Content Marketing Archives - Power Digital Marketing

10 Best SEO Companies

Power Digital — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 01:02:49 +0000

In today’s bustling digital marketplace, a brand’s online presence is every bit as important as its physical one, if not more so. Whenever a potential consumer searches for a company’s specific type of product or service, or information relating to it, the ultimate goal is to be the first result that pops up on Google.

But how do brands achieve this coveted spot?

With search engine optimization, or SEO, of course. If a business is the proverbial needle in the internet’s haystack, search engine optimization could be the magnet that pulls it to the surface.

However, effective SEO takes time and effort. The best SEO services require a deep understanding of algorithms, keyword strategies, audience behavior, content production, and competitive landscapes, combined with a constant fine-tuning of the invisible strings that impact a website’s ranking.

The sheer enormity of the task is why many brands and small business operations turn to SEO companies to champion their digital initiatives with their expert SEO service and SEO strategy. But in a crowded marketplace, choosing the right digital marketing agency is a challenge, to say the least. To that end, brands should take the time to look into the best SEO companies before making a decision.

#1 Power Digital

Specialty: SEO, PR, Social Media, Content Marketing, CRO, PPC/Paid Media, Influencer Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Email Marketing, Partnerships, Amazon, Paid Social Advertising, Web Design & Development, Digital Creative Design & Rapid Ad Creative, Diligence (PE/VC), Marketing Operations, Programmatic, Tiktok
Industries: B2B SEO, B2C & eCommerce SEO, beauty, fashion, private equity (due diligence), retail media
Strengths: Custom marketing playbooks, proprietary technology, consumer values, 2.4x faster growth
Pricing: Custom pricing
Headquarters: San Diego, California
Notable Clients: Casper, Catalonia Crunch, Honest, MyFitnessPal, Bob’s Red Mill, Gorjana, Smart Sweets, Lord & Taylor, Puravida, Kate Somerville, Taylor Guitars

Power Digital stands as a beacon for innovative growth marketing. They serve as SEO expert consultants at the crossroads of brand and growth, driving visibility and revenue through tailored strategies that include full SEO services, a proprietary technology platform, and a fully-integrated marketing team. And the effectiveness of their team speaks for itself—companies that partner with Power Digital report growth 2.4x faster than the industry average, earning the agency a top spot in SEO company and best SEO agency rankings.

#2 Growth Plays

Specialty: B2B Content Strategy, SEO Service, Machine Learning
Industries: B2B and investment funds
Strengths: Generating revenue pipelines, real-time monitoring for technical SEO issues, expert writers recruitment
Pricing: Custom pricing
Headquarters: Los Angeles, California
Notable Clients: Hopin, Podia, Heap, Lattice, Launch Darkly, Cortex, Gremlin

Growth Plays focuses on generating actual revenue pipelines, not just pageviews. The company does this by using a unique two-part, 9-week process to map and rank for critical search terms while enabling the creation of top-tier content. Growth Plays further serves clients by offering additional services like competitive analysis, writing team recruitment, 24/7 site monitoring and reporting, and content opportunity assessment, making them one of the best SEO company choices out there.

#3 Directive Consulting

Specialty: SEO, Paid Media, Design, Lifecycle Marketing, Video, Strategy
Industries: Tech
Strengths: Data-backed marketing strategies, proactive communication, results-driven processes, $1 billion in revenue generated
Pricing: Custom pricing
Headquarters: Irvine, California
Notable Clients: Adobe, Amazon, Uber Freight, Snap Inc. Sonar, DBT Labs, Zero Fox, Arctic Wolf, Bill.com

Directive Consulting is a specialized customer generation agency for tech companies that promises to deliver meaningful results. With more than 150 expert tech marketers in the firm, Directive provides one of the best SEO services available and has served as the growth architects behind more than 200 technology companies, ranging from early stage to mature.

#4 Delante

Specialty: International SEO, SEM, Content Marketing, Technical SEO
Industries: CBD, software house, hospitality, travel
Strengths: Predictable traffic growth, complete SEO process, 100+ years of combined industry experience
Pricing: Custom pricing
Headquarters: New York City, New York
Notable Clients: Best Western, Fellowes, Douglas, Youniq, Mugga, Botland, Nebbia, Molehill, Ovoko, Paul Rich

As a hands-on SEO agency specializing in driving predictable traffic growth, Delante isn’t just another SEO expert consultancy—they actively implement the complete SEO process from beginning to end, working across 25+ countries and 30 industries. Aside from the SEO expertise they bring to the table, the team at Delante is known for their transparency, communication, and can-do approach to all challenges.

#5 CEEK

Specialty: SEO, Social Media Marketing, Paid Targeting, Influencer Marketing, Web Development, Content & Creative
Industries: Hospitality, eCommerce, small business, luxury
Strengths: Outsourced solutions, OCMX methodology, ROI-focused strategies
Pricing: Custom pricing
Headquarters: London, England
Notable Clients: Tinder, Radisson, Clever, Various Eatiers, The Lookout, Diet Starts Tomorrow, The Savoy, Carte Noire

CEEK is your in-house marketing team, outsourced. Although they have a passion for working with start-ups in particular, the London-based marketing firm offers comprehensive outsourced SEO and social media solutions designed to help businesses of all sizes. And with dedicated teams for all areas of marketing—including SEO, influencer marketing, content creation, social media marketing, and paid targeting—CEEK ensures that brands can easily (and successfully) navigate the complex world of marketing.

#6 iPullRank

Specialty: Audience Research, Content Strategy and Marketing, Technical SEO, Generative AI Services, Content Engineering
Industries: Finance, eCommerce, media/publisher
Strengths: $2 billion in incremental revenue, JavaScript SEO, audience-driven strategies
Pricing: Custom pricing
Headquarters: New York City, New York
Notable Clients: LG, Citi, Polo, Complex, MLB, Beats, American Express, DocSend

Founded by Search Engine Land Marketer of the Year, Mike King, iPullRank is a leading digital marketing agency specializing in technical SEO and content strategy for enterprise and mid-market brands. Why does the company place in the top ten? Because their team balances innovative technical expertise with creative content engineering while maintaining a people-first approach. All of these aspects work together to create value for their clients.

#7 Graphite

Specialty: SEO, Data Science, Content Marketing, Conversion Optimization, Data Analytics, App Growth
Industries: B2C, B2B, finance, tech
Strengths: Growth-stage focus and growth strategy, SEO strategy, technical SEO
Pricing: Custom pricing
Headquarters: San Fransico, California, with remote teams across North America, Latin America, and Europe
Notable Clients: MasterClass, Medium, Robinhood, Upwork, Reforge, Thumbtack

Graphite has made a name for itself by creating sustainable, scalable growth engines for both consumer and enterprise companies. By prioritizing user needs and experiences alongside SEO, the company is able to build impactful, intentional strategies that deliver real results. For instance, in just three years, the agency improved MasterClass’s organic traffic by over 400%, resulting in revenue growth of over 10M per month.

#8 Pearl Lemon

Specialty: Local Services SEO, WordPress SEO, Technical SEO, eCommerce SEO, International SEO, SEO Auditing, PPC Services, Link Building, Website Migration
Industries: B2B, B2C, eCommerce, finance, law, business, home goods
Strengths: Effective organic traffic growth, brand awareness, conversion, analytics and reporting, SEO consulting, 25+ years of combined SEO experience
Pricing: Custom pricing
Headquarters: London, England
Notable Clients: Clad Home, Indie Law, Elevano, Lina, Selfie Booth, ASTTERIA London, Book Like a Boss, Applicant Tracking Systems, SeniorGuidance.org

Pearl Lemon is a globally remote, award-winning SEO team based in London, England. Bootstrapped into a 7-figures-per-year company in less than 2 years by founder Deepak Shulka, the company knows a thing or two about rapid growth. Pearl Lemon provides extensive international and local SEO services to brands across industries, with results that have earned them top rankings on platforms such as Clutch, Design Rush, and Agency Spotter.

#9 Panem Agency

Specialty: SEO, PPC, Targeted Advertising, Web Analytics, SEO Auditing, Digital Planning, Google Smart Shopping, Full-Service Digital Marketing, Startup SEO
Industries: Web and mobile development, retail, SaaS SEO
Strengths: Customer-first approach, data-driven SEO, competitor and niche analysis, content strategy and roadmap building, reputation management
Pricing: Custom pricing
Headquarters: Lviv, Ukraine
Notable Clients: Visengine, Qubstudio, Avenga, Otakoyi

In just seven years, Panem Agency has grown from a company of two passionate SEO and business specialists to a large team of full-service digital marketing experts who build custom SEO strategies that align with each client’s unique needs and goals.

#10 uSERP

Specialty: Link Building, Digital PR, SEO
Industries: SaaS, finance, education
Strengths: Authority backlinks, brand mentions, digital PR marketing, organic search
Pricing: Link building plans cost between $10,000–$20,000+ per month. Link building plus content services are available for between $20,000–$40,000 per month.
Headquarters: Denver, Colorado
Notable Clients: Monday.com, ActiveCampaign, Crowdstrike, Freshworks, Preply, Breadcrumbs, Nav, Propel, EarlyBird, MOS, Reply

uSERP relies on high authority backlinks and coveted brand mentions to drive rankings, traffic, and revenue growth for ambitious companies looking to outrank competitors and establish themselves within their industry. And this strategy has proven incredibly effective—on average, uSERP is able to increase organic search traffic for their clients in as little as two months.

Partnering with the best SEO company

In the mercurial digital landscape, top international SEO and local SEO companies are crucial allies for brands striving to boost their online presence. By offering a multifaceted approach—including but not limited to strategic analysis, on-page optimization, specialized SEO, and continuous monitoring—the experts from the best digital marketing agencies can help brands rank higher on search engines by delivering high-quality traffic, leads, and sales.

If you’re looking to gain a competitive edge in your industry by optimizing your online presence, partner with a top enterprise SEO agency, like Power Digital. With experience serving clients across a variety of industries, Power Digital can help fuel your brand’s growth with data-driven insights and strategies tailored to your unique business goals.

Reach out today to learn more about what a partnership with Power Digital could look like.

Sources:

Forbes. Six Reasons Good SEO is a Long Game. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2021/02/23/six-reasons-good-seo-is-a-long-game/?sh=518833441080

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10 Best Content Marketing Agencies

Power Digital — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 01:02:10 +0000

Brands looking to scale up quickly often invest in content marketing or other services from a growth marketing firm or a digital marketing agency. These service providers boast the tech fluency and innovative tools needed to create and leverage a strategic digital growth strategy.

But for companies looking to partner with the industry’s best, who are the best content marketing agencies making waves and producing results today?

This content marketing company guide breaks down ten of the best content marketing agencies working in the digital space right now. These industry content marketing service leaders are building brand-new ways to connect with customers and skyrocket brand awareness.

#1 Power Digital

Specialty: Full-funnel digital marketing
Industries: B2B, B2C, eCommerce, fashion, private equity, retail
Strengths: SaaS, B2C, eCommerce, or B2B content strategy and organic search growth
Pricing: Custom pricing
Headquarters: San Francisco, California, USA
Notable Clients: Casper, Berkshire Hathaway Home Services, Bob’s Red Mill

Brands looking for a top content marketing agency leveraging the latest technologies to produce tangible growth should explore Power Digital’s extensive slate of services.

Power Digital’s content marketing service scope exceeds that of a traditional search engine optimization or SEO company—the brand’s expert content marketing strategy team offers full-funnel marketing services, boosting interactions at every stage of the customer journey. Plus, their strategies are powered by nova Intelligence, the company’s proprietary, data-driven marketing intelligence application, offering a roadmap to digital growth across channels and stages through a comprehensive content marketing campaign.

For companies looking for a SaaS, B2C, eCommerce, or B2B content marketing agency, Power Digital should be at the top of the shortlist.

#2 Column Five

Specialty: Brand development, content marketing
Industries: SaaS
Strengths: Content marketing campaign ideation, strategy
Pricing: Custom pricing
Headquarters: Southern California, USA
Notable Clients: Charles Schwab, Intuit, VISA

Column Five offers digital marketing services in four major areas:

Brand strategy
Content strategy
Content creation
Distribution strategy

When it comes to content marketing, their team offers everything from campaign planning and keyword strategy to creative consulting and customer journey mapping.

Column Five is a content marketing company that’s laser-focused on narrative, leveraging storytelling concepts to increase brand awareness and attract lifelong customers. Perhaps most importantly, they’re a SaaS-specific services provider, meaning their approach may not be compatible with a retail, food and beverage, or apparel brand.

For companies looking for a SaaS-aligned, story-focused, data-driven content marketing agency to reach the right audience and cultivate a strong brand narrative, consider Column Five.

#3 Fractl

Specialty: Organic search
Industries: B2B, B2C
Strengths: Organic growth strategy, content development, technical SEO
Pricing: Custom pricing
Headquarters: Delray Beach, Florida, USA
Notable Clients: Discover, Care.com, Indeed

Companies looking to hyper-focus on organic search engine growth via the best SEO companies, consider Fractl—one of the industry’s top content marketing agencies specializing in search engine marketing.

In practice, Fractl is highly focused on two key metrics in search engine optimization (SEO):

Ranking – Fractl ideates, designs, and installs content tailor-made to rank in search engine results. The brand also manages content refreshments to keep sites competitive.
Linking – Fractl touts a wide network of media outlets, publications, universities, and other entities, and focuses on linking as an organic growth strategy in tandem with ranking.

For businesses looking for a content marketing partner with extensive SEO experience and expertise, Fractl might be an ideal partner for organic search growth and SEM strategy.

#4 Foundation Inc

Specialty: Data-driven content marketing
Industries: B2B, SaaS, manufacturing
Strengths: Content marketing industry thought leadership
Pricing: Custom pricing
Headquarters: Remote
Notable Clients: Webex, MailChimp, Canva

A 100% remote content marketing agency, Foundation Inc specializes in content strategy, creation, and distribution in a few specific sectors:

SaaS
B2B
Manufacturing
Other traditionally “boring” industries

While Foundation recognizes that there’s no such thing as a “boring industry,” their team focuses on developing solutions and sharing insights for brands in traditional or old-school sectors that want to leverage digital marketing.

To that end, the brand also offers data-driven market insights via The Foundation Lab, their proprietary thought leadership and industry learning hub. The Foundation Lab is designed to be a resource for both marketing professionals and business owners alike.

For brands working in software, industrial, or traditional niches, Foundation Inc might be a strong contender for a digital marketing partnership.

#5 Codeless

Specialty: SEO
Industries: SaaS, service
Strengths: Content production, content exporting management
Pricing: $10,000-$20,000
Headquarters: Remote
Notable Clients: Robinhood, Freshworks, Monday.com

Offering SEO services 100% remotely, Codeless is a content marketing agency with two key arms:

Codeless content engine – Codeless strategizes, produces, and optimizes content for brands looking to grow their presence and improve their search engine rankings.
Wordable – Codeless’s proprietary publishing product, Wordable, automates formatting for seamless copy publication.

In addition, they offer free training video content to marketers and other industry players.

Codeless touts a focus on long-term ROI through SEO, content management, and public relations services. The company specifically works in the SaaS, service, and affiliate website niches, catering to both B2B and B2C products.

Brands looking for 100% remote services, upfront pricing, and a focus on long-term growth might find a compatible match in Codeless.

#6 The Content Bureau

Specialty: B2B content marketing
Industries: Tech, finance, professional services
Strengths: Retention and longevity
Pricing: Custom pricing
Headquarters: Orinda, California, USA
Notable Clients: Adobe, American Express, Microsoft

The Content Bureau proclaims that content is queen. Focused on providing B2B content marketing specifically to technology, finance, and professional services clients, B2B has had a foothold in the content marketing space since 2000.

The woman-led brand is uniquely focused on longevity, in both:

Client retention – The Content Bureau touts two-decade partnerships with select clientele, and their customer service model is focused on long-term relationship-building.
Creative staff retention – As part of their effort to provide outstanding service, The Content Bureau invests heavily in talent retention and employee experience.

The company’s content offers run the gamut from ads to social media marketing to white papers. Brands looking for a long-standing content partner, The Content Bureau is a strong contender.

#7 Builtvisible

Specialty: Organic growth
Industries: Travel, financial services, eCommerce
Strengths: SEO, organic emphasis
Pricing: Custom pricing
Headquarters: London, England, United Kingdom
Notable Clients: Iceland Air, G4S, Red Hat

Builtvisible is a UK-based content marketing agency deeply focused on organic growth approaches via SEO, digital PR, and custom tooling and workflow applications.

Their organic specialty lies at the heart of all of their work, and they primarily leverage organic approaches to build customer loyalty and make a long-term impact on their clients’ bottom lines.

Builtvisible is also highly tech-aligned: they aim to combine the best of human resources and automation power to produce tangible digital growth.

For brands looking for a tech-savvy, organic-focused partner with experience across a variety of industries, Builtvisible might be a good fit for content marketing services.

#8 Optimist

Specialty: Organic growth, product-led clientele
Industries: SaaS, B2B, B2C
Strengths: Organic SEO, strategy
Pricing: Custom pricing
Headquarters: Remote
Notable Clients: Submittable, Hellosign, Kubera

Optimist is an organic-focused content marketing agency focused on servicing product-led clientele. So, most of their clients are B2B, B2C, and SaaS..

Strategy is the backbone of Optimist’s approach to content creation. Investing heavily in strategy before content creation begins, the team defines a clear set of goals and needs before developing a roadmap to growth.

In addition, Optimist is focused on delivering quality content—insightful assets that meet end-users’ needs and guide them along the customer journey throughout the funnel. To this end, they’re laser-focused on delivering value, efficiency, and tangible results.

The company brings a team of five to seven marketers, strategists, and experts to each project, offering clients a wealth of expertise and full-service support.

Optimist might be a good fit for businesses that want to take a hands-on, strategy-heavy approach to content marketing and digital growth.

#9 Grow and Convert

Specialty: Conversion-focused SEO & PPC
Industries: B2B, B2C, SaaS, service, eCommerce
Strengths: Conversion and sales growth
Pricing: Custom pricing
Headquarters: Remote
Notable Clients: Yelp, Rainforest, Brandfolder

Grow and Convert is a full-service content marketing agency focused on tangible business development—specifically, content that produces conversions.

With an emphasis on demo-based SaaS providers, Grow and Convert leverages a large, remote writing team to produce conversion-centric content that promotes demo sign-ups. In addition, they seek to enhance accountability for conversions and other metrics in the content marketing field at large.

Grow and Convert also offers a content marketing strategy course that both:

Provides businesses and marketers with tips and strategies for high-conversion content.
Connects participants with a community of marketers and business leaders for long-term relationship-building.

Grow and Convert might be a compatible content marketing partner for businesses looking for growth-focused experts with ample experience in the SaaS and demo space.

#10 Compose.ly

Specialty: Content writing
Industries: Finance, fitness, legal, medical, tech
Strengths: SEO-friendly content
Pricing: Starting at $999/month
Headquarters: Remote
Notable Clients: WebMB, Constant Contact, Calendly

Compose.ly focuses on delivering SEO-friendly, high-quality content efficiently and at scale. With a large network of writers, Compose.ly offers a highly scalable service to brands large and small.

Their content writing offers include:

Blog posts
E-books
Ghostwriting
Press releases
Technical content

In addition, they also offer:

Fully managed content writing
A writer marketplace for direct writing team recruitment
Content editing services

With a wide-ranging industry scope, a large outsourced team, and an SEO focus, Compose.ly can deliver high volume without sacrificing quality.

Brands looking for a hands-on or hands-off content generation experience from a provider that can easily scale might be a good match for content marketing services from Compose.ly.

Partner with the best in content marketing at Power Digital

Today’s top content marketing companies are leveraging powerful technologies, remote work, and niche industry knowledge to produce high-quality content that converts current and prospective customers.

But if you’re looking for the best of the best in content marketing, partner with Power Digital. With a robust team of seasoned digital marketing agency experts and a high-octane, proprietary strategy engine (nova), Power Digital is the growth marketing firm that can help you unlock your brand’s full potential.

Take your marketing to the next level and explore innovative content solutions with Power Digital.

The post 10 Best Content Marketing Agencies appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

9 Benefits of Content Marketing

Power Digital — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 16:58:54 +0000

Whether a digital marketing agency captains your brand’s outreach or you’re sailing your own ship in uncharted waters, usingthe most powerful marketing strategies will keep your company afloat. To which, you’ve likely heard about content marketing—and for good reason.

A 2019 survey of American consumers found that 41% of poll participants access three to five pieces of branded content before ever reaching out to a sales rep, making the case for content marketing.¹ of content marketing.

So, what exactly is content marketing? And why should you invest in this long-term marketing strategy?

Let’s demystify this concept and explore the nine benefits of content marketing that your brand can reap as you navigate your way to success.

What is content marketing?

Firstly, what is content marketing? Withholding the jargon and buzzwords, content marketing is a few concepts in one:

It’s a plan to create and release unique and relevant content that resonates with your target audience
It’s a method that attracts potential customers to your site by providing useful content they want
It’s a highly branded, consistent messaging campaign that shows your potential customers that you have what they need (brand awareness)

The term “content” deserves its own TED Talk. But put simply, it’s the stuff your brand puts out into the world that isn’t always your product—your social media posts, website, blog post, email newsletter, email marketing, video content, billboard and everything else that has your name on it.

In a content marketing strategy, great content needs to accomplish two critical tasks:

Your content has to provide valuable information to your viewers, visitors and readers.
Your content needs to convince your audience that you have the product they need.

Content marketing is multifaceted, complex and evergreen—just like your brand.

9 advantages of a content marketing strategy

We’ve explored what content marketing is—but what can it actually do? Let’s break down nine benefits of content marketing that just might convince you to drop everything and start creating.

#1 Content marketing will teach you about your clients

One of the first steps in a content strategy is to build your brand’s persona—the voice your brand uses to send its messages.²

A robustcontent marketing strategy needs a unique voice that authentically connects with your audience —one that’s trustworthy, approachable and distinct enough to embody your brand. To create that voice, you’ll need to find out what kind of voice your customers want to hear. Do they prefer listening to, seeing and reading content that’s:

High-level or in-depth?
Quippy or to the point?
High-brow or casual?
Fast-paced or leisurely?
Sarcastic or polite?
Edgy or wholesome?

As you explore what your clientele wants to hear, you’ll learn more about them—information that can help you tailor your content and refine your products.

#2 Content marketing can scale with your brand

Content marketing is ultra-scalable.

Why? Because there are so many avenues for sending content out into the world and countless genres of content you can utilize.

Let’s explore a hypothetical:

You run a small greeting card business. It’s a small business—you have just a few employees, you’ve recently become profitable and you want to grow your website traffic, sales, and existing customers by 10% in the next 12 months.
You start producing blog content for your website with help from an SEO company, and you accomplish your sales growth goal within the expected timeline.
With that extra revenue, you invest in your business. You buy another printer, hire another graphic designer or purchase real estate. But, to keep funding these investments, you need to grow a little faster.
In addition to your blogging efforts, you decide to start making informative TikToks or running TikTok ads about greeting card etiquette, personalized stationery and other relevant topics. Your videos direct customers to your eCommerce site, and your website traffic and sales grow even more.

SEO and content marketing go hand-in-hand to help your business gain visibility and drive sales. The cycle continues—and as you grow, so does your content marketing strategy. There’s limitless potential.

#3 Content marketing makes your brand more visible

In the hypothetical above, the content marketing strategy grew your greeting card business because it introduced more people to your brand—people who will remember your logo, your voice or your unique product and return to you when they need what you offer.

One of the most important functions of a content marketing strategy is increasing your brand’s visibility. Two elements of content marketing make this possible:

Content quantity – The more you put out there, the greater the chances that a potential customer will stumble upon it.
Technical tactics – Content marketers use highly specific strategies to draw in visitors to your content. SEO, or search engine optimization, is one example.

Content marketing should be robust, but it should also be well-choreographed. Both efforts can help to increase your brand visibility.

#4 Content marketing encourages transparency

A 2022 poll discovered that about 72% of consumers prioritize a brand’s transparency when choosing between two similar products.³

And, as you develop your brand’s persona and put out unique, high quality content, you’ll share more information than ever before about:

Your brand’s origin story
Your product, what it’s made from and how it’s made
How your brand conforms to (or rebels against) industry standards
How your product reflects your brand’s values

The more specific you can be, the better—and content marketing presents a massive opportunity to be transparent with consumers. Trustworthiness brand loyalty.

#5 Content marketing creates a more informed consumer base

A major project for content marketers is discovering what information customers want at each stage of the sales funnel—and giving them just that.⁴

If you make it a priority to share high-quality, well-sourced information in your content, you aren’t just helping a few customers learn about one small part of your product or industry. You’re also helping your end users (and consumers in general) become more informed.

That effect flows through the entire economy, improving the market for the better:

Transparent brands put out useful content featuring high-authority information.
Potential customers view that content and learn more about the product they need.
Armed with intel, they choose the best available product. And, when they can’t find one that meets their standards, they explicitly tell brands what’s missing from the available options on the market.

Informed customers demand better products—a phenomenon that challenges your brand to create the best money can buy.

#6 Content marketing is another opportunity to serve your customers

When a potential client searches one of your brand’s keywords and discovers your high-authority listicle, infographic or how-to video, you’re meeting their immediate need right away. They want information, and your content delivers.

And, whether or not they “like and subscribe” (or make a purchase), consumers will remember your brand the next time they think about the topic they were researching when they stumbled across your content. You met their needs once, and that increases their confidence that you—or your product—can do it again.

#7 Content marketing is customizable

Content marketing isn’t like traditional marketing—you aren’t limited to a 30-second TV spot, a 2” x 3” newspaper ad or even the seemingly-massive canvas of a roadside billboard.

You set the rules for:

How your content looks.
The tone you want your brand to embody.
How much (or how little) you want to write, photograph or record.
The topics you want to discuss.

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to content marketing, and you have the freedom to craft a bespoke strategy.

#8 Content marketing can establish your brand as an industry expert

Did we mention that your relevant content should be high-authority?

When you post video content, make an infographic or write a thought leadership blog post that cites quality sources and acknowledges the good, the bad and the ugly of a topic, you establish your brand as a knowledgeable industry expert.

In a landscape where consumers can access intel on their own, committing to spreading reliable information is a feather in your cap—one that your future clients will certainly notice.

#9 Content marketing generates high-intent leads

At its core, content marketing is about lead generation—putting your brand in the periphery of customers with high intent to buy. And statistics show that content marketing works.

Let’s consider video content alone. In a 2021 study of over 500 consumers:⁵

98% said they had watched a video while researching a product or service.
88% said that a brand’s video convinced them to make a purchase.
78% said that, after watching a video, they were convinced to download software or a mobile app.

When your target audience is on the hunt for product comparisons, reviews or industry knowledge—even if they’re on the fence about buying any brand’s product—your high quality content could be the last push they need to whip out their wallet.

Dive into content marketing with Power Digital

The benefits of content marketing are clear—releasing relevant, informative and quality content to your customer base can boost your bottom line, increase brand awareness and so much more.

If you’re convinced of the power of content marketing by now, you’re living proof that the concept works. When you’re ready to develop a high-octane strategy to draw in new customers, turn to the experts at Power Digital.

Our digital marketing experts use their tech savvy, industry know-how and content acumen to develop strategies for today’s top brands. Companies like AirBnB, Casper, Beyond Meat and Peloton trust the Power Digital team to drive growth and brand affinity.

Your brand is ready to grow—our content marketing agency is here to help.

Sources:

Forbes. Five Factors of Effective Content Marketing. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2022/04/04/five-factors-of-effective-content-marketing/?sh=25e82d3b588d
Investopedia. What Is Brand Personality? How It Works and Examples. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/brand-personality.asp
The Food Institute. Report Shows Modern Consumers Demand Transparency from Brands. https://foodinstitute.com/focus/report-shows-modern-consumers-demand-transparency-from-brands/
Forbes. 16 Top Content Marketing Trends to Stay on Top Of in 2022. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2022/01/24/16-top-content-marketing-trends-to-stay-on-top-of-in-2022/?sh=448266585c84
Wyzowl. The State of Video Marketing 2022. https://wyzowl.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/pdfs/Wyzowl-Video-Survey-2022.pdf

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What Is Link Building: A Beginner’s Guide

Power Digital — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 16:58:54 +0000

Dozens of factors go into a website’s search rankings: quality content, mobile-responsiveness, search engine optimization (SEO), and page experience to name a few. While many brands understand and focus on these key elements, there’s one area that’s frequently overlooked by even the top brands: link building.

What is link building exactly? And why does it matter?

This beginner’s ultimate guide to link building will show you how you can implement an often overlooked, but supremely powerful, SEO tactic that improves your rankings, drives traffic and bolsters your website’s authority.

What is link building?

Link building is an SEO strategy that involves incentivizing other websites to provide links to your website’s homepage, landing pages or blog posts to increase the SEO authority of your domain.

In SEO, these links are known as backlinks. What is backlinking? Backlinks are one of many signals Google uses to gauge a site’s quality and authority on a topic.

The Google algorithm’s ultimate goal is threefold:

Understand the root meaning of a user’s query.
Analyze what content holds the information most relevant to that query.
Prioritize the content that is most helpful in the final search result.

When a prominent website links to your site, a measure of their authority is passed on to yours. This is considered a high quality backlink. When dependable sites link a page, it indicates to site visitors (and Google) that the information on your site is trustworthy.¹

For example, let’s say you moved to a small town and asked your neighbors to help you choose between doctor A and doctor B. If everyone suggested doctor B, you could feel reasonably confident that the more popular medical provider was the better option. You may not have any experience with that person, but others do. Therefore, with no other information to base your decision on, your best choice would be to side with the majority.

In short, SEO link building is a human and algorithmic heuristic.

Google’s journey to prioritizing link quality

In the early days of Google’s search rankings, the total number of backlinks was the primary factor in the ranking equation. But this incentivized brands to pursue strategies that focused on acquiring as many backlinks as possible, even if they were from spammy or irrelevant sites.

Google has since changed those ways by shifting the focus to link quality. Now, Google views a quality link as an organic link that exists on an established and authoritative domain or website.

For instance, if Ink.com published a report that linked to a newly established website, Google would consider that a vote of confidence for the new site. As a result, the algorithm would pass on a portion of Ink.com’s authority to the new site.

In other words, the more authoritative the domain within the backlink profile, the better.

Breaking down the attributes of a link

Before we can dive into the nuances of link building or discuss strategies for fostering backlinks, you must first understand how a link is made and read. The vast majority of links can be broken down into three attributes.

For example, consider the following link and its corresponding parts:²

Visit W3Schools

Anchor tag – The “
Link referral location – The “href” is short for hyperlink referral. The text within the quotation marks points to the URL to which the link will go.
Anchor text of the link – The “Visit W3 Schools” is the text that a user would see on the page and click to open the link. The text is often bolded and/or colored to make it evident that the link is clickable.

Types of links

As you approach an SEO link-building strategy, you should be aware that not all links are created equal. There are several different types of links. Some are more valuable to your authority than others.

Follow links – A follow link is a standard backlink that informs Google that the link should pass on authority and page rank to the trusted site. Doing so helps search engine bots better understand what the content entails—and helps increase your site’s authority.
No-follow links – A no-follow link is given the attribute rel=”nofollow.” This tells Google that you want to link to another site, but would prefer the search engine not crawl the site. Typically this is done to link to a site you don’t wish to endorse or for a sponsored link, such as an ad or banner ad. In other words, no-follow links are necessary at times, but will not strengthen your SEO authority like a follow link will.
User-generated links – User-generated links are widely considered to be a low-quality linking tactic that rarely transfers any site authority. User-generated linking can be done in user profile pages, advertisements, blog comments or embedded infographics. (Think “user-generated content” for links.)
Organic links – Organic, or natural, links are the crown jewel of backlinks. These occur when a person on a different website—without any incentivization—links to your site in their blog, videos, posts or web copy to provide their site visitors with valuable, informative content. (All the more reason for you to publish quality content on your website.)

Benefits of link-building

Manual link-building tactics can positively impact a website in more ways than one. By deploying this SEO strategy, your brand can:

Bolster brand credibility – Google search engines measure domain authority by evaluating the quality and quantity of backlinks (among other things). When a trustworthy publisher links to your content, that signals to Google that you provided information that another site thought would improve their user’s experience. That link functions as a third-party reference that says your domain is an authoritative source. Over time, more high-quality links lead to an increase in credibility.
Improve SERP rankings – In most cases, the higher your domain authority ranking, the more likely your site will rank highly in search results pages (SERPs). And we probably don’t need to tell you about the benefits of appearing on page 1 of Google as opposed to page 56.
Increase web traffic – Link building can drive web traffic directly and indirectly. When backlinks to your site exist on more sites across the web, and those links are clicked on, those clicks turn into website visits. Indirectly, as your site becomes more visible in search results, more organic traffic will follow.
Create positive feedback loops – Successful link building can create a self-perpetuating cycle of linking. Once you get the ball rolling, it can create a positive feedback loop; the more backlinks you receive, the higher your credibility reaches, which leads to—you guessed it—more backlinks.
Boost brand awareness – Backlinks fall into the word-of-mouth marketing category. When another page links to your site, it encourages the reader to learn more about your brand. If the reader clicks the link and enjoys the content, you generate a positive initial touchpoint with a new site visitor.
Support revenue growth – More traffic, improved authority, and increased rankings result in more potential customers interacting with your brand. This affords you access to a larger swath of potential consumers. And a wider net? This means more visitors cycled into your sales funnel.
Foster partner relationships – Although link building can occur naturally, more often than not, it’s the result of your direct outreach and relationship building with industry influencers and like-minded brands. Over time, these relationships can strengthen your brand’s trust and influence. Guest posting is an example of that type of partnership.

How To encourage link building

Every brand would like to increase its volume of high-quality backlinks without having to lift a finger. Unfortunately, that’s not quite feasible. Brands that boast an impressive list of quality backlinks rarely reach that point by accident. Instead, they deploy careful link-building strategies to improve both the quantity and quality of links, such as:

Performing link outreach – Similar to cold-calling, link outreach involves messaging websites related to your niche and requesting that they link to your content. One approach could be to identify the sites that link to your competitor’s sites and see whether they would also link to your site—or better yet, boot out your competitors and link to yours instead.
Partaking in guest blogging – Some sites invite other industry experts to contribute to their blogs. Or, they may accept guest blogging queries. Either instance presents a unique link opportunity to plug your website and establish your authority via high-quality content. If you create a piece that readers consider valuable, you may well enjoy a rush of new backlinks and site visitors.
Creating visual assets – Visual assets are pieces of content that are easy to link to and provide sites with valuable content that they may not want to create themselves. Images, infographics, diagrams, and charts are all wonderful options. Plus, you can use them in your own social media efforts and sales collateral.
Leveraging social media – When you have new blog posts or visual assets, share them on social media, engage in the comments, and tag relevant brands and influencers to nurture a conversation. If you provide valuable content or interesting discussion, there’s a high likelihood that readers will share your blog post or link on their channels.
Uncovering unlinked brand mentions – If your brand has been mentioned online—whether in the news, on social media or in the trades—it’s not uncommon for a publisher to forget to link to your site. Fortunately, there are social listening tools that notify you whenever you’re mentioned but not linked. In such cases, you could reach out to the person or brand and ask them to link the content.

Jump start your link-building strategy with Power Digital

When a link building tactic is properly deployed, it can increase your site’s total number of backlinks. That, in turn, could improve your overall authority and rankings, leading to more traffic, brand awareness and revenue.

But managing and monitoring a backlink strategy is no small feat. It’s important to partner with content strategists who know the ins and outs of requesting, building, monitoring and optimizing backlinks. That’s where our growth marketing agency can help your team break the mold. Our digital marketing experts can elevate your brand’s presence with bespoke content strategies that make an impact. We are both an SEO company and content marketing agency, delivering growth solutions you can rely on.

If you’re ready to take the first step toward growth, get in touch with us today.

Sources:

Google Support. How Results Are Automatically Generated. https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/how-search-works/ranking-results/
Beter Programming. The Anatomy of HTML Links. https://betterprogramming.pub/a-primer-on-html-links-af632c4857e0
Search Engine Journal. How to Use Guest Blogging for Natural Link Building. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/link-building-guide/guest-blogging/#close

The post What Is Link Building: A Beginner’s Guide appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

What is Organic Search and How Does It Affect Your Business?

Power Digital — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 16:58:54 +0000

Organic search results are the links that appear below the ads on Google’s search results pages. They present valuable opportunities for businesses because they can help audiences discover your products and services without spending money on paid advertising.

While the definition of organic search is relatively straightforward, it’s another thing to learn how to implement organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) best practices that can reward you with quality website traffic and leads.

Read on to learn what organic search is, some common types of organic search results, and some tips for optimizing your own website content so it can climb those search engine rankings (organically, of course).

What is organic search?

Organic search refers to results displayed by a search engine due to their apparent relevance to the search term. Unlike ad boxes above or to the right of them, organic search results are not paid search results.¹ In other words, you can’t pay to place your organic search results on page 1 of Google. The search engine’s algorithm decided they earned a spot based on merit alone.

Figuring out what factors search engine algorithms reward is an ever-evolving process as changes are made over time., they reward websites with the information they deem most relevant to a user’s search query.

Mysterious as those algorithms might feel at times, there are proven strategies you can employ to boost the traffic of your own website—and we’ll get to those soon.

First, let’s establish how taking the time to capitalize on organic search traffic can benefit your business.

How does organic search affect your business?

Capturing referrals to your website from organic searches is especially appealing for businesses because it’s traffic you don’t have to pay for.

Don’t get us wrong, there’s plenty of value in pay-per-click. But sending a quality piece of content off into the search engines and watching it soar to page 1 for no cost except for what it took to create it? That’s pretty satisfying.

Organic search traffic isn’t just beneficial because it’s free. Its value also comes from its ability to convert higher than many other forms of marketing traffic. In fact, one report on average conversion rate in 2021 reported that B2C organic search traffic converted higher than any other marketing traffic.²

Website conversions like form completions or chat engagements are the nutrients that fuel your sales funnel. Simply put, more organic traffic means more conversions that lead to more sales.

Types of organic search results

These days, “organic search” actually exists in several different formats—it’s no longer confined solely to those quintessential blue, underlined links below the search bar.

A masterful organic search or organic SEO strategy should aim to garner not just one, but several kinds of organic search results. They exist to be helpful to users, and landing in those spots makes your brand that much more visible to potential customers.

Types of organic search results include:

Featured snippets

Featured snippets have prime real estate on Google. They appear in a box at the top of the search engine result page and feature a piece of content that appears to answer the question a user is asking. That content could include:

YouTube videos
Tables from an article
Snippets of text from a certain article or page

When a user clicks on the link to the content, Google will shoot them directly to that portion of the web page, as long as their browser is compatible.³

You can capitalize on featured snippets by anticipating questions your potential customers commonly have about your products, services or industry. Then, create quality content that answers those questions and makes strategic use of SEO organic keywords. Google will have the final say in what gets the coveted featured snippet box, but these efforts will certainly persuade in the right direction.

Video carousels

Some information just comes across better in film-form. As if videos weren’t already ubiquitous, younger audiences are increasingly using video-based platforms like TikTok and YouTube as their primary search engine, and Google is taking note.⁴ For that reason, video search results will likely gain increasingly more prominence in organic search results in years to come.

Google tends to rank YouTube videos, including YouTube Shorts, highly, so if your brand manages a YouTube channel, you’ll definitely want to optimize your uploaded videos to take full advantage of website traffic opportunities that can come from organic searches.

Image carousels

Similar to video carousels, image carousels simply display photos that appear relevant to a search query. To help your visual content appear in these image carousel positions, be sure to tag every image on your website with alt and title tags.

How to Grow Your Organic Search Traffic

Some aspects of Google’s and other search engines’ algorithms are a bit of a mystery for proprietary reasons, and others are subject to change, but there are a number of SEO strategies that are proven to be effective in climbing those search engine results pages (SERPs).

What is SERP? Click on the link to learn more about the importance of ranking highly on SERPs.

Here are a few practices you can adopt to grow your business’s organic search traffic.

Create relevant content

The key word when it comes to ranking highly in organic search results is relevance. The search engine’s goal is to help the user find the information they’re looking for, so it’s going to reward content that offers that.

As you plan your brand’s content strategy, make sure landing pages, blog posts and other materials incorporate SEO keywords that apply to the subject. But don’t overdo it and delve into spammy territory. Make your content just as readable as it is SEO-friendly.

To create relevant content, focus on these factors:

User intention: What do you believe the user wants to know?

User knowledge: What does your target know, and what don’t they know?

User language: How will your target audience pose this question?
User need: What problem is your target audience trying to solve?

Another piece of advice: don’t try to position yourself as an authority in areas outside your brand’s expertise solely for SEO. If users visit your website and are disappointed with what they find and quickly leave your website, it could cause an adverse effect on your rank—and your credibility.

Not sure where to start? Consider working with a content marketing agency to roll out an effective SEO content plan.

Add FAQ sections to content

An easy way to increase the odds of climbing those SERP ranks is to capture common SEO questions in a “frequently asked questions” (FAQ) section. Here, you can appeal to related search queries in one spot with brief, relevant and informative answers. This format also makes it easier for Google bots to find and index your content.

Keep content fresh

Another aspect that search engine algorithms reward: current content. Have a set schedule for publishing new content as well as optimizing existing articles with the latest information.

Optimize, optimize, optimize

Search engines tend to reward websites that appear to be relevant and usable. The work of managing a website is, of course, never done. Use tools like Google Search Console and enact the advice given to tune up your website’s performance.

Ask questions like:

How are my page loading speeds?
Is my website usable on mobile devices?
How secure is my website’s platform? Does it adequately protect users’ data? (URLs beginning with “https” as opposed to “http” are actually favorable in the SERPs.)

In the content itself, beyond keywords, take time to optimize the seemingly smaller details, like metadata. Two crucial components of metadata include:

Title (how your page title appears in an organic search result headline)
Meta descriptions (how the description under your title appears in a search result)⁵

Invest in your brand’s SEO success with Power Digital

If you’re new to the world of SEO and content marketing, you don’t have to navigate it alone. Partnering with an SEO team that knows the in and outs of SEO trends and best practices can save you valuable time and resources.

That’s where hiring a digital marketing agency or an SEO company comes in. At Power Digital, we strive to be the SEO and content marketing agency behind your SEO success while feeling as tight-knit as an in-house team. Your success is our success. And we can’t wait to help elevate your brand to its fullest potential with the power of organic search.

Sources:

Google. Organic Search Result. https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6054492?hl=en
First Page Sage. Conversion Rate by Traffic Source. https://firstpagesage.com/seo-blog/conversion-rate-by-traffic-source/
Google Search Central. Featured snippets and your website. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/featured-snippets
The New York Times. For Gen Z, TikTok Is the New Search Engine. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/16/technology/gen-z-tiktok-search-engine.html
Michigan Tech University. Five Ways to Improve your Site’s Ranking (SEO) https://www.mtu.edu/umc/services/websites/seo/

Additional sources:

The post What is Organic Search and How Does It Affect Your Business? appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing

Power Digital — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 16:58:54 +0000

Content marketing is on the rise and not slowing down any time soon. With 82% of content marketers actively using vlogs, podcasts and other creative content to reach audiences,¹ this attention-grabbing approach to digital marketing and advertising is here to stay. Content marketing and digital marketing have eclipsed traditional marketing in the last couple of years.

But what is content marketing? What are the benefits of content marketing? And why should using it to its full potential live near the top of your to-do list? We’ll be answering these questions—and so many others—as we make our way through this ultimate guide.

What is content marketing?

On paper, content marketing is easy to define: It’s content (blogs, videos and more) used for marketing purposes. In general, content marketing casts aside traditional advertising in favor of more entertaining or informative assets.

In practice, however, content marketing is more of an all-encompassing philosophy. It represents a shift in the way brands interact with consumers. It’s a transition from the “old way” of marketing (selling products or services to the public) to the “new way” (entertaining and informinga specific target audience).

Content marketing is all about providing value to existing and future customers. By creating and sharing content that is fun, funny or informative, brands can naturally build trust with their target audience. Compared to the traditional media approach—which is disruptive and often in-your-face—content marketing is the approachable, more organic path to building loyalty and boosting revenue.

The different types of content marketing

Although its goal of “increasing sales without feeling sales-y” remains the same, content marketing takes dozens of different forms. Broadly speaking, all types of content marketing fall under one of five categories

Visual content marketing

Our forefathers drew on cave walls and we’ve been basically scrolling visual content ever since. , it has played a role in marketing and advertising since the dawn of Madison Avenue.

But now, when billions of people have high-quality cameras and editing software in their back pockets,² visual content and video marketing are more prevalent than ever. The three most typical forms of visual content marketing are:

Video – Arguably the most important (and most viewed) form of content marketing, video content is king. In 2022, Americans watched 6.8 billion hours of online video.³ While pre-recorded videos are the bread and butter of streaming platforms and social media, live streaming on platforms like YouTube and Twitch is seeing a meteoric rise.⁴
Images – From gorgeous landscape photos to intentionally rudimental memes, pictures really are worth a thousand words. While they may not be as visually stimulating as video, still images remain a smaller-budget solution for visual content marketing.
Infographics – The infographic is the ideal marriage of visual and written content. Colorful charts and diagrams offer a more aesthetically-pleasing way to distill information than a lengthy whitepaper.

Audio content marketing

Podcasts currently dominate the audio sphere, with 57% of Americans over 12 identifying as listeners.⁵ But let’s not discount other audio mediums. Anything from an audiobook to an ASMR video content can be an auditory vessel for your brand’s message.

For a more extreme example, there’s the hip-hop EP We Beefin?⁶ Released by the fast food chain Wendy’s (seriously), the mixtape is a masterclass in creative audio content marketing—even if it won’t be winning a Grammy any time soon.

Written content marketing

In a world where attention feels like an ever-shrinking commodity, the written word often takes a backseat to more engaging content format. However, writing still holds a sizable sway in content marketing. For anything that requires authority or detailed context, written content remains number one.

There are several kinds of written content marketing, including:

Blog posts
Listicles
Whitepapers
Case studies
eBooks
Checklists

Written content marketing is fundamental to search engine optimization (SEO), the strategy that helps brands rank higher on search engine results pages. SEO and content marketing work together to increase visibility and drive engagement.

Social media content marketing

Much of the content on a social media platform is visual, audio and written. For that reason—as well as the enchantment that social media has over consumers—social media content marketing deserves its own category.

Thanks to the ever-evolving nature of platforms like TikTok, Instagram marketing, Facebook and YouTube, social media marketing can be either:

Temporary content – Instagram stories and Snapchat messages are ephemeral media, lasting 24 hours at most.
Static posts – Photos and videos posted to a page or timeline are more immortal. Static posts include everything from three-word tweets to 10-minute TikToks.

User-generated content marketing

Yet another category that defies categorization, user-generated content (UGC) can be any of the above. UGC is any engaging content that a member of your audience makes (typically without remuneration).

Most commonly, UGC is a social media post or story, but it can also show up as:

A testimonial
A video tutorial
A product or brand review
A blog post or comment

Encouraging UGC from your supporters is one of the easiest ways to cushion your marketing budget while leaning into organic content marketing.

Others include email marketing and other outbound marketing and advertising practices.

How to approach content marketing

No matter which type of content you feel suits your brand, the approach to building (or refining) your content marketing strategy stays largely the same. Here’s a quick blueprint for developing a content marketing strategy.

Step 1: Define your audience

Like any other marketing effort, your content marketing framework should start with a target audience deep-dive. Who are your existing customers? Maybe you already know who your target audience is. But do you know what kind of content they prefer?

Start by ensuring your buyer persona is up to date. Along with your ideal customer’s age and income bracket, you’ll list their likes and dislikes, hobbies, preferred media sources and lifestyle choices. Prepare for plenty of research (or a partnership with a digital marketing agency).

When you have a picture of your perfect persona, you can create content that speaks directly to them—and deliver it to them wherever they are.

Step 2: Examine your current content

Chances are you’re already producing relevant content that you can use for content marketing. Whether its brand blogs, tweets or live streams, you’re on the right track.

If you’ve published content in the past, there’s also likely some valuable data waiting at your fingertips. Most platforms provide performance metrics to gauge past content performance.

Look back at all of your relevant content from the past year and note the number of:

Views
Likes
Clicks
Comments
Shares

You now have a much clearer understanding of which valuable content lands well, and which doesn’t. From there, you can set goals for your upcoming content marketing campaign and measure success in a more meaningful way.

Step 3: Plan your upcoming content

The biggest mistake brands make when creating content is embarking without a content strategy. With a target audience and a set of KPIs at hand, you’re already a step ahead. But you’ll still want to plan out your content for the best results.

For written content creation, preparing typically means building topic clusters and relevant keyword research before writing. For videos, you’ll want to spend time writing scripts and scouting locations. Other types of content will require different arrangements.

Your plan should also include how and when you’ll disseminate your content. Which channels will you utilize? Will you add paid media to your strategy? How frequently do you want to post? Depending on your budget and goals, this part of the plan will vary.

Step 4: Produce and publish your new content

Finally, it’s time to write, record or re-share your content. Thanks to your thorough planning, this should be the simplest step of the process. Once you’re happy with the final product, you can start sharing it as per your plan.

It’s worth noting here that one piece of quality content can easily become several. Repurposing content is one of the best ways to ensure your marketing well never dries up. For example, one long-form blog post could also become:

A series of social posts
An infographic
A video summary
A section of a whitepaper

Repurposing your valuable content also allows you to cover multiple channels simultaneously—without spending a ton of extra time or money.

Step 5: Analyze and react

Your content marketing campaign doesn’t end when you press “Publish.” Using built-in analytics tools and third-party dashboards, you can track every aspect of every post to see what’s working and what isn’t.

Most importantly, when you notice a trend, pounce on it. Data is only as useful as the actions it prompts. If a video series isn’t bringing you the ROI you hoped for, don’t be afraid to pivot. If a one-off podcast generates significant buzz, be prepared to write an entire season. Successful content marketing is all about flexibility—but knowing when to be flexible comes from analysis.

Learn more from the masters of content marketing

In the end, content marketing is the marketing strategy du jour. But it’s far from a fad. Content marketing is here to stay, and if you want to see lasting growth, you need to see it through.

While this is an ultimate guide, there’s so much to know and learn about content marketing—far more than can fit in a blog post. For insights and info that go far beyond the surface, there’s our digital marketing agency.

Part SEO company, part content marketing agency, and all growth marketing firm, Power Digital exists to help brands reach their full potential. Whether you need a nudge in the right direction or a total overhaul, our team of experts can take your brand where you want it to go.

To chat more about our content marketing and other services, get in touch today. We’re ready to hit the ground running. Are you?

Sources:

Ahrefs. 63 Content Marketing Statistics for 2023. https://ahrefs.com/blog/content-marketing-statistics
Statista. Number of smartphone subscriptions worldwide from 2016 to 2021, with forecasts from 2022 to 2027. https://www.statista.com/statistics/330695/number-of-smartphone-users-worldwide/
Statista. Cumulative monthly time spent watching video content in the United States from March 2019 to March 2022 (in billion hours), by device. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1327396/cumulative-time-spent-watching-online-video-us/
Forbes. Going Live Online: The State Of Live Streaming And The Opportunities For Brands. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2021/02/04/going-live-online-the-state-of-live-streaming-and-the-opportunities-for-brands/
Forbes. Podcasts Are A Powerful Storytelling And Advertising Tool. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jiawertz/2021/12/31/podcasts-are-a-powerful-storytelling-and-advertising-tool/
Wendy’s. The Wendy’s ‘webeefin’ Mixtape Story. https://www.wendys.com/blog/wendys-mixtape-story

What is content marketing?

The different types of content marketing

Visual content marketing

Our forefathers drew on cave walls and we’ve been basically scrolling visual content ever since. , it has played a role in marketing and advertising since the dawn of Madison Avenue.

Video – Arguably the most important (and most viewed) form of content marketing, video content is king. In 2022, Americans watched 6.8 billion hours of online video.³ While pre-recorded videos are the bread and butter of streaming platforms and social media, live streaming on platforms like YouTube and Twitch is seeing a meteoric rise.⁴
Images – From gorgeous landscape photos to intentionally rudimental memes, pictures really are worth a thousand words. While they may not be as visually stimulating as video, still images remain a smaller-budget solution for visual content marketing.
Infographics – The infographic is the ideal marriage of visual and written content. Colorful charts and diagrams offer a more aesthetically-pleasing way to distill information than a lengthy whitepaper.

Audio content marketing

Written content marketing

There are several kinds of written content marketing, including:

Blog posts
Listicles
Whitepapers
Case studies
eBooks
Checklists

Social media content marketing

Thanks to the ever-evolving nature of platforms like TikTok, Instagram marketing, Facebook and YouTube, social media marketing can be either:

Temporary content – Instagram stories and Snapchat messages are ephemeral media, lasting 24 hours at most.
Static posts – Photos and videos posted to a page or timeline are more immortal. Static posts include everything from three-word tweets to 10-minute TikToks.

User-generated content marketing

Most commonly, UGC is a social media post or story, but it can also show up as:

A testimonial
A video tutorial
A product or brand review
A blog post or comment

Encouraging UGC from your supporters is one of the easiest ways to cushion your marketing budget while leaning into organic content marketing.

Others include email marketing and other outbound marketing and advertising practices.

How to approach content marketing

Step 1: Define your audience

When you have a picture of your perfect persona, you can create content that speaks directly to them—and deliver it to them wherever they are.

Step 2: Examine your current content

Chances are you’re already producing relevant content that you can use for content marketing. Whether its brand blogs, tweets or live streams, you’re on the right track.

If you’ve published content in the past, there’s also likely some valuable data waiting at your fingertips. Most platforms provide performance metrics to gauge past content performance.

Look back at all of your relevant content from the past year and note the number of:

Views
Likes
Clicks
Comments
Shares

Step 3: Plan your upcoming content

Step 4: Produce and publish your new content

A series of social posts
An infographic
A video summary
A section of a whitepaper

Repurposing your valuable content also allows you to cover multiple channels simultaneously—without spending a ton of extra time or money.

Step 5: Analyze and react

Learn more from the masters of content marketing

In the end, content marketing is the marketing strategy du jour. But it’s far from a fad. Content marketing is here to stay, and if you want to see lasting growth, you need to see it through.

To chat more about our content marketing and other services, get in touch today. We’re ready to hit the ground running. Are you?

Sources:

Ahrefs. 63 Content Marketing Statistics for 2023. https://ahrefs.com/blog/content-marketing-statistics
Statista. Number of smartphone subscriptions worldwide from 2016 to 2021, with forecasts from 2022 to 2027. https://www.statista.com/statistics/330695/number-of-smartphone-users-worldwide/
Statista. Cumulative monthly time spent watching video content in the United States from March 2019 to March 2022 (in billion hours), by device. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1327396/cumulative-time-spent-watching-online-video-us/
Forbes. Going Live Online: The State Of Live Streaming And The Opportunities For Brands. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2021/02/04/going-live-online-the-state-of-live-streaming-and-the-opportunities-for-brands/
Forbes. Podcasts Are A Powerful Storytelling And Advertising Tool. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jiawertz/2021/12/31/podcasts-are-a-powerful-storytelling-and-advertising-tool/
Wendy’s. The Wendy’s ‘webeefin’ Mixtape Story. https://www.wendys.com/blog/wendys-mixtape-story

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What Is a Whitepaper?

Power Digital — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 16:58:54 +0000

Unlike traditional marketing channels, white paper writing extends beyond persuasive techniques. Originating as official government reports and technical writing, these marketing tools have long since left the oval office and become solutions-based research to advocate for a product or service.

Whitepapers are well-researched fact-based advertisements on a specific topic. They are often considered gated content because they often require readers to sign up or fill out a form to access them. They are an essential part of a comprehensive content strategy.

Whitepapers may involve a deep dive into a company’s secret sauce, a thesis on the core tenets of the business or an evaluation of a given industry.

So, how do you craft an authoritative and persuasive marketing messaging strategy? We have you covered in this blog post.

What is a whitepaper, and what is its purpose?

When used in commercial settings, a whitepaper is an informational document shared by an organization for sales and marketing purposes. They’re often used in business-to-business (B2B content marketing) contexts.

While a whitepaper is geared toward marketing purposes, its primary goal is to inform a potential customer or target audience about something an organization wants to offer them, which can include:¹

Products
Processes
Best practices
Case study
Thought leadership content
Services
Proposed solution to a problem
Research results

Whitepapers are also commonly used to share findings after an organization has conducted original research in their industry. Essentially, a whitepaper presents an opportunity for your organization to share and display its expertise while establishing a sense of credibility with its readers.

A well-rounded white paper is able to balance subtly persuasive language (when appropriate) with factual evidence from reliable sources. In doing so, they establish the organization as an authoritative source.

Types of whitepapers

You have plenty of options when it comes to deciding how you want to organize a whitepaper. What’s most ideal for you will depend on the information you’re writing about and what your goal is.

The following frameworks are commonly used to write whitepapers for businesses and nonprofits:

Technical or backgrounders – The backgrounder is arguably the most traditional type of whitepaper. The main goal is to explain a new or unfamiliar concept or technology to a particular audience—often one that has technical knowledge in the industry field. The paper may go further and outline the benefits of using said concept or technology.²
Numbered lists – Numbered list whitepapers are appealing because they can break down concepts and processes into more easily digestible steps.
Problems and solutions – A problem/solution whitepaper dissects a problem the intended audience faces, then uses persuasive elements supported by factual research to present them with solutions—ideally ones the organization can provide.

How to prepare a whitepaper

As you gear up to write your whitepaper, reading other whitepapers published within your industry will help you gain a sense of what consumers are looking for and how you can construct effective promotional and quality content.

Whitepapers often use an academic or authoritative tone that still aligns with your brand voice. For example, a company that sells outdoor gear with story-driven marketing campaigns would need to balance its narrative voice with an expert tone to formulate a successful and persuasive whitepaper that appeals to and informs its customer base.

To create a compelling whitepaper, heed the following:

Research extensively – Essentially, white papers are research reports, with a persuasive twist. To maintain an authoritative tone, it’s critical to use reliable sources and cite them throughout. When looking for factual evidence to cite, try to go beyond what the customer would find on their own with a quick internet search. Instead, prioritize primary sources that provide first-hand knowledge of the topic you’re speaking to. If sources in your whitepaper are hyperlinked, be sure to include a list of them at the end of your paper for readers who might print out your report or read it offline.³
Get visual – Make use of visual aids, like graphs or charts (when appropriate) to make the paper more visually appealing and more digestible for the audience. Graphics can improve the readability of your whitepaper and deepen the reader’s understanding of complex topics.⁴
Prepare for the long haul – While the nature of the information you’re sharing will dictate your whitepaper’s length, most whitepapers fall between five and six pages, or just around 2,500 words.⁵

How to write a whitepaper

Once you’re ready to dive into the content, there are eight steps you’ll want to follow. Think of them as the yellow brick road of whitepapers.

Step 1: Identify the purpose and audience

Essentially, the purpose of a whitepaper is to influence the decision-making of prospective customers. To do that effectively, you’ll need to identify your audience and how to best appeal to their wants and needs.

To determine your scope, ask yourself questions like:

What is the information that needs to be communicated?
What problem does this product or service solve?
What were the major findings in recent surveys/studies?
Who is this being written for? What are their primary concerns and challenges? What’s appealing to them?

Honing on these specifics allows your business to speak directly to those most likely to be interested in—and benefit from—your product, service, or solution.

Step 2: Conduct your research

Once you’ve answered your “why’s” and your “who’s,” it’s time to take a deep dive into the research process and gather your “what’s”—also known as the material that will support your key arguments.

Identify your key sources—ideally primary ones—that support, expand upon, or provide vital background information pertaining to the topic of your whitepaper. This could include:

Case studies
Statistics
Academic articles

Once you feel like you have enough information on your hands, you can also collect and build any relevant visual aids, like charts, graphs, or photos to supplement your research.

Step 3: Choose your framework and draft your outline

Once you know your purpose, audience and visual material, you can pick the whitepaper structure that’s the best fit for organizing your information.

Typically, you’ll want to include the following in the outline:

Introduction – In the first section, you’ll provide a big-picture overview, or summary, of the topic and what you aim to explore.
Background – The background will provide context for the topic you’re speaking to, identify a particular issue (if applicable) and provide evidence to support your findings or claims.
Solution – Using well-conducted research, you’ll provide a solution to the problem that was introduced.
Persuasion – For commercial organizations, an advertisement that aligns with your research will follow the solution proposition to inform the reader of a specific product, service, or value proposition.
Conclusion – Provide one last summary of the information discussed to enhance your audience’s understanding.
Sources – At the end of your whitepaper, you’ll cite your sources.

Step 4: Craft your introduction and conclusion

Plenty of how-to lists will place writing your introduction higher on this list, but hear us out—numerous changes can happen during the writing process, and introductions are often more effective, concise and informative when constructed around information that’s present within your whitepaper.

Once you know where your whitepaper’s path leads, you can then summarize your research, value propositions and product details in a final call-to-action. This must strike the perfect balance between persuasion and information to maintain the integrity of your document—a flashy endorsement can delegitimize the credibility of your whitepaper.

Step 5: Choose an eye-catching title

Once you know all your whitepaper’s contents, it’s time to pick a title that pulls readers in and helps them understand what they should expect to take away from reading it. It can also address the problem being discussed within the document.

Consider your brand voice and the key defining moments in your white paper as you look for title inspiration. Oftentimes, longer titles are most effective in grasping audience attention.

Step 6: Review, revise and repeat

As technical as it might be, writing a whitepaper is also a fluid and creative process. Once you’ve finished your first full draft, it’s beneficial to read through the whitepaper to ensure it serves its intended purpose and aligns with your brand voice.

While you revise, pay special attention to:

Structure
Style and formatting
Organization and flow
Readability
Sources and visual aids

With each new read, you might find yourself bouncing back and forth between the steps above, and that’s okay—it’s part of the process. Once you’ve finished polishing your project, you can pass it on to other stakeholders for a final stamp of approval—or maybe just a few more tweaks.

Stakeholders can provide insight into certain aspects of your messaging and ensure it aligns with company values and expert knowledge.

Grow your marketing strategies with Power Digital

A whitepaper is a solutions-based document that promotes an organization’s offerings through in-depth research and persuasive voice. At Power Digital, we’re solutions-based, too.

Power Digital is a growth marketing firm and digital marketing agency that uses data-rich user insights to create a multi-channel marketing campaign that speaks to your company’s needs and brings brand awareness to your business.

Working as both an SEO company and a content marketing agency, we deliver growth solutions you can rely on. Get in touch with Power Digital today.

Sources:

Purdue Online Writing Lab. White Paper: Organization and Other Tips. https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/subject_specific_writing/professional_technical_writing/white_papers/organization_and_other_tips.html
Stanford University. Definitions of White papers, Briefing Books, Memos. http://law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Definitions-of-White-Papers-Briefing-Books-Memos-2.pdf
University of Massachusetts Lowell. White Paper Style Guide. https://libguides.uml.edu/whitepaper_style
Investopedia. What Is a White Paper? https://www.investopedia.com/terms/w/whitepaper.asp
Zapier. What is a whitepaper? And how to write one. https://zapier.com/blog/what-is-a-whitepaper/#definition
Corporate Finance Institute. White Paper. https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/management/white-paper/
Master Class. White Paper Guide: How to Write a White Paper. https://www.masterclass.com/articles/white-paper-guide#how-to-write-a-white-paper

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How to Combine SEO and Content Marketing Effectively

Power Digital — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 16:58:54 +0000

If you’ve been around the marketing block, you may already know that putting content out there won’t draw in new audiences on its own. You also have to ensure that content shows up at the right place and at the right time.

SEO, or search engine optimization, is your best tool in making that magic happen.

When you effectively combine SEO and content marketing, the result is far greater than the sum of its parts. To help you understand how to combine these strategies in an effective content marketing campaign, we’ll first define both SEO and content marketing. Then, we’ll highlight specific techniques you can use to integrate them and help your business grow.

What is SEO, anyway?

Before we can combine SEO and content marketing, we first need to understand our two ingredients. So, let’s define SEO.

Search engine optimization (SEO) encompasses all of the processes and techniques you can use to increase your visibility on search engines.

If you have a question—for example, “how to combine SEO and content marketing effectively”—then your first thought will probably be to Google it. When you type in your query, pages and pages of answers appear almost immediately. For you, the process is pretty straightforward. But a lot goes on behind the scenes to decide what answers appear first.

Google and other search engines have to create order out of the billions of web pages on the internet. To combat this chaos, search engines use a three-step process:¹

Crawl – Picturing digital spiders crawling through the internet? You’re not far from the truth. Search engines first use bots to “crawl” web pages and collect information.
Index – Search engines then put the information collected during the crawling process into online indexes, much like how librarians organize books.
Rank – Finally, algorithms use hundreds of factors to analyze the web pages and decide what order they should appear in when you search for something online.

If you have a website, you want it to appear first on search engines so that you can drive more traffic. That’s where SEO comes in. If we gave a full lesson on SEO, we’d be here all day—so for now, know that there are three primary types:²

On-page SEO – It’s in the name: on-page SEO involves all of the content on your website, from blogs and product copy to title tags and internal links.
Off-page SEO – Similarly self-explanatory: off-page SEO involves elements that aren’t on your website, like backlinks or social media marketing.
Technical SEO – Finally, technical SEO involves backend strategies like optimizing your website for mobile devices or decreasing file sizes.

We could opine about SEO forever—but those are the basics you need to know to build a synergistic SEO content marketing strategy.

What about content marketing?

Before we can whisk together our ingredients, we need to define content marketing. Content marketing is the inbound marketing strategy du jour. Traditional marketing uses an outbound strategy (think TV ads, billboards or cold calling), but those strategies aren’t always successful anymore for two major reasons:³

Return on investment (ROI) – Data suggests that content marketing is less expensive than traditional marketing while also bringing three times as many leads.
Consumer trends – More and more people now use ad-blocking software, dramatically reducing the number of views on online advertisements. This represents a larger trend in the ways consumers avoid traditional ads.

Rather than consuming traditional ads, one report found that consumers now view at least three pieces of related content during their sales journey. As a result, the popularity of content marketing continues to rise. This inbound strategy organically drives traffic by producing high-quality content that consumers want, such as:³

Blogs
Ebooks
Podcasts
Videos

Your SEO content marketing strategy shares the goal of high-quality content.

3 best practices for combining SEO and content marketing

When done correctly, content marketing and SEO are mutually beneficial—SEO brings more visitors to your content, while your SEO content increases your search rankings. But what must you do to achieve this perfect partnership? There are many strategies you can implement, but to get right to the heart of it, we’ll break it down into three best practices.

#1 Prioritize content quality

You can bake a cake with a few simple ingredients—milk, eggs and sugar—but the quality will certainly differ if you use an expired carton of milk or eggs vs. fresh milk and eggs from a local farm.

SEO and content marketing are the same. Your final output and its success depend on the quality of the inputs you use. This is why high quality content should be at the top of your list when combining SEO and content marketing.

When it’s time for search engines to rank your web pages, content quality is one of the most crucial ranking factors. Put simply, whether it’s a sales page or a blog, better quality content is more likely to rank higher.⁴

So, what does high quality content look like?

Search engines may not be human, but their algorithms are built with humans in mind. Always remember that the end-point user of your content is a real, live person with a question that needs to be answered.

As a result, search engines like Google design their algorithms to reward content written by real humans and optimized for real readers. Creating your content with this in mind ensures that both your SEO and content marketing strategies are sound.

To that end, your major considerations for quality should include:⁵

Readability – We said it before (like a paragraph ago), but we’ll say it again because it is so important: real humans will be reading your SEO content. Designing your content around your target audience is therefore key—and should affect everything from your voice and tone to the length of your sentences.

Structure – Similarly, how you structure your content is integral to how both humans and search engines respond to and navigate your content. Both look for content structure that is logical and easy to follow. You can quickly improve your structure by effectively utilizing headings and breaking up large blocks of text.⁶
Format – As with structure, the right format for your content can define the user experience. Rather than reaching a specific word count, focus on establishing the scope of your topic so that you directly answer the question readers searched for—and do so as quickly as possible. The topic you’re covering and the level of detail required should decide the length of your content.⁶

Ensuring that all three facets of your content sing can help to ensure your readers stick around—and your SEO rankings do, too.

#2 Weave in keyword strategy

Back in the early aughts, much of keyword strategy involved plastering keywords on a page—as many as could be included—with the hope that more keywords would achieve more search results.

But today, our search engines are smarter. Which means your relevant keyword strategy must be, too.

Building content around keywords that are woven in naturally can help to ensure that your content not only includes those vital words and phrases, but also provides valuable information to the reader. That content should be created both to encourage readers to visit the page and stay there to enjoy the full experience.

Your content quality goes hand in hand with this strategy. But utilizing effective and relevant keyword research tools or partnering with a digital marketing agency can help you to pinpoint which ones can help you produce real growth.

#3 Don’t forget about links

Links are another vital consideration when combining content marketing and SEO. When we talk about links, SEO and content marketing, it’s important to distinguish between several different kinds:

Jump links link to different sections on the same page. These can make it easier for readers to navigate your content, especially long-form content. They encourage readers to stay on your website as opposed to becoming frustrated and leaving because they can’t find the answer they’re looking for.⁶
Internal linking refers to links from one page of your site to another. This is one of many ranking considerations that search engines use, and can help search engines understand the structure of your site. Internal links also help to keep your readers on your website and allow them to find additional relevant content—thereby increasing the value of your page.⁶
External linking, or links that send readers to another website, may send readers away from your page—but they’re still useful because they communicate to both readers and search engines that you’re an expert who creates well-researched content.⁶
Backlinks, finally, are one of the most vital tools for increasing your search rankings. These are links on another website that lead visitors to your page—and they help to show search engines that your content is valuable, authoritative and trustworthy.⁶ Creating relevant and high-quality content is one of the most crucial ways to encourage backlinking.

Advantages of combining SEO and content marketing

Now, it’s time to mix SEO and content marketing together—and reap the delicious benefits of this irresistible pairing. With the right strategies in place, you can expect to benefit from two key advantages:

Increased traffic – Research estimates that a staggering 68% of website traffic is a result of searches.⁸ The benefits of this traffic are twofold. First, you attract more potential customers to your website. Second, well-written content communicates to your audience that you’re an expert in your industry.⁴
Boosted brand awareness – A better SEO strategy can increase your brand awareness and visibility by increasing your ranking on search engine results pages (SERPS). The top five spots have the best click-through rates (CTRs). That means more organic traffic directly to your website.⁴ It also means that people will begin associating your brand with specific industry keywords and phrases. To capitalize on the benefits of better brand awareness through SEO, it’s essential to produce quality content that will rank well.⁴

Build a comprehensive marketing strategy with Power Digital

The recipe for SEO and content marketing success may sound straightforward. Sprinkle in a little linking, a dash of keywords, a heaping spoonful of quality content. And voilà—you’ve got yourself a delectable SEO and content marketing strategy to drive traffic to your website and boost your brand’s visibility.

In practice, however, these strategies can take some trial and error. That’s why you need a content marketing agency and an SEO company in the creative kitchen with you.

Power Digital works with you to help realize your full potential. We bring together marketing, consulting and data intelligence to help companies across the world grow faster and build brand recognition. Get in touch today to learn how our team can elevate your SEO and content marketing strategies.

Sources:

Search Engine Land. What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization? https://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-seo
LinkedIn. What are the 3 Types of SEO? https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-3-types-seo-harry-sanders/
Search Engine Land. What is content marketing? Defining marketing’s present and future. https://searchengineland.com/what-is-content-marketing-388970
Search Engine Land. How SEO and content marketing work together. https://searchengineland.com/seo-content-marketing-388978
Forbes. How SEO And Content Marketing Work Together To Fuel Your Online Success. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2018/07/03/how-seo-and-content-marketing-work-together-to-fuel-your-online-success/?sh=225a8e3016bf
Search Engine Land. 25 tips to optimize your content for people and search engines. https://searchengineland.com/tips-optimize-content-people-search-engines-388271
Hubspot. 11 Creative (But 100% White Hat!) Ways to Earn Backlinks in 2022. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/backlink-strategies
MediaPost. Google Crushes Facebook As Commerce Traffic Generator. https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/347378/google-crushes-facebook-as-commerce-traffic-genera.html

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How to Repurpose Content

Power Digital — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 17:49:02 +0000

When it comes to content marketing, besides finding the right content marketing agency, the main priority is to reach a wider audience, but how do we do that successfully? Developing new content and consistently posting blogs is important, but repurposing old content is guaranteed to provide value and reach new audiences. Learning how to repurpose content will not only improve the value of your existing content but will also help you to:

Tailor your overall strategy
Maximize time and resources
Expand your online presence
Reach a wider or new audience

There are so many ways to repurpose content to achieve the best results. Follow along as we offer our tips on repurposing content through different channels such as email, social media, Pinterest, and more.

How to repurpose content on email

Why spend more money and time creating and promoting new types of content when you can repurpose content you’ve already created? Did you know there are many different ways you can repurpose your content through email? From sharing blog content and important product/service information, to addressing your audience with a heartfelt letter from the CEO, the opportunities for cross-promoting content are endless.

Automations

When repurposing content via email using email automations you can do just about anything. If you have a great piece of content, even micro content, that educates your audience on your product or service, you can potentially include it in a welcome sequence or even create a brand new automation pushing different pieces of content that all educate and engage your audience. The beauty of automations is that you only need to set them up once and then they are automatically triggered by customers joining your mailing list and the cross-channel content promotion does the work itself!

Broadcasts

On the other hand, broadcast emails offer a unique way to push your content because you can always blast content out to your lists at any time, without the need for a specific trigger. The power is completely in your hands. Whenever you publish a piece of content via your blog, website, social media platforms, etc. it’s a good idea to push it out with your email campaigns to capitalize on a new avenue of promotion.

All in all, don’t let your content go to waste – give it another chance to shine using email marketing and all the great ways you can promote your best work!

How to repurpose content on Social Media

If you have a presence on a social platform, you can benefit from repurposing your existing blog. You’ve already put in the work by creating a valuable blog post for your target audience, and now you can reach new audiences without putting in the extra effort of a new post.

Additionally, you may have an audience that likes to visually digest their content instead of reading it, or they are much more present on social media platforms and aren’t aware of your blog. To ensure you are reaching all of your audience, start the content creation process by reading through your existing great content and highlighting sentences, statistics, or quotes that stand out. Or, you can jot down the main takeaways. Next, you can repurpose your visual content and bring it to life across almost any social media platform, such as:

Creating an infographic
Sharing a quote on your Facebook or Instagram story
Making a short video or video series
Creating a collection of posts

You don’t have to be an expert in design or photoshop to repurpose a social media post. There are several content format platforms out there, such as Canva, that offer thousands of templates for virtually all forms of social media content. Or, you can create a post from scratch!

How to repurpose content on Pinterest

Another way to get the most mileage out of your content efforts is by incorporating a Pinterest blog strategy. Posting a blog written content in the form of a blog to Pinterest is considered a Rich Pin which allows you to include a larger header image header and a link to your website. Some benefits of posting blogs on Pinterest are higher user engagement, further reach, and brand awareness.

Although this strategy is directly intended to continue engaging users on Pinterest, this is also a win, win, for your site traffic. Through utilizing a Pinterest-blogging strategy, you can promote posts and ultimately earn more traffic to your blog than what you would have gotten from organic searches alone.

Repurposing great content for lead generation

Repurposed content can also be used for lead generation.

Try taking an existing blog and building it out to be a white paper, downloadable, or Slideshare. There are many ways to make your content more engaging no matter what format you’re using. By taking the information that is already available and making it a more robust resource, these pieces of content can be sent to potential new clients to show your business is at the forefront of your industry.

You can also take a series of blogs that already exist to create a downloadable Ebook. If you have several blogs around a similar topic, you can repurpose them into a single ebook and use it for lead generation. By having it behind an email lead generator, you not only show potential customers you are a thought leader, but also gaining a strong email list.

Using existing resources not only saves you and your team time, but can also be extremely useful for building a strong lead generation funnel and positioning yourself as a leader in your industry.

Next steps for your content repurposing strategy

When it comes to repurposing content, there are many ways you can take advantage of the valuable content that you’ve already created. By repurposing your existing content through channels like email, social media, Pinterest, and lead generation efforts, you can save time and resources, and also establish a cohesive content strategy. Not only does this make your marketing strategy more efficient, but it creates opportunities for the additional promotion of some of your best content.

Once you start incorporating new channels into your content repurposing strategy, it will help position your brand as a thought leader in the space, and it will more importantly maximize your time. For additional information on content strategy and other marketing services contact Power Digital today!

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Balancing SEO and Quality Content

Kristin Crabb — Tue, 13 Jul 2021 16:21:44 +0000

Intro: What Is Quality Content and How SEO Plays a Role

The oft-quoted “Content is King” has long been a tenet of marketing strategy, and still is. However, how do you craft content to effectively reach this regal status? The answer lies at the intersection of quality and SEO optimization. No matter what type of content you’re developing – product copy, blog articles, about page description, lead magnets – providing relevant, valuable, and engaging content is a foundational step for success. Build upon that with strategic optimizations of the content that align with the intent of user’s searches and you’ll also be well-positioned in the search engine. Read on for general guidance and tactical recommendations of how to achieve this within your own content.

How To Build Quality Content

Building quality content on your website is crucial to creating a strategic SEO strategy. However, understanding what resonates with your target audience may change your strategy over time, so in the meantime, stick to these three simple steps when you first start building out content to set yourself up for success:

Develop brand voice guidelines and stay consistent with them. Establishing brand voice, style and value guidelines is an important step in creating unique, quality content. Sticking to these guidelines throughout your content strategy will help you stand out amongst your competitors and build brand awareness for your website.
Keep your audience’s interest in mind when writing your content. If you have a good idea of who your target audience is and what they’re interested in reading, ensure you tailor your content to them. The quality of your content is ultimately determined by your audience, so conduct keyword research prior to developing your content strategy to better understand what topics and keywords users are searching for and implement them into your strategy.
Ensure your headline and first paragraph are compelling. In order for readers to be interested in your content and prevent a high bounce rate, you need to grab their attention within the first 50 words of your content. Utilize your brand voice guidelines to do this to ensure you’re staying consistent with your verbiage.

Quality Content: Do’s and Don’ts

Quality content is when SEO tactics and customer-focused content consolidate. It’s the perfect marriage of analytical and creative and can result in increased search rankings and increased organic traffic. Google defines quality content as focusing on the user rather than the algorithm itself. When it comes to creating quality content, there are must-have features you’ll want to include in your content as well as some things you’ll want to avoid.

Quality content do’s:

Follow E-A-T guidelines: EAT stands for expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.
Use keyword research to find topics your target audience is interested in
Make sure your content is primarily for users, not the search engine
Make sure your content is truthful and not deceiving: If your metadata describes content focussed on how to wash curly hair, make sure the bulk of the article is focused on how to wash curly hair.

Quality Content Don’ts:

Avoid duplicate content – duplicating content or taking content from another site will be flagged
Avoid keyword stuffing – make sure the content sounds natural and organic
Don’t add content just to add content – make sure the content is intentional and helps the user
Refrain from including any sneaky redirects

Ultimately, don’t try to fool Google. Search engines can decipher between quality content that’s intended for customers and content that is jam-packed with outdated tactics.

Modern SEO Best Practices

Search engine optimization is constantly evolving and marketers should expect that Google will continue to roll out algorithm changes. It’s your job to account for these changes, reassess and refine. Now, that being said, it can often still feel daunting to keep up with the latest best practices. However, we’ve consolidated some modern SEO best practices to help keep your content strategy strong.

Create a meaningful FAQ page. This is key for prioritizing the user experience by answering questions in a concise manner that’s easy for the user to digest and understand. Plus, you’ll get bonus points from Google for showing customers that you care.
Make sure to organize your content by topic. And again, it all circles back to the user experience. This is another way to create a seamless experience for users to get to the information they’re looking for quickly. It’s important to note that as your website architecture changes, you’ll want to update how your content is organized as well.
Focus on building relationships and providing value with link building. Link building is an incredibly effective SEO tactic that takes time. However, the immediate focus for link-building success goes back to the basics: building meaningful relationships. You’ll want to be selective and develop relationships with domains that support your audience. During this process, make sure to take advantage of Google Search Console to guide who you reach out to.

As with all SEO strategies, it’s important to recognize that building authority doesn’t happen overnight and Google will continue to change in ways that you can’t predict. But, as long as you continue to prioritize the user experience, you’ll be rewarded.

How to create quality content

As you can see, creating quality content is a multifaceted process… But a very important one! Our list of dos and don’ts will help keep even the most confused on the right track. But if you’re still unsure, put yourself in the shoes of the user and consider whether you’re just writing for rankings or if you’re truly writing to provide an answer to someone’s question. If you choose the latter, you’ll always come out on top!

Sources:

https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2020/06/23/modern-seo-strategy-three-tactics-to-support-your-efforts/

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B2B Content Marketing Best Practices

Kristin Crabb — Wed, 16 Jun 2021 22:30:12 +0000

While business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers can often focus on flashy branding and fun taglines, business-to-business (B2B) companies require an entirely different approach.

In B2B, brand trust and authority are key—and there’s no better way for B2B companies to build them than through content marketing.

What is B2B content marketing? It’s the creation and distribution of informative and valuable content including white papers, videos, webinars, and blog posts that move target audiences down a B2B company’s sales funnel.

This is your guide to what B2B marketing is and the best practices for B2B content marketing.

Step 1: Set Clear Goals

Creating an effective B2B content marketing strategy can be costly and time-consuming. Therefore, it’s important for B2B companies to understand its objectives before opening a Word document or getting the cameras rolling for an informational video.

To get started, determine the primary goal of your campaign as a B2B content marketer and the way you’ll measure your success. According to the Content Marketing Institute, most B2B businesses cite the following goals:¹

Awareness – Create visibility through memorable content creation that provides a clear sense of your company’s value propositions. Successful awareness campaigns can be measured by impressions and clicks.
Consideration – You can measure your audience’s level of engagement by dwell time, captured email addresses, high CTRs, or other KPIs of your choice.
Conversion – New leads and conversions should eventually result in new business partnerships and increased sales.

While it’s fairly easy to create campaigns that build brand awareness, consideration and conversion come with high-quality content that fosters trust.²

Keep your goals at the forefront as you design your content ideas

Step 2: Know Your Audience

Once you’ve established your goals, strategize about the best way to achieve them given your target audience.

As a B2B company, you probably already have a list of potential leads and target industries. But the advanced tools that help B2C companies target potential customers based on demographic information and browsing habits can help your campaigns succeed, too.

Beyond demographic data, consider the following B2B marketer questions.

What Does Your Audience Need and Value?

It’s one thing to have a link to your recent white paper show up in a potential leads’ Twitter feed. It’s another for them to actually click on it, and still another for them to read it.

To foster engagement, create content that grabs your audience’s attention.

Understand clients’ pain points – Your B2B company provides a solution to customers’ problems. Your content marketing can often serve an educational purpose, helping them understand how and why your services provide relief.
Use your knowledge base – Existing customers often come to you with queries and problems. If you’re seeing the same issue or question arise again and again, it could be a great topic for a piece of content marketing or an entire educational series.
Analyze data – Keep track of the search queries that lead users to your website. Create content that specifically addresses these topics.
Test concepts – There’s nothing worse than creating a piece of content that simply doesn’t get clicks. Use Twitter to test out potential headlines and see which garner the most interest in terms of likes, comments, and even link clicks.³

As you create this content, continue to keep your goals at the forefront.

If your goal is awareness, you might want to provide a free Webinar or blog post.
If your goal is consideration, ask users to provide their email in exchange for access.
If your goal is conversion, intersperse clear CTAs throughout the content.

What Professional Services Do You Need to Reach Your Audience?

You’re a leader in your industry. You probably know exactly why you’re the best company to solve your clients’ questions and boost their bottom lines. But that doesn’t mean you should write your own commercial scripts or branded assets.

If your content has errors or is plain-old hard to look at it, clients will run in the other direction. Successful content marketing is:

Well-planned and well-written – If you’re creating a podcast or video, it’s important to start with a clearly organized outline (even if you choose to ad-lib). Likewise, text on slides and in eBooks needs to be concise, clear, and error-free. If you’re not up for this level of textual organization, you’ll need to work with a copywriter.
Visually attractive – Consistent visual branding helps customers recognize your business across its various homes on the web. Likewise, clean graphic design conveys professionality.
Technically optimized – If the video on your landing page doesn’t load, users will close the window within seconds. Likewise, if your online course is clunky to navigate, no one will complete it. Ask back-end designers to review all technical specifications and ensure a smooth user experience.

Great content can require an upfront investment. With the right strategy and continued analytics, you won’t regret it.

Step 3: Create High-Impact Content

When implementing a content marketing strategy, it’s important to work on two fronts:

Create evergreen content that is, as the name suggests, always relevant to your business’s mission and services.
One great form of evergreen content is a pillar page, a 3,000+ word post that addresses one of your customers’ most-cited pain points and your solution. A pillar page can also link out to other posts and pages.
Likewise, your YouTube channel could create a playlist with some of your most relevant videos.
Introduce new content to capitalize on trending topics and draw new users into your content funnel.

Beyond these guiding principles, choose the right format for your ongoing campaigns.

Experiment with New Forms

Which of the following best engages your target audience?

Blog posts
IGTV videos
YouTube tutorials
Webinars
White papers
Podcasts
eBooks
Client case studies

If you haven’t experimented with all of these B2B marketer genres, it’s impossible to answer the question.

Go Outside Your Network

Besides creating native content for your site and marketing channels, consider other B2B content marketer venues and forums.

Writing a guest post for a popular blog or business periodical can introduce you to a wider audience. This enhances your credibility, and you can tout the accomplishment in your newsletter.
Seek out speaking engagements that establish your chief officers as thought leaders within your industry space. These are also great opportunities to interact face-to-face with event attendees.

Step 4: Promote Your Content Effectively

Whether you’ve uploaded a new video to Instagram or written an op-ed for a local newspaper, content promotion is just as important as content creation.

Get your content marketing materials in front of the most eyeballs by using the following strategies.

Use Your Existing Channels

Don’t forget to announce the new publication in the following forums:

Your newsletter
LinkedIn
The “news” or “updates” page on your website
Your social media channels

And you’re not limited to announcing the content on a single occasion.

Add a short line to a future newsletter: “In case you missed it…”
Take advantage of social media hashtags like #TBT to reintroduce an older post.

Implement SEO

We’ve already discussed the importance of tracking search queries. Beyond the keywords and phrases that are already bringing users to your website, research other potential topics that will extend your organic reach and capture new users at the top of your sales funnel.

If you have some marketing know-how, you likely already know that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of incorporating relevant keywords into your content to boost its search engine rankings.

It’s important to use SEO principles on:

Blog posts
Landing pages
Your Google My Business Page
YouTube
LinkedIn

If you don’t already have an SEO strategy for the channels where users discover your services and content, now’s the time to develop one.

Use Paid Ads

SEO isn’t instantaneous. If your new blog post addresses a red-hot topic, you want potential customers to discover it now.

Paid advertising is a great way to target users based on demographic data and behavior.
If you notice a search trend related to your industry and want to show up at the top of Google’s results now, create a Google AdWords bidding strategy that will get your content in front of inquiring minds.
Use past data to choose whether Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, or another forum will yield the best ROI.

You can also pay influencers within your industry to promote your content.

This can be a great way to expand your reach, and the influencer’s plug can also be reused in future advertising campaigns.

Include Share Buttons

Your existing network is valuable, but the best content inspires users to share on their own channels. Make it easy to do so with widgets for reposting and linking.

Step 5: Adjust Your Approach With Data

When you’re first getting started with content marketing, it feels like there’s a whole world to explore. But over time, you’ll see clear patterns in user behavior according to your KPIs.

Perhaps you’ve become a minor TikTok celebrity within your field. Or maybe white papers drive email signups and lead to conversions.

Continue investing in the content formats that are best achieved your stated goals
Adjust your SEO approach based on data
Update and continue to promote high-ranking content

Over time, you’ll develop a content marketing strategy that helps your business grow.

Formulate Your Content Strategy With Power Digital

Ready to create your first piece of content?

With so many options for format and so many potential KPIs to track, it can be difficult to know where to start.

At our digital marketing agency, we’re experts in content strategy. We help you design content that aligns with a holistic marketing strategy while tracking your ROI. Get in touch today to learn more about how we can help you design and create content that drives B2B conversions that include LinkedIn B2B marketing and other business platforms like Alibaba.

Sources:

Content Marketing Institute. 2020 B2B Content Marketing: What the Successful Do. https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2019/10/success-differentiators-b2b-research/
Forbes. Why B2B Companies Need To Think About Content Marketing Beyond Lead Generation. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2021/05/18/why-b2b-companies-need-to-think-about-content-marketing-beyond-lead-generation/?sh=8b2c58b2713f
Social Media Examiner. How to Test Blog Post Titles With Twitter. https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/use-twitter-to-test-blog-post-titles/

The post B2B Content Marketing Best Practices appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

How to Measure Content Marketing ROI

Power Digital — Fri, 14 May 2021 00:06:26 +0000

Intro: What is Content Marketing ROI?

In content marketing, return on investment (ROI) is how much you spend on content marketing in relation to the revenue you earn from your digital marketing agency efforts. ROI isn’t immediate with content marketing, as it can take several months for your content strategy to have apparent results. Although it might not be quick, it can still have an enormous impact on a brand’s performance.

Let’s dive into how to measure and increase ROI when developing your content marketing plan.

How to Measure ROI

To understand the success of your content strategy, it’s essential to establish which content marketing metrics, or key performance indicators (KPI’s), you should be tracking as a content marketer. For example:

Are you mainly interested in generating brand awareness? If so, website traffic might be what you choose to pay attention to.
Are you looking to rank number one on Google’s search engine results pages (SERP) with your blog post? If that’s the case, keeping track of your keyword movement should likely be top of mind.
Are you looking to see assisted conversions from your marketing efforts? Keeping an eye on your content’s conversion rate could make the most sense.

No matter the content marketing success metrics you choose to adopt, your business’s content strategy should be customized to fit your larger business goals.

It’s also vital to note that engagement and ROI are not separate metrics, but have a significant influence on each other. We recommend creating a robust process to determine all opportunities to test your content piece length, calls to action (CTAs) within the blog post, total time spent on the page, and see if any of those impact your organic traffic, assisted conversions, or keyword rankings. By examining how such changes affect your analytics, you can start to gain a better idea of your overall content ROI.

One key thing to remember when measuring the ROI of your content creation is that your success is relative. Like any other marketing channel, the competitive landscape is constantly changing and it’s important to always evaluate your content performance and identify areas where you can experiment to see improvements.

How to Improve ROI

There are a few ways you can improve your content marketing ROI: use content to support your core converting pages, create more quality content that converts, and make sure your other channels are maximizing the value of your blog’s qualified traffic.

Use Your Content Strategy to Support SEO

You first need to evaluate how your current content strategy is supporting your overall organic growth goals. Consider your core revenue-driving or converting pages and how you can utilize your content marketing strategy to bolster those.

For example, if one of your top-converting pages is ranking at the bottom of page one or on page two for a relevant keyword, you may want to utilize your content marketing strategy to build authority around that page and link back to it. By using your content strategy to improve visibility and increase traffic to your core revenue-driving or converting pages, you’ll be able to see a larger return on investment for your content marketing campaign.

Create More Content That Converts

If you’re looking to improve your content marketing ROI with a direct impact from the blog, you might want to take a look at your top-revenue driving or top-converting blog posts. These may uncover findings that could translate into similar topics that could convert. Maybe your top-performing topics fill a middle-of-funnel content need for your audience and this is leading to increased conversions. In which case, add more middle-of-the-funnel content into your strategies to boost your content marketing ROI.

Learn more: A Guide to Marketing Funnels

Make Sure Your Other Channels Are Set Up For Success

A core benefit of any content marketing strategy is the qualified traffic it brings to your website. By filling the top of the funnel with people who are looking for information related to your products or services, you have a much larger remarketing pool of potential customers/leads. In order to improve your content marketing ROI, you want to make sure your other digital marketing channels are set up for success to maximize touchpoints.

For example, a person may land on your blog organically through a search query. If your paid media social strategy isn’t buttoned up and remarketing to that same person through an ad on Instagram, you’ll miss out on moving them through the funnel. Content marketing can play a huge role in assisted conversions, but not if your other channels aren’t successful.

Setting Benchmarks

To set your content strategy up for success, you have to set clear goals. Let’s start by identifying several metrics you can use as benchmarks:

Website traffic by source/medium
User behavior, such as time on page or bounce rate
Impressions and click-through rate (CTR)
Lead generation
Keyword rankings

By creating benchmarks, you allow yourself to see how your strategy is performing at any given point and how your performance metrics change over time. When analyzing your data, you should always be keeping a close eye on your competitors. Shift your focus from industry-wide benchmarks to benchmarks against your top rivals. Make sure you understand the share of social proof or search results they have so you can properly forecast your trajectory.

For instance, if you’re looking at a number of leads, anyone can do that, so dig deeper to better understand the customer journey and strategies that have impacted growth. Ask yourself and your team questions such as:

What percentage of your organic search leads become purchasers?
How many “high-quality” leads result in a sale?

Can Your Content Marketing Strategy Make You Money?

Short answer? Yes! That said, it’s not always immediate and it’s not always direct.

You will need at least 3 months worth of crawls by Google to start to see the leading indicators of a new SEO-based content strategy and at least 6 months before you are really humming. And when it comes to direct content revenue, we like to view that as a cherry on top.

For example, if you run an SEO-based content marketing strategy for a successful ecommerce business, you’ll likely see some direct conversions come through the blog. However, most people aren’t going to conduct a top of funnel Google search to find an answer and immediately convert right then and there. This is why your content should aim to support the growth of core pillar/transactional pages of the site through a technical internal linking strategy and continuously introduce monthly new users to the brand so you can retarget them through paid advertising and push them farther down the funnel.

When looking to demonstrate positive ROI through your content marketing efforts, it’s important to consider additional success metrics such as assisted revenue and overall growth in organic revenue. In highlighting details like a customer’s last touchpoint before a purchase, these metrics can help to showcase the success of an integrated content marketing, on-page, and off-page SEO strategy.

Make Your Content Count

Your content marketing strategy can have an enormous impact on your business over time. It’s a marketing strategy that can be very effective for top-of-funnel traffic, which means a greater quantity of fresh eyes on your business. However, the most important thing to remember is that measuring content marketing ROI is really dependent on what success means to you and your business. Remember to set benchmarks so that you know what performance looks like, then don’t be afraid to adjust your goals over time and pivot your content marketing strategies for the optimal performance you’re looking for.

Whether you have an ecommerce, business to business (B2B), or lead generation business, content marketing can move the needle and help you acquire customers in a more cost effective way.

The post How to Measure Content Marketing ROI appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

How to Cross-Promote Content

Power Digital — Fri, 16 Apr 2021 23:07:38 +0000

We all love the phrase “work smarter, not harder” and we’re firm believers in a cross-promotion strategy that will utilize all parts of the marketing funnel when it comes to your content marketing strategy. Content doesn’t just have to live in one place, like your blog. It can morph and you can flex your content muscles within many different channels. Thinking with a full-funnel approach will only maximize the effectiveness of your content strategies overall and create a synergistic and cohesive feel across all channels. Let’s dive into how to cross-promote content according to our digital marketing agency.

Email

Today, we live in a visual economy where, in order to really capture a consumer’s attention and elicit a click, we need to deliver captivating copy and imagery that is engaging and stimulating. That’s where email promotion can help.

Utilizing email to help cross-promote your content practically does the work for itself. In most cases, the content in question is already created and it’s just a matter of outline your general message and then sending your information out into the world.

Promoting your content via email can be done in three different ways:

Automated Campaigns
Broadcast Campaigns
Newsletters

With an automated marketing campaign, you can easily add your content to a Welcome Series in order to help educate the user on your brand’s identity and core values. Capturing a new subscriber’s interest from the get-go can help to build a strong foundation and help nurture them down the marketing funnel.

Want everyone to know about your premium piece of content? Send a broadcast email. When it comes to broadcasts, the whole purpose is to send out an email that is one and done and only sent to current subscribers. They are designed to inform your readers and promote new announcements. Broadcasts can include announcements, sales, important updates, and digests — AKA your content.

Newsletters also technically fall into the broadcast category but are unique in how they can be presented to your audience. Newsletters can feel incredibly personal and tailored to your brand’s voice, tone, and values, hence making it the perfect vessel to promote your content.

All in all, email can be an amazing resource for cross-promoting your content.

Organic Social

One of the most popular channels to incorporate into your cross-promotion strategy is organic social. Organic social allows you to push your promotions into the feeds of your followers. Anyone who is following your business page has the potential to see a post or story about your latest promotion and has now been further pushed down the funnel.

Nowadays there’s hardly anything that comes free. Organic social is one of the marketing tools out there that actually is free. In fact, it’s essentially free advertising. You can also utilize each social platform to ensure you’re targeting various demographics. Below are some organic social media platforms that you are probably already familiar with:

Facebook
Instagram
Twitter
TikTok
Snapchat

The reason why it is beneficial to incorporate organic social into your overall marketing strategy is because it will have a synergetic effect on your marketing outreach efforts. While organic social is free, your audience is limited, so it’s important to use organic social in addition to your other marketing channels.

That being said, organic social is a great channel to use in tandem with your other marketing efforts. You can use organic social to promote new products, services, or events. You can also use it to promote your other platforms or share new blog posts and various content.

Paid Social

Incorporating a paid social strategy into your content marketing strategy can help generate promotion opportunities that would otherwise be untapped. By using paid social as a resource, content can then be used to garner even more views and interaction with potential customers. Rather than an organic social strategy, paid social is sure to get your content in front of your target audience. You can use these platforms to get your content in front of more people, and even use content to lead to more sales.

By understanding the different demographics of each social platform, this will allow you to make sure you are reaching potential users at the right time. A few examples of popular paid social content promotion strategies include:

Targeted Facebook Ads – boosts, Ads, Pins
Instagram ads – stories and promoted posts
Retargeting Display or Facebook Ads
Linkedin – Sponsored content or sponsored inmail

Facebook and Instagram have the highest return on investment when it comes to sales and targeted audiences. However, there are others that are emerging as new leaders in the paid social space. For example:

Snapchat ads – filters, lenses, Snap ads
Promoted Tweets
YouTube: if you have video content to share, this can be an easy cross-over for the right brand!
TikTok – in-feed video ads, branded hashtag challenge, branded effects, etc
Pinterest ads

Regardless of the platform, it’s important to support engagement, whether it’s to click a link to your site, to comment on the post, or share! There are new social platforms emerging all the time, and capitalizing on their views can be a game-changer for your content and brand. Keep in mind that PPC (pay-per-click) can vary greatly depending on the platform and target audience. So always keep in mind that there is a cost/benefit ratio with these kinds of decisions.

Using First-Party Data Within Your Content Strategy

Utilizing first-party data is a great way to keep your content strategy well informed, and can be used across different channels, such as paid search and email. Unlike third-party data, where data is bought from other companies, first-party data is the information you collect from your own, free sources. Obtaining this data comes directly from your customers, site visitors, and followers across social media platforms. First-party data includes information such as:

Purchase history
Time spent on your website
Demographics
Interests
And more

First-party data is the most transparent form of data because you own it and are responsible for collecting consent from consumers and complying with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). As a top of funnel strategy, you can take these customer insights in a cross channel marketing strategy and produce content that better aligns with the users’ intent or interests. These insights are not only useful for your top of funnel content strategy, but also for departments further down the funnel to create a more personalized customer journey and targeted messaging.

Measuring the Impact

Now that you’ve gone through the process of cross-promoting your content, you’ll want to see the impact that it had. How many impressions, clicks, or sessions did your post drive? Can you pinpoint a single channel that contributed to the success of your content? Measuring the impact of your cross-channel strategy will be so important in understanding what works, what doesn’t, and where you can optimize to achieve better results in the future. So, as you get started with developing your 2021 content marketing plan, don’t forget about those results!

Sources:

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Can Your Brand Benefit From a Content Strategy?

Power Digital — Fri, 26 Mar 2021 14:44:41 +0000

Why Content Marketing?

When it comes to your marketing strategy, great content really is king… and queen, for that matter. However, there are a few things to consider when deciphering what type of content strategy to go after. The first being your overall business goal. Are you a B2B company looking to garner more leads or perhaps an ecommerce brand pushing for brand awareness? Content marketing will be effective in both of these situations, but will require very different strategies and tactics. Our guide will help you determine the best content model for your business, as well as how to get there through managing content from a digital marketing agency’s perspective.

How to Craft a Content Strategy Based on Your Business Goals

Depending on your business goals and target audiences,the content type you include in a dedicated content marketing plan will differ. A few helpful questions that can act as thought starters to inform your content marketing strategy include:

What is the typical lifecycle of a target customer?
What content type would they need at each phase to help push them to make a decision?
Where do your target customers live online? Are they searching for information on Google? Looking for how-to guides? Interested in thought leadership in whitepapers?

Understanding the answers to these questions can help you craft your content plan and business goal. For example, if you are an ecommerce business, you may want to develop blog content that answers common questions users may have around your product type. If your target audience includes businesses, you will likely include whitepaper or case study content ideas to provide valuable resources, generate awareness for your solutions and nurture leads down the funnel. Start by considering your business and content goals and the audiences you’d like to reach through this lucrative marketing plan, and that will spur ideas around what type of content your strategy should include.

What Are Your Competitors Doing?

When creating a content strategy, the first step your marketing team should be focused on should be analyzing what your competitors are doing. The benefit of starting a content strategy after your competitors is that you can look at their existing content’s failures and successes, learn from them and create better, quality content from those insights. Here are three questions to ask yourself once you’ve identified what your competitors are doing with their own content strategy:

What keywords are they ranking for that you are not?
What content ideas are your competitors producing? Is it interactive content? Is it long-form content?
How are your competitors positioning their brand? Are they already known as a thought-leader in a specific niche or industry?

Understanding the answers to these questions is key to determining the volume you will need to gain impression share.

How to Understand Your Target Audience

Whether you are looking to attract new customers or retain existing customers, it’s important to understand your target audience. If you are looking to target a niche audience within your broader target audience, then your content should be tailored appropriately. The goal here is to create content that resonates with your audience. You can begin this content creation process by conducting research to identify your niche audience and determine where your brand can meet their needs.

For example, if your brand sells cookware, then a niche audience could be women in their early to mid-20s. This group will likely prefer content that covers advice and recipes for those that are beginning their cooking journey, whereas an older group would prefer more advanced techniques and be willing to invest in extra accessories. It’s important to note that when you focus on a niche audience, much of the competition from your larger audience is removed and can result in a better bang for your buck. In addition, niche audiences also tend to be more engaged. so be sure to interact with them often.

Content Marketing at Different Stages of the Funnel

There are three stages of a business funnel — top of the funnel (TOFU), middle of the funnel (MOFU) and bottom of the funnel (BOFU). This funnel helps guide a lead or user through the buying journey with the goal of converting them into a customer at the end.

At each stage of the funnel, a user has different needs and interests. At the top of the business funnel, the user is in discovery mode. This user has just discovered your brand or product and may be interested in learning more about you. To capture users in this stage of the funnel, you will need the following content:

The middle of the funnel is when a user or a potential new customer is in the consideration mode. This user is now deciding whether or not your product or service is valuable to them. Oftentimes, they are comparing your business against similar businesses in the industry. This is a crucial stage of the funnel and producing the right kind of quality content can assist the user in making the right decision. At this stage of the funnel, you will need:

White papers
Case studies
Webinars
Reports
Email courses

The last stage of the funnel is when a user will make a purchase. They have gathered all the information they need and are ready to enter their credit card information or sign up for your service. This may be the end of the funnel, but there is still valuable content you can create to push the user over the edge. Bottom of the funnel content includes:

Customer stories
Testimonials
Consultations
Free trials/products
Promo codes

Getting the Most Out of Content Creation

No matter what your marketing goals are with your content strategy, nearly any brand or marketer can benefit from producing great content. Ultimately, you’re providing value to your customers at various parts of the funnel, which means you’re creating a more engaged and loyal audience over time. A robust content strategy might take some time to develop, but it’s well worth it in the long run. Most brands make the mistake of thinking that they can’t produce enough content so they don’t produce any at all. Or, maybe you already have great content and aren’t sure how to make the most of existing content! Just start somewhere, even if it’s small, and it’ll only enhance your overall marketing goals and content marketing strategy as a whole.

The post Can Your Brand Benefit From a Content Strategy? appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

How Exploding Topics Can Help You Identify Future Search Movement and Viral Topics

Power Digital — Thu, 25 Feb 2021 15:50:41 +0000

We get it. It’s more complicated than ever to make your content stand out online and get it in front of new users simply because of the amount of content online. If you’re looking for fresh ways to stand out in the SERP and bring in new users, finding keyword trends and topics that have viral potential but haven’t quite taken off yet might be the strategy pivot you’ve been looking for.

Exploding topics is a little like investing. You have to consider the landscape as a whole, but ultimately you want to get in on it before everyone else does. To have the upper hand, we can ask what people are searching for. What topics are up and coming? How competitive is the topic? What do people care about right now and how might that evolve in the next few months?

This article will cover everything you need to know about how to find exploding topics and content creation that has a viral ability to take your blog or your content marketing services to the next level. You will learn how to know what an exploding topic is, how to identify them, how this viral content can help your business, and how to make the most of that topic with a cross-channel strategy.

What is an Exploding Topic?

Let’s first dive into what an exploding topic encompasses. To start, they consist of any new topics that are currently trending but have yet to gain immense popularity or virality.

Exploding topics are diverse and can vary based on industry, category, or consumer interest. Key factors that help calculate an exploding topic include conversations, social media shares, mentions, and searches of related topics across the web. To determine the right kind of exploding topic depends on utilizing the right tools and resources, as well as your best judgment.

How to Identify Future High Demand Blog Topics

When it comes to identifying exploding topics before your competitors have, you might wonder how you can determine the viral potential for a topic that hasn’t quite gone viral yet. To get ahead of the game, you can look to rising trends. Tools like Exploding Topics and Google Trends lend a hand in finding a trending topic or one that is beginning to see rapid growth. By leveraging these tools, you can put out timely content that has the potential to bring thousands of new visitors to your brand’s website. So, how do you use these tools to your advantage?

How to Use The Exploding Topics Tool

Exploding Topics isn’t like the standard keyword research tools we all know and love. With Exploding Topics, you can search by category and time frame to identify new topics that are about to take off. If you are a skincare brand, you can filter through the database for trending topics in the beauty category over the past 1 month, 3 months, or longer. Some skincare brands were able to identify “maskne” (aka acne caused by your face mask) as a rising search trend during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. With tools like Exploding Topics, this was made possible before their competitors even knew what this new term even meant.

How to Use Google Trends

What is Google Trends? Well, similar to Exploding Topics, Google Trends data allows you to identify the latest trending topics related to your product or service or overall industry. You can filter by time frame, category, and geographical region to identify trends based on the core term search term you enter. This allows you to find related queries that are trending. For example, if you are a jewelry brand that sells engagement rings, you can enter “engagement rings” as your core search term and identify several trending topics that relate to engagement rings. You might find that unique engagement rings is seeing significant growth in search interest, which may lead you to craft a blog post around the Top 10 Unique Engagement Ring Styles.

The best part about both of these tools is that they’re free and easy to incorporate in your evergreen content planning. With different search functionalities, you are sure to find relevant topics with viral potential and the ability to positively impact our brand.

How These Tools Can Help Your Business

While more time is certainly needed to measure the real impacts of these tools on content marketing programs, exploding topic applications are generating early, positive results.

Curious how to make blog content more engaging? Here’s a look at three of the top areas that these tools are currently benefiting:

#1 Efficiency

Coming up with new topic ideas for blog articles on a consistent basis can be challenging — not to mention time consuming. And when you’re developing a piece that’s intended to be “trending,” it’s critical that your entire content strategy be on-point — from topic selection and keyword research to writing, editing, optimizing and promoting.

Exploding topic applications can help cut your ideation and research time in half. Not only that, they can offer peace of mind that the topic you’ve chosen will drive traffic to your site, be engaged with by readers and be shared among their networks.

#2 SEO

From an SEO strategy perspective, proper execution of blog ideas around an exploding topic can really fan the flames of your content marketing initiatives. Take Possible Finance, for example.

This company opted to create multiple blogs around the exploding topic of “COVID financial support” in March of 2020. As you can imagine, their decision to create this content during a time of financial uncertainty for many Americans — and in anticipation of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act — helped their blogs to garner thousands of new keyword rankings in a matter of days. Not only that, these rankings for nice keywords with high search volume helped to drive tens of thousands of new users to Possible’s website in just a few weeks.

#3 Thought leadership

Of course, organic traffic is only the beginning of the buyer’s journey for many businesses. Staying ahead of the competition and being forward thinking is critical to moving prospective customers down through your funnel.

Companies that can produce authoritative content around an exploding topic before it goes mainstream will do wonders for their thought leadership and, ultimately, their business. Companies that take a more consistent approach to creating this type of content — noted it’s high-quality and relevant — will eventually find both potential and existing customers looking to them as a leader and authoritative voice in that newly created space. And the more consumers are engaged with your brand; the more likely they are to purchase your product or service.

How to Promote Your Exploding Topics Cross-Channel

One of the most important parts of a successful content strategy is planning for promotion within the marketing funnel once your post is live. By leveraging other channels, you’re able to squeeze more juice out of your content efforts while also supplementing the results for other channels. Here are a few promotion tactics we’d recommend:

Email – Our email marketing approach is to “make more deposits than withdrawals.” This means it’s crucial to provide value to your audience and link to assets that will further educate them within your flows (prior to asking for the sale.)
Organic Social – With organic social, it’s important to differentiate your content frameworks and have a healthy balance of educational, promotion-focused, and engagement-based content within your monthly content calendar. Sharing a blog article is a great way to hit on the educational content (while also pushing traffic to your site.)
Paid Social – Exploding topics are great to leverage on paid social as “clickbait” to prospecting audiences. It provides a great first touch in the buyer’s journey and typically has a higher click through rate (CTR).

One of the best parts of producing content from exploding topics is it has evergreen SEO value. One of the benefits of evergreen content is the opportunity to have more virality as the topic continues to surge in popularity.

Staying Ahead of Your Competition

After you’ve put in the work of identifying new content ideas and publishing a viral or exploding topic, it’s up to you to maintain and sustain its growth. In the weeks and months to come, visit your analytics frequently to identify downward trends in traffic — knowing this will give you insight into additional actions you may need to take. If traffic is dipping, there may be fresh, competitive blog content circulating the web that is leading to a loss in rankings, or perhaps interest in the topic itself is running out of steam. Do a quick Google Search to evaluate the competitive landscape around the topic; in doing so, pay attention to subtopics competitors include in their post that you don’t mention. Is there a fresh spin you can look to include that “out-values” competitors? Perhaps new information has since surfaced on this trend, which can help you determine if an updated perspective should be considered and included.

Ultimately, an “exploding topic” content marketing strategy is a highly effective way to stimulate immediate traffic and business results online. The more you can keep it updated, relevant, and valuable to your target audience, the longer your success will reign.

If you want to learn more about the benefits of blogging for your business, contact us today!

The post How Exploding Topics Can Help You Identify Future Search Movement and Viral Topics appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

What Is Semantic Search?

Power Digital — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 16:00:15 +0000

Understanding Google’s Evolving Algorithm

When it comes to ranking on Google, a huge component of its strategy lies in semantic search. But what exactly is semantic search, and why is it relevant for a search engine? Semantic search seeks to understand user intent and provide the most accurate information possible based on contextual meaning.

In the world of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning algorithms, search engines work to mirror natural conversations in order to provide the most relevant data for their searchers. A better understanding of information allows a search engine to ultimately improve their users’ search experience.

So what is the best strategy to ensure your content is not disqualified and remains ahead of search technology? We’re sharing some key strategies to help enhance your SEO strategy using semantic search and stay on top of the evolving algorithm.

Semantic Search and SEO Strategy

In the past, a content SEO strategy was based solely on how many keywords you could incorporate into your copy. Now, Google is getting more sophisticated and looking beyond just how many keywords you can place into your content.

Today, the key to successful keyword optimization of your content lies in your overall keyword selection and how you use them. Understanding user intent and focusing on relevant results from the search engine are key to a successful keyword search strategy.

Search intent around a keyword, for example, greatly impacts how Google ranks your site. Google’s semantic search algorithm is now able to consider the contextual meaning behind a search query/keyword, and rank the results based on these connections. Making sure the keyword’s search term aligns with the desired keyword search result is essential for semantic search.

In your own content, consider focusing on a more pointed phrase using your desired keyword to ensure that search intent is relevant, even if it has a lower search volume.

Take a Holistic Approach to The Topic

Google may have gotten smarter, but so have keyword optimization platforms. Utilizing keyword optimization tools like MarketMuse can help elevate your content within Google’s ever-changing algorithm. MarketMuse takes a holistic approach to optimize your content for semantic search.

MarketMuse is an AI-powered content marketing tool that uses machine learning to maximize the efficiency and accuracy of your keyword planning. It uses existing data around the topic to help boost your SEO strategy. Instead of keyword stuffing your brand’s content, MarketMuse provides a semantic analysis of your content in real-time and recommends a list of related keywords, along with the frequency that each keyword should be used organically throughout the content.

Using natural language in your content will not only make your search query results rank higher, but it will also make your content better for readers. Using an organic content strategy creates polished, professional, and informative content for your brand, and Google will recognize these advanced semantic SEO practices when crawling your content, which will help to elevate your rankings in the search engine results page (SERP).

Google Places User First in Semantic Search

The reason why Google favors content that is optimized for semantic search is because it wants to serve users with content that best answers their search query. By incorporating topically-relevant terms and semantic search terms in your content, through optimization tools like Market Muse, you are putting your best foot forward for ranking amongst the competitive landscape.

Another reason why optimizing for semantic search is important is because Google is smart and keyword stuffing is not in the best interest of the user. Keyword stuffing appears “spammy” to search engines and thus, is devalued in the eyes of Google. Therefore, the use of variant keywords and semantic phrases provides your content with SEO value without keyword stuffing.

Our Strategy

At Power Digital Marketing we know how important semantic search is to a good SEO strategy. To ensure we are creating the most relevant and impactful content for our clients, we use topic modeling and content clusters to build topical authority around a specific query or keyword. By choosing article topics that center around a specific theme, but target different searcher intent, we are able to talk to the machine learning algorithms and become a part of the Google knowledge graph around a specific topic.

By creating these content clusters, we are able to work within the semantic search framework by creating a holistic view of a topic. By targeting an array of user intent, internal linking these articles within the body of the other’s copy, and optimizing the content for the specific target keyword, we are able to build a full scope around a topic.

The post What Is Semantic Search? appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

Developing Your 2021 Content Marketing Plan

Power Digital — Wed, 02 Dec 2020 10:58:18 +0000

In the world of marketing, content should always be valuable, digestible, and relevant. With endless content creation possibilities, having a great content marketing plan can help increase brand awareness, capture new audiences, and establish thought leadership.

Given the unique circumstances of 2020, it’s vital to assess what has worked for content marketing this year and what didn’t quite hit the mark. It’s also time to dive into the content marketing framework that will produce the most buzz, depending on your target audience and marketing goal(s) for 2021. Deploying a successful content marketing strategy ahead of time will help maximize your content and garner a surge in publicity and popularity, ultimately generating more prospects.

If you’re still in the beginning stages of planning your content strategy, here are some helpful tips and insights to help you get started. You may even consider outsourcing content marketing services to support your internal team.

2020 Content Marketing Trends to Continue and Leave Behind

It’s no secret that 2020 has impacted businesses in ways that we couldn’t predict. In the current environment, it is more important than ever to construct a content marketing strategy that incorporates the trends that dominated this past year and leave behind those that did not.

Video

Just when it seemed like video content consumption couldn’t increase at a higher rate, it became essential for content and social media strategy. The global pandemic has left our entire lives almost entirely dependent on video. As the year comes to an end, this channel has proved to be a crucial tactic for content marketing. Visual content keeps audiences engaged longer than any other type of content and gives brands a chance to communicate more intimately with their consumers through Q&A sessions, product demos, expert interviews, and behind the scenes footage. When utilized in a “live” format, the level of interaction and engagement is highest. Google loves video, therefore from an SEO standpoint, video content will definitely help boost page rank, especially as consumers continue to demand video in search results.

Interactive Content and Personalization

Another content marketing effort that continues to drive results is interactive content, like quizzes, surveys, and polls. Its success is centered around consumer participation. Rather than passively reading, your potential customer has the chance to interact with your brand, further deepening the relationship.

Even better, when providing this content type, it allows your brand to further personalize the content. Content personalization involves using consumer behavior and preferences to show each person relevant content tailored to their needs. Incorporating these two elements into your content marketing strategy builds powerful insights and directly impacts purchase behavior.

Constant Posting

A common misconception in the world of content marketing is the need to produce and post content constantly. This cadence isn’t necessary and, in many cases, can do more harm than good. The strategy behind your content production should always be based on quality, not quantity.

Today consumers are bombarded with more content than ever, and in order to truly make an impact, your content needs to be consistent, high-quality, and engaging. When you sacrifice quality for quantity, you actually dilute your quality content and risk ruining your audience’s perception of your existing content and brand. Leave this content marketing trend behind moving into 2021.

2021 Trends to Have On Your Radar

As we move forward into the new year, there are a few key strategies that will help your content stand out amongst the noise.

Supplement Rankings with Ads

Creating a content calendar with blog post ideas is primarily an organic strategy. However, coupling content with pay-for-play has been known to drive some serious traffic. How does this work? It’s simple. Find a keyword that is ranking organically in a prime position on page one of the search engine results page (SERP). Bid on said keyword via Google Ads, and watch the traffic flood in. Taking up more real estate on a user’s search results will likely win over their click and hopefully, in the long run, their business.

Share, Share, Share

The best kind of marketing strategy is one that is integrated. This means using all channels to uplift each other for the common good of brand awareness. One example of content integration is sharing a blog as social media content or via emails. This is a great way to get the most mileage out of your content strategy and make sure blogs are getting views as they increase rankings each month.

Tips for Planning

The first step to begin your 2021 content marketing plan and get a leg up on the competition is to think holistically about your marketing goals. You need a digital marketing strategy that focuses on the “big picture.” Once you have your foundation set, nailing down the technicalities will be much easier.

Review the data of past performers — What content piece(s) consistently saw high engagement and page views? What articles received the highest amount of organic traffic and page one rankings on Google? What blogs earned you the most social shares and comments? These are just a few of the questions you should be asking yourself before developing your calendar. By identifying the patterns that worked and didn’t work, you will be able to expand on topics and a content format that worked best!
Talk to your current customers — Your customers, in many ways, hold the key to the types of content prospective customers are beginning to read. A quick email survey, phone call, or one-off email are just some of the ways to pick their brain and evaluate how you should approach your calendar.
Get company buy-in — Start thinking about which in-house employees would be willing to help build out production. After all, your content strategy is only as good as the execution. Everyone in your company can and should contribute, whether that is producing the content, being interviewed as subject matter experts, sharing content on social media, or enabling others to contribute to themes that fit their expertise.
Think ROI — Sometimes, you will need internal buy-in from the powers-that-be. An investment in content is essential to your bottom-line. A proof-of-concept internal report that showcases how the blog is contributing to overall traffic, brand awareness, conversions, assisted conversions, etc. may be necessary to have in your back pocket, so content is seen as a company-wide priority.
Evergreen, Long-lasting Content — Your calendar needs to be timeless in order to perform well in 2021. Long-lasting relevance is key to today’s readers. Stats, trends, and figures can lose momentum fast and may cause people to lose interest, not to mention that the search engine will be quick to remove your content from page one once it loses its “freshness” — unless you are implementing regular updates.

Timeless content will keep viewers and search algorithms interested for a much longer time. Start thinking about topics and better content practices that serve value, disregarding time.

Looking Ahead

No one could plan or prepare for what happened in 2020. As marketers, we can only grow and continue to adapt to new circumstances we are faced with. While planning your 2021 content marketing plan, it’s important to look back and learn from what types of content worked and what types didn’t work from the year prior.

Whether you’re a B2C or B2B marketer, by implementing these valuable content tips and tricks, your business will cut through the noise and drive more organic traffic. At Power Digital, we serve hundreds of clients and drive maximum results. We are a B2C and B2B marketing agency that can help you scale your business. Contact us today for a free audit!

The post Developing Your 2021 Content Marketing Plan appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

How To Get The Most Out Of Your Existing Content

Power Digital — Thu, 05 Nov 2020 10:35:17 +0000

Do you have old blog posts that have gone a little stale? Need help making older posts fresh and appealing without having to write a brand new blog post?

Many people think that their job is done once a new post is written and that they can sit back and reap the benefits of blogging for eternity. Unfortunately, that is far from true. Even the most evergreen content needs a little revamping now and then to stay competitive in the search engine and with the latest algorithm updates and content marketing trends.

Updating your existing content can also be extremely beneficial to you and your business if you don’t have the bandwidth for consistent blog content creation. Whether you have limited resources, backlogged content, or are simply looking for faster results. Sometimes analyzing and re-optimizing older content can be exactly what you need to continue increasing your SEO ranking.

Now, where do you start? Your original post has already been crawled by Google and gained authority, but now it’s time for a content upgrade.

In this guide we will break down how to refresh your old blog content to increase your search engine traffic with some important content strategies.

Why Google Likes Updates

Are you more likely to click into an article from 2014 or 2020? Most would say 2020, which is why Google favors fresh content. Google’s algorithm is constantly changing, and therefore, so should your content. With each new year, comes new data and new search queries. For Google to provide users with the most relevant and timely search result list, Google will rank “fresh” content first. Even if you have evergreen content, it’s important to go back in and update any outdated information. By updating a popular post on your blog, you are signaling to Google that your content is relevant for the search intent.

When Should You Update?

Updating your outdated content can be an extremely valuable tool to help increase blog traffic and improve keyword rankings. However, it’s important to understand the best time to revise your content, to ensure it is utilized to its fullest potential. One thing to note is that search rankings take time. You should always give Google enough time to properly understand your content and rank it amongst the competitive landscape, you can then start to strategize ways to elevate your content. It is typically recommended to wait at least 4 months before revisiting old content.

Relevancy and accuracy are also important factors to consider when deciding the appropriate time frame for revising content. A change in statistics, current events, or studies can affect the accuracy of your content and shift how relevant the information is to your readers. Regardless of your industry or topic, search intent will evolve over time. Updating your content every season or year for relevancy will help you stand out from competing articles and support the increase of your blog SEO rankings by optimizing your content strategy.

How To Identify Which Blogs Are Low Hanging Fruit

Now that you know why and when you should update old content, it’s time to figure out what to update. The best way to get quick results is by capitalizing on low hanging fruit opportunities.

What is low hanging fruit and how does that apply to content? Many of us in the SEO world refer to low hanging fruit as keywords ranking on page two of the SERP or at the bottom of page one. By optimizing your existing content for these specific keywords, you have a much greater chance of getting your content to rank higher on page one of the SERP than if you were to create a new post. When you publish new content, it takes Google about 3 months to fully crawl the page and recognize any significant keyword rankings. Those pages are trying to rank for keywords from scratch. When you optimize existing content for low hanging fruit opportunities, you have much less ground to cover to get up to priority positions in the SERP.

How do you find these keywords? Our favorite tool to analyze keyword rankings is SEMrush. This platform allows you to throw in any URL and navigate all of the keywords ranking for that page. (SEMrush has far more capabilities beyond just this, but we’ll save that for another article.) To identify the blogs with the most significant low hanging fruit opportunities, simply drop in the domain, filter the URL by your blog subfolder, and filter keyword rankings by positions #11 – 20 (aka page two of the SERP).

From there, you’ll have to get strategic on what you’re trying to accomplish. The best keywords to go after are ones that have a high monthly search volume and the right search intent for the piece of content. You want to drive as much quality traffic to the site as possible. Once you have a list of low hanging fruit keywords and blogs you’d like to target them on, you should prioritize them based on expected website traffic gains and relevancy to the brand.

Content Elevation: Our Process

To properly support our existing content and make sure it is being utilized to its fullest extent, we identify the top-performing articles that have the best opportunities to increase current keyword ranking with high monthly search volumes. Once they are identified, we perform our content elevation strategy to make the older posts even more “premium” and successful. This process includes:

Re-optimizing content from a semantic search perspective based on our target keyword and supporting keywords.
Bulking up existing content to stand out from competing articles and/or updating for relevancy.
Adding in expert quotes or testimonials sourced using HARO software.
Creating custom infographics and imagery to support written content and make the article more digestible and premium.
Adding CTAs (Call to Actions) to funnel traffic to the appropriate pillar page.
Using an internal linking strategy to support other blog posts or landing pages and share link equity.

EAT Guidelines

One of the key ways in which Google differentiates between high and low quality content is through the lens of E-A-T – Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These are a part of a broader set of guidelines that Google released in 2015 to share more information around how it views and evaluates content on the web. The E-A-T guidelines are intended to solve the issue of trust on the internet and apply most strongly to the health, wellness, and financial industries.

To understand what E-A-T means, let’s break down the definition of each further:

Expertise: refers to the author or creator of the content on a page – is that author an expert and is it clear that’s the case?
Authoritativeness: means having broadly recognized authority on a subject – are you a quality source of information?
Trustworthiness: refers to the website, the author and the content – do you provide reliable and accurate information?

A few specific examples include adding an author-date & byline to articles or content on your site, incorporating author biographies, and citing sources on your blog. It’s crucial to follow these guidelines to ensure your website is well positioned in Google’s eyes and won’t receive any adverse impacts in Organic rankings or performance if not compliant.

Bring Old Blog Posts Back To Life

If you want to increase your organic visibility quickly, updating your existing content is a fast and easy way to do just that.

It’s guaranteed to make a big impact on how well your content ranks, and the volume of traffic you get from search engines.

To begin, add fresh content to your old content once you’ve identified low-hanging fruit opportunities. Look at competing content that is ranking well and fill in the gaps where your existing content misses the mark. Add in additional links and resources, and double-check that there are no broken links.

Focusing on relevancy is also crucial. You should work to improve the accuracy of all concepts discussed. Analyze featured snippet placements for the main keywords you are targeting, and any relevant related post that can help you ensure your content includes the most essential information.

Once all updates have been, make sure your updated content meets all the newest requirements of Google’s algorithm updates.

Give your content another boost by distributing it on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and share with any relevant groups. If you’ve shared it before, share it again and emphasize your promotional strategy on the new findings you discuss.

With these elevation tactics and SEO tips, your existing content becomes a powerhouse of SEO opportunity. What was once old and dying out is now alive and thriving. For more content marketing tips contact a top digital marketing agency such as Power Digital!

The post How To Get The Most Out Of Your Existing Content appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

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9 Benefits of Content Marketing

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#2 Content marketing can scale with your brand

#3 Content marketing makes your brand more visible

#4 Content marketing encourages transparency

#5 Content marketing creates a more informed consumer base

#6 Content marketing is another opportunity to serve your customers

#7 Content marketing is customizable

#8 Content marketing can establish your brand as an industry expert

#9 Content marketing generates high-intent leads

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What is organic search?

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Types of organic search results

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Create relevant content

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The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing

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The different types of content marketing

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Step 2: Examine your current content

Step 3: Plan your upcoming content

Step 4: Produce and publish your new content

Step 5: Analyze and react

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