Month: December 2021

Do you want to increase your website’s rankings? SEO is a powerful way to do this. On page SEO refers to the content on your website, and it can take time and patience to get it right. In this blog post, we will go over three tips for optimizing SEO on your website so that you can rank higher in search engine results pages (SERP).

These tips are the foundational pieces that I have used for my business and clients that flat out get results.

SILOing Your Content

A big part of search engine optimization is creating content. One mistake people make is not structuring that content properly so it is easily followed. The first thing you need to know is how to structure the content so when someone comes to the site they can easily navigate and find the content they are looking for.

The best way to do this is through SILOing your content.

What is SILOing you ask?

SILOing stands for “siloing information.” It’s the process of organizing website content in a hierarchical manner. On each page, you have to provide links that lead users down a hierarchy, or order, of topics or subtopics.

I like to draw it out on a white board and make it look like an organizational chart.

Here is an example of what a hiearchy would look like:

The main topic of focus for the entire website is right at the top. Below the main topic, start creating subtopics. I like to keep the subtopics to 5 or less in the beginning. Then, underneath each subtopic, start writing all the potential things you can write about on that particular topic.

If you have a hard time  coming up with things to write about, go to websites like answerthepublic.com or quora.com and search the subtopic. Then just write down all the questions that come up and answer them.

How long should each article or piece of content be for SEO?

There are many answers to this question depending on where you focus. From our experience with clients, we have found that top-performing content is at least 1200 words and that content should not be less than 800 words. If content is under 800 words, it typically performs poorly in rankings.

Now with SILOing, you can use multiple pieces of content in a “series” like format to get the word count up.

The idea behind having this much content is that you want to build authority on the topic.

Google hasn’t really come out and said 800 – 1200 words is the mark, but if you can easily write 1200 words on a topic it shows that you know a little of what you are talking about, Google likes that.

As for keywords and getting all that in there. Each piece of content should be themed towards a question or single topic that falls under that sub topic. This makes it really…

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Without SEO, publishing content online is like sending a rocket to space without a destination.

If you don’t tell that rocket which direction to head (the moon or Mars?), you’re stuck crossing your fingers and hoping things work out. That’s not good marketing. Good marketing comes with predictability, data, and then some crossed fingers.

And that’s the perfect way to describe search engine optimization, SEO, in 2022. 

SEO is part of the search engine algorithm: 

Input = Keywords

Output = Content

For every keyword, there are thousands of pages of search results and plenty of content to choose from (outputs). But, page 1,000 isn’t nearly as useful as page 1. Even page 2 of search results can feel like no man’s land. 

That’s why marketers care about SEO. Because all search engine pages are not equal. The power of ranking top 3 on page 1 of a search engine beats out ranking first on page 2 by 100x (honestly, maybe even 1,000x). 

How do you land a coveted spot on page 1 of the search results?

By picking the right SEO keywords through these three steps.

3 Steps SEO Experts Use to Pick Keywords

SEO has been around long enough that you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. A new, innovative, never-before-seen SEO strategy that takes you months to implement and even longer to see results is the opposite of what SEO experts are doing.

The SEO experts writing high-quality content, landing on page 1 for relevant searches, and seeing results from their content are the ones following this tried-and-true SEO strategy.

#1: Ideate Keywords

There are two types of advertising: interruption-based and intent-based. Interruption-based advertising is an ad on your social media newsfeed. It’s the ads between paragraphs on the news article you’re trying to read. It’s a search engine ad strategically placed before the organic results. This isn’t your focus in organic SEO marketing, but this IS your focus in paid SEO advertising.

In SEO marketing, you’re focused on intent-based advertising. When somebody chooses to search for an answer to their question—that’s intent-based advertising. A search for “olive green cotton blanket” is an example of intent-based advertising. 

And the search engine results are a mix of interruption (paid ads) and intent-based advertising (organic results).

When you’re ideating keywords for your products and brand, you’re looking at intent-based words. These are the words somebody needs to use to find your products or brand. For DigitalMarketer, these are words like:

• Digital marketing training
• Digital marketing help
• Content marketing training
• Copywriting training

These keywords correlate directly to our products. They teach people how to be great digital marketers, either for their own company, their full-time marketing role, marketing consultancy, or their agency clients.

Your customer avatar asks specific questions and uses certain words to describe to search engines what content they want output. Use these questions to make a list of 20+ keywords you could rank for:

1. What questions do your customers ask surrounding your products or brand?
2. What…

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Search engine optimization (SEO) is an integral part of digital marketing.

SEO helps with brand discoverability. When done right, SEO can create the most consistent and by far the highest-quality traffic source which doesn’t require on-going maintenance.

Yet, SEO is usually the most isolated part of the marketing. Whether it is an in-house team or a third-party service that’s delivering your SEO campaigns, it usually exists on its own without really communicating goals, progress, or results to the whole company.

This creates silos that can lead to poor results and even reputation crises.

How does SEO work in digital marketing and how can a business make it work better?

What is SEO?

SEO is a collection of tactics (content, technical, link building, even website security and usability) that ensures that your website is easy to understand for search engines.

Basically, it ensures a machine knows that your page will be easy to find to a human being who is looking to solve a related problem.

Search engine traffic is one of the highest-quality traffic for many reasons:

• Unlike PPC (paid) traffic, it doesn’t require an ongoing investment to keep coming
• Unlike social media traffic,  it doesn’t require an ongoing work to keep coming
• Unlike social media traffic, you are not interrupting people’s browsing. Instead you give them what they were actually searching for.

In other words, it is consistent and it converts well. No other digital marketing tactic beats that.

Apart from driving direct traffic, search engine optimization helps build brand awareness by increasing your brand’s organic findability.

Keep Your Whole Team Aware of Why SEO is Important

The great thing about today is that everyone understands the value of ranking high on Google! Sadly, however, many folks only know that they “need SEO” without having really understood what that means. 

SEO these days is too hard for a digital marketer to do alone. Many SEOs find themselves in situations where an executive will simply come down and go “Why are we not ranking well for ‘dingwobble’?” 

Keep working hard with teams for them to understand how they contribute to the SEO process:

• Product Marketers who are responsible for the business, personas and messaging understand that SEO is critical to driving the bottom line revenue numbers they are looking at. Part of the persona developing process should be the development of the “digital persona” – what websites and search terms are these people looking for? This helps the product marketer when it comes time to develop messaging, as that is going to be critical for developing the content, so the right search terms better be there!
• Field Marketers responsible for the campaigns need to know how SEO fits within their campaign, how it in fact is core to our demand generation, and how to make sure to keep the campaigns integrated.
• Marketing Communications is creating the content, so SEO should…

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