SEO

Think you know SEO? Think again. The ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing brings new trends and strategies the moment you’ve caught up to the last round. Stay on top of these SEO trends to keep your business’s website and digital marketing campaigns successful.

1. Nurture leads.

Studies and reports about e-consumer behavior suggest that customers do their research and take their time with the decision to buy. Capturing them as a lead isn’t enough. Email provides a constant line of communication and allows you to share additional resources with them, from testimonials and reviews to social media stories and news coverage.

• Design for mobile first, because that’s how most customers are browsing the web. Use AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) and a responsive design with clear, easy navigation. Mobile-friendly is customer-friendly (and customer-friendly is SEO-friendly).
• No time to watch a page load! Check your website’s speed and invest in quality hosting before your bounce rate jumps off the charts.

2. Create amazingly amazing content.

Most people now understand that you shouldn’t just write for search engines—you need to write amazing content that people want to read. This means that “amazing” is no longer enough to stand. Google is looking for content that’s amazingly amazing.

• Blog articles should drill into a specific topic in-depth. 800 words laser-focused precisely on what your customer wants to know will out-perform 2,000 words that ramble vaguely around a topic your customer is interested in.
• Use formatting to guide readers easily through your content. Assume they’ll only read about 10-25% of what you write. (And that’s probably a generous estimate!) Numbered lists, bullet points, bold key phrases, spacing, and strategic images or infographics can keep them scrolling through to the end and help them get a digestible overview of what they need to know.
• Keep your visitors engaged with attention-commanding images and videos.
• Stay ahead of the trend by utilizing the newest types of technology and content, like VR (virtual reality). Start building up ranking before the masses catch on.

3. Steer traffic to your amazingly amazing content.

It doesn’t matter how amazing your content is. If all you do is create and publish content, all it will do is sit there.

• Build up your social media networks, and use social media to share content. This is an easy way to direct traffic to your website. Different platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, have the potential to drive traffic from different target groups of customers and potential industry partners.
• Build up your professional networks, and share your content with industry experts who find value in sharing your content with their followers. One link into your website from a quality source with a large following is much more valuable than 50 links to your website from irrelevant, unpopular sources.
• Regularly invite content from credible guest bloggers. These contributors will promote this content to their own followers and help drive additional traffic to your site.
• Practice content repurposing. You may have written the blog, published it, and promoted it two months ago, but if there’s a new demand for the topic, don’t miss out. Put the right content in front of the right audience at the right time.
• Search for broken links with outdated URLs on websites where you would like your content to be linked to. Bonus points if the broken link was directing to a competitor in your market. Offer a link to your content as a replacement for their broken link.

4. Think about links in a new light. 

It’s no secret that links are linked to SEO, but the criteria for SEO-worthy links continues to evolve.

• Link to industry expert material that is perfectly relevant in the context of your content. These links should open in a new window or tab so they do not navigate away from your website.
• Internally link to other relevant content within your site. Keep your customers on your website longer.
• Create anchor text within certain pages so internal links direct readers exactly to the most relevant part of the content. Make their experience as easy as possible. Know where they’ll want to go, and take them there.
• Consider an approach to content where you write a larger piece immediately followed by smaller, focused articles that drill into detail on the subcategories of that larger piece. This will allow you to easily set up a structure of internal links.

5. Key in on keyword strategy.

It has become common knowledge that there’s more to SEO than just keywords and links, but that doesn’t mean that keywords aren’t valuable.

• Understand LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing). Search engines like Google don’t only calculate exact keywords and phrases. They also analyze other related terms according to relevance.
• Don’t overdo your keywords. Again, the focus should be on readability and interest for your readers and your customers. If you focus only on keywords, you’ll end up with unnatural sounding content that readers don’t enjoy engaging with. 

By focusing your brand’s SEO strategy around these 5 trends, with time you can expect to see higher search rankings, more website traffic, and ultimately higher profit and ROI. It can take time to make Google trust you, so it’s important to start now and to stay on top of it. Part of staying on top of it means staying on top of the always-evolving trends. Keep your content marketing current.

To learn how Illuminati Studios can help your brand optimize its SEO and content marketing strategy as part of an integrated digital marketing campaign, please contact us.

SEO

You may have heard that a complete digital marketing campaign for your business should include a blogging and content marketing component.

One of the primary ways that blogs can boost your brand’s growth is by maximizing SEO, or search engine optimization, so your business appears higher in Google search results. This is especially crucial when you consider that most people won’t even click or tap through to the second page of results.

• Blog length of more than 300 words

• Use keywords likely to be entered in a search engine when searching for a business similar to yours

But these can’t be the only techniques that go into a blog post, or what you’ll end up with is something that people don’t want to read. Keyword density should not be your sole focus.

Search engine optimization goes beyond just keywords and word count. Search engines like Google have evolved in complexity and rely on a complex algorithm to determine SEO and page rankings.
 

• Grammar and spelling matter.

• Short words, sentences, and paragraphs make it easier to read. Aim for a conversational tone, and check your Flesch-Kincaid readability score.

• Page design, formatting, and typography (including font, size, spacing, and header structure) can affect whether people read it.

• Breaking up text with relevant images improves readability and shareability.

• It must be interesting to your audience.