Facebook usage decline: What does this mean for your marketing? Full examination of the data and related issues based on research. Includes 5 actionable Facebook Marketing tactics.
The post What The First Facebook Usage Decline Really Means For Your Marketing appeared first on Heidi Cohen.
If you want to get a top Google ranking, then we say you follow the old saying: When in Rome, do as the Romans do. When having a website you want to get the best display on Google for, do what Google would like you to do.
We gathered a list of 22 must-dos, things that Google said you should be doing in order to rank high in SERPs.
How to rank high on Google fast. That’s everyone’s concern. After all, Google (and search engines in general) is the sole playground where our websites and their whole activity take place. We display, play, fight, and sell online. The offline environment is another story. But most people forget something. It’s that success doesn’t come for granted, but it’s rather built. To better there’s bitter, said someone once.
Speaking of which, here’s a list with pieces of advice directly from Google that will help you boost your traffic and rankings. All get big thumbs-up from Google. Check for yourself:
Google is smart – they know how they like their food. Google is a fully automated search engine set to explore the web on a daily basis and find those websites that deserve to be on the first pages. Many ask themselves what’s the best way to make Google like them in order to rank high in SERPs. You’ve got great content, rich and good link profile, yet Google doesn’t place you in top positions. So what should you do? We gathered all the things Google encourages their users to apply in order to rank on top positions and compiled them.
We wanted to see if Google really has the answer to all questions and if yes, we would’ve easily declared our quest ended. So we typed a query into the search bar: How to make Google like you? And this is what we got:
Apparently, we didn’t find an answer to our question. So we decided to take the research a little step further and search related phrases and ranking pages of this long tail keyword. We looked it up on Keyword Tool & Content Assistant and, again, we had a lot of fun on the returning results.
Things are simple. The truth is there’s no thorough and comprehensive list of everything Google says you should do to get a top position.
There are tops and lists, but there’s little clear-cut answer to what’s there to be done in order for Google to like you and lift you high in SERPs.
Before setting out to discuss what Google says you should check if you’re hunting for first positions in search results, remember this. You should make sure to get your website Google-friendly in all aspects, avoid implementing shady practices on your website, hence taking care to not be that person who gives a black eye to the industry of SEO and marketing when trying to rank high.
Among many others, Neil Patel summarizes what we know so far and tells us the most important things of getting up in SERPs. Neil himself points out the fact that getting a top Google ranking is hard and takes a lot of work, resources, and time. He shares 3 ways you can rank #1 on Google, and you should definitely know them.
The following 24 steps Google listed as paramount to rank high in SERPs are the baby steps to a greater tomorrow.
It’s good to know the overall picture of what you should do to get your website on the very top of Google search. However, you should definitely check all the things Google promised will make you attractive to the search engine algorithms.
Find all missed marketing tactics and use them for your very benefit. Just like in this meme, find the ingredients used in your (apparently) unattractive-to-Google website, and “googlize” them. Your website ranking story will be different.
source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en
As always, content is king. And the king must be served right in order to be happy and thrive. It’s important to pay attention not only to the page content, but also to the one in the title tags, URLs, snippets, and alt tags. We’ve underlined the most important things for which you should optimize your content.
There are thousands of instances across the web where pages and websites use and display unrelated and dull titles. This prevents them from being targeted by the Google algorithms and be ranked higher in SERPs. Here’s one example:
The description meta tag provides the search engine a concise yet comprehensive explanation of the page content. In addition, Google might use them as snippets for your page when popping out in search results. Often times, people are drawn to click through a page when, after skimming the SERPs and reading the titles, to check the text in the meta description. This both helps Google’s algorithms to better understand your page contents, and the user, who’d be more likely to land on your page if the words do the work.
However, it’s possible for Google to skip your meta description text and instead select something more relevant for the query from the page contents. In case Google cannot find something worth mentioning from your page content, it’ll turn to your description meta tag – hence, it’s always useful to have one, just in case they’ll need it.
These are the do’s when talking about successful description meta tags:
If you want to rank high both in Google and in the users’ eyes, avoid doing the following:
Whenever you want to convey a message containing names, content, or links, use text instead of images. This way you make sure the search engine can crawl your content, given that the crawlers can’t recognize text comprised of graphics. However, if you still want to display words in an image and not do it again in the page content, you can use ALT attributes. Make sure that the ALT attribute is short yet descriptive, faithfully describing the meaning of the photo as it can be easier both for Google bots to index it and for users to find the image bearing it in their SERPs.
Structured markup data is a code used by your website to make Google better understand the content on a page. This data can improve your position and page display on search. The main role of the structured markup data is to offer a thorough search experience to the user and turn them into a possible customer. Google Search also uses structured data to show rich and complex result display, providing more information within narrower borders and in more eye-catchy ways.
source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en
Simply put, structured data is a systemized format for giving information about a page and hence better and more efficiently classifying the page content. By helping Google understand your page content, you convince them to place you higher in SERPs.
Structured markup data is of great use to businesses. For example, you can provide significant key business details such as physical location, contact info, prices or price range, and marketing details like official name, logo, social profiles and many more. Your business information will get more exposure in search results, Knowledge Graph cards, and Google Maps.
Google My Business is a great way to start getting your website in front of potential customers. Claim or create a new business, verify yourself as the owner of that listing, and provide/edit details such as address, contact info, business type, photos, reviews, feedback, social links, comments. This way you’ll definitely pop with the right info back to user queries.
Google developed a Structured Data Testing Tool which is free and extremely easy to use. It’s meant to test your markup and verify the accuracy of your data.
Another smart move would be to enable breadcrumbs. They trail the page’s position in the site hierarchy, ultimately forming a chain. Users can easily track pages, one level at a time, by starting from the last breadcrumb up to the first one. Google Search is interested in displaying breadcrumbs in markup format, hence better guiding users through.
Users can fill in different queries, and even if their search might return the same webpage, the breadcrumbs will know how to categorize the content in accordance with the Google Search query – example: Books › Authors › Ann Leckie › Ancillary Justice or Books › Science Fiction › Award Winners.
To find out more about structured markup data and the penalties for deploying spammy markup, go read this other article we’ve posted not long ago.
It’s often happening that users bump into a page that doesn’t exist on your site anymore, for various reasons: they follow a broken link or a mistyped URL. Setting a 404 page that nicely informs users that the page isn’t working and redirects them to relevant ones can greatly influence users’ experience, hence click-through rate and ratings. Here’s Google’s reasoning behind why custom 404 pages are so important.
404 pages usually contain a message guiding users to their root page. One twist would be to provide some extra links besides the homepage one, links to popular or related content on your site. This way you’re more likely to retain and eventually convert them. Google says you can also use Search Console to find the sources of URLs responsible for “not found” error status.
As for what you should avoid, here’s what Google tells us to do:
Content comes in a variety of forms, all meant to entertain and satisfy as many of the human senses as possible. We are witnesses to the competition blogs, websites, outlets, and every possible business is in. The best thing is to know what your readers want and feed them that.
source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en
Google recommends us to create a powerful and useful mix of keywords, one that would leave your competitors far behind and will make your content more likely to be found by user searches. Remeber that you serve a wide variety of user types, both new and experienced ones. Hence those with a heavier load of knowledge will know how to refine their search and introduce more specific keywords in order to get the results they’re looking for. Anticipating the different and various search behavior can really benefit your piece of content when writing it. Google provides two tools that can help you fit your content for the competition ahead: Google AdWords with their Keyword Planner and Google Search Console (find the top searched queries your page ranks for and what are the ones who drew the most readers).
Consider providing interesting, useful, and unique content. You can write news stories, user case studies, original pieces of research. Furthermore, write easy-to-read, grammatically correct and attractive text and organize your topics clearly (you can use headings and break up the content in divisions) as these score a lot when speaking of text readability.
Your content should be the means to make your reader come back. Make it new, exciting, fresh. When using keywords and answering to users’ questions (you can find many with auto-complete in the Google search bar) make sure you’re not doing keyword stuffing and the text stays relevant and natural. Don’t (only) optimize for search engines, but for your readers. In the end, they’re your customers.
Chocolate is intoxicatingly attractive to those with a sweet tooth. The same mechanism works for quality content. The more high-quality page content on your website, the more visitors, conversions, fans, mentions, positive sentiment, and credits to you, says Google. Quality content will also appeal more to webmasters, driving them to link to you more and more often.
Whenever crafting content for your web pages, think of what words will most likely attract readers to your content. In addition, scan the web, the competition, and your own page to see what concerns people most. Take extra care of your homepage – that one might be the most important landing site for users.
A study from DoubleClick by Google conducted an analysis on more than 10,000 mobile web domains and stated: “We found that the average load time for mobile sites is 19 seconds over 3G connections. That’s about as long as it takes to sing the entire alphabet song!”.
source: www.doubleclickbygoogle.com
Although not yet an official ranking factor, AMP is paramount for site quality and user experience, a fact backed up by well-known webmasters.
More than 50% of mobile users decide to abandon a webpage if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Therefore it’s high time you considered implementing it on your mobile if willing to rank better in Google Search. He’s a how-to guide on how to use Google AMP to make your website rank higher on Google.
Similar to creating fit and appropriate title tags and snippets, so it goes for URLs too. Creating descriptive yet concise URLs can truly help your fans and fellow marketers link to you. Extremely cryptic links that contain various characters, letters and numbers are chaotic an irrelevant. Easy, SEO-friendly and user-friendly texts in the URL will encourage people to link to you more, make your site better organized, and provide potential users an appropriate text for their anchor texts when linking to you.
Moreover, simple text URLs provides both Google crawlers and users with more information than a highly coded and messy parameter would. Here’s an in-depth study on how the title and URL influence rankings.
Advertising with Google won’t have any effect on your site’s presence in our search results. Instead of paying for your position in Google, try to deploy transparent, relevant, organic, in a word natural means to get your page up in SERPs.
There’s nothing more powerful than listening to and obeying the common sense rules of doing your job first, and maybe only after paying for some boost. True, lasting fame doesn’t come with money, but with working hard. And this will eventually pay off and make you stand among the first search result in Google.
More so, it’s usually nagging the user, as your paid ad featuring your web page doesn’t always really deliver an answer to the query, but rather sticks among the first results without being of any use (it contains 1-2-3 keywords). It’s not relevant to the query.
Tweets are now indexed on SERPs. For a second time in a row, Google partnered with Twitter in 2015 to get full access to the so-called Twitter firehose of thousands of tweets spread every second on the web.
Most users are not satisfied with the information a couple of hours old, hence they want the freshest piece of news they can get. No need to emphasize that you should start optimizing your tweets with fit keywords and length so to serve both your interest – of attracting readers – and users’ interest – of finding the piece of content they’re after.
Having previously talked about AMP, it’s time for you to know that the common belief indicating that speed is sometimes everything has now become a regulated fact. Folks wish their questions to be answered fast; in fact, as fast as possible.
| 53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than three seconds to load. That’s a big problem. | |
 |
Daniel an |
| Global Product Lead, Mobile Web at Google | |
Page speed has been used as a ranking signal for some time now, says Google, but this year it comes with a twist – starting July 2018, page speed will not only address desktop searches but mobile searches as well. In terms of being a ranking signal, of course.
Besides, page speed primarily influences how people experience your site services, and they easily bounce off when having to wait for too much time for the page to load.
source: www.thinkwithgoogle.com
This update will mainly affect the sites offering the slowest user experience. However, the page speed ranking signal will not weigh heavier than that of great, relevant, popular content. Hence, the page can still rank high if the content is a big asset in the game.
Unlike in the old times, the web is now filled with a gazillion rich, complex, great websites that roll heavily on JavaScript. Google needs access to your JavaScript, CSS, and image files on your website in order to be able to see and display the page the natural way a user would see. This will help crawlers index your content better. Moreover, they say this permission benefits your context in the sense that it’s better indexed, while the pages are better rendered. Especially on mobile.
source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en
Google recommends you to use their tool Fetch as Google to allow the Googlebot to crawl your JavaScript, CSS, and image files. The cool thing is that you can see exactly the way Google renders your page and will help you know beforehand what indexing errors to avoid. Moreover, you can analyze and test your robots.txt files using Google Search Console. More on this type of files and the mistakes you should avoid lest your rankings would drop, you can find in our article.
As previously said, if willing to benefit from structured data markup in Google Search or Maps, hence gain extra visibility, you should definitely use Google My Business service too.
According to Google, there are multiple benefits when opting to create a listing in Google My Business: it’s free, your business gets in the spotlight in searches, easily attract customers by simply sharing helpful information which otherwise is already on your website but not visible enough, take charge of what people (should) see when searching for your business, update your info when needed, use enticing snapshots of your business, engage online and display ratings, and build popularity and loyalty.
Google My Business mostly benefits local businesses, hence listing your brand this way should be part of your local SEO strategy.
Everybody dreams of being up there, ranking no. 0 (which is higher than 1) in SERPs. The answer box is a snippet powered by Knowledge Graph, and usually offers the answer to your query often sparing you from flickering, looking for, and opening another search result. It’s like popping two times in search results – that surely must be a blessing. Results range from product information, nutritional facts, answer boxes, all-time music hits, to recipes, various uses, how-to guides, and blockbuster movies. You can even check how to optimize your content for answer boxes.
Researchers in Canada found out the average human attention span has fallen from 12 seconds in 2000 to eight seconds. Hence, if you want to really catch users’ attention and get higher rankings, target the search boxes using well-crafted content.
Even if your website isn’t quite new and Google already crawled your pages, it would be wise to check your internal links from time to time. Google comes to rescue you and lets you do a check and report on your internal links pointing to the other pages on your site using Search Console.
Linking to a certain page is vouching for their relevance, utility, and importance. It’s like a certificate of quality given to it. Hence, if a less important page on your website has more links than a more important and truly helpful one, than you should really reassess your internal linking.
Smartphone usage is overwhelmingly popular nowadays; the mobile searches have long overrun the desktop ones. There’s this trend now of “mobile-first” designs and updates, yet the truth lies elsewhere. You shouldn’t fit into one category or another, give to one more importance than to the other, but actually go multi-platform. That’s where the great audiences come from.
source: www.smartinsights.com
Hence, given that the web is accessed more and more on the mobile devices, it’s needless to say that you should have your website designed mobile-friendly. And here’s how Google can help you – with a mobile-friendly test tool.
Furthermore, make sure you design your site for all device types and sizes, including tablets, not only desktops and smartphones.
This one is way simple. Google encourages us to use synonyms when writing and making a piece of content live on our pages because this serves to the greater good of having your website found in response to queries.
Synonyms are variants of the same word or phrase. Google Search is smart enough to return results that not only include the very word typed in the search bar, but also content that means the same thing as the typed-in term. It’s because Google tries hard to guess user’s intent behind the actual query. For example, if you write “professor” and one synonym for that could be “teacher”, the search engine might return results for both “professor” and its synonym “teacher”.
Google tries to understand language, not only terms in general. That’s why synonyms stand very high in Google’s eyes. They help the search engine to better sense the world surrounding users’ words and, hence, what they’d wish to receive in response to their queries. Synonyms are the bridge between users and Google bots.
It very much has to do with the fact that content has been overrun in importance by context and search experienced a facelift, now being more of a topical search than the regular one. Context makes it easier for crawlers to return relevant results to queries (or not; it depends). Here‘s where you can set to add synonyms to queries.
| Knowing how Google uses context and semantically related phrases can improve the content you create and how well you optimize pages for particular queries” | |
 |
bill slawski |
| Director of SEO Research at Go Fish Digital / @bill_slawski | |
Images often occupy the most visual space on the page and justify the most of the downloaded material and bytes on the web. That is why Google recommends starting optimizing images, which most of the times is seen as both art and science. Plus, users can lose their patience waiting to download something from the web that simply wouldn’t load and have to wait for many seconds to minutes. It’s all about page speed.
The many formats available out there – GIF, PNG, JPG – ask for separate optimizations. There are multiple techniques to do that and here’s where Google comes to rescue us.
Users nowadays want and expect a secure online environment. Preventing unauthorized access to the interactions between the user and your website and encrypting it is a good practice for communication on the web. And that’s why you should secure your website with HTTPS.
If that’s not an argument enough, then maybe you listened to Google, that, starting August 6, 2014, made HTTPS as a ranking signal official. And you know why? Because another top priority to Google besides quality is security. They want to keep their users satisfied and happy, yet secure at the same time. Anyways, this ranking signal doesn’t, of course, weigh that much s high-quality content does, but it’s very important.
HTTPS is a way stronger encryption than the former one, HTTP. The former one can now prevent breaches on websites, hence Google called for HTTPS everywhere.
Make sure you’re using correct redirects, and those would be 301 redirects, not 302s. This is the fittest way sure to provide a clear path to correct pages for users. While a 302 redirect conveys the message of a page content “moved temporarily”, the 301 one means that a page has been permanently moved to a new place. Here’s why 301 redirects are considered (more) useful:
If you want to know how to implement a 301 redirect for your website, here‘s what Google says you should do.
In order for your pages to appear in SERPs, you need to have your website crawled by Google. Many times, when doing content optimization, redirects, or content pruning, Google doesn’t immediately crawl it after you make the fix live. Yes, there are times when you can request an accelerated crawl but most times it takes a couple of days for your new content to be live.
Therefore, if you wish to rank as high as possible in search results and be sure you provide the high-quality content you know you have on your website, debug your pages. You can find here how to do that and what tools you can use – some of them having been previously mentioned in our article: Search Console, Fetch as Google, Robots.txt Tester, AMP report, and so on.
And that’s a wrap, boys and gals! Try implementing the above-listed tips coming right from Google’s mouth and there’s no way you won’t benefit from them. This is definitely not a success recipe, but it’s the path to experimenting, experiencing, and eventually getting to know what’s bringing success or not.
We believe we should first do our job, and then expect miracles to happen. By following these steps, you make sure you abide by Google’s wisdom and rules and make them to like you and rank you higher in search results.
But that’s not all. You now know what Google likes, yet we haven’t told you what they don’t like at all. Avoid doing the following and you’ll surely stay out of trouble:
Mic drop. But please lift it yourselves and tell us your opinion and maybe other tips you know they’re extremely important in order to make Google like you.
The post How To Rank High On Google | 22 Google-Backed Tips To Get Atop Of The Search Results appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.
Efficient SEO marketing techniques can definitely help your business on Maui. Did you know that in the United States alone, companies spend over $20 billion a year on search engine optimization services? The internet today is one of the most effective marketing platforms around and companies in the US – and all over the world … Continue reading “How SEO Marketing Can Help Your Company Grow”
How SEO Marketing Can Help Your Company Grow See more on: nickponte.com
Have you considered optimizing your Hawaii business for voice search? According to several studies, over 50% of teenagers and 40% of adults are already familiar with Siri, Cortana, or other voice search options. People are using them on a daily basis to get immediate answers to their most pressing questions. As voice search steadily grows … Continue reading “Voice Search – Is Your Hawaii Business ready?”
Voice Search – Is Your Hawaii Business ready? Find more on: https://nickponte.com/
Inside scoop on using conferences, trade shows and events to improve your marketing even if you don't attend. Explains how conferences work and how to tap into conference attendance to grow business. Bonus: Conference attendance survival checklist.
The post How To Attend Conferences: Ultimate Marketing Guide To Generating Business appeared first on Heidi Cohen.
Content Marketing is dominating the internet. It stays at the core of everything, be it an article, a video or even an ad. So, in order to succeed or even attempt to be successful at digital marketing, you have to create some form of content.
However, many people find it very difficult to create content or do link building, especially if they’re in a ‘boring’ niche. This complaint often comes not only from the website owners themselves, but also from various digital marketing experts trying to promote their clients.
In this article we’re going to write about how you can overcome this barrier and show you that it’s possible to create interesting content and do efficient link building in any niche.
The article doesn’t cover any OnPage SEO tactics. Technical SEO should be dealt with on any website, regardless of the niche it’s in. There is not excuse for a slow web host and website and for not having an SEO Plugin installed. If you haven’t fixed that already, I really recommend you to read these SEO resources first to make sure you don’t have any major OnPage issues:
There are two main issues when dealing with ‘boring’ niches: content creation and link building & content distribution. We’ll discuss both of them in more detail, so that you can take the actions that will provide the best results.
I’ve listed below some really useful things you can follow to make your life easier when creating content. They are placed in an order, so you can follow them as you start the content creation process. But, before we get to them, let’s start with busting the ‘boring niche’ excuse:
Many times when I talk about implementing a content strategy for someone’s more narrow niche website, I get this remark:
“That’s not going to work for me. What are we going to write about? I’m not doing rocket science, like Elon Musk.”
If you think rocket science isn’t boring, I’ll remind you what’s it like (probably) to be a rocket engineer every day:
iopscience.iop.org
I don’t know about you, but it looks pretty boring to me (no offense intended to engineers/physicists).
It’s not about the niche, it’s about the way you put content out there. Musk is more interested in his actual customers, but likes to create hype around everything and he knows how to do it very well.
Source: indianexpress.com
If you’re not his customer, you’re not really interested in the technologies that he’s working on, but you think it’s cool, so you share it.
And that’s the secret to a content marketing strategy that also benefits SEO: getting people to share your content, even though they’re not your direct customers. Creating hype and convincing people to link to you.
| “There really is no such thing as a boring subject. Just boring, unimaginative writers.” | |
| Ben Hurt | |
Now that ‘hurt’, right? Well, I actually got this quote from CreativePool, where Magnus Shaw also said this: “It’s a nice sentiment. But any article on leech breeding is going to come off a little dull. Unless you’re a leech breeder, I suppose. Or a leech.”
That’s true. I mean… just thinking about leeches makes me go a little “eww”. But I have to use my marketer’s side of the brain. So immediately, I remembered that leeches are often used to treat different illnesses. It’s also Taboo and will probably cause some controversy. It might be a little dull, but it will work.
You might be thinking “Hey, that’s not actually about leech breeding!”. Well, it doesn’t have to be. One thing you can always do is think outside of your direct niche. People might not buy your leeches, but they definitely want to know what health benefits they might bring, or much, much simpler than that, how to remove them from the skin.
Here’s a really good example from The Art of Manliness:
The Art of Manliness’ Infographic showing how to remove a leech from your skin
In order to create share-worthy content in a ‘boring’ niche, you can use adjacent topics. This way you can address a larger audience and get more exposure.
Now another thing you have to do after publishing something cool and useful is to distribute it properly:
If you had a car detailing service and decided to promote it using some fliers, where would you send employees to share the fliers? Would you send them into a very populated mall, or would you send them to some car events? Well, I hope you chose the car meetings, because although the audience isn’t that numerous, they’re definitely more interested in what you have to offer.
This is especially important on the internet. Don’t just share your content anywhere. The post above would go well in the survival niche. This means that you need to find some survival oriented websites and Facebook groups you can promote your content to.
This infographic was eventually republished by LifeHacker, which proves that even big sites will share it.
Remember, your purpose is to make that post get viral. The social shares and backlinks you’re going to get from it will help your domain grow the authority it needs to increase it’s overall strength in the search engines. This means that when you publish new less awesome posts targeting your customers, with some ‘boring’ content, it will naturally rank higher.
Ok. We’ve seen how even leeches can be turned into something interesting. Let’s give some more examples, to prove that you can start creating interesting content in any niche:
The pool-building niche:
If you think pools are boring, excuse me dear Sir, pools are not boring. Not by far.
If a Turkish airline company can make something awesome regarding a pool, why couldn’t a pool-building company do so?
Here are just a few interesting content ideas from the top of the web:
How about blenders? You think blenders are boring? Over 800.000 Blendtec subscribers think otherwise:
But dump all that! Here’s a really ‘boring’ niche. Poop smell.
Well, I hope you get the point. Everything can be made interesting, funny and shareable. I know, I’ve mostly shared videos and images, but who says you can’t also build an article around that? Here, have a look at this awesome post from The Renegade Pharmacist. It went viral pretty quick and it’s about medicine, but it’s targeted to the masses.
The problem isn’t that a niche is boring. The problem is that you have to find a way to target a broader audience, other than your very narrow niche, so that you can get the links and shares you desire so much. Now the post from the Renegade Pharmacist was actually written by a doctor. This means it is well documented and the information in it is accurate.
One thing that can happen is that it’s hard to find someone to write content in your niche, because they have absolutely no idea about it. This can lead to misinformation of the audience and can result in negative feedback from your readers. That’s one of the reasons I believe that InHouse SEO and content creating works the best. You need a team of dedicated people that are genuinely interested in your product or subject.
Having an in-house team of writers that are passionate about your subject can help you create better content and eliminate the risk of misinformation.
The team from Examine.com turned these hard to understand scientific studies about nutrition into popular, easy to understand content that went on a tour around the web. This would not have been possible if the research hadn’t been done properly, or the writers hadn’t had any idea what they were talking about.
This might be a little hard to do in the leeches niche, but you can always sketch the ideas yourself. If you can’t find them or can’t afford to hire them, at least make sure you closely collaborate with the team of writers you outsource your content to, so that the information in your content is accurate.
Anyway, I hope I proved that you can turn regular, ‘boring’ things into something really interesting and share-worthy.
When you first start writing, things might be simple. But as time passes and you churn through the topics, you get into a point where you have no more ideas.
Forums: Forums are a really good place to look for ideas. Even if forums aren’t as popular as they once were, old questions might still be unanswered. Forums are also very time consuming because you spend a lot of time reading everyone’s opinions before you can make a decision. You can synthesize the information into one single piece of content and eventually even share it with the forum users.
Social media groups: This is the modern forum. Social media groups are full of interesting topic questions. If you can’t find a group about your very specific niche, just go into a parent category niche or an adjacent one. For example, if you’re selling only fishing bait, you can go into fishing groups, or survival groups. People always ask questions there and share interesting things. You can pick that up and create some content around it.
Quora: Quora is a great resource to look for questions. Although the answers there are usually good, they still might not be so share-worthy. You can take that content, modify it and improve it and then make it 10 times more awesome. You will usually compete with Quora in the search engines if you write on the exact same topic.
Brainstorming: This is where you actually use your imagination to its fullest. Now the basic principle of Brainstorming is that you gather with some people around a whiteboard or a piece of paper and you start pouring ideas in, as soon as they come up. They you select what’s the best and dump the bad ones. While this is a good approach, I’d recommend you also have a notebook with you, because ideas pop up randomly. Write them down when they do. If you’re more tech savvy, you can use your phone. Just not while driving (I used to quickly record it at a red light).
Talking with friends: Talking with friends about the subject is really helpful in identifying new topics. You can talk with friends that are interested in the subject and with people that don’t have a clue. This way you’ll get some advanced topic ideas and some of the more basic ones, like questions that beginners usually ask.
Having a clear structure in mind before you start writing can help you maximize your productivity. This also helps the reader a lot. People don’t go through all the content. They skim through the article and skip video parts entirely. If you have a long article or video, break it down into smaller parts so people can get the main idea from just reading the headlines. If they’re interested in the particular headline, they’ll read it more in-depth.
How to & Tutorials: People will always look for this kind of information on the web. You can use Brian Dean’s Skyscraper technique for it. The technique implies researching the web, finding gaps and building a piece of content that fills those gaps.
Case study: Case studies are targeted to the readers interested in your topic on a deeper level. It usually goes well in the digital field, but can also work in other areas, like medicine and financial.
Interviews & Roundups: If you’re out of ideas or want to make your topic a lot more interesting, you can interview or mention experts in your field. This works very well not only for building interesting content, but also for distributing it. The people you interview and mention in your articles will be more than happy to share your content. Don’t start with giants. They carefully craft their time for profitability. Go for the small guys and build up.
Top list: As easy as it sounds, just make a top list of anything. Numbers in your title boosts conversions. It also helps if the numbers are odd. A good example is our article about SEO myths.
Controversial: There are ways and ways of making content interesting. One way is to discuss/create controversial topics. Whenever there is a popular topic that nobody really has an answer to, or opinions are different, you can write about it. It will have a lot of engagement. Just make sure you have some people on your side as well and don’t offend anybody!
Have you ever heard the saying “any publicity is good publicity”? It’s kind of true, you know?
Think of #bloggergate for example. Although John V. Stenson was not a nice person (building his brand around being very blunt and disrespectful) the truth is that Elle Darby did hit around 1.5 million views on her monetized videos and added around 15k subscribers to her channel. So, one way or another, this helped them both become more popular.
I’m not saying that Elle deserved to be treated like that or that I agree in any way with Stenson’s methods. You can’t excuse being an asshole with “It helped her as well.” However, Stenson’s theory is that if you can get into the middle of something where half of the people will be with you and half against you, you can profit. I think that you don’t always have to pick a side. You can just ask the question and avoid conflict.
There’s one more thing that always seems to do the trick: nudity, or sexualizing the content. In my opinion, there’s no marketing there. Obviously, putting some naked people around will get you attention but the marketing in it is 0. There’s no real idea behind it. It’s just the bottom of the barrel, exploiting basic human desire, or whatever that is.
Absolut Vodka recently published a commercial with what looks like their employees naked, under the pretext that “they’ve got nothing to hide”. But we hide our genitals for a reason. We hide them because we have evolved and become more selective, smarter. If alcohol truly had nothing to hide, they would put images of drunk people doing bad things, along with the ones of people having fun. They would put more emphasis on the “drink responsibly” thing. They would sponsor or build new detox centers. Now that, in my opinion, would bring your brand trust.
Video & Graphic: It has been estimated that by 2019, about 80% of the content that will be consumed on the internet will be in video format. If you want to make people engage more with your content, images and videos can help. You can always include some text to go with your video, like the transcript for example, or a short article to go with your infographic, explaining everything in more detail. Check out this article about analyzing your competition to see an example.
Answering all the questions: Answering all the questions on your niche website can be though, but very profitable, especially if nobody else does it. As an example, I have this really awesome video with Marcus Sheridan, where he explains this concept and proves that it works!
Often, I hear people saying: well, if I answer to all my problems for free then users won’t buy my product anymore. Of course, if you have a digital product, you can’t put everything out for free. But many times, a product has much more than that. It’s an organized system, with the purpose of sharing the information in the right order. Publishing bits and pieces won’t affect you with anything.
I’ve recently talked to someone who has a cleaning products seller as a client. I recommended that they create more interesting how-to-articles. One idea I came up with was “9 DIY cleaning solutions”. His answer was “He sells cleaning products! I can’t just tell people how to make them at home!”
While the people who will share that article will probably never buy his products, the purpose here is to get the social activity and links. Obviously, it’s a good idea if your product doesn’t have harmful chemicals. You can always market the idea of “I’ve already made this for you. You can buy it from me.”
A persona is an imaginative representation of your users. A business can have many user personas. The trick with personas is to identify them so that you may address the audience in a way that will resonate with them.
Think of an user persona as a fictional CV. Photo, age, location, interests, work places, experience, studies, etc. After you’ve created the persona, imagine talking to it. Get to know it and know how it acts. What gets it upset, you avoid, what gets it excited, you add more of.
This way, you can create content that is targeted to your ideal customers.
If you’ve ever watched an internet marketing product ad or motivational videos, you probably know what I’m talking about. It resonates with you and makes you want the product a lot. But most of it is BS. As I got into marketing, I started thinking all of it is BS.
But one video made me change my mind. A friend of mine was selling his product. His promotional video resembled everyone else’s. But I knew his story and I know it was true. The way he put it made it very appealing and even got me excited.
Storytelling is not about lying. Storytelling is about getting your customer excited about what you have to sell. The more personal you make it, the more you touch their heart and the more they will buy from you.
It’s not expensive. You can start by asking a friend to take a look. I ask my sister to proofread my content all the time. She’s been happy to do it so far. You can also use a basic spell checking software, like Grammarly. Depending on your niche, grammar might have a small or big impact on your readers. Better if you get it good!
You won’t hit success the first time you publish. To be honest, you probably won’t hit success the 100th time. But you will learn, through failure.
If you don’t monitor your results, you’ll have no idea what worked and what didn’t. That means you’ll always be relying on luck and will never have a strategy proven to give results. It’s very important to know what you should focus on and what not so that you don’t waste your time. Maximum results with minimum effort!
While the tips in this article are useful, nothing is stopping you from refining your own process of doing things. Who knows, maybe you’ll discover something new!
Ok. So you got your ideas, you’ve followed our SEO friendly blog post checklist, you’ve done your keyword research and you have your awesome piece of content ready and well optimized. Now what?
Well… you can’t just publish it and expect people to come roaring in to read it. You have to promote it. While promotion can take many forms, I’ll outline some of the things we use to promote our content and how you can apply them as well.
But first… let’s talk about the advantage you might have when dealing with boring niches.
Do you know where SEO is the hardest? In the SEO and marketing niches. It’s popular, we write awesome content, we have the knowledge and we promote it thoroughly… But yet, getting links from other relevant authority sites isn’t that easy. Nobody will want to link to you, because they know that will help you and will always keep that in mind.
Have you ever heard the phrase “Sure, I can link to you, but it has to be a nofollow link“?
We hear that a lot! Even if the content is awesome. Even if we worked hard. Even if we know the owners of the websites.
In a ‘boring niche’, however, when someone sees something awesome, you have the chance of them not thinking SEO first and actually link to you, just because the content you provide is absolutely brilliant.
Of course, many people in other niches know this as well and some will avoid linking to you, but it’s not the first thing that comes into their minds. They have editors and writers that might naturally link to you without thinking “Wait, I don’t want to help anyone ever, even though I expect help in return all the time”.
And with that, I’ll also recommend that if you see something awesome, share it! Even if it’s your competition. Not only that Google likes it when you share relevant and useful content, but you’ll prove to everyone else that you’re different. This can open up opportunities you never thought existed.
The best way to get backlinks quickly is by reverse engineering your competitors to find out how they’ve got their backlinks. Using the cognitiveSEO tool you can analyse your competitors to spot new backlink opportunities.
First, you can use the unnatural link detection on your competitors to identify their bad links. We’re looking for websites that have a clean, natural link profile.
Screenshot from the cognitiveSEO tool showing the Unnatural Link Detection feature
In this case, the website’s link profile does look pretty good. Click on the green line to find the good links. You can export them, build relevant content and the outreach to pitch your content to those websites.
Another interesting feature you can use is the Common Domains in the Competitive Link Analysis section. In the following graph, you can spot websites linking to all the competitors, but not linking to your website.
Graph from the cognitiveSEO Tool showing common domain between competitors
This graph tells us that those sites are very likely to share content in my niche. You can pitch them your content and expect a higher success rate.
Social Media is a great way of getting your initial exposure. While Facebook Pages are the first place you probably share your content on, they aren’t necessarily the best for distribution, especially since the recent algorithmic changes. When you make your post, try to get people to comment on it. Facebook distributes your content depending more on the engagement rate, and comments are the best type of engagement you can get on your posts.
Another thing that works well is to find groups around your topic (the same groups you’ve used to get ideas from) and promote the content there. Don’t overdo it! The admins will quickly ban you if you do so. Start off by answering questions and being helpful. Always share other content as well. If the admin is a website owner, share their content from time to time. This will get you a greener pass to be able to post new things.
Also, the purpose of this is to get social shares. Avoid posting promotional things. If you want to do so, create your own group. Which reminds me… are there any Facebook groups in your niche? If not, having the first one is not a bad idea!
I love it when I start talking about blog comments being a legit way to get some backlinks. People always jump in and say “It doesn’t work!” or “You’re going to get penalized if you do that!”.
But you know what the funny part is?
They tell me those things in the comments! With links back to their sites, lol.
Blog comments are a great way of getting initial traffic to your website. The key to it is not overdoing it. By overdoing I mean posting on irrelevant blogs, 20 times per day. If you instead find some relevant blogs and really have something to say about the topic, don’t hesitate to comment and leave a link back to your website.
If your comment is good, people might even follow the link and end up on your website. Then you can capture them in your e-mail list and spam them from there. Just joking! Don’t spam through e-mail. It’s against the law.
A really good way to get links is to find the unlinked mentions that you already have. Sometimes, when people mention your brand or product, they forget to link to you, or might link improperly.
Using a tool like BrandMentions can help you identify these link building opportunities. The tool monitors your brand and notifies you about fresh web mentions, as soon as they happen. You can contact the people that mentioned you and ask for a link to your website. Most of them will be happy to give one.
Screenshot from the web mention monitoring tool, BrandMentions
You can always try a free alternative, like Google Alerts, but it won’t always get you the results you want and deserve. However, it’s a good idea to try them both out, just to see the difference, hehe’!
There are many ingenious methods for link building. One of them is the link reclamation method. You can definitely use it to build high quality links. This method requires the cognitiveSEO tool and the concept behind it is the following:
Website links to content > Content disappears because of various reasons > Website loses traffic
What can you do? Profit, of course! Here’s how:
1. Find your competitors’ broken pages and links.
2. Update or re-create the content of the website the broken link originally led to.
3. Contact the webmasters who have the broken link on their site and recommend them your alternative.
Basically, you will be helping some sites clean their pages of broken links, while you gain some really relevant links your competitors used to have.
Not every niche out there is interesting for everyone, but I hope that reading this helped you get some content ideas for your ‘boring’ niche. Now you have a general blueprint on how you can come up with ideas to create the content and also promote them accordingly.
If you still think your niche is so boring that you can’t come up with new ideas, let me know your niche in the comments and I’ll try to help you come up with some cool ideas.
The post How to Write Content & Build Quality Links for Boring Niches appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.
Ever lost your creative mojo? Stare at the blinking cursor praying for inspiration. This is Blank Screen Syndrome (BSS) or Blank Blog Post Syndrome. 5 steps with tactics to give yourself permission to write and overcome BSS.
The post The Ultimate Guide To Overcome Blank Screen Syndrome appeared first on Heidi Cohen.
Influencer marketing is a topic we all love to discuss, both in the press and on social media and especially if you’re working in digital PR and SEO. In my experience, many of these conversations are referring to the, relatively recent, boom in YouTubers, Instagrammers and Bloggers who seem to be taking over our social […]
The post Creating an effective influencer marketing strategy appeared first on Builtvisible.
