Why content marketing for your brand?

Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing Strategies

In this new digital world, no brand will succeed without using content marketing tactics, the foundation for SEO and tons more. What is content marketing? It’s a form of inbound marketing. Producing content, sharing information and putting it out there for customers to engage with is content marketing and a form of inbound marketing. You’re nurturing your audience and customer relationship by providing relevant information as bait in order to rein prospects in and make your current customers happy. This “content” can be anything – videos, social shares, blogging, landing pages, a glossary and more.

Reported recently by Econsultancy’s, Content Marketing Survey Report, the top five business objectives for brands participating in content marketing:content_marketing_objectives-blog-full-Econsultancy
• Increased engagement
• Increasing traffic to website
• Raising brand awareness
• Increased sales
• Improved SEO

Is this a surprise to me? Not at all!
If you are interested in content marketing for small businesses or even bigger brands, you should read my Propel post, “Why is content ‘King’ for digital marketing.” Here I talk about all the reasons and benefits of content marketing.
• Gain credibility with information
• SEO improvements through keyword density, social media shares and inbound link building
• Engagement through likes and shares on social media
• Online visibility through the web you are building and improved keyword rankings

No matter what type of business you are, B2B, B2C, retail, medical, and on and on content is going to influence your presence online and gain you the audience you want. Content marketing is a long term inbound marketing strategy and requires dedication but, trust me, it is the way Google and other search engines are moving towards in order for businesses like you to succeed online.

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Google to Eliminate Adwords Tool for Keyword Planner Instead

SEM, SEO

In the past week, I’ve noticed as I do research for a client’s keyword strategy, there is a comment at the top of the Google Adwords tool alerting me “In the next month, Google Adwords tool will be replaced by Keyword Planner.” What?!?!

Google Adwords screenshot
Google Adwords screenshot

I swear by the Google Adwords tool to conduct my research. As I did a little investigating, this is what I found. According to SearchEngineLand, the Keyword Planner was announced by Google on May 20 and within 60 days of that the Google Adwords tool will be no more.

It’s obvious that this will change the keyword research process a bit but I am not too concerned. I understand Google is trying to only provide tools to those who will utilize them correctly and eventually spend on those keywords – I was surprised the Google Adwords tool was free and accessible for so long! Now, only those users signed into Adwords will be able to use the Keyword Planner tool. It appears WordStream is excited for the change as they discuss the new Keyword Planner incorporating both the Google Keyword Tool and Adwords Traffic Estimator. This should be interesting for local SEO! To read more about the difference and update go to Google’s Support site here.

More to come on this in the next few weeks.

How to define your brand’s keyword strategy?

Inbound Marketing, SEO

A keyword strategy is one of the first steps and SEO basics for any inbound marketing strategy. I could think of twenty different approaches to strategically choosing the most successful keyword strategy for a client – nothing is set in stone. Below I’ve outlined my thought process anytime I begin keyword research!

1. Goals: What are you or your client trying to achieve online? Are you starting from scratch and looking to gain brand awareness or simply build up your website traffic? What about lead generation or increase your online sales? What does your competition look like; are they ranking first page for keywords you want to rank for? I’d like to think you and I can have it all, and that very well may be true; however for an online marketing strategy, you can’t have it all at once unfortunately.

2. Metrics: Once you’re decided on what your goal is, think about how you are going to measure that particular goal. How will you know that you are reaching it, or have met it? See below for what I mean.

Increase Organic Web Traffic: If my goal is to increase organic web traffic to my website, than the keywords I choose should be lower-medium competition with large monthly search volumes. Think of researching industry terms or buzz words; remember shorter tail keywords are more informational with larger search volumes.

Grow Sales or Lead Gen: Trying to make more money or gain more qualified leads? Well, growing your website traffic astronomically with large search volume keywords is not the way to go! Remember, slow and steady wins the race. Analyze your Google Analytics and website data to identify which keywords driving traffic have the lowest bounce rates, highest time on site, or are already converting for you. Start your keyword research there.

Beat the Competition: Start analyzing your competitor’s websites for any keywords that jump out at you. Review their title tags and meta descriptions, what do you see? It always is good to manually check the keyword searches incognito on Google to see who and what rank they are coming up for that particular term. Is that page dominated by directories, forums and reviews? If so, that may not be the keyword for you, but if you find that a lot of your competition and websites are ranking first page of Google for that term, it may be a good idea to include that in your strategy.

3. Research: I could go on and on about the different approaches to keyword strategies but I’m not going to, I think you get the drift. Now, after you’ve identified a whole list of possible keywords – you need to research them. No matter your online marketing strategy, have it be SEM, SEO, or social I always recommend using the Google Adwords Tool.  Type in each of the keywords that you want to research and not only will the tool spit out competition and volumes for your keywords, it will also recommend suggested keywords.  Export this data into an Excel spreadsheet and begin organizing! Forget terms with little to no search volume and ignore terms with extremely low competition (below .10).  The amount of keywords you’ll end up with varies; for extremely local clients I may only have a list of 20 keywords, and for enterprises I could have a list of 400. Use your judgment because you could conduct keyword research all day, I’m not joking you!

Once you have your final list of keywords, it is always best to identify if the domain you are trying to optimize is ranking for that specific keyword. Personally, I conduct keyword research with RankChecker by Seobook or Moz.com research tool. You can always check Google incognito if there are only a few terms, but I try to stay away from that due to local and personal search.

At times I have clients that rank on every term I search and others I have do not rank on a single term. Again, be strategic. I always try to attack low hanging fruit terms that the domain ranks on pages 2, 3 or 4 of Google first. Those are easy wins that we know will progress. If the domain is not ranking on anything, choose medium competitive terms with lower volumes. Start small – online marketing tactics don’t gain results overnight and it helps to win on small volume terms first and reap the benefits later.

4. Monitor, Analyze & Repeat: Keywords strategies begin to gain results or experience trends after the 90 day mark. I don’t even like to report on a strategy until at least the 60 day mark due to this. Make sure you monitor the metrics we talked about above, organic traffic, sales, keyword rankings, etc. After 90-120 days, if your keyword strategy doesn’t appear to be working in you favor it may be time to rinse and repeat. Keyword strategies are always a work in progress, they are never set in stone – businesses change, goals change, and so do strategies. There is no need to get discouraged or feel you wasted time if a strategy didn’t work for you. Just remember to be realistic and choose a strategy within your realm. If you’re a brand new site and choose a keyword strategy with volumes of 50,000 or 100,000, you need to re-evaluate your expectations. It could take 3 years to rank on those keywords!

I hope you found this keyword guide helpful. Just remember that identifying keywords is one of the first steps to a successful SEO and inbound marketing strategy.