The Best SEO Techniques From SEO Professionals

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The greats in any field — whether they’re Olympians or mathematicians — might be gifted with some talents that others might not have, but at their core, they’re people just like you and I who spend their days and nights practicing, theorizing and outworking their competition.

The same has to be done for those who want to succeed in the SEO industry. You have to outpace your competitors, and you have to always find innovative answers to the impossible question. As the #1 digital advertising agency in Utah, we know a thing or two about dominating the SEO field.

Never Stop Studying and Strategizing

SEO is constantly changing. It’s still a newborn in the advertising field, so those that hold the keys to all of SEO’s abilities, like Google, are still trying to figure out what’s the best way to utilize the tool for brands and companies in Utah and beyond. The best way to keep up to date with changing search engine trends is by following the blogs that are navigating where the industry is going. Blogs like Google Webmaster Central, Search Engine Land, Moz Blog and SEMrush Blog are all crucial to helping you how to approach your next SEO strategy.

Understand What Is and Isn’t Working in SEO

Quick rule of thumb about SEO: Never trust your feelings, only the numbers. As I mentioned before, search engine optimization is a new field, so it’s important to trust the numbers over your past experiences.

Visiting SEMrush’s winners and losers report will help you get a better understanding of how certain website are able to build a large audience just because of their search engine presence.

Talk Is Cheap. Work Is Priceless.

It’s crucial to implement a strategy on how you’ll approach your brand’s search engine potential, but you can’t spend countless days theorizing the best approach. Sometimes the best way to succeed in SEO is by strategizing, implementing, failing and repeating. After a strategy or two, you’ll start to see some sort of success, but if you don’t, it might be best to go back to the previous steps, and see where you might’ve gone wrong. Keep your SEO actions consistent by developing a plan and timeline that you commit to.

Don’t Settle in Your Success: Break The Glass Ceiling

This tip is vital. If you follow the previous steps, you’re on the right path to SEO success, but if you stay satisfied with that success, you’ll become stagnant. Success is fleeting, especially in the shifting landscape of marketing. Take your success and invest it in resources and strategies that will make you even more successful.

You Need More Than Good Content For SEO

By | SEO | No Comments

If you go your entire life not seeing “Field of Dreams” then you’ve wasted your life.

Harsh, but accurate.

“Field of Dreams” was a pop culture phenomenon that still holds some resonance today thanks to its meme-tastic quote: “If you build it, they will come.” That quote is a good streamlined metaphor for how some SEO agencies treat their online presence. If you build good content, then people will come to your website.

That’s unfortunately become an oversimplification of what’s needed to help build your SEO potential, especially if you’re looking for your brand to reach beyond the nearest borders in your surrounding Utah neighborhood. Good content is vital, but so are a few other factors.

First, Let’s Define, “Good”

We can get all philosophical and existential on you, but we’ll keep to the basics of “good” content. It needs to be unique, useful, entertaining, and relevant. That’s just the bare bones of what good content is, and you need a lot more than just those factors in order to make any dent in a search engine’s rankings. But before we jump into the more technical stuff, it is important to emphasize that good content is essential to SEO potential, it’s just not the only factor.

Getting Your Content Shared

In a perfect world, only the best content online would get shared, and you’d be known as the SEO Guru because your content is just so good that people are dying to share your next inspired thought. Unfortunately, this isn’t a perfect world. We live in the world of Buzzfeed lists and Grumpy Cat movies, and it’s hard to get any other kind of content shared.

It’s hard, but it’s crucial. If Google’s algorithm sees your content is being shared, then it will place you higher in a search engine’s rankings. There’s a lot of different strategies on how to get your content shared on social media and on other sites, and it’s a good idea to see which one best suits your brand. A relatively common strategy though is to simply ask people to share your content. That strategy can work, but it’s important that your shares and links are always organic.

The Tech Behind Content

Template sites like WordPress give you a good foundation for spreading your content, but you need to make sure that your site has an extensive and updated sitemap, created metadata and title tags, intricate site security and exceptional site speed. Google and other search engines take these factors into consideration when they figure out where your content should rank. Your good content won’t do anything for your SEO potential if your website is riddled with toxic links, slow load times and convoluted site navigation.

Look Out Into The Future

It’s going to take you a while to become a notable presence on SEO. While you’re waiting for that to happen though, you need to ask yourself important questions about your content. You need to figure out who your audience is, what keywords you want to rank in, and how your content can be integrated in other parts of your brand’s campaign.

Think of good content as dirt. Dirt’s essential. Kevin Costner needed dirt to build his baseball field in “Field of Dreams.” He needed the proper tools though to turn that dirt into something more than just dirt. That’s what your content needs also: tools to turn it into something more.

Avoiding Poor Taste in Advertising

By | advertising, Utah | No Comments

Advertising agencies in Utah and throughout the rest of the United States are always trying to push boundaries. We want to do things that no other agency ever has before. Agencies have to be careful, though, that in their quest to be creative and innovative they don’t go too far and produce advertisements that are in poor taste.

7 Content Marketing Trends You Should Know About

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At Fusion 360, we pride ourselves with being the leaders in content marketing. From our offices in Utah, we set precedent, make waves and basically make everybody wish that they were as cool as we are. Well, we’ll let you in on a little secret of how you can be: Set trends when you can and follow trends when someone else thought of an awesome idea first.

The year 2016 has set a lot of amazing trends in content marketing. Here are a few top trends that we think you should be aware of and use to produce the most effective content.

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What Are the Different Types of Content?

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‘Content’ is one of those marketing buzzwords that gets passed around more frequently than your weekly office bulletin. And for good reason — after all, what would content marketing be without the content? But too many people working in businesses from Utah to New England don’t seem to have a good grasp on what content really is — and all the different forms it can take.

Written Content

Probably the first thing you think of when you think ‘content’ is written content. Written content can be a lot of things, from the most basic copy on your website to the most intricately detailed how-to guide.

The most common kinds of written content are:

  • Blogs
  • Articles
  • Stories
  • Lists/listicles
  • How-to guides
  • EBooks

Blogs, when updated regularly, are great for building consistent readership, and provide a forum for addressing topics that may be relevant to the target audience. Articles and stories may cover current happenings in your industry, and lists (or listicles) are a format of written content that’s easily digested and shared — perfect for content marketing.

How-to guides and eBooks are a little more elaborate, but can act as powerful methods for sharing your expertise with your target audience. Work for an adventure sports company in Utah? A comprehensive guide to outdoor activities in Utah is sure to do wonders for your company’s authority within your field — and it provides value to your target audience.

Visual Content

Visual content consists of well, visuals. Visual content is usually created in the form of photos, graphics, infographics or even memes.

Infographics are the pinnacle of visual content in the world of marketing right now. Infographics are more likely to be viewed and shared, and some research even indicates visual information is significantly more likely to be remembered later on down the line.

Your average photo or graphic can be used to liven up your blog posts or company webpages, but they can also boost engagement on social media. As any content marketing expert knows, a Facebook post or Tweet with an image attached gets significantly more engagement than a text-only post.

Finally, memes, a relatively recent phenomenon on the internet, can be used for humorous purposes — and that’s pretty much it. Don’t overuse these (or try to use them when you don’t really understand them) or they may end up devaluing your brand.

Other Media ­– Video, Podcasts, Interviews

Besides text and visuals, other media formats such as videos, podcasts and interviews can be great ways to liven up your content marketing. Consumer engagement with video has grown tremendously in the past few years, and experts don’t expect its progression to slow anytime soon.

While video is great for the audio-visual audience, podcasts are best for the audiophiles. Invite an expert or panel to join you for an interview on a particular topic, update your podcast regularly and make sure you’re getting the word out. Your audience’s morning commute from Farmington, Utah will never be the same.

Optimize Your Content for Different Platforms 

As you can see, there are many different kinds of content, and we’ve only just scratched the surface. Whether you’re a content marketing analyst for a startup in Utah or a marketing director in the Big Apple, transforming your content for all different kinds of mediums is truly powerful.

Looking for an example? Just look at this infographic and video we’ve got to go along with this post.

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Facebook and Google Rule Mobile Advertising

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While Facebook and Google fight each other to see who will reign supreme in mobile advertising, every other company seems to not even be trying in the ad space.

Mobile advertising is the fastest growing digital advertising format in the US, but there seems to be a hesitancy with businesses investing in it. Some marketing agencies are trying to get ahead of the curve by investing advertising dollars in apps, but some companies that dominate the mobile space like Twitter and Alibaba don’t take that as a sign that companies want to advertise on its mobile platform. Google and Facebook are betting that is what companies want, and the bet has paid off big time.

Together, the two companies own about half of the mobile ad revenue in the entire world, and that revenue keeps growing in the billions. The weird thing though is that Google and Facebook’s investment in advertising on mobile devices doesn’t seem like that big of a gamble to begin with. Twitter’s small investment in mobile advertising seems like a much bigger gamble.

Think about it: You can’t walk down the street without seeing at least a couple of people on their phones checking their social media, reading the news or playing “Pokemon Go.”

Google and Facebook have an excess of information on pretty much everyone — from your favorite type of music to what you’ve been shopping for online. Those analytics help marketing agencies understand what type of ads to place on your phone, which is invaluable information for them.

The biggest caveat to mobile advertising is the increase of actual purchases made on your phone isn’t increasing. Entering in your credit card number or buying plane tickets is just way easier to do on a laptop than a phone still.

But there’s hope that the problem will still be fixed. According to BI intelligence, Marketing agencies and companies alike are expecting to spend nearly $42 billion on mobile advertising.

What Is SEO #2?

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The more effort put into optimizing a webpage for search engines, the more likely that webpage is to rank among the first page of search results for a particular set of search terms. For digital marketing companies, this is the end goal — a high-ranking, authoritative webpage that brings in traffic from all corners of the internet, whether consumers are searching from their homes in Utah or European coffee shops.

Outdated SEO Tactics to Ditch

By | SEO, Utah, Utah SEO | No Comments

The world of SEO is constantly changing. For marketing companies, in Utah and elsewhere, this means that they need to be on top of every update that Google makes. When a small tweak is made in the way Google prioritizes, marketing agencies need to make big changes in the way they help their clients. For those investing in the content marketing world and those interested in how it works, here are three things that marketers should stop doing for search engine optimization.

How to SEO From Home

By | SEO, Utah | No Comments

SEO seems like a massive undertaking, since Google has piles of rules that seem to be another language to someone without a Masters in computer programming. But with a few tips you may be able to optimize your blog or website from your kitchen in your underwear while on vacation in Southern Utah or on the East Coast.

Keywords

With every article you write you want to use a series of words, or keywords, in every site in order to make sure that people searching for what you’re writing about can find you. Use words that best encapsulate your blog or website’s topic or theme. You only need two or three words at most for your topics. If you do cover more than one topic, have one or two keywords per topic. Make sure to stay consistent with every article, or your keywords will be just more words in your article and doesn’t help your SEO.

Consistency

If you want to keep your Utah website on top of the Google search engines, make sure you post to your site on a regular basis. A slow site will not get the optimization it needs to stay ahead of the game. Even a quick update on your blog or website can help your SEO, so keep up on that writing. Find a time when you can write and keep a list of stories you come up throughout the week. This way you’re never completely out of ideas when it’s time to buckle down and start typing.

Links

One thing Google’s algorithms look for are links to other sites. Whether those links are to sites away from your projects or to stuff you’ve already written about, links are important to having your writing recognized on the web. Make sure that the links are relevant to your article. Nothing is more annoying than trying to read about how to keep a kitten from a Utah animal shelter healthy and ending up linking to great places to buy cheese in the area.

The Evolution of SEO

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One might think that SEO has been around since the inception of the Internet, but in reality, SEO has only existed since search engines and marketing came together to create their proverbial lovechild. Search engine optimization, or SEO, helps connect marketers with consumers who might be interested in their particular product.

Generally, SEO does this well: Google and Bing don’t typically point you toward a basketball website when you’re searching for cats up for adoption in Utah, for instance. This is where your SEO company comes in — an SEO company can help you optimize your SEO and get your company out on the market. But before we go into that, take a look at the evolution of SEO — understanding the history of SEO may help you better understand what SEO is, and what it can do.

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