You can track, monitor and measure your progress with several tools such as Twitter Counter and Twitonomy. Here are 3 of my favorite Twitter tools:

#1. Twitter Analytics

Twitter Analytics
Twitter Analytics – A look at the Followers tab in the Analytics menu

Twitter recently rolled out its native Analytics tool. It’s better than any third party twitter tool as Twitter has unlimited access to its own data. It’s also free for anyone with a Twitter account.

Here are some neat elements of Twitter Analytics:

  • You can buy ads on Twitter and analyze these ads to see what’s working. You will get a report on metrics such as impressions, engagements, follows and eCPE metric (effective cost per engagement). It also has reports on device targeting, location, interest and gender targeting.
  • The lead generation cards tab allows you to create lead generation cards. Lead generation cards automatically capture the user’s name, username, and email address and lets them send this to you with one click.
  • The Twitter followers tab has a neat graph that shows you your follower growth and even shows you the percentage of people following you for various interests such as the percentage of people following you for content marketing, SEO etc.
  • It also gives you access to some other nice metrics such as top cities of your followers and follower gender. It was interesting for me to note that 70% of my followers were male and only 30% were female!
  • The timeline activity sorts your tweets according to most popular, best tweets and good tweets. Your most popular and best tweets are judged by the amount of favorites, retweets and replies a tweet receives. This info is very useful for crafting future tweets as you know what’s working and driving engagement instantly by looking at this metric.
  • The timeline activity shows you with the help of a graph, the amount of mentions, follows and unfollows you received in the past week. If you received a lot of unfollows a certain day, for example, you can go back and examine what you did on that day.

#2. Followerwonk

Followerwonk
Followerwonk comparing the social reach of 3 twitter handles

Followerwonk comes as a free and paid solution. Fortunately, I have access to the paid version since I pay for Moz Pro and Followerwonk comes standard with Moz Pro.
Here are some of the features that are useful in Followerwonk:

Followerwonk does a deep analysis of followers and also of users you follow including:

  • Their location
  • The best hours to get them on Twitter
  • Their social authority scores. This is useful to know because you can easily know who your top influencers are.
  • Their gender
  • Their follower counts. Again this info is useful because if they regularly retweet you, you know based on their follower size how much of a reach your tweet will have.
  • Track changes in followers – how many lost or gained – I was relieved to find that out of 90 days, I gained followers for 60 days and only lost followers on 25 days. There were 10 days with no change.
  • Want to see who your top influencers are? The sort followers option allows you to sort followers according to a number of criteria such as their social authority score, number of followers, number following, number of tweets or number of days online.
  • Want to know how you stack up to competitors? The Compare Users tab allows you to compare 3 twitter handles. You get all kinds of stats including their social authority, number of followers, number of tweets and number of people that they follow together.

    #3. Commun.it

    Commun.it
    A look at Commun.it’s dashboard

    Comun.it calls itself a community management tool for twitter. I love this Twitter tool and would strongly recommend it to anyone looking to increase their engagement on Twitter.
    Commun.it has a paid version as well which I haven’t tried but I’m happy with all the insights I get with the free version.

    • I look at the Relationships tab to tell me who are my high value members based on criteria such as:
      • my influencers
      • my most engaged members
      • my supporters
    • The Followers tab gives you a list of people to engage with, consider to follow or unfollow. It also gives you a list of new followers and unfollowers.
    • The Monitor engagement tab allows you to monitor mentions and tweets around specific search terms.
    • The Leads tab finds you new leads to follow based on their keywords and search terms.

    These are my favorite Twitter tools to monitor engagement and help me increase my reach on Twitter. What are some of yours? Please share with me in the comments below. Thanks. Also, my twitter handle is @Gazalla

    • Local SEO: How You Can Benefit from these Exciting Changes

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    If you are serious about optimizing your business to increase its online visibility, then local SEO is the best way to increase foot traffic as it introduces your business to prospects who can walk in and directly do business with you.

    The recent changes to local SEO by Google will allow you to get more business, gain more leads and prospects. Sounds too good to be true? Well, be the judge yourself after reading about these exciting changes to local SEO. Don’t forget to leave a comment telling me what you think of these changes.

    Local Carousel Search

    Most industry experts are calling Google’s new way of displaying local search results a game-changer to local SEO. The local carousel is a horizontal strip of images with a black background at the top of the SERP. If the quantity of results are too many to fit the screen, the carousel slides from left to right. Although, currently all results are not displayed in carousel mode, it’s the way most local results will be displayed soon. The carousel occupies prime real estate and in terms of positioning is placed higher than even paid search.

    How you can benefit: Since local carousel occupies prime real estate and is attractive, prospects tend to click on these results, first. It is even more crucial now than it ever was before to have a good pic and good reviews. Images are first pulled from your Google+ profile.


    Local carousel for a Google search on restaurants in Manhattan.

    Helpouts

    Google announced just last week that it’s testing Helpouts, a service that connects people who need help with the right expert, consultant or business. Helpouts uses Google+ hangouts to connect people with the consultants and experts. The service is currently in testing and will be available soon. Here are the 8 categories that Helpouts will initially cover: Home & Garden, Computers & Electronics, Health & Counseling, Nutrition & Fitness, Fashion & Beauty, Art & Music, Cooking and Education. Google is serious about keeping up the quality of the featured experts. In order to create a helpout, you need to list your qualifications, certificates, training and experience. Helpouts can either be charged (with payment handled via Google Wallet), or for free. Google will take a platform fee of 20 percent for any paid Helpouts, which includes credit card transaction and Wallet fees.

    How you can benefit: Local businesses and global businesses will benefit as physical location will no longer be that important. But if you are within a prospect’s geographical location, that prospect could easily set up an initial consultation before deciding to do business with you.

    Google City Experts

    Google’s new City Expert program recognizes the most active people who write reviews and upload photos of local places. You can sign-up for Google city experts programs and receive access to local events and recognition online. Currently, the program is being tested only in major cities but will eventually expand to include most cities around the globe.
    How you can benefit: Reviews on sites like Google, Yelp, Bing and Yahoo help local businesses get more exposure and build their online credibility. A 2012 study published on Search Engine Land shows that 72% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
    Verifying a Google+ local business page should be the first task for any local SEO campaign and maintaining a strong presence on Google+ is a must for any business. It’s also important for local SEO to increase your influence in the Google+ community as Google will value your content better.

    Schema Mark-up for Geo-based SEO

    To pinpoint the exact location of your business can be a tricky proposition and using the structured data mark-up that is a joint initiative by Google, Yahoo and Bing makes it extremely easy for search engines to understand the latitude and longitude of your business. Although, structured data has been around for at least a couple of years, very few local businesses are using it to geographically mark-up their sites and gain the benefits of higher rankings.

    The important thing with schema and with any local citations are that your contact information and geographic location should be listed correctly.

    The Local Business section of Schema.org has a variety of categories that businesses can implement as part of the footer or contact page of their website, including address, phone, fax, operating hours, and even accepted payment types.

    The schema markup is displayed via HTML div tags. Here’s an example of geo-schema mark-up:

    </p> <div itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/Plumber”> <span itemprop=”name”><strong>Plumbers in Exton, PA</strong></span></p> <div itemprop=”address” itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/PostalAddress”> <span itemprop=”streetAddress”>310 Lancaster Ave</span><br /> <span itemprop=”addressLocality”>Exton</span>,<br /> <span itemprop=”addressRegion”>PA</span><br /> <span itemprop=”postalCode”>19425</span> </div> <p>Phone: <span itemprop=”telephone”>610-123-1234</span><br /> URL of Map</div> <p>

    In this example for a plumber, the only information that is displayed on the website is the information between the span and div tags. Visitors won’t be able to tell that a business is using schema unless they view the source code of the website.

    The ‘itemprop’ in the span tag identifies the schema markup property for that piece of information. All available properties are shown on Schema.org in their applicable category.

    Reviews and Testimonials
    Using schema in tandem with in-site reviews and testimonials helps search engines find the information quickly and display reviews of a company’s product and services on search engine results pages:

    </p> <div itemprop="review" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Review"> <span itemprop="name">Value purchase</span> &#8211;<br /> by <span itemprop="author">Lucas</span>,<br /> <meta itemprop="datePublished" content="2011-03-25">March 25, 2011 </p> <div itemprop="reviewRating" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Rating"> <meta itemprop="worstRating" content = "1"/><br /> <span itemprop="ratingValue">4</span>/<br /> <span itemprop="bestRating">5</span>stars </div> <p><span itemprop="description">Great microwave for the price. It is small and fits in my apartment.</span> </div> <p>

    (example from schema.org)

    How you can benefit: In addition to using schema for on-site reviews and testimonials, local business websites should also link to their online review pages on sites like Yahoo, Bing, Yelp and Google. Having links to these profiles on the local business website will help them get indexed faster. Since Google, Yahoo and Bing all index schema mark-up quicker, it makes sense to have this for local search.

    Filed Under: Seo

    How to Plan Your Entire Website with a Content Map

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    How do you create strong, meaningful, powerful content that sells, converts and engages your customers? The secret lies in creating a fool-proof content strategy that works for each and every website right from a small business to a large corporate site. In creating a content strategy for your website, essential tasks such as keyword research, content gap analysis, site maps and content audits take a back-seat to the creation of a content map, a simple diagram that places key pieces of info at your finger tips.

    A content map is an invaluable tool that assists content strategists and it’s elements are the building blocks for your entire website right from content to design to development and marketing.

    I like to use the content map that Joe Pulizzi and Kristina Halvorson used on slide 42 of their slideshare presentation – Web Content Strategy – How to Plan for, Create and Publish Online Content for Maximum ROI

    Here is a quick look at that slide:

    Content Map diagram from Joe Pulizzi and Kristina Halvorson’s SlideShare presentation

    I like to approach this map in this order:

    1. Business objectives
    2. User goals
    3. Our main offerings
    4. Website Priorities

    Once you answer these simple questions such as your business objectives, user goals and your main offerings you can easily set website priorities.

    #1. Business Objectives

    What is the purpose of having the website? Is it to convert as many prospects to customers or are you looking to strengthen your reputation and become a thought leader in your industry? Are you looking to differentiate your brand? In many cases, it can be a combination of all three.

    What is the key overall messaging that you would like to convey? In the interest of clarity, what are you trying to say and achieve? Your web strategy will differ based on the actual goals of the site:

    For example if our goal is only to sell a product or service we will gear our content towards that objective. If on the other hand, the main purpose of our content is to establish ourselves as a thought leader in our industry, then our content requirements will be different.

    #2. User Goals

    We need to clearly define our users before we can come up with their goals and I like to divide this step into two:

    1. Persona development: Who are the users? When we clearly define our personas we can come up with their goals in visiting us once we answer these questions:
      • What are my persona’s pain points?
      • How will my product solve these pain points?
      • How will my product address the needs of my personas?

      Persona development allows us to:

      • quickly craft messaging that speaks directly to our prospects.
      • invest advertising dollars in the the best channels for engaging with our prospects and customers.
      • tap into the language that best resonates with our audience.
    2. User Goals: What are the goals of these users? Content on the web is highly task driven and knowing why they come to our website enables us to craft the type of content that will engage our users and keep them coming back again and again.

    #3. Key Offerings

    What is our USP (unique selling proposition)? What is it that sets us apart from other businesses like us? What is it that makes us beyond compare?

    In order to write landing pages that convert every time, we need to answer this key question: Given a choice of potentially thousands of competitors on the internet why would the customer want to buy from us? What are we offering that the others are not? How is our product different from the thousands of other products in the market like ours?

    #4. Website Priorities

    This last step is the easiest as it involves putting together all the information from the previous three steps.

    If I was a baker and I want to sell my baked goods as well as share recipes, I would need to create two personas (not necessarily separate) of bakers and buyers. My users’ goals would be to get good recipes as well as to buy baked goodies. My website priorities would be to convince and convert prospects to buy my baked wares and to share my recipes with other bakers.

    Let’s say that I was creating content for a women’s wing of a hospital. Their main objectives are to educate and inform their audience about early detection for certain conditions and also to promote the various options for these conditions in their hospital. The user goals would be to find out more info, to study and research their conditions as well as to understand the various options. The website priorities in this case would be to educate and promote options for the various conditions.

    Once you create this type of a content map, content creation becomes a snap and all the web disciplines can borrow from this map to create a site that has the user in mind right from it’s very inception.

    This process has saved me a ton of time. What strategies do you use to plan your content? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

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    Content Writing: 5 Essential Skills of Every Content Writer

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    Your website today is truly your virtual office. It’s the place where a prospect is first introduced to your business and your product or service. Your content can make or break that first impression.

    Here are certain key skills to look for in your content marketing advocate. Your content writer’s main job is to:

    • Be your brand advocate and promote your business with fresh content.
    • Write compelling copy that convinces and converts prospects and retains existing customers.
    • Increase your sales with messaging that motivates your customers to buy from you.
    • Ensure that your content is easily indexed by search engines.
    • Help you find new clients, new leads with effective lead generation techniques through content marketing. A good content marketer will be thinking of new ways to generate business, attract leads, prospects with the help of excellent content be it in the form of a webinar, the right eBook or whitepaper.

    Your content writer should be versatile enough to able to write for different audiences and prepare different types of content marketing collateral such as:

    • Email newsletters
    • Whitepapers
    • Blogs
    • Lead generation collateral such as eBooks, webinars

    #1. Passion for Writing and Selling

    Your ideal content writer should be able to get into the mind of your customer and know their key motivators.
    Here are some essential areas that an excellent content writer will have mastered:

    • The art of crafting a powerful headline.
    • The skill of creating perfect calls to actions as well as the skill of knowing to avoid content mistakes that cost valuable conversions.
    • The skill to create kick-ass landing pages that convert every time.
    • They should know how to speak to what the copywriting world calls “key motivators”. A good copywriter is one who can identify and speak to the key motivators such as fear, greed, guilt and pain.
    • It’s a no-brainer that your content writer needs to have the language skills to write error-free copy and these days it’s important from the seo perspective as well. Copy that has a lot of grammatical errors is instantly pulled out by the Panda filter as spam. Of-course the main reason is to have a professional looking site that is not sloppy.

    #2. SEO Copywriting Techniques

    In these days, you might as well be a dinosaur if your content is not easily searchable. With Google’s Panda and Penguin updates, the last thing you want to do is to have your content banished from the online world! it’s as important to know what works as it is to know what doesn’t. An ideal content writer will have thorough SEO knowledge and will also keep abreast of future SEO trends. Search engine optimization is a rapidly evolving field and your writer should be able to:

    • Create fresh content that search engines haven’t indexed before.
    • Research effective long-tail as well as head keywords and synonyms.
    • Have metadata knowledge so that each page has the appropriate title, description and keywords.
    • Know and use seo tools that enhance rankings.
    • Know basic html tags, especially the tags that help with increasing a site’s visibility such as alt tags for images and creating the right anchor text.
    • Keep up with the latest search engine updates, various filters such as Panda, Penguin and other algorithm changes that Google comes up with to enforce content standards.

    #3. Social Media Strategies and Community Building Skills

    Web content and social media these days go hand-in-hand and having a content writer that knows how to incorporate social media into your content marketing mix is crucial. The ideal writer should know how to:

    • Write content that engages your audience so that they are compelled to share with their network for added exposure.
    • Engage prospects and customers alike so they come back for more, subscribe, sign up for that eBook or webinar
    • Encourage a dialogue and build a community with lots of interaction in the form of comments, tweets, email feedback.

    The days of passive marketing are over and we’ve entered the golden age of customer interaction, social media and community building.

    #4. Site Architect and Content Strategist Role

    Unless you are a large corporate site, the chances are that your web content writer is also going to double up as your site architect. A good writer should be your content strategist and should prepare your site with the user in mind for optimum ease of access and navigability. Content strategists need to have the big picture in mind and an in-depth understanding of how content can be exploited to it’s fullest potential. They also advise their clients on all content matters including identifying gaps in content, identifying the key overall messaging, the UX vision for your site and taxonomies.

    #5. Knowledge of Analytics

    Your site metrics are an important indicator of how well your content is being received. Your metrics will inform you of everything content related such as:

    • Content popularity
    • Search terms that are most popular
    • Shared content
    • Content value
    • Page views and bounce rate for your top content
    • Which content is ranking well and driving traffic through search engines

    Good content writers know how to interpret site metrics so that:

    1. they create more of the content that’s converting, optimizing and getting your business more leads.
    2. they use Analytics tools to split test different versions of a page or call to action to see which version is better at converting or gaining more leads.

    Other nice-to-haves include:

    • Image editing knowledge
    • CSS and site layout code
    • Knowledge and experience with different content management systems
    • Basic web design skills

    In this market, what you pay for is what you get and although a content marketer with all these skills doesn’t come cheap you are guaranteed rich dividends in the form of better ROI and ultimately better cost per sale metrics, more business, more leads and of-course more prosperity.