It’s easy to think that content marketing is a puzzle that is so complex that you’ll never be able to solve it. Certainly, that’s the myth that many SEO and content marketing consulting firms tell their clients in order to convince them to use their services. eVisible takes a different approach: we want to demystify the content marketing process so you can understand exactly what we can do to quickly and effectively provide you with real results.

To help you out, we’ve pulled together a few very simple pointers that can help anyone to improve their content marketing and get results from their efforts — whether they are hiring a consultant to help or doing it themselves.

Keep Your Focus

It’s tough to create — or execute — a top-notch content marketing campaign if you aren’t sticking to your original plans and using your focus to execute tasks on schedule. Keep a to-do list of tasks that have to be done in order for your content marketing to succeed — and make sure that you stick with these deadlines as much as possible.

Don’t Worry About Negative Comments

If you create content that is being read by the public, there’s a good chance that you’ll get some negative feedback no matter how great the quality of your work. Dealing with critics is simply the nature of having work being read online. The good news is that people who nitpick every blog posts aren’t your real audience.

Keep Things Brief

People have a tendency to use too many words to express what could be said in a few. Readers have short attention spans and want you to get to the point as quickly as possible. If you struggle with brevity, you can use tools such as the Hemingway App (hemingwayapp.com) to check your writing for was it can be tightened. You can also simply read your content out loud to make sure it flows properly.

Be Excited About Your Writing

If you aren’t excited about the opportunity to use content marketing to reach potential customers, it will come through in your writing — this means that your readers won’t be enthusiastic at all. In fact, you can use your enthusiasm as a way to get readers engaged in your content. When you are thinking about story topics, figure out what makes you excited about your company and use this as a guide for the topics that you want to explore in your content marketing.

Always Write In Your Own Voice

As you read blogs to get ideas for your own content marketing, it’s common to pick up on the things that the best content marketers do that helps their work connect with their audience. While it’s great to learn from the best, you also don’t want to alter your unique voice in order to copy what other people are doing. These content writers are great because they have found their own unique voice. The more you write, the closer you’ll come to finding your own voice as well.

Be Honest With Your Readers

If someone is taking the time to read your content, you owe it to them to be upfront with them. This means not overselling your products and services or making false claims. This will always lead to angry readers.

Be Efficient With Your Content Marketing

You only have a certain amount of time each day to devote to content marketing, so it’s important to use your time wisely. Having a solid game plan will help you to use your time as efficiently as possible. Building a content calendar is a great way to make sure that your time each day is spent writing instead of hunting for topics. You can update this calendar regularly as new ideas pop into your mind.

Congratulations: your blog post has become very successful! People are reading it, commenting on it and sharing it with their friends on social media. It’s exactly why you hire blog writing services to help you with content in the first place. However, just because your blog post is popular doesn’t mean that it can’t be more popular.

eVisible provides article writing services for clients and helps them to take steps to seize the momentum of popular posts and make sure they are as effective as possible. Here are some steps to take once you realize that a post has the potential to be a hit:

Refresh Your Content Regularly

Go back to your old content and see which posts were once popular but have stopped receiving a high number of hits. There’s a good chance that these posts have not been updated in quite some time. You can reverse this trend by freshening up your content with updates, new information or just formatting it to make it easier to share with hot social media sites. Doing this will almost always lead to an increase in views for old posts.

Use Your Sidebar Space

Almost every blog has sidebar space. Chances are that you use it for banner “ads” directing people to your events, special activities or other sections of your website. Why not also use this space to highlight your most popular posts? If people see that the most popular posts on your site are in one place, there’s a good chance they will click on them to see exactly why they are so popular.

Include Popular Posts In Your Email Marketing

Your most popular blog posts clearly have content that your customers will find engaging, so it makes sense to integrate them into other aspects of your marketing. When you perform a drip email marketing campaign, why not have some space within the message to highlight two or three of your most popular posts? It’s even better if these posts are relevant to the same topic as your email.

Collect Information In Exchange For Access

A popular post is a commodity that you can utilize — if done wisely. You may want to have pop-up come up over the text or graphics of the post and make it so that readers have to choose whether or not to sign up for your newsletter in order to read the rest. If you take this approach, it’s important that you also give readers a way to say “no thank you” and read the post without giving you additional information or signing up for a newsletter.

Repurpose Your Content Into a New Format

Putting old content into a new format is a great way to recirculate your popular material and get fresh hits. For example, a text-driven post that was successful two years ago might make a perfect infographic today. Or you might find content in a post that now makes more sense to be picture-oriented so you can share it through sites such as Instagram.

You can also extend your content by getting more in-depth than you did originally. Research suggests that content that is 2,000 words or more tends to rank better than content that is 1,000 words or less. You can also tweak your post headlines in order to utilize tips such as making them “how tos” or “lists” in order to get new eyeballs.

Whether you are creating your own content for marketing purposes or working with an content marketing service such as eVisible, the steps that your content takes between the first draft and being published are critical. It’s in this process where you can fine tune your language, be more concise with your editing and ensure that you are hitting all of your key points. The difference between a good piece of content and a great piece of content often comes in the editing and revision process.

Here are a few things to keep in mind as you review your content after the first draft but before it goes live to the world:

Read the Draft Out Loud: Reading your work out loud — even to yourself — will give you a better understanding about how the text flows and if it has the right tone. In addition, reading out loud is a great way to catch typos (such as missing or misused words) that might slip through while re-reading it on paper.

Use the Proper Amount of Keywords: Just like Goldilocks, you want to find a balance of keywords in your content that is “just right” — enough that is impacts your organic search engine results but not so much that it begins to seem overstuffed (which can lead to your content being marked as spam by Google). A good rule of thumb is to aim for about 75 words of text for every keyword phrase used.

Get an Outside Perspective: It’s very easy for you to become insular when dealing with your own content. After you’ve written and edited a piece of copy enough times, it can become difficult to tell if it’s good or not. The best way to solve this problem is to have someone from outside your organization read your content. This will give you a different perspective from someone who can tell you if the writing connects with an “outsider.”

Use Image Alt Tags: One of the most important things you can do with your content from an SEO perspective is to make sure you are using Image Alt tags. This is the code inside of an image tag that will display if an image will not load on a person’s screen for whatever reason. Search engines such as Google consider it a positive for images to have alt image text.

Aggressively Promote Social Media Sharing: After you’ve created great content, you want your readers to share it with friends and co-workers. So make it easy for them to do this! Make sure that your content has sharing “buttons” to let people quickly share your stories to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or other relevant social media sites. You can also optimize your content for social media sharing by coding in Open Graph tags and Twitter Cards.

When undertaking an SEO campaign, most people look at their content first. While this is valuable, you also need to consider the first thing that a person will see before going to one of your web pages: the link. It’s important to analyze your SEO page titles in order to make sure that you are maximizing their effectiveness and power to boost your SEO rankings. Here are a few things you need to look at with your URLs:

Work to Create Shorter and Easier to Read URLs: Making the URL of your pages or blog posts easy to understand means that readers seeing the link will have a better sense of what to expect when they click. This also makes the links more attractive to search engines. Including keywords that you want to rank for as part of your URL is still an effective way to increase your rankings. You still want to avoid overstuffing your URLs with keywords — which, like other content, can make it look “spammy” in the eyes of search engines.

Along with easier to read URLs, you also want to keep your URLs as short as possible. This issue isn’t with search engines but with your readers. It’s been proven that people don’t like to read, copy or share longer URLs (over 100 characters).

Single Domains and Subdomains Are the Best: We’ve repeatedly seen the results — when someone fixes their website architecture so all of their content is in a subfolder instead of a subdomain, their SEO results improve. You should also avoid URLs that have multiple folders, since this can create lengthy URLs that appear to have many levels.

Canonicalize Similar URLs: Another way to improve your search engine rankings is to review if you have instances of multiple URLs with similar content. If you do, use a rel=canonical tag to canonicalize the similar URLs.

Avoid Tracking Parameters: Having tracking IDs at the end of the URLs is not as common — or necessary — as it used to be. You may need them in some cases to help track clicks for specific campaigns, however, so use your judgement to determine if the benefits outweigh having lengthy URLs.

Match Your Titles and URLs As Closely As Possible: People want to know the content of their stories before they read them. Keeping your URLs as closely related to the title of your page or blog post as possible will make sure readers know exactly what it’s about just from the link. However, you typically don’t need to worry about using connecting words from your title such as “and,” “or” or “but.”

Watch Out for Awkward Punctuation Characters in URLs: Many characters that are used in titles can create link breaks in URLs or have trouble being recognized by browsers. This can include empty spaces or characters such as “&” or “#.” Try to avoid using special characters in URLs and stick to basic letters and numerals. As noted, avoid spaces in URLs if possible and use dashes or underscores instead.

Keep Redirections to a Minimum: Most users won’t have a problem if a link they click on redirects to a different site. Things start to get dicey when a URL redirects two or more times before getting to its final page. Search spiders might get confused and readers might see this as being “spammy.”

Don’t Use Hashtags to Create Separate Content: There are exceptions to this rule, but generally it’s cleaner to have a fresh URL than to use a hashtag so that someone can jump to a specific point within a page.

Be Careful of Inconsistent Case Sensitivity: This is especially true for Linux/UNIX servers, which can interpret separate cases as separate URLs. Take steps to redirect or canonicalize URLs that use an incorrect case to the right one.

Local SEO is absolutely critical for any business that has a local customer base. Whether you are a restaurant looking for more diners or a car dealership looking to attract more customers, your main focus of online marketing is to attract the attention of people in your area who are interested in your products and services.

So how do you go about improving your visibility with local customers? Local listing optimization happens when you focus on the right avenues for promoting your business online. There are many Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that can help you to determine the effectiveness of your local SEO work and find out which tactics are right for you. Several of these tactics involve effectively gaining citations with local directories.

Among the KPIs that you need to track your local SEO performance:

Track Local Rankings for the “Big Three” Search Engines: Finding out where you rank in your local areas for searches on Google, Yahoo and Bing is the easiest way to get a sense of the strength of your local online presence.

Go Beyond the Big Three As Well: You also need to track your rankings for search engines, directory and niche sites outside of Google, Yahoo and Bing. This can be an extensive process, so it’s a good idea to use automated tools to help you to stay current.

Check Your Rankings on Local Search Sites: Do searches for your keywords on sites such as Yelp, Superpages and Citysearch to see where you are ranking. Make sure you do enough searches on different variations of keywords to get a strong sense of your rankings.

Maintain Consistency: If you have out-of-date or incorrect business information on a local search site listing, you are confusing your customers. This can also be confusing to search engines as well. Perform regular searches to make sure that your listings are up-to-date.

Track Your Links: You need to know how your website’s visitors are interacting with the links on your site. Tracking these links allows you to review the layout of your site and its content to see if changes should be made.
Monitor Review Quality and Quantity: When a potential customer reads lots of great reviews about your business, it gives them confidence in your goods or services. Along with checking local search sites about the quality of your reviews, it’s also important to be concerned about the quantity of reviews. It’s possible that having more reviews will improve your search rankings. Get creative with ways you can reward customers for reviewing your company on sites like Yelp.

There are many different types of local search sites — each of them are potentially great placement opportunities for your citations. Some of the options include:

• Local Directories (such as Yelp or YP.com)
• Niche Directories (including directories aimed at specific industries)
• General Directories
• Social Platforms (such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn)
• Local Media
• Event Sites

Before you start adding citations to these sites, it’s important to know where you are already listed. There are several free tools available that will allow you to see the local sites that are already listing your company’s information. This is a great way to clean up and outdated or incorrect listings before you start on a local SEO campaign.

As with any part of SEO, local search optimization doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It needs to be part of your overall online marketing campaign — and you need to have a game plan in place in order to maximize your ROI. A few steps to consider before starting:

1. Define your goals for your local SEO campaign. Are you looking to get more visitors to your site? Phone calls for follow-ups? People buying directly from your site? Knowing what you want people to do once they get to your site will guide your SEO tactics.
2. Perform web analytics on your local landing pages. This will give you a way to track your clicks and conversions to tell which tactics are working and which ones are not getting customer’s attention — or getting them to do what you want.
3. Measure your rankings against goals and past performance. Automating this process means you can spend less time compiling data and more time reviewing the results to get the information you need to effectively adapt your SEO campaign.

Doing content marketing and doing it right are two separate things. Most people recognize that having lots of content is important to your search engine optimization efforts along with your online marketing program. However, fewer people take the time to think about the type of content tactics that will be most useful in building a successful strategy.

You can go beyond basic content marketing strategy by thinking about it as one part of your overall marketing efforts. A well thought out content marketing plan can help you to build your brand, create new connections with customers and improve your sales. As you get ready to plan out your content marketing strategy, here are five questions you need to ask first:

Who Is Your Target Audience?

You can’t craft a message designed to connect with a potential customer if you don’t know who that person is. You need to review all of your available resources in order to better understand who your target audience is and how you can effectively reach them. This can include researching your competitors and reviewing your current web traffic and demographic information. Use this information to answer questions about how your customers access product information and what information they are looking for when they go to a website.

Why Is Content Marketing Important To You?

This is ultimately the most important question that you can ask of yourself when developing a content marketing plan. Content marketing can help you attract the attention of new visitors while creating bonds with existing customers. However, if you don’t have larger plans for what to do with these potential or current customers, your content marketing work is wasted.

Where Can You Reach Your Audience?

By understanding who your customers are, you can also understand the best ways to reach them. Different customers will interact to certain types of content more strongly than others. For example, YouTube is a great option for customers interested in watching product videos, while Tumblr is an outstanding platform for visual content such as infographics.

When Should Your Content Be Published?

Along with how to reach your audience, you also need to understand when they are most likely to be online so that you can deliver them fresh content when they are ready to see it. You can leverage research from social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook to see when certain demographic segments are most likely to be active on their sites and use this as a guideline for when to post your content.

What Do You Want Readers To Do?

The point of marketing is to entice a reaction from the person receiving your marketing message. This can mean many different things: signing up for more information, asking for a phone call or purchasing a product directly from you. The type of content that you create will be partially determined by the action that you want your potential customers to take after viewing your content.

Determining your plan for content is only part of the equation. It’s important to be just as focused when creating and distributing your materials. Make sure you are working with the right content creators and know the right places for the content to live. Figure out which rich media sources are right for specific types of content. Once you’ve created your content, have a structure in place for marketing it and tracking its success so you know what is working and what needs to be tweaked.

There is perhaps no piece of meta data on a web page that is more important that a title tag. This is the short description that tells both users and search engines what a web page’s content is about. One bit of evidence highlighting the importance of title tags comes from Kristine Schachinger of Search Engine World, who wrote that title tags are “like the title of the chapter of a book” and “the most important single tag on your page.”

It’s impossible to do effective search engine optimization without paying close attention to your title tags. This is particularly true with Google’s recent modifications to its results page layout, which places additional emphasis on title tags. With this in mind, what are some of the ways that you can leverage title tags to your advantage? Here are 10 of the hottest tips:

Grab Attention With Your Title Tag From the Beginning: Much like with a headline, you want to grab people’s attention from the start of your title tag. Use a strong, declarative statement to catch the eye of a reader.

Make Title Tags Long Enough to Explain the Page: Even if the description is too long to fully display on the search engine results page (SERP), Google may still be using all of it to determine the topic of your page.

Short Title Tags Are Wasted Opportunities: When you have a short title tag, you lose the chance to fully explain your page. You also run the risk of Google “filling in the blank” with extra content.

Be Bold: Having part of your title tag in bold will catch the reader’s eye. You can do this by including phrases that customers are likely to search for in your tag. Google will automatically bold the phrase that is searched for in the result.

Leverage Thematic Search Results: Google now can tell what you are searching for and delivers results based on this — not necessarily just based on your keywords. Using this information can help you to craft a broad title tag that can return many Google results.

Include a Call to Action in Your Title Tag: Just asking people to “click here” isn’t enough; you need to let people know what they expect to get out of clicking on your link. Tell them what the end result of their click will be ahead of time.

Do What Your Competitors Aren’t: In order to stand out from the competition, sometimes you need to take an approach that stands out from them. Review your competition’s title tags and try to approach yours from a different angle.

Give Specific, Real-Time Data in Your Title Tag: You can program title tags to include dynamic content related to searches. This might include information on how much of a certain product is available in a local area.

Don’t Forget About Your Brand: Even when you are posting links to products, it’s important to include your brand name. This helps to ensure that you rank for your brand and that you avoid possible SEO headaches.

This All Might Not Matter: Google will give results based on what it thinks that users are looking for, which can mean that it will give your homepage title tag over your individual page’s title tag in the SERP for any number of reasons. You’ll need to experiment to see which strategies avoid this happening to your pages.

Title tags are just one of the many ways you can improve your search engine rankings through meta content. Find out more about how eVisible integrates meta content into our SEO services for clients by viewing our approach to SEO success. Have more questions about best SEO practices? Find out answers by reading our FAQ on SEO.

It’s extremely important to include frequent content updates as part of your small business search engine optimization strategy. Google places a high emphasis on fresh content in rewarding sites with higher search engine placements. However, many small businesses struggle to come up with content on a regular basis because they lack the resources or ability to write and create content consistently.

However, content marketing isn’t out of your reach as a small business. With the right planning and foresight, you can manage your content marketing process and create pieces that will accomplish two goals: increase your reputation with Google and attract new customers. Here are some steps you’ll want to take as you building your content marketing strategy.

Make a Content Calendar

One way to combat this is to create a content calendar that lays out a month’s worth of content ahead of time. This saves you the headaches associated with feeling rushed to create content and lets you work ahead. If you have content on a calendar, you are less likely to not do it because you are busy with other tasks.

Do Your Research

Want to know what you should be writing about? Find out what is already popular. You can do research through Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools to see what sites people are visiting and the type of content that is on those sites. You can also visit social bookmarking sites and do research to see topics that are getting buzz on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites.

Understand Newsjacking

If a story is trending on Twitter or Facebook, chances are people are interested in reading different takes on it. Be agile and ready to post stories about trending topics – even if your take is different than the mainstream. Trendsmap is a great resource for understanding the topics that are generating interest in localized areas.

Create Visual Content

You don’t have to be stuck doing nothing but writing. Infographics, photo slideshows and other types of visual content are very eye-catching and viral. Utilizing visual content can help you get out of a “content rut” and make your content stand out from other text-based items.

Get Interactive With Surveys

Web users want to be engaged and make connections with content. One way to do that is to survey your audience about trends in your industry or their preferences. You can use this to generate even more content and get some outstanding market research – something that always comes in handy when you are doing marketing for small business.

Try Video Blogging

You don’t need a fancy production studio to have your own video blog. Modern cameras and even smartphones have high-end video cameras. With some basic video editing equipment, you can post to YouTube and reach out to a new potential audience.

Look at Repurposing Content

If you still don’t have time to create new content, be creative with existing content. Take lots of information from different stories on a similar topic and turn it into an overview. Or revisit an old blog post and update it with new information.