30-second summary:

• Link building starts from on-page SEO
• Get your on-page SEO right by working on pillar and cluster pages
• Blend your on-page success with off-page SEO strategies
• Link building is not about the quantity 
• Create a 12-month plan to maximize your off-page SEO success

SEO is more important than ever. As online usage is increasing and consumers’ heads are turning to online purchases, it’s vital to have a strong search presence for your business. Your ranking and authority will determine whether you’ll get more visits from prospective customers. Link building can help you build your ranking and authority by earning valuable links.

Quality is crucial that’s why you need to aim for relevant content that will make your earned link more important.

So how do you get started with off-page SEO?

NO-BS have earned more than 50,000 contextual links after working with 5,000 websites for link building so they launched a helpful guide on how to build a strong off-page SEO strategy.

Let’s look at the takeaways.

Content created in partnership with NO-BS.

Start with your on-page strategy

You can’t work on your off-page strategy without building your on-page SEO strategy first.

Your site should be optimized for the best results so that you make the most of the links that you’ll learn.

Thus, you should prioritize working on quality content, target keywords, page speed, mobile optimization, and metadata among others.

User experience is very important. You can’t rank high on SERPs without providing the best experience to all users.

Here are a few ideas to get started with on-page SEO.

Create pillar and cluster pages

The pillar and cluster model was first introduced by HubSpot several years ago. It’s an extremely helpful way to organize your content based on the main themes and topics to make your SEO strategy more structured.

For example, if you’re working for a branding agency, a pillar page could be about ‘brand building’ and a cluster article could be ‘5 tips to be authentic when building your brand’

Think of the pillar pages that define your business and start organizing your current content based on clusters that fit in the pillar pages.

Working on the pillar and cluster pages can help you both with on-page and off-page SEO as you are building your authority through relevant content.

Build themed link funnels

Once you work on your pillars, it’s time to build your themed link funnels.

Link funnels can help you build topical authority starting from your pillars and moving it up to your conversion pages. It’s the best way to link your on-page and off-page strategy to get the best results out of them.

Now it’s time to build different tiers of your links that you can also use in your future content.

First of all, start by building your pillar pages. Think of the main themes that define your site’s content. Your pillar pages should be the pages that you ultimately want to lead everyone to.

It’s the page that will bring everyone closer to any sort of conversion. You can include testimonials, social proof, details of your services, etc.

The next step is to work on your content clusters.

Your content clusters should be pages that are somehow relevant to your pillar page. They are not as broad as your pillar page but they still have a connection to it.

All your content clusters should link to your pillar page.

Your links should be in two to three tiers to help you organize your content and they should be somehow linked back to your cluster page.

This is a useful strategy to blend on-page and off-page optimization.

Once you have your themed links ready, start exploring new ways to diversify your content and your links.

Work on the anchors, experiment with different types of content and always make sure you create unique content.

Now it’s time to improve your off-page SEO strategy.

Create a 12-month off-page strategy

The best way to build your off-page strategy is to work on a 12-month plan. You have more chances to be successful once you document your strategy.

NOBS have created a template with some examples of content and ideas on how to use the spreadsheet.

Here are a few of the ideas to consider.

Identify your top keywords

Start by identifying your most important keywords. You should sort them out in clusters as part of your on-page strategy.

Add each keyword to a pillar and explore the keyword difficulty for each one of them.

Come up with blog ideas for your pillar pages

Work on blog title ideas that could match your pillar pages. This way you are creating the URL for each page.

Add more topics to the relevant pillar to make it easier when creating new clusters.

Create a plan for your links

Set up a plan for the content you’ll create for the pillar pages. There’s no need to create all your posts at once! Expand your plan to the tier 1 and tier 2 links for each of your clusters.

Don’t make your strategy too complicated, you can focus on one cluster at a time and less competitive keywords.

Pay attention to the anchor text

Be careful with your anchor text. Make sure that the text you choose is relevant to the link you use on each cluster article.

You don’t need to aim for exact-match keywords, it’s better for the link to be naturally placed in the text.

Track the links you’ve earned

Keep track of the number of links that you’ve earned. It makes it easier for you and your team to keep track of your progress.

There’s no need to aim for large volume links at once. It’s better to start gradually with 1-2 links per month.

To find out more about the tactics to boost your off-page strategy, download the guide ‘How to design a strong off-page SEO strategy’ here.

30-second summary:

• Link building is still one of the best tactics to boost your Google rankings
• Forum link building can help you tap into niche communities
• Crowd marketing is the concept of setting up a strategy for forum link building
• There’s no need to be discouraged if you’re just getting started
• Quality is important both in your content and the forum that you decide to join

SEO is evolving through the years and it’s still more important than ever in your digital strategy.

It takes time to rank high in Google’s search results and one of the best ways to improve your success is to aim for credible backlinks to your content.

Backlinks can prove that the content is trustworthy and useful enough for the users to get you higher in SERPs. 

Through the years, link building is still one of the most effective methods to build your SEO. It helps you improve your search visibility and work towards reaching higher in the SERPs in a consistent and efficient way.

The question is, how can you make the most out of it in 2020?

Forum link building can be your secret weapon. Crowdo has released ‘The Ultimate Guide to Forum Link Building in 2020’ sharing tactics and examples to make it work.

Here are the key takeaways:

Content created in partnership with Crowdo.

Embracing crowd marketing

One of the most common tactics in link building is guest posting. It’s the process of featuring your content on another blog to get a link back to your site.

Although it’s a popular method, there are still more options to consider.

For example, ‘crowd marketing’, involves link building through communities and forums.

Crowdo is listing the benefits of ‘crowd marketing’ on their latest report:

• Forums can be relevant for every niche industry. You can get links back to your site even when trying to reach a very specific group of people
• It can be easier to get a link on a forum compared to getting a guest post published.
• A lot of forums have been around for many years, which increases their credibility as a source of a link

It’s relatively easy to get a backlink from a forum. Your research can help you find the best way to reach your target audience to maximise the value.

It’s important though to avoid spamming or automated link generators. Crowd marketing should be a white hat technique rather than a quick win with no tangible results.

Focusing on the right links

You don’t want to gather as many links as you can if they don’t add value to your site and your ranking.

The quality of backlinks is crucial. If you’re unsure how to define the quality of the backlink, here are the key factors to consider:

• Website traffic. Examine the traffic of the website to understand its popularity and it value it can bring
• Relevance. Pick the forums and threads that are relevant to your site’s content. Don’t waste your time on links that are useless.
• Authority. Look at the domain authority (DA) of the website. Tools like Ahrefs/ Moz / Semrush can help you discover a site’s DA. Aim for a DA that’s at least 50.
• Context. Make sure your link is naturally placed in a sentence. Don’t just add the link on its own but rather link it to the right context.
• Quality of forum. Analyse the forum’s quality. Too many spam posts are not a good indication of its quality. Aim for forums that are highly moderated as this may indicate the increase in the quality and the trust.

Best practices for scaling up link building

If you’re just getting started with link building, it might feel challenging to scale up your efforts.

There’s no need to quit though.

Here are Crowdo’s tips on how to address your challenges:

• Don’t skip research. Research is crucial. Find the communities that are more relevant to your target audience. Look at their metrics. Read the latest threads to explore the topics that you want to be featured on.
• Build trust. When you’re just getting started in a community, it’s important to take the time to build trust. If you need to register, fill all the details on your profile, join additional conversations, and aim for the long-term relationship.
• Confirm that the threads are indexed by Google. Make sure that the forum threads that you’re about to post are indexed by Google. You don’t want to waste your time without seeing the content indexed.
• Treat link building as an investment. Link building takes time. If your niche forum requires a registration fee, work on your end goal and what you want to get out of it. If it justifies the investment, do not hesitate to invest more time and resources on it.

Practical examples

If you want to see what forum building looks like, here is an example from Crowdo’s report.

In this example, the target niche is insurance providers. The community has more than 80k visitors, 93 DA, 48 TF. Thus, it makes the perfect source to add value to a conversation along with a dofollow backlink.

It’s a great example of how your research can lead you to the right source to make your link both useful and relevant.

Next steps

If you need additional help with your forum building, agencies like Crowdo can help you with on-demand link building services.

They are offering an exclusive offer to our readers with a 10% discount. You can find out more here and make the most of the offer using the coupon code provided in the link.

If you want to find out more about forum link building, make sure you read their latest report here.

30-second summary:

• Although Google’s updates have downplayed the importance of keywords, they are still important in your SEO strategy. It’s not enough to create content and stuff it with keywords to engage your target audience.
• Ignite Digital is reminding us of the importance of understanding how keywords work. It’s not enough to pick the most popular keyword and add it throughout your text.
• By not adding meta tags, you are reducing your chances of getting your content ranked and discovered through specific keywords.
• A website owner that is having too many 404 errors is signalling Google that they are not frequently reviewing their website or that they have abandoned it. This wouldn’t contribute to good ranking in SERPs.

Search engine optimization can help you boost your brand while increasing your site’s traffic. Quality content that is relevant to your target audience can boost your authority to secure future SEO success.

However, it’s important to get the foundation right to avoid sabotaging your tactics.

Ignite Digital, an experience-driven digital agency in all aspects of digital marketing, have written a report with the SEO mistakes that we need to avoid.

Here are some of them:

Content created in partnership with Ignite Digital.

SEO Mistake #1 – Not doing keyword research

Every business wants to rank high in the search results. Using the right keywords can be the key to success.

That’s what makes keyword research a vital part of your SEO strategy. It can help you discover the best keywords to rank for and increase your traffic. It can also bring new leads to your website and help your business increase sales.

Although Google’s updates have downplayed the importance of keywords, they are still important in your SEO strategy. It’s not enough to simply create content and stuff it with keywords to engage your target audience.

The keyword research strategy is extremely important and can help you discover great opportunities for your business to stand out amongst competitors. 

Ignite Digital is reminding us of the importance of understanding how keywords work. It’s not enough to pick the most popular keyword and add it throughout your text.

Different types of keywords can serve different purposes. For example, you can use generic keywords to describe your business, your product, and your services. These are important for brand awareness.

You can also use niche keywords to be more specific. Long-tail keywords may not necessarily attract the same traffic as the general keywords, but they can lead to better business prospects since the search intent is more specific.

SEO Mistake #2 – Not adding title tag or meta description

The goal of search engine optimization is to increase the organic traffic to your website to improve your business success. You want to rank as high as possible in the SERPs to appeal to new or returning customers.

While you’re working on producing content of great quality, there is a crucial step that you might be ignoring. Adding title tags and meta descriptions to your pages can help your SEO tactics become extremely successful..

As you’re aiming to increase your search rankings, all your pages should be optimized based on what search crawlers want to find. In this case, meta tags are providing all the necessary information for each page and what it should rank for.

A meta description can provide an overview of what the page is about while the title can also include the keyword that you are ranking for. An effective meta description can increase your click-through rates and thus, bring more visitors to your site.

It’s important to be clear and distinct as you only have 160 characters to describe your content and your business. Your meta description should appeal to your potential customers to convince them to click on your link.

By not adding meta tags, you are reducing your chances of getting your content ranked and discovered through specific keywords.

Start by experimenting with the different ways you can present your content in just 160 characters. Think like a user and what would grab your attention to visit a website.

SEO Mistake #3 – Having too many 404 errors

Imagine you’re a user looking for “affordable bikes” as a search term. You’re looking at a meta description that resonates with what you’re looking for so you decide to visit the site. That’s when you see “Error 404” and no content at all.

Many users face similar problems and they end up disappointed or frustrated by the user experience. The common message of ‘page not found’ can happen to all websites. However, there are many cases that it shows up way too often. As a business owner, you might not even know that a page is not working.

404 errors can impact your website’s ranking. The more errors you are having, the worse it becomes for your SEO strategy.

It’s useful to know that Google is actually normalizing 404 errors. They are aware that things can change and that all websites can end up having such pages. However, it’s important to be aware of them and work towards removing them.

A website owner that is having too many 404 errors is signalling Google that they are not frequently reviewing their website or that they have abandoned it. This could negatively impact a good ranking in SERPs.

On the contrary, you can run 404 checks to locate pages that are not working anymore to ensure that they are redirected in the correct page.

If you’re still having a 404 error on your site, make sure that you are customizing it while including a call-to-action to improve the user experience.

There are many SEO mistakes that we can make at some point when working on our search strategy. To find out more about the most popular SEO mistakes and how to avoid them, make sure you read Ignite Digital’s report here.

30-second summary:

• Performance marketing is growing strong and the idea of thinking of the future along with emerging technologies that can supercharge your campaigns sounds exciting.
• The applied use of AI in marketing is a common challenge for many brands. As consumer behaviors are changing and new technologies emerge, it’s critical for marketers to explore the different benefits of integrating AI into their marketing strategies.
• AI can transform performance marketing by making the most of all available data. The ability to collect and analyze data in a centralized way can help you focus on the bigger picture.
• Website intelligence based on AI can be the key to your success in all areas of marketing. Data can be extremely valuable from planning your upcoming campaigns to adjusting your budget and learning more about your target audience.
• You can also use predictive modeling with your ad campaigns to make the most of AI in optimization and campaign efficiency.
• Using AI to organize and analyze your incoming leads can help you save time but also improve your efficiency. It can help marketers make a case for the number of leads that they generated even in real-time.

The world is changing and it’s crucial to adapt our marketing strategies to remain successful.

2020 has already affected us in one way or another, whether it’s about updating our marketing campaigns, adjusting the ad spend, or shifting the focus on new digital channels. However, it’s not enough if you don’t plan ahead to future proof your strategy.

Performance marketing is growing strong and the idea of thinking of the future along with emerging technologies that can supercharge your campaigns sounds exciting.

Machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), chatbots, voice assistants, personalization are among the trends that are already shaping our strategies. The challenge is about understanding their potential now to increase the investment when planning ahead.

For example, the use of AI in performance marketing can be very promising. Many companies are already successfully integrating it into their strategy.

If you’re still cautious about it, check out this new white paper by SherloQ, Inc., which provides some examples of how to integrate AI into your marketing mix.

Content created in partnership with SherloQ, Inc.

How AI can benefit your marketing plans

The applied use of AI in marketing is a common challenge for many brands. As consumer behaviors are changing and new technologies emerge, it’s critical for marketers to explore the different benefits of integrating AI into their marketing strategies.

Making data-driven decisions

AI can transform performance marketing by making the most of all available data. The ability to collect and analyze data in a centralized way can help you focus on the bigger picture.

It can also help you make better decisions at a more practical level.

For example, lead generation and qualification can be time-consuming. The ability to integrate all your leads both from your website and ad campaigns can be a game-changer.

SherloQ, powered by IBM Watson, makes the aggregation of data easier in real-time.

Human involvement is still crucial, of course, by rating categorizing the leads based on your criteria, you can train your data further. However, you are still able to save time and keep all your leads in one place to make your process easier.

Gaining valuable insights

Website intelligence based on AI can be the key to your success in all areas of marketing. Data can be extremely valuable from planning your upcoming campaigns to adjusting your budget and learning more about your target audience.

For example, the option to analyze all transcripts, calls, and keywords in real-time can help you improve your communication and use the learnings to form your next campaigns, website changes, or even content planning.

SherloQ is making the process easier by aggregating, storing, and processing your data in real-time while the Intelligence Report can help you uncover all the opportunities for your business.

Using machine learning to personalize the experience

ML can be very powerful both for marketing and sales. The ability to learn from your process to automate key tasks can be valuable especially when there is time pressure and you need to focus on many tasks at once.

Moreover, personalization can help you improve your customer experience to maintain successful engagement both with existing and new customers.

You can also use predictive modeling with your ad campaigns to make the most of AI in optimization and campaign efficiency.

SherloQ can also help you with the real-time ranking of your leads to make sure that you don’t miss any opportunities.

How AI can improve your pipeline 

Lead generation and qualification are all about seizing every single opportunity that comes your way. You don’t want to lose a potentially big deal simply because you lost it among all other leads.

Using AI to organize and analyze your incoming leads can help you save time but also improve your efficiency. It can help marketers make a case for the number of leads that they generated even in real-time.

The wealth of insights can also help you plan your next campaigns. For example, SherloQ allows you to connect every lead with the keywords and the ads that they converted on. It can make performance marketing easier while making the attribution more comprehensive.

Automotive dealers have asked SherloQ how to increase their car sales. The complicated consumer journey was making it hard for them to know how their performance marketing efforts are translated into sales.

Thus, they’ve used SherloQ to aggregate their data from phone calls, chats, emails, and organic and paid marketing. A closer look at the data led to the conclusion that most leads were converting through organic emails and organic chats via social media, yet the dollars were being allocated toward paid search instead.

Having a better idea of where your leads are coming from and what keywords they are using to land on your website can be extremely helpful.

The ability to use AI to organize all the data and rate the leads can help you make better decisions in the planning of your marketing campaigns and budget.

To find out more about how to improve your marketing with AI, read SherloQ’s whitepaper on performance marketing and AI here.

30-second summary:

• SEMrush have created the guide ‘How to Do Online Competitor Analysis’ to help you start looking at what your competitors are doing.
• Analyzing your competitors’ digital marketing strategy can help you optimize your campaign and your upcoming ideas to improve both your short and long-term wins.
• A website traffic analysis can help you learn more about your biggest competitors, their performance the past months, their audience and whether there had been any big changes to their results.
• A good way to get started is to explore the general overview of your competitors’ digital strategy, their traffic, the most popular locations and whether there are any seasonal trends. The analysis will help you dive deeper into the market trends and how they compare to your own performance.
• You don’t need to reinvent the wheel to run a successful advertising campaign. It’s okay to look at your competitors’ ads to find inspiration for your upcoming campaigns.
• You can analyze your competitors’ online mentions, social media presence, their overall reputation and the number of backlinks to get a better idea of their strengths and weaknesses.
• Competitor analysis can help multiple teams for both short and long terms goals in your business. Start by looking at different strategies and channels and make sure you gather the findings in one place to evaluate your own performance.

A frequent review of your digital marketing strategy can help you stay successful with your tactics. However, focusing on your own tactics is not enough nowadays. You should be able to know what your competitors are doing and how you can outperform them.

Analyzing your competitors’ digital marketing strategy can help you optimize your campaign and your upcoming ideas to improve both your short and long-term wins.

SEMrush have created the guide ‘How to Do Online Competitor Analysis’ to help you start looking at what your competitors are doing.

Here are some ideas on how to get started:

Content produced in partnership with SEMrush.

Analyze the competitors’ site traffic

A look at your competitors’ website traffic can provide many useful insights. You can start by mapping out your competitors and how their online presence is performing.

A website traffic analysis can help you discover more details about your competitors’ digital marketing strategy, their performance over the past months and whether there had been any big changes to their results.

You can also look at their most popular channels to decide how you can adjust your digital marketing strategy based on the findings.

After the first review of their website traffic, you can narrow down the analysis to focus on your closest competitors.

It can also be useful to review any trends and seasonal changes that might affect the traffic and what these changes could mean to your own tactics.

Analyze the competitors’ SEO tactics

If you want to build a long-term digital marketing strategy then you need to include SEO to your plans. Improving your ranking in search results can lead to a consistent number of views to your website every month.

You should also look at your competitors’ ranking to explore how you can rank higher than them.

A good way to get started is to analyze a target website’s organic search visibility on a daily basis.

The analysis can help you explore your competitors’ best keywords, their average monthly search traffic but also their most successful pages.

The learnings can help you optimize your campaign and your content so that you target the right keywords. You can also explore potential keyword gaps to help you rank higher at a shorter time.

Analyze your competitors’ online ads

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel to run a successful advertising campaign. It’s okay to look at your competitors’ ads to find inspiration for your upcoming campaigns.

Analyzing your competitors’ online ads can help you find out useful information, such as:

• the number of keywords bidding on
• average traffic coming from keywords
• estimated paid traffic cost
• websites your rivals are competing with
• historical data to analyze seasonal changes in your competitors’ ads

The learnings can help you spot opportunities that your competitors might be missing or even specific markets that you can tap into.

You can even use the data to explore new ways to improve your ROI, from picking different keywords to trying out new channels and audiences.

Analyze your competitors’ content marketing and PR efforts

If you want to improve your content marketing strategy then it’s good to look at what your competitors are doing in terms of content and PR.

You can analyze your competitors’ online mentions, social media presence, their overall reputation and the number of backlinks to get a better idea of their strengths and weaknesses.

An analysis of their content marketing and PR efforts can help you understand your target audience and also the opportunities that you can explore.

For example, if you want to reach a very niche audience and your competitors have already created too much content and are popular then you may want to explore the missing opportunities that you can tap into.

It can be a new channel, a new content type or an opportunity to think outside the box.

You can also get inspired by their content marketing tactics and adjust them to fit your own objectives.

Analyze your competitors’ social media presence

Your social media presence can tell a lot about your digital marketing strategy. Imagine looking at your competitors’ social media presence!

Your competitor analysis can include a closer look at your competitors’ social channels, their frequency of posting, their engagement rate and their most popular channels.

It can help you discover opportunities of standing out by learning from your competitors’ mistakes.

Whether it’s the tone of voice, a sudden post that got viral or even the use of the new channel, there are many useful insights that you can explore.

Putting the learnings into action

Right after understanding how your competitors are doing in digital channels, it’s time to make the most of these learnings.

The best way to use competitor analysis is to incorporate the findings to your digital marketing strategy and your upcoming campaigns.

How can you use the findings then?

Here are some ideas from the SEMrush team:

• Reevaluate your benchmarks and your performance based on your objectives
• Compare your digital marketing strategy and results with your competitors’ tactics
• Include the learnings to your understanding of the target audience
• Be flexible and open to change based on your findings
• Share the learning with other internal teams or agencies you work with

Competitor analysis can help multiple teams for both short and long terms goals in your business. Start by looking at different strategies and channels and make sure you gather the findings in one place to evaluate your own performance.

To find out more details on how to perform a competitor analysis, download SEMrush’s guide here.

In other words, the URL of the featured snippet appears a single time in the SERP instead of serving with the snippet and its base position lower in the result.

The change is already having a significant impact on the number of clicks that featured snippets receive.

Digital marketing agency, 97th Floor conducted a study looking at almost 3000 high-volume SERPs that were affected by the spot-zero termination.

They’ve written a whitepaper to share practical tips on how to prioritize your SEO needs after Google’s update, and have also provided a free STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Results) reporting template to help you strategize.

Here is how to get started.

Content produced in collaboration with 97th Floor.

1. Highlight the date of the change in your analytics platform

The first step is to make sure that you mark the date of January 22 in your analytics platform. It’s the easiest way to keep track of all the changes that happen after Google’s update.

You can also mark the date in other SEO tools that you’re using to track your success with keywords and traffic to your site.

2. Exclude featured snippets from your new keyword research

According to 97th Floor’s research, there was a significant drop in the number of clicks on featured snippets after the spot-zero termination. Thus, make sure you run new keyword research to explore new opportunities. This time, filter out featured snippets and “people also ask” boxes to find keywords that will earn more clicks.

3. Re-optimize your URLs to become featured snippets

97th Floor noticed that it now becomes easier for URLs at the front page of SERPs to turn into featured snippets. Up to now, most featured snippets were in spots 1-3 but now there is a shift that includes more SERPs from the first page.

This means that you might not necessarily need to aim for spot 1 or 2 to land a featured snippet. Spend some time on optimizing your URLs holding lower position keywords to increase your chances of success.

4. Review your traffic coming from featured snippets

Google’s update has impacted the popular snippets that used to attract a high volume of site clicks. Thus, it’s not necessarily useful to aim for landing a featured snippet.

If you’ve noticed a drastic decline in your number of clicks, explore the idea of opting out of the featured snippets aiming for spot two instead.

5. Review your title tags

Now that the clicks are reduced, it’s more important than ever to work on your title tags. Aim for text that is more “clickable” without being misleading.

For example, if your brand is not popular, you can leave out its name from the title to focus on the content that will make your URL more clickable.

Double the time you are spending on optimization to review your SEO success.

6. Improve your meta descriptions

As with title tags, it’s crucial to pay attention to your meta descriptions to make your links more appealing.

It’s the best time to review your meta descriptions to explore how it can affect your clicks to your site.

7. Review your structured data mark-up

Featured snippets don’t make the only way to highlight your links. The structured data associated with your URLs can help you boost your performance in SERPs.

There are many mark-ups for your URLs and they vary based on the content:

• Customer reviews
• Event details
• Product pricing
• Recipe information
• Local business information
• Single Images or Carousels

8. De-optimize the featured snippet if needed

The best way to ‘deactivate’ the featured snippet from your link is to implement the “data-nosnippet” attribute to the HTTP of any page you want to de-optimize.

It’s safer to use this code instead of changing the copy as this could potentially affect your ranking.

9. Communicate the changes

Don’t forget to update your boss or client about the latest changes. Communication can make your job easier both in the short and long term.

Educating your clients can also help you get buy-in for long-term action plans that are clear on the implications of any changes coming from Google.

Start by presenting the situation, how you’re going to address it and the next actions.

This article only provides a flavor of the actionable recommendations in 97th Floor’s whitepaper. Download ‘The 10 Actions SEOs Need to Take Following Google’s Spot-Zero-Termination‘ for a more in-depth view, as well as their free STAR reporting template.

We’ve welcomed 2020 and it’s the perfect time to start thinking of the best way to maintain a successful content marketing strategy over the next 12 months.

New channels, tactics, and trends emerge every day but the challenge is to decide on the ones that you want to include to your own strategy.

There are many posts that focus on the latest big trends and how you could revolutionize your tactics for 2020. We’ve decided to go back to basics to review how simple tactics and trends that can improve your content success.

1. Focus on the experience

It’s not enough to increase the frequency of your blogs to improve your content marketing success. In a digital world full of new content, the challenge is to stand out from your competitors.

A good way to achieve success is to focus on the experience. Your content should be relevant and informative but it should also facilitate the user experience.

Content experience is a growing term that refers to the role that sits between content marketing and UX. It’s about reviewing how you can improve your content, your website and even your strategy to ensure that your readers are spending more time on your posts.

There are many ways to improve your content experience:

• Test the mobile version of your site
• Aim for short paragraphs that are easy to read on mobile
• Enhance the “readability” of your content by allowing your text to “breathe” with images and sub-headings
• Review your loading speed
• Aim for personalization

Not all changes require too much of your time. What’s important is to acknowledge how your team, your tools, and your processes can gear up towards improved content experiences in 2020, one step at a time.

2. Include visual data

Visual content can improve the reading experience. It can also help you get the main data to stand out. Infographics, for example, help you summarise your key points in a more visual way. They can even help you enhance the “shareability” of your post.

Visual quotes can also help you get your point across in a way that stands out to the reader. You can also include videos in your content to provide an alternative content format for your story.

Another idea that is very helpful in SaaS marketing is to include GIFs when talking about your product. It’s easier for your readers to understand what you’re referring to.

Using visual data in your content marketing can help you simplify complicated ideas and we’re seeing more brands using videos and GIFs to present their data.

Visual storytelling is growing stronger and it’s useful to experiment with different formats to find out what works best for your readers.

3. Write long-form content

There is a constant struggle on the internet to grab someone’s attention. Not everyone is spending a lot of time on a page, which pushes us to come up with new ideas of bite-sized content. This is actually a good approach in many ways but we also need to remember that long-form content is not dead.

There are many reasons to create long-form content in 2020:

• Build trust with your readers
• Go in-depth in the topics that you’re writing about
• Showcase your writing style and your personality
• Improve your SEO

Medium got popular as a platform that focuses on writing rather than distractions. You can find the content of great quality and many writers are not afraid to go in-depth in the topics that they’re covering. The Medium looked at their most successful posts to find out that the ideal blog post on their platform is around 1600 words and it takes seven minutes to read it.

Moreover, creating long-form content is also helping your search ranking. Long-form content is helping you cover in-detail a topic that you want to serve as the authority.

Not all your posts should be too long. But it’s still a good idea to dedicate some time every month to produce a few pieces of more than 1000 words.

4. Read your content out loud

A simple method to improve your content writing in 2020 is to start reading your content out loud. It’s easy to get lost in your thoughts when writing content. What seems to be making sense to you might not necessarily do so for anyone else.

Everything you are writing should sound natural. Start creating content that feels more conversational to “hack” a more successful writing style.

Once you start applying this idea to your content marketing strategy, you start realizing that online writing should not be hard to understand. The idea is to help your readers enjoy your content in a simple and authentic way.

Reading your content out loud is pushing you to review the way you’re getting your message across. It is a practice that helps you improve your writing along with the reading experience. Next time you’re planning to create content for your customers, read it out loud before you publish it. You might be surprised by the difference it can make.

5. Make your SEO smarter

It’s time to make your search engine optimization smarter for 2020. How about being more strategic with SEO to focus on what matters?

You can start by making small changes that can have a long-term impact:

• Stop focusing on the most popular keywords and start discovering the long-tail keywords that can help you stand out
• Spend more time on improving your content rather than making sure that you stuff it with your focus keywords
• Invest in the tools that can make SEO easier
• Stop aiming for position one ranking in SERPs and explore the different ways to stand out (for example, visual ranking or featured snippets)
• Write more conversational content to increase the chances of showing up in the featured snippets and the question boxes

What’s important is to start thinking of SEO as another element of your content marketing strategy that addresses your readers’ needs. It’s not just about ranking at the search results. The end goal should always be to deliver a great experience.

What’s next?

Not every content marketing trend should be groundbreaking. Sometimes even the simplest change can lead to great success.

Look at your existing content marketing strategy and what worked in 2019. Start exploring the areas that you want to improve on and find small wins that you can implement.

Look at these five trends as the starting point to simple changes that you can make to improve the understanding of your audience and their needs.

Brighton SEO is an exciting conference for everyone who wants to find out more about the latest trends and tactics in all things SEO. No matter how experienced you are, there’s always a session to inspire you to try out new ideas.

Greg Gifford, Vice President of Search at Wikimotive, talked about entities and the future of SEO.

Defining entities for SEO

Google is considering an entity a thing or concept that is singular, unique, well-defined, and distinguishable. In fact, according to Greg Gifford, entities are the most important concept in SEO.

It was back in 2012 that Google moved to entity search. Real-world entities and their relationships started being ranking signals. A year later, Google started focusing on the semantics to make its ranking algorithm smarter. Then we found out in 2015 that ranking search results started being based on entity metrics.

Thus, it’s time to start focusing more on entities and how they affect our SEO.

It’s useful to remember then that every site consists of numerous entities. The internal links are simply the relationships between entities. Our content is simply made up of entities and their relationships.

The future of search

When thinking of the future of search, we need to keep in mind that Google is becoming smarter.

Here are Gifford’s tips that will future-proof your SEO strategy:

• The ranking will be more about real-world signals. This means that we need to explore the right balance between our current SEO tactics and the brand we are building with old-school marketing.
• Voice search is all about the intent of conversational queries. Conversational content will become very important.
• Mobile search will continue to make local SEO vital for everyone. Consuming content through mobile phones is pushing us to think of our mobile strategies and how we can improve them. In fact, local SEO will be the key to our future success. As Greg Gifford reminds us, links from local businesses will matter even if they are unrelated to your business.
• Google My Business is your direct interface to Google’s entity information about your business. It is further blending into mobile SERPs that will blur the lines even more between online and offline actions. In fact, real-world offline actions related to business entities will help your ranking.
• Start writing content that answers questions in a unique way. It’s helpful to read your content out loud. Conversational content will help you master the new world of entities and their relationships that affect ranking.
• Another excellent tip that can be very helpful is to think like you’re targeting rich snippets. It’s not the goal but it’s the right mindset to help you create more relevant content.

Four things we need to stop doing in SEO

According to Greg Gifford, we need to stop doing these things that will affect the future success of our SEO strategy:

1. Stop concentrating on keyword matching

SEO will be less about writing content with the right keywords and more about having the best answer based on the intent of the search.

2. Stop concentrating on single pages

Build your entity and pay attention to how it’s connected to other entities instead.

3. Stop thinking about optimizing individual page elements

The optimization should not focus on one page but rather on the overall entities and how their relationships can improve your success.

4. Stop concentrating on link building as the most important SEO tactic

Links will probably always matter but will be less important as Google gets better at understanding entity signals.

Focus on the entities and their relationships

There are many interesting takeaways from this session in Brighton SEO that can be useful when planning your strategy for 2020.

• Make sure you’re paying attention to local SEO.
• If you want to improve your online business, focus on the right balance between offline and online relationship building.
• Mobile search will be more important than ever so make sure you create content for mobile users.
• Your content should be conversational. Don’t be afraid to read it out loud before you publish it.
• There’s no need to spend too much time on individual pages and keywords if you forget to look at the bigger picture.

You can also find the session’s slides here for more details.

What future trends can you spot for SEO in 2020? Share them in the comments.

LinkedIn has turned into the number one platform for professionals and B2B brands. It’s been a social media platform with a consistent mission and it is attracting millions of people and brands who want to focus on professional relationship building.

Just a few months ago, Microsoft announced that there has been ‘record levels of engagement’ on LinkedIn seeing a Q1 growth of 24% for on-platform sessions. It’s not surprising then that more brands are investing time in updating their LinkedIn strategy over the last few years.

A good way to understand how LinkedIn works and how to improve your engagement is to look at their algorithm and their recent updates.

Understanding LinkedIn’s algorithm

LinkedIn has recently updated their algorithm that decides what shows up on our feeds. We might be talking more about Facebook’s algorithm when it comes to social media changes, but it’s still useful to understand how other platforms behave. When it comes to LinkedIn, what comes up on our feeds is based on their framework of ‘People You Know, Talking About Things You Care About.’

The most obvious posts that show up in your feed have to do with the people that you’re connected to or follow. There are also posts that your connections have liked, commented, shared that show up on your feed. Moreover, you can also see posts from groups, hashtags and topics that you follow.

The idea is to discover content that you care about. It’s not enough though to focus on relevance without the necessary value. The bigger the value, the higher the chances of seeing a post in your feed.

LinkedIn is relying on a machine learning algorithm that identifies the best conversations from all members that should show up to your feed. There is a two-pass architecture that ranks in the fraction of second thousands of posts to pick the most relevant ones for each member. The first pass rankers (FRP) are handling the preliminary selection that is based on predictive relevance (what they assume that you find relevant). For example, this selection can include updates from your connections, job ads and sponsored updates. The second pass ranker (SRP) combine all the preliminary scores to build a single list of ranking.

The FollowFeed is the main first pass ranker that brings tougher all the feed updates from your network and it includes more than 80% of your feed updates. In fact, these updates actually lead to more than 95% of the members’ conversations.

After an extensive series of tests and advanced machine learning features, LinkedIn is now focusing even more on the probability of contribution for the posts that show up on your feed. Thus, LinkedIn members see the content that they have more chances to share, comment, or react to.

To find out more technical details on LinkedIn’s algorithm, read their blog on their latest updates.

Focusing on engagement

LinkedIn is aiming to encourage participation and the rise of engagement in the platform comes from a series of changes to their algorithm. As with Facebook, ‘meaningful interactions’ are important to ensure that users are exposed to the most engaging content.

From a brand perspective, it’s very important to keep up with these changes to ensure that you’re creating engaging content.

It’s crucial to encourage conversations to increase the chances of having your content show up in more feeds.

You can start building the engagement through a series of steps

• Create posts that lead to conversations: don’t just share a link that you find interesting, ask a question and try to make it more engaging
• Encourage people to mention others: be creative with your content and encourage people to mention others who would find your posts interesting.
• Be part of existing conversations: use your personal profiles to join existing conversations and monitor your brand’s mentions to respond to them
• Use employee advocacy to reach a broader network: ask for help from your employees and their personal networks when sharing important content
• Create content that people want to share: tap into the psychology of a social media user and create content that is interesting enough for your audience to instantly share it

Improving your LinkedIn strategy

Pete Davies, Consumer Product at LinkedIn, has written an article sharing his own tips on how to improve your LinkedIn content strategy to get your posts to show up on users’ feeds.

Some of his tips include:

• Encourage conversations: the recent changes in LinkedIn’s algorithm make it imperative to create content that people will want to contribute to it. Aim for engagement that feels genuine.
• Pick niche over broad: think of your target audience and focus on your niche. You don’t need to share posts that are general as LinkedIn members seem to prefer niche topics they are interested in.
• Be authentic: authenticity can help you stand out with your content. Except for relevance and value, you also want to master your own tone of voice that will help you build a stronger community.

Moreover, we also see more brands adding to their LinkedIn strategy:

Videos

More brands are sharing videos and they tend to show up more frequently on our feeds over the last few months. Not all videos should be around campaigns, you can also share videos from your team, interesting interviews or even UGC that might be relevant.

Creative posts

There is a new trend on LinkedIn with posts that stand out with their creativity. How about sharing link posts that people won’t be able to ignore?

Hashtags

Hashtags have also had increased importance on LinkedIn especially when you want to improve your niche relevance.

When it comes to LinkedIn, what we need to remember when creating content is the reason why people are visiting the platform. People are visiting LinkedIn to connect with like-minded professionals. The content should be both interesting but also engaging to ensure that your brand stays relevant

“Podcast SEO” is expected to be a growing term among SEO professionals, marketers, and podcast hosts over the next few years.

What do we mean by “podcast SEO” and how can you really optimize your podcast for search engines?

Here is everything you need to know.

Podcasts show up in Google searches

Google has announced earlier this year that podcasts will start showing up in search results.

You will be able to search for a podcast and find some of the episodes straight through the search results. The indexing of the podcast will return the audio content that you can consume directly.

There is also the potential for Google and its services to analyze the audio and automatically transcribe it to highlight a podcast in relevant search results.

What’s interesting is that Google Podcasts has recently started automatically transcribing the podcasts to use the content as metadata. Thus, people are able to find specific information as part of an episode without even knowing about the podcast before.

This is a big moment for anyone interested in SEO to understand that podcasts are becoming more important. With Google’s support, there is a clear indication that podcasts cannot be ignored as a source of content.

“Podcast SEO” is now a growing term and there is a great opportunity for successful podcasts to build their audience through search traffic.

Thinking of SEO when structuring an episode

How do these changes from Google affect your podcast? A good starting point is to think of your content structure.

A podcast can sometimes feel like a casual conversation but it still has a structure and a theme. Whether you’re producing formal or casual content, you want to be able to have a clear theme.

Think of what you want to talk about and how the questions can maintain a good flow.

It will be easier for Google to understand the content of your podcast and how to index it if you start thinking of your audience, and what they expect from you.

Moreover, a clear theme also helps your listeners understand your main focus without getting lost in the conversation.

Creating a site for your podcast

You don’t necessarily need a site to start your own podcast. All you need is a hosting provider. However, if you want to start thinking of SEO more seriously, you want to be certain that you own the data and the relationship with your subscribers.

You can also build an email list to grow your most loyal listeners.

A site can also help you improve your podcast’s SEO. It’s easier for search engines to discover your episodes when you provide additional context to them.

Many podcasts publish a new blog post for every new episode to describe their new topic. It’s a great way to build up the content for your podcast and make it easier for search engines to pick up the main theme and the focus keywords.

You can also treat your blog content as any other regular blog post to link from one episode to the other, add related posts, and keep your audience engaged.

Adding keywords to your podcast episodes

Your podcast’s title is your number one keyword. However, you won’t just rank for it once you create more episodes so you want to make sure that you increase your chances of building your audience.

When creating content for your podcast you want to pick one main keyword that will describe it. Think of your theme, the episode’s structure, and find the best keyword to describe it.

Make sure that you don’t pick the same keyword on every episode as you risk cannibalizing your own success. Even if there is a similarity from one keyword to another, it is still important to aim for one keyword per episode.

Your keyword should have a high search volume and ideally a low competition. You can aim for long tail keywords and you can find inspiration by searching in Google or through the use of tools like Ubersuggest.

Decide on the episode titles

Your podcast titles will determine whether your potential audience will spend the time to listen to your episodes.

Even when someone discovers your podcast, they won’t necessarily listen to every single episode if the titles aren’t appealing enough.

Your titles should be clear and descriptive while taking into consideration the limitation of characters.

A keyword can also be helpful in the episode’s title but you still want to make sure that you add it in context with the rest of the content.

Should you include the episode’s transcript?

Google may have just started automatically transcribing the podcasts but they are not yet perfect.

A transcription of your episode can help search engines understand your podcast in more detail.

It can improve the discoverability of the episode through the right focus on keywords, content structure, and key topics.

A transcription also makes your podcast more accessible to people and you can even split the topics that you’re talking about in time brackets to help everyone find them easily in your podcast.

Podcast transcriptions can be time-consuming though and not every podcast host might be ready for this step. If you’re serious about building your audience and improving your SEO, even in the longer term, it might be worth the effort.

Metadata

As with every other practice of SEO, metadata can provide additional details about your content.

A podcast’s description can explain what the episode is about. It should provide further information right after the title. The description is also helpful for search optimization to allow search engines to understand the topic of your episode. You can also add your main keyword to ensure that you are consistent with it.

Tags are also useful for your podcast. They allow people to discover them by looking at specific categories or genres. You can add several tags but you want to make sure that they are still somehow relevant to your podcast.

Think of your potential audience and what they should search to discover your podcast.

Link to your podcast on social media

Sharing is caring. A good indication of a podcast’s success is the number of shares and comments it gets on social media. You don’t need to have an extremely popular show to see a few positive comments or shares on social media.

As with every form of content, content marketing is an important factor in improving your success. Pick your social media channels and other forms of promotion based on your topic and target audience. This can be a consistent effort with the promotion.

Encourage people to share the link if they’ve enjoyed your show and create tracking links to find your best-performing channels.

This can be a great way to improve your SEO through “online word of mouth” as it can improve your levels of popularity and eventually your ranking.

Ask for reviews for social proof

Podcast reviews can also help your podcast’s success. It’s not just an indication of the quality of your podcast but they can also help improve the social proof.

Ask your listeners to leave a review if they enjoyed your podcast. Start with your most loyal fans and make it as effortless as possible.

Social proof can be very useful for SEO as it “notifies” search engines of the most successful pieces of content.

Add your podcast to Google Podcasts

As Google becomes serious about podcasts, Google Podcasts is now more important than ever.

If you’re not uploading your episodes to Google Podcasts yet, you can quickly do it by adding your podcast’s RSS feed.

It’s the easiest way to start improving your SEO presence while monitoring your rankings, and you’ll show up as an audio snippet in search results.

Quality first, SEO next

I assume that we’ll start spending more time with “podcast SEO” as podcasts keep growing as a content type. The fact that Google is paying more attention to them and the way that they can show up in SERPs is a good indication that the podcast market will only grow stronger.

What you need to remember though is that quality should still be a priority for your podcast.

Audio and content quality will be the key factors to your podcast’s success. Promotion and SEO will only work if you have a solid starting point for your podcast.

Find a creative title, a unique topic, and pay attention to your sound’s quality. These things will help your future audience connect with you and your podcast making success easier through marketing and SEO.

Got any queries or thoughts on “podcast SEO” that you’d like to share? Leave a comment.