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Content and SEO – The Undeniable Connection
Content and SEO are undeniably intertwined in today’s online ecosystem. To be a good content marketer you need to understand SEO. To be truly great at SEO you need to understand content marketing.
If you doubt the value or effectiveness of content on any level I urge you to read this report by Ascend 2 on “The Most Effective SEO Tactics.” Here you will clearly see how content and SEO work together. For a 57% majority of marketing influencers, on-page content development is effective. This ranks it as the most effective means of SEO.
Organic search is still where the largest amount of traffic is available. Some may argue that the user intent behind search is also the most valuable type of traffic out there. A person who is searching for something is more likely to click through and interact with your brand once they find it. Think about it, if you are optimized for keywords like “buy a car” and you’re an auto dealership – you’re sitting in a great spot. A person searching “buy a car” is more than likely looking to buy a car. This principle gets a bit more dicey once you move to venues like social media or banner advertising. It’s been proven that there isn’t much real intent behind banner clicks. Some studies have even found blank banners actually get more clicks than banners with actual images on them. Go figure.
Content and SEO Should Be Your Bread & Butter
Knowing what you know now, content – search engine optimized content should be your core discipline when it comes to marketing. Content can take on a variety of forms. It can be blog posts, it can be video shorts, it can be long videos, infographics, etc. Google’s algorithms pay close attention to several factors when ranking web pages. One of them is shelf life. If you have a search optimized piece of content that’s shinier and newer than someone else’s the chances are good you will get some quick visibility from that initial publishing. On the other hand, sites that have been up longer tend to have a larger amount of backlinks as a result. So content is both your long and short game – new content gets you visible quickly, and the proliferation of content day after day spreads your brands tentacles out into the web… making you visible in corners of the web you never even dreamed existed.
Content and SEO – Images & Video
While keyword optimized articles like this one are a great way to get your foot in the door don’t forget the future is video. YouTube is also the world’s 2nd largest search engine. So think about this – if you have a keyword optimized article, with a keyword optimized video embedded in it – you’re now double visible in both Google search and YouTube video search.
Images are another area that is heavily overlooked by marketers. Google Image Search gets a huge volume of searches. If you are not optimizing your images with alt tags and making sure they are visible in search you are missing out on another big stream of potential traffic.
Declining Click Through Rates in Search
A recent comment from Rand Fishkin:
“34% of searches get no clicks at all. If we look at all search queries (not just distinct ones), those numbers shift to a straight 60%/40% split. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that over time, we get closer and closer to Google solving half of search queries without a click.”
Due to mobile use and several other factors click through rates are declining in search. So while SEO can help you be visible how do you get the user to the page? The smart money is on Google Rich Answers – which will allow you to pipe elements of your content directly into the SERP via SEO tactics. Area’s like this are why just knowing how to create content isn’t enough in today’s world. You have to have a little bit of science behind you as well.
So as you can see, content and SEO are very closely linked. Any wise marketer knows how to combine these two disciplines for maximum effectiveness.
If you need help with your digital marketing don’t hesitate to contact us!
Contact Apex Digital Media
Byadmin
Rise of the Social Media Agency
Social Media didn’t really become mainstream until the advent of MySpace. Before that there were obscure social networks like “Friendster” and Facebook existed but was only available to college students. Once Facebook opened it’s doors to the public around 2007, you began to see the real power of social media. With the rise of social platforms – came the rise of the social media agency.
Around 2011 I helped to build “The Women’s Influencer Network” while at Digital Media Management. At that time a social media agency was almost a laughable prospect. Instagram was barely a year old and social media in general belonged to the youth. YouTube influencers were beginning to become a thing but overall Google search had an almost unmistakable monopoly on real web traffic.
With the advent of the smartphone and the gradual shift of the public to mobile devices social networks have increasingly become a destination. Platforms have evolved accordingly, Facebook had zero advertising when it originally launched but is now arguably one of the most effective digital advertising channels available to marketers. Over time they organically introduced ads that while visible are not incredibly obtrusive to users. It’s easy to scroll past or skip most of the ads. The ads keep the platform free to users and give advertisers worlds of data they never dreamed they’d have access to.
To see real success on Facebook, though, requires advertising experiments and a working knowledge of the digital landscape. This is where the social media agency becomes a real value to a business.
You may not be ready to wear a lab coat, but you can hire a team of certified scientists to help give you an edge. Facebook targeted ads are more in line with “interrupt advertising” as opposed to search, which is intent-driven based on the keywords that are entered by the user. A strategic campaign integrates all elements of a company’s digital brand. Social channels are now one of the most important.
But all audiences are different, they respond differently to different things. This is another place that a professional social media agency can provide real value. As a business you don’t have time to experiment with social campaigns and data. Hiring out to a professional agency not only takes this task off your plate – a real agency has multiple clients that they can compare your data against. A lot of times this can make a social media agency even more effective than an in house team.
No two audiences are the same. At the end of the day effective social management is about drawing in the people that care most about your brand and doing the things that work best with your audience. Any great social media agency will sit down with you and ask questions that can be answered with data. Once those questions have been answered they will be able to execute in the most effective way possible.
