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.

Search marketing is about more than just achieving the highest page ranks for your web pages. Getting ranked on the first page of a Google search isn’t useful if a customer isn’t given a compelling reason to click on your link. This is one of the main reasons that doing semantic markups on your website is important even though they are not a ranking factor with Google.

A semantic markup is the adding of HTML markups to your web pages that give Google clues about the context of its content. In many cases, this takes on the form of rich snippets of text, photos and other information designed to give readers more information about what is on a particular web page and who is responsible for it. While it won’t result in a higher search engine results page (SERP) listing, it can play major dividends for your click-through rate (CTR). The reported increase in click-throughs for results with rich snippets is an average of 15 percent.

For this reason, adding semantic markups to your web is one of the steps that eVisible recommends for our clients. Our website development and consulting services go beyond just achieving better search results and focus on improving your ability to connect with new clients. Semantic markups are a great way to increase your visibility with little extra effort required.

If you are not doing semantic markups on your site, you need to start. Here are four of the most basic types of semantic markups that you should consider implementing right away:

Breadcrumbs

Think of breadcrumbs as a way to let web users quickly navigate your website. Instead of just your home page coming back in a result, end users can see links to very specific landing pages. This can direct them to the areas on your site you are most interested in showing off and cut down the amount of clicks between them and a sale.

Facebook Open Graph

An Open Graph markup allows you to connect your web pages to Facebook’s social graph. This means that you can control how your web page is displayed when a link to it is used on Facebook or other social media sites. You can create a headline specially designed for social media sites and choose which images will be used when your links are shared.

Rating and Review Information

Give potential customers an idea of what other people think about your business by including ratings and review information in the search results. The rich snippet information can also include the number of reviews – a higher number gives people more confidence – price levels and other product-specific information.

VideoObject Schema

People want to know more about videos that you create before they click on a search result to view them. Including a screenshot and some basic information (description, length, etc.) about a video in the search results can enhance CTRs.

Website visitors react to what they see in very predictable ways. Study after study has shown that how a person encounters a website will have a significant impact on how they react to it. Even with the exact same content, one website layout can increase the chances of conversions while another can make the site more vulnerable to high bounce rates.

A good rule of thumb to follow throughout your entire website layout and design work is to focus on what you want people to do on the page. A big part of conversion rate optimization is to understand the purpose of the page and getting people to have a laser-like focus on the page elements that will push them to do the task you want them to do. Whether it’s signing up for more information or making a purpose, every element on the page should drive a visitor to do just that.

So how do you do this? Here are just a few of the ways that you can increase your likelihood for conversion rate success:

Limit Choices: Too many choices can leave website visitors paralyzed by options, so they wind up doing nothing. Instead of giving visitors multiple different forms to fill out, limit them to one choice. Instead of having all of the different social media sites listed with sharing buttons, limit the page to the few sites that make the most sense for your customers.

Top to Bottom, Left to Right: People read websites like they read newspapers. This means they expect the most important information to be “above the fold”, i.e. above the first half of the page. They also are used to reading left-to-right, which means that you want to make sure that valuable information is on the left side of the page. Keep calls to action and other secondary content on the bottom half of the page. If a person scrolls to this part of the page, chances are that they are ready to take the next step.

Headline Sizes Matter: People are attracted to big, bold headlines that spread across the screen from the top of the page. Design your site so the most important information is encapsulated within a headline at the top of each page.

Use Images: Especially of people. Studies have shown that website visitors react particularly strongly when they see pictures of people on a website.

Think About Usability: If a person can’t navigate your website, they’ll click away rather quickly. Avoid this by utilizing a clean layout with a solid color contrast, plenty of white space and an avoidance of overstuffing the pages with too much clutter.

Keep Ads and Sidebars Away From Main Content: Whether you are selling ad space on your site or have internal links to other pages on your site, you want to keep these elements apart from your main content. Have a clear delineation between the main content and any sidebar content that might pull people away from your main message.

Most people understand the importance of creating an effective content marketing campaign. However, it’s much more difficult to create a campaign that is destined for success. In fact, most content creation strategies are doomed to fail before they even get off the ground.

Here are a few of the most common issues that cripple content marketing campaigns and what you can do to avoid these mistakes:

Not Establishing Your Parameters Before Starting Your Campaign.

When This Happens: In the early stages of a campaign, usually when a company decides that it needs to do content marketing in the first place.

Why This Happens: It’s easy to get excited about starting a content marketing campaign. It’s often so easy to get excited that you don’t think about why you are doing a campaign, who your target audience is or what your objectives should be.

How to Avoid It: Think about who the ideal person to read your content is, then write content that you believe will directly impact this person’s life.

Not Creating Content on a Regular Basis.

When This Happens: A few months into a campaign, as soon as the “newness” of launching a creative campaign wears off.

Why This Happens: It’s easy to devote a lot of energy into a content creation campaign at the beginning. But it’s also easy to give up on a campaign before it really gets off the ground.

How to Avoid It: You need to understand that Google rewards content only if it is done on a consistent basis. Set a schedule to post several times a week at the start of your campaign and stick to it.

Keywords Matter.

When This Happens: Poor keyword strategies often doom content creation campaigns from the beginning.

Why This Happens: It’s common to take the wrong approach to keywords, such as keyword stuffing or using keywords that are too broad.

How to Avoid It: Start by doing some effective keyword research to make sure you are targeting the right phrases that will connect with your target customers.

Failing to Create Internal Links.

When This Happens: At the start of a campaign before you even write your first piece of content.

Why This Happens: Many people simply don’t understand the importance of internal links and how much of a role it can have in helping the overall SEO on their site.

How to Avoid It: Content and links are two things that should work together and not independently of each other. Think about ways that you can internally link to multiple pages on your website with each piece of content.

Failing to Diversify Your Content.

When This Happens: Whenever a marketer fails to realize that everything they publish can potentially be content marketing material.

Why This Happens: It’s easy to get locked in on a certain type of content (such as blog posts) and continue to produce it again and again.

How to Avoid It: Diversify your content. eVisible can help you to create high quality blog posts for your site. We can also provide you with the right mixture of premium content and link creation.

Not Integrating Images Into Your Content.

When This Happens: Throughout the entirety of a content creation campaign.

Why This Happens: Too many people associate “content” with “words” and don’t understand the potential value of integrating images into your articles, blog posts and onsite content.

How to Avoid It: Images make stories more interesting and help to improve SEO results. Use them every time you create content.

Not Using Social Media to Promote Your Content.

When This Happens: After the first blog post is a written and a content marketer simply expects that people will magically find it and make it viral.

Why This Happens: It’s a fundamentally lack of understanding about how content gets shared. You need to promote your content in order for people to find it.

How to Avoid It: Use popular social media sites to share the content you create. Come up with ideas such as mailing lists or forum postings to expand your reach.

Nothing is more frustrating than spending weeks or even months to redesign your website, only to see traffic plummet soon after the new version of the site goes live. It’s especially frustrating because you obviously did all the work because you expected to improve your search engine ranking, get more traffic and see more conversions. Where did it all go wrong?

In most cases, there is no single culprit; it’s usually a series of small mistakes that, on their own, would create minimal damage to your traffic but when taken together can be disastrous. Here are four of the most common problems we’ve found at eVisible when people try to relaunch their sites and their traffic tanks:

Check Google Analytics

It’s possible that your site’s analytic tracking didn’t automatically restart when your new site was launched. Manually check Google Analytics to make sure that it’s enabled and working properly; if it isn’t, check individual pages for issues like missing tracking code placement.

Recheck Google Analytics

You can also go deeper with your analytic research to see if there are unforeseen problems. Make sure that you have 301 redirects for any pages whose address structures have changed and thoroughly look for any 404 pages. Do a keyword search to see which keywords are underperforming and if they have been removed from poorly performing pages.

Review Your robots.txt File

It’s possible that your site has been deindexed for some reason. One possible explanation is with your robots.txt file. Check the head of page source code for a meta robots tag exclaiming noindex and also check for anything that says “disallow:/” in the code.

Check for Host or Server Issues

Changing your hosting or server can lead to communications issues that will make it impossible for search engines to index your site. There are several tools available for checking your DNS health; one thing you absolutely should do is look at your DNS errors and server connectivity in your Google or Bing Webmaster Tools.

Acquiring links is a valuable tool that should be a part of any SEO campaign. SEO link building services allow you to extend the reach of your brand beyond your website while increasing your site’s credibility in the eyes of major websites such as Google. However, you need to be careful when it comes to managing your link building campaign. Not enough people realize the importance of backlinks monitoring and how much damage that poorly managed links can do to your SEO reputation.

Google and other sites will punish sites if they have links on their website that have been changed or deleted within a short time frame; for the search engines, this is a clear signal that these links have been collected in unnatural ways. The best method of building link popularity is through natural links that appear to the result of other sites posting your links because of the high-quality content that exists on your pages. When a link partner suddenly deletes or changes your links at the same time, this is flagged as a potentially unnatural behavior by Google and could impact your site ranking.

You need to be willing to check your links on a regular basis to make sure that your link partners are keeping your links up and holding up their end of the bargain. In some cases, links can be deleted because the owner of another website has deleted a page on their site and accidentally forgot to move the link; in other cases, the partner might have deleted the link after a short period of time to make room for new links.

Manually checking backlinks one time a day or more is time consuming. One way to work around this is to automate the process with one of the many SEO tools available that do backlink checking. You can purchase and use one of these tools yourself, or you can work with an SEO company like eVisible who can do it for you. Once you’ve determined which links have been deleted or changed, you need to act on it by contacting your partner and convincing them to live up to their end of your deal and restore your link.

SEO practices can go a long way in impacting your Search Engine Results Placement (SERP). Producing the right content and using best SEO practices such as authorship, site links and social signals can improve the SERP display of a website page on a search engine query. But this is only part of the battle. In order to profit from a high SERP, you need to be able to get people to click through to your link. With higher SERP conversion, your high-ranking link is as worthless as one that is at the bottom of the search engine rankings.

SERP conversion is often an overlooked element of search engine optimization. However, it should be an important part of any SEO conversion strategy. Organic clickthough strategies are proven to lead to an increase in highly targeted and motivated visitors to your site who are ready to make purchasing decisions. Ultimately, that’s the goal of any online marketing campaign – get qualified leads ready to buy to your site.

Over the years, we’ve developed many different strategies to improve organic clickthrough rates. The right strategy for you will depend on your unique position, but these five strategies have been proven to work over time:

Rich snippets such as ratings, number of total reviews, price range and contact information can go a long way in getting people to click on a link. This is even more powerful when combined with strong calls to action to “see pictures” or “read unbiased reviews.”

Building a brand through offline tactics can help your SEO strategy. Google rewards links associated with known brands. Running contests and offsite promotions are some of the ways that you can create positive association with customers and get them interested in clicking on your link.

Harness multimedia by going beyond text. Create videos and use attention-grabbing images. Make sure to caption and tag them for full optimization.

Optimize your site by reviewing your internal linking strategy and site structure. Research how customers are viewing your site so you can create breadcrumbs in your search results.

Take ownership of your content by attaching your company’s name – or your name – to the great content you are creating. It establishes credibility with searchers and helps with your Google ranking.

By now, you probably know about the some of the basic tools for SEO keyword research before launching an online campaign. Everyone understands the tools that are available through Google’s Keyword tool and performing various online searches. But if you want to take your campaign to the next level, you need to go beyond the basics and use a wide range of sources for your research.

One great way to do this is with eVisible’s free Keyword Suggestion Tool, which provides you with effective and targeted keywords to meet your needs. Along with this, there are other outlets that will provide you with useful information and potential keywords for your SEO campaign. Here are four sources to consider:

Popular Posts of the Year: One way to understand what keywords people are searching for is to see which blog posts are generating interest within your niche. One way to do this is by performing a Google search that looks something like this:

[your field]+most popular posts of 2012+traffic

So, if you an investigative firm, you might perform a Google search like this:

“Investigative Law” “most popular posts of 2012” traffic

The results might take you to posts like this one from the Diligentia Group highlighting their 10 most popular posts out of the more than 50 they made in 2012. Reviewing these posts will give you a sense of which keywords they highlighted and what readers were searching for when they arrived.

Google Keyword Tool Searches By Year: You can also use chronology to narrow your searches when using the Google Keyword tool. When reviewing your analytics data with Google Keyword, do a search for “2012.” This will tell you the phrases and keywords that were generating interest in the previous year and which ones will likely to become popular soon.

Wikipedia: Nothing is more frustrating than spending money on a keyword campaign only to see a Wikipedia link come up first on results. It can be hard to move a Wikipedia site some a top ranking. You can use this tool (https://stats.grok.se/) to review the traffic volume of any Wikipedia site for the last 90 days to see if a page associated with any keyword term is going to be an obstacle to your success.

Government Websites: As Search Engine Land accurately points out, government sites are potential goldmines for keyword information. In many cases, you can see the most popular pages, referring sites and keywords used for many government sites that could relate to your niche. Reviewing this data will give you a better sense of popular keywords and potential link partners.