How come SEO doesn’t work without content marketing? Why do you need both?

When you have only SEO: You get content that appears in search, but users don’t care about it. Do you want site users to be more than just viewers and bystanders? Do content marketing.

When you have only content marketing: You get content that nobody ever finds online. Your content and your audience; do you want these two to meet? Do SEO.

Content marketing is about making your content work and making content that works. With SEO in the equation, there’s also making your content rank. It’s clear that content is at the crux of all of this business, and that a successful union of content marketing and SEO requires fulfilling those three requirements.

And here’s how you meet them.

1. Making the best content

Let’s define “the best content” first. The devil is in the details, so let’s grab him by the horns and drag him out into the light.

• The best for whom? That’s easy: your target audience.
• The best at what? At being what your target audience needs when they use Google (or any other means of search): a solution to a problem, a source of accurate information, entertainment etc.
• If it’s the best, then what is it better than? That would be the best currently existing content, most likely owned by your direct competitors.

So the goal is to create content which has these three traits. All of them, even the third one, boil down to pleasing your audience. How do we do that?

Obviously, in order to be popular with your audience, you need to be intimately familiar with them. What they like and what they don’t, what they want, how they think – that’s the bare minimum. All these things are on your users’ minds every time they search for some specific content and can be summarized in three words: user search intent.

So, how do you satisfy search intent?

• Choose a topic (or a range of related topics) your target audience is interested in. With a variety of topics, you will be able to attract more visitors, but you’ll also risk turning into a jack of all trades and a master of none. Keep educating yourself!
• Create content that isn’t bad. Sounds painfully obvious, but this is the one step you absolutely cannot mess up at any cost. Otherwise your whole campaign will crumble like a house of cards.
• Create unique content. Users don’t want more of the same thing they’ve seen elsewhere. Your site may share a purpose with others, but the rest needs to be special.
• Make your content as in-depth as possible. This is the sort of content that tends to be the most popular, gets the most backlinks, ranks the highest and drives the most traffic. Be careful not to confuse depth with length; a 4000 word long-read might be full of water instead of anything actually useful.
• Anticipate questions that are related to your content’s topic. For example, if a user is looking for an article about getting rid of facial wrinkles, they’ll also want to know about the best diets and skin care products. Additional related information will make your content more in-depth, as well as add more keywords to rank for.

That should help you form a clear vision of what your content should be like. Proceed to create what you envision and make it better than whatever is ranking on Google’s page #1.

The next step is to give your content the ability to convert users.

Converting means making users perform a specific action on your site (such as subscribing or buying a product). As you can imagine, this is one of the most vital parts of content marketing; it’s where you sell your content. For this part, you are going to need careful planning and experience in using websites similar to your own.

• Include your main keywords in the titles, descriptions and URLs.

Not only is this really good for your SEO, it’s also the best way to let the users know you have the content they need.

• Give the users an incentive to perform the desired action.

Users will never do what you ask if they don’t get anything out of it. If they come to solve a problem, say the solution is behind a call-to-action. If they’ll want more content like the page they are viewing, let them know they will have more if they subscribe, and so on.

• Plan out the path from the top of the page to the CTA.

Place yourself in the users’ shoes. How would they use your content? Where would be the best spots to put CTAs?

You can try to play the guessing game, or you can analyze the pages on your site that have already attempted to convert users. Use a heat map generator both on the pages that succeeded and the pages that failed to see what works and what doesn’t.

• Emulate the more successful sites.

Learning from the superior is a sign of wisdom. And the best part about imitating websites with high CTR scores is that they don’t have to be your direct competitors. For example, you can safely pick an ecommerce site which sells different products than yours and see what it does better.

Find what works for others and start doing it on your own site. And if you can make improvements to their tricks, that’s even better. Content creation software tools could help you a lot in the process of planning and producing high-converting content.

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2. Optimizing content for search engines

Content marketing and SEO both play an equally large role in putting your site on the first page of Google. If content marketing can be described as the social aspect of conquering the search, then SEO is the technical aspect. So what do you do on the SEO side of things?

Use keywords that will bring you the most traffic

You can find keywords for your site with WebCEO’s Keyword Suggestions tool. But how do you know a keyword is good?

You know how Google works: you type in a few words, and the search engine shows sites which have them. But the search results don’t always have the exact match of your query; they may have synonyms or even be missing some of the words you used. What does this all mean?

The best keywords have these traits:

• Descriptive and clearly reflecting user search intent. These types of keywords are known as long-tail.
• Semantically related to your main keywords.
• Have a high number of monthly searches (or search volume).

If you have connected your Google Search Console account to your WebCEO project, you can check the effectiveness of your keywords in the Google Search Queries report, namely:

• Average ranking position in Google
• Click-through rates
• Clicks and impressions

Make your site mobile-friendly

Everyone has a mobile phone with an Internet connection these days. To make a long story short, make your website and its content work as well on mobile devices as on PCs – or even better.

• Increase loading speed
• Implement a responsive design
• Leave some space between elements
• Make sure your popups don’t cover too much screen
• Don’t use elements unsupported by mobile devices (such as Flash)

Test your site with WebCEO’s Speed Optimization tool to see how well your site looks – both on mobile and desktop.

Fix technical errors

Promoting a site full of errors is like trying to win a race in a broken car. You’ll never finish first, if at all.

Now, you can’t know when something might break on your site, but you must fix all errors no matter where and when they appear. A few examples of what could happen to your site:

• Broken links (they are especially damaging when they are broken CTAs)
• 404 errors
• Unindexed pages
• Server errors
• Broken page code

Use WebCEO’s Technical Audit tool to check if everything is all right with your site. If there are problems, see to them immediately!

Fix SEO errors

Unlike technical errors, optimization errors don’t cause your site to malfunction; in some cases, they might not affect a user’s experience at all. They simply mean you are squandering your site’s SEO potential. Googlebots can pass over your site and not really know what it’s about if you don’t optimize.

Here are a few examples of SEO errors you can fix to increase your rankings.

• Missing H1 tags
• Missing sitemap
• Missing robots.txt file
• Missing image ALT attributes
• Missing hreflang tag in localized pages
• Blank, overly long or duplicate meta tags

Find these errors on your site with WebCEO’s On-Site Issues Overview tool.

Break your content into segments

Long content can be a chore to take in all at once. If yours is like that, make it easier to consume by dividing it into parts. Here’s what you can use:

• Paragraphs. This is the easiest and most obvious way to improve readability. There’s no limits on how short you can make them; even one-sentence paragraphs work wonders.
• Subheadings. This is the best option SEO-wise. H2, H3 and H4 tags can act as titles for individual segments, which helps both the users and Google understand the structure of your content and what it’s about.
• Images. These are best used when they are relevant in the context, especially when they contain valuable data (such as diagrams).
• Calls-to-action. If there’s just one CTA on a page, some users will never even see it, let alone click on it. Placing a few CTAs throughout the page (where it makes sense in the context, of course) is a good way to boost your conversion rates.

Use high-quality visuals

Pictures and videos are among the decisive elements that shaped the Internet as we know it. They play a major role in driving conversions, too. What are the best ways to use them?

Images:

• Use only high-quality ones (unless there’s a point you want to make with poor quality)
• Set their height and width to the exact size you need, and not a pixel bigger
• Convert them to the format that will yield the smallest file size
• Merge them into a single image where possible

Videos:

• Use only the ones with high-quality visuals and sound
• Host them on other sites like YouTube
• Set them to play automatically where appropriate (for example, above the fold where you don’t want the users to miss it)

Increase site loading speed

Other than helping you rank, site speed is the decisive factor in keeping users on your site. Here’s what you can do:

• Host your site on a powerful server or a content delivery network
• Enable caching in the .htaccess file
• Use compression software such as Gzip
• Minimize your HTML, CSS, JavaScript and other code
• Optimize your images
• Don’t host large files on your own site
• Keep your page redirects to a minimum (the ideal minimum being zero)

Test your site with WebCEO’s Speed Optimization tool and see what needs improvement.

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3. Promoting content

Now comes the “marketing” part of content marketing. Everybody says high-quality content is the key to ranking in Google. And of course, there’s a catch. Even the best tourist content about the Spain doesn’t go places on its own; it needs your help to make it happen.

See, content isn’t restricted to being Internet pages. Content, first and foremost, is information that motivates a person to become your customer. Anything that falls under this definition can be considered as content: an email, a Google ad, a TV commercial, even shouting in the streets. It’s only a matter of reaching your target audience.

Let’s assume you have picked your audience carefully and that your content matches their interests. Here are the next steps.

Build links strategically

Link building is where SEO and content marketing intersect the closest. Everyone will tell you that in order to build links, you need to create high-quality content. But when you try it, the best you get is a few nofollow backlinks from social media. Why does it work for your competitors and not for you?

Because this plan is missing several crucial steps.

You’ll be lucky to get any backlinks by doing nothing other than making content. Other sites, especially the authoritative ones, won’t stumble upon it by chance and just decide to link to it on a whim. The best link building technique is to create content which has value for the audience and for the linking sites.

Simply put, here’s the plan:

1. Expose other sites to your content

2. Give them an incentive to link to it

What possible incentives are there? Here are a few instances when link building turns into a mutually beneficial exchange:

• Your content is a source worth citing in Wikipedia.
• Someone (for example, a blogger or a reporter) is in the process of writing an article. You reach out to them and offer to use your site as a source. One of the sites where you can do that is Connectively.
• “Skyscraper” technique: you create an article and contact someone who links to its less in-depth, outdated version.
• Broken link building: you contact a site linking to a page that doesn’t exist anymore and suggest they link to you instead.
• Creating or sharing viral content on your site, for instance something the folks at Reddit would like.
• Making unique sources of data and statistics (case studies, researches, surveys).
• Creating your own non-stock images.
• Guest blogging.

The most efficient way to build links is to target specific sites where you want to create backlinks. And for that, you need to pick your targets first. Find the most authoritative sites in your niche through Google – or, even better, with WebCEO’s Dangerous Competitors tool.

This tool finds your competitors for your chosen keywords. They are not all going to be your direct business competitors, so you’ll want to cherry-pick the ones who are actually stealing your audience.

Make your site appear in no-click searches

Featured snippets, quick answers, Knowledge Panel, voice search. All of them can generate traffic, but they were mainly designed to give users the content they want without making them click. Even so, if you don’t appear in those search results, someone else will.

The same applies to pay-per-click ads. They occupy so much space above the organic results, it’s a wonder SEO is still relevant.

Fortunately, the requirements for getting featured snippets aren’t very strict – they boil down to using keywords and formatting your content in a distinct way (FAQ, list or table).

Share your content in social media

How else are you going to get traffic from there in the first place?

Still, not all of your social media followers will engage with your content. That’s why you need a large audience: the more followers you have, the better your chances. How do you get more?

• Share your business pages’ content on your own personal pages
• Ask the people you know to share it
• Reply to commenting users
• Reply to the users who PM you (and reply quickly)
• Ask users to comment, like, share and follow
• Be active on other people’s pages
• Share other people’s content on your pages

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Use email outreach

Remember how content comes in many more forms other than site pages? Email is another one of those forms. Quite powerful, too, even despite the risk of getting stuck in spam filters. If you are subscribed to somebody’s updates, you know how true this is.

How do you make this method work for you?

• Have a ton of email addresses in your database. You’ll be lucky if even 5% of them respond to your call to action. The wider the net you cast, the more fish you’ll catch.
• Don’t email to your competitors and irrelevant sites. If the addressees aren’t your target audience, your emails will fail.
• Design an email newsletter. There’s no better way to make your emails unique and your brand recognizable. Quick tip: you can use a free email templates builder to make this process very easy.
• Prepare several good pitches. Don’t just send everyone the same email. If you have options, some of them are certain to work better than others.
• Make new pitches when necessary. There can be all sorts of occasions: Halloween, Christmas, Easter, your site’s anniversary and so on. A special pitch for a special day is a good way to spice things up.

Afterword

It turns out there’s a lot of extra oomph your SEO needs to be effective. You will want to check if your content marketing strategy is working, too. How?

By checking these metrics in Google Analytics.

• Page views (how many times users visit your site)
• Click-through rates (% of users who visit your site after finding it)
• Bounce rates (% of users who leave your site after visiting one page)
• Dwell times (how much time users spend on your site)
• Page depth (how many pages users visit per session)
• User flow (how users browse through your site)
• Goals flow (how users reach your calls-to-action)
• Conversions (% of users who complete calls-to-action)

And, of course, the Google site rankings for your keywords. Those can be seen with WebCEO’s Rank Tracking tool.

But the easiest way to tell if it’s all worked is to check your goals. The desired number of user registrations, the amount of profits, the ranking positions and so on – have you got them? And if you’ve gone above your hoped-for success numbers, how far above was it? If all your hard work has set a trend for growth, that’s how you will know you have become good at content marketing.

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The post Why Your SEO Strategy Isn’t Working (Hint: No Content Marketing) appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Content is the common thread tying together SEO and digital marketing. Want your website to be at the top of search results? Make great content. Want to sell something? Make great content. Since that’s where the two goals intersect, it’s clear that superior content is the gateway to greater rewards in each.

And video might just be the winning ticket you were looking for.

Want proof? The most prominent example is YouTube. Video content helped it become a giant on par with Google itself, enough to make YouTube SEO its own thing – to say nothing of all the ad revenue generated there. Video can be packed with more information than any other medium, which makes it such a potent tool in communication. And that’s what SEO, digital business and video marketing are all about: reaching and communicating with your audience.

Need more reasons to start using videos? Don’t worry, we’ve got plenty.

Video Marketing Statistics in 2022

“The 2020s will be the decade of video.” How I wish I had a dollar for every time I’d heard that over the previous decade. I’d have enough to make Elon Musk cry!

Two and some years into the new 20s, how is this prediction holding up? Spoiler alert: very accurate so far. Countless businesses have bet on video content and they did not regret it – quite the opposite, in fact. Numbers can do a great job describing the impact video has had on digital businesses – and, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Here is an infographic: the fruit of Renderforest‘s research on video content and how it has been used by businesses in the 2020s. Below the infographic itself, we are going to highlight the most impressive points.

1. Benefits of video content

Videos are widely used (and that’s an understatement). There are plenty of businesses and marketers to vouch for the benefits. What does the majority say?

Using videos in your marketing campaign increases:

• Return on investment
• Brand awareness
• Lead generation
• Site traffic

Every single thing that matters, as you can see.

85% of businesses use videos in marketing and consider them a vital part of their strategy. What’s more, videos have proven to be especially effective during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to 91% of marketers.

2. Video consumption

They didn’t lie when they said the 2020s would be the era of videos. Halfway and some into 2022, global video traffic is climbing past the 82% mark – as expected. And thanks to such a high percentage, we can see how users prefer their videos:

• 33% of viewers will stop watching a video after 30 seconds. That’s how little time you have to hook them in!
• 25% of viewers finish videos that are over 20 minutes long. Not great, not terrible.
• 75% of viewers prefer horizontal videos to vertical ones.

3. Types of videos

There are many kinds of videos out there. What do businesses prefer? How effective are those preferred kinds at their job?

• Explainer videos: these are used by 62% of businesses, as well as by 82% of B2B businesses. This type of video has an enormous audience: 94% of people who want to know more about the product will watch an explainer video. Also, 93% of millennial viewers love how-to videos.
• Logo animations: they are present in 46% of videos made by businesses, and in 58% of B2B business videos.
• Video ads: they are less common than you’d think. Only 38% of businesses use them!
• Demo videos: these are even less common, employed by 33% of businesses.
• The 3 most popular types of videos are webinars, demos and social videos.
• And the most effective types (as reported by businesses) are informative and entertaining.

4. Videos and platforms

Now, everybody knows YouTube is king when it comes to videos. But what about other places?

It turns out businesses use videos quite effectively on their own sites. Putting a video on a landing page can increase your conversions by up to 80%!

What’s more, having a video on your landing page increases its chances of appearing on Google’s first SERP by 53%. Naturally, that includes homepages.

And here’s my favorite part: videos are effective even in emails!

44% of people are willing to watch a video included in an email. In fact, a video can increase an email’s CTR by up to a whopping 300%.

However, only 25% of businesses use videos in email marketing as of now (partly due to people being cautious about spam in emails, but that’s where verification tools like SPF record checkers come in). Sounds like a powerful, untapped niche you could use!

5. Videos on social media

We’ve seen how effective landing pages and emails can be. But when you want to post a video somewhere, what comes to mind? YouTube first, social media second, right?

Let’s look at the numbers.

• 81% of social media users say videos are their favorite type of content.
• 75% of people are more likely to follow a brand’s page if it has video content.
• For 74% of businesses, their videos receive the most engagement in social media.
• Twitter in particular is going through a video Renaissance of sorts: its video views are 220 times greater in 2022 than last year.
• Lastly, 56% of businesses post at least 5 videos per month on their social media.

Afterword

I think it won’t be long before augmented reality becomes the next booming trend. But for now, video content is king, and these statistics should be enough to convince you. It can be tough to make a good video, but this type of content has the highest ROI – that’s a proven fact.

When you are making a video, have fun! The audience respects professionals who love their work. Enjoy what you do, and the viewers will happily join in for the ride.

Additionally, you can use WebCEO’s SEO content assistant to ensure your video content reaches its maximum potential audience.

The post Video Marketing: The Future of SEO (Infographic) appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

There’s no content marketing without content. It’s critical to the success of your online business. Content helps drive traffic to your site by making you recognizable to search engines, helps people connect with you, and most importantly, it drives sales. In short, you can never have enough good content.

Yet consistently creating new content is both costly and time-consuming. Generally speaking, it’s worth the investment. But there’s one thing that’s pretty frustrating about the content we write for our blogs and websites: it’s one and done.

For all the time that goes into creating blog content for SEO, it’d be nice if we could do more with it than just post it and then wait for it to cycle down to the bottom of the list, only to be forgotten forever. It’s true that reposting the same content is bad practice. You’ll look lazy to your readers, and search engines will start to think you’re no longer original and relevant.

But you don’t need to repost your content to get more out of it. There are quite a few things you can do that will allow you to make use of the effort you put into creating it in the first place.

Consider the following ways for making old content continue to work.

1. Refresh it

When you load a piece of content up onto your website, remember that in some respects you’re freezing time. Whatever you create is going to reflect your goals and understanding of your audience at that particular moment.

But you and your business are constantly changing and growing. One way to make use of your older content is to go back through it and to optimize it for what you now know about your business.

This is especially true for conversion content. As you move along, you’ll learn more about what works for your audience and what doesn’t. And while you don’t want to repeat yourself over and over again, you do want your content to be as effective as possible in driving sales and conversions.

Go over what you’ve got on your site and change wording, tone, style and voice to reflect what you now know about your audience. This way you don’t need to create any new content, but you will be able to get more out of what you’ve already created in the form of better conversions and sales.

To further support your content refresh and optimization efforts, check out WebCEO’s SEO Content Assistant. This tool can help you identify areas where your content can be improved or updated, ensuring that it continues to perform well in search engine results and engage your audience.

2. Make it up-to-date

We all want our content to be as evergreen as possible. In a perfect world, every piece of content would be comprehensive enough and written in such a way that we would never need to touch it again. But we don’t live in that perfect world.

Things are changing constantly. New research reveals new trends, and people are innovating all the time. Eventually, your content will go stale.

But this doesn’t mean you need to completely redo what you’ve written. In fact, you can often have more success by simply building upon what you’ve already written. For example, you can repost the original blog, and then in a different font or in a different color you can go through and add in content that is new or different from the original.

This will often times resonate better than a new piece because readers who have already read the original will be able to more quickly find out what’s new. Furthermore, new audiences can easily catch up on how things were and how they’ve changed.

Updating posts helps not only in content marketing, but in SEO, too. Google and other search engines like fresh, relevant and timely content, but you can also boost rankings and improve search engine performance by updating and overhauling older content.

This strategy works great with pieces optimized for conversion. For example, if you have a “Best X for Y” page set up to try and drive sales, updating it yearly to include any new trends, new products and new recommendations will help show to your readers that you know what you are talking about and that you are a relevant and authoritative source of information.

3. Expand upon it

Part of the challenge in creating content for a blog or website is determining which topics to pursue. To be successful, you need to spend a lot of time brainstorming topics and then finding people who are capable of writing about them.

If you start to run low on ideas, or need some content to fill your calendar, then consider using your older content for inspiration.

There are two ways you can do this. The first is to simply add depth to the topic. If you put together 1,000 words for one post, maybe you can expand it into two or three thousand. You could create a series, with the original content serving as part one. Subsequent parts would be new content, but everything would be related to the first post.

The second way to do this would be to turn sections of your original content into their own blog posts. When we write for the web, we’re somewhat limited in what we can say because of web readers’ inherently short attention spans. In each section, we try to touch on the most relevant points, leaving out some details so as to prevent being wordy.

For an example, consider this post. We’re discussing different ways to use old content. In each section, we’re going over general ideas so that you, the reader, can learn about the different option available. But we could easily do a post for each section that goes over more specifically how you could optimize, update or expand upon your content.

If you do decide to do this, then it’s worth mentioning that you should focus on the most widely-viewed content on your site. Taking the pieces people already like and expanding upon it is a great way to leverage your content. It will show to your audience you’re receptive to their needs and are willing to spend time to make sure you’re as useful to them as possible.

4. Rewrite (or reuse) it

A key component to the success of any online business is how you generate links. Link building is essential for driving traffic to your site and establishing yourself as an authority. And one of the best ways to do this is to write guest posts for other blogs. This puts you in touch with influencers, and it also helps attract new audiences.

However, as you likely already know, guest posting is hard. There’s lots of competition, and blogs and websites are demanding more and more from their guest contributors. It’s become very challenging to find guest post topics that will be useful and interesting to the audience you’re targeting.

One way to work around this is to take some of your better content and rewrite it for other blogs. Nearly every blog will want original content, but this doesn’t mean you need to come up with a completely new idea. Sites may like what you have to say, so save time and energy by repurposing what you’ve already done so that it will work for other sites.

Another option is to try to get people to repost your content. Many blogs will be willing to post already written blogs with proper citation. This requires an outreach campaign, but it can be very useful for helping you get more out of your content.

5. Convert it to a different format

We’ve been talking almost exclusively about blog posts, but there are many different mediums you can use on the web. One of the best ways you can repurpose your old content is to change its format.

Videos, podcasts and infographics have taken the web by storm. But making them can be costly and time-consuming to make. To save energy, and also to make your old content keep working for you, consider turning an old post into one of these other formats.

Infographics in particular are a great option largely because they are highly-shareable. This makes them a great opportunity for reposting old content. Simply organize the main point into something visual – you even have free tools to help you with that, like Canva Infographic Maker. Then just start promoting what you’ve made through social media.

Thanks to WebCEO’s Social Media Analytics tools, you’ll easily track your social mentions, analyze your social media traffic and see how well your content works for you on Facebook.

Oldie but goodie

Just because content is old doesn’t mean it serves no purpose. While reposting something doesn’t make a lot of sense, there are lots of ways to repurpose existing content to make it keep working for you. Consider using some of these strategies for your blog or website and let your content drive your business to new levels.

The post 5 Ways to Revive Your Old Posts Like a Content Marketing Pro appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

To build a brand online, you will need customers and other stakeholders to trust it and identify with what your business does. The following are some of the steps in the process of building a strong brand online.

1. Analyze and Understand the Market

It is always important for you to have a deep understanding of the market where you want to operate. Understanding the market allows you to know what the customer needs that are not getting fulfilled. It helps you understand how you can do things differently from what is already being done and carve a niche for yourself.

When you find out what the customers are searching for online through research, you can then use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques. SEO helps you to ensure that your brand comes up as often as possible when potential customers search for information that is of interest to them.

Watch for particular phrases to use in your SEO and content marketing initiatives. It is this information that you can then use to advertise effectively. The looping Keyword Research Tool “Get Suggestions” can help you learn what variants of your keywords are being used by people in your local area.

2. Pinpoint and Analyze Your Competitors

The other way to build your brand is by analyzing your competitors. Study how they have effectively, and ineffectively built their brand. Ask the following questions:

• Are they consistent with their message and visual identity across channels?
• What is the quality of their products or services?
• Do they have customer reviews you can read, or social mentions about them?
• How active are they in social media?
• What is the engagement rate of their visitors?
• What is the quality and the tone of their content?
• What are their strengths and weaknesses?

Utilize the data and combine it with your business in such a way that it makes you unique from the market.

3. Build Trust in Your Brand

To ensure that there is trust between you and your online audience you should always think long and hard before publishing anything for them to see. Online audiences tend to lose trust in anyone who doesn’t respond to their inquiries quickly. It is advisable to maintain a regular schedule for posting your updates, blogs or other posts. Ensuring that the content of your website and other online platforms is simple and relatable is also key to building trust.

Posting regularly is how you keep your audience engaged. It is also important to, as much as possible, communicate with your audience in real time. This is usually made possible by the use of social media marketing. Many companies nowadays employ full time social media managers who respond to queries from customers in real time.

Long term relationships help you to stabilize your brand. If for example, if you keep changing your graphic designer, there is a chance that despite their best efforts, the graphics you get from these different relationships may be different. This would lead to a situation where your brand can not be properly identified. Stable, consistent design has always been important in web design, email marketing, postal mail, TV ads, magazine ads, text messaging, social media and video presentations.

To achieve that consistent design, you will need quality images. While you can hire photographers to take the pictures you need, or it is easier to acquire pictures for free through online sharing platforms.

Strong, long-term relationships with other suppliers also contribute in helping your customers understand you.

4. Be Creative and Use Humor

When seeking to get people to click on your advert in a Pay Per Click initiative, one way you can get it moving is by use of humor. Once you have been online for some time and you have acquired a considerable following, people on the net will start stereotyping you. Stereotyping happens especially when you have been engaging with your customers and prospects on social media. Once you get wind of the stereotype that is going around your brand, use that to entertain your audience with some self-deprecating humor.

In social media marketing, a dose of well researched humor for clients and prospects is a good way for you to start the day. Humor also makes your page appear more approachable. People want a face for your brand and a humorous face creates an air of friendship and camaraderie.

5. Track Your Online Brand Mentions

Another crucial part of building your brand’s reputation is monitoring its online mentions. Your campaign is meant to produce results, and the customers’ opinion of you reflects how well you are trying – not exactly something you can ignore safely. And why would you ignore your brand’s mentions when you can make them work for you?

Tracking brand mentions helps you to:

• Build new links from unlinked mentions
• Start fixing your brand’s reputation if it’s bad
• Communicate with your audience where discussion is possible
• Turn your haters into supporters (if your diplomatic skills are strong)
• Research the market by getting to know your customers and their wishes better

You can find mentions of your brand by using search engines and Online SEO tools, and it’s best to use both in tandem. There are plenty of things even Google can’t find. Did you know that not even 10% of posts made on Twitter are added into Google’s index? But with a social monitoring tool like WebCEO’s Web Buzz Monitoring, you can easily find them all.

In addition to SEO and social monitoring tools, use Google to expand your search range and cover both indexed and unindexed brand mentions. Forums and review platforms are the most obvious places to look – and depending on the reputation you’ve already made, those might be just the tip of the iceberg. Be sure to search far and wide!

6. Evaluate and Change for the Better

Always have your ear on the ground as far as public perception of your brand is concerned. This helps you to sift through these perceptions and identify which ones to keep and which ones to demolish. Demolition of some of the perceptions is meant to ensure that the only perception that comes through to your online audience is the one that properly represents your business. This means that you will want to brainstorm with your team on how things can be done to clarify your brand image.

Afterword

Don’t forget that, ultimately, your reputation is a reflection on how you treat your customers. Value them, and they’ll value you back, too!

The post Brand Building: How to Build a Good Reputation appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Our blog has seen a lot of SEO talk lately. SEO for legal firms, SEO for fashion sites, tips for local SEO… However, before you even start doing SEO for your site, the first and the most important steps are creating a brand, doing proper positioning and taking care of online brand tracking.

What is the sign of a good brand reputation?

Who creates a website without the intention to lure visitors in? I guess there are webmasters who want to dwell in the unexplored pages of Google’s search results; maybe even the deep web. Somehow I doubt you are one of them. You were born for greatness. You want to make your website known and famous; maybe it already is. Whatever the case, your success is deeply tied to your online reputation: one of your highest rewards and one of your main concerns at the same time.

A good brand reputation is like a tree. Not only does it feels nice to rest under its shadow, it can also grow and bear fruit to even riper rewards if you nurture it right. And obviously, it will wither if you don’t show it proper care. Growing the tree of your reputation is a complex task, and not the least important of its steps is tracking your brand mentions online. That’s what we’ll give special attention to today.

How to find online brand mentions

Many people are scared to search their own name online. Woe to you if you named your brand after yourself, for you’ll have to overcome this fear. If you were more creative, all is good in your world. Search away safely.

A simple Google search can reveal a lot about your reputation: reviews, for example. Yet there are a number of reasons I wouldn’t recommend relying on Google alone.

• It sorts search results by their rankings, regardless of how old or recent they are. This poses a problem if you want to know what’s new.
• It likes to put results you’ve clicked on before in the top positions. This can be circumvented by going incognito, but can you really be bothered to do that every time you want to Google yourself?
• Your own site will most likely occupy the top search results, making your search needlessly longer.

You could try and come up with sophisticated search requests that would solve those problems (there are plenty of secret Google Fu techniques), but there’s an easier way. It’s much more optimal to use an SEO tool which can quickly find the brand mentions that you need.

If you have a project in WebCEO set up and running, you can start tracking your mentions with the Web Buzz Monitoring tool.

Click on Settings. That’s where the beast awaits commands from you to obey. It’s all fairly simple. The first step is typing the keywords you want to track.

You can choose up to 20 different words and phrases. You can even use the minus sign to exclude all results with specific keywords; this is in order to filter out irrelevant matches. I can’t come up with a serious example from the top of my head, so let’s go with a silly one. Suppose you want to track mentions of pizza, but you don’t find pineapple pizza appetizing enough to want to see it in your results. You go to Settings -> Keywords and type in pizza -pineapple and pizza -Hawaiian in the list of keywords to be tracked. Done! No more recipes that offend your taste.

Below Keywords is the Languages menu where you select the preferred languages of results. Pretty straightforward.

Press Save when you are finished tweaking the tool, and in a few moments you’ll have your mentions. They’ll be displayed in two separate sections: News and Blogs and Twitter Buzz.

The former is for when your brand’s name, linked or unlinked, is dropped in news articles and blog posts. The results are marked as ‘read’ as soon as they appear on your screen (i.e. they’ll turn purple if you keep scrolling and will stay blue if you don’t), and you can filter out read posts by clicking on the menu in the top left corner above the list. Tremendous help when you need only fresh updates, isn’t it?

Twitter Buzz, as the name suggests, shows the most recent tweets with your mentions (in hashtags and otherwise), picked from Twitter. It shares the settings with News and Blogs, so you don’t have to configure the tool twice.

If you happen to get a particularly positive mention – an article full of accolades or a tweet that received lots of likes and retweets – you can mark it as a favorite so you could easily find it again whenever you want. As they say, confidence is built through success. Let those favorite mentions become a foundation for yours!

How does online brand monitoring help you?

Now that you’ve discovered a goldmine of your brand’s mentions, what are you to do with it? How does this information help you? You put it to good use, of course! Here are the advantages of brand monitoring:

• It provides opportunities for link building. Expect to get more than a few unlinked brand mentions. While they work fine for raising awareness, you can attempt to make them even more useful. Reach out to the person who talked about you in their article and ask them to attach your site’s URL to the mention. Chances are, they’ll do it: after all, they liked you enough to bring you up in the topic.
• You can interact with your target audience. If the mention sparked discussion in the comments, you can join in and participate. Do commenters have questions about you? Be helpful and answer them. Are you being scolded instead of praised? This could be your chance to present yourself in a more positive light. Conversation is the best way to build reputation.
• You can research the market. Just sit back and absorb information without actively doing anything (but don’t make it a habit). It’s important to know how the public perceives you, how their opinion of you can be improved and how you can improve yourself to bring in more customers.

Awareness is the key to winning any battle, and your online reputation is worth fighting for. Be constantly aware of what the Internet thinks of you, and that’s half of the battle already won. Knowledge, swift action and a good SEO tool are the nutrients you need for growing the tree of your success. Be sure to take good care of it!

Sign Up for a Free 14-Day Trial
and Combine Brand Tracking with Good SEO!

The post Why Online Brand Tracking Is No Less Important Than SEO appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

While B2C organizations were forced to adapt to the changing face of the marketplace years ago, now a healthy percentage of B2B buyers are actually millennials. As a B2B marketer, do you know how to effectively market to millennial buyers and their distinct preferences?

The Changing Face of B2B

Whereas in 2012, millennials accounted for just 27 percent of the B2B research demographic, they now account for roughly half of all researchers and buyers. That’s a growth rate of over 70 percent in just three or four years. To remain competitive and successfully target this burgeoning demographic, here are some tips to think about:

No.1: Focus on Relationships

Millennials have grown up in a world that’s personally tailored to their needs and preferences. This has largely been perpetuated by technology and mobile devices, which allow users to change virtually any feature they want. As a result, they’ve grown to expect personalization in other areas of life – including business.

Instead of using old marketing tricks that cast a wide net and hope to capture a handful of leads, you should begin focusing on relationship building. “They want to feel connected to the marketer, whether through social media or through the personality that’s used in advertisements,” says Green Residential, a property management company that frequently works with millennials. “All in all, if you want to market effectively to this group, you’ll need a social connection and a creative plan.

Thanks to WebCEO’s Social Media Analytics tools, you’ll easily track your social mentions, analyze your social media traffic and see how well your content works for you on social medias.

No.2: Understand the Affirmation Process

While B2C buyers tend to make their own purchase decisions after referencing online reviews, social media, and other elements of social proof, the B2B millennial buyer is different. Contrary to popular belief, millennials do value the opinions of others in their organizations.

“We B2B millennials greatly value the input of thought leaders and colleagues that we respect,” says content marketer Tarah Speck. “We will likely pull several other influencers into the dialogue, and enter into a collaborative process before making the final purchase decision for a B2B solution for our company.” For B2B marketers, this means you can’t totally isolate B2B buyers from their organizations or industry connections.

No.3: Millennials Love Simplicity

It may seem strange for a generation that’s incredibly adept at multitasking, but millennials actually love simplicity. They crave simple websites and landing pages, streamlined navigation, and easy-to-use interfaces. Busy landing pages, popup advertisements, auto-play videos, and other “surprising elements” don’t perform particularly well with this group.

When in doubt, choose a simple marketing tactic over a more complex one. It’ll resonate much better with these tech-savvy buyers and leave them with a more positive impression of your brand.

No.4: Accessibility is Important

Millennials are everywhere. They’re scrolling through social networks, browsing blogs, watching clips on YouTube, texting, emailing, and more. If you want to reach millennials, you need to reach them where they are: everywhere.

An isolated approach won’t work. You need to develop information that’s easily accessible and digestible across multiple mediums and platforms. Not only does this increase the chances that a millennial target will be engaged, but it also makes it more likely that they’ll be exposed to the same messaging in multiple places, which obviously reinforces your message.

Reaching the B2B Millennial

The differences between millennial B2B customers and previous generations is often overstated, but you shouldn’t underestimate the importance of developing a strategic approach. Millennials have their own preferences, characteristics, and nuances. Your ability to identify these traits and leverage relevant tactics will result in higher conversion rates and more sales. Keep these tips in mind as you proceed.

The post 4 Tips for Marketing to the B2B Millennial appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

One of the most difficult challenges faced by companies of all sizes is how to cut marketing costs without hurting the brand. It can be a tricky task to shave marketing expenses when you also feel a need for revenue to bring more awareness and customers to your business.

But small businesses and startups often find themselves facing experiencing difficulty in obtaining financing. Sometimes cutting costs appears the only logical way to go.

The key to getting a great return on investment doesn’t lie in removing certain marketing activities from your strategy, but in shifting your energy to the most efficient techniques. Consider the following.

1. Eliminate Waste

There will always be some kind of issue with your marketing strategy that drains money or drives away leads. For example, you may have a program that costs you X amount per month, but has not been generating any leads.

Instead of turning automatically to cutting costs, focus your energy toward identifying wasteful practices and deleting them.

2. Make Fewer Marketing Mistakes

You’re probably aware that this notion is a lot easier said than done, but that shouldn’t discourage you from tackling it. Your marketing team needs to have enough knowledge and experience to achieve your marketing goals with the fewest mistakes possible.

One of the biggest sources of marketing errors is business owners who try to do all the marketing themselves. This may be an admirable endeavor, but it tends to be the quickest way to lose money. Hire people who know what your firm does, and you’ll usually see mistakes diminish substantially.

3. Stretch Content

Perhaps you’ve developed a stash of working content that’s creating leads and boosting steady sales. A useful approach for cutting marketing expenses is to reduce the amount of new content you generate and nurture the high-quality content you already possess.

A single piece of excellent media can go a long way if you’re willing to put a little extra effort into distributing it across social media.

4. Reduce Ad Size

When you post advertisements, keep in mind that bigger isn’t always better. Though a bigger ad will be more immediately visible, that doesn’t mean a smaller ad will go unnoticed, and it costs a lot less.

As an additional cost-saving measure, you could reduce how long the ad runs. For example, a 30-second spot is obviously half as long as a 60-second spot, but it could potentially do as good a job within that shorter time frame.

5. Take Advantage of Free Tools

Are you paying for a software product or online service, but not using all the features? If that’s the case, you might be better off switching to the free version.

In addition, this might be a good time to take a harder look at the programs you’re currently using and compare them with more affordable options.

6. Focus on Conversions

Often when you measure the success of your marketing efforts, it’s easy to get caught up in counting inbound leads and traffic, and not putting enough weight on conversions. But conversions are your ultimate goal, so flip the scenario and put a little less weight on leads and more attention on conversions.

7. Consider Outsourcing

Every successful marketing program will need to run multiple disciplines at the same time. You’ll need people who specialize in advertising, SEO, paid search marketing, lead nurturing, content, analytics, and more, depending on the size of your company and specific strategy.

Instead of trying to do all of this in-house, think more efficiently about hiring an outside company that will handle these areas better than you can. Freelancers are also an option, particularly for those jobs you need only once in awhile. Your biggest expenses will sometimes come from your in-house staff.

P.S.: Follow this step-by-step Digital Marketing Strategy from WebCEO in order to bring your marketing to a new level in 2016.

The post 7 Ways to Save on Your Marketing Budget in the New Year appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

The main predictable online marketing trend for 2015 and ongoing years is the increased importance of content marketing and its distribution through cross-channel social platforms. Content strategy should be first in your online marketing strategy as all other trends that will be listed here lean on its quality pillars.Let’s face and follow them today in order to earn some benefits tomorrow.

Cross-Device Attribution Revolution

In 2014, Internet usage on PCs has been significantly decreased because it is being exceeded by mobile devices usage. According to Search Engine Watch, 99,5 % of consumers use tablets and smartphones  to access content/information and 15% of consumers use mobile devices to purchase.

This huge shift from desktop to mobile experiences will certainly affect your digital marketing strategy to a greater extent in 2015. As Google constantly updates its mobile marketing best practices and is adding mobile-friendly ranking factors to its algorithm, you should have already optimized your website for mobile device usage in order to provide a mobile-friendly user experience. As soon as people access your site across multiple devices like tablets, smartphones, laptops and PC without such design and SEO problems like zooming your content, consuming page load time, endless scrolling content and difficult-to-touch buttons, you will see your conversion rate improvement. For comprehensive mobile optimization, check out the WebCEO Website Audit tool.

Another issue is with cross-device campaign tracking. It is critically important to identify online user behavior across different devices and track an individual’s journey to his or her final destination which is conversion. While they are on desktops, it is easy to track logged-in users because of cookies, but on mobile devices cookies don’t work. Data on cross-device advertising is helpful for user retention (retargeting). User devices data is partially displayed in Google Analytics and your CRM system. The Facebook Atlas Ad Platform with its cross-device reporting feature can help with this issue and help marketers track and reach the right audience across various platforms and devices.

Tip: It is critical to measure your cross-device marketing success and one of the things that can point to the increase or decrease of your success is your mobile results rank tracking.

Retargeting Retention

Retargeting has significantly evolved in the last few years. It started as site ad retargeting, to catch the attention of people who had visited your site before, and evolved into powerful display, search, social, mobile and video retargeting strategies which help marketers to reach lost and new potential customers on multiple platforms and at different scales. According to eMarketer.com, 88% of polled U.S marketers used retargeting and 56% were planning to run it in the next 12 months. Google AdWords and Facebook Ads are one of the most powerful platforms for retargeting ad campaigns. Discover more about effective retargeting with WebCEO’s Online SEO tools.

Retargeting has a lot of positive benefits:

1. It builds the familiarity and trust of new visitors to your websites that makes them more likely to buy a product.
2. It helps to retain existing customers and keep your brand at the top of their minds
3. The conversion rate of the companies that use retargeting campaigns is more likely to increase to 50-60% among retargeted consumers.
4. Improvement of your ROI

Tip: Be careful while running retargeting campaigns. Be sure to monitor a campaign’s progress. Put in a frequency cap in order to limit the number of ads per month for one user and use a kind of “shutoff” in order to switch off ads to those of your retargeted users who have already been converted (if you want to do this).

Location-Focused Online Marketing Concentration

4 of 5 searchers land on search engines to look for information about local business, services or products. Local searchers are more likely to convert, so if your business is targeted to some local markets, you should think global, but act local. Location-focused marketing should include both offline and online strategies. Pay attention to local-specific values, traditions, as well as the cultural and social identity of consumers. The localization of your online marketing strategy focuses on personalization which leads to high consumer engagement and conversions. Consumers want to be listened to and understood by international brands. The Google Pigeon Update rollout seriously affected  global search results. Since then local search results are in great favor by Google. Make sure you have properly optimized your online business for specific locations.

Tip: Help Google to spot and highlight your website local “beacons” that you can properly place with the help of the WebCEO Post-Pigeon Local SEO Guide.

Video Marketing Augmentation

Video Marketing has evolved from a visual part of your content strategy into a full-fledged type of online marketing. It is now one of the most powerful forms of online advertising that can perfectly serve as educational, entertainment, and engagement tool. The future of video ads as one of the key parts of any good online promotional strategy, can be easily predicted by looking at convincing statistics proclaiming that by 2017, online video will account for 70% of consumer Internet traffic. You will need to focus on the creation of various formats of video content and their cross-platform distribution and social media promotion. Still yet, the format and the length of your video content will depend on the industry niche, size and nature of your product or service.  One of the most popular formats is that of an explainer video that is  under 2 minutes in length or an animated video made to explain the product or service in a most entertaining and effective way. A good format helps to reduce the bounce rate on your home page and on promotional landing pages, and you will see an increase in the click-through-rate of external video-sharing platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Vine, etc. Have a look at a Google Trends report of interest over time for an “explainer video.”

Tip: Learn from some popular brands that won from video marketing in the current year and be sure to follow fast-growing digital trends like this in 2015.

The next year will not be easy for digital marketers and business owners, because the online world is turning into a “rabbit hole” with multiple digital “tunnels” that can misguide you on the way to success. Be sure to follow our predicted route so you won’t get lost.

The post Digital Marketing 2015: 4 Trends To Capitalize On appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.