What does video content mean?

Video content is a source of traffic that many brands and businesses are utilizing rather than text content to attract users to websites. There are several ways you can use video and video SEO to engage your audience including creating videos to show tips, to get people excited about upcoming events or new products, to give consumers a look at your business and help them feel more connected. You can also use video to provide content concentrated on how-tos, best practices, to help develop your brand as a thought leader, and more that's not completely on brand. This will help drive consumers to trust you and feel like you're not consistently trying to sell them on your products.

How effective are videos?

The growth of video content has been enormous. Some estimates say that in 2020 about 80 percent of online traffic will be used for consuming video content. There is a growing appreciation of video content format and this form of visual marketing is also now preferred over text by an estimated 59 percent of senior executives. Brands that want to remain relevant will need to dive into video creation to develop the type of content that customers are demanding.

Why is video so important in marketing?

Marketers often focus their video content marketing efforts on YouTube, where successful videos can go viral and help draw major attention to the brand. However, there is also considerable benefit to offering a number of different videos right on your website. These videos will help to enhance the personal connection between the viewer and the brand. By providing powerful imagery, video content provides readers with an easy means of connecting with the brand and seeing how a particular product or service might help their lives.

How do I know which videos to post on my site?

The videos that should be posted on your website are often those that are more oriented towards your brand and late-funnel visitors. For example, online product demonstrations can be a great way to help potential customers feel as though they are almost touching your item. Seeing this firsthand can boost their confidence in your product’s performance and its ability to serve their needs. Video interviews with organizational leaders and customer testimonials can also be great options for posting on your website.

Videos are a wonderful way to improve your website by adding more variety to your content and making your material more appealing to a greater audience. Understanding how videos work for you can help you create an effective strategy and elevate the performance of your site.

Discover more video SEO best practices and get started with BrightEdge today!

Are you being noticed in the overcrowded digital marketplace? Dumping heaps of money into advertising will not grow a loyal audience. Enter the world of content marketing. The curtain lifts and your company story begins.

What is Content Marketing, Exactly?

Content marketing is the creation and dissemination of branded digital content (online material). It differs from public relations and sales in that it does not overtly promote the brand or its products. Yet, content plays an increasingly expanded role in courting the digital consumer. Content marketing aims to identify, speak to, and stimulate the interests of target audiences. Rather than focus on products, it focuses content around consumer desires and identity. Branded content is created around clear guidelines that communicate a company’s character. Companies with clear and consistent brand mission, values, and identity are better trusted by consumers. Content-rich websites increase traffic. They provide material customized to online searches and targeted audiences.  Content marketing best practices include evaluating keywords, trending searches, and user behavior. This increases the customer base and generates marketing leads. Ultimately, this contributes to brand recognition and trust. That, in turn, leads to increased sales and a bevy of other benefits.

What is Content?

Content includes visual and written text and multimedia. (All of which can be optimized independently and in relation to each other.) It is not just blog posts and newsletters. Content includes everything —Instagram, photos, Tweets, white papers, advertising copy, UI text, Facebook statuses, briefs, user generated content, et cetera. It also includes live or scripted video content marketing or awareness infographics.

More importantly:

• Content is a single piece of content; or, more broadly
• Content is how discrete content and/or text comes together to tell a story about your brand, product, and the customer.

Branded content is a little misleading, since all copy reflects the company.

What is story?

Content is the sum of every visual and written textual message that goes out. Content creates your story. But what does story mean? Story is the digital landscape all your messaging creates. People navigate in that space, hoping for adventure and discovery. This is the customer journey. Plainly, the brand is no longer an entity. It’s a total environment where the digital consumer is the hero.

The consumer can choose any digital landscape they picture themselves in (and there are lots). The proliferation of rich visual landscapes, rising prominence of UX, and high bounce rates prove the user’s primacy. Within the first few seconds, your content must answer, “How is this relevant to me, the viewer?” Today it is about the user journey through your world. Hopefully, that is towards your CTAs. It is not enough to have a good product. This is how SEO and content marketing can help. SEO helps you grab attention and divert traffic. Quality content keeps that traffic moving through your domain.

So, stop brandishing your logo. Cast the spotlight on your visitors. How do you make your story part of their journey? First, you have to know your audience. Second, your story and product need to be central to their needs. Content is the way you reach audiences and build consumer trust. It is how those individual chapters scattered across platforms and pieces coalesce into a known brand with strong appeal.

Customer Journey in Storied Content

Since the customer is your hero, here are content must-haves:

• Setting (Brand) – Identifies the context of the story
• Characters (Consumers) – Locates the hero within the context
• Mission (Identity) – Is the wants, needs and values that motivate the hero’s journey
• Obstacles (Disincentives) – Understands the obstacles
• Outcome (Value offered) – Creates meaningful ends for the customer

Your content should be able to integrate all five of these categories.

Content must understand and communicate its identity and purpose. (Remember: your brand is the setting!) That setting should compel a target audience. It should appeal to audience desires. Understand the obstacles. And, openly promise to fulfil user needs.

Since the customer journey guides user behavior, it bears on multiple departments. Content is increasingly a cross-functional area. Companies are restructuring around digital spaces. Content runs through an growing number of overlapping organizational teams. Because, how do you get noticed in a crowded digital marketplace? There are over 3 billion internet users. 60% of time on mobile devices is spent on social media. The fact is: we live digitally. Outcomes depend on attracting and keeping audience attention. Integrated marketing leverages content to carry marketing messaging to captivated audiences. And loyal audiences journey towards marketing outcomes.

Integrated Marketing. Where Does Content Come In?

Siloed approaches to marketing are gone with the 20th century and VHS. Integrated marketing campaigns unify the various marketing communications’ expressions and strategies to ensure:

• Messaging is consistent across channels
• Story is centered around the customer’s need for information
• Outcomes are clear, reliable, and build continued engagement

At the heart of integrated marketing, is content. Content guides the customer journey. It is the total environment that carries and connects advertising, PR, sales, and social media across various media channels and activities. Although content marketing is a more nebulous, watching for corollary growth and revenue as content increases can show dramatic increase in consumer attention.

Content writers can also be incorporated into traditional copywriting and messaging roles. This will help extend brand impact by infusing voice and value at all touchpoints. A brilliant content writer will wield persuasive, subtle rhetoric that goes far deeper than syntax. They should be able to apply conceptual (meaning structures) and lexical (relations between words) semantics to messaging. These root connections between your audience and your brand more deeply. It’s not just what you say. It’s how you say it.  

The Benefits of Content Marketing

Content marketing is distinct from advertising campaigns in that it plays a long game. Its goal is not a specific revenue boost for a product. Your SEO tools provides invaluable insight into what users want. From those keywords and searches, providing quality content will capture the ongoing attention of increased traffic. Content marketing:

• Increases brand visibility and positions brand as a dependable authority.
• Generates more inbound traffic by catering to target audience interests and improves lead generation.
• Content rich websites make visitors more likely to purchase products by keeping them within site. Strategically create links that continue or augment the visitor’s journey.
• Audience-oriented content increases engagement, sharing, and return visits and opens communication with audience and proxy audiences
• Improves brand recognition and deepens familiarity with brand identity (values, mission, and purpose) for a lasting consumer base consumer trust and identification
• Ensures brand and content consistency across platforms, products, departments, and campaigns
• Soft touch points avoid expensive and off-putting hard pitches
• Grows exponentially, providing the framework for organic growth

The first step in creating effective video content is knowing what your audience wants to see. Performing keyword research, using the BrightEdge Data Cube, will help you find topics that are the most commonly searched for by your targeted audience. Data Cube will also tell you if the keywords in question serve effective video content on the SERP, which will make it clear which topics are highly relevant for video.

Follow these tips to ensure that your video captures your audience’s attention and ensure that they watch it from beginning to end:

• Create an engaging and helpful video script. People are not looking for a commercial or sales pitch; they want to be entertained or informed.
• Choose appealing customers, employees, or actors to be in the video. People need to be interested in your video to watch it all the way through, so select subjects that will be able to hold their attention and articulately share a compelling story.
• Create a high-quality video. Videos that are shot with poor lighting or low grade cameras, for example, tend to be distracting and can even detract from your brand’s reputation.

Once you have uploaded your new content, make sure you optimize it. This includes adding tags and descriptions that will help it stand out from the rest while also being clear about the content topics you cover. You will also need to distribute and promote your video as much as possible by linking to the video from your social media platforms, emails and website.

What makes a video good?

There are three factors that can help create an effective video.

• Create an engaging video script
• Choose appealing customers, employees, or actors to be in the video
• Create a high-quality video using professional equipment

Why is a video so effective in marketing?

Videos are becoming an increasingly popular means of communicating with visitors. An estimated 59 percent of senior executives prefer videos over text content. And 82 percent of businesses say that videos have had a positive impact on their success. With customers finding value in accessing video content in their online journey, brands are responding by creating interesting and informative clips, to more effectively engage with a greater percentage of their target population.

What role do videos play in establishing relationships with prospective customers?

Effective videos can be a helpful means of building relationships with target customers. Site owners are encouraged to include images with their content because it helps to establish a more personal connection. Videos take this benefit to the next level. Now, instead of just viewing static images of people from your organization or your products, viewers can hear you speak, listen to other customers describing your service, or see your products in action. This will help you to build a more personal relationship with the prospects and thus encourage greater trust and loyalty, boosting your site success.

Creating an effective video can be a major asset for your website. Understanding what makes a video effective can help you develop content that excels.

Discover the best ways to optimize your video content with the SEO platform industry leader, BrightEdge!

Keywords are words or phrases that help search engines identify the topics that your content covers. Algorithms have sophisticated systems for analyzing the keywords that users employ in their queries as well as the terms that are used throughout a given piece of content. This helps them match the user with the content that will best answer their needs.

Why is keyword research important?

Before semantic search, keywords were the primary means of communicating to search engines the topics you were covering. Generally, the more often you used the keyword the more relevant your content appeared. Unfortunately, this led to practices, such as keyword stuffing that were designed to trick the search engine and ended up hurting the user experience.

Google has introduced various updates over the past few years that were designed to better understand the concepts within the query and website. This has resulted in a shift in the importance of keyword usage.

This does not mean that keywords are obsolete. They are still used by the search engines to discern the topics that are being covered, but they are looked at as a part of a larger picture. Instead of pulling out keywords, the search engines look at how various topics are related to better understand the content that your material covers and how it relates to various queries. They are thus able to return more relevant and applicable search results for users, enhancing the user experience.

How do I perform keyword research?

Since you know that Google is not looking to match a string of data in a query with a string of data in a particular article, you do not need to stress about including certain keywords a minimum number of times in your piece while creating your keyword planner. Instead, you should use a keyword research tool to familiarize yourself with the topics that seem to have the most importance for your target audience. Leverage BrightEdge Instant to perform extensive keyword research for your brand.

Once you have identified the topics, you can make enhancements within your content in order to show relevance to the search engine and to the user scanning the results on the SERPs. You should use your keyword in the title, H2 headings, the meta description, and occasionally throughout the content, provided it is natural in all of these instances. You should also look into including semantically similar keywords. An example of semantically similar keywords would be the phrases ‘laptop repair’ and ‘fix a broken laptop.’ This will help Google’s new semantic algorithm see your content as more related to the topic at hand.

Keywords are not obsolete in modern SEO, but the best practices have changed. The cornerstone of successful keyword usage is to keep the focus on adding value and being helpful and natural, while creating content around topics that you know interest your intended readers.

What is a workflow process?

A workflow process for your content takes a piece of content from its earliest inception to its publication. This includes all the people who contributed to the development of the piece, its editing, and the final version.

How do I set up a workflow process?

When a workflow process is efficient, it will help an organization to complete numerous pieces of high-quality content on a regular basis and experience fewer obstacles that could slow down the process. An efficient workflow is often a sign of digital marketing maturity. By creating and implementing a successful workflow, you're able to prove your team is aligned and your content is progressive. Here are a few key characteristics of a quality workflow process:

• The content production team stretches across specialty lines so that everyone from PR to customer services has the opportunity to submit ideas for content. Avoid silos as they only distance and separate team members from one another.
• Everyone involved in the content production process can easily see how a piece of content is progressing and who it will be going to next.
• It is easy for everyone on the content production team to find and review the latest version of the piece of content.
• Everyone on the team has a uniform idea about the job the content will perform and the style and tone it will have when it goes to publication. The team members must all be synced up at this point in case any of them need to make changes to the content.

How do you improve your own workflow process?

Improving your workflow requires analysis of your process current state and the reduction of repetitive steps to increase efficiency.

First, review your current workflow. You should detail every step in the creation of a piece of content, even steps that may seem insignificant, so that you get an accurate overview. For example, if the editor emails the writer with a question about the third paragraph, you should still include this point in the list.

Examine this overview and look for areas that are very repetitive or otherwise slow down the process. For example, if you are emailing copies of the article to multiple different people, it is likely that everyone involved has several copies of the material downloaded on their computers. This can lead to difficulties with version control and duplicative efforts when editing the document.

When you have identified points in the process that could be improved, devise solutions that address these inefficiencies. For example, if emailing the document is causing multiple versions to exist, consider adopting a cloud-based system, such as Google Docs. This will allow the document to be stored in a single location and everyone can edit and make notes on the same version, which makes it easier to follow the suggestions.

Finally, maintain strong communications between all team members. Create a common editorial calendar that lets everyone review the projects and their status.

Can you make money with webinars?

Webinars offer a range of benefits for brands. To begin, they are a fantastic means of establishing trust with your target audience. You will be casting yourself as the authority and acting as a helpful resource for others when you create a webinar.

Live webinars also allow you to interact personally with prospective customers. Your attendees will have the opportunity to hear you speak on topics that matter to them. Offering a question and answer (Q&A) section is a great way to get to know the questions and concerns of your target customers while establishing your authority in providing answers to these questions.

Effective webinars can also support other parts of your marketing strategy. You can use the registrant list to help grow your email lists so that you can continue to engage with prospects. After you create a webinar, it can be recorded and offered as gated content after the session and continue to bring in more prospects and leads. You can use your CTA at the end of your webinar to offer your products in order to profit off of a webinar.

How do I decide what topics to cover?

When you decide to create a webinar, the right topic is crucial for having an effective one. It will help you attract registrants and keep everyone engaged throughout the webinar. The key to understanding the topics that will interest people is researching the latest trends in your industry, including what other industry leaders are covering. This does not necessarily mean the topics that others are covering in webinars; if you repeat what everyone else is saying, you will not have an effective webinar. Instead, you want to find the topics that are attracting attention in articles, blogs, movies, and other formats that would also translate well to a strong webinar.

Use organic search research, such as through the BrightEdge Data Cube, to better understand the topics that people are searching for the most. This will help you find the topics to create a webinar on that will attract audiences to your webinars. Consider the buyer’s journeys of your target customers and their pain points. This will help you understand what customers would like to read about that will help encourage them to progress through to conversion.

How do I develop an effective webinar?

To create a webinar that is effective, you will need three main parts:

• A strong draw that attracts people to register and attend
• A quality presentation that leaves people feeling encouraged and enthusiastic about you and your brand
• A strong follow up that encourages people to access recordings from the webinar or decks from your presentation as gated content

How does a webinar work?

1. Creating a strong draw

• Begin by creating an engaging and search-friendly headline.
• Advertise your webinar throughout your distribution network. Creating preview videos, blog posts that describe what participants will learn, promotional announcements on newsletters and emails, and even using some paid search can all attract traffic to your webinar.
• Create an appealing offer for those who attend the webinar, such as a 10 minute consultation or a new download, such as an infographic or white paper.

2. Assembling a quality presentation

• Use an experienced presenter who knows how to deliver information in a friendly yet authoritative manner.
• Do not fill up your presentation deck with too much text or dry bullet points. Instead, keep the text minimal and use engaging images.
• Remember that people are more likely to recall feelings than numbers - so do not just read off lists of statistics. Instead, incorporate the data into a greater story that connects with the users.

3. Ensuring a strong follow-up

• Create articles and blog posts after the webinar, articulating the most important information that was shared and some of the best questions you received. Include a link to the gated webinar content.
• Promote the recording and gated content on social media and your website.
• Webinars can be great tools for boosting brand reach and reputation. Keeping these guidelines in mind will help guide you towards success.

Create other optimized content that engages your customers and offers the opportunity to rank higher in the SERPs!

Why should I do content marketing?

At BrightEdge, we’ve seen content marketing and SEO work for thousands of high-growth businesses. Developing quality search optimized content helps improve email, social, newsletters, paid advertising and, of course, organic search. However creating good content that’s optimized for customers is not easy. 

Despite the proven success of correctly optimized content and SEO, some businesses are still on the fence about content marketing. Some of our clients even say “no” or "not now" to both the BrightEdge Content platform and to the additional help from experienced strategists, writers, and SEO advisors we provide. We don’t take it personally. They didn’t reject us. Instead, they rejected content promotion as a strategy and becoming one of the content companies in the industry. 

We’ve used these rejections and excuses to refine our product and our process to build a bullet-proof plan of action for jump-starting marketing programs. Here’s how we’re addressing our leery clients’ concerns.

Excuse: There’s no explicit ROI for content marketing

Response: There are plenty of ways to measure content marketing ROI. We’ve seen our clients consistently double their organic traffic when they focus on building out quality content. True, it’s not always easy to attribute every visit or conversion to a specific piece of content, but there is plenty of evidence that this works, especially with the right goal measurement and attribution model. Beyond traffic, industry-wide, website conversion rate is nearly 6x higher for companies adopting content promotion than companies that don’t.

The Net: Content marketing more than earns its keep, and BrightEdge Content reporting can help you measure your actual ROI. 

Excuse: I'm no writer

Response: Majoring in journalism is not a prerequisite for creating effective content. Consider outsourcing your ideas to your team or to freelance writers, dictating your content, curating and commenting on articles about your industry, or asking guests to blog for you. Outsourcing content makes sense early on to quickly get to a critical mass number of pages as you start to flex your own content creation muscle. Content also comes in more forms than blog posts and emails: videos, podcasts, and infographics are increasingly popular mediums for delivering relevant information to searchers. 

The Net: You might be surprised how many quality writers you already have in your organization if you just start asking, but use outsourced professionals if necessary to give you that early momentum. 

Excuse: There’s no place for content marketing in my marketing plan

Response: Content marketing doesn’t operate as its own independent channel. Instead, content is most effective when incorporated into your entire marketing strategy. For organic search discovery, search algorithms adapt to user behavior; user-focused content translates to better rankings. Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms also require landing pages to drive traffic to. Quality content pages can help deepen your social media followers’ connections. Even PPC campaigns see the benefits of content marketing and from optimized content: the content presented to users who click through on AdWords should match search intent. Content is also essential after acquiring qualified leads. And using email marketing to drive traffic to blog posts or other on-site content improves your customer acquisition efforts. 

The Net: Content marketing will complement and amplify your SEO, social, PPC, and email campaigns.

Excuse: I can’t compete with the big guys for keywords

Response: You don’t have to compete with global corporations for keywords. Small businesses, for instance, have distinct advantages over large companies, including the opportunity to focus even more narrowly on their specific customers. Cater your content strategy with the long-tail keywords addressing the needs and queries of your audience. Get out in front of the so-called “domain authorities” with niche content driven by keywords that will resonate and rise above them. 

The Net: A content strategy focused on long-tail keywords and niche content will allow you to optimize for the organic search of a high-value audience. Let the specific needs of your target customers inform your content strategy. 

Excuse: My customers aren’t online/too few/prefer face-to-face 

Response: B2B companies underestimate the ubiquity of connected devices and how much research is done via online searches. The average B2B buyer completes 57% of their purchase decision before engaging a sales rep—and that was 5 years ago. That said, most B2B marketers do understand the importance of smart content: 89% of B2B marketers are already using content promotion. 

The Net: Quality content creates quality traffic which creates higher conversion yields. 

Excuse: SEO and Content Marketing take too long to generate results

Response: Don’t assume your content needs to sit for months or years to prove its value. Yes, content marketing is a long-term strategy, but you can still achieve quick wins—bumps in traffic, better search rankings, additional revenue—with a few smart moves. We advise clients to publish 50+ pieces of optimized content, cross-link with internal pages, and adjust paid search campaigns to align with published content. Even the traffic to content from a daily Tweet or LinkedIn post can add up quickly.

The Net: Well optimized content can show results within weeks.

Excuse: Nobody likes “keyword-stuffed” content

Response: There is a distinct and important difference between smart, optimized content and webpages loaded with keywords intended to manipulate search ranking. SEO content is essentially user-optimized content focused on useful information with keywords used appropriately and in context. Keyword stuffing results in a poor user experience—and Google knows it. The Google search algorithm updates to penalize pages produced in a way that is not valuable for the user. 

The Net: BrightEdge Content is a smart content marketing platform, enabling engaging, information-rich, and useful content. We’ve helped clients rank #1 in search for their targeted keywords, and not by keyword stuffing.

Discover SEO best practices that can help guide you through creating content for your content marketing strategies!

What is multi-channel marketing?

Multi-channel marketing is a strategy to allow your customers to buy your products in a variety of ways whether in store, online, through magazines, main in orders, orders over the phone, and more.

Customers today are largely channel agnostic. This means that they are ready to interact with brands on whatever devices or platforms they happen to be using at that time. They may check emails on mobile, shop on desktop, and redeem social media coupons in stores. They want to access brands across a diversity of channels and the brands that are unavailable to fulfill these spontaneous needs will be overlooked. Integrated marketing is quickly becoming an important part of any marketing strategy.

Build Omni-Channel Marketing Campaigns

Why is multi-channel marketing important?

In a multi-channel marketing environment for retail, brands need to create a consistent voice for the various platforms where customers expect them to be. Brands also need to develop content creation strategies that span multiple channels, forming uniform goals and processes across all aspects of the different marketing specialties.

Your content creation process needs to align with your earned, paid, and owned channels. The content development professionals need to work together with the different types of marketing specialists to learn how to best target customers on the different channels and how to create a uniform goal and strategy that will encompass them all.

What is a multi-channel strategy?

For an integrated marketing program to be successful, the silos that had previously separated different types of marketing can no longer exist. Follow these tips to create success and alignment throughout your marketing campaigns:

• Break down the walls that separate the different team members. Hold trainings and meetings where the different groups will meet and get to know each other's strategies and processes.
• Offer trainings where people can get to know the basics of other specialties within marketing.
• Create a joint understanding of the voice and tone that will be used when creating content for customers or speaking with them directly.
• Form joint projects where you create goals and messages that will be the same across the different types of marketing.
• Promote the content across the different platforms.
• Measure your results. Look at how individual campaigns have impacted goals such as brand lift and revenue.

Customers today are active on a variety of different channels and brands need to be ready to meet them where they are to encourage them to move towards conversion. This means creating content as a team and reaching over to other specialties, developing solidarity as a team and a uniform voice for interactions with customers.

Is a blog good for SEO?

Blogs are great for SEO because search engines like to display sites that show active involvement through regular updates. Writing a blog will help you incorporate a variety of different types of information about your industry into the content, will which boost your domain authority and the placement of your website on SERPs.

Regular blogging also helps you engage with the wider community and build rapport with your intended audience. Blogging allows you to explain your opinions and demonstrate your expertise on a regular basis. Fresh content will help keep readers interested so they continue to build a relationship with your brand.

How often should you write a blog post?

The frequency of your blog posts will depend upon a few different factors. You will need to think about:

• Your industry
• Your traffic patterns
• How often you can write

1. Your industry. Your industry and how often your customers expect news and information. For example, the blog on a gossip or news site will need to be updated multiple times per day to remain current, while a lifestyle blog will likely only need updates once or twice a week.
2. Your traffic patterns. The traffic patterns of your blog. If your site is seasonal, such as a retail company that specializes in holiday gifts, you might post at least every day during the height of the season, but taper off to once or twice a week in the off season.
3. How often you can write. The frequency with which you should reasonably be able to write on your blog. Do not be overly ambitious so that you start out strong but end up losing focus. Instead, try to be realistic about your schedule and come up with a frequency you can maintain.

When it comes to establishing the frequency and cadence for updating your blog, the more often you can publish valuable information, the better. However, consistency is far more important than publishing every day. If you cannot stick to a daily schedule, it is better to create a frequency of two to three times per week that you can maintain. This also helps set expectations for your readers so that they know when they can expect new content and will make repeat visits to your blog.

How do I promote my blog?

Once you have your target schedule, you want to focus on building an editorial calendar around the topics that would most likely interest your readers. Create an outline of your ideal buyer personas and then map these personas to their buyer journey. You want to understand where your targeted customers are in their path towards conversion and understand what they need to see to encourage them to make that choice. Use keyword research and the BrightEdge Data Cube to uncover topics that your target audiences want to see.

As you begin to develop content, remember that the majority of the people who are referred to your website from a search engine are at the top of the sales funnel. While it can be tempting to produce content that focuses on your brand, this type of material will be less appealing to this group and may lead to drop-off. Instead, focus your content on interesting and informative material that will entice this audience to seek out more information about your company and products.

Blogging can be a valuable resource to attract new customers to your site and build relationships with them. A successful blog is built on sharing high-quality content on a regular cadence that revolves around the needs of the users. Don't forget to post links to your post on your social media profiles!

What is internal linking?

Internal linking is a way to connect one part of your content to another. They make it easy for site visitors and search engine bots to move around your site and find other areas that offer information about related topics. By improving navigation, you help users discover deeper levels of insight you offer on a particular topic.

Why is internal linking important?

Using internal linking benefits both your users as well as search engines. For your users, the links will make it easier for people to explore your topic and see what you have to offer on a particular subject. If they are reading an article about a particular topic and want to learn more, they can click on your links and find the information they seek. Your links will help you keep people on your website and engaged with your brand, which helps you continue to build a relationship with your prospects. By keeping your audience tuned into your website, you will be able to see an increase in how much time is spent on your site. When you practice internal linking, you guide your readers from one page to the next, all through your website. You can introduce a true sense of expertise when you provide informative content from page to page. 

Internal links will also provide search engines with more information about the depth of your insights and what you have to offer customers. Internal links help the algorithms find other information you have to offer on a particular subject so they are able to link the various pieces together and grasp the value of the user experience you offer visitors.

Since your links will also help you improve site engagement, they should also have a positive impact on your SERP placements.

How do you create an internal link?

Internal links are a valuable way to build your content and reputation. Those interested in taking advantage of this SEO technique should keep these guidelines in mind:

• Do not just link for the sake of internal linking. Your internal links should be placed because they have value to offer your readers and will help them learn something more about the topic at hand.
• Make sure that all your links on a particular article, both internal and outbound links, automatically open in a new tab. This improves the user experience because people are able to click on the link to read later without disrupting the piece that they are currently exploring.
• Link from informational pages to important landing pages for that particular topic. If you have a landing page that offers a white paper download about Quick Answers, for example, you want to make sure that your articles that discuss Quick Answers offer visitors a link to download this paper.
• Use links so they seem natural. Just as you do not want to artificially stuff content with keywords, you also do not want to add links in ways that seem forced.