With so many tools out there, we know firsthand that finding the right ones can be confusing. We curated this ultimate guide to share what we’ve learned with you. Discover two paid and three free SEO tools, their pros and cons, and the real-world problems they solve. 

If you’re in a hurry, check out our quick guides: 

Free SEO Optimization Tools

Google Search Console 

Best for website troubleshooting and performance tracking

Intro to the tool

Search Console is your first step toward mastering search engine optimization. It helps anyone with a website get a grasp on the basics, and it’s a must-have tool for pros. Search Analytics shows you the terms people punch into Google Search to find your site, helping you refine content. Plus, tools like sitemap submissions and the Index Coverage Report simplifies how Google categorizes and ranks your pages. 

Pros and cons 

Pros of Search Console:

• Content strategy: Get vital intel on how users find your site on Google, what they click on, and how your pages rank. 
• Troubleshooting in your hands: Search Console alerts you to things like 404 errors and other issues that prevent your site from ranking higher. Fixing small errors makes a big difference, so never ignore an alert.
• Specialty reports: Dig into Google’s specialized reports to understand and improve your site’s mobile usability and links. 

Cons of Search Console:

• Data overload: If you’re new to SEO, the sheer amount of information can be overwhelming. But don’t let it put you off. Learn how to use it step by step, tool by tool.
• Manual labor: Fixes aren’t automatic, so you need some technical knowledge to take action on Search Console’s insights. 
• Delayed info: It doesn’t provide real-time data, but you can use it to focus on trends and issues over time. 

Special features

Search Console is a direct line of communication between you and Google Search. It provides actionable data about how Google indexes your site, alerts you to critical issues and tells you which search terms you’re ranking for.   

Pricing

Google Search Console is available at no cost.

What we’ve heard

Tom Demers, cofounder of Measured SEM and Cornerstone Content, outlines Google Search Console’s functions:

Demers says he “likes that Google Search Console monitors, debugs, and optimizes your website — and you don’t need to know how to code to benefit from this tool.”

What are Google Search Console’s use cases?

Here are some examples of how different users might incorporate Search Console into their SEO strategy:

• Technical SEO: Monitor Core Web Vitals to identify and troubleshoot website speed and user experience issues. This helps maintain high engagement and reduce bounce rates.
  
• E-commerce site owner: Track indexing issues for product pages and make sure Google is discovering new products. This drives your site’s visibility and sales since you can quickly address indexing failures through instant alerts.
  
• Recipe blog: Identify high-potential keywords with low competition through Search Analytics. Use these insights to tweak your content to improve rankings for those terms.
  
• Restaurant: Measure clicks from Google Maps results and queries such as “restaurants near me” or “best contemporary American cuisine in New York.” This refines your SEO strategies to target local customers more effectively.

• SaaS website: Catch crawl errors, troubleshoot broken pages, and check that you’ve implemented structured data — think product schema — correctly. 
  
• Web developer: Use the Fetch as Google feature to test how Googlebot renders pages and diagnoses rendering issues that might be invisible to users but prevent Google from understanding your pages.

Google Business Profile 

Best for boosting local businesses’ visibility on Google  

Intro to the tool

Google Business Profile is your online storefront, only better. Use it to tell customers about your hours, contact info, photos, directions, and reviews. Google displays this info prominently on local Google Maps and Search results. Optimize it and collect enough glowing reviews, and you’ll be at the top of the deck when web users search for your industry in your location. 

It’s best for:

• Brick-and-mortar businesses: Retailers, restaurants, tradespeople, service businesses, and any company with a physical location customers visit.
• Businesses with a strong local customer base: A strong GBP presence is a must if your business serves a defined geographic area.

Pros and cons 

Pros of Google Business Profile:

• Local SEO hero: GBP puts your business on the map — literally. It’s designed to connect your services with the needs of local customers effectively. 
• Customer interaction hub: Use the platform to respond to messages, answer questions, and show off how responsive you are.
• Full of insights: Track clicks, calls, site visits, and other hard data that helps you understand how customers and prospects interact with your brand. 

Cons of Google Business Profile:

• Requires regular updates: You need to update your profile regularly to stay relevant and rank high in local searches.
• Intensely competitive: Local SEO is a fierce battleground, especially in populated areas. Go all out to make your listing stand out.
• Limited control: It’s your profile, but Google might make changes or add content you can’t amend. 

Special features

Optimizing your Google Business Profile is the best way to get discovered online locally. When you search for a service, Google shows you three results under a map. Make your way into the “local pack,” as it’s known, and watch footfall and site traffic soar. Add attributes, such as “women-owned” or “outdoor seating,” to show your target audience key details at a glance.   

Pricing

Google Business Profile is available at no cost.

What we’ve heard

Digital marketing guru Neil Patel says:

“Keeping tabs on your Google Business Profile using Google Maps or Google Search allows you to step into your audience’s shoes and see what your business looks like online to them. Keeping your profile up to date is crucial to making sure you and your customers are on the same page.”

What are Google Business Profile’s use cases?

• Small business owners: Ensure your listing is complete, accurate, and has a bunch of high-quality photos. A well-maintained profile can build trust and attract more customers. 
  
• Multilocation brands: Use GBP’s bulk location management features to streamline updates across all your stores.
  
• Service-based businesses: Proactively ask happy customers for reviews and manage them with care to build credibility.

QuestionDB

Best for content ideation and keyword research using real user questions

Intro to the tool

Google’s 2024 deal with Reddit highlights a key trend: people are using conversational searches. QuestionDB mines questions asked by real people on real platforms such as Reddit and Quora, giving you actionable real-world data, such as long-tail keywords and emerging search trends. This free tool can help you drive serious, conversion-focused traffic. 

Pros and cons 

Pros of QuestionDB:

• Never assume again: See the questions people are genuinely asking instead of making assumptions.  
• Audience insight goldmine: Dig deep and create detailed audience personas based on your target market’s questions. Learn about their pain points and desires to find new ideas, and watch new ones pop up daily.
• Target SGE and conversational search: QuestionDB shows you how conversations translate into search behavior. Analyzing Reddit-sourced questions shows you what’s gaining traction before it hits the mainstream.  

Cons of QuestionDB:

• Requires data analysis: You have to carefully sort through results and understand how to translate queries into search intent. Then, transform that knowledge into bottom-of-the-funnel content. 
• Can get overwhelming: QuestionDB offers a ton of data, so focus your searches to avoid overload.
• One small part of a solution: Without strong writing and strategic SEO, knowing which questions to ask won’t propel your content to the top of the SERPs.

Special features

QuestionDB is a uniquely useful tool for any brand, marketer, or freelancer looking to improve their ideation game. Find questions that people are asking in your niche and create content to satisfy their curiosity. 

Pricing

The basic plan is free, and QuestionDB recommends trying it out before deciding if you require the paid plan. For more extensive features, consider the paid plan options: $15 per month for an individual and $50 for an agency.

What we’ve heard

Digital marketing influencer Matt Shirley sums up the benefits of using QuestionDB:

“Publishing high-quality content around questions that real people ask will not only help you rank higher on Google, your business will also gain more authority and establish topical expertise.”

What are QuestionDB’s use cases?

• Content manager: Supercharge your editorial calendar with questions people are actually asking in your industry.
• E-commerce business owner: Craft content that addresses your target audience’s pain points and search intent.
• SEO strategist: Target the conversational keywords that offer a better chance of ranking high and addressing users at the decision-making stage of the buying process.
  

Paid and Advanced SEO Tools

SurferSEO

Best for AI-powered on-page optimization

Intro to the tool

SurferSEO gives you the blueprint to create content that ranks. Get keyword guidance and on-page optimization tools and see what’s working on Google. It provides data-driven guidelines for keyword density, related terms, optimal word count, and which headings to use. 

Curious about AI-generated content? SurferSEO has an AI-driven writing tool you can test drive. Such an advanced toolkit might initially intimidate beginners, but as soon as you have a firm grasp on SEO basics, this comprehensive platform can help your agency or brand rank higher on SERPs.

Pros and cons 

Pros of SurferSEO:

• Handy blueprint: SurferSEO analyzes more than 500 signals across the top 10 articles currently ranking on Google. It uses this data to generate a blueprint to help you craft SEO-optimized content. 
• AI-powered: SurferAI can create articles in minutes.
• Audits and content gap analysis: Surfer performs thorough content audits and content gap analysis to help you level up your content strategy. 

Cons of SurferSEO:

• AI hallucinations: Relying on AI-generated content for factual information, grammar, syntax, storytelling, and brand voice isn’t an option. AI content without human oversight comes across as low-effort to readers and search engines and could get flagged as spam by Google.  
• Steep learning curve: Surfer offers a comprehensive suite of SEO tools that are more useful for individuals and teams with SEO know-how. However, it’s expensive, so make sure you understand how to extract the maximum ROI before investing.
• Critical oversight needed: Sometimes, Surfer suggests keywords that aren’t relevant to your content at all. It’s a tool, not a fix-all. Think critically and don’t over-rely on it. 

Special features

Some of SurferSEO’s unique features include:

• SERP Analyzer: View a dashboard offering a detailed look at what’s currently ranking and see how your page stacks up.
• Keyword Research: Strategize using topic clusters for a holistic SEO approach.
• Integrations: Integrates with Jasper, WordPress, Google Docs, and Contentful. 
  

Pricing

• Essential: $89 per month — ideal for small business owners and freelancers
• Scale: $129 per month — suited for for midsize agencies and marketing teams
• Scale AI: $219 per month — designed for agencies and content teams looking to scale up with AI
• Enterprise: $399 per month — best for large agencies and marketing teams

What we’ve heard

SEO sage Matthew Woodward says:

“I like it because it helps me with my SEO daily tasks in a way no other tool in that price range does. It has quickly become a key tool in my SEO process, and we are seeing more and more SurferSEO success stories by the day.”

What are SurferSEO’s use cases?

• Lifestyle blog: Optimize existing articles on “healthy recipes” to improve their ranking potential by adding additional keywords found in the SERP analysis.
• Digital marketing agency: Create detailed content briefs for clients that include keyword targets, content length, and structure recommendations based on SurferSEO’s competitor analysis.
• Online course provider: Identify content gaps on competitors’ websites related to “learn [insert industry]” that you can fill to draw in qualified traffic.

Ahrefs 

Best link-building tool for big brands and agencies  

Intro to the tool

Ahrefs is your backlink analysis buddy. It’s a favorite tool among SEO experts because it helps uncover who’s linking to competitors, finds new link-building opportunities, and keeps tabs on your website’s backlink profile. Backlinks are one element of SEO success — think of them as endorsements from other sites. Ahrefs helps you get the backlinks that will make an impact on your SERP ranking.

Pros and cons 

Pros of Ahrefs:

• Massive backlink database: Ahrefs  has an extensive, regularly updated backlink database, making it a go-to resource for SEO-boosting link-building efforts.
• Robust toolkit: Ahrefs does more than analyze your backlinks. It offers solid features for keyword research, content analysis, and competitor tracking.
• Data-driven directions: Ahrefs helps you interpret complex data like a pro and tells you how to turn those insights into an action plan.

Cons of Ahrefs:

• Steep learning curve: Ahrefs is a professional tool that’s ideal for agencies, big businesses, and freelance SEO specialists. Those new to SEO might need time to fully realize its potential.
• Pricey investment: Ahrefs is expensive.
• Backlinks might not be as vital as they once were: Google is starting to prioritize user intent, E-E-A-T, brand mentions, UX, and comprehensive content just as much as links. If you’re on a budget, you can focus on these elements without spending a fortune on software.

Special features

• Site Explorer: Take a deep dive into any website’s backlink profile. Find out who links to it and what the most valuable links are.
• Rank Tracker: Keep tabs on your search rankings and see how they compare to competitors.
• Site audits: Ahrefs crawls your site to generate a detailed report on technical SEO issues that could hamper your ranking potential.

Pricing

• Lite: $79 per month — ideal for small businesses and side projects
• Standard: $159 per month — suitable for marketing consultants and SEO professionals
• Advanced: $319 per month — designed for lean in-house teams
• Enterprise: $799 per month — best for large agencies and major enterprises

What we’ve heard

Backlinko boss Brian Dean uses Ahrefs for broken link building. He says it’s “because I can EASILY find broken external and internal links in Ahrefs. In fact, this simple feature has saved me dozens of hours.”

What are Ahrefs use cases?

• Digital marketing agency: Track clients’ backlink profiles, identify and act on link-building opportunities, and generate reports to show off your results.
• E-commerce store selling outdoor gear: Discover where competitors get backlinks on camping blogs, hiking forums, and peer review sites. Then, target those same websites for your own products.
• Recipe blog: Understand which recipes attract the most backlinks and prioritize creating similar content to improve your site’s appeal.
• SaaS company: Identify review websites and industry blogs featuring your competitors. Pitch your product for inclusion on those same sites.

SEO Tools Are One Element of Your SEO Strategy

SEO tools are powerful, but they’re not crystal balls. A suggested keyword might be popular, but is it truly relevant to your business? Can your content deliver on what searchers expect? Remember, tools inform your strategy, but your expertise guides it.

While SEO is an essential piece of the digital marketing puzzle, it’s not the whole picture. Outstanding user experience, compelling content that genuinely addresses customer needs, and alignment with your brand voice are just as crucial for long-term success.

What’s the Best Tool for SEO?

There’s no single best tool for SEO optimization. The ones that work for you depend on your customers’ needs, business goals, and level of expertise.

Our CEO, Carlos Meza, sums it up:

“There are many SEO optimization tools available on the market. You need to pick the one that works best for your business type. For instance, there are tools that are better suited for enterprise, while there are others better suited for SMBs.

Also, you need to keep in mind that these tools only offer a blueprint, and some of their information isn’t 100% accurate. You should always exercise critical thinking and use data from the tools as one piece of information and not the ultimate answer. Combining Insights from the tools with your experience and critical thinking is the best formula.” 

For those ready to take their SEO strategy to the next level, our SEO Content Writing Services are here to help. Visit our SEO Content Writing Services page to learn more about how we can enhance your content’s SEO performance.

The post Tools for SEO Optimization appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Have you ever felt like you were stuck in a content rut? Delivering enough leads to create brand awareness and conversions regularly is your main priority. But you’re at wit’s end trying to maintain consistent blog output or keeping up with the Joneses in ranking for certain keywords.

Sound familiar?

If you’re devoted to content marketing and SEO, you’ve experienced this conundrum. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 64% of marketers say their biggest knowledge gap is understanding the process of developing a scalable content strategy.

Okay, let’s be honest. You can never create enough content to stay 100% ahead of the never-ending buying stages of personas and their iterations or to keep up with the real-time changes in search-engine algorithms.

But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to create great content to help you achieve your business goals—you have to get strategic about it. You can successfully scale content for SEO with a little elbow grease and the right approach while avoiding haphazard strategies or sacrificing quality.

First, understand why SEO should be a priority and how to make it work for your business. Second, you need a content strategy to scale as your business grows—without breaking the bank. Lastly, focus on creating quality content that attracts and engages your target audience.

We’ve got some answers to help you start making all that happen.

Before we jump in, let’s understand why scaling your content for SEO is crucial and how Google’s changing algorithms will impact your content strategy.

Why Is Scaling SEO Content Important?

Like most marketers, you probably create content for two reasons: to create awareness and generate quality leads. If you’re looking to scale your content for SEO, developing content that attracts more organic traffic from search engines should always be on your radar.

Why?

Because organic traffic is the lifeblood of any business; 51% of all visitors to B2B and B2C sites come from search engines and SEO-driven traffic SEO-driven traffic converts at 14.6% versus 1.7% for outbound advertising.

But Google’s algorithm updates in 2022 show that search engines are getting smarter. SEO is no longer about cramming in as many keywords as possible and hoping for the best. For instance, Google E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, Trust) assesses the quality of your site’s content in how well it demonstrates expertise, is written authoritatively and gains its audience’s trust. This means that marketers need to be more strategic in their approach to SEO to rank high on SERPs (search-engine results pages). 

Now that we’re up to speed, let’s explore some actionable SEO content scaling strategies you can use to make this happen.

The 6 Tips to Scale SEO Content to Crush Growth Goals

These six tips to help you scale content for your website will skyrocket organic traffic and help you hit your SEO goals.

1. Keyword Research
2. Create a Content Calendar
3. Cluster Strategy With Content Pillars
4. Set SEO-Content Goals
5. Seek Out Subject-Matter Experts
6. Outsource Your Content Production

1. Keyword Research

Before building a 12-month content calendar, take a step back and do your due diligence with keyword research. This is the first step in creating audience-centric and search-friendly content for the best topics to focus on.

Scaling scale content for SEO by aligning it with keyword research increases your SERP rankings, drives more traffic to your website and highlights your brand as authoritative in your industry.

Remember, search engines have evolved over the years to deliver the best results to searchers (search intent). And searchers are savvier and more articulate about what they’re looking for than ever before.

As a content marketer, focusing on context and search intents is essential to overall success. When growing your niche authority and scaling your SEO content, you’ll want to start by targeting longtail keywords. 

According to HubSpot research, 50% of search queries use longtail keywords. These are more specific keywords (usually lower search volume) than your main target keywords. For example, if you’re a travel website targeting the keyword “travel,” you might also want to target the following longtail keywords:

• Travel tips
• How to plan a trip
• Best places to travel

In the long run, go after competitive keywords and phrases you can realistically rank for. Once you have a concrete list of target keywords, it’s time to start creating a content calendar.

2. Content Calendar

A content calendar is a roadmap for your content marketing strategy. It helps you plan, track and publish your content regularly, ensuring your content aligns with your business goals and objectives.

Let’s take a quick overview of how to create a content calendar for your SEO content scaling efforts.

The first step is to convert keywords into content topics. For each keyword on your list, come up with a few different content ideas that you could realistically rank for.

Next, create monthly topic segments or content campaigns around these ideas. These could be blog post series, ebooks, webinars, etc.

Once you have your topics and campaigns mapped out, start creating individual pieces of content. This is where you’ll need to get specific and fill in the details of your content calendar, like post titles, descriptions, target keywords and publish dates.

Delegate responsibilities to editors, writers and designers to help with the creation process. And don’t forget to include an SEO team member in the mix to ensure each piece of content is optimized for search.

When starting to scale content for SEO, having a schedule and process can avert content production bottlenecks and ensure each piece is of the highest quality.

3. Cluster Strategy With Content Pillars

To scale content for SEO, start by identifying your content pillars. These are the broad topics that you want to cover in depth. Once you have your pillars, creating a cluster strategy around each is doable.

A cluster strategy can be defined as creating a main piece of content (often called a pillar page) and then surrounding it with several supporting pieces of content (called cluster pages).  A cluster page on your website contains a wealth of information on a specific topic. It includes an overview of the topic, many blog posts and other resources that dive deeper into the subject.

Say you have a blog about travel. Your main content pillar might be “how to plan a trip.” The cluster strategy around this topic would be to create a pillar page on the same topic. You’ll then surround it with several blog posts covering specific aspects of trip planning, like budgeting, packing and choosing a destination.

Here’s a rundown of how to create a cluster strategy for your content:

• Brainstorm a list of potential content pillars. You’ll want to cover these broad topics in-depth on your website.
• For each content pillar, create a main piece of content (often called a pillar page). This could be an in-depth blog post, an e-book, or even a video series.
• Create supporting content (called cluster pages) around each pillar page. These could be blog posts or social media posts that link to the pillar page.
• Optimize each piece of content for your target keywords. This will help you rank higher in search results and get more traffic to your website. It’s always best to carry due diligence if you want to learn how to optimize content for SEO.
• Increase exposure for your content by promoting it on your social media channels and other online platforms. This step drives even more traffic to your website.

The advantage of using a cluster strategy is that it allows you to cover many keywords with less content.  And because you’re linking between the different pieces of content, Google can easily understand the relationship between the topics. This can ultimately help improve your search engine ranking.

4. Set SEO-Content Goals

Your SEO content strategy is the backbone of your scaling efforts and will help determine what types of content to create, how to optimize it for search, and where to publish it. But SEO is an arduous and ever-changing process, and if you don’t have specific goals, it may not be easy to measure your success. 

Here are steps to set SEO content goals:

• Define your target audience. Who are you reaching out to with your content? What are their needs and wants? What type of content do they prefer?
• Research your target keywords. What terms and phrases are your target audience searching for? What are your competitors ranking for?
• Set realistic goals. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Start small and gradually increase your content output over time.
• Track your progress. Use tools like Google Analytics to keep tabs on your traffic, conversions, and key metrics over time. 
• Promote your content. Once you’ve published your content, promote it through social media, email marketing, and other channels.

The beauty of SEO is that it’s an ongoing process. As you continue to produce and promote high-quality content, you’ll see your traffic and conversions increase.

5. Seek Out Subject-Matter Experts

It’s crucial to ensure that each piece of content is of the highest quality if you’re looking to scale your content for SEO. That’s why it’s important to seek out subject-matter experts (SMEs) who can provide insights and perspectives that will add value to your content.

These topic-based specialists are well versed in their respective fields, such as marketing, design, or development.  When you involve them in your quest to scale content for SEO, you can achieve new levels of depth and insight that would otherwise be unattainable.

How Do You Find SMEs?

Start by looking within your organization. You might have a wealth of experts at your fingertips. You can also reach out to your network of contacts and see if they know anyone who would be a good fit.

Once you’ve found a few potential SMEs, reach out and ask if they’re interested in contributing to your content. If they are, work with them to develop a plan for their involvement. You could work with them to:

• Write a guest post
• Record a podcast episode
• Give an interview
• Create a video tutorial

Their depth of knowledge can make your brand more credible, authentic and trustworthy—all of which are essential for scaling your content for SEO and developing trust with your audience.

6. Outsource Your Content Production

As much as you’d like to keep the whole content marketing in-house, it’s not practical to do everything yourself. At some point, you’ll need to outsource certain aspects of your content production.

This could include hiring freelance writers and a full-fledged marketing agency. Finding partners you can trust to produce high-quality content that aligns with your brand voice and messaging is important.

While it all depends on your needs and marketing budget, here are factors to consider when outsourcing your content:

• Quality: Can they produce content aligned with your current standards? Do they have a good understanding of your brand voice and messaging?
• Quantity: Can they handle the volume of content you need to produce? Do they have the necessary resources in place?
• Cost: What’s their price point? If you’re working with an agency, are they transparent about their pricing?
• Communication: Do they respond to your emails and calls promptly? Communication can make or break an otherwise great working relationship, so it’s important to ensure that you’re on the same page.

Outsourcing can be a significant boon to your content marketing efforts, allowing you to scale your production without sacrificing quality.

Scaling SEO-Content With the Experts

Quality content may not be the easiest route to successful marketing, but it’s surefire. As more brands vie for attention online, the importance of quality content will only grow.

Scaling content for SEO is a chance to set your brand ahead of the pack by establishing yourself as a thought leader in your industry.

If you’re looking to take your business to new heights, consider outsourcing SEO content writing services that can help you produce high-quality, keyword-rich content assets you need to drive traffic and conversions.

The post 6 Tips to Scale Content for SEO appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

In this post, we’re going to put aside the mechanics of SEO for a moment, and focus on something equally important to search engines: great writing that connects with readers. Sure, there are still algorithms running in the background, but with the wonders of modern-day SEO, the content your customer wants to read often meets many of the requirements for ranking well.

Read on as we explore how to produce high-quality content that performs better in search engines and helps you meet your business goals — by putting people first.

Importance of Quality Content for SEO

As a marketer, you have a chance to engage your audience each time they type a relevant query into the search box. They’re usually turning to Google at distinct stages of the buyer journey: when researching a problem, learning about products and solutions, learning about your specific brand, and making a purchasing decision.

When you create the kind of engaging, comprehensive and reliable content they’re looking for, you improve your chances of appearing higher in search engine rankings. You also fulfill your business objectives — by satisfying your target audience’s informational needs, you can drive traffic to your site and bring customers into your sales funnel.

What Is Quality Content for SEO?

Keywords play a role in helping customers find your content, but algorithms have evolved to the point where they can also analyze the language on the page to determine overall context and meaning. Search engines are capable of identifying rich, purposeful content that makes for a great user experience.

High-quality SEO content:

• Appeals to your customer. Offer content that’s interesting, compelling and effortless to read.
• Answers user queries. Deliver content at the right touchpoints to address your customer’s needs and concerns by knowing what keywords they use when trying to solve a problem.
• Is reliable and trustworthy. Show that your content and site are credible and authoritative, and that you’re an expert in the topic you’re writing about.
• Is easily understood by search engines. Employ SEO best practices to optimize your content and website for search bots.

10 Tips for Creating High-Quality SEO Content

Now that we know what great content looks like, let’s explore steps to achieve it. Here are tips for producing high-quality SEO content that’s useful for customers and effective for search engines.

1. Know Your Customer

High-quality SEO content is customer-centric, so spend some time getting to know your audience through market research. Understand the pain points that they’re looking to solve and how they search for information. The more data you have about their needs and behaviors, the better you can target your content. Remember, the goal is to serve the right information when they turn to Google for knowledge.

2. Consider Search Intent

Think about the reason your customer searches for these keywords, and write with their purpose in mind. Where in the buyer journey are they? Are they gathering information or looking for the best deal?

Your content should be relevant for the keyword you’re trying to rank for. As Ahrefs explains, a landing page designed to convert visitors to sign up for a credit card probably won’t rank for the term “best credit card.” Google looks for informational blog posts and comparison charts that help searchers decide what the best credit card is.

A quick way to determine search intent is to plug the keyword into Google and look at the type of content that’s currently ranking.

3. Use Topic Clusters to Organize Content

Approach your content creation strategically and use topic clusters to organize your pages. A topic cluster is a hub of content anchored by a pillar page. The pillar page sets up a broad overview of the topic, using links to direct readers to more specific but related content.

Topic clusters are useful for SEO as they can establish expertise in a topic. For example, a pet food store can create a topic cluster about feline nutrition. The pillar page might discuss the overall importance of feeding cats healthy food, linking to more specific pages based on a reader’s interest. These pages could include in-depth nutrition guides for cats at different life stages, such as kittens, seniors and adults.

This type of structure is more useful than a random assortment of pages as you can match keywords to the buyer’s journey. Broad keywords are used in pillar pages to draw in readers researching a topic. As your content gets more in-depth, the keywords become more precise. Our fictional pet food store may eventually guide readers to an article comparing foods for overweight cats. This comparison piece may then drive readers to a product page for low-calorie cat food.

4. Leverage Semantic SEO

Keywords are a starting point for creating your content, but focusing on a single keyword can make your writing stiff and robotic. That’s why semantic SEO is so great for customer experience. Search engines scan the words on a page and use semantic analysis to determine if content is relevant, which means you can weave related keywords and ideas into your copy.

With semantic SEO, you can focus on a topic rather than a keyword, adding depth and nuance to your piece. What are people who search for your primary keyword interested in? How can you add value to keep them on the page?

Start by using keywords that are important to your business, and add related, or semantic, keywords. Let’s go back to our pet food store example. According to Google, people searching for kitten nutrition ask a range of related questions. Should you feed your kitten wet or dry food? How much weight should a healthy kitten be gaining? When can you switch to adult food?

When you incorporate some of these questions into your piece, you address your initial topic and deliver value by covering it comprehensively. This anticipates your customers’ need for related information and takes advantage of opportunities to rank for other keywords.

5. Satisfy Google’s E-A-T Standards

Readers want content they can trust. To help deliver this kind of content, Google looks for signs that the person writing the content and the platform publishing it are credible. The more Google can trust your content as a reliable source, the more likely it is to rank highly.

As you’re writing content, make sure that you meet Google’s E-A-T requirements, which stands for:

• Expertise
• Authoritativeness
• Trustworthiness

We’ve already talked about how to establish expertise by using pillar pages and semantic SEO to create comprehensive content. You can also demonstrate trustworthiness by:

• Building links from respected sites to your site. Links from professional organizations, publications, influential bloggers and other authoritative websites can show that your site is also considered reputable.
• Using respected sources in your content
• Ensuring content is accurate and up to date
• Adding author bios
• Including a detailed “about us” page to demonstrate your expertise
• Adding ratings and testimonials
• Keeping your site’s security certificates up to date

Check our Google E-A-T SEO checklist for more tips on achieving authority across your entire website.

6. Add Internal Links

As you build out your content inventory, add internal links to guide readers through your site. Internal links help improve user experience, directing readers to important pages such as products or services and additional resources that may be of interest. These links help to keep customers on your site as they gather information to inform their purchasing decisions. They’re also helpful for highlighting older, but still informative, pages readers might otherwise miss from your archives.

In addition to making the site more useful for your customers, internal links give search engines context by showing how pages are related, especially if you use clear anchor text to describe where a link takes the reader.

Links are especially helpful for sharing authority between pages, which can help with ranking. This is known as link equity. A strong-performing page that Google already considers authoritative can pass on some of its authority to another page through links.

7. Make the Headline and Introduction Count

Even if your content contains the right kind of information users are seeking, you need to present it in a compelling way so that your audience wants to consume it. Pique your reader’s interest with a snappy headline and introduction. Try appealing to emotions, outlining what’s at stake, or using humor to grab their attention and entice them to read further. Accurately explain what readers will learn if they invest time in your piece, and deliver on your promises clearly and concisely in your copy.

8. Write Content That’s Easy to Read

Dense, hard-to-read content is likely to push readers back to the search results to find a competing site. Make your copy easy to scan and understand so users don’t have to struggle to find the answer to their query.

• Avoid jargon and write in an appealing style
• Use short paragraphs
• Add variety to your writing with sentences of different lengths
• Bring ideas to life with examples
• Organize ideas using headers and subheaders
• Use bullet points and numbered lists
• Choose an easy-to-read font
• Format the page with plenty of white space

You can still cover a topic in-depth and make it easy to read. Try summarizing complex information with illustrations and charts, and add alt-text so search engines can understand the content of an image. You can also provide an outline at the beginning of your article with links to key sections so readers can jump to applicable sections quickly.

9. Create Content That’s Better Than Competing Sites

SEO is competitive — at the same time you’re trying to land at the top of search results and convert customers, so are your competitors. The best way to beat competing sites is by offering something unique.

Remember, SEO is not just about keywords, so you need to deliver informative, original content that’s different from what everyone else is creating. Make your content valuable.

• Back up your information with statistics, studies and surveys
• Make sure research is current
• Present ideas in new ways, such as a shareable infographic
• Make use of videos and images
• Offer complimentary resources such as downloadable templates or checklists
• Let your brand voice and personality shine

10. Implement SEO Best Practices

Once you’ve hit the mark with your outstanding content, make sure search engines find it. Write a strong meta title and description, create descriptive URLs, check that your site loads quickly and is mobile-friendly, and ensure you’re following industry best practices on how to optimize content for SEO.

Don’t forget to create links from external sites back to your site to establish authority — through guest blogging, for example.

Elevate Your SEO Content Game

Successful SEO isn’t simply about plugging in keywords to reach the top of search results. An effective content strategy is based on an understanding of your customers and what they want to read. Drive your business towards its goals with optimized content that puts people first. Learn how Crowd Content’s SEO content writing services can supply you with publish-ready blog posts, landing pages and web content.

The post How to Create High-Quality Content for SEO appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

But managing numerous social media profiles across a half-dozen platforms entails numerous activities. These might include writing and scheduling social media posts, replying to comments, monitoring the success of social campaigns and more.

In other words, social media management is a lot of work.

Successful social media management requires constant attention. For many, it’s a full-time job. Fortunately, there are several tools available that help with your business’s social media presence. A social media management tool can help you maximize your social presence while minimizing your efforts.

What Are Social Media Management Tools?

Social media management tools simplify your social media presence across platforms. They give you a single platform to manage all of your profiles from. And they provide some excellent tools for getting the most from your social efforts. For big businesses, they’re incredibly useful. And for small teams and freelancers, they’re lifesavers.

Some of the most popular social media management solutions feature a variety of user-friendly features to help you manage your social presence. A few of the things they offer are:

• A central tool to manage profiles across social media networks
• Planning and scheduling social media postings
• Automated monitoring and moderation
• Improved analytics

Sounds good, right? It gets better.

The Benefits of Using Social Media Management Tools

The ability to see all your social media feeds in one location is likely the biggest advantage of social media management software. Being able to monitor customer conversations and campaign performance from a single platform saves time. And probably your sanity.

You can also save time by generating social media postings in advance and scheduling them to go live at a specific time. You won’t have to stop what you’re doing throughout the day to post on multiple platforms. You’ll also be able to better plan your content releases according to optimal posting times.

Stay Organized

Spreadsheets are popular among social media marketers for planning and managing their posts. But it’s far more effective to utilize a social media management tool. Most of them come with content planners to help you stay on top of things. They enable you to:

• Balance different types of social messaging
• Publish posts when they’re likely to receive the highest engagement
• Curate compelling content to share with your followers
• Plan for seasonal and release-specific messaging

These planners allow you to schedule posts when your target audience is most likely watching their feeds, ready to engage. In most cases, adjusting your schedule is as simple as dragging and dropping.

Analyze Social Performance

Another crucial component of successful social media management is analytics. Every major social platform offers analytics reporting that shows you how well your social marketing efforts are doing and where they need improving.

But the built-in analytics on individual platforms don’t show you the big picture of your broader social marketing efforts.

With a social media management tool, you can leverage cross-platform analytics to find out what content performs best across multiple networks. You can create custom reports based on the requirements you need rather than network-specific data.

Finally, maintaining consistency on every social network is a significant time sink. Social media management tools offer content libraries that can help keep things organized across networks. It also helps ensure your social presence is on-topic and brand consistent, regardless of the network.

Streamline Social Feeds and Messaging

Staying on top of the conversation is a cornerstone of effective social media marketing. It’s not just about engaging with your customers — you need to know what the conversation is surrounding your brand.

While many platforms allow you to filter conversations based on keywords, doing so across multiple platforms is a chore, to say the least. With a social management tool, you can listen for keywords across social networks, email lists and other channels, all from a single dashboard.

This kind of integration enables you to engage and do the following:

• Monitor post interactions, such as likes, shares and comments
• View and send messages
• Examine profiles and monitor follows
• Monitor and respond to conversations

All from a single platform. You’ll never find yourself bouncing through browser tabs again.

For bigger businesses, social management tools are invaluable. Not only do they consolidate messaging across platforms, but they also provide routing options to get each message to the appropriate person or department. All of which interface with your business’s CRM.

The 5 Best Social Management Tools for 2023

There are countless social media management tools in the wild. As is the case with other business solutions, choosing the right one depends on your brand’s needs.

Perhaps you need a tool to manage multiple profiles. Or maybe you’re more interested in content scheduling. On the other hand, you might want something that integrates with your CRM and provides in-depth insights.

Whether you’re a freelancer, a small business with ambitious marketing plans or a thriving enterprise, you’re covered. These five social media management tools have what you need.

The Best Overall: Sprout Social

Sprout Social offers robust publishing features, detailed analytics and a wealth of scheduling options. The platform supports all major social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest. All in an easy-to-use package that won’t break the budget.

Some of the biggest benefits that Sprout Social offers are:

• An excellent dashboard for managing social media postings, feeds and schedules
• Tools for social media optimization
• Reports and analytics for measuring user engagement and returns on investment
• Excellent scheduling tools for batching and posting content

Sprout Social also provides great social listening features, including tools for identifying influencers. There’s even CRM functionality focused on social media contacts. Impressive analytics capabilities and an easy-to-use interface round out Sprout Social’s offerings.

This makes it a fantastic all-in-one social media management program. With a commendable balance of cost, features and analytics, Sprout Social is a great choice for most small and medium-sized businesses.

Best for Freelancers and Small Businesses: SEMrush

SEMrush is best known as an SEO platform, but it also offers extremely capable social media management tools for all the major social networks. The social management tools cover posting across networks, including automated scheduling and content editing tools. There are also ad management features for Facebook and Instagram.

SEMrush’s social media tracker enables marketers to track user engagement across networks. It covers post reactions as well as mentions across each network. It also aggregates analytics data, so you can monitor performance from a single dashboard.

Being an SEO tool at heart, SEMrush is keen on competitive analysis. As such, its social media tools include features for monitoring your competitors to see what kind of posts they’re putting up and how often.

The biggest benefit of using SEMrush for social media management is its SEO integrations. You can manage your social media presence and your SEO efforts from a single tool. And integrations between the two are robust and seamless. Perfect for freelancers and small businesses with limited budgets and manpower.

Best for Analytics: Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a complete social media toolkit with some of the best analytics available. With support for over 20 social networks and an App Directory that provides even more, you’re never left wanting. The platform also provides integrations to other popular tools, such as Mailchimp, Zendesk and Canva.

The comprehensive analytics that Hootsuite offers are some of the best available, providing detailed tracking tools, customizable reports and performance metrics. They help paint a clear picture of your social marketing efforts by pulling from over 200 metrics. Once generated, you can export the reports to Excel, PowerPoint or PDF to share with colleagues.

It’s worth mentioning that adding analytics capabilities increases the platform’s price. But for businesses that depend on social media for most of their marketing efforts, the cost is worth it.

Best for Automation: HubSpot

HubSpot is an all-in-one solution geared toward enterprises. Along with its social media marketing offerings, it provides SEO management, a CRM platform and even email services.

The biggest selling point of HubSpot is its full line of marketing integration and automation tools. While you can certainly manage your social presence with ease, the platform also has tools for:

• Editing and creating landing pages
• Content management
• Lead management
• Automated content posting on your website

HubSpot’s bulk scheduling feature makes queuing up and posting to various networks a breeze. With a provided template, you can add your batched content, select a post schedule, choose which networks to post to and select your campaigns. The template even shows you the character count of each post. When you’re ready, you can drag it back over to HubSpot and you’re all done.

From social media to web conversions, HubSpot lets you optimize every step of your sales funnel. It’ll even help you create targeted CTAs to improve ROI. There’s also full Canva integration, which allows marketers to design attractive images with a few clicks. For full-scope marketing efficiency, HubSpot is difficult to beat.

Most Affordable: Buffer

If you’re looking for a tool that’s a little less complex and a little more affordable, Buffer might be the one for you. Since it’s one of the few tools that offers a free plan, it’s a great solution for freelancers. It’s also a great option for younger businesses just getting into social media marketing.

Despite its low cost, Buffer still provides a lot of value. It supports all the major networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest. In addition to accessing all your feeds from the platform, you can schedule all your social media posts using a full-featured content scheduler. There’s also an optimization tool for hashtags and mentions across platforms.

A standout feature of Buffer is its available browser extension for scheduling posts. With the extension installed, you can click a browser button, compose an update and add it to a queue.

Who Should Use Social Media Management Tools?

If you spend more than a few hours per week managing social media, a social media management tool is a good idea. If you spend more than a few hours per day doing so, you need a social media management tool.

These tools are excellent for freelancers and one-person marketing teams — people who are accustomed to wearing multiple hats. When you’re juggling multiple tasks across numerous platforms, simplification and automation are essential. This gives you time to think about strategy rather than dealing with daily busy work such as posting and content creation.

For small businesses, social media management tools offer big benefits. If you have a marketing team, these tools help them collaborate better and more securely across platforms. They also give smaller businesses the power to run with the big dogs, so to speak. Even if you don’t have the staff hours to do so, you can run campaigns with daily posts.

Social media management enables secure cross-platform collaboration, CRM integration, message routing, and more for larger companies. They also provide permission controls so businesses with compliance concerns can keep PR incidents to a minimum.

The bottom line is that social media management tools provide more than just a single platform to manage your social profiles. All the tools listed here offer advanced scheduling features for managing posts. More importantly, they provide integrated analytics that can synergize your marketing efforts across networks.

In marketing, where even small improvements can equate to big returns, social media management tools are invaluable.

Conclusion

Your social media presence has a big impact on your brand. Social media management tools give you the power to manage, automate and optimize that presence without making it your full-time job. They’ll also provide you with insights to help amplify your brand’s impact and grow your business.

If you’re looking for other ways to free up your time so you can focus on the bigger picture, let Crowd Content help. Our team of professional freelance writers can provide you with in-depth articles, engaging blog posts, compelling web copy and more. We’ll even write your social media posts for you. In other words, we’ll supercharge your content strategy. Go ahead and take a look at what we offer or get in touch with us to find out more.

The post Here Are the 5 Best Social Media Management Tools for 2023 appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

What Is Keyword Search Intent?

In simplest terms, search intent is the purpose of the user’s query. When people use Google and other search engines, they have a goal in mind. They may want to learn more about a topic, solve a problem, buy something or find a specific page on a website. If the content on your pages matches the user’s search intent, you’re more likely to make a sale, add a new subscriber to your email list or convince the user to bookmark or share your site.

Types of Search Intent

SEMrush has identified four types of keyword search intent: transactional, commercial, informational and navigational.

Transactional User Intent

Transactional means the user wants to complete some type of action. The user might want to fill out your contact form, sign up for your email list or contact your business by telephone. These actions bring people into your sales funnel and give you the opportunity to convert them into paying customers.

Commercial Intent

When it comes to generating revenue, commercial intent is probably the most valuable. Users with commercial intent are interested in buying a product or service. They may not buy from you the first time they visit your website, but they might download your lead magnet or take advantage of a free trial.

Informational Intent

Users with informational intent want to solve a problem, answer a question or learn more about a topic that interests them. “How to do SEO” and “Why do zebras have stripes?” are examples of searches with informational intent.

Navigational Search Intent

People with navigational intent want to get to a specific website, not just any website that answers their question, solves their problem or helps them complete a purchase. For example, someone might type in Panera to find the corporate website for Panera Bread.

Matching the User’s Intent

Matching the user’s intent starts with keyword research. In many cases, it’s easy to understand what the user needs. For example, “buy mystery books” and “pet food coupon code” align with commercial intent because it’s clear the user wants to buy something or obtain a discount on a future purchase. Someone doing an informational search might enter “types of orchids” or “how to remove stains.” Keep an eye out for these signal words when you’re coming up with a list of keywords to target.

Identifying Keyword Search Intent

Some keywords are a little more difficult to figure out. The user might want information, or they might want to buy something. There are a few ways to determine the true intent of a search. The first is to contact your existing customers and ask them what keywords they use when they search for products, services and information related to your niche. You could also send out an anonymous survey to gather data from as many customers as possible.

The second way to identify a user’s search intent is to check out your competition. Type the target keyword into your search engine and look at the top-ranking pages. What kind of content do they have? How have they incorporated the keyword into their content? You don’t want to copy from your competitors, but you can get some good ideas by reading their content and figuring out what they’re doing to match user search intent.

Finally, using Google’s autocomplete feature and checking out the “People also ask” box on the search results page can give you valuable insight into a searcher’s true intent. Autocomplete makes predictions based on the text you type, making it easier to find out what terms people are using. For example, typing in “best shoes” brings up predictions for “best shoes for plantar fasciitis,” “best shoes for standing all day” and “best shoes for nurses.” Based on these suggestions, you might surmise that many searchers are interested in buying supportive shoes that can relieve pain or help with specific foot problems. The “People also ask” box displays questions that are closely related to the user’s search intent.

Optimizing Your Content

Developing New Content

Now that you understand the search intent of the people in your target audience, it’s time to optimize your content. One of the best ways to do this is to create landing pages that are optimized for commercial and transactional keywords. People “land” on these pages when they click links in emails, online advertisements and other online locations. On a typical landing page, you offer something valuable to entice the user to give you their contact information. Some business owners offer discount codes or coupons, while others promise to deliver white papers or case studies via email.

Blogging is also a great way to deliver content that matches the user intent for your target keywords. For best results, the primary keyword should appear in the post title, a few times in the body of the post and in at least one header. The title of the post is your first opportunity to convince the reader that your page matches their search intent, so it should be clear and concise. “A Guide to Buying Nutritional Supplements Online” is much better than “Nutritional Supplement Tips” because it’s likely to appeal to users with commercial intent and informational intent. It also clearly states what type of content you’ll provide.

Revising Existing Content

If you have existing content that doesn’t align with your target keywords’ search intent, go back and revise it. You may need to update an informational page to match a user’s commercial intent, for example. Revising content can be time-consuming, but it’s important to update your pages as much as possible. Just changing a few words here and there isn’t likely to change the content enough to make it match a different type of search intent. At Crowd Content, we have teams of experienced SEO content writers available to help you create new pages or update existing ones.

Changing the formatting on your existing pages can also help you do a better job matching user search intent. Incorporating keywords into your page titles, headers and descriptions give potential customers a quick overview of what each page has to offer, making it easier to convince them that the content meets their needs.

Benefits of Matching Search Intent

Matching search intent has several benefits for your business. Google’s predictive tools make it easy for the search engine to understand if your optimized content is closely related to other queries. If you focus on matching user intent, your site may show up in the results for more searches. Optimizing your content based on keyword search intent also helps reduce bounce rates. If a visitor comes to your website and the content doesn’t match their intent, they’ll probably click the back button. Once this happens, it can be difficult to convince them to come back. If the content matches their search intent, they’re more likely to stay a while and read what you have to say.

In some cases, optimizing your content for search intent makes it more likely you’ll be featured in Google’s snippets. These snippets have premium positioning at the top of the search results, making your site much more visible to potential customers. Finally, you’re likely to get more page views if a visitor sees you’ve made an effort to match their search intent. For example, a visitor might enter your site on a landing page, click over to a blog post and then visit your contact page to submit a request for information.

Tools for Online Marketing

Online marketing tools make it much easier to identify appropriate keywords, determine the user’s intent for those keywords and optimize your content to appeal to your site’s visitors. The SEMrush tool is one of the most comprehensive as it helps users identify appropriate keywords, determine the user’s search intent for each keyword and optimize their content accordingly. SEMrush also takes the guesswork out of building links, creating a content marketing campaign and analyzing traffic.

Wrapping Up

Quality content is one of the most important aspects of a successful website. Blog posts, articles, case studies and other types of content position you as an expert and can help you match each user’s keyword search intent, giving you more opportunities to generate revenue. If you’d rather focus on SEO and web development, Crowd Content’s experienced writers are ready to create reader-friendly content that gets results

The post Optimizing Your Content to Match User Keyword Search Intent appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

How Pinterest Affects SEO

Is Pinterest good for SEO? The short answer is yes. Because Pinterest has evolved into a digital search engine, it can be a great source of organic traffic if you understand how to use it. One of the biggest reasons Pinterest should be a component of your SEO strategy is because the site has more than 450 million active monthly users. If even a tiny percentage of these users see one of your pins, you have the opportunity to drive more traffic to your website than ever before.

Another reason Pinterest is good for SEO is that many users are already primed to buy something or request more information about a product or service. If these users see your pins, they’re more likely to visit your website than a search engine user who doesn’t want to buy anything or isn’t sure what they want to do. You can take advantage of their intent by incorporating buyer keywords into your pins and descriptions. A buyer keyword is a specific word or phrase that someone uses when they want to buy a product or service.

Finally, Pinterest provides an important opportunity that other social networks don’t: the ability to create product pins. When you write a Facebook post, you can mention your products and services, but there’s no way to create individual product pages and promote them to other Facebook users. Product pins allow merchants to highlight their products, making it easier to convert Pinterest views into sales. In some cases, it’s even possible for customers to purchase products without leaving the Pinterest website, eliminating an extra step in the purchase process and making it more likely the user will complete the transaction.

Improving SEO With Pinterest

Now that you understand how Pinterest affects SEO, it’s time to create an account. It’s best to register as a business so you can access Pinterest’s scheduling, advertising and analytics tools. When it’s time to choose a user name, the decision you make can have a big effect on your SEO results. It may be tempting to choose something clever or quirky, but you should create a user name based on the needs of your target audience.

If you’re promoting a cookbook, for example, you may want to include a keyword like “chicken recipes” or “slow cooker meals” to help people understand what your content is about. Including a relevant keyword can also help drive traffic to your profile, making your Pinterest SEO strategy even more effective.

Setting up a Pinterest Profile

After you create your account, it’s time to write an attention-getting profile optimized with relevant keywords. For best results, your company logo and any other images you use should have the same logo, colour scheme and other elements as the photos on your website and other social media profiles. Using the same design elements across all platforms ensures customers know what to expect from your brand.

The profile header should contain your formal business name, but there’s a trick you can use to make this headline more effective for SEO. After your company name, add a vertical bar (the | character) followed by a keyword related to what you do. If you operate a plus-size boutique, for example, your profile headline will be more effective for SEO if it reads “Daisy’s Boutique | Stylish Clothing for Plus-Size Women” instead of just “Daisy’s Boutique.”

Conducting Keyword Research

General keyword research software isn’t as effective for Pinterest optimization as it is for identifying relevant keywords for your website. Fortunately, Pinterest has built-in tools to help you understand what kind of information Pinterest users want to find. For example, the Guided Search tool is similar to Google’s autocomplete feature, which makes keyword suggestions based on what you type into the search bar. A search for “sofa” brings up suggestions like “sofa set designs,” “sofa table decor” and “sofa design living rooms.”

You can also use Pinterest topics to identify keywords that are relevant to your audience members. When you look at the category page, it lists more than 30 topics, from art to women’s fashion. Click your desired category to look at some of the most popular pins; you can get keyword ideas from the subtopics and pin titles. The wedding category, for example, has subtopics for wedding decorations, bridal party attire, wedding cakes and wedding flowers. Within the wedding decorations subtopic, you’ll find pins focused on gold wedding tablescapes, affordable wedding favors, wedding photo display ideas and rooftop wedding ideas, all of which make great keywords.

Verifying Your Website

Claiming your website can help you take advantage of additional SEO benefits. In addition to giving you access to Pinterest analytics, verifying your site also ensures your profile photo appears with the pins that come from your site. Once you’re a verified merchant, a blue checkmark will appear next to the website URL in your profile, increasing trust and making Pinterest users feel more comfortable clicking a link to your site or buying one of your products and services.

Pinterest Marketing Tips to Improve Your SEO

Once you set up your profile and determine which keywords to target, how you use Pinterest can make or break your SEO strategy. Following these tips can help you drive organic traffic to your website and bring positive attention to your business.

Pin Frequency

Pinterest isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it platform. For best results, you should be pinning several times per day, as every pin represents a new opportunity to connect with a potential customer. It’s natural to be concerned about pinning too much, but remember that Pinterest is very different from Facebook, Twitter and other platforms. You won’t be overwhelming potential customers by posting multiple pins per day. Try to space out your pins so you have a steady flow of new content, rather than a quick burst of content that users may forget about within a few hours.

Keywords in Descriptions

Pin Descriptions

When you create a pin, you have an opportunity to write a description that captures attention and helps optimize your content for the search engines. Fortunately, Pinterest allows you to write several sentences, making it easier to incorporate relevant keywords and help users understand what your pins are all about.

First and foremost, your description should be aimed at helping readers. Keywords are important, but they aren’t helpful if they make it difficult for people to understand what you’re trying to say. Your description should also be written in a positive tone. You don’t want potential customers to think you have a negative outlook or spend your time bashing people online. Every pin description should contain the following:

• Your brand name, preferably in the first sentence
• Keywords that relate to the pin or board content
• Valuable information about the topic
• A request for the reader to do something (click, read, learn, etc.)

As with any other type of content you write, your descriptions should be free of typos, spelling mistakes and grammar errors. If proofreading is one of your weak areas, have an employee or a trusted friend review each description before you publish it.

Board Descriptions

Pinterest also allows you to write a description for each board you create. These descriptions appear just below your profile picture when someone views one of your boards, so they’re prime real estate. Each board description should contain some of the same information as your pin descriptions: your brand name, relevant keywords and a clear explanation of the content.

You should also describe your target audience by explaining who’ll benefit from viewing the pins on your boards. If you run a budgeting website, for example, the description for your meal planning board might be aimed at busy moms who want to spend no more than $2 per serving on each family meal.

Content Quality

Keyword-rich pin and board descriptions are great, but they can only get you so far. You need to focus on writing high-quality content on Pinterest, on your website and on your other social media profiles. If a user clicks a Pinterest link and ends up on a page lacking substance, they may not trust you enough to buy from you. Publishing quality content can also help you reduce your bounce rate—the percentage of people who land on one of your pages and leave without viewing other pages on the site—improving your search engine rankings.

As always, it’s important to meet the needs of your audience members. Not all visitors prefer the same types of content, so try to publish a mix of blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, reports and e-books. If you don’t have a professional writer on staff, hire an experienced writer or editor to write content or review your drafts. Taking this extra step can help you position your brand as one that always puts its audience members first.

Is Pinterest Good for SEO? Best Practices to Follow

Like any other endeavour, Pinterest is most effective when you follow established best practices. These practices can help you improve your search engine rankings, position yourself as an expert in your industry and better meet the needs of your audience.

Image Orientation

Something as simple as image orientation can make a big difference in how people perceive your pins. That’s why you should use vertical images. Otherwise, the image may get cut off, making it difficult for Pinterest users to see what you were trying to share.

Business Logos

Pinterest is an essential component of your branding strategy, so don’t miss out on the opportunity to share your brand image with users. Add your business logo to every pin so audience members start to associate your brand with your content. Just be careful not to put it in the bottom right corner of a pin; this is where Pinterest puts its product icons.

Linking Practices

The purpose of using Pinterest for SEO is to drive organic traffic to your website. To do this, you must make sure the content on your linked pages matches the content on your website pages. Imagine if you were using Pinterest, clicked a link on a pin about the best shoes for flat feet and ended up on a page about holiday decorations. You’d probably be confused, and you might even get annoyed with the pin creator for sending you on a wild goose chase. Make sure the links you include in each pin are highly relevant to the reader’s intent.

Using Pinterest to Your Advantage

Pinterest has made it much easier for business owners to compete with large corporations when it comes to building their audiences and driving organic traffic to their websites. Pinterest can also help you build trust with audience members, making them more likely to buy from you.

If you have a small marketing team, it can be difficult to find time to create several new pins each day and update them as needed. The expert freelance writers at Crowd Content can help. We provide a variety of writing services, from creating social media posts to helping business owners improve their search engine rankings with quality content. Crowd Content also has subject matter experts to help you with keyword research or fact-check your content before you publish it.

The post Is Pinterest Good for SEO? How to Use Pinterest to Drive Traffic appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

The experts behind content analysis tool Yoast say a standard page should be at least 300 words long and cornerstone content should start around 900 words. HubSpot looked at its data and puts the ideal blog length at 2,100 to 2,400 words. Widely ranging expert numbers do little to help you understand the real answer to how long should a blog post be, but we’ve got actionable advice to help.

How Long Should a Blog Post Be?

The answer is: as long as it needs to be to meet your objectives. Understanding why you’re writing blog posts is the first step in determining the best word count.

One of the problems with numbers published by expert SEO and marketing firms is that they tend to arrive at those answers in the same way. They look at pages showing up in the top spot on Google, figure out the average word count of those pages and consider that a good place to start.

But word count doesn’t directly impact your SEO performance. You could write 2,000 words and never show up on the first search results page if you’re not attending to other factors. And SEO performance isn’t your only objective, so it’s important to take all your goals into account when determining word counts.

We reached out to marketers to find out what word counts are working best for them for different objectives. Find your main goal for content in the list below and see what word count ranges might help support it.

1. Ranking on Search Engine Results Pages: 2,000 to 2,500+ Words … Usually

Writing blog posts that rank on Google is very important for most businesses. When considering ranking content, it’s important to realize that you’re competing with other content that already ranks. With that in mind, you need to look at a number of different factors:

1. Word Count
2. Matching Search Intent
3. Topic Comprehensiveness
4. Visual Appeal
5. Behavioral Metrics (bounce rate, time on page)

You should always focus on writing for the user first, so matching their search intent and comprehensively covering the topic is key. But, there’s a lot of evidence that ensuring your content is longer than what’s already ranking can help you rank better.

Our advice is to know what word count the top search results clock in at and ensure you’re at least in the ballpark.

How Do You Benchmark Your Content?

The simplest way to find out how many words blog posts that rank well in Google are is to look at the top results for your targeted search term and note their word counts.

That’s also the most tedious way.

Fortunately there are many great tools available that automate benchmarking for you, suggest word counts, and also give you reports on what topics to cover to deliver comprehensive content.

All of these tools can help with your benchmarking:

• MarketMuse
• Ink
• Surfer SEO
• SEMrush
• Content Harmony

They all work slightly differently and produce different output, so be sure to find the one that works best for your workflow.

But, How Many Words Should I Really Write?

The old “it depends” answer isn’t always satisfying, so we will mention some benchmarks we think are worthwhile.

When it comes to showing up in SERPs, Goldie says 2,000 to 2,500 is a sweet spot, saying studies have shown diminishing results as content drops below the 2,500 mark. But he was quick to point out that there are always numerous outliers here — that means content that performs well consistently falls outside this word count range. So, it’s important to note you don’t have to write 2,500 words to drive SEO performance for a blog.

That being said, Cannon gets even more specific. “The best-ranking articles on Google are most usually 2,450 words. If you want to place well on search engines and get thousands of novel readers per month, this is the most suitable length to write,” he says.

But Cannon also has caveats. “Make sure you write regarding a topic that audiences are actually searching for.”

2. Getting Social Shares: 1,000+ Words

Julian Goldie, CEO of the Goldie Agency, specializes in helping websites rank higher on Google. He says, “Studies have found an association between content that’s 1,000 words or more and the number of social media shares those posts collect.”

According to Goldie, content that gets a lot of social shares is engaging and draws the user in, but it’s not too long. People can read it in a short amount of time, increasing the number of people who get through the entire post and think to share it with their friends.

One thing to keep in mind here is that content with great visuals is more likely to be shared as well. Don’t just add 1,000 words of text and expect visitors to click your share button. Add interesting images, graphics and interactive elements to boost your shares.

Some of the most shared types of content on social are very visual heavy like listicles and quizzes. You can definitely learn from their example.

3. Building Links: 750-1,000 Words

Goldie said that research has found that, “blogs with approximately 1,000 words gained more backlinks than their much more pointed and much longer counterparts.”

He points out that word counts ranging right around the 1k mark are succinct while offering enough to be valuable. And value is what gets people to link to your pages. You’ve explained something they want to share with others, provided expert opinions that are unique or helpful or offered entertainment that can’t be found elsewhere.

Will Cannon, CEO of Signaturely, says you can go a little lower with word count and get the same results if your posts are high quality. He points out that around 750 words is the “standard length for professional journalism,” and says that he, “finds it’s rather good for obtaining links from different bloggers.”

4. Drive Comments and On-Page Engagement: 75-600 words

If you want to drive on-page engagement to create community or shepherd people down your funnel, shorter content may be better. Cannon says that very short posts are great for enticing discussions. These aren’t going to drive a lot of social shares and Cannon admits that they’re terrible for SEO. But when you leave things unsaid, your readers are likely to show up to pitch in.

As you get toward the higher word counts in this range, such as 300-600, you get content that drives comments as well as potential for social shares and SEO.

5. To Build Authority

If you want to build authority in your niche, you need to write content that’s long enough to cover the topic in a user-friendly and effective way but short enough to be as accessible as possible. Write as much as you need to comprehensively cover your topic and no more. Fluff can destroy user experience.

Jeff Proctor, the co-founder of DollarSprout, provides a concrete example to demonstrate that the piece with the most authority isn’t always the longest post. “At the time of this writing,” he says, “the number one result for ‘federal tax brackets’ is 755 words. The number seven result is 1,230 words. The number one result is more user-friendly and less confusing.”

It’s interesting to note that often times when you aim to build authority you’re sharing some unique knowledge and expertise you have. Often there won’t be a ton of existing content that also has this information, so you might not need to focus on word count as much.

6. For Sales Enablement

Sales enablement content is any content that helps your Sales team nudge prospects towards converting. That could include blog posts, case studies, videos, white papers, testimonials, and many others.

Good content that addresses customer challenges and pain points is like gold to your Sales team. By having blog posts for each of your target persona’s biggest pain points you can empower your sales team to help prospects understand how to solve these challenges (hopefully by leveraging your service!).

That can really help your team nudge prospects towards becoming customers.

When creating sales enablement content, word count tends to be less of a factor than with other objectives. Here, you really just want to ensure you’re writing enough to comprehensively tackle the pain point you’re addressing. That said, nine times out of ten you’re still going to want a reasonably long blog post and want to understand how it stacks up to competing content.

8. For Sharing News

One common type of blog post is when you share company news with your audience. This can often overlap with the other objectives we’ve listed here (you want social shares, people to comment on your post, etc) but more often than not you’re not competing with any other existing content out there.

The news is all about specifically happening at your company. So, just write as much as you need to convey that news while encouraging your audience to comment, share, and interact with it.

Word Count Isn’t the Only Factor That Matters

Proctor says, “It’s no longer an arms race among publishers for who can create the longest, most in-depth piece of content but rather who can create the best experience for a user’s search query. These are not always the same thing. People don’t like sifting through a 3,000-word post when their question can be answered in a well-constructed” shorter post.

To sum up his comments: User experience, comprehensiveness, and quality count more than the number of words you’re using.

How to Choose Word Counts for Your Post

Avoid choosing a one-size-fits-all length for your posts. Choose word counts for each post or each type of post. You might start by:

• Looking at the top results for your target keywords. See if there’s a trend in how many words are being used.
• Using an SEO or content optimization tool such as MarketMuse, Ink, Surfer SEO or SEMrush to get recommendations about how long your word count should be.
• Choosing a word count range from this post that aligns with your main objectives for a post.
• Understanding your budget and how much you have to pay per word for the quality you want.

But don’t tie yourself down to those answers. If you can cover your entire topic in a high-quality, user-friendly way with more or less words, start there. You can always come back and make changes to your content to add or remove word count in the future.

Am I Competing?

We’ve mentioned competitive benchmarking several times in this post, but it bears repeating. You should always ask yourself if your blog post will compete with other existing content.

If it is, like when you’re trying to rank for SEO, then you absolutely have to understand the competitive landscape for your content. That means understanding what word counts posts that are doing well feature, but you also need to look at other elements as well.

If you’re not competing, like in the case of writing a post about a company news item, then you don’t necessarily need to focus on word count as much.

Most Posts Have Multiple Objectives

We’ve listed out multiple reasons why you’d want to write a blog post here. Just remember – they’re not mutually exclusive. Most posts satisfy multiple objectives.

Focus on understanding what objectives are most important to you and prioritize writing an appropriate word count for those. For content where you’ll be competing with other content, understanding the competition should really guide your targeted word count.

Fill Your Word Count Goals With Quality

Whether you’re looking for 75-word pithy posts or 3,000-word thought leadership, Crowd Content can help. Reach out to find out how we can help or sign up and start placing blog post orders today.

The post How Long Should a Blog Post Really Be? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

From unraveling the mysteries of SEO jargon and revealing the best practices to steering clear of the antiquated tactics that could tank your rankings, we’ve compiled everything you need to know to optimize your content for SEO.

SEO and Content Marketing

Search engine optimization (SEO for short) is intricately linked to content marketing. Quality content is essential for good SEO because it attracts search engines and readers alike. Without optimizing your content with the right keywords and SEO practices, you’ll likely end up in internet limbo. Optimized content reaches more people and establishes your site as a valuable resource, improving your rankings and visibility online.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

SEO is the art of making your site and content more discoverable on various search engines. Google Search is the most common, with all SEO pros pining for the top-ranked position. Generally, the higher your content ranks on the SERPs, the larger the share of search traffic you get.

Written content, such as blogs and general web copy, is the most common and recognizable home for optimized text. But you can apply SEO to almost any platform with a search function. YouTube, Amazon Marketplace, the App Store — you can use SEO on each one to help hoist your content to the top of search results.

Many tactics go into SEO (more than we can get into here), but there’s one central tenet: Well-optimized content is the most valuable ranking factor out there.

And it makes sense. Google wants to show searchers the best possible content to help them satisfy their search intent. It’s all part of Google’s quality rater guidelines; Google prioritizes content that showcases experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. So, above all, people-first content is where it’s at, and Google keeps tabs on your application of E-E-A-T principles using search engine spiders (web crawlers).

“Google thinks more and more like a website visitor with every core update. So, with that being said, your content needs to be thoughtful and helpful to actual readers. Don’t write for the algorithm; write for human beings.” 

Joshua Pelletier, Content Director, BarBend

What are search engine spiders?

There’s no need to start spinning out over the next iteration of Matrix Sentinels — search engine spiders are entirely benign. Also known as “web crawlers,” search engine spiders are bots that filter through website content. For example, Google predictably calls its web crawler Googlebot, while Bing chose to name its standard web crawler Bingbot.

These autonomous programs sift through endless content and use a massive list of criteria to determine the best content. To make them happy, create quality content that comprehensively covers the search intent you’re targeting. Crawlers are ultimately trying to determine what human readers find most valuable, so in simple terms, you need to give the people what they want.

Why Optimize for SEO?

In the 21st century, consumers use the internet and, more specifically, search engines to find and buy products and services. To compete in the online marketplace, your site has to appear in the SERPs when people type relevant keywords into the search engine.

Imagine you go to Disneyland. The park is packed, and you mistakenly told friends you’d meet them “by the kiosk selling mouse ears.” That doesn’t exactly narrow things down, does it? SEO is like dropping a giant pin with your location. But instead of giving the roadmap to friends, you’re giving consumers everything they need to find you ASAP — before they find other friends and forget about you entirely.

The top-ranked site on the SERPS receives almost 40% of all the clicks. The site in position No. 2 gets 18.7%, and the third-ranked site walks about with just over 10% of the SERP traffic. After that, numbers fall off considerably.

The more SEO-optimized pages on your site, the more opportunities you have to earn significant traffic. So, creating optimized SEO content covering all the topics and search terms your buyers use is incredibly valuable.

SEO Best Practices

It’s time to dive into SEO content strategy. These are the legitimate techniques you can use to make your high-quality content stand out in the SERPs.

Start with a great SEO content strategy

Excellent SEO content doesn’t come out of nowhere. To optimize content for SEO, you have to start with a strong SEO strategy. Far too many otherwise talented people create articles and blog posts on the fly and try to optimize them afterward. More often than not, they end up with clumsy content.

You can avoid this inelegant scenario if you plan ahead, use proven keyword research tools, and weave SEO into your content as you go along.

• Research your audience before you begin. You can use a survey provider such as SurveyMonkey or Typeform to find out what your target consumer base wants.
• Conduct exhaustive keyword research. Once you know what your audience wants, determine their search terms. This can be as simple as using Google’s Keyword Planner or more advanced through SEO tools such as Moz, Semrush, or Ahrefs. You should know all the keywords your audience uses and what stage of the buyer’s journey they apply to. 
• Focus on creating comprehensive content. Your keywords should help you develop a list of core topics to be covered, but take it a step further and look at latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords to discover related topics that are almost, if not equally, as vital. Say your primary keyword is “Las Vegas.” Conceptually related semantic keywords might include “Sin City,” “casinos,” “hotels,” and “Super Bowl.” For a shortcut, check out tools like Ink and MarketMuse that provide all-in-one, AI-driven research, audit, and optimization interfaces.
• Write long-form articles. Blog posts should ideally be between 1,500 and 2,500 words long. But that number can shift depending on search intent, the topic demands, and your content goals. Pieces that top 3,000 words get the most organic traffic, but that length isn’t always ideal for other formats. Use tools like Ink, MarketMuse, or Surfer SEO to determine the word count you need to hit to compete with existing search results.
• Stay on task. Longer articles rank well, but only if they’re thorough and avoid fluff or filler. Writing for the sake of writing won’t win you an audience. Writing a shorter piece packed with value is better than fluffing your way to the maximum word count.
• Create supporting visuals. Your content shouldn’t be a wall of text. That’s as daunting for readers as it is boring. In fact, content is reported to be 43% more persuasive when accompanied by visuals. Content with infographics or illustrations increases the overall appeal, legibility, and value. Images can even rank with Google Image Search if you optimize the file name and alt text.
• Include a clear call to action. Readers need to know what to do next, so point them in the right direction with a prominent call to action. This can help drive leads and conversions, while keeping visitors on your site and indirectly boosting your SEO.

Use keywords effectively

Keywords are critical to SEO. Forget everything you learned in 2003, including the idea that keyword stuffing has any place in modern times. Instead, follow widely agreed-upon basics:

• Use your primary keyword within the first 100 words and in one H2.
• Repeat the primary keyword a few more times in your content, but don’t go overboard.
• Include your primary keyword in your meta title, meta description, and page title.
• Work in 1-2 mentions of secondary keywords and related terms as naturally as possible. (Using one of these in an H2, too, doesn’t hurt.)

NOTE – Remember your primary keyword is the one that best represents the topic and search intent for which you’re crafting your content.

Today’s Google algorithms recognize synonyms and ignore stop words (a, the, which, at, on, etc.), so you can modify your search terms to make them more readable.

• “Piano lessons Philadelphia” becomes “piano lessons in Philadelphia.”

You can also change keywords in other subtle ways without losing Google points, like this:

• “Shortest route New York to San Diego” becomes “shortest route between New York and San Diego.”

Effective keyword use extends to image text, including alt text and captions.

“Don’t forget about secondary keywords. Secondary keywords allow search engines to further categorize text. They provide additional semantic information that helps algorithms make judgements about relevancy and topic.”

Kim Smith, Digital Marketing Manager, Clarify Capital

When looking for LSI keywords and additional topics needed to make your content comprehensive, you’ll find more than you can realistically focus on. Many SEO tools simply check to see if you’ve included these keywords because there seems to be a correlation with improved rankings. But the smarter way to approach this is to identify the subtopics they represent and create content to address them.

This hub-and-spoke approach adds value for the reader and naturally gets your related keywords in. Content strategists map this out by creating master pillar pages linked to cluster content that supports the main idea. Your pillar page might be about DIY weddings, while cluster pages cover hiring entertainment, making our decorations, and sourcing flowers.

Create high-quality content

Readers stay engaged with high-quality content. You might call it “sticky” content — it’s unique, entertaining, inspiring, and educational enough to keep your target audience glued to the page.

High-quality content usually comes bearing a few trademarks. 

• Relevant to your product or service
• Comprehensive and trustworthy
• Filled with practical advice
• Error-free and easy to read

“Get specific with your content and the value it delivers to your specific audience.”

Marin = Perez, Director of Content Marketing, Kajabi

If that sounds like a callback to the E-E-A-T standards we discussed earlier, that’s no coincidence. Googlebot can tell the difference between churnalism and content created by a thought leader. To ensure you make the grade:

• Pay attention to structure. Dynamic headers and subheads containing strategically placed keywords speak volumes.
• Meet your audience on their level. Lose the industry jargon, and speak plainly to your readers.
• Make your content shareable. Put social media buttons in a prominent place to make sharing easier.
• Use bullets and numbered lists. Organize your content and make it snackable with bullets, numbered lists, and other typographical elements.
• Compare your article with current SERP winners. Beat your competition by comparing your new content with Google and Bing rankings. Look for content gaps, and create content to fill them.

Use on-page content optimization 

High-quality content and SEO are decent on their own, but use them together and on-page content optimization can turn masterful prose into a true moneymaker.

• Use keywords organically. Don’t overdo keywords. Instead, use them naturally within the body of your content and in H1s and H2s.
• Know that location (and local SEO) is everything. Include location-specific phrases in H1s and your body content to optimize your site for local readers. Once Googlebot notices, your site will appear in geo-specific SERPs.
• Create scannable content. Break your body copy into digestible chunks to keep readers interested. Avoid excessively long paragraphs, avoid complex language, and keep sentences under 25 words. Organizational assists, including bulleted lists and H3 subheaders, can help with scannability, too.
• Don’t confuse the bot. Headings are essential, but you need to use them properly. You only need one H1 on your page, and headers should always follow the numerical hierarchy — H1, H2, and H3s when needed.
• Apply schema markup. When you publish, take the time to add schema markup to your content. This structured data gives you a better shot at getting your content into Google’s featured snippets.
• Interlink appropriately. Your content should be organized in topic clusters, and eventually, you should have content for every topic. Include keyword-rich internal links between these pages.

“Add structure. Use structured markup (schema) to ensure your classes and related product pages, as well as business information (name, address, phone number), is properly formatted for Google and other engines to index properly.”

Kent Lewis, President and Founder, Anvil Media

Outdo The Competition

Every piece of content you publish competes with a slew of content from other brands that are targeting the same search terms you are. You need to create the best possible content on a topic to stand out.

When looking at the competitive landscape, evaluate what the current top search results feature in terms of:

• Word count
• Topics covered
• Content types (text, images, video, etc.)
• Schema markup

Several tools can automate this research and score your content against your competitors so you know how you’re doing. The best ones to check out include MarketMuse, Ink, Content Harmony, and Surfer SEO.

E-E-A-T considerations

Google’s E-E-A-T update has been an industry-wide game-changer. For content to rank, it needs to showcase:

• Experience: Highlight first-hand, real-world experience related to the topic at hand. If you’re writing about pet health, you should have a pet and have gone through some of the things you discuss on the page.
• Expertise: Google will love your pet health page even more if the author has relevant expertise — perhaps a byline from an actual veterinarian or a well-known pet health guru.
• Authoritativeness: Position yourself as the go-to source for pet health. How your page is put together and the content you share should feel reliable. In other words, do readers believe you’re legit?
• Trustworthiness: Content can’t be purely editorial. Use proper attributions, source citations, and linked statistics to prove your site is informative, accurate, and safe. (Up-to-date site security certifications can help with the latter.)

You might demonstrate E-E-A-T by:

• Writing a detailed writer bio that demonstrates why you’re an expert on the subject
• Including links to authoritative sources in your content
• Seeking out quotes from other experts 
• Featuring data points from reputable sources
• Having your content fact-checked by a subject matter expert to ensure 100% accuracy

Optimize for domain authority

Domain authority looks at the quantity and quality of links to a website to determine that site’s importance. Every site gets a score ranging from one to 100. The higher your score, the more likely you’ll rank at or near the top of the SERPs. 

To improve your DA score, you must integrate links as you create content and find ways to encourage people to link back to your pages.

• Include internal links to web pages on your site, such as backlinks from cluster topics to pillar pages.
• Embed social media posts with links to your site in your content, encouraging people to share them. Tools like Click to Tweet help with this.
• Create graphics with embedded codes so people can easily add them to their site.
• Encourage people to use your imagery as long as they link to your site.
• Format your content to make it easy to reference. Tables, charts, and FAQs make your content easier to reference and link to.

By effectively interlinking all the pages on your site, you pass the authority from page to page, lifting all their search rankings.

Be accurate

Inaccurate and poorly written content can be a brand killer. Mistakes make you seem untrustworthy. To paraphrase Google Search Advocate John Mueller, Google won’t penalize you for sloppy writing, but your audience might.

Never publish content without:

• Proofreading your work
• Including outbound links to reputable sources
• Double-checking your links are correct and lead to active pages

Running your article through a plagiarism checker like Copyscape

Technical SEO Optimization Tips

While we’re primarily focusing on how you can optimize content for SEO, it’s important to note a few technical SEO optimization tips you should address.

• Check your site on a wide range of mobile devices. Responsive layouts tend to flow between gadgets, so check forms and links to ensure they stay clickable. Your content should be easy to digest and legible regardless of whether someone is scrolling on an Android tablet or flicking through on their iPhone.
• Play around with images to decrease your site loading time. Large, high-resolution images look great, but they slow websites down. Use optimized JPGs to display photos, and go for lossless PNGs if you need to incorporate pictures with text or transparent backgrounds.

Periodic site maintenance can enhance your search engine ranks, too. Check that all pages appear on your site’s XML map and that internal and external links are current.

Finally, ensure your site pages have succinct and descriptive URLs for a possible lift in your rankings.

SEO Techniques to Avoid

Every dog has its day, and that applies to SEO content strategy. Stay far away from the following tactics in 2024:

• Keyword stuffing: Often tied to keyword density, avoid cramming your targeted keywords in your content as often as possible. Keyword stuffing is ineffective, and if you do it anyway, you could get flagged by Google for having low-quality content.
• Duplicate content: Google doesn’t officially penalize sites for duplicating content, but when the search engine finds multiple sites serving up the same text, it decides which to rank and which one to bury. Embracing original content — even when producing hundreds of local SEO city pages or product descriptions — can keep you from cannibalizing your site.
• Spinning. Spun articles are the cheap designer handbags of content. They don’t rank well because they’re basically plagiarized and often read awkwardly. Google recognizes spun content as spam-like and subpar, so it’s best to skip it altogether.

SEO Content Optimization: Keeping It Real

To summarize that deep dive into all things content SEO optimization, here’s a summary of what we’ve discussed: 

• SEO optimization tactics are smoke signals for search engine bots or spiders.
• Search engine spiders crawl the web to index and evaluate content.
• Effectively optimizing your content for specific search terms and topics could result in high search rankings and organic traffic.
• SEO content creation best practices include on-page optimization techniques, careful keyword use, and informational accuracy.
• Evaluate your content’s competitive landscape and outdo the competition.
• Help boost domain authority by encouraging people to link to your content.
• Steer clear of antiquated SEO content tactics such as keyword stuffing or article spinning.

Optimizing content for SEO has a learning curve, but if you stick with the tips in this guide, you could scale to the top of a SERP like a total pro. Too busy to write your SEO content? Crowd Content has a team of 6,000-plus writers waiting to help. Our freelancers know SEO and can tackle everything from blogs to web copy to category descriptions.For more information, contact our managed services team or sign up for a self-serve Marketplace account today.

The post How to Optimize Content for SEO: A Quick Guide appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

What’s Amazon’s A9 Algorithm All About?

Amazon’s A9 algorithm is always working hard behind the scenes, analyzing product listings and determining where they should appear in search results. You might hear the algorithm referred to as Amazon A10, as there have been updates. But no matter what you call it, the system’s ultimate goal is to keep consumers happy by matching them to the products they’re most likely to buy.

Indexing

The first step in any Amazon SEO strategy is to ensure your listing is properly indexed. Amazon organizes listings by keywords so it can serve up relevant items when users perform a search. 

Invest time in comprehensive keyword research to learn which phrases customers use to find your product and include those search terms in your copy. We delve into some Amazon keyword tips later in the article.  

Organic ranking

Organic ranking refers to where you’re placed in any given Amazon search as a result of the algorithm. The system considers factors such as keywords, sales, conversion rates, customer reviews, pricing, and availability. It also leverages artificial intelligence to recommend products based on behavior and browsing history, with machine learning improving results over time.

**Also, https://twitter.com/HimanshiRaj5721/status/1716514138262839781

A strong product page with an engaging product description is critical to gaining traction in the rankings. The more people who are swayed by your listing and buy your product after doing a specific search, the higher your organic ranking for that keyword.

“Satisfy the consumer by providing a great digital shelf experience, top to bottom,” explained Mike Black, CMO of Profitero. “This means maximizing product availability, traffic, and conversion.”

Having a compelling product page with product descriptions that engage is critical to ranking organically on Amazon. Click to Tweet

Best seller ranking (BSR)

Amazon also highlights top-selling products for specific search terms to help boost sales. This is a form of social proof — if you see thousands of other customers snatching up a certain product, you’ll probably take a closer look at the item. 

You only appear in BSR results based on your sales, which is another reason to invest time in creating killer product descriptions that help convert. While your overall sales numbers are considered, recent transactions carry more weight — and sales from organic searches carry more weight than those generated through paid ads. Note that page views and reviews aren’t included in BSR rankings — this ranking is all about successful purchases.

Researching Amazon Keywords

Most Amazon journeys start with a search, so let’s make sure your listing can be discovered. Play detective and dig up the keywords customers type into the search bar.

Keyword research tools are the Watson to your Sherlock, pulling up keyword ideas in seconds. Some platforms, such as SECockpit, draw suggestions from a variety of search engines, including Amazon, and can be useful for a broader digital marketing strategy. You can also use Amazon-specific tools, such as Semrush’s Instant Keyword Research for Amazon or AMZScout.

For example, to get insight into the keywords other products are targeting, head over to AMZScout’s Reverse ASIN lookup tool. Enter the product’s 10-digit Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN). The tool will serve up a list of indexed search terms for that product, along with the search volume and relevance score.

You can also research popular keywords for your niche using another AMZScout tool, Amazon Keyword Search. For example, if you’re selling books on Amazon, plug in “books for kids” to find relevant keywords and monthly search volumes:

Finally, AMZScout’s Keyword Tracker helps you monitor how your listings and competing listings rank for certain keywords. This helps you track your performance and focus on improving listings that are missing the mark.

Amazon keyword tips

During your keyword research, you’ll run across short-tail and long-tail keywords:

• A short-tail keyword is a broad search term consisting of a single word or a few words, such as “ice pack”
• A long-tail keyword is more than a few words long and has precise search intent, such as “ice pack for injuries”

Use a mix of short- and long-tail keywords so your product is indexed for both types of searches. Relevant long-tail keywords are used less often by searchers, but they can sometimes be easier to rank for, and they can help you attract buyers with a clear idea of the type of item they want. 

A well-established product on Amazon can be ranked with thousands or even tens of thousands of keywords. Because you have limited space in your listing, you can’t be expected to include every possible search term. Pick the keywords most relevant to your product and those with a reasonable monthly search volume to generate traffic. Use a higher volume keyword as your primary keyword and include it in the all-important product title. Place secondary keywords in your listing copy.

Product Listing Optimization

SEO for Amazon is only partly about the algorithm. Customers aren’t interested in keywords, but they do want to know whether a product suits their needs. Help them make their decision with a rich product listing that’s lively, descriptive, informative, and crafted for human readers.

If you can craft a strong, compelling product listing, it won’t take long for users to be drawn to the magic “add to cart” button. Nearly 30% of Amazon purchases are completed in 3 minutes or less.

Product title

The product title is one of the main ways Amazon determines the relevance of your product for indexing. When you write your title, include your most important high-search-volume keywords, and ensure they’re arranged in a somewhat understandable order. Most Amazon product titles don’t really make sense in terms of syntax or grammar, but they effortlessly convey what the product is.

Although you can write longer titles, Amazon recommends 60 to 80 characters — after that, they can be difficult to read. Avoid writing in all caps, abbreviate measurements, and use numerals instead of writing out numbers.

Bullet points

Bullet points give readers a quick overview of key product features. You can include up to five bullet points totaling 1,000 characters. This provides ample room to naturally fit keywords, but remember to strike a balance and make sure the copy is inviting.

Write a short phrase summarizing each feature at the start of the bullet using capital letters, lines, or brackets to draw attention to them. Follow this with a sentence or two providing detail or elaborating on the benefit.  

Product description

The product description is the spot for additional details that aren’t included in your bullets but are important for the customer to know. It could be a list of product specs or aspirational copy that persuades a customer their life isn’t complete without your item. A well-crafted product description can help drive sales, which boosts your organic ranking in the long run. 

The product description is limited to 2,000 characters and must be written in HTML. You can enter all your markup manually with tags for bold, bullets, and paragraphs, or you can paste your copy into a free online text to HTML translator.

Optimized sizing charts

One of the biggest challenges for online consumers is determining whether the clothing or shoes they’re eyeing will fit. Fortunately, Amazon is always looking for ways to make it easier for customers to shop.

In early 2024, the marketplace announced it’s leveraging AI and machine learning to provide personalized sizing guidance to customers. By analyzing brand size charts, reviews, purchases, and returns, the marketplace can now recommend the best-fitting size for a particular customer.

Sellers can benefit by using Amazon’s new Fit Insights Tool to improve product listings. Available through the Seller Central dashboard, this tool provides:

• Feedback on your size charts based on customer expectations
• Analysis of your product return rate compared to similar products
• A summary of customer insights, both positive and negative

You can use this information to see which of your listings need improvement and better address customer concerns. This can enhance user experience, reduce your product return rate, and lift your overall sales.

Backend keywords

At this point, you should have search terms from your keyword research that you haven’t used — after all, your product listing should be sleek and engaging and not stuffed with keywords. These additional search terms might include abbreviations, spelling variations, and alternate product names. You can input these keywords into the backend for indexing purposes. The backend is only for the algorithm and isn’t visible to readers.

Previously, backend keywords were limited to 250 bytes of text. In 2024, Amazon increased backend keywords to 500 characters, giving you more space to highlight keywords. There’s no need to worry about grammar or punctuation. Simply copy in keywords you weren’t able to include in the rest of the listing.

Maximizing Your Amazon SEO Strategy

We’ve covered the basic elements of an effective listing, but with so much competition for customers, every advantage helps. Ramp up your efforts and explore additional Amazon SEO tips below to maximize your online presence. 

Provide great visuals

Visuals help customers get a better sense of your product. Amazon recommends including six images and one video in a listing to fully leverage the media. Show the item from different angles, provide close-ups of details or features, and wrap up with some images of happy customers using the product.

Make sure photos are well-lit and clearly focused on the product. Backgrounds should be simple or plain white so they don’t distract from the item. Use descriptive image file names and alt-text to help Amazon and Google understand and index the page.

Leverage A+ content

Some sellers and vendors have access to A+ Content, previously known as Enhanced Brand Content. Use this Amazon tool to create rich and visually appealing listings. You can provide in-depth content or charts to engage users, upload photos to play with mood and tone, and edit layout. This customization can elevate your product, setting it apart from regular listings and increasing sales by up to 8%.

Encourage reviews

Follow up with your customers and encourage them to leave reviews to help build credibility and establish your seller authority. Respond to reviews and work to resolve problems so customers are assured that your business is trustworthy and you deliver quality service.

Use your brand name

It might seem counterintuitive to include a brand name in your listing if your business isn’t well known. However, it’s good practice to include it at the beginning of your title. You’ll avoid a situation where someone searches for your product by brand name but can’t find it — or worse, finds competing listings instead.

Don’t forget about Google

So far, our focus has been on optimizing your listings for Amazon’s search engine, but let’s not forget the other internet giant. Google crawls the Amazon website as if it’s any other site. Follow SEO best practices for high-quality content to help your product listings gain exposure on Google and send more traffic to your Amazon pages.

1. Perform keyword research, although most of the search terms you’ll dig up are likely similar to Amazon’s
2. Place keywords prominently in the page title, bulleted list, and image alt-text
3. Evaluate the top-ranking pages for the Google search terms you want to rank for and make sure your listing is better

Drive Results on Amazon With Optimized Product Descriptions

If you sell products on Amazon, a well-crafted product listing — fueled by the right keywords — helps your brand shine and gives users the confidence to purchase. To make an impact, your listings should be visually appealing, informative, and aligned with the customer’s needs. Learn how Crowd Content’s product description writers can bring your Amazon SEO strategy to life, creating exceptional copy that impresses your reader and helping you crush your sales goals.

The post How to Optimize Product Listings With an Amazon SEO Strategy appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

But there are other search engines that many people use instead of Google. Among those, Microsoft’s Bing is a real factor. It also presents an opportunity to gain traction quickly, as long as you take some steps to optimize for Bing. 

ALSO – Hire SEO Content Writers

Why should I care? The traffic potential of Bing

It’s fair to wonder if investing time and resources in Bing is worth it. After all, Google dominates every conversation about search. When people say they are doing SEO, it is generally assumed they are talking about optimizing their content for Google. 

If you look deeper, however, you’ll see that Google may not have the stranglehold you imagine. Yes, they are dominant—about 75% of all internet searches are done through Google.

But 75% isn’t 100%. Let’s talk about that other 25%—it’s significant market share and Bing has the biggest portion of it. 

As Morgan Taylor, CMO at LetMeBank, notes, “So many people are focused on Google SEO that they don’t even think about the fact that between 25% and 35% of users are going to use Bing as a search engine. The fact that most people are considering Google and not Bing indicates that Bing is going to be less competitive which means you have a better chance of having a higher ranking.”

For starters, Mozilla, the popular open-source browser, recently ended its relationship with Google. It has turned to Yahoo as its default search engine. Yes, that Yahoo. 

Why does Yahoo matter when we’re talking about Bing? Well, since October of 2019, Yahoo search has been powered by the Bing search engine. Optimize for Bing and you are basically doing the same for Yahoo—the Yahoo Webmaster Tools have been replaced by Bing Webmaster Tools. Many people have started to refer to it as the YBN—the Yahoo/Bing Network.

Together, Bing and Yahoo account for a serious chunk of search activity in the United States. The demographics of its users also make Bing attractive—roughly ⅓ of Bing users have annual incomes of $100,000 USD or more. What’s more, because many companies underestimate the value of Bing, it’s easier to rank well in search queries than it can be on Google since the competition is not as fierce. 

And what about the B2B audience? 57% of B2B marketers say search is their best lead source, and Bing has outsized numbers when it comes to reaching this audience. It makes sense—so many companies still work in Windows environments.  On these systems, Microsoft Edge is typically the default browser, and employees are often required. That means their default search engine whenever they’re at work is Bing. 

Here are eight ways to improve your search results on Bing. 

1. Learn Bing Webmaster Tools

Part of optimizing for Bing is using and understanding Bing Webmaster Tools. If you rely on the tools that Google provides—and you should—make sure you’re getting the most out of them on Bing as well. 

For starters, it’s powerful. There’s a great dashboard, a tech diagnostics panel, a keyword research tool, a controller for managing outbound links, a reporting tool, and more. 

Together, these features make it easy to track overall search performance, the Click-Through Rates from each search, pages that were crawled and indexed, and the top organic search keywords. You’ll need a Microsoft account to use Bing Webmaster Tools, but if you want to rank well on this search engine, you really need to use it. 

For instance, if you’re finding it’s taking a while for Bing to find your site and do a crawl, Bing Webmaster Tools has a feature called Crawl Control. Use it to set a crawl rate and specify the time of day when you want your site to be crawled. Before you do that, however, make sure your site map is sparkly clean. Just like in Google, Bing has little patience for “dirt” in a site map—too many 404 redirects, for instance, will result in your site being penalized in search rankings. You also need to manage your 301 and 302 redirects well—remember that a 301 redirect will be treated as permanent while a 302 redirect is viewed as a temporary change by search engines. The best practice is to make sure that all your permanent redirects are written as 301s. 

Finally, as much as we believe Bing has real value, you do want to ensure that your efforts to optimize for it don’t damage or hinder your SERP on Google. Use the panel in Bing Webmaster Tools to diagnose and analyze results—and compare them to Google. If you see your SERP on Google dip because of your work with Bing, you may need to make some adjustments. 

2. Take Care of Bing Ranking Factor Basics

Some of the first steps you take to optimize for Bing are similar to tasks you need to complete with Google. 

In Bing Webmaster Tools, submit your site and provide the URL with your site’s XML site map. Then make sure your site is tagged and categorized, if you haven’t already done that. Ensure robots.txt allows indexing and Bing should find it, but it doesn’t hurt to submit it as well. Once these details are handled, you should begin to see rankings improve. 

It’s also valuable to use Bing Places for Business—create a new listing or claim ownership of an existing one. This is especially important for local search. 

3. Insist on Quality Content

Like Google, optimizing content for Bing means ensuring quality. Both search engines serve their customers by providing quick access to content that matches their needs and answers the questions they’re asking. 

First, it needs to be relevant. But it also needs to be complete—both Google and Bing seem to be rewarding content of greater length than in the past, believing that it indicates more thoroughly researched material and greater comprehensiveness. 

Make sure your content is information-rich and valuable to the reader. While Bing may have a more old-fashioned take on keywords than Google does, it still rejects content from its rankings when it believes there is keyword stuffing. Images with text, video, infographics—use these to enhance the experience for the user and improve the rank of your site in Bing.

Remember to factor in these elements when creating quality content for Bing: 

• Be comprehensive and satisfy search intent.
• Write in a style that is appropriate for your target audience.
• Source the information and credit the author whenever possible.
• Format and present content in a way that is easy to follow. 
• Maintain a clear distinction between sponsored and owned content.   

4. Use Keywords Correctly

Target keywords are just as critical with Bing as they are with Google, but there are subtle differences. 

Bing, for instance, places more importance on exact match keywords, in a way that is a bit more like the way Google did in its early days. Topic completeness also matters—every search engine wants to point users to results that answer as many questions as possible. 

Semantic keywords are less valuable. This can be challenging when you’re trying to rank on both search engines since Google can view that as keyword stuffing, especially if your content doesn’t flow naturally or fails to completely address the topic. 

That said, Bing is still looking for quality content. Just try to find a balance—get your exact match keywords in without stuffing. 

Overall, Bing can be considered slightly less advanced because it relies more on some legacy search factors when it comes to ranking. Exact match domains, the use of specific keywords in headings, title tags—all of these appear to carry more weight as the ranking factors. 

While Google may now incorporate other elements in its algorithm, these elements still carry clout in its rankings, too. In other words, you’re unlikely to hurt your results on Google by making sure these details score well with Bing. In the long run, the work will yield positive results. 

5. Push User Engagement

According to Tonya Davis, Marketing Manager at ThoughtLab, “One of Bing’s largest ranking factors is user engagement. So ensuring you have a low bounce rate is going to play a critical role in your rankings. This means monitoring your Bing Webmaster tools and using various tactics to improve user engagement is key.”

Whether you’re trying to rank for Bing or not, it’s a good practice to monitor this anyway. Google may not place quite the same premium on bounce rate as Bing does, but the two search engines have begun to converge around many of the same factors. For instance, both are beginning to rely more on RankBrain, a machine learning artificial intelligence system, to drive search results. 

Finally, and again this is true for any search engine, backlinks matter. But they do seem to carry more weight on Bing than Google. Marcu Tober, CTO and Founder of Searchmetrics, notes that, “The number of backlinks seems to be the most relevant metric for Bing.”

Here’s how Bing explains their approach to backlinks. 

“The site linking to your content is essentially telling Bing they trust your content…Bing rewards links that have grown organically…links that have been added over time by content creators on other trusted, relevant websites made to drive real users from their site to your site…links buying, participating in link schemes (link farms, link spamming and excessive link manipulation) can lead to your site being delisted from the Bing index.”

6. Use Social Media to Drive Bing Search

Bing makes no secret of the importance it places on social media. It may see this as a way to differentiate itself from Google, and it’s definitely a key ranking factor. 

Bing places more importance on user engagement. The search engine values connections to social media influencers and a consistent presence in social media channels. 

According to Bing’s own webmaster guidelines, “Social media plays a role in today’s effort to rank well in search results.  The most obvious part it plays is via influence.  If you are a social influencer, your followers tend to share your information widely, which in turn results in Bing seeing these positive signals.  These positive signals can have an impact on how your site ranks organically in the long run.”

In addition to social influencers, Bing places a premium on things like Shares, Likes, and Comments, since it indicates the level of engagement it values. Encourage your customers to be active on your site, and use your social media brand to build your audience.

Make sure your main ranking pages are ones that perform well on social media. If Bing sees traffic move from social to your site, and that is followed through with a low Bounce Rate, you will eventually be rewarded with higher rankings on Bing. 

7. Turn to Bing as a Tool for B2B

Were you surprised about the size of the group that uses Bing for search? Well, you should also consider some of the specific industries that rely on Bing more than Google. 

Bing can be a valuable tool for B2B, especially in categories such retail, finance, and technology. In these sectors, perhaps owing to the popularity of platforms such as Yahoo Finance, Bing has traction. And remember—the Windows operating system still powers desktops in the corporate world, and many companies require their employees to use Edge as their browser. And using Edge is going to mean they will most likely use Bing.

If you’re trying to reach a B2B audience, don’t ignore Bing—both organically and with Bing Ads. This platform can be especially valuable for smaller companies up against larger competitors or startups that with bootstrapping budgets. As with organic search, the competition is less intense, so the Cost-Per-Click is lower than it is when you use Google Ads. 

8. Try Bing Places

Geographic targeting has real value when you’re working to rank in Bing. While you can focus on audiences this way through the structure of your website, Bing lets you indicate the location of your audience by using Bing Places.

Free to join, simple and straightforward, using Bing Places also helps you optimize for Bing search rankings. Within Bing Webmaster Tools, you’ll find the instructions you need to list your business—they’re easy to follow. Bing Places is an important tool for local SEO, and works in a way that is very similar to My Business from Google. 

Is this the Big Bing?

Well, that might be a stretch. No SEO expert sees the importance and dominance of Google diminishing anytime soon.

But Bing is a channel that far too many companies ignore. There are clear benefits to optimizing quality content for Bing—less competition, an opportunity to leverage social media, a demographic that skews slightly higher, a B2B slant. Make sure your site is Bing-ready, compare the results to Google, and you will eventually see the value of your efforts.

ALSO – Black Hat SEO Tactics That Work in 2020, But Might Not For Long

The post How to Optimize SEO for Bing appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Whether consumers are querying Siri or typing into a desktop browser, one thing is consistent: If you’re not engaging in digital marketing and ensuring your site is search-engine optimized for every stage of the buyer’s journey by creating relevant ecommerce content, you could be missing out on these opportunities.

One way to create SEO content that helps you show up for consumers online is by publishing high-quality buying guides. Plus, this content can increase user experience on your site and help persuade someone in the middle or later parts of the funnel to click and make a purchase (or visit your local store to do so). High-quality buying guides can be planted with mid-funnel search terms that draw in consumers at that stage of their journey and help set the stage for harvesting conversions later.

Read on to find out how to write engaging SEO buyers’ guides that help land you on the first page of SERPs and guide your customers through appropriate buying decisions once they discover your brand.

What Are SEO Buyers’ Guides?

An SEO buyers’ guide is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a piece of search-engine optimized content that also guides the buyer through various aspects of shopping or making a purchase.

The concept of an SEO buying guide is based on the fact that modern shoppers tend to follow a path to purchasing that aligns with the roadmap below.

• The buying journey begins with the search engine.
• The consumer clicks your link (if you’ve done the SEO work to show up).
• Your interesting, relevant content informs the consumer’s decision.
• At this point, the consumer makes a purchase decision or continues to ponder and research, depending on where they are in the funnel. A good buying guide informs that next action, whatever it might be.

Top of the funnel: An introductory buying guide provides high-level options and helps the consumer see the brand as an expert. This increases the chance the consumer will return to the site or brand once they’re ready to take the next step.

Middle of the funnel: Typically, this is where buying guides shine the brightest. The consumer is aware of their need and may know what type of solution they want. The buying guide sets the brand or its products up as a high-quality solution, prompting the consumer to click through, sign up or call to find out more.

Bottom of the funnel: The consumer is ready to make a purchase now or nearly immediately. Some buying guides concentrate more on specific products to help the consumer make a final decision between items. But it’s important to realize that buying guides should work in conjunction with your other content. For example, product descriptions are usually the bottom of the funnel content that ultimately drives the conversion, so using your buying guides to push site visitors toward those pages is a good idea.

Need help with product copy? Connect with a skilled product description writer.

ALSO – 5 Secrets From Successful Product Copy Teams

What Are the Benefits of Publishing SEO Buying Guides?

Buying guides provide a number of simultaneous benefits, including:

• Increasing on-page SEO and rankings for valuable middle of the funnel keywords
• Providing high-quality, comprehensive content that helps increase the E-A-T value of your pages
• Delivering something of value to the consumer to increase brand loyalty, trust, and authority
• Creating a potential path via which a consumer finds the product or service they need and helps nudge them toward a purchase decision
• Providing valuable long-form content for your site

All those benefits combine to help your page perform better in SERPs and increase your conversion rate and revenue.

Josh Bluman, Co-founder of JJ Suspenders, notes that buying guides “make your site an authority on a subject, which is also good for SEO and can improve your overall website’s ranking.” That’s because buying guides are an example of comprehensive content. They naturally provide complete coverage of a topic, answering a lot of questions searchers have about products or types or solutions and incorporating a wide range of semantic keywords.

“We recently started adding a bunch of buying guides on our off-site blog MajestyCoffeeSchool.com,” says Nunzio Ross, the co-owner and ops manager of Majesty Coffee. “The results have been fantastic. We’ve noticed a pretty substantial increase in traffic and sales since we started doing it…It’s pretty safe to say our sales have increased by about 1/4 since the buyer’s guides started getting traffic.”

Common Types of Buying Guides

Buying guides actually come in a wide range of content types, and how you create yours depends on factors such as best practices for your industry, the needs and wants of your audience, and which part of the sales funnel you’re targeting. If you’re not sure where to start, consider five common types of buying guides below.

As you can see, a lot of these types of buying guides can overlap. You can have an introductory shopping guide or a technical comparison guide, for example. It’s up to you to mix and match these elements to create content that resonates with your audience.

Top Tips for Creating Compelling Buying Guides

Put some of the tips below to work to create buyers’ guide content that sets you apart from others both in the search engines and with your readers.

1. Conduct research before you write.

Don’t assume that because you’re an expert on your products that you’re also an expert on what people want to know. Ross says the entire point of a buying guide is to answer the questions customers might be asking. Do keyword research to find out what people are turning to search engines to find out, then answer those queries in your buying guides.

Why? Keyword research aligns your content with what’s performing in search results, increasing your chance of landing a top spot. Content that answers specific consumer queries gets more engagement and keeps people coming back to your page.

ALSO – Qualitative Keyword Research: How to Invest 10 Minutes into Your Content Marketing Process & See Your Content Rise to the Top of Google

2. Use conversational language that aligns with your audience.

Write as if you’re an expert speaking to a friend about the topic—but think about how you communicate with different subsets of friends. A gamer who is explaining his computer choice to a non-gaming friend uses different language than he would when explaining to another gamer. Use the right communication style for your target audience.

Why? People turn to buyers’ guides for help making a purchasing decision, but no one wants to be talked down to (or talked over).

3. Pay attention to formatting.

“Huge blocks of text,” says Ross, “are a no-no.” Break up your content with plenty of headers, bulleted lists, tables and other scannable content. Don’t skimp on design. Buying guides are typically long-form content, but the best examples are visually appealing and draw the reader in with more than a wall of text. 

Why? It helps the reader digest the information and makes content easier to glance through when seeking fast answers to a specific question.

4. Always ensure content is optimized for mobile.

Use responsive designs and write shorter paragraphs that won’t create a wall of text on mobile devices whenever possible.

Why? A huge portion of people who start their buying journey on digital channels do so via mobile devices. And users don’t just conduct research from a single device; 60% or more move from device to device as they go through the buyer journey.

5. Write with authority.

Bluman says brands should ask, “Does this content help us become an authority on the subject and build our brand?” You shouldn’t publish buying guides for the sake of taking up more pages on your website. They should come from a desire to truly assist consumers and share what you know about the products you create or sell.

Ask yourself: What will make my guide the most comprehensive content for this subject, and how do I make sure the search engines agree?

Why? First, it’s more authentic. Pages and pages of buying guides that simply try to hit an SEO keyword are lackluster, boring and, in some cases, seen as inauthentic. A few high-quality buying guides that provide expert advice and answers are valuable to your readers, which increases the value of your brand in their eyes. Second, it’s good for SEO. Google likes expert, authoritative pages readers can trust.

6. Include images and other media.

Break your buying guide text up with pictures, videos and other media.

Why? People want to see the products you’re recommending, including how to use them. Images and video also make it more likely someone will share your content on social media.

7. Include links and calls to action.

Don’t turn your informative buyers’ guide into a sales free-for-all, but do include relevant product links, buy buttons or CTAs to get a quote or schedule an appointment.

Why? Ultimately, at the end of the day, conversion is what you’re after. The best way to foster that in high-quality content is to provide specific and helpful next steps.

Where Should Buyers’ Guides Go on Your Site?

No one rule exists for the best on-site location for your buyers’ guides. You may need to test various locations to find what works for you. However, here are some starting guidelines that work for many sites.

• Buying guides aren’t landing pages. Don’t use them in place of presell, sales and landing pages to try to make conversions after funneling interested readers via ads.
• Buying guides are definitely not home page copy.
• You might publish product buying guides on category pages. Category pages list all of a similar type of product (such as women’s jeans or coffee makers), and a relevant buying guide on the bottom of the page can support SEO.
• You might publish buying guides on your blog, using those pages to drive organic traffic and link into your eCommerce pages.
• You can create a specific area of your site for consumer resources, placing buying guides there and linking to them from relevant category, brand and product pages.

What Types of Keywords Should Your Buying Guides Target?

Short version? The types of keywords that people are searching for. Do your research with tools such as SEMrush to find out what phrases consumers are using to find this type of information. 

Slightly longer version? Since most buying guides are mid-funnel content, they should incorporate mid-funnel keywords. Typically, these keywords indicate the consumer is headed toward a decision but they still need a bit of guidance. Examples of mid-funnel keywords include:

• What’s the most cost-effective phone?
• Best smart TVs
• How to choose roman blinds for my window
• Reviews for plumbers in Austin

Buying guides might also incorporate some keywords with commercial intent. These are often targeted with product descriptions, but it makes sense to pepper a few in buying guides to better support the bridge that allows mid-funnel visitors to convert to bottom-funnel customers as they engage with your content.

Commercial intent keywords are those that indicate the person has a serious plan to make a purchase immediately or soon. Phrases that include words such as buy, deal, discount, price, cost, coupon, free shipping, affordable, best, comparison and review all indicate potential commercial intent. 

Get Help Creating Buying Guides That Perform

Sold on the concept of buyers’ guides, but not sure how to string all that content together? No worries. Our team of professional copywriters bring product knowledge, SEO savvy, and wordsmithing to the table to craft buying guide copy that can wow the wariest of readers.

The post How to Write Engaging SEO Buyers’ Guides for Your Website appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

However, SEO isn’t a one-size-fits-all endeavor. There are many different ways to approach SEO, and what works for one company may not work for another. In spite of this, some tactics are better than others and are more likely to work for a longer period of time. 

When choosing an SEO strategy for your business, it’s important to understand best practices as well as the most effective ways to succeed while still following Google’s rules and preferences (like writing high-quality SEO content). 

This post covers what you need to know about black hat SEO, including how it works, when it works, what the future may hold, and why sticking with white hat techniques is the best way to approach SEO in the long-term.

Black Hat vs. White Hat SEO

In general, SEO practices can be divided into two categories: white hat and black hat. White hat practices are considered those done in good faith that play by the rules of Google’s search guidelines. Things like the legitimate use of keywords and high-quality content are considered white hat strategies as these are the kinds of activities that Google encourages.

Black hat SEO techniques, on the other hand, skirt Google’s rules in order to see an immediate boost in traffic. These options are considered less legitimate and are seen as a way to break rules (or bend them, at best) in order to get ahead. While Google often penalizes sites caught using blatant black hat techniques, there are too many tactics and too many players out there for Google to catch all of them. 

And, while many of the more basic strategies, like keyword stuffing, are known and actively discouraged, even automatically penalized in Google’s algorithm, there are still some more advanced black hat techniques that still slip past Google’s ever-evolving algorithms and thus avoid SEO penalties. That is, unless a Google employee finds it and issues a manual penalty to a site. 

These are the black hat SEO options that Google may not notice today – but is certainly aware of and looking to crack down on in the future. 

Also – Google’s Webmaster Guidelines: What Can You Learn to Help Future-Proof Your Content for Algorithm Updates

Doorway Pages

Want to drive traffic to your site? Of course you do! So, doesn’t it make sense to have as many pages as possible ranking that lead back to your contact or purchase pages? That’s where doorway pages come in – highly templated pages with thin, duplicated content that exist solely to rank for niche, long-tail keywords.

In theory, this makes sense. After all, peppering your site with keyword-rich doorway pages provides more content across the web that belongs to your company. And since these pages are often optimized for niche long-tail keywords, they often rank very well. This can lead to an increase in organic traffic as searchers click on these doorway pages. 

However, visitors are often greeted by a really poor experience on these pages, and immediately directed to actually important pages on the site. While some will make it to these pages, others will click away within a few seconds to find another resource that actually has something valuable to offer. 

The problems with doorway pages are clear – but wouldn’t giving up on doorway pages mean less traffic? Savannah Little, a Senior SEO Specialist at WRAL Digital Solutions, explains that the switch from unqualified traffic to qualified traffic can look like a decline year over year – but the metrics often tell a different story. As she puts it, “part of the transition from black hat techniques to white hat techniques includes imparting on the client the knowledge that not all traffic is good traffic and having less organic traffic is okay, especially when they’re converting at a higher rate and the year-over-year conversions are up.”

It’s important to distinguish between doorway pages established for the sake of being doorway pages and legitimate landing pages that differentiate between things like service areas. These kinds of pages, like city pages, can function in a similar way to doorway pages but as they provide quality user experiences, the end result is quite different.

For many businesses, putting more effort into what are effectively doorway pages and building valuable landing pages with great content could yield greater results and mean they don’t have to take down their existing pages. 

Expired Domains

Maintaining a website is a critical part of ongoing operations for pretty much any company. From time to time, domains expire, either as companies go under or choose to go in another direction online. However, domains aren’t just destroyed when they expire: they go up for sale to other buyers.

A common black hat strategy involves purchasing expired domains that previously ranked well and had backlinks from the kind of reputable sites Google likes to see. Then, fresh content can be created under the old URLs to include anything the buyer wants while still preserving the backlinks already in place. While this works superficially, Google is getting smarter at evaluating relevance, which puts this strategy on unsteady ground moving into 2020.

“This is a black hat tactic because it’s taking advantage of Google’s preference to rank highly authoritative websites in search,” explains Nikola Roza, the CEO and Owner of Nikola Roza – SEO for the Poor and Determined. “This tactic is on its way out in 2020 and beyond, because Google is getting smarter at determining relevance, and they will soon be able to figure out algorithmically this glaring lack of relevance, and devalue links pointing to these domains. And this will tank those black hat sites for good.”

Scholarship Link-Building

Scholarship link-building isn’t a terribly popular strategy but it’s still considered viable by some who are focused on getting valuable .edu links at all costs. These .edu links are valuable, often because the institutions behind them have huge domain authority, but the context of why you’re getting the backlink matters here. 

In essence, a company creates and advertises a scholarship for students in hopes that different schools and scholarship sites will feature their scholarship and include links to the company’s site. 

In many cases, the scholarship never pays out, and if it does, the amount is small and the purpose isn’t to reward students – it’s to game Google’s system.

“Even IF a webmaster pays out the scholarship, there’s misaligned intent and clear desire to ‘game’ the system, which is against Google’s Terms of Service. While Google hasn’t released a specific update targeting these profiles, scholarship link building is a clear footprint. Google COULD easily crackdown if (or when) they want to,” states Ewen Finser, a digital marketer and the Founder of TheDigitalMerchant.com.

Private Blog Networks

Private blog networks, or PBNs, have long been a fallback for companies of all sizes. This strategy involves the creation of a network of seemingly authoritative sites simply for the purpose of building links to a primary website. 

Note – sites created for PBNs often use expired domains with existing quality backlinks. 

While now largely out of vogue as Google is getting better at detecting this strategy, some businesses still believe that using PBNs is the best way to enhance domain authority.

However, Google now values page authority over domain authority, immediately decreasing the value in this once-trusted strategy. Google is also specifically targeting PBNs and has actually been de-indexing these pages if a network is suspected.

Link Swapping and Buying

Most marketers are aware that building backlinks is critical to search rankings and building authority, but not all are sure how to create an effective linking strategy organically. As such, link buying and link swapping have become a popular option for those who understand the principles behind linking as an SEO strategy but aren’t sure how to get started.

Link swapping is often managed through closed Facebook pages catering to niche industries that exist solely as a way to swap links. This essentially creates a large web of reciprocal linking. While this is in the grey area of SEO, it’s not an overly valuable tactic.

Andy Chadwick of Digital Quokka explains how this concept works, and why it’s not a great idea, calling a site that relies on the existence of link swapping, “a site whose link profile is almost entirely made up from domains who they too have linked to. You’ll see this most commonly on “mummy” and “recipe” type blogs where users will write a recipe and then link to their friend’s similar recipe and vice versa. We know Google’s actively targeting these sites,” he warns, citing an unnamed Google update from November.

Link buying, on the other hand, is considered questionable SEO from an ethical standpoint and Google strongly advises against it. For those in small or difficult niches, developing the content necessary to build quality backlinks can be a challenge. 

To get around this, many SEOs make use of services that explicitly sell links from websites that meet certain criteria. There are different ways this is achieved including getting links added to existing posts, publishing new guest posts, and even getting links added to directories. 

This lets the SEO choose the exact site placement he wants, what page of his it will link to, and also the anchor text he wants included in the backlink. In theory, it’s a really powerful tactic.

Andy Chadwick explains why this idea is less effective than taking the necessary steps to do things right: “You need to ‘link build.’ Again, normally you’d pay for someone to do this. Here is where the subtle difference is – ‘link building’ should be done by building up relationships and making the right people aware that your content exists. ‘Buying’ is simply exchanging cash in place for a link. Normally the latter yields very poor results, especially in the long run, because if the site is selling links to you, they’re probably selling it to loads of other sites to and, eventually, the site will become spammy.”

What Can Go Wrong?

These tactics can and do work for many SEOs. SEOs, if nothing else, are great at finding new tactics that will drive results. They’re also quick to abandon tactics that no longer offer any value. 

Most of the tactics we’ve discussed have at least been discouraged by Google, which means they’ll likely try to reduce the tactics’ influence in Google’s search algorithm in upcoming updates. Or, they’ll build penalties into the algorithm. Either way – it will likely mean a drop in rankings and traffic for businesses that relied on these tactics.

A bigger threat to be aware of though comes in the form of manual penalties. This happens when someone from Google’s search team identifies unnatural SEO tactics on a site or group of sites and applies a manual penalty to the domain. This can result in a site being entirely removed from Google, and these penalties are notoriously hard to recover from. 

ALSO – The Complete Guide to Google E-A-T: What Is It, Why Is It, and How Do You Create It?

White Hat Options

So if these black hat SEO tactics aren’t the best way forward for your SEO, what should you focus on?

There are actually a lot of ways to boost your SEO in a white hat way:

1. Create high-quality and comprehensive content. On-page factors are hugely important, so having the best quality content on the web can do wonders for your SEO. An upside to this is that you’re likely to earn backlinks to your site if other marketers view your resources as valuable.
2. Build link magnets – things like original research, surveys, tools, etc. – they’re all things that other marketers might consider linking to when attempting to add value to their audiences.
3. Link outreach – there’s nothing wrong with reaching out directly to publishers in related fields and asking them to link to your resources. If it adds value to their readers, they might do it.
4. Public relations – what’s old is new again, as they say. Public relations has evolved into a way for marketers to get major publications, bloggers, and influencers to cover newsworthy stories. If you can get this kind of coverage, the links are usually from high domain authority sites and carry a ton of weight.

ALSO – 7 Tips for How to Write SEO Content

These are just a few approaches to try, but it’s important to keep in mind that they’re all likely to hold up over time and won’t run you much risk of being penalized by Google. That’s better for your business long-term.

And although doing things the white hat way may not be as quick or easy to generate large numbers of backlinks, the results are often better. 

As Reece Mack, an SEO Manager at Trek Marketing explains, “Consider Public Relations outreach, opinion articles, and guest posting to improve your authority and authentically build your public profile. These days, the quantity of backlinks doesn’t hold as much weight as the quality.”

Choosing Black Hat Options

For those who want to go from A to Z while skipping the rest of the alphabet, black hat techniques can seem enticing. However, it’s important to realize that Google’s approach to determining search results gets more sophisticated every day. The black hat strategies that work today, regardless to what extent, likely won’t work for long. As such, it’s very important that those considering these strategies understand the limitations – including the fact that any perceived growth is unlikely to generate real results in the long-term.

By staying on the up and up and perfecting skills in the white hat tactics Google encourages, it’s much easier to see sustainable and real growth that can benefit your business at a base level – not just on the surface.

The post Black Hat SEO Tactics That Work in 2020, But Might Not For Long appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

The answer to that first question is easy. E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. The answer to the second question is that we all care because Google cares, and if we want our sites to rank, E-E-A-T is the acronym of the day, every day.

Whether you’re generating all your content in-house or easing your load by contracting with top content creation services, here’s everything you need to know about E-E-A-T, Google’s algorithm updates and lots of fun tidbits in between.

A is for Algorithm

Google is constantly updating its algorithm — and that statement is not an exaggeration. In 2020 alone, Google made a whopping 4,500 changes to search. That works out to about 12 tweaks per day, all of which impact how sights rank on the search engine results pages (SERPs). And here’s the kicker: Google never shares what exactly they’ve changed.

While most laypeople and even some experts may not see the immediate side effects of those daily changes, even the smallest update is important. And sometimes, there’s an overhaul that makes everyone from SEO experts to copywriters sit up and take notice.

Take Google’s May 2022 core update, for instance. This update was so hefty it took two weeks to fully roll out, and it made a correspondingly significant impression on site rankings. Google’s intent was to reassess how they analyzed sites, likely fine-tuning the algorithm to further the search giant’s mission to reward content that’s accurate, user friendly and relevant.

But why the big change in mid-2022? And more importantly, did it work as intended?

Aftershocks From the May 2022 Core Update

After the May 2022 core update rolled out, Google saw volatility in rankings across the board, though some industries were affected more than others.

On desktop, real estate saw the biggest jump in rank volatility, followed by books and literature, hobbies and leisure, and travel, with pets and animals snagging the fifth-highest spot. The list was similar on mobile, with one notable exception: health replaced travel in the top five.

Even more significantly, research showed that 6.7% of the search results making up the top 10 post-update were previously ranked in the 20th spot or lower.

Whatever Google changed, it clearly affected some verticals more than others. So how can site owners prep for updates and protect themselves from that volatility?

Google has never deviated from its quest for content that provides superior user experience. The past half decade or so has seen updates that fueled mobile optimization, targeted spam, and boosted helpful content. None of these changes should come as a surprise. Really, Google is putting its tech where its mouth is and changing its algorithm to reward sites that are doing what Google has asked for all along.Pssst… curious what Google has up their sleeve next? Here’s a look at the Google algorithm predictions for 2023.

E-E-A-T: Google Spells Out Their Vision (Literally)

While Google technically abstains from sharing the nitty-gritty details of their updates, those details are, in many ways, totally irrelevant. It’s not important how Google analyzes sites. What’s important is that people understand what that analysis is meant to do. In other words, site and content creation should speak to the mission, not the methodology.

And the mission, should site owners choose to accept it, is to E-E-A-T.

Google E-E-A-T is the newest iteration of the concept formerly known as E-A-T, or “expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.” The recently introduced extra E stands for “experience,” of course.

• Experience: Google believes searchers are interested in reaching content created by people who have actually lived the topic. It may not be coincidental that Google added Experience as artificial intelligence-generated content gained traction. This “E” also looks at technical aspects like load speed, visual stability and interactivity (all emphasized in Google’s May 2021 update aimed at page experience).
• Expertise: Expertise goes behind experience to look at the credentials and overall track record of the person and/or publisher behind a piece of content. Having an MD attached to medical content or using a gold-medal athlete to talk about the Olympics demonstrates expertise.
• Authoritativeness: Authority builds on expertise by finding ways for the content itself to feel important, accurate and reliable. Well-written content that contains links to other authoritative and high-ranking pages can help legitimize a site. It also helps if the content is referenced by other professionals with their own proven track records.
• Trustworthiness: Trust is a fickle thing in the SEO world. For a site to be trustworthy, it has to tick a lot of boxes ranking from up-to-date, factual content to off-site links that are properly anchored (using relevant text) and lead to similarly credible content. Sites that have most of the trustworthiness boxes ticked but screw up on one or two significant aspects — keyword stuffing, for instance, or fudging the facts to suit an agenda — can lose trust and traction quickly.

Keep in mind, these critical components are not weighted equally. Google looks at “trust” as a primary factor, “because untrustworthy pages have low E-E-A-T no matter how Experienced, Expert, or Authoritative they may seem.”And transparency is improving. Google now shares documents outlining their search quality rater guidelines. And yes, there are actual people involved in the evaluation process. While AI plays a vital role in ranking, so apparently do the people tasked with reading content to see whether it’s really answering search queries or just pretending to. Real, live people can be especially helpful when looking at that first “E” — bots can scan and analyze content, but they can’t get a gut feeling about how slow load times or a stagnant site make them feel (yet).

Content isn’t Evaluated in a Vacuum

There are blueprints to help site owners and content creators build content that meets E-E-A-T expectations. But it’s almost impossible to chase ranking by reworking faulty content and trying to make it more worthy.

This is partly because SEO takes time to gain traction and show results. But it’s also because sites aren’t evaluated in a vacuum, they’re analyzed in comparison with other sites fighting for the same SERPs. When site owners took to social media to complain about a shakeup in organic traffic numbers in March 2018, Google offered up some valuable advice:

It’s still worth pursuing the E-E-A-T ideals, though, because sites that publish content that shows high levels of experience, expertise, authority and trustworthiness stand to benefit beyond higher search rankings.

• Boosted behavioral metrics: Positive behavioral metrics on things like time on page and click-throughs to other pages can lead to a positive RankBrain score, which can then boost your performance in search results.
• Increased links and social shares: If your content is perceived as authoritative, people are more likely to share it with others. Social shares and links can boost SEO performance, but they also lead to general organic traffic outside of SERPs. Plus, since someone sharing your site is akin to a recommendation of your content, people who click through are arriving with some pre-trust built in, which can be of benefit to your conversion rate.
• Inclusion as a featured snippet: Being featured in the very top spot on Google search results is akin to claiming the SERP throne — and yes, these snippets can even steal the spotlight from paid pads (and you don’t have to fork over a single dime).

The Ultimate Checklist for Creating E-E-A-T Content

Time for a quick recap. So far, we’ve learned:

• Google makes lots of updates, and it makes them often
• Some more sweeping updates, like the one from May 2022, can cause some interesting swings in search result rankings
• We don’t know the exact changes Google makes, but we do know why they’re making them
• E-E-A-T is always the both the mission and the measuring stick

Here’s our E-E-A-T SEO checklist to help you craft content that answer’s Google’s call.

Be Comprehensive

There are several noticeable differences between sites that rank high on SERPs and those that only appear a few pages into scrolling, but the biggest is that high-ranking sites offer content that is more than a simple regurgitation.

Anyone can list the top three reasons to sell your home.  But it takes an expert to expound on those three reasons, offer real-life examples, and include information that goes above and beyond the initial ask.

To make your content more comprehensive:

• Conduct keyword research to see what people are looking for
• Think about your target audience and searcher intent
• Utilize tools like MarketMuse and SEMrush SEO content templates to analyze existing content and search queries before forming your own plan
• Play with Google’s autocomplete tool and review People Also Ask questions for ideas on how to expand your outline
• Leverage alternative content formats to appeal to different types of learners and boost engagement (Pro tip: Not everything needs to be a blog! Podcasts, infographics and call-out boxes are just a few of the ways you can shake things up)

Build Authority in Your Chosen Niche

In this arguably awful era of #fakenews, how often do we take people at their word? Does that number drop when you’re evaluating someone (or some site) that’s completely new to you?

Of course it does.

Humans are not naturally prone to blind trust. Fewer than half of all Americans say they trust mainstream media. People want proof something is true, and that requires going above and beyond a simple “trust me, I’m a writer” kind of statement.

In addition to creating comprehensive content that proves your knowledge, you can build authority (and therefore trust) by:

• Encourage links from related and authority sites. Publish high-quality content that people will want to share and link to and watch your network build naturally. Guest posting opportunities can also help (they’ll link to you if you link to them), as can acting as an expert and lending a quote to someone else’s authoritative content.
• Build reputable citations. Citations occur when your business is mentioned on another site. These mentions are especially powerful when they contain full NAP data (business name, address and phone number). Get involved with local and industry events, join industry organizations and claim your profiles on review sites to increase your online mentions.
• Generate social shares with content that helps or entertains. Amuse or amaze people and they’re more likely to share. Drive that engagement further by being active on your own social profiles and responding to comments.
• Include links to authority sites. It’s one thing to state a fact. It’s another to provide a source. We can shout about algorithm changes until we’re as blue as the Crowd Content logo is, but nothing drives home the point better than linking to an explanation by Google or Search Engine Journal.

Authorship Matters: Who Wrote This and Why Should Anybody Care?

Google cares about the who of content just as much as it cares about the what. This is especially true for certain types of pages. So why, then, are so many web pages, blogs and articles written by “staff” or with no name attached at all?

The answer is that authorship hasn’t always been as important as it is now, and some sites are still trying to catch up. This is where you have an opportunity to get ahead.

By all means outsource your content, but add a byline that highlights an expert from your company before you publish. This helps add authority and anchors the content as something that’s important enough for a person on your team to take ownership of.

You can further amplify authority by:

• Creating and linking to author profiles for your in-house team that highlight relevant credentials and experience
• Using Googlespeak (aka author markup best practices) to communicate authorship to search engines
• Encouraging those who contribute content to your site (freelance writers, for example) to write their own detailed, authoritative bios

To see these tips in action, mosey on over to NerdWallet’s site. This behemoth of financial industry news and insights lists not only the writer on each piece, but the editor, too. Each name is linked to a bio page that includes the individual’s title, their areas of focus, a bio highlighting credentials and experience, and the person’s top pics for other authoritative titles. You can also see what that person has written or edited previously, laying out a road map of their expertise for the public to follow.

This isn’t just a Jane Doe, put-a-name-to-AI situation, it’s a real person with real insight. Google loves that, and other real people should love it too.

Recruit Expert Contributors

In-house content creators are nice to have, but with the benefits of outsourcing content consistently mounting, it’s important to know how to make the most of freelance contributions, too.

First, let’s look at what “expert” really means in ContentLand:

• A literal expert with the credentials and accreditation to back it up, like a Culinary Institute of America graduate writing up recipes or a CPA writing personal finance advice
• Someone who has written enough online content in a particular niche to have Google authority

The first option is better for projects that demand a high level of verifiable authority, like interpreting medical studies. The second is typically better suited for niches where credentials aren’t as plentiful or necessary, such as gardening tips or parenting blogs.

To ensure your team of contractors is bringing enough to the table:

• Hire freelancer writers who have either Google authority or credentials in your field and are willing to use their own names and bios
• Contact industry experts who would be willing to participate in guest blogging for your site.
• Pepper content created by non-credentialed writers with quotes from experts (you can give them a shout out and a link as a thanks) sourced from:

• LinkedIn profiles and groups
• Industry Facebook groups
• Networking Slack groups
• Help a Reporter Out
• Qwoted

Another pro tip: Try a content roundup (one way to repurpose content) that includes quotes and tips from experts to master both the “comprehensive” and “authoritative” aspects of Google’s ask.

E-E-A-T More Than Just Your Blog

Gordon Ramsay wouldn’t have his Michelin stars if he ponied up a mouthwatering main course but totally biffed it on the appetizer, sides and dessert. The entire meal matters, which is why you have to evaluate your entire site through an E-E-A-T lens if you want to win the SERPs.

Ace your About Us page

If we had a dime for every time we happened across a weak and emaciated About Us page, we’d be swimming in Franklin D. Roosevelt profiles. For some reason, companies tend to phone it in when it comes to their own people and accomplishments, but that’s the exact wrong approach.

Instead, craft an About Us page that’s packed with:

• Company history
• Names, titles and backgrounds of your team
• Awards and accolades

Among the sites that won biggest after the May 2022 Google core update were mega brands Etsy, Instagram, Apple and Wikipedia. All have robust About Us pages — or in the case of Apple, a group of seven pages under the About Apple umbrella that address everything from company news to ethics and compliance info. Etsy’s About Us is the warm and artsy welcome you’d expect from a global marketplace focused on handmade and vintage goods. The brand discusses its mission, describes how the marketplace works and clearly illustrates what they have to offer versus the competition. There are even links to investor relations info and product announcements.

Humanize your company with team bios

Team bios are important enough to mention twice. Faceless corporate entities don’t command the same loyalty as brands that showcase team members, putting faces with the names of the powers that be.

Would you be more likely to buy baby blankets from Blankets R Us, which has no About Us page and no clear ownership, or Mama’s Baby Blankets, which shares Mama’s real name and bio along with pics of her knitting those fuzzy covers with her own two hands?

Etsy understands the assignment. Their team page kicks off with a sweeping vision statement: “The people who work at Etsy share the vision and values of community.” We’re already prepped to like these people. Then comes headshots and names, linked to bio pages, for each person on the leadership team. And then, Etsy knocks humanization out of the park by sharing a collage of hundreds of Etsy employees tasked with building and maintaining the site.

It’s practically impossible not to feel connected, because it’s just so easy to believe that all these fine humans are on the same wavelength as the people they’re serving. Apple’s leadership page is less cozy knits and garden chats, which is what you’d expect from a tech company. The focus is instead on the titles and credentials of the executive team and those on the board, illustrating how bios and proof of authority can change from niche to niche.

Construct a site-wide content strategy using content clusters

We sound like a bit of a broken record yammering on about the need for comprehensive content, but that’s how important it is to avoid regurgitation and offer a distinct POV. But covering all your bases can quickly turn into content cannibalization if you don’t have a content plan and stick to it.

Start by considering the different content types — and even sub types, like multiple ways to create and structure blogs — to help vary your approach to each topic. Then map out your topics, using topic clusters to give readers an overall view of a subject as well as an opportunity to deep dive into specifics.

Hubspot has a great example of a topic cluster centered on content marketing. A list of relevant topics might include:

• Content marketing strategy
• Types of posts
• Content planning tips
• Blogging mistakes
• Buyer personas
• Buyer’s journal
• Approaches to brainstorming
• Writing tips
• Common grammar errors
• Gated content
• Benefits of outsourcing
• Distribution channels
• How to scale

The main/pillar page briefly touches on all of those topics/keywords, while the spoke pages would go more in depth on each topic or keyword, tackling the ins and outs one blog at a time.

This creates a comprehensive content web that’s packed with opportunities for expert contributions and backlinks galore.

To do this yourself:

• Use keyword and topic research tools such as SEMrush and the teams recruited by SEO content writing services to ideate potential topics
• Choose a topic for your pillar page that’s relevant to your brand and interesting enough for your audience to want to follow
• Write a pillar post that paints a broad picture of your chosen topic — and remember that this is long-form content, so no need to try to cram everything into a 500-word blog
• Follow up with shorter, more in-depth posts that refer back to and build on the pillar content
• Link from the pillar posts to the supporting posts and back again, then link from spoke to spoke (or supporting content to supporting content)

Do all of the above, and your topic cluster will act like a road-side flare, alerting Google that you’re churning out high-quality, E-E-A-T supportive articles that prove you’re an authority worthy of an appropriately high SERP ranking.

ALSO – 7 Tips for How to Write SEO Content

How to Audit Your Site to Ensure Content is Google E-E-A-T Compliant

Chances are you’re not reading this guide to Google E-E-A-T and SEO as you’re about to make your very first website. No, it’s more likely that you already have a website up and running with a decent amount of content published and available for public consumption. So, is it time to go on a deleting rampage and scrap it all?

Thankfully, there’s no need to take the nuclear option here. That’s just a waste of time, money, content and SEO traction. You don’t want to lose whatever organic traffic and site authority you already have, you want to build on it.

Put on your E-E-A-T hat and audit all your existing content (that means web pages too, not just your blogs), flagging the following:

• Content with no author name/byline attached
• Author bios that are lackluster or missing altogether
• Content that lacks appropriate backlinks, which is a sign that your content is either not visible enough or not viewed as authoritative by others in your niche
• Content that isn’t linking out to other authoritative sites and/or authoritative content on your own site (you should have at least a few of each type)
• Pages that aren’t ranking for the right keywords
• Accuracy and timeliness — content that isn’t evergreen may need to be updated or replaced

Let’s Get Specific: E-E-A-T Tips for Specific Industries

Because this is the ultimate guide to understanding and acting on the intricacies of Google E-E-A-T, we can’t just throw out an answer to “What is E-E-A-T in SEO?” and call it a day.

While the tips above will certainly help you kick start your content audit and site refresh in a meaningful way, there are also some insights that can help brands in specific industries tailor their content and overall content marketing strategies even further.

To save you time and tons of clicks, we’ve pored over the Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines and put together this must-read cheat sheet, industry by industry.

Health and Wellness

Health and wellness is a very broad industry that encompasses everything from yoga poses and personal care products to preventative medicine and public health policy. The market was valued at a whopping $4.8 billion in 2022, a number expected to increase by $3 billion by 2030, so it’s no surprise the industry is as crowded as it is competitive.

This might feel daunting, especially if you make the mistake of assuming that all content in this niche has to be written by someone with clinical credentials, like an RN or MD. Luckily, that’s not the case.

Google has spoken up about E-E-A-T adherent medical content, stating: “It should be written or produced by people or organizations with appropriate medical expertise or accreditation. High E-A-T [now E-E-A-T] medical advice or information should be written or produced in a professional style and should be edited, reviewed and updated on a regular basis.”

In practice, “appropriate medical expertise or accreditation” is relative. A blog titled “Top 10 Yoga Poses for Stress Relief” may be best when written by a trained yogi with a decade of teaching experience, while an article discussing research into stem cells is probably better bylined by a research biologist or someone with similar credentials.

Here are some other takeaways for brands in the health and wellness space:

• Use bylines and bios for all content creators and contributors (editors and subject matter experts SMEs) included) to create layers of indisputable authority
• Prioritize accuracy by requiring proper citations/sourcing and employing fact checkers to verify research and writer/editor interpretations of that research
• Update regularly to ensure content remains E-E-A-T compliant

If you can’t access (or afford) credentialed writers for every piece, try pairing up talented writers who are adept at research and can produce polished content with SMEs that can add authority and check accuracy. It’s often easier and less costly to find an SME who can check content versus one who can produce that content from scratch.

Finance/Legal

Money and legal issues are two things that the average person takes pretty seriously. Google gets this and has laid out guidelines accordingly.

According to E-E-A-T, financial and legal content must:

• Come from credible sources, with proof in the form of fleshed-out About Us pages and clear authorship
• Be trustworthy, requiring lots of research and fact checking
• Be updated regularly, especially if there’s a major change in regulations or another newsworthy event related to the industry

Remember Nerd Wallet? They own a lot of the prime real estate for finance-related topics (especially in the personal finance realm). Click on one of their featured snippets or top-ranking articles, like this one on how to raise your credit score fast, and you’ll quickly see why they’re winning the SERPs.

• The content has bylines for the writer and editor, and both names are linked to bio pages that list the contributors’ credentials, education and other published work
• As of our publish date for this guide, the NW article is listed as “Updated Nov 1, 2022,” meaning it was written earlier and has been updated at least once to ensure accuracy and timeliness
• There are tons of links and even a quote from the senior direct of public education and advocacy at Experian to help drive home key points and increase authority/ trustworthiness.

Home, Garden, Real Estate, Hobbies and Parenting

Before we dig into this industry, this is a good time to introduce another fun Google acronym: YMYL.

YMYL stands for “your money or your life,” which sounds like a bad line from a movie about a mugging but is really just what Google calls “pages or topics that could potentially impact a person’s future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety.”

YMYL topics like crocheting or pruning tomato plants might seem “soft,” but they’re still subject to E-E-A-T guidelines. After all, if content is meant to impact future happiness and safety, among other things, expertise definitely matters. But the type of expertise and/or credentials required change a bit depending on the subject matter.

Google absolutely recognizes informal experience when it’s relevant and appropriate to the topic:

Some topics require less formal expertise. . . Many people share tips and life experiences on forums, blogs, etc. These ordinary people may be considered experts in topics where they have life experience. If it seems as if the person creating the content has the type and amount of life experience to make him or her an “expert” on the topic, we will value this “everyday expertise” and not penalize the person/webpage/website for not having “formal” education or training in the field.

Here’s an example of credentialed expertise versus less-formal expertise around the same general topic:

• Tips for remodeling a home or installing a toilet should probably come from someone with demonstrated expertise in building, plumbing or other relevant trades
• Tips for maximalist bathroom décor may rely more on personal experience

STEM

Google doesn’t typically extend its everyday expertise free pass to science and tech articles, especially when the content claims to present new information or theories. Instead, Google expects these articles to represent and include well-established facts and expert consensus.

To publish STEM content that’s in line with E-E-A-T:

• Use expert content creators
• Source facts and other info from highly credible sites
• Go straight to the primary source for those facts, such as studies published in scientific journals

Food, Beverage and General Retail Products

Everybody eats and everybody has an opinion on food, so it’s not exactly shocking that everyday expertise often comes into play for content in this niche. There’s a lot of common knowledge surrounding cooking, for instance, and content surrounding retail products relies heavily on reviews.

There are some exceptions here. While a layperson could write a blog on favorite Cabernet and cheese pairings, you might want a trained sommelier to weigh in on deep-dive wine topics like vinification techniques. A frequent shopper could offer up tips on extreme couponing, but it would take an expert to confidently espouse on the psychology of retail product pricing.

To know whether you should recruit an expert or if you’re okay with “everyday expertise,” think about the topic at hand and whether someone would need to study to fully understand and explain the nuances of that topic or if a hobbyist has the chops to cater to search expectations.

The Final Word on E-E-A-T

There’s no secret handshake or magic potion that will earn you a shortcut to the top of Google’s search results. It’s a level playing field, and the top spot is open to anyone willing to put in the time and effort to meet E-E-A-T expectations.

But the road isn’t always well-paved and hurdles aren’t exactly uncommon — especially when Google’s averaging over a dozen updates per day. Keeping up with trends and investing in E-E-A-T friendly content is a solid, winning strategy that benefits rankings and readers alike.

Incorporate the tips above and you may soon see:

• Better SEO performance
• Higher conversion rates
• Increased strength in the face of Google’ scrutiny — no matter what updates are in the offing

ALSO – Expert Checklist: SEO for Blog PostsIf you know you need to do something to improve your SEO and just don’t have the time, knowledge or in-house resources to get it done, we can help. Find out more about Crowd Content’s professional writing services and how they can help you create E-E-A-T content.

The post The Complete Guide to Google E-E-A-T: How to Improve SEO appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

In communities of marketers and SEOs, it’s a constant debate: do you grow a business using PPC or content marketing? The instinct is to choose one or the other — you can either pay to aim offers at a chosen audience, or optimize relevant content to reach your target demographic through unpaid channels.

But, we’re finding more and more that these don’t have to be two distinct strategies. Content marketing and paid channels like Facebook and Google Ads CAN be melded together, and what’s more, it may be more effective than using one or the other.

This is a discussion about how content and advertising can be used together in a cost-effective, high-ROI campaign.

What Is Content Marketing?

The first step to understanding how to mix content and advertising is to understand exactly what content marketing truly means. Many business leaders think that if they have a blog and post content regularly, it’s a content marketing strategy.

If you want your content marketing to not be a complete waste of time, though, you have to think hard about the goal of any given piece of content you create. Let’s say you write a blog. How can you get the work you’ve done in front of the right sets of eyes?

Valuable content can be truly invaluable when used with a variety of strategies, according to the Content Marketing Institute:

Content is non-negotiable in an SEO strategy; a blog post optimized for keywords, backlinks, and on and off-page best practices has the potential to multiply the number of views on a piece of content.

Email marketing: No matter the type of email list you have access to, thin content that isn’t relevant to your readers won’t get the clicks to justify continued use of the channel.

It’s crucial in social media; even loyal customers aren’t quick to engage with weak content.

ALSO – Social Media: How Does it Impact Your SEO in 2019?

Content Marketing and Ads: Addressing the Limitations of Unpaid Media

But, what happens when your organic and “unpaid” channels aren’t getting the results you need to promote your products and services effectively? If you’re a marketer for a smaller brand without the authority to compete on a level playing field with the big boys, SEO, email, and organic social media alone may fall short.

For example, email campaigns are generally high-ROI activities, but only if you have the email addresses to make it worthwhile. Social media is great for nurturing a warmer group, but organic posts are unlikely to reach colder parts of your target audience.

This is when it’s time to start pursuing paid channels. But, there’s a mistake that many marketers make when switching from content marketing to paid advertising: they de-emphasize valuable, high-performing content, with the expectation that adding money to the equation will make up for it.

Why Is Content So Important in Paid Advertising (and Vice Versa)?

Imagine you’re running a Facebook ads campaign. You optimize the targeting and reach perfectly. You do everything right, except build your ads on the back of a great piece of content that provides a solution to a relevant issue faced by your audience (psst… here are some examples of content that inspires and excites).

What’s going to happen? Most likely, your cost-per-click (CPC) will be high and your engagement rate low. In short, your ads will be a waste of money.

The same goes for something like Google PPC. Without valuable content to direct people who click, your opportunities to get new leads without offering discounts or special promotions will be limited.

So, we’ve established that content can be limited without paid channels, but also, that paid channels can be limited without great content. Leveraging them both can be the answer.

How to Mix Paid Ads and Content Marketing

We understand that leveraging paid traffic with valuable, relevant content can address common roadblocks that can arise when you run a campaign using just one or the other. But, getting started can be tough. How do you know what to do first?

Most marketers agree: content comes first. You need to identify your strongest content and work backward. But, how do you decide which content to use? Here are a few examples of how to identify valuable content and use it effectively in content advertising.

Identify the Best Content for Your Chosen Paid Channels

The harmony between your content and the way it gets distributed should be top of mind.

Andy Mura, Head of Marketing at Userlane: “when it comes to paid promotion for top-of-the-funnel content, the first — and highly important — step is to identify the kind of content that will yield the best results.”

The goal of this practice is to find something that marketing guru Larry Kim calls “unicorn content”. This is content that ranks high, gets tons of engagement on social channels, and outperforms relevant KPIs. But, how do you single out this rare type of piece?

Look to the Past

This is where having a breadth of content-focused campaigns in the past can give you the advantage. Based on past results (traffic, click-through rates, and other data), you can identify high-performing content to promote through paid channels.

Don’t make the mistake of assuming something that performed well in the past will simply work in the future, however. Here are some tips to refresh old content for a new purpose (or in this case, paid promotion).

Consider the “How”, Not Just the “What”

What’s the risk of choosing the wrong content for a given channel? Low engagement and poor ROI. Imagine you’re using a Google ads campaign to break into a new market, and research has uncovered the potential to reach new leads. If you build your ads on the back of content that’s more relevant to current customers than cold leads, you won’t get the response you’re looking for and that spend will go to waste.

But what happens if you don’t have the data on past content to inform future strategy?

Facebook Ads Content Marketing: You Can Use Paid Ads to Test Content

If you don’t have good data to use when choosing content to build a paid strategy on it, you don’t have to guess — you can build your own data.

For example: Facebook’s advertising algorithm gives marketers the ability to test content across a variety of different audiences, as well as test two pieces of content against each other to the same audience. This is the strategy used by Quincy Smith, a marketer at Ampjar, when conceptualizing a paid content marketing campaign.

Says Smith, “we have audience segmentation in Facebook that corresponds to our user-profiles and so we will promote pieces of content to these groups and see who responds favorably.”

Marketers who just use paid ads to boost content they already know to be “high-performing” may be missing out on using these channels as a way to identify new, strong content that may perform even better.

Content + Retargeting = Conversions

Most people are familiar with the concept of “funnel”. Top-of-funnel customers are those who know almost nothing about your brand. Bottom-of-funnel customers are those making a purchase.

You can use paid content marketing to push prospects along the funnel — simply promote broadly relevant content and track the hand-raisers. These are the people who will be more receptive to receiving narrower, “mid-funnel” content in the near future.

Facebook and Google ad channels provide an easy way to track this timeline: just build a Facebook ad promoting content to the coldest leads — those who have never even heard of your brand before. With the installation of a Facebook pixel on your landing page, you can build a list of users who are farther down in the funnel and thus, more likely to convert.

Paid Ads and Content Can Be Mutually Beneficial

By backing your paid advertising with great content, you can drive leads to your business, but that’s not the only potential benefit:

According to Abel Hegyes, Marketing Director at eBacon, “website visitors who are just looking for information have turned into customers along the line. So our PPC strategy helps to drive traffic to our informational content sites and targets customers who are in the educational stage of our sales funnel.”

This is a great example of the symbiotic relationship between content marketing and PPC advertising. In the best case, an ad campaign built on a particular piece of content will drive new leads to your business, but even if it doesn’t, traffic to the page from users looking to relevant answers will boost your SEO, even if your content isn’t destined to end up on at the top of a results page.

The Best Channels for Promoting Content

We’ve mentioned a few of the channels that will provide the highest ROI for content promotion: Google Ads is among the most commonly used, and for good reason — when leveraged with top-of-funnel keywords and match phrases and paired with unique, relevant landing pages, Google Ads can provide cost-effective promotion of a wide range of content. Facebook, too, has been successful in this purpose.

Some channels you may not have considered offer cost-effective native advertising on a wide variety of sites, meaning that you can see your content placed on domains that are relevant to your audience. Among the most widely used are Taboola and Outbrain.

Your Next Steps

As we mentioned, the content comes before you can think about injecting ad spend into the equation. This starts with figuring out what your audience needs, and identifying relevant posts, white papers, case studies and more that helps meet those needs.

This can take place using a content audit, an intensive process of indexing all the content you’ve created (and deployed) in the past. You may not have the type of content you need, however. Before you can start blending content marketing and advertising, you need to have a content creation process that yields valuable assets.

The post Content Advertising: How to Leverage Paid Ads in Your Content Marketing appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Most web marketers will tell you that these days, long-form content for SEO is king. Long gone are the days when agencies cranked out threadbare, 500-word posts crammed with keywords designed to increase their clients’ search engine rankings. Today, it’s all about information-rich, keyword-savvy copy that fully satisfies searcher intent.

According to Orbit Media’s 2021 study on blogging, post lengths have been climbing year-over-year. Today’s posts average 1,151 words compared to 800 words in 2014, a word count increase of 42%. Perhaps more telling is that 50% of bloggers writing long-form content report strong results for their efforts.

ALSO – Find skilled content writers to craft long-form content for your website

But is it best to use long-form content for SEO? While you should never write fluff to meet an arbitrary word-count goal, long-form content may make the most sense for digital marketing campaigns. Keep reading to learn more about long-form content and why it can be a true value-add for your website or blog.

What Is Long-Form Content?

Before you can understand the pros and cons of content length, it’s important to define what we mean by long-form content. While there isn’t a universally recognized number of words that characterize long-form content, according to Forbes, experts generally agree that the low end of word count lies somewhere between 1,200 and 2,000 words.

Tony DeGennaro, Director of Marketing for Dragon Social Limited, offers a different perspective on defining long-form content. He believes it’s more about providing an in-depth look at the covered topic and less about word count. DeGennaro explains that at Dragon Social, “We aim to answer nearly every question a potential reader could have in that one piece of content. It’s due to this we don’t really have an optimal content length. We write as much as necessary to achieve this goal.”

By this definition, you can distinguish long-form as content designed to comprehensively cover a topic, including semantically related subjects. Exploring these logical ‘next steps’ connected to the main topic can ensure the piece’s completeness, even promoting a higher search engine ranking.

Casey Hill of Bonjoro defines long-form content by a different measure: dwell time. Essentially, dwell time considers how long a viewer spends consuming web page content returned by a search query before clicking back to the results page.

Although Bonjoro generally classifies anything over 1,500 words as long-form, Hill, the company’s growth manager, notes, “The more important factor than length, however, is ‘dwell time’ and here we want to shoot for 120 seconds or greater.”

Long-Form Content Types

Regardless of actual length, long-form content can take several different shapes, including:

• White papers. These authoritative reports are meant to inform a brand’s audience about a particular topic or issue.
• Case studies. Used to analyze a principle or subject, case studies detail the development of a particular individual, business or unique situation.
• Long blog posts: Often informal, blog posts generally explore a topic related to the overarching subject of the blog.
• Guides. As instructional material, guides are meant to inform and direct the reader along a particular path.
• Essay-style listicles. These trendy articles take the form of lists and can be considered long-form or short-form content, depending on the approach. Long-form listicles generally include brief essays on each item.

Why Opt for Long-Form Content?

While there may be no hard and fast rule governing the word count of long-form content, online marketers know these meaty articles can be a real value-add for businesses, bloggers and websites.

The benefits of long-form content include:

1. Better Search Engine Rankings

The numbers don’t lie — long-form content ranks well. In fact, Bonjoro’s Casey Hill points out that in 2019, Google’s algorithms adapted to prioritize long-form content. Hill notes, “For many organizations, well-formatted long-form content began to see a 5-10% placement prioritization for SEO versus comparable short-form content on the same blogs.”

One reason for this bump in performance is that well-crafted longer pieces may utilize more long-tail keywords, which are multi-word keyword phrases that hit on your site whenever someone searches for those exact phrases. These long-tail keyword match-ups also let search engines know that your content is high-quality and on target for your topic.

In addition, most long-form content pays attention to semantic completeness, addressing, if only briefly, related topics that give the audience a full picture of the topic at hand. This effort to create comprehensive content is often rewarded by search engines designed to rank these longer, comprehensive articles higher than content of lesser quality.

2. Longer Visitor Engagement

If you post information-rich content that’s worth reading, chances are good that visitors to your site will linger longer and come back more often. This is particularly important when readers reach your site through Google search results because the time spent on your page essentially tells Google that you’ve given searchers what they were looking for, letting Google adjust search rankings for future searches.

3. Improved Conversion

Forbes notes that companies, such as Crazy Egg, were able to improve their conversion rates significantly by using long-form content. In the case of Crazy Egg, conversion rates increased by more than 30%.

4. Establishing Your Site as an Authority

By providing high-quality long-form content on your blog or website, you bring credibility to your brand. Eventually, this credibility establishes your site or brand as an authority in your industry or subject matter, which can ultimately lead to better name recognition and more online sales.

5. More Social Media Shares

According to Search Engine Land, long-form has historically outperformed short-form content when it comes to social media shareability. According to a study conducted by Quick Sprout, posts greater than 1,500 words receive significantly more social shares and likes than shorter posts. The upshot of enhanced social media engagement is new readers and site growth.

ALSO – Social Media: How Does it Impact Your SEO in 2019?

6. More Backlinks

Another benefit of longer content is a higher percentage of backlinks, which can provide more organic traffic. To encourage backlinking, your content should entice link creators to view it as valuable enough to link to or even to use as background information for their own articles.

Since shorter content, by its nature, provides less information, it’s often considered less valuable, resulting in few, if any, backlinks. Content that takes a deep dive into its subject matter is almost guaranteed to generate more backlinks, which in turn contribute to better search engine rankings.

Tips for Creating Long-Form Content

While the benefits of long-form content are undeniable, it’s important not to lose focus on quality. Keyword stuffing and other black-hat SEO tactics have no place in modern content and can actually harm your search rankings. 

There are several ways you can ensure that readers make it all the way through even your longest pieces:

Be Informative

According to Audrey Strasenburgh, SEO Strategist at FreeLogoServices, it’s important to be informative when creating long-form content. “Your users are probably looking for advice, examples, a How-To, or a history lesson of some degree,” she explains. “Always look to answer the What, Where, Why, and How questions of your industry — and never hesitate to cover a topic that hasn’t been covered before.”

Be Thorough

Jerryll Noordern, a real estate investor and digital marketer with SEO Real Estate Investors, believes that content marketers should worry less about content length and concentrate more on pleasing their audience. Rather than aiming for a specific word count, Noordern suggests trying to produce an article that includes all the information your audience needs. He advises, “Cut the fluff. Make it as short or as long as it needs to be.”

One thing to consider in an effort to be thorough is semantic completeness. To cover a topic thoroughly, a writer should consider related subjects. Even touching on these connections as a sidebar can go a long way toward creating the most comprehensive piece of content possible.

Keep It Readable

Another suggestion from Strasenburgh is to check your content’s readability score. She suggests that an 8th-grade level is ideal. The Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test can help determine the grade level and reading ease of your content by generating a score. The higher the score, the lower the complexity of the article. According to the site, most business writing should aim for a score of around 65.

There are several additional tools available to check your readability score and help you benchmark against similar content generated by your competitors, including Yoast SEO and SEMrush’s online writing assistant.

To keep your material readable, you should follow a few basic rules:

• Keep paragraphs short.
• Limit long sentences.
• Avoid words that have too many syllables.
• Minimize the use of industry jargon.

Include Actionable Tips

Readers like takeaways, particularly when they include easily executable steps designed to generate results. Bulleted lists with action items for users give your audience a road map to guide them toward what to do next.

Stay Evergreen

Don’t limit the shelf life of your post, if you can help it. Whenever possible, avoid language that dates an article, and write about topics that are evergreen to ensure the longevity of your content and keep visitors coming back.

Formatting Is Critical

Casey Hill of Bonjorno notes that in long-form content, formatting is particularly critical. “Have clear headings, anchor links to different sections when possible and make it easy to navigate,” Hill suggests, “A wall of poorly laid out text with high keyword concentrations is not a guarantee for good rank and certainly not something that will hold a reader’s attention.”

A well-organized table of contents can be especially helpful in constructing long articles, giving your audience an at-a-glance view of what’s included in your text. Smart use of visual elements, such as text boxes, diagrams, featured images, PDF downloads and white space, can also make an article less overwhelming to readers.

Audrey Strasenburgh also suggests using title tags to break down subsets of ideas and incorporating bullet points or numbered lists to keep information more digestible. “Don’t forget images!” she says. “Images that accurately describe the content will keep users scrolling down the page.”

If words are the bread of your long-form content, formatting is the butter that makes it go down smoothly. Savvy formatting can keep visitors on the site longer, which is vital to optimizing for Google’s RankBrain and increasing your search ranking.

Avoid Fluff and Filler

Kyle Douglas, the SEO Manager of Revium, believes that there is such a thing as too many words. As he explains, “Overdoing content can increase bounce rates just as much as content that is too short. If I’m trying to find a ‘plumber near me,’ I want the contact details and information on their services. Not a 2,000-word article on their plumbing history and capabilities.”

A good rule of thumb is to never use fluff or filler to pad content simply to increase your word count.

Managing Long-Form Content

If you think your website or blog would benefit from the addition of long-form content, there are tools that can make the process of content creation and management less cumbersome. Here are a few resources to help optimize longer articles:

Content Optimization Tools

There are several tools available to promote content optimization. SEMrush offers a template to help content creators craft and optimize SEO-friendly articles. This tool lets you compare your content to pages holding the top ranks for your primary keyword(s). A second option, MarketMuse’s creative brief tool, lets you streamline the process of content creation, illuminating opportunities and gaps in your content.

Keyword Research Tools

Whether you’re writing long or short content, keywords are essential. Keywords are determined, in large part, by the terms that searchers type into search engines, and finding the right target keyword can set the tone for your whole article. Although it’s no longer essential to match keywords exactly to potential search terms, matching the searcher’s intent is vital.

Finding the right keywords can be daunting, but there are tools available to help. Whether it’s finding out what keywords your competitors are using or discovering semantically related keywords, the right tool can take you far. Some tools to start with are:

• SEMrush
• Moz
• Ahrefs
• Keyword Planner
• Wordtracker
• Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest

ALSO – Qualitative Keyword Research: How to Invest 10 Minutes into Your Content Marketing Process & See Your Content Rise to the Top of Google

Google’s Webmaster Tools

What better way is there to understand search engine rankings than the search engine leader itself? Google’s Webmaster Guidelines help content creators better understand Google’s search algorithms and how the search engine views websites.

You can find out more about how these guidelines can help webmasters and marketers navigate the sometimes-challenging ins and outs of Google in our recent post.

How Long Is Too Long?

There may be such a thing as too long, however. According to Mark Webster, the co-founder of Authority Hacker, an industry-leading online marketing education company, the optimal length for long-form content may be lower than you think. Authority Hacker recently performed a study on the topic, looking at various ranking factors for over 1 million SERP results, including content length. What they found was surprising.

Webster says, “We previously believed long-form content was king. We would invest thousands of dollars into huge 8,000-word guides assuming it must be good, right? However, upon analyzing the top #1 positions in Google, the optimal number was much lower — in fact, the average word count of the top one to three SERP results are just 1,500-2,000 words.”

In light of its study, Authority Hacker began to divide its longer posts into shorter chunks. Webster notes, “Both user feedback and rankings have shown us that this style is much more favorable than ultra long-form content and we will certainly continue to pursue this style in the future!”

So what does all this mean when you’re trying to decide on content length? Ultimately, what it all comes down to is outdoing your content competitors, rather than shooting for an arbitrary number.

ALSO – How to Determine Optimal Content Lengths

The Long and Short of It

Long-form content may indeed be king, but there are benefits to short-form posts as well. Ultimately, an engaging mix of longer and shorter pieces may be the best way to keep visitors coming back to your site.

ALSO – Are Short Blog Posts Worth It in a Long-Form World? Visit Crowd Content to learn how we can help your website gain traffic and increase conversions through targeted, professional long-form content.

The post What Are the Key Benefits to Long-Form Content for SEO? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

The early days of SEO might be called the Wild West days of SEO. The fastest guns might have ruled the towns of the old west, but the fastest and most prolific keyword stuffers ruled digital marketing once upon a time.

But those days are gone, and while there’s no new sheriff in town, Google has increasingly adopted the white hat approach to SEO and ranking. And other search engines have followed suit. Today, they reward high-quality SEO content. More importantly, readers demand valuable, engaging content.

Check out these seven tips from SEO experts on how to create engaging content that boosts your placement in SERPs.

1. Do Your Research: On Keywords and Searcher Intent

Always begin with keyword research. John Matyasovsky is a content marketer for Roofing Webmasters and says, “Start by finding a keyword people are searching for. You can use tools like MOZ Keyword Explorer, SEMRush, or AHRefs to analyze the volume, competition and opportunity. Once you have a keyword that fits your topic, you can then research semantic terms on LSIGraph. These are words to include within the content of the post rather than just using the target keyword over and over.”

Target, or primary keywords: The main search term you’re targeting with your content.

Secondary keywords: Search terms you’re also targeting, but they aren’t as high priority within your content as the primary phrase.

Semantic keywords: Related terms or keyword synonyms that can boost your performance in the search engines and may be able to fit into your content organically. Semantic keywords help boost SEO while supporting engagement, because no one wants to read 1,000 words that include the primary keyword repeated 10, 20 or 50 times. That’s keyword stuffing — no one, including Google, appreciates it.

It’s not enough to know what keywords are performing right now. You have to understand why, because that lets you uncover searcher intent. If you don’t know why someone is searching for a term, you can’t create content that appropriately serves and converts them.

Consider the keyword term “softball bat.” Searcher intent could be to find a bat to purchase (softball bats for sale), but other possible intents include researching bats for future needs (best softball bat for), finding out about a specific bat (fastpitch softball bat), getting tips on caring for a bat (how to clean a softball bat) or just wondering what a softball bat actually is (what is a softball bat). The content for each of these intents would be unique.

Chris Love, a web developer and SEO expert with more than 25 years in the business, says, “For us, a factor driving anything we produce is researching what is currently ranking, identifying why and [determining ] what they may be missing. Analyzing the top 5-20 results for a target keyword tells us what type of content to create. It could be a list, how to or general research article. But you always need to determine what problem the searcher is trying to solve and [whether you can] provide a great answer and make your presentation better than what is currently ranked.”

Love also says, “Make sure your content aligns with the search intent. This is where analyzing the structure of the top results pays dividends. Don’t waste time producing content that is not structured in a similar fashion as the pages you are trying to beat. There’s a reason you see all those ‘Top X Reasons Why Y’ type articles: consumers find those articles the most appropriate [for the intent of their searches].”

To Love’s point, it’s important to group keywords with similar intents so you can align the content of a page with them. The old days of creating a page for every keyword are long gone; content marketing needs to speak to a solution for specific intents, which means you need multiple pages.

ALSO – Qualitative Keyword Research: How to Invest 10 Minutes into Your Content Marketing Process & See Your Content Rise to the Top of Google

2. Aim for Semantic Completeness When It Comes to Content and Keywords

It’s not enough to catch a few of the keywords in your research and go from there. In addition to searcher intent, the best SEO concentrates on semantic completeness. Not only are you answering the user’s question on the matter, you’re also answering as many of the questions as possible without going overboard.

And that requires a comprehensive approach to keyword research. Joe Goldstein, Director of SEO and Operations for Contractor Calls, gives an in-depth explanation for how to go about finding all the potential keywords and intents you might want to address.

“Start by taking your keyword and simply checking out the other search results. Literally just go through everything on the first page of results and take down notes about which kinds of supporting sections, talking points or supplemental content can be found on each page. Then, check the autocomplete options at the top of the search and the ‘searches related to’ section at the bottom. These searches and keywords are all relevant to your target keyword, since Google bothered to put them anywhere near the search results. So use them liberally in your content.

Next, I usually head over to SEObility’s free TF*IDF tool. This tool takes any target keyword and breaks down the on-page supporting keywords for top search results. What’s even better is that it shows the average usage per result as well as the max number of users among any of those results, which can help you spot outliers and branded terms.

While some experts insist that all TF-IDF tools are useless because Google uses a more sophisticated form of document modeling in its search algorithm, it’s important to realize that one of TF-IDF’s big limitations is that it simply ignores semantics while returning correlation. When you search for “buy cheap pumas” using that tool, you might see keywords like “cats” and “jungle” in the mix if that kind of content has snuck into the search results. Since Google’s actual document modeling is based on entity analysis (it can tell the difference between a cat and a shoe based on context), just ignore the keywords that are irrelevant to your version of the target keywords.

Re-seeding those underrepresented supporting keywords into your content is one of the best ways to quickly move up the rankings for your target keyword while also casting a larger net for related searches. You can also repeat the process with those related searches — such as “buy pumas online free shipping” — to uncover a larger set of relevant supporting keywords.”

Luke, an SEO Manager at Adzooma, points out a statistic that brings the need for this type of semantic completeness into focus. “According to Ahrefs,” he says, “The average number of keywords in top 20 pages also rank for over 200 other keywords. Using LSI terms and synonyms can help and avoid keyword stuffing.”

But it’s important to remember that the game isn’t to stuff as many keywords in as possible. You should be writing content that naturally employs these terms as you explain them or use them in relation to the topic at hand. Tools such as LSIGraph and Marketmuse can help you discover what these keywords might be.

3. Aim for the Featured Snippet

The featured snippet — or Google Answer box — is becoming an increasingly hotter topic in SEO circles, with more brands chasing this prime real estate on SERPs. According to Ahrefs, around 12% of searches trigger a featured snippet, and that number is growing.

While the answer box isn’t stealing all the thunder from other organic search results (such as the top spot, which still gets the most clicks), it does serve a very valuable branding purpose. The featured snippet gets a bit more than 9% of the clicks on average — but not all searches result in clicks. Sometimes, the featured snippet answers the question or intent of the search and the user is done, which means the page that landed that powerful spot earned a boost when it comes to future recognition or brand awareness.

Love provides these tips for those chasing the Google answer box.

• Find ways to make your content better than the existing snippet answer.
• Make your featured snippet content prominent on your page by:
  • Placing it right after the keyword question.
  • Highlighting it with a block quote, list, table or better styling.
  • Include an image or photo to support your snippet content. “Diagrams can be a great choice here, says Love, as “search engines are looking for imagery to quickly explain a concept.”

ALSO – Expert Checklist: SEO for Blog Posts

4. Create Quality Content

Michelle Levine is an SEO Manager for Vistaprint. She says, “The most important tactic for writing high-performing SEO content will always be writing outstanding content. The more people that find your content useful, the higher that content will rank.”

Quality content is:

• Well written. Consider working with qualified and proven SEO freelance writers or our expert enterprise team to create high-quality SEO content that drives results.
• Grammatical and clear. There’s a reason we offer clients the ability to add editing steps to their orders. While the average person won’t necessarily care about a minor grammar faux pas, the misplacement of a comma or the wrong version of a word can actually change the entire meaning of your message.
• The right length. Find out how to choose the right word count for your topic.
• Highly relevant to the audience. Don’t just ask yourself what you have to say on this topic. Ask what your audience wants to hear.

5. Use Tactics that Spawn Engagement

It’s not enough to score a high rank in the search engines and draw people into your site. Once they’re on-page, you must be able to engage them. Behavioral metrics, such as time visitors spend on page, how often they click to read more of your content and bounce rates all factor into your future placement in SERPs.

Zach Hendrix, Co-Founder of GreenPal, says, “If average time spent on [your] site is 3 or 4 minutes versus your competitor’s less than 1 minute, Google will reward your page by pushing [it] higher up in on search engine results pages.”

To this end, your content has to be more than high quality. It must be designed to engage the reader — whether that’s through the writing style, format or interactive options.

Hendrix recommends what he calls Bucket Brigades, which are small sections of content on the page that are designed to carry the reader through to the end. “With the bucket brigade tactic, you can keep your visitors on-page longer by breaking up the copy every two or three sentences with bolded or subhead phrases,” he says. The point is to “captivate your reader and psychologically drive them down the page [so they are] reading more of your copy and [staying] on your site longer.”

Hendrix recommends phrases such as:

• Here’s the deal
• Why does this matter?
• What’s the catch?
• How can this help you?
• The best part

You can also use tools to drive engagement such as Click to Tweet or social share buttons, which naturally encourage users to get involved with your content and even share it with others.

6. Incorporate Visuals or Think Visually as You Create Content

Alice Gerwat is the Content Editor and Social Media Manager at Magic Freebies. She says that visual content is no longer an option for brands investing in content marketing and SEO efforts.

“When writing content with SEO in mind,” she says, “It’s essential to include images to complement your written words, as we are living in a visual age. A study by Jakob Nielsen back in 1997 revealed that internet users never even read — they scan. This means your audience picks out information in bite-sized chunks, using visual markers on the page [to do so]. Images are as important visual markers as bullet points, H1s and H2s, as they help guide the reader to get the most value out of what they’re reading as quickly as possible. It’s also worth making the alt tags for your images as descriptive as possible so search engines can interpret your image as relevant to your written content.”

Remember that image SEO is almost as important as text SEO. Google Images is the #2 search engine for a reason — pictures are still worth a thousand words and many users still default to visual searches to find what they need quickly.

Other ways you can optimize the scannability of your page while improving SEO?

• Incorporate diagrams and infographics that summarize the content or answer
• Embed videos and multimedia
• Design content with visual scanning in mind, telling a story with the help of headers, bullet points, bold and italics, and other formatting tools

7. Learn How to Write SEO Content for the Big Picture

Finally, remember that one blog post, landing page or product description does not make an online marketing strategy or SEO plan. Every piece you write should fit into the big picture of your overall SEO plan. That means choosing content topics that support each other and your overall message and linking between them.

Topic clusters are critical here, because they help draw people further into your pages, increasing behavioral metrics and driving someone closer to the conversion. Plus, they help position your brand as a true authority. For example, if you’re a personal finance brand, it’s no longer enough to write a stellar blog post about saving money. Instead, you should create an entire topic cluster of posts on the topic to serve various searcher intent and entice consumers in different stages of the funnel. For example:

• A general post about saving money attracts people at the top of the funnel who are just looking into this topic. You might make this a pillar post with links to more in-depth content on a variety of topics, such as getting out of debt, saving at the grocery store or putting money away for a big purchase or retirement
• A more specific landing page or post might draw attention specifically to your workshop on personal budgeting for success with a specific financial goal. This type of content is still part of the overall cluster, but it’s geared more toward people further down the funnel who are ready to make a decision or purchase.

It’s critical to link all these things together in logical ways that help the buyer discover you via organic search and then stick with you through the rest of the journey. Luke says, “Make sure to have at least 3-4 internal links… linking to relevant pages you want to rank higher is good for SEO as it helps when Google crawls your site and reduces crawl depth per page.”

ALSO – Crash Course: How to Become an SEO Content Writer
ALSO – What Can You Learn to Help Future-Proof Your Content for Algorithm Updates

Make a Plan, Check Your Plan and Tweak Your Plan

Good SEO is not something you’re going to stumble upon one day and then never have to worry about again. It’s a constantly evolving online marketing discipline. Start today by making a plan following some of the tips above. Put it into action writing SEO content that engages. Then, check your metrics, analyze the results and make small changes to try to improve them. Search engines are always making tiny tweaks to their algorithms, so you have to do the same with your content.

The post 7 Tips for How to Write SEO Content appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Keyword research is an integral component of any content marketing strategy; it ensures your content is relevant to your audience and acts as the foundation of your SEO efforts by providing insights into which phrases have the most search volume. That in turn guides you to in creating effective SEO content that will rank highly and capture that search traffic.

We often tackle keyword research by using a quantitative tool to estimate the volume of searches associated with a given phrase then compare the merits of several phrases based on the search volume and level of competition. While numbers are powerful, starting with quantitative keyword research overlooks the more impactful (and quick) process of qualitative keyword research.

Qualitative keyword research focuses on language and semantics and often takes the form of brainstorming. You’ll step back from the numbers and take your keyword research to a higher level by thinking about the audience. 

Let’s take a look at an example of qualitative keyword research for the purpose of writing a blog post.

In our example, our goal is to write a blog post about energy chews. Whether this is a topic that you know well or only tangentially, our qualitative keyword research is insightful.

Google Auto Suggest

Grab a piece of paper and go to www.google.com. Type a two-word phrase relating to your topic into the search bar (don’t hit the Enter key yet). In this case, we’ll go with “energy chews.” You’ll notice a dropdown appear.

The words suggested by Google in the dropdown tell us that if a person starts typing “energy chew,  that phrase is likely to continue with words like “Walmart, “near me,” or “for a half marathon.” This automatic suggestion feature is known as Google Search Suggest.

If you find any relevant keywords of interest in the dropdown, jot them down on your piece of paper.

Now, go ahead and perform the search for “energy chew.” Then, scroll through the search results and look for a box titled “People also ask”. This is a great place to find long-tail keywords, typically in a question format. Write any relevant questions or phrases you find on your piece of paper. 

ALSO – Long Tail Keywords: What They Are and How To Use Them

Next, click the down arrow next to any “People also ask” questions that seem relevant.  Read the text that appears and notice whether it answers the question. This text is known as “snippet bait.” It is the content pulled from a page or post which succinctly answers the question. You’ll now see new questions appear, and these questions will also be in line with your interest. (Read more about featured snippets in the context of voice search.) 

How much time you spend in Google doing qualitative keyword research depends on your topic. If your goal is to write a highly specific blog post on energy chews, then you may now have a specific angle to explore — such as “energy chews for half marathon.” Alternatively, you may be intending to publish a comprehensive piece of content about energy chews such as “Energy Chews: A Definitive Guide.” In that case, your searches in Google will continue until you’ve gathered enough information for an article of that depth and size.

Answer the Public

Now that we’ve covered Google Auto Suggest, let’s turn our attention to a second tool — Answer the Public. Again, searching for two-word phrases related to your topic is a great way to start. These entries typically lead to plenty of data, but not an overwhelming amount. 

Type in “energy chews” and hit Enter. Look at the resulting array of words which are organized into a wheel:

This is qualitative data that has been clustered by questions — can, what, will, which, where, who, when, why, how, and are. As you scroll down the page, you’ll find more clusters including prepositions (without, can, with, to, for, near, is) and comparisons (or, and, like, versus, vs).

If your goal is to write a complete piece of content, then these wheels of data will break down your topic into subtopics, which can help you structure and outline your post. The question format is especially valuable since you’re most likely aiming to answer users’ questions. 

ALSO – Expert Checklist: SEO for Blog Posts

You can also switch from a wheel layout to a grid view in Answer the Public, which displays phrases organized by topic.

Next Steps

Your piece of paper should now be filled with keywords you have brainstormed. Start to organize these phrases into clusters. Learn more about keyword clustering to master this powerful SEO tactic. You can prioritize your work by collecting estimated search volume from keyword research tools such as the Moz Keyword Explorer. 

Although it’s often overlooked (or skipped), qualitative research is a key task in any step by step approach to keyword research. It is quick, easy and will help inform your content so that as you share your expertise online, you can rise to the top of Google. 

Give this process a try while writing your next blog post or building a new landing page. If you’re using Crowd Content, be sure to pass along any insights you find to your author so that they can be incorporated into your content. 

The post Qualitative Keyword Research: How to Invest 10 Minutes into Your Content Marketing Process & See Your Content Rise to the Top of Google appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Updates intended to improve the engine’s search results are implemented daily, although they’re often small enough to go unnoticed. Several times a year, however, Google makes more significant changes to its search algorithms and systems in its efforts to deliver relevant content in billions of daily searches. 

Our post on Google’s June algorithm update dives deeper into one of the more recent changes.

These large-scale Google algorithm updates are known as core updates, and while they’re generally seamless to searchers, they can have major consequences for website search rankings. That’s why it’s so important for webmasters and marketers to understand these changes and what they mean for content creation. In fact, deciphering the principles behind these algorithm updates can not only help you course-correct to reverse associated drops in website traffic but may actually enable you to future-proof content in anticipation of upcoming core updates.

Google recently addressed its core updates, discussing how these changes impact website search rankings and providing insight into how the algorithm views content. If you’re looking for ways to improve your search rankings and adapt your website to meet Google’s standards, the key is content, content, content. And, if you’re an SEO content writer, knowing ow to write to satisfy these guidelines is critical.

Here’s what you need to know about Google’s core updates so you can future-proof your content against future algorithm changes.

The Benefits of a Google Algorithm Update

Every Google algorithm update is launched with one primary goal: to better assess the way the search engine evaluates websites in order to deliver relevant content that satisfies search intent to searchers. In practical terms, Google aims to reward quality, relevant content with higher search rankings.

While some webmasters view these changes with trepidation, Nachum Balofsky of 1SEO I.T. Support & Digital Marketing believes the algorithm updates can ultimately make the job of a content strategist easier. Balofsky, the company’s in-house SEO & Content Strategist, explains, “The smarter Google gets at figuring out your intentions, the more we as digital marketers can focus on things like UX and useful content.” Balofsky also postulates that as Google’s algorithms continue to increase in sophistication, web professionals can leverage Google’s understanding of language and topical themes to their advantage.

What that means for you is that as Google reassesses the way its search engine views content, you should reassess the content you’re providing, using the roadmap Google has conveniently laid out.

Reevaluating Website Content with the Google Algorithm in Mind

Periodically reevaluating your website content is always a good practice (freshness is a significant ranking factor), but it’s essential if you want to future-proof your content for Google’s algorithm updates. While Google has made it clear that quality and relevance top its list of what it looks for in a high-ranking website, you need to understand how Google defines quality and how you can apply that to content creation.

As Marcus Miller, head of SEO & Digital Marketing at the UK Agency Bowler Hat, explains, “Google is and pretty much always has been perfectly clear that quality content is that which helps the end-user achieve their goals.” Miller expresses the importance of reading Google’s various webmaster help pages, including its webmaster guidelines to get a real feel for what the search engine is shooting for.

In its recent post, Google shared a list of helpful questions to ask during a self-assessment of your content, but conducting a thorough evaluation boils down to several key points.

Embrace originality

Valuable content will likely include original information. While the topic may be familiar, your content shouldn’t be. Even if your page builds on preexisting information or data, it should offer a fresh take, a new perspective, or an insightful analysis of the subject.

Some great ways to create original content include:

• Presenting existing data that may be buried in a more accessible way
• Getting quotes and contributions from industry experts
• Conduct your own primary research through questionnaires and surveys
• Sharing your own company’s experience by sharing internal data or creating case studies

It’s also important to avoid mass-produced and distributed content, which may be repeated over and over on websites throughout the internet. Stick with high-quality, SEO-rich content that’s been created specifically for your site.

New to content writing? Check out Crash Course: How to Become an SEO Content Writer

Provide substance

Substantial, complete information is a must if you want to obtain a high spot on Google’s search results. Marcus Miller, who has worked in the SEO industry since 1999, says, “Given that Google now understands things rather than just simplistic text-based analysis then we can assume that Google understands what is important in a given area. So, to create high ranking content we have to look at first creating content that is comprehensive and is truly the best answer to a given question.”

To do this, consider using tools like SEMrush, MarketMuse, or LSIgraph to evaluate what topics are expected to be covered in your content to make it semantically complete. This is one major way that Google evaluates content completeness, so it’s important you get it right. 

Demonstrate expertise

It’s important to establish the authenticity of informational content in a way that makes a visitor confident in trusting it. If your site aims to be the authoritative source for a particular topic, establish that, and when possible, use content written by a topic expert or enthusiast.

Some of the key takeaways from Google’s move to favor E-A-T content include:

• Adding detailed bios for your contributors that demonstrate their expertise
• Making sure your about us page shows why your company is an expert in the space
• Getting backlinks from other authority sites

Building expertise requires a sitewide effort, but it’s important that each individual post pulls its weight. 

Attribute what isn’t yours

It may go without saying, but if information or data is sourced from other sites, printed materials, or area experts, those sources should be clearly attributed. Links to an author’s bio or a website’s About page should always be provided if they’re available.

Presentation matters

Something that’s often overlooked in content creation is the power of presentation, but the reality is that poor presentation can impact how visitors perceive a site’s quality. Typos and grammatical errors can make a website appear unprofessional. You should never post sloppy work. And while ads can bring in necessary revenue to sustain a site, they should not be distracting or interfere with the readability of your main content.

Similarly, you’ll want to invest in a good user interface and making your content visually appealing. That can include creating custom graphics that highlight things from your content, adding infographics, and even adding video. 

All of these factors will influence your user interaction metrics like time on site and bounce rate. Google is believed to be looking at these factors through their RankBrain tool, so it’s important you ensure your performance is good.

Optimize for mobile

With more and more people viewing content on smartphones and tablets, it’s vital to optimize your content for mobile viewing. Since most sites have now been switched to mobile-first indexing, your mobile experience is really how Google evaluates your site’s content.

A few things you’ll want to keep in mind include:

• Make sure your site is responsive and easy to use on mobile
• Avoid having paragraphs that are too long to read on mobile
• Add lists, FAQs, and how-to sections to break up longer content
• Allow visitors to read the first section, and then expand to read your full content
• Ensure all images are displayed properly on mobile

ALSO – 9 Things You Need To Do To Improve Content For Your Blog To Give a Better Mobile Experience

Venturing Beyond Content Assessment

Search results are relative, and while it’s important to assess your content based on its individual merit, it’s also helpful to view your site in relation to others that appear along with it in search results. Determining whether your page provides enough value to match or outweigh similar pages will go a long way toward understanding its place in search rankings.

Several tools exist that let you benchmark your content against the top-ranked pages for your keyword. These include SEMrush’s Content Template and MarketMuse’s creative brief tool. 

Getting a second opinion can also be valuable in your quest to future-proof for Google algorithm updates. A new set of eyes can provide a fresh, unbiased look at content that you may have combed over multiple times.

The E-A-T Perspective

Another way to understand Google’s algorithm and what it evaluates as it attempts to deliver relevant search results is to review Google’s quality rater guidelines. Quality raters are everyday folks who help the company assess how well its algorithm is performing by viewing the websites that result from a search and providing feedback about their quality. Understanding these guidelines can provide valuable insight into Google’s algorithm and how you can put it to use when developing content.

Google’s raters are trained to use the E-A-T perspective in evaluating websites. 

According to Chris Turner, the Digital Strategy Director for Golden Spiral Marketing, E-A-T — which stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness — has likely become one of Google’s top considerations for page quality.

Turner, who has over 10 years of experience in marketing leadership, advises webmasters to demonstrate these principles either formally — through credentials, for example — or by personal experience. “For starters,” Turner advises, “ensure statements, claims, and declarations are substantiated with verified references, research, or credible first-hand data. Next, pursue and cultivate third-party locations and references to the content that show other industry resources value the content and support the domain authority.”

Marcus Miller adds that it’s important to help Google understand that your page is a good result for a particular search term. He explains, “You have to understand what is important to your potential customers. What questions do they have? Can you create better answers than what is out there? How do you demonstrate to Google that you are an Expert and Authority that they can Trust? How do you help to build signals that this content is useful for those users?”

Our post on creating content with E-A-T in mind offers additional thoughts on future-proofing content using the E-A-T perspective.

Breaking it Down

At the risk of oversimplifying, content is king when it comes to Google’s algorithm updates. While Google offers several tools to help webmasters understand its algorithm updates and how its search defines a quality website, probably the best thing you can do to future-proof your site is to offer high-quality content that’s relevant to your target audience, or, as Marcus Miller says, “In a nutshell: Create the best answer to any given question and then tell the world about it.”

The post Google’s Webmaster Guidelines: What Can You Learn to Help Future-Proof Your Content for Algorithm Updates appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Reinventing the wheel is a waste of time, and most people agree with that sentiment. But what about improving the wheel? There’s a reason the owners of show cars and collectible vehicles put the time and elbow grease into making wheels shine. That little bit of sparkle can mean the difference between a blue ribbon or an honorable mention at a car show.

The same sentiment holds true when it comes to content marketing. Yes, Google and everyone else loves unique, creative and relevant content. But if you’re reinventing the wheel with every word by starting with a from-scratch editorial calendar, then you’re probably wasting time, burning out creative resources and falling behind the competition when it comes to publishing content.

Because here’s the not-at-all-secret tip that successful content marketers use to capture audience attention and drive SEO: You can reuse your old content to support new wins in SERPs and new traffic to your site or social profiles.

The Benefits of Content Repurposing

Regardless of the type of content you plan on reusing, this tactic has some benefits for SEO and your bottom line. Some reasons to repurpose your blog posts and other content include:

• Saving time and money. It’s often faster and easier to repurpose what you already have than it is to come up with something completely original. Plus, chances are if you’re reusing a landing page or article, you won’t have to rewrite the entire thing. That can save you money if you’re paying someone by the word.
• Expand your reach. You can take a blog post and split it up into dozens of different social posts, create an infographic or slide decks from it, use it to fill out content for email subscribers, or turn it into a short script for video content. The same idea now lets you engage target audiences across numerous channels.
• Get more ROI out of high-quality content. It takes a lot of effort to create high-value marketing collateral in the first place, and repurposing content lets you get more out of each piece.
• Keep up with a robust publishing schedule. Whether you’re trying to get out six Tweets a day or want content on your company blog three times a week, keeping up with the demands of an editorial calendar isn’t easy. Sliding your old content into the mix — albeit with a slight facelift — can help you keep content churning consistently without diminishing quality.

ALSO – 6 Content Marketing Tips That Ensure You’re Following Best Practices for 2019

How to Repurpose Content

When it comes to reusing content, you can do so in a number of ways. Here are some of the most popular methods for turning existing content into something new.

• Refresh an old post. This is akin to a minor renovation on a room. You’re not taking anything down to the studs, and a lot of the writing is going to remain intact. Instead, you replace all the stats and facts with the most updated information and add anything that’s relevant to today. You then republish the post with a more current date. This is a good method when you have content from years past that’s simply a bit out-of-date.
• Rewrite an old post. This is a bring-it-down-to-the-studs effort. Plumbing is getting ripped out, bathtubs replaced. Or, in the case of a post or article, you’re scrapping all the words and starting from fresh with only the topic and some of the talking points. Choose this method when you’re sure the concept of the content was on point, but it failed to drive SEO for some reason.
• Reuse existing content in different formats. You can take content you created in the past or today and expand its reach by converting it into different formats. Pull out quotes for social media, turn data into visuals or simply publish a shorter form of the content on a site like Medium to get more viewers. Use this method when you have strong content but your site isn’t yet getting the traffic you need on its own or you want to delve into multichannel marketing.

5 More Tips from Content Marketers About Content Repurposing

1. Plan Seasonal Content with the Future in Mind

Although BestCompany.com Content Manager Alice Stevens typically aims for evergreen content that stands the test of time, she knows that in-the-moment blog posts also perform well. But one-and-done work can be a form of waste in the content world, which is why she plans each piece of content with the future in mind.

“I do some seasonal content to capitalize on trends or events,” says Stevens. “There are some articles that are seasonal, like articles about health insurance open enrollment. When I write these articles, I plan to update and repurpose them as necessary for the following year.”

2. Use Analytics to Choose Which Content You Repurpose

Popular posts from the past can be made fresh again, but when you’re creating content, remember that the blog content that’s performing right now can also be repurposed to drive more traffic or engage different audience sectors.

Andrew Maff, Director of Marketing and Operations for Seller’s Choice, says his company doesn’t tend to consider whether existing content will be valuable again in the future. But they do look at their past content to see if they can use it again as different things trend.

“For example, when Rakuten, the largest eCommerce site in Japan, first started gaining popularity, we wrote about it on our blog,” says Maff. “A year or so later, when Rakuten was trending more and more on Google, we optimized that blog article for current SEO trends and are now a top listing for the topic.”

Hamna Amjad, a Content Marketing Executive with Gig Worker, adds, “You should consider recycling those pieces of content that have already done well with your audience. Those pieces of content that became very popular are likely high-quality and relevant to your audience and can be repurposed. Your focus should be on adding value to the original content.”

3. Present the Content in New Forms with Added Information

Amjad provides a few tips on how to add value to your existing content when you repurpose it. Some ideas Amjad provides for content repurposing include:

• Create infographics. “It’s been proven that audiences are attracted more by visual content rather than plain textual format,” says Amjad. “This format works really well if you have a lot of data in your content.”
• Develop podcasts around the content or content around podcasts. Amjad points out that “podcasts are the only passive way to consume information, so more people are hopping onto this trend. Podcast transcripts can easily be converted into blog posts and vice versa.”
• Create videos based on content. Video is highly engaging and often favored by younger audiences. Amjad notes that you can easily convert a blog post or article into a video script.

4. Combine Blog Content into Longer-Form Content

Go through popular blog posts and turn them into an eBook, or gather customer testimonials and data to create a case study. You can also convert information from popular posts into large Slideshare presentations that position you as a leader in the niche.

5. Rescue Mediocre Content and Give it New Life

“In my experience, content can be split into two categories when it comes to repurposing,” says Reece Cambron, search specialist at Lucid Agency. “The first is content that has been live on the site for a while but has never quite achieved the results you had hoped for. The second is new content that is designed to serve a specific short-term purpose. In both cases, a strategic repurposing of the content can yield an improvement in rankings and organic traffic.”

So, how does Cambron give unsuccessful existing content new life?

“As a best practice, I try to repurpose a few unsuccessful content pieces each month,” says Cambron. “These are typically blogs with useful information (not just internal news or press releases) that didn’t have the success I expected.” Cambron provides a step-by-step approach for positioning this lackluster content for better SEO success.

• Start by conducting additional keyword research around the topic to see how search volume or intent may have changed since the piece was originally written
• Rework the content to optimize for these phrases.
• Adjust the metadata, H tags, and even the URL if necessary to ensure the blog is transformed into a new, better version of itself.

ALSO – 6 Situations Where Content Rewriting Can Help Your Marketing

Need Help Repurposing Your Content?

Whether you simply can’t keep up with the publishing schedule that works for your company or you need a fresh pair of eyes to figure out how to make your content shine, freelancer writers can be an invaluable resource. Check out all the ways Crowd Content freelance content writers can help you get more out of existing content.

The post Content Repurposing: How to Make the Old New to Drive SEO appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

For eCommerce sites, category and subcategory pages typically account for the largest chunk of organic traffic, only lagging behind the homepage in terms of volume. That’s because the typical consumer is more apt to use search phrases that are better matched to category pages than product pages.

Need help writing killer category pages? Connect with skilled eCommerce content writers today!

If you’re looking to purchase a new shirt, you’re much more likely to plug “men’s shirts” into Google than “Ralph Lauren collared cotton button-down shirt in brown and blue.” The category phrases still have strong intent, though they’re a bit higher up in the funnel, and those long-tail searches are where your product pages come into play.

There are plenty of other reasons to create and optimize SEO eCommerce category pages:

• There’s lots of competition for those long-tail, bottom-of-the-funnel product keywords, which makes them difficult to rank highly in the search results
• Category pages with robust content help the search engines understand the site structure a bit better
• Even though category-type search phrases don’t convert as well as product-related keywords, you can use them to drive substantial traffic to product pages
• Traffic that hits your category pages is highly qualified and likely to convert if you run retargeting campaigns 
• Category pages are higher up in the hierarchy of the site than product pages, so they get better internal link equity

ALSO – Content Marketing for eCommerce: 6 Types of Copy You Need to Succeed

What should I include in my category page content?

Google is all about quality content instead of those keyword-stuffed gibberish pages of the past, and that includes eCommerce category pages. Many eCommerce companies, though, still create short paragraphs that are filled with keywords and shoved down at the bottom of the page below the products. These SEO footers aren’t usually meant to be read, so quality is often pretty poor.

If you want your category pages to do their job, they must:

• Meet the searcher’s intent
• Add value to the reader
• Educate, inform and engage

Let’s say someone searches for “kitchen blenders” and they land on your category page. The text should tell the reader about the different types of blenders, what features are available, what they can use the product for and, typically, what the most well-known brands are.

The category page for blenders on the Williams Sonoma site does a terrific job.

The content on your category pages should be useful to those in the early stages of the buying process, and it should also include a clear call to action. Mention leading or well-known brands, provide useful information about the products and for new or obscure products, don’t forget to mention usage occasions. Also, sprinkle lots of action verbs in your content, and stay in active voice whenever possible. 

Even if you’re not an eCommerce operation, your pages may benefit from category pages that are beneficial to the reader.

What should the content cover?

Part of satisfying search intent in today’s SEO landscape is ensuring that you cover the semantically related topics to your target keyword well.

Remember that Google is ranking semantically complete content highly these days, which means you should be crafting content that covers all the semantically related keywords and topics. 

For example, when searching Google for “LED televisions,” pages that cover some of the following keywords/topics as identified by SEMrush’s Content Template are more likely to rank highly.

These keywords can help you design sections and subheadings your description should cover. This is especially valuable when you need to create longer content. For reference, SEMrush recommends that a category page aimed at the keyword “LED televisions” would need to be longer than 1600 words to outperform Google’s current top 10 ranked pages. 

ALSO – Copywriting for SEO: How to Be Sure Your eCommerce Copy Converts and Ranks

Should I include internal links in my category page?

Yes, yes and yes. Ecommerce category pages are a perfect spot to include links to internal pages. Bloomingdale’s does a great job at internal linking, though you could argue that they could include even more.

Always link to subcategory or brand pages from your category pages and avoid links to product pages. Since products tend to come and go and newer, better models replace old ones over time, you could find yourself spending oodles of time fixing broken links and updating copy.

Need help writing product descriptions? Hire professional product description writers.

If you’re creating content for subcategory or brand pages (and you should be), be sure that these pages do link off to specific products. Visitors that have made it to these pages are further along their buying journey and more likely be evaluating products.

While pushing visitors closer to your product pages is an important use of hyperlinks, remember that you’re ultimately helping visitors learn more about their options at this stage of their journey. You should also consider linking off to more educational resources such as buying guides to educate consumers.

Here’s how Best Buy helps visitors to their TV category page to learn more about their options:

How long should my SEO eCommerce category pages be?

The experts are all over the map when it comes to the proper length for SEO eCommerce category pages. Ahrefs says they should be “short and sweet, but Backlinko insists that category pages should be at least 1,000 words long and contain your primary keyword three to five times. The truth is that there’s no one answer. Your category pages should be as long as needed to get the job done.

A good rule of thumb – take a look at what competitive eCommerce websites have on their category pages, and then do more – or do it better. This is true for the length of content and for the number of products that you display on the page. Don’t forget – if retail giants like Amazon and Walmart have category pages for women’s shirts that display a lot of products (50 or more) per page and your women’s shirt category only displays 10 products, your rankings (and traffic) may be impacted.

ALSO – How to Determine Optimal Content Lengths (and Why Longer Isn’t Always Better)

I mentioned the need for creating semantically complete content earlier in this post. Using tools like SEMrush to audit your top competitors helps you identify the topics that are being covered in Google’s top-ranked content so you can craft content that covers all the topics they do – and more.

In the example of the search for “LED televisions,” you can quickly build out a category page with multiple subheadings about screen quality, gaming and power use. That’s incredibly helpful when you’re trying to write a piece that’s at least 1,600 words long.

Where should I place the content on the page?

At the top of the page or at the bottom – it’s a question that’s up for a lot of debate. Most designers want category content to show below the product listings so as not to mess with design or user experience, but copy that’s shoved to the bottom of the page may or may not ever be read.

How to handle this dilemma? Consider putting your content at the top of the page with a Read More button or put a short sentence or two at the top – just enough for the search engine bots and readers – and then include the remainder of the content at the bottom.

You’ll need to assess what’s right for your site’s design as well as the consumer experience.

The best piece of advice we can offer is to make sure that your content is displayed in an appealing way. Great content hooks readers and boosts search rankings, but how both interact with that content makes a difference between a page that looks appealing and one that’s bound to drive consumers away. 

Try to break up your longer content into multiple sections, add imagery and leverage expandable fields to give your content the best chance of being read.

What about on-page SEO?

As discussed, there are two primary reasons for crafting high-quality category pages:

1.       Providing useful information to the consumer
2.       Giving the search engines something to grab onto to help rankings

SEO is extremely important for brand and category pages – in fact, it’s the first thing you should think about. That means really putting thought into the length you’ll need and the keywords you’ll use. There are lots of other things to think about as well, but digital marketing experts like Search Engine Journal and Credo have done a great job of covering everything you need to know to optimize your category pages properly.

To sum it up:

• Assess your competitors (which keywords, how much text, how many products, etc.)
• Determine which categories you should optimize 
• Research how many products you should display per category
• Do thorough keyword research
• Organize your keywords according to search intent, mapping each intent to a stage of the buyer’s journey
• Write semantically complete content
• Craft your metadata properly
• Include internal links and make the link text relevant
• Keep an eye on page load speed
• Ensure you have a simple navigation hierarchy – no more than three tiers

Category pages are some of the most important pages for any eCommerce site. Whether they’re landing pages for traffic from Google search or pages your visitors navigate to in order to move along their buying journey, make sure they’re adding value to your visitor and you’ll go a long way towards higher page rankings and increased sales. 

The post How to Create Killer SEO eCommerce Category Pages appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

“Alexa, why is voice search so important for online marketing today?”

Ask her this, and she’ll probably return a featured snippet answer including at least one statistic about voice search and local SEO. The two are becoming integral to each other as more people turn to voice assistants to find the best burger in town, make a dentist appointment or discover new retail outlets.

Brands that aren’t optimizing web content for voice search are poised to lose big in both the near and long terms. And that’s especially true for local companies. Find out more about voice search below and get some tips for optimizing your content for this up-and-coming technology.

What Is Voice Search?

Voice search is any internet search launched by the spoken word. Individuals can query various search engines via voice assistants on mobile devices, computers, smart speakers and other devices. When you ask Google, Alexa, Cortana, Siri or Bixby a question, you’re conducting a voice search.

The AI software that powers the voice assistant turns to the internet, conducts a search based on your question and returns the most relevant results to you.

Why Is Voice Search So Important?

Experts predict that 50% of all internet searches will be conducted via voice by 2020. Lest you think voice search is a young person’s technology, consider this: 65% of people age 25 to 49 use voice-enabled devices one or more times per day, and 57% of people age 50 and over said the same. More than 60% of adults age 25 to 64 said they see themselves using voice devices even more in the future.

Smart speaker stats also speak to the importance of voice search. The market for these devices grew 200% from Q3 2017 to Q3 2018. And by 2022, more than half of all households are expected to have these devices, with consumers spending $40 billion via voice shopping by that milestone.

Voice Search and Local SEO: A Marriage of Convenience

The numbers above demonstrate the growing importance of voice search in all types of online interactions. But the relationship between voice search and local SEO is especially strong due to the convenience voice offers consumers. On mobile devices especially, consumers are highly likely to ask Siri or Google “Where can I get a pizza nearby” or “How do I get to the children’s science museum?”

Tips for Optimizing Content for Voice Search

1. Create Location Pages to Serve Local Searches

Creating local pages helps you perform better for local voice searches. But it also provides other benefits, including:

• Helping customers find pertinent local information they need to buy
• Ensuring local branches can publish content relevant to them and their consumers that might not be relevant for all your stores
• Providing a landing page option for your local GMB or directory profiles

Tom Buckland, Managing Director for HQ SEO provides a five-step list for optimizing voice search and local SEO that has resulted in a 20 to 275% increase in visibility for his clients:

1. Get listed online with tools such as GMB and Yahoo Local
2. Reduce page loading time — snippets and rich results won’t be shown for high loading times
3. Use long-tail SEO — if you optimize for longer questions, you’re more likely to be in results than if you just optimize for head terms
4. Write more local content — include information about local areas and landmarks if you can
5. Use structured data markup — schema on site is prevalent in 90% of rich snippets and this will be the case for voice searches

ALSO: Want Success With Local Landing Pages? Learn How to Avoid These Pitfalls

2. Aim for the Featured Snippet

Ben Taylor, founder of WriteBlogEarn.com, says he’s started to make efforts to structure all his content for voice search.

“I incorporate concise questions and answers into all of my reviews and articles,” says Taylor. “The questions that Google shows with ‘featured snippets’ near the top of the search results are usually a good guide to the kind of things to include. My results have been solid but not always completely predictable. As with any kind of SEO work, nobody knows exactly what Google’s algorithm is concentrating on. In some cases, I’ve taken the answer box from a competitor, in others I haven’t, but it’s still worth attempting it with each piece of content.”

Some tips for creating content for this purpose include:

• Asking questions relevant to your content and audience within your content. Taylor gives suggestions such as “What is X?” or “How much does X cost?” You can see examples of questions in the first two headers of this article.
• Provide a 25-40(ish) word concise answer immediately following the question. Google and other search engines like short answers they can display in the answer box, and voice assistants like concise answers they can read to the user. You can follow up with additional paragraphs to expand on information following that.
• Use schema markup to indicate a question and answer, especially in Q&A sections of content. This clues the search engines in and helps increase the chances your content is served up as a featured snippet or in voice search results.
• Create “People Also Ask” sections to extend your content, create more feature snippet opportunities and cater to voice searches.

3. Include Long-Tail Keywords and Conversational Language

Gregory Golinski is the head of digital marketing at  YourParkingSpace.co.uk. He says they realized content needed to be adapted to take into account how smartphone users talk to their devices when conducting voice searches.

“We tried to make the content on our website sound more like conversational English. We asked ourselves: what would a smartphone user say to find our platform? What kind of keywords would they use? How would they phrase their question?”

That means doing some new keyword research and including long-tail keywords in your content. Someone searching via desktop or typing a mobile query may only include a few words. For example, “Pizza in Raliegh” is a potential typed search term. But most people don’t launch Siri and start firing off lists of keywords for searches. Instead, they speak in a natural way. “Siri, where can I get pizza in Raliegh?” or “Siri, what are the top-rated pizza places in town?”

Not sure where to start with these types of keywords? Luckily, resources such as SEMRush’s keyword research tool let you search only for questions related to your primary keywords. That’s a great place to get started when you’re optimizing for voice search.

“One thing that remains the same for content writers, whether they’re writing for voice search or regular web search,” says Keri Lindenmuth, Marketing Manager for KDG, “is to continue getting in the mindset of their users. While before you were thinking of key phrases they were searching, now you’re thinking of key questions they are asking.”

Lindenmuth also reminds content marketers to keep the voice format in mind when structuring content. “Eliminate long paragraphs and break content into bullet points or lists, something easier for a voice device to recite.”

Work With Teams That Keep Up With Trends

Convinced about the critical nature of voice search, but still not sure how to implement this type of content? Consider working with enterprise content teams who keep up with trends and know how to produce content that performs, or hire a freelance writer with voice search experience from the Crowd Content marketplace.

The post A Detailed Look At What Makes Web Content Well-Optimized for Voice Search appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Blog posts should never sound like you wrote them solely with SEO in mind. Which is to say, they shouldn’t read like a robotic regurgitation of formulaic keywords and information you garnered from a 90-second internet search. That type of content does nothing to convert consumers, drive up revenue or foster positive behavioral metrics for better performance on Google.

But that doesn’t mean SEO for blog posts is something you can ignore. Check out what the experts are doing to ensure viable SEO while also engaging target audiences and driving conversions.

ALSO – Hire Blog Post Writers to Craft SEO Friendly Content

1. Blog Content Answers User Questions

Brooks Manley, an SEO Lead for Engenius, says that comprehensive content is a key to good blog post rankings in 2019.

“This doesn’t mean just touching on the subject you write on, but answering every question a user may have on it,” says Manley. “For instance, if you write a blog on how to kill roaches, you need to cover the different kinds of roaches, what products to use, where to buy the products, etc. Google wants to see queries answered with a single click, and posts that do that will be rewarded in 2019.”

You might start with one focus keyword that you want to rank for after doing your keyword research, but that should inform you as you learn more about the search intent behind that keyword.  You’ll discover what questions and related topics are semantically linked to your targeted search queries, which will help guide you when you start writing.

2. Complete Content that Covers Numerous Subtopics

Ryan Underwood, an SEO Specialist & Digital Marketing Executive at YourParkingSpace.co.uk also points to complete content as a critical factor in landing at the top of the search engine results page.

According to Underwood, it’s not just about answering all the right questions. You also have to do the keyword research to understand the various subtopics individuals are interested in when it comes to your main subject.

“Google wants to see that your content is covering a topic in-depth,” says Underwood. “We make sure we show Google this by including subtopic terms. These are terms that are slightly different but are associated with the main topic. For example, if we were writing an article about Harry Potter, subtopic terms could include Hogwarts, Snape, Quidditch, etc. The more of these terms you include, the more Google recognizes that your content covers as many points of interest as possible, and you rise in the rankings.”

Underwood adds, “An easy way to find Subtopic Terms is to type your target keyword into Google Images. A list of words and phrases will appear between the search bar and images. Pick a few of these and scatter them throughout your content.”

Just don’t get too heavy in peppering your page with these types of terms without ensuring they fit in an organic way into content. Keyword stuffing is never a good idea, and you’ll see in some of the expert tips below that user experience is important for SEO. Keywords are still important, but you should aim at creating complete content, not aiming for specific keyword density.

3. Use of Multiple Types of Media to Tell the Story

When talking about search engine optimization, many content marketers often think solely in terms of text on page. But that’s a mistake in the modern market, where people expect to see narratives conveyed via a variety of media.

Luke Wester, Digital Marketing Analyst at eCommerce company Miva, Inc., says, “What’s working for SEO in 2019 are visuals that help tell the story of your blog post. A large portion of users are skim-readers, and visuals make the content easily digestible. In addition to understanding the point of your post quicker, users also tend to stay longer, which increases key metrics like time on site. Basically, when you’re going over your SEO checklist for your next blog, make sure you include visuals that help tell the story of your blog.”

4. Video On Pages to Rank Higher

David Sanchez of Mammoth Web Solutions also picks up on the need to encourage more time on your pages. After all, behavioral stats such as time on page, bounce rates and whether someone clicks deeper into your site can all impact your RankBrain score. Which in turn impacts your position in the SERPs — Google wants to provide links to pages consumers find helpful and engaging, and a past history of that type of behavior looks good for your site.

“Use video,” says Sanchez. “Video increases length of time on page, which in turn causes increased rankings.”

5. Authentic Content

You know what else keeps readers on the page? Authenticity they feel like they can connect with.

Sanchez says, “Be intensely honest and personal. To quote Seth Godin, this is the Connection Economy. If people feel connected to you, they’ll trust you, engage more, share your content more, and, in turn, your rankings will increase.”

6. Optimized for Mobile and User Experience

You shouldn’t need an SEO expert to create this box for you, but here it is. Sanchez points out, “Your site cannot take more than two seconds to load anymore, even on cell phones. This is no longer optional.”

The truth is that internet users have many other options, and they won’t hesitate to tap or click their way to them. And with more people accessing the internet on mobile devices than on desktop devices today, you can’t afford not to invest in responsive website design and providing a mobile-friendly experience. Plus, Google’s mobile-first initiative that launched in 2018 means that sites that don’t perform well on mobile get ranked down in the SERPs regardless of other factors.

7. Authoritative Content

Sarah Blocksidge, Web Producer at Sixth City Marketing, reminds content marketers that SEO for blog posts and other content in 2019 relies heavily on authority. “In 2019, for our agency, it’s all about establishing authority. So we are writing informative blog posts on topics that potential clients might be searching for.”

Blocksidge and her agency aren’t alone in chasing authority for online marketing. Google has signaled repeatedly that authority content is important, going so far as to publish its own E-A-T guidelines aimed at helping marketers create more authoritative content.

For a more detailed look at this, check out our article on creating E-A-T content.

Google is rewarding pages that do well according to their E-A-T guidelines with higher placement in the SERPs.  This usually means your site’s posts have expert bylines, bios, links from expert sources, and high-quality content. This is especially true if you’re writing blog posts in certain niches, such as medical, financial or legal. Google (and users) expect to see content that offers in-depth answers and comes from people with the professional experience to back up their words.

8. Content Aligns with Business Goals

The SEO Manager at Brand Buddha reminds content marketers that we’re never writing solely for the search engines. Yes, on-page SEO elements are critical to finding your audience and attracting them to your page, but there’s always a danger in chasing metrics for the sake of those metrics. Make sure you’re putting SEO tips to use in ways that align with business goals. Brand Buddha’s SEO Manager advises “communication with the sales team to come up with content that serves them better.”

If your content doesn’t align with business goals, it’s also possible that it might feel out of place to your visitors in context with the rest of your site. If this happens, your behavioral metrics like time on site and bounce rate might suffer, which could also end up impacting your rankings.

9. Link Internally a Few Times

Don’t forget about the content you’ve already generated. Just because you wrote it two months or even a year ago doesn’t mean there’s no SEO value for those blog posts. Doing some internal linking from new posts to old ones can help older posts get more eyes on them and boost its rankings. Consider:

• Linking internally to a couple of relevant pages or blog posts to keep readers on your website (and increase those critical behavioral metrics)
• Make your internal links contextual with the article it’s in and keyword rich with the targeted keywords of the destination post. This can help pass link equity to the destination page, which can boost its rankings.
• Updating older blog posts with keywords that are performing today to drive more new traffic to your content “backlist”
• Finding ways to repurpose older content; for example, if you’ve answered a lot of questions about a specific topic in older posts, create a pillar post that addresses the overarching topic, includes relevant keywords and links out to your other posts

Jeremy Harrison of Hustle Life believes internal linking is critical for every blog post’s SEO. “I’ve seen several sites boost rankings and average time on site by refreshing their internal links. I can’t stress enough – when you publish a new post – make sure you’re internal linking is on point.”

10. Link Externally a Few Times

While it’s really important to sculpt your site’s internal links, don’t neglect to link to authority sites in your blog posts. You’ll want to do this for a few reasons:

• Links to authority sites where readers can dive deeper into topics you cover quickly adds value to your readers
• Having links to sites considered authorities in your space can associate your site and blog post with those sites in search engines. There’s some evidence this can help your content rank after you publish
• When linking to authority sources, let them know you did. Often they’ll promote your post and their contribution there, which helps you get some visitors, social shares, and possibly even some backlinks.

It’s important not to go crazy with outbound links in your posts, but when done properly, they can add real value to your posts.

11. Meta Description and Other Tags are SEO-Friendly

Keywords aren’t just for the text content that readers see. Remember to include your keywords in title tags, image alt tags and meta descriptions. When possible, incorporate secondary or long-tail keywords into these locations too — search engine bots crawl all of this information, and when you include keywords here, it points to increased relevance. Title tags and alt image tags are direct ranking factors, so it’s critical you do this.

Including focus keywords in your meta descriptions has an indirect impact on search rankings as well, since search engines highlight keywords in the descriptions that they show in search results. This can boost your organic clickthrough rate, which not only gets you more clicks, it also serves as an indirect ranking factor through Google’s RankBrain. If you want to rank in Google search results, doing well with RankBrain is key.

For a full look at this, check out our article on SEO for metadata.

12. Schema Markup and Structured Data

It’s always advisable to look at your post to see which schema markups and structured data formats you can include on your content for a variety of reasons. While there’s no conclusive evidence that schema and structured data has a direct impact on rankings or getting featured in Google’s featured snippets (position 0 as its often called), many SEO experts have found that to be the case.

At very least, schema helps search engines better understand what your content is and that has a number of benefits including improving how your link appears in search engines.

By setting markup like the one for articles, Google may be able to pull additional fields such as adding the “last updated” field or including an image when displaying your post in their search results. That can make your post more attractive to searchers, which can boost your organic clickthrough rate and help your rankings.

For a full list of marking up your blog posts, check out Google’s guide to article markup here.

Similarly, consider using the FAQ or how-to structured data types when creating your next blog posts. At the very least, Google looks to content formatted like this when pulling content for their FAQ and How-to featured snippets, so even if structured data itself doesn’t help you get placement in the snippet, following their formatting guidelines might help.

13. CTA or Encouragement to Engage

Finally, encourage your audience to like, share, link to or engage with your blog posts. This type of engagement can be a boon to SEO for blog posts in numerous ways. First, linking to or sharing your blog posts on social media creates more backlinks and referring domains to your content. That’s a major factor that can increase your performance in the SERPs. Next, the more time someone spends engaging with your content, the better your behavioral metrics are. Again, that’s good for search engine placement.

To see how social media affects SEO, read Social Media: How Does it Impact Your SEO in 2019?

Get Content that Enhances SEO for Blog Posts Today

If you’re ready to publish blog content that serves you well on both the sales and SEO fronts, consider working with the teams at Crowd Content. Whether you want someone to manage the entire process or you just want to find a writer or two who can craft blog content that helps you move toward success with business goals, we can help.

The post Expert Checklist: SEO for Blog Posts appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Search engine optimization, commonly called SEO, is a set of techniques used to improve a website’s search engine rankings. The higher your pages rank, the more visitors you’re likely to attract, leading to increased sales.

Although social media usage doesn’t directly influence your page rankings, it can help you drive more traffic to your website, making it an essential component of an SEO plan. Keep reading to learn more about the importance of social media SEO for business.

How Social Media Usage Affects SEO

Just because social media usage doesn’t directly influence your rankings doesn’t mean you don’t need to use Facebook, Twitter and other social networks to grow your business. Social media SEO affects your rankings indirectly in the following ways:

Backlinks

Backlinks are one of the most important factors in determining how well a page will rank compared to competing pages on the same topic. In simple terms, a backlink is a link that refers to another website. If you cite a subject matter expert in one of your blog posts and link back to that expert’s site, you’re giving them a backlink. Google and other search engines place a lot of emphasis on backlinks because these links represent a “seal of approval” of sorts. Linking to a site shows you think the site has something worth reading or viewing.

Done right, social media SEO gives you an opportunity to collect backlinks from authoritative websites, increasing your site’s overall authority. For example, if one of your blog posts “goes viral,” you’re likely to receive backlinks from major media outlets and established influencers.

Site Authority

Social media SEO also helps you build a positive reputation and establish authority in your industry. Think about the process you follow when you need to buy something online. You probably type product-related keywords into your search engine, look through the results and visit the website with the most relevant information. But what if multiple sites sell the same item at the same price? You need a way to determine which site to visit. That’s where authority comes into play.

The more social media accounts you maintain, the more opportunities you have to share your brand. If people search for what you sell and see your company’s name showing up on Facebook, Instagram and other networks, they may feel more comfortable buying from you or at least visiting your website to get more information.

Search Results

With many people now using social networks as search engines, it’s more important than ever for your business to have a strong social media presence. This is especially important if you run a business that makes the bulk of its revenue from local customers, such as a restaurant or roofing company. Instead of opening a separate browser window, navigating to Google or Bing and searching for companies, products and services, some users just type their queries right into the search bar of their favourite social network. If you don’t have a profile on that network, you won’t show up in these searches.

Traffic Source

The more pages you control, the more opportunities you have for people to find your business and learn more about what you do. If you have a single website with a few pages on it, you have few opportunities to show up in search results for relevant keywords. When you use social media, however, you’re producing additional content that can help people find your business. If someone searches for relevant keywords, they may find one of your Facebook posts, tweets or Instagram photos.

Social Media SEO Tips to Grow Your Business

It’s clear that social media SEO has positive benefits for business owners, but it’s important to develop a cohesive strategy that helps you achieve your SEO goals. Here’s what we recommend. If you need help writing tweets, Facebook posts and other types of content, our team of experienced professionals can help.

Partner with Influencers

According to Neil Patel, an influencer is someone who serves as an expert within a specific community. On social media, influencers may write thought leadership pieces, review products related to their areas of expertise or promote specific brands. Partnering with influencers in your industry has several potential benefits for your business. One of those benefits is exposure to a much larger audience. Influencers may have hundreds of thousands—or even millions—of followers. If just a small percentage of an influencer’s audience sees a post about your products or services, you could experience a surge in site traffic and sales.

Working with an influencer also gives you the opportunity to strengthen your brand. Depending on how you structure the partnership, the influencer may agree to post about your product a certain number of times or do a video review that features your product prominently. Every post is an opportunity for an audience member to see your logo or hear your company name. Partnering with an influencer can even help your brand seem more legitimate, especially if you work with someone who has a positive reputation in your industry.

Christian Anderson, president of Lost Boys entertainment, offers the following tips for identifying influencers in your industry and partnering with them to promote your brand:

1. Check with an agency. Some agencies represent multiple influencers, so contacting a single agent could help you identify several potential partnerships. Agents also have experience making sure an influencer’s content aligns well with a brand’s goals. Therefore, working with an agent can help you avoid partnering with an influencer who could damage your brand instead of helping you build it.
2. Contact influencers directly. This takes much more time than contacting an agency because you need to research your industry and determine which influencers have the largest audiences. You also need to determine if each influencer posts content that aligns with your goals. Although this is time-consuming, it can also help you get better pricing.
3. Be clear about your goals. You must provide enough information for the influencer to make an informed decision about whether they want to partner with you. It’s important to be clear about what you expect in terms of content type, content length and publishing frequency.

Focus on Engagement

Many business owners make the mistake of thinking content frequency is more important than content quality. That couldn’t be further from the truth. While the search engines do take publication frequency into account when determining page rankings, they also look for quality signals to tell them if one page is more relevant than another for a specific keyword. It’s better to publish high-quality content three times per week than low-quality content every day.

One way to make your content more engaging is to include photos and videos. Huge walls of text are a barrier to engagement because they make your content more difficult to read. It also takes a lot more time to read a long post than it does to look at a photo or view a 30-second video. Another way to increase engagement is to skip the stock photos and do your own photography. You don’t have to be the next Ansel Adams to take photos for Instagram or Facebook; simply use a point-and-shoot digital camera or the built-in camera on your cell phone to snap photos of your products or employees.

Pick the Right Platforms

Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram…the list of social media platforms seem endless, especially if you don’t have experience using social media for SEO. The good news is that you don’t need to be on every single platform—just the platforms where people in your target audience are likely to hang out. Nearly 80% of adults between the ages of 30 and 49 use Facebook, but only 48% of them use Instagram. If your target audience includes adults in this age group, using Facebook is a better use of your time than using Instagram.

Age is an important consideration, but it isn’t the only factor you should use to determine where to spend your time online. You also need to consider race, ethnicity, sex and household income. If you sell a high-end product, it’s important to know that 50% of adults who earn more than $75,000 per year use LinkedIn. Adult women are more active on the top three platforms—Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn—than adult men, a fact that can help you determine the best way to spend your time and your marketing dollars.

Repurpose Your Content

You shouldn’t post the exact same thing on multiple platforms; that would defeat the purpose of using more than one social network to improve your page rankings, drive traffic to your website and connect with members of your target audience. But that doesn’t mean you can’t repurpose your content to save time. Repurposing involves taking your existing content and using it as the basis for new content. This eliminates the need to “reinvent the wheel” and keep coming up with new ideas. Here are a few examples of content repurposing:

• A few years ago, you wrote a blog post on how to use your product to save time or increase efficiency. You can repurpose the content by updating it with recent statistics and editing some of the content based on current best practices in your industry. Sharing a link to the updated blog post gives the content new life and eliminates the need to come up with a brand-new idea and write a blog post from scratch.
• You have an e-book that introduces potential customers to your business and provides an overview of your products and services. If the e-book contains statistics, you can add those statistics to infographics and share them with your social media followers.
• If you have a podcast related to your business, you can link to the transcripts on Facebook or post “behind-the-scenes” videos on your Instagram account. Not only does this help you repurpose your original podcast content, but it can also help you appeal to new audience members.
• You can even turn existing infographics into short blog posts by using the infographic content as an outline and filling in each section with new content.

Repurposing content saves you time, but it can also help you improve your search engine rankings, as Google is more likely to see your site as an authority if it has several pages of content focusing on closely related keywords.

The Takeaway

It’s easy to write off social media as something teens do after school, but the truth is that social media is an effective way to market a wide variety of products and services. SEO content creates more opportunities for search engines to find your pages and determine how relevant they are to specific search queries, driving traffic to your website and giving your business more authority.

The post Social Media SEO: Essential for Businesses in Every Industry appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

There are now some 3.5 billion people across the planet who are lucky enough to have internet access. That’s a whopping 45% or so of the population. The advent of the world wide web has led to unprecedented globalization, but as businesses expand their reach, they’re also learning about the power of local SEO.

Most people may not care where their mail-order flip-flops come from, but when they need an exterminator or want to try a new Mexican restaurant for dinner, their Google searches become geographically specific.

• Half of mobile users who conduct a local search visit a nearby store within 24 hours
• Searches using keywords such as “near me tonight” or “near me today” have grown by 900% over the last two years

Clearly, people value convenience and urgency. For businesses with broad service areas encompassing many different cities, it’s vital to accommodate consumers and harness the power of local SEO, which includes creating local landing pages and city pages for SEO.

Turns out, that’s easier said than done (but stay tuned — we have a solution).

The Burden of Creating Local Landing Pages in Bulk

There are two types of businesses that typically need a massive amount of local landing pages:

• Physical Location-Based Businesses: Companies like Avis/Budget and 1-800-Got-Junk with a national presence and brick-and-mortar branches in many different locations
• Comparison Shopping Sites: Orbitz, Zillow, Uber and Indeed offer everything from flights to ride shares to job listings, all of which are geographically sensitive

These companies often turn to third-party content creation services, which rely on teams of freelancers to generate content for each relevant city or other location. The process is intricate: meet requirements for quality and quantity while adhering to internal SEO mandates and other key directives.

Things often turn problematic when it’s time to scale. Suddenly, the freelance teams can either maintain quality or churn out quadruple the content, but they can’t do both. You should never have to choose between content you can be proud of and the amount of content you need to grow.

Struggling With Subpar Deliverables

As your contractors work furiously to keep up with demand and quality slips, there’s one person left holding the bag — you. Internal SEO and content teams are forced to pore over each and every page your content partner sends over and make revisions. That’s not so bad when there are only five or 10 orders in the mix; it’s an intolerable and completely unrealistic time-suck of a task when those 10 orders become 1,000.

Even if you have the personnel bandwidth, it’s unlikely you have the lead time. All that post-delivery editing eats away at the workday until you’re questioning what you’re even paying for. If you spend a full week or two editing freelance content before you can publish it, what’s the benefit of outsourcing?

ALSO: Can You Outsource Landing Page Copywriting? 7 Things to Consider First

Overly Generic Content

Lest you entertain the thought of creating one landing page and simply swapping out the city names, think again. Google is smarter than any of us are probably comfortable with, and its algorithms look for relevancy and originality. They’re looking for natural inclusion of semantically related terms like neighborhood names, tourist attractions, local businesses and the like. If you don’t have those terms covered in engaging copy, you’re unlikely to rank well.

And if you don’t have those things covered, your user experience isn’t going to be great. You likely won’t be providing searchers the info they want, and they’re gonna bounce. That’s going to hurt your behavioral metrics which can lead to RankBrain reducing your search rankings, but more than that, it’s not good to have all your traffic bouncing. No leads are earned that way.

Rely on copy and paste, and you’ll sacrifice rankings as well as user experience — two things increasingly linked.

We encourage the use of a template to create consistent layouts from page to page and city to city, but within that template, our writers create completely unique copy relevant to each location and company branch.

Messing With Missed Deadlines

A missed deadline isn’t just an inconvenience, it’s the tiny snowball that turns into an entrepreneurial avalanche. If you get your landing pages late, you can’t build your website on time, which affects your launch, puts a snag in your marketing plans and derails sales indefinitely.

When you’re ready to scale, you need a content team that can keep pace right alongside you. Anything else is a recipe for wasted resources and frustration.

Disjointed Company Details

Google prizes NAP consistency — that means displaying the name, address and phone number of each local store the same way from page to page. It doesn’t much matter if you switch between “St.” and “Street,” but overall, location data should be written identically across the board.

The aforementioned template once again comes in handy here. We can match NAP formats for sites such as Google My Business or go with your in-house preferences. We’ll also line up other content sections, too, keeping subheads consistent and making it easy for consumers to skim and find the information they need quickly.

The Crowd Content Solution

We have one central mission: Deliver publish-ready content our clients can use ASAP.

To meet our goal and give clients the content they deserve, we start every project with a calibration stage. We give our writers your parameters, let them work their magic, double check for consistency and then pass it back to you for approval. If we need to make adjustments, we will and then add those changes to the project brief used for the duration of the project.

ALSO – Get The Complete Guide to Creating City Pages For SEO

Additionally, we push each local landing page through three levels of production — write > edit > QA. No matter how big the batch or how lofty the project, we know that every order from the first to the last always sounds like the initial (approved) batch.

Our unique approach addresses a plethora of pain points, solving common content creation challenges along the way:

• Tired of overly generic content? We work with a list of high-quality data sources from which our writers consistently pull great local info. Whether you need statistics on the population of local retirement communities or want to reference the average monthly cost of pool maintenance, we’ll work together to identify and agree on authoritative, accurate references.
• Can’t afford missed deadlines? We don’t blame you. Crowd Content’s detailed project management system keeps every aspect of our team on track, ensuring deliveries are met regardless of scale.
• Concerned with informational organization? We work with our clients up front to get pertinent data and then organize it in a spreadsheet and use our QA step to check that writers (and editors) are including the right details in the right places.

Ready to ramp up your business and need help with local SEO? Contact our team, and we’ll help you get started.

The post Want Success With Local Landing Pages? Learn How to Avoid These Pitfalls appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Ever searched for a simple recipe online, only to find yourself trapped in a seemingly endless scroll past a blogger’s life story before hitting the actual ingredients list? You’re not alone. This phenomenon isn’t just a test of your patience — it’s a glimpse into the complex world of SEO, where the battle cry seems to be “the longer, the better.” But should you turn every post into a novel to satisfy Google? Spoiler alert: It’s not that straightforward.

Decoding the Length Myth: Quality Over Quantity

While long content peppered with detailed anecdotes and long-tail keywords can engage readers and please search engines, it’s the substance — not the length — that truly matters. Google values content that fully addresses user queries, acting as a comprehensive resource. Yet, length for the sake of length — filling pages with fluff rather than valuable insights — won’t fool Google’s discerning algorithms. The goal is to create content that directly answers readers’ questions, while avoiding unnecessary tangents. As you aim for SEO success, focus on creating meaningful content that informs and satisfies, rather than on merely extending word counts. 

A Quick Overview of Current Conventional Wisdom on Word Counts

Recent studies indicate that content length matters to Google. According to Yoast, cornerstone pages perform best with over 900 words, but even taxonomy pages should have at least 250 words to maximize rankability.

It’s not just about pure rankings, either. Content with 1,000+ words attracts backlinks from twice the number of referring domains as 400-word content, according to backlink data from Ahrefs. Neil Patel also found that pages with more than 1,500 words receive up to twice the number of Twitter shares.

These findings shape conventional SEO wisdom asserting that longer content is typically better, and most sites such as BuzzSumo, Medium, and CoSchedule, call for content between 1,500 and 2,400 words to optimize performance in Google.

Still, there’s some nuance to content length. Neil Patel points out that different content lengths perform better in various industries, and SEMRush reminds content creators that quality is more important than length. However, as a general guideline, research from Hook Agency pinpoints 1,760 to 2,400 words as optimal.

What’s Google’s Stance on Content Length for SEO?

Google doesn’t like to give too much away regarding how its algorithms work and what might give you a leg up against the competition. However, John Mueller, head of Search Relations at Google, has repeatedly stated that content length isn’t a ranking factor.

Instead, Google looks for authority and overall content quality. Longer content often meets those criteria because it offers more value to users by thoroughly covering the subject matter.

So, what factors do equate to quality in the eyes of Google? Your content should:

• Approach the topic in an original way
• Provide a complete resource to answer all questions surrounding the topic
• Offer a unique analysis of available information
• Avoid using clickbait to attract users
• Flow well and be free of glaring spelling or grammar issues

Google also recommends looking for ways to highlight your expertise during content planning and creation:

• Build overall website and business credibility
• Present information using evidence and appropriate sourcing to improve trust
• Highlight the skills and knowledge of your authors so readers know where the information is coming from
• Double-check everything for factual accuracy

Finally, everything about the content should be oriented toward real people rather than search engines. This means content should be reader-friendly and should answer the questions it promises to answer.

While SEO is important to a page’s success, you must ensure that people don’t leave your page to look for more or better information elsewhere.

Why These Benchmarks Aren’t the Be-All, End-All

Most SEO experts will tell you not to take their numbers as gospel. Yes, research is important, and you should always understand what trends affect content marketing and your industry in general. But you don’t write content in a vacuum made solely of word counts; you write content for actual users — the people whose needs, preferences, and feedback shape its success.

You also have to consider the topic, the time available to create the content, and your budget, as these can all impact content length.

Google won’t rank your content higher for using 1,000 words to say what others say in 100 words. 

Ultimately, you don’t need to write every piece of content according to some benchmark. CoSchedule notes that content that comes in around 2,500 words tends to perform best in the search engines — but that doesn’t mean every page or piece has to be 2,500 words. For example:

• A product description for a white cotton T-shirt should not be that long.
• A blog about how to wash a white cotton T-shirt will be full of unnecessary fluff if you try to get it to 2,500 words.
• A buying guide that discusses all the varieties of white cotton T-shirts and how to find the right one for you could, however, reach 2,500 words without being full of superfluous content.

Padded Content Doesn’t Do You Any SEO Favors

But if 1,500, 2,000, or 2,500 words is the range  for optimal SEO performance, why can’t you make your basic T-shirt description that long?

It’s true. Most writers can meet the word count quota on any type of content by  including irrelevant information, repeating exact phrases and statements, and saying everything in the longest way possible.

We like to refer to this as “peanut butter writing,” illustrated in the following example: “I love peanut butter sandwiches because peanut butter sandwiches have a lot of peanut butter in the sandwich.”

That’s 18 words giving you five words of information and no additional value. Here’s why peanut butter writing should be avoided:

• People don’t appreciate it. Online searchers are busy and don’t want to parse through fluff to find the information they want. 
• It reduces the authority of your brand. That means people are less likely to return to your site, share your content, or link to it.
• Users can only handle so much. Even if someone makes it through one PB writing article on your site, they probably won’t return. This means less traffic flowing to your site.
• Fluffy writing isn’t as strong. Concise writing converts better because it gets straight to the point and avoids confusion.

In short, too much fluff can negatively affect the time people spend on your pages and the bounce rate. Consequently, people will be less likely link to your content, . hindering your site’s growth potential.

ALSO – Copywriting for SEO

Choosing the Right Word Count

If you’re not sure how to choose the right word count, you’re not alone. 

Here are some tips for identifying the correct word count for every project.

Consider the topic and outline

Start by sketching out a simple outline, assigning each component a word count, and adding it to get a total. For example:

• Blog post: How to Buy a Book for a Child in Your Life
• Introduction – 50 words
• Seven tips – 700 words (100 words each)

• Find out what reading level they are
• Discover some of their interests
• Choose nonfiction or fiction
• Choose whether you’ll buy online or in the store
• Talk to bookstore employees for recommendations
• Buy something from an author or series they already read
• Consider the parents or guardians when you buy picture books
• FAQ section with three questions – 300 words

• What are reading levels, and how do they work?
• How can you learn more about kids’ books on Goodreads?
• How much stock should you put in Amazon reviews?

• Conclusion and call to action – 75 words
• Total word count: 1,125

An outline helps you determine the right number of words, but it also keeps the writer on the appropriate path and away from padding.

Need help coming up with a topic? Ideation 101: How to Develop Strong Article Themes That Work

Complete competitive benchmarking for your industry

There are industry benchmarks for content length. It makes sense that a blog in the tech industry should look different from one in the medical or fashion fields, and these numbers can be a good starting point. 

But consider conducting benchmark research to help you understand the type and length of content performing in your niche. Tools like MarketMuse and SEMRush Content Templates can help you see how your content measures up against the competition, build strong outlines, and develop winning SEO ideas.

These tools look at the content currently ranking in the top 10 results on Google for the term you’re targeting and tell you how long your content should be to outperform the ranking content. In most cases, creating longer content than your competitors should be a priority for you.

The tools also disclose what topics your competitors’ content covers and suggests what topics to include in your content — one aspect of effective content gap analysis. In most cases, the top 10 results don’t cover all topics, so if you do, your content should outperform the others.

Here’s an example of what a report for the term “peanut butter sandwiches” looks like:

You’ll see a list of semantically related words (topics) you want to explore in your article. Build these into your outline so you naturally discuss them.

You’ll also see it recommends a word count of 651 words or more.

In most cases, the recommended topics are semantically linked to your main topic, so covering them as subtopics should add value for your readers. This is a great way to increase your word count without adding fluff.

Also, there’s a lot of evidence indicating that Google ranks semantically complete content well, as it delivers a high topic relevance. It’s one of the best ways to meet the expertise and authority demands of Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines.

While the tools mentioned above can help you identify ideal keywords, you can also use solutions like LSIgraph to find these related topics.

Consider the type of content page you’re building

The type of page you’re creating tends to dictate length, so that’s another benchmark to consider. Again, you should  conduct your own research and testing. Listed below are the ideal lengths for each type of content:

• Blog posts: 1,000 to 1,500 words. Ensure the outline and topic are appropriate for the word count.
• Pillar pages: 3,000+ words. Hook Agency’s research shows continuing improvements in traffic and social shares up to 7,000+ words, but you won’t see this success from topics where there simply isn’t much to discuss.
• City (or local) pages: 300 to 800 words. Ensure each page targets local SEO accordingly and offers a unique take to avoid duplicate content.
• Landing pages: 400 to 1,000. Again, the word count depends on the topic you’re covering.
• Guides: 1,500 to 2,500 words. Google rewards guides that explain how to do things in detail. You should also look for opportunities to include experience and expertise in this type of content. Create how-to guides that fit your company’s practical skill set.
• Product descriptions: 50 to 300 words. Only the most complex or unique products, such as computers, need the higher end of the word count.
• Press releases: 400 to 700 words. Keep press releases short to ensure journalists can digest your message quickly and easily.

Remember, these benchmarks for SEO content length are simply guidelines. If you’re struggling to meet these word counts, it could mean you should drop the word count or reassess how you approach your topic.

Conversely, the opposite is also true. More words are better if they help paint a more comprehensive picture of the topic without boring readers.

Does User Intent Affect Optimal Content Length?

User intent — the information a user expects to find when searching for a specific keyword — affects optimal content length. 

For example, someone searching the term “how to build a computer” will want a comprehensive resource that discusses the process at a high level while also explaining how to choose and install individual parts.

However, someone searching the term “buy running shoes” won’t typically want much information because they’re ready to purchase a product. You won’t necessarily benefit from a 2,000-word product page in this case.

Another aspect of search intent is specificity. Some search terms have a narrower scope, and your content needs to go in-depth on the topics. Longer content naturally targets more open-ended keywords, such as “nutritional benefits of apples,” whereas searchers will want quick answers for a term like “capital of Italy.” 

Get the best of both worlds by offering concise featured snippet answers within your longer-form content, targeting narrower keywords.

TL;DR: There’s No Easy Answer

Choosing the right word count comes down to knowing what your audience wants and providing exceptional value. If you’re struggling with either of these, book a consultation call with our content strategy service. Our experienced strategists will utilize their industry knowledge to iron out the wrinkles in your SEO content.

The post How to Determine Optimal Content Length for SEO appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

As Google Ads bids become increasingly expensive, Google advertisers are trying to find tricks to advertise at a lower price. Short-tail, broad keywords are highly competitive and getting more and more expensive over time, so many advertisers are searching for long-tail keywords to improve conversions. In other words, they’re looking for longer keywords that are less competitive and, therefore, cheaper.

But it’s not only about money. Long-tail keywords are usually used by searchers when they are closer to purchasing a product.

For example, if you sell summer clothing, bidding for the keyword “clothes” will be very expensive as there will be a lot of competition. Plus, people searching for “clothes” are likely in the early stages of their purchase decision and not close to buying.

If you are a small business, you likely won’t have the same budget as large companies like Zara that have a huge marketing budget. As a small company that sells summer clothing, you’ll want to find more specific and lower-cost keywords like “slim-fit short sleeve,” which also show searcher intent to buy soon.

A smart implementation of a long-tail keyword strategy leads to a lower traffic acquisition cost and higher-quality traffic, which means a higher conversion rate and, therefore, a higher ROI. You’ll attract the audience that’s searching for the exact same products you’re selling at a lower cost per click.

There are several ways of finding long-tail keywords that fit your products and services. However, the question is, how do you make sure those keywords are going to bring you enough traffic, and, more importantly, high-quality traffic that converts? Here are some tips:

1. Go to Google.com and search for terms related to your business.

Using Google’s autocomplete in the search box is the easiest way to find long-tail keywords, but not many people do it. It will show you some suggestions for searches starting with the word or words you used. These suggestions correspond with what people search for online. They are not necessarily the most searched keywords, but you should target them, as they will definitely be high-quality keywords.

2. Go to your Google Ads account and check the keyword tool.

The Google Ads keyword tool might seem complicated at first, but it’s actually a very easy and resourceful feature to use. Let’s take a look at how to use it:

Once you are on your Google Ads account, go to Tools > Keyword Planner and click on Find New Keywords. Then you can suggest some keywords related to your business and the kind of long-tail keywords you want to find. If you don’t have any keywords you want to choose from, you can also insert your URL and Google will suggest keywords based on the content of your site.

You can make the search more sophisticated by excluding the terms you don’t want in your long-tail keywords. And that’s it! Google will suggest plenty of long-tail keywords you can select that could be relevant to your business. Not all of them will be, but it will give you tons of ideas.

Not only will it give you ideas for keywords, but also their number of monthly searches, trends, competition, and bidding estimations. This information is very useful when it comes to making decisions on which keywords are best for you, taking your budget, products and objectives into account.

A useful trick that you can perform on your Keyword Research Tool is entering your competitors’ URL and checking the terms that appear as relevant for them. You can find good ideas here that you might not have thought about. However, it is possible that the keywords that appear here could have a higher cost per click than usual.

3. Check which terms people are using to find your site.

You can do this directly from your query report on your Google Ads account. Here, you’ll probably find keywords you have already targeted, but you can always make important discoveries by checking it once in a while.

Where can you find your query report? Just enter the keywords section of one of your campaigns or ad groups and go to Search Terms. You will be given the option to add and exclude keywords directly from there. Excluding the keywords you don’t want to appear will result in saving money that is essential for you to spend on keywords that are actually relevant to your products.

With the extra information it provides you (interactions, cost per conversion, conversion rates, etc.), you can make very informed decisions that will help you optimize your Google Ads campaigns correctly.

4. How is organic traffic coming to your website?

SEO and SEM strategies are quite different, but you can use them in collaboration to get the best traffic to your online store. Checking the organic terms you rank for and the terms people use to get to your site can be useful when it comes to thinking of new keywords for your ads. You can make a list of them and create variations, add them to the Google Ads keyword tool to generate more ideas, etc. Once you have the final list, include them in your Google Ads campaigns.

Note that this method only looks at the terms you currently rank for in Google search results. That’s a result of your SEO and will depend on your eCommmerce content, backlinks, and many other factors. Talking to your SEO team might help you reveal other search terms you’re not currently ranking for (but want to), as well as search terms your competitors are ranking for.

You can make a list of them and create variations, add them to the Google Ads keyword tool to generate more ideas, etc. Once you have the final list, include them in your Google Ads campaigns.

You can find this information in your Google Search Console or Google Analytics account. Just enter your Google Analytics account, go to the Acquisition section, then click on Keywords > Organic, and a list of the organic keywords you are ranking for will appear.

ALSO – How is your eCommerce copy performing?

Keywords are one of the most important, if not the most important, parts of any Google Ads account. Your keywords are the key your clients use to enter your online store. By researching long-tail keywords, you will improve and optimize your account and “generate more keys” that more customers can use to access and enter your site. Try all these strategies to get more qualified traffic and a higher ROI.

The post How to Find the Best Long-tail Keywords to Drive Google Ads Conversions appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

If you’ve walked the SEO walk for even a mile or two, you’ve likely stumbled upon the challenges of Google algorithm changes. Google is in the business of serving up the highest-quality, most relevant pages possible for every search query, and it’s always tweaking its algorithms to do just that. But several times a year, the search giant makes a big enough change to its ranking algorithms that the aftershocks are felt across the web.

That’s what happened in March 2019 when Google released its March Core Algorithm update. While SEOs are still debating exactly what changes that update made (which is tough to identify, as Google describes the changes as not targeting specific tactics), evidence is showing that sites following E-A-T guidelines benefited most.

E-A-T content was definitely important to the Medic Update that happened in late 2018 (named the Medic Update since it hit online health brands the hardest). Out of the ashes of that update, Google offered advice about creating great content (E-A-T content) that might fare better against future updates.

What Is E-A-T Content?

E-A-T content is something Google talked about in a white paper that supports their comments on the Medic Update. It explains how Google measures the quality of each page — and we know that quality is a critical factor in ranking.

According to Google, three factors play a major role in quality determinations:

• Expertise
• Authoritativeness
• Trustworthiness

Expertise refers to whether the site owner (or the author) is knowledgeable about the subject at hand. There’s a difference, for example, between a licensed RN with 15 years in the business and a high-quality LinkedIn page writing health content and a random author without any credentials doing so.

Authoritativeness refers to the credibility of the website. Is it long-standing? Do other credible sites link to or reference it?

Trustworthiness refers to whether the website inspires trust. Is it known for high-quality, accurate content? Again, do others reference or link to it?

How Do You Create E-A-T-friendly Content?

Consistently producing high-quality, relevant SEO content that’s accurate goes a long way toward having content that keeps the principles of E-A-T in mind, but marketers can take it a step further with a few of the tips below:

• Make use of bio and about pages. If you have the expertise, don’t let it go unsaid. Create bio pages and bylines for blog posts and articles your staff or freelancers write, and include specifics that position the authors as experts or influencers in the niche. Do the same on your about pages for the company as a whole and its leadership. Consider your entire team; if you have experts on staff, talk about them online.
• Regularly audit content performance. A blog post you published last year that hasn’t gained any views or traction may be dragging your entire site down when it comes to E-A-T. Don’t be afraid to purge some of your poorest-performing content to right the ship.
• Up the ante on your backlinking game. Sure, link building and old school black hat SEO tactics don’t push you up the search engine pages anymore, but links are still important. They help establish your credibility and authority. Study new linking tactics to score some support for your pages.
• Work with writers who can deliver authoritative content. You don’t have to write all your own content to stay authoritative in the niche, but do vet your freelancers and writing teams to ensure you’re working with people who understand your industry and can write high-quality content.

ALSO– How You Can Find a Great Content Writer Who Has Niche Expertise

Long-Term Benefits of E-A-T-friendly Content

Creating content with E-A-T in mind does seem to help pages rank better on their own, but it also has a variety of knock-on effects that can strengthen your content now and in the future. Here are three ways E-A-T content can be good for traffic, page performance and search engine rankings:

1. Boost Behavior Metrics

The type of content that passes muster under Google’s E-A-T requirements is also the type of content visitors are likely to spend time engaging with. When users trust the content you provide and perceive that it’s high quality and authoritative, they’re more likely to read the entire article or follow internal linking to other pages on your site.

That improves behavioral metrics, such as increased time on page and decreased bounce rates. Those in turn drive up your RankBrain score, which is a factor in search engine ranking.

2. Increased Links and Social Shares

True E-A-T content is more likely to impress and resonate with readers, and that leads to more social shares and links. This is fantastic news in its own right, because that means more people are likely to connect with your brand online. But it’s also good news for search engine rankings, because links enforce credibility.

3. Inclusions in Featured Snippets

Finally, E-A-T content that impresses Google is more likely to be included in featured snippets. These are concise answers to specific queries that Google pulls from various pages; the site with the featured snippet gets prime placement on top of the organic search results — and often on top of paid, map or local pack results.

Check out the image below for an example of a featured snippet. The query was about types of screwdrivers, and Google pulled a short answer from Primer Magazine. You’ll notice that the site answers the question in a few short sentences and even includes an image.

It’s also important that you consider what type of featured snippet Google would show for the keywords you’re targeting, and you should structure your content to match.

In the case above, that means posing a question and an image (and alt-image attribute) or subhead and then answering the question in around 25 to 50 words. You can also provide a structured list to answer the question. Adding schema markup to your page may also help you get placed into the snippet section.

You don’t have to limit your own page content to those 25 to 50 words; in fact, it would be disastrous to do so. Continue on providing E-A-T-quality content for the rest of the page, addressing other elements of the topic or expounding on the information in the short answer. After all, longer content also performs well in the search engines.

Our Crash Course on Becoming an SEO Content Writer dives into why you should care about featured snippets.

The Final World on E-A-T

This is nothing ground-breaking. Search marketers have known for a long time now that quality is a critical component of success in the search engines. But Google’s provided us with a more detailed breakdown of what it considers quality, and by sculpting your pages to match E-A-T requirements, you can help safeguard them against future algorithm updates.

The post How Creating Content With E-A-T In Mind Can Help Future-Proof Your Site Against Algorithm Changes appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Ninety-three percent of all website traffic starts with a search engine query.

The result? It’s not enough for companies to just create good content — they also need to optimize content so it’s well received by search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. The lion’s share of searchers will click a link on the first page of the search results, so it’s critical that your content is ranked highly enough to make it to the first page.

Think of it like setting up a brick-and-mortar shop: you can have the best store out there, but if you don’t have signs, an address on the map or other ways for potential customers to know what’s inside, you’re not going to get people coming into the store.

For freelance writers, this need creates opportunity: businesses need high-quality articles, blog posts, city pages, website content and other types of SEO-optimized written content to help build out their search engine marketing strategy. Even the best written content won’t deliver the search traffic businesses need if it hasn’t been optimized for SEO, including the proper use of keywords, solving searcher intent and more.

Some companies leverage in-house talent to bridge the gap, but many now recognize the value in specialization of labor and are looking for highly skilled SEO content writers to help drive their content strategy. It’s no easy task: SEO writing takes discipline, focus and the ability to shift gears or change topics on demand. But for writers with the raw talent and willingness to improve their craft, SEO writing offers substantial opportunities.

Ready for a crash course? Here’s how you can become an SEO content writer.

Writing Is the Foundation

First thing’s first: Make sure you’ve got the writing skills to pay the bills. (Yes. I do like cheesy sayings.)

In practice, this means you’re able to create high-quality content that’s free of grammatical and spelling errors, draws in and engages readers and quickly communicates key points.

When it comes to SEO writing, there’s a tendency to think of it as more mechanical and less creative than other types of content, but the truth is that brands now recognize the value of SEO-driven articles and blog posts that draw in potential consumers with great storytelling and subtle brand positioning.

If you’re already comfortable with the basics — great. If you think you can use some improvement, check out our Writer University for actionable lessons to get your writing where it needs to be. There are also plenty of other resources, including Poynter University, Purdue’s Online Writing Lab (OWL), and my personal favorite, Minion Fogarty’s Grammar Girl. You should also subscribe to AP’s online stylebook and do a bit of studying.

For help with content questions, writing structure or workflow you’ll find plenty of forums and writing groups online. One of the most popular is WriteWords; the site offers everything tips and tricks articles to job opportunities to writing groups that can help evaluate and critique your work.

You’re going to have to do all the groundwork on getting your writing, grammar, logic, flow and structure up to speed. This article is about how to add to those skills by learning how to take the really compelling, engaging content you write and adding value by optimizing it for SEO.

ALSO – 10 Things to Know Before You Start Writing for a Client

ALSO– Copywriting for SEO

Understanding Searcher Intent

Modern SEO demands more than simply using keywords in your writing. It’s critical that you understand what the most relevant information is to satisfy someone plugging in those keywords.

The days when keyword-stuffed content (Read: “I love peanut butter sandwiches because peanut butter sandwiches have a lot of peanut butter in the sandwich.”) are gone. Today’s search engine algorithms like Google’s RankBrain look at the behavioral metrics of content such as bounce rate and dwell time to determine how actual readers view your content and whether it’s deserving of a high placement in the search engine results.

Start by reviewing the set of keywords you’re given, and then try to put yourself in the searcher’s shoes. Let that guide you as you write.

Someone who’s thinking about getting a new dog might search for these keyword terms:

• Best dogs for families with kids
• Cost of canine veterinary care
• Dog training

While these are more likely queries from someone considering a career in the veterinary field:

• Canine anatomy
• Common diseases in dogs
• Veterinary schools

And someone who’s shopping for their dog might use these terms:

• Cheap dog collars
• Best doggy doors
• Soft dog beds

Though the topic — dogs — remains the same, the people plugging in those groups of search terms were looking for something very different and had unique searcher intents. Make sure you come to that same type of understanding before you head for your keyboard.

Good SEO-optimized content should focus on solving searcher intent instead of simply slotting in specific keywords. Focus on doing that through great storytelling, and your content should rank well.

The A to Z of Keywords

Keywords, key phrases, targets — call them whatever you want. But rest assured, they drive SEO content. If you’re an SEO copywriter, chances are assignments will come complete with keywords designed to help them perform well across multiple search engines.

Types of Keywords

Most clients will provide you with several different types of keywords. Though they may look the same and have a similar purpose, the way you use them in your copy differs.

1. Primary Keywords: These are the most important keywords for SEO. They typically have a high search volume and low competition, though you’ll also see clients rely on long-tail keywords — those that are more specific and have a lower search volume but a much more focused searcher intent.

2. Secondary Keywords: These keywords are very relevant to your primary keyword, though they typically have a lower search volume. Think of them as keywords that support the primary.

3. Semantically Related Keywords: These terms are related in some fashion to your primary keywords, though they go beyond mere synonyms. Often referred to as LSI keywords, these indicate topics that would naturally be included in an article about your primary keyword. Sticking with the canine theme, an article about “dog training” might have LSI keywords that include “potty training puppies,” “dog whisperer,” and “interpreting dog behavior.” Semantic keywords might indicate subtopics you should cover.

Keyword Placement

There’s no definitive way to use keywords, and how you will use them varies depending on the type of content you’re writing. But, here’s an example of instructions for a standard blog post:

1. Primary Keyword: Include in the page title, meta description, H1, at least one H2 and early in the body text.

2. Secondary Keyword: Include in an H2 and in the body text for that section.

3. Semantic Keywords: Include as many as you can at least once in the body text.

Each client may have their own philosophy on keyword placement, so be sure to ask questions before you start writing.

Occasionally you’ll have clients that ask for each keyword to be used multiple times or to reach a certain keyword density, but this is becoming less common. The approach outlined above lets you get your keywords in while still focusing primarily on writing for the user and solving search intent.

Stop Words and Such

Trust me — the time will come when you’re handed keywords that are grammatically incorrect or very difficult to work into the content, especially when you’re dealing with SEO-optimized local content (dentists New York, plumbers near me, etc.).

Making slight variations, adding/removing punctuation or changing a keyword from singular to plural should have no impact on how Google reads the keywords. You’re also able to add what Google calls “stop words” without impacting the recognizability of the keyword.

Don’t be mistaken — Google has gotten really, really good at figuring out what the actual keywords are meant to be despite everything else going on around them, but you are bound to run into clients who are adamant that their researched keyword terms can’t be altered.

Each of your future clients will have their own rules on what to do (or not to do) with the keywords they provide you, and it’s in your best interests to adhere to what they say — even if it may not be in their best interest SEO-wise. If what you know to be true conflicts with what the client says, simply make your point, send them some links to authority sites on the subject and then get back to work.

Keyword Research

While it’s not very common, clients sometimes ask writers to do keyword research for content they write. There are a number of tools that can help you do this including Google’s Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, SEMrush Keyword Magic, Moz Keyword Explorer, etc. You can also use Neil Patel’s new UberSuggest tool to get keyword ideas and analyze traffic, and LSI Graph to generate semantically related keywords — and they’re both free. It just doesn’t get better than that.

What you’re looking for is a keyword or group of keywords that have a reasonable search volume, show a clear intent you can address with your content and ideally isn’t overly competitive.

How do you know if a search term is competitive? Look at the existing top search results for the search term, and audit the resulting content. How long is it? Does it include lots of data and sources? Are semantically related topics covered? If the content does all these things well, it might be tough to rank higher.. But, if they’re lacking in all these areas, you have a good shot at outranking them.

Keep in mind that keyword research is generally executed by SEO professionals and not writers or editors. If you’re going to take this responsibility on, think about how you’re going to charge the client — whether it be an hourly rate or by the keyword — so you get compensated for all your time.

Keyword Formulas

On very large projects such as writing product descriptions or city pages, clients often won’t have a specific keyword for every assignment they order. Often, what they’ll do instead is ask writers to create their own keywords based on a simple formula involving broad keywords.

For example, if a client wanted city pages for a car rental business they might give writers this formula to build keywords:

Primary – “CITY NAME” + “Car Rentals”

Secondary – “Best Cars for” + CITY NAME”

For product descriptions, it usually looks something like this:

“BRAND” + “MODEL NAME” + “DESCRIPTOR” + “PRODUCT”

Formulaic keywords are simple to work with, but just make sure you get all the requirements you need from the client before you start.

Why You Should Care About Featured Snippets

Here’s the hard truth — 75 percent of users never click past the first page of search engine results.

Featured snippets in the form of instant answers, knowledge graphs and videos are stealing traffic from the top organic results.

Ahrefs reports that 12.29% of all search queries have featured snippets in their search results. On these searches, the featured snippet captures 8.6% of clicks, which takes away from the top ranked search result. On the flip side, Inc.com reports that if you can earn a place in the featured snippet, your page traffic could increase 20-30% and your organic CTR could go up by 677%.

Combine that with the 70 to 80 percent of users ignoring paid advertisements and the reality sets in: If brands can’t get their SEO content in the top 10 search results or featured snippets (position 0), almost no one is clicking through and their competitors will take most of their potential audience.

What you can (and should) do is optimize for featured snippets as you write. There are three basic types:

Paragraph Snippet

Listicle Snippet

Table Snippet

There’s lots to learn about writing content that Google will consider for a featured snippet, and we can’t fit it all in here. But it’s fair to say that most featured snippets are the result of a searcher asking a question. You just need to supply the answers.

Answer the Public is a great (free) tool to use. Simply plug in your topic or keyword, and it will spit out ideas in the form of questions:

Read this article from the Content Marketing Institute to get more advice on how to rank for featured snippets. This HubSpot article also gives some great advice.

The Importance of Metadata

Start strong. Searchers don’t see much of your article in search results — in most cases, all they’ll see is the title and meta description. The result? Your title and meta description need to grab attention and compel users to click through.  

There’s been a lot written about how to write engaging titles, and there are even (free) tools to measure their effectiveness. Though the data may be out of date, this 2017 study conducted by BuzzSumo is a great starting point for learning how to craft good titles. Once you’ve got the hang of it, use CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer to see how well you’ve done. Ideally, you’ll want a score of 60 or higher.

The meta description is a short blurb — anywhere from 160 to 320 characters, depending on where Google stands on the subject at the time.

The sole purpose for meta descriptions is to get searchers to click on the link. That’s it. You don’t have a lot of words to use, so what you write has to be concise, informative, compelling and reflective of the article or post it points to. Shopify has a really informative post on the subject, a does Neil Patel.

Finding the Right Fit

No beginner’s guide to SEO copywriting would be complete without a few tips on where to get you first job and where to go for help if you need it.

Looking for a job? Great content marketers are hiring. Crowd Content is a great place to start — we offer jobs for writers of varying skill levels and specializations along with opportunities to work directly with clients if they like what you create. In addition, our quality rating system means that when you write great content you get more chances to write for better pay. It’s a win-win.

SEO Writing Jobs Going Forward

SEO is here to stay. Companies need content writers who can deliver fresh, creative articles that grab user attention and satisfy search engine algorithms. If you can master everything I talked about here and stay current with SEO trends, your skills will always be in demand.

The post Crash Course: How to Become an SEO Content Writer appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

It should be.

While the days of stuffing the meta keywords field full of search terms you’d love to rank for are long gone, metadata still impacts your rankings in a few key ways.

Title tags have always been an important ranking factor on their own, and including your primary keyword naturally in the title is an important aspect of optimization.

While meta descriptions have not been a direct ranking factor since Google launched RankBrain in 2015, behavioral metrics such as bounce rate, dwell time and organic clickthrough rate (OCTR) are key. Google pulls the page title and meta description to display in its search results, so both of them are now playing an active role in how RankBrain evaluates your site.

Metadata influences these behavioral metrics in a few ways:

1. OCTR – If you achieve a great OCTR, RankBrain will see that searchers find your metadata compelling enough to click on and might reward you with higher search rankings.
2. Bounce rate – If your bounce rate is too high, RankBrain might interpret it as searchers are not finding the content they expect based on your metadata, leading to lower placements in the search results.
3. Dwell time – This is the inverse of bounce rate. If searchers spend a lot of time on your site after clicking a link, that indicates to RankBrain that they find your content a good match for what they searched for.

These are the three primary factors that influence RankBrain’s “Relevance Score.” If your metadata does well with these factors, RankBrain should reward you with better search results.

While good metadata helps you rank, it’s also intrinsically important in encouraging searchers to click on your links and drive traffic. It acts as a guide to search engine crawlers and your audience, letting them know exactly what the pages are all about.

Think of your title and meta description as ad copy — it needs to entice a click and communicate what your page is all about.

But what does good metadata look like?

Let’s take a look at that.

A Quick Recap of Metadata Elements

There are two primary metadata elements that impact your SEO — title and description. These are the elements you should optimize for when trying to improve your SEO through metadata.

ALSO: The Do’s and Don’ts Of Metadata

If you’d like a more technical, in-depth look at these elements, be sure to check out the w3school page on the Meta Tag.

Title Tag

The title tag specifies your web page’s title. Potential visitors see this in a few places, including search engine result pages and when your content is shared in social media (if you’re not using Open Graph tags).

Note: try to keep titles to under 60 characters, as Google only shows about that many in the search results.

As mentioned, the title tag is the only metadata element that’s a direct ranking factor, and as such, it should be optimized for the primary keyword. Typically, this means you’ll include the keyword in the title in a natural way, including using stop words and punctuation to ensure it flows well.

The title also needs to be written in an engaging way that compels people to click on it.

In the Google search result below, Impact Branding does a good job compelling searchers to click with their title. They’ve also integrated the keyword “social media conversations” into their title. Though that’s not the only reason it’s helped them rank on the first page of Google results for that keyword, it’s certainly important.

What makes a strong title? Focus on the following:

1. Keep it succinct – less than 60 characters ideally
2. Use words that are action focused and elicit emotional responses
3. Follow a title convention that readers are familiar with such as lists, reviews, how-to and questions
4. Make sure the title connects well to your content

Meta Description

Your meta description is a short summary of the page. Similar to titles, descriptions get used in search results and social media previews. Google shows roughly 160 characters of a meta description in its results, so most marketers focus on keeping theirs under that count.

While not a direct ranking factor, the description lets you really sell your content to encourage clicks and boost OCTR, helping you with RankBrain. When displayed in the search results, Google even highlights any matching search terms in your meta description, increasing the likelihood of you capturing a click. If possible, include your target keyword (and secondary keywords) in your meta descriptions to give your OCTR a boost.

Here’s an example of Google doing that for the search term “social media conversation.”

The same advice we discussed for titles also applies to meta descriptions, but consider these as well:

1. Make sure you succinctly describe what your page is about, while piquing readers’ interest
2. Include a call to action encouraging searchers to click on the link
3. Include keywords you expert to rank for to help searchers know your content is a match for that term
4. Use a variety of keywords you expect to rank for and not just your primary keyword

Tesla delivers a strong meta description that tells us exactly what the brand’s website is all about in just a few words and compels searchers to click:

What happens if your meta description isn’t succinct and doesn’t accurately reflect what your page is about? Google might ignore your description and generate its own based on the content on your page.

That’s not an ideal outcome, so make sure you put lots of care into your descriptions.

As you come to terms with how important your SEO metadata is in terms of ranking, know you don’t have to go it alone. The internet is brimming with tools to help you test, analyze and audit to keep you on the right track.

Tools to Help You Optimize Metadata SEO

SEO metadata optimization ultimately comes down to working on your meta title and descriptions, and there are a number of great tools that help you do that. We’ve chosen six of the top choices that we just couldn’t do without.

1. ClickFlow

ClickFlow is an awesome tool that lets you test the effectiveness of your metadata so you can make minor adjustments for huge rewards.

Essentially, it lets you test metadata variations and see which one delivers the highest OCTR. All you need to do is connect your Google Search Console to the tool, and you’ll be able to start optimizing. ClickFlow organizes and manages all your metadata experiments, which is a huge benefit, as metadata experiments can be a pretty manual exercise otherwise.

The dashboard lets you organize all your experiments and get some high-level performance metrics. It’s pretty easy to prove your efforts are successful if you can show increased clicks, OCTR and revenue increases.

The beauty of this is that you get to grow your organic traffic without having to keep building lots of links or producing lots more content, as simply increasing your OCTR helps you with RankBrain. Subsequently, you can boost your rankings.

Besides — what marketer ever said no to more clicks?

2. Google Analytics/Google Search Console

This might be an obvious one, but these are two important tools for metadata optimization.

Google Analytics is a totally free web analytics service that lets you analyze a website’s traffic. It’s pretty encompassing, and when used in conjunction with Google Search Console (also free), it can help you monitor your organic clickthrough rate.

While not as structured as ClickFlow,  you can use it to work out how effective your titles and descriptions are by tracking a page’s OCTR.

To access this, navigate to Aquisition > Search Console > Landing Pages.

Here you’ll see how your pages are performing in Google’s organic search. By making changes to your page’s metadata and tracking changes to your OCTR, you can create your own metadata tests manually that are similar to ClickFlow’s.

Plus, Analytics will let you see which pages have the highest number of organic impressions. Finding a page with a large number of impressions can yield the best results if you successfully boost your OCTR.

While clickthrough rate alone can help you gauge how effective or ineffective your metadata is, Google Search Console also comes with an HTML Improvements section that flags potential problems with your title tags and meta descriptions. This includes missing titles or descriptions or duplicate titles and descriptions. I’ve focused on how you can improve existing metadata so far, but missing or duplicate metadata is a bigger issue and extremely low-hanging fruit.

3. Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets are necessary to keep organized if you’re manually experimenting with metadata.

Make sure you create a spreadsheet that tracks:

1. Current metadata
2. Test metadata
3. Current Impressions
4. Current Clicks
5. Current OCTR
6. Test Impressions
7. Test Clicks
8. Test OCTR
9. Current search rankings
10. Test search rankings

All of this data comes from Analytics and Search Console, but keeping it organized lets you track the results of your experiments. It also lets you track titles and descriptions in case you need to switch back to them.

Any spreadsheet tool will work for this — Excel, Google Sheets, Open Office, Libra, etc.

4. CoSchedule Headline Analyzer

CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer is a great  tool to experiment with your meta title tags. A title tag works a lot like a headline, and it’s your chance to grab the attention of searchers in the SERPs. A title tag must be compelling and direct, and it needs to succinctly and powerfully explain what the content is all about.

As this is not always easy, it’s a good idea to use a testing tool that lets you analyze your data and results.

Headline Analyzer evaluates your headlines and gives you a score from between 1 to 100, with 100 being a perfect score. (Not sure if anyone has ever achieved that though!).

It evaluates your word choice, title length, keywords included and more. In general, if you can earn a good score with Headline Analyzer, your title should perform well.

Note: This tool suggests you have a minimum of 55 characters in your headlines; just make sure you don’t go too far above that or Google may truncate your title in search results.

This tool is free to use. If you want to use CoSchedule’s broader set of tools that let you organize your marketing and social media, packages start out at only $80 per month.

5. SEMrush

SEMrush is a premium search engine marketing suite that’s designed to boost your marketing efforts. Whether you’re running PPC campaigns, social media campaigns, or want to increase traffic organically, it’s pretty handy to have by your side.

There are many ways it can benefit your metadata SEO game, but one of my favorite features is the SEO audit. The tool scans all your web pages and identifies any that are lacking metadata or have duplicate content.

Many online marketers either sometimes forget to add meta descriptions to new pages or have inherited sites with missing metadata. In either case, adding metadata to a page that doesn’t have it is a big opportunity.

Here’s a resource on how to perform an SEO audit with SEMrush and nail your metadata.

SEMrush is a paid service, but if you’re looking for a tool that will audit your site’s metadata in a similar fashion, check out Screaming Frog, which offers a free plan that lets you audit up to 500 pages.

6. Crowd Content

Writing meta descriptions and title tags isn’t easy, especially when you have a large number of pages and want to run experiments.

Crafting compelling, persuasive bite-sized pieces of content that convince searchers to click on your web page at scale is tricky.

ALSO – Getting Metadata With Your Orders

This is where a service such as Crowd Content proves useful. Home to versatile, professional metadata writers, it lets you connect with a writer who knows what makes internet users tick. They’ll acquaint themselves with your business and your content, and then deliver compelling metadata that hits the mark with your target audience.

Wrapping It Up

Title tags and meta descriptions remain the most important metadata elements in 2019, and they should continue to form a key part of your SEO strategy moving forward. The overall role of metadata SEO has changed over the years, but it’s key that you continue to nail these two.

With RankBrain using behavioral metrics such as organic clickthrough rates to determine how useful and relevant a piece of content is to the end user, you need to leverage the power of title tags and meta description to persuade Google and the searcher that you’ve got the best piece of content.

The tools I’ve mentioned here should help you get organized and focused on improving your metadata’s SEO.

Have any other tools you think I should have covered? Please let me know in the comments below.

The post Is SEO for Metadata Important to You? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

We even wrote the book on city pages.

One of the most common questions people ask me is how you can get writers to create content for these pages that actually sounds natural to someone who lives in the targeted city.

And that’s a critical question. I’ve seen so many city pages that sound like they could have been written about ANY city. Just imagine reading:

“Our location is nestled in CITY NAME’s vibrant downtown close to great coffee shops, restaurants and any services you can imagine.”

That’s pretty weak, and it could apply to ANY city. What it’s really lacking is any sort of distinguishable information.

To combat this, we usually provide writers with a selection of great data sources they should gather information from to include in their content. This makes the content feel natural to the reader and also produces higher-quality content that’s more likely to rank organically.

Below is a list of some of the sources we use. Keep in mind not every source will be helpful for your project, and there are a lot of other sources you can also include. The key thing is to identify your sources before your writers get to work, and make sure they know what their sources are and what data you want them to use.

1. Trip Advisor

Chances are you’ve used Trip Advisor when planning your vacations, or even checking out attractions in your own city. It’s also a great source that writers can turn to and find authentic information about cities including details and reviews about neighborhoods, attractions, shopping, and dining.

Trip Advisor does tend to feature reviews from travelers, so it might not work as well when you need perspectives from locals.

2. Yelp

If you want reviews on local services and establishments from locals who live there, Yelp is a great source to turn to. This tool is useful

for discovering establishments to write about, as well as reading reviews that can help writers understand which establishments are preferred by locals.

3. City Hall and Chamber of Commerce Sites

These sites are a great source of information about a community’s laws, bylaws, plans, programs, and more. Depending on your industry, including some of this information (or linking to it) on your city page can be extremely valuable for your readers.

For example, if you were creating a city page for a plumbing company, you might want to include information about a city’s water conservation program.

4. Area Vibes

AreaVibes lets you see housing, education, climate, amenity, cost of living and other information down to neighborhood levels. They’ll also calculate a livability score based on these factors, which helps writers get a sense of which areas are the better areas in a city.

This can be really helpful when your city page needs to discuss specific neighborhoods in a city. That kind of information makes locals feel like the writer really understands the city, and also enables the writer to make recommendations.

For example, if your city page was going to recommend retirement communities in a city, you’d want to be sure that your writer recommends ones that are in nice neighborhoods.

5. Livability 

Livability provides a treasure trove of information for most cities. You can find valuable statistics, information about local infrastructure and amenities, and even links to local news stories.

6. Zillow 

While primarily a site to find homes, Zillow also includes a wealth of information about an area’s housing stock, schools, amenities, and other characteristics.

7. Trulia

Trulia is actually very similar to Zillow, and you’ll find a lot of similar information. You might have a look and see which site offers better information for the cities you’re targeting and refer to the site you prefer.

8. Nerd Wallet’s Cost of Living Calculator

This is a really cool that lets you look up the cost of living in pretty much any area and compare it with other areas. Not only does this give writers perspective on the areas they’re writing about, but this type of information can be extremely valuable for companies whose customers would consider cost of living when using their services.

For example, if a company helped renters find homes in different neighborhoods, letting them know how the cost of living stacks up against other cities could be extremely valuable.

9. Bureau of Labor Statistics

The Bureau of Labor Statistics provides government data around employment. In the context of city pages, this lets your writers find out about the job market and average wages for specific positions in each location.

10. Census Data

The United States Census Bureau lets writers delve into all types of demographic data for a given area, which lets them weave interesting facts into their content.

Most countries have some form of census data available, so if you’re creating city pages for countries other than the United States you should look up that country’s data.

11. City Data

City Data provides similar information to census data, mostly demographic data, but in a potentially easier-to-access format. Plus, they include international information if you want to target countries other than the United States.

12. Local News

While not as condensed as some of the other data sources we’ve included here, having writers review a city’s local newspapers, television, and magazines can help them get a good feel for the community. In certain cases, referencing local stories and trending topics in your city pages can add an authentic flare.

Mo Data, No Problems?

While a case can be made that mo’ money creates mo’ problems, having mo’ data sources for your city pages is unlikely to cause you problems.

The more sources your writers can look at, the better they’re going to understand a community and the better they’ll be able to write authentically about it.

Identify sources that have the data you need upfront, share them with your writers, and be sure you provide instructions on how to use the data and you’ll get high-quality city page content created every time.

The post 12 Data Sources You Can Cite To Make Your City Pages Stand Out appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

It’s kind of a big deal, and so are city pages.

And, with good reason – over 50% of Google searches now show local intent.

That’s a massive amount of traffic and it’s absolutely critical that businesses that rely on local customers have a strategy that captures this traffic.

Local SEO is a rather big field that includes tactics like:

1. Creating and optimizing Google My Business (GMB) pages
2. Tracking placement in Google’s “Local Pack”
3. Managing local citations
4. Getting placement in local business directories
5. Creating city pages to rank in SERPs for locally focused keywords

In essence, local SEO can be called any tactic that helps attract locally focused searchers organically.

There’s a wealth of information about items 1 through 4, but not a lot about creating city pages.

At Crowd Content we’ve been working with clients for several years to create high-quality city pages to help them rank for valuable local keywords and convert visitors in those locales to clients. To date, we’ve created tens of thousands of these pages for hundreds of clients.

With that, we’ve seen what works well for these pages, and, what doesn’t work so well.

We’ve taken what we’ve learned, gathered advice from some of our expert SEO friends at companies like Avis-Budget, GreenPal , and SEMrush, and written our latest ebook – “The Complete Guide to Creating City Pages for SEO – How to Create Engaging City Pages at Scale That Will Delight Visitors, Drive Traffic and Get You More Business.”

What’s Inside the Ebook?

Not to toot our own horn too much, but this ebook contains everything you’d need to know to create amazing city pages at any scale.

This includes:

1. Doing keyword research
2. Developing a template
3. Choosing your content mix for your pages
4. Gathering resources and data sources
5. Example topics to cover by industry
6. Keyword placement within your template
7. Determining appropriate content length
8. Creating these pages at scale
9. Examples of high-performing city pages

We’re confident that if you have questions about city pages, you’ll find the answers in this ebook.

Why Did We Write This Ebook?

I mentioned before, but there isn’t a ton of info available about creating good city pages. And, they’re really important for a lot of businesses.

We still see companies trying to create what are in effect” doorway pages”, offering little unique content to visitors and putting them at risk of being penalized by Google (see – Google’s doorway page penalty).

Often, you’ll see nearly identical content on each city page with only the city name swapped out.

This isn’t good for the company or their visitors.

So, we’ve created this ebook to help companies create city pages that deliver huge value to their visitors, and help them drive local traffic to their sites.

Whether you need to design a city page program from scratch, or just want some pointers to improve your current program, we hope you’ll find this ebook a valuable resource

If you have any questions about city pages, feel free to reach out.

Also Read – How to Design and Create a Local Landing Page Program

The post [Ebook] The Complete Guide to Creating City Pages For SEO appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Google Posts let you promote your local business, announce events and sales and introduce new content or products directly on Google’s search and maps pages. You can create as many as you’d like, and they’re completely free.

While these posts only last for 7 days, there’s an interesting opportunity here to promote any relevant high-quality content you’ve recently published. Content promotion is a huge part of content marketing success, and another channel is worth testing.

Of course, you can’t use Posts unless you have a Google My Business profile, which requires you to have a physical location too.

What is Google My Business?

Google My Business is a tool that that lets business owners create a profile that may be visible on the first page of the search results and on Google Maps (in the “local pack”) when users search for your business directly or for more general searches where your business is relevant.

Each GMB profile contains images and information about your business including hours of operation and location, and you can even use it to set up a free website.

Google My Business also lets you respond directly to customer reviews, which helps to build brand loyalty and encourages direct interaction with the public. With a Google My Business profile, you have full use of Google Posts.

It’s important to note that each GMB profile must be tied to a real, physical address. A P.O. Box or Aunt Susie’s home in a different location aren’t physical locations in Google’s eyes.

Google Posts: Communicate With Your Audience For Free

Google Posts are quick and easy. They appear within your Google My Business profile, which means they’ll be displayed above the fold on the first SERP when a search triggers your profile. They’re a perfect way to announce a sale or new product or to share the brand new blog post you recently posted on your site.

Google Posts can include images, videos, text and even a button to take viewers to your site. There are several different types of posts. They are:

• Event Posts: Hosting a special event? Event posts include a title, date, start and end times and may also have an image or video and a button.
• What’s New Posts: These posts are perfect for sharing that shiny, new blog post or landing page. They can help to drive traffic to new content or make general announcements regarding your business. You can include an image or video and use the CTA button.
• Offer Posts: Use this type of post to announce a sale or promotion. Offer posts require a title, start and end dates and times and a View Offer button. They can also include a photo or video, coupon code, link and terms and conditions.
• Product Posts: If you want to single out a specific product that you sell, product posts are the way to go. These require a title and photo or video, and you can also include a button.

Cardinal Digital Marketing CEO Alex Membrillo says, “We use Google Posts to showcase blog posts, location or landing pages, special offers, events, sales and even products. We also tie in the post content with Google AdWords strategy to keep messaging consistent.”

So Simple, Even a Caveman Can Do It (Sorry, GEICO)

Google Posts can be written and launched in minutes. To create one, follow these simple steps:

• Sign in to your Google My Business account
• If you have multiple locations, select one
• Click on Create Post

• Select post type
• Choose options (What’s New, Event, Offer or Product)

• Enter relevant information
• Click Preview
• Click Publish

If you’re using the Google My Business app, the process is pretty much the same. Posts can also be edited or deleted from the Posts menu. Free and easy? There must be a catch.

For a more detailed look at creating posts on both Desktop and Mobile, check out Google’s help page.

Insightful Insights

What good is a new toy without at least some analytics? With Google Posts Insights, you can evaluate an individual post’s performance or the performance of all posts over a 7- or 28-day span. The summary shows the important metrics: views, clicks and percentage of change over a rolling 7- or 28-day period.

Because the product is fairly recent, there aren’t a lot of statistics concerning its effectiveness, but some have found success. “We’ve found that mobile-only ads with coordinating Google Post content perform, on average, 44 percent better than stand-alone ads,” says Membrillo. “We’ve also measured up to 70 percent more map views for clients that have active Google Posts related to their location and geo-area.”

There’s Always a Catch

Yes, Google Posts are free and easy, but there’s a little more to it (Relax, it’s just some rules and guidelines, and most are common sense):

• Google Posts content must be relevant to your business
• Low-quality images aren’t permitted
• You cannot link posts to irrelevant sites
• Inappropriate or offensive content is prohibited
• Scams, malware, viruses, phishing: not allowed
• Avoid misrepresenting information and misleading claims
• Stay away from regulated products and services

Best Practices Deliver Best Results

Should you decide to give Google Posts a go, keep these tips in mind to maximize your results.

1. Make sure that your photos are bright and in focus. They should be relevant to your message and can be submitted in JPG or PNG format. The minimum resolution for images is 720 pixels wide and 540 pixels tall.
2. Keep your video files to 100MB or less and, again, make sure they’re relevant. Acceptable video formats include FLV, AVI, MP4, MOV, WMV, MPG, M4V, MKV, M2TS and MTS.
3. Use titles and writing that lead a viewer to action while keeping your message short and sweet. Titles can have up to 58 characters, and details can include as many as 1,500, although Google recommends 150 to 300 characters for best results.
4. Include a CTA button; some post types require it. You can choose from buttons that say Call, Visit, Learn More, Buy and Book Online.
5. Share. Businesses spend a lot of money creating new content and trying to drive inbound traffic. Use Google Posts to share that content and engage new customers for free. You only risk the couple of minutes it takes to create a new post.
6. Use it often. “My experience has been that the more you post, the more traffic and overall visibility your Google My Business listing will get,” advises Bill Hartzer, president of Hartzer Consulting; a boutique SEO agency. “I recommend maxing out the number of posts and posting as much as possible.”

If you’re looking for new ways to use inbound marketing and leverage Google’s reach in the local and global market, you could do a lot worse than Google Posts. Sometimes you can get something for nothing.

The post How to Leverage Google My Business Posts to Promote Your Content appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

First, it must include strong keyword optimization and content that captures the intent of what consumers are looking for online and capitalizes on and satisfies that intent. If your copy does this, you benefit from:

• More time spent on page
• Higher rankings in the search engines, which in turn leads to increased organic traffic

A second factor of strong eCommerce copy is that it provides the consumer with all information required to make a decision at whatever stage of the customer journey they’re at, whether they’re just doing research or ready to make a purchase. The goal is to encourage them to take the next step towards a purchase.

Ultimately, great eCommerce copy is copy that converts at a high rate.

[ctt template=”4″ link=”tWo4N” via=”yes” nofollow=”yes”]Great #eCommerce copy is copy that has a high conversion rate. [/ctt]

Devin Stagg, the marketing manager for Pupford, an eCommerce dog food and supplements brand, puts it like this: “Even if you get organic traffic from Google, the user experience is what will get you the purchase, and that is all that matters.”

But how do you combine these two factors — strong optimization and user-centric content that converts — on the page? In our experience, the easiest way to do this via eCommerce content is with a mixture that includes:

• Product descriptions
• Brand/Category descriptions
• Buying guides

Each of these types of content tends to target consumers in various buying stages, which means they come with different keyword requirements and content intent.

We’ll break down each of these content types, providing some advice on how to get started with each one by looking at companies who are hitting it out of the ballpark with both keyword optimization and stellar content.

ALSO – What is Copywriting and What Are Its Best Practices?

Product Descriptions

Product descriptions tend to target buyers in the final stage of the funnel. These consumers are ready to make a purchase, they just need to be convinced that your specific product is the right choice.

And if you think what you say about your product on the page doesn’t make a difference, think again. Alongside detailed images and user reviews, consumers rank product descriptions as a top influencer in whether they will make a purchase online or not.

Before you can influence those consumers with cleverly written marketing copy that satisfies their questions, you have to get them to your page. That makes keyword optimization the first step to creating great PDs.

Matt Sklar, a writer for evo, a sports and outdoors eCommerce retailer, says his team always begins with keyword research. “Even if we think we already know the answers, we validate with data. This helps to see how searchers really talk about a topic,” he says.

Keyword formula: Optimizing thousands of PDs quickly

Keyword research is important, but it’s not always easy for companies with large catalogs and sites. And while keyword research is always valuable, there are some tips and tricks you can integrate into PD writing that we’ve learned from working on millions of product descriptions over the years.

Organic searchers who are in this stage of the buying journey tend to search using variations of the product and brand name. You can use this knowledge to build a formula for coming up with keyword variations for your PDs.

Keep readability and actual user behavior in mind when you use these formulas. While they work 90 percent of the time, sometimes you have to make a call to leave part of the product or brand name out because it’s too clunky and not likely to be searched for by a user.

For example, the technical name of a toy, including the branding, may be Mattel Barbie Doll Princess fashion set. Following the formula in the image, you’d also throw in a descriptor: Mattel Barbie Doll Princess pink and blue fashion set.

That’s a mouthful, and most people are going to search for a Barbie Doll fashion set because Barbie has enough name recognition to stand on her own. Keep this in mind when integrating keywords into your product descriptions, or the user experience gets a little hairy.

Where should keywords go in PDs?

Once you figure out what keywords to use in your eCommerce content, slot them into the page title, metadata and first paragraph of your PD. For short PDs, that’s really all you need. If your PDs come in on the longer end (100 or more words), you can also slip a keyword into the last sentence or paragraph as long as you keep readability in mind.

Write quality product descriptions

Matt Sklar’s evo team might start with keywords, but the end goal is high-quality content. “We write content that seeks to answer the searcher’s question. It is Google’s goal to serve users the best and most helpful content, and they are continually improving in that regard . . . So, we always set out to create the best content on the internet for a given topic,” he states.

Takeaway: Product descriptions aren’t throwaway content just to attract search traffic. They mean something, and you should write them like they do.

Plus, you get double benefits of doing so. The impact of great eCommerce content extends beyond just the impact it has on conversions. It also leads to visitors staying on site longer and interacting with more elements, which signals to Google that your site has a good interaction rate. This can indirectly influence rankings through the RankBrain algorithm, pushing your page up in the SERPs.

[ctt template=”4″ link=”Xs6ot” via=”yes” nofollow=”yes”]Great #ecommerce #content seeks to answer the searchers’ question.[/ctt]

Some quick tips for creating quality product descriptions include:

• Understanding the appropriate length
  • What type of information will users expect to find in the description?
  • How many details are covered in tables or easy reference points on the same page?
  • How complex is the product? A 200-word PD about shoelaces is overkill; a 20-word PD about a SmartTV is unlikely to provide enough information.
• Creating variety on the page
  • Don’t just upload a wall of text.
  • Include media, such as photos and videos.
  • Make use of headers and bullets, especially in longer PDs.
• Keeping your target audience in mind
  • If you’re selling computers to general home users, you’re going to write about them differently than when selling laptops to gamers.

A look at eCommerce content that performs: Best Buy

Best Buy has its PD game down, which is saying a lot, since the company has tens of thousands of products to handle. Here’s an example of a PD page for a self-charging robot vacuum.

Not only is the copy optimized for key SEO terms, it also serves compelling content for each buyer stage at an appropriate point. The text is broken out between various forms of media, including images and spec tables, and the blurb directly under the image provides the keyword and several major selling points for the product.

Look at the results for Best Buy’s page. For this one product description, the company is ranking for 88 different keywords in the US index, which is worth an estimated $1,600 per month.

And Best Buy achieves this simply by following good protocol for creating product pages and descriptions.

Category Pages

Category pages are a step up from PDs in the hierarchy of an eCommerce site. This is the page where all the robot vacuums are listed, for example. You might have different levels of category pages, all depending on how your consumers are likely to search for various products.

For instance, if you sell vacuums, you might have category pages for bagless vacuums, pet vacuums and robot vacuums, because all of these product groups solve a different set of problems for consumers.

Category pages are great for individuals who are at the awareness and consideration stages of the buying journey, because they provide more information about specific types of items without delving into certain models. Customers in this part of the buying journey want to see different options and get answers to questions about functions, benefits, sizes, colors and other factors.

Category pages are one of the first pages visitors who land on your homepage will click to, and they’re also where most of the general or broad keywords searchers use in Google will land. In either case, you’ll want to help users satisfy objectives to learn more about this category of product so they move toward the desire stage, which is where they might make a purchase.

Category page content can reside above or below the product lists that go with the category. Content that might be included in a category page includes:

• Discussion about different brands
• Information about the different types of products (or sizes, colors, styles)
• Answers to common questions about the product type (ex: How do I buy the right size glove?)
• Use cases for various products (ex: use cases for Dutch ovens versus stock pots within a cookware category)

Determine keywords for category pages

As with PDs, you’ll need to start with keywords. The difference is that keywords for your category pages are broader; users aren’t looking for a specific Barbie or even a white, bamboo queen sheet set. They’re looking for Barbie accessories or queen sheet sets.

You can begin keyword research using SEMRush’s keyword research tool, Moz’s keyword explorer or your own Google AdWords account. As you compile lists of keywords, consider their intent: keywords that match the intent of finding out more about a specific type of product will likely have the highest return, though other keywords can be valuable and may be peppered into category descriptions as secondary or long-tail phrases.

Where do category page keywords go?

Include the primary keyword for each page in the title, metadata and heading. Because category pages tend to be longer than PDs, consider including the keyword (or secondary keywords) toward the beginning and end. If you can use subheadings to break up the content, use a keyword in at least one of the subheaders.

Patrick Delehanty, the marketing manager at Marcel Digital, notes that the keyword or relevant phrasing should also go in the URL for the category page. This is actually good advice for any type of eCommerce page. “Make sure that [the URLs] contain important product names and keywords that are relevant to the audience,” says Delehanty.

A look at CDs that perform: Dick’s Sporting Goods

Check out Dick’s Sporting Goods’ page for canopy tents and pop-ups. You’ll find the category description content at the bottom of the page, where it provides answers to common questions about products in this category and links to more eCommerce content (specifically relevant buying guides).

The page ranks for 2,400 keywords and enjoys monthly traffic worth nearly $45,000. This includes 223 keywords ranked in the top 3.

Buying Guides

Buying guides are ideal when you’re trying to help visitors who are at the early stages of the buying decision. They’re also perfect content for retailers that sell complex products.

They can be located in your site’s main navigation, and often retailers will include them in category pages as additional resources. In the previous section, we saw how Dick’s included links to buying guides in its canopy category page content, and Best Buy also includes links to buying guides in its CDs.

Buying guides don’t just talk about what types of products are available and what the features and benefits are; instead, they start by educating the reader. That may include some discussion about feature and benefits, but it’s not the goal.

Thomas Jepsen, the owner of Contractor Quotes and a marketing and SEO veteran, says certain phrases about the product’s intent or solution are sometimes easier to rank for than the product itself. And that’s a big benefit of buying guides.

“If, for instance you’re selling polyurethane, this product helps protect floors, which in turn makes them last longer,” says Jepsen. “Sit down and think about all the ways that people may be searching for relevant information regarding your product and create content for it. For polyurethane, the content you might want to create includes: What is the best sealant for floors? How do I apply Polyurethane to my wooden floors? How do I make floors last longer?”

This is the type of content that might be relevant to your buying guide. It’s also the type of thinking you need to do when performing keyword research to understand what might lead people in the earliest stage of the buying journey to your page. They’re either looking for information on an overall product type or looking for a solution to a problem without any specific product in mind.

Elements of strong buying guides

Buying guides are longer than PDs and CDs typically, so you need to break them up with headers, bullets and various forms of media. The best buying guides include high-quality images, infographics and even videos. They also answer specific questions for the reader.

Tip: If you ask a question in the format of a header and then answer it in a clear, concise manner, your content could be scraped for display in Google as a featured snippet, making your buying guide page even more valuable in the SERPs.

A look at buying guides that perform: Best Buy

Here’s Best Buy’s buying guide for 4K televisions.

In addition to having a great design, strong images, video and useful navigation, the content here is stellar. And you’ll notice one thing — this content all addresses questions someone who is at the early stages of their buyer’s journey would have:

1. What is 4K?
2. What is upscaling?
3. What is high dynamic range?
4. What 4K content is available today?
5. Can you stream 4K content?

By addressing these questions in depth on its site, Best Buy keeps visitors in its ecosystem and can direct them to category pages or even product pages as shoppers get closer to making a purchase decision. Plus, the retailer can track and retarget these visitors with relevant ads for 4K televisions.

As you might expect, there are a ton of monthly searches on Google from people looking to learn more about 4K televisions. Best Buy is capturing a huge chunk of that traffic.

In total, Best Buy’s buying guide ranks for 507 keywords, 55 of which are in the top 3 results. SEMrush estimates the monthly value of that traffic at over $30,000.

General Advice for Writing Great eCommerce Copy

Whether you’re pounding out PDs or getting into the nitty gritty with buying guides, a few tips hold relevant across all types of eCommerce copy. Check out this advice from experts in the field.

• “Create an outline for yourself. It’s the easiest way to hit all the important topics and not get lost along the way,” says Tyler Tassinari, a digital marketing strategist at Three29. (This is valuable advise especially for buying guides.)
• “It’s important to remain focused on providing benefit to your readers,” says Lee Dussinger, a senior content strategist with WebTek.
• “Keep an eCommerce-specific SEO checklist that you review before posting [content],” says Nicolas Straut, a content marketing associate with Fundera.
• “Avoid duplicate content on item and category pages by creating different descriptions and titles for each page,” says Stacy Caprio of Accelerated Growth Marketing.
• “Readers in the online world are often distracted and busy. So use short paragraphs, great sub-headlines and bullet points,” says Syed Irfan Ajmal, growth marketing manager at Ridester.

We know that’s a lot of advice to apply to your pages, and putting Caprio’s tip of unique content on each listing to work can seem like a daunting task. That’s why we offer professional eCommerce content creation services, which let you work with experienced project managers or hire freelance copywriters to populate your PDs, CDs and buying guides with high-quality, relevant text.

If you’d like more info on how to do these well yourself, be sure to check out our ebook on creating eCommerce content at scale or watch the webinar we hosted with SEMrush on this topic.

The post Product Copywriting for SEO: How to Be Sure Your eCommerce Copy Converts and Ranks appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Product descriptions outranked pictures and customer reviews as a top-influencing content factor for buyers considering a purchase on an ecommerce site.

With Google just as likely to return a product page as it is a category page on the search engine results (SERP), merchants have an opportunity to optimize their products for better ranking.

Google treats each product page as it would any other web page, meaning duplicate content could be an issue. For ecommerce giants with tens of thousands of SKUs, pages that need original, optimized content aren’t hard to find.

To be sure that your product pages rank well, consider these options.

[Free Ebook] How to Create Ecommerce Content At Scale – On Time, On Budget, Every Time, With No Exceptions

3 Ways to Improve Your Product Page SEO

1. Check for Content Quality and Duplication

Your product page is no different from any other on your site. Google will check its content, comparing it against both internal and external pages. While duplicate content within your internal pages won’t necessarily hurt you, it isn’t an ideal situation either. Google will choose which page has authority for you.

Follow these best practices to minimize internal duplication issues:

• Use a canonical tag for products that show up in multiple places in your taxonomy.
• Use one page for products with variations (size, color, etc.) instead of individual URLs containing the same product description.
• For products with separate variation pages, denote one as the master copy using the canonical tag, or use unique product descriptions for each.

Using unique product descriptions and coding your pages to better communicate with Google will go a long way toward helping your rankings.

Check your content against external sites.

All too often, retailers publish the product descriptions provided by the manufacturer.

• The manufacturer’s description isn’t original and is treated as such by Google. This has the potential to hurt your rankings, and it might keep your pages from ranking at all.
• Manufacturer descriptions aren’t designed to sell a product for your business.

Another common misstep is the use of a competing merchant’s description. Doing so practically guarantees that the competitor will outrank you in the SERPs, as your content is a copy of theirs. This is especially true of sites like Amazon with very high domain authority (DA), and it may also result in penalties — not to mention it’s an illegal practice.

Check your page content for accuracy and volume.

If your content is unique, you’re in a better position to perform well in the search results; however, original content isn’t enough. Product descriptions that contain errors or too few words tend to perform poorly, both in ranking and conversion. Be sure to include enough information to score well in relevancy.

Product page content that’s original, well-crafted and optimized drives organic traffic.

2. Optimize Your New Content

If you’re not selling small-market or unique products, there’s a good chance that you’ll have stiff competition for the more broad search terms such as smartphone or washing machine. There are still ways that you can optimize your product descriptions and target lower-cost clicks that could have higher conversion rates.

It starts with keyword research.

There are many tools designed to assist merchants with keyword research. Some of the notable ones include:

• Google’s Keyword Planner

• SEMrush’s Keyword Magic

• SEMrush’s Competitor Reports
• Moz’s Keyword Explorer

These tools help you to build strong keyword lists, including long-tail keywords, for all of your products.

Optimize product descriptions with long-tail keywords.

Keyword tools will help you to identify relevant keywords for a given product. For instance, a search for washing machine could show you that other associated searches include:

• Washing machine repair

• Washing machine delivery

• Washing machine and dryer

• Washing machine on sale
• Washing machine reviews

By analyzing these lists, you can find terms that may indicate a buyer is close to purchasing a product that you offer. For PPC advertisers, these longer phrases are often less competitive, which means you’ll pay less per click.

Keywords can give you an idea of where the buyer is in their process:

• Broad keywords. These are typically used by people in the beginning stage of the buying process or for informational purposes. They’re extremely competitive keywords and often have higher PPC costs. Example search term: refrigerator.

• Long-tail keywords. These show that the buyer is possibly interested in more than general information. These words are helpful for both targeting and eliminating potential buyers. Example search terms: smart refrigerator or refrigerator repair service.
• Intent keywords. This is where skilled SEO pros excel. Intent keywords can help identify when a searcher is ready to buy. Targeting these types of keywords will often provide less, but better-qualified, traffic. When done carefully, you’ll attract high-converting clicks at a lower cost. Example search terms: refrigerator free delivery or new smart refrigerator black.

By targeting searchers who use these longer phrases and optimizing your content to be relevant, the conversion rates on your product pages should increase.

To optimize for organic traffic, you’ll want to fit some of the key terms that apply to your product into its description to add relevancy. When using these longer phrases, you’ll be more likely to rank higher than those using less savvy methods.

3. Optimize Your Category Pages

Some businesses opt for formal keyword research on their category pages instead of the more time-consuming product pages. Depending on the scope of your catalog, it may be wise to take this approach. Optimizing and using your category pages for PPC campaigns is quicker than analyzing and mapping individual product pages, although merchants who opt for the more in-depth approach may have an advantage.

Regardless, you should still optimize your product pages with a basic template to target the more common long-tailed keywords. A template could be as simple as:

• Brand > model name > descriptor > generic product term. For instance, Keurig K525 platinum coffee maker or Specialized Rockhopper mountain bike.

Be economical with your product descriptions. Trying to fit too many keywords in can make them difficult to read, which doesn’t resonate well with buyers. Focus your descriptions toward buyers while keeping some carefully selected keywords in place.

Consider Your Options

Beginning a project of this size can be a daunting task, but it’s necessary to stay (or become) competitive. Product pages must include original, optimized content that sells your product.

No matter how many SKUs your site holds, you have options. You can:

• Write them yourself. Some products practically describe themselves, but others are more challenging. There’s plenty of posts online offering advice on how to write compelling and effective product descriptions. Some give excellent tips. Decide the proper word range for your niche and start writing. It’s a viable option for smaller inventories, but it can be quite time-consuming.

• Hire staff. Some jobs are that big. Hiring staff gives you the ability to oversee the project and offer direction and feedback quickly. Your volume will dictate the amount of staff you’ll need. If your products have technical features or measurements, hiring an editor would be a smart move. Even the best writers make mistakes, so someone will need to fact check and proofread the work.

• Hire freelance writers. Many freelance writers would be happy to write your product descriptions. With some trial and error, and time, you should be able to assemble a team of product description writers that understands your requirements and produces solid work. Of course, you’ll still need to do the editing, and communication can be tricky.
• Work with a content marketing service. Content marketing services staff hundreds and sometimes thousands of writers. With large talent pools, they’re able to train a team of writers to produce copy to your specifications. Some even offer editing services and a dedicated project manager to facilitate consistent communication and implement project changes. By limiting your involvement to project oversight, you won’t be bogged down by a long process.

If you’ve got thousands of SKUs, you’ve got thousands of SEO opportunities. Talk to a professional to learn more about your options.

The post Thousands of Product Descriptions? You’ve Got Unique SEO Problems appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

• Pens
• T-shirts
• Notebooks
• USB sticks
• Lanyards
• Keychains
• Stress balls

I should probably mention pens twice.

These are all great items to pick up and are often good to bring back to the office and share among your colleagues. That said, when we decided to exhibit at SMX Advanced last month in Seattle, I was determined that we’d hand out something a bit different that didn’t ring true to the classic swag cliche.

With that in mind — and given the fact I’m a major dog mom — I decided that we’d give out something that attendees’ fur babies could enjoy.

After a bit of searching, I found these awesome dog bandannas:

I must say, we were a bit unsure about this decision up until the moment the first rush hit our booth. Fortunately, many dog parents were in attendance, and it was great to make friends while chatting about our doggos.

Reasons why this swag worked:

• It’s unique and memorable
• Great conversation starter or subject changer
• Three people took one for their child (multipurpose?)

When we handed these out to attendees at the show, we also asked them to send us pictures of their dogs wearing them…because, why not?

I was overjoyed to see some of our new friends sending their pictures in, posting them on Instagram and Facebook, and I’m happy to share them with you now.

Here Are The Dogs of SMX

The post Introducing the Dogs of SMX appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

[Free Ebook] The Complete Guide to Creating City Pages For SEO – How to Create Engaging City Pages at Scale That Will Delight Visitors, DriveTraffic and Get You More Business

Local searches also drive sales: 50 percent of smartphone users and 34 percent of computer or tablet users who perform local searches make a purchase within a day.

The bottom line is — local traffic is significant and valuable. Many businesses are taking advantage of this through local SEO, which most often revolves around creating and managing their Google My Business (GMB) profile and local citation building. That’s important, but it does miss a couple things:

1. A lot of organic traffic goes to search results beneath the “local pack” — the local results and map section pictured below. The amount of traffic going to the local pack varies a lot by industry with some industries like restaurants seeing most traffic going to the local pack, whereas rehabilitation centers see significantly less.2. If you don’t have a physical location for each location you service, you can’t create a GMB account for that location — and that means missing out on local traffic

This represents a huge lost opportunity — for you and your potential customers.

To capitalize on this opportunity, many businesses create local landing pages (often called city or state pages) to rank for these local searches and connect with customers in those markets.

Why Local Landing Pages Matter

Local landing pages can benefit your business in multiple ways, but the biggest benefits are:

1. Search traffic: Ranking for keywords with local intent so your pages show up directly beneath the local pack
2. Better engagement: Connect with your local customers by sharing information relevant to their area
3. More leads: Companies with more landing pages get a higher number of leads than those with fewer landing pages
4. Competitive advantage: In many industries, creating local landing pages is not a widely used tactic or it’s done poorly, which means you can leapfrog your competition

Increased Search Traffic

There’s a huge amount of search traffic with local intent on the major search engines, predominantly Google. Capturing that local traffic can prove challenging, especially for businesses that don’t take advantage of all local SEO opportunities available to them.

Google My Business, for example, only allows address listings for the area where a business has a physical location, leaving your brand out in the cold if you don’t have multiple brick-and-mortars but you do service multiple areas.

The inability to create a Google My Business page for other relevant areas only means you won’t appear in the local pack.

While many searchers will click on a result in the map, many folks searching for “mechanic in Seattle” are still going to scroll down to see the traditional search results.

If you can’t be in the local pack, creating content that ranks for these traditional search results is your best shot at capturing local intent traffic. And, if you are in the local pack, you can still benefit from increased exposure.

Better Engagement

Local landing pages provide an easy way to communicate location-specific information and target regional trends, landmarks, neighborhoods and characteristics that may be the tipping point for a shopper on the fence or those customers not in your immediate location.

For many customers, knowing that a business has a strong connection to their community can make a world of difference to their decision-making process and who they actually end up working with.

Take our example of someone looking for a mechanic in Seattle. If that person landed on the homepage of a large auto service business with a long list of locations and only found contact info for the their nearest branch, how strong of a local connection has been made?

On the other hand, if they find information such as:

• How long that branch has been active
• Info about the staff, such as a message from the manager
• Examples of community involvement
• Reviews from local clients
• Photos of the shop and some of the staff
• Information unique to the area, such as how you need to have the right tires to drive in Seattle’s rainy weather

These are just a few examples, but this type of content can make visitors feel like a business has a strong connection their city and make them more likely to do business with them. It drives an emotional connection, and that’s powerful when marketing your business.

This type of content also usually contains relevant LSI keywords (latent semantic indexing) — keywords that are related to the primary keywords of your page. For example, if your primary keyword is “dog parks,” LSI keywords that your writers might naturally work into the text could be “canine parks” or “parks for dogs.”

Google tends to reward pages that have covered a topic in depth, and good use of LSI keywords is a great way to do that. So, while you’re delivering a better experience to visitors, you’re also keeping Google happy.

Finally, customers who visit your site often look for information on how you operate in their area. Having these types of pages built into your site’s navigation can help you easily deliver what they’re looking for, which also provides a better user experience.

More Leads

A recent HubSpot study indicated a 55 percent boost in leads for companies that increase their number of landing pages from 10 to 15, and companies with 40 or more landing pages get 12 times the leads of those with five or fewer pages. This happens for several reasons, but a primary cause is that these companies tend to have landing pages that are highly targeted and relevant for their audience.

While this is a great stat, marketers often struggle with how to get to a point where they have more than 40 landing pages. Given each landing page should serve a single purpose and provide unique value to visitors, it can be a challenge to justify getting that many landers up.

Creating local landing pages (or city pages) is a great way to get your site’s landing page count up because the local information you provide can be very valuable to your visitors from that area. Even if the conversion goal is similar, the focus of each page is sufficiently unique. And, each page will be highly targeted to the intended audience which should give it a strong conversion rate.

By creating your local landing pages, you’re very likely to see your site’s overall number of leads generated significantly increase.  

Competitive Advantage

Finally, local landing pages can offer competitive advantages as well, keeping you ahead of your regional competitors.

In many industries, creating local landers is not a widespread tactic, and in many more, companies have created very low-quality, generic pages. In either case, you have a great opportunity to get a leg up on your competitors by creating high quality local landers.

That leg up can manifest in several ways:

• Bigger share of local search traffic
• More awareness of your offerings in the area versus competitors’
• A stronger sentiment that your company is connected to the community

These are all big wins for any company serving multiple markets.

What Makes a Great Local Landing Page?

As effective local SEO tools, local landing pages are most often created to drive local traffic. They also help convert local traffic into leads, because they offer more personalized and relevant content to visitors.

A great local landing page goes beyond the basics, delving into the features and factors that define areas, cities, towns or counties, and highlighting the things that will make consumers purchase from you rather than from the business down the street. As mentioned earlier, this often results in pages that naturally make good use of LSI keywords.

When creating a local landing page, consider including:

• Unique, relevant content customized to regional information, including sites of interest, colloquial language, city or town nicknames, neighborhood information and any other community-specific selling points
• Strong use of location-based keywords
• LSI keywords (cover the topics they suggest)
• Unique and location-specific metadata
• Internal links to other relevant areas of your site
• External links to trusted sources with info your visitors would find useful
• Business reviews
• Staff quotes
• Local images and videos
• Service area maps
• A place within the main navigation of your site

These are just a few of many elements you could include on your city pages. Fundamentally, you just want to include content that connects your business to the community you serve and convince local visitors that your solution can help them.

An effective local landing page can take many forms, and how you choose to make a point can vary greatly from one business or purpose to another. Just be sure the location you’re using plays a leading role.

Note: this largely covers what you can do on-page to make your local landing pages great. There are a number of other things you can do off-page such as link building, soliciting reviews, and encouraging social updates about your pages. Check out this great resource from Moz for more info.

The Logistics of Landing Page Creation

If you’re reading this shaking your head and thinking, “My business serves multiple counties full of small towns. How can I possibly make a landing page for every one?” — you’re not alone.

The process of creating a large number of landing pages can be daunting — and some marketers ignore the process entirely in fear of the workload. However, mass-producing city pages isn’t quite as labor-intensive as it sounds.

Here’s a proven process that can help you manage a large local landing page creation project.

1. Develop a Template

Before you get started with content creation, you need a template that defines which parts of your pages will remain constant and which elements will update with every geographic area. For example, the headline, intro and photos may be region-specific, while the core call to action is more general. Be sure to set specific guidelines for each section to make sure all relevant information is captured.

Most companies will create a keyword strategy that supports each page’s SEO. If you’re creating a small number of local landing pages, you might just use a tool like SEMrush, Moz or Ahrefs to find targeted keywords in each area.

If you’re producing a large number of pages, you might consider creating a formula for your keywords. This most often involves finding your top-level keywords and then adding the location you’re targeting.

For example, “auto mechanic” + “Seattle” gives you “auto mechanic Seattle.”

2. Create a Style Guide

Like most brands, your business likely has its own style and corporate identity. This can vary from professional and polished to fun and casual, depending on the persona you want to share with customers. Your local landing pages should utilize this same tone, highlighting who you are and what you do.

To ensure all content meets your expectations, create a style guide providing an overview into language preferences, writing style, tone and voice. If you don’t do your own writing, this can guide your content creation team or freelancers in the right direction.

3. Assemble Resources

Once you know the kind of information you need, start pulling together resources to use when writing. These can range from Wikipedia pages to town or community websites; if it’s legitimate and it provides a well-rounded and authentic impression, it’s a potential source.

Common sources include Yelp! and TripAdvisor reviews, city hall and Chamber of Commerce sites, Zillow and Trulia for real estate information and even financial metrics from Nerd Wallet and the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. You can also pull from your own experiences, using turns of phrase and colloquialisms that you’re familiar with.

If you have access to internal resources such as customer reviews, staff interviews or quotes and local pictures, it’s also great to collect those to use for your pages.

4. Create Content

If writing is in your wheelhouse and you have time to take on a large-scale project, it’s certainly possible to create content yourself. However, if you have dozens of pages and not enough internal resources, a professional hand will help.

Crowd Content’s team of talented writers can tackle content projects for you, utilizing a deep knowledge of language and SEO expertise to create local landing pages that convert.

With writers and editors across Canada, the US, the UK and Australia, it’s possible to put together a team for virtually any location, giving you instant access to experts in your region. Your team of writers can work with any format or style of your choice, ensuring a finished project that pleases.

Crowd Content will take your template and map each unique section to a field that your team of writers will complete. By doing this, you can provide writers with specific instructions for each field as well as minimum or maximum word counts. This ensures consistency and quality of your content which makes creating the actual pages much easier.

If you’d like to get Crowd Content’s help building out your content, please get in touch with us to get started.

5. Export Your Content

As writers finish each city page using your custom template, Crowd Content will export the finished content into a CSV file that will have each city page’s content one row. Each field you’ve mapped will live in a cell within that row.

This makes it possible to collect data for hundreds of landing pages in one concise document that’s ready to upload and publish.

6. Publish Your Pages

If the thought of manually publishing page after page sounds a little unpleasant, you’ll love what RallyMind can do.

Instead of building each page manually, RallyMind uses Google Sheets to collect data from properly-formatted CSV files to automatically populate and publish hundreds of landing pages at once.

Note: you’ll need to import your CSV file into Google Sheets and use the Google Sheet for this process.

Getting this set up is quick and easy:

1. Create your RallyMind  account
2. Build a master template design using the site builder. Use the drag and drop tool to create your template, and specify which fields you want to include. This will be the base for all of your local landing pages and should include all fields you wish to populate from the Google Sheet you’ve created.
3. Make sure that all fields are mapped exactly as how they are set up in your Crowd Content template. This ensures each city page will be properly filled out and formatted.

When you’re ready to go with your landing pages, you can then sync your Google Sheet with your Rally Mind project and template. In minutes this will auto-create a new landing page for each row of data in the Google Sheet based on your template.

If you love the idea of local landing pages but have been hesitant to make the leap, the partnership between RallyMind and Crowd Content is the opportunity you’ve been waiting for.

Give it a try yourself, or drop us a line to help you get this process set up for your company.

The post How to Design and Implement A Local Landing Page SEO Program appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

I highlight what you need to know — and do — to put this new metadata and SEO trend to work for your site below.

The Importance of Writing Strong Metadata

If content marketing was a sport, it would be track. To compete, you’d have to put both long-distance runners and sprinters on the pavement.

A long-term marketing plan that builds an audience and inspires trust with high-quality content is critical to success. The bar for quality content rises every year — unlike the long jump record, which has been unchallenged since 1991.

At the same time, best practices, tools and search engine mechanics evolve rapidly in this industry, and your team must be able to keep pace with all of that.

It always surprises me to see brands not investing in either of these things; for example, we still see many pages that haven’t created metadata for optimized search engine performance. Even brands investing in producing in-depth, authoritative posts sometimes ignore these little details — and that’s like the relay team dropping the baton mid-pass. You might have the fastest runners on the field (or best content online), but without the baton pass, you can’t win the race.

Here’s what makes metadata critical to SEO success:

• The meta title tag is an important ranking factor, which means it’s a major player in where you end up in the SERPs. You’ll want to slip in a keyword or two, and maybe your brand name. Since most meta titles display to users within the SERP (but not once on your page), you also want to consider clarity and conversion.
• The meta description tag isn’t an explicit ranking factor, which means the content in it doesn’t directly impact SERP algorithms. The content is seen by consumers conducting searches, though, and is your one chance to sell your content’s value and entice someone to click on your link (and that behavior does factor into your performance in the SERPs).

Put these factors together, and you have a monstrous impact on your page’s organic click through rate (OCTR). This is pretty much the baton pass here, guys. You don’t want to drop it.

[ctt template=”4″ link=”f6Ue3″ via=”yes” nofollow=”yes”]What about Google’s recent move to longer meta descriptions? Here’s what you need to know. [/ctt]

So, What About Google’s Recent Move to Longer Meta Descriptions?

Google announced in December 2017 that it was boosting character counts for meta description text shown in their SERPs. Previously, it showed between 160 and 180 characters; now it will display between 250 and 300 characters, depending on the results page.

Before you get excited over the extra space and start filling it with keywords, let me say this: I think Google is giving us a clear signal here.

Yes, Google wants you to provide more detail for searchers before they visit your site, and they’ve made it possible to do that.

No, they don’t want keyword stuffing and low-quality content in the meta description. And neither do you.

Meta Descriptions Are the First Impression

Meta descriptions are your first touch point with someone searching online.

Tossing keyword stuffed hodgepodge into your meta tags is like a restaurant serving up a random assortment of ingredients they pulled off the bottom shelf. It’s not going to look enticing, and most people aren’t going to order from that menu. Yes, include primary keywords so Google will highlight them in the SERP, but nest them in quality metadata marketing copy that says something about your page and convinces people to click.

Treat your meta descriptions as ad text — connect with whatever intent your searchers have, entice them to click and you’ll get more clicks. This will help you boost your organic click-through rate (OCTR) and can help you rank better.

More From Eric: How’s Your Image SEO Game?

Strong Meta Descriptions Can Boost Your RankBrain Score

A second reason you need high-quality meta descriptions is because it helps you attract the right people to your site, and that can indirectly boost your RankBrain score and your position on Google’s pages.

RankBrain is Google’s third most important ranking factor (after quality content and backlinks), and it essentially looks at how searchers interact with the pages they see in the results. Primarily, that comes down to two major factors.

• Dwell Time (Time on Page). This is how long someone stays on your page. Average dwell time for a Top 10 result is about 3m 10s (less than the current world record for fastest mile, which is 3m 43s). At an average reading speed, that’s enough time to ingest about 600 words of content, so you need to provide excellent, longer form or interactive content to keep people on the page. You also have to attract users interested in your content; if your meta description is attracting people interested in cars and you’re serving up even the best content possible on collectible ceramics, the bounce rate will be high (this is also referred to as pogosticking). You dropped the baton, and your RankBrain score will suffer.
• Organic Click Through Rate. This is the percent of clicks your page receives out of all the clicks received by the displayed results for that search. A high percent says that your meta data is doing a better job at enticing people than the meta data from your competition.

RankBrain combines these two factors, which are both dependent on strong meta descriptions, to help Google understand how your page is truly performing from a searcher’s perspective. Pass the baton and perform well, and Google may reward you with a bump up the page results podium.

[ctt template=”4″ link=”7esWZ” via=”yes” nofollow=”yes”]What should brands do now that Google displays longer meta descriptions? Here’s what you need to know.[/ctt]

What Should Brands Do Now that Google Displays Longer Meta Descriptions?

Reading between the lines, I think Google’s move to longer meta descriptions is going to change how you optimize for factors such as RankBrain. Your organic competitors are going to be leveraging the longer character limit to boost their CTR, so to keep up you need to do that too.

It’s not a 100-yard dash to see who gets to the top, but you do need to act now rather than later. Start by taking an endurance event stance; if you haven’t started managing your meta, you need to learn, and if you’re already in the game, extra training never hurt anyone.

If you have pages that you think you should be ranking better for, it’s worthwhile to head into Search Console and review that page’s organic CTR. You might find that updating the meta description to boost CTR will not only get you more clicks immediately, but it might also help your rankings in the mid-term.

If you see success with that, a full audit of your site’s OCTR could be in order.

And since everyone’s starting with the longer descriptions at the same time, the playing field is at least a bit level for now. Take this opportunity to rethink your metadata SEO strategy, work in some better performing keywords and work with partners to write meta descriptions that use the extra length to sell your page to the right target audience.

Keep Reading: Web Design Decisions that Drive SEO — For Better or Worse

The post What You Need to Know About Google & Longer Meta Descriptions to Boost SEO this Year appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

You’ve just written a post that exhaustively explores your topic and satisfies searcher intent.  It’s engaging and informative, and you know readers and search spiders alike are going to love it. Awesome!

Now, how’s your image SEO for the post?

After putting in the work of crafting a killer post, you need to make sure that your visual game matches up. What does that mean?

Kissmetrics tells us that quality content isn’t enough. To maintain a solid ranking, you need to include rich media, such as images and videos, and they should reflect the same quality and voice as your post to help communicate its point. These graphics can include charts, graphs, screenshots, GIFs and photos. They’re are a big part of the overall perceived quality of your post, so it’s important that you get this right.

[ctt template=”4″ link=”Rx0S0″ via=”yes” nofollow=”yes”]Combine quality content with optimized images to achieve and maintain solid rankings. [/ctt]

How Can Image SEO Help Your Site?

There’s no question about it — images that aren’t optimized can hurt your website. Photos that take a long time to load, for example, can send your rankings plummeting and your bounce rate skyrocketing. On the flip side, properly optimized images provide a better user experience, which might improve time on site, and they can broaden your site’s ranking opportunities via the SERPs and Google Images.

Google and other search engines have a large list of factors that determine search rankings (check out Search Engine Land’s table of ranking factors), and it’s important to understand what they are and which ones are relevant to the media on your site.

File Name

Include your targeted keyword in the media’s file name, but in a human, readable way. Readers and spiders should be able to get a good sense of what the subject of the image is based on the file name.

Alt Text

Adding relevant, descriptive alt text to each image ensures that readers who are using screen readers or have images disabled are able to understand what the image represents. Bonus points for including your target keyword, as this is a ranking factor and will impact both the post’s ranking as well as the image’s visibility within Image Search. According to Moz, industry best practice is to keep your alt text to 140 characters or less.

Image File Size

High-resolution images are necessary to give your site a professional look, but bloated file sizes can impact load times and your overall ranking. Use tools such as Optimizilla, TinyPNG or Kraken to compress your images to reduce their overall footprint.

Responsive Design

Google is placing a greater emphasis on the mobile experience and are even making moves toward using a mobile-first index in the near future. If you want to rank well, you’ll need to make sure your site delivers a good mobile experience. A critical part of that is ensuring your graphics respond to mobile devices to show an appropriately scaled image. This isn’t just good for SEO; it also enhances the user experience.

Image Captions

Entice your readers to stick around and read more by giving your images “deep captions.” Image captions are one of the most-read elements on a web page after headlines, so make yours count. Deep captions are typically two to three sentences long, which is usually enough to engage readers so they stay on the page.

Link Bait

Creating graphics that engage users, offer some unique value or are just entertaining ups your chances that readers either link to the images in their own content or share them on social media. This can be a valuable source of backlinks for your post. If you’ve optimized the images as described above, it tells Google that your post is relevant for the keywords and topics you’re targeting.

You can get creative when using images, but high-quality photos, charts, graphics, GIFs, infographics and visual quotes all work well. If you do choose to use these types of images, make sure to include share buttons and/or embed code so you don’t miss out on getting some easy links.

Related: 3 Things You Have to Get Right for Successful Infographics

Getting the Most Out Of Google Image Search

Roughly 22 percent of all searches in the U.S. are Google Image searches, giving properly optimized images a much broader reach. Google Images also frequently appear as featured snippets in many text search results where they can steal clicks away from text results. That’s a substantial amount of traffic that you can capitalize on if you put the time and effort into the images on your site.

The good news is — if you follow proper image SEO and take the time and effort to optimize, your pages will most likely rank well in image searches for the graphics already in your posts. Still, there are a few more things you can do to get even more out of image search:

• Use Google’s Search Console to see what images are ranking for in Image Search. To do this, visit Search Console > Search Traffic > Search Analytics, and then change Search Type to Image. You can then view the Clicks, Impressions, CTR and the Average Positions your images are ranking for. Keeping an eye on this can give you a good sense of whether your images are ranking for the terms you want them to. It will even help you identify high-value opportunities where you might want to try to get better rankings for your images.

•  
• Benchmark against the competition. Once you’re able to see which search terms your images are ranking for, you might want to start comparing your on-site graphics (and possibly metadata) against your competitors. Look at things such as image quality, legibility, whether they’re offering unique info and whether they’re engaging. Try to improve your image SEO so image searchers would rather click on your image than competitor images.
• Brand it. Add your logo, web address or some text that will encourage someone viewing the image to visit the page the image lives on.

[ctt template=”4″ link=”nVN2J” via=”yes” nofollow=”yes”]Don’t forget to optimize images when giving your posts that last-minute #SEO pass. [/ctt]

And now, for your reading pleasure, a well-placed graphic with full-blown image SEO:

Share This Infographic On Your Site

The post How’s Your Image SEO Game? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

If you’re strapped for analytic time and resources or you just want to keep things simple, the only content marketing metrics you should measure are those that tell you about exposure, engagement,  entrances and exits.

Exposure Metrics

What is it? The numbers that tell you how many people actually see your content. They include exposure numbers on social media, views on YouTube, and page views and unique visitor stats for websites. Concentrate on tracking engagement metrics on pages that really matter: yes, it’s important to get views on social media, but if your Facebook fans never make it to your sales page, your content isn’t working.

Where do you get it? Google Analytics, Facebook and Twitter reports or custom tracking solutions you might use.

What does it tell you? Whether or not your content is actually reaching an audience. If exposure metrics are low, there might be a problem with your SEO, Google might not be archiving your pages or the times you post on social media might be at odds with active times for your target audience.

Related: Why Readability Scores Could Make Your Content Better

Engagement Metrics

What is it? Content marketing metrics that tell you whether the audience is responding to or reacting to your content — both signs of a healthy content campaign. Engagement metrics include number of blog or social comments, shares, likes, follows and even reviews.

Where do you get it? Reporting from WordPress or other blog platforms, Google Analytics, social platform reports, Hootsuite or other social-tracking solutions.

What does it tell you? Whether your content is interesting or appropriate for your target audience. When content is relevant and interesting enough to draw your audience in, engagement numbers go up. Higher engagement numbers can be linked with better conversion rates, and they’re also one of the best performance indicators for social marketing.

[ctt template=”4″ link=”3aCry” via=”yes” ]You can’t make data-backed decisions to improve campaigns unless you monitor the numbers that matter consistently. #DigitalMarketing[/ctt]

Entrance or Exit Metrics

What is it? Entrance metrics tell you whether a visitor to your site converted, either by signing up, clicking on a link or making a purchase. Exit metrics tell you when a visitor did not convert, but instead bounced or left your site for another option on the web.

Where do you get it? Google Analytics or other proprietary web analytic software.

What does it tell you? Whether your SEO, social and other off-page marketing efforts align appropriately with your on-page content and product or service offers. You could be driving thousands of visitors a week to your page, but if very few of them convert, then you’re engaging the wrong audience or have a problem with content on your landing pages.

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The post 3 Powerful Content Marketing Metrics You Have to Be Monitoring appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Get the Most Out of On-Site Images

A picture might be worth a thousand words for the viewer, but images themselves are meaningless when search engines try to evaluate page content and relevance. Google might sport facial-recognition technology, but its bots can’t tell how an image correlates to keywords. You can combat that challenge by consistently using alt tags with all images on the site. During development and after, follow best practices for integrating alt tags.

• Keep the text short and specific
• Don’t force keywords
• Describe image content clearly
• Choose images that naturally relate to page subject matter

Carefully Consider Pay Walls

Pay walls -€” or any wall between the user and content -€” can tank your SEO. First, bots won’t complete a form, sign up for membership or make a payment just to crawl the site, and membership only pages are often not indexed in search engines to protect brand and privacy. Second, if everything valuable is behind a wall, then your landing pages don’t have any help in supporting conversions. Blocking off sections of a site often makes sense, but leave enough open to support SEO and ensure potential customers can engage with your brand.

Plan Internal Linking Strategies

Internal linking is a good way to boost your authority and spread strong SEO across multiple pages, but unorganized linking practices can reduce performance in the search engines. Integrating irrelevant links into onsite content can confuse or drive away visitors, and it’s also seen as the cousin to keyword stuffing. Make sure you link to relevant content to support positive user experiences.

Site architecture also plays a role in linking strategies. During development, define the types of pages your site will support and how links, categories and tags play a part. Set parameters for internal link selections so content creators and tech staff are consistent in tying the site together in the future.

Build Your Site for Speed

Finally, site architecture impacts speed, and speed impacts SEO. Slow or muddled sites don’t perform well in the search engines, and they certainly don’t perform well with today’s users, which are looking for a return on their time investment within seconds of landing on your page. Make development decisions that ensure pages are sleek, user-friendly and fast to load.

How fast the page appears is only one aspect of speed. Menus, categories and links should make it easy for users to navigate your pages quickly. Individuals who can’t find what they are looking for in one or two clicks on your site are likely to bounce to another option.

By marrying SEO and web design, you can create or support fully-functional, user-friendly pages that catch search engine attention in the best possible way.

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The post Web Design Decisions that Drive SEO – For Better or Worse appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

With the issue of keyword ratios as variable as it has been in the world of SEO, it’s often difficult to keep track of the current state of keyword density and how much strength the concept still has in terms of ranking high in organic search results.

What’s the Optimal Keyword Ratio for SEO?

This is somewhat of a trick question, because content marketing experts agree that there truly is no target number that writers should aim for in their content.

Experts Chime In

According to Forbes, marketers are quickly moving away from keyword density as a focal point when creating content, and Google’s Matt Cutts has said that there is no magic number that will help a web page rank.

SEOBook’s Aaron Wall believes that keyword ratios are part of an overrated and outdated concept for modern SEO, while Brett Tabke offers up what he thinks could be much more useful, one that he refers to as keyword proximity density. As he explains it, modern SEO is concerned much more with where keywords are than how many are crammed into a page. The basic guidelines of the theory of keyword proximity state that keywords should be:

• On the page
• In the H1 title
• Preferably, in the URL
• In the header of the article
• Spaced out throughout the piece

When you start to examine where keywords are in your post rather than how many there are, you’ll start to see results in terms of SEO. The most important factor when writing blog posts or website copy is that the information is valuable to the reader, following along with the latest tenets of content marketing.

[ctt template=”4″ link=”f2D34″ via=”yes” nofollow=”yes”]Content marketers agree that there truly is no target number you should aim for in your content.[/ctt]

So Are Keyword Ratios Still Relevant?

Don’t take the fact that keyword density is an outdated concept to mean that you shouldn’t worry about keywords at all. You still should, but be aware of your priorities in regards to them. What matters more to the search engines is not the number of keywords on the page, but rather where the keywords are and how they’re used.

If you don’t use a keyword or target phrase at all, your page has no chance of ranking for that word or phrase. Try not to force keywords into the text. Instead, use them where they naturally fit in the body of the content, and always keep value to the reader top of mind.

Related: Why Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords Allow for Better SEO

What’s The Lesson?

Keyword density isn’t a concept you should really be worried about. Instead, spend time focusing on using keywords strategically in accordance with where they are on the page.

In the presentation mentioned above, Matt Cutts wraps it by saying: “In other words, your keywords are important to show Google what you’re talking about.”

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The post What’s the Latest on Keyword Ratios, and How Do You Calculate Them? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

How Does Voice Search Work?

When conducting voice searches, users simply speak their queries into their smartphones or into microphones attached to their computers. The convenience offered by using the spoken word to interact with machines makes it no surprise that voice’s share of total search traffic is increasing markedly.

In its “2016 Internet Trends Report,” venture capital firm KCBP states that 1 in 5 searches by Android users in the United States is powered by speech recognition. Bing has also revealed that one-quarter of all searches made through the taskbar in the latest version of Windows are spoken aloud. Both figures are up from virtually nothing five years ago.

Catering to Voice Searchers

When people chat with Siri, Cortana and other digital assistants, they tend to ask a lot of questions. This means words that typically begin a question such as “who,” “what” and “where” will appear more heavily in search requests.

You can alter your content to include some of the specific questions that potential visitors are likely to pose. If you run a sports equipment distributor, you could include, “What equipment is needed for” followed by the name of a sport, repeating this phrasing for each type of goods you stock. FAQs and other Q&A-style documents should see a healthy boost in search rankings from voice sources.

Search entries of longer-than-average length are expected to trend since people are speaking in whole sentences for voice search instead of just typing short phrases. Long-tail keywords, already an important part of SEO, will assume even greater significance as this tendency continues, so you would do well to improve your grasp of them.

One thing to watch out for is the possibility of your website’s name not being recognized correctly in voice search, especially if it has an unusual spelling or pronunciation. Little can be done about this apart from using misspellings on purpose within your site, but if you’re thinking of launching a new brand, you can choose its name carefully to make sure it’s not susceptible to this problem.

The Future Impact of Voice Searches

The software that parses natural conversations is getting better and better all the time. Expect upcoming voice recognition systems to display a keener awareness of context-specific cues and individual users preferences. They’ll be able to more accurately direct potential buyers and readers to your online resources as long as you’ve adjusted your text to honestly address their questions, concerns and needs. Assuming you’ve done your homework, conversions should increase while bounce rates drop.

There have been numerous shifts in the search landscape over the years, and each time, they’ve wrong-footed the unprepared. Show a healthy respect for voice search when refining your SEO strategy, and you’ll be ready for this game-changing advance.

The post Capitalizing on Voice Search Traffic in 2016 and Beyond appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Top search firms, SEO content writers and SEO strategists currently employ Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), which allows them to determine what a page is about regardless of the frequencies of words present. You can use LSI principles to your advantage to achieve higher SERP placement.

Latent Semantic Indexing Details

In addition to accounting for changes in tense, pluralization, word order and the like, LSI also identifies synonyms for important phrases as well as verbiage that’s routinely used in conjunction with main subject words. For example, the keyword “professional sports equipment” is semantically related to the terms “fitness equipment” and “agility sports training.” “Affordable legal services” is pertinent to searches for “legal document review” and “legal advice.”

By including words that are legitimately associated with the keyword you’re targeting, you’ll let the search algorithms know that your text is appropriate to serve to people interested in that topic. Online marketing company New Media Sources conducted a case study and found that a new page using LSI techniques got 20 times as many hits as a similar page created at the same time that did not use such a strategy.

How to Use LSI

You can tweak your website to include LSI keywords without making it sound awkward or artificial. Ultimate Keyword Hunter is a great resource and is available for free download merely by providing your email address. If you prefer a web interface, try LSI Graph although unregistered users are limited to three queries per day.

Before delving into these specialized tools, however, you should be aware that Google routinely provides valuable info every time you search the web. Whenever you start typing in the search bar – as long as you have autocomplete turned on – you’ll see a list of possible matches:

View post on imgur.com

Also, at the bottom of every search results page, Google provides a list of related keywords:

View post on imgur.com

You’ve probably been conducting latent semantic analysis every day without even realizing it! Though the help given by Google in this area isn’t as sophisticated as that offered by dedicated software, it still serves as a great starting point. Since the purpose of any adjustments you make is search engine optimization, this data coming straight from the horse’s mouth shouldn’t be discounted.

The development of latent semantic indexing is a phenomenon that allows writers and website owners to produce results that are easy to read while still being SEO-friendly. There’s no reason to try to cram in dozens of ill-fitting pieces of jargon: By introducing just a few carefully chosen LSI keywords, you can really enhance your search performance.

The post Why Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords Allow for Better SEO appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

As the market becomes more and more competitive, you need to start adopting new strategies that can bring more impact to your site’s ability to drive traffic. Here are 3 tips useful to those trying to take their traffic to the next level:

Embrace the Impact of the Influencer

When you utilize an influencer to promote your product, you’re basically piggy-backing on a brand that’s already been established to promote your own.

Shopify has an excellent blog post on this concept, that discusses that consumer actually value word-of-mouth product recommendations more than conventional advertising. The value of an influencer endorsement, however, relies on how relevant they are to your audience.

Optimize the Impact of Your Advertising

Speaking of which, the value of your advertisement rests on how well you know your audience. One way to glean an in-depth understanding of your audience is by creating and studying customer personas that lend a little information about your audience.

By knowing where to find your audience in the digital market, you can target your advertising budget to be the most effective it can be. For example, which demographics watch the most TV, and how? Will your paid social media advertisements be more effective on Facebook, with the largest audience, or Instagram, with the youngest?

Use Analytics to Fine-Turn Your Website

If you’re not using some form of analytics to learn about your site, you’re missing out on your ability to grow. Google Analytics is the largest aggregator of website data, and within hours of signing up you can find out where your site is bringing in traffic and where it’s failing.

To ignore the many free tools that Google curates for website managers is to put blind faith in charge of your website’s success. The ability to monitor which keywords are bringing in traffic and which customers are being converted at the highest rates is invaluable in terms of your website’s growth.

Once you learn the basics of SEO and content marketing, your work is not done; you’ve simply grasped the foundations on which you can build a site that drives traffic and creates conversions.

How do you take your site’s traffic to new heights? Tell me in the comments:

The post Advanced Methods for Increasing Website Traffic appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Maybe some spoke to you, and maybe some turned you off from a purchase completely, but in a marketplace driven by ecommerce – in the U.S. alone, online shopping represents nearly 8% of total sales – what marketers have to say about a product can hold great influence over a site’s success or failure. Skilled product description writers know their copy directly impacts both conversion rates and a site’s SEO which are both critical.

1. Paint a Mental Picture

In a brick and mortar store, you can hold a product, feel the material between your fingers, and evaluate fit, size, color, and appearance in person.

In an ecommerce setting, on the other hand, product images and descriptions are the only resources shoppers have to make a purchase decision, so a poorly written description isn’t doing anyone any favors.

A good product description exists to paint a mental picture, creating the experience of seeing, feeling, and assessing an object first hand.

Through the use of evocative, illustrative language and tools like buyer personas, marketers can create a written representation of the personal experience online shopping lacks.

2. Build an Emotional Connection

Use of descriptive language is only part of the equation, however. The other half involves creating an emotional connection, inspiring need or want in a consumer.

Describing a little black dress isn’t enough; marketers need to take things one step further, providing a potential buyer with a linguistic adventure detailing what kind of feelings such a dress may offer.

A dress by itself isn’t necessarily exciting, but imaging the experience of attending a glamorous event in the aforementioned dress, for example, can be the missing piece of the puzzle a shopper needs to click “Add to Cart.”

Psychology tells us that emotional connections are paramount in influencing buyer decisions, making an ability to connect with shoppers is an extremely important tool in content marketing.

3. Provide SEO Benefits

You may be able to craft the best possible product descriptions on earth, but if no one can find your site online, shoppers will still pass you by.

Superb product descriptions can provide SEO benefits in addition to drawing in consumers, elevating your site in the SERPs in order to draw customer attention.

In order to reap the SEO benefits of your product descriptions, fresh, original, and high quality content with an emphasis on the right keywords content is a must.

Duplicate content and keyword stuffing can only hurt you, so playing by Google’s rules while still crafting compelling, creative content can help you create product descriptions that hit the mark every time.

Are your product descriptions worthy of an A+, or are you still struggling to nail a 4.0?

Tell me in the comments what you do to write product descriptions that wow!

The post What Are the Benefits of A+ Product Descriptions? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

What many small businesses don’t know, however, is that mobile marketing involves more than simply optimizing their site and email formats for mobile browsers.

If that’s all you’re doing to reach your local customers, you’re leaving a major well for reaching potential customers untapped.

Here are a few ways small businesses can take advantage of mobile marketing strategies in local markets:

Take Advantage of Geotargeting

For physical businesses that market to consumers, huge steps forward have been made in the area of mobile marketing. In 2015, Google announced a response to an increase in mobile searches containing some variation of the phrase “near me” in the form of a local advertising option for businesses.

This marked a significant expansion in the way businesses can interact with the mobile community in their area, including the ability to target deals directly to local consumers.

Geotargeting is a significant tool for local, product-based businesses to market on the basis of knowing their potential customers’ locations.

Advertise on Apps and Primarily Mobile Sites

Many sites, like Facebook and Twitter, are seeing increased use from mobile browsers. Some apps, like Foursquare and Snapchat, have a user base that is mostly or all active only on mobile devices.

To reach these users, you have to pinpoint the best mobile sites and apps on which to advertise, which entails keeping your ear to the ground on mobile trends and popular apps.

Here’s a blog that contains a guide of best practices for small businesses looking to capitalize on Facebook’s mobile site, using location extensions in their ad campaigns.

Distinguish SEO and Mobile SEO

There are different considerations to account for when striving for high rankings in mobile SEO than you’re probably used to paying attention to in your desktop SEO.

Mobile site redirection, pop-ups, page loading speeds and button size are all aspects that you’ll have to view in different ways to capture a high mobile SEO ranking for your keywords.

Here is a guide of best practices to follow for succeeding in a mobile SEO campaign, and driving local traffic.

Use these tips to make sure you’re not ignoring a huge marketing channel.

Do you have a current mobile marketing campaign, and if so, what’s working for you? Tell me about it in the comments!

The post How Small Businesses Can Harness Local, Mobile Marketing appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

There is a movement, however, in establishing that SEO and content marketing are inexorably related, and as such must be fine tuned and integrated for marketing success.

I tend to agree. Here are a few ways to grow your digital presence in a way that creates a harmony between SEO and content marketing:

Understand the Ways Keywords and Backlinks Interact

Keywords and backlinks are two major common threads between SEO and content marketing, and unsurprisingly, they hold an important key to integration of the two.

Increase Your Rankings for Keywords Using Content

Grasp of technical SEO can lead to capitalization on keywords and the ability to dominate your niche.

Using analytics, you can see the keywords that drive your traffic, effectively communicating to you what sort of content will be valuable to your audience. You can use this information as a jumping off point; when you know what your audience wants to read, your blog can target content directly to them.

Harness Backlinks From Authoritative Sites

Most marketers already know that backlinks from other reputable blogs raise your SEO ranking. This is a key example of a way in which SEO and content marketing are related: we value backlinks for their contribution to our SEO rankings, but backlinks aren’t possible without great content that provides value to the site using at a resource.

A method of achieving this at a higher rate is looking at the SEO rankings for sites for various keywords, and seeking opportunities for guest blogging, where you can link back to relevant pages on your own blog.

Build On Your SEO With Content Marketing

Integrating SEO and content is a matter of knowing how to develop them. As this Kissmetrics article suggests, once you master technical SEO, there is no room to change or grow. With content marketing, on the other hand, there are never a shortage of ways to innovate and gain leverage on your competition.

If you think of your digital marketing budget as a house, you have to build the foundation first. This is your SEO; you can’t have an effective digital presence without an effective SEO campaign.

The rest of the house, however, is your content marketing. You can develop and add on the more creative features of your house with content that targets your relevant keywords and retains your audience through providing consistent, valuable content.

The post How Can You Integrate Your SEO and Content Marketing? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

And yet, many brands neglect the holy grail of web conversions: landing pages.

Landing pages are essential for increasing brand awareness and driving revenue. But there are key elements that make or break whether they succeed or send people packing. If you aren’t optimizing your landing pages for conversions, you’re missing out on some big opportunities.

In this post, we’ll show you how to optimize your landing pages for maximum conversions so you can make the most of your traffic and turn web traffic into customers.

Defining Landing Pages

What exactly is a landing page, and what does it do?

In simplest terms, a landing page is a single web page that visitors “land” on when they click through from another source. This might be an advertisement, an email or a search query on Google.

You should design each landing page on your site to accomplish a specific marketing goal in exchange for providing some value to the visitor. What qualifies as something of value? It could be:

• A free e-book or printable
• A white paper with insights
• A webinar or free course
• A coupon, promotion or free trial for a product or service

When visitors land on these pages, enticed by your offer, they’re encouraged to take action. Common “calls to action” (CTAs) include inviting visitors to sign up for an email list or giving them the chance to make a purchase on the spot. If the user takes you up on your offer, your landing page has succeeded in converting them.

Remember, landing pages almost always have a singular focus. It goes back to what researchers refer to as “the paradox of choice.” When people are presented with too many options, they tend to get overwhelmed. Don’t crowd your page with multiple calls to action such as “Follow us on social media!” “Start a free trial!” and “Get 10% off!” If your page is cluttered, the user will likely take no action at all — and might even leave your site.

Why You Need Landing Pages

Landing pages aren’t a typical part of your website’s structure. That’s why you usually won’t find links to landing pages on a site’s main menu. Rather, each stands alone to serve a highly specific short-term marketing goal, such as:

• Improving the performance of a paid advertising campaign by responding precisely to the user’s need or intent
• Increasing conversions on a particular product or products
• Generating leads or driving free trial activations
• Encouraging mailing list signups

Aside from achieving these marketing goals, landing pages are important for a few other reasons.

For one, they boost your credibility. A good landing page provides a concise, crystal-clear message that explains the value of your brand, product or service. A great landing page tells visitors your business has their best interests in mind. For example, addressing buyer concerns on your landing page can increase conversions by up to 80%.

Great landing pages also build your brand. Even if your landing page doesn’t immediately convert a visitor, it can create a strong impression that will help them remember your offering in the future. Memorable landing pages also make it more likely visitors will refer friends and family to your offer, which is arguably the most important aspect of any marketing effort.

Because they help convert leads into paying customers, landing pages are a critical part of your digital marketing strategy. These pages help guide users further along their customer journey because they act as a nudge to take action. And the more optimized they are, the better they can serve their purpose.

Optimizing Your Landing Pages for Conversions

There’s a lot that goes into maintaining a strong digital presence. Fortunately, much of the work you probably already do also applies to landing pages. This includes things such as:

• Making your website mobile-friendly
• Improving page loading times
• Maintaining consistency across your website
• Focusing on technical SEO

If you’re already covering these bases, you’re halfway to optimizing your landing pages. But there are a few more things you need to know and put into practice to get the most out of your conversion machines.

Let’s take a look.

Make Headlines!

Catchy headlines entice people searching the web to click through and visit your site. This applies to your homepage, any content you create and — yes — your landing pages.

Since landing pages are typically focused on providing a benefit to those who click through, you should draw visitors in with a strong value proposition. Maybe it’s a limited-time offer, a free e-book or an exclusive webinar. Whatever the case, incorporating words such as “now,” “today” or “free” can pull visitors in.

When crafting headlines, make sure you match your meta title to the actual page title. They needn’t be identical, but they should definitely express the same idea. This assures users they’ve come to the correct location. Don’t risk jeopardizing your reputation and search engine rankings with misleading meta tags.

Make Content Appealing and Scannable

It’s difficult to strike a balance between enough material and the minimum amount of visual crowding. Effective landing page designs contain features that showcase how beneficial the product or service is without detracting from the calls to action or offer.

Look at a landing page as a potential customer would to optimize it. Ask yourself:

• Are your logo and branding prominent on the page?
• Are your CTAs clear and recognizable?
• Is the messaging concise and representative of your intended goal?

It’s also important to focus on the quality of the copy. Once you’ve hooked your visitors with a catchy headline and a visually appealing design, it’s crucial to keep them engaged with copywriting that’s compelling, punchy and succinct.

Break your content down into scannable chunks to encourage users to read all the way through your landing page. There’s probably more than one feature or benefit to what you’re selling, so use numbered lists or bullet points to make them more digestible.

Video content, in particular, is getting more popular on landing pages, since not everyone engages solely with text. This doesn’t imply your page should be devoid of words, however. Combining strong copy and compelling video is a great strategy to keep people engaged.

Leverage Social Proof

Look for places to insert reviews or testimonials about your product or service, which are an element of social proof. Social proof has been shown to increase conversions.

If you don’t already have testimonials to draw from, incentivize your past customers to provide them. You could also highlight how many individuals have already taken advantage of your offer if your product or service is popular. This could entice others to join the trend and try your goods or services for themselves.

A video or product demonstration may give context if you offer something unique or misunderstood. This also aids potential consumers in imagining themselves using your product or service.

Call Your Visitors to Action

One of the first things visitors see on your website should be your CTA. And while this may be a little more difficult if you’re designing for mobile users, it’s absolutely crucial for landing pages.

But don’t stop there.

Landing pages are unique in that they’re a mix of engaging content and continual calls to action. While you need a strong call to action at the top of your page, be sure to have one at the bottom too. And if your content can support it without things becoming crowded, add a few in the middle as well.

Also, make sure your CTAs are easily recognizable. Contrasting buttons, prominent arrows and even imagery that draws visitors’ eyes to the desired action are all excellent strategies.

Track and Refine

A big part of optimizing landing pages lies in the process of analyzing and refining. There are a number of great tools out there, such as Google Analytics, that help you track page interactions.

The best strategy is to use A/B testing. This involves looking at the statistics and creating alternate pages to figure out what elements help move visitors down your funnel. You can A/B test different visuals, copy, CTAs and just about any other element. This gives you the ability to polish each landing page to maximum efficiency.

Landing Pages and SEO

A big part of your marketing strategy and website is largely about SEO. And while it’s a discipline unto itself, effectively optimizing a landing page has some search engine-specific considerations you’ll want to pay attention to.

These include:

• Incorporating a strong keyword strategy
• Building landing pages based on target audience personas
• Focusing on backlinks in your marketing efforts
• Making your landing pages sharable

You’ll also want to create individual landing pages for each audience category to maximize your SEO. Since landing pages are focused on singular goals, you won’t want them to be too broad. Instead, build a specific page that speaks to smaller groups of your target market. As long as your landing pages aren’t competing with each other, you’ll see results.

In short, any SEO strategies you use across your main website should be incorporated into your approach with landing pages. Aside from generating more and more leads, the extra traffic will boost your search rankings.

Optimize Your Landing Pages With Great Content

While it’s tempting to toss up any old page and call it a day, landing pages are too important to your brand to skimp on quality. By taking the time to optimize them for your target audience, you can ensure you’re driving more of the right traffic to your site and converting more leads into customers.

If you need help polishing your landing pages, the Crowd Content platform gives you access to thousands of qualified and professional freelance writers, many of whom specialize in crafting compelling landing page copy. If you’re ready to start driving conversions with your landing pages, sign up today.

The post How To Optimize Your Landing Page for Conversions appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

One of the biggest benefits that forums and Q&A sites offer is the ability to generate a high amount of site traffic.

1. People Google Questions, Not Just Keywords

One of the reasons that these types of sites are generating more traffic is because of the rising trend of Googling questions.

While the questions do still contain keywords on the same topic, search volumes for generic primary keywords are seeing a slight decrease.

In fact, it’s becoming more and more commonplace for people to simply type the question into Google, than to use primary keywords and sift through the results looking for the content that they want. While you could create a specific piece of content to address each question, often users will do this for you if they create a thread on your forum.

2. Questions Include Long Tail Keywords

Another benefit that forms and Q&A sites both offer is the ability to easily incorporate longtail keywords.

Whereas, with blogging alone, it is often hard to incorporate long tail keywords that are you trying to target.

With questions, answers and forums, it is easy to incorporate three and four keyword phrases that are very specific to your market. This is because, in most cases, “natural” questions already contain long tail keywords.

3. Provide Genuine, Relative and Authoritative Answers

Whether you build your own forum or Q&A site, or use someone else’s, you can still leverage a great deal of traffic through this medium.

There are many resources that can help you learn How to Increase Website Traffic. However, it is important that you do not spam the sites as your posts and links will most likely get deleted.

Yet, when you provide genuine, relative and authoritative answers, you’ll find that people are following back to your website.

4. Boosts a Website’s SEO

When you’re leveraging the power of forums and Q&A websites, there are definitely some SEO advantages to be had.

For starters, these sites create the perfect storm for generating a diverse array of back links for your website. In fact, in order to make a link campaign look natural it is important to have back links from a variety of sources (forums, blogs, news sites, social bookmarks, static sites, etc.).

In addition, as a result of the variety of links, Google and people alike will find your site more authoritative and genuine.

5. Builds Trust

Here’s where the part about not spamming Q&A sites or forums comes into play.

People have quickly become very savvy when it comes to spam. If you’re leaving low quality answers, lots of links to your site, and constantly promoting your own products or services, then people will quickly be turned off.

However, when you take a more non-promotional route, and provide relevant and authoritative answers, people are more likely to look to you as an authority in your niche.

In fact, this is also a great opportunity for you to boost your thought leadership in order to set your site (and services or products) apart from the crowd.

These are only a few of the ways that forums and Q&A sites can be leveraged to generate site traffic.

Whether you build one on your own domain or simply use a popular site such as Quora, when used correctly these sites can offer massive benefits for both SEO and site traffic.

Do you know of any other benefits of Q&A sites and forums? Let me know in the comments section below.

The post 5 Reasons Forums and QA Sites Can Generate Site Traffic appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

As the most successful businesses have found, however, the online environment is not well-suited for a company that resists change. As the trends and shapes taken on by an online market are actively changing, they necessitate an online presence that changes with it.

Use these tips to make sure your business’s online presence is one that is evolving for the growth of your business.

1. Build a Dynamic Website

Your website must reflect the goals of the business in its structure and tool set, but this doesn’t mean the work is done after launching a site.

As Forbes notes, a website isn’t like a paper advertisement or a billboard; it can and should be changed frequently to fit new commerce, payment and advertising technology as well as design trends and be responsive to feedback.

2. Stay On the Pulse of eCommerce Trends

Ecommerce is one of the fastest growing sectors of business due to the expanding capabilities of online markets and the fact that it’s a space that is extremely receptive to innovation. As a result, trends in eCommerce are very useful to keep track of for your business.

An article from Entrepreneur suggests that a key obstacle for a growing online presence isn’t money, but rather the lack of creativity in response to trends in eCommerce.

3. Don’t Stop Tracking and Monitoring

To have a strategy of engaging online presence and effective SEO, you have to know if what you’re doing is working or not. A business that sets an SEO strategy or online customer service channel for brand engagement has to monitor the effects of these strategies.

Has your conversion rate improved as a result of changes in your online presence? Has your SEO led to more visitors to your site or social media channels?

Tracking and analyzing strategies for your online presence is key to acclaiming the returns on your investment, and knowing what to keep and what to change about your online brand management.

If you think your work is done after website creation and basic SEO, think again. These simple tips will help with an evolving business that adapts to an inherently evolving market.

The post 3 Ways to Make Sure Your Website Evolves appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

That is not to mention the fact that search engine algorithms are constantly being updated, and what was true just weeks ago may now be outdated.

As 2016 is now well under way, there are a few things all SEO content writers and strategists should definitely be focusing on for this year’s SEO strategy.

1. Site Speed

Did you know that 40% of consumers will bounce off of a site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load? Site speed has been an official ranking signal for Google since 2010, and it shows.

Most websites that enjoy top Google SERP rankings have a page load speed of less than 2 seconds.

If your concerned about your site’s loading speed, you can check your site and get helpful suggestions for improvement by using Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

2. In-Depth, Comprehensive Topical Content

Google’s Hummingbird Algorithm update entirely changed the way Google search engines look at content. Where it used to determine the topic of content by keywords alone, it can now understand the topic.

Now, when we type in a question such as, “Who played in Spiderman 3”, Google understands that we are looking for actors in the movie Spiderman 3 and provides us with an answer.

Need more convincing? Check out what the SEO experts at Moz have to say on the topic.

3. Long-Form Content

Gone are the days when 200-300 words of content constituted a good length. Now, the average Google first page result has approximately 1,890 words.

Numerous studies now show that pages with long-form content tend to rank significantly better than others.

There could be many reasons behind this: it generates more social media shares, it’s a preference of Google’s, it boosts topical relevancy or it just shows that site owners prefer to publish excellent content.

Whatever the reason, Google search results rank long-form content higher than short-form content.

Crowd Content writers are often utilized for their ability to write in-depth, search engine optimized, comprehensive articles that Google loves.

4. Bounce Rates

While you may not have thought about it before, other than to sigh over the amount of lost traffic, bounce rates may be having a major impact on your website ranking.

When your visitors are bouncing off of your website like kids on a pogo stick, Google seems to take this as a clear message that people do not like your content or it is not relevant for the keyword searched for.

While Google has denied that bounce rate is a determining factor in website rankings in the past, recent studies show a strong correlation.

5. Backlinks

While you may have heard that backlinks are no longer important, this is simply not true. The truth is that they are still VERY important, however, they are being measured a bit differently than they have been in the past.

In a recent study performed by Backlinko, they found that not only was there a strong correlation between backlinks and page rank, but also between unique referring domains.

In other words, it’s better to have backlinks from a wide variety of domains, instead of just a few.

“In fact, the number of unique referring domains was the strongest correlation in our entire study.”

– Brian Dean, Backlinko

In addition, the same study also found that a site’s link authority is strongly correlated to higher rankings. You can improve your site’s link authority using the Moz Open Site Explorer.

Regardless of your 2016 SEO strategy, these 5 things could ultimately be the difference between success and failure for your website.

The ultimate takeaway from the constantly updated algorithms of Google and other search engines is that quality is the ultimate driving factor.

Please use the comments section below to let me know if you have any other tips and tricks or general remarks on the topic.

The post 5 Things That Really Matter for SEO in 2016 appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Technology and search engines are constantly being updated and upgraded, which means you need to stay up-to-date too!

Here are five of the most important SEO and web marketing trends for 2016 that every business should be aware of.

1. Mobile Optimization Can Make or Break your Website

More internet-friendly devices than ever before are now browsing the web. From smart watches to laptops, 15% of all global traffic is now from mobile devices. In fact, mobile optimization is quickly becoming the norm, instead of the exception.

In addition, this year’s Google search algorithm update has provided a major boost for mobile-friendly websites.

With the growing trend of using mobile devices to search the web, Google has made it easier to find mobile optimized websites. So, Google is now using mobile friendliness as a determining factor in search results ranking.

If that doesn’t convince you, here are some more stats.

2. Local SEO is Even More Important

Local SEO has been gaining ground steadily ever since Google released the Pigeon update. In turn, more and more marketers and businesses are beginning to focus on local SEO.

This is why it is extremely important that you incorporate location specific keywords and tailor your content to your local, target audience in 2016.

In fact, many Crowd Content clients turn to their freelancers to write local landing pages for franchise locations all across the country, or around the world. They do this to boost their SEO value and see positive results.

3. Videos Are Essential

You have probably already heard about the great benefits of using videos to engage your audience, but did you know that videos make up about 62% of all universal Google searches?

In fact, compared to plain text content, videos have 50 times more organic page ranks.

If that isn’t enough to convince you, video searches also have a 41% higher click-through rate.

4. Social Content is Becoming More and More Important

Even though Google’s search algorithms are top secret, they have shared that social media content is becoming more important than it once was.

Currently, about 76% of Internet marketers are already using social media to support their SEO efforts.

Many brands are already seeing that their social media profiles are having an impact on search results.

See for yourself! Google search “Designhill” and see what the top listings are (hint: mostly social profiles). This is common with many businesses now.

5. Keywords Aren’t What They Once Were

As Google’s search algorithms have grown smarter, keywords have steadily declined in importance. While it is still absolutely necessary that they be included, Google can now interpret the meaning of content better by using semantics.

Search engines are now smart enough to consider the other words that would typically be found in addition to the keyword, as well as authoritative signals that might be included.

With the constantly evolving world of search engine algorithms and improved technology, 2016 marks the year of some major changes in the way we market and optimize content.

Make sure that your website is following the latest trends in order to enjoy the benefits of higher search engine rankings.

The post What Are the 5 Most Important SEO Trends This Year? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

The online community is an untapped source of SEO gold that is successfully mined and brought to surface with user generated content.

Online Community, Your Personal Goldmine

How do I love thee, online community? Let me count the ways….

Sorry, some love had to be injected into this topic because once you see the value that  community can bring to your website, you might get emotional …and that’s okay.

In fact, most site owners and content managers work so hard at building good SEO, they overlook some of the easiest (and most obvious) optimization goldmine opportunities.

Online Community Generates SEO Love

Skeptical?

That’s what happens when you give all of your attention to SEO and it doesn’t return your love with traffic and search engine rankings for your website. Listed below are some of the best reasons to fall in love with an online community and collect some SEO gold for your website.

#1 – For the Love of Content

At this point, you are well aware of the relationship needs that exist between your website and Google. Great content is absolutely necessary for this love to thrive and grow. An online community can add literally hundreds of pages of great content to your site, at no cost to you!

#2 – More Hang, Less Bounce

Interaction that occurs within the community will spread to give your entire website a warm fuzzy SEO feeling. This lower bounce rate builds website value and increases optimization as more and more visitors decide to hang out.

#3 – Here’s Linking at You, Kid

Natural links are great for SEO but very difficult to achieve. With an community built by users sharing their life experiences and information learned in the process, your website gains much needed credibility and turns the head of Google and other search engines.

Best of all, your users become invested in your online community, and begin caring that it is being used correctly.

#4 – Suitors for your Site

An online community is a superb way to improve the level of traffic coming to your website. Even better, much of this improved traffic will be returning visitors who have found your website to be helpful, interesting or entertaining.

#5 – You Can’t Run from my Love

Your visitors’ previous exit strategies diminish as they stay and clicks through the various categories of your site, checking out pages upon pages of your amazing SEO optimized content.

Research shared by the University of Michigan reports a 19 percent increase in profits for sites with online communities.

User Generated Content and the Online Community

Whilst the explanation is entertaining and rather cosmo, the facts remain true and accurate. The online community is an untapped goldmine in SEO benefits and Google is going to fall in love with you all over again.

These results are provided with help from your target audience’s contributions: user generated content. Now is the time to decide which types of online communities will be best suited for your site.

The post 5 Reasons Why Your Online Community is an SEO Goldmine appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

The coming of 2016 is the perfect time to spruce up your site, and your product descriptions can be a great place to start.

The Value in Product Descriptions

Product descriptions are a very important part of your content strategy.

While you know all there is to know about the products you’re selling, most visitors to your site do not. Product descriptions are a way to introduce the benefits in what you have to offer in a way that stands out, urging customers to buy from you instead of your competitors.

Rather than providing the bare basics, effective product descriptions are personal, creative, and detailed, creating an image for readers that prompts them to buy.

Identify Your Shortcomings

The best way to overhaul your product descriptions is to identify what isn’t working. Do you have a list of features rather than high-quality content detailing benefits? Are you telling your customer what a product is rather than creating a mental image of what your product has to offer?

Imagine yourself as a neutral third party, visiting your site for the first time. If your descriptions aren’t creating the experience you want, it’s time to create a plan for stepping up your ecommerce game.

Improve Search Engine Optimization

If your original product descriptions are stale or you’ve been using the manufacturer’s stock text, you may be missing out on valuable SEO benefits. Effective product descriptions can step up your SEO, making it much easier for web users to find your site when searching for what you have to offer.

By crafting content that utilizes product SKU longtail keywords, incorporates category descriptions, and features the right combination of key phrases and words, you can boost sales while increasing web visibility.

Embrace the Power of Outsourcing

If you don’t have time to re-write thousands of product descriptions, outsourcing your content can be an excellent solution. Effective content geared at ecommerce growth is too important to rush through, making a team of freelancers a valuable option for businesses looking for big results.

Crowd Content writers make product descriptions easy, giving clients the ability to create teams of writers, place high-volume orders, and work with specialists to create powerful content that works.

Most New Year’s resolutions are of a personal nature, but that doesn’t mean you can’t resolve to step up your content game as the ball drops on 2015.

Improving your product descriptions can be a very valuable development in your ecommerce strategy, growing your business and making 2016 the best year yet for your company.

The post Why the New Year Calls for New Product Descriptions appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Companies focused on local customers need a blogging strategy that boosts search results and builds genuine relationships. Here’s how to get started. 

1. Optimize Your Google Business Profile

Think of your Google Business Profile as your online storefront and the first impression potential customers see. A meticulously optimized listing gets you found, builds trust, and positions you as an authority in your industry.

It’s essential that you claim and verify your GBP, as unverified listings don’t show up in Google Maps or searches. Next, focus on completing key fields such as name, address, phone number, and hours and add a keyword-rich description that tells customers exactly what problems you solve. Add high-quality photos to visually enhance your profile.

It’s impossible to overestimate the power of reviews. Encourage as many five-star reviews as you can and aim to respond to all feedback strategically, with professionalism and empathy.

Finally, keep your profile buzzing by making regular posts to your GBP. Share timely updates, promote local events, and give a behind-the-scenes look that speaks to your industry.

2. Know Your Local Audience

Visualize your blog posts being shared by local groups, popping up in the search results of people right in your neighborhood and sparking conversations that lead directly to your business. To achieve that level of local impact, you need to know who you’re talking to.

Here’s how to pinpoint your ideal local audience and tailor your content to their needs and interests:

• Start with what you know: Outline your ideal customer’s basic demographics, then conduct deep research into their problems, goals, and interests in the context of your business.
• Be social: Monitor local Facebook groups, relevant subreddits, or Nextdoor discussions. Observe the language people use, the questions they ask, and what they care about within your community.
• Assess the competition: Check out what your local competitors are doing. Analyze blog comments, social media engagement, and the types of reviews they receive. Moving forward, you can use this data to inform your own content. 
• Use location-based keywords: Use tools such as Google Trends to see how people search in your specific area. Pay attention to variations in phrasing — for example, “best Austin bakery” vs. “top bakeries near Zilker Park” — and customize your content accordingly. 
• Don’t be afraid to ask: Engage directly with past customers. Consider sending a simple post-purchase email asking “Why did you choose us?” or using customer feedback surveys to reveal what motivates people to spend money with you. 

In short, to create blog posts that are optimized for local SEO, you have to understand the unique needs and search habits of people in your community.

3. Expand Your Keyword List

Ranking well in local searches is crucial to your local business’s success, and a blog is a great way to improve your standing. Make sure keywords are sparingly and strategically used in the body of your blog, as well as in the meta description and meta title.

Escape the pressure of selecting a perfect long-tailed keyword to attract readers ready to convert by doing some keyword research. Using your hometown as a keyword is a great idea, but don’t stop there. Give potential customers more opportunities to find your business by mentioning the name of your county, neighborhood, and nearby cities. Conduct thorough keyword research to find other relevant keywords and enhance your post’s visibility.

4. Write About Local Events

Writing about local events on your blog is a powerful way to boost online visibility and solidify your connection to the community. Think elections, festivals, neighborhood gatherings, and charity events. The key is to find authentic ways to tie these events back to your business vertical.

For example, a restaurant could provide tips for baking a cake to bring to an annual local charity event. Likewise, a digital marketing agency might promote a local fundraiser online or create social media buzz for a community event.

Don’t be afraid to get creative. Interview organizers, spotlight local vendors, and share stories about your company attending local events on your blog and social media. Actively participating in and showcasing local events positions your business as a genuine part of the community, building trust and attracting a loyal local following. Don’t forget to share snippets of longer posts on your GBP!

5. Use Local Schema Markup

Schema markup gives search engines the clearest possible picture of your business and its local relevance. This type of optimization significantly impacts your visibility in local search results. Here are some tip on maximizing results when using schema markup

• Essential schema types: Focus on LocalBusiness schema, adding properties like address, phone number, hours of operation, and even your geo-coordinates.
• Tools to simplify: Use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper, or if you’re comfortable with code, schema.org provides detailed documentation.
• Go the extra mile: Use schema to highlight customer reviews, pricing information, upcoming local events hosted at your business, and any unique offerings that set you apart.
• Check your work: Check Google’s Rich Results Test to validate your schema implementation.

Investing time in schema markup requires a learning curve, but it gives you a critical edge in local search, helping you show up prominently when it matters most.

6. Repurpose Blog Content for Social Media 

Drive growth by strategically repurposing content for different social media platforms. This expands your reach and drives more traffic back to your website.

To do it effectively:

• Adapt to each platform: Don’t simply copy and paste. Personalize content based on platform norms, with image-heavy posts for Instagram and snappy, conversational content for X.
• Utilize diverse formats: Turn statistics into infographics and key takeaways into quote cards — or create short video teasers based on your blog topics.
• Leverage local hashtags: Research popular hashtags in your area and incorporate them into your posts to connect with a local audience.
• Engage and interact: Don’t just broadcast. Ask questions, respond to comments, and spark discussions related to your blog content with your social followers.

Repurposing extends the lifespan of your blog content and helps you connect with your local audience by meeting them where they hang out most.

Following these tips empowers you to create a more effective blogging strategy for your local business. Need help gaining online visibility in local searches? Our blog writing service can help you achieve long-lasting results. 

The post 6 Strategies to Harness Blogging for Local SEO and Drive Visibility appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Any link was a good link, and they all helped to build page rank. Today, thankfully, the rules have changed.

Quality Links

Now only high-quality links will help you. The link farms and low-quality sites that once worked well can actually count against you. Google will actively penalize sites that use shady backlinks.

Before creating anything that will link back to your site, consider what type of site it is.

Will it end up helping, or hindering, your page rank?

Guest Posting

One of the most common ways to get a new backlink is to create a guest post for a blog and to put a link to your site in the bio at the end. However, even guest posting can be penalized upon if not done correctly.

Before considering guest posting, think carefully about how this can benefit you other than getting a link. Building word of mouth so that other people will link to your site is really your end goal—not the link itself.

Watch Your Numbers

If you do decide to guest post either on a blog or an informational website of another type, don’t send out posts to every site that will take you. A high quantity of low-quality links will count against you.

If you have a lot of low-quality links out there, get rid of them.

So, How Do You Build Links?

Google is encouraging people not to build their own links. You still need backlinks in order to rank well, but by selectively linking your high-quality content, those backlinks will come naturally.

Place your link in a few well-considered places, use social media to promote them, and hope that others will link to you. If your site is awesome and useful you can expect that people will continue to link to it over time.

The post How to Backlink for SEO Success in the New Web Marketing Era appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

The World Wide Web is an incredibly dynamic place. Not only is content constantly changing, but search engine rankings and what people search are constantly changing, too.

How can developers and publishers be sure that the keywords they use to optimize content will be the ones trending in the future?

They can’t!

If you can be certain of anything, it’s that trends will continue to come and go. Content developers need to optimize content for the most active keywords at the moment the content is created.

Google’s new real-time data makes this possible. And more than possible, with the ever-increasing pace of the internet it’s necessary to create content specifically designed to appeal to potential visitors, by being relevant to what those potential visitors are already engaging with.

Real Time Trend Data Tells Content Creators Exactly What People Are Looking For

More web content is created every day than you’ve ever thought to read. And most of it is optimized to keywords, in order to make sure the right people read the content.

But lots of awesome content goes unread every day. And lots of that content is SEO optimized.

So what’s going wrong?

A lot of this SEO optimization is based on keywords that are only vague guesses at what customers may search for. And competitor businesses are probably using the exact same keywords.

It’s easy for content to become lost in the clutter.

Researching real-time search trends can give content developers insight into what potential readers and customers are looking for right now and allow them to tailor their content accordingly. This can help with choosing content subjects as well as SEO optimization.

Trends Vary Among Search Channels

Google allows you to search in a number of different channels: the Web, news, images, YouTube and others. Google Trends allows developers to analyze channels individually or in groups. Understanding trends in different channels can lead to greater insight into what potential visitors are really interested in.

A great example is Microsoft’s recent earnings release and the release of Windows 10. Microsoft released earnings on Jul 21, 2015, and as is common when companies release financial results, searches related to the Microsoft stock symbol “MSFT” increased.

Then on July 29, Microsoft launched the free Windows 10 software upgrade, and searches for the keyword “Windows 10” skyrocketed.

If you publish content related to the stock market, or content related to computers, you could potentially gain visitors using this information.

Two pieces of content, one optimized to “MSFT” and the other optimized to “Windows 10” released as the keywords broke out around each event had the potential to yield a significant number of new visitors for both types of content publishers: visitors who are actively engaged and seeking solutions, and who would otherwise be lost to competition.

Listen to what customers are asking for with real-time data from Google Trends. It has the potential to increase the number of visitors to any website and bring content developers a more thorough understanding of visitor needs.

The post Boost Your SEO: Optimize Articles in Real Time appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Metadata is data that describes the content of your website.

The blurb that shows up on a search engine page and on social media is metadata, but other than that most non-programmers don’t see metadata.

Metadata makes it easy for your audience to find out what your website is all about and if you can provide the products or services they want.

There are 3 main components to metadata: title, description, keywords.

Search engines stopped using keyword metadata around 2009 as a ranking factor because spammy websites were using keywords unrelated to their content to get lots of page views. But the metadata title and description are still used as ranking factors.

Want to know how to create compelling Meta tags that will help drive traffic to your website? Here are some do’s and don’ts to keep in mind when writing them, direct from our team of pro metadata writers.

Title

Do: Keep it short and to-the-point. Search engine results pages will only display the first 55 characters, so make sure you don’t get cut off mid-sentence.

Don’t: Duplicate the title from other web pages within your site. The title should be unique to each page with a keyword describing its contents.

Description

Do: Use a call-to-action. Give readers a reason to view your webpage by telling them what they will get if they click on your link.

Don’t: Try to fool the viewer by stuffing tons of keywords into the description that are not relevant to the information they will find on the page. They will end up exiting your page immediately. Both the viewer and search engines will start to look at your website as one that can’t be trusted, hurting your online reputation.

Do: Provide a solution for the reader. In less than 155 characters, explain how your products or services can help with a problem your audience may have.

Keywords

Do: Use long-tailed keywords because these words have less competition and traffic, yet will direct more targeted Internet searchers to your website.

Don’t: Use generic keywords. While they get hundreds or thousands of searches, they are not specific to your webpage and could get lost in the shuffle with larger, more established websites.

While Meta tags alone won’t help your rank higher in the search engines, they will provide your audience with a snippet of what to expect from the webpage. Keep these tips in mind as you create interesting and valuable content for your audience, or hire a Crowd Content writer to create content with great metadata.

The post The Do’s and Don’ts of Metadata appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

The numbers listed under this header represent the percent of website visitors who left your website quickly. Having a high bounce rate could mean a number of things, but ultimately indicates that the wrong kind of traffic is coming to your website.

In order to target the right kind of traffic and keep your bounce rate as low as possible, here are a few ideas that will lead you in the right direction.

1. Use Long-Tailed Keywords

Using broad keywords in your website content will definitely attract a large amount of traffic, but if the keywords aren’t specific to your business, you’ll end up losing your visitors rather quickly.

For example, if you are trying to rank for the keyword “shoes,” but your website sells women’s shoes, you’ll lose many visitors who are searching for shoes that aren’t offered on your website.

Using specific keywords will draw in a smaller number of people, but your audience will be more targeted and more likely to stay on your website in search of what they are looking for.

2. Website Navigation Should be Easy

Especially for visitors who have never been to your website before, they may not know exactly where to go to find what they are looking for.

Having a website that is easy to maneuver and clearly tells the visitors where to go will make them more likely to stay on your website.

If the website requires takes them through a maze of buttons and are still having a difficult time finding the product they are looking for, they will probably leave your site to go to one that is more user-friendly.

3. Speed

Have you ever gone to a site where it feels like you are waiting forever for the web page to finally load?

It can be extremely stressful and most people aren’t going to stick around to see that page if it doesn’t load for them right away.

Having a speed of more than a couple of seconds can drastically effect your bounce rate and your search engine rankings (even 10 seconds is far too long for potential customers to wait for the page to load). There are tons of tools available to test the speed of your website, including Pingdom.

4. Make Your Message Clear

While it may be obvious to you what products or services you sell, not having a clear message on your homepage can leave visitors scratching their heads trying to decide if your products are what they are looking for.

Include a few sentences on your homepage that describes your mission statement and why your potential customers should buy your products.

If they aren’t sure what your company does by simply glancing at your website content, they will most likely leave before they get a chance to find out.

5. Keep Clutter to a Minimum

I don’t know how many websites I have gone to where they are trying to fit as much information, videos, audio, and pictures onto their homepage. This is too distracting and could overwhelm your site visitors.

Keep the site design clean, simple, and easy to understand from the first moment they look at it.

I am not promising that these tips will bring in tons of new customers, but they will help you reach the right audience and reduce your bounce rate.

For more ideas on promoting your website, check out this article on how to market your website and boost traffic.

The post 5 Proven Ways to Lower Your Website’s Bounce Rate appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Everyone knows how effective social media websites like Facebook and Twitter are for SEO and branding purposes. But one underutilized website for search engine optimization is LinkedIn.

Not only is it an excellent resource for connecting and networking with other professionals in your area and industry, but it is also a powerful tool when it comes to getting the word out about your business, products, and/or services.

If you want to make the most of your LinkedIn account, here are some simple tips to drawing attention to yourself and your business on the social media site and in the search engines. 

Use Keywords Throughout Your Profile

One of the great things about LinkedIn is the fact that you can type a keyword into the search bar and get results from all over the networking site that match those exact words.

It’s an easy way to find people in specific industries or locations. One of the best ways to get found is by including powerful keywords throughout your headline and job description.

Make a list of about 10 keywords you want to rank for and make sure they can be found in your profile. 

Make Your Profile Public

While some people prefer to keep their profile private, it won’t do them any favors if they are hoping to enhance their Linkedin SEO efforts.

By making your profile public and out in the open, not only will it be easy to be found, but you will also make it that much easier for search engines like Google to find you.

Include a Link to Your Website

Building links is a must for any website because, if linked to the right websites, it will help bring your search engine rankings up.

With its high page rank and popularity, LinkedIn is the right website for the job. Including a link in your profile will be one more external link to add to your list.

Use the Publishing Option

Content still reigns as king, so the more writing you get out there, the stronger your website will be. LinkedIn is a great publishing tool that allows you to publish articles in the same way you would publish a blog post.

It’s a must to help build your credentials as an expert in your field, while also including a link or two to your site. Also, don’t forget to create engaging content that your audience will want to read.

There are tons of benefits to using this social networking site, including as part of your SEO and social media marketing campaign. Use these tips to strengthen your brand, website, and reputation online.  

The post How to Improve Your SEO Using Linkedin appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Google’s April 21st algorithm updates (without the zoo animal name this time) have happened as some web owners still hold their breath hoping they’ll still have their page rank when the dust settles.

What to Expect: The Road Ahead

But what will the result be for the average website? Is it still something to worry about? Google emphasized mobile-friendliness on this latest algorithm change roll-out and stated that sites should get mobile-friendly or risk losing their rank in their search engine.

Does Quality Still Rule Over Mobile-Friendliness?

But they also stated that, when all is said and done, it was still great content that would win the day. In this Q/A session Google presented shortly after the roll-out, Google announced (see #9) that sites will still be ranked high if they are of high-quality, even if they don’t pass the mobile-friendly test.

Google’s Holy Grail

You have to hand it to Google-for every new algorithm update, ranking regulation, or change they make to their system, they always provide the tools to fix problems that keep you from ranking high.

So there is no reason why you can’t beat the system with the tools Google provides for you themselves. One such tool I call the “holy grail” of Google’s toolbox is Google Analytics.

The Power of Google Analytics