The Benefits of Hiring Freelance Writers to Create Content

When you’re contemplating whether to rely on your in-house team or work with freelance writers to create content, there are plenty of reasons to choose freelancers. Some of the biggest benefits of hiring freelance writers for content creation include:

Cost Savings

Keeping a full-time writer on staff can put a big dent in your budget, especially if your content needs are inconsistent or change with the seasons. Hiring freelancers means you only pay for professional writing when you need it, and you don’t have to deal with the overhead costs of adding a new employee.

Professional Quality

Bad grammar and poor word choice can turn off potential customers, costing you sales and hampering your ability to make a profit. According to CXL, poor grammar can affect your site’s credibility, particularly if typos and nonstandard phrasing occur on static business pages or product pages. Professional freelance writers have the experience necessary to create error-free content so your business makes a great first impression. Freelance writers also know how to craft content that captures attention. With expertise in marketing, search engine optimization and best practices for web writing, a freelancer helps ensure your content achieves your goals. 

Writer expertise isn’t just about grammar and keywording, though. It also involves building your brand identity. Freelance writers are experts at adding the right style and tone to your content so readers remain interested and engaged.

Specialized Knowledge

Freelancers bring specialized knowledge to your project that you might not otherwise be able to find. Some have niche expertise in specific fields, such as medical degrees or prior industry experience. Others might offer specializations in particular types of writing, such as product descriptions, social media posts or long-form content. Because freelancers come from diverse backgrounds and have expertise in a variety of fields, you can easily find a writer or team of writers perfect for your project.

Offsite Project Completion

With an in-house writer, you need to provide office space and equipment. Freelancers work remotely, and they’re used to working independently and meeting deadlines, so you can rest assured the content you need gets done on the timeline you require. Using freelancers typically doesn’t require you to restructure your existing teams, either. So there’s no downtime involved when you add a freelancer to your existing project structure. 

Fast Turnaround

Outsourcing your content writing to freelancers can speed up your overall timeline. Freelance writers deliver high-quality content quickly, and you can specify the deadline to make planning easier. Writing projects assigned to your in-house team could get sidelined as other tasks come up, but a professional freelance writer can prioritize your content and keep your editorial content calendar on track. Freelancers also work all through the day, so you might be able to get a quicker turnaround from a freelance team than you could from employees who are limited to working a 9-to-5 shift in the office. If you need content within an extremely short time frame, such as less than 24 hours, a freelancer may be your best option.

Agility and Trend Spotting

Freelancers tend to stay abreast of what’s happening in the world of content creation and SEO. While full-time employees might have too much on their plates to track the latest Google search engine algorithm adjustment or trending keywords, freelancers know the latest best practices to get your page to rise in the rankings and capture reader attention. According to Quick Sprout, 42% of companies lack the skills in-house for effective content marketing, which makes hiring a freelancer with that expertise the wise choice.

Providing Relief to Your In-House Team

Overburdening your in-house employees can lead to unwanted turnover and missed deadlines. Hiring a freelance writer frees up employees to do what they’re best at instead of concentrating on trying to produce the next blog post or product description for your site. Alleviating the workload of your internal employees also helps build morale and reduces burnout. 

Leveraging Freelancers to Support Your In-House Team

Hiring freelancers to supplement the work your in-house team is already doing can help speed up production and ease the burden on busy employees. Leveraging the talents of freelance writers is different from managing your regular team of full-time employees, though, and you need to determine where each fits into your overall business structure. Some things to consider when using freelance writers to support a team of in-house employees include:

Establishing the Parameters of the Job

While hiring new employees typically means bringing them through an onboarding process, freelancers don’t require onboarding. Instead, working with freelancers involves defining the parameters of what you need them to do for you. Before hiring freelance workers to take on your long-form content creation or social media posts, establish the scope of the job. Determine the budget, timeline and specific requirements of each piece of content you intend to outsource. Have an end goal in mind, including what you want the written content to accomplish. For example, if you’re outsourcing blog post creation, do you want that content to bring new visitors to your site, convert casual readers to buyers or establish your company as an authority in the industry? The goals of your content help determine the type of content you need.

Assign a Dedicated Project Lead to Deal with Freelancers

Talk to your existing team to determine where freelancer-produced content fits into your existing structure, and assign someone to take charge of scheduling and posting the content once it’s in your hands. Having a single person as the point of contact for freelancers ensures you aren’t providing conflicting information to your writers and keeps everyone accountable. Your project lead can also communicate with in-house teams to make sure the content is adhering to overall company guidelines and meeting the needs of different internal departments.

Automate Content Distribution

Hiring a freelance writer to create great content is only part of the process. You also need to get it onto your site and post links on social media. Automated tools can help you move content from your inbox to your live webpage. You can also create content calendars that give your internal team and site visitors an idea of when new content goes live. Automation can help you maintain consistency so a blog post always goes up on the same day of the week or social media posts appear within a certain time frame after an article is posted. The project lead in charge of content can handle setting up when and how to post the content your freelancers provide. 

Use Freelancers Strategically

While it can be tempting to assign all your writing tasks to a freelancer, you and your team may be better served by taking a more strategic approach. Decide what content is essential for your current business needs and establish specific, measurable goals for that content before hiring a freelancer.

If you need to completely revamp your website or create one from scratch, decide what pages are necessary for your initial launch or rebranding and which can wait for a later update. You might want to start with the front-facing landing page and some pages describing your services and company history, or you might need 10 blog posts to start establishing a regular blog posting schedule right away. Established companies with an existing web presence may want to bolster their social media or update product category pages, which could necessitate a different type of content strategy. Planning out your content needs and timeline makes it easier to figure out when in the process to hire a freelance writer. 

Some types of projects work better with freelancers, so part of your company strategy should involve assessing projects and finding the right ones to turn over to a writing team. Things to consider when deciding whether to use a freelance writer include:

• Whether the project has a measurable, well-defined objective
• Whether the timeline and scope are appropriate for a freelance contract
• Whether any regulatory guidelines or privacy concerns prohibit the use of freelance talent for the project
• Whether you have the skills in-house and whether your employees with applicable skills have the time to complete the project on their own

How to Work With Freelance Writers to Optimize Your Success

Working with freelancers can maximize the effectiveness of your entire team, and there are ways to set up the freelance job to simplify the process. For a successful long-term relationship with a freelance writing team, check out these tips:

Make Your Content Guidelines Crystal Clear

The more detail you can include in your content guidelines, the more easily a freelancer can create the content you need. You may want to establish separate written documents as brand guidelines and specific guidelines for each writing task. Your brand guidelines include details such as your overall brand tone, information about your target audience and examples of content you want to emulate.  Content guidelines for a specific project lay out the details of that particular piece of content, such as a blog post or social media update. Here are some specifics you may need to include in your content guidelines:

• Specific keywords you want to use and keyword placement
• Linking requirements to internal pages or external expert content
• Any metadata you want included
• Whether you want a call to action and how you want it framed

Establish Routine Check-Ins

If you’re hiring freelancers to provide content on a specific schedule, set up regular check-ins to assess how well the content is working and whether you need to make changes to your content plans. For example, a company that needs weekly blog content might reevaluate its content needs after a few months once it becomes clear which posts are doing best in terms of reader engagement and conversions. Writers producing social media posts may want frequent updates of new products and services you offer so they can include those things in the posts they write. 

Consider Offering Bylines

While some types of content need to remain anonymous or give the impression it was created in-house, other content might be better served by having a writer’s name attached. Offering to attach the freelance writer’s name to the content can be a way to establish a relationship with that writer and keep them producing the kind of content you need. Hiring the same writer or a small team of writers every time helps establish a consistent tone for your website, press releases or blog.

Provide the Necessary Information for Freelancers to Get the Job Done

In addition to a well-defined content brief that outlines the details you need included in your project, you may also have to provide other information that helps your writer accomplish your objectives. Including links to similar ranked content by competitors can help your freelancer create content that outperforms others in your industry. Freelancers also need to know what you want out of your content. If you want specific links included, you should provide those. Sometimes content creation also involves knowing more about your company, so you may want to send details about your mission statement or how you’re positioned within the industry. 

Start with a Calibration Round or Test Project

If you plan to establish a long-term relationship with your freelance writing team, consider running a paid test project or calibration round before turning over the entire project for rapid content creation. During a test project, you provide the basic guidelines for your project and the freelancers create sample content for you to peruse. Together, you and the freelance team can make changes to the guidelines or format of the project before anything goes live. You might discover that your word count or keyword guidelines need some minor adjustments, or you may decide that an SEO suggestion by the freelance writing team would work well for your project. Test projects are typically paid and may involve a few rounds back and forth before you settle on the content requirements for your job. 

Trust Your Freelancers’ Expertise

When it comes down to it, you’re hiring freelance writers because they provide expertise, speed and flexibility your in-house team can’t currently match. Micromanaging your writers can hamper your long-term content goals, so aim for a working relationship that lets you turn over the task to your writers and get stellar content on or before your stated deadline. If the freelancer or manager of a team of freelancers makes suggestions about SEO best practices, you may want to consider incorporating those suggestions into your job to get better results. 

Learn About the Writing and Editing Process

If you’re working with a content agency, ask about the writing and editing process. Decide whether your freelance job should be sourced to a specific writer or given to a larger team that can produce content more quickly. Find out whether the work goes through a round of editing before being sent back to you. When you’re working with a team of freelancers, you may be able to request the same writers or specify writers of a particular quality level before you assign the job. 

Connect With Freelance Writers Using Crowd Content

Working with freelance writers can be an easy way to increase your work capacity and save money. The first step to outsourcing your company’s freelance writing is to find freelancers who can meet your needs. Visit Crowd Content to connect with over 5,000 professional freelance writers who can help craft content that draws attention, establishes authority and converts browsers to buyers.

The post How Freelancers Support In-house Teams appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

SME Review on Managed Projects

Right now, when you choose our Managed Content services, you gain access to our most capable writers and benefit from the industry expertise of our in-house content managers, who compile teams of the best writers and editors to ensure that quality remains top of mind. 

Currently, our workflow operates like this: The writer creates the content, then it’s passed to a team of diligent editors, and finally, our content managers perform a QA check on your content before delivery.

The SME Review portion of our Managed Content model adds a fourth layer of review to your orders and ensures your content is accurate and high-quality. 

What Is an SME?

SME stands for Subject-Matter Expert. SMEs have a specialized, unique background in either the professional or academic world (or a combination of both) or may have written bylined content in your industry.

An SME is qualified to review content in their area of expertise. An SME reviewer’s responsibilities might include:

• Review and fact-check all content for accuracy
• Edit in “suggesting mode”
• Make suggestions or comments in the content anywhere they believe something should be stated differently or if there are factual errors
• Compare submitted content against the order brief

Primary SME Fields

At Crowd Content, our SME database includes writers from countless industries, from restaurant/hospitality and finance to political science and government.

Most of our SMEs come from these primary industries:

• Health/Medical
• Finance
• Technology
• Legal

SME Review vs SME Writing

SME Review refers to a subject-matter expert in a particular industry who reviews existing written, edited content for accuracy and compliance. They may fact-check the writer’s resources, make sure information is up to date and ensure statistics are reported correctly. 

SME reviewers have college or advanced degrees in related fields. For example, an SME finance reviewer with academic experience might have a degree in:

• Math
• Accounting
• Actuarial studies
• Finance
• Economics

When you inquire about the SME review layer being added to your content plan, you’ll be presented with a list of qualified SME reviewers with different academic and professional backgrounds for you to choose from. That way, you can decide if you’d prefer someone with an economics background versus someone who works as an accountant, for example. Depending on the volume of your content, you may want to select more than one SME reviewer.

SME Review: A Scalable Solution

At Crowd Content, we create high-quality content for your business at scale. The SME review layer fits perfectly with your content plan and budget.

An SME writer who writes bylined content in their area of expertise may cost well above our Managed content rates with an SME review layer. SME writers often charge custom rates upwards of 50 cpw, and the quality of the writing may vary widely.

When you choose to add an SME review layer to your content, you can publish high-quality, verified content at scale without exceeding your content budget. 

Pairing an SME reviewer with 4-star writers who are capable of researching, synthesizing, and producing well-written content is how you can meet your business’s publishing goals. It ensures you can produce content at the volume you want.

Say your goal is to produce 100 articles a month. You’re going to encounter problems with deadlines, budget, and varying quality levels if you opt for SME writers.

SME writers are better suited for smaller projects, perhaps one or two articles a week or month.

Adding an SME review layer to your content plan can help you level up its accuracy and quality. Contact a member of our sales team who can help you get started with the process.

FAQ

What verticals are SME reviewers available in?

SME reviewers are available in the health/medical, finance, technology, and legal fields. We also have SME reviewers available in many other verticals and industries, including STEM, and we’re able to recruit in specific verticals if needed.

Is SME review scalable?

Yes. It’s a logical, scalable solution for businesses looking to produce a high volume of quality content.

What’s the difference between an SME writer and an SME reviewer?

An SME writer may have specialized experience in their field but charge custom rates for content. For content that requires a lot of research, SME writers may charge between 50 cents and a dollar per word. 

An SME review layer, on the other hand, is added onto the usual workflow of a 4-star writer, editor, and content manager review (QA) and costs significantly less, about an average of 30 cpw, depending on the complexity of the project.

The post Why SME Review Is a Viable Solution to Scaling an Expert Project appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

One way to stand out from the crowd is to hire subject matter experts (SMEs) or interview them for your publications.

What are subject matter experts and why are they more important than ever for marketers? Keep reading to find out.

What Are Subject Matter Experts?

A subject matter expert is someone who has highly specialized knowledge in a particular industry or field of study. SMEs often work on large projects in the information technology, engineering, and legal fields, but you can find them in almost any professional setting.

Copywriters and journalists also consult SMEs when drafting articles, reports, case studies and technical or scientific content.

Here are just a few of the ways subject matter experts use their expertise:

•Doctors, nurses and other medical professionals often serve as expert witnesses in medical malpractice cases.

•Workplace safety experts use their knowledge of OSHA guidelines to protect employees against work-related accidents.

•Data analysts rely on SMEs to help them identify trends in large sets of data. SMEs can also help data analysts better understand the metrics that are most important in a particular industry.

•Manufacturing companies often hire outside engineers to optimize new product designs or turn manual assembly processes into automated ones.

•Many companies hire software developers to solve complex problems or help them choose new software packages based on custom business requirements.

Increasingly, SMEs are also playing a significant role in content creation and SEO.

Why Are SMEs Important for Content Creation and SEO?

To drive traffic to your website and convert visitors into paying customers, your content must be both interesting and accurate.

Google is increasingly valuing E-A-T (expertise, authority, trust) when determining search rankings, so having SMEs involved in your content creation can really boost SEO.

Readers can be even more discerning than search engines. If a reader catches you in a mistake, they’re less likely to buy from you. Working with subject matter experts can help you avoid costly errors and ensure your content is as relevant to readers as possible.

How Can SMEs Help With Content Creation?

SMEs can help you with the following types of content:

Articles: A subject matter expert can review your draft and make sure the content is accurate. You can also contact SMEs and ask them for quotes to incorporate into an article. Incorporating quotes from experts shows your readers you’re willing to go the extra mile to deliver high-quality, authoritative content.

Case studies: A case study is a great way to show prospects how your firm’s products or services have benefited your existing customers. Case studies usually describe a problem a customer was having and explain how a company’s product or service solved that problem.

They combine business facts with storytelling to create a compelling narrative that can be shared with potential customers. Working with a subject matter expert can help you make the case study as persuasive as possible without compromising quality.

White papers: A white paper can help you explain product features and benefits to prospective customers. Subject matter experts provide valuable input to ensure technical jargon doesn’t get in the way of helping prospects understand your value proposition.

Buying guides: If your company sells high-tech products, working with a subject matter expert can help you publish high-quality buying guides. These guides educate readers and help them understand why they should purchase one product over another.

These are the 4 most common content types that SMEs work on. But, SMEs add value to any type of content where E-A-T is important.

SMEs for SEO

Search engines prioritize unique content. A SME may be able to help you come up with an interesting angle for an article or alert you to a new trend in the field before everyone else starts covering it, helping you drive more visitors to your website.

A lot of content optimization tools guide SEOs to create content that covers topics and search terms that already appear in content ranking well in Google for a given search term. That can lead SEOs to create very similar content to their competitors. SMEs let you add truly original content by leveraging their unique knowledge and skillset. That can set you apart from the pack, and on its own may boost rankings.

SMEs are a valuable resource for companies that publish medical, legal, technical or scientific content. Even if you vet your freelancers carefully, a generalist may struggle to explain complex topics to a lay audience. SMEs can read through each article and make sure that every detail is accurate, enhancing your site’s authority.

Google (and other search engines) ultimately want to serve the best content to satisfy a searcher’s query. It makes sense that expert level content is more likely to do that, and Google uses various ways of measuring how effective your content is at helping its users.

Working with SMEs also creates opportunities to add expert bylines to your content. These expert bylines can help you attract backlinks from other sites. Because SMEs have expert insight, they can help you create truly unique content rather than rewriting what’s already out there. And, other marketers want to link to authoritative sources so having bylined, expert level content can be hugely beneficial in driving links.

All of this adds up to a much higher E-A-T score. In SEO, E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. While not officially a ranking factor according to Google, empirical evidence suggests that higher E-A-T does help you rank better for competitive search terms.

How to Position Yourself as a Subject Matter Expert

Here are some tips for becoming a subject matter expert:

1. Commit to continuous learning. No matter how much experience you have, there’s always something new to learn, especially if you’re in an industry characterized by frequent change. Sign up for professional associations, attend workshops and take online courses to keep your knowledge and skills as current as possible.

2. Start developing your own ideas. The more you experiment with new developments in your field, the more innovative you can be. You’ll also gain new knowledge and skills that you can share with others.

3. Build a strong social media presence. If you don’t already have accounts on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, sign up as soon as possible and create profiles highlighting your credentials. Once your accounts are all set up, spend time sharing content and having discussions with other people in your industry.

4. Start sharing your expertise. Networking via social media is great, but it’s not the only way to share your knowledge and skills with others. Consider running a workshop, presenting at a professional conference or teaching a class in your area of interest. Starting a podcast or an educational YouTube channel is also an effective way to spread the word about your expertise.

5. Create a writer biography (bio). Not only does your bio explain your credentials, but it also provides a quick summary of your accomplishments. Your bio can be shared online, helping you promote your brand even when you’re busy doing other things.

What Crowd Content Is Doing to Connect with Subject Matter Experts

Crowd Content works with expert writers across a variety of subjects to produce high-quality content for businesses of all sizes. We regularly work with SMEs in specialized fields to ensure every piece of content gives readers a positive impression of our clients.

If you have a limited budget, we can incorporate quotes from experts or have SMEs review your drafts before you publish them. To find out how to work with one of our expert writers, visit the Crowd Content website.

The post Looking for Ways to Increase Your Site’s Authority? Try Working with Subject Matter Experts appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Most popular types of content

The best websites create a mix of different content types to keep their readers interested. While there are hundreds of different types of web content, these 50 in-particular are our favorite types of digital content.

1. Articles

This type of web content develops an idea and incorporates interviews, quotes, and data to support the article’s hypothesis. Articles are usually long-form content, between 1,000 and 3,000 words.

2. Blog posts

Blog posts typically range between 500 and 750 words, focusing on a variety of topics. Some of these topics can include news in the industry, bios of industry leaders, reviews of new products, and more.

3. Surveys

Adding surveys to your content arsenal can gauge your readers’ interest and to increase reader engagement with your brand. Surveys are also fun for the reader and is one of the more interactive content types.

4. Quizzes

Quizzes are another way to engage your reader, by having a question on one page and the answer on the next, which adds extra potential for ad revenue and click-throughs.

5. Photos

Images help make your content more visually appealing, and contributes to the overall user experience. Additionally, optimizing your photos with alt-text and captions to your images can even help with your rankings on Google Images.

6. Videos

Using videos is a great way to diversify your content and add visual interest to your pages. These can be videos you take yourself or videos from sources like YouTube or Vimeo. (Just make sure to give credit where credit is due.)

7. Case studies

Case studies outline how a particular individual or company used a product or service. Seeing a real person use your product can help potential buyers see themselves using it and, thus, encouragement to purchase from you.

8. Website content

Website content encompasses many content types. This can include website pages detailing your individual services, products, people, locations, etc.

9. Guest blogs or posts

Find guest writers from notable people in your industry, writers of other blogs or websites that focus on your topic, or on social media pages or groups related to your topic. Adding a few posts by guest writers adds a new voice to your pages and helps to bring in new readers to your website.

10. Interviews

First person interviews with people actively involved in your topic is a way to share different points of view with your readers and expand their knowledge of your topic. You can ask readers to submit questions in advance to increase your user engagement.

11. FAQs

Everyone has questions. A FAQ (frequently asked questions) page is one of the best content types to help address common questions all in one place. This helps you better manage your time and not have to answer the same question over and over again.

12. Press releases

Press releases from companies in your field make good fodder for your blog or website. Just make sure that you don’t copy the release directly to avoid a duplicate content penalty from the search engines.

13. Announcements

Do you have a new employee, product, or even some new swag? Let your readers know about it in an announcement post. Market your site as the place readers can learn about news from your company before any other source.

14. Contests

Contests are a good content type for getting new readers and to keep your readers coming back to your site. Like quizzes, this repeat traffic is good for increasing your click-through rate.

15. E-books

Having an e-book that your readers can download, or read directly on your site, can expand on your regular content types with more in-depth information. Promoting an e-book is an excellent way to promote your company as an expert in your field.

16. Landing pages

Landing pages are designed as the first page that a site visitor sees when they take an action like clicking on an ad. It’s important that these remain your highest-quality pages, so they make a good first impression to the user.

17. Infographics

Out of all the other types of content, infographics remain one of the best at providing a visual representation of data or information to your reader. Plus, they also just look cool and can often illustrate a point much more clearly than if you explained the point with only text.

18. White Papers

A white paper is a concise report that seeks to educate the reader about a complex issue, which you can post directly on your site or offered as a download. Like e-books, they help to establish your site as a leader in your industry.

19. “How to” posts

Readers like to learn how to use a product or accomplish a task. (Look at the proliferation of YouTube videos of this ilk.) “How to” posts can range from recipes to instructions on installing a hot water tank.

20. E-courses

E-courses are designed to teach your reader about your topic. Generally divided into several sections, the reader can complete one each day or week. This type of post is another good way to get readers to return to your site.

21. Lists

Lists are, arguably, the most popular type of web content. Whether it’s “9 ways to attract a new boyfriend”, “The 10 hottest guys on the PGA circuit” or “5 ways to cook acorn squash”, there’s just something compelling about a list. List headline are very clickable and a good way to introduce new readers to your site.

22. Reader questions

You probably get questions from readers. Rather than answering the same questions privately over and over again, it just makes sense to create a page or two of real questions you’ve received from readers. (Just make sure that you get permission from the reader if you use their question verbatim.)

23. Roundups

Roundups are compilations of links to other sources posted elsewhere on the internet. This can include things in the news related to your industry this week or something like the best places to shop online for a product related to your industry. Make sure not to copy text from the other site, just the link, to avoid having your SEO suffer.

24. Book reviews

Every topic has books written about it. Share with your readers the ones you’ve read and what you thought of them. (Just make sure not to spoil any plot twists or surprises.) You might even ask readers about their favorite books to increase engagement.

25. Product reviews

One of the perks of having a successful blog or website is that companies are often willing to send you a product to review at no cost to you. You can also purchase a product to review (with none of the potential ethical problems of accepting gifts.)

26. Predictions

Look for this web content type towards the end of the year, when everyone with a web address is offering their opinion about what will happen in the new year. Prediction posts are fun and, until January 1st, you can’t be wrong. This is another way to encourage readers to view you as an industry expert.

27. Demos

Similar to “How to” posts, demos show how to use a specific product and can be a useful way to market your wares.

28. Live streams

Live streams, such as Facebook Live broadcasts, let your readers attend events, board meetings, product unveiling, contest drawings and other happenings right from their homes or office. This is another good way to engage site visitors.

29. Awards

Awards are a fun way to get other businesses and individuals involved in your site. “Best of 2021”-type awards can start with nominations, move on to have readers vote on the top picks and end with an announcement of the winners. This type of content not only engages readers, but draws in fans of the nominated companies that may not have been familiar with your site before.

30. Guides

Guides are a comprehensive look at a topic or destination. For example, if you have a site about Ohio travel, you might create a “Travel Guide to the Lake Erie Islands”. With several of these pieces, you can market your website as a comprehensive resource about your topic.

31. Templates

Templates are examples for readers to use to create their own documents or crafts. This type of content might be a sample resume format or how to write a letter of recommendation.

32. Check lists

Checklists are useful lists that help readers prepare for something. For example, a checklist might be “things to pack when you hike the Appalachian Trail” or “Documents to take when you apply for Social Security benefits”.

33. Memes

Memes are just silly, funny content that combine images with jokes, sarcasm or political humor.

34. User-generated content

Why not have your readers create your content? These can be blog posts, videos, images or full articles. Just make sure that you post guidelines and that your readers understand that you have editorial control.

35. Research and data

Recent statistics and research can make for interesting content and help your site provide industry-leading resources for your readers.

36. Maps

Maps are useful to illustrate where a user can find an attraction, business or other sites.

37. Essays

If your website is like most sites, the bulk of your content is informational and written in the second or third person. Essays give you an opportunity to share your own, first-person experiences and create a rapport with your readers.

38. Event calendars

Event calendars list things that are happening during a particular time frame. For example, you might post “What to Do in Nashville in May” or “Stephen King Book Events in the Midwest”. These can be a useful resource and bring new visitors to your site.

39. Giveaways

Do you have some swag you’d like to offer your readers? You can ask them to take an action like signing up for your newsletter or liking your social media page in order to qualify for the freebie.

40. Social media posts

Posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn are generally shorter versions of the content on your website. You can include a link to your longer content, so readers can learn more if they are interested in your topic.

41. Podcasts

Podcasts are increasingly popular. These might be interviews or instructional talks and work to support your other marketing efforts.

42. Testimonials

Share what your readers and/or customers are saying about you with a testimonial page. (Again, it’s important to ask permission before you use someone else’s words.) Testimonials are great from a marketing point of view because they come from (presumably) unbiased third parties.

43. Industry news

This might be a roundup, a recap of a press release or an article about a single happening in your field.

44. Glossary

This type of content page is especially useful if your industry or topic has a lot of jargon within your field. Prevent readers from becoming confused by creating a glossary page that defines these terms and then link back to it when you use those terms on other pages.

45. Comparisons

A type of product review, comparisons show a side-by-side look at two or more products. This might be a face-off between a Ford Mustang and a Chevy Camaro.

46. Best practices

This type of page gives readers advice on how they can make their life a little easier. It’s even better if you can include how your product or service can make a reader’s life easier.

47. Recipes

Who doesn’t like cooking? Just make sure that you only post original recipes. While ingredient lists aren’t subject to copyright restrictions, the instructions on how to cook a dish are.

48. Cheat sheets

Everyone likes to learn about an easier way to do something. Again, see if you can work this around one of your products or services.

49. Screenshots

Screenshots are images of what’s on your computer screen at a particular moment. These are useful when you’re trying to explain to readers how to do something on their computer.

50. Calculators

Calculators can be useful for things like figuring compound interest, paying off a mortgage early or estimating retirement income.

Creating Quality Content with Crowd Content

We understand that creating quality content can take you away from your other job responsibilities. That’s why Crowd Content matches quality writers to website and blog administrators like you. We have more than 5,000 professional writers waiting to create top quality content for your web pages.

To learn more about adding diverse types of content to your website, blog or social media pages, feel free to contact us today.

The post 50 Popular Types of Web Content for Driving User Engagement appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

I’ve found one of the best ways to do that is attending SEO-focused conferences, and MozCon is one of my absolute favorites. Their lineup of speakers is second to none and Moz usually presents some really powerful data from their own experiments. Plus, it’s a great opportunity to connect with fellow SEOs and talk shop.

We sponsored MozCon in 2020, and we’re proud to be sponsoring again this year. The team running MozCon does a really good job putting on virtual conferences, and I’m confident this year’s show is going to be a real winner.

MozCon 2021 is happening July 12th to July 14th and is all virtual. You have until July 9th to register, and I’d really encourage you to.

Their lineup of speakers this year is impressive, including the likes of Britney Muller, Cyrus Shepard, Dr. Pete Myers, Jackie Chu, Lily Ray, Luke Carthy, Ross Simmonds, Wil Reynolds, and many more.

Crowd Content will be at the show hanging out at our virtual booth, checking out the sessions, and participating in the Birds of a Feather discussion groups on various SEO topics. We’re also going to be doing giveaways at our booth, so if you are attending MozCon, be sure to pop by and say hi!

The post MozCon Here We Come! appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

There are a lot of moving parts involved, including having a talented group of 6,000+ writers, constantly improving content creation technology, and supporting clients with expert content creation advice.

And as marketers, we have to stay on top of the most recent trends and emerging technology as it relates to SEO and content marketing. 

With that in mind, we’re proud to be sponsoring MarketMuse’s Content Strategy Collective event from June 22nd to June 24th.  

What Is It?

This is a virtual conference that aims to arm you with the knowledge you need to create a content strategy that drives results. 

Ever asked yourself what you should write about? How long should it be? What topics should you cover? What you should link to?

Yeah, us too.

This conference will help answer all of those questions and more.

Taking place over 3 days, you’ll get to connect with some of the best minds in marketing today. Some names you might recognize — Rand Fishkin, Andy Crestodina, Heidi Cohen — we could go on, but really, check out the list and prepare to be impressed.

How Are We Involved?

We think this event is really going to help marketers create better content, so we’re happy to be sponsoring the event to help make that happen. Creating comprehensive content is critical to both content marketing and SEO success these days, and this conference should be an amazing resource to help marketers do that. 

We’ll have a virtual “booth” set up where we’ll be sharing some great free resources and chatting to attendees.

On top of that, our own Rick Leach, a Senior Project Manager on our Enterprise Production team, will be hosting a workshop on how you can scale your content output while still properly optimizing your content for SEO.

How Can You Attend?

You’ve probably gotten the hang of virtual conferences over the last year or so, and this conference functions like most of them do. Just register at the main conference page and then sign onto the site on June 24th.

There are free passes available that will get you into many of the sessions, and standard passes that get you into workshops (like ours) start at $199. If you’re interested in a standard pass, be sure to reach out to your Crowd Content Customer Success Manager and we can help you with a discount.

We hope to see you there! 

The post We’re Sponsoring the Content Strategy Collective! appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

While Google constantly tweaks their algorithm-sometimes as much as once per week-they’re usually small changes resulting in minimal impacts. The exception, however, is with core updates.

One such update was released in December of last year. Given the history of volatility with core updates, this particular change stirred plenty of controversies, dropping just in time for the holiday shopping season. And, as usual, it caused quite a few ups and downs across multiple industries.

On April 2, Google shook things up again with a product review update that’s changing how marketers and creators publish product reviews.

Google’s Product Review Shakeup

With April’s update, Google is setting its sights on “thin” content. The update makes it much more difficult to rank for pages that simply summarize a bunch of products. Instead, Google is rewarding pages with content full of quality information, in-depth analysis and excellent research.

Right now, this update only applies to English-language product reviews, but already it’s had a profound impact. Even though it’s not a core update, it’s causing the same sort of shakeup normally reserved for bigger, broader algorithm changes.

This isn’t the first time Google has taken aim at thin content. On February 23, 2011, the search engine launched its now-infamous Panda update. Panda was a significant algorithm change meant to address the increasing prevalence of thin and spammy content produced by so-called “content farms.”

The update worked, rewarding high-quality content and causing a substantial drop-off in lower quality, churned content with little substance. All in all, just under 12% of search queries were affected.

Who the April Update Affects and How

April’s update is a little more focused. Right now, the changes only apply to sites with product reviews. That’s not to say, however, that we won’t see these changes applied to content across the board in future updates. Google remains committed to rewarding great content over thin content and that’s not changing any time soon.

Overall, If you’re already producing informative, high-quality product reviews, you just might see your rankings improve. Since Google is setting out to “better reward such content,” it’s possible that pages on your site will rise up above other sites that attempt to exploit the algorithm by mashing together several product affiliate links instead of offering genuine review content.

But if your strategy has been to emulate the top Google results in hopes of outranking the competition, you may want to reconsider your process. While the change won’t necessarily penalize this kind of content, it does reward creators that put a significant amount of effort into making great content for their visitors.

Great Content Rises Up

Google is rewarding product review pages that provide users with valuable content. In other words, content that aims (and succeeds) at providing the kind of high-quality product reviews you’d expect to use to make your own purchasing decisions.

Reviews that cover the pros and cons of a product, provide a well-balanced and in-depth understanding of the use cases and provide as many details as possible are going to see their rankings rise. This includes strong images or video that supports the information, along with how well it compares to the competition. In other words, really great product reviews are getting their just deserves in rankings.

One interesting line in Google’s guide mentions content written by “experts or enthusiasts who know the topic well.” Going forward, we’re likely to see original content written by expert contributors and passionate enthusiasts who truly care about their subject matter. As the old saying goes, you can’t fake passion.

While Bad Content Falls Through the Cracks

The “thin content” that simply summarizes a product will drop off in favor of reviews that share ample research and thoughtful consideration. If you’re creating or publishing sub-par content that’s made for the sole purpose of filling it with referral links, you may want to rethink your strategy.

Looking for product information, reviews and comparisons is a big part of how we use Google. People turn to the web to research a product they have an eye on or to learn about their available options in a given product category. They need good reviews to make the best decisions.

Savvy marketers know this. It’s why a lot of content on the web is built to rank well and then inundate visitors with product recommendations that aren’t necessarily backed by careful reviews and thoughtful research. They simply aren’t providing visitors with valuable insights that help them weigh options and explore the benefits and trade-offs of each product.

What About Affiliate Reviewers?

Sites that focus on creating product reviews are likely to be impacted the most by this update. Does that mean it’s time for these particular sites to pack up and move on to greener pastures of revenue generation? Not necessarily.

April’s update isn’t about targeting affiliate reviews-it’s about rewarding quality content. For those operating a review site that generates revenue through affiliate marketing, as long as they’re producing excellent content filled with in-depth product comparisons and insightful recommendations, this update is a blessing.

Sites with thin content and walls of affiliate links, however, may want to adjust their approach. Rather than seeing this update as an attack on this type of content, it’s better to see it as Google reinforcing its commitment to quality websites that provide the answers users are searching for.

The Future of Product Reviews

If you’ve been in the marketing game for a while, you may recall when Google launched its Panda update back in 2011. Like April’s update, Panda focused on rewarding sites with high-quality content. Also like April’s update, Panda moved top-tier content up through the ranks while demoting thin, overly optimized content.

A Focus on High-Quality, Engaging Content

Going forward, marketers and creators should focus on quality over quantity. And while quality is often subjective, Google isn’t without its benevolent streak. The company provided users with a set of guidelines for product review content that helps clarify what kind of content Google is looking for with the changes. Here are a few key questions from their documentation on the update (wording our own):

• Does the content convey expert knowledge about the products reviewed?
• Does it show the physical appearance of the product and how it’s used beyond the information provided by the manufacturer?
• Does the content provide actual measurements about how a product performs in various categories?
• Does it explain what differentiates a product from its competitors?
• Does the content discuss the pros and cons of a particular product based on thorough research?
• Does it describe how the product has improved over previous products and releases to address issues and help buyers make an informed purchase decision?

Of particular interest in their announcement is that Google uses the term “thin” to describe less-than-stellar content. It’s important to understand a distinction here: Thin has no bearing on word count-instead, it’s about the kind of value the words within provide. Pushing out a few thousand words of low-quality content will not move the meter for you here.

A simple way to look at creating great product reviews is to consider whether the content you have is something you would use to make your own purchasing decision. The next time you’re about to publish one, stop and ask yourself: “Would I genuinely use this article as a guide for buying this product?”

The Right Tool for the Job

As Google’s algorithms improve and its requirements for top-tier content increases in complexity, we’ll also see content optimization tools improve and evolve, providing ways for marketers to understand and address these requirements.

Already, tools like MarketMuse and Frase offer a way to optimize your content for better search rankings. These AI-powered solutions analyze content that’s already ranking in real-time and then compares it to what you have, providing real-world, actionable suggestions. This kind of live analysis of existing content gives you the insight you need to create content that answers user’s questions accurately and without any mystery.

Don’t Publish Reviews? Pay Attention, Anyway

Even if you don’t publish product reviews, there’s a lot to take away from the update, especially considering past changes to the algorithm. Google’s track record in requiring authentic content with depth and insight isn’t new. And while this particular change is focused on product reviews, there’s no reason to believe that Google won’t apply the same high bar to future content, whether it’s a product page or blog post.

Need more convincing? In the guide for April’s update, Google explicitly states that the product review changes aren’t a core update, but they then go on to link to their advice page for how sites should adapt their content for core changes.

At the end of the day, Google has always been about high-quality content. While the search giant is in the business of selling advertisements, they wouldn’t have gotten far if their core product didn’t provide users with what they want and need: Great content that answers questions, inform decisions and provides insights to the people reading it.

Quality is the New King

Way back in 1996, Microsoft founder Bill Gates penned an essay that described the future of the web as a marketplace for content. In it, he wrote a phrase that’s turned into an oft-repeated-if not cliched-mantra for content marketers: Content is king.

While it’s been decades since that essay was written, there’s no denying the importance of content, even today. But as Google continues to tweak and refine their algorithm, there’s just one thing that remains constant in their quest to return the best search results, and that’s quality content that provides real value.

Perhaps it’s time for content to descend from its throne-quality has risen to take its place. Long live the king!

The post Google’s Product Review Algo Update – What Does It Mean For Content Creation? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

But what are white papers, and why are they important — and are they better than orange papers? We’re kidding about that last part: orange papers aren’t really a thing.

In this post, we’ll talk about why white papers should be part of your SEO strategy. Then, we’ll teach you how to write a white paper. Let’s go.

What is a White Paper?

In a nutshell, white papers are special reports — they’re concise, authoritative guides about complicated topics. They’re meant to inform readers or help readers make decisions, and they provide the publishing organization’s unique viewpoint on the subject at hand.

Generally speaking, white papers are pretty short. Most contemporary white papers are between 3,000 and 5,000 words long — about the length of a regular editorial — with the most important information written on the first page.

“If you don’t get to the point on page one, you can forget about influencing any significant decisions.” ~ John Kilpatrick – Greenfield Advisors

Interestingly, the very first white papers definitely weren’t short. Coined in Britain about a century ago, the term “white paper” first appeared in 1922. The Churchill White Paper incorporated nine documents and a memorandum, so it read more like a book. Its name came, quite simply, from the color of the cover.

One common characteristic of white papers is they’re often packaged as PDFs complete with appealing visuals that help communicate key points. They can serve as powerful lead magnets that many marketers use for mid-funnel conversions.

Why White Papers Matter

Perhaps more than any other type of sales funnel content, white papers present opportunities for thought leadership. If you’ve done your own research, you can use it to prove the points you make; if possible, incorporate other data as well, to showcase widespread support for your idea.

In short, white papers are great mid-funnel content that let you help your customers while demonstrating your brand’s unique authority in your field.

Articles and blog posts live on your site, so they’re readily available to anyone. White papers are a little different: they’re essentially premium content. Most organizations turn them into downloadable PDFs — visitors have to provide email addresses and other information to receive download links.

When they’re put behind a “download wall” like this, white papers make a great email collection tool (AKA lead magnets).

Used as part of your sales funnel, collecting emails from people who download your white papers lets your grow your email list of mid-funnel prospects that you can market to.

In time, you can use that list to create a segmented email marketing campaign — and segmented campaigns generate a great click-through rate. These campaigns can help nudge your leads further down the funnel towards conversions.

White papers take a little more time to research and write than regular articles, so they often cost more per word. And, you’ll likely spend more time designing the final product. Having said that, these multi-purpose documents provide a great return on investment, so they’re worth the extra outlay.

“A good white paper helps decision makers make smarter decisions. A white paper should provide new knowledge and new insights that are not available anywhere else.” ~ Mark Kantrowitz, Savingforcollege.com

How They Help Your Sales Team

Sales people ultimately want to help their leads make the best buying decision to solve the challenges they face. As marketers, creating white papers provides sales people with a powerful resource they can share with their leads to help them learn more about the challenges they face, and hopefully how your solution can help.

That’s called sales enablement and it’s very valuable for your company.

Types of White Paper

White papers are an essential part of any successful sales funnel. There are three main types of sales and marketing-centric white papers:

• Backgrounder: These documents go behind the scenes to reveal the publishing organization’s methods for success — and they sometimes also include case studies. Background white papers work well in the awareness stage of a sales funnel.
• Listicles: These white papers share exclusive tips and tricks for business success, or provide readers with a step-by-step list of instructions. Numbered list white papers work well in the interest and evaluation part of a sales funnel.
• Improved solution: These guides define problems, describe typical solutions and then offer the publishing organization’s innovative new solutions. Improved solution white papers work well in the interest and evaluation part of a sales funnel, and also at the desire and action stages of a sales funnel.

When they’re well written and positioned, all three types of white paper generate leads. Some white papers use the numbered list and the improved solution format to create an all-in-one document.

How to Write a White Paper

“Think about who you’re going to write this document for. Are they physicians, lawyers, marketers, media professionals, artists? Know why they would want to read your white paper.” ~ Julien Raby, ThermoGears

White papers build trust and help to establish your company (or you) as a thought leader. If they find the information in your white paper helpful, people often come back for more. You can use the following formula to write your own white paper:

1. Think about your narrative arc. Every good story has a beginning, a middle and an end — and characters that stay constant throughout — and the same applies to a white paper. Create an outline before you begin.
2. Perform consumer research. Your white paper has to be compelling — people have to want to read it. Tools like SurveyMonkey can help you create consumer questionnaires to determine whether people find your white paper topic interesting.
3. Find a content gap. Don’t write about ultra-popular subjects — instead, concentrate on a niche to insert your paper into a content gap.
4. Define your readership. Are your readers industry professionals or are they regular consumers looking for a quick fix? Use relatable language and stay away from jargon — unless you’re speaking to the tech crowd.
5. Write a great hook. Draw readers into your guide with a compelling first sentence, and then continue with a well-defined intro. Include a short summary of the paper’s content and tell your audience how they’ll benefit from reading it from start to finish.
6. Make your paper valuable. Now’s the time to show off your unique insight. When white papers include lots of useful information, they get shared — and your brand gets noticed.
7. Keep things interesting. Stay away from dry, formal language. Write in a relatable way and include anecdotes if you can.
8. Wrap things up with a great conclusion. Reiterate some of the topics you covered and end with a call to action.
9. Check your work. Never, ever upload a white paper — or any other type of content — without proofreading first.

“Make your white paper as appealing as possible with the inclusion of visuals – charts, images and tables that provide proof of your central solution or problem. If you’ve undertaken primary research, these charts and graphs will be your main weaponry to sway your audience.” ~ Collin Matthews, Cookwared

Boost Leads With a White Paper

White papers are an integral part of online success. You can use them to generate leads and position yourself as an industry authority. Three different types of white paper exist: behind-the-scenes documents, listicles and improved solutions — and they work well at various stages of the sales funnel.

If you’re interested in a white paper for your site but don’t have the time (or the inclination) to write one yourself, Crowd Content can help. Our thousands-strong team of dedicated writers create sales funnel and SEO-centric content seven days a week. To find out more, get in touch online or call us on 1-888-983-3103 today.

The post Thought Leadership Central: How to Write a White Paper 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.

As of 2019, a decade after it launched, Walmart Marketplace had more than 28,000 sellers offering 45 million items to consumers. Those numbers continue to grow, which means competing in this area requires standing out from the crowd. The way to do that is via Walmart Marketplace SEO.

ALSO – Connect With Skilled Walmart Marketplace Product Description Writers

What Is Walmart Marketplace SEO?

SEO is search engine optimization. When your products are listed on Walmart’s Marketplace, you must optimize them for at least two search engines.

First, you’re optimizing for the Walmart algorithm. Shoppers looking for things from Walmart often navigate directly to the store’s online site and use the search functions there to find what they need. If you haven’t invested in the right SEO efforts, you won’t show up high enough in listings on the site to be found by consumers who are ready to make a purchase.

But SEO in your Walmart Marketplace product description is also important in helping your product page rank in Google. People who aren’t yet set on buying or looking for products on Walmart often start with the search engines. In fact, that’s where 93% of all searches start, and Google currently holds the lion’s share of the search market. Strong optimization can help your products show up in regular search results, expanding your potential customer base outside of Walmart regulars.

Parts of Walmart Marketplace Product Descriptions You Can Optimize

While you’re mostly free to create honest, unique product descriptions with the type of content your target audience will respond too, you do have to fit it within the format of a Walmart Marketplace description. Those descriptions typically come with the following parts, all of which offer a place for optimization:

• Product name between 50 to 75 characters
• Images
• Shelf description, which is a bulleted section where you can highlight the most significant features and benefits related to your product
• Long description between 1,000 and 4,000 characters
• Short description between 500 and 1,000 characters
• An attributes section which includes specs such as model numbers, color, size and other details

(Source)

Dos and Don’ts for Optimizing Your Walmart Marketplace Descriptions

With every other seller in the Walmart Marketplace creating product descriptions in the above format, how do you stand out from the crowd and rise to the top of the listings on Walmart and in other search engines? Start by applying the dos and don’ts below.

1. Do keyword research.

You can’t have SEO without keywords. “Incorporating keywords seamlessly in interesting descriptions helps improve your SEO,” says Yaniv Masjedi, the CMO at Nextiva. “However, the keywords should appear clear and natural — not forced — when read by consumers.”

Natural, clear keywords that are relevant to the content and not forced start with keyword research. Use tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner or SEMrush to find out what types of phrases people are using to find products like yours.

Once you have a primary keyword — and maybe a secondary keyword or two — use them a couple of times in the product description, making sure to include them in key locations such as the product title.

But don’t forget semantic keywords.

These are the types of phrases that someone might use when naturally speaking about the product. For example, if someone is talking about cotton t-shirts, they might also talk about the texture of the fabric (soft), the fit of the shirt, elements such as the collar or sleeves and whether the clothing is machine washable. Including this type of context in your description helps Google and other search engines know that you are really talking about cotton shirts.

Walmart product descriptions provide plenty of room for keywords — semantic and otherwise — within natural, easy-to-read copy.

2. Don’t forget to do competitive research within the Walmart Marketplace category.

Remember that you’re also optimizing for onsite Walmart searches, so read some of the descriptions for products showing up in top spots there to see what types of phrases are being included. In fact, your competitive research into descriptions for similar products within a category should include:

• How long are high-performing descriptions? Are they barely above the minimum character counts, or are your competitors using every last character available to them?
• What types of features/benefits are being called out? While you should always play to the strengths of your product and the needs of your own target audience, it’s helpful to know what others might deem important.
• What type of language is used? Are competitors winning with humorous product descriptions or earning top spots with technical content that covers every base? Again, you need to balance what’s being done by others with the needs of your own business and customers, but knowing what’s already performing helps you know where to start with your own marketing experiments.

3. Do create a unique but specific product name.

Make sure your product name is as unique to your description as possible without going creatively over the top. Consumers should be able to identify exactly what this product description is about by the product name field, but you also don’t want to copy the Walmart, Amazon or other product titles from competitors or your own listings on other sites.

A good formula to follow when creating product names is:

Brand + Size/Color/Attribute(s) + Product Name + Style/Attribute(s) + Package Count(if applicable)

This makes it easy to get enough information in the product description, provides flexibility for unique names and different products and also ensures there’s enough information included. Whenever possible, you should also include the keyword in the product name.

Here are some examples so you can see how the formula above is very flexible.

• Keyword: wood dining table
  • HomeCompany Oval Mahogany Wood Dining Table With Leaf, Seats 6
  • HomeCompany Oval Wood Dining Table – Mahogany – 8-ft.
  • HomeCompany 8-foot Wood Dining Table in Mahogany
• Keyword: red men’s shirt
  • FashionMan Large Red Men’s Shirt, Long-sleeve Button-up
  • FashionMan Small Button-up Red Men’s Shirt, Long-sleeve, 16in Collar
  • FashionMan Medium Long-sleeve Red Men’s Shirt, Button-up w/ 16in Collar

4. Don’t forget about quality images.

Images are critical to any product description. You’re selling something, and while people give up the chance to see and touch the item in person for the convenience and cost-effectiveness of shopping online, they’re probably not going to splurge on something they can’t see at all.

Images should display your product in the best possible way, and you should have more than one whenever possible. A good rule of thumb is that the more technical or complex the product, the more images you should have to show various parts so consumers can make a good decision about their purchase. It’s also a good idea to show the product in action and in images where good size comparisons can be made.

For example, if you’re selling a tent, images might include the tent set up on a white background, the tent set up in a real-world environment with people in or outside of it, the inside of the tent, the tent as it looks when packed up for storage and any close-ups of special features.

Before you prepare images, ensure you understand Walmart’s image requirements. The images must be quality, not include accessories that aren’t part of the product and not include watermarks in many cases. Walmart’s image requirements change periodically, so keep up with Marketplace policies in the Seller Help section.

5. Do use strong marketing copy in the short and long descriptions.

Once you have images and a product name, it’s time to write the short and long descriptions. “Description” can be a confusing misnomer, because you certainly don’t want to simply describe your product.

Consider the following examples of descriptions. Which one is more inviting to the reader?

• This is a blue shirt in size large with long sleeves. It’s cotton and has a picture of a unicorn on the front.
• Cozy up to a campfire in this soft, warm long-sleeve women’s shirt. The light blue color is easy to mix-and-match with your favorite jeans or pajama bottoms, and the cotton shirt sports a fanciful image of a unicorn to show off your imaginative side.

You can learn more about strong marketing writing in product descriptions from our blog post on the topic and from these tips from top marketing copywriters.

As far as the technical aspects of completing the descriptions, we asked a few successful Walmart Marketplace sellers and marketers how they do it:

• Aalap Shah, founder and CEO of 1o8 agency, says, “From an SEO perspective, we recommend paying particular attention to the category you’re being listed in, filling out every single available field with target keywords, and creating a clear, action-oriented product description field.”
• Masjedi agrees that a complete description is important, as is maximizing the short description. “The section has a 1000-character limit, and businesses must use every last character as possible.”
• Sherry Mae, the CMO at Tankarium, points out the importance of getting the shelf description right. “Shelf descriptions play a massive role in determining SEO ranking in the Walmart Marketplace,” says Mae. “The bullets should paint a picture in a prospective customer’s mind on its purpose, use and how the product will benefit their life.” She also says to include one keyword in each bullet point if possible.

6. Do encourage customer reviews on your products.

The good news is that some of the content that helps build SEO on your Walmart Marketplace descriptions doesn’t have to be created by you. “Walmart values customer service,” says Jeremy Owens, the CMO of Seriously Smoked, “so your team needs to be prompt on addressing customer concerns and issues. Part of Walmart’s SEO algorithm considers customer reviews, so I suggest maintaining an excellent relationship with your buyers.”

Owens recommends having a dedicated team to address customer service needs and a third-party fulfillment partner that’s prompt with delivery.

Start Creating Winning Walmart Marketplace Descriptions Today

As you can see, writing the type of marketplace descriptions that lets you compete in the Walmart Marketplace requires research, planning and creative marketing copy. Luckily, you don’t have to do all of this alone. Find out more about working with proven product description writers at Crowd Content. We can help you create Walmart Marketplace SEO that drives conversions and bolsters your bottom line.

The post Walmart Marketplace SEO: Show Up Strong in Walmart’s Marketplace 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.

That’s a really good question, and frankly, one that has a lot of correct answers.

Cost savings, scalability, quality, expertise, efficiencies – all are perfectly valid reasons to turn to freelance writers to support your marketing team.

I’ve worked in the content writing space for over a decade and it’s afforded me the opportunity to work with many amazingly talented professional writers. I can’t even count how many businesses I’ve seen benefit from working with the right freelance writers, but it’s a big number.

Unclear how freelancers could benefit your business? Check out the infograph I’ve created below to illustrate the many benefits you could leverage by working with these talented folks.

Please include attribution to crowdcontent.com with this graphic.

The post [Infograph] – Why Hiring Freelance Writers Makes Sense appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

As search engine competition heats up, brands are increasingly relying on expert contributors to boost their rankings. There’s nothing Google loves more than high-quality content written by domain experts and industry authorities. And when you give Google what it loves, it rewards you with trust, authority and a steady stream of new leads.

But this increased demand for expert content means those same experts cost more and more. Someone with a law degree or Ph.D. next to their name probably won’t write your content for a few cents per word. If you want to establish trust and authority in Google’s ranks, it’s going to cost you a premium, right?

Right! Well, it depends, actually.

Why Brands Leverage Experts for Content

Readers can tell when an article was authored by someone with experience and a deep interest in the subject. The originality shines and the ideas are crystal clear. The content stands apart from the competition and instills confidence. But wowing readers is only half the battle.

Content also has to wow Google.

In its quest to provide the most relevant and highest quality content available, Google continuously refines its algorithms. And make no mistake: These are highly sophisticated algorithms capable of discerning great from not-so-great. Thankfully, the search giant isn’t without its benevolent streak, telling content producers exactly what it’s looking for through its E-A-T guidelines.

We’ve covered in detail what Google’s E-A-T guidelines mean for brands and how they impact content production and search engine performance. The long and short of it is this: Google wants to see high-quality, authoritative content written by trusted experts with deep insights.

For this reason, marketers are turning to expert writers to produce reviews, buying guides and thought leadership pieces. After all, in a world full of fake news and questionable recommendations, when you can establish trust and authority in your domain, you’re much more likely to make the conversion.

Defining an Expert Writer

Despite Google’s biases toward content written by experts, there’s an important distinction to make on what constitutes expertise. The guidelines aren’t implying that your content writers should hold doctorates in your field. The search giant recognizes that people develop expertise through all kinds of life experiences — formal or otherwise.

Take this paragraph, for example, pulled from Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines:

“Some topics require less formal expertise. Many people write extremely detailed, helpful reviews of products or restaurants. 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.”

In other words, how Google classifies expertise depends on the niche. Informal experience is perfectly valid, even for more advanced topics such as finance or health. It gives the example of a forum where caregivers share tips with each other regarding caring for chronically ill family members. These folks are living the experience, and that makes them qualified to share it.

“When I look for an expert, I am definitely interested in credentials. However, this doesn’t have to be a formal designation. All I really want is someone who has demonstrated his or her expertise. If they run a blog about a particular topic, this helps a lot,” says James Pollard, founder of The Advisor Coach, a marketing consultancy firm that works with financial advisors.

Google’s requirements do tighten on topics surrounding “your money, your life.” Referred to as YMYL, these could potentially impact a person’s finances, health or overall well-being, so the search engine gets a little more discerning about credentials. That said, the overall message remains the same: The expertise of the writing must match the level of the subject.

The Types of Expert Writers

There are a few key ways to identify experts, according to Google. The traditional credentialed experts are the people with initials behind their names. They’re the doctors writing about cancer, the nurses writing about patient triage and the CPAs writing about taxes.

Next are experts with resume experience. These are writers with real-world experience in the field they write about. A retail salesman who authors buying guides, a software developer who writes about start-ups or a bookkeeper creating personal finance content are good examples.

“When hiring experts, I look for certifications and experience. It is also beneficial if they have an established online presence so we can link to their work on other credible websites,” says Darin Evangelista, a freelance content marketing consultant and content strategist at ChatterSource.

Finally, authors with publishing authority are people with bylines in major publications. For example, a journalist who’s written extensively about mental health is certainly qualified to write about the subject.

“One way that we’re doing this is by hiring authors who have a great reputation in their industry. We do research on writers to see where they’ve been published in the past. We also check their writing quality and their level of expertise,” says Jacob Landis-Eigsti, owner at the marketing consulting company Jacob LE.

The Cost of Expertise

As with health care, specialists command a higher rate than generalists. You wouldn’t expect to pay a surgeon the same rate you pay your family physician. Content writing is no different: Authority costs more.

But just how much more depends on the industry, the content and the kind of expertise needed. While expert content prices vary wildly, you can expect to pay at least double what you’d pay a generalist. Landis-Eigsti says the price multiplier on experts is even higher. “As a small business, it’s tempting to spend $30-50 on an inexpensive writer, but we’ve had better luck by finding someone who is an expert and paying 5-10 times as much.”

But that extra up-front expense does offer some benefits, says Landis-Eigsti. “When you hire an expert writer, you’ll get a better finished article. It’s more likely to rank with Google and we don’t spend our valuable resources on revisions and rewrites.”

But there’s another distinction to make, and that’s between an expert and an expert writer. An expert has authority attached to their name in the form of a degree or job title, but they may not be a great writer. They’re almost certainly not well-versed in SEO practices. It’s likely that content produced by a pure expert will require some heavy editing before it’s ready to be published.

Fortunately, you don’t necessarily need a doctor to write your content. In addition to knowing how to write for online audiences and create content that aligns with SEO strategies, an expert writer can establish authority in other ways. These include:

• Implementing quotes from credentialed experts
• Including current, authoritative research and links to back up facts and stats
• Having a credentialed pro review the content before it’s published and listing them as the reviewer in the byline area

A Team Approach to Content Writing

When it comes to producing great content that aligns with your brand’s goals, messaging and style, you need quality writers. But that doesn’t mean all your content requires a writer with domain expertise. There are several types of content often produced by nonexperts with great results, including:

• Product descriptions
• Basic blog posts on general topics
• City and local pages
• Meta tags and descriptions

With this kind of content, the quality rests on different metrics. You need great marketing writers who know how to write with relevant keywords and a larger SEO strategy in mind. You typically wouldn’t include bylines for these pages. Instead, your brand, about us page and the overall site serve as the authority in these areas.

Building a well-rounded writing team can provide your brand with the benefits of specialized niche writers while leveraging more cost-effective generalists for other kinds of writing. This is one of the biggest benefits of the Crowd Content platform: You gain access to a wide variety of professionals that include domain specialists and general marketing writers alike.

Evangelista agrees, saying, “I like to utilize a mix of expert writers and more general writers, depending on the subject matter.”

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an expert content writer?

An expert writer is one who’s skilled in writing web content on a domain- or industry-specific topics. They’re capable of producing high-quality content within their niche that’s engaging and thoughtful while still being set up to rank well in search engines.

Is content written by an industry expert guaranteed to rank well?

Not necessarily, though it depends on the expert. It’s important to keep in mind that someone with expert knowledge in a particular field may not know the ins and outs of producing search-optimized content. This is why it’s important to find an expert content writer, not just simply an expert.

Why should I hire an expert writer?

Hiring an expert writer ensures your content establishes trust through expertise. This is especially important in specialized industries, such as finance or technology, where your readers are likely to be much more knowledgeable about the given topics.

How much does it cost to hire an expert content writer?

Rates vary wildly depending on the writer and their niche, but most expert writers charge anywhere from 10 cents to a dollar or more per word.

Where can I hire expert writers?

You can find expert writers right here on Crowd Content! We have thousands of qualified writers with a range of industry experience. You can create casting calls to find writers with specific domain knowledge or let our project managers build a team for you.

Another good way to find expert writers is by simply scouring the web. Industry-specific forums and groups are good for locating freelancers, as is searching on social media sites such as LinkedIn.

Leveraging Crowd Content’s Expert Writers

Looking for an expert writer to help with your content marketing strategy? We can help. At Crowd Content, we source thousands of expert writers with a range of industry experience to help our clients produce top-tier content at affordable prices. We even depend on our writers to help produce our content, so you can rest assured they know their stuff.

Using our platform, you can search through our writers to find the perfect fit or open a casting call and build your own expert writing team. No time for building and managing a team? No problem. Our customer service experts and content managers can do it for you.

Go ahead and get started today.

The post How to Leverage Expert Content Writers 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.

As we head into the busiest time of year for retailers and eCommerce companies, many marketers working in those industries are seeing the culmination of their year’s efforts.

These industries work months, even years, in advance when it comes to writing content including product copy, category page descriptions and buying guides.

So while this year’s efforts may be coming to fruition now, it’s important to look ahead to what you can do next year to take your SEO and conversions to new heights.

With that in mind, we recently hosted a webinar with Brian Hennessy, CEO of Talkoot and former Global Writing Director at Adidas, that explored what the world’s most successful brands are doing to create amazing product copy.

In short – Brian really, really knows how to write amazing product copy, and I haven’t met anyone else as passionate about product stories as he is.

If you didn’t catch the webinar, here’s the recording:

I also want to highlight some of the key takeaways from the webinar.

Information Confirms. Stories Convert.

Brian’s first point was a great one. When it comes to writing product copy, many brands don’t put a ton of effort into each individual product, and what gets produced is rather short and tends to provide descriptive information about the product and little else.

Those types of descriptions do have value, but Brian’s point is that they’re most likely going to confirm information that shoppers who are already seriously evaluating a product already know and give them a small nudge to make the purchase.

Shoppers who are undecided are unlikely to be convinced to buy based on this type of product copy. But, if you craft a compelling product story and establish an emotional connection with this shopper, they may just convert.

This screenshot shows product pages for two very similar axes from Best Made and Lowe’s. Brian highlighted that despite being very similar and largely serving the same purpose, Best Made’s axe costs around 8 times what Lowe’s does.

How are they able to charge more?

A big part of it comes down to their product copy. Lowe’s example basically just lists the key features of the product, whereas Best Made’s tells a rich story about the axe’s design, manufacture and uses. The story builds intrigue and helps the buyer feel connected and invested in the product.

That adds to perceived value and makes shoppers more likely to convert.

eCommerce SEO Helps You Write the Way Shoppers Buy

As marketers, we know that SEO is really important. It can drive a ton of traffic to eCommerce sites, and that traffic is more likely to convert than traffic from most paid sources.

In the webinar, we highlight that by discovering the search terms and intent that your customers are using when they search online in Google and other search engines, you can discover what they’re looking for and craft your content to match.

Shoppers are using Google to help them as they make their buying decision and move through the buyer’s journey. Keywords can help you get insight into that.

By doing the proper keyword research, you can find keywords that represent different stages of the buyer’s journey for people that could buy all your different types of products.

 Consider the example of someone who is thinking about buying a tent.

At the awareness phase, he might be looking for general information on the different types of tents available and would search Google for a broad keyword like “tents.” You’d want to make sure you have a good blog post or category page covering this topic in-depth to help him learn and also get him into your funnel.

At the consideration phase, he might have narrowed his search down to a particular type of tent and would be searching for longer tail keywords like “pop-up tents.” This is a great place for you to create an informative category page description that explores the benefits of pop-up tents. You can then link off to specific models to get him engaging with your product stores and push for the conversion.

Finally, at the decision phase, he’s largely identified the type of tent and likely a specific model he wants. His search in Google will be very long tail and likely show commercial intent. He might search for “buy Coleman pop-up tent”. Traffic from these types of searches is extremely high value and close to converting, and also almost always link to product pages, which is why so many brands put so much effort into crafting product stories that are SEO-optimized and designed to convert.

Also – 4 Ways to Get Compelling eCommerce Content for Your Brand

The Product Content Lifecycle

You’re familiar with the product supply chain, but have you thought of writing product content in that context?

One of Brian’s points was that there’s a lot that goes into writing just one product story – research, writing, review and QA, editing, publishing, optimizing, etc. The process will vary a bit depending on your company, but his point was that defining your process is key and ensuring you’ve built the right team and collection of tools to efficiently follow the process is critical.

This is something that we’ve done at Crowd Content with our Enterprise content team. Depending on the project, we have defined processes, tools and teams for each step of the process:

1.       Research

2.       Writing

3.       Editing

4.       Quality Assurance

5.       Publishing

Brian goes over some great tips on how to set this up, so be sure to check out this section of the webinar replay.

Good Product Copy is Fresh Product Copy

Most major brands are constantly refreshing their product copy.

Why?

For a number of reasons:

1. Google’s Freshness Algorithm. Freshness is a dedicated ranking factor in Google’s algorithm, so the simple act of refreshing your content can help you realize a ranking boost. It looks at how much of your content you refresh, how often and what percentage of your text is refreshed. Think of it like this – if you see content that hasn’t been updated in a long time, wouldn’t you also think it’s losing relevance?

2. SEO performance. Content is the most important ranking factor in Google’s algorithm. If your product pages aren’t ranking well, you’ve ensured your other on-page factors are optimized and you have high domain authority, there’s a good chance your content could be updated to help give you a ranking boost. Things you can look at improving are your freshness, match with search intent, topic completeness, readability and crafting better content than competing content that currently outranks you.

3. Seasonality. How your shoppers interact with your products may vary depending on the season. Think of how you’d position a t-shirt in the summer versus winter:

In the summer you want to focus on how the t-shirt can help you keep cool, whereas in the winter, you might position it as a base layer that will help you stay warm. By updating to make your product copy more seasonally relevant, you can boost conversions.

4. Product Updates. Often, details about your products will change or how your consumers use them will. It’s critical that your product copy is updated promptly if this happens. Consumers are intelligent and will often notice inaccuracies which can create doubt during the buying process. Worse, if someone buys your product and then discovers the information that led to their purchase was inaccurate, you may be faced with a costly return.

ALSO – Content Marketing for eCommerce: 6 Types of Copy You Need to Succeed

Wrapping it Up

We had a great time working with the team at Talkoot on this webinar, and I feel that Brian brought some great insights that anyone looking to succeed with creating product copy can learn from.

Be sure to check out the replay and please let us know what you think.

The post Webinar Recap: 5 Secrets From Successful Product Copy Teams 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.

Producing great content is a necessary part of digital marketing, but staying competitive takes a lot of work. Here’s how outsourcing can help.

Content marketing is constantly evolving, and it’s not going away. It’s now one of the pillars of a business’s overall digital marketing efforts. If you want to be found online, you need engaging, thoughtful content — and lots of it.

Yet even businesses with in-house marketing teams often don’t have the resources to produce the high volume of quality content required for good results. With SEO, link building and social media marketing all on the list, marketers already have their hands full.

With so much riding on producing quality content on a consistent schedule, what are businesses to do? Outsourcing your content writing might be the solution.

A Closer Look at Content Outsourcing

If you want to have any chance at competing with the big businesses and their monster marketing budgets, your content strategy needs a never-ending supply of top-notch content. Even for a small business, producing the quality and quantity of content Google expects is a full-time job for any one person. If you’re a small business owner handling everything yourself, your hands are pretty much tied.

Even for larger businesses with in-house marketing teams, the budget required to rival the content output of the competition might be too constraining. Or maybe your team’s efforts aren’t getting the results you need to rank well enough on Google. After all, not every marketer is a proficient content writer. Creating content that generates leads is the biggest challenge for over half of all marketers.

In these instances, you need a helping hand. Content outsourcing is essentially hiring a skilled freelancer or a trusted team outside your business to help produce high-quality content at scale. It’s a flexible, cost-effective method of creating blog posts, white papers, articles and every other kind of written content. By outsourcing your writing work, you’re free to focus on the bigger picture, such as refining your overall marketing strategy and growing your business.

There are a few different methods of outsourcing your content writing. Most businesses go with one of the following:

• Hiring a freelancer to write your content
• Partnering with a content writing service, such as Crowd Content
• Partnering with an agency that specializes in content production

There are, of course, pros and cons to each of these. A freelance writer may not be able to deliver the results you need. An agency may be too cost-prohibitive for those results. And you may be altogether skeptical of a content writing service.

We’ll get into the details of choosing the right partner, but first, let’s look at the many benefits that content outsourcing provides.

The Many Benefits of Content Outsourcing

Content outsourcing is highly effective. The benefits seem almost too good to be true, from improved flexibility, volume, and quality in your content strategy to lower cost. But there’s a reason that 84% of all B2B marketers outsource their content creation.

Many reasons.

1. Improves Flexibility

Having a dedicated writer on your marketing team has its benefits. But given the rapid shifts in digital marketing, it can also be a disadvantage. You may need more or less content at any given time. Or you might need an entirely new type of content to stay competitive. It’s tough to adapt to evolving requirements with a single voice and perspective.

Outsourcing gives you the ability to adapt to these changes. You’re free to hire more writers when you need more content. You can peruse different writers when you need a shift in tone or perspective. And you can even experiment with new writers to try things that your competition may not have thought of yet.

The versatility of voice and the ability to scale up and down as needed means content outsourcing provides the flexibility necessary to stay competitive.

2. Gives You Time

Ernest Hemingway said, “Time is the least thing we have of.” He was no doubt familiar with how good extended writing took. Researching, drafting, editing and publishing content is time-consuming.

And while it may seem like writing your content is a cheaper option, you need to put a dollar value on the hours you spend doing it. Would your time be better spent on core business tasks? Probably so.

Outsourcing your content production gives you your time back. The best part is that when you choose the right partner, you get content at a much higher quality that’s still guided by your marketing vision.

3. Is Cost-Effective

In the U.S., the average salary of a content writer is $48,702. That’s not including all the added expenses, such as equipment, training and the rest of the overhead that comes with keeping a full-time employee. And as we talked about previously, this only gives you a single perspective for your content. Expensive and inflexible.

With content outsourcing, you’re only paying for the content you need. Whether it’s produced by a freelancer, a content writing service or an agency, you’re paying for content and content alone. No equipment, no holiday pay and no headaches. It’s an infinitely more affordable option.

4. Means More Volume

Even if your business has a full-time writer on staff, there’s a hard limit to how much quality content a single person can produce. Sure, you could have your writer churn out two or three low-quality blog posts every day, but this will do more harm than good for your content marketing strategy.

If you want a large volume of comprehensive articles and high-quality blog posts that engage your audience and convert leads, content outsourcing is the way to go. For consistency and fast turnaround, there’s no better way to scale your content marketing affordably.

5. Complements Your Team

Outsourced writers have often worked for several different clients. Because of this, their knowledge and experience are much broader. Additionally, these writers and content producers often have their fingers on the pulse of marketing and industry trends. All of this gives them the ability to come up with fresh new ideas to invigorate your content with.

These fresh perspectives and innovative ideas are complementary to your existing marketing team. Even for businesses with dedicated writers, it’s challenging to keep your wordsmiths enthused when they’re writing about the same thing day after day. Bringing in outside help ensures your content never loses its zeal.

Finding the Right Partner for Your Content

Despite the many benefits of content outsourcing, there are some challenges associated with outsourcing your content. Whether it’s a freelancer, a content writing service, a marketing agency, or even your in-house writer, overseeing your content’s production and ensuring it adheres to your overall content strategy takes a bit of work.

Some of the challenges with content outsourcing include:

• Ensuring the content creator understands your vision of the blog post or other piece and is able to produce something that matches it
• Protecting uniformity with a style guide and other measures, including editing, so your content has a consistent brand voice and doesn’t sound like it was written by a group of disparate writers
• Integrating the outsourcing process within your existing content marketing strategy, which includes getting buy-in from the entire marketing team to ensure a streamlined workflow

The good news is that these challenges are easily overcome with diligence and some thoughtful planning. Whether you’re outsourcing Facebook posts, landing pages or highly researched articles, there are proven methods for building relationships with a partner that can get the job done.

Freelancers, Agencies and Content Writing Services

Success in outsourcing your content begins with the kind of outsourcer you choose to work with. And that boils down to your content marketing budget and what type of content you need in terms of volume and quality.

But when you’re perusing possible outsourcers, it’s essential to keep in mind that it’s not always cut and dried. There are great freelancers, agencies and writing services that can spin up your content production with little supervision and deliver results quickly. But there are content outsourcers that will do more harm than good, too.

Take freelance writers, for example. They can run the gamut in terms of quality and price. You might get lucky and find an affordable freelancer who produces sparkling blog posts that place your site at the top of Google search results. On the other hand, you might find someone who’s not so affordable, requires constant feedback and revisions and ends up producing poor content anyway.

Agencies are usually more consistent in terms of quality. In most cases, writers at agencies are guided by a creative director, so you may not need to do much guidance. And since these businesses are built to provide innovative services to other companies, they can almost certainly produce volume.

But leveraging an agency — even a boutique firm — often comes with a hefty price tag. For some businesses, the results are worth paying for. But for others, agencies are too cost-prohibitive.

When choosing a partner, keep these things in mind:

• Ask the right questions: Understand what kind of content you need and why you need it. Then ask questions about how the outsourcer can help.
• Vet their work: Read up on testimonials and case studies to make sure they can deliver on their promises.
• Find out about their process: Ask questions about the processes they use to get successful results.

For many businesses, content writing services are a happy and effective middle ground. Some marketers are wary of these services, often buying into the myth that they sacrifice quality for convenience. Others believe these services exist to profit from high-volume, generic content written by poorly paid writers.

While these services do exist, it’s not a measure of content writing service out there. The fact of the matter is that you can leverage them for high-quality content at affordable prices.

Take what we do here at Crowd Content, for example. We operate a content writing service and incentivize our freelance partners to create high-quality content that produces results. We treat them well, pay fairly and take measures to ensure our clients are always happy with the completed work.

We also go the extra mile to help clients find writers who are ideal for their specific projects. Whether you search our robust workforce yourself with our self-serve options or work with our sales, customer service or project management teams to launch your campaign, you can find freelancers with a wide range of knowledge and experience.

Best Practices for Outsourcing Content Writing

Ultimately, if you want high-quality content, it’s not just about where you outsource your content creation. By understanding how best to partner with content writers and other freelancers, you can streamline communication and increase the chance of receiving a publish-ready piece of content that performs.

Here are some best practices for outsourcing your content and working with writers:

• Provide detailed briefs: Whether you’re leaving things open to writer creativity or mandating where the keywords, headers and bullet points go, don’t leave your writer hanging with vague instructions.
• Samples are one of the best tools you have: Briefs are invaluable, but samples can remove ambiguity and help writers home in on the tone you’re looking for.
• Make sure writers know your audience: Be sure the writer knows who your target audience is. Include customer personas and style guides to help them understand your brand’s voice.
• Writers are more than words on a page: While guidance is necessary, you can also better leverage a writer’s expertise and creativity by giving them ample space to create. Set guidelines for the type of content they need and let the writer do what they do best.
• Foster a partnership over time: Writers who’ve written blog posts for you over the years often need less direction than those who aren’t as familiar with your brand. Putting the time in to educate and coach writers about what you want can pay off big in the end.

When to Outsource Your Content Writing

Outsourcing research, writing, editing, social media posts management and even video scripts goes a long way if you’ve just started a business and you’re building it from the ground up. In these early stages, leveraging an outsourcer for the time-consuming content production process allows you to focus on acquiring new clients and growing your business.

Outsourcing your content is also a good bet if you don’t see results with your existing strategies. Effective content marketing isn’t easy, and producing the content required is even more challenging. Taking a step back from the busy work and focusing your efforts on the marketing nuances will free you to refine your approach. Content marketing is much more effective with a visionary guiding a team of content producers.

Supercharge Your Content Strategy With Crowd Content

For anyone doing business online, an effective content strategy is necessary. But it takes some serious time and effort to produce great content for that strategy. Outsourcing the work is a winning strategy if your business doesn’t have the resources to create excellent content.

At Crowd Content, we have some of the best tools available to help you supercharge your content strategy. With thousands of talented writers to choose from and detailed order forms to craft effective briefs, our platform was built to help businesses like yours get effective content quickly and easily.

Sign up today to get started.

The post Tips for Getting Amazing Results with Content Outsourcing 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.

“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.

Google’s broad core updates in early June have left some brands staggering in the wake of lost traffic. Some of the ramifications of the update weren’t a surprise for those following trends in the wake up the previous Medic update, but a shake-up in the SERPs is always a game of Russian roulette for companies that rely heavily on organic traffic to fill the coffers.

Here’s what you need to know about Google’s June 2019 Core update.

What Is a Core Update?

Core updates are an overall optimization of Google’s algorithm based on broad principles instead of a targeted update on any one particular element or ranking factor. They’re not “maintenance” work meant to fix a specific, identified problem.

Updates such as Panda or Penguin were targeted — specifically meant to target issues such as the quality of backlinks or content. The June core update may include some changes related to quality, but it wasn’t specifically geared toward that.

When releasing core updates Google always advises there isn’t anything you need to “fix” to recover lost rankings. Moreover, you just need to do all the essential SEO things well including writing great SEO content, providing great user experience, being mobile friendly, having fast page speeds, building healthy backlinks, and updating your site often.

Takeaways and Talking Points for Google’s June 2019 Core Update

Let’s start by looking over some of the expert talking points of this broad core algorithm update and what they mean for brands and content marketers.

1. Google Announced the Update

Google announced the update via Twitter a day ahead of time to give the SEO community a heads up. This is the first time news about an update was broken by Google and ahead of the game.

The benefit of the announcement is that brands could monitor their SEO performance and traffic immediately to understand how they were impacted instead of second guessing after traffic changed.

The takeaway is that, whether or not Google continues to notify the community of updates in the future, it’s important for content marketers to follow industry leaders and keep up with trends and news.

2. The Core Update Overlapped With the Diversity Update

The core update rolled out from June 3 through June 8. The diversity update(which aimed to show links from different domains in search results instead of showing many links from one domain) rolled out from June 4 through June 6.

The takeaway for brands is that paying attention to when traffic changes began is critical to understand which update might be impacting you. That lets you know what types of changes may be needed in the future.

3. The June Update Reverted Some of the March Update

Some of the March core updates seem to have been reverted with the June update, based on losers in March becoming winners in June.

The takeaway is that you can’t ride or die based on Google updates that occur a few times per year. You have to find what works for your audience and concentrate on delivering high-quality content that serves consumer needs.

4. Video Carousels Get More Action

The June 2019 update did more than shake up search traffic. It also caused some changes to the SERPs themselves, with more video carousels appearing on desktop following the update.

The takeaway here isn’t very specific. This does point to Google signaling the continued value increase for video, which is something all content marketers should consider in the image-and-media-based market today.

Winners and Losers From June’s Update

SEO data companies, including Search Engine Land, are able to provide specific lists of winners and losers of the Google June 2019 core update. But the consensus seems to be that:

• E-A-T content is still important to success in the SERPs
• Google continues to look for authority and authorship, especially in YMYL (your money, your life) arenas
• The June update did seem to target news sites with low-quality content or low-quality topics

ALSO – How Creating Content With E-A-T In Mind Can Help Future-Proof Your Site Against Algorithm Changes

Some Advice From the SEO Community in the Wake of June’s Core Update

1. Concentrate on E-A-T Content

Arren Wilkinson, the SEO Manager at 52fridays says, “It’s clear to me that the June 2019 update heavily penalized sites that are lacking in E-A-T. Of most of our client sites that seemed to suffer the most, all were lacking in expertise in their editorial content. These sites also suffered during the Medic update of 2019.”

In the wake of these broad core updates, Wilkinson says, “My best piece of advice would be to work solely on improving your E-A-T; get experts to contribute to your editorial content, get cited from experts in your niche, and be transparent with your users (explain how your site makes money, its business model, etc.).”

Marissa Ryan, a Managing Partner at VisualFizz, goes even further, stating that author bios for your blog posts should read like resumes. She notes that bios should prove “the writer’s expertise in your industry by linking to other projects, other writings and other brands.”

Ryan also says companies should avoid using one author for all content. “You should have multiple writers on your blog.”

This advice about authority and E-A-T content is important for all companies, but it’s especially critical for YMYL brands as Google is paying increasing attention to the quality and authority of that content.

2. Remember That Search Algorithms Constantly Evolve

Audrey Strasenburgh, SEO Strategist at FreeLogoServices, points out that brands gain and lose traffic based on different algorithm tweaks. Strasenburgh says, “The general consensus is that websites that were severely impacted during the March algorithm update saw marked increases in site visibility after the June update. FreeLogoServices, in particular, saw an increase in SERPs after the June update where we did not fare as well in March.”

The takeaway for online brands and marketers is that lost rankings can be found again, and sometimes it’s about consistently churning good content while the dust settles in the SERPs.

ALSO – Crash Course: How to Become an SEO Content Writer

3. Update Content to Reflect Search Intent and User Need

Victor Pan, the Principle Technical SEO at HubSpot, agrees that Google algorithm changes come and go and there’s no magic fix for companies that lose ranking when the search engine tweaks its processes.

“There’s no magic bullet for dealing with these core algorithm updates,” says Pan, “but what everyone can do is look at their content that lost visibility and traffic, look at the SERPS of those pages, empathize with the user’s need, based on device time, location, time of day or need state, what search features are showing up… and then update the content to address those gaps. Time and time again, the best content wins. One-and-done evergreen content is dead. Periodically updated evergreen content is the new norm.”

Ryan agrees, saying, “if your website hasn’t had any updates in a while (more than 6 months), you may have noticed a steep decline in organic traffic. Update your static pages, and make sure to contribute to your site at least once a week.”

The take-aways here are:

• Web pages can’t be left on the shelf to rot; you have to take them down and dust them off periodically
• Google is about serving the intent and need of the user, and it’s going to continue placing pages that meet those demands in the top ranks
• You can’t avoid analyzing the performance of your pages; if you don’t know which of your pages are performing well and which aren’t, you’re missing out on valuable knowledge that can help you create higher-ranking content going forward

4. Differentiate Your Pages

According to Ryan, pages on your site with similar content won’t all stand on Google.

“Brands, especially eCommerce brands, found that many of their product pages became unindexed from Google.” says Ryan. “This is because of Google’s canonical push, which means that if Google determined several pages on your website were too similar, they would only index one of those pages and consider it the canonical version of all the other pages that were very similar. If this happened to you, update your individual product/service pages to be completely unique and give lots of info about the product/service. Then, push to the Google search console for a recrawl.”

5. Ensure Your Site Supports Strong User Experience for Desktop and Mobile

Michael Zima, Co-Founder of Zima Media, LLC, wraps it all up by returning to the need to support the user.

“We have to remember that Google’s mission is to make the information of the world available in one click,” says Zima. “Now more than ever, your website content has to solve the searcher’s intent, visiting your website has to be a pleasure with a modern experience and everything has to be blazing fast since the mass rollout of the Google mobile-first indexing. We know Google is prioritizing the mobile version of your website for both searchers coming from either mobile devices or desktop computers as implied by the mobile-first name.”

Zima likens well-performing sites to Swiss army knives, unfolding with many utilities for the user. To accomplish that, he says, “We see more and more success by creating a reliable pillar webpage to bring more qualified clicks from Google by creating a meaningful piece of content instead of sprinting and creating several weaker and shorter pages.”

The post Google’s June 2019 Core Update: What You Need to Know 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.

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.

Email dates back more than four decades, but it’s still got a lot to offer for businesses that want to connect authentically and powerfully with a target audience.

If you think the email list is dead (or even dying) as a marketing tactic, think again. It’s alive and well, even among younger generations. According to a study commissioned by PowerInbox, more than half of all adults age 18 and up subscribe to at least one email newsletter. And those same subscribers do engage with advertising and offers in the emails; in fact, two-thirds say they’ll click special offers in an email if it’s interesting and relevant.

With so much to sort through online, consumers naturally spend more time and effort on the brands that do the work to reach them. That means you can’t rely on a tried-and-true automated email campaign or newsletter format to keep hitting it out of the ballpark, and if you’re seeing email engagement slide, it might be a good idea to try some new approaches (or possibly hire a talented newsletter writer).

But you don’t have to go far to scout out effective email campaigns: We’ve put together some tips and tricks garnered from real-life examples of effective lead-nurturing emails for you to check out.

1. Create Simple Messages from Individuals

Larry Kim of Mobile Monkey often shares great advice on Facebook Messenger marketing and specifics about his own marketing campaigns, and he’s scored some winning open and click-through rates with email marketing. It’s not surprising, because he knows how to put together an effective email that resonates with the reader and catches their attention.

But the unicorn marketer doesn’t make it flashy: he keeps it simple and direct. Check out the screenshot below for an example of one his marketing emails. The subject line, “check your phone” is simple but attention grabbing. In a list of emails in your inbox, this will stand out on a scan through because your immediate thought may be “Wait, did someone text me?”

Once you open the email, it’s addressed to you, poses an immediate question and starts to convey the message — all in a way that seems like Larry is talking directly to you. It’s a tactic that makes it more likely someone will click on the call to action or links provided later in the message. He also often links to his social media and blog posts, linking one piece of content with his entire channel.

2. Give Real Value for Free

Words like free, gift, freebie and give-away still resonate with individuals and drive crazy open rates. And that’s true whether you’re engaged in B2C or B2B marketing.

That said, used improperly or too frequently in your subject lines, these words can set off spam filters. Be sure to use them carefully, and make sure your subject lines don’t come across as spammy.

More than just promising value in your subject line, figure out what you can offer your subscribers that’s easy to deliver and not costly to you but will be valuable to readers.

Check out Digital Marketer’s early January promotional email below. Like the example from Larry Kim, it’s simple, personalized and comes from an individual in the company. But it also comes bearing free gifts, a fact which is stated in bold right in the first sentence. Talk about a hook.

3. Keep Mobile Users in Mind

Mobile bypassed desktop computing as the preferred platform for accessing internet content in general sometime between 2015 and 2016, and it didn’t take long for access to email to follow suit. According to ReturnPath, users were choosing mobile access to email over webmail at a rate of two to one as of 2017. (Webmail refers to online mail providers such as Gmail). Use of desktop email programs such as Outlook to receive and send emails was low on the preference list, and desktop email programs such as Outlook to receive and send emails was even further down.

Given those numbers, it’s critical to design your newsletters with mobile devices in mind. Keeping it simple does this, because a text-only email with basic links is going to display well on most screens. Just keep the length of paragraphs and list elements in mind. Shorter may be better, because mobile users could get tired of scrolling before they get to the goods if you’re long-winded.

But mobile doesn’t completely preclude longer content. Check out the screen shots below from part of a digest-style email from The Hustle. While this email had a single header graphic (that would have scaled on a mobile device), the rest is fairly simple and features small content chunks broken up by headers and white space.

4. Design and Write for Your Audience

When a sports scout is looking for a new pitcher for a baseball team, they aren’t just looking for someone who ticks all the boxes when it comes to curveballs and game stats. A good scout also looks for a player who will work well with and complement the existing team.

Your job in creating email marketing materials is similar: No matter what is performing for everyone else, you do what performs for your audience.

Check out the screen shot below of an email from Sarah Foil, who provides editing and other services to authors. You’ll note that the bulk of the email actually looks a lot like an Instagram post. That’s followed up with a very direct and conversational CTA that asks for the reader to take specific actions.

This works for Foil specifically because she knows exactly who her audience is: they’re also the audience for Bookstagram, a subset of Instagram that posts pictures and content about creating and reading books and general bookish lifestyle. It’s likely this image is going to naturally resonate with her audience.

To follow Foil’s example, figure out what your audience is interested in and what type of content they are likely to engage with online. Then, convert that into something that works for email.

Expert Advice, but No Easy Answers

If you’re here looking for a magic formula for email newsletters that succeed in 2019, we’re sorry to disappoint. The truth is, there aren’t typically easy answers in marketing. Instead, there’s a lot of expert advice, such as the breakdown above about types of email newsletters that work.

But the coach (or advice giver) can’t make the play for you. You might use a pinch hitter to create quality content for your newsletter or tweak your subject lines with an expert’s eye, but no one understands your brand like you do.

Whether you’re working with an agency to create your email marketing campaigns or doing the work in-house, take some time to really understand your audience and your message so you can hit it out of the ballpark with email marketing.

The post What Types Of Email Newsletters Are Most Effective in 2019? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Another month, another Google algorithm update. You’ve likely been hearing a lot about ‘Florida 2’ over the last week — and for good reason. As Roger Montti of Search Engine Lands put it, “It’s a big one.”

Although there’s been plenty of speculation over this latest core algorithm update by Google, with SEOs reporting significant ranking improvements and drops, we still don’t have a ton of clarity around the update.

Even its name has been a source of confusion. Is it actually Florida 2?

The short answer? No.

The long answer? You’ll find out below, along with a more detailed look at what’s going on here.

What is the March Google Algorithm update all about?

Google confirmed through Twitter that they released a “broad core algorithm update,” as they do several times each year.

A broad core update means that Google is not targeting a specific signal, tactic or niche; in fact, it often means it isn’t targeting anything. Broad updates are simply improvements in the overall algorithm for the purpose of better matching search queries to the best search results.

In plain and simple terms, these updates generally are an optimization of the existing process to ensure that great content that satisfies searcher intent continues to take its place at on the first page.

The update was confirmed to have started on March 12th, according to Danny Sullivan, Google’s public Search Liaison.

So why was it referred to as Florida 2?

Search Engine Land has a detailed article explaining this, but here’s a quick synopsis.

Florida 1 — also called Florida — was a significant update made in the early 2000s. It was the first major Google algorithm update, and it ensured the spammy tactics of the previous decade such as leveraging keyword-stuffed affiliate sites to rank for high-volume search terms and then linking to your actual site were no longer contributing to overall high search rankings.

This update left brands, agencies and consultants of the day scrambling to adjust SEO tactics in a major way. Ultimately, the change was for the best as it pushed brands to create higher-quality websites that had a clear focus on creating valuable content.

Florida laid the groundwork for other hard-hitting updates; ones that would impact the remainder of those aforementioned “spammy” websites.

The original Florida update launched in November, 2003 just before PubCon Florida in Orlando — hence the moniker “Florida.”

The March Core Algorithm Update also happened right around a PubCon event in Florida, so people decided to christen it as a sequel. WebMasterWorld.com was the first to refer to this update as Google Florida Update 2 as forum members discussed what impacts they were seeing.

To be clear, though, the two Florida updates are not necessarily related other than both launching when PubCon events were taking place in down South. Florida 1 targeted a specific tactic of using affiliate sites to rank for high-volume search terms and then funneling traffic back to the main site. Florida 2 is a core algorithm update and likely extends well beyond targeting just one tactic.

How does this impact my website?

While we’re still waiting for clarity around the overall impact of the update, we’re watching two things — what Google is reporting and what the experts are saying.

Google shared via Twitter that all sites should remain focused on creating great content. Outside of this recommendation, the search engine has yet to share what exactly this broad update impacts.

Anecdotally, we’re seeing many of our clients benefiting from these changes. They’re mostly focused on creating high-quality, informative content, so that does suggest this update rewards better content.

Who is the update impacting?

Members of the SEO community have been abuzz about websites focused on creating E-A-T content and how they’ve been impacted most.

E-A-T stands for:

• Expertise
• Authority
• Trustworthiness

At this point, discussion suggests that the update has impacted websites that host a lot of this type of informative content, with a particular focus on health sectors.

Further discussions indicate that sites with this type of content are being rewarded in search results, which might be coming at the detriment of sites with less informative content.

Here’s what we’re seeing…

Many SEOs are reporting it seems Google has updated how its algorithm looks at informational keywords as the primary focus. This has impacted many media pages including Complex, Everyday Health, Variety and more.

In SEO-speak, informational keywords are search terms where a user is looking for a specific bit of information. Think of informational as specific and focused — for example, “weather in London” or “alcohol percentage on Fat Tug Beer” as compared to “get play tickets in London” or “buy Canadian beer.” They’re more about learning something than making a transaction.

If you have a site that has a lot of content relating to these informational type keywords, you may have been impacted by this update.

Are you seeing this? Something else? Let us know in the comments.

What are SEO experts saying?

While we’re still waiting for more details on this update, we’re also looking to the experts for their feedback on the March update. Many are just speculating at this time, but it’s important to consider what they’re seeing through their lens.

Here is a collection of insights from several experts who are sharing their initial feedback on this latest update.

Notable SEO expert Mordy Oberstein has shared that many websites took a significant hit or increase in visibility, while failing to initially understand why. When looking at data from March 12 to March 18, some websites actually recovered within a few days. Mordy’s observation shares that this is too preliminary to determine what the actual impact of the update is, though it seems to be less significant when compared to the “Medic Update” from August, 2018.

Marie Haynes, an influencer in the SEO space, shared her thoughts within 48 hours of the update.

Dr. Pete Meyers, Marketing Scientist at Moz, echos Oberstein’s findings around the improvement of some websites that experienced significant declines in search rankings in the months leading up to this update:

WebMasterWorld had plenty of expert forum discussion on the change, with members reporting both positive and negative updates.

One discussion shared:

Based on previous observations these type of Core updates usually take a week+- to fully deployed. Most niches will be affected to varying degrees throughout the week with some days being more pronounced than others.

During the rollout of the update, some days will be up and some days will be down but I find if you have a large initial jump or drop that will be how your site comes out at the end, though it will be not as pronounced.

Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable and a self-proclaimed SEO geek is trying to gather SEO experts’ experiences with this update by asking them to take this survey and share what impacts they’ve seen.

Hopefully, he’ll share his results soon and we can all better understand the impact of this update.

Barry shares:

It is important to check your analytics, Google Search Console, ranking data, etc and see how your sites were impacted on or after March 12th. That is when you may or may not see changes, negative or positive changes.

As you can see, there’s a lot of discussion around this update among the experts, but we’re still trying to learn more and understand the update better.

In closing…

One thing we do know for certain — the update made on March 12 had a significant impact for many brands.

While Google has referred to this as a broad update in that it’s not made to target a specific signal or niche it’s interesting to note that their only advice was to focus on creating great content. That is a bit vague, but knowing that Google is focused on giving searchers the best possible content that best solves their needs, it seems that creating amazing SEO content is the best way to safeguard yourself against future algorithm updates.  

The post Florida 2? What’s Google’s March Core Algorithm Update Really All About? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

That’s a good question.

SEO professionals always have optimization on their minds. Ensuring their websites, content, and blog posts are as optimized as possible is critical to their success.

And, we’ve known for a long time that blog titles are a key element of optimizing a blog post. Brian Dean even states that they’re the most important on-page SEO factor. They’re a ranking factor on their own, and in recent years, they’ve become important for other reasons.

If you’re an experienced SEO professional or SEO content writer, you already know the importance of creating engaging titles and meta descriptions for your blog posts. And if you aren’t, I’m going to explain why blog titles are really important.

What Makes a Blog Title SEO-Friendly?

There are a few things to consider when it comes to blog titles and SEO. The truth is that most of the things that made a blog title SEO-friendly before 2019 still work. Most notably:

1. Keep titles under 60 characters
2. Include your primary keyword in the title
3. Write an engaging title that encourages searchers to click on your link in the Google results

A title that does all this is still likely to help you rank. The biggest difference now is that Google is looking beyond the title itself, and is now looking at the behavioral metrics it drives through RankBrain.

RankBrain helps Google determine which pages are the best to display in their search results, and it does that by seeing how users interact with your page and its metadata as it’s shown in search results. It’s critical your titles are optimized for this.

So, in 2019, do all of the things listed above, but also pay attention to the impact your titles have on Organic Clickthrough Rate (OCTR), Dwell Time, and Bounce Rate. If a title is underperforming, it’s time to test out a different title. Your titles need more than just keywords, they need to be optimized to improve these behavioral metrics..

What Makes an SEO Title Clickable?

Optimizing your title for your target keyword is great, but what makes a title more clickable? There is no magic answer to this question.

You need to focus on a strategy that mixes SEO-friendliness with curiosity, intrigue and a little emotion. The goal of your SEO title is to persuade a user into checking out your material. A good title will accomplish this by making a user curious and tapping into their emotions.

Keep in mind, your SEO title (meta title) can be different than the on-page title for your blog post.

So, what does a clickable SEO title look like?

• The message behind the title is based on the intent of the search term you’re targeting and optimized to appeal to users searching for it.
• It’s short. Long titles often get cut off by Google, making them less effective.
• It should include your main keyword if you want your content to show up on Google for specific keywords. However, keywords should be used naturally, and there’s nothing wrong with stop words like “in, an, it, etc.”
• The value proposition should be clear. If you’re solving a problem, try suggesting that your blog post has the answers they need. But, make sure your title accurately depicts the depth of your content or you might get a high bounce rate.

And be careful not to fall for this trap either.

If Google detects your title doesn’t represent the content properly, it’ll change it on its own. This is bad for SEO, and will often diminish the value of your post.

In the end, clickable titles are based on human psychology. If someone feels that a post can solve their problem, there is a good chance they will click on it to find the answers they are looking for. That’s why understanding searcher intent is critical to titles.

Keyword Focused Titles Alone Aren’t Enough

Human psychology plays a large part in whether someone clicks your link or not. I mentioned it above, but the power of curiosity should never be overlooked.

Think about it like this.

Most searches start when a potential customer has a problem. The first thing they’ll do is search for that problem using a keyword. In this scenario, let’s say they broke their glasses frame and want to piece them back together.

Logically, they type something like “fix broken glasses frame arm.” Here is a glimpse at the results:

So, which one do you choose? The video has a direct title and may be helpful because it’s visual, but the best and worst ways guide will show you several methods. As a reader, the extra choices draw you in.

The words you choose to accompany your keywords are important. Choose the wrong words, and you can waste a perfectly good blog post. In the above example, all of the titles focused on searcher intent in some form, which makes it more likely a searcher will click on their link.

Okay. What words are best?

There is no single answer to this question. You have to understand the type of content that you’re writing, and who you’re writing it for.

Are you writing a guide? Your title should suggest you have the solution.

Are you trying to inform your audience? Try establishing why your topic is urgent and worth reading.

When your title appears in Google results, as shown above, it’s really acting as a headline for your post. And if the idea of writing strong headlines makes you cry a little inside, don’t worry, this next section was written just for you.

Headline Enhancing Tools Exist – Use Them!

Even some of the best content writers struggle with headlines. If this sounds familiar, there are tools you can use to improve your headline game.

I like the CoSchedule Headline Analyzer because it breaks the anatomy of your headlines down like DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man.

I made this headline up, but you can see that it scored reasonably well. If we look deeper at this headline, we can see that it had a strong mix of emotional and power words.

The tool also looks at your title length when determining your score. This feature is great as you can identify when your titles that are too long.

For WordPress websites, I recommend checking out Yoast’s SEO plugin. The plugin will analyze your titles and posts for things like:

• Focus keywords
• SEO-friendly meta descriptions
• Proper length
• Keyword density
• Internal linking
• Readability

And best of all, both of these tools are free. So, you have no reason not to use them when it comes to creating SEO-friendly blog titles.

SEO Titles Take Practice

At the end of the day, SEO titles aren’t rocket science. Know your keyword, the intent behind it, and write a title that your audience resonates with. That’s the key to any successful SEO content, not just titles.

Just remember, creating high-performing SEO titles requires proper keyword research, a certain understanding of human behavior, and probably a bit of testing.

And some days you may feel like this:

But if you keep writing, improving, and plan for the long haul, you’ll do just fine.

The post What Does an SEO-Friendly Blog Title Look Like in 2019? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Spoiler Alert: The answer is no.

Absolutely, positively, and without reservations, focusing on high-density keyword articles is a bad idea, and if you find one in the wild you should quietly escort it into the woods and put it out of its misery. It’s a mercy.

And I’d recommend you never, ever, EVER write one yourself. I’d add another “ever”, because it’s appropriate, but I don’t want to get dinged for word stuffing.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. In the years book-ending 2000 keyword stuffing was a perfectly valid and widely practiced SEO strategy. SEO experts would write “keyword articles”, where the bulk of their SEO content was keywords and related keyword phrases, barely held together by just enough filler content to vaguely approximate a real article.

Writers active during this time will remember (not so fondly) clients asking for specific keyword densities with their articles. I’ve seen briefs that asked for as high as 15% density.

The result? These articles were often mostly unintelligible. The text would be so stuffed with every permutation of the keywords being targeted that it resembled the English language only in the way that Play-Doh Fun Factory soft serve resembles ice cream or Nickelback resembles music.

But this worked because search engines
at the time weren’t savvy enough to realize they were being gamed. And this
situation lasted longer than you might expect, but it had an expiration date.

Panda
Mauls Keyword Articles

As the early 2000s wore on search engines, and Google specifically, got incrementally better at recognizing and penalizing keyword stuffing, and as a result keyword stuffing got gradually subtler, but still remained a common strategy for SEO professionals. But in 2011, with Google’s release of their now famous Panda update, keyword stuffing and keyword articles were read their last rites and pronounced dead.

Panda, named for Navneet Panda, the
Google employee responsible for the machine learning breakthrough which
underpinned the entire update, allowed Google’s engine to rank pages based on
hundreds of different metrics, and then cross reference those results with user
experiences. And it could do this on a massive scale. In very short order
Google’s search results got orders of magnitude smarter.

Rand Fishkin, founder and former CEO of Moz, summed up Panda’s impact this way:

“So, Panda kind of means something new and different for SEO. As SEOs, for a long time you’ve been…building good content, making it accessible to search engines, doing good keyword research, putting those keywords in there, and then trying to get some links to it. But you have not, as SEOs, we never really had to think as much or as broadly about, ‘What is the experience of this website? Is it creating a brand that people are going to love and share and reward and trust?” Now we kind of have to think about that.’”

For the first time, in a really meaningful way, Google was able to distinguish a site that people found useful, memorable, and generally likable from pages people found confusing, grating and unhelpful. Suddenly keyword articles and keyword stuffing were a major drag on search rankings, because Google’s machine learning algorithm associated them with low quality sites with poor user experiences.

If
Keyword Articles Are Dead, What Replaced Them?

No one thing replaced keyword articles. Instead a whole new way of thinking about creating content for SEO was born. A better question then might be, “What’s constitutes good SEO content in 2019?”

Keywords
Are Still Important

To start, keywords still play a role, though it’s dramatically deprecated from the heady keyword days of the early 2000s. You want to try and get your target keywords into your page title, meta description, H1 header and somewhere in the body. But once is enough. Unless it organically fits in other places (and it often will) it shouldn’t be wedged in. You can almost guarantee Google will devalue your content if your keywords are stuffed in places that feel spammy and disjointed. And, so will readers.

Next, it helps to place semantically connected keywords in your body content as well. These are keywords and keyword phrases that are meaningfully connected to your targeted keywords and help establish that your content is the most semantically complete piece of content for the intent it aims to solve.

ALSO – Why Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords Allow for Better SEO

But above all, search intent is the most important part of creating content for SEO, as we’ll soon see. Semantically related words and topics help Google understand the intent of your page. If your target keywords are “grilling burgers”, is your page about how to cook them or where to buy them? If you add semantically-related phrases and subjects like:

• Gas grill
• Quality charcoal
• Indirect grilling

your intent becomes clearer. Tying semantically-related words to your keywords and topics helps Google determine whether your article is the best and most comprehensive article for a given search. And, a semantically complete article is much more valuable for your readers.

ALSO – Copywriting for SEO: How to Be Sure Your eCommerce Copy Converts and Ranks

Searcher
Intent is Where You Focus

Google’s search algorithms try and serve up the most relevant results based on what it thinks is the intent of the user’s search phrase. So if someone searches for “grilled burgers proper temperature” it’s likely Google will guess they’re looking for information about grilling burgers, not locations of restaurants that sell grilled burgers.

They’re likely to get the latter if they were to search for “grilled burgers restaurants”. The more that you can do to optimize your content to match your targeted searcher intent around the keywords you’re targeting, the better your content will do in search rankings.

Keyword
Research is Key

According to Joshua Hardwick, Head of Content at Ahrefs,

“Google’s entire business model relies on them serving the most appropriate result in the top spot. You can use that fact to your advantage by checking your gut instinct against what currently ranks for your target keyword.”

It’s still important to research what keywords to target.. You need to see what people are searching for.

Note – You don’t always want to optimize for the most competitive words though, because those can be much harder to rank for and are often too broad. Most SEO tools will give you an idea of organic competitiveness.

We won’t get into keyword research too much here except to point you in the direction of several great tools to help. Here are several you might consider:

• Google’s Keyword Planner
• SEMrush Keyword Magic (paid)
• Keysearch
• Keyword Tool
• Moz’s Keyword Explorer (paid)

In our example you wouldn’t optimize for “burgers” because it’s simply too broad a concept. Instead you want to look for words related to burgers that are commonly searched for that more closely fit your page’s intent. “Grilled burgers” or “burger recipes” or “properly grilling burgers”. And then, you would expand to semantically related keywords and topics that add more depth.

Bear in mind though that optimizing for searcher intent isn’t about cramming in as many semantically-related keywords are you can. You’ll definitely get devalued for that.

Your process should be organic. Think of these keywords as topics that your article should cover. More than anything, keywords should tell you what searchers what you to write about – not which keywords you should include.

You want to work in keywords that fit well with the content you’re creating, and this shouldn’t be difficult because…the content you’re creating is intended to service the specific intent you’re targeting.

If you’re finding it hard to work your keywords in, your content is likely already failing on other fronts and will not rank well. Notably, you’re likely not covering the topics the keywords represent.

You should focus on delivering great content that does a great job of satisfying what consumers most likely want from it. If you’re doing that a lot of the other stuff follows fairly naturally.

Make
Sure it Looks Good

Brian Dean with Backlinko doesn’t mince words on this point. He says,

“Design is THE most underrated part of content marketing. You can have the best content ever written. But if it looks like this… [A giant text block straight out of 1998] …it’s not gonna work. That’s why I invest A LOT of time and money into content design.”

Remember. Google’s looking to rank sites people want to visit. If your page is ugly, clunky or confusing you will never rank well. So make sure your pages don’t suck.

ALSO – How’s Your Image SEO Game?

Keyword Articles Are Dead. Let’s Move On

To reiterate our initial answer to our initial question, high-density keyword articles are to SEO as eight-tracks are to modern home audio.

They shouldn’t be used in modern SEO. Not even ironically. They don’t help SEO and will only serve to damage your page ranking. If Google finds out you’re engaging in keyword stuffing they may send a very angry, hungry panda to teach you a lesson.

Please don’t make them do that.

The post Do High-Density Keyword Articles Still Have a Place in SEO? 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.

Why?

Because the sheer amount of writing now required for even small and midsize businesses makes this impossible to avoid: Any content created for organizations should be subject to proofreading at a bare minimum and more thorough editing at best. But, that doesn’t always happen.

For many companies, however, a more specific pain point has emerged: Technical writing. Engineering firms, software development companies, medical organizations and manufacturing enterprises must transform complex concepts into actionable, easy-to-read insights. For many, it’s hard to strike a balance in-house — how do they retain core concepts without frustrating their audience? How do they ensure simplicity without compromising specificity?

The solution? Hire a technical writer. But what makes a great technical writer? What skills are must-haves for businesses to get the biggest return on their writing investment?

Technical Writing at a Glance?

Technical writing is the ability to simplify complex concepts for a specific audience. Great technical writing does more than just get the message across — it helps engage readers and motivate them to learn more about a subject.

Given the increasing complexity of business operations and the quickly-expanding role of technology in day-to-day business processes, highly-skilled technical writers are now in demand. As noted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the market for technical writing is forecast to grow at 11 percent per year — faster than average in comparison to the job market at large.

It makes sense: As companies look for ways to deliver engaging content that both demystifies complex topics and resonates with readers, they’re on the hunt for technical writers capable of quickly delivering top-tier content on-demand.

While any company could find themselves in need of a technical writer, organizations involved in IT, manufacturing, engineering or medical sciences are often tasked with converting nuanced and detailed concepts into clear and concise prose. This could take the form of user manuals, eBooks, specification sheets, technical product documentation or even press releases.

Top 10 Business Must-Haves

As the job market grows, both business demand and the technical writing labor force will increase.

The result?

Evaluation becomes critical: What separates one writer from another? What skills and talents make them the best-fit for your business? What assurances do you have that their work will be completed on-time and require minimal revision?

Here’s a look at the top 10 must-have skills for your next technical writer.

1) Content Clarity

The top skill for any technical writer? Producing content that’s easily readable, engaging and logically segmented to draw reader interest. This is no simple task — many experts in your company have vast technical knowledge but lack the ability to clearly communicate what they know to anyone who doesn’t share their skill set.

Best bet? Before bringing on a technical writer, ask them to create a small set of trial content based on information you provide.

2) Audience Awareness

Not all technical writing targets the same audience.

Consider a user manual. For front-line staff members, actionable and simplified use cases are ideal — they need to understand how the service works and what to do if they encounter common issues. For more tech-savvy management staff, this same manual requires greater depth and complexity; a stand out technical writer can speak to both audiences with equal facility.

ALSO – Find Your Target Audience With This 4 Step Formula

3) Brand Alignment

Your brand has a mission. Key values. Value propositions. And while technical writing is often used to create internal documentation for a product or service, brand alignment is critical to ensure users, managers and stakeholders alike recognize can identify a cohesive brand narrative. In the same way software developers consult with IT teams to understand their needs, technical writers should ensure all content meets brand expectations.

4) Professional Planning

Creating great technical documentation requires great planning. The result? Businesses need writers capable of creating content plans and carrying through on expectations to meet specific deadlines. While this can be difficult to evaluate in face-to-face meetings or via email, it’s worth asking prospective writers for references that can verify both timeliness and attention to detail.

ALSO – The Struggles With Content Planning and How to Overcome Them

5) Corporate Communication

A great technical writer also has the soft skills to go beyond the keyboard and easily interact with SMEs (subject matter experts). Why? Because these SMEs are the critical link between products and services that require documentation and content that clearly articulates requirements, expectations and context.

Simply put? Great writers aren’t enough: You also need great technical communicators.

6) Superior Sourcing

From creating user experience documents to product guides and technical checklists, sourcing is critical for above-average content. Great technical writers need the ability to combine provided sources with relevant outside information to produce documents that can be adjusted to serve multiple end users.

7) Concept Conversion

Many companies recognize the need for good technical writing but aren’t sure how to effectively translate business concepts into readable content. Great writers do more than simply write to the brief their given — they’re able to take abstract concepts, ground them in conversational language and create relatable work that doesn’t lose its technical impact.

8) Education (or Experience)

Writing skill sets vary considerably, making it difficult to directly compare technical content creators. A degree in communications is often a good indicator of technical writing skills, but it’s also worth looking for more specific training such as Bachelor’s or Master’s degrees in computer science or engineering. Experience is also critical. Writers with years of experience and extensive client lists are often in high demand for a reason.

Depending on your industry, finding someone with demonstrable industry training and experience could prove a huge asset. Technical writers tasked with writing documentation for programming languages, for instance, benefit tremendously if they have a background in software engineering.

9) Web Savvy (or Willingness to Learn)

Web skills are great add-ons for technical writers, such as the ability to use and modify HTML documents, interact with CMS tools or leverage CSS. If these skills are a must-have but experience is lacking, look for established technical writers with a willingness to learn.

10) Adaptive Aesthetics

Great content that looks terrible won’t engage users or drive uptake. In addition to their “core” writing skills, technical writers should also have the ability to visually assess technical documents and make adjustments as required. This includes everything from breaking up long paragraphs for better readability to including bulleted lists that provide actionable takeaways.

Note – this doesn’t mean that technical writers need to be designers. It means they should write their content in a way that isn’t going to drive the designer crazy.

The Write Stuff

Technical writing is now a must-have for companies of all sizes and industry verticals. But not all writers offer the same ROI — start with our top 10 must-find list to make sure the writer you hire can produce the content you need.

The post What Makes a Good Technical Writer? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Are shorter blog posts your best bet, or does long-form content generate more engagement?

In a world of shifting content marketing expectations, it’s easy for companies to miss the mark and suffer the SEO consequences. Here’s what you need to know about blogs, length and getting the most for your digital content dollars.

Long Story Short: Content Trends

The title gives it away — long-form content is quickly becoming the standard for sites that want to drive solid SEO. Total it up, and you’ll find that this piece falls into a sweet spot of 1,200 to 1,300 words — enough to offer more in-depth insight without overwhelming audiences.

But what’s driving this trend? And are companies really seeing a difference between long and short blog posts?

To answer the last question first, absolutely. As noted by Search Engine Land, long posts rank extremely well.

Top-ranked posts typically break the 2,000 word mark, and longer posts generate more backlinks on average. According to Small Business Trends, search engines theoretically find long-form content easier to categorize and contextualize.

At first glance, it definitely makes sense to write or buy blog content in excess of 2,000 words to capitalize on this trend.

But is that the whole story?

The Value Challenge

The data is clear. Longer pieces generally perform better, make it easier to add links and, as noted by The Next Web, can help improve social media sharing.

So why bother with short-form blog posts?

Because there’s a marked difference between a good blog post that happens to be short and a long blog post that’s only long because it “should” be. And that difference has a name: Value.

Longer posts aren’t just generating traffic because they’re long — they offer companies the chance to go in-depth about topics that interest them and add value for users.

However, it quickly becomes very obvious if businesses are prioritizing post length over value.

Think of it as finding a balance between fluff and fact. If you only need 500 words to get the message across, don’t write 1,000 words. While smaller posts may not generate as much traffic, they’re often a great source of inspiration for longer posts that draw out or dive into specific details.

And while data seems to indicate that longer posts perform better (and on average they do), that’s largely because they better satisfy searcher intent. If you do an excellent job satisfying searcher intent with a shorter post, you may outrank competitors with longer posts that are made up of weaker information.

ALSO: Thought Leadership in Content: What It Really Means

Short Blog Posts: Finding the “Write” Amount

Numbers should be your secondary concern behind searcher intent. If you can answer customers’ questions with short content or solve their problems with a short blog post, do it. Prioritize creating content to solve searcher needs and not word count targets if positive organic outcomes are your goal.

That said, word count is your secondary concern, and you should be aware of how long your competitors’ content is. I’d recommend using a tool such as SEMrush’s SEO Content Template to see how long your competitors’ content is and what topics they’ve covered. While you don’t necessarily have to write more than they have, this can give you a good ballpark and guide you to create more semantically complete content.

Because every search term has a different competitive landscape, how much you need to write varies a lot. In general, though, different lengths of blog posts are going to serve different objectives.

So what’s the ideal amount to write? Let’s break it down:

• 500 words(ish): These quick-hitter blogs are useful if you’re reporting on newsworthy items, announcing new products or bringing in guest posters. Don’t expect massive traffic returns here, but a well-written piece may generate some organic shares and comments.
• Sub-1000 words: Content that’s anywhere between 500 and 1000 words is still considered short content and remains the length of choice for most online journalists. It’s long enough to tackle one topic and delve just below the surface, in turn prompting further discussion.
• 1000 – 1500 words: This is what many advertising and content marketing firms now consider the “ideal” blog post length. It’s not exactly long or short, falling somewhere in the middle and making it possible to take on multiple aspects of a single topic in one post. Well-written pieces of this length can generate solid SEO and reliable traffic over time.
• 2000 words and over: These are the big ones — in-depth, well-researched blog posts that don’t shy away from going deep and discussing complex topics. If they’re well-written, these longer posts own the ranking game. Keep in mind, though, that low-quality posts are easy to spot and entirely ignored by curious users.

ALSO: Is Long-Form Content The Way to Go?

Look Before You Long-Form

If everyone else is going long-form, you should too — right?

Not without a plan.

Longer content alone doesn’t guarantee consumer interest, organic shares and backlinks. You need to create content that users want to read.

Start with what’s sometimes referred to as the “skyscraper method:”

• Research top keywords that align with your business objectives to see what content tops the list.
• Read through and discover what type of content is already on the web. How long are these pieces? How in-depth?
• Look for spaces where your company can fill in knowledge gaps or offer deeper coverage to stand out from the crowd. Tools such as SEMrush’s SEO Content Template or MarketMuse can help you identify possible topic areas and begin building out your content strategy.

What does this mean for longer posts?

If you find high-quality short content that’s generating significant traffic for your competitors, consider building out a long-form strategy that leverages key points but delivers more in-depth analysis.

If keyword analysis turns up minimal content of any length, start with short-form pieces to prime your audience and update the pieces over time as needed.

No matter the existing content landscape, remember that your goal isn’t just to hit a particular word count or write longer posts than your competitors — it’s to create high-quality content that aligns with consumer interest and delivers immediate value.

Reader, Interrupted

Short posts also come with a unique advantage over their longer cousins. They’re quicker to read and digest. Sure, this is obvious, but what’s not so apparent is the impact on users if they’re interrupted while reading a long-form article.

Let’s say they’re halfway through a 2000-word piece you’ve put weeks of work into. A colleague or family member breaks their concentration, and after the distraction, they try to refocus on the post at hand. As noted by Inc., however, it takes 23 minutes to recover after a distraction and get back on track. The result is that readers may give up halfway through your content — not because it’s poorly-written or missing the mark, but because they can’t find enough time.

Short content in the 500 to 1000 word range can be consumed in 2-5 minutes, making it far more likely that readers will stay until the end and be curious enough to comment or read more.

The Short Stack

Long isn’t always better. There are some areas where short-form posts excel. These include “episodic” content posted over a set period of time; smaller connected posts published at regular intervals can help keep readers engaged. Diving into cluster items from SEO topic clusters are also well-served by shorter posts since they may not require the depth to support longer-form content.

Don’t just take our word for it. As noted by Forbes, sites like Tech Crunch are out there generating $2.5 million every month. Take a look at their site, and you’ll find the vast majority of content is less than 1000 words. Meanwhile, massively popular site Huffington Post covers breaking news with pieces ranging from sub-500 words to more than 2,000.

TL;DR?

The stats are in. It’s a long-form world — in-depth, deep-coverage content outperforms shorter blog pieces.

But this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule. Badly-written, extremely long content won’t do you any favors, while tight, short copy can help engage users and set the stage for more in-depth discussions, comments and social media shares.

Bottom line? There’s still a place for short blogs posts in a long-form world.

The post Are Short Blog Posts Worth It in a Long-Form World? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

In case you missed it, here’s a link to the slides and recording.

I had a great time chatting with Krista about this topic and seeing firsthand how SEMrush’s suite of tools can support a great city page program with keyword research, topic and question discovery and local rank tracking.

Be sure to check out the replay if you’re looking for help with those areas, or send Krista a note.

The live chat was pretty lively for this webinar, and we were asked some really great questions.

I answered the questions that came up during the webinar, but I feel that many of them deserve more in-depth information.

With that in mind, here are the top questions I was asked along with some more detailed responses.

Google likes fresh content. What do you add to the city pages to make them fresh?

This is a great question, as freshness is an important ranking factor with Google. If you’re creating and managing a large number of city pages, keeping their content fresh could be a challenge.

The way I see this, there are two main ways you can keep fresh content on your pages:

1. Dynamically
2. Manually

Dynamic content can be a lot easier to manage, as it shouldn’t require you to spend any time creating it. This can include things such as user-generated content (reviews, questions and answers, etc), product or data feeds (MLS listings, event feeds, etc) and even social media feeds.

The beauty in this type of content is that it’s always updating. You can’t get much fresher than that.

The downside is you might not always have control over it. If there’s a risk of bad content being published, you might need to jump in and curate the content. These elements typically represent a small portion of your page’s overall content, so the bulk of your page would still be static.

What we see most of our clients do is develop a schedule for manually refreshing all of their city page content. One partner has a list of 300 city pages that they constantly refresh, starting over once they’ve finished a cycle.

If you get into a regular routine and have the resources to manage and stick to it, freshness should be easy for you.

Here are the main reasons we see companies refreshing their content:

1. Seasonality: Getting fresh content in advance of the holiday season, for example, is a good way to boost search rankings and connect with users.
2. Business changes: If you change how you operate in a city, it’s important your copy is updated.
3. Local changes: Sometimes the environment you operate in changes, so it’s also important to refresh your content to reflect that.
4. SEO driven: This is probably the biggest reason, but clients tend to refresh pages when its SEO performance calls for it. If rankings slip or new competitors emerge with better content, it might be time to improve your content.

If you’d like more info on creating fresh content for city pages, be sure to check out our ebook.

ALSO: 3 Simple but Powerful Blogging Strategies for Local SEO

Is Schema markup useful with city pages?

Absolutely!

Google uses schema markup to find relevant content that it can include in featured snippets. With city pages, this often shows up with your page’s content being included in their Instant Answers and People Also Ask sections.

Say I was considering a trip to Iceland and searched for “What type of car to rent in Iceland?”

This is what I’d see at the top of Google results (beneath the ads):

You can see the Instant Answer points to a page created to answer questions like this. You can also check out the Instant Answers from Iceland Like a Local and Frommers . If you click through to those pages, you can see that they’ve set up schema, which makes them more likely to get picked for these featured snippets.

Note: I used the OpenLink Structured Data Sniffer (OSDS) to look at these pages. Doing this, you can see what types of schema markup your competitors are using. SEMrush can also help you identify competitors using schema.

While schema can help you get selected for Google’s featured snippets, you do need to have high-quality content that will deliver a great result to searchers who see the snippet.

In the case of the People Also Ask section, you need to have great answers to those questions. Adding an FAQ section to your page is a good way to present this content in an easy-to-read manner that also makes it easy for Google to pull your content.

You probably know what a lot of these FAQs are, but as I mentioned on the webinar, often you’ll discover long-tail keywords when doing your keyword research that are actually questions you can answer on your page. If you do this, you’ll help your chances for getting featured in a snippet and create more semantically complete content that delivers a better user experience, which on its own can lift all your search rankings.

Tip: Krista actually highlighted how SEMrush’s keyword research tools can surface questions for you, which makes for great content on your pages.

Can you get covered if you are in a suburb?

Yep, but you want to approach how you present information about suburbs with caution.  

If you have great locally relevant content for the suburb that visitors would be looking for and is more useful than getting generic corporate info, you’re probably safe to create a suburb page of its own.

You’ll also want to do some keyword research to determine if there is sufficient search volume to make it worth your time. What I’ve seen is that many suburbs don’t have search terms with enough search volume to make creating a page for it worth your while. If this is the case, searchers might be looking for your services in the main metro, and you might want to focus on ranking for terms at the metro level.

Including sections about each suburb on the main metro’s page can actually beef up the content of that page, make it more semantically complete and more likely to rank well.

You might still create city pages if there’s a bigger business case for doing so. If you have locations in multiple suburbs, you might want them to each present their unique info and make it so that visitors to your site can navigate to their closest location.

How do you handle “surrounding cities” when our service area isn’t just the current city but other cities? We do not have locations in other cities.

This question is similar to the one above. I mentioned this on the webinar, but if you provide services in surrounding cities but don’t have physical locations there (hence are not eligible for a GMB account or inclusion in the Local Pack), city pages can get you ranked for valuable local search terms from those surrounding cities.

Make sure you can reasonably provide services to those cities, and if you can, go ahead and create a city page for them — as long as there’s enough search volume to make it worth your while.

​Does content length matter? I was once advised to aim for 2,500 words with my keywords intermixed throughout, but I found this to be content overload for my users

It does matter.

But, it’s not a simple answer, and I would never throw out a ballpark number to hit with every page. There are a few factors you should look into:

1. How many words do you need to write to solve the searcher intent you found doing your keyword research and create semantically diverse content?
2. How long is your competitors’ content? You’ll likely want to write more than them (and solve searcher intent better). Check out SEMrush’s SEO Content Template to get detailed analysis on your competitors’ pages
3. How much content can you fit into your page’s design without overwhelming visitors?

If you answer all these questions, you should get a sense of how long your content should be.

Creating comprehensive content that fits nicely into a design template is incredibly effective.

​How do you pass authority to these city pages from the main site? For example, do you just link to the main overall Locations page, which then links to all the town/city pages?

That’s probably the easiest and most effective way of doing it. This also makes it simple for your visitors to find the city pages they’re interested in and switch between locations.

If you have a smaller volume of pages, you might also consider creating fresh content on your blog or news section that covers topics unique to each city, and then link back to the associated city page. We do see many clients doing this, but it can be a bit of work.

Many companies will also tie their local SEO programs in with these city pages by linking directly to the city page from the associated local directory and GMB profiles.

When you say navigation, is the sitemap enough, or do you need it in the menu or just a link from a landing page?

I don’t think the sitemap alone would be enough for these pages. It’s really important to remember that you should only be creating city pages if you can present unique, locally relevant info to your visitors. If you can, you should make it easy for them to access that info, which means it should be a prominent part of your navigation.

Just including them in your sitemap might also run the risk of Google considering your pages Doorway Pages.

When identifying Doorway Pages, Google looks at a few things that might cause problems here:

1. Is the page a part of the site’s navigation?
2. Does the page exist only to rank for search traffic?
3. Do the pages all funnel visitors to an actual page with value?

​What are the different actions we can take to land in the local pack versus organic results?

This webinar focused mostly on getting ranked in the organic results, as does our ebook. At a high level, a good city page program can help you get ranked in organic results for city specific search terms for your locations or areas you serve.

Getting found in the local pack is the focus of local SEO at large. SEMrush has some great local SEO resources, and I’d really suggest diving into those.

ALSO: How to Design and Implement a Local Landing Page SEO Program

Do you recommend creating town or area pages in addition to city pages?

Sometimes.

I can’t say that would be a good strategy for every business, but I think it comes down to two main questions you need to ask:

1. Do I provide uniquely local services at the town or area level such that users will find local info valuable?
2. Is there sufficient search traffic for search terms that these pages could try to rank for?

If the answer to both questions is yes, you might consider going to the town, area or neighborhood level with your local pages.

Creating the content for these would be much the same as what we presented on the webinar and in the ebook.

There are actually some cool things if you do this. If you’re familiar with Hubspot’s Topic Clusters model for SEO, you can treat the city page as your pillar, and then the smaller locations become cluster items that support the city page.

​Do you usually add the state to the city page URL or H1?

This can be valuable, but you’d want to consider what you’re trying to optimize for and what your overall local page structure looks like.

Again, I’d look at the keyword research to see what the search volumes are for the locations you’re targeting. If a lot of the search terms include state, this could be a really good idea. A lot of our clients do this.

Many clients also create state pages, which then link down to each city page that state includes. If you opt for a setup like that, you’d want to make sure you don’t end up cannibalizing the state page’s targeted keywords.

Wrapping Up

These were the top questions we were asked that I felt warranted more detailed answers. If you have any other questions about city pages, be sure to get in touch, and I’d be happy to chat.

The post Answers to 10 Interesting Questions About Creating High-Quality City Pages appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

We were there exhibiting and showing off our self-serve content marketplace as well as our fully-managed enterprise writing services.

It was a great experience for a number of reasons. We loved meeting hundreds of great folks at the conference and hearing directly what’s working well for them with SEO and PPC .

We also had the opportunity to check out a number of awesome sessions. SMX went above and beyond presenting a great lineup of speakers this year, and I’d really encourage you to check out the slides they’ve made available to see if any of the presentations can help you out.

A couple of presentations that I particularly enjoyed were:

Solving Complex SEO Problems

by Hannah Thorpe

This presentation was awesome, and I think really captured where SEO is heading. Hannah goes in-depth discussing how Google is becoming a discovery engine, versus just a search engine. Be sure to check this out for some great advice on how you can optimize for discovery as well.

SEO Diagnostics – How to Identify Complex SEO Issues

by Arsen Rabinovich

It’s probably not surprising that most of the sessions I really enjoyed were in the SEO track. Arsen did a great job with this presentation and provides a great framework for identifying and resolving SEO issues that arise. I found his section on “SEO Triage” especially valuable.

Creating High-Value City Pages That Delight Visitors and Drive Traffic

by me

I was thrilled to get the chance to talk about creating high-value city pages at this year’s SMX East. We had a great attendance, many thoughtful questions and a number of people came and chatted with us about city pages after.

The Dogs of SMX – Part Two

We first introduced our “Director of Content Barketing” dog bandannas earlier this year at SMX Advanced, and we were handing them out again at SMX East!

People seemed to love them, and we actually gave away every bandanna we brought with us. It was really fun to chat with people about our furry friends, and many of them were kind enough to send us photos of their dogs sporting their new bandannas.

Here’s the collection of photos we’ve received:

View this post on Instagram

Director of barketing #benji #dogsofnyc #dogsofnewyork #mommysboy #happydog #maltipoo #dailybarker #ruffpost #happy #directorofbarketing #dogsofinstagram #dogsofinsta #newyork #smx

A post shared by Benji (@leongbenji) on Oct 24, 2018 at 7:13pm PDT

View this post on Instagram

“I got a new part time job as director of barketing.” #dogsofsmx

A post shared by Everette Da Bubba (@everettedabubba) on Jul 26, 2018 at 7:40pm PDT

The post SMX East Recap + The Dogs of SMX Part Two appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

We all know — quality content is king.

As noted by Forbes, “It’s what separates the winners from the losers online; it’s what will help your site rank well in the search engines, what will naturally attract high-quality inbound links and what will help you build trust, credibility and authority with your audience.”

That’s a tall order for any digital strategy, made more so by the fact that content doesn’t last forever — what once generated backlinks and visitor numbers worthy of social media humblebrags can quickly become stale and unappealing.

But how do you know when it’s time to shift gears and consider content rewriting to get your website or blog back on track?

Here are six situations that call for digital do-overs.

You’ve Changed, Man

Change is inevitable. Maybe it’s your corporate focus. Maybe you’ve updated your mission statement or branched out into new industry verticals.

Guess what?

That “perfect” blog post you purchased last year isn’t doing the job. Sure, you could spend the time and money creating an entirely new post, or you could hire an article rewriter to put a fresh spin on your content while adding updated information.

Think of it like this: There’s no reason to toss quality articles, but their value shifts over time. If your company incorporates big changes, make sure your content follows suit.

ALSO: 3 Reasons Why Spring Calls For a Content Refresh 

Content Rewriting: Readin’ for the Season?

Targeted copy outperforms generic content. This is especially true as the months-long period of the “holiday season” emerges from its food coma each year — your site needs relevant, seasonal keyword-driven content to help capture user interest during this period

If most of your content is mostly working, it’s probably not worth the cost of complete text rewriting just to hop on the holiday bandwagon.

Worth your time, though, are quick rewrites and updates that leverage what you’ve already got to create seasonally-themed web copy, product descriptions or gift-buying guides.

Performance Problems

It can happen to any company. Suddenly your SEO numbers aren’t up to their usual standards and unique visitor numbers are dropping.

First step? Find your problem. It might be:

• New Competitors Up in Your Business: The nature of digital business makes it possible for new competitors to spring up seemingly overnight. If your SEO numbers drop, it’s time for a competitive SEO analysis. If you’re not number one, opt for a competitive content do-over.
• The Smell of Stale Content: Fresh content drives SEO. Stale content — even if it’s still relevant — limits search engine exposure. Keep things fresh with periodic content rewrites.
• Major Search Engine Algorithm Updates: Big search engines like Google occasionally change how they rank and list page results. The caveat? They don’t always make these changes obvious (or public). If you notice tanking rankings with no other cause, be sure to check with a tool like SEMrush’s search sensor, which will tell you if there’s been an algorithm change and what it seems to target.  If the change targets site content (and it often will), learn what you need to change and consider content writing with a focus on the new reality of SEO.

Break it Down

It’s worth paying for long-form, high-quality outsourced content such as white papers and case studies prepared by research firms and professional freelancers: You get above-average textual content that’s data-rich and brand-driven to help your business perform.

The challenge?

Many readers won’t wade through long-form studies and surveys; they want bite-size readable content that satisfies their desire for info without wasting their time. Here, high-quality content rewriting services can help break existing resources down into multiple assets. For example, you could turn a 2000-word white paper into four or five blog posts or break a case study into multiple articles.

Repurposing content presents a huge opportunity to make it more digestible for readers and help you extract more value from the investment you’ve made in creating it. Many content marketers report repurposing a single piece of content more than 10 times.

ALSO: Repurposing Content to Drive SEO Results

Inherited Issues

Maybe you’ve inherited subpar content from another marketer or content that was written for a different age. Often, the domain age — rather than any in-text value — makes this content worth keeping.

But what’s the best strategy to make use of this content?

In some cases, a quick pass with proofreading tools or paraphrasing tools can snap this content into shape. In others, you may need full-on rewrites to preserve the pages’s domain age but deliver readable text.

Regardless of the level of work required, rewriting this older content presents an opportunity for you to take under performing content and make it shine.

Looking For Budget Friendly Content

The need for fresh, relevant content is more present than ever. And, in a pinch, a company light on time or budget might look for easy ways to get content to promote.

There’s no such thing as free content — at least not content of value. While free online article spinners promise something for nothing, offering to create new articles from your existing content, you’re better served improving content than simply imitating its style.

Do a quick search, and you’ll come across a host of article rewriting tools or “article spinners” that (for a low, low fee!) will repurpose old articles by paraphrasing current content, inserting synonyms where possible and effectively giving your digital assets a second life.

As noted by Search Engine Journal, however, these article spinning services often deliver unreadable results.

For example, one synonym for the word “digital” is “numerary.”

If your original content dives into the need for “digital transformation” but the text spinner spits out a piece about “numerary revolution,” your SEO isn’t going anywhere but down. And, your readers are going to be very confused.

In practice, rewriting content presents an alternative to risky methods of getting low-cost content such as content spinning. This means tapping experienced article rewriters to repurpose old content but add new insights, in effect keeping what works without (effectively) ripping off your own resources.

Wrapping It Up

I’ve gone through a number of reasons why you might consider rewriting existing content, but fundamentally, I want to stress that it’s a powerful tool to help your content program perform better. Whatever the reason you decide to rewrite content, it gives you the opportunity to learn from what’s worked and hasn’t worked with the existing content and create something better.

If you’ve decided that it’s time to spruce up your content, be sure to check out our wide range of content creation services.

Are there any other situations we didn’t cover that would warrant rewriting content? Let me know in the comments.

The post 6 Situations Where Content Rewriting Can Help Your Marketing 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.

[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.

You can be the top thought-leader in the industry and still miss out on valuable audience time and connections if your content isn’t optimized for a good mobile user experience.

More and more, people are turning to portable devices for research, reading, shopping and making connections. In the United States alone, mobile users spend about 89 hours a month — or almost 3 hours a day! — interacting with mobile content.

And almost no one goes desktop-only anymore. Even among the 55+ crowd, 67 percent are multi-platform users (they use computers and mobile devices to get online) and 7 percent are mobile only. Only a quarter report they only access the internet via a desktop. For those ages 18 to 34, desktop-only use drops to a mere 3 percent.

In short: if you aren’t providing content for your blog that can be easily consumed on a mobile device, you’re probably alienating a large percent of your potential audience. Good mobile engagement requires a great mobile user experience, and a big part of that comes from how you create and manage your content.

[ctt template=”4″ link=”9a5HB” via=”yes” nofollow=”yes”]Today’s consumers want #blog content that’s optimized for a better #mobile experience. Here are 9 tips to get you there. [/ctt]

It’s not even just about properly engaging those who swipe more than type.

We all know Google keeps its eyes on things, and it’s very interested in how your site performs for mobile users. A poor user experience that results in low dwell times and high bounce rates isn’t what Google wants to see, and the browser giant is quick to slap you down in the SERPs if you refuse to play nice with mobile users.

Pro tip: Since engagement specifics vary with your demographic and topic, always check your analytics before you make content decisions.

What can you do to improve user experience on your mobile site?

A lot, actually.

Seriously, so much goes into Responsive design and strong mobile content. We’re going to talk mostly about good blogging and writing tips for mobile-friendly content, but you can check out these additional mobile optimization tips from Kissmetrics in addition to our content tips below.

1. Don’t build with large blocks of text.

I just pulled up my last blog post on a mobile device. The first paragraph is about 55 words, and that also takes up the entire screen.

What I’m getting at here is you don’t have much property to play with, so make it count.

Fit thoughts into smaller blocks of text so mobile users can easily scan it, and alter the types of blocks you use to keep things from getting boring. You wouldn’t build an entire castle out of the same 4×4 LEGO blocks (well, you could, but how boring and dysfunctional would that be?). So build your content with:

• Subheadings
• Bullets
• Paragraphs of different lengths

Sort of like what I did with the content in this section. Change it up, and excise the fluff (that’s just good writing advice).

2. Use a simple writing style.

People who access your content via mobile don’t always have the same goals and behavior as those browsing on a desktop. Mobile users often:

• Want a specific answer
• Need information quickly
• Are viewing content while doing something else

Pretty language has its place, but it’s not typically in your mobile-optimized content. Make it easy for users to find and understand the information, or they’ll go somewhere else.

More From Eric: How’s Your Image SEO Game?

3. Deliver the right content for your blog.

Many mobile users are still paying data premiums, which means content they choose to view isn’t always 100 percent free. So don’t make them spend both time and data navigating to your site only to find blog content that isn’t right.

That means:

• The content for your blog has to match the title. Clickbait sleight-of-hand is no fun for anyone.
• Blogs should be high quality and back up the promise of your title, links and meta tags.
• You shouldn’t hedge with an overly long introduction; get into the content quickly.

4. Provide easy-to-decipher meta tag clues.

Knowing that mobile users are ready to swipe or tap off your content quickly — and that Google’s watching your bounce and dwell rates — you don’t want to attract people who don’t want to read your content.

That means your meta titles and descriptions, which show up in the search engine, need to be clear and focused.

Tell them what your content is about. Clearly. Accurately. Enticingly.

[ctt template=”4″ link=”76kc5″ via=”yes” nofollow=”yes”]Don’t forget the #mobile user. Optimize your blog’s #content to give them the best experience possible. [/ctt]

5. Break up content to match scrolling needs.

Break longer posts into multiple pages to cut down on scrolling or enhance page speeds. This can help readers absorb digestible, fast-loading segments of longer content without scrolling endlessly.

That said, don’t overdo this. We’ve all seen the listicle sites that list one list item of the promised content on three different pages. Most often this is designed to maximize ad impressions rather than delivering a great user experience.

There’s no hard rule on how much content to display on a single page, but generally it should take be readable within the average time on page for your mobile users.

Google provides a developer speed test you can use to find out if speed is an issue when people access your pages.

6. Alter the format of content delivery throughout the post.

Remember all those 4×4 LEGOs we’re not going to build a castle with? Adding different sizes and shapes makes it easier to create things, but what if all your blocks were yellow?

We’re back at boring again. That LEGO castle needs some color, and so do your pages.

Alter the format of your content throughout the post. Obviously you’ll want to include media such as pictures, video and infographics when possible (that work on mobile), but this is true for text too. Break up content delivery into sections such as FAQs, reviews, call outs and testimonials.

7. Leverage schema markup appropriately.

Design your content around schema markup, which gives Google the opportunity to display your content in mobile search results more efficiently. Schema markup tells the search engine more about your content and its purpose, and it shouldn’t be an afterthought when writing blog posts for mobile audiences. Many mobile users will find answers to their queries directly in Google’s search results in featured snippets which are powered by schema. Make sure you have the relevant tags on your content so Google can feature your content.

For a list of all schema you can use, check out schema.org

8. Keep mobile in mind when selecting images.

Choose images that are going to display appropriately on mobile devices, and double check your posts on various platforms to ensure images are compressed properly. The wrong images or an unresponsive design slows performance on page and can even make it impossible for users to read your content.

9. Take care with links and CTAs.

Finally, if you link from your content, choose outbound links that are mobile-friendly. This is a good idea for all links but is critical for any CTAs.

Why spend all this time optimizing your post for mobile before pushing the user into an unpleasant experience or to a page that simply doesn’t work.

Wrapping Up

The need to create content that works for mobile users is only going to grow. We may still be more tethered than Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke predicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but golden age science fiction is rapidly becoming reality. At least where mobile devices are concerned.

And brands that don’t keep up and cater their content accordingly are likely to become lost in digital space.

Keep Reading: How Small Businesses Can Harness Local Mobile Marketing

Keep Reading: Your M-Commerce Deep Dive: Data, Trends and What’s Next in the Mobile Retail Revenue World

The post 9 Things You Need To Do To Improve Content For Your Blog To Give a Better Mobile Experience 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.

Writing product copy for large eCommerce companies is one of Crowd Content’s specialties, and we do it a lot. In fact, we’ve written over 100,000 product descriptions to date. You learn a lot when you do something 100,000 times, so we’re joining forces with SEMrush to share what we’ve learned.

Join us on December 7th at 9am PST to hear about what leading eCommerce companies are doing in regards to:

1. Keyword research
2. Duplicate content issues
3. Prioritizing content projects
4. Mapping keywords to content based on intent
5. Using templates to create keywords en masse
6. Product description length
7. Writing style

[ctt template=”4″ link=”3Z74r” via=”no” nofollow=”yes”][WEBINAR] Sprucing up your eCommerce site? Join us on Thursday, December 7 to learn how the experts do it. [/ctt]

Crowd Content CEO Clayton Lainsbury will deliver a quick presentation exploring all these topics, and we’ll then have an open roundtable discussion with several eCommerce experts:

• Paul Lovell – Head of Search at Pricesearcher
• Mike McManus – Digital Marketing Specialist at Marketing Labs
• Greg Shuey – Managing Partner at Stryde eCommerce Marketing
• Rick Dickson – Director of Content and Data Governance at Office Depot

This experienced group will discuss the industry best practices covered in the presentation and will also answer questions from the audience.

If you’d like to hear what these experts advice and get your questions answered, make sure you register for the webinar on SEMrush’s site.

The post [WEBINAR] Crowd Content & SEMRush: Learn the Secret to Creating Killer Product Descriptions 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.

It’s my first day back in the office today after attending INBOUND 2017 in Boston with the Crowd Content team, and I want to share some of my experiences.

If INBOUND 2017 had a recurring theme, it’s that you need to be authentic and true to yourself and your company in how you communicate with your audience. Several of the show’s great speakers, including Michelle Obama, John Cena and Rand Fishkin, all spoke about this.

So, authentically, I think Hubspot did an amazing job with INBOUND 2017.

If you haven’t been to an INBOUND conference before, I’d highly recommend you check one out. This year’s show featured over 250 speakers and had over 21,000 attendees hailing from over 100 countries. There aren’t many marketing conferences at this scale.

We were so happy to meet amazing people doing great things in content marketing. INBOUND does a great job creating a positive and inclusive vibe with ample chances to meet new people.

While the conference and its attendees were great on their own, some of the speakers really made the experience incredibly valuable. Here are three of the most teachable, inspiring moments I experienced from some of the industry’s most inspired thought leaders.

The Invisible Giant that Mucks Up Our Marketing

by Rand Fishkin

I’d really encourage you to watch Rand’s presentation. He opens with a great discussion of cultural conditioning and how it biases us to behave and act in certain ways. He then explores how this applies to us as marketers, leading us to follow norms and practices that we’ve been conditioned to. Sometimes this can prevent us from taking actions that could actually benefit our businesses.

Key Takeway:

Conventional wisdom is that working on search engine marketing (SEM) can only benefit you by earning organic rankings (SEO) or displaying your ads in paid results (PPC). However, the reality is that only  54.7% of search results have only those two types of results. There are a plethora of other types of results you can optimize for including Knowledge Panels, Related Questions, Images and Featured Snippets.

RELATED: 3 Powerful Content Marketing Metrics You Have to be Monitoring

Topic Clusters Over Keywords: It’s the End of SEO (As We Know It)

By Leslie Ye

We all know that focusing on specific keywords in your SEO is pretty out of date. For at least the last few years, and certainly with the advent of Google’s RankBrain, it’s critical that pages satisfy searcher intent and that the content has high semantic value. That means that an individual page will rank for a number of related keywords instead of just one.

Expanding on that, each page should live within a topic cluster (or neighborhood) of pages that are related and speak to similar searcher intents. These pages should link to each other and support one pillar post that acts as a hub or overview of the topic.

Leslie’s presentation does a great job presenting this approach and really delves into the logical reasoning behind the move to topic clusters over keywords. She also presents some good information on how to track progress by cluster rather than by keyword.

Key Takeaway:

Make sure that you’ve done historical optimization, and plan to do it at regular intervals. This involves auditing which pages are getting traffic, ranking for search terms and generating conversions. Depending on what you find, you may want to improve the content to improve rankings and get more traffic, optimize the design for conversion or many other things.

When doing this, you’ll also want to ensure that all pages on your site belong to a topic cluster and are properly linking to their cluster-mates.

You’re likely to find that certain content duplicates other content, and in those cases you might consider merging and updating the content. (Be sure to do this around the older post and update it.)

Unicorn Marketing: Getting Unusually Great Results Across Every Marketing Channel

By Larry Kim

Check out Larry’s marketing theory here.

Larry gave a great presentation focused on helping you identify your unicorn content — your top 3% performing content. The question is, your top 3% based on what? The answer turns out to be clickthrough rate. From there, he goes on to outline how high clickthrough and engagement rates are tied to positive performance in SEO, PPC, CRO and Social.

Key Takeaway:

Always be looking at your content to spot unicorns. Content that has exceptional engagement rates should be identified and expanded into spinoff content and campaigns, since you already know there is an audience demand for this type of content.

In Closing

These are just a few of the most compelling highlights from literally hundreds of sessions offered, so I’d really encourage you to check out Inbound’s YouTube channel to watch some of the other great sessions offered.

INBOUND 2017 was a great show for a number of reasons; chief among them its strong reminder to be authentic to your brand in any content and communication you create. As the former First Lady Michelle Obama says, “It’s all about us believing in our authentic self.”

Did you attend INBOUND this year? If you did, what were the highlights for you?

The post Topics, Trends and Takeaways: What I Learned at INBOUND 2017 appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.