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.

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.

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.

If you are selling products online, you need to have landing pages instead of simply directing customers to your website’s home page. Why is this? It’s because your home page has to do many things – tell customers about your entire business and your entire product lines along with creating an atmosphere that tells the story of your business.

A specific product can get lost on a home page. Landing pages give you one place to direct customers to when they are searching for something particular. A great landing page creates a seamless flow to the product page from the ad or other point of entry that the customer used to get to the landing page. It should all feel like a natural extension of the same campaign.

Conversion rate optimization is all about finding out how to utilize landing page design to get people who visit your site and turn them into customers. But how do you do this? At eVisible, we use our years of experience to help customers develop powerful landing pages for their websites. Here are just a few of the practices that we’ve found can seriously improve a company’s website conversion rate:

BOOSTING CONVERSION RATES CAN BE A LAUGHING MATTER

Too many times, marketing experts translate their serious need to boost their conversion rates to the types of marketing they do. While it’s important to focus on letting customers know how you will solve their specific problems, this doesn’t mean that you can’t use humor to do it. In fact, when done correctly, a humorous marketing campaign can make deep connections with customers and lead to extremely successful viral campaigns.

Here are just a few of the ways that you can use humor in your marketing campaign with an eye on boosting conversion rates:

Use the truth: Customers often expect to get marketing speak and fluffy but pointless copy when they read a website or ad campaign. You can shock them out of this by appealing to them truthfully. Admit that your breath mint won’t cure athlete’s foot, make them wealthy or help them to marry a supermodel, but that it will make their breath smell better.

A matter of extremes: You can also take the opposite approach to attacking your conversion rate. Use playful exaggeration to showcase exactly how great your product is or counteract the claims of your competitors.

Two things that shouldn’t go together: Much comedy consists of humorous situations that arise when two things that should never go together suddenly come together. Think about Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” going somewhere like the opera. You can use incongruities to showcase key elements of your product.

The power of real people: Sometimes all you need to do to create compelling content is let real people be themselves. Some of the most powerful stories can come from customers or employees in unscripted settings talking about the strengths of your company and your products.

Parody for fun and profit: Don’t be afraid to make fun of elements of your business or your industry to make your point. Customers – even those within your industry – want to laugh at familiar things. They even don’t mind laughing at themselves if it’s done right.

Just have fun: Sometimes the best conversion tools are just plain fun. This can be a simple video game, a coloring book or some other fun gadget on your site that attracts attention.

SQUEEZE PAGES DON’T HAVE TO BE A DRAG

Squeeze pages aren’t listings for anacondas that are available to rent at children’s parties. They are landing pages that are specifically designed to solicit opt-in email addresses from potential subscribers. These emails can be used to send out newsletters, email announcements or prospect for new clients. However, just giving away some free information with the promise of more “if you send us your email” doesn’t work – people are just too jaded and protective of their privacy to give up their information.

Instead, you need to be sophisticated with how you construct your squeeze page. It needs to address a specific topic that you know your customers are interested in – in many cases, you want to propose a solution to a common problem. If you can back this up with specific numbers of how you solved the problem, this provides more credibility to your claims.

You need to construct the squeeze page thoughtfully. Start with a powerful headline that speaks to a customer’s problems. Add a call-to-action near the top that lets people know what to expect from the site. Informative videos can help to capture people’s interest. Make sure that you have several ways for people to opt-in at different points on the page. In short, give them a reason to opt-in and there’s a good chance that they will.

FIND YOUR UNIQUE VALUE PROPOSITION AND RUN WITH IT

Studies show that you only have 10 seconds to convince a customer to dig deeper into your website. This means that you have to hook them quickly if you want to convert clicks to cash. The best way to do this is to clearly communicate the Unique Value Proposition of your business – that is, what makes your company a clear choice ahead of your competitors.

How can you do this? Here are a few things to consider:

• Think about what you want customers to feel about your business and convey that immediately.
• Use language that addresses the customer directly and that avoids marketing slogans and jargon.
• Along with discussing the features of your products, lay out how these features will benefit the customer.
• Use real world examples of benefits and uses whenever possible.
• Don’t use tired superlatives touting your business – no one believes these things unless you can back them up with proof.
• Understand the problems that have led customers to search for your company and address these problems – and your solutions to these problems – head on.

Once you have a Unique Value Proposition identified, make that a key component of your entire website. From your home page to individual product pages, reinforce this value proposition over and over again. You should even do this on action pages such as shopping carts to ensure that you close sales. And make sure that you evaluate what your competitors are doing – if their value propositions are vastly different than yours, it’s a sign that either you or them are not connecting with your customers.

Remember that context matters just as much as content when it comes to landing pages. You need to make sure that customers understand exactly how your products will benefit them in real-world terms. Telling them how you can help them is one thing – showing them is something far more powerful. No matter how you attack it, a powerful landing page is the best way to show customers what you are all about.

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.

In the modern online world, all businesses are global. Customers from around the world can visit your site, browse your goods and services and contact you for more information or place an order. When you construct your website and create an SEO strategy, it’s important to consider international factors, especially if you plan on doing a significant amount of business with customers from outside of the United States.

Considering the international reach of your site allows you to accomplish two things: you can avoid issues that might harm your site’s SEO in other countries and you can take advantage of opportunities presented by the international reach of your site. Businesses of all sizes can benefit from taking a worldly approach to their SEO audit and considering global elements. Here are some of the things you need to check when evaluating your global website from an SEO standpoint:

Targeting Languages vs. Countries

The world is increasingly becoming a melting pot, and this extends to languages. Many countries have more than one official language. Other countries – such as the US – don’t have an official language but might have many different languages spoken within its borders. Depending on your business goals, you will want your sub-directories, sub-domains and ccTLDs to either be targeted toward specific countries or specific languages, and you’ll want to have a consistent and simple way of doing this throughout your website structure.

In addition, you’ll want to make sure that you remain consistent through on-screen and meta content if you are structuring your pages by country or by language. For example, if you are targeting for languages, you don’t want to have country flags be the icon for making a selection.

Optimizing Structure for International Sites

Each international version of a website needs to have its structure analyzed thoroughly. Website owners need to make sure that it isn’t overly complex or have unnecessary directories while also making sure that the URL names are clear and in the right language for the target audience.

Alignment, Indexing and Crawling Issues for International Web Versions

To further ensure that your structure is correct on the International version of your website, you need to make sure they are crawled and indexed correctly by search engines such as Google – along with local search engines popular in the regions you are targeting. Make sure that you aren’t block language or country versions through your robots.txt or that you are redirecting all crawlers to one version of your site.

Hreflang Annotations

Incorrect Hreflang annotations can directly impact your international search traffic. You need to make sure that you are using the correct language and country code and that you are correctly cross-referencing similar pages on your site with content for other languages or countries.

Webmaster Tools Geolocation Settings

If you are using sub-directories or sub-domains instead of ccTLDs, use the Geographic Tools in Google Webmaster Tools to make sure that you are targeting the correct countries.

Cross-Checking Content

It’s surprisingly easy to have your localized website content be different than what you expect. Make sure that you check each country- or language-specific website version to make sure that the right content is being displayed.

Avoid Cross Linking

Remember that cross-linking pages on various versions of your site can lead to penalties from Google. Avoid doing this as much as possible.

No matter what size your business, if you need to reach an international audience, eVisible can help. Our Internet marketing firm works with companies of all sizes to find online marketing solutions to expand their reach and attract new customers.