A BrightEdger

M Posted 9 years 7 months ago

t 9 min read

The start of January is when most people make their New Year’s resolutions: commitments to drop bad habits and make improvements to their lives. While resolutions are often made with the best of intentions, it is common for people to abandon these newly minted vows within a few months. The swell of gym goers during the months of January and February – followed by a noticeable decrease in the months that follow – is a testament to this.

In order to achieve the goals that you set, it is critical to create a plan, including the incremental steps required to make progress. Identifying finite and achievable goals, creating a series of action points, and then maintaining a cadence are the keys towards accomplishing New Year’s resolutions.

If improving content performance via SEO is your New Year’s resolution, then the same strategies ring true. Ensuring that your content is primed to show up in search requires a structured plan and discipline in follow through. Here are some best practices for achieving New Year’s resolutions as well as how BrightEdge can help you achieve organic success in 2017.

1) Reflect on your journey to the present

Most people don’t just wake up one day and make a decision to change their life. While the decision itself may occur in the moment, it is usually prefaced by reflecting on the past to determine how they arrived at their present state. These realizations serve as the starting point to formulating a target list of improvements.

The same is true for SEO.

It is important to assess content performance over time and to identify when algorithm updates or site changes have had an impact. Using BrightEdge Data Cube, you can research trends and patterns in your site performance. Similarly, you can research competitor sites for benchmarking. Data Cube is the industry's largest content repository, allowing you to research keyword and performance trends instantly and comprehensively.

2) Set your goals

It stands to reason that you’ll never hit your goals if you don’t identify – down to key metrics – what you want to accomplish. It is important to set explicit, measurable and achievable goals. For example: instead of just saying, “I want to lose weight” or “I want to look like this supermodel,” better weight loss goals would be, “I want to lose 10 pounds” or “I want to fit into my pre-baby jeans.”

The same is true for SEO

As a digital marketer, you know the targets that you need to hit. Whether it’s purely SEO goals, such as better ranking on your highest converting pages, or improvement in business metrics, such as revenue or market share, it’s important to clearly identify these goals in order to start building out your strategies. A couple of easy places to start:

• Focus on low hanging fruit. Using the filters in Data Cube, you can identify the topics where your content is just below the best real estate on search results pages (ranking in positions 5 through 20, for example). By identifying the topics that are within striking distance of success, you hone in on a more targeted list to plan out your optimizations.

• Beat your competitors at their own game. Conduct competitive analysis using Site Comparison in Data Cube to see your site performance side-by-side with the competitors of your choice. Then perform a Keyword Gap Analysis to identify content strategies that are working for your competitors and set goals to create or optimize content on these topics to capture those audiences.
• Follow the money. Use BrightEdge Opportunity Forecasting to determine which site improvements are forecasted to yield the highest revenue gains. Then, make a business case for prioritizing SEO efforts according to business impact.

3) Get tips and tricks

In the effort to achieve their resolutions, people seek out tips and advice at higher levels at the start of the New Year. For example, searches on “diet tips” consistently increase 2x between the last week of December and the first week of January. Using expert advice and battle-tested tips can help you successfully hit your goals.

The same is true for SEO

You don’t have to “reinvent the wheel” when it comes to identifying and prioritizing site optimizations. Using Recommendations, either at the keyword or the page level, you can access lists of suggested improvements generated by DataMind, our proprietary deep learning engine. Recommendations quickly point you in the direction of high priority site updates, within a workflow that allows you assign tasks to team members for fast resolution.

4) Have others hold you accountable

A critical step in hitting goals is to have others hold you accountable. When you are on the cusp of slipping or take a misstep in your journey, your support system is there to help you get back on track to hitting your targets.

The same is true for SEO

With the rapid change occurring in the search landscape, such as algorithm updates and changes in search behavior, SEO is a constant effort. You can get “tripped up” without even knowing it. Anomaly Detection allows you to create proactive alerts that tell you when unexpected changes have impacted your site performance. Set alerts from a curated selection of essential business questions or create customized alerts freeform. This active monitoring system gives you peace of mind by sending you notifications when anything out of the ordinary occurs.

5) Celebrate your victories

When you have hit a milestone or fully completed a goal, you want to share it with the world! Whether via social media or direct communications, you’ve earned the right to let people know what you have achieved and how proud you are of your accomplishment.

The same is true for SEO

Demonstrate the impact of SEO by creating StoryBuilder charts and dashboards and sharing them with stakeholders. Select from a series of prebuilt templates, each answering a critical business question, or create a customized dashboard according to the unique story that you are aiming to tell. You can also elect to have StoryBuilder dashboards automatically sent to members of your team, to keep everyone apprised of the progress you are making together.

For help reaching your SEO and content performance goals in 2017, please reach out to us. The BrightEdge team has the strategies and technology to help your content excel in the New Year.

jcollins

M Posted 9 years 8 months ago

t 9 min read

Leverage these Benefits of Content Marketing to Drive Growth

Believe it or not, content marketing has been around since 1732 when Benjamin Franklin published the Poor Richard's Almanack in order to promote his printing business. While the times have changed and the printing business is much more digital, the fact remains, there continues to be many benefits of content marketing. Surprisingly, many marketers have not implemented a clear content marketing strategy and some even resist this as just a fad.

After 284 years of leveraging the benefits of content marketing it is safe to say content marketing is here to stay. In fact, according to Hubspot, 39% of today's marketing budgets are spent on content marketing, which produces 27 million pieces of content every day. If you already take a sophisticated approach to content marketing you probably have an effective performance strategy, but here are 5 benefits of content marketing that you might not have considered yet:

1. Content marketing can turn customers and prospects into advocates

Engaged customers and prospects are more likely to become active brand loyalists. If you can connect the dots between content and the business impact for your customers and prospects, you have a winning formula. Think about how you found this blog post.  Were you looking for the "benefits of content marketing"? Are you trying to implement a more effective content marketing strategy? Maybe you are just getting started in your content marketing plan and are looking for ideas. When content consumers find value there is a good chance they will post/share on their social networks or email it to a co-worker. It may seem like a small gesture, but this type of endorsement will help to grow your base of brand advocates. Watch how some of our customer advocates are leveraging the value of the BrightEdge platform to capitalize on content strategies that make a positive business impact:

2. Content marketing can connect the dots between marketing and sales

Sales and Marketing alignment can sometimes feel as hard as aligning Republicans and Democrats, but it doesn't have to be this way. In many organizations Marketing is responsible for generating leads and Sales is responsible for closing deals. The implication of this mindset on your content strategy is that your content ends up producing the dreaded "low-quality lead". We are all in an evolved business environment where a Smarketing (Sales + Marketing) approach helps support the buyer throughout the buyer's journey. One effective way to align your content strategy with the buyer's journey is to work with your sales and customer success teams to determine the different stages of the buyer's journey and the personas that influence each stage. Once you have collaborated and agreed on the stages you can start developing the content that relates to each stage of the journey. Now, instead of hearing about "low quality leads" you can start discussing how to convert the prospects through a seamless path from prospect --> opportunity --> customer --> upsell and renewals --> references. Once you have valuable content for each stage you can start mapping the content throughout the sales process. This will not only help your sales team sell more efficiently without having to painstakingly search for relevant content, but it will ensure your marketing message is aligned to the needs of the customer. If you're looking for a more prescriptive guide to how to establish this connection, make sure to read our white paper on how to Execute an Integrated Campaign Successfully.

3. Content marketing builds on your core vision and drives a productive working culture

Your content is a reflection of how your company positions itself within the market. The employees are the driver of this position - in short, they are the ones to get stuff done. If your content is aligned to the corporate messaging and the corporate messaging is aligned to the efforts of your employees, it becomes difficult to be disjointed. Additionally, whether you realize it or not, your future employees are reviewing your content and making an informed decision about whether they want to dedicate their time to your company.

4. Content marketing can be leveraged to build your own personal brand and professional portfolio

You may have heard the term "Thought Leadership" and wondered how you can position your unique perspective into becoming an established thought leader. Think about your perspective as the engine and content marketing as the car. If you have an engine without a car you aren't going to go very far. You need the engine (your perspectives) to power your car (content) in order to drive your company and personal brand forward. Taking this approach will not only help you in real-time to generate results, but it will expand your networking reach. When you combine the performance of the results with a connected network it is easy to see how your own personal career interests quickly becomes one of the default benefits of content marketing. See how the DataCube can help understand the demand and performance of your content. This is a great way to test the market demand for the type of thought leadership you are looking to provide.

5. Content marketing is cheaper than traditional marketing channels

SEO and content marketing go hand-in-hand. In order to generate significant organic traffic you will need effective content that is optimized to find your buyer. It is important to understand that content marketing is not a quick fix. It is going to take time and a strong commitment to all the benefits of content marketing and creating SEO reports. One piece of killer content is not going to be the game changer, but if you can find the striking distance keywords and develop relevant content you will be in a much better position on ROI then if you exclusively deployed an SEM strategy. It may be tempting to get the quick fix of a windfall of paid media, but once your program is over, the leads are over. Alternatively, your optimized content establishes content equity that will continue to compound to drive business results. Check out your opportunities in organic with this free Search ROI Opportunity calculator. There are many more benefits to content marketing, and at times it may feel overwhelming. However, the benefits are increasingly obvious. If your interest is piqued, check out this webinar to get some helpful tips on how to balance this strategy and make a positive business impact.