Paul's SEO & Internet Marketing TIps For Small Businesses

Friday, 7 August 2015

War And Peace: Bloomberg’s Massive History Of Google’s EU Antitrust Case

If you want a history of Google’s search battles with European antitrust regulators, a new article from Brad Stone (and colleagues) at Bloomberg will more than satisfy you. While there’s very little truly new information, the well-researched (and lengthy) piece is nearly comprehensive...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

The Problem With The Story You Are Telling

Good, relevant content is more important than ever, because of a Panda.

Back in May, 2014 Google released an update to their search algorithm, called Panda 4.0. According to SearchEngineLand, “Google’s Panda algorithm is designed to prevent sites with poor quality content from working their way into Google’s top search results.”

I’ve been doing a lot of reading and researching on the update (and its impact on content marketing) for our clients, and while there are many different opinions on how to best handle the changes to how Google evaluates your site, everyone seems to agree on one thing: if you are creating content that is engaging and that people actually read, you will do well on Google and with SEO.

As if that was something that was really easy to do.

Throw a rock at a content marketing website or blog, and you will hit an article about the importance of telling a story. The thing that you really have to remember, however, is that the story that you want to tell isn’t necessarily always the story that your buyer wants to hear. For example, the fact that you just released a new product is not a “story” that most of your customers are going to be interested in … but I would bet that it’s the story your product marketing team is pushing you to tell. The problem is that product-centric white papers, webinars, press releases and articles simply are not that interesting to the buyer … and here’s the thing … Google can tell whether or not the audience is engaged by your story, and it will impact your SEO.

With everyone (and their sister) using Google Analytics, and engagement metrics from all those sites helping Google understand and identify the content that people are actually reading, it makes sense that this type of information will help the search engine make recommendations based on what people actually like. So how should this influence your content marketing strategy?

Well for one thing, you can’t forget that some of the most important content that you’re going to be creating isn’t going to be meant for a large audience. It should be geared towards a very specific audience at a very specific moment in time, and those are the people that are going to search for and find your content. They will actually read it, rather than just bounce off the page after a few seconds. They will be engaged by your content, and Google will notice that – as well as when they share it — which will naturally and organically help your SEO.

Trying to game the system? It simply isn’t enough to stuff your content full of keywords, or to develop a linking scheme, or build out your page titles and metatags any longer. All are still important, but you need to be careful, because Google catches companies that try to “game” the system.

Who cares if only 100 people see it as long as they’re the right 100 people and it’s the content that they need to push them through to the next stage of the buying cycle. Don’t always just go for the big bang — go for quality content that engages the right audience. More people like them will follow, because the bottom line is that Google is getting better all the time at evaluating websites as if it were a human. The actual content on the page is now way more important than the code underneath it.

This article originally appeared on the Annuitas blog.

The post The Problem With The Story You Are Telling appeared first on B2B Marketing Insider.

#82: When PR Goes Good, and Bad, and Horribly Wrong

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Emma, Official Sponsor of the UnPodcast

On this episode of the UnPodcast we share stories about ways companies have used PR:

Good Ways (Swedish Blood Bank)
Bad Ways (Paula Deen)

and…

Horribly Wrong Ways (Orem Owlz)

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If you hire a PR expert, ignoring them is not a good idea. http://ow.ly/Qy3pI via @UnMarketing and @UnAlison
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Items mentioned in this episode

When services become 'living' how will brands survive?

This is an exciting time to be a marketer. In fact, it’s an incredible time to be a part of any business looking to connect with consumers to sell a product.

Why? Because consumers are looking at products and the path to purchase very differently.

Video Marketing For Small Businesses Infographic

Top 10 Video Content Ideas for Small Businesses

Does Your Business Need Help With Video Marketing?

As YouTube is the second largest search engine, only beaten to first place by Google (and who owns YouTube, yep, that’s right…Google!), getting a video ranked on to the first page of Google is 50 times easier than ranking a web page, you and your business are missing out on a huge amount of free traffic as well as sales and customers/clients.

Blue Square Management can help your business create and rank your video content. So why not call us today on 01689 602 248 to find out how we can help you get more leads, increase your sales and grow your business with online video marketing.

PLEASE SHARE THIS POST IF YOU FOUND IT HELPFUL

Blue Square Management
Video Marketing Agency
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Orpington
Kent
BR6 8ED

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The post Top 10 Video Content Ideas for Small Businesses appeared first on .

Wednesday, 5 August 2015

7 Must-Read Tips To Simplify Content Marketing Planning

Forrest Gump tells us “Stupid is as stupid does.” Well, if that is the case then we should stop being stupid with our content marketing planning. Rather, the new quote should be “Simple is as simple does.”

Simplification is the new innovator. Simplification is the new disruptor. Simplification is the key to a deeper customer connection.

Too many brands have an enthusiastic, scattershot and complex approach to their digital and content go-to-market strategy.
Sales, marketing and content creation have converged.

The sooner we simplify and innovate this convergence, the sooner we catch our customers’ attention to deepening the relationship. If we are Modern Marketers (and sellers and publishers), then we should think how to connect better with our Modern Buyers in today’s digital, social, and customer-centric time.

7 Ways To Solve The Content Marketing Planning Conundrum

1. Be open to reinventing your marketing approach completely. If there is ever a sacred cow in the brand strategy room, it’s content creation – who owns it, who deploys it, who measure it? Modern Marketers need to consider killing their current approach to customer contact with relevant content. Focus on creating content that customers want to read. And, manage the right metrics to understand its business impact. Measuring content and connection success from the ground up – the connecting awareness, consideration and conversion business impact will translate into a winning business strategy.

2. Tear down internal silos to focus on the big picture. Departmental silos are complex and stunt innovation. Daily, big brands and small businesses navigate the gauntlet of tools, content creation, resourcing, and budget management silos. Modern Marketers need to tear down silos and focus on their long-term strategic thinking and activation that is the most efficient path to get from point ‘A’ to point ‘B.’

3. Create an efficient content creation supply chain. Content has many lives on many different channels, so we need to consider how the content creation supply chain can work for us vs. against us. Many brands spend too much time creating content for one-time use. When brands simplify content creation and distribution they build for long-term use. This focus enables them to double down on the opportunity to drive always-on organic reach. What if marketers built content as if it was at the start of its journey instead of its end? Create content at an earlier stage, to be consumed and shared in multiple channels – email, Twitter, blogs, videos, SlideShare, social selling posts – to simplify the marketing process. Create content to make it easier for everyone to share content on earned channels.

4. Be ready to jump on real-time triggers to distribute the message. Anchored and pop-up trigger events are a simple strategy to fuel the spread of hot content. For instance, in 2014 The New York Times assessed they strategically handled the Michael Sam ‘trigger event.’ However, their digitally and socially savvy competitors focused their content and owned channels to jump on the opportunity on Google hangouts and YouTube interviews – where THEIR readers were vs. where the owned channels were.

5. Understand competitive activity – inside and out. Competitive tracking is one of the simplest ways to stay ahead of the competition. Brands need to be listening to, reading about and dissecting competitive campaigns apart to know what’s working with their content and distribution. For instance, brands should regularly review HubSpot’s and Marketo’s content and marketing strategy, whether or not they are competitors. Listening and discovering how others ‘do marketing’ will help you to advance your marketing strategy more quickly.

6. Adopt and integrate social strategies vs. adding them in the end. Everyone knows it’s harder to retrofit something vs. building it from the ground up. Social media morphs content and distribution to the readers. It’s clear that many brands add social into the mix as an afterthought – sometimes as a wrong-sized or misplaced gear in their machine. This misplacement hinders organic distribution. Brands must figure out how to activate their content creators and marketers to think more socially. Companies are still trying to figure out how to leverage social to grow their audience (see their leaked report from 2014); likely due to their internal struggles. On the other hand, BuzzFeed has increased their footprint by 6X; likely due to smart social coworkers, empowerment and understanding that a great social media share is better than a great article headline.

7. Listen, amplify and connect to develop an audience. As Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot implied “If you’re not (listening to and) responding to customer inquiries, questions from leads and prospects about your products, and influencers in your space on social media, your competitors are, and they will eat your lunch.” Listening is always the first step to developing content, and audience and a sale!

Do you have a tip to help simplify sales, marketing and content planning for 2015? If so, please share in below in the comment section. Or, contact me directly at MarketingThink.com, onTwitter, LinkedIn or Google+.

As the New York Times stated, “We need makers, entrepreneurs, reader advocates and zeitgeist watchers’ to make the Modern Marketer recipe work.” Here’s to cooking up a simple content marketing plan.

This article originally appeared on MarketingThink.com (Photo Credit)

The post 7 Must-Read Tips To Simplify Content Marketing Planning appeared first on B2B Marketing Insider.

Why embedded videos in email marketing don't work

If the vertiginous rise of video-sharing and streaming platforms such as YouTube, which receives more than 6bn video views from 1bn unique users every month, has taught us anything it's that people have a voracious appetite for video.

It should be no surprise then that more than four out of every five marketers plans to use video in their email campaigns in the future.