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What are Primary Keywords and Secondary Keywords in SEO?

April 1, 2020 by Steven J Wilson 2 Comments

Primary keywords and Secondary keywords are terms used by webmasters and content creators to target specific search queries to help rank their content higher in search results.

These days, keywords are just as relevant as they were a couple of decades ago. Of course, they are not the main factor in the optimization of your content. Your content also needs to be complemented by on page-technical improvements, link building, social signals, navigation, and schema markup.

So what are keywords, and why are they important? What is the difference between primary and secondary keywords? How can I do proper keyword research and optimization? What are the best tools I can use for keyword research?

Below, I’ll answer all of these questions and guide you through your keyword optimization journey.

What are Keywords and Why They are Important?

Keywords are words or phrases that people search for in Google, Bing, Yandex, or in other search engines. Using these keywords, people are trying to find answers to their problems and discover meaningful solutions.

To put things simply, you need to have specific keywords on your page in order to rank higher and become visible in search engines for these terms. Understand that Google is now using over 200 ranking signals, with keyword optimization being just one of them. Nevertheless, choosing the right keywords is the key to success.

To better understand why keywords are important, you first need to discover how Google works. In the past, they used to rank sites that focus solely on a specific keyword. Basically, overloading the page with their primary keyword. Now Google focuses on a wide range of aspects.

They want you to create content for the end-user and integrate as many LSI (latent semantic index) terms as possible. In other words, they also want you to use numerous primary keywords and multiple variations of your primary keywords.

Because it’s so easy to be lost in keyword optimization, your main goal should be to write meaningful posts and content that adds value and encourages people to engage with you. However, you should never neglect the importance of using the right keywords that have the proper search volume.

Keep reading to better understand the difference between primary and secondary keywords.

What is a Primary Keyword?

Primary keywords are those terms you want to rank up for. These are terms with high search volume that can bring a considerable amount of traffic to your site. If we’re taking the same example listed above, your primary keywords are all the terms that relate to buying laptops online.

As a rule of thumb, your primary keywords should be targeted to a broader audience and should be spread out across the text on your site. You want to include your main keywords in the title, headings, anchor links, first and last sentences. You should include a maximum of 2-3 primary keywords per page, and a minimum of one.

Primary Keyword Examples

For instance, if you’re selling laptops online all across the state of Texas, your list of keywords should include the following:

buy online laptops Texas
purchase laptops online in Texas
laptop stores near me
buy online laptops Texas in the USA
laptops for women Texas

You want to integrate these keywords in the text, in your meta title & description, and also in your headers. However, you also need to incorporate secondary keywords, which have a supporting role.

What is a Secondary Keyword?

These are keywords that play a supporting role. In other words, they support the primary keywords and bring in additional information. These are LSI keywords that you have to use naturally throughout your content in order to provide value to the end reader.

Secondary keywords do not have as much SEO value as the primary keywords, but using them can still help you outrank your competitors.

Secondary Keyword Examples

If you are selling laptops online in Texas, some of the best secondary keywords you can use are:

Lenovo laptop shop near me
buy Asus laptops
purchase laptop batteries
laptop chargers online
laptop repair services
the best laptop accessories store
laptop dealer near me

As you can notice, these supporting keywords can be used to showcase the benefits of your main product or sell additional products that go well with your main offers.

How to Properly do Keyword Research?

Finding primary and secondary keywords is not as daunting as it may sound. Finding the right keywords for your business is a streamlined, step-by-step process. Let’s take a closer look at what you can do to find just the perfect keywords to rank for:

1. Define your services & products

First and foremost, you need to look at what you are offering. Are you selling laptops? That means that your keywords should relate and include laptops for primary terms. On the other hand, if you have a restaurant, you should choose keywords that relate to food, professional service, and spending time with family.

2. Look at what your customers need

Next, you need to find ways on how to solve the problems and needs of your customers. For instance, if you own a restaurant, you want to use secondary keywords that relate to spending time with the family, choosing a place to propose, eating well in the evening, or having breakfast. These are all secondary keywords that connect and support the main keyword, which is “local restaurant.”

3. Check out your competitors

An excellent source of discovering keywords involves taking a closer look at your competitors. You can use spying tools such as SEMRush or Spy Fu to find out what keywords your competitors are using and look at how they are ranking for these keywords. If you notice that one key competitor is outranking all others, try to determine how they are leveraging the true power of primary and secondary keywords.

4. Research more keywords

You can use several tools and platforms. We would recommend you to start with Keyword Planner and Google’s own search platform to find primary keywords and then continue by looking for secondary keywords on Quora, SEMRush, Tube Buddy, and SpyFu.

5. Map the keywords to pages

Next, you want to ensure that your site sections and pages all focus on specific keywords. Each primary keyword should ideally be tied to one page. You can also use two or three primary keywords per page. For secondary keywords, the best way to capitalize on their value is to integrate them into blog posts, case studies, and press releases.

Best Tools for Keyword Research

Choosing a keyword research tool is the best way to find all those unique competitors you could rank for. While you should also use free tools such as Keyword Planner, Google Trends, and Quora, you can get more value by investing in a premium tool.

The best tools for keyword research are SEMRush, Tube Buddy, and Spy Fu. Each one of them caters to a specific audience and could help you find tons of great keywords that your competitors are not utilizing. Let’s start with the most famous tool, SEMRush.

1. SEMRush

This tool is one of the most famous competitors spying platforms available today. You can do a whole lot on this digital marketing research platform, from finding new keywords and improving your page structure to studying your competitors’ ads, keywords, and pages.

SEMRush caters to all business owners that want to know exactly how their competitors have succeeded and managed to get high-quality traffic to their sites. You can discover the exact keywords your competitors are ranking on, the links they have to their pages, and even look at their Google Ads campaigns. This priceless tool acts like a mole that spies for you. It helps take the guesswork out of what is working well for your competitors.

Features

Some of the main features of this program include site audit, keyword research, content optimization using the best keywords, benchmark data collection, competitor spying, and SEO strategy improvement. You can discover the exact keywords used by your competitors and use an advanced tool called “Keyword Magic” to dive deeper into the competition, keyword difficulty, and SERP features.

Inside SEMRush, you can also discover with ease long-tail keywords that surround your primary keywords.

Cost

The starting price for this excellent tool is $99 a month, an industry-standard, but you can gain access to more features by upgrading to the Guru Plan or the Business plan, which costs $199, respectively $399 a month.

Learn More about SEMrush

2. Tube Buddy

This keyword research tool is just perfect for Youtubers. If you have a YouTube channel, and you want to grow your brand’s reach on this platform, you definitely want to discover what Tube Buddy has in store for you.

Features

You receive access to a thumbnail generator, advanced video embedding, A/B testing, keyword research, video tags finder, auto translator, and a multitude of other helpful features that help you rank Youtube videos.

Cost

The price starts at just $9 a month. You can get access to even more features with their Star plan at $19 a month or their Legend plan at $49 a month.

Learn More About Tube Buddy

3.SpyFu

This robust platform offers a plethora of keyword research options.

Features

You get access to interactive reporting, keyword research, sales lead, domain searches, and backlink tracking, to name a few. Thanks to the tracking tab, you can keep a close eye on the keywords you selected and compare it with how your competitors are performing.

Cost

Pricing starts at $33 a month for the basic plan, $58 a month for the Pro plan, and $199 a month for the team plan.

Learn More About Spyfu

Conclusion

Using both primary and secondary keywords is imperative if you want to enjoy success online and outrank your competitors. Think out of the box, use all the tools available at your disposal, and begin ranking high in Google & Bing for high-volume keywords. This will allow you to benefit from all that free organic traffic and skyrocket your business.

What Is SEO in Digital Marketing?

March 24, 2020 by Steven J Wilson 2 Comments

SEO is one of the many ways to drive traffic to your website. But more than the traffic it brings, it’s one digital marketing strategy that can help deliver high quality leads to your business for years to come.

In this guide, I’ll walk you through the nitty-gritty of SEO. Here, you’ll get a better understanding of what SEO is and why it is essential for businesses like yours.

By the end of this piece, I’ll help you make an informed decision on which is the best route to take for your business or blog.

To begin, let’s start with what SEO is.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is the practice of optimizing content so that your website is discovered in the search engine results page (SERPs).

The goal of SEO is to drive ‘earned,’ ‘unpaid’ organic traffic to your website.

In simpler terms, you make specific changes to your website to make it more appealing to search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. And what do you get in return?

Those search engines will display your website on top of the SERPs. It helps show your business in front of your customers as they search for what you have to offer. And this means more targeted people are seeing and clicking links to your website based on past work.

Optimizing for search engines increase both the quality and quantity of a website’s traffic. It also helps website owners gain exposure to their brands without continued spending on ads.

Why is SEO Important?

There are many other ways to drive traffic to your website, aside from SEO. But why should you optimize for search engines?

SEO’s impact lasts more than several years.

While paid advertising, social media, and other digital marketing strategies can drive traffic to your website. They last for a relatively shorter time compared to good SEO. This is especially true for paid advertising that gives immediate results but disappears completely once the campaign ends.

The more time, effort, and budget you spend on SEO, the better and longer your website will enjoy consistent organic traffic.

But the importance of SEO doesn’t just end there. Optimizing for search engines also gives you 20x more traffic opportunities than PPC on both desktop and mobile. This is when your website appears in organic search results.

Organic search plays a critical role in getting users to engage or convert. To put that in numbers, 40.9% of Google searches get an organic click for mobile devices. That’s a huge difference compared to the mere 2% of paid clicks. For desktop devices, it’s 62.2% organic versus 2.8% paid clicks.

These are only a few of the many reasons why you should utilize SEO for your business.

Types of SEO

There are two types of search: organic and paid.

As stated above, organic means unpaid, natural rankings in search results. Paid search, as the name suggests, focuses on paid rankings.

Organic search can be optimized with various SEO practices. Meanwhile, traffic from paid search can be acquired through search engine marketing (SEM).

For this guide, we will focus on organic search and discuss the different types of SEO.

On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO involves optimizing the content on your website.

Optimizing each page on your website helps search engines understand the topic of the content you are publishing. This tells search engines that your website is relevant to people who are searching for specific terms.

In this type of SEO, you do the following:

Keyword Research – Looking for keywords to include on a page (more on this later)
Content Creation – Publishing high-quality, informative content revolving around the keywords
Keyword Optimization – Adding the keywords in strategic places in the content

For On-Page SEO, excellent content is key to rank higher in the SERPs. According to Rand Fishkin of SparkToro (formerly with Moz), your content should be ten times better than other content available on the results page. That and a couple of relevant and related keywords.

Areas of On-Page SEO

To find success in this type of SEO, you must pay attention to these areas that will help increase your rankings, traffic, and conversions.

Title Tag

Title tags are an HTML element the shows the title of your web page. Along with meta description, they appear in search engines like this:

Meta title tags are crucial because they help search engines understand what your page is about. This is why it’s vital that you follow the SEO best practices for optimizing title tags, such as including your target keywords.

SEO aside, they also leave first impressions on the people looking on search engines, which can be a make-or-break factor on whether searchers will click on your link.

Meta Description

Located just below the title tag, meta descriptions explain what your page is about. It is the longer version of the title tag.

Just like the first HTML element, meta descriptions also tell search engines what the topic of your content is. Meta descriptions also need keywords to rank your page in the SERPs.

Header Tags

Header tags are HTML elements H1-H6 that’s long been a fixture of SEO, but most people know a little about. But what exactly are header tags?

These HTML elements are used to determine headers and subheadings within a content. Just take a look at the illustration below.

While header tags aren’t as critically important for site rankings as they used to be, they still serve a role that can indirectly influence your rankings.

Header tags indirectly impact rankings by:

Making content more scannable for an easy read.
You are sending the right signals to search engines about what topic your content contains.

Image ALT Tags

People visiting your web page can physically see the photos published on your site. But search engines can’t. And this is where image ALT tags come in handy.

ALT tags, otherwise known as “alt attributes” or “alt descriptions,” are HTML code and text that you add to describe an image. If you include keywords in these tags, search engines will easily determine what your photos are about.

These tags are vital because they not only make for better user experience, but they also contribute to image SEO. ALT tags lend search engines a helping hand by describing what an image is about through keywords.

Internal Links

Internal links are hyperlinks that direct to another page on the same website.

Internal linking is an essential step in SEO for the following reasons:

It allows for more straightforward navigation on the website.
It helps establish site architecture for the given website.
It helps distribute link juices around web pages.

Both internal and external (more on this later) links send search engines signal about the topic of your content. But internal links are used to show relationships between content. As search engines determine such relations, they work on ranking your most essential pages higher in the SERPs.

Page Speed

Page speed is another important ranking factor that Google is looking for. It is the measurement of how fast your web page content loads.

Page speed is often described as “page load time.” A page’s loading time is dependent on several factors, such as image compression, page file size, and the site’s server.

Google penalizes pages with longer load times, which tend to have a lower average time on page and higher bounce rates. Hence, it’s crucial that you follow the SEO best practices on increasing your page speed. This includes enabling compression, reducing redirects, and improving server response time, among others.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO involves optimizing efforts outside of your website. Unlike on-page SEO, you often do not have control over off-page SEO.

For instance, you reached out to an authoritative website to link to your website. That’s off-page SEO. It is considered off-page because you didn’t change anything about your website.

Off-page SEO is vital because it touches many of the search engines’ off-page factors that help rank a website. Some of the most important of these factors include the following.

Links

Building links is at the core of off-page SEO. This is because links are one of the most important ranking factors for Google.

Links are crucial because search engines use them to discover new web pages. They are also used to determine how well a page should rank in the SERPs.

Search engines look at the number of links from external websites pointing to a page you are trying to rank. These links tell search engines if the page has sufficient quality to rank for relevant keywords.

In general, the more high-value links you build, the better you rank in the results page.

We will discuss link building in great detail at What is the SEO Process section. Keep on reading to learn more about this process.

E-A-T

E-A-T in SEO stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. It is one factor in determining Page Quality.

Search engines determine a page if it has a beneficial purpose. If it does, it’s E-A-T level is considered whether the content is YMYL (Your Money or Your Life).

This ranking factor matters on topics such as YMYL, which include pages that can potentially impact a searcher’s safety, financial stability, health, and happiness.

And what do these all mean? It all boils down to links and high-quality content.

As mentioned above, links are crucial to rank higher in the SERPs. And it’s not just any link; it should be linked from high-quality content. For you to create high-quality content, you need to look at your E-A-T.

Social Engagement

Google made it clear that social media is not a direct SEO ranking factor. But despite this, there’s still a connection that indirectly affects how search engines see your content.

Engagement metrics, like “shares,” play a role in SEO. How? The more social shares you get, the more visibility of your content gets.

And visibility sends the right signal to search engines that your content is high-quality and relevant to the keywords you are targeting.

That said, social engagement impacts SEO. And you should also pay attention to this when trying to rank on the results page.

Local SEO

Statistics show that 46% of all Google searches are local. And how do you take advantage of these searches? Through local SEO.

Local SEO is the process of optimizing content to drive traffic organically. But in this type of SEO, you are targeting more relevant local searches.

Investing in local SEO is vital because 80% of local searches result in conversions. And 50% of people who made those searches visit a store within a day after conducting a local search.

If your business offers laundry services, and a local customer searches, “laundry service near me,” local SEO helps you get found in the SERPs. That means an opportunity to convert, so you shouldn’t miss out on local SEO.

Important Parts of Local SEO

The process of local SEO is not all that different from organic SEO. This involves taking the following steps to optimize your content for local searches.

Performing keyword research.
Creating content with a local focus.
Acquiring high-quality links.
Outreaching.

These steps will be discussed in great detail in the What is the SEO Process section.

What is the SEO Process?

Now that you have an idea of the types of SEO, it’s time you get an overview of how the SEO process goes.

How Search Works

Search engines rank a website in three primary steps:

Crawl – search engine crawlers scour the Internet for content.
Index – search engines process and store information they find into a huge database called an index.
Rank – from the index, search engines chose the best answer (aka most relevant) for each search query.

For crawlers to rank your website higher in the SERPs, you have to optimize your content for search engines. How? Through the steps below:

Keyword Research

SEO campaigns usually start with keyword research.

Keyword research is the process of finding words and phrases that your audience enter into search engines. It involves analyzing those search terms to help you develop an informed content and marketing strategy.

The ultimate goal of this process is to optimize content around those keywords. You do this, so your website ranks in the SERPs.

Importance of Keyword Research

Keyword research is crucial because it tells you what topics your customers care about. It also gives you relevant data like search volume that tells you how popular those topics are to your target people.

Determining the intent behind each search term also lets you identify what sort of content you should create to resonate with your audience.

By researching keywords for their search volume and intent, you get insight into what answers people are looking for. You get a clearer view of what you should consider in the next steps of the SEO process.

It is like a compass that tells you where to go when doing content creation, outreach marketing, and promotion, among others.

The Keyword Research Process

SEO specialists usually take the following steps to discover search terms.

Making a list of relevant topics for your business.
Research keywords that fall into those topics.
Discover related search terms.
Come up with a mix of head terms and long-tail keywords for a balanced strategy.
Use keyword tools like SEMrush to check how competitors rank for specific keywords.
Refine your keyword list based on search volume, general intent, and trends.

Content Creation

Once you have your keywords sorted, the next thing to do is to create your content.

SEO speaking, content must be of high-quality and should contain useful information to your audience. Remember that when searchers type a query, they are looking for a ‘relevant’ answer.

If you want to rank on the results page, your content must be able to provide answers that are of value to searchers.

Importance of Content Creation

In digital marketing, content is ‘still’ king.

Search engines’ mission is to compile and organize information and to present the best possible answers to questions.

That’s why content should be useful and relevant to searchers. And the ‘best’ answers are always rewarded by search engines in the form of a higher results page ranking.

Simply put, content with SEO value, ranks higher in the SERPs. So, you should work on creating optimized, valuable content. And by optimized, we mean strategically placing relevant keywords on the content you are creating.

Different Forms of Content

There are different forms of content, and they work differently depending on your audience.

Remember that each industry is different. One industry may find blogs to resonate with its audience. In contrast, others may notice videos to be an effective form of content that drives results.

The idea is to find what content appeals to your audience. Because the more it appeals to them, the better search engines will look at your content.

Below, we rounded up some of the most common types of content that work best for SEO.

Web Page Content
Video Content
Blog Posts
Long-Form Articles
Evergreen Content
Photo and Visual Galleries
Podcast
Social Media
Local Listings

Link Building

After creating content for your audience, the next to do is to build links to your website.

As mentioned above, links are one of the most important ranking factors that Google has established for SEO. Previously, we’ve discussed internal links. Now, let’s talk about external links, aka inbound links or backlinks.

Importance of Links

Inbound links are links that point from one website to a page on another website. They are like “votes” for a specific page, acting as a real-life reputation.

To put it simply, think of links as people. Say, you asked five people what the best diner in town is. Then, they all said, “Steven’s Kitchen in Manhattan.” In your mind, you would trust Steven’s since people are vouching for it.

This is what links do for search engines. These links signal to search engines that other website trusts your content.

And the higher the number of links that point to your website, the higher you appear on organic search engine rankings.

Ways to Build Backlinks

Link building can be done in several methods, and Moz has provided an exhaustive list to help you build high-quality backlinks. To give you an idea, we rounded up some of the most popular strategies that tend to work for most campaigns.

Publish a blog
Find customer and partner links
Create unique resources
Build resources page
Refurbish top content
Get involved in your local community
Be newsworthy
Be personal and genuine with outreach

Outreach

Aside from link building, outreaching is another way to help businesses rank for their chosen keywords, thus attracting organic traffic.

But what exactly is outreach in SEO?

Outreach is technically one way to do link building. In this method, you reach out to people to create valuable backlinks from third-party sites. Other than gaining traffic, doing outreach also helps businesses build credibility within their respective industries.

Often, businesses also perform outreach to improve brand awareness. This is done in several ways, like earning a mention from influencers and press releases, among others.

Importance of Outreach

Outreach is crucial in SEO to stand out from the crowd.

As more and more digital marketers create content for link building, the supply of content is now significantly exceeding demand.

It is up to the outreach specialist’s skill to identify strategically valuable publishers and convince them to accept and promote their content.

When you do this correctly, you may enjoy high-quality backlinks to your website. And that means better ranking and more organic traffic for your web pages.

Ways to Perform Outreach

Businesses can outreach in various ways. This includes the following strategies:

Email outreach
Social outreach
Influencer outreach
Press outreach

Is SEO Difficult?

With all the steps mentioned above, you’ve probably guessed: SEO is complex.

Learning its process by yourself demands a significant amount of time and attention. You might even have to spend months just to learn the basics and find your footing in this digital marketing strategy.

This is why many business owners are too intimidated to take on SEO themselves.

But you know that SEO is an excellent investment. So, what should you do?

Seek help from the professionals.

Marketers who have spent enough time mastering the optimization method offers you better chances of achieving your business goals through SEO.

Should You Hire Someone for SEO?

If you are a business owner who doesn’t have the luxury of time to spend on learning SEO from scratch, it’s probably best you hire an expert to optimize your website.

Pros of Hiring Someone for SEO

You get someone who has a full understanding of SEO

When you hire someone for SEO, you acquire valuable digital marketing knowledge that will help you achieve your business goals. You are getting someone with advanced skills that can work hand-in-hand with you.

You get someone who is updated on current algorithmic changes

Search engine algorithms are an ever-changing element that you need to keep up with. And staying up-to-date is one of the many offers that an SEO specialist can bring to the table. Using outdated tactics can hurt your rankings.

You get someone to talk to within your business

Got an in-depth question about SEO? Feel free to discuss it with an SEO expert. Having someone to do SEO for you means you can explore ideas that might work best for your business. There is not a one method works for all approach in SEO. Strategically piecing together business goals with SEO could be the thing that helps you stand out to algorithms.

Quicker Return on Investment

SEO is an investment that, when done right, gives excellent returns. Depending on your business goals, SEO can provide some of the best returns in digital marketing. For instance, one case study shows how a website saw an average of 140,000+ organic visitors per month from the previous 20,000. That’s an increase of 600%, boosting the client’s brand awareness and, ultimately, their revenue.

Cons of Hiring Someone for SEO

SEO takes time to get results

As we will discuss below, SEO is a commitment that takes months or even years to pull off. Be mentally prepared to commit to 6 to 12-months for superior results.

SEO Is Complicated

Many factors contribute to the success of an SEO campaign. If you’re hiring someone to do the job for you, you will have to rely on that person’s skill to get results. That’s why it’s crucial to find an SEO expert with experience and someone whom you feel you can trust to deliver results.

How Long Does It Take to See Results From SEO?

If you’re hiring SEO experts to work for you, know that there is a baseline period for you to see results from your optimization efforts.

Ask some SEO agencies, and they will tell you that it takes 6 to 8+ months to rank for high competition keywords. High competition means keywords that have high search volume that often convert well into visitors or purchases.

Many marketers and advertisers bid for high competition keywords because of its opportunity to convert, gaining huge traffic and sales. Thus, the term “high competition.”

In contrast, it may take you 4 to 6+ months to rank keywords with lower competition. By lower competition, it means terms that have relatively lower search volume.

Low competition keywords often rank easier in search engines because fewer marketers and advertisers are bidding for them. Ranking low competition terms usually take little to no link building and no domain authority.

As a general rule of thumb, it is best to find high volume keywords with low competition during the keyword research phase. These keywords give businesses a chance to rank on the results page.

With that said there is value in using keywords that have low volume with low competition as well. I recommend this more for newer sites that are still growing and building their E-A-T with google.

How Much Does SEO Cost?

The cost of SEO services depends on what is included in the package. Services are based on the scope of a project, but just to give you an idea, the typical SEO campaign cost in 2020 is around $750-$2,000 per month.

One-time projects cost around $5,000-$30,000. Hourly rates for consultants are priced between $80-$200.

Feel free to contact me if you are interested in SEO services.

Wrapping It Up

Now that you have a better understanding of SEO, it’s time to decide which is the best route for you to take for your needs.

Decide whether to take it upon yourself or hire someone to do SEO for you. But here’s a piece of advice: if you want to increase your chances of success in this strategy, it’s best that you seek the help of an expert.

What is your take on SEO? Is it worth learning or getting experienced help is best?

How To Boost Brand Awareness With Digital Marketing

March 6, 2020 by Steven J Wilson 2 Comments

When you are buying toys, do you look for plastic blocks or Legos? When you are shopping for office supplies, do you search for sticky paper or Post-It Notes?

These brands have successfully embedded their product names in their respective industries. They have become so well-known that people would mention these brands’ names rather than their generic terms (Kleenex vs. tissue, Coke vs. cola, Band-Aid vs. bandage, and so on).

And that’s the magic of brand awareness.

In this guide, we will discuss the importance of brand awareness for your business gaining customer loyalty.

Find out why you should prioritize brand awareness in your digital marketing campaigns, and discover what marketing strategies you can use to establish your brand among your audience.

What Is Brand Awareness in Digital Marketing?

Brand awareness is a term that refers to the degree of consumer familiarity of a product by its name using various marketing channels.

It distinguishes the product of a brand from its competition.

Simply put, it is a measure of how well your target audience recognizes your brand.

And what does a high level of brand awareness mean for your business?

More sales.

When consumers are confronted with choices, they are more likely to buy a product from a brand they are most familiar with.

That’s why brand awareness should be a priority for businesses, especially startup brands.

In fact, brand awareness is so crucial that 37% of marketers say it was their top priority in 2019.

Now that you get how vital brand awareness is to you, the next question is: “How can you establish brand awareness?”

One way to do this is through correctly utilizing the many digital marketing channels at your disposal.

How Digital Marketing Can Increase Brand Awareness

Over the years, digital marketing has become a gamechanger for many brands.

It is continuously dominating many marketing channels, with over half of the world’s population using the Internet.

With digital marketing, you can:

Reach a more targeted audience in a more cost-effective and measurable way
Level the playing field, especially if you’re a small business
Interact with prospects and learn valuable insights from them
Be hyper-personalized with your audience
Reach a global marketplace

Online is where your customers are. And using digital marketing channels is beneficial to reach them, hence establishing awareness around your brand.

To get started with digital marketing, here are some strategies you can do to increase consumer familiarity with your product.

Digital Strategies to Increase Brand Awareness

Search Engine Optimization

You want your brand to be found online and beat the competition. And this is what search engine optimization (SEO) can accomplish for you.

SEO helps show your product in front of your customers. This strategy allows your webpage to appear on the first page of search results, such as Google.

The primary role of SEO is to gain websites ‘unpaid’ organic site traffic from the search engine results page (SERPs).

This is done through various on-page and off-page methods.

How SEO Impacts Brand Awareness

With increased traffic to your website, your brand gets exposed to a broader audience.

And more exposure means more people recognize what your brand does.

For instance, one case study illustrates how digital marketing consultant Hunter Branch saw firsthand what SEO could do to improve brand awareness.

Brand Awareness Example Using SEO

In the said study, Branch shared working with one client, a writing coach, who was generating about 20,000 visitors monthly from search.

The client is already a successful author prior to putting up his online presence.

After implementing a full-blown SEO strategy, the client, who just transitioned to becoming an online writing coach, started to gain an average of 140,000 organic visitors per month.

But here’s the best part: The client is now widely known as one of the top writing coaches online.

That’s how appearing in the top 3 organic search results made an impact on his branding.

How to Boost Brand Awareness with SEO

As of this year, more than 64% of marketers are actively investing in SEO.

You should want to keep up with the competition, here are some ways to use SEO for brand building.

Link building

The more quality links that refer to your page, the higher you rank in the SERPs. But how do you get those links?

I believe that valuable content is equal to strong backlinks.

By content, I mean unique, relevant, and valuable content made for users & for search engines.

Some examples include how-to guides and free downloadable templates.

Aside from creating content, you can also build backlinks through email outreach, guest posting, and public relations, among others.

Optimizing content

Creating content is one thing; optimizing content is another.

For Google to find your content, you have to add keywords to your page to increase organic visibility.

Since you’re specifically targeting audiences at the awareness stage, it is also essential to optimize your content for non-commercial keywords.

Another key is to put more focus on long-tail keywords. This type of keywords has a 3% to 5% higher click rate than generic searches.

Also, aligning your keyword strategy with your branding helps you assert more control over the perception of your brand.

That’s why it is crucial to choose keywords that are relevant to your brand.

Internal Linking

When a prospect landed on your page, help him navigate around your website through internal linking.

Internal linking involves adding a link to another page on your site using anchor text.

Anchor text can be your main keywords, a variation of your main keywords, or secondary long-tail keywords.

With a clear strategy, you can improve the user experience while driving more site traffic to your pages.

But internal linking does not only direct visitors to your other pages. It also passes link equity to improve your SERPs ranking.

Content Creation

In the previous strategy, we have briefly touched the importance of content.

However, since content creation is so vital in brand building, it warrants further discussion as our next digital strategy.

For this guide, we’ll focus on the creation of branded content and how it impacts your brand awareness campaigns.

But what is branded content?

Branded content is content that brings value to your new customers.

It lets you show to your audience who your company is and what your brand represents.

This type of content strays from traditional advertising. Its purpose is to entertain or to inform, to catch consumer’s attention, and drive real engagement.

This includes articles, videos, infographics, and podcasts, among others.

How Content Creation Impacts Brand Awareness

Strong brand awareness campaigns are more than just consumers knowing your brand name. It shows how well your audience understands the qualities that make your company unique.

It is through developing an effective content strategy that sets your brand apart from the competition.

Content is also a way to show personality, share opinions, and to position your brand on issues. Simply put, content is what humanizes your brand.

And consumers would likely do business with humans over a mere brand.

Brand Awareness Example Using Content Creation

One great example of a successful branded content is Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches campaign.

The campaign started with customer research suggesting that only 4% of women would describe themselves as “beautiful.”

From the said research, Dove came up with a short video highlighting how women perceive themselves versus how strangers describe them.

The video garnered over 114 million views in just one month, and it became the most-watched branded content in 2013, even with some intense criticisms of the ad.

With the campaign’s success, Dove got the world talking. And the best part? Dove was able to send their brand message that “beauty is for everyone,” separating them from their competitors.

How to Boost Brand Awareness with Content

According to B2B Content Marketing, seventy-two percent of marketers believe having a good content strategy was a significant key to their success.

Do you implement a content strategy for your brand already?

If not, here are some ways to get you started.

Understand your audience

Who is your audience? Where do they spend their time online? What are their likes, preferences, and interests? What are their problems that needed solutions?

You are connecting with your audience, so naturally, you will begin to understand them.

And when you have a good understanding of your audience, you can tailor your content to make it speak to them.

Create your brand story

Aside from your audience, you should also understand your brand.

What is your story? What are your visions? What are your company’s values? What is your company’s voice? What solution do you offer to your audience?

To craft an effective content strategy, you must know these crucial things about your business because these are the reasons why your new customers would care about your brand.

Choose your digital marketing channels

Which type of content do you want to use for your brand? For the awareness stage, you’ve got plenty to choose from.

Blog posts and articles are the most common forms of content for the early stage in the marketing funnel.

If you’re looking for content ideas, this is where your understanding of your audience would come in handy.

If you’re targeting an audience with a short attention span, infographics are a perfect choice. This is because this type of content is easy to read and understand.

Meanwhile, videos are a great avenue to show the personalities of your brand. Statistics also show that video is the number one form of media used in content strategy, overtaking the first two forms of content mentioned above.

Test your content strategy

Now that you have determined vital elements of a good content strategy, it’s time to put them together and create your content.

Monitor how your content performs, analyze its effectiveness through key metrics, and adjust as needed.

Social Media

What’s a better place to be in as a brand than with social media?

These platforms have billions of social media users waiting to become your customer. Also, it’s free to create your accounts on social media. And if you’re running ads, you can achieve a lot with a meager budget.

With the number of opportunities available using social media marketing, you don’t want to miss out on this essential marketing strategy.

So, whether it’s on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, or other channels, it is crucial to establish your presence using social media marketing to boost brand awareness.

How Social Media Impacts Brand Awareness

Your audience spends a lot of their time browsing through their feeds.

On average, internet users spend 144 minutes per day using social media according to Statista.

This presents a great opportunity for your business to reach them online.

Having a social media presence helps you become more visible to your customers.

It allows you to connect with them, engage with them, more importantly, increase brand recognition, and create brand advocates.

By sharing your brand voice and story on social, whether through posting compelling content or running ads, you can raise awareness of your business.

Brand Awareness Example Using Social Media

Not everyone would be interested in a blender.

However, many would like watching random objects be smashed into a pulp for some reason.

Blendtec’s “Will it blend campaign” just tapped into this unexpected interest.

Will it blend viral social media campaign

In a Facebook video campaign, Blendtec tried to blend some of the most random objects while asking the question, “Will it blend?”

The brand was able to pique the curiosity of its audience that resulted in thousands of views. It also inspired multiple spin-offs of other brands trying similar tests.

The takeaway: be creative in showing off the power of your product with your social media marketing strategies.

Even a product can provide entertainment to your audience while showcasing its abilities.

How to Boost Brand Awareness with Social Media

If you’re still not taking advantage of social media advertising, you’re missing a lot.

Whether you’re new to social media marketing or are already using it, you need to have a deep understanding of your brand and your audience to catch up with your competitors.

Then, here’s what you need to do next with your social media campaign.

Set SMART goals

You have to be clear on your goals when using social media marketing, and the SMART goal framework helps you with that.

The SMART framework requires you to have goals that are:

Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Time-bound

Here’s an example of a SMART goal:

“We will increase brand awareness by increasing the number of impressions to 10,000 by the end of the fourth quarter.”

Determine key metrics

Having a SMART goal also helps you establish key metrics to measure the performance of your strategy.

You can track different social media metrics depending on your campaign. What’s important is to determine which metrics are relevant to you. For brand awareness, metrics like reach, impressions, shares, and mentions can tell a lot about your progress.

Choose your platform

Each social media platform is unique. To succeed in your effort, you have to determine which platforms best fit your goals and strategy.

You don’t have to be on every platform. Pick the one that is relevant to your brand and your audience.

Determine where your potential customers hang out. For instance, if you’re a makeup brand, you would benefit more in visual platforms like Snapchat and Instagram.

Once you have picked the platform, fill out your profiles completely, including profile and cover photos, bio, and profile info. Also, include keywords that people would use to search for your business.

Create a social media content calendar

Next, determine what you should be posting, how often should you post, and when is the best time to post content.

Having a social media content calendar helps make your posting organized.

You can use it to plan all of your social media marketing efforts across all your channels.

When creating your social media calendar, remember to have a mix of content you created and curated from other sources.

Then, experiment on which type of content works for you: links, videos, images, quotes, reshares, and plain text updates.

For starters, you may adopt the 80-20 rule, which states that 80% of your posts should inform, educate, or entertain.

The other 20% can be content that directly promotes your brand.

Test and Analyze

As you begin posting content, you’ll find out which content, schedule, and frequency performs best for your business.

Using social media analytics tool like Buffer helps you test and analyze each post.

Using the insights you have obtained, test different posts, campaigns, and marketing strategies against each other.

Once you determine what works best, it’s time to adjust your strategy.

Focus more on the proven methods that work and refine them so you get the most out of your brand awareness campaign.

Engage

Finally, don’t forget the social aspect of social media marketing. Engage with your community.

Reply to comments, look for mentions, follow conversations, and monitor feedback about your brand, products, and services.

Allot time in your day to engage with your audience.

Remarketing Campaigns

Remarketing is a type of online advertising that allows you to show targeted ads to people who have already visited your website.

This ad follows visitors across the Internet. They appear as they browse the web, watch YouTube videos, and scroll through their social media feeds.

How Remarketing Impacts Brand Awareness

Remarketing allows you to remain connected with your audience. Once people visit your website, ads will follow them all over the web.

This gives your brand great exposure. And more exposure means your brand becomes more recognizable, giving you a competitive advantage.

But aside from brand awareness, remarketing campaigns also increases the chance for your visitors taking action.

This is especially crucial since 70% to 96% of websites visitors leave without taking action and will never return, according to Bounce Exchange.

Brand Awareness Example Using Remarketing

Software company Lumension achieved an 865% increase in homepage views thanks to its remarketing efforts. This is despite cutting its marketing budget by 30%.

How did they do it?

The company retargeted five main groups, combining this technique with their awareness efforts.

Its awareness campaign has increased the audience size for their retargeting campaign. Its retargeting, on the other hand, converted the new visitors they gained from their awareness campaign.

And what was Lumension’s biggest takeaway? Be willing to take a risk. The company’s success sprouted from its openness to play with a strategy they were unfamiliar with.

How to Boost Brand Awareness with Remarketing

If you want to find success in this strategy, it pays to know the different types of remarketing campaigns you can implement for your brand.

Display Ads

Display Ads show up to people who have visited your website.

This form of remarketing can appear in two main types of platforms: Google display network and social media.

Both platforms offer large viewership that can help raise awareness about your brand.

Email remarketing

This type of remarketing campaign targets people who open or take some specific action on your emails.

People who open your emails already showed their interest in your brand. With email remarketing, you can reinforce this interest by keeping your brand on their minds by delivering the most relevant content to their interest creating customer loyalty.

Remarketing search ads

This campaign allows you to display remarketing ads on the search engine themselves. This will enable you to target people who have visited your website.

Video remarketing

People who have either visited your website or watched your videos get retargeted with this method. This type of ad appears on YouTube and the Google display network.

Content Syndication

Brand awareness is also brand recognition. Brand recognition is the extent of how the public can identify your brand by its attributes.

For people to recognize your brand, it’s not enough that you publish content and just leave it there hopes and wishes.

You have to make the content appear elsewhere for more exposure. This technique is otherwise known as content syndication.

How Content Syndication Impacts Brand Awareness

Content syndication is a technique involving republishing content on other sites to get a wider audience.

Syndicated content is a great way to increase brand awareness as well as drive links to your website.

This is especially true if you get featured in most of the biggest and most influential sites on the Internet.

You may have heard that duplicate content from syndication can hurt your SEO and potentially penalize your website.

Technically this is true but not something I’d stress about as long as you complete these three things.

Use Googe Search Console to make sure your content is indexed and recognized by Google before syndication.
Share your content across your branded social media accounts and profiles.
Add the rel canonical tag to tell search engines that your page URL is the master copy that you want to appear in SERPs.

Brand Awareness Example Using Content Syndication

BestSelf Co is known in its industry for its productivity articles. To put that in numbers, they get 186,000 new visitors every single month.

But how did they do that? By combining fantastic content marketing and blog posts with content syndication.

They targeted big sites like Inc to turn its visitors into BestSelf blog readers.

And they did successfully, driving over 1,800 email signups to their newsletter after a few weeks.

They now leverage the new traffic from syndicated content into over $2 million in revenue.

How to Boost Brand Awareness with Content Syndication

Since it is hard to land syndicated content on publishing giants like CNN, BBC, and the New York Times, you can start small through self-service syndication.

In self-service syndication, you republish your content on publishing websites such as the ones below:

Social networks

Social platforms such as LinkedIn and Quora feature their built-in publishing tools. LinkedIn publishing is mainly a great avenue as it notifies your connections every time you post an article.

Blogging platforms

You may also consider republishing on other blogging platforms aside from your own. Examples of this are Medium and Tumblr.

Medium is an excellent choice for self-service syndication because of its handy import tool that lets you import your content from anywhere on the web.

It also has its own loyal followings, enabling you to reach a new audience and engage with them.

Multi-author blogs

Multi-author blogs like Business 2 Community and Social Media Today, amongst many others, also provide a syndication-friendly platform for business-related content and digital marketing content, respectively.

Measuring Brand Awareness

In the previous section, we defined brand awareness as a measure of how well your target audience recognizes your brand. But the big question is: “how do we exactly measure brand awareness?”

In digital marketing, having a KPI is vital to determine how your strategy is performing.

KPI allows you to see what works for your brand and what doesn’t. Thus, it’s important to identify some key metrics you’ll need to measure the success of your digital marketing strategies.

Below, we’ll guide you on how to measure brand awareness with key metrics.

5 Key Metrics to Measure Brand Awareness

1.Traffic

Website traffic is a good indicator of people becoming more aware of your brand. If you are getting increased traffic to your website, this could mean that your brand awareness efforts are paying off.

But when we say traffic, we mean specifically measuring direct traffic and net-new traffic to your site. Direct traffic means people directly typing your URL into the search bar.

Net-new traffic is the number of new visitors to your website given a certain period. Both of these traffic channels indicate changes in brand awareness.

You can find your direct and net-new traffic in Google Analytics.

2. Branded search

When people type the name of your brand in search engines like Google instead of typing the URL directly, that’s counted as branded search.

People won’t be searching for your brand if they are not aware of it, won’t they?

As a rule of thumb, the more people who are searching for your brand name, products, or services, the more they are aware of you.

Tracking your branded search volume lets you see how general awareness of your brand is changing.

Fortunately, Google offers plenty of tools to monitor branded search volume. You can use Google Analytics, Google Ads, or Google Trends for this matter.

3. Brand mentions

Mention is the number of times your brand, products, or services has been mentioned online.

Mention can either be on social media, in the news, or your industry publication.

Monitoring these mentions lets you know if people are talking about you and how they think about your brand.

Are they saying positive, negative, or neutral things about you? Whatever the case, you can do this to gain vital information for future products, support, and digital marketing campaigns.

To track mentions of your brand, use various tools like Google Alerts or Mention.

4. Social reach

Social reach is an engagement metric that shows how your post impacts people. If your post is shared far and wide, it is usually an indication that your content is resonating with your audience.

This metric is measured by the number of people who share your posts for their networks to see.

The more people sharing your posts, the wider your social reach becomes. And what does it mean for your business?

More people will see your content, thus improving brand awareness.

You can use tools like SharedCount to check how many times your posts get shared socially.

5. Feedback

Feedback comes in the form of surveys and reviews. This is if you want to understand how people see your brand and how you can improve it.

Surveys are great to know how people hear about your business. You can either ask existing customers how they knew about you or ask a set of an audience if they are familiar with your brand, via online or offline means.

Likewise, reviews give you insight into how actual customers perceive your brand.

Reviews significantly impact how potential customers see you, so it is crucial to monitor review sites like Yelp to know how you can improve your products or services—thus improving the people’s perception of you.

Wrapping It Up

Brand awareness is the first step to creating a business that converts.

But creating awareness about your brand doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a carefully crafted strategy from your marketing team to find success.

If done right, the techniques above, combined with consistent monitoring and some great digital marketing tools, can help you build familiarity around your brand and lead to increase growth, revenue and create brand advocates.

21 Ways To Drive More Traffic To Your Website

February 19, 2020 by Steven J Wilson 12 Comments

Website traffic is crucial for business owners. More traffic to your website could mean more sales, Ad revenue, email subscribers & leads, so it should be a top priority.

While you know that you should be driving more traffic to your website, it not as easy as some make it sound. It doesn’t take much to overcomplicate the process and get confused about what to do next.

So, it’s time you learn the many ways to increase your website traffic, which I rounded up for you along with additional resources to help you dive deeper into the strategies that you want to try out or optimize.

They all come with their own sets of strengths and weaknesses, which I detail below.

Advertise

Paid advertising is a quick way to drive traffic to your website. There are many ads that you can run on different channels.

For search engines, you can run pay-per-click (PPC) or retargeting ads. For social, there are sponsored posts. You can also have banner ads or rich media on websites, apps, and socials with display advertising.

Each channel has its pros and cons, but combining the different types of advertising can be an excellent strategy to consider.

That said, paid advertising is a vital strategy for digital marketers. In fact, marketers who participated in the 2019 CMO survey project a nearly 90% increase in social media spending in the next few years.

Meanwhile, 40% of brands and agencies said in another study that they want to increase their PPC budget. This indicates how effective and lucrative it is for marketers.

Strengths:

Paid search ads are well-targeted
Offers huge reach and immediate results
Results are measurable through detailed data analytics
Running a paid ad is usually inexpensive
You have control over your marketing budget

Weaknesses:

Paid search still costs money
Ads disappear after the campaign ends
There is a risk of overspending

Additional Resources on Paid Advertising

Use Social Media Presence for more site traffic

Establish A Social Media Presence

Fact: 45% of the world’s population are on social media. And 54% of them use social media to research products according to statistics by Oberlo.

But most importantly, 73% of marketers believe social media marketing has been “somewhat effective” or “very effective.”

These numbers just show how vital having a social media presence for your brands is. That’s why you should start paying more attention to your social media efforts now.

Ensure you are doing more than just creating a profile. Use your social channels to link and promote your content. But it’s not just mediocre content I’m talking about here. You should post relevant content that gives the most significant value to your followers, which we will discuss further in our next point.

Aside from posting great content, you should also use social features such as Facebook Messenger, live videos, Instagram Stories, and IGTV. Remember that the key to succeeding in your social media marketing efforts is by being an early adopter of new features.

LinkedIn is my recommended platform at the moment. You can still have success with others, but LinkedIn’s organic reach easily makes it the social platform you should take seriously sooner than later.

Start by connecting with me on LinkedIn here.

Strengths:

Social media marketing is cheaper than most marketing strategies
Offers broad reach and large audiences
You get to engage with your customers through community building
Gives your brand personality
You get to learn more about your customers

Weaknesses:

Social media marketing is time-consuming
It takes a long time before you get results
Your brand is prone to negative feedback
Most end up utilizing the “Pay to Play” model

Additional Resources On Social Media Strategy

Create Content for more website traffic opportunities

Produce Relevant Content

If you don’t have a blog yet, you should start it as soon as possible.

Statistics show that marketers who prefer blogging are 13 times more likely to attain a positive ROI on their efforts. 57% of marketers also said they’d gained customers through blogging.

The content you produce on your blog gives people a reason to keep coming back to your website. Aside from that, it also helps improve your SEO, which I will discuss later on.

But how do you create content that is of value to your customers? First, you need to know your buyer persona. Then, conduct SEO research to learn what your audience is searching for online. From there, create a well-written blog.

There are different types of content ranging from lists, interviews, infographics, evergreen, and more. Discover which content attracts more website traffic and devise an effective content strategy.

Strengths:

Blogs are excellent for brand awareness and authority building
Gives your audience a reason to come back to your website
Blogs help improve SEO ranking
You attract new customers, engage existing ones, and convert both

Weaknesses:

Creating content can be time-consuming
Producing unique and creative content can be challenging
Blogging requires you to have regular updates

Additional Resources On Content Creation

Utilize Search Engine Optimization

As previously mentioned, blogging can help boost SEO. But what is SEO, or search engine optimization?

SEO is a method used to gain ‘earned,’ ‘unpaid’ organic traffic from search results.

Optimizing for search engines can increase the quantity and quality of traffic your website receives. This involves several methods, including on-page SEO, off-page SEO, keyword research, improving site architecture, link building, and content creation, among others.

According to Adweek, SEO is vital because 81% of shoppers conduct online research before they purchase a product. And this strategy helps people know your website exists at the time they are most engaged with what you offer.

Strengths:

SEO gives your website exposure to people searching for solutions online
Delivers a continuous flow of traffic through on-page and off-page methods
Makes you an expert in your niche
SEO-generated leads can go as high as 14.6% close rate

Weaknesses:

SEO requires time to see results
Has no guarantee for results, especially if you are aiming for page 1 ranking
May require significant investment if you’re hiring external help

Additional Resources On SEO

Local SEO to Drive more website Traffic in Specific Areas

Don’t Forget Local SEO

Local SEO is an excellent strategy if you own a brick-and-mortar store. The same holds if you service a specific geographic area.

Data shows that 80% of local searches result in conversions. In fact, 50% of users visit a store within a day after conducting a local search, while 76% who look on smartphones drop by after a search, according to Google.

So, if you’re offering pizzas and a local customer searches, “best pizza near me,” you’ll be missing out on the opportunity to get found and convert. That’s why you should optimize for local SEO.

To do this, claim your business page on Google My Business. Enter your name, address, and phone number, and make sure they are consistent with your social media pages.

Also, ensure you are using location-based keywords that are relevant to your industry.

Strengths:

Local SEO gives you the upper-hand over competitors
Increases visibility for businesses in their communities
Shows your website at the exact time local customers are searching
Ensures business is legitimate to your prospective customers

Weaknesses:

Not recommended for international or online-only businesses

Additional Resources on Local SEO

27 Local SEO Tips Your Lazy Competitors Are Neglecting
Local SEO [2020 Tips]– Moz
Local SEO: The Definitive Guide (2020)– Backlinko

Guest Posting

The art of finding popular blogs and writing a high-quality article for them. This is one of the fastest ways to boost your website’s traffic and awareness if you target the correct sources.

Several case studies have shown how effective guest posting is in driving significant traffic to a website. For instance, one SEO expert generated nearly 400 visitors after publishing on Moz. And that guest blog still drives 10-20 visitors even after more than two weeks after the post was published.

While it promises excellent results, guest posting is easier said than done. But there are definitive guides out there to help you get started with guest blogging.

The first step is to find respected blogs in your niche and build a relationship with them. Learn about their audience, style, and the topics they cover before making a pitch.

Strengths:

Guest posting shows you’re active in the community
Builds your reputation in your industry
Allows you to generate more backlinks

Weaknesses:

Building a relationship with reputable bloggers can be a challenge
The standard for guest blogs can be very high
Writing high-quality guest posts can be tedious

Additional Resources on Guest Posting

Email Marketing to connect with your audience and drive website traffic

Utilize Email Marketing

Email marketing is a traditional content marketing strategy that is still very much alive. When combined with other approaches, it can prove a valuable tool for driving traffic to your website.

Data shows that an average return of $42 can be expected for every $1 you spend on email marketing.

As you produce valuable content, you can support it with email marketing. Promote a new blog to your current subscribers or followers for a quick traffic boost.

This is why it is crucial to build your email list as soon as possible.

To get started in the email list building, add sign-up forms on your website. This can be a pop-up on your homepage or about page. You can also use your social channels to promote email newsletters.

You’ll have to be creative. Personalizing the email marketing experience is crucial now of days. You have to stand out. A set it and forget it email drip will not cut it if you are looking for the best results.

Strengths:

Email marketing is relatively affordable
You can quickly create an email campaign and reach a warm audience promoting your content and offers
Easily track and measure your efforts

Weaknesses:

Your emails could get marked as spam
Not well-targeted; you may not be reaching the right audience
Unsolicited emails can cause customers to consider your business less reputable
It’s getting more challenging to cut through the noise

Additional Resources on Email Marketing

Video Content for more followers and visitors to your website

Create Video Content

While text-based content is still the heart of digital marketing, social evangelists are beginning to prefer watching a video than to read. In fact, visual materials such as videos offer significantly higher information retention. That said, you must incorporate video in your content strategy.

According to BrightCove, videos yield a 157% increase in organic search traffic. Hubspot finds that 85% of marketers create video content online.

Fortunately, you don’t have to spend much to produce a video. There are free tools out there to make the video creation process a tad easier.

Consider embedding videos into your blogs. Then, you may want to put up a YouTube channel for your business.

Also, take advantage of social features such as Facebook Stories, Facebook Watch, IGTV, and live videos. The last one is particularly useful in boosting organic reach, which I will discuss in my next point.

Strengths:

Video content has strong engagement
Improves conversion rates
Easy to repurpose and reuse

Weaknesses:

Professional-looking videos have high production overheads
Some people can’t watch videos online, limiting your reach
Not all audiences are into video content

Additional Resources on Creating Video Content

Live Streaming for increase followers and website visitors

Broadcast Live Videos

A decline in organic Facebook reach began affecting brands in 2014. One of the primary reasons for this decline is the volume of content being published on the platform.

So, how can you expand your reach organically? Facebook has begun the shift to make News Feed more about connecting with people, and one way to do this is through live videos.

Yes, live videos rank even higher than news feed videos. This is because it is exciting, in-the-moment, and creates a more personal relationship with your audience.

Broadcasting live videos is a great way to establish your social media presence. It can also help boost your traffic by directing your audience to your website. But most importantly, it has a positive impact on sales.

Strengths:

Live videos boost organic reach
Allows stronger engagement than regular videos

Weaknesses:

Requires to go live regularly
Risk of producing low-quality videos
Can be unpredictable as it is prone to technical difficulties

Additional Content on Video

Engage in Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a powerful strategy to raise awareness about your brand. Did you know that driving brand familiarity is four times more effective when you team up with YouTube influencers than those with celebrities?

Your brand also gets more credibility when you collaborate with influencers.

When deciding on whom to team up with, research the micro-influencers in your community.

Micro-influencers may have smaller following, say, 10,000 or below. But their followings are well-targeted and could lead to the best results for your brand. This means more engagement, clicks, and a higher ROI.

Collaborate with micro-influencers, tap into their followers, and generate more traffic to your website.

Strengths:

High engagement rate
Broadens your brand’s reach
Tap into a relevant audience
Helps build trust and credibility to your brand
Relatively affordable

Weaknesses:

Difficulty measuring results
Risk of fake influencer metrics and followers

Additional Resources on Influencer Marketing

Interview Industry Thought Leaders

Aside from influencers, you should also tap into the insights of thought leaders in your industry.

When thought leaders talk, people listen. Respected people in your industry can attract attention from your target audience.

Think Pat Flynn with Smart Passive Income, John Lee Dumas with Entrepreneur on Fire, and Tom Bilyeu with Impact Theory. These entrepreneurs offer tons of value on their own, but utilizing other thought leaders helps them expand their audience and keep people coming back to learn from the next thought leader.

But what makes a thought leader? He or she is someone who offers information that people can’t get from anyone else. A thought leader can adequately explain what works and what doesn’t on a particular topic based on their research and experiences. They offer great advice that makes for valuable content.

And once you complete an interview, be sure to promote it across multiple channels. Doing so can bring in loads of traffic to your website.

Strengths:

Builds your authority, expertise, and trustworthiness
Attracts attention from your target audience
Longer shelf life than the average blogs and articles
Access to the thought leader’s following, resulting in a more extensive reach
Offers new information and ideas that are shareable

Weaknesses

Finding industry leaders to interview is a challenge

Additional Content on Interviewing Thought Leaders

Media Coverage and Public Relations

If you’re a thought leader yourself, you can use your expertise to catch the attention of the media.

Media coverage creates an excellent opportunity for you to to generate some word of mouth buzz, which can help to bring traffic to your website.

You can also get yourself interviewed without being a thought leader.

If you have new products that you deem valuable for the community, or if you have a unique company culture that you’d like to share, you can be in the center of the media attention.

The key is to let your marketing and public relations teams collaborate.

Also, do your research and use your connections wisely. Avoid spamming media outlets if you want to secure a segment and build an ongoing relationship with them.

Strengths:

Wider reach through media outlets
Can put a face on your company, boosting credibility
Gets people to pay attention to your business
Lets you develop an emotional connection with your audience

Weaknesses:

Attracting the media’s attention can be tough

Additional Resources on Gaining Media Coverage

Host Giveaway Contests

Contests and giveaways can get people engaged and excited. And this means an opportunity to increase your website traffic.

Aside from website traffic, hosting contests can grow your following by a considerable percentage.

According to Tailwind, Instagram accounts can achieve 70% faster follower growth when brands hold contests.

But when I say giveaway, I mean freebies that people would want and are relevant to your brand. So, ensure you do some research about your audience. Then, decide the prize, the contest type, and the platform to hold your contest.

Once these are all set, craft a compelling ad copy with engaging graphics. Do all these, and you’re ready to run your first giveaway contest.

Strengths:

Giveaway contests are engaging
They have the potential to go viral
Gain a substantial social following
Allows you to gather user-generated content

Weaknesses:

Requires time and money
Risk of causing drama around your brand (People don’t like not winning)
Prone to unsuccessful campaigns

Additional Resources on Host Giveaways and Contests

Community Building

Community building involves starting a Facebook group, Twitter chat, or LinkedIn group, etc. Invite your followers to join your community where you can provide value while driving traffic to your website.

Social media groups are a great avenue to build awareness while engaging with your audience. In fact, 40% of marketers believe they should prioritize private communities in 2020.

It’s a powerful strategy because communities are highly-targeted, and it lets you establish authority in your niche.

Above all else, brands should provide solutions to the problems shared in the group. This opens up the opportunity for you to gain FAQs that you can use to produce original content.

I also encourage brands to engage in your community other than the groups you have built. Join Facebook group discussions, participate in Twitter chats, and answer questions on forums.

The key to community building and engagement is to be human, and to connect with your audience.

Strengths:

Directly engage with your audience
Gain valuable insights about your customers
Allows linking back to your website

Weaknesses:

Starting to build a community can be tough until you’re established
Requires constant updating and moderation
Can be time-consuming

Additional Resources on Community Building

A/B Testing

Data is crucial in running successful campaigns. One way to obtain this information is through A/B testing.

A/B testing is a method to compare two versions of your marketing materials. These can be a web page, an email, or a social media ad.

There are various elements that you can test. It can be the headlines, CTAs, images, audio, and videos, among others.

For example, you create two versions of a social media ad with only the image changed.

Then, you run the two versions of the ads, against the same audience, to test which will appeal more to that audience. The results can be measured based on specific metrics such as click-throughs or conversion rates.

A/B testing allows you to learn which elements work best for your goal, say, increased website traffic.

Strengths:

Gain quantitative evidence of what works and what doesn’t
Test new ideas
Make gradual changes to improve performance

Weaknesses:

Requires time and resources
Works with only one variable each test
Could end up with constant testing

Additional Resources on A/B Testing

A/B Testing– Optimizely
5 Tips for Running an A/B Test on a Budget

Publishing on LinkedIn for increased traffic

Publish Articles on LinkedIn

The world’s largest social network for professionals has been offering a valuable publishing platform that can drive traffic to your website.

This gives your content an excellent opportunity to reach a large audience.

Here’s another reason why you should publish on LinkedIn: over 80% of social traffic to B2B sites come from LinkedIn.

Publishing on LinkedIn is an excellent way to boost your traffic.

Strengths:

Chance to get featured on LinkedIn Pulse, displaying your content to a large audience
Connections are notified each time you publish on LinkedIn
Makes you an authority in your industry
Posts are shareable; users who interact with it also make your post visible to their first-degree connections

Weaknesses:

Articles require some traction to be featured
Needs high-quality articles and engagement to gain traction
Requires constant update along with your website’s blog if not utilizing syndication

Additional Resources on Publishing to LinkedIn

Answer Questions on Quora

A wide range of questions is posted daily on Quora. And this is an excellent opportunity to get your content found.

Answer questions on Quora, and include a relevant link to your website to further expand on your answer.

However, you should not link just to promote your content. Make it a practice to post a helpful, thought-provoking, and inspiring answer. Remember that readers can tell an intelligent post from a salesy one.

Quora posts have the tendency to go viral. Use it properly to leverage the Q&A site.

Strengths:

Wide range of questions posted daily that you can provide answers
Allows you to connect with others in your industry
Great way to generate early traffic
Another platform to syndicate content

Weaknesses:

Answers require expertise to make an impact
Prone to spam content

Additional Resources on Answering Questions on Quora

The Marketer’s Guide to Quora– Neil Patel
How To Use Quora for Marketing

Comment on Blogs and Forums

Blog or forum commenting will not get your website large amounts of traffic, but it does help in getting your name out there.

The key is to provide quality and relevance in each comment.

When commenting on blogs or forums, comment on specific points. Offer more information and add additional value to the post. You may also share your experience in solving similar problems mentioned in the blog.

Posting well-thought comments can show your depth of knowledge on the matter, which can even win you a guest posting spot on that particular blog.

Eventually, you’ll be rewarded with what you desire: more website traffic and additional traffic opportunities.

Strengths:

Allows you to display your expertise
Makes a name by providing well-thought comments
Search engine rewards you with more authority
Helps generate more backlinks and traffic
Attracts new readers to your blog

Weaknesses:

Requires knowledge of the subject
Can be deemed spam if your comment is not useful
Takes time if you do it regularly

Additional Resources on Blog Commenting Strategies

Focus On Your Headlines

Your headlines can make or break your content.

Your headline is the most seen piece of content and should not be an afterthought. When you share your content on social media or your post shows in organic results, your headline is one of the determining factors of whether they will visit your site.

The majority of times, readers don’t get the opportunity to see the stats you’ve compiled, those custom images, relatable stories, your products or services unless you first get your headline right.

Strengths:

Narrows traffic to relevant audiences
Can boost Click Through Rate in organic results
Increases social shares
Peaks curiosity

Weaknesses:

A weak headline can create a low click-through rate
Low social shares
Sometimes you have to try multiple headlines

Additional Resources on Creating Headlines

Mobile Optimization

A study by Hitwise found that nearly 60% of all searches take place on a mobile device.

Mobile web surfing is continuing to pull dominance away from the desktop. Google is even prioritizing it in its algorithms.

The simplest thing you can do is use a mobile responsive theme, compress images and video, and have good mobile caching. Setting up an AMP mobile site could be an option depending on your objectives as well.

The first organic listing on mobile receives 27.7% of clicks, versus 19.3% of clicks on desktop according to SEOClarity.

Strengths:

A faster mobile site is attractive to Google
Allows for a good user experience
Increases conversions

Weaknesses:

May require some technical knowledge

Additional Resources on Mobile Optimization

Focus on Establishing E-A-T

E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Google developed E-A-T as a way to help determine how knowledgeable and trustworthy your content is to searchers.

Google is very cautious when it comes to sending traffic to content that could affect someone’s life or finances.

Google defines content that can alter someone’s life or finances as YMYL, Your Money Your Life.

Doing the things mentioned throughout this post is a great way to establish E-A-T and will help your content rank in Google.

Strengths:

Rank higher in search results
You are trusted in your topic
Increased natural backlink opportunities
Strong branding

Weakness:

It takes time to build E-A-T
You must produce many pieces of content throughout relevant sources on the web
You have to develop an effective outreach strategy

Additional Resources On Establishing E-A-T

Final Words

All of the above methods are proven useful and effective for business owners, brands, and marketers.

Start by implementing a few of these tactics, optimize your own strategy, and start generating more traffic for your website.

What is your best traffic generating sources?

Why Branding Should Be Your SEO Strategy For 2021

February 6, 2020 by Steven J Wilson Leave a Comment

Developing strategic branding, that can be detected on an algorithmic level, will create longevity and allow your brand to continue to progress through all future Google updates.

Google has been on a mission for years to continue to improve search results to deliver results as accurate as possible.

Google is getting better and better with delivering results factoring in user intent.

Furthermore, artificial intelligence continuously improves the various parameters affecting search rankings. This will continue to make it increasingly difficult to create pages and content that take full advantage of current technicalities in the algorithm.

It’s time to begin taking a serious look into strategies that fit with Google’s update trajectory.

We have to begin focusing on a critical aspect that continues to deliver long term results. One that has been used for years offline.

You have to understand where Google is headed based on their past updates and current algorithms to understand what they expect from your brand.

“Brand is what wins. It always has and always will. It’s how everyone makes a decision.” Gary Vaynerchuk

Brand Recognition Increases Profitability

According to PwC’s Consumer Insights Survey, 35% ranked trust in the brand among the top three reasons for their purchase decision.

Brand recognition is among the ultimate objectives of building a profitable business. It increases the chances of potential customers buying products associated with a brand as long as they associate the brand with something they value.

The same can be observed among search engine users. Having a recognizable brand dramatically increases the likelihood that searchers will click and choose your content over other results. This causes your website to get more traffic, which can then lead to increased conversions.

You can see in the above diagram from CrazyEgg that the beginning of a conversion funnel begins with recognition and awareness of your brand.

The wider net you cast will increase your chances of links, which increases your opportunity to increase profits.

These clicks are essential since a page’s click-through rate is now among the top factors for ranking search results in Google. This makes your branding awareness an indirect factor in getting your content to the top results for your queries.

Why Click-Through Rates Are Important for Search Engine Rankings

To understand how branding affects where your website ranks in search results, you must first realize that search engines give the utmost consideration to user behavior.

One such consideration includes the click-through rates (CTR) that links get when listed as a search result.

Depending on how much the click-through rate exceeds the average for the search term helps determine where you will rank on SERPs. A more significant positive margin results in a higher ranking on the first page of the search results.

Wordstream ran a study and found that for every 3%, you increase your click-through rate will result in an increase in your search result position by one position.

The click-through rate is used as a measure by the algorithm to determine which results generate interest from its users. This is their way of recommending to their users the pages that others previously engaged with while searching for similar keywords.

Why Your Brand Could Be the Deciding Factor for a Higher Search Engine Ranking

I have skipped many number one search results to go straight to content from a Brand I trust.

This is true for many others as well.

“Authority can, and does, influence search a great deal. Brands with higher authority are often more desired, and therefore searched out more frequently by customers because it’s a brand that they trust. This, in turn, results in even better search visibility because it’s getting more traffic.” SEMRush

As you can see, this increases the ranking of your pages on search results of the keywords related to your pages.

Building Your Brand Is the Best Way to Establish E-A-T

E-A-T is a factor in Google’s search engine algorithm. It stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

This is used to help Google evaluate the potential of a website’s content and to help determine if the content will be accurate and able to produce helpful information for the user. Any content scoring poorly with the E-A-T evaluation would be less likely to show higher in search results.

To understand what is taken into consideration, here is a brief look at each element of E-A-T:

Expertise

Google divides expertise into two types – formal expertise and everyday expertise. Formal expertise relates to content created by individuals considered as formally educated, verified, or accredited like doctors, financial advisors, and lawyers.

On the other hand, everyday expertise is those demonstrated by individuals who have adequate life experiences in their topic.

According to Google’s guidelines, expertise is demonstrated when content is factual and is delivered in a professional manner.

It should provide your readers with what they need from their search. You can find this out by starting with keyword research and understanding their intent behind their search queries.

Once you know these things, you can then start writing comprehensive content that can be easily read and understood by your audience.

You should also add supplementary information in your content or link to another page on your site that can help them answer further questions that they might have.

Authoritativeness

This is measured through the relevant credentials on the topic displayed by the content creator. This metric applies to the main content, the webpage, and the website as a whole.

Both types of expertise can use the about page to provide proof for their authority. As for contributing content creators, professional expertise is displayed through a professional title, short bio, photo, certifications, an official website link, or a full bio link.

As for everyday expertise, a statement that the content creator shares their significant personal experience, not professional advice, can serve as a basis of their authority.

These proofs of authority are not limited to the bio and about pages of authors. Creating content outside of one’s website as long as the content coincides with the website’s niche or field is another crucial factor in determining authority.

For example, Google would not see content discussing a medical condition written by a doctor as authoritative to the doctor’s website if it is found on a website for financial advice.

Trustworthiness

This is simply the integrity of your website and its contents.

You should, at the very least, have some of the underlying security features and pages added to your site. If your website does not use author biographies and reference external sources where applicable, it could also be a sign of an untrustworthy source.

Some examples of things you should have set up early on when launching your website:

A secure domain (HTTPS)
A contact page
A physical address (if applicable)
A terms and conditions page
A privacy policy page
The refunds and returns policy for your transactions
A comprehensive specification for products being sold
A biography in the about page
An author biography section for relevant blogs or articles

How Authenticity helps build E-A-T

As a brand, you want your targeted audience to look to your brand as the expert authority in your niche. You want them turning to your brand whenever they need more of what you offer.

The goal should be for your target market to see your brand positively, and the best way to express that is through authenticity.

A survey conducted by Social Media Today found that user-generated content was the most effective in creating authenticity and trust for a Brand.

You want to deliver the value that your audience expects and give them more of what they may not even realize they want.

Focus on developing a strategy that holistically blends Branding and E-A-T to establish your overall goals.

The only difference between the two is that E-A-T targets Google’s algorithms, while branding is more concerned with your audience’s perception of your brand. Together these will have a substantial impact on your overall rankings.

Brand Awareness Leads to Links

An established E-A-T brings awareness among content creators in the same niche as your brand.

This comes with your brand’s content being used as a valuable resource when creating their content.

These are essentially backlinks that help in improving your search engine ranking.

There is a strong correlation between backlinks and the amount of traffic you generate from Google.

The more you build your E-A-T, the more backlinks you will generate naturally, which will keep Google happy.

Overcome YMYL with Solid Branding

YMYL, “Your Money or Your Life,” pages are web pages providing content related to topics that may affect a person’s financial stability, happiness, health, or safety.

These include topics on personal finance, financial transactions, medical information, legal affairs, news, public and official information, and car safety.

YMYL pages are placed under a stricter set of quality guidelines in evaluating content for search engine results.

These guidelines include E-A-T.

You are less likely to be affected by the current and future standards for such pages if you continuously work on establishing stronger E-A-T. Especially in the earlier stages of your site.

This does not mean that you can get away with breaking YMYL guidelines on E-A-T. You would still have to back up elements of your content with facts from other reliable E-A-T resources and maintain a smooth-running website.

E-A-T is the foundation that establishes your brand in Google’s algorithm. Because of this, your pages can break into the top results even if it’s a YMYL page with less friction.

Good Branding Creates Longevity

SEO standards will continuously change due to improvements made to the search engine algorithms to continue to improve user experience.

This results in technical strategies only lasting until the next update. Such approaches may be only good for a few months up to a year.

In some cases, these updates result in dramatic changes in how pages are ranked in search results.

This is why you have to create proper brand recognition from your target audience. Your brand’s reputation from your audience cannot be taken away by any update on Google’s algorithm.

And, the most significant way to do this is through high-quality content.

“Content is the cornerstone of internet marketing and for successfully building a brand.” Neil Patel

Users Will Consume More of Your Content

With Brand recognition and quality content, users are more likely to consume more of your content, which results in lower bounce rates.

If you provide more value through the effective use of internal links, you will increase their time-on-site and their pages per session.

“… bounce rate doesn’t have a direct impact on SEO. But, It does have a huge impact on lots of metrics that DO have a direct impact on rankings.”
Mathew Woodward

Final Thoughts

These metrics will be observed by Google and will be seen as a justification to increase your ranking for relevant keywords.

Aside from your audience, other content creators will be referring to your content as a trustworthy source.

You are further establishing your brand recognition and awareness.

Effective branding will stand the test of time and will help you dominate rankings.

What are you currently doing to build your brand and establish E-A-T?

The Secret To Creating Content That Search Engines Love

February 6, 2020 by Steven J Wilson 2 Comments

There is an underlying element that gives our content massive opportunities for success. We spend so much time writing our blog post, recording and editing our video and podcast, creating and editing images, emailing our subscribers, servicing our clients, and sometimes we overlook the fundamentals that shape the success of our content.

The opportunity of driving more traffic to your site, getting more email subscribers, getting more YouTube subscribers, generating more leads primarily lies within the Second Layer of Your Content.

Let’s dive into why the Second Layer of your content is the most important aspect of digital marketing and content creation.

Understanding Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is the method of building brand awareness, trust, and community in order to sell your products or services to people through digital mediums.

Smart Insights shows how digital marketing plays a huge part in the Life Cycle of customers for your business.

Digital marketing is a critical component in business and branding. It’s expected of you to at least have the basics, and why wouldn’t you. You are able to strategically reach people when they’re looking or currently in need of a particular solution to their issue. The ultimate goal is to figure out the best way to package up your product or your services and deliver it to people where they are searching for it.

But you have to create your content in a discoverable way, and that can be achieved by optimizing the Second Layer of your Content.

What is the Second Layer of Content in Digital Marketing?

The Second Layer of Content is the layer of text-based content, that is attached to the Primary Visual Layer of any piece of digital content.

For example, what you see in a YouTube video is considered the Primary or First Layer of Content. It’s the main thing people consume when watching, reading or listening to your content.

The Second Layer would be the video tags added to help with discoverability in search.

With the many articles being created discussed digital marketing trends for 2020, The Second Layer of you Content is a crucial element that is being overshadowed by the shiny new objects.

As marketing technology advances and the need for fresh content arises, the fundamentals get blurred.

Here’s how, regardless of the medium, the Second Layer of your Content is still a critical element to your strategy.

Voice Search

Yes, you are using your voice to search for a particular term and getting a voice response to your query.

The way this works is similar to your talk to text function on your smartphone.

Your speech is being translated to text for the algorithms to understand what you are searching for.

Then the algorithm searches and pulls the Second Layer of Content (text-based content) from, let’s say, the schema markup of a reputable site.

Then your device reads that content to you.

Without this website doing their proper due diligence and having optimized Second Layer or text-based content on their site, the voice search would have picked another piece of content that is deemed more relevant to the search query.

Video

I’m sure you’ve probably heard how video is dominating right now in the digital marketing space.

We will spend hours over a couple of days recording and editing a video in order to get that quality content that is expected now of days.

But, a best practice for all video-based content is to include a transcript of the video with each upload.

This is because algorithms still need text-based content in order to fully understand what is being said in your video.

Imagine after spending all that hard work on your video that YouTube only really understands 20% of the context of your hard work.

The same is true for Youtube tags.

Your video’s tags are not seen but are a critical element in your video’s searchability.

This is what Hubspot contributor Clifford Chi had to say about Youtube Tags.

“YouTube tags are important because they help YouTube grasp your video’s content and context. This way, YouTube can understand your video’s topic and category, and associate it with similar content, which can amplify your video’s reach.”

Images

Another example is the images that you add to your Website. A best practice is to have your keywords in the Image Name and Alt tag.

Algorithms still cannot fully understand images without having this text-based content added. Without them, the relevance of these images on your site is zero.

As you can see from the examples mentioned earlier that regardless of the medium, the second layer of content (text-based content) is what helps get your content discovered. Making it easy for algorithms to understand your content will increase the odds of your content doing better in search and recommended videos.

How To Optimize the Second Layer To Your Content

Here we will discuss the key fundamentals that will help with the discoverability of your content.

Schema Markup

Schema markup is a quick to implement solution that will help search engines better understand your content and deliver more informative results to searchers.

According to Neil Patel, at least one-third of all Google’s search results include rich Snippets, which includes schema markup.

How to add schema markup to your content:

Go to Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper
Select the type of data you want to mark up
Paste the URL of the page you want to Mark up
Highlight the content you want to mark up
Categorize the highlighted content from the My Data Items choices.
Mark up as much of your content as possible. More information the better
Click Create HTML
Test your Markup
Add it to your webpage

The process is relatively quick once you have gone through the steps a few times.

If you are not familiar with schema markup and using Google’s structured data tool, Buisness2Community has an excellent tutorial walking you through the process.

Keyword Research

I’m sure if you have had a website for just about any period of time, you have come across the importance of keyword research.

This is not an exciting topic, to say the least (although I enjoy it. Don’t Judge Me!), but it is vital to the overall discovery of your content.

According to Moz, Keyword research is a core SEO task that involves identifying popular words and phrases people enter into search engines -make in an attempt to figure out what to rank for. Researching keywords gives marketers a better understanding of how high the demand is for certain keywords and how hard it would be to compete for those terms in the organic search results, offering some direction to optimization efforts.

Understanding the 5 Most Common Keyword Types

Short-Tailed Keywords

These are highly competitive keywords that are 3 words or less. ‘Digital Marketing’ is an example of a Short-Tailed Keyword. Short-tailed keywords are usually the first step when someone is searching for an answer and should be used, but the primary focus should remain on less competitive long-tail keywords.

Long Tailed Keywords

Long Tailed keywords are longer and very specific. “Digital Marketing Tips For a Landscaping Business” would be an example of a Long-Tailed Keyword.

These will generally provide you with the best results, along with using Evergreen Keywords.

Evergreen Keywords

These keywords are generally something that will be relevant for the long term without the need for fresh content. This varies wildly depending on your industry, but anything like Digital Marketing Trends For 2021 will obviously only be relevant for that year. It will require updated content on the trends for the following year. Try to create pieces of content that you rarely or minimally have to update regularly.

Ahrefs uses evergreen content to help them generate over 200,000+ visitors a month.

Geo-Targeting Keywords

These keywords include a specific location. These are great for local businesses who are creating content for your particular area. An example of this would be “Your Guide to Lowering Your Electricity Bill in Nashville.” If you are creating content and service, a 50-mile radius of your location. Using Geo-based keywords may result in less overall traffic but more relevant local traffic that can actually turn into leads for your business.

LSI Keywords

LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) Keywords are alternative Keywords that Closely relate to the main keyword you are targeting. An example would be you targeting the keyword “Digital Marketing.” An LSI Keyword you could add to your content is “Digital Marketing Hacks for Small Businesses” or Digital Marketing for Lead Generation.”

Strategically use Exact Match Keywords

Now, I know Google has been releasing updates to better understand user intent making exact match keywords less important.

But, after tons of content created and studies, I found that Exact Match Still has tons of potential for increasing your search results.

Using SEO Quake and Moz Bar to get a quick snapshot of the data when doing my keyword research within the search results.

SEO Quake and Moz seach results screenshot

This allows me to analyze my potential competition quickly. If I’m researching a keyword and all the results on page 1 have high Doman Authority and ranked as some of the most popular websites on the web- then I know I should find longer tailed alternatives or move on.

I have come across many results of small no named websites that appear ahead of massive sites like Content Marketing Institute, Wordstream, and Copyblogger to name a few.

Yes, the Exact match still matters in 2020!

Now, I wouldn’t build my strategy around it completely. Looking back at all the Google updates up until today, the goal is to better understand the searcher’s intent, and one day Google will crack the code where exact match may not mean much of anything.

If you are not familiar with Google’s long list of updates over the years Search Engine Journal has a complete list of all updates and changes.

But in the foreseeable future, I recommend “strategically” using exact match when it makes sense.

Titles

This is one of the most essential places to optimize your Second Layer. Merely adjusting the Titles on your content can result in an increase in your CTR on search.

According to Backlinko, Title tags that contain a question have a 14.1% higher CTR.

Do not brush over this piece of the content. Be very strategic and methodical about your Titles. Of all the people who will see your Title across search, social media, and email. Less than 8% will click on your links, while only about 2% will completely consume your content. Don’t miss the opportunity to bring them to your content by not focusing on your most seen piece of your content.

H1, H2, H3 and H4 tags

These tags help break up your content, and better help search engines understand who deep you went into a particular topic. Optimizing this for your Second Layer will be huge for your content searchability as well as user experience.

Meta Descriptions

This is another critical element in your optimization. If you were to search for a particular keyword, the results would have the query bolded in the description.

Blogging Wizard Search Ranking screenshot

In the above example for BloggingWizard.com, Google pulled two separate pieces of content from the article in order to make sure that the Meta description for the search phrase, ‘Keyword Research Examples’ is also relevant to the query.

Create a detailed summary of your content, including your main keyword of no more than 160 characters.

Finishing Up

I have worked with clients that did a great job with creativity. They took professional photos, created high-quality videos, wrote interesting blog posts that are helpful and unique. Yet, they get little to no benefits from their efforts.

The issue with much of the content these days is not creativity. It’s that all the emphasis is focused on the First Layer of Content with little to no regard to the most important Second Layer of your Content.

The fundamentals of digital marketing are still necessary. I enjoy trying, learning and implementing new strategies and technologies as much as the next guy, but we can’t let these shiny new objects distract us from what has been and remains important.

What are your thoughts on your second layer content?