We all knew that marketing had changed forever once consumers began using smartphones to price-check products and services. True, in-person shopping still has the considerable advantage of immediacy — customers can take your products home right now — but profit margins had to shrink to overcome the willingness to wait a bit for competitors to ship to the doorstep. Suddenly, it seemed, SEO and content strategy were separating the successful from the dwindling.

This dynamic has affected every industry, whether you provide products or services. Consumers nowadays show an endless appetite for calling out price gouging or poor service on social media. Bad online word of mouth can sink a business seemingly overnight. On the flip side, prospective customers are more willing to believe positive reviews submitted by verified buyers. When someone speaks well of your company, it can help nudge others into action.

In this ever-shifting terrain, it’s no longer enough to be highly skilled in your specific niche. Your expertise must be visible online if you hope to achieve any significant growth. What you say about yourself is a great starting point, but what other people say about your business (both online and offline) matters now more than ever.

Learning to Train Your SERP Dragon

Assuming you’ve been actively marketing your products or services online for more than 15 minutes, you already understand the incredible importance of search engine optimization (SEO).

By now, most of us are well aware that “The Holy Grail” for all forms of eCommerce is to have your content displayed on Page 1 of search engine result pages (SERPs). In a perfect world, a prospective customer or client would enter a keyword directly related to your niche, launch that query into the vast wilderness of cyberspace, and BOOM! Your specific expertise would land on the top of the SERP, prominently displayed for all to see.

If only it were that simple, right? Unfortunately, experts estimate that well over five billion — with a “B” — comprise our worldwide digital population. That number is hard to imagine, let alone compete with! Thankfully, there are a few things you can do to raise your odds of engaging with your target audience.

1. Optimize all of your online content to the search intent of relevant keywords.
2. If the goal of a keyword is to sell products, you must have a landing page for every product to perform well in SERPs.
3. If the keyword intent is primarily to inform and educate, you must provide long-form content that offers lasting value.

Are you keeping tabs on what are other businesses doing?

To guide your content development, spend some time studying the competition. What type of content is currently performing well in your niche? In other words, what shows up today when you search your keywords? Where are the pain points? How can you provide solutions that address a problem that prospective customers are trying to solve? Can you narrow your content's focus to attract your ideal audience?

At this point, longtail keywords become crucial.

For example, suppose you hope to rank for the keyword “computer repair” but you don’t have any helpful content on that specific topic published to your website. In that case, your business is likely to struggle to rank well, if at all. It could end up all but buried on SERPs by the big box stores with massive marketing budgets. If, on the other hand, you effectively optimize all of your content to “computer repair,” your local shop can reasonably expect an uptick in clientele once you begin to rank.

Onsite Topical Authority Is the Meat and Potatoes for SEO and Content Strategy

If you are unfamiliar with the term “topical authority,” it’s pretty much what you would guess. In short, modern search engines crawl the web endlessly, sniffing out authentic expertise.

Suppose, in the example above, your computer repair shop in Biloxi has a website crammed with helpful content, an online reputation as affordable and competent, no shortage of stellar reviews verifying great customer experiences, and backlinks from other trusted providers. In that case, your topical authority should elevate organically.

Simply stated, you will rank higher on SERPs if search engines confirm that you know what you are talking about.

On the other hand, your team might very well comprise the most talented and efficient computer repair techs across the American South. But if you do not have trustworthy, authoritative onsite content — and the subsequent topical authority to go along with it — your business is unlikely to rank well in SERPs.

Of course, you may not have entered the computer repair business to spend your time optimizing and curating online content. However, this is what it will take if you want to grab the attention of someone using a smartphone to search for help.

The good news is that whether you realize it or not, you generate valuable content every day. Whenever you assist a client with a real-world issue, that’s valuable content. Developing strong, rankable online content is primarily a matter of communicating solutions in digital format. Build a website crammed full of helpful solutions. You are far more likely to attract the attention of Google and other search engines. You will also build customer loyalty as they look to you for the expertise and (you guessed it) increase your topical authority.

Better Optimized Content Grabs More Search Traffic

The best roadmap for pursuing a winning SEO and content strategy is (thankfully) reasonably simple. Solve problems for other people.

True, some of the people you help will never darken the doors of your business, but that’s OK. Keep in mind the thousands upon thousands of people in your local area. If every single one of them showed up at your door, you’d have a seriously tough time accommodating them. If millions (let alone billions) of people emailed you with a relevant question, your servers would spontaneously combust. You are not trying to interact with everyone but rather target those most likely to need what it is you have to offer.

What’s the Search Intent Behind Your Target Keywords?

Once you boil down the essence of your business to relevant longtail keywords, it’s time to focus your efforts on search intent. Is your target audience of that target keyword trying to find a specific online resource…or conduct research? Are they actively shopping to make a purchase…or just learn more before they commit? While you might hope to push all four of these online searchers to your product pages, long-term success comes by providing content tailored to each.

Online audiences tend to shy away from pushy content. Can you provide a link to your product or service on an informational tutorial? Absolutely! Just make sure that your tutorial is the primary focus. Your goal should be to establish trust and reliability. You are more likely to gain authority if the content you serve up directly relates to search intent.

Returning to our modest computer repair shop in Biloxi, a smartphone user might read an article stepping them through a confusing software upgrade. Assuming your information was easy to find, easy for anyone to understand, and easy to implement, that person is highly likely to commit some portion of the experience to long-term memory. Months or even years later, when the need arises to replace an outdated machine, they recall the excellent customer experience you provided. Your shop suddenly becomes the first stop on the shopping circuit.

Optimize Content to Relevant Longtail Keywords

Keep in mind that even small bits of additional online traffic can add up to a significant boost to your bottom line. No, it probably won’t happen overnight, but SEO and content strategy is a process that will yield results as you continuously create, post, monitor, evaluate, and tweak.

Your content establishes your authority. Your longtail keywords should act as arrows pointing to the center of your expertise. Marketers often refer to this as the hub and spoke strategy for content development. If you select keywords that garner a lot of online traffic but aren’t directly related to your niche, misled users will leave (quickly) with a negative impression.

When done right and appropriately maintained over time, your value-laden information can start an SEO and content strategy snowball rolling down the hill. You increase your domain authority by optimizing your blogs, videos, and online materials around longer-tail keywords. As third-party voices — customers, industry experts, influencers, etc. — begin touting the value of your product or service, you gain additional authority. Every time your niche SEO snowball rolls over in the hills of cyberspace, it will pick up even more credibility.

Putting Yourself in the Buyer’s Shoes Meets Search Intent Needs

Why would someone go to the internet to poke around? Because they have a specific problem, they need to solve. Typically, in this realm, patience is at a premium. If your target customer happens to land on one of your resources and does not immediately find it helpful, they will bounce. Knowing your audience's search intent is the North Star for creating content designed to solve the immediate problem.

The best way to offer your potential clientele a rewarding online experience is — this may sound overly simplistic, but it’s true — treat others as you would like them to treat you. You can do this by being relentless about crafting an online buyer’s journey that doesn’t leave your target audience with cartoon question marks popping out of their heads. Treat your users' time as valuable (it is) and move them along with purpose and clarity.

How can I buy from you if I've never heard of you?

Your first step is to create awareness of your niche expertise. Awareness content is information designed to educate and inform, not sell. At this point in the buyer’s journey, overly promotional content simply does not work. Your goal is to solve problems, answer commonly-asked questions, and provide solutions. The user has a problem. You’re helping to solve it, regardless of whether it results in a sale or not.

If you can solve problems and make a sale, great! But keep your primary focus on offering helpful, evergreen, bulletproof content. If you can do that, just trust that your niche authority will rise over time…and so will your sales.

We understand that most businesses would prefer to reverse the sequence, but the online world doesn’t tend to work that way. You don’t have any customers “trapped” in your showroom. As a result, they feel zero reluctance to bounce off your site if they sense you are not trying to help.

Domain Authority Stems from Reliability and Trust

The world of SEO and content strategy can be complicated and confusing, but it doesn’t need to be. As you develop your online presence, it might help to remind yourself of a simple truth. People prefer to buy products and services from people who know their industry inside and out.

Hopefully, you also bring a great deal of enthusiasm to your niche. Is it your desire to help people find solutions to real-world problems? If that desire is authentic, that authenticity, combined with expertise, will put you on the path to sustainable growth. If you’re unsure as to your best next move, we can help. Schedule time with one of our marketing experts today.

Prospective customers simply are not finding your product or service by using their smartphones to search. Worse, your competitors seem to have a crack SEO team at work. They've cornered the search engine market using keywords that strike at the heart of your business model. This is intolerable, of course, because you’re the best at what you do! Countless potential customers are being led horribly astray.

Deep breath. Awareness of a problem has taken hold. This is the necessary first step.

You’ve already taken the steps of committing to the process of improving your online performance through learning more about SEO, digital PR, geotagging, the primary types of keywords, website analytics, and more. However, as you began digging into the details, it became clear that no one person can possibly accomplish everything needed to improve — and retain — higher rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs). You ultimately arrive at the realization that you need to hire more staff.

With that realization, you’ve taken the necessary second step — one that is frequently the most challenging. Very likely, the investment required to construct a search engine optimization (SEO) team from scratch seems daunting.

Don't Allow Panic to Make Your Situation Worse

However, you should never undertake building your team in a hurry. Instead, objectively assess your efforts to date. Realistically evaluate the skills you already have on board with existing team members. Commit to starting small and building consistently over time. SEO team success requires that you play the long game.

SMB owners might decide to combine some of the roles listed below. They might hold off hiring in one area to beef up in another. You'll want to set up something suited to your unique needs. There is no “one size fits all” approach that applies to every niche. Feel free to adapt these broad categories to arrive at a customized solution for your SEO team. Plan to review progress and identify deficits at least once per quarter.

Setting Your SEO Team Up for Success

1. SEO Team Lead

As with any company-wide initiative, the buck ultimately has to stop with someone. Given the constantly shifting terrain of the SEO realm, it’s all too easy for team members to get so far down into their respective rabbit holes that they lose sight of the bigger picture. Perhaps nowhere is the frequency of this common issue easier to get out of hand than during an SEO overhaul.

Whether you call this person the “Chief SEO Executive” or “SEO Top Banana” will be a function of the nature of your business and the overall vibe of your company culture. How you title this position is far less critical than it is that it signals authority. Everyone on your team signs off on the notion that whatever this individual says….goes. Every decision this person makes is final, for better or worse. Full stop.

Ideal characteristics for this role would include a high degree of flexibility, calm demeanor (i.e., not easily agitated), strong communication skills, and the ability to play the long game consistently. This person has a well-defined game plan that includes a unified approach, frequent praise for milestones achieved, and benchmarks that can adapt to changing market conditions.

Ideally, this person also has a strong background in PR and serves as a liaison between the SEO team and PR personnel. As the PR people are working to create positive brand awareness, those efforts are likely to uncover opportunities for back-linking, referral traffic, and building up the authority of your company’s website assets

2. Digital Content Lead

This person is responsible for planning, creating, and regularly updating the Content Creation and Publication calendar. One of the most frequent mistakes that SEO team leadership makes is seriously underestimating just how much legwork is involved in this singular task. After all, the end result is a calendar display that provides a consistent view for all team members. On the surface, it doesn’t seem like much of an end product.

In this case, appearances can be deceiving. The content lead is responsible for interacting with every member of the SEO team, coordinating the production and editing of 100% original content, knowing the strengths and weaknesses of every team member, and (not least) keeping a grip on approved vacation schedules. This person is also well versed in big-picture company objectives and the keywords required to obtain them.

Whoever occupies this position should (ideally) be a direct report to team leadership. These first two positions are frequently combined into one, but in most cases, that is not an ideal structure. If you must start out this way, look to split the two responsibilities at your earliest opportunity.

3. On-Page SEO Specialist

Among marketing specialists, the on-page SEO specialist can perhaps be considered your company’s online content introvert. Of course, they are always looking outward for research and trends to help optimize internal content creation efforts, too. However, the primary focus is creating, tweaking, and constantly fine-tuning company-curated websites, social media channels, videos, and all other publicly available digital media under the direct control of your SEO team.

There is certainly no shortage of sample job descriptions for this position available online. However, key attributes to keep in mind are the ability to work well with content creators to optimize copy, revise landing pages, caption photos, edit videos, conduct research, and bring their insights to bear on pre-existing, current, and future content creation. At times, this person might recommend that precious pieces of digital content be revised beyond recognition…or deleted altogether. As you might well guess, having some diplomacy skills will prove helpful.

4. Off-Page SEO Analyst/Technician

This function is quite similar to that of the on-page SEO team specialist, but the primary focus is consistently outward. This person relies on data-driven reporting — website analytics, sales figures, impartial niche rankings, and so forth. They use these as tools for connecting with external entities that might reasonably have an incentive for creating inbound links. The off-page specialist is particularly interested in boosting the overall credibility of the company. The key concepts for this person are overall content relevance, perceived trustworthiness, and domain authority.

If relationship building, outreach, and link building (see below), can be meaningfully compared to sales, this position can perhaps be analogous to customer service. There is likely to be a great deal of crossover between the on-page and off-page duties, but there are shades of difference in approach, which (again) is why it’s often best to split these responsibilities between staff. Your on-page people are responsible for “baking the world’s greatest cake.” Off-page expertise requires an ability to answer the question, “Why aren’t more people buying?”

5. Relationship Management, Outreach, and Link Building

On the surface, this position sounds a lot like sales, but it’s slightly more than just that. Yes, this position approaches external entities to gauge interest in collaboration, but it does not stop there. Given the fluid nature of online content — what works well one day might quite literally tank the next — this person’s responsibilities don’t end once someone cuts a check. Instead, this person maintains an abiding enthusiasm for the success of clients. They conduct regular research to share with clients to help them stay on top of SERPs and continuously enhance their reputation.

What Win-Win Relationship Building 'Looks Like'

There’s a terrific scene toward the end of the 1996 film Jerry McGuire. The title character authentically celebrates a significant victory for one of his sports clients. Across the field, another client who signed with a competing firm wonders why his agent never shows that level of enthusiasm. Separating quick sales from abiding interest marks the dividing line between sales and ongoing support. Staff in this position work for your company, yes. However, they are constantly on the prowl for opportunities that might benefit the external entities with whom they interact.

This position requires a deep understanding of the need to bring win-win propositions to the table week after week. The relationship management employee must maintain a keen awareness of what the on-page and off-page specialists do. They must understand how it can be leveraged to their client’s advantage. They must be able to speak to both highly knowledgeable SEO customers and those who need it boiled down to the most superficial level. This person must be able to explain how inbound links are most likely to come about, what can be done to boost online reputation, and more.

At the level of the SMB, relationship building might translate into better working relationships with suppliers, other businesses, customers, nonprofits, and local, state, and federal governments. In short, this person seeks to position your company such that other entities want to be associated with it, both online and in real life.

6. Technical SEO Team Support

Depending on the size of your business, you may start out with your web hosting and maintenance services being outsourced. Most SMBs do begin their online adventures precisely like that, and many choose to keep it that way. This might be perfectly acceptable in your situation and you, therefore, see no need to hire any professional “web nerds.”

Fair enough, but keep in mind that whenever you outsource anything, you enter into a queue. The level of priority you represent to that company will be in direct proportion to how sizable your account is as compared to others. Suppose that service provider has clients whose monthly recurring revenue (MRR) dwarfs that of your company. It’s not hard to guess who is going to get faster turnaround times on service requests. This sort of prioritization is to be expected, so patience may be needed.

Having a technical person or team just down the hall from your office can make all the difference in the world when it comes to the need to update the website core, scan for plugin conflicts and promulgate desired mark-up practices for both on-page and off-page SEO teams.

These people need to not only be highly conversant in what works best for SEO now, but they are also forward-looking. Suppose you’ve ever had a hosting provider send you an urgent email. They urgently inform you that you must update your site structure immediately. In that case, you know full well the value of getting advance notice. Forward-thinking does not throw your entire company into panic mode.

Play the Long Game with Your SEO Team Members

As mentioned at the beginning, there is no hard-and-fast rule for how to construct an SEO team that will meaningfully contribute to your company’s success. You can probably expect at least a certain amount of trial and error as you move forward. Copying what works for one company in your niche usually doesn’t work, either. Your unique selling proposition should be different from your competitors, so your strategy should differentiate, not blur, distinctions.

Of course, the sky’s the limit when it comes to conquering the digital realm and owning the industry you occupy through the use of custom SEO. What you probably do not want to do is hire a bunch of people only to turn around and let many or most of them go six months later. The impact of such a move will be devastating to the morale of the team members who remain.

If the staffing budget represents an initial stumbling block, better to combine a few of the roles listed above into one as a solid starting point. Just maintain ongoing awareness that it's easy to overwhelm you digital PR team. Many times burnout can creep up on even your most energetic team members without their realizing it. Be ready to add staff as need dictates, before your people begin to lose their energy and excitement.

As any company experiences growth, there always comes that awkward time. Various responsibilities need to move from in-house to the hiring of outside experts. Though growth itself is a highly desirable outcome, it can be challenging to know when the time has come to let go of absolute control of anything. It’s no different when it comes to the subject of knowing when the time is right to hire a national SEO agency.

In days gone by, for example, your company might have gotten by admirably in-house. Perhaps you delegated the social media responsibilities to someone you did not hire for that specific purpose. As your niche market expanded, competition intensified. Before long, other companies that did not provide equal value to yours were capturing eyeballs and, ultimately, poaching customers.

Sure enough, it’s tough to let go of anything that started out as "your" baby. However, wisdom is to be found by watching for the signs that change is needed. As your market expands, a national SEO agency can help you navigate unfamiliar terrain.

While market pressures vary by industry and location, there are specific vital indicators that anyone can use as a template. More and more consumers are migrating their shopping habits to the laptop or smartphone. As a result, it’s critical that your company not miss out.

Use the following “Top Ten List” as a measuring rod for gathering more data and determining when the time is right to engage with a national SEO agency.

Top Ten Signs You May Need to Invest in a National SEO Agency

1. You don’t have a content marketing strategy.

If you don’t yet have a content marketing plan — or aren’t sure what that even means — don’t spend a lot of time beating yourself up over it.

Many, many thriving businesses were caught off-guard by the dizzying speed with which online marketing has developed. Today, any number of otherwise-successful entrepreneurs are still underestimating the value of a clear, cohesive content marketing plan that encapsulates every single customer touchpoint.

You’re an expert at what you do. However, that expertise may not extend to content marketing, and that too is OK. Keep doing what you do best.

The main takeaway here is to realize that almost every business, regardless of niche, needs a content marketing plan. In our increasingly online world, not having one is running the risk of being buried by your competitors as you expand. Working with a national SEO agency can help you uncover opportunities you might miss otherwise.

2. You’re not showing up in SERPs, not even at the local level.

Search engine results pages, or SERPs, are the de facto marketplace of the 21st century. Whether we like it or not, the simple fact is that an ever-increasing number of consumers are using their smartphones to scan for possibilities before they make a commitment of time, treasure, or talent. Businesses that ignore this reality or delay any sort of content marketing plan simply aren’t likely to thrive long-term.

For example, let’s say you operate a woodworking supply store in Peoria. Think of your city as the bullseye on a target. You might be doing OK if a potential customer in Western Australia doesn’t find your business. Still, you should be concerned if enthusiasts in central Illinois type in the search string “woodworking supplies” but miss your business altogether.

As your sphere of influence radiates outward, you’ll most likely need a national SEO agency. They can help you start showing up in online searches conducted in central Illinois, the entire Midwest, the continental U.S., and beyond.

3. Marketing costs have gotten out of hand.

The old adage went something like this: “Advertising doesn’t cost…it pays.” But maybe you’ve noticed that you’re not so sure that’s true anymore. You can look at your numbers at the end of every month and see clearly that you’ve been spending more and getting less in return.

If your ROI seems to be decreasing over time, it may be that your messages simply aren’t being seen. The simple fact is that audiences are skipping from one media outlet to the next with a flick of their thumb. This phenomenon can prove highly frustrating for companies trying to get their voice heard above the din. It’s especially true when expanding to the national level.

The good news is that this new openness in the media landscape is a lot less pricey than many traditional outlets. Your company might do better spending hundreds for an online placement than thousands for a billboard on the interstate. The key is to “spend wiser,” not spend more. A national SEO agency can help coach you as you shift your marketing budget around.

4. People who want to find you…can’t.

Panic is never a good thing, of course. However, suppose you are out to dinner with friends, and they struggle to find your website or social media channels even as you are sitting across the table from them. In that case, it’s probably time to drop back and seriously reconsider how things are going with your online marketing strategy.

Pay attention when prospective customers struggle to find you online or complete a transaction. Statistics such as website bounce rates or abandoned carts can help pinpoint exactly where you are losing someone. However, you should balance those statistics against anecdotal evidence you and your team gather day by day, week after week.

The temptation, of course, is to dismiss observations and complaints as “user error,” but this is unwise. More likely, it simply means your SEO needs tweaking…or maybe a complete overhaul. What has always worked well may fall flat as you expand into new markets. You may need to work with a national SEO agency as you strive to avoid these common pitfalls.

5. Your website analytics have plateaued…or nosedived.

If you’re interested in growing your business, you should take special note of overall website traffic trends. Reaching a plateau is only acceptable if you are hiking a mountain and need to take a breather. Similarly, a sharp decline in traffic is a serious indicator that something, somewhere, may have gone wrong.

Again, your primary expertise may not be reading website analytics. You want to focus on providing the best product or service at a competitive price. That’s what you should be doing. However, someone needs to be paying attention and drawing meaningful conclusions from your data. If that’s not you, then it might be time to outsource this vital task.

6. Social media efforts aren’t providing the bang you expected.

Perhaps the only reason you opened a social media account was to broadcast information about your business to the waiting world. The reality is that social media should be viewed as primarily a social endeavor. The vast majority of people don’t use social media as a substitute for reading ads. They use social media to interact.

Increasingly, companies are hiring social media specialists. These people are skilled at responding to user posts and elevating the reputation of their company as they do so.

However, many small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are stuck. They're in that space where they are too big to not have social media but too small to hire full-time staff to handle these messaging channels. Rather than act as a logjam, this situation could be a prime indicator that it’s time to bring in outside help. A national SEO agency fully understands this dynamic and can help you leverage it to your advantage.

7. Your online position does not match your level of expertise.

Have you ever listened to someone speaking directly to your niche and thought to yourself, “This person clearly doesn’t know what he is talking about?”

Of course you have. Who hasn’t?

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and pretty much every other platform have given anyone with an internet connection the ability to speak with impressive-sounding authority. The trick these days is to find one’s way through all the noise and static. It's easy to miss voices that ring true with both authenticity and measurable results.

The savvy experts these days are focusing more on helping others solve problems than making sales. They’ve realized that garnering trust will, in relatively short order, translate into a healthier bottom line. Your company might be the best in its niche. However, if your voice is getting shouted down online by pretenders, you'll need help. This is a strong indicator that it’s time to partner with a national SEO agency.

8. Your business struggles to form meaningful partnerships.

Trust-building takes place at both the micro level and the macro level. The micro level consists mainly of individual interactions. These include not only how customers interact with you or your employees but also what they say about you to friends and family.

It’s vital to understand that you simply cannot build long-lasting trust at the macro level if the micro-level foundation is unstable. When your business scores win after win at the individual level, you are far more likely to garner the attention of reputable business partners and investors.

Perhaps you enjoy a solid local reputation but find it tough to get investors and other strategic partners interested. This might be an indicator that “something not good” is happening online. A skilled national SEO agency will be quick to suss out why potential opportunities keep eluding your company.

9. Competitors are dragging down your online reputation.

For years, the successful restaurant chain Wendy’s has been doing a terrific job at using its social media accounts to take potshots at the competition. They’ve done this by using a successful mixture of good-natured humor, well-known facts, and their unique brand messaging to land bullseye after bullseye. The messages are amusing and fun to read, even if you don't happen to like hamburgers.

And therein lies the key to a successful online marketing campaign. Boosting your SEO might be a matter of taking yourself less seriously…or it might not. There are literally thousands of variables that might come into play. Working with a national SEO agency can help you refine your message as you seek to broaden your appeal.

Because you are good at what you do, you shouldn’t feel obligated to become a Messaging Voice Expert. Lit up in an unguarded moment, you might even respond to online potshots in a manner that further degrades your online reputation or unintentionally validates the same critique you are seeking to answer. Frequently it’s tough to respond well, and this is why an outside agency might be able to provide critical distance and a higher-level perspective.

10. Your great local word-of-mouth is AWOL online.

This one is last for a reason. It’s the surest sign that you need a national SEO agency to help you translate your excellent local vibe into a broader online reality.

While an increasing number of people are slow to believe what they read online, that does not (yet) apply to everyone. A lot of damage can take place in a brief amount of time. If you’ve ever read a horrid review of a restaurant online only to have a close friend contradict it, you know exactly what this looks like. Online perceptions often don’t convey real-world reality.

Any reputable national SEO agency should be highly skilled at sniffing out unseen factors that might be affecting the quality of your online reputation. Agile, data-driven decision-making is the “secret sauce” that can help your business elevate both its reputation and its positioning on SERPs. Consumers these days have no shortage of options. However, a skilled national SEO agency can help you bring your product or service to the attention of the customers you are seeking.

Developing a growth marketing plan is a critical element of any digital strategy. However, all too often, marketers make common mistakes about the data and insights they have available and the planning and execution of a plan.

Here's a closer look at things to avoid when developing your growth marketing plan.

What Is Growth Marketing?

Growth marketing is a long-term, strategic approach to marketing that relies heavily on data. The approach helps brands achieve consistent, sustainable, and measurable growth.

An effective growth marketing plan uses an end-to-end approach that looks at every stage of the marketing funnel to attract and entice customers. However, too many traditional marketing approaches focus exclusively on the wide end of the funnel.

The successful growth marketing plan is different. It features a balanced approach that approaches every stage — awareness, acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referral — equally.

Additionally, with a balanced focus on each stage of the customer journey, your marketing plan will deliver deep insights and data. As a result, this information can help determine how successful a campaign was. Consequently, it can also help inform future campaigns.

Mistake 1: Marketing Without a Plan

You need a well-defined plan in order to start developing a marketing strategy. Additionally, your marketing plan needs to clearly identify your customer personas and each phase of the funnel.

Developing these strategies requires collaboration and perspective from multiple team members. It requires setting priorities, goals, measures, and outcomes.

In addition, it also requires being willing to experiment and testing out ideas, concepts, and new messaging. However, to test out ideas, you still need a plan to measure the outcomes against.

Mistake 2: Failing to Remain Consistent with the Brand

No matter what marketing strategy you deploy, you need to remain consistent with your organizational brand. Brand matters deeply. Consequently, you do not want a marketing strategy in place that does not align with the brand.

In a competitive market, disruption and damage to your brand can have disastrous consequences. Therefore, remain true to the brand and brand guidelines within a growth marketing plan. In addition, if the results of that work dictate taking a closer look at your brand, then do that work separately.

Mistake 3: Failing to Develop a Content Strategy

Content is king. It drives search engine optimization. Content leads customers to your website. Consequently, it reinforces other messages.

Developing a content strategy is a core component of growth marketing. Your content can take many forms — blog posts, videos, e-books, white papers, and websites. This content has several benefits.

First, it answers questions that customers and prospects are asking. A smart content strategy plan knows the concerns, questions, and needs of its customers and provides answers.

Second, a good content marketing strategy positions your brand as a leader, with the knowledge, insights, and expertise within your industry.

Finally, content marketing is versatile. As a result, it can be used again and again to use in multiple formats.

Mistake 4: Ignoring Social Media

Marketing strategies need to be comprehensive. Additionally, they should use as many arrows in your quiver as possible. Social media is a critical component of an effective strategy.

You’ll need to do some research to determine which platforms are best for your brand. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, and YouTube are among the most popular.

One of the most powerful benefits of having a content strategy plan is the ability to use digital PR to distribute the content in the right places.

Mistake 5: Using 'Black Hat' Strategies

Black hat hacking uses various strategies to trick search engines — and users — to monetize activity. In marketing, that might mean link building to boost SEO results or creating link farms that drive traffic.

These approaches are not worth the time and can lead to unforeseen problems. As a result, you could end up being blacklisted by search engines.

To avoid the perils of SEO, be sure to avoid adding irrelevant keywords to your content just to boost website hits. Irrelevant content can also turn off audiences and lead to increased bounce rates.

Don’t “keyword stuff” by adding too many keyword links to your website in the hopes of boosting your Google search ranking. Google algorithms can detect this misleading practice.

On the flip side, keyword research is essential. Identifying the most relevant keywords and keyword phrases can better inform your messaging, content strategy, and growth marketing.

Mistake 6: Forgetting It’s About the Product

If you want to be successful as you experiment and implement a marketing strategy, be careful to remember one thing. It’s about the quality of your product or service.

In the end, it has to be about providing high-value, highly needed products, and services. Consequently, finding a way for these marketing initiatives to inform new iterations of your products and services is critical.

How? Consider that conversion rates and bounce rates can give you good data about what’s valuable. Understanding what customers are looking for and where they spend time on your website are valuable insights. As a result, this information can help you refine product lines and marketing focus for increased profits.

Mistake 7: Not Knowing Your Competitors

Growth marketing can seem like an insular, internal process. However, it needs to be well informed by what’s happening with your competition.

Consequently, reviewing and analyzing what others in your space are doing can inform how you develop messaging and distinguish your brand.

Mistake 8: Ignoring Mobile

Most people who search for something, browse a website or engage online are using a mobile device.

Mobile-first is no longer an anomaly. It’s a must. As you’re optimizing your messaging and marketing, you have to think about the mobile experience.

Customers are most likely to be using a smartphone or tablet when they are engaging with your brand.

Mistake 9: Setting Unreasonable Goals

Your strategy needs to include goals that are measurable, realistic, attainable, and transparent. As a result, set your goals based on past performance and data-informed projections.

Mistake 10: Not Reviewing the Plan

Your marketing plan should be an organic, ever-evolving tool. Reviewing your plan regularly will help you determine if you are reaching your goals.

Course corrections are perfectly acceptable and will allow you to build a growth marketing strategy that aligns with where you are.

Growth marketing is an excellent way to scale a business by focusing on customers at every phase of their journey with your brand. Learning how to build an effective growth marketing strategy gives you the tools to market effectively for long-term gain.

You can get started speaking to a growth marketing agency specialist today. Book a call whenever you're ready to dive in.

The best SEO professionals in the world have stopped using the trial and error method for generating traffic to the sites of their clients. They already know the SEO tricks that work and what doesn’t work through deep research, which is why hiring a seo agency can be helpful.

But we can all learn from their smart strategies and gain a reasonably good understanding of SEO before we go on to the hiring stage. The SEO tricks are nothing more than a logical series of methods that sync together to drive more traffic to your website. Today, SEO is more about creating a brand presence, awareness, and brand voice online. You can start with a brilliant logo, complete with branded content on a responsive website design, and optimize it for search engines. However, it can't go further than that if you are looking for results with more leads, more customers, and more opportunities to upsell other services and products. 

That's why we are here to help. Let’s take a look at these marketing hacks professionals use to increase the sustainability of their brands online. 

Change the Way You Write Blogs

Up until a few years ago, the correct way for a company to do blogging was simple. All you had to do was a blog on a regular, consistent basis and add a few key phrases. But this oversimplified method of blogging soon resulted in a plethora of unread content being distributed all over the web, and most of this content wasn’t particularly useful to anyone.

Today, blogging algorithms look for more than keywords. Experts recognize that blogging has to be meaningful if search engines are going to pay attention. If a blog isn’t entertaining, helpful, or interesting, it will almost certainly fall by the wayside—and drag your website ranking down with it. Here’s what professional marketers are doing today.

FAQ Blogs

Blogs must be helpful, and what better way to help your audience than by answering questions? FAQ blogs can be long-form articles that contain interesting content but are mostly made up of questions & answers.

A 2021 Study showed that 8% of Google queries are questions! Chances are, if someone is asking about anything related to your industry, they’ll land up on your site if you’re the one answering their questions.

Blog Pillar Posts

The blog pillar post concept has been a severely neglected method of blogging, but it’s super effective if done correctly.

The premise is that you write one primary blog for your website and continue to update it on a monthly basis. Adding to and tweaking the same blog month after month is something Google relishes, and this will set your website up as an authority on the topic you’ve written about.

Video & Image Content

If your blogs are void of images and videos, you’re probably not going to be too popular with search engines. Images allow you to link your content in a meaningful way to social media platforms, while videos help you to connect with the ever-large YouTube audience. These connections are essential in broadening your outreach over the web.

Learn Call-To-Action Psychology

Marketing professionals are trained to understand the psychology behind marketing. Although this can take years to learn, you can also implement some basic psychological positives into your call to action processes:

• Positioning your CTA on the top right of a page will often make it immediately visible, as this is where most people look first.
• Using certain words and colors for your CTAs can invoke different emotional responses in your audience.
• Implementing a sense of urgency (countdowns, expiration offers, etc.) has shown to invoke that urgency in people who want your product or service.

CTA Psychology is a fascinating subject, and you’ll do your SEO a massive favor if you learn it.

The Importance of Research: Measure Twice, Cut Once

The best SEO experts never presume anything. They test, research, and investigate as much as possible before delving into a digital marketing campaign. They strive to learn the buying habits of their target audience and spend a lot of time planning their marketing strategy before executing it.

Taking the time to perform this SEO trick will effectually improve the results of your SEO efforts because it’s always wisest to measure twice and cut once!

Teach Your Audience

Developing free training courses and online tutorials have become a wildly popular lead magnet for those who want to set themselves up as experts in any given industry. As an expert, you will garner the trust of your target audience and consistently direct them to your site, your services, and your offers.

Create Combination Campaigns

Covering all your bases is a good SEO trick to ensure success. If you’re only focusing on one aspect of SEO, you’re missing out on a myriad of others.

It’s also crucial that these aspects be connected to one another. Here’s a checklist you can use to ensure you always combine your marketing efforts:

• Onsite content (primary place to start)
• External content (showcasing your knowledge on other affiliate sites and connecting them to yours)
• Social media (for sharing)
• Emails (for consistent communication, upselling, and reminders)

Putting all of these together is the best way to ensure the best possible outcome for your SEO.

Final Thoughts

SEO has become the cornerstone of online content. If you want to get the most out of your SEO then follow the tips we’ve provided in today’s article. 

Even if your business is small, chances are you have some big competition. And in the digital age, you and your competitors are both vying for visibility, traffic, credibility, and authority online. When you want your business to stand out from your competitors, creating rankable content for SEO that positions you at the top of search engines’ rankings is key.

But when it comes to creating content that ranks, providing helpful information for humans simply isn’t enough. There’s also a great deal of search engine optimization (SEO) strategy involved in the creation of any high-ranking content piece. And if you don’t get the strategy right, chances are you won’t get the results you’re after either.

So what exactly is rankable content and how do you create it? Read on to find out.

What Is Rankable Content?

Rankable content is easily readable, search-engine-optimized content that’s created to rank for a target keyword or keyword phrase. This type of high-quality content also targets a user’s search intent for specific keywords. That means it’s relevant to the user’s “what and why” behind a specific search query and provides valuable and accurate information.

Aside from having target keywords and providing value, rankable content must also be competitive with other content that ranks highly for the same search terms and search intent.

Develop a Customized SEO Strategy

Do you know what your industry’s top-converting keywords are? Do you know your target audience’s search intent for specific keywords? Do you understand how to organize your content so search engines know how to index your site and identify your area of authority?

If you’re unsure of any of these things, you’ll have a tough time creating content that ranks highly in search engines. That’s where a custom SEO strategy comes in.

There are more than 200 factors that determine where a piece of content ranks in search engine results for a specific keyword. Custom SEO planning analyzes what your business is trying to achieve with your content and maps out a strategic plan to help you attain those results.

A custom strategy not only includes on-page SEO, which focuses on on-site content and structure but also off-page and technical SEO. When you get all three elements right, your content starts to move up in search engines’ rankings.

If you’re currently creating the content you think people are looking for, you’re missing the mark. A custom SEO strategy will allow you to craft content that you know users are definitely searching for, which will ensure your content becomes more rankable over time.

Write Valuable, Targeted Content

Long-form content also tends to earn a great deal of backlinks and shares, both of which influence search engine rankings. When crafting rankable content, your overarching goal is to provide the reader with valuable information that’s relevant to a specific search query. Make sure you’re writing content that aligns with the length of content that is currently ranking for your targeted term.

But to create in-depth content that targets a user’s search intent, you must first understand the type of content you’re creating and how that affects its ideal word count. A “how-to” post will naturally require more content than a simple “what is X?” post. The amount of research required to support the content will also determine an optimal length.

When creating valuable content, you must also consider the content your competitors are publishing. Does your content provide more value? Does it deliver more accurate information? Does it cover subtopics that your competitors’ content doesn’t cover? If you can provide more value related to specific keywords and search queries, you stand an excellent chance of outranking your competition.

Create Scannable Content

Attention spans are short these days. People get scared off by huge blocks of text. Readers want information that’s not only easy to find but also easy to digest and retain. According to studies, over 75% of digital users don’t read online text in its entirety. That means your content must be scannable if you want it to rank.

What’s scannable content? It’s content that’s formatted in a way that allows readers to quickly grasp the major points of your message. Scannable content includes:

• Subheadings that organize the text into scannable chunks.
• White space helps prevent visual fatigue by giving readers’ eyes a break from processing text.
• Numbered or bulleted lists that group together similar items for easy scanning and digestibility.
• Bold and/or italic text (used sparingly) that emphasizes important words or phrases that readers can benefit from being able to see quickly and easily.
• Easy-to-read sentences that vary in length and don’t contain superfluous information (aka fluff).

Optimize Your Content for More Keywords

When you’re trying to rank for target keywords, you must consider how competitive those keywords are. Only going after high-competition keywords can make ranking tough, especially if you’re competing with very high-authority sites that already have super-strong SEO. That’s where finding high-volume, low-competition keywords that you can also target can be helpful.

Your competitors may not be targeting those keywords, but your target audience is searching for them. So if you target a mix of high- and low-competition keywords and phrases, your content ultimately stands a better chance of moving up through search engine rankings.

Creating rankable content isn’t difficult, but it does require strategy. If you’re unsure how to create an SEO and content marketing strategy that’ll get you the results you’re looking for, Relevance can help.

7 Innovations in Search Engine Optimization and Their Application

The search engine optimization industry is constantly making innovations. Likewise, new technologies regularly emerge to help marketers and developers streamline their content creation strategy to achieve better organic search results. As a result, to ensure that your brand stays relevant in search engine results, you'll need an SEO expert to adapt to these fast-changing technologies and the latest trends in online marketing, social media, and more.

Don't get left behind. To reach your potential customer, your search engine marketing plan will need to combine social media, link building, email marketing, keyword research, Google AdWords, backlinks, and (of course) great fresh content. Your targeted audience will find you once you begin to rise in search engine ranking.

Learn to scale your SEO process, use specific keywords, tweak all of your core web vitals, and generate a high-quality search result. Do this by implementing these seven innovations in search engine optimization as a core component of your marketing strategy. There is a lot of trial and error involved with attaining effective SEO and digital marketing success, so plan on that!

1. Mobile-First Indexing for Improved SEO Ranking

Did you know that 50.81% of total global website traffic comes from mobile devices? Search engines, as a result, have begun prioritizing mobile-friendly content.

Smartphone proliferation has grown by leaps and bounds. As a result, more and more users are switching to mobile search rather than using desktops, laptops, or other devices. Your SEO efforts and content marketing will stall out if you're designing and marketing for desktop and ignoring what Google Analytics is trying to tell you.

In response to the dramatic increase in mobile search, Google Search introduced the approach of mobile-first indexing. This approach uses the mobile version of a website to index and rank it in search engine result pages (SERPs). Consequently, Google rolled out its mobile-first indexing for every website. That being so, optimizing websites to be mobile-friendly and cross-device compatible has become more pertinent for marketing than ever.

Google is steadily moving toward indexing only mobile versions of websites rather than desktop versions. If your website is still focused primarily on its desktop index and not optimized for mobile viewing, then it is likely that Google may not index it at all even if your relevant keywords are all top-notch. Obviously, this is likely to significantly affect your search engine rankings and ROI.

The need of the hour is to switch to responsive website design with Google mobile-first indexing, fast loading time, and improved user-friendliness.

Optimize dynamic website content and images to deliver enhanced mobile experiences. Mobile-first indexing can help boost your page rankings and organic traffic and backlinks using a mobile-optimized version of your site.

2. Natural Language Processing: Producing Effective Short-Form Content

Ever since Google rolled out its 2019 Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) algorithm update, Natural Language Processing (NLP) has emerged as a technology innovation powering the SEO industry.

Using NLP, Googles algorithm looks at the context of a word as it appears within a sentence to understand its meaning. This means that Google will no longer rely on particular search terms and phrases to provide the most relevant answers. Rather, they will look into the intent behind the search.

Leveraging BERT, the Google algorithm now understands the context behind every search and then provides appropriate information.

"By trying to understand the 'context' of search queries, and by mining the relationship between stop-words with other words in the query, Google's BERT algorithm pushes the limits of how a traditional search engine understands a user's needs. With Google weighing in on NLP to gain a deeper understanding of user queries, it implies that content-makers who get more specific, relevant, and descriptive with their content and information - including links - in their pages tend to rank higher."

Jaya Kumar Data Scientist, Deep Learning and NLP Specialist

From the perspective of SEO, NLP is important to marketing because creating high-quality, informational content will help make it most relevant to a searcher's intent and not the keywords they are using.

3. SSL Certificate Labeling for Strengthening Customer Trust

While often overlooked, SSL certificate (HTTPS) labeling is an important SEO trend that businesses must consider. HTTPS is a crucial ranking factor for Google as it secures improved trust with your target audience. Ongoing innovations in search engine optimization have only reinforced this requirement.

Websites that hold an SSL certificate are labeled as "HTTPS" by Google. This indicates that the site offers high-level security and integrity. The security of user data is a vital factor! It can help boost your search engine rankings and drive increased traffic.

A site that does not hold SSL certification or is a non-HTTPS site will be labeled as "Not Secure" by Google and other search engines. This can significantly affect search engine rankings. Additionally, end-users will be reluctant to visit any site that is not safe.

The implications for innovation in this space are clear. To boost search engine rankings and offer a secure browsing experience, websites must obtain a basic SSL certificate. It's now an integral element of any SEO strategy.

4. Automated Content Curation Using GPT-3

If you are looking for true innovations within the SEO industry and digital marketing, the Generative Pre-Trained Transformer Number 3 (GPT-3) is worth your attention. One of the most prominent examples of its application is a 2020 story published by The Guardian on its website - written entirely by a robot.

Using a broad pool of datasets, GPT-3 technology is trained to mimic the way humans write. Some of the datasets it uses come from Wikipedia, Common Crawl Dataset, historical books, etc. When you input a writing prompt into GPT-3, it will read the relevant information on the internet and predict what will follow next.

As such, the GPT-3 API is a revolutionary content curation tool you can use across different SEO applications. These include tasks such as writing emails or creating the first draft of a report. All you need to do is feed the API some bullet points as an outline, keeping your keyword ranking in mind, and the robot will write it automatically.

5. On-Page Automated SEO Optimization for Enhanced Search Experience

Google has been continuously updating its algorithm to offer an improved search experience to users. As a part of its algorithm update, the search engine giant now considers long-form content as a vital ranking factor. Long-form content ideally takes a more in-depth approach to the topic and, as such, tends to meet the searcher's intent.

However, writing high-quality and relevant long-form content is not easy. It involves considering a wide range of factors such as competitor research, keyword discovery, topic selection, creating engaging headings and subheadings, providing valuable insights, constructing a social media support strategy, and much more.

Continuously creating unique content that is of value to your readers is one of the more challenging innovations in search engine optimization.

"One of the first places I turn for new article ideas is the 'Top Content' area found within my Google Analytics account. There, I'm able to access a quick list of the posts on my site that have been viewed the most often, providing me with some interesting insight into the subject matter that my audience finds most interesting."

Eric Siu "Easy Market Research: Leveraging Your Existing Data for Content Creation"

New AI-Powered Tools Speed Content Creation

Normally, the next step would be to spend several hours editing and optimizing each piece of long-form content for search engines. This is where on-page automated content optimization and technical innovation come into the picture.

Tools such as Content Harmony or Frase AI streamline the process of content research or checking top-ranking pages. They provide useful data developers can use to curate high-quality content.

Content Harmony helps design content briefs automatically, helping meet a searcher's intent in a shorter amount of time. Writers only need to provide a keyword/keywords and the software will analyze SERPs automatically based on various data points. The generated results help the author create content briefs.

Source: MarketMuse (All rights reserved.)

6. Optimizing A/B Testing for SEO with Augmented User Interaction

Most SEO professionals tend to focus on end-user A/B testing rather than SEO A/B testing in digital marketing. The former involves picking website visitors randomly and assigning them to various versions of a web page. Based on the user's interaction with the pages, professionals use these SEO activities to gauge overall online marketing performance.

However, SEO A/B testing adds Google bots assigned to analyze the same version of any page. In essence, you are showing different elements of any page to Google to test their SEO-friendliness. These include meta description, featured snippet, title tags, H1, schema markup, anchor text, etc. SEO A/B testing helps clarify what works well for the page and what does not. Optimizing a page based on these results will help boost its search rankings and visibility.

7. Innovations in SEO Do Not Negate the Need for Non-Text Content

The purpose of using non-text content factors in SEO is to offer an improved user experience on your website.

Text alone lacks the engagement factor that keeps audiences interested, especially in long-form content. As a result, adding non-text content factors is crucial. These include images, graphs, infographics, videos, animations, audio clips, slideshows, PDFs, etc. will help improve the quality of your content. Likewise, doing so will make it more relevant and engaging.

Conclusion

With modern technology developments such as those already mentioned and Google Search Console making their way into the industry, it is evident that SEO optimization is definitely not dead. On the contrary, custom SEO has never been more important, especially local SEO. This will continue as Google constantly changes its approach to how websites are ranked in SERPs.

Do you want to leverage the potential of SEO to boost your search engine visibility, drive organic traffic, garner quality backlinks, and improve ROI? If so, you must commit to staying current on these technologies and implement regular modifications to achieve quality results. You might even consider partnering with a professional SEO service.

If you would like to connect with an SEO strategist to speak more about implementing innovative strategies and learn more about technical SEO, contact one of our Relevance SEO experts.

Being visible online is now crucial for every business. No matter if you only work locally or sell goods worldwide, you need to stand out in the crowd of competitors. You need to reap the beneficial results of content marketing. For this reason, many companies invest in effective SEO services performed by experienced and skillful professionals for their marketing efforts.

A skilled marketer or PR agency uses many techniques when building a marketing strategy. Some strategies are applied to the website itself. These typically involve combing through Google Analytics, conducting a content audit, overhauling blog posts, and optimizing all existing content for crawling by a search engine.

Others are performed off-site to achieve the impressive results of content marketing in the digital age. Among the off-site methods, there are two that are usually considered to be the most significant: digital PR and content marketing. Thanks to them, you can improve brand awareness, reach a wider audience through enhanced content distribution, and appeal to a potential customer by providing more engaging content that addresses the felt needs of your target audience.

Most companies profit considerably from a combination of social media marketing, PR efforts, media placements, publishing a white paper, media placements, journalist relationships, and more.

Additionally, those strategies can have both short-term and long-term effects on your business. Read on if you'd like to find out more about creating B2B content, how B2C marketers leverage relevant content as part of a comprehensive content marketing campaign, and why inbound marketing is beginning to eclipse more traditional marketing practices.

Digital PR

As the Digital Marketing Institute explains, "Digital PR includes a wide variety of marketing possibilities such as being interviewed by online publications, increasing your online presence, and using the interactive power of social media for further growth and recognition."

Digital PR is similar to traditional PR, focused on networking with journalists. The big idea in the content marketing world is to encourage them to feature a particular brand in magazines, newspapers, radio, and television. Consequently, digital public relations specialists search for coverage with articles on online news sources and websites or on social media and blog posts.

Digital PR Tactics

Nowadays, many digital PR tactics are used to improve a company's visibility on the internet. These include:

• business profiling via sharing B2B content;
• developing relationships with bloggers, B2B content marketers, B2C marketers, and online journalists to get press coverage;
• creating online press releases and soliciting other forms of media coverage;
• arranging online reviews and interviews on a targeted media outlet;
• blogger outreach and influencer marketing aimed at being more visible on blogs and social media profiles;
• posting online content to improve reputation, brand mentions, and receive valuable backlinks; and
• ensuring that press releases are well-optimized with high-quality links leading to your website to boost your search rankings.

Short-Term and Long-Term Benefits of Digital PR

Digital PR provides a business with many short-term and long-term benefits. However, to track its performance, an expert content marketer or full-fledged PR firm will recommend you set the goals for your campaign before you start it.

Some results that can help inform your goals and content marketing efforts might be as follows.

Improving Website Traffic

If many people read about your company as you share your branded content on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media, you are likely to get more visitors to your website. As a result, every point of contact with valuable content represents a chance to enhance your company's brand awareness (and profits) through content promotion.

Enhancing SEO and Rankings

As your business engages in content creation and gets mentioned on high-authority websites and in other B2B content marketing, it allows you to receive valuable links that work excellently for SEO. Consequently, when Google rates your site higher, it can rank higher for keywords associated with your industry. As a result, the savvy B2B marketer knows that you will get more traffic in this way as well.

Boosting Sales

One of the most significant benefits of any public relations practice is increasing sales. Therefore, when a company sees ROI from their online marketing investment, they know it is a crucial sign. It shows that all the marketing efforts were worth it and eventually paid off. Keep this in mind as you establish your marketing budget!

Generating Leads

Thanks to an excellent digital PR strategy, your great content will reach a relevant audience that's interested in your services or products. As a result, the more people that read about your offer and click through to your website, the more potentially valuable leads you will get.

Building a Trustworthy Brand

Similar to traditional PR, this digital counterpart aims at gaining your client's trust. Thanks to a lot of positive references online, your brand will definitely grow its reputation. Additionally, if your content creation efforts consistently yield an excellent blog post adapted to SEO standards, search engines perceive your website as a reliable source of information.

Content Marketing

You may think that content marketing is an on-page SEO tactic, focused on creating and publishing content on your company's website. However, in fact, this term is much broader. Instead, it involves both on-page and off-page methods. The successful marketing team typically uses a combination of email marketing, blog content, Google Ads, video content, and more to help boost their content marketing ROI.

Obviously, these days content creation means a lot more than firing off a random blog post every now and then. Yes, it's vital to create quality content on your site to increase your brand awareness. However, you should also remember to provide excellent, engaging assets to maximize the results of content marketing. (Seek to publish these authoritative resources elsewhere, too.)

Content Marketing Strategies

The most common practices used by content marketers are as follows:

• infographics;
• guest blog posts;
• eBooks;
• whitepapers;
• research papers;
• surveys; and
• case studies.

Experienced B2C marketers closely associate any content marketing effort with PR, link-building, and social media. As a result, these all become part of a successful content strategy and contribute powerfully to the process of building a reliable brand. Consequently, content creation and a healthy marketing budget represent twin necessities for taking your business to the next level.

Short-Term and Long-Term Benefits of Content Marketing

Social media is quite ubiquitous nowadays. Consumers are starting to expect unique and interesting content on various channels from every company. Consequently, any PR pro will tell you that it's worth following this trend as part of your overall content strategy and marketing efforts.

Whether you work with an agency or have your own in-house PR person, great content marketing can provide you with many short-term and long-term benefits.

Increased Reach

With content marketing, you can be wherever your customers are likely to appear. Your PR content can answer comments on social media, point them to a blog post or press release, or respond to questions on forums. You do not have to limit yourself to creating content for your website only.

Higher Authority and Credibility

Creating a lot of reliable content shows your company's expertise in the industry. In this way, you can appear as a credible provider who really knows a lot in their field. You can do it through publishing, for example, case studies, webinars, downloadable resources, or blog posts. This is what many PR professionals mean when they use the term inbound marketing.

Boosted Website Traffic

Similar to digital PR, content marketing sources can significantly improve your website traffic. This is because relevant and useful content (among other PR activities) will encourage your audience to come back to your website for compelling content and more.

Retargeted Audience

When you analyze your content's performance, you will gain the data necessary to retarget your audience. Content marketing success means providing them with the information they need. After taking a look at the users who viewed your content, you will know which display ads to retain in your content strategy to maximize the chances of making a profit.

Wrapping Up

Both digital PR and content marketing can provide your business with a lot of benefits. The obvious results of PR and content marketing are both obvious and quantifiable. Consequently, it's well worth combining them as part of your content marketing strategy. And yet, according to the Content Marketing Institute, more than half of businesses reported that their company had yet to put together an integrated digital marketing strategy.

Don't let your business become a content marketing statistic! Taking care of public relations and building a positive brand image has never been more crucial. As a result, numerous companies are fighting for the same audience, employing content marketers to help grab eyeballs online. You should do your utmost to stand out and attract them to your product or service. If you haven't done so already, start putting together a marketing budget and a content marketing strategy.

Thanks to content marketing and digital PR, your website will rank higher in search results. As a result, you will get more website traffic as just one of many results of content marketing. Additionally, your business will appear more relevant and trustworthy.

A content marketing strategy is vital as many people nowadays are exceedingly wary of online fraud. Therefore, investing your resources in PR and content marketing and leveraging off-site SEO techniques can really pay off.

The principles behind search engine optimization (SEO) make sense for businesses looking to capture target audience interest in a particular field, industry, or product type. For example, a consumer enters the phrase "brown spots in lawn" into the Google search bar, and multiple lawn services providers pop up. Their profiles feature content filled with tips and tricks as well as Google ads for useful products. This search result tactic works wonders for businesses with large audiences that address problems most everyone faces. But SEO also works well in niche markets, assuming it's leveraged correctly.

Obviously, some businesses don't have large audiences. How can SEO be as effective for them to target a potential customer? If you are operating within a niche business, read on. Learn how you can effectively leverage SEO for online success.

Understand Search Volume

Search volume is an important concern for SEO. It is essentially how many people are searching with the intent of finding and interacting with your niche.

No matter which SEO tool you use, researching search volume will give you a good idea of the size of your online audience. Scanning through Google Search Console, for example, you'll learn what terms your target audience are using to search for your industry or your business in particular.

The best way to research search volume is through Google's Keyword Planner, which you can access through your Ads Account. Here, you can find graphs pertaining to the popularity of different words and phrases used in the search. Because you are working within a niche, you are likely to discover that your search volume is low.

However, it shouldn't be non-existent.

If you do try to use a keyword phrase that is associated with little to no traffic on any search engine, the Google Keyword Planner should tell you that your keywords aren't contributing to SEO success.

Search intent is a bit different from keywords. While terms, phrases, and related keywords used in the search query factor into intent, they aren't always directly descriptive of what a web user wants in the search results.

Google is getting better at understanding and identifying intent through machine learning tools like BERT. Accordingly, you should try to work with search intent within your content to increase the number of keywords you rank for and boost your search volume.

• Related Article: Step by Step Guide to Keyword Research

Research Keyword Specificity

Usually, specific keyword phrases are better for SEO because there is less competition for them.

For instance, huge corporations tend to rank for "financial services," but smaller, local businesses have more opportunities to rank for "financial services Modesto CA." This is a great example of how to approach an SEO strategy in niche markets. Using local SEO and niche driven SEO allows smaller businesses to rise in ranking for a specified target audience.

However, there is a fine line between appropriately specific and obscure. You need to be careful not to cross that line. If you do, you'll lose whatever meager web traffic you can get.

Keyword research is difficult even at the best of times. Still, when you are trying to balance on the edge of specificity, you should consider hiring an SEO expert or marketing agency. Many specialists can provide SEO services such as keyword research, niche driven SEO, or technical SEO a la carte or provide a comprehensive package.

SEO agencies have the right keyword tools to help you track and choose the best terms and phrases to target, especially when your search volume is low, to begin with. They will start with a content audit and an SEO audit. They will conduct keyword research and help you assess your current domain rating. Plus, experienced SEOs know more about managing search engine intent with keywords.

Research Your Search Competition

It is likely that you operate within a smaller niche because you discovered a need and worked to fill it. You might be the only business of your kind. However, you will still probably have some sort of competition for your keywords. A cursory glance at your website's Google Analytics can help you see how your niche edit is performing.

To dominate in your chosen keyword categories and develop a content strategy, you first need to know what pages you are up against. The very best email marketing effort, blog post, or affiliate marketing campaign won't boost your domain authority if you are getting drowned out by your competitors. And yet you certainly don't want to waste time chasing every Google trend.

It's important to note that your competition might be firmly established in your industry. They might be ranking for your niche keywords for a completely unrelated reason. Regardless, you should look into their content and SEO tactics and work to best them in every way. Specific factors include domain speed and image quality to content quantity and relevance.

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Develop Niche Content

Content creation is easily your most powerful tool in attracting a niche audience. The more content you have, and the higher quality it is, the better your link building will be and the higher your search ranking factor will be. That result is irrespective of the volume of searches coming your way.

You likely know your business and industry inside and out, so you can begin developing content and social media links for your target audience today. Right now.

However, creating your own content for the purpose of inbound marketing isn't a terrific long-term strategy. For one, lacking an outsider's perspective on your industry and products can be a hindrance to your business's ability to relate to and engage its audience.

For another, you might not have the time or skill to produce high-quality content on a schedule. Additionally, you might lack a network of publishers for the placement of your content to garner backlinks. Now or later, you should contract content marketing services. They will provide the expertise you need to execute your niche content properly.

It is more difficult to practice SEO within a niche market. You might quickly see your domain rise to the top of the search results. However, you might never obtain the huge influx of traffic that businesses in larger industries experience. Still, niche driven SEO remains an important digital marketing tactic. You should look into leveraging a niche marketing strategy for business success today.