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Four Things You Must Be Willing To Do To Win At SEO

posted on February 11, 2013

SEO-1I’ve worked with a lot of clients during my career as an online marketer. What I’ve found is there are two types of clients, those who are “all in” and those who want to “pass the baton” and believe it or not those clients who are “all in” have a higher percentage of success and ROI than those who just don’t want to deal with it and pass their agency the baton. In today’s post, I want to talk about four things your business must be willing to do to win at SEO.

Every Member of The Organization Is Part of The Marketing Department

This is probably the most important thing that any business can implement to help drive business growth and help with SEO and other marketing initiatives. Gone are the days when the marketing department consists of a few individuals, if you want to win, every member of your company needs to be involved in the following:

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Creating Compelling Content That Generates Links, Shares, and New Business

posted on January 30, 2013

content-magnetToday’s post is the last of a three part series where I’ve covered SERP Analysis and Brainstorming Content Topics. I hope to tie everything together with this final post where I will be discussing content generation. In this post I will be talking about audience identification, buyer personas, content development, and strategically seeding your content for maximum visibility. This is going to be a longer post, so let’s jump in.

Audience Identification

Before you create any piece of content for your organization, you need to be able to answer the following question: Who is this content targeted at? Your answer should be one of two:

  • This content is to attract potential customers and move them into the sales funnel

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Three Stupid Simple Ways To Brainstorm Content Topics

posted on January 8, 2013

In my last post I talked about how to gain crucial insights from SERP analysis. Through proper SERP analysis, you can put together not only an SEO strategy, but content marketing strategy as well. In today’s post I want to talk about three ways of coming up with dozens of ideas to fuel your content strategy. We will start off talking about word association.

Word Association

When putting my content plan together, one of the very first things I like to do is build a big mind map of all the potential topics I can think of. I do this through word association. For those unfamiliar with word association, this was originally a game in which an original word is chosen and each player finds a different word that they associate with the original word. At the end of the game you might have hundreds of words associated with the original word. It is a great way to brainstorm content topics.

When going through this exercise, I start with my primary or head keyword and then branch out from there. As you can see in my example below, I used photography as my main keyword. In five minutes I was able to come up with 28 different topics I could write about.

word-association

This is a very simple, yet powerful way to get your creative juices flowing. If you need a mind mapping software to help you with this exercise, I suggest XMind. It’s free and quite robust. Now let’s talk about the second way to drum up content ideas, internal research.

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How To Gain Crucial Insights From SERP Analysis

posted on December 17, 2012

SEO.com-Named-to-the-Inc.-500-Fastest-Growing-Companies-in-AmericaThis post comes from our Search Marketing Channel sponsor SEO.com.

It was written by SEO.com’s VP of Client Services, Greg Shuey.

A lot of SEOs still believe that setting an SEO strategy is as simple as performing site optimization, maybe adding some content to the site (landing pages or blog posts), and then link building like a mad man. Putting heavy emphasis on link building used to work for SEO because the algorithms would consider external anchor text links as credible sources of tying together content and keywords.

In this post, I’d like to address a component of strategy setting that is often overlooked or completely ignored and can have a massive impact on your ability to rank well in the SERPs (search engine results pages) and drive revenue for your business. We are going to be discussing gaining insight from SERP analysis.