SEO Archives - PROSAR Inbound Inc.

8 April 202028 October 2022

Make Your Content FRUITFUL: An 8-Point Checklist to Writing Good Content

Bowl of colourful fruit for PROSAR's FRUITFUL Content blog article.

It may seem that content generation has become a hot tactic in marketing just over the past decade, but it’s actually been around for decades. David Ogilvy, often referred to as the Father of Advertising, always believed that the steak is more important than the sizzle. He maintained that good copywriters must know their product extensively, present the facts honestly, and explain the products merits effectively.

Ogilvy favoured well-written copy as the most persuasive advertising tool. If you have a good product (and you truly understand your market), your primary task is to inform, educate and explain — thus helping your audience make the logical decision to buy. With all the hype and noise created by online marketing these days his message is rather refreshing.

Although content generation is not new, it is now seen as a key means of attracting and engaging with your audience. It’s not simply a matter of generating content; there are reams and reams (or rather, gigabytes and gigabytes) of content being pushed out. If your information is going to be noticed and have any effect, it must be good. To help you with that ambition, consider this list to make your content more FRUITFUL:

Facts – Do your research and really understand what you are writing about. It’s difficult to inform others from a position of ignorance.

Relevant – Understand who your target audience is. Knowing who you are writing for will inform what you write about as well as how you write it. It will also direct where you post/promote the content.

Useful – Beyond being relevant, is the information of use? Readers will have interest if it affects them: consider how does this information make their life better, simpler or more enjoyable.

Images – Many people are more visual-oriented, others are simply too busy to thoroughly read your piece. So complement your words with appropriate photos, tables, charts, funny illustrations, etc. to help convey your message.

Trustworthy – Be honest, in reference to the information as well as how it is presented. We all want our product or service to stand out above the fray, but writing strategically and persuasively does not require falsehoods, or even hyperbole.

Flow – People respond well to stories partly because of their structure. A logical order of information and understandable chain of events makes it easy for readers to follow. The tone of “voice” of your writing and rhythm of the sentences can make your writing more accessible and engaging. (And this may change dramatically depending upon the content or audience.)

Unbiased – Ultimately you have an agenda. If you are communicating professionally, you are either trying to gain awareness for you or your organization, improve SEO, build brand, attract potential clients (or finally impress your mother). But, biased writing is typically discounted or disregarded by readers, so keep their needs in mind, not your own.

Learn – Humans have a thirst for knowledge, we strive to be continuously learning, so being a resource is an excellent way to earn readership. Incorporate tips and information that enable a “knowledge take-away” (like a check list!). Informing is good, but teaching is better (without being preachy or condescending).

There are many considerations in writing good and accessible content. You may also want to check out 5 Tips for User Friendly Content.

22 December 2019

3 Ways to Improve Your Website

Keyboard with "time t Update" key for PROSAR website improvement blog

In addition to regular content additions to keep your website fresh and a maintenance program to ensure that your website is technically up-to-date and secure. Here are three things you can do to leverage your website more effectively:

Marketers learn that Features explain what something does, while Benefits describe why it matters to the user. Then they can internalize and personalize material, making them more likely to act on your information.

Regardless of what your organization does, you’re selling something: products, services, memberships, ideas, etc. — there is a persuasive purpose for your website. Making your content meaningful to the user and helping them visualize how it makes their life better or easier, will have greater impact. Take advantage of your website to effectively position your organization and its message with persuasive and contextualized content. [Read more: 5 Reasons to Use Content Marketing]

Content Audit

Do you know what content you have and how it fits into your overall marketing and sales goals? Don’t worry, most companies don’t. (This blog will help you get started: Own Your Content)

Having content is good, but in order for it to be strategic it needs to fit into a plan. The plan determines what you need, the audit reveals what you have, you determine how it fits into the overall strategy and what other pieces you need to fill the holes. To make this manageable, we use a spreadsheet with columns for:

Source (web page, blog, whitepaper, infographic, etc.)
Topic
Name/Title
Funnel (does it fit top, middle or low in the info/sales cycle)
Workflow (what workflow or campaign is it part of)
Usability (our own scale on how useful/effective it is for our audience)
CTA (is there a relevant/custom call-to-action/ad in the content

Improving SEO and AODA

Keywords are still important, but keyword stuffing will cost you. Google’s keen sense of good online content can sniff out the junk to determine what is truly a good resource with many layers and forms of relevant content. Meta data is still important as it is used in your search displays, so word your page titles and descriptions carefully, to engage potential readers as they search the web. Check out our 5-Minute SEO Check You Can Do Yourself.

For several years, Ontario has been rolling out the web applications of AODA (Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act), a set of guidelines to make Ontario more accessible for people with disabilities. Websites are now judged on whether they adhere to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, AA compliance (except for live audio and video). The timeline for when compliance is required can be found on Ontario’s AODA page. In addition to being complaint, making your website accessible according to WCAG opens your website to a wider variety of potential prospects, improves SEO results and earns goodwill among clients. Check out our article on freindly user-content as a starting point.

Marketing Automation

Often referred to as Inbound Marketing, automated marketing enables a series of tasks to be automatically completed when triggered. For example, a client clicks on an e-newsletter link to your “Our Widgits” web page, and visits a specific new widget page three more times in a week. That shows some obvious interest, so your website may automatically send an email to the client with more information on that specific widgit, additional shipping information and a link to your delivery schedule. If your client clicks on the delivery link, another more informative email could be sent, and the appropriate sales rep sent a prompt to call said client immediately. II the client doesn’t click on the delivery link, then a different email with other information and an incentive might be appropriate, or links to relevant blog articles, or references from other clients who have ordered that widgit…

Point being, strategic tasks can be set up to happen automatically, accommodating for the receiver’s actions and sending the right information at the right time. It allows you to look after prospects’ and clients’ needs efficiently and effectively.

Use of dynamic content, presenting different content on a page for different buyer personas, further nurtures leads, and extensive tracking and reporting provides insight and intelligence to make the user-experience as rewarding as possible.

There is much that your website could be doing to better communicate and engage with your audience. Start taking some steps to leverage its potential.

8 June 201828 October 2022

5 Tips for User Friendly Content

Above view of business man working place. Cup of coffee, laptop, notebook and pen. Business, education or blogging concept.

In this drive for more, more, more content, it can be hard to ensure that all your content is accessible. Sometimes it’s important to take a step back and ask yourself: Is my content readable?

Not every member of your target audience is going to be internet-literate, and not everyone is able to easily navigate websites from disabilities. These members of your audience are just as important as those who understand the internet. Catering to them allows you to expand your market.

The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) also has content regulations in place, so taking a look at your content can be the start of compliance and is a part of upkeep on your website.

Here are five tips to make your content as accessible and readable as possible

1- Use Headings Extensively

Headings help break up long blocks of text, allowing people to more easily scan content. Having properly nested headings is critical for both readability and AODA. This means a single H1 is at the start of the page, followed by secondary headings being H2, and so on.

This also means not using headings for spacing. The only time H1 should show up on the page is at the beginning, and all subsequent headings should have text in them. Screen readers rely on headings to determine the content of the page, and they are a key component of compatibility.

Easily scanned content also allows busy professionals to know if the page will be valuable to them, making them more likely to either keep browsing the site regardless of if they find what they want on that page. If they don’t find what they need, they know finding other content on your website will be easy because it’s well organized.

2- Make sure titles are descriptive

Jargon happens in any industry. But, be careful that your menu headings and links leading to other sections of your site are in plain language.

There is nothing more confusing than looking at a website and having to decipher what basic menu headings mean. This leads to guessing at what sort of content might be beyond the link. It’s a problem for those who screen readers, too, because unclear headings make it much slower to navigate website; people who rely on them might give up — and your website to get penalized in its SEO ranking.

Go through your menu headings and make sure somebody with minimal knowledge of your industry or organization can make a reasonable guess at what’s behind the menu item.

3- Employ Lists

Bulleted lists are easier to skim, and can act as a mini table of contents for longer pages of content. They provide high points that can then act as hyperlinks down to headings should such jumps be advantageous. Even if they’re lower on the page, their indented nature makes them stand out, causing people to pay attention.

Accordion lists are also useful for keeping pages at a manageable scroll length. While people are less shy about scrolling than they used to be, there’s still something intimidating about a long scroll bar.

Both techniques allow people to see the most important information at once, giving people to read the sea of content around them.

4- Ensure Logical Groupings

This is a fancy way of saying grouping like with like, which is harder than it sounds.

This is especially important when you have content that can fit under multiple headings. Information about programs and services offered can fall under multiple headings. It’s important to make sure the pages are cross-linked.

Really look at your content from top to bottom and determine if people would assume all the information under the heading (including sub-pages) can be found under the top heading. If it feels obscure or unnatural consider breaking off the content to something more appropriately named.

5- Have a Site Map

Some people know exactly where they want to go. If you combine proper headings and good page names, a site map is an invaluable tool to help people know where to look. Placing it in the header or in an otherwise prominent position will give people a shortcut.

A site map is also required for AODA compliance, allowing people to navigate easily.

If you keep these five tips in mind, you’ll be well on your way to having users get the most out of your content. And the more users can get out of your content, the more likely they are to trust your business. As an extra bonus, you’ll be closer to AODA compliance.

20 April 2017

Hyperlinking for AODA and SEO

wooden puppet facing unknown endings from non-descriptive links

Hyperlinks have become ubiquitous online, for good reason. Smooth, streamlined text that gets rid of a messy looking url is the hallmark of websites. A simple “click here” or “download” can string users along your site without breaking up the paragraph flow, and can even be inserted within sentences for an unobtrusive experience.

Except when hyperlinks can bring you farther away from AODA compliance, and worsen your SEO.

Bad Links

A bad link is, simply, a link that doesn’t provide context within the hyperlink text. While it’s very tempting to use these, since they’re the least obtrusive, they aren’t AODA compliant.

Examples of bad links include:

“Click here”
“More info”
“Continue reading”

While they look fine in context of a paragraph, links are often not read within the context of their paragraphs. As a result, people who use screen readers will come across link text that gives them no information for what they are about to click, rendering your website frustrating to navigate at best.

Google also doesn’t like blank links without a description, and while it will follow the link to rank your content, it won’t give any extra points for making the link difficult to understand when taken alone.

Good Links

Thankfully, it’s rather simple to turn a bad link into a good link. It’s simply a case of adding context to the link itself.

Examples:

“Click here to…”
“More info on…”
“Continue reading about…”

By filling in the blank about what you’d previously discussed in your content, you make the link stand on its own. This means anybody or anything that comes across the link will know exactly what it leads to.

This makes your site easier to navigate, and you can get a few more points in search in the process. While it can be tedious to go through and check every hyperlink to make sure it can stand on its own, the peace of mind knowing all links are compliant is worthwhile.

Keep your website up-to-date, SEO savvy and AODA compliant. Check out our monthly maintenance packages.

8 March 2017

How to Write Alt Text

PROSAR: understanding sales and marketing - image of a businesswoman pressing a floating unlock button

Alt text, short for “alternative text”, is text in the metadata of images that shows up either when the image doesn’t load, or for screen readers. If you’ve ever had an email full of images have the space replaced with, say, a coupon value, you’ve seen alt text.

While it appears simple, alt text requires time and effort to get the hang of.

Why should you put in alt text?

In short, it makes the graphic content of your website readable. This is useful for:

SEO
People with slower/limited internet connections
Individuals who use screen readers

If you’re in Ontario, you might be facing down the legal requirements of AODA, which requires all graphic information to be accessible in text. This is in accordance to WCAG, the international standard for web accessibility that is becoming the norm worldwide. While this is a laborious task, it reaps many rewards outside of disability circles.

By utilizing alt text to the maximum capacity, you can reap a rich keyword benefit that won’t visibly clog up the page (but don’t overdo it, as Google will still penalize you for keyword stuffing), and make your site available to a larger demographic.

Implementing alt text on a WordPress site is as easy as installing Yoast (for SEO) and allocating the hours to writing the material.

How to put in alt text

Simple images: describe the image in the “alternate text” window provided when you go to edit an image on your website. Sometimes, you need to go into the image’s properties to find this window. If the image has a caption associated with it, make sure the caption and image are vaguely related— the image might not be read with the caption!

Complex information: Diagrams that show a company’s organization, pie charts, and other images that present information graphically must also have alt text provided. It can be tricky to know how to tackle these, because usually you do graphics to make complex information more easily digestible.

For things like pie charts or flow charts that don’t show many steps, you can still describe the image in the alt text window. Just be extremely clear what information leads to others. For pie charts, descriptions should include what it’s for and the percentages per allocated slice. An example is:

Pie chart for [diagramed information] displaying: 49% of funds went to rent, utilities, maintenance; 32% to programs; 16% to staffing; 3% other.

Flow charts can be done much the same way:

Chart shows [item] at head, displaying four branches labeled 1, 2, 3, 4. Down the 1 branch, we have items A, B, and C. Down the 2 branch, we have L, M, N.

For larger pieces such as infographics, consider having a transcript of the whole chart that is available at a well-described link, such as “Click here for transcript of infographic.” (making sure your links are descriptive out of context is also required for WTAG compliance!)

Regardless of how you write the descriptions, making sure to include key terms you want to rank for (when appropriate) will boost your overall SEO. It is a heavy time investment, but the rewards are numerous— including people knowing your company is thinking about multiple types of web users.

Image credit: oatawa

2 February 2017

5-Minute SEO Check You Can Do Yourself

Give this a try. Google personalizes search results to individual searchers so the results of your test won’t perfectly scale up to all the possible real-world searches, but it will provide you with an idea of where you stand and where you want be.

Keywords You Should Be Winning

Write down five keyword phrases you feel that your website should absolutely be found for other than branded terms like your company name or product names. Be specific. If you sell regionally, include your region. If your product addresses a specific need, describe it. For example, “monitoring software” is too general because it doesn’t describe what’s being monitored. “Network monitoring software” would be much better, but one could even go further and add more descriptors such as “free”, “home” or “open source”.

Type Them Into Google

Perform your search and look at the first page of the search results. Are you one of the top three search results? If not, are you elsewhere in the search results?

If your website is not on the first page, ask yourself if your website has content relevant to this search. If it does, why isn’t it showing up? If you don’t have relevant content, and the keyword phrase is truly important, then you’ve just isolated content that needs to be created. After all, you’ve got to have content about a topic if you wish to be found for that topic.

Are your competitors doing better than you in the search results? If so, you’ll need to find out what they’re doing right so you can act to better compete against them.

Does the search results page feature ads either above the normal results, or along the side? Are your competitors advertising there? If they are, they’ve likely done the math and consider it a good investment. You should consider throwing your hat in the ring as well; otherwise they’re getting visitors that you could be getting.

Does the first page search results page feature any Google+ page results? If so, is your Google+ page listed there? Are your competitors? If you own a local business, you’ll want to make sure you’ve got a properly setup Google+ for local business page so you can be featured prominently in this scenario.

Happy With Your Result?

For the searches where you are on the first page, read your website’s search result listing. Do you feel the wording is relevant? Do you feel it will compel people to click on it? Is it more compelling than the other search results?

What specific web page are people being brought to within your search result? Is it the page you’d expect? Is it the best page on your website for your target audience to land on? Does this page satisfy their search and provide them with an excellent experience? Will they likely do what you’d like them to do, such as making a purchase or providing their contact info?

Improving Your Result

If you found deficiencies in your website’s SEO performance, they need to be discussed with your team. There may well be legitimate reasons for what you’re seeing, and that can be part of the conversation. If there truly are problems, shedding light on them opens up the possibility for generating ideas on how to overcome them. If you don’t have in-house SEO staff to handle this, consider getting outside help. A SEO expert can look at your SEO check, further develop the keyword list, conducting searches in a way that isn’t influenced by Google’s personalization of search results. This evaluation will provide you with a much better idea of your website’s SEO performance, and from there you can create a roadmap to get to where you want to be.

PHOTO BY SCANRAIL/ISTOCK / GETTY IMAGES

4 January 201713 August 2021

7 Reasons Why You (Probably) Need a New Website

Hand-drawn image that says Time to Update

I spoke with the owner of a manufacturing company recently who asked “why should I invest money in a new website when I already have good clients and I don’t deal with the public?”

In another discussion, a client stated, “We need to keep our costs as low as possible, so perhaps we’ll look at a revamping the website next year.”

As an experienced marketer, I found it incredible that seasoned and capable managers could have these viewpoints. Obviously, if times are tough and you need to choose between a new website and paying your staff and suppliers, marketing should take a back seat while you hunker down and prioritize payments. However, if you are simply waiting until your cash flow is particularly flush before addressing your website, waiting for the “right” time may be your downfall.

An effective website is a crucial piece of your marketing arsenal and shouldn’t be put-off or overlooked as an effective conduit for sales. Despite management’s best intentions, very few websites are actually designed to facilitate the sales process. Simply listing what you do and including a map as to where you are, won’t cut it anymore. The real role of a website is to interest and engage those who aren’t already sold. To educate those who don’t know about your product/service or how it can benefit them. To position your company and product/service favourably with customers and prospects. To initiate or nurture strong relationships.

Here are seven reasons why your website is important, and deserves your attention:

1) Powerful Prospecting

Whatever you sell and whoever you sell it to, your market is doing its research online. Prospects are clarifying product info and qualifying your company as a worthy supplier. If your website isn’t designed and edited to engage viewers and facilitate the sales process, you’re losing potential sales.

2) Create Caring Customers

We all understand the value of our customers and the importance of nurturing those relationships. Websites are an opportunity to always have the porch light on and the welcome mat out. A warm place where customers can be reminded of what you do, as well as learn about services they had no idea that you provide. It’s easy to take existing clients for granted, so review your website every now and then with a customer-centric point of view and ensure you’re addressing their needs and affirming their decision to do business with you.

3) Engage Employees

Using your online presence to motivate and retain employees is an important aspect that should go beyond a website application form. Featuring your team online, highlighting social outings, participating in blog articles… there are many ways to involve company staff in the website and welcome them as part of the family.

4) Build Brand

Brand sets the tone and positions your organization in the minds of your audience. Your website should be a hub for your brand. The design, messaging, and functionality combine to deliver a user-experience that will either support or malign your brand. A strong brand will help you gain sales, recruit talent, attract solid suppliers and please the public; so how is your website supporting your brand?

5) Supercharge SEO

In order for people to do business with you, they have to first of all, find you. Your website is not only your opportunity to tell your story, but it can serve as the magnet to attract viable prospects, too. Properly setting up your site for SEO and having strategically written content will lead to more traffic based on relevant organic searches. This increases your website’s potential to deliver qualified leads.

6) Responsive Design

More and more people are searching the web on their smartphones. In fact, this past Christmas season, Amazon shipped over 3 billion packages and 72% of those orders were made on a mobile device. Whether you have an e-commerce site or a blog, making your website easy to navigate and read is critical. A responsive website adapts to the screen size so laptops, tablets and smartphones can all provide an enjoyable user-experience. It also helps with your Google rank, as the search engine giant appreciates sites that adapt to the users’ screen, and penalizes websites that don’t.

7) Accessibility

In some states and provinces, having a website that is accessibility by people with a disability is regulated. In Ontario, the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) outlines how your website must comply (based on WCAG 2.0 criteria). It covers colours and contrast, size of type, consistency and ease of navigation, Alt text for all images… there’s a long list of design and technical considerations to optimize the user-experience for a variety of users with different abilities. Not only is it good sense to make sure your website can be used by the entire populatin, but now it’s the law.

There are more reasons good reasons to look at what your website can be doing better for you; such as providing fresh content, facilitating administrative actions, creating process efficiencies, polling and intelligence gathering… what would you add this list?

Image Credit: IvelinRadkov / Getty Images

30 September 2016

Content Creation for Link Building

I’ve spoken about blogging for qualified SEO before, and blogging is an important part of increasing the traffic to your site. However, simply generating the content isn’t enough to be ranking in search. On top of the creation, you have to integrate the content into your website. A simple way to do this is link building.

Abstract geometric polygonal structure, 3d illustration pattern background — credit: gl0ck / gettyimages

Benefits of Link Building

Link building basically means linking your content internally among your own pages. While it’s important not to go overboard— Google will penalize you for putting in too many links, as it realizes you’re trying to trick its algorithm— placing links in relevant portions of your website helps their ranking and drives leads deeper into your website, reading more of your material and, as a result, qualifying themselves.

When you combine link building with a visitor tracking system such as SharpSpring, you gain valuable insight to your website traffic almost impossible to gain without link building.

Content Creation Strategy

Link building needs to be a part of your overall sales strategy. Since the primary purpose of producing content is to drive sales, it’s important you work link building into all your online content. This covers your blog posts, along with social media and even the text on your website.

A good link building strategy will holistically address how links fit in everywhere your website, outside of pushing links to social media and inter-linking blog posts. It sets up content management as part of your overall marketing efforts, which, in turn, helps keep you constantly up to date.

Maintenance

Now here comes the tricky part— finding time. While the initial effort to do a strategy might be a daunting effort, the resulting maintenance doesn’t have to be. It’s more a case of being aware that it will continue to be part of your link building process.

As you generate content, establish how and when links will be shared, and develop a system where you regularly review what content you want to promote within your website. Depending on how quickly you generate content, you could be looking at reviews every month or every six. Whatever you decide, make sure you use the time to take an inventory of what you’ve produced, how it supports your sales, and adjusting as necessary.

21 September 2016

5 Reasons to Use Content Marketing

PROSAR content marketing graphic on blackboard

Content Generation and Content Marketing are current buzzwords and part of a leading marketing trend, but the concept has been around since the dawn of commerce. Content marketing is simply using information strategically to communicate with your market. What has changed since the first messaging merchants is the complexity and scope of that communication and its delivery. So buzzwords or not, a more focused and strategic approach to getting your message out is now critical.

Here are five reasons why you should be taking a structured approach to your content marketing.

1. Myriad Touchpoints

The ad guys in Mad Men had it comparatively easy; they could focus on a killer ad campaign knowing that a high percentage of their market would absorb their newspaper, TV and radio ads. Since the halcyon days when a campaign brainstorming required a brain-numbing amount of whisky, the Internet has given the information and communication world a whole new environment. This new landscape is vast, cluttered and omnipresent.

A minority of small companies are treating their websites as strategic communication hubs (unfortunately most are still virtual brochures with a link to their dormant Facebook page). And even if you are paying attention to your website, simply keeping it up-to-date isn’t sufficient. Blogs, online communities, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+… there are myriad touchpoints where your existing and potential market could connect with you. A strategic content marketing plan will determine which are best for your company and what needs to be done to properly support them.

2. Consumers Want More Info

The Internet has empowered consumers like never before. They now expect to easily find online all required info about any product or service, as well as reviews, user comments, instructions, how-to videos… in essence they want it all and they want it now. A strategic plan helps you to determine how you can most effectively provide that information in a compelling way.

Early advertising guru David Ogilvy understood the importance of content marketing. He maintained that “the more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be.” Ogilvy helped the industry to appreciate the value of understanding your market and providing the right information in an appropriate manner. And even in those simpler times, this Mad Man realized that “Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the complex symbol which is the brand image.” The fact that the communications and marketing world has become all the more complex underlines the importance of Ogilvy’s insight.

3. Open Lines of Communication

In addition to providing you with countless ways to connect with your market, social media and blogs also enable a two-way communication. This may seem daunting but it can be an incredible opportunity. A dialogue with consumers is a direct means to learn from your market and gather valuable information.

Ensure that the bulk of information about your organization online is under corporate stewardship.

4. Your Brand is Linked to Your Content

While you are putting good content out there, it is important to also listen to what is being said about you. Scanning the web for mentions and responding swiftly and appropriately has become an important aspect of brand stewardship. Whether you are thanking someone for kind words or a helpful suggestion, or addressing a misperception or mistake; dealing with it publicly and honestly helps you earn loyalty.

Essentially, it all reflects on you (or your organization if you really don’t want to take this personally). I believe that a company’s brand is now formed as much by the unofficial and/or unpaid content online as it is by the paid media and carefully crafted PR. Online, everyone hears you scream — the Internet hears everything said about your company and saves it for anyone to read. Your brand is living 24/7 online and you are probably unaware as to how it’s doing.

5. Much of the Content Online is Crap

This proliferation of information on the Internet has bred a lot of poorly researched, badly written and pathetically self-serving crap. (Yes, yes, there is also a ton of really good content, but when you research a purchase online, what percentage of the information is both helpful and well-written?) So users need to sift through the garbage to find what they are looking for. If you’re churning out less than stellar material, you could be doing more harm than good and actually tarnish your brand.

Conversely, if you are actually producing relevant and readable material, you can help to define your brand as trustworthy and a valued online resource. This positioning moves you a whole lot closer to a buying relationship.

Writing compelling content is not easy, heck, just writing good informative content is challenging. With professional guidance, a strategic plan determines what content you should be producing, what you should be writing, what your staff can do, and what professional marketers/writers should create for you, as well as a schedule to make sure it actually happens. And this structured process makes it much easier to deliver good content.

What would you add to my list of reasons to approach content marketing in a professional manner?

Photo Credit: Getty Images : Cacaroot

9 September 2016

Blogging for Qualified SEO

man typing on keyboard with ideas floating around his head

SEO is important for any business, but determining how to best improve it can be a tricky task. One easy way to improve your website, short of an SEO audit and a website revamp, is to regularly blog. Regular blogging gives prospects a reason to return to your website, and can improve your ranking— so long as you purposefully plan your content. Here are some tips for getting the most out of your blogging.

1. Set a goal and a strategy

Start with your end goal in mind. In a sentence or two (or less!) you should be able to explain exactly what your blogging strategy is supposed to accomplish. How is this content helping reach your business objectives? Talk with your team and do what you can together to ensure the goal is as clear as possible. No piece of content should be random or lacking purpose, even if it’s a short blog. Really examine your sales process to determine how you can use blogging to support it, and how you want to drive people through your funnel.

2. Make sure the pieces support the goal

Higher ranking SEO might get more people to your website, but that isn’t as important as getting the right people to your website. If you’re blogging just for the sake of it, without putting your sales goal to the forefront, your SEO efforts won’t provide as much return as they could. Have benchmarks and review points in place to adjust your blogging strategy, and make sure to review every piece so it does the best job it can.

3. Use inbound marketing techniques to further your sales

Once you’ve written the content that gets more qualified buyers to your site, you have to continue nurturing them along your sales funnel. If you’ve properly set up goals, you should know where to drive your leads for the next stage of the buying process. Setting up CTAs is the easiest way to do this, but depending on your overreaching content strategy, you could use individual blog posts in a multitude of ways.

4. Continue improving the rest of your online presence

Blogging is only one part of a content strategy, which, ideally, covers everything you produce— from website pages to social media posts. While blogging can generate an improvement, you need to make sure all of your content strategy is optimized to drive qualified leads to your sales team. You can do this yourself or hire an external agency, freeing up your resources to work on further nurturing those sales instead of trying to keep up to the constantly-moving target that is SEO.