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.
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.
Content marketing is a vital part of any successful business plan, and it would not be possible without a good content writing team. Your content writers are master wordsmiths, but even they need a little inspiration from time to time.
By giving your content writers a creative friendly environment, you ensure the happiness of your staff and the quality of the products. From Utah to Europe, inspiration can be found in numerous ways, one only needs to look. Allow your creative team to explore and innovate in a way that sparks creativity, your content marketing quality depends on it.
Snapchat is one of the most popular social media channels today, especially among younger markets. Some content marketing agencies in Utah think it may even overthrow Facebook’s long-held supremacy on the social world.
Well, this news may add support to those opinions: Snapchat just announced changes that will allow content marketers to use the social media platform in new and, frankly, kind of awesome ways.
Snapchat Memories
Snapchat Memories is the newest feature on a social media site known for the fact that it is always evolving. Snapchat is still discovering its identity in the social world. Memories is an evolution that seems small but could drastically change content marketing.
The Snapchat blog explained Memories as a way “to create new Stories from Snaps you’ve taken, or even combine different Stories into a longer narrative.” Why is it such a big deal? Snapchat’s notoriety came from being a service that operated in real-time. Users have to post content as it happens, with no way to create content and post it after the fact. Memories changes everything.
What Content Marketers Can Do
With Memories, a content marketing company in Utah could create pictures and other content and then publish that content at a later date. Without the pressure of real-time publication, the quality of produced content will most likely grow. Content can be created and edited outside of Snapchat and then uploaded. This same Utah agency could even stitch together Snapchat Stories made of content that was originally published on other platforms.
Essentially, Memories allows for greater content sharing between Snapchat and other platforms. The possibilities for marketers to use Snapchat more extensively and efficiently are endless, but every new movement has its challenges (like Taylor Swift’s transition to pop music…haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate…)
If marketers start publishing tons of high quality content while the average Snapchat user is publishing in real time, snaps could lose the feeling of authentic interaction that makes them an effective way to reach audiences in the first place. In the end, will Memories move content marketing for better or worse? Time, and snaps, will tell.
If your SEO strategy doesn’t involve social media, then please, fire your SEO team. Social media and SEO go together like cookies and milk. If you want your company’s reach to go beyond the borders of Utah, you’ll need to integrate an SEO strategy that involves social media.
Social Media Boosts Your Link Building Like Crazy
In its simplest definition, SEO is about building links to your website, and social media is about engaging with people and promoting the things you care about. Let’s say your company that’s based in Utah has 500 followers on Twitter. If you post a link to an article or a page from your website on Twitter, that post has a chance of being shared by at least a quarter of your followers. Every time that link is shared, it will go to a whole new audience outside of Utah that you couldn’t reach.
Twitter handles 19 billion search queries a month (that’s five times more than Bing), and if your tweet is shared enough, it could be prominently displayed as a search result on Twitter. If your tweet comes across the eyes of an influential site, they could feature it on their site, and that would boost your SEO on Google immensely. People from outside of Utah will take notice of your company.
Having an Active Social Media Presence Builds Traffic to Your Website
SEO will boost your website’s presence on search results, but that doesn’t mean you get a large returning audience. Social Media builds a real audience that brings real traffic to your website — but that’s only if you have an active social media presence. Interact with your followers and post links to your site, and you’ll see your web traffic go up.
Social Media Works as Quality Control for Your Site
Social media can be brutal sometimes. If your followers don’t like what you wrote, they’ll be sure to tell you. Or maybe you post a link to an article that gets no likes or shares. That probably means the post wasn’t interesting to your audience. Your audience knows what they want and don’t want, and if you respond to how they interact, you’ll be able to make more content that your followers want to see, which boosts your traffic and your presence online. This comes back to the idea of having quality over quantity. You need a lot of links to build up your SEO potential, but don’t let your quality slip in the process.
In the past few years, content marketing has exploded from a relatively new concept to the industry standard. Everyone from marketers in Utah to entrepreneurs on the East Coast creates content, which means it’s becoming ever more difficult to be relevant. With so much content available, how can you make your content stand out?
Take a minute and think about Lady Gaga. That’s right, Gaga. You’re thinking, “What in the world does Lady Gaga have to do with content marketing in Utah?” Well, wherever she goes, the woman stands out. Her popularity soared because she was able to find a niche audience and give them what they wanted.
Being relevant in content marketing follows this same principle — the Gaga principle, if you will. The Gaga principle states that to be relevant your content must be unique, be directed to a specific audience and be valuable to that audience.
When we say that your content should be unique, you say, “duh.” However, creating unique content is easier said than done. Writers tend to glean inspiration from others, but if you search “content marketing in Utah” and then write an article about the exact same topic as the top article on the web, you’re just saying something somebody else has said in a different way. Search the web for ideas, but instead of looking at what is out there, ask yourself, “What isn’t in these search results? What is missing?” That’s what you should write about.
The more specific your audience, the better. The most common problem when creating content is trying to appeal to multiple audiences at once. Pick one, and the more niche the audience the better. Don’t just write for adults ages 18–30. Write for adults ages 18–30 in Utah who own dogs. When this demographic searches, your content will appear instead of being lost in a sea of hundreds of pieces.
After you select a niche audience, write content that is valuable to them. The best content gives people useful information. A good rule of thumb is that the more in-depth your content is, the more valuable your content will be.
You can make your content relevant. You really can. It takes time, research and planning, but it’s worth it. By working to give a specific audience unique and valuable content, your popularity will grow. As Lady Gaga would say, you’re on the edge of glory.
It’s a fairly known fact that avid readers make avid writers; however, does reading on a regular basis contribute directly to a higher success rate for content marketers? Reading on a regular basis expands vocabulary, heightens the ability to empathize and stretches personal world-views. How do these attributes contribute directly to a successful content marketing campaign —and is there a link between the two?
Edward Abbey’s Unintentional Content Marketing Move
Edward Abbey’s novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, chronicled a group of environmental terror-ists/activists who traveled frequently throughout the American West (with quite a few references to Southern Utah). The novel was well-written and quickly became one of the most influential pieces of fiction to protect environmentally questionable activities.
The writer, Edward Abbey perhaps inadvertently used his voracious reading skills and witty writ-ing style to create a piece of environmentally-conscious fiction that would go on to unintention-ally became a content marketing centerpiece for political activism, specifically throughout the Southern Utah region.
Reading to Adapt to Different Brand Voices
Avid readers don’t just adapt the diction of whatever author they’re currently engrossed in; they also learn to embody the distinct voices, personalities and quirks of protagonists. The ability to embody a wide variety of different brand voices is the golden fleece of content marketing — and a skill set that any avid reader picked up long ago.
Reading on a regular basis — whether it’s sci-fi, fantasy, fiction, non-fiction or autobiographical — familiarizes the reader with different character and author voices, which ultimately serves greater positive purposes within the content marketing spectrum.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Read Everything
Here’s our advice for any current content marketing experts or wannabe content marketers: Read. Read everything you can get your hands on, whether it’s a discount, trash novel that you’ve found at a garage sale or it’s a non-fiction guide to the deserts of Southern Utah. Read-ing on a regular basis will up your content marketing game.
We don’t know about you, but when we think of advertising geniuses, we think of “Mad Men,” Don Draper, Roger Sterling — basically anyone from the AMC hit series. But there are real Don Drapers in today’s market of advertising, and they have killed the advertising world. Advertising agencies not only in Utah but around the globe have looked to these individuals for inspiration and tips on how to be a better advertising agency. They have mastered the art of advertising and have made billions of dollars in revenue for their companies.
Not all advertising is about giving great presentations and using the right colors, and these advertising agency execs, can prove that to you. Some of these names you might not recognize, but their companies you just might.
If it takes a village to raise a child, then it is safe to say that it takes an entire team to create quality content. Content marketing can be difficult to master, but when done correctly — content marketing has the power to exponentially build business. From Utah to Europe, content marketing draws in consumers and functions as the driving force behind great online business.
If your business, be it located in Utah or beyond, wishes to grow its content marketing capabilities, it need only to create the content marketing dream team.
Strategists
No content marketing campaign is complete without the help of a strategist. A strategist looks at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats facing a businesses and helps generate content pertinent to those areas.
The strategist helps the team find the best places to put content, the best topics to write on and the most effective way to reach audiences.
Writers
You won’t have content if someone does not create it, so without writers, content marketing is non-existent. Quality writing is always in style and the better the writing, the better for business. Writers must incorporate SEO and know the voice of each client individually.
Designers
In an increasingly digital world, it is important that a marketing team use designers. Designers lay the content out in a way that is easy to read and easy to find. If readers can’t navigate the content, they are not likely to continue reading, thus designers are vital.
Designers are the bridge between visual and textual information. Without them, a content marketing team would be nowhere near complete.
The prefect content marketing team does not end there, though. For each individual business, other content marketing team members can be added to create a perfect and personalized team. Whether you’re in Utah or beyond, great content is generated by a great content marketing team.
Advertising agency employees from Utah to the East Coast use the month of July as one of remembrance. No, we aren’t mourning a loss. Seventy-five years ago, on July 1, 1941, the first legal commercial ran during a baseball game and television would never again be the same – except for baseball, that’s always the same *yawn*. This date is a reminder of the continuous cycle of innovation.
The Illegal Ads
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) originally ruled that advertisements weren’t allowed on television. Advertisers across the country were about as bothered by that fact as Tyrion is bothered by being short (“Game of Thrones” spoiler: he’s not).
Ad men thought television lacked the prestige that came with traditional media. As the men who “drink and know things”, they weren’t questioned. Radio reached 90 percent of American homes. It was hard to picture anything that could top that.
In the 1930’s the rebels of advertising who proved to be “bad to the bone” created product placement. The announcer of the baseball game ran an ad for Proctor & Gamble, Socony Oil and General Mills. He held a bar of soap, wore a cap and sliced a banana into a bowl of Wheaties — though it’s hard to imagine how awkward this looked, the loophole was a doorway for advertisers.
The First Legal Ad
Television’s first legal commercial was reminiscent of the radio ads that would run. Bulova, a watch company, ran a grainy, shaky, 10-second ad during another baseball game. During the live ad the announcer read, “America runs on Bulova time.”
The first ad cost Bulova’s advertising agency a whopping *gasp* $4 to create and didn’t even reach those in Utah. Television has now become a $70 billion market place.
The Future of Television
What was once considered the bread and butter of the advertising agency industry is now questioned for its viability. In an age where viewers can skip the commercials to see if Khaleesi will finally rule the seven kingdoms, it leaves professionals from the state of Utah wondering where the innovation will shift next.
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