Content and SEO: Optimization from creation to conversion

By 2019, it is predicted that content marketing will become a $300-billion industry. However, this content will have limited value unless it is actually found by the right audience, optimized to achieve maximum impact and measured in relation to business results. Ensuring your content is search-engine-friendly and optimized across the buyer’s journey is critical to the success of both content and SEO teams.

Major search algorithm updates, such as Google’s Panda and Penguin, are focused on delivering users the highest-quality results and the most relevant content. Brands with a solid content marketing strategy — focused around people, process and technology — that also optimize for visibility across search engines are rewarded with increased search performance in the form of traffic, conversions and revenue.

A major challenge for many organizations is optimizing content for search during the content creation process and then replicating it, at scale, across large websites and content management systems. The solution lies in creating and developing content that is targeted, insightful and compelling for your audience.

Source: SAP Content Performance Whitepaper

Following are seven keys steps that marketers can take in order to optimize content from point of creation to conversion.

1. Understand your audience and segment strategies before creating content

More than 60 to 70 percent of content produced by B2B companies goes unused. Before creating content, it is very important to understand for whom you’re writing, and why. A good starting point is to audit your existing content to see what types of content resonated best with your audience. In parallel, building out buyer personas and profiles helps you match content creation to buyer needs.

2. Scout the competitive landscape for opportunities and gaps

Understanding how your content stacks up in the market and against the competition is the next step in this process. Brands that skip this step are losing millions of digital dollars to their competitors in terms of traffic, conversions and revenue.

Look at what your competition is doing well, and determine where it is falling short, in order to gain a true understanding of your competitive landscape. This will help guide your content creation and optimization efforts.

3. Map content topics to buyer personas and purchase journeys

Understanding what types of content convert at various stages of the buyer journey allows you to map and optimize content assets to maximize conversions across all stages of the buying cycle. The identification of previously hidden opportunities can result in massive increases in conversion and revenue.

4. Enable content authors to pair pages with the right topics and keywords

As organizations look to scale their content marketing efforts, it is essential to ensure that content creators are armed with search insights that help empower them to create content that is valuable and converts. This step is critical to content creation and web page development.

Content Management System (CMS) integration is now a key component of the SEO and content marketing optimization process. For example, at the Adobe Summit last month, Kirill Kronrod, senior global SEO manager from Adobe, shared an example where switching to an SEO-friendly CMS resulted in a 307-percent increase in organic traffic within a year and a 287-percent increase in rankings on Page 1.

You can view the full presentation on the Summit website here.

5. Optimize your content in ways that address user needs and respond to competitor content

On the content marketing battleground, almost every company is using content to capture attention. With so much content flooding the market, only the most creative brands are able to make their content stand out from the crowd. This is where images, video and website design and aesthetics really help move the needle.

6. Amplify and distribute content

Social media amplification and distribution helps expose people to your high-quality content. When brands regularly produce content that their customers appreciate, those customers are far more likely to share the content with their connections on social platforms. Not only does this help distribute your content, but it also helps with PR and Psychographic Segmentation.

7. Convert and measure success — tie your results to business outcomes

While every piece of content may serve a different purpose, it is vital to have metrics in place to prove the value of your efforts. Make sure that you define and measure multiple touch points to help gain a more holistic picture of how your audience is interacting with the your content and how results show up in the SERPs.

Setting quantitative goals (i.e., traffic, conversion and revenue) and aligning these with key business priorities will round out your content optimization process.

Conclusion

The right SEO insights empower authors to create the right content that matters to the right user. Utilizing search data allows content creators to easily identify what topics matter most to the consumer. This equips them with powerful insights at the time of authoring and subsequently elevates your SERP position and the chances of conversion.

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With “Trips” app, will Google finally deliver a better travel experience?

Roughly two weeks ago Google teased a new “travel assistant” app to its roster of Local Guides (local review writers). The app is reportedly called “Trips” and the following is from an email distributed to the Local Guides mailing list on April 21:

According to a post on TechCrunch, the new app will enable users to record past trips and plan upcoming travel, including flights, hotels, sightseeing and dining. Colorful screenshots (below) originally published on the Dutch site AndroidWorld provide clues about form and functionality. Among them, the app will work offline without a connection.

None of the screens I saw featured Google Maps, which I find interesting. Perhaps where directions are involved, it will send users to the existing Google Maps app. It also appears to include a recommendations feature.

Beyond this, Trips will apparently utilize Google Now’s ability to organize and present travel information from Gmail and Google Calendar. I asked Google about the new app and the company offered the following general statement:

“We love to travel and are hard at work dreaming up new ways to make the travel experience hassle-free. While we do that, sit tight and keep on using our amazing tools like Google Flights, Hotel Search and Destinations on Google to plan your next adventure.”

Google’s various travel search tools to date have been largely unremarkable, with some useful or novel features. But overall, they’ve done little to really compete with established travel brands. The most recent Google travel property is Google Destinations, which appears in search results but offers limited utility.

From everything I’ve seen, the Trips app appears to be a nice mashup of existing Google travel properties and broader search capabilities. Indeed, Google may finally be consolidating all the tools the company developed since it bought travel software company ITA in 2010.

At that time Google’s Eric Schmidt and Marissa Mayer said that the company wanted to create consumer travel products that “solve end user problems” and “look different” from existing tools. Perhaps Trips will finally make good on that promise.

According to the US Travel association spending on leisure travel in the US was worth $651 billion in 2015. So, in addition to the potential value of new consumer travel experiences, there’s a pile of travel marketing dollars chasing that consumer spending.

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60% of local SEOs are outsourcing more tasks in 2016 vs. 2015

Learn from top social media marketing experts at SocialPro this June in Seattle

If you’re looking for advanced social media marketing tactics that the pros are using to drive results, SocialPro is your go-to event. Whether you’re an in-house marketer or work at an agency, you’ll learn earned, owned and paid social media marketing tactics and strategies. See the agenda!

Get one-on-one facetime with these expert practitioners:

This year’s line up will help you tackle some of the toughest challenges you are facing today!

Wondering if Twitter advertising can identify and acquire customers? 

Geoff Colon from Microsoft, Sahil Jain from AdStage and Nate Wright from Twitter reveal the tactics they use to maximize (and measure) results from Promoted Tweets for top-, middle- and bottom-of-the-funnel success.

Desperate to derive meaning from your social data?

Push your limits in social data…you may be quite surprised at what you’ll find out! SpredFast’s Chris Kerns will share his data-driven and research-based insights that make social marketers like you smarter.

Overwhelmed with emerging platform options?

Considering that the half-life period of a Pinterest pin is a thousand times longer than a tweet or Facebook post, this platform should not be ignored. Lorraine Goldberg from Allrecipes, Brittany Mohr from Pinterest, and Matt Siltala from Avalaunch Media dive into optimization and advertising tips to maximize ROI.

Does social attribution leave you confuddled?

One of many challenges facing marketers is tying social activities to business results. Is the “perfect attribution model” a myth? Kiko Correo, Glowforge, Dave Rigotti, Bizible and Michelle Wallace, Tableau Software will put those rumors to rest by providing a practical framework for developing an accurate and credible social attribution model.

See the full lineup of sessions and speakers here.

Don’t miss this opportunity to meet these experts at SocialPro

Secure your seat today and pay the early bird rate of $1,495. You’ll get two days of quality content, networking, and amenities that make SocialPro an exceptional, once-a-year experience.

We look forward to hosting you at SocialPro. Register today!

-The SocialPro Conference Team

P.S. – Here are some useful links:

• Share the experience with colleagues! Teams of 3 or more save big. Learn more.
• Got questions? Check out the FAQ or drop us an e-mail at registration@socialproconf.com.
• Special hotel rates at the Seattle Marriott Waterfront.

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The benefits of creating a purpose-driven SEO strategy

With more than 500 Google algorithm updates made on average each year, how can a site owner build an SEO strategy that stands the test of time?

Defining your site’s purpose and mapping out the objectives you are trying to achieve is the key to not just ranking, but creating an SEO strategy that produces actual business results.

I know this sounds elementary, but SEO is way more that just ranking for keywords. Too many site owners forget this and obsess over rankings. While rankings are important, they only tell us part of the story. Without a clearly defined purpose that states what you are trying to accomplish, how will you know if you are succeeding?

If you took the time to read the Google Search Quality Guidelines released back in November of 2015, the main task search quality evaluators are asked to perform is to figure out the site’s purpose and determine if the site actually met its intended purpose.

While the search quality evaluators don’t have direct control over site rankings, this document can still tell us a lot about how Google is trying to better understand websites and how they impact real users.

Google itself has a very clear purpose, and its former head of web spam, Matt Cutts, stated that purpose as plain as can be back in 2014: “We’re trying to return great search results for users.”

Building a purpose-driven SEO strategy

The first step in building a purpose-driven SEO strategy is to define the site’s purpose. Every other part of the strategy will stem from this purpose.

There are a ton of reasons a website could exist. Here is a list of common page purposes (note that this list is by no means comprehensive):

• To share information about a topic.
• To share personal or social information.
• To express an opinion or point of view.
• To entertain.
• To sell products or services.
• To allow users to post questions for other users to answer.
• To allow users to share files or download software.

When looking at this list, it’s much easier to see that a site’s or page’s purpose can drastically change the focus of its SEO strategy. For sites that have more that one purpose — say, to sell products or services and to share information about a topic — defining the end goal of each part of your site will help point you in the right direction.

So, now that your site’s purpose has been defined, what’s next? There are hundreds of factors at play when it comes to ranking for terms that will drive the right traffic to your site.

As many in the SEO world saw back in March, Google’s Andrey Lipattsev stated in a YouTube Q&A that links, content and RankBrain are the top three ranking signals in Google’s search algorithm. When it comes to RankBrain, there are still a lot of unknowns; however, we can take some very practical actions around content and links.

Purpose-driven content

Content is the reason people visit any website. The purpose of your site will determine the type of content you need to create in order to achieve its purpose. With content being one of the main ranking factors, how well your content connects with your intended audience is key.

A majority of people searching online are asking questions. They are looking for solutions to problems, checking out latest trends, feeling bored and looking to be entertained… the list goes on and on.

When building your content for SEO, you need to think about the questions your intended users are asking and create quality, compelling and thorough answers. Understanding these questions will help give you a better idea of your target audience and the types of keywords they are using to find answers to their questions.

I strongly believe that keyword research needs to be user-focused. Just because a certain term has a lot of traffic, it doesn’t mean it’s relevant.

All keywords must point back to the site’s overall purpose. This will help contextualize your SEO strategy and help ensure that the traffic you do generate actually represents people who want to be on your site and interact with you.

When it comes to keyword research, there are a number of ways you can approach this. Instead of giving you a step-by-step process, I’d rather just share some best practices.

How to select purpose-driven keywords

When selecting purpose-driven keywords, it’s always a good idea to start with your brand. Brand focus keywords are a great way to drive traffic from those who already know a little bit about you and what you do.

After listing out all your brand focus keywords, diving deeper into your own content and the content of your competitors is a great way to find more relevant terms. Using other tools such as Google Trends, checking out profiles of prospective customers on social media channels, and even reading sites like Quora will help give you a better understanding of the types of content people are looking for.

Once you’ve narrowed down the list of relevant, purpose-based keywords, then you can run them through your research tool to determine traffic, competition and so on.

For those of you who do better with lists, here’s a breakdown:

•  Define brand-related terms.
•  Scan your site and competitor sites for other keywords.
•  Look at other sites your target audience uses for additional relevant terms.
•  Narrow down the list and run it through your preferred research tool.

If you’re not sure what keyword research tool to use, check out this comprehensive list here.

Purpose-driven link-building strategy

Backlinks have been and will continue to be an essential part of any SEO strategy. Because of the weight backlinks carry, many have used them to game the system — and as a result, link building has gotten a bad name over the years.

Google has gotten pretty good at identifying and penalizing spammy link-building practices, which has led to SEOs being very cautious and sometimes abandoning link building altogether in favor of content marketing. But, while building and earning links has gotten tougher, it should still be at the core of your search efforts. In order to succeed in search and drive relevant traffic, you must have a targeted, purpose-driven link-building strategy.

When it comes to your link strategy, not all links are created equal. A site’s authority alone shouldn’t dictate the value of that link. It has to make sense within the context of your site’s purpose. Context is key — this is where your link strategy and your content come together.

In order to earn links, you have to have a site that is actually linkworthy. What makes a site linkworthy? Eric Ward (aka Link Moses) explains it brilliantly in his post here, but I’ll give it to you in a nutshell: “Create useful content.”

Now, just creating content alone isn’t going to do the work for you, but when you outreach to relevant sites and look to build relevant links, your content has to be good. As Eric Ward says in his article, “The less useful your content, the less likely you are to ever receive a link to it.”

No matter the purpose of your site, you can create relevant, topic-based content that will encourage links. The reason many fail to reach their desired end goal is that they aren’t  willing to do the hard work.

Once you’ve created the content, promote it to relevant sites and related industries. Purpose-driven link building takes time and patience, but it’s worth it. Remember, it’s not so much the number of backlinks you can earn, but the quality of the links that actually matters.

Find your purpose and work toward it

In an increasingly competitive online world, the sites that build a strong foundation and focus on providing value to their audience are the ones that will stand the test of time.

Defining your site’s purpose and using that as a guide for building your search strategy will not only help you reach your goals, but also delight your customers and make your site more linkworthy.

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Teacher’s Day Google Doodle dedicated to “invaluable civil servants” leading today’s youth

Google has replaced its logo on its U.S. homepage with an animated illustration to mark Teacher’s Day.

“Today’s homepage by artist Nate Swinehart honors the invaluable civil servants all across the United States who’ve dedicated their lives to molding a thoughtful, compassionate generation of citizens,” reads the Google Doodle blog.

The illustration – made up of six pencils fashioned to look like a teacher leading and reading to the five students trailing behind him – leads to a search for “Teacher’s Day” and includes a sharing icon to post the image in social feeds.

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Bing app for iOS brings image-based searching to iPhones

Bing has updated its iPhone app to enable image-based search. The feature allows users to take a picture or use an existing image as the basis of a search. While convenient and potentially useful, it’s a bit hit-and-miss right now.

To access image search, touch the search icon on the home screen, and then the camera icon in the lower right of the following screen (pictured below). A frame around the desired image allows users to expand or narrow the scope of the image being searched. This can make a difference in recognizing the object.

Google introduced a similar capability (“Google Goggles”) in 2009 but shuttered it in 2014. Amazon currently allows users to search for products by image, which can be especially useful because you can then buy them immediately if desired.

In my test of the Bing feature this morning, the accuracy of visual results was mixed. I searched a range of objects in my kitchen: small appliances, books, computers, fruit, knives, shoes. Some items were recognized and some were “misinterpreted.” The mug in the screen shot above is an example of a good result. However, a photo of running shoes that were orange and blue generated pictures of colorful arm tattoos — though when I “reframed” it, Bing found shoes.

I compared the same searches using the Amazon image search feature and found that it did about as well as Bing. It got some things right that Bing did not, and vice versa.

While I would expect this feature to come to Bing for Android, it’s not clear when that might happen. It will also be interesting to see if Google revives image search for mobile at some point.

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