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10 Things Your Competitors Can Teach You About SEO

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10-Things-Your-Competitors-Can-Teach-You-About-SEO

Remember the age old adage, keep your friends close but, your enemies closer? In the world of digital marketing and search engine optimization, there is no one closer to you in search rankings than your competitors. So why do business’ often overlook this step and jump right to building strategy?  There is a wealth of information and competitive advantage that can be gained from finding and analyzing your competitors. When it comes to a thorough search engine optimization strategy, seeking out what your competitors are doing right (and what they’re doing wrong) will help guide you on your way to SEO success.

Determine Your Real Competitors

Find your real competitors, and remember they include any website or organization with whom you are competing with for traffic and visibility, regardless of whether their product or service is exactly like yours. I included this because a complete competitive analysis, although worth it, is no small task so knowing who you’re truly competing against in SERPs is important. You should be able to identify at least one competitor on your own but, here’s some advice on finding some more top competitors. You should aim to make a list of 5-10 competitors in your industry and geographical area.

  • Set up a Google Alert to receive email notifications on updates on competing products/services, be notified when other people mention your business, and keep up to date with industry news
  • Use industry keywords to search for other businesses on major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing
  • Use associations’ member directories to find other competitors in your niche.

Analyze Which Keywords & Long-Tail Keyword Search Queries You’re Competing For

After you’ve determined the keywords which are most relevant to your business’ product or service through brainstorming what you already know about your business and some preliminary keyword research, you can begin analyzing who else is ranking for those same terms. A commonly known tool that is easy to use is Google Keyword Planner. Enter your competitor’s URL one at a time and discover what keywords Google determines are most closely related to the topic and content on their site. You can also view keyword volume and level of competition.

Use another keyword tool like SEM Rush to enter the web address of a competitor and view what keywords their website ranks for organically. You can also discover new organic competition you may not have found in your own research, and monitor ranking changes for multiple domains.

Scope out the Competition’s Content Marketing

To reap benefits like more brand awareness, improved rankings and increased organic traffic, you need to produce high-quality content regularly. It is one of the most significant tools for gaining qualified traffic online. Learn from your competitor’s strengths and shortfalls by taking some time to explore their content marketing. So what does high quality content mean, anyway? While reviewing competitor sites pages and building strategy for your own web pages, remember these tips:

Purpose: Firstly, it should serve the audience with relevant and useful information. It should be keyword focused, and targeted to the ideal audience. Step one is to build buyer personas so you can use them to guide your content marketing.

Style: The content should talk with visitors, not at them. For blog posts, it should be value-based, not product/service or sales focused. Content should include visuals or other interactive media.

Substance: Not too much information, not too little. Put value before volume. Internal pages should be a minimum of 350-500 words each. Ideal length of a blog post is approx. 1600 words.

UX: User experience is of the utmost importance. The content should address the ideal audiences’ question or problem in an appealing way and be accessible via mobile devices. How quickly the page loads, how content is formatted on the page, its readability, and ease of guiding the user through to their end goal are all critical – and just some of the considerations for UX.

All Hail the Blog

Take the time to review each of your competitor’s websites for an active blog. Take detailed notes on:

  • how often they post
  • the quality of their content
    • is it applicable to the target audience?
    • is it relevant, engaging and helpful?
    • does it follow best practices?
  • Don’t forget social; take a peek at whether or not they’re consistently social syndicating the posts they’re publishing
  • Assess total number of views, comments, social shares, and other interactions.

Get a feel for what sort of content (topics, style, medium) your target audience is interacting with on competitor’s websites, what seems to be resonating with them? What’s inspiring them to comment or share with their own social network?

Remember, if any of the above seems lacking or is missing all together, those are golden opportunities to put the work in now to quickly outshine that competitor.

Not only is blogging a vehicle for generating more relevant content for your business in order to be ranked for a larger set of keywords, or improve your current rankings, your target audience will find more value on your website and reward you for it.

Even if you’re of the mindset that your industry borders on boring, you can still easily find relevant and interesting topics which will be found by your desired audience when executed correctly.

Get Social!

It is usually quite easy to track down some data to find out which social networks your ideal audience engages with the most. Simply put: fish where the fish are. The biggest obstacle is obvious; you’re not the only one fishing.

The most popular social media networks that are likely to be utilized by your competitors include:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Google+
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • You Tube

Explore more than one competitor’s social presence and keep notes on these important indicators of social media stardom:

The following suggestions will need to be adjusted for which network your exploring but, this gives you a good idea of what to look for.

  • Total number of fans/followers. Quick Tip: If you don’t have competitor monitoring software set-up, record the date also so when you return to check in on them down the road, you know whether they’ve grown or not, and by how much.
  • Total number of daily/weekly/monthly posts; frequency per network
  • Fan/follower engagement (comments, social shares, +1’s, retweets, favorites etc.)
  • Style/topic of content published
  • Frequency of their own, original content – versus – content from outside sources
  • Use of network features (how thoroughly a competitor fills in all the profile features available for any one social network)

Perform a Competitors Backlink Analysis

Using high-quality, relevant and engaging content that’s appealing to your target audience is the first step to being in a position to begin link building. Why? Simply because all link building campaigns start with something worth linking to. Before you craft your own link building strategy, use your detective skills (and some handy tools) to scope out your competitor’s links. You’re likely to find some potential link opportunities for your own business too.

Use one of these free website link explorer tools to:

  • Discover competitors high-authority backlinks
  • Perform an in-depth link analysis
  • Distinguish between quality links and spam
  • Discover potential backlink sources

Free Tools: Moz’s Open Site Explorer | Majestic Site ExplorerBing Link Explorer

If you or your marketing provider can master the task of building high-quality links to your website, it can put you ahead of your competition in search results.

Check Your Own Website (& competitors) for Broken Links

Understanding the landscape of the link profile for your site and competitors can help you further improve your efforts in this critical area of your SEO marketing strategy.

Broken backlinks if left unattended can add up, and they negatively affect user experience (ever been annoyed by the “404 page not found” message when you’re expecting the content you were clicking for? Yes, me too.) They can also work against your site’s ability to improve rankings so it’s important to find and manage them by either removing them or redirecting them to an active URL.

There are several free tools you can use to discover broken backlinks on your own site like Google Analytics. Check out this comprehensive step-by-step guide. You can also use the free tools mentioned in the previous section.

Title Elements

Title elements, or title tags are a good place to start to access your competitor’s search engine optimization. Title tags are one of the most important on-page SEO elements because they communicate to the search engines and users what the content of the page is about. They appear in the search results pages, in tabs in your browser after you navigate to the site, as the auto description when a page is bookmarked, and in some cases, link anchor text on external websites.

Here are some best practices for you to easily analyze your competitor’s title tags and guide decisions on your own site to improve your SEO

Title tags should

  • be unique for each page; even if the content is different, having identical title tags on multiple pages is considered duplicate content which can and eventually will get the guilty site penalized by Google Panda.
  • include targeted keywords which make sense with the page content, describing what the page is about
  • use keywords in the head of the titles & branding at the end (keyword proximity)
  • mindful of length; no more than 70 characters

Title tags shouldn’t

  • overstuff keywords, called keyword cannibalization. No more than 3 keywords should be assigned per title, per page. Keywords should be spaced throughout the content and page focused.
  • shouldn’t mirror H1’s

Are They Mobile?

With the recent Google Mobilegeddon update, you’ll want to know whether your competitor’s sites load and are usable on a smartphone. Notice I said load and usable, they are two different things. So, test it out using Google’s simple mobile friendly test as well as on your own smartphone.

Mobile has become increasingly important, and if you want to compete alongside and eventually get ahead of your competitors, a mobile responsive site is a requirement. If competitors haven’t got a mobile responsive site, and you are redesigning an existing site or launching a new website, you have a golden opportunity to get ahead.

Local Signals

Your competitions marketing efforts in the local landscape is important to note, especially if your business has a brick and mortar location, you can’t overlook the importance of your presence in local search results.

Since one of the keys to local SEO is a presence on popular online directories, investigate where your competition has up-to-date local profiles. Sites like Google My Business, Yahoo Local, Yelp, Yellowpages.com, Bing Places, and any other local directories which may be lesser known but, specific for your industry – check those too.

Look for:

  • Consistency between the contact information on their website and their various profiles
  • How well they’ve utilized all the profile features (i.e. including a professional photo, full description etc.)
  • Whether they have any local reviews; are they interacting with their audience by replying to reviews, or complaints? Observe their communication strategy.

Your competitor’s presence on directories like these may be strong, or non-existent but, either way, be sure to include time to build out these profiles carefully and thoroughly. You will benefit from the increased accessibility to your business’ information through directory profiles.

Now that you’ve got a good idea of some of the valuable information you can gain from competitor research and analysis, get started! Knowledge is power. With the knowledge of what your competitors are doing well, and not so well, you can improve your business online to outshine them all. Comment below to add your own tips on how you can learn from competitors to improve your search engine optimization.

 

 

The post 10 Things Your Competitors Can Teach You About SEO appeared first on Riverbed Marketing. from author Todd Mumford


How To Disavow Links In Google Webmaster Tools

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How-To-Disavow-Links-In-Google-Webmaster-Tools

Are you seeing a downward trend in your rankings and traffic? Many factors contribute to improving these metrics, however, one of the common reasons is a poor link profile.

If you’re here, you may suspect you have some poor quality, spam, & toxic links pointing to your website that can hurt your site performance, or you may have received a notification from Google that they’ve detected a pattern of unnatural links pointing to your site.

No matter the situation, having the know-how to manage the link profile of your website is important to the overall health and performance of your site in search engines.

Why?

Links are like votes of confidence which contribute to the overall authority of your website in the eyes of search engines. The value of a particular website or page can be measured with Domain Authority and Page Authority (MOZ metrics). Although “PageRank” (PR) is referenced in some Google help console sources as an indicator of quality, the PR measurement is largely obsolete as it has not been updated by Google in years.

That being said, we will still reference PageRank as it relates to Google’s own quality guidelines. Although the scoring metric is out of date, it is still valuable on a basis of measuring link manipulation throughout your review as typically low-quality links are commonly developed during a time when PageRank manipulation was at its peak.

Irrelevant links, restricted content, or just plain terrible spam links can significantly hurt your site and when too many occur, even bring crippling penalties to your domain’s doorstep.

How do you know which links to remove, which ones to disavow and which ones to keep? Follow the guide below to analyze your link profile and determine the best actions to take with each link.

There are some rules here:

Request removal of the link first, before requesting Google disavow it. In the disavow tool, Google states:

Disavow Links In Google Webmaster Tools

This means that you shouldn’t use this tool willy-nilly, there are specific situations it should be employed, and they are:

  • Your website has received a manual penalty
  • Your website has received an algorithmic penalty
  • You or your marketing provider are regularly monitoring your backlinks and using best practices to request removal and in some cases, requesting Google disavow links.

For more info on the latter, please review this video from Google’s Matt Cutt’s “Should I use the disavow tool even if there’s not a manual action on my site?”

Step One: Source Several Lists of all the Backlinks to Your Site

There are several free tools you can use here, we recommend sourcing more than one list so you have a better chance of gaining a complete view of all the links pointing to your site.

Firstly, Google Webmaster Tools.

If you have a Gmail account, you can access Google Webmaster Tools and add your site(s) if you haven’t completed this step already.

SEO Tip: You will want to verify both the www and the non-www version of your domain in your search console. To Google, these are entirely different sites.

i.e. www dot riverbedmarketing dot com and riverbedmarketing dot comG WebM Tool Nav

If you’re setting up search console in Google Webmaster Tools for your site for the first time, you will need to verify your website(s) and wait a few business days for it to show any data.  

To get a list of links to your website, follow these steps:

  1. On the Webmaster Tools Home Page, click the site you want to view
  2. On the Dashboard, click Search Traffic, and then click Links to Your Site
  3. Under Who links the most, click More
  4. Click Download More Sample Links. If you click Download latest links, you’ll see dates as well.

Don’t stop there, explore these user-friendly (and free!) backlink tracking tools to help you build a robust list of the links to your site.

With some more work and patience, you can see notable improvements in your website’s rank and traffic.

Bing Link Explorer: Sign up for a free account and use their link explorer to view and download your backlinks. You can register with Bing Webmaster Tools (also free) to check out more resource tools for keyword research, SEO & competitive backlink analysis.

Majestic SEO: The most robust source of data you can get for backlinks is from majestic.com. Easily sign up for a free profile and verify Google Webmaster Tools with Majestic SEO to unlock the free options for your owned site. Once you verify your domain, click ‘Historic Index’ to view links. Then click on the backlinks tab, scroll down, and click download data.

You can also check out:

Moz’s Open Site Explorer: You can sign up for a free 30 day trial for Moz Pro but, your credit card is required. The link explorer features are easy to use and you’ll have additional resources to explore your site for the trial and get a feel for how the tools perform. You can easily cancel or continue with a paid subscription after 30 days.

Step Two: Create a Spreadsheet To Easily Organize All of Your Data

You’ll have a lot of data to comb through at this point so I recommend a well-formatted spreadsheet like this one from Pinpoint Designs.

This is critical because there are specific requirements for the type and format of the file you can submit to Google to request disavow of links and domains. Especially if you are making a case for removing a manual or algorithmic penalty, the provided spreadsheet will help you immensely in tracking your own efforts to have a toxic link removed, which Google will consider as part of your reconsideration request to lift a penalty.

Make a copy of the file in your own Google Docs account, and add all your data to the corresponding sheet in the template.

There is already a formula built in to pull the data you enter on each of the sheets into the master data sheet and remove duplicates.

Step Three: Identify Unnatural, Low-quality & Spam Links

Review, review, review – everything! Go to each URL on your spreadsheet and make a judgement call on whether you should keep the link or request it be removed – failing removal by the webmaster, you can request Google disavow the link or all links from a specific domain.

In your disavow file, you can mark whether you want to disavow an entire domain by entering

domain:spamsite.com

or disavow a specific page by specifying the URL like this: spamsite.com/page-with-toxic-link

Each link needs to be on its own line and usually you will want to do a domain-wide disavow when you see multiple low quality links from the same website.

You can also annotate a link or group of links and record your efforts towards removal by adding the number sign # before comments for your own documentation such as, “#High spam domain contacted webmaster by email several times with no response. Include for disavow”

The notes are optional but helpful for your own records and in submitting a reconsideration request to Google if you are experiencing a manual penalty.

Some bad links are easy to spot, and some aren’t so I recommend reviewing Google’s Quality Guidelines to familiarize yourself with their quality standards.

In the Link Schemes section, Google explains an unnatural, low-quality link:

Any links intended to manipulate PageRank (Website authority) or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site.

The following are examples of link schemes which can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results:

  • Buying or selling links that pass PageRank. This includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links; or sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link
  • Excessive link exchanges (“Link to me and I’ll link to you”) or partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking
  • Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links
  • Using automated programs or services to create links to your site

I also recommend you check out this blacklist link checker by Marie Haynes who has significant experience as a major influencer in the link disavow/penalty landscape. This tool can help you check the quality of a particular link you are unsure about by referencing it against a blacklist of domains manually reviewed for exclusion.

If you are unsure about the quality of a link, try this tool see if the domain shows up on any known blacklists.

Step Four: Contact Webmasters and Request Removal

Once you’ve sorted out the bad links from the good ones, you want to make every effort to contact the owner/webmaster of the sites which are connected to yours via toxic links and request they remove them.

Wherever possible, personalized email outreach directly to the webmaster stating the page(s) the link is on, where it is positioned on the page, the anchor text, and the URL it points to can help take a lot of the work out of the equation for the webmaster and you’ll have a better chance that they’ll follow through and remove it.

You’ll likely need to contact them more than once and make an effort to reach them in numerous ways. Wherever possible, call them, contact them by email, utilize their live chat, message them on their social networks – do everything you can to get the toxic links removed and document every action you take in an attempt to get the links removed.

Step Five: Creating Your Disavow File

From your spreadsheet, copy the list of links and domains you want to disavow into their own Google Docs spreadsheet and select File – then, Download As – and select Plain text – this will create a .txt file that you can upload in Google Webmaster Tools.

Here’s how:

  1. Sign into Google
  2. Go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main
  • Select your site from the dropdown menu
  1. Select Disavow Links
  2. Select Disavow Links once again
  3. Click Choose File
  • Upload your .txt file

Some common errors that prevent a successful upload of a disavow file are:

You’ve neglected to remove http://www. before the url or domain

There are sometimes domains with weird symbols or characters, for example, a colon in the domain will cause an error to be flagged.

Go through your list to remove any domains that are made up of nothing but symbols, numbers, punctuation and re-try your upload.

It’s very important to know that a new disavow file will automatically override a previously uploaded file so if you have submitted a disavow file in the past, you want to add your existing list.

For example, if I previously submitted a disavow file with 50 domains, and my most recent link audit turned up 50 more domains that I also want to disavow, my new .txt disavow file would have 100 domains listed.  

To access a previously submitted disavow file so that you can update your list and re-upload to Google, follow these steps:

  1. Sign into Google
  2. Go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main
  • Select your site from the dropdown menu
  1. Select Disavow Links
  2. Select Disavow Links once again
  3. Click Download

Once download successfully,

  1. Copy your list of domains
  2. Paste it into a Google Doc
  • Add the new links you want to disavow to the previously submitted list
  1. Save as a .txt file

And then, go back to webmaster tools and follow the steps from earlier in this post to upload your file.

Once your disavow file has been uploaded, it’s important to note that changes won’t be recognized by Google until they re-crawl the websites called out in the disavow file. This can take some time, so the benefits of disavowing may not be immediately visible and will typically occur over a period of 1-2 months in most cases.

In summary, to create the building blocks of a disavow file to submit to Google, you’ll need to:

  • Collect ample data from several sources to compose a robust list of your link profile
  • Review the links and domains to determine the good from the bad and the ugly.
  • Keep an organized record of your removal requests and notes on the links/domains; you can also group links and domains to make note keeping simpler.
  • Format the disavow file according to domains and links to disavow
  • Create a .txt file and upload to Google Webmaster Tools

Although it is a lot of work to complete a link audit and work through the process of removal requests and disavowing, when done properly, you will see improvements to the health of your link profile, page rank, traffic and most importantly, user experience. You want links which will add value to the content on your site and to the user navigating your content and links.

Remember, it’s not just the search engines that you need to satisfy, it’s critical to create an enjoyable, relevant, simple and responsive experience for your ideal customer.

Comment below and share your own experience and tips!

The post How To Disavow Links In Google Webmaster Tools appeared first on Riverbed Marketing. from author Todd Mumford

Google Officially Updates Penguin Algorithm – Here’s What You Should Know

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Last week Google officially updated its Penguin algorithm again. First released in April of 2012, Google introduced the algorithm code-named Penguin, with the primary function of decreasing the search engine rankings of websites that were found to violate their code of conduct.

First released in April of 2012, Google introduced the algorithm code-named Penguin, with the primary function of decreasing the search engine rankings of websites that were found to violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Specifically, this focused on penalizing excessive use of keyword-rich links that were typically built unnaturally in bulk – or the websites themselves were owned by the marketers to maliciously bolster website rankings above competitors. This was done by using what are now affectionately called Black Hat SEO techniques, or Spamdexing – in layman’s terms: a deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes.

The History of Penguin

Back on April 24th, 2012, Google shook the SEO landscape by introducing its first revision of the Penguin algorithm. This was at a critical time where SEO was much simpler than it is today, and when a large number of links pointed towards a target website would serve to bolster website rankings and manipulate traffic to accelerate past competitors.

This initial change impacted 3.1% of queries that were manipulated by spammy tactics, in contrast to their future updates the initial launch of Penguin was instrumental in setting the tone for what was yet to come in the coming years.

The algorithm was updated a few times over the years, notably in October of 2012, as Penguin 3 – which affected approximately 0.3% of search engine queries. Penguin 2.0 was released in May of 2013 and affected 2.3% of queries.

Penguin 3.0 was speculatively released on October 18th, 2014 – with Google confirming on the 21st of that month that the Penguin update was only a “refresh” without adding new signals.

These long lulls in the history of updating the Penguin algorithm left many business owners high-and-dry when trying to resolve problems with their current domain, many waiting upwards of two years with hopes of seeing a return to their former glory.

The algorithmic penalty that was applied in each milestone updates would penalize entire sites for utilizing spammy tactics. Despite performing immediate cleanups with genuine intent to correct the problem, webmasters remained penalized until the Google would refresh their status.

Google released Penguin 4.0 in late September 2016, and it represents a number of new features and capabilities: most importantly, it now operates in real-time and is one of Google’s core ranking algorithms.

 

 

What’s Changed?

Penguin Now Operates in Real Time

Yes, that’s right – this new update to Penguin operates in real time, meaning that SEOs and marketers don’t have to wait for refreshes and updates to see the results of a cleanup to a backlink profile.

Because data is refreshed so much faster, corrections to your backlink profile can be made and changes are visible much faster; recovery isn’t instant just yet, so it’s still necessary to wait for Google to recrawl and reindex sites that link back to you. Page rankings are re-evaluated each time Google recrawl’s a page, and therefore, the impact of any incoming spam and links are altered almost immediately.

With the algorithm now operating in real time, this probably spells the end of public announcements from Google citing any updates, so don’t expect any more comment from Google’s head-honcho’s on future revamps or refreshes.

Site owners are going to be able to see results much more quickly in Google’s search results as links are disavowed and negated. You’ll still have to wait for a refresh, mind you – this keeps Penguin different from Panda, which still operates on a long-cycle.

What Has Changed in How Google Penalizes Bad Links?

This real-time aspect can have a slightly negative reaction on sites with bad link issues. Penguin has been made part of the core Google Ranking Algorithm, along with Panda, meaning sites will be able to quickly discover that they could have a potential new issue with Penguin.

Google’s Gary Illyes says that the Penguin update “managed to devalue spam instead of demoting.”

This means that spammy link tactics will be de-valued where they are applied to a page, instead of penalizing a brand as a whole, which has caused heated lawsuits in the past and has quite literally handed businesses to bankruptcy.

Illyes also noted publicly that Google still recommends using the Disavow file to recover from Penguin issues, although you technically may not need to, instead focusing on correcting the problem at its origins.

“If you still see the crap, you can help us help you by using it,” Illyes said on a public Facebook post.  “There’s less need… Also, manual actions are still there so if we see that someone is systematically trying to spam, the manual actions team might take harsher action against the site.”

As a result, many SEO’s and webmasters interpret this to mean that Penguin doesn’t penalize anymore – to an extent – it now seems to simply ignore and devalue spammed links instead, adjusting their rankings.

Core Ranking

Penguin is now a part of Google’s core ranking algorithms, along with Panda, one of the company’s strongest spam-fighting algorithms. Penguin is now “baked into” Google’s larger search algorithm network, which encompasses over 200 signals.

The big change here, is that Penguin is now part of the main search algorithm, rather than just a filter which is refreshed during core algorithm updates after extended waits as we outlined above in Penguin’s history.

Penguin will also be implemented in all languages worldwide, so searchers around the globe will begin to notice these changes. This will, of course, take a couple of weeks, so if you haven’t noticed updates or changes yet – they’re coming.

More “Granular”

Google themselves call this Penguin update “more granular” than its predecessor. But what does this actually mean for webmasters and marketers?

Previously, Penguin was usually applied as a site-wide penalty which would suppress traffic until low-quality links pointed towards the penalized site were corrected – from here, the corrections were realized only once a new Penguin update “refresh” had been rolled out.

So when asked what “granular” meant – Google responded by saying: It means it affects finer granularity than sites. It does not mean it only affects pages.”

What we can take into consideration as a result of these insights, is that Google will be focusing on suppressing results to offending pages instead of websites in their entirety. Sections of a website will experience reduced traffic and rankings instead of the entire website.

A good interpretation of this explanation comes from Searchengineland.com, who translate it as meaning that Penguin may impact specific pages or sections of a website, while other pages remain untouched.

The good news is that the positive outcome of corrections and improvements to these areas can be realized in months, rather than years.

With the calculations happening in real time, marketers can now correct, measure, improve and repeat. This change ultimately puts site owners back in the driver’s seat on amended offenses to Google’s guidelines in a timely manner.

What Does the Future of Penguin Look Like?

This could represent the beginning of a more forgiving, collaborative Google.

Penalizing actions – and not entire brands – means supporting site owners who have potentially fallen victim to poor marketing tactics they’ve been unaware of.

RankBrain, a machine-learning artificial intelligence technology used by Google to help process its search engine results could be calculating these new link factors since it is now part of the core algorithm. If RankBrain is assisting this development, we may see Google learning to more effectively counter spam in the future as computers actually learn to do these things, rather than rely on humans to teach them detailed programming.

It’s business-as-usual for SEO best practices. Continue to avoid heavy use of spammy keywords in links like “Buy Red Shoes,” and continue to focus on branded links and naturally occurring contextual links.

The post Google Officially Updates Penguin Algorithm – Here’s What You Should Know appeared first on Riverbed Marketing. from author Todd Mumford

5 Effective Alternatives to the Google AdWords Keyword Planner

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Keywords. Probably one of the most if not the most important part of any online marketing whether it be PPC or SEO, it is also especially important for creating your content plan. Creating a well-researched keyword list for your online marketing campaign or site can provide insight into what the competition might be like, how to gauge what to spend, and ranking opportunities you should take advantage of.  

For most popping the list into Google Adwords Keyword Planner provides all the information needed as well as ideas for where to build out your keyword research. However as you may know you need a paid Google Adwords campaign running to gain access to all the good data. So you might find yourself in need of some alternatives.  

Well look no further, I’ve created a list of 5 alternatives that I use when building out my keyword list and why I find them useful.

  1.  SEM Rush

The first is SEM Rush. SEM Rush does have a free option that gives you 10 free searches a day. That’s a lot if you’re not in any rush (see how I used that) and use them wisely. If you need more consider getting an upgraded account.

SEM Rush gives you a lot of great information for both paid and organic keywords. You can see competitor information such as rankings, as well as search volume for specific keywords. You can also see average cost per clicks on keywords to get an idea of a budget for your campaign. Another cool piece of information SEM Rush shares is ad copy for specific keywords and phrases.

  1. Moz

Moz’s Keyword Explorer is another tool that gives you 1-2 keyword search per day free. It gives you lots of great information on search volume, and difficulty as well as keyword suggestions and SERP Analysis of domains ranking for that keyword.  The keyword suggestions can be exported to a CSV file as well.

Keyword Explorer is just one of the great tools Moz has to offer, if you’re looking for a tool for your overall SEO I would recommend looking into all that Moz has to offer.

  1. keywordtool.io

Keyword Tool uses Google Autocomplete to generate keywords relevant to any search. There is a free account that will give you information on suggested keywords, a great way to build out your keyword list. Another cool aspect of the tool is the ability to add in negative keywords to eliminate any unwanted searches.

The paid account gives you access to search volume and cost per click information as well as competition level for Adwords.  You can take a look at average monthly searches and export the list to Excel.

  1. Wordstream

Wordstream is better used as a paid tool, although it does have a free option that shows related keywords for 30 searches per day, which is quite a lot. To get access to all the keyword information requires a paid account.

If you decide to stick to the free account, the Wordstream Keyword tool offers keyword suggestions to help build out your keyword list, which you could then pop into Keyword Planner to get a better estimate of search volume.

  1. SEOBook Keyword Tool

This is a free tool that gives a lot of great information on not only the keyword you’re looking for but related keywords.  You can see monthly as well as daily search volumes for keywords and average cost per clicks. This is a great alternative to some of the paid tools I’ve mentioned.

There are a lot of options out there and while Google’s Keyword Planner is where I start my research for any PPC or SEO Campaign I always like to pop on a couple of the other tools to see if they have some suggestions or opportunities I might have missed.  

The post 5 Effective Alternatives to the Google AdWords Keyword Planner appeared first on Riverbed Marketing. from author Whitney Wells

Automation’s Role In Inbound Marketing

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In The Ordeal of Change Eric Hoffer writes…

“In times of change, learners will inherit the earth, and the learned will find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists. The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who can’t read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and re-learn.”

And when it comes to inbound marketing, we’re certainly talking about a gigantic, and often agonizingly painful, unlearning and relearning process.
Human nature is conditioned to do more of the same, but doing it harder and longer.

In Change Or Die: The Three Keys to Change at Work and in Life, Alan Deutschman tells us that over 80% of people refuse to change their lifestyles even when their doctors tell them that unless they change, they most probably die pretty soon.

Intellectually we may know that trying harder (good ol’ Boxer’s approach to work in George Orwell’s Animal Farm) is as futile as trying to nail jello to a tree, but thanks to thousands of years of genetic programming, we do it anyway.

But when it comes to inbound marketing, we have to learn to do, following the old Monty Python wisdom

Less But Something Completely Different

And this less but something different is, if you want to grow your business reasonably consistently and predictably, the replacement of inconsistent and unpredictable human performance with consistent and predictable system performance.

Yes, there are many aspects of your business that can’t be automated, but a big chunk of marketing can be.

Modern businesses, due to their complexities, can no longer rely on superstars’ heroic performance. Every now and then, and at one point finally, even super heroes become super zeros.

It’s not hard to imagine that in most businesses, the cost of the work force takes up a significant part of the company’s variable costs.

We also know from a McKinsey study that 1% reduction in variable costs can lead to as high as 7.8% increase in operating profit.

This number alone should be a good incentive for most business owners to stop regarding headcount increase as business growth. We can call it business enlargement, but definitely not business growth.

The other area that spurs business owners to marketing automation is that the buyer environment has changed. Once upon a time, even high-priced solutions could be transacted in “one fell swoop” in a short space of time at just a very few meetings.

Today, the buying cycle is much longer than it was only 10 years ago.

MarketingSherpa reports that 11% of B2B purchases take over 12 months from initiation to completion.

Another important consideration that adds a huge pile of money to the cost of sales is that while 10 years ago, and definitely before the Internet, the buying process was relatively linear, today it’s an iterative process. When you look at your sales funnel you see that even the slightest forwards movement of your prospects is preceded and succeeded by lots of sideways movements.

That’s when prospects consume a significant amount of your content without any forwards movement. And even after consuming enough content, they may not move forwards but backwards.

As the buying behaviour has changed, we have to change our behaviour about selling.

One big change is that specialization highly valued and appreciated.It means companies have to shift from mass marketing to niche marketing. Both lead generation and lead conversion processes must be highly personalized to your buyer persona, the perfect client who could be interested in doing business with you.

Also, since buyers have lots of alternatives besides doing business with you, you have to differentiate your business from the masses and effectively communicate this difference.

But before we go into it…

Let’s Start Automation With Non-Automation

This is it. Automation must start with manually designing and overseeing your marketing automation process. Here you have to define…

• Your target market and buyer persona (perfect client profile).
• Your message that represents your products/services.
• Your method of taking your message in front of your target market.
• The mechanism to bring interested buyers into our sales funnel for decision-making.

Your Target Market And Buyer Persona (Perfect Client Profile)

It’s far too easy to say that your target market is, let’s say, small businesses.
But what small businesses?
Product or service businesses?
B2B or B2C businesses. Or even B2G (government)?
How small are those businesses? A couple doing network marketing from the kitchen table or a 50-person manufacturing plant generating $20 million in annual revenue?

The reality is that there is huge perceived value in specialization. A “consulting firm” that consults on everything with executives, entrepreneurs and small business owners is likely to be price-shopped, because such a firm is easy to replace.

Address Your Market’s Biggest Problems And Links To Your Products/Services

Then you have to create the messages that address your market’s biggest high-level problems. High level problem is a problem that is recognized as a problem by the top executives in the boardroom. Those high-level problems are related to declining sales, shareholder value and similar high-level performance indicators.

People who can address those issues are treated as respected experts and paid generously. However, website graphics, search engine ranking and Facebook likes are not boardroom problems, and people who address those issues are traded like sacks of potatoes.

Once you’ve established your market’s biggest problems, you can start linking those problems to solutions, that is, to your products and services.

Do you plan to use field salespeople or do you want your sales copy do all the work?

Both approaches work, but you need slightly different copy. Keep in mind that if you send salespeople to buyers who are not ready to meet salespeople, it can backfire.

If you sell expensive and highly customized services, then you need salespeople. But if you sell SaaS services, you can use copy to do all the sales work.

Your Method Of Taking Your Message In Front Of Your Target Market

This is very industry specific. If you have a broad target market, here you’re in trouble again because you have to invest in several marketing platforms.

• Target market A, small, local coffin carving companies, may be active on Facebook but not on LinkedIn.
• Target market B, Fortune 500 CEOs are likely to be active on LinkedIn but not on Facebook.
• Target market C, retired people with diabetes may use only the Yellow Pages.

Now you have to set up three platforms because clients could come from either of them. But this scattered approach can also drive you as crazy as two waltzing mice.

You’re better off focusing on one single target market, with one specific perfect buyer type.
You can set up…

1. Perfect client company.
2. Perfect buyer – the buyer with whom you’re building the relationship.
3. Perfect project – The types of projects/work you enjoy and the type that you want to stay away from.

Once you have a detailed client profile, you can adjust everything you do and say to that imaginary person.

The Mechanism To Bring Interested Buyers Into Our Sales Funnel For Decision-Making

This is a step-by-step process of how you catch buyers’ attention, keep their interest and escort them from first contact to the decision-making point.
This is where you can set up your sales funnel and anticipate buyers to move inside your funnel.

You write every piece such that they allow readers to move to the next stage (qualify) or drop out (disqualify). And remember, dropping out is fine. Not everyone is meant to be your client.

And Then Comes The Automation

Once you have a pretty good idea of how buyers move inside your funnel, you can start automating the process.
Let’s start with events…

Before the Funnel

This is where, using fishing lingo, you put out an invitation to come and check your bait.

I like using a sequence of 3-5 pieces, which can be either email or snail mail. Yes, snail mail is alive and well. Actually, I’ve read, I believe in Target Marketing, that snail mail can offer some three-time higher ROI than email. Nevertheless, you can win big with email too.

Those who ignore your offer after five tries, will always ignore it, so you can end it here. Then 4-6 months later, you can put them on a new campaign.

But those who took your offer, they go to check your bait.

Here I like using something free that doesn’t require registration. The call to action at the end of this piece is to register for and download a white paper/special report.

Then, I have a 5-piece follow-up sequence going deeper into the report’s topic.

Inside The Funnel

Then I can settle into a steady and cozy follow-up process and keep buyers interested and gently advance them in the sales funnel.

Apart from writing the pieces, the whole process is pre-programmed and the emails go out automatically like clockwork.

As you can see, there is no chasing and convincing. Byers can enter and exit the sales funnel to their little hearts’ content. They are completely in charge of what they do.

Leaving The Funnel

Buyers can leave the funnel in two ways.

Either they drop out and leave your list or reach their decision points and become clients. But they’ve become clients on their own volition. They don’t feel forced or manipulated.

Summary

We’ve all heard it that a pen can be used either to write nice poetry or to pick someone’s eyes out. Marketing automation is the same. It can be either a miracle worker in your business or a certifiable nightmare.

But think of Bill Gates’ two rules:

1. “Automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency.”
2. “Automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”

This is why you have to make sure that your operation works well manually. Automate only the effective parts of your system.
Don’t rush it. You’re not chased by the Tatars.

Take one small segment of your system and test it repeatedly. Once you’re happy with its performance, then start automating it. Then take the next segment and repeat.

Automating your system is like recruiting talents. You do it one by one. There is no such thing as mass-recruitment of talented people.

You can mass hire workers, but recruiting talents is, ta… da… Monty Python again, something completely different.

Marketing automation is a beautiful thing. When it’s done well, it can make your marketing consistent and predictable which are good for your brand. You can also save a small fortune on headcount, which means that you can increase personal productivity, a.k.a. annual revenue per employee.

The post Automation’s Role In Inbound Marketing appeared first on Riverbed Marketing. from author Todd Mumford

What Is A Content Calendar and How Can It Make You More Irresistible To Your Market

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What Is A Content Calendar, And How It Can Make You More Irresistible To Your Market

Marketing maven Dan Kennedy is fond of saying:

“The difference between chicken poop and chicken salad is timing.”

And when it comes to content marketing, we have to consider British journalist, musician, broadcaster and the inventor of Franglais, a fictional language, made up of French and English, Miles Beresford Kington’s view on the topic:

“Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.”

And if we look at inbound marketing from a pragmatic perspective, we can instantly see how perfectly both Dan’s and Miles’ maxims apply to it.

Inbound marketing is really the type of content we distribute and the timing of the distribution.

And when it comes to connecting with your target audience using content marketing, a content calendar is one of the main engines of your campaign.

What Is A Content Calendar?

A content calendar is a visual representation of the timing and the nature of content that your marketing team distributes to various segments of your database, depending on…

  • What they’re interested in?
  • Where they are in your sales funnel and at?
  • What pace they’re moving forward?

The purpose of good content is to generate new sales leads and gently nudge existing sales leads towards the next stages of their decision-making processes inside the sales funnel.

The main benefit of the calendar approach is that…

  • You can see the consistency of the distributable or already distributed content.
  • You can see the exact timing of the distribution.
  • You can adjust your content creation team’s time frames.

And now we can move and start building our content calendar starting with the first step…

Design Your Marketing Persona(s)

Before we can create sales cycles, funnels and other nipple-piercingly fancy bits and bobs, we have to decide who we want to send all that content to.

This video from the late Gary Halbert can help you to better understand the importance of the person to whom we send our messages.

One part of marketing is the target market, but the other, and often neglected part, is the very person who is going to receive our content.

The more you know about the type of that person, the more receptive your audience will be to your message.

For more about creating a buyer persona, please read Hubspot’s How to Create Detailed Buyer Personas for Your Business.

Inspect Your Sales Cycle

This inspection is based on your target market’s buying process.

But don’t make the mistake of examining the sales cycle from the seller’s perspective, following a process like…

  1. Lead
  2. Prospect
  3. Appointment
  4. Proposal
  5. New client

If you map your content calendar based on the above steps, you go against buyers’ buying processes, and it sooner or later result in a serious clash. And after the dust has settled, what you see is that otherwise high quality buyers have committed mass exodus from your sales funnel, and no amount of Baileys Irish Cream or Nutella on toast can seduce them back into your funnel.

Use the buyer’s perspective to:

  1. Recognize problem
  2. Define possible long-term consequences
  3. Define cost of problem and consequences
  4. Allocate budget
  5. Define deciding criteria
  6. Assess alternatives
  7. Select solution
  8. Select solution provider

Listing Your Content Pieces

We know that different pieces are suitable for different stages of the sales funnel.

Buyers at the beginning of their “funnel journeys” need eye-opening pieces that help them realize that there is a problem that costs the company big money and needs to be solved.

Also consider that some buyers love reading but hate videos or podcasts.

And some content pieces are…

  • Social media posts
  • Blogs
  • New articles
  • Videos
  • White papers (B2B) or Special reports (B2C)
  • Case studies
  • Research studies
  • Social media channels
  • Podcasts
  • Templates, cheat sheets, checklists
  • Games and puzzles
  • Calculators

At the beginning of the funnel, buyers need problem-driven articles because first they try to solve their problems in-house.

At the end of the funnel, after buyers have realized the problem can’t be solved in-house, buyers need case studies and some social proof to make their final decisions.

Brainstorm Your Content-Friendly Subjects

Decide which parts of your subject matter expertise land themselves to relatively easy content development and distribution.

Yes, every profession has some areas that are not exactly content-friendly, partly because they are very hands-on skills, and it’s pointless to write content on them.

 

In Knowledge Creating Company, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi make a distinction between explicit and tacit knowledge.

  • Explicit knowledge is easy express in words and numbers. It’s easy to codify, document and then memorize. Large number of people can learn it in a short space of time. E.g. learning the chromatic scale.
  • Tacit knowledge is impossible to put into words and numbers. It’s impossible to codify, document and then memorize. E.g. learning to compose like Mozart.

We have to make sure we use explicit knowledge for content. Trying to explain tacit knowledge would leave your audience as frustrated as a centipede on a shoe-shopping spree.

And this leads us to…

  • Explicit capability that can be delivered quickly and cost-effectively using various codified methods, like written text, audio or video. E.g. online courses.
  • Tacit capability that must be delivered in a hands-on manner over an extended period of time. That makes the delivery expensive. E. g. medical residency.

Mapping Out Your Sales Funnel And Calendar

This is where you map out what gets sent out to which segment of your list and when.

The timing is defined how buyers behave inside the funnel. If there is indication of a specific piece’s consumption, then the system can release the next piece of content.

So, the sales funnel dictates what piece of content goes into the calendar at what point.

We want to make sure that the calendar reactive in such a way that it sends out the next piece of content in reaction to buyers’ action.

If you publish an article on how to select a SaaS software development firm, first the buyer has to read about why his company may be losing out by running off-the-shelf cloud-based software and how custom-made cloud-based software can be more effective.

Other Factors That Can Influence Your Calendar

There are some other factors that must be calculated when assembling your calendar.

This is an area where marketing people should compare notes with salespeople, since they’re out in the field and they know about infinitesimal nuances that can make a big difference in buyer behaviors.

Some factors are…

  • The target market’s seasonality.
  • Special industry trends.
  • Industry-specific conferences, tradeshows, etc.
  • Anticipated new product or service launches in target market.
  • Anticipated news announcements.
  • Industry’s regulation level – Highly regulated industries can be quite unpredictable.
  • Effects of economic and political changes on industry.

Granted, many factors can’t be foreseen or anticipated, so the best thing you can do is build some flexibility into your content calendar.

When you find out about a major industrial tradeshow, you can tie your next few pieces of content to that tradeshow.

Mentioning these events also gives your content pieces a chance to be picked up by other news outlets.

Elements Of A Calendar Entry

Here we specify what is what in a specific content piece.

  • Title: Title of the content piece.
  • Problem: Clarifies the problem of the market which the piece addresses.
  • KW 1: Long-tail keyword #1
  • KW 2: Long-tail keyword #2
  • KW 3: Long-tail keyword #3
  • Key points: A short explanation of what the article does.
  • Type: Blog, tip sheet, special report, case study, etc.
  • Length: xyz words
  • CTA (call to action): The action you want readers to take after consuming this piece.
  • Preceded by: Title of the previous piece. (Vital to mimic the buyer’s thinking process)
  • Succeeded by: Title of the next piece. (Vital to mimic the buyer’s thinking process)

You may use fewer or more fields in your calendar entries depending how complex your sales funnel is and how thinly you segment your database.

Calendar Template

There are more content calendar tools out there than stars in the sky.

You can read The Complete Guide to Choosing a Content Calendar, and most probably, you’ll find the one that is most suitable for your purposes.

Also, to complement the tool of your choice, you can read Michell Hall’s article on comprehensive list of calendar templates.

Once you select a tool and have a structure, then you can start creating your own content calendar.

Summary

Content type and timing are the two arms of the proverbial inbound marketing giant.

Yes, when you have both arms, you have a giant that can do amazing things seemingly effortlessly. The proverbial juggernaut that moves forwards unobstructed and generates dream clients for your business.

But if you miss either the type or the timing, you can end up with a paralyzed giant with his dominant arm missing and the other arm aimlessly flailing.

 

The post What Is A Content Calendar and How Can It Make You More Irresistible To Your Market appeared first on Riverbed Marketing. from author Todd Mumford

How To Run An Effective B2B SEO Audit

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In many small- and medium-sized (SME) B2B organizations, search engine optimization, using American inventor and marketer, Ron Popeil’s famous slogan for his Ronco Showtime Rotisserie & BBQ, is a “set it and forget it” function.

Business owners erroneously believe that once they’ve “done SEO”, it’s done forever, and requires no further attention on their parts.

But to do effective SEO, they have to establish where they are right now, and to do that, they have to do a SEO audit.

And when they look up what a B2B SEO audit is, they realise it’s a pretty complex process.

The good news is that you can do a scaled down mini-audit, and in this article, we outline what you should check.

So, let’s start with…

Some Serious Problems

Because of this “set it and forget it” attitude, many websites show serious SEO neglect, with the top 10 problems, according to Semrush, being…

  • 1. Duplicate content
  • 2. ALT attributes missing
  • 3. Duplicate title tags
  • 4-5. Internal and external link rot (broken link)
  • 6-7. Duplicate and/or missing meta descriptions
  • 8.Low text to HTML ratio
  • 9-10. Missing or multiple H1 tags on one page

The reality is that SEO is changing very fast, and we haven’t even talked about Google’s recent “Fred” manoeuvre.

It means that companies that get a significant portion of their customers, thus revenues, through their web presence, have no option but to consider SEO as an ongoing business function.

If they want to reap, they have to sow first.

When businesses realize that they should do SEO on an ongoing basis, they start as if they always had been doing it without any interruption.

It means, they start doing various SEO tactics, without strategies and another key component.

 

So, if you belong to the SEO “set it and forget it” camp and now want to re-start, the first step must be to declare that your website suffers from the SEO “set it and forget it” syndrome, and then perform a mini SEO audit to evaluate the search engine friendliness of your company’s website to see where actually you stand.

So, let’s move on to…

Preparing For The SEO Audit

The first question right out of the gate is…

Who Should Do The Mini Audit?

Just like in every kind of audit, there must be checks and balances in place, which means that the audit must not be done by one person. Ideally there are two auditors to avoid random acts of naughtiness and mischief.

They should be people who are somewhat web-savvy but are not involved in web work on a daily basis – People are reluctant to criticize their own work.

So, ideally, it’s a dual role between the marketing manager and marketing coordinator.

In sub-$10M companies, it’s often the VP of sales and marketing with another sales and marketing manager.

Where To Start?

Continuing with your preparation, you have three key questions to ask…

  • Check which accounts do you need unrestricted access to?
  • What exactly do you need to know about your website to audit it properly?
  • What audit tools do you need to do the job?

Accessible Accounts

Please note that many of the following tools and services are provided by Google, so if you have one Google account, may that me Gmail, Google+ or any other Google tool, you can use that login info to with most Google tools.

Access to all web analytics login information: It’s common problem in many companies that certain people have the nasty habit of keeping login information to themselves, and in doing so believing they have made themselves fire-proof. But it’s also a crime. As the business owner, or the business owner’s representative, you must have unlimited access to any login info.

Access to all social media accounts: Social media can have a serious impact on any company both in positive and negative way. Within four weeks after breaking Dave Carroll’s guitar and wiggling out of responsibility, due to backlash on YouTube (16,347,776 views and 99,139 likes), United Airlines’ stock price fell 10% and stockholders lost about $180 million.

Access to payments systems accounts: If your company takes online payments or does online banking, you need this access.

Access to Google AdWords and all other PPC accounts: If your company uses PPC marketing, then you need access because you need key numbers from the PPC dashboards.

Access to Google Search Console (previously Webmaster Tools) accounts: This is many of the tools your webmaster uses on a daily basis to keep your website in good working order.

Access to business accounts: This includes access to CRM, email management and distribution program, project management program and any cloud-based account that has anything to do with your company’s performance.

List Of Tools to Aid Your SEO Audit

Here we look at a list of tools you need for your SEO mini-audit.

Knowing that what you do is a SEO mini-audit not a full 360° SEO audit, and with this in mind, there is no point to flood you with expensive tools, since they would be underused and the extra data would be overwhelming.

It’s like when you don’t feel well. You take your temperature, your blood pressure and maybe your heart rate and that’s all.

But you don’t self-administer ECG, EEG or blood gas analysis. You ask the respective experts to do those procedures.

So, the tools here enable you to perform the proverbial temperature-, blood pressure- and pulse check.

So, let’s see…

For every tool, you can find several makes from different companies, but this list gives you all the tools for a mini audit.

I know it’s not much, but using Einstein’s words, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

And we shouldn’t hunt for sparrows with AIM-7 Sparrow missiles.

Wow, if chairman Mao Zedong knew that during the Great Chinese Sparrow Campaign between 1958 and 1962!

Look Into The SEO Audit Itself

Overview

Checking your domain’s indexed pages

  • Do a Google search for your site and see what comes up. In the Google search box, type “site:yourwebsite.com” (without quotes).
  • Note the number of returned pages right under the Google Search box: E.g.: “About 416,000 results (0.63 seconds)”.
  • Is the first page your home page? If not, it can be the sign of some SEO errors, poor branding, poor internal linking (too many links to home page or too many exact match keywords) or even some form of penalty against your site.

Open your Google Analytics and check for organic landing pages.

  • Is this number close to your previous search results?
  • This gives you a pretty good idea about your indexed pages.

Run a search on your branded terms

  • Make a note of your domain’s pages that come up.
  • If the proper pages aren’t showing up as the first result, there could be issues, like a penalty, in play.

Check Google’s cache for your key pages

  • Can you see your content with the appropriate navigation links?
  • Are there any invisible?

Using this bookmarklet, you can also check the text-only version of the cached page.

Now do a search on your mobile devices

  • Is your listing marked up as “mobile friendly”? One good source is Akamai’s white paper, Delivering the Best Mobile Experience. Read How AMP Works for detailed step-by-step instructions on how to make your website mobile-friendly.
  • Are your pages mobile friendly? What that means is that both text and images properly scale based on the size of your mobile device and all buttons are recognizable for their functions.

Mobile unfriendliness can cause the loss of organic visits.

On-Page Optimization

A big part of on-page optimization is optimizing meta tags because they are read by both search engines and visitors. And since they make the first impression of a web page, you have to pay attention to them.

Also, Google’s new ranking algorithm uses machine learning known as RankBrain.

It takes metrics from user behavior such as click through rate (CTR) from search results and uses it to determine the site’s quality factors.

Title tags

  • A standalone title tag should be optimized for each page.
  • Title tags should be max. 55-60 characters (512 pixels) long. You can preview this with a tool such as Screaming Frog.
  • Write down pages with missing title tags.

Description tags

  • A standalone description should be optimized for each page.
  • Give a brief description of what’s on the page.
  • Description tags can be as long as you make them, but they get cut off at 160 characters. You can check it in Screaming Frog.
  • Since 2009, meta the description is no longer Google ranking a factor. However, today’s meta descriptions should be written like ad copy to entice users to click through. This supports SEO by improving click through rate from search results pages.
  • All key pages of your website should have a properly optimize meta description with a compelling call-to-action.

To quickly audit your title and description tags, type in the google search box: site:yourwebsite.com

At Search Engine Watch, you can see some both good and bad examples for title tags and meta descriptions.

Keywords

  • Each page includes one primary keyword phrase multiple times and some alternate keyword phrases
  • Make sure every keyword has significant amount of supporting content on your website. Write about related themes or more granular points of focus on the subject.
  • Make sure the page’s primary keyword phrase is included in the H1 tag
  • Check images for alt text and make sure alt texts include keyword phrases.

SEMrush has a free version, in which you can enter your website and it will spit out all the keywords that the website currently ranks for. First type in your URL and then click ”organic research” under “domain analysis” in the top left side menu (second menu item under Overview).

Clean URLs

  • Make sure your URL is descriptive.
  • Separate words with hyphens not underscores
  • Keep the addresses of your indexed pages static
  • If you use short URLs (bit.ly, etc.), keep each of them under 150 characters.

Some extra points

Content

For a long time, conventional wisdom was that no one wants to read long articles on the web. And with the proliferation of smart phones, this notion became even stronger.

However, after a few algorithm changes at Google, even the staunchest short-article fanatics have started realizing that the type of readers who are likely to become customers down the road want deep and meaningful articles.

In “Ogilvy on Advertising”, legendary advertising man, David Ogilvy wrote,

“All my experience says that for a great many products, long copy sells more than short … advertisements with long copy convey the impression that you have something important to say, whether people read the copy or not.”

The former dean of the Graduate School of Retailing at New York University, Dr. Charles Edwards, once said, “The more facts you tell, the more you sell. An advertisement’s chance for success invariably increases as the number of pertinent merchandise facts included in the advertisement increases.”

And finally, in “Tested Advertising Methods,” renowned copywriter, John Caples wrote, “Advertisers who can trace the direct sales results from their ads use long copy because it pulls better than short copy… Brief, reminder-style copy consisting of a few words or a slogan does not pull inquiries as well as long copy packed with facts and reader benefits about your product or service.”

Also, Kevin Delaney, the editor-in-chief of Quartz, reports that articles between 500 and 800 words have the hardest time with being ranked. They are too long for being short and snappy and too short for being deep and detailed. So, in most cases, they get ignored.

Optimizing the home page

According to SEO copywriter, Heather Lloyd-Martin, a page with only 250 words is regarded as thin content, that is, something dodgy. In Longer Is Better for Blog Content: Truth Or Myth?, Julia McCoy, CEO of Express Writers, confirms Julia’s point.

  • Does your homepage have at least 500 words?
  • Are keywords properly placed in the content?

Optimized landing pages

  • At least five paragraphs and 500 words. It enough for search engines but may not be enough for visitors.
  • The content has been uniquely writing especially this specific page.

Appropriate keyword usage

  • Is there a good match between they pages’ content and keywords?
  • Does the page use words and phrases that are semantically similar to the keywords and relevant to the topic on the page?
  • Does the page use short-, mid-, and long-tail keywords?
  • Do a Google site search for your main keywords and note where they show up?

Available visitor educational content

  • Besides search engine-friendly content, do you have enough visitor-friendly content to inform and educate your website visitors about who you are and what you do?

Formatting content

  • Content formatted both for easy skimming and reading.
  • Content is properly paragraphed.
  • Proper H tags are used throughout the content.
  • Only one H1 tag on every page.
  • H2 and H3 tags are used to make content easier to read.
  • Images support the message of the content.

Page headlines and subheads

  • Headlines and subheads include keyword phrases
  • Skimming headlines gives the gist of the page

Amount of content versus ads

  • In B2B, on-page advertising like Google AdSense can undermine the website’s credibility
  • Google frowns on on-page advertising
  • If you run on-page ads, make sure you have good content too or Google can penalize your page.

Duplicate Content

You can use Copyscape to find whether or not there is a duplicate version of the content that you’re about to publish. This is important because if your content is already on another web page with good SEO and more and better links, your content has as much chance of survival as a mouse at a healthy diet conference for cats.

  • Every URL on your website has its dedicated content
  • Do searches for random content snippets (Put the snippet between quotation marks)
  • Note the pages where each snippet shows up.
  • Is there any content duplication on sub-domains?
  • Note that printer friendly versions of pages can cause content duplication. The impact of this is not a concern if it’s on your own domain, but some embedded content plugins or widgets can sometimes be hosted on unique URLs outside of your website. This is a scenario you will want to avoid.

Accessibility

  • Check the robots.txt. Varvy has bot the tool and a tutorial to help you check your pages. The robots.txt files specifies which web pages the search engines have access to and which pages hey are barred from. Since this is a rather advanced setting, if you’re not experienced in web coding, seek some help.

Check website without JavaScript, cookies, and CSS

  • Use the Web Developer Toolbar (a free Firefox add-on)
  • Is the content there?
  • Are the navigational links operational?

Now change your user agent to Googlebot

  • Use the User Agent (a free Firefox add-on)
  • Are they cloaking?
  • Does it look the same as before?
  • Check for 4xx (client) errors and 5xx (internal server) errors.

Sitemaps

  • txt file includes XML sitemaps. An essential tool to use is Google Webmaster Tools.
  • XML sitemaps are submitted to Google/Bing Webmaster Tools

Check meta robots noindex tag on each page

  • Check for accidental noindex tagging using SeeRobots for both Firefox and Chrome.
  • Are noindex tags applied to the right pages?
  • Check your site with Moz or Screaming Frog

Site Architecture And Internal Linking

Page linking

  • How many outgoing links does each page have?
  • Are links under 100 per page?

Over 100 links per page, the SEO value of the page can get seriously compromised.

Specific vertical and horizontal linking logic

  • Landing on the homepage systematically leads visitors on a pre-planned journey.
  • Category and product pages are linked to other relevant category and product pages.

Additional reading:

Importance of Internal Linking and Internal Linking Tactics

Technical Considerations

301 redirects used the right way

  • 301 redirects are used consistently.
  • 301 and Not 302 is used to redirect root to a landing.
  • Check your 301 redirects with the Live HTTP Headers Firefox plugin.
  • No 302, 307 or JavaScript redirects. Use Screaming Frog to check them.
  • Direct redirects and no redirect chains.

JavaScript, iFrames and Flash usage

  • Is there any hidden (by Javascript) text on the page? See Google’s cloaking guidelines.
  • Are there any JavaScript based content on the page?
  • Are there any JavaScript based links on the page?
  • Is it deliberate page rank sculpting or an error?
  • Is any part of the page’s content in iFrames?
  • How wide-spread is Flash usage on the page? Does it prevent the page from being indexed?

XML Sitemaps

Canonical

  • 301s are set up for canonical sites
  • Google Webmaster Tools contains the Canonical version of the site
  • “Rel canonical” tags are set up throughout the site

Mobile Compliance

Observe mobile behaviour

  • How mobile friendly is the website?
  • How well does it work on mobile devices?
  • Are your analytics ready for mobile?
  • In case of separate mobile site, does the desktop site refer to it with a rel=”alternate” tag?
  • Does the mobile version canonical to the desktop version?
  • Here you can see some examples of the “alternate” tag.

International Usage

Check all international version of your website

  • In Webmaster Tools, make sure that country-based targeting is enabled
  • Are your website targeting intentions in synch with your Webmaster Tools settings?
  • If you have several versions of the same website, make sure the content is unique on each of them.
  • Implement hreflang and rel alternate if necessary as per this documentation.
  • Make sure every URL is in the same language as the content is written,

Analytics Considerations

Analytics codes

  • Analytics codes are inserted on every page. Make sure there is only one code. Google Tag Manager is an excellent tool to do it.
  • To avoid self-referrals, make sure your own IP address is blocked from analytics. See details here.
  • Internal searches register in analytics
  • Analytics is set up for geographics tracking.
  • Both Google Adwords and AdSense codes are linked to analytics.
  • Event tracking is set up for key user interactions

Summary

As we discussed at the beginning of the article, this is a SEO mini audit. I emphasise “mini” because the real SEO audit is much more comprehensive.

Yes, instructions are available by the truckload, but, just like a financial audit, the SEO audit has to be done by someone who is not emotionally entangled with the company. After all, we can often have a bias towards our own content as this is a particular area of subjective opinions.

One of the greatest benefits of an audit is its objectivity because the auditor has nothing to gain or lose by giving you certain good or bad news.

Nevertheless, now you know where your website stands and what needs to be done. And even if you decide to forego a full audit with a reputable agency, I bet you have a massive list of tasks the mini audit has surfaced for you. Even just some implementation of fixes to the areas you audited over time can have meaningful returns to your bottom line. The list may be daunting, but chip away at it over time… you’ll be glad you did.

The post How To Run An Effective B2B SEO Audit appeared first on Riverbed Marketing. from author Todd Mumford

Healthcare Content Marketing: How To Generate The Right Content

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Producing great content for the healthcare industry can be a bit like getting lost in the woods; easy to deal with if you know how to handle yourself in the bush, but straight up panic-inducing, if not.

The stigma in writing and tailoring great content to the healthcare industry is that most writers think they have to be doctors or nurses to do it well – or that they have to elevate their vocabularies to speak directly to doctors and nurses – and it’s easy to understand why. It’s a competitive, complex topic that holds issues of legality and compliance.

Good writers have to interact with, and research topics of authority – there’s no avoiding it. Plus, doctors and the entire world of healthcare deserves our respect; so it feels nearly disrespectful to write about the importance of the healthcare community in layman’s terms. At the same time, generating great content means addressing the fact that most people won’t understand the Latin names for conditions, or the in’s and outs of molecular biology.

So, generating the right content for healthcare-based clients is like a delicate dance – on one hand, there’s a level of seriousness and authority that needs to be addressed, but in such a way that’s engaging for a broad audience to read.

 

If watching reruns of House M.D has taught us anything, it’s to embrace the seriousness of healthcare with a free-spirited attitude… and that rocking a blazer with jeans and running shoes is legit, but that’s another post.

 

Reimagine your Perspective

 

Producing content for healthcare is really no different from any other industry. It’s about sourcing credible references, doing good research, and showing the topic respect – just as any professional content writer will show a topic about law, retail or manufacturing. The difference, perhaps, lies in the singular perception of healthcare – it’s strictness, or rigor. The mark of content regarding healthcare is one of unwavering importance.

Remember that, and tailor your perspective to that of your readers. With healthcare, your reader is likely someone who is seeking the best physician, surgeon, or facility available to them. They’re probably searching for solutions, information, or even treatments for a list of specific symptoms or emotions associated with health – so put yourself in their shoes.

As you’re writing, ask yourself a few key questions:

 

  • Can you easily interpret the information you’re writing?
  • Are your definitions and terms understandable to younger readers?
  • Is your clinical content accurate without being confusing or overwhelming?
  • Are you offering actionable explanations?
  • Have you addressed the questions of your readers?

 

A great way to discover more about your potential readers is to employ the use of a well executed buyer persona. These are structured processes that critically map out ideal target buyers, demographics, and psycho-graphic analysis to more effectively target your content.

The purpose of a buyer persona is to clearly define the goals, pain points, and challenges that your potential buyer faces as they go about their decision making process, also known as the buyer journey. This process serves to ensure that you are speaking to your audience in a way that caters to their needs in self educating about the problem or solution they are researching. The buyer persona leans heavily on the modern day shopper, because they prefer to self-serve and self-educate on their own terms; this puts them in control of where and how to buy solutions to their problems.

 

Identify Your Target

 

The beautiful thing about an inbound marketing content strategy is acknowledging out of the gate that you’re aware your ideal prospect is already looking for answers to their questions. This means that your biggest hurdle is finding out what those questions are and using this insight to formulate specific and tailored content made specifically for the audience that’s going to find it most useful.

Step 1 in any content marketing campaign is accurately and confidently identifying your target. In healthcare content, you can assess the niche business you or your client is in, and tailor your buyer personas and audience demographic analysis to create the perfect content calendar for attracting the right people.

 

However, “healthcare” doesn’t have to mean doctor or hospital-centric content either, there are a plethora of health-related topics that can act as great jump-off points for attracting a broader demographic whose interest is on health, wellness and event training. Plus, in terms of numbers and traffic generation, there are many more people who are not medical professionals who are looking for advice and resources on health. For example:

 

  • Weight loss/diet blogs – giving information on tips and tricks for losing that last 5 pounds, or highlighting weight loss journeys.

 

  • Training blogs – more of a wellness sub-topic, but training, weight-lifting, or running blogs are an attractive platform for those who primarily use exercise and physical activity to improve their health.

 

  • Nutrition blogs – Blogs that are focused on healthy, organic food options that promote health and even suggest relief from health-related ailments like diabetes, iron deficiencies, high cholesterol, tooth decay, etc – all beneficial answers for those researching for alternative health treatments or changes to their lives that put health first.

 

  • Healthy living blogs – more open ended in scope, but healthy living blogs can support healthcare related topics by insisting that a new, healthy outlook on life and the activities that you find solace in can actually help to improve your mood, spirit and overall health in time. Niche topics like hiking, canoeing, yoga, gardening, jogging, etc – all aspects of healthy lifestyles that can be used to combat certain medical or healthcare related topics.

 

A great way to build some background information on your ideal target demographic is to start with larger, more broad topics, and dial in on something tighter as time goes on. This funnel-style of target identification will help you to wean out the crowds that aren’t interested in your content, or typically like to find their info elsewhere. Further, it mimics the natural sales-funnel ideals of a success inbound campaign – as a balancing act that needs to be addressed at every stage.

For example, a sales/persona funnel needs to maintain a funnel shape, this means dictating where your energy goes as readers progress further down the rabbit hole. Our fearless leader, Todd Mumford, notes sales funnels should always be fat at the top – liken that to appealing to a large audience with broader content topics. Further down the line, the sales funnel is thinned by visitors entering and beginning to make their sales-related decisions – liken this stage to readers determining how specific or relatable – or not – your topics are for their research purposes.

At the end of the topic funnel, you’ll have gathered some invaluable information about your readers as you experiment with different topics, focus and voices. Similar to the way a sales funnel will inevitably thin to a point when customers are ready to make a purchasing decision; when you can help someone to make a buying decision, your content is always a deciding factor – know what content gets your reader to the end of the sales funnel, and you’ll know what type of health-related content is capable of attracting the right readers – and whether or not your content is able to answer their questions.

 

Tone & Voice

 

Voice is so, so critical in successful healthcare content. Writing is hard enough, but knowing when to use a friendly, upbeat tone, or a professional voice is paramount to break through to a considerable audience. This skill is all about practice – writing a lot will of course inevitably make you better at writing for specific sub genres of people; healthcare content and its related niche markets are unique in that different types of writing will generate a spark with a different audience.

 

ThoughtCo tells us that tone is a web of feelings stretched throughout an essay – so whatever you do, healthcare content should always offer a boost of some kind. Negative aspects to health are abundant, and important, but should never finish your content posts. Writing meaningful healthcare content is all about hearing and feeling the tone of your readers as well. Remember, marketing and content creation is all about building friendship, and meaningful relationships based on trust: give your readers something to grab onto, and don’t take advantage of their trust. It’s a precious commodity that needn’t be tampered with; health should never be tampered with.

Offer motivation when you need to. Offer sobering facts to encourage your readers to make beneficial changes in their approach to health. Exchange ideas and promote innovation to instill a sense of good tidings and good expectations.

 

Keyword Optimization

 

Discuss benefits, SEO implications

 

When writing for healthcare applications, content producers are fortunate in that readers are likely searching for symptoms and specific names of conditions or illnesses. Your inbound marketing team can help you to decipher which words and phrases produce the highest search numbers that can be implemented into your content as sub-headings and titles, and lightly implemented into the content itself. What SEO does, is improves your pages appeal to search engine results. It’s a technique that helps your site and therefore your content, to rank higher in organic search results. Search engines like Google are typically looking for title tags, keywords, image tags, internal link structure to build context upon, and inbound links.

What SEO is NOT about, is littering your content with transparent, ill-placed words as often as possible. Optimization is more of a dance; a masterful, crafty dance. In fact, more search engines will dock your site based on an obvious overabundance of keywords, known as keyword stuffing. Never push, or allow your keyword placement to feel unnatural.

Let’s imagine your client sells diabetic socks. A good idea would be to target a portion of your content towards those looking to better understand and self-educate on the benefits of keywords like ‘increased circulation,’ ‘blood flow,’ and ‘transmission of blood to the feet,’ resulting in reduced swelling, soreness, and inflammation.

See what we did there? We took a beneficial product that a reader may or may not be aware of, and marketed it as a benefit to specific problems that we can accurately perceive a broad readership may already be looking for answers to. Remember, the right people already have questions and need answers to those questions – your keyword research will be to hone in on and decipher which problems are questions are most-asked, and tailor your expertise to answering in the best, most comprehensive way to help build trust with your readers, and authority on the subject.

 

Build Structure

 

Content marketing is at a bit of a crossroads. As the discipline evolves, and readers develop new ways to engage with and interpret content, some writers and marketing outfits have lost their touch. Only 30% of B2B marketers say their organizations are effective at content marketing, down from 38% in 2016. This means that content marketers need to re-dedicate their approach to content creation.

Healthcare lends itself well to this reinvestment of marketing prowess, because much like content marketing it requires consistency, measurable results and dedication. Marketers and content writers need to add consistency to their marketing efforts and stay true to the process. Just like an incorrect cut in surgery can cause massive hemorrhaging, unfocused marketing can do the same to an organization’s bottom line.

Content marketers also need to take the responsibility to comply with best practices. Content marketers and writers need to be careful when writing about sensitive topics like healthcare and refrain from offering medical advice outright when not properly vetted by a PHD for liability concerns. Some of these potential areas of consideration can significantly delay effective marketing from taking place. It takes a well oiled process with an intimate understanding of the industry to keep consistent marketing sustained.

 

—-

 

At its core, healthcare content creation is about insisting that readers acknowledge that optimism in their ability to help themselves is key to the success of the material itself. We’ve written at great length on the importance of writing with respect, and with humility – but writing to inspire confidence, trust, and camaraderie via healthcare and health-related content can represent much more.

Generating the right healthcare content, it would seem, revolves around a writer’s ability to identity with, and to develop strong, positive strategies with tone and voice, as much as SEO and keyword research. A content writer could spend months compiling the most factual and hard-nosed piece on the internet – but if it doesn’t speak to someone; help them identify in a positive light – there’s a good chance it’ll be skipped over.

Respect, friendship, accuracy, and trust always rule the day.

The post Healthcare Content Marketing: How To Generate The Right Content appeared first on Riverbed Marketing. from author Nelson Phillips


5 Effective AdWords Keyword Planner Alternatives

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Keywords. Probably one of the most if not the most important part of any online marketing whether it be PPC or SEO, it is also especially important for creating your content plan. Creating a well-researched keyword list for your online marketing campaign or site can provide insight into what the competition might be like, how to gauge what to spend, and ranking opportunities you should take advantage of.

For most popping the list into Google Adwords Keyword Planner provides all the information needed as well as ideas for where to build out your keyword research. However as you may know you need a paid Google Adwords campaign running to gain access to all the good data. So you might find yourself in need of some alternatives.  

Well look no further, I’ve created a list of 5 keyword planner alternatives that I use when building out my keyword list and why I find them useful.

  1.  SEMrush

The first is SEM Rush. SEM Rush does have a free option that gives you 10 free searches a day. That’s a lot if you’re not in any rush (see how I used that) and use them wisely. If you need more consider getting an upgraded account.

SEM Rush gives you a lot of great information for both paid and organic keywords. You can see competitor information such as rankings, as well as search volume for specific keywords. You can also see average cost per clicks on keywords to get an idea of a budget for your campaign. Another cool piece of information SEM Rush shares is ad copy for specific keywords and phrases.

  1. MOZ

MOZ’s Keyword Explorer is another tool that gives you 1-2 keyword search per day free. It gives you lots of great information on search volume, and difficulty as well as keyword suggestions and SERP Analysis of domains ranking for that keyword.  The keyword suggestions can be exported to a CSV file as well.

Keyword Explorer is just one of the great tools MOZ has to offer, if you’re looking for a tool for your overall SEO I would recommend looking into all that MOZ has to offer.

  1. keywordtool.io

Keyword Tool uses Google Autocomplete to generate keywords relevant to any search. There is a free account that will give you information on suggested keywords, a great way to build out your keyword list. Another cool aspect of the tool is the ability to add in negative keywords to eliminate any unwanted searches.

The paid account gives you access to search volume and cost per click information as well as competition level for Adwords.  You can take a look at average monthly searches and export the list to Excel.

  1. Wordstream

Wordstream is better used as a paid tool, although it does have a free option that shows related keywords for 30 searches per day, which is quite a lot. To get access to all the keyword information requires a paid account.

If you decide to stick to the free account, the Wordstream Keyword tool offers keyword suggestions to help build out your keyword list, which you could then pop into Keyword Planner to get a better estimate of search volume.

  1. SEOBook Keyword Tool

This is a free tool that gives a lot of great information on not only the keyword you’re looking for but related keywords.  You can see monthly as well as daily search volumes for keywords and average cost per clicks. This is a great alternative to some of the paid tools I’ve mentioned.

There are a lot of options out there and while Google’s Keyword Planner is where I start my research for any digital marketing campaign I always like to pop on a couple of the other tools to see if they have some suggestions or opportunities I might have missed.  

The post 5 Effective AdWords Keyword Planner Alternatives appeared first on Riverbed Marketing.

What is Inbound Marketing Automation & Where It Fits

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In The Ordeal of Change Eric Hoffer writes…

“In times of change, learners will inherit the earth, and the learned will find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists. The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who can’t read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and re-learn.”

And when it comes to inbound marketing, we’re certainly talking about a gigantic, and often agonizingly painful, unlearning and relearning process.
Human nature is conditioned to do more of the same, but doing it harder and longer.

In Change Or Die: The Three Keys to Change at Work and in Life, Alan Deutschman tells us that over 80% of people refuse to change their lifestyles even when their doctors tell them that unless they change, they most probably die pretty soon.

Intellectually we may know that trying harder (good ol’ Boxer’s approach to work in George Orwell’s Animal Farm) is as futile as trying to nail jello to a tree, but thanks to thousands of years of genetic programming, we do it anyway.

But when it comes to inbound marketing, we have to learn to do, following the old Monty Python wisdom

Less But Something Completely Different

And this less but something different is, if you want to grow your business reasonably consistently and predictably, the replacement of inconsistent and unpredictable human performance with consistent and predictable system performance.

Yes, there are many aspects of your business that can’t be automated, but a big chunk of marketing can be.

Modern businesses, due to their complexities, can no longer rely on superstars’ heroic performance. Every now and then, and at one point finally, even super heroes become super zeros.

It’s not hard to imagine that in most businesses, the cost of the work force takes up a significant part of the company’s variable costs.

We also know from a McKinsey study that 1% reduction in variable costs can lead to as high as 7.8% increase in operating profit.

This number alone should be a good incentive for most business owners to stop regarding headcount increase as business growth. We can call it business enlargement, but definitely not demand generation.

The other area that spurs business owners to marketing automation is that the buyer environment has changed. Once upon a time, even high-priced solutions could be transacted in “one fell swoop” in a short space of time at just a very few meetings.

Today, the buying cycle is much longer than it was only 10 years ago.

MarketingSherpa reports that 11% of B2B purchases take over 12 months from initiation to completion.

Another important consideration that adds a huge pile of money to the cost of sales is that while 10 years ago, and definitely before the Internet, the buying process was relatively linear, today it’s an iterative process. When you look at your sales funnel you see that even the slightest forwards movement of your prospects is preceded and succeeded by lots of sideways movements.

That’s when prospects consume a significant amount of your content without any forwards movement. And even after consuming enough content, they may not move forwards but backwards.

As the buying behaviour has changed, we have to change our behaviour about selling.

One big change is that specialization highly valued and appreciated. It means companies have to shift from mass marketing to niche marketing. Both lead generation and lead conversion processes must be highly personalized to your buyer persona, the perfect client who could be interested in doing business with you.

Also, since buyers have lots of alternatives besides doing business with you, you have to differentiate your business from the masses and effectively communicate this difference.

But before we go into it…

Let’s Start Automation With Non-Automation

This is it. Automation must start with manually designing and overseeing your marketing automation process. Here you have to define…

• Your target market and buyer persona (perfect client profile).
• Your message that represents your products/services.
• Your method of taking your message in front of your target market.
• The mechanism to bring interested buyers into our sales funnel for decision-making.

Your Target Market And Buyer Persona (Perfect Client Profile)

It’s far too easy to say that your target market is, let’s say, small businesses.

But what small businesses?
Product or service businesses?
B2B or B2C businesses. Or even B2G (government)?

How small are those businesses? A couple doing network marketing from the kitchen table or a 50-person manufacturing plant generating $20 million in annual revenue?

The reality is that there is huge perceived value in specialization. A “consulting firm” that consults on everything with executives, entrepreneurs and small business owners is likely to be price-shopped, because such a firm is easy to replace.

Address Your Market’s Biggest Problems And Links To Your Products/Services

Then you have to create the messages that address your market’s biggest high-level problems. High level problem is a problem that is recognized as a problem by the top executives in the boardroom. Those high-level problems are related to declining sales, shareholder value and similar high-level performance indicators.

People who can address those issues are treated as respected experts and paid generously. However, website graphics, search engine ranking and Facebook likes are not boardroom problems, and people who address those issues are traded like sacks of potatoes.

Once you’ve established your market’s biggest problems, you can start linking those problems to solutions, that is, to your products and services.

Do you plan to use field salespeople or do you want your sales copy do all the work?

Both approaches work, but you need slightly different copy. Keep in mind that if you send salespeople to buyers who are not ready to meet salespeople, it can backfire.

If you sell expensive and highly customized services, then you need salespeople. But if you sell SaaS services, you can use copy to do all the sales work.

Your Method Of Taking Your Message In Front Of Your Target Market

This is very industry specific. If you have a broad target market, here you’re in trouble again because you have to invest in several marketing platforms.

• Target market A, small, local coffin carving companies, may be active on Facebook but not on LinkedIn.
• Target market B, Fortune 500 CEOs are likely to be active on LinkedIn but not on Facebook.
• Target market C, retired people with diabetes may use only the Yellow Pages.

Now you have to set up three platforms because clients could come from either of them. But this scattered approach can also drive you as crazy as two waltzing mice.

You’re better off focusing on one single target market, with one specific perfect buyer type.
You can set up…

1. Perfect client company.
2. Perfect buyer – the buyer with whom you’re building the relationship.
3. Perfect project – The types of projects/work you enjoy and the type that you want to stay away from.

Once you have a detailed client profile, you can adjust everything you do and say to that imaginary person.

The Mechanism To Bring Interested Buyers Into Our Sales Funnel For Decision-Making

This is a step-by-step process of how you catch buyers’ attention, keep their interest and escort them from first contact to the decision-making point.
This is where you can set up your sales funnel and anticipate buyers to move inside your funnel.

You write every piece such that they allow readers to move to the next stage (qualify) or drop out (disqualify). And remember, dropping out is fine. Not everyone is meant to be your client.

Enter: Marketing Automation

Once you have a pretty good idea of how buyers move inside your funnel, you can start automating the process.

Let’s start with events…

Before the Funnel

This is where, using fishing lingo, you put out an invitation to come and check your bait.

I like using a sequence of 3-5 pieces, which can be either email or snail mail. Yes, snail mail is alive and well. Actually, I’ve read, I believe in Target Marketing, that snail mail can offer some three-time higher ROI than email. Nevertheless, you can win big with email too.

Those who ignore your offer after five tries, will always ignore it, so you can end it here. Then 4-6 months later, you can put them on a new campaign.

But those who took your offer, they go to check your bait.

Here I like using something free that doesn’t require registration. The call to action at the end of this piece is to register for and download a white paper/special report.

Then, I have a 5-piece follow-up sequence going deeper into the report’s topic.

Inside The Funnel

Then I can settle into a steady and cozy follow-up process and keep buyers interested and gently advance them in the sales funnel.

Apart from writing the pieces, the whole process is pre-programmed and the emails go out automatically like clockwork.

As you can see, there is no chasing and convincing. Byers can enter and exit the sales funnel to their little hearts’ content. They are completely in charge of what they do.

Leaving The Funnel

Buyers can leave the funnel in two ways.

Either they drop out and leave your list or reach their decision points and become clients. But they’ve become clients on their own volition. They don’t feel forced or manipulated.

Summary

We’ve all heard it that a pen can be used either to write nice poetry or to pick someone’s eyes out. Marketing automation is the same. It can be either a miracle worker in your business or a certifiable nightmare.

But think of Bill Gates’ two rules:

1. “Automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency.”
2. “Automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”

This is why you have to make sure that your operation works well manually. Automate only the effective parts of your system.

Don’t rush it. You’re not chased by the Tatars.

Take one small segment of your system and test it repeatedly. Once you’re happy with its performance, then start automating it. Then take the next segment and repeat.

Automating your system is like recruiting talents. You do it one by one. There is no such thing as mass-recruitment of talented people.

You can mass hire workers, but recruiting talents is, ta… da… Monty Python again, something completely different.

Marketing automation is a beautiful thing. When it’s done well, it can make your marketing consistent and predictable which are good for your brand. You can also save a small fortune on headcount, which means that you can increase personal productivity, a.k.a. annual revenue per employee.

The post What is Inbound Marketing Automation & Where It Fits appeared first on Riverbed Marketing.

What Is a Content Calendar & How It Drives Brand Advocacy

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Marketing maven Dan Kennedy is fond of saying:

“The difference between chicken poop and chicken salad is timing.”

And when it comes to content marketing, we have to consider British journalist, musician, broadcaster and the inventor of Franglais, a fictional language, made up of French and English, Miles Beresford Kington’s view on the topic:

“Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.”

And if we look at inbound marketing from a pragmatic perspective, we can instantly see how perfectly both Dan’s and Miles’ maxims apply to it.

Inbound marketing is really the type of content we distribute and the timing of the distribution.

And when it comes to connecting with your target audience using content marketing, a content calendar is one of the main engines of your campaign.

What Is A Content Calendar?

A content calendar is a visual representation of the timing and the nature of content that your marketing team distributes to various segments of your database, depending on…

  • What they’re interested in?
  • Where they are in your sales funnel and at?
  • What pace they’re moving forward?

The purpose of good content is to generate new sales leads and gently nudge existing sales leads towards the next stages of their decision-making processes inside the sales funnel.

The main benefit of the calendar approach is that…

  • You can see the consistency of the distributable or already distributed content.
  • You can see the exact timing of the distribution.
  • You can adjust your content creation team’s time frames.

And now we can move and start building our content calendar starting with the first step…

Design Your Marketing Persona(s)

Before we can create sales cycles, funnels and other nipple-piercingly fancy bits and bobs, we have to decide who we want to send all that content to.

This video from the late Gary Halbert can help you to better understand the importance of the person to whom we send our messages.

One part of marketing is the target market, but the other, and often neglected part, is the very person who is going to receive our content.

The more you know about the type of that person, the more receptive your audience will be to your message.

For more about creating a buyer persona, please read Hubspot’s How to Create Detailed Buyer Personas for Your Business.

Inspect Your Sales Cycle

This inspection is based on your target market’s buying process.

But don’t make the mistake of examining the sales cycle from the seller’s perspective, following a process like…

  1. Lead
  2. Prospect
  3. Appointment
  4. Proposal
  5. New client

If you map your content calendar based on the above steps, you go against buyers’ buying processes, and it sooner or later result in a serious clash. And after the dust has settled, what you see is that otherwise high quality buyers have committed mass exodus from your sales funnel, and no amount of Baileys Irish Cream or Nutella on toast can seduce them back into your funnel.

Use the buyer’s perspective to:

  1. Recognize problem
  2. Define possible long-term consequences
  3. Define cost of problem and consequences
  4. Allocate budget
  5. Define deciding criteria
  6. Assess alternatives
  7. Select solution
  8. Select solution provider

Listing Your Content Pieces

We know that different pieces are suitable for different stages of the sales funnel.

Buyers at the beginning of their “funnel journeys” need eye-opening pieces that help them realize that there is a problem that costs the company big money and needs to be solved.

Also consider that some buyers love reading but hate videos or podcasts.

And some content pieces are…

  • Social media posts
  • Blogs
  • New articles
  • Videos
  • White papers (B2B) or Special reports (B2C)
  • Case studies
  • Research studies
  • Social media channels
  • Podcasts
  • Templates, cheat sheets, checklists
  • Games and puzzles
  • Calculators

At the beginning of the funnel, buyers need problem-driven articles because first they try to solve their problems in-house.

At the end of the funnel, after buyers have realized the problem can’t be solved in-house, buyers need case studies and some social proof to make their final decisions.

Brainstorm Your Content-Friendly Subjects

Decide which parts of your subject matter expertise land themselves to relatively easy content development and distribution.

Yes, every profession has some areas that are not exactly content-friendly, partly because they are very hands-on skills, and it’s pointless to write content on them.

In Knowledge Creating Company, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi make a distinction between explicit and tacit knowledge.

  • Explicit knowledge is easy express in words and numbers. It’s easy to codify, document and then memorize. Large number of people can learn it in a short space of time. E.g. learning the chromatic scale.
  • Tacit knowledge is impossible to put into words and numbers. It’s impossible to codify, document and then memorize. E.g. learning to compose like Mozart.

We have to make sure we use explicit knowledge for content. Trying to explain tacit knowledge would leave your audience as frustrated as a centipede on a shoe-shopping spree.

And this leads us to…

  • Explicit capability that can be delivered quickly and cost-effectively using various codified methods, like written text, audio or video. E.g. online courses.
  • Tacit capability that must be delivered in a hands-on manner over an extended period of time. That makes the delivery expensive. E. g. medical residency.

Mapping Out Your Sales Funnel And Calendar

This is where you map out what gets sent out to which segment of your list and when.

The timing is defined how buyers behave inside the funnel. If there is indication of a specific piece’s consumption, then the system can release the next piece of content.

So, the sales funnel dictates what piece of content goes into the calendar at what point.

We want to make sure that the calendar reactive in such a way that it sends out the next piece of content in reaction to buyers’ action.

If you publish an article on how to select a SaaS software development firm, first the buyer has to read about why his company may be losing out by running off-the-shelf cloud-based software and how custom-made cloud-based software can be more effective.

Other Factors That Can Influence Your Calendar

There are some other factors that must be calculated when assembling your calendar.

This is an area where marketing people should compare notes with salespeople, since they’re out in the field and they know about infinitesimal nuances that can make a big difference in buyer behaviors.

Some factors are…

  • The target market’s seasonality.
  • Special industry trends.
  • Industry-specific conferences, tradeshows, etc.
  • Anticipated new product or service launches in target market.
  • Anticipated news announcements.
  • Industry’s regulation level – Highly regulated industries can be quite unpredictable.
  • Effects of economic and political changes on industry.

Granted, many factors can’t be foreseen or anticipated, so the best thing you can do is build some flexibility into your content calendar.

When you find out about a major industrial tradeshow, you can tie your next few pieces of content to that tradeshow.

Mentioning these events also gives your content pieces a chance to be picked up by other news outlets.

Elements Of A Calendar Entry

Here we specify what is what in a specific content piece.

  • Title: Title of the content piece.
  • Problem: Clarifies the problem of the market which the piece addresses.
  • KW 1: Long-tail keyword #1
  • KW 2: Long-tail keyword #2
  • KW 3: Long-tail keyword #3
  • Key points: A short explanation of what the article does.
  • Type: Blog, tip sheet, special report, case study, etc.
  • Length: xyz words
  • CTA (call to action): The action you want readers to take after consuming this piece.
  • Preceded by: Title of the previous piece. (Vital to mimic the buyer’s thinking process)
  • Succeeded by: Title of the next piece. (Vital to mimic the buyer’s thinking process)

You may use fewer or more fields in your calendar entries depending how complex your sales funnel is and how thinly you segment your database.

Calendar Template

There are more content calendar tools out there than stars in the sky.

You can read The Complete Guide to Choosing a Content Calendar, and most probably, you’ll find the one that is most suitable for your purposes.

Also, to complement the tool of your choice, you can read Michell Hall’s article on comprehensive list of calendar templates.

Once you select a tool and have a structure, then you can start creating your own content calendar.

Summary

Content type and timing are the two arms of the proverbial inbound marketing giant.

Yes, when you have both arms, you have a giant that can do amazing things seemingly effortlessly. The proverbial juggernaut that moves forwards unobstructed and generates dream clients for your business.

But if you miss either the type or the timing, you can end up with a paralyzed giant with his dominant arm missing and the other arm aimlessly flailing.

The post What Is a Content Calendar & How It Drives Brand Advocacy appeared first on Riverbed Marketing.

How To Run An Effective B2B SEO Audit

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In many small- and medium-sized (SME) B2B organizations, search engine optimization, using American inventor and marketer, Ron Popeil’s famous slogan for his Ronco Showtime Rotisserie & BBQ, is a “set it and forget it” function.

Business owners erroneously believe that once they’ve “done SEO”, it’s done forever, and requires no further attention on their parts.

But to do effective SEO, they have to establish where they are right now, and to do that, they have to do a SEO audit.

And when they look up what a B2B SEO audit is, they realise it’s a pretty complex process.

The good news is that you can do a scaled down mini-audit, and in this article, we outline what you should check.

So, let’s start with…

Some Serious Technical Problems

Because of this “set it and forget it” attitude, many websites show serious SEO neglect, with the top 10 problems, according to Semrush, being…

  • 1. Duplicate content
  • 2. ALT attributes missing
  • 3. Duplicate title tags
  • 4-5. Internal and external link rot (broken link)
  • 6-7. Duplicate and/or missing meta descriptions
  • 8.Low text to HTML ratio
  • 9-10. Missing or multiple H1 tags on one page

The reality is that SEO is changing very fast, and we haven’t even talked about Google’s recent “Fred” manoeuvre.

It means that companies that get a significant portion of their customers, thus revenues, through their web presence, have no option but to consider SEO as an ongoing business function.

If they want to reap, they have to sow first.

When b2b businesses realize that they should do SEO on an ongoing basis, they start as if they always had been doing it without any interruption.

It means, they start doing various SEO tactics, without strategies and another key component.

So, if you belong to the SEO “set it and forget it” camp and now want to re-start, the first step must be to declare that your website suffers from the SEO “set it and forget it” syndrome, and then perform a mini SEO audit to evaluate the search engine friendliness of your company’s website to see where actually you stand.

So, let’s move on to…

Preparing For The SEO Audit

The first question right out of the gate is…

Who Should Do The Mini Audit?

Just like in every kind of audit, there must be checks and balances in place, which means that the audit must not be done by one person. Ideally there are two auditors to avoid random acts of naughtiness and mischief.

They should be people who are somewhat web-savvy but are not involved in web work on a daily basis – People are reluctant to criticize their own work.

So, ideally, it’s a dual role between the marketing manager and marketing coordinator.

In sub-$10M companies, it’s often the VP of sales and marketing with another sales and marketing manager.

Where To Start?

Continuing with your preparation, you have three key questions to ask…

  • Check which accounts do you need unrestricted access to?
  • What exactly do you need to know about your website to audit it properly?
  • What audit tools do you need to do the job?

Accessible Accounts

Please note that many of the following tools and services are provided by Google, so if you have one Google account, may that me Gmail, Google+ or any other Google tool, you can use that login info to with most Google tools.

Access to all web analytics login information: It’s common problem in many companies that certain people have the nasty habit of keeping login information to themselves, and in doing so believing they have made themselves fire-proof. But it’s also a crime. As the business owner, or the business owner’s representative, you must have unlimited access to any login info.

Access to all social media accounts: Social media can have a serious impact on any company both in positive and negative way. Within four weeks after breaking Dave Carroll’s guitar and wiggling out of responsibility, due to backlash on YouTube (16,347,776 views and 99,139 likes), United Airlines’ stock price fell 10% and stockholders lost about $180 million.

Access to payments systems accounts: If your company takes online payments or does online banking, you need this access.

Access to Google AdWords and all other PPC accounts: If your company uses PPC marketing, then you need access because you need key numbers from the PPC dashboards.

Access to Google Search Console (previously Webmaster Tools) accounts: This is many of the tools your webmaster uses on a daily basis to keep your website in good working order.

Access to business accounts: This includes access to CRM, email management and distribution program, project management program and any cloud-based account that has anything to do with your company’s performance.

List Of Tools to Aid Your SEO Audit

Here we look at a list of tools you need for your SEO mini-audit.

Knowing that what you do is a SEO mini-audit not a full 360° SEO audit, and with this in mind, there is no point to flood you with expensive tools, since they would be underused and the extra data would be overwhelming.

It’s like when you don’t feel well. You take your temperature, your blood pressure and maybe your heart rate and that’s all.

But you don’t self-administer ECG, EEG or blood gas analysis. You ask the respective experts to do those procedures.

So, the tools here enable you to perform the proverbial temperature-, blood pressure- and pulse check.

So, let’s see…

For every tool, you can find several makes from different companies, but this list gives you all the tools for a mini audit.

I know it’s not much, but using Einstein’s words, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

And we shouldn’t hunt for sparrows with AIM-7 Sparrow missiles.

Wow, if chairman Mao Zedong knew that during the Great Chinese Sparrow Campaign between 1958 and 1962!

Look Into The SEO Audit Itself

Overview

Checking your domain’s indexed pages

  • Do a Google search for your site and see what comes up. In the Google search box, type “site:yourwebsite.com” (without quotes).
  • Note the number of returned pages right under the Google Search box: E.g.: “About 416,000 results (0.63 seconds)”.
  • Is the first page your home page? If not, it can be the sign of some SEO errors, poor branding, poor internal linking (too many links to home page or too many exact match keywords) or even some form of penalty against your site.

Open your Google Analytics and check for organic landing pages.

  • Is this number close to your previous search results?
  • This gives you a pretty good idea about your indexed pages.

Run a search on your branded terms

  • Make a note of your domain’s pages that come up.
  • If the proper pages aren’t showing up as the first result, there could be issues, like a penalty, in play.

Check Google’s cache for your key pages

  • Can you see your content with the appropriate navigation links?
  • Are there any invisible?

Using this bookmarklet, you can also check the text-only version of the cached page.

Now do a search on your mobile devices

  • Is your listing marked up as “mobile friendly”? One good source is Akamai’s white paper, Delivering the Best Mobile Experience. Read How AMP Works for detailed step-by-step instructions on how to make your website mobile-friendly.
  • Are your pages mobile friendly? What that means is that both text and images properly scale based on the size of your mobile device and all buttons are recognizable for their functions.

Mobile unfriendliness can cause the loss of organic visits.

On-Page Optimization

A big part of on-page optimization is optimizing meta tags because they are read by both search engines and visitors. And since they make the first impression of a web page, you have to pay attention to them.

Also, Google’s new ranking algorithm uses machine learning known as RankBrain.

It takes metrics from user behavior such as click through rate (CTR) from search results and uses it to determine the site’s quality factors.

Title tags

  • A standalone title tag should be optimized for each page.
  • Title tags should be max. 55-60 characters (512 pixels) long. You can preview this with a tool such as Screaming Frog.
  • Write down pages with missing title tags.

Description tags

  • A standalone description should be optimized for each page.
  • Give a brief description of what’s on the page.
  • Description tags can be as long as you make them, but they get cut off at 160 characters. You can check it in Screaming Frog.
  • Since 2009, meta the description is no longer Google ranking a factor. However, today’s meta descriptions should be written like ad copy to entice users to click through. This supports SEO by improving click through rate from search results pages.
  • All key pages of your website should have a properly optimize meta description with a compelling call-to-action.

To quickly audit your title and description tags, type in the google search box: site:yourwebsite.com

At Search Engine Watch, you can see some both good and bad examples for title tags and meta descriptions.

Keywords

  • Each page includes one primary keyword phrase multiple times and some alternate keyword phrases
  • Make sure every keyword has significant amount of supporting content on your website. Write about related themes or more granular points of focus on the subject.
  • Make sure the page’s primary keyword phrase is included in the H1 tag
  • Check images for alt text and make sure alt texts include keyword phrases.

SEMrush has a free version, in which you can enter your website and it will spit out all the keywords that the website currently ranks for. First type in your URL and then click ”organic research” under “domain analysis” in the top left side menu (second menu item under Overview).

Clean URLs

  • Make sure your URL is descriptive.
  • Separate words with hyphens not underscores
  • Keep the addresses of your indexed pages static
  • If you use short URLs (bit.ly, etc.), keep each of them under 150 characters.

Some extra points

Content

For a long time, conventional wisdom was that no one wants to read long articles on the web. And with the proliferation of smart phones, this notion became even stronger.

However, after a few algorithm changes at Google, even the staunchest short-article fanatics have started realizing that the type of readers who are likely to become customers down the road want deep and meaningful articles.

In “Ogilvy on Advertising”, legendary advertising man, David Ogilvy wrote,

“All my experience says that for a great many products, long copy sells more than short … advertisements with long copy convey the impression that you have something important to say, whether people read the copy or not.”

The former dean of the Graduate School of Retailing at New York University, Dr. Charles Edwards, once said, “The more facts you tell, the more you sell. An advertisement’s chance for success invariably increases as the number of pertinent merchandise facts included in the advertisement increases.”

And finally, in “Tested Advertising Methods,” renowned copywriter, John Caples wrote, “Advertisers who can trace the direct sales results from their ads use long copy because it pulls better than short copy… Brief, reminder-style copy consisting of a few words or a slogan does not pull inquiries as well as long copy packed with facts and reader benefits about your product or service.”

Also, Kevin Delaney, the editor-in-chief of Quartz, reports that articles between 500 and 800 words have the hardest time with being ranked. They are too long for being short and snappy and too short for being deep and detailed. So, in most cases, they get ignored.

Optimizing the home page

According to SEO copywriter, Heather Lloyd-Martin, a page with only 250 words is regarded as thin content, that is, something dodgy. In Longer Is Better for Blog Content: Truth Or Myth?, Julia McCoy, CEO of Express Writers, confirms Julia’s point.

  • Does your homepage have at least 500 words?
  • Are keywords properly placed in the content?

Optimized landing pages

  • At least five paragraphs and 500 words. It enough for search engines but may not be enough for visitors.
  • The content has been uniquely writing especially this specific page.

Appropriate keyword usage

  • Is there a good match between they pages’ content and keywords?
  • Does the page use words and phrases that are semantically similar to the keywords and relevant to the topic on the page?
  • Does the page use short-, mid-, and long-tail keywords?
  • Do a Google site search for your main keywords and note where they show up?

Available visitor educational content

  • Besides search engine-friendly content, do you have enough visitor-friendly content to inform and educate your website visitors about who you are and what you do?

Formatting content

  • Content formatted both for easy skimming and reading.
  • Content is properly paragraphed.
  • Proper H tags are used throughout the content.
  • Only one H1 tag on every page.
  • H2 and H3 tags are used to make content easier to read.
  • Images support the message of the content.

Page headlines and subheads

  • Headlines and subheads include keyword phrases
  • Skimming headlines gives the gist of the page

Amount of content versus ads

  • In B2B, on-page advertising like Google AdSense can undermine the website’s credibility
  • Google frowns on on-page advertising
  • If you run on-page ads, make sure you have good content too or Google can penalize your page.

Duplicate Content

You can use Copyscape to find whether or not there is a duplicate version of the content that you’re about to publish. This is important because if your content is already on another web page with good SEO and more and better links, your content has as much chance of survival as a mouse at a healthy diet conference for cats.

  • Every URL on your website has its dedicated content
  • Do searches for random content snippets (Put the snippet between quotation marks)
  • Note the pages where each snippet shows up.
  • Is there any content duplication on sub-domains?
  • Note that printer friendly versions of pages can cause content duplication. The impact of this is not a concern if it’s on your own domain, but some embedded content plugins or widgets can sometimes be hosted on unique URLs outside of your website. This is a scenario you will want to avoid.

Accessibility

  • Check the robots.txt. Varvy has bot the tool and a tutorial to help you check your pages. The robots.txt files specifies which web pages the search engines have access to and which pages hey are barred from. Since this is a rather advanced setting, if you’re not experienced in web coding, seek some help.

Check website without JavaScript, cookies, and CSS

  • Use the Web Developer Toolbar (a free Firefox add-on)
  • Is the content there?
  • Are the navigational links operational?

Now change your user agent to Googlebot

  • Use the User Agent (a free Firefox add-on)
  • Are they cloaking?
  • Does it look the same as before?
  • Check for 4xx (client) errors and 5xx (internal server) errors.

Sitemaps

  • txt file includes XML sitemaps. An essential tool to use is Google Webmaster Tools.
  • XML sitemaps are submitted to Google/Bing Webmaster Tools

Check meta robots noindex tag on each page

  • Check for accidental noindex tagging using SeeRobots for both Firefox and Chrome.
  • Are noindex tags applied to the right pages?
  • Check your site with Moz or Screaming Frog

Site Architecture And Internal Linking

Page linking

  • How many outgoing links does each page have?
  • Are links under 100 per page?

Over 100 links per page, the SEO value of the page can get seriously compromised.

Specific vertical and horizontal linking logic

  • Landing on the homepage systematically leads visitors on a pre-planned journey.
  • Category and product pages are linked to other relevant category and product pages.

Additional reading:

Importance of Internal Linking and Internal Linking Tactics

Technical Considerations

301 redirects used the right way

  • 301 redirects are used consistently.
  • 301 and Not 302 is used to redirect root to a landing.
  • Check your 301 redirects with the Live HTTP Headers Firefox plugin.
  • No 302, 307 or JavaScript redirects. Use Screaming Frog to check them.
  • Direct redirects and no redirect chains.

JavaScript, iFrames and Flash usage

  • Is there any hidden (by Javascript) text on the page? See Google’s cloaking guidelines.
  • Are there any JavaScript based content on the page?
  • Are there any JavaScript based links on the page?
  • Is it deliberate page rank sculpting or an error?
  • Is any part of the page’s content in iFrames?
  • How wide-spread is Flash usage on the page? Does it prevent the page from being indexed?

XML Sitemaps

Canonical

  • 301s are set up for canonical sites
  • Google Webmaster Tools contains the Canonical version of the site
  • “Rel canonical” tags are set up throughout the site

Mobile Compliance

Observe mobile behaviour

  • How mobile friendly is the website?
  • How well does it work on mobile devices?
  • Are your analytics ready for mobile?
  • In case of separate mobile site, does the desktop site refer to it with a rel=”alternate” tag?
  • Does the mobile version canonical to the desktop version?
  • Here you can see some examples of the “alternate” tag.

International Usage

Check all international version of your website

  • In Webmaster Tools, make sure that country-based targeting is enabled
  • Are your website targeting intentions in synch with your Webmaster Tools settings?
  • If you have several versions of the same website, make sure the content is unique on each of them.
  • Implement hreflang and rel alternate if necessary as per this documentation.
  • Make sure every URL is in the same language as the content is written,

Analytics Considerations

Analytics codes

  • Analytics codes are inserted on every page. Make sure there is only one code. Google Tag Manager is an excellent tool to do it.
  • To avoid self-referrals, make sure your own IP address is blocked from analytics. See details here.
  • Internal searches register in analytics
  • Analytics is set up for geographics tracking.
  • Both Google Adwords and AdSense codes are linked to analytics.
  • Event tracking is set up for key user interactions

Summary

As we discussed at the beginning of the article, this is a SEO mini audit. I emphasise “mini” because the real SEO audit is much more comprehensive.

Yes, instructions are available by the truckload, but, just like a financial audit, the SEO audit has to be done by someone who is not emotionally entangled with the company. After all, we can often have a bias towards our own content as this is a particular area of subjective opinions.

One of the greatest benefits of an audit is its objectivity because the auditor has nothing to gain or lose by giving you certain good or bad news.

Nevertheless, now you know where your website stands and what needs to be done. And even if you decide to forego a full audit with a reputable agency, I bet you have a massive list of tasks the mini audit has surfaced for you. Even just some implementation of fixes to the areas you audited over time can have meaningful returns to your bottom line. The list may be daunting, but chip away at it over time… you’ll be glad you did.

The post How To Run An Effective B2B SEO Audit appeared first on Riverbed Marketing.

How B2B SEO Differs from Business to Business

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When you’re selling directly to consumers (B2C), your SEO campaigns are trying to drive customers to buy now.  Selling to businesses takes a different strategy, especially when it comes to search engine optimization.

The B2B buying journey takes longer.  Purchases are larger. The stakes are higher.  Your B2B SEO campaigns are driving buyers through the customer journey.  You’re targeting them at each stage of this journey with relevant information, such as White Papers, newsletter sign-ups, thought leadership pieces, and demo requests.  You’re trying to build trust and credibility in your brand as they do their research.

 

The B2C Customer Journey

The B2C customer journey is pretty simple.  Consumers see an ad or information online. They might find your product when they’re searching online and see a PPC (Pay Per Click) ad or find your website organically.  From there, they browse your products and decide to buy.

How B2B SEO Differs from Business to Business

 

The B2B Customer Journey

For B2B customers, the journey takes a different route. One message rarely entices someone to make a purchase.  It’s often the cumulative effect of messaging and exposure that leads buyers to convert.

There are also several additional challenges that B2B marketers are facing.

Most B2B sales involve multiple decision-makers and economic buyers.  75% of B2B buyers say their purchase involves multiple people across roles and locations.  Each person involved in the decision may be searching for different information.  One size does not fit all.

We tend to think of B2B buyers as doing initial research online, then converting to offline interactions with sales reps.  In fact, B2B buyers are engaging with online content through every step of the buying journey. Gartner research shows that 83% of B2B customers are doing online research right up to the purchase phase.

 

How B2B SEO Differs from Business to Business

 

B2B SEO Tactics

Your B2B SEO strategy needs to be focused on four key questions:

  1. Who needs our product or service?
  2. What is their motivation?
  3. How can we demonstrate that we have the solution they need?
  4. How can we create content in a way that is search engine friendly?

 

On-Site SEO

The mission of search engines is to serve up the most relevant content every time a visitor enters a query.  Your goal is to make sure you’ve got that content and the search engine will favor it over your competitors.

Google has more than 200+ ranking signals it uses in its algorithm.  Effective SEO starts with making sure your website is optimized to these ranking signals. While Google has never published what these ranking signals are in full, here are what experts say are some of the most important factors you need to worry about in 2019.

  1. High-quality content on your websites and blogs.
  2. Content should be SEO-optimized with keywords and provide real value to visitors.
  3. Content that matches the user’s search intent
    When a B2B buyer is searching in your niche, you want to have the specific content they’re looking for
  4. The right keywords everywhere
    Even the best content can be overlooked by the search engines if you aren’t using keywords throughout your content and your website
  5. A secure website (HTTPS)
    Browsers and search engines are not only pushing non-secure sites down the list of organic results, but some are also actively flagging sites as non-secure.  Potential customers are becoming wary of visiting non-secure sites.
  6. Optimized for mobile
    Google gives preference to mobile-optimized websites, especially for mobile searchers.  Nearly half (48%) of searches start on mobile and 52% of customers say a poor mobile experience made them less likely to engage with a company.
  7. Page load speed
    More than half of web visitors leave a site if it takes more than three seconds to load.  Search engines now prioritize sites with short load times.
  8. User experience and on-page optimization

Off-Site SEO

As you create content to market your business and deploy B2B SEO tactics, keep all of the above items in mind.  Here are some of the strategies that will help you improve the SEO of B2B marketing.

 

Buyer Personas

When multiple decision makers are involved, they are likely searching for different things.  Product managers may be searching for tools that provide more efficiently while Business managers may be searching for tools that provide a faster ROI.  You’ll need to create SEO-enhanced content for both. An effective technique is to create profiles of the people most likely to be in the decision-making chain.

How B2B SEO Differs from Business to Business

Marketers call these buyer personas.  Identify the roles of the people you’re trying to reach and the motivations they have for making a purchase.  By understanding what drives their decisions, you can determine how best to create content.

 

Feeding The Motivation

Effective sales teams learn to probe for the pain point.  By identifying the problem businesses need to solve, they can position their product or service as the solution that eases the pain.  This motivation can help you identify keywords to match search intent.

 

Content Creation

B2B marketing teams need to develop an entire ecosystem of marketing material to help engage customers at each point in the process.  These content pieces should be customized to buyer personas and motivations. Your SEO activities should target the right people at the right time with the right content.

 

The Right Keywords

People search in all sorts of ways.  Using the right keywords can be the difference between being found online and being forgotten.  SEO for B2B takes extensive keyword research. You’ll need to identify how people search and the phrases they’ll use most often at various stages of the buying journey.  Because products and services in business often are targeted at solving specific problems, you’ll need to incorporate both broad terms and niche, industry-specific keywords into your strategy.

How B2B SEO Differs from Business to Business

These keywords should be used in your marketing materials, your website, your landing pages, and your advertising.  For B2B SEO, the search volume may be low and competition for these keywords may be high.

 

Link Building

SEO for B2B means consistent link building.  One of the key ranking signals that Google uses is the quality of your inbound links.  Getting your content placed – with links back to your website – on high authority websites makes the search engines take notice.  Getting links through guest posts, placement, reviews, or other methods on industry-leading online publications can help with your SEO and attract industry leaders.

The more diverse your link building strategy, the more successful it can be.  Make sure to avoid placing links anywhere. Links on poor quality sites can hurt your SEO.

 

SEO For B2B

Employing both on-site and off-site B2B SEO is crucial to reaching B2B customers.  Backlinks, keywords, and aggressive SEO strategy are all important. At the center of it all, however, is valuable content that provides the information B2B buyers are searching for.  Without high-quality content that positions your company as the solution to the problem that started them searching, you won’t drive them to convert.

The post How B2B SEO Differs from Business to Business appeared first on Riverbed Marketing.

B2B SEO: An Essential Component of Successful B2B Campaigns

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There’s no denying the benefits of great SEO. Over 70% of internet traffic comes from the top five organic search engine results, with the first result raking in over a quarter of the traffic for any given search query. Gaining placement in those results ensures a business gains immense visibility, improved credibility and better marketing results.

Oftentimes, however, larger companies put the majority of their marketing budgets into PPC campaigns, completely neglecting SEO. After all, why do all that work when you can simply buy your way into the top spot?

But doing this is ignoring a huge opportunity to improve your marketing ROI over the long term.

Why B2B SEO is Different

Whether it’s an ecommerce shop that sells shoes or a B2B business selling a CRM solution, the fundamentals of SEO remain the same, with the goal being driving more traffic. This is accomplished through a combination of:

On-Site SEO, which focuses on the technical aspects of your website and ensuring that all of Google’s 200+ ranking signals are well optimized for. This means having a fast, secure, technically sound website that doesn’t deviate from standards and works well across all devices.

Off-Site SEO, which involves providing search engines with quality content that’s relevant to user’s search queries. This means creating and publishing content that answers people’s questions in an engaging way. It also means having a deep understanding of your target audience and learning about the kind of information they seek and how to provide it to them in an industry-specific way.

Yet, while these principles apply to all websites, the differences in B2B SEO are stark. B2B sales cycles are vastly more complex. Each prospect that starts down the sales funnel could take months to reach the purchase phase. What’s more, for a single business, there are usually multiple decision-makers traversing the sales funnel, each one in different stages.

In other words, the way you approach B2B SEO differs significantly from consumer SEO. And while this should come as no surprise, it’s worth taking a closer look at, because these added complexities mean unique challenges in B2B SEO.

But they often mean unique benefits, too.

Increasingly Complex Sales Funnels

Think about the level of thought, research and consideration that goes into buying a piece of clothing or a pair of shoes on an ecommerce website. Now consider the same for a business that’s looking at investing in a new SaaS solution. It’s easy to see which one is more complex.

There’s also the challenge of making sure your business is visible in search engines for every part of the sales funnel. From the awareness stage all the way down to the purchasing phase, your business needs to provide prospects with relevant, informative content to move them along the path toward a loyal customer.

More work? Certainly. But once that work is done, you’ll have relevant content appearing in search results for every stage of your sales cycle. And that means more opportunities for targeted web traffic without paying for a PPC campaign.

Keyword Challenges

B2B SEO is particularly challenging on the keyword front. Because of the added complexity across products, services and sales funnels, B2B-specific keywords usually have much lower search volume compared to B2C industries.

In other instances, there may not be well-defined keywords at all. This leaves businesses and marketers in the precarious position of drilling down and finding just the right search queries to align with their target audience’s intent.

But this also presents opportunities. Many companies in emerging B2B markets are still in the early stages of SEO, and many don’t pursue it at all, leaving untapped top-of-the-funnel leads on the table, waiting to be capitalized on.

Thoughts on Thought Leadership

A big part of the complexity in B2B search engine optimization comes from the evaluation phase of the sales funnel when a prospect is considering their options. When they’re in this phase, buyers want to feel confident that the company they’re looking at has the right solution for their needs. And this is happening long before they pick up their phone or fire off an email.

To instil this confidence, your business needs to demonstrate its expertise with a decidedly confident and engaging media presence. You need to present your business as an industry leader that has the experience, talent and passion to provide the best solution available. One of the best ways to do this is through thought leadership in your industry. This includes demonstrating knowledge and unique insights through:

  • Relevant blog posts and white papers
  • Guest posting on related websites
  • Marketing your content and engaging in conversations across various social channels
  • Conferences and webinars
  • And more

Granted, this requires a significant investment of resources, but this is precisely the kind of marketing that builds successful brands. It not only fosters loyalty in your existing customer relationships, but it creates awareness and strong equity in future prospects while strengthening your demand generation efforts.

Why the Long Game Is the Right Strategy

Because of these challenges, many organizations opt to avoid optimizing for SEO entirely. The thinking goes that putting the lion’s share of their marketing budget into PPC campaigns is a better investment. And while that seems to make sense, it’s short-selling your efforts and locking your business into slim returns on its investment.

With PPC campaigns, you’re essentially paying for website traffic indefinitely. And advertising costs are only trending higher: Digital advertising spending is forecasted to hit $640 billion by 2024, up from $378 billion in 2020. In other words, you’ll hit diminishing returns sooner rather than later, and you’ll need to continuously increase your advertising investment to sustain the same level of traffic.

Playing the long game is the right strategy if businesses want to generate leads in a sustainable way. SEO channels built over time provide the most stable form of leads for any organization. And even though investing in organic traffic can eclipse the cost of a PPC campaign, keep in mind that once your PPC campaign stops, so do your leads. Put simply, the potential ROI on organic SEO is far more substantial than PPC in the long run.

Diversifying your lead sources with SEO alongside a robust content strategy provides much more stability, and it’s an investment that returns dividends, so to speak. By publishing evergreen content that continuously engages your prospects and customers, you’re moving away from a pay-by-lead model and embracing a more holistic approach. An approach that fosters awareness and brand loyalty — something that’s impossible to put a price tag on.

PPC as a Tool, Not a Crutch

Despite the clear benefits of building an organic SEO presence, PPC still has its place in marketing. But it’s important to see it as a tool in your toolbox rather than a crutch to stand on. In fact, when used in conjunction with search optimization, it can help push your organic traffic into overdrive.

In any SEO campaign, you’re going to form a list of high-value keywords that you’ll want to focus on in your content strategy. The problem is that, while your list may seem like natural choices for your business, they may require an enormous amount of effort to rank for. As a business, you need to know what kind of financial returns you’ll get from investing in them.

This is where PPC can help. You can buy your preferred keyword’s traffic for a month or two and measure traffic with a tracking campaign to determine the quality of the visitors using those particular keywords. If the keywords you’re testing produce value, you know they warrant serious investment on the SEO side of things.

Long story short, PPC campaigns can enable you to identify what is and isn’t working well before you spend months attempting to rank for a given keyword.

The Bottom Line

Large B2B organizations often ignore SEO entirely and dump their marketing budgets into PPC campaigns. Doing this is missing out on huge opportunities to expand lead acquisition, leverage brand loyalty through thought leadership and substantially improve their marketing ROI.

As a business, you can continue paying daily for the privilege of your current traffic, or you could build a content strategy that generates leads for years to come. Looking at the ROI over a longer period of time, it’s easy to see how SEO can be a significant force in your business’s marketing.

Ultimately, paid ad campaigns will continue increasing in costs, so the savviest B2B marketers should be on the lookout for ways to expand their lead acquisition channels by means such as SEO.

The post B2B SEO: An Essential Component of Successful B2B Campaigns appeared first on Riverbed Marketing.

The Key Questions a Top-notch SaaS Marketing Agency Should Be Diving Into

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Navigating the SaaS Marketing Ocean with the Right Questions
Let’s say you’ve found yourself a potential SaaS Marketing Agency. They’ve got a proven track record, a team of experts, and a promising proposal. But are they asking the right questions about your business? A savvy agency will dig deep to understand your business, buyers, and marketing goals. This article explores nine vital questions they should be asking to steer your SaaS marketing strategy toward success.

 

1. The Sales Process: Can we have a Deep-dive?
A stellar SaaS Marketing Agency should want to delve into the depths of your B2B SaaS sales process. They should ask about your interactions with salespeople and your sales methodology. After all, understanding how you sell your product is the first step to marketing it effectively.

 

2. Unraveling the Business Problem: What’s the Value Proposition?
The best marketing agencies won’t just focus on selling your software; they’ll want to understand the business problem it solves. They should delve into your software’s unique value proposition to articulate it clearly to your prospects.

 

3. Anchoring Customer Loyalty: What’s Your Strategy for Reducing Churn?
In the choppy SaaS seas, customer retention is key. A top-notch agency will want to understand your strategies for reducing customer churn and tracking customer health scores. After all, keeping a customer is often more cost-effective than acquiring a new one.

 

4. The Acquisition Conundrum: How Do You Attribute Success?
Attribution can be a tricky beast. Your agency should ask about how you understand customer acquisition attribution. This knowledge will help them optimize your marketing tactics and measure ROI accurately.

 

5. Mapping the Buyer’s Journey: Who’s Buying, Who’s Using?
Understanding your buyer’s journey is a must for any SaaS Marketing Agency. They should be asking about how your prospects search for your solution, and importantly, if the buyer is different from the user. This knowledge is especially critical in crafting personalized marketing strategies.

 

6. Scoring for Success: What’s Your Lead Scoring System?
Lead scoring is crucial in a SaaS business. A well-versed agency will ensure they understand your lead scoring system to align it with your unique sales funnel. This will help them craft marketing strategies that convert high-quality leads.

 

7. The Power of Paid Search: Are You Using ABM and A/B Testing?
Paid search is a powerful tool in the SaaS marketing toolkit. Your agency should discuss account-based marketing (ABM) and A/B testing with you to understand their role in your marketing strategy.

 

8. Listening to the Customer: How Do You Collect and Use Feedback?
Customer feedback is crucial in improving customer experience, retention, and loyalty. A top SaaS Marketing Agency will want to learn about your feedback system, including review sites, NPS surveys, and social media monitoring.

 

Charting Your Course for SaaS Marketing Success
The right SaaS Marketing Agency won’t just provide a service – they’ll become a part of your crew, asking the right questions and using your answers to chart a course for success. By addressing these questions, your appointed agency can develop a comprehensive SaaS marketing strategy that transforms website visitors into leads, and leads into long-term customers. It’s a voyage towards success – and your agency should be ready to steer the ship.

The post The Key Questions a Top-notch SaaS Marketing Agency Should Be Diving Into appeared first on Riverbed Marketing.


The Roles of a Fractional CMO in a B2B SaaS Startup

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As the B2B SaaS landscape continues to grow, startups in this space face increasing challenges to stand out in an increasingly competitive market. One effective strategy to navigate this competition is to leverage the skills and expertise of a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). However, for many startups, hiring a full-time CMO can be cost-prohibitive. Enter the fractional CMO – a seasoned marketing executive who offers their expertise on a part-time or contract basis. But what exactly are the roles of a fractional CMO in a B2B SaaS startup?

 

Defining Strategic Direction
A fractional CMO plays an essential role in defining the strategic direction of a startup’s marketing efforts. They use their expertise and experience to craft a comprehensive marketing strategy that aligns with the business objectives of the startup. This strategy encompasses all aspects of marketing, from brand positioning and messaging to demand generation and customer retention.

 

Brand Development and Positioning
Building a strong, recognizable brand is crucial for any B2B SaaS startup. A fractional CMO assists in brand development, ensuring that the brand resonates with the target audience and stands out in the market. They help shape the brand’s messaging and positioning, aligning it with the startup’s value proposition and the needs of its customers.

 

Driving Demand Generation
A key role of the fractional CMO in a B2B SaaS startup is driving demand generation. Through their understanding of the startup’s market, customers, and competitors, they can identify opportunities for customer acquisition and lead generation. They develop and implement strategies to attract and engage high-intent prospects, optimizing the marketing funnel to drive conversions and ultimately, revenue.

 

Enhancing Customer Experience and Retention
Customer experience and retention are crucial in the subscription-based SaaS business model. The fractional CMO works to enhance the customer experience across all touchpoints and develop strategies to increase customer retention. They may implement measures such as customer feedback systems, personalized marketing, and customer loyalty programs.

 

Mentoring the Marketing Team
Beyond strategic guidance, a fractional CMO also provides mentorship for the startup’s marketing team. They help build a strong marketing culture within the organization and upskill the existing team. This mentorship can be invaluable in fostering a high-performing team that can drive the startup’s growth.

 

Navigating Market Changes
The SaaS market is fast-paced and constantly evolving. A fractional CMO uses their broad experience and marketing acumen to help the startup navigate these changes. They ensure the marketing strategy remains relevant and effective, adapting it as needed in response to shifts in the market or customer behavior.

 

Providing Cost-Effective Leadership
For a B2B SaaS startup, a fractional CMO provides the benefits of seasoned marketing leadership without the full cost of a full-time executive. They offer a cost-effective way for startups to access high-level marketing expertise, which can be particularly valuable in the early stages of growth when resources may be limited.

 

Conclusion
In conclusion, a fractional CMO plays multiple roles in a B2B SaaS startup. From strategic planning and brand development to demand generation and team mentorship, they provide crucial guidance to help the startup navigate a competitive market and drive growth. Whether or not a startup should hire a fractional CMO depends on its specific needs and circumstances, but there’s no denying the value that a skilled fractional CMO can bring to the table.

The post The Roles of a Fractional CMO in a B2B SaaS Startup appeared first on Riverbed Marketing.

SaaS SEO: Key Steps to Accelerate Growth

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SaaS SEO: Key Steps to Accelerate Growth

Introduction to SaaS SEO and its Importance for Growth

SaaS SEO, or Software as a Service Search Engine Optimization, is the process of optimizing a SaaS website to improve its visibility and ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). This involves various techniques and strategies to attract organic traffic and increase conversions.

The importance of SaaS SEO for growth cannot be overstated. In today’s digital age, where customers rely heavily on search engines to find solutions to their problems, having a strong online presence is crucial for the success of any SaaS business. By implementing effective SEO strategies, SaaS companies can increase their visibility, reach a wider audience, and ultimately drive more traffic to their website.

There are several benefits of running SaaS SEO campaigns. Firstly, it helps in increasing organic traffic to the website, which means more potential customers are discovering the SaaS product or service. Secondly, it improves the website’s visibility on search engines, making it easier for users to find and access the website. Thirdly, it helps in building brand credibility and trust, as websites that appear on the first page of search results are often perceived as more reliable and trustworthy by users.

Understanding Your Target Audience for SaaS SEO

To effectively implement SaaS SEO strategies, it is crucial to understand your target audience. Identifying your target audience involves researching and analyzing the demographics, interests, and behaviors of your potential customers.

Understanding the needs and pain points of your target audience is essential for creating content that resonates with them. By addressing their specific challenges and providing solutions through your SaaS product or service, you can attract and engage your target audience.

Creating buyer personas is a useful technique for understanding your target audience. A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. It helps you understand their motivations, goals, and challenges, allowing you to tailor your SaaS SEO strategies to meet their needs.

Conducting Keyword Research for SaaS SEO

Keyword research is a critical component of SaaS SEO. It involves identifying the keywords and phrases that your target audience is using to search for solutions related to your SaaS product or service.

Keyword research is important because it helps you understand the language and terminology your target audience is using. By incorporating these keywords into your website content, you can improve your chances of ranking higher on search engine results pages.

There are several tools available for conducting keyword research, such as Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, and Moz Keyword Explorer. These tools provide valuable insights into search volume, competition, and related keywords, helping you identify high-value keywords to target in your SaaS SEO strategy.

Identifying high-value keywords involves finding keywords with high search volume and low competition. These keywords have the potential to drive significant organic traffic to your website and increase your chances of ranking higher on search engine results pages.

Optimizing Your SaaS Website for Search Engines

Optimizing your SaaS website for search engines is crucial for improving its visibility and ranking on SERPs. There are two main aspects of website optimization: on-page optimization and technical optimization.

On-page optimization techniques involve optimizing the content and structure of your web pages. This includes incorporating relevant keywords into your page titles, headings, meta descriptions, and content. It also involves optimizing the URL structure, internal linking, and image alt tags.

Technical optimization techniques focus on improving the technical aspects of your website that affect its performance and accessibility to search engines. This includes optimizing page load speed, mobile responsiveness, URL structure, XML sitemaps, and robots.txt files. Technical optimization also involves ensuring that your website is properly indexed by search engines.

Creating High-Quality Content for SaaS SEO

SaaS SEO: Key Steps to Accelerate Growth

Creating high-quality content is essential for SaaS SEO success. High-quality content not only attracts organic traffic but also engages and converts visitors into customers.

There are various types of content that can be created for SaaS SEO, including blog posts, whitepapers, case studies, videos, infographics, and webinars. Each type of content serves a different purpose and appeals to different segments of your target audience.

When creating content for SaaS SEO, it is important to follow best practices. This includes conducting thorough research, providing valuable and actionable information, using relevant keywords naturally, and optimizing the content for readability and user experience.

Building Backlinks for SaaS SEO

Building backlinks is an important aspect of SaaS SEO. Backlinks are links from other websites that point to your website. They are considered as votes of confidence by search engines, indicating that your website is trustworthy and authoritative.

There are two types of backlinks: internal backlinks and external backlinks. Internal backlinks are links from one page on your website to another page on the same website. External backlinks are links from other websites to your website.

To build backlinks for SaaS SEO, you can employ various strategies such as guest blogging, influencer outreach, content promotion, and social media engagement. These strategies help in attracting high-quality backlinks from reputable websites in your industry.

Leveraging Social Media for SaaS SEO

Social media plays a crucial role in SaaS SEO. It helps in increasing brand visibility, driving traffic to your website, and improving search engine rankings.

There are several social media platforms that can be leveraged for SaaS SEO, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube. Each platform has its own unique features and audience demographics, so it is important to choose the platforms that align with your target audience.

To leverage social media for SaaS SEO, it is important to follow best practices such as creating engaging and shareable content, using relevant hashtags and keywords, engaging with your audience, and promoting your content through social media advertising.

Measuring and Analyzing Your SaaS SEO Performance

Measuring and analyzing your SaaS SEO performance is crucial for understanding the effectiveness of your strategies and making data-driven decisions.

There are several key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be used to measure SaaS SEO performance, including organic traffic, keyword rankings, conversion rate, bounce rate, and backlink profile. By tracking these KPIs over time, you can identify trends, spot opportunities for improvement, and optimize your SaaS SEO strategies accordingly.

There are various tools available for measuring SaaS SEO performance, such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, SEMrush, and Moz. These tools provide valuable insights into website traffic, keyword rankings, backlinks, and other important metrics.

Staying Up-to-Date with SaaS SEO Best Practices

Staying up-to-date with SaaS SEO best practices is crucial for maintaining a competitive edge and maximizing the effectiveness of your strategies.

There are several resources available for staying up-to-date with SaaS SEO best practices, including industry blogs, forums, webinars, podcasts, and online courses. These resources provide valuable insights into the latest trends, techniques, and strategies in SaaS SEO.

Some SaaS SEO trends to watch include voice search optimization, mobile-first indexing, user experience optimization, and the use of artificial intelligence in search engine algorithms. By staying informed about these trends and adapting your strategies accordingly, you can stay ahead of the competition and drive sustainable growth for your SaaS business.

Conclusion and Next Steps for SaaS SEO Growth

In conclusion, SaaS SEO is a critical component of a successful digital marketing strategy for SaaS businesses. By understanding your target audience, conducting keyword research, optimizing your website, creating high-quality content, building backlinks, leveraging social media, measuring performance, and staying up-to-date with best practices, you can drive organic traffic, increase conversions, and achieve sustainable growth for your SaaS business.

The next steps for SaaS SEO growth involve implementing the strategies and techniques discussed in this article. It is important to develop a comprehensive SaaS SEO strategy, set realistic goals, and allocate resources accordingly. By consistently monitoring and optimizing your SaaS SEO efforts, you can continuously improve your website’s visibility, attract more organic traffic, and ultimately drive growth for your SaaS business.
If you’re looking to accelerate the growth of your SaaS business, you may find this article on “Dominate the First Page of Branded Search Results” helpful. It provides key steps and strategies to ensure that your brand appears prominently in search engine results, increasing visibility and driving more traffic to your website. Check out the article here for valuable insights on how to optimize your online presence and stand out from the competition.

FAQs

 

What is SaaS SEO?

SaaS SEO refers to the process of optimizing a Software as a Service (SaaS) website to improve its search engine rankings and drive more traffic to the site.

Why is SaaS SEO important?

SaaS SEO is important because it helps SaaS companies increase their visibility and attract more potential customers to their website. This can lead to increased revenue and growth for the company.

What are some key steps to accelerate SaaS SEO growth?

Some key steps to accelerate SaaS SEO growth include conducting keyword research, optimizing website content, building high-quality backlinks, and regularly monitoring and analyzing website performance.

What is keyword research?

Keyword research is the process of identifying the words and phrases that potential customers are using to search for products or services related to a SaaS company’s offerings. This information can be used to optimize website content and improve search engine rankings.

What is website content optimization?

Website content optimization involves making changes to website content, such as headlines, meta descriptions, and body copy, to improve its relevance and quality for both users and search engines.

What are backlinks?

Backlinks are links from other websites that point to a SaaS company’s website. High-quality backlinks can improve a website’s search engine rankings and drive more traffic to the site.

Why is monitoring and analyzing website performance important?

Monitoring and analyzing website performance is important because it allows SaaS companies to identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions to optimize their website and improve their search engine rankings.

The post SaaS SEO: Key Steps to Accelerate Growth appeared first on Riverbed Marketing.

How To Master B2B Keyword Research Theory

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Welcome to the dynamic world of B2B marketing, where mastering the art of keyword research can be a game-changer for your business. If you’re eager to enhance your marketing strategies, understanding the nuances of B2B keyword research is a pivotal step. This guide is your gateway to mastering this essential skill.

We’re set to explore the intricacies of effective B2B keyword research and the theory behind the selection process. From its significance in shaping your content strategy to recognizing the specific characteristics that set B2B keywords apart, we’ve got you covered. Plus, we’ll jump into deciphering searcher intent, providing you with actionable insights and methods to refine your keyword research techniques.

Get ready to unlock the full potential of B2B keyword research and transform your approach to SEO and growth marketing.

 

Key Takeaways

  • Accurate keyword research is crucial for optimizing B2B content and driving targeted traffic to the website.
  • Understanding searcher intent behind keywords is essential for effective keyword research.
  • B2B keyword research should focus on industry-specific jargon, long-tail keywords, and solution-focused keywords.
  • B2B web searches require more specific and detailed information, targeting qualified leads and considering the needs of multiple decision-makers.

 

Understanding B2B Keywords

Definition of B2B Keywords

B2B keywords are search queries used by professionals and businesses to find services, products, or information relevant to their industry. These keywords are typically more niche and targeted compared to B2C keywords, often reflecting a higher level of specificity and industry jargon.

Differences between B2B and B2C Keywords

The main discrepancy lies in intent and complexity. B2B search terms are often aimed at longer sales cycles and specific industry needs, while B2C keywords tend to be more general and aimed at quick purchasing decisions.

Why Keyword Research Accuracy Is Important

Accurately conducting keyword research is essential for optimizing your B2B content and driving targeted traffic to your website. In the world of B2B keyword research, it’s not just about finding the right keywords, but also understanding the searcher’s intent behind those keywords.

By focusing on bb keyword research and keyword research for bb, you can uncover the specific terms and phrases that your potential customers are using when searching for products or services in your industry.

When you accurately conduct keyword research, you gain valuable insights into the needs and desires of your target audience. By understanding the bb searcher intent, you can create content that aligns with their goals and provides the information they’re looking for. This not only improves your website’s visibility in search engine results but also increases the chances of attracting qualified leads.

Moreover, accurate keyword research helps you stay ahead of your competition. By identifying the keywords that are driving traffic to your competitors’ websites, you can optimize your own content and outrank them in search engine rankings. This gives you a competitive edge and allows you to attract more potential customers to your website.

 

Unique Attributes of Keyword Research for B2B

Keyword research for B2B content requires a unique approach to uncover the specific terms and phrases that resonate with your target audience. In the B2B space, the priorities, needs, and language of businesses differ significantly from those of individual consumers.

To effectively conduct keyword research for B2B, consider the following:

  • Industry-specific jargon: B2B audiences often use industry-specific terminology. Understanding and incorporating these terms into your keyword strategy can help you connect with your audience and establish credibility.
  • Long-tail keywords: B2B buyers tend to be more specific in their searches, using longer and more detailed phrases. Targeting long-tail keywords can increase the chances of attracting high-quality leads.
  • Solution-focused keywords: B2B buyers are typically looking for solutions to their business problems. Focus on keywords that emphasize the benefits and solutions your products or services offer.
  • Competitor analysis: Analyze the keywords your competitors are targeting to gain insights into their strategies. This can help you identify gaps and opportunities in your own keyword research.
  • Keyword intent: Consider the intent behind the keywords your B2B audience is using. Are they looking for information, comparing products, or ready to make a purchase? Tailor your keyword strategy accordingly.
  • Overlapping intent: Where both B2C and B2B buyers may use the same or similar search queries to find products in related industries.

 

What Is Keyword Intent?

“Keyword intent” refers to the purpose or goal behind a user’s search query when using a search engine. It’s an essential concept in search engine optimization (SEO) and digital marketing, as understanding the intent behind keywords helps in creating content that matches what the user is looking for. There are typically four main types of keyword intent:

How To Master B2B Keyword Research Theory

Informational Intent: The user is looking for information or answers to questions. These searches often start with “what,” “how,” “why,” etc. For example, “how to tie a tie.”

Navigational Intent: The user is trying to get to a specific website or page. Instead of typing the URL directly into the address bar, they use a search engine with the name of the site or brand. For example, “YouTube” or “Facebook login.”

Commercial Intent: This is a blend of informational and transactional intent. The user intends to buy in the future but is currently looking for more information or is comparing options. Searches might include “best laptops 2024” or “iPhone vs. Android comparison.”

Transactional Intent: Here, the user’s intent is to perform a specific action, typically making a purchase, signing up for a service, downloading an app, etc. Examples include “buy Nike running shoes online” or “Netflix subscription plans.”

Understanding keyword intent helps businesses and content creators to target their audience more effectively, optimize their websites for relevant searches, and align their content with what their potential customers are seeking.

 

Remember these fundamentals about b2b keyword and searcher intent:

Type of Search Description
Informational Individuals seeking to gather knowledge or learn about a topic.
Navigational Users aiming to locate a particular website or specific page.
Commercial Consumers exploring various brands, products, or services for potential purchase or engagement.
Transactional Users intending to perform a specific task, such as buying a product or signing up for a service.

 

Type of Search Examples
Informational “SaaS for small businesses”, “Cloud-based SaaS benefits”, “SaaS security features”
Navigational “Salesforce login”, “Asana homepage”, “HubSpot dashboard”
Commercial “CRM SaaS reviews”, “SaaS accounting software”, “Email marketing SaaS comparison”
Transactional “Buy Microsoft Teams”, “Subscribe to Trello”, “Acquire Adobe Creative Cloud”

 

Using Searcher Intent To Your Advantage

To effectively optimize your B2B content for search engines, it’s crucial to understand the intent behind the keywords your target audience is using. Searcher intent refers to the underlying motivation or goal behind a search query as we reviewed earlier. By understanding the intent, you can create relevant and valuable content that aligns with what your audience is looking for.

The three main types of searcher intent you’ll focus time on optimizing around are: informational, commercial, and transactional.

 

How To Analyze Keyword Intent For SEO

To determine the intent behind a keyword, you can analyze the search results for that keyword that are currently ranking in Google search results and other search engines. Look at the type of content that ranks highly and see if it aligns with your understanding of the intent for that keyword. Additionally, consider the language and context used in the search query itself. This can provide insights into the user’s intent.

While there are several tools on the market that can help to categorize and determine keyword intent, it’s important to understand the fundamentals of how that works and what you’re looking for.

Tools often categorize a keyword’s intent as one or the other, but as you’ll see in some of our examples… the lines can sometimes be crossed with blended results. It’s important to analyze what you’ll be competing with to find out what type of content will work best to achieve your goal. More importantly, Google may have some biases towards what result it thinks is best for the query, and in those cases it’s best not to fight an uphill battle if you don’t have strong SEO authority established.

 

Types of Search Results Pages

Here are some of the search results to look out for when analyzing your keywords:

  • Results rich with services, products, or solutions are generally dominated by commercial and transactional intent keywords
  • Results rich with blog content, long form articles or videos are generally targeted towards informational intent keywords
  • Blended results with both long form content and services -or- products can demonstrate mixed intent

 

How To Master B2B Keyword Research Theory
Example – Mixed intent results with both articles and solutions pages

 

Understanding B2B Keyword Modifiers

Understanding and effectively utilizing keyword modifiers is crucial. Unlike the more general approach seen in B2C keyword research, B2B requires a strategic inclusion of specific modifiers that resonate with a professional and business-oriented audience. These modifiers aren’t just additives to the primary keywords; they are pivotal in refining the search to target the exact audience and their unique needs within the business context.

Understanding B2B Keyword Modifiers

In the realm of B2B keyword research, understanding and effectively utilizing keyword modifiers is crucial. Unlike the more general approach seen in B2C keyword research, B2B requires a strategic inclusion of specific modifiers that resonate with a professional and business-oriented audience. These modifiers aren’t just additives to the primary keywords; they are pivotal in refining the search to target the exact audience and their unique needs within the business context.

Types of B2B Keyword Modifiers

B2B keyword modifiers vary, each serving a distinct purpose in aligning the content with the intended business audience. For instance, modifiers like ‘corporate’ or ‘enterprise’ suggest a focus on larger organizations or more complex business solutions. On the other hand, terms like ‘SME’ or ‘small business’ target a completely different segment, often focusing on scalability and cost-effectiveness. Similarly, industry-specific modifiers like ‘healthcare’ or ‘finance’ can drill down to target niche markets within the B2B space. Understanding the nuanced differences these modifiers bring to keyword research is vital in crafting an effective B2B SEO strategy.

Leveraging Industry-Specific Modifiers

Incorporating industry-specific modifiers into your B2B keyword strategy can significantly enhance the relevance and precision of your content. For instance, using terms like ‘fintech solutions’ or ‘healthcare compliance software’ not only narrows down the audience but also addresses specific industry needs and pain points. These modifiers help in creating content that speaks directly to the concerns and interests of professionals in these sectors, thereby increasing the likelihood of engagement and conversion.

Competitor-Based Modifiers in B2B SEO

Another effective strategy in B2B keyword optimization is the use of competitor-based modifiers. This involves integrating terms like ‘alternative to [competitor name]’ or ‘[competitor name] vs [your brand].’ Such an approach is instrumental in capturing the attention of an audience that is already exploring similar products or services in the market. It’s a proactive way to position your offerings in direct comparison or as an alternative to established solutions, thus tapping into an existing demand.

Utilizing Modifiers for Product Types and Trends

B2B keyword research also benefits from modifiers that relate to product types and industry trends. Using terms like ‘cloud-based CRM tools’ or ‘AI-driven analytics platforms’ caters to an audience seeking specific technological solutions. Similarly, incorporating trend-based modifiers like ‘remote work software’ or ‘sustainable energy solutions’ can capture the evolving interests and emerging needs within various B2B sectors. These modifiers not only enhance search relevancy but also demonstrate your brand’s alignment with current industry trends and future directions.

Challenges and Keyword Modifiers

Modifying keywords in B2B SEO isn’t without its challenges. The key is to strike a balance between specificity and search volume. While highly specific modifiers can significantly narrow down the audience, they may also reduce the overall search volume, potentially limiting the reach of your content. It’s a delicate balancing act, requiring ongoing analysis and adjustment to optimize the impact of your B2B keyword strategy.

Here is an example of how one search leans a little more towards consumer searches, while select word choices in the second search re-enforce the context of B2B. It’s important to pick and choose your battles wisely to avoid generating poor results, or the wrong type of prospects coming in clogging up sales processes.

 

How To Master B2B Keyword Research Theory
Example 1 –  More targeted towards personal

 

How To Master B2B Keyword Research Theory
Example 2 – Expressly targeted towards businesses

Keyword Research Process

1. Industry Analysis

Identifying Target Industries

To begin, outline the industries that will most benefit from your offerings. Research their market size, growth prospects, and unique lingo to create a foundation for your keyword search.

Analyzing Industry-Specific Keywords

Explore trade publications, industry forums, and professional LinkedIn groups for language and topics prevalent in your target sectors. This will inform the creation of a tailored keyword list.

 

2. Competitor Analysis

Identifying Key Competitors

Pinpoint which competitors are ranking highly for your desired keywords. Examine their content and SEO strategies to understand the competitive landscape.

Analyzing Competitor Keywords and Strategies

Use tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to analyze the keywords your competitors rank for and how these contribute to their online presence. This insight helps in differentiating your strategy.

 

3. Customer Analysis

Understanding Target Customer Personas

Create detailed personas for your potential customers. What are their pain points? What solutions might they seek online? This context will refine your keyword targeting.

Analyzing Customer Search Behavior

Leverage analytics to understand how existing customers discover your services. Surveys and interviews can also shed light on their search behavior.

 

4. Keyword Generation

Brainstorming Relevant Keywords

Convene with your team to brainstorm potential keywords. Draw from industry insights, competitor research, and customer analysis.

Expanding Keyword List Using Tools and Resources

Utilize keyword research tools like Google’s Keyword Planner to grow your list. Look for long-tail keywords that capture the specificities of B2B searches.

 

5. Keyword Evaluation

Assessing keyword relevance and search volume

Filter your list by relevance to your business and search volumes—target keywords with substantial volume that directly relate to your products or services.

Analyzing keyword competition and difficulty

Consider how difficult it will be to rank for each keyword. Keywords with lower competition may offer quicker wins for your B2B SEO.

 

6. Keyword Selection

Prioritizing Keywords Based on Relevance and Potential

Classify keywords based on which will most effectively meet your strategic objectives including website traffic, lead generation, or thought leadership.

Creating a Final Keyword List

Finalize a list that balances broad-reach industry terms with niche, low-competition keywords.

 

Implementing B2B Keywords

On-page Optimization Techniques

Once you have your keywords, integrate them into meta tags, headers, and throughout your content in a manner that’s natural and adds value for the reader.

Incorporating Keywords in Content Strategy

Develop a content plan that builds your authority for these keywords. Create blog posts, whitepapers, and case studies rich with your targeted terms that meet customer information needs.

By mastering B2B keyword research theory, you’re setting your content up for success in a competitive digital market. Use the analytical frameworks outlined to capture the nuances of your industry’s search behavior and leverage these insights to align your content strategy with your audience’s needs.

Great B2B keyword research is a blend of art and data—requiring creativity to envision potential search scenarios and analytics to validate and prioritize your choices. Understanding the rationale behind keyword selections empowers marketers to make informed decisions that lead to effective SEO strategies and, ultimately, measurable business results.

 

Tying It All Together

Now that you have a strong understanding of the unique attributes of B2B web searches, it’s time to tie it all together and apply this knowledge to your keyword research strategy. By incorporating the key elements we discussed earlier, you can create a more effective approach to finding the right keywords for your B2B audience.

First, remember to focus on intent. B2B searches are often driven by specific needs and problems, so it’s crucial to identify the keywords that align with those intentions. Think about the pain points your target audience might’ve searched and the solutions they’re seeking. This will help you identify relevant keywords that will attract the right prospects.

If you don’t know what your prospects are searching for yet, it’s important to consider surveying your existing customers or conducting B2B marketing research to maximize data-driven insights. By using the fundamental steps provided in this guide today, you can avoid testing without insights by conducting these simple litmus tests in the search results you plan to compete in. Validate that your competitors are competing in those results to determine you have the right fit if you lack the data at hand.

Next, don’t forget about long-tail keywords. These longer, more specific phrases can be highly valuable in B2B keyword research. They often have lower search volume but higher intent, meaning that the people using these keywords are more likely to be interested in your offerings. Incorporate long-tail keywords into your strategy to capture these highly targeted prospects.

Lastly, make use of B2B-specific tools and resources. There are various tools available that can help you identify and analyze B2B keywords, such as industry-specific market research tools and competitor analysis tools. These tools can provide valuable insights and data to inform your keyword strategy.

The post How To Master B2B Keyword Research Theory appeared first on Riverbed Marketing.

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