Balancing Creativity and SEO in Content Writing

In the realm of search engine optimization (SEO), content is king. Be it website copy, blog posts or guest posting, content is an integral part of effective SEO. However, not all content you create brings glory to your business. Unique, high-quality content blended with creativity supports SEO efforts.
If you're not creative in your writing process, you will be creating content like many of your competitors, reducing the chances of standing out from the crowd. In this article, I’m going to share six SEO content writing tips that will help you balance creativity in your work. Let’s dive in.
Related: 4 Content Assets You Can Publish on Your Website to Attract Attention

1. Search for important keywords.

The first step to creating useful content is to find important keywords and phrases that your audience uses to search on Google. Use Google Keyword Planner, a free tool, to find out terms that your audience uses to conduct online searches. Once you have made a list of keywords, you should include them in your content.
Naturally incorporate keywords into your content. Stuffing keywords in your content will do more harm than good to your business. The more long tail keywords you use, the better it will be for your content to rank on Google. 

2. Solve your audience’s problems.

Writing content that solves pain points of your prospects and customers is a surefire way to ensure the success of your SEO efforts. People tend to share content that they find useful, increasing the reach of content. The more people who read your content, the more Google will like your content. Therefore, you should make sure your SEO content strategy revolves around your audience’s problems.

3. Organize content for skimmers.

Humans have a shorter attention span than goldfish -- and the notoriously ill-focused goldfish has an attention span of nine seconds -- meaning that your visitors might leave your web pages without reading your content completely. Even if they stay, most of them are not going to read between the lines.
That said, be sure you organize your content for skimmers. Use bullet points, subheads and italics to highlight important information. Write short sentences and short paragraphs. Place important information in the beginning, the middle and the end of your content pieces. 
Related: Consumers Don't Have an Attention Problem. It's Just That Your Advertising Isn't Very Good.

4. Include facts and figures.

Facts and figures are essential to persuasive writing. They support your hypothesis and argument in your content. If you make your SEO content writing rich with supporting data, you will create persuasive, inspiring content. However, you should engagingly present data so that your content doesn’t look like a boring report painted with numbers. Also, make sure that the data you are using make sense easily. If your audience struggles to get the meaning of the numbers you mentioned in your content, they will lose interest, no matter how useful your content is.

5. Use enticing, relevant images.

It is true that a picture is worth a thousand words -- and eyesome images help you get noticed. Always use engaging, relevant images in your SEO content. There are several good ways to include images in your content. Product images, blog images and infographics are ways to enrich your content. Whenever you are using an image in your content, don’t forget to add an ALT tag to make it search engine friendly. Sometimes, it is difficult to find/create suitable images. The benefits a good image can offer is worth your time.

6. Write for humans.

While writing SEO content, consider the following questions:

1. Is this the way a normal person will say things?
2. How will someone feel hearing what I have written?
3. Am I making my points clear enough?

If you throw away all the big marketing words and write in the tone and language of your audience, your content will make a lasting impression. 
Related: 3 All-Too-Familiar Writing Patterns You Need to Eliminate From Your Marketing Copy Today

Conclusion.

Unique content is vital for the success of your SEO efforts. If you write content based on important keywords, organize it for skimmers, include data to add credibility and complement it with relevant images, there is no reason why your audience wouldn't love to read your content. Remember, if people love your content, Google will love your content.

Reference:https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/317033

Dos and Don'ts to Guide Your SEO Campaigns

SEO or Search Engine optimization is the process of optimizing a website to increase its ranking on the search engine results page (SERP). Web-crawlers, or ‘spiders’, of different search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. are constantly scouring the internet and indexing the websites. So when you google something, you are not actually accessing the internet, but rather browsing through the websites indexed by Google. These websites are arranged on the results page according to their relevance to the search keywords, which is computed by special search engine algorithms to determine the significance of each webpage.
Businesses have realised the importance of ranking higher on the search engine results page, as it increases their traffic and visibility across target audiences. This has led to an increased investment in SEO campaigns, especially by companies that have higher stake in expanding their online presence.
However, extensive knowledge of how search engines work is essential to build an SEO campaign. Here are some Dos & Don’ts to keep in mind-
What you should do-

• Content planning-

Content is the key to a successful SEO campaign. Different types of content- text, pictures, videos, audios, infographics, etc. should be planned for the quarter well in advance. This allows for a smooth measureable step-by-step traffic growth on the website.
Also, one should hire content writers who are well-versed with native writing style as they understand how SEO writing works and utilise the keywords and webpage space optimally. Quality and quantity should be at equilibrium while planning.

• Aim should be ‘Featured Snippets’-

Google Featured snippet is the highlighted content on top of the results page which provides gist of the information requested. The focus while planning must be to develop the web pages that have all the ingredients that can help you earn "Featured Snippets".

• Boost organic traffic-

While planning, have measurable sales goals and actionable items which are driven by strategies that boost organic traffic.
That is why it is essential to have a separate budget for premium tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush and Moz which can advance your SEO campaign.

• Bank on backlinks-

The outreach campaign planning starts with preparing a list of influencers who can be helpful in sourcing content for the website. Aim should be to become an influencer and help others with resourceful content to earn reputation. This helps to increase backlinks which also helps to climb website ranking on search engine’s index.

• Barnacle SEO Approach-

For the first three months of the campaign, the plan should focus on ‘Barnacle SEO approach’, which means leveraging highly ranked websites to drive your presence on the internet and generate brand equity. This helps to make the homepage powerful, and then the rest follows.
What you shouldn’t do-

• Over-commit in the projection planning-

Quote achievable figures when presenting the plan to your client. Every industry’s target audience differs, so projection of the people you can reach with your campaign should not be over-stated. This requires extensive homework.

• Don’t over-do the backlinks-

Those 5 million backlinks gigs might look enticing but rather they are harmful for the website. Google, the most popular search engine, no longer rewards the websites with most backlinks. With the preference of quality over quantity, if the anchor text is not built in a natural way then your website can be penalised, which will lead to a dramatic drop in the ranking.

• Experience counts, don’t hire novices-

SEO is not a game of guesswork. It requires factual understanding of how search engines evolve, making it a super-specialist domain.
Do not waste your budget by investing in inexperienced agencies or employees. Google is constantly updating the way it operates. If need be, your SEO campaign should be flexible enough to do the same.

Reference:https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/319072

Google Explains Why Singular and Plurals Rank Differently

Google’s John Mueller discussed why Google showed different results for the singular and plural versions of the same keyword phrase.  Many SEOs recommend adding synonyms to content, including the plural and singular versions of the targeted search phrase. John Mueller explains why it may be better to choose singular or plural then focus on that.

Question About Singular and Plural Keyword Phrases

In a recent Google Hangout someone asked the following question:

What are reasons for completely different positions for keywords in singular and plural? We have some examples where the plural ranks in top five and the singular isn’t in the top 100.

Google’s John Mueller’s Answer

The search intent should be very similar. So depending on what is happening there we might be seeing these as something a little different.
So just because one is singular and one is plural doesn’t mean that we would show the same search results for those kinds of queries.
It’s very possible that we see these as completely different elements and maybe even as completely different intent from the user side.
So that’s something were I wouldn’t necessarily assume that Google will always treat singular and plural words as complete synonyms and… show exactly the same search results for those two versions.
As a site owner, it might be worth thinking about what users might be searching differently and if my site’s really the most relevant one for people who are searching for singular version of this word versus those searching for the plural version.

Why Would Google Show Different Results?

The user intents underlying search queries can be different between synonyms and singular/plurals across all possible niches and topics. So it is impossible to generalize that singular keywords mean this and plural keywords mean that.
It can be said with certainty that there are differences between singular and plural keyword variations. But the reasons why they are different will vary specifically for each variation, topic and niche.
That is the meaning of John Mueller’s statement:

“It’s very possible that we see these as completely different elements and maybe even as completely different intent from the user side.”

How Singular and Plural Keywords Can Differ

Singular Can Signal a Search for a Recommendation

For some searches there are user intent differences between singular and plural. For example, for certain forum related searches I discovered that Google tended to promote a page that is recommending a forum but isn’t a forum itself, in searches using the singular version.
The plural version of the same search returns actual forums in the search results.
This does not happen across the board with searches for forums. The differences are, in my opinion, likely triggered by user intent signals, as indicated by click through rate data and/or predicted click through rate data.
This is why I prefaced this discussion by saying that we can’t generalize about the reasons. But we can discover how to identify the user intent on a keyword by keyord basis.
Now I will illustrate a specific instance and show you how Google’s algorithm is detecting the user intent and showing different searches for

How to Identify User Intent

Here’s another example, this time more specific. The search terms are Teddy Bear and Teddy Bears.

Singular Phrase: Teddy Bear

When you search for Teddy Bear, Google shows a Wikipedia result at the top of the page. That is an indication that the top user intent for that particular search phrase (teddy bear) is informational.

This search results indicates that the most popular user intent for the keyword phrase Teddy Bear is informational in nature.

That means that for most users who search for the singular phrase, teddy bear, they are searching for information about teddy bears. That Wikipedia page is very  likely not ranking at the top of the page because it has the most links or because it’s anchor text ratios are optimal.
That web page is ranking there because it satisfies the most users making that specific search query.
This is why data driven studies of the search results that purport to show ideal anchor text, inbound link patterns or keyword distributions are not accurate. The user intent factor overrides those considerations, rendering them useless for understanding why Google ranks web pages.
One can’t truly understand why a web page ranks for a search query without also considering the user intent that underlies that ranking. 
This is important for diagnosing why a site does not rank well, why a site lost rankings, for content marketing and for keyword research and planning.

Plural Phrase: Teddy Bears

Google shows predominantly commercial web pages for the plural version of the phrase, teddy bears. This is an indication that most people who search for teddy bears are sastified with search results that show commercial web pages at the top.

Some people are satisfied with informational results for that particular phrase and that’s likely why Google shows the Wikipedia page, but ranked lower.

About Those Synonyms

I have consistently advised against following the trend of seeding a page with synonyms. That is the old keyword spamming trick. It is unsophisticated and separated from the concept of understanding why Google ranks a web page in the context of user intent.
Yes, Google and Bing use synonyms to produce accurate search results. But as you can see by this discussion of singular and plural variations, the user intent plays an important role in the choice of whether to choose one word or another.
Simply adding synonyms to a page is a gross simplification of how web pages are ranked.
If you really want to be accurate in your keyword choices, understand the user intent for each keyword phrase you want to rank for. Then build the content appropriate for that user intent.

Reference:https://www.searchenginejournal.com/singular-plural-keywords/267177/

5 SEO Mistakes that People are Still Doing in 2018

Search Engine optimization increase the traffic on your website and we are going to explain how

With the advent of online marketing took a completely new turn. It won’t be wrong to say that businesses which are investing in online marketing faster became more successful than businesses that didn’t. Everything that used to be on papers, newspapers, billboards, flexes, etc. has now shifted to the internet. You now have online banner ads that act like billboards. You have affiliate programs that work like referrals and websites are much better than newspaper ads.
If you want to make your business an international entity you could not rely on throwing pamphlets in people’s homes or handing handbills over. You need to invest in various digital marketing programs for that purpose. In most cases, you don’t even have to spend any money to market your business, product or service. Most of the time is spent on improving your image and reputation. In all of this, SEO serves as the blood and fuel of all online marketing because search engines results are the places where the money lies. SEO has evolved greatly in last 6-7 years and Google must be given credit for that.
Google has been updating its algorithms with some strict rules and keeping SEO professionals on their toes. Panda, Hummingbird, and Penguin are all the different names given to updates done in the search algorithms by Google. This made SEO serious business and while doing it properly could bring you to the top search engine results, any clumsy actions could have you catapulted out of the search engine results.

If you are an aspiring search engine optimization professional, a company looking for a sound SEO strategy or a business currently deploying SEO strategies in its only marketing, here are the 5 deadly mistakes to avoid.
1.  Ignoring the Mobile Users:
We already knew that mobile searches on Google have surpassed the desktop searches. If you are still ignoring the mobile users while creating an SEO strategy for your business, then believe me you are going to lose a bunch of sales. Generally, people consider page speed optimization is the only factor to target the mobile users, but this is not the end of the world. If you have a separate mobile website, then you need to take care of following points while targeting the mobile users:
•    Present short and catchy web pages content to the mobile users
•    Plan separate header and Meta tags (Not keywords focused) to target the mobile users
•    Use short contact forms on the mobile website.
•    Avoid ads in the content

2.  Not Mastering the Keywords
Knowing your business-related keywords is one thing and mastering them is another. Being a master in keyword research, you should have understanding, which keywords will help to get sales and which keywords will work for brand awareness. You can’t mix both of them, so make a separate list of sales related keywords and brand awareness keywords. Use tools like Keywords planner, Semrush, Google Trends, Google etc to find out the best keywords for your business. Master the keywords or simply hire the masters of keywords for the job.
3.  Focusing on Links Quantity
There was a time when the quantity of building links was more important than the quality. If we talk about the present day, Google has cracked down severely on low quality and spammy links and other links which were trying to manipulate Google’s ranking in many ways. So what can we do? Well, the key to link-building success is to generate natural quality links. Focus on earning the links by sharing the good quality and engaging content. Guest blogging, infographics, explainer videos, and broken link building methods etc. are easy and best ways of earning the natural backlinks.

4.  Not Structuring Website Properly
Has it happened to you at any point in time that you watched a great movie with great acting, dialogues and material but you thought that it could have been made better or some scenes were unnecessary? This is the same with your website. How your website is structured is extremely important for your SEO strategies. The structure of your website should be extremely smooth and spiders from search engines should be able to move from one page to another and the pages deep in the layers of your website easily.  But the question is, how can you make your website structure user-friendly? Here are the few easy and effective ways:

• Make your website URL structure neat and clean
• Use of breadcrumbs
• Do internal linking in the content
• Use HTML and XML sitemaps
• Use the structure data markups on your website

5.  Not Going Social
If you are still a businessman who thinks, social networking websites aren’t meant for your business then you need a big renovation of your thoughts. Social media is either a friend or enemy of businesses today. It has the power to take your business to new heights and make it an international entity within months or bring you down on the ground within a week. Share your stuff online. Be creative with your content. Share your business-related content, not as business content but stuff that would make the masses smile and talk about your content.

Reference:https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/316721

7 Ways to Use Google Trends for SEO & Content Marketing

Google Trends is one of the best tools for SEO research.
With these seven tips you’ll be able to extract hidden insights that no other tool offers.
These tips affect keyword choice to content marketing to how to best promote your website.

Google Trends & SEO Strategy

1. Learn Amount of Keyword Traffic

Google Trends is an official Google tool that offers a visual comparison of traffic levels. It does not tell you the exact amount of traffic. But it does show a relative amount.
This is especially helpful if you know the amount of traffic from a related keyword phrase.

Tip#1 How to Obtain More Accurate Traffic Data

If you want to unlock the traffic data of a keyword, compare that keyword with a keyword you already rank for and are familiar with the traffic levels.
Although Google Trends won’t show you the exact amounts, as long as you know the amounts for one keyword, the traffic levels of the other keyword will become more understandable.

2. Gain Insights for Content Marketing

There are two ways to look at the keyword data, stretched across over a long period of time and a short period of time.

Long Period Trends

You can set Google Trends to show you the traffic trends stretching back five years. This is valuable for showing you audience trends.

Upward Trending Long Range Trends

If a trend is going up this means to focus energy on creating content for this trend.

Downward Long Range Trends

If the trend line is moving down, then it may be a signal that audience content consumption is changing.
For example, review this five year trend for WordPress the search term, WordPress the software and WordPress the website:

There’s a clear downward trend for WordPress in all it’s variations. The downward trend extends to phrases such as WordPress themes, WordPress plugin, and WordPress hosting.

Tip #2 Plan Future Content

The long view helps you make decisions about future directions. The long view helps you understand where to put the focus for content. If a product is trending downward, then maybe it’s time to think about shifting content resources to another topic or product or even change the content model altogether.

3. Short View Insights

Viewing keyword trends in the short view, such as the 90 day or even 30 day view can reveal valuable insights for maximizing your content marketing.
For example, two of the top trending keyword trends are How To and and Near Me searches. When you scale down to the 90 day view you can see what days of the weeks those searches are popular.

Tip #3 Plan Publishing Schedule

This takes the guess work out of creating a publishing schedule. Searches related to How to trend upward on Sundays and Mondays. Searches related to Near Me trend on Fridays and Saturdays.
If you have a site or a podcast focused on how to do things or a hobby related site, then publishing on a Sunday, Monday, or Wednesday and sending out an email to subscribers may be the best approach.
If your business is a restaurant, then you know that it is important to have specials, special pricing and so on published by Thursday so that it’s ready for site traffic on Friday and Saturday.

Tip #4 Keywords by Category

Google Trends has the capability to narrow down your keywords according to categories in order to give more accurate data on your keywords.

Tip #5 Keyword by Geography

Google Trends provides keyword information by geographic location. This information can be used for determining what areas are the best to outreach to or for tailoring the content to specific regions.
Keyword popularity information by region is valuable for link building, content creation, content promotion and pay per click.
For example, if a topic is popular in a particular region you can narrow your content promotion to identifying regional magazines, groups and clubs that are related to the niche you’re publishing or marketing to.

Tip #6 Geography Data May Enhance Ranking

Geographic information can also be used to enhance your content so that it is relevant to the most people. Google ranks pages according to who it’s most relevant for, so incorporating geographic nuance into your content can help it rank for the most people, especially if those people begin to promote your content in social media, blogs and podcasts.

Tip #7 Rising Queries

The ability to gain insight into keyword phrases that are rising is quite possibly the most useful feature of Google Trends.

All you do is type in a keyword phrase and this section will give you twenty five related search queries that are trending upwards. This data helps keep you on target with how consumers are changing. It allows you to react to new opportunities.

Takeaway: Google Trends is Useful

Google Trends is an incredibly useful tool. A little creativity yields important search marketing insights. Spend some time with Google Trends, I’m certain you’ll discover insights that will improve how content is created and promoted online.

Reference:https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-trends/266721/

5 SEO Concepts Entrepreneurs Should Implement in 2018-2019 to Boost Google Ranking

As an entrepreneur, you have an idea you are confident about. You have your initial investments in place, a functional business model and a clear idea about your target audience. The next obvious thing to do now is, spread out to your audience. There could be multiple ways of doing it, word of mouth, adverts or be on the web.
By now, you have probably seen for yourself how influential and helpful the web can be. It can connect you to absolute strangers across the globe at any given time. The web makes for the largest marketplace and most probably the most time and cost efficient marketplace too.
You are on the web now, how do you ensure you are ranked high enough on search engines? A better ranking on these search engines shows you in results when a prospective customer looks out for you. You don’t want to get lost in the crowd of searches, do you? Here comes the concept of SEO or search engine optimization.
You most certainly have a brief idea about SEO. My understanding of it is quite related to our real lives. I have seen relevant people refer to you or your business only when they see the value. Search engines are like those established figurines in society. They suggest your business only when your business seems valuable. Gradually other good websites give a link back to you as you have already been recommended by an established search engine. Wouldn’t you agree a shop is good when the mayor of your city says it’s good? It doesn’t always have to be in terms of how much you have achieved as a business, but about how smartly you have promoted yourself and your business.
Here are 5 SEO concepts entrepreneurs should implement in 2018-2019:

• Install any Plugin-

Plugins in work great for everything in general if your website is made on wordpress. Plugin doesn’t stop at just managing your meta descriptions and titles for you but does much more. It solves a lot of hidden technical glitches that your website might have been going through. As solopreneurs, we have hundreds of things on our plates and it’s not always possible to pay attention to such details. This Plugin acts like your name label when you go to a party. The name label helps others to know your name, designation and other basic things right. You can update the basic introductory attribute of your blog or landing page so that when Google crawler comes to your website, it quickly identifies you. And if you help Google, then Google is your friends. As the website owner, you can still have control over your features as per your choice. This plugin updates each time google algorithm updates ever so frequently. You can focus on writing and structuring your content while these plugins will take care of the technical SEO.

• Interlink your blogs-

There are 2 extremely great reasons why interlinking your blog with relevant articles from the past, is good for your SEO. The smartest way of doing it is, strategizing which stage of the customer journey is the Blog targeted at. It could be Awareness, Consideration, Decision or Delight. This will make it easier to interlink your articles with your previous posts. Apart from making your website more relevant, here are the other 2 reasons interlinking is a must:

• The amount of time a reader spends on your website increases significantly. This is great for you when you have relevant and interesting links included within your content. Here the audience spends a good amount of time without even realizing how much time has passed.
• Interlinking also informs search engines which particular blogs on your website are relevant. These get better rankings based on the keywords you have used and the targeted keywords.

Linking the right articles within your blog will help the inbound lead generation in your marketing strategy. This will abet search engines and social media platforms to bring a customer to the content you have written for them.

• All the out-going links from your website should be no-follow-

You don’t want to distract your audience. It’s like when you go to X brand shop for shopping and come across a great shower gel from another new brand. You will feel seduced to check their store for better deal and content. On the web, the other brand is the website you have provided an out-going link to. You don’t want to divert your audience from your website. There is a  concept of LINK JUICE in SEO which essentially can be imagined a juice pitcher with holes. The more holes (out going DO FOLLOW links) you have, the less juice you will have inside. So your aim should be to save the juice. So try giving less out going Do Follow links. If at all you feel link to hyperlilnk other external resources, link them by making them No Follow links.
The right way to do it is, add “No follow” status to all outgoing links. You can either do it by using a code every time you are making a hyperlink
<a href="http://somelink.com" rel="nofollow">Some Link</a>
or by installing a plugin which makes all linking no follow by default. Manually uncheck the no-follow status and ensure all your internal links are “Do follow”.
Plugin name : Title and Nofollow For Links

• Build external links referring to your website by guest blogging-
  This is an extremely smart way of putting out the word for your business in front of relevant people and a larger audience. It takes time to grow as a business, but there are established businesses out there with larger audiences. Contribute an article for their website and get a link back to your website. But for that to happen, you will have to make connections with editors online or at networking events. Here is a quick sketch note which I made showing the difference examples of emails you can think of sending to editors. Pitch them your guest blog, resources, infographics, research and many more.
  
  Start publishing on established websites of your genre and link them to your best articles that are relevant to the content you are writing. Going back to the initial “Mayor” example, Google recognizes your links that have been added to an established website. Additionally, you get to reach out to this websites larger audience pool.
• Disavow bad links pointing to your website-

Your articles being mentioned and linked on different websites is not a great thing always. Chances are ill-intentioned websites are trying to bring down your SEO by linking your articles to irrelevant articles. Google has specific set standards for the quality of links that point towards your website. When too many irrelevant websites put your links, it raises an alert for Search engines. When your SEO starts building strong grounds, competitors can start maligning your SEO backlinks. IT could be porn websites, non-genre websites that do not go in line with your business, mentioning you repeatedly.
Analyze well in advance which are those bad backlinks pointing at you.  This will allow you to see for yourself which are the good backlinks and which are the ones bringing down your SEO
After you have found the bad ones, share this will Google by going to this link and Google will then not count those backlinks and make them irrelevant to your google rankings

Reference:https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/317943

5 Surprising Ways Great Content & PPC Can Help Each Other

When it comes to improving your PPC campaigns, you’ve heard all the advice. Focus on improving quality score and click-through rates. Optimize your account structure. Use negative keywords.
And while those are all valid tactics that can work, there’s one thing that rarely (if ever) comes up as a way to improve your PPC campaign: Great content.
I know what you’re thinking.
How can great content benefit your PPC campaign? That would be like saying buying Google Ads improves your organic search ranking, right?
Not only do I believe that quality content can benefit paid media, but I also think that paid promotion is a great way to drive exposure to your content.
Keep reading to learn how you can use content marketing to improve your PPC performance, and vice-versa. Then, I’ll share four actionable tactics for creating high-performance PPC ad campaigns to maximize your content ROI

1. Use PPC Ads to Get Traffic FAST

The problem with organic search strategies is that it’s nearly impossible to drive eyeballs to your website without a pre-established audience. Consider that more than 4 million blog posts are published every day, making it nearly impossible for your blog posts to receive exposure without an underlying strategy.
Leveraging PPC ads to drive traffic to your website in the early stages of development will give your brand some exposure and early revenue.
Best of all, traffic derived from paid clicks will represent a large share of the target audience you’re already seeking to sell your brand to.
It’s essentially like killing two birds with one stone. Using Google Ads and Facebook Audience Insights, you can derive greater insights from your audience while, in turn, reaching them to gather brand exposure
Slapping on a piece of detailed or informative content can help to further differentiate your brand from other advertisers. One survey found that 90 percent of customers are more likely to trust brands with custom content.
The idea is to focus on both campaigns simultaneously and target similar keywords. Content can be used to inform, while paid advertising should be your tool to convert.
This strategy can help your brand become top-of-mind whenever you appear in the search results for any keyword search.

2. Use PPC Ads to Bias People Toward Your Brand

Contrary to popular belief, studies have shown that paid ads actually help to drive clicks to organic listings, rather than cannibalize them.
This is because people who view paid ads are more likely to remember your brand when conducting a future search, even if subconsciously.
Rand Fishkin outlines this idea in this informative article. Essentially, having two listings on the same page will improve your click-through rate incrementally by biasing the searcher toward your brand.
This could hypothetically make your brand appear more authoritative as well, or larger than life.
Brand affinity dramatically increases the CTR of repeat visitors as well.
As research has shown, it’s cheaper to keep an existing customer than acquire a new one.

3. Deliver an Awesome Landing Page Experience

Even the savviest paid media manager sometimes runs into difficulty creating a landing page that satisfies the client and even his/her vision.
Content marketers are naturally great storytellers and creative in their own respect. Leverage your creative content to craft a unique landing page experience that nurtures inbound leads through your conversion funnel.
Visitors who click on ads are likely to investigate your website before making a conversion. Consider the buyer’s journey and how content can be applied across this process:

• Awareness: A customer is alerted to a particular need or problem (blog posts, curated content, infographics, videos, articles).
• Consideration: A customer realizes a particular need and conducts research on it (white papers, testimonials, reviews, landing pages, ebooks).
• Decision: A customer decides to make a purchase or conversion (tutorials, trials, product demos).

Consider providing testimonials, user reviews, and links to relevant articles aside landing page content for visitors to read before making a purchasing decision.
Not all visitors who click on an ad will make a purchase during that session or even that day. Providing relevant and quality content on your site will become a valuable touchpoint on your attribution path to generate conversions.

4. Find Content Insights from PPC Keyword Data

If there’s one feature your SEO and PPC campaign already share, it’s keywords.
Leverage your PPC keyword data to discover which keywords drive the highest traffic and revenue.
You can also analyze ad copy that’s performing well and apply it to your organic content campaign.
Consider using commercial intent keywords in your content to promote your services/products to customers.
Branded keywords are incredibly successful and have a much higher CTR than other standard keywords.
Group your keyword strategy together and transfer the success of one campaign to the other.
Conduct A/B testing to decipher which keywords operate the best within each campaign.

5. Steal as Much SERP Real Estate as Possible

Naturally, having two links on the same page would increase website clicks.
This is especially critical over mobile displays where users tend to favor top results and paid advertisements.
Aside from increasing click-through rates on both listings, having extra links increases brand exposure and authority in the eyes of the searcher.
Now, if only you could get a rich snippet, too!

4 Actionable Tactics to Increase Content Marketing ROI Through PPC Campaigns

Now that you understand the benefits of combining PPC and content marketing, here are some ways to fully maximize this.

1. Promote Your Great Content with Facebook Ads

Use Facebook’s Audience Insights to segment your audience and target ads to new audience members relevant to your vertical.
Promote your best performing content by boosting your Facebook post to target specific audience groups.
Boost your Facebook post promotes content and ads to two audiences:

• “People who like your Page and their friends”
• “People you choose through targeting”

Use PPC ads to build an audience for your content and then utilize “boost post” to reach more people who are may interested in your content.
Facebook Audience Insights and Twitter’s Tailored Audiences provide amazing remarketing tools for any PPC ad or promotional content.
Leverage your PPC spend to build an audience for your brand and target them with different ad campaigns based on your most shared and liked content.

2. Write Irresistibly Clickable Headlines

Use BuzzSumo to discover content that’s currently viral in your industry.
Leverage these keywords and topics to create a compelling and relevant headline for your ad display.
This will entice users to engage with your ad display who typically don’t engage with click advertisements.
Conduct A/B testing on different headlines that target different niche keywords to see which ones produce the most clicks and conversions.
It should be noted that clickable does not equal clickbait. It’s still important to user experience to craft headlines that are relevant to the content itself.

3. Think Mobile-First

According to Merkle (download required), 60 percent of paid search clicks across all platforms are from phones and tablets.
Use images, infographics, and any form of visual content to increase your mobile conversion rate for paid ads.
The rules for landing page content is different for mobile. It’s paramount that responsive design is enabled and that content is optimized for mobile.
Some tips:

• Write short headlines.
• Use concise paragraphs.
• Avoid pop-ups.
• Use small image sizes.
• Include a clear call-to-action.

4. Craft Killer CTAs to Convert More Visitors

You should present a clear call-to-action on your landing page, especially for paid promotion articles.
This could be accomplished through a form field on the side or even a pop-up CTA. This will help transform leads into conversions for your paid promotion campaign.
People still debate whether a CTA should be placed above-the-fold or at the end of content.
In terms of paid promotion, I’d suggest using your content to hook reader interest and then throwing your CTA at the end of the landing page for more conversions.

Conclusion

In most digital marketing agencies, SEO, content marketing, and paid media remain are placed in siloes, sharing nothing more than the water cooler.
By integrating content marketing into PPC campaigns and vice-versa, you can leverage each department’s strengths to gather more conversions for your site and increase your brand’s affinity.

Reference:https://www.searchenginejournal.com/combine-content-marketing-ppc/239589/

The Five SEO Trends Taking Shape In 2018

Matthew Goulart is the Founder of Ignite Digitial, an experience-driven digital agency.

Just when you think you have Google’s search engine optimization (SEO) algorithm figured out, it changes. It’s a never-ending system that started off as nothing more than using select “keywords” and backlinks but has now turned into an elaborate necessity within every marketing strategy.

SEO is an ever-changing field, and the only one with all the cards is Google. We know that Google relies on numerous individual ranking signals. As such, these signals change from time to time. By staying up to date on news of changes at Ignite Digital, we are able to tweak our strategies and plans so that we can best optimize our advertising campaigns for our clients.
Needless to say, SEO has come a long way, far beyond the days of keyword placement and backlink strategies. So, let’s find out which SEO trends have been strengthening in 2018.
1. Page Rank Based On Your Mobile Website

You might have an amazing website when viewed from a desktop or laptop, but if it isn’t responsive to mobile devices, you may be in trouble this year. One of the biggest changes in SEO in 2018 is that Google is launching its mobile-first index. This means that your website ranking will be based on the mobile version of the page.
So, make sure your impressive website looks just as impressive when viewed on a mobile device by focusing on page load time, navigation, design and information. Otherwise, your page ranking could drop or remain nonexistent.
2. Optimizing SEO Strategies For Voice Searches
With the rising popularity of voice-activated smart devices, it seems like everyone has a Siri or Alexa to call their own. From Google Home to Amazon Echo, smartphones, Pixel phones and more, fewer people are typing their queries in search engines. Instead, they are pressing a dimly lit button and speaking into a device to find whatever it is they’re looking for online.
What this means for businesses is that it’s imperative to optimize your SEO strategies for voice-activated searches. Think long-tail keywords and accurate syntax used in everyday language. We are finding that people are likely to text search, for example, “marketing service [city location]” but are much more likely to say, “What are the closest marketing services in [city]” when using voice-activated technology.
3. Providing Instant Answers In Featured Content
Before 2018, the meta description was a place to write a brief overview of what your content was about, and doing so was exceptionally suffice. However, with the rise of voice searches has come a requirement for featured content that provides instant answers.
Since devices such as Siri, Alexa and Google Home can provide instant results to questions, they need to be able to quickly scan your content for the answers they’re looking for. As such, they aren’t going to scan hundreds and thousands of characters, words, paragraphs and web pages to do that. Instead, they’re going to find the best, most accurate and easy-to-find answer. It’s not called smart technology for no reason!
In order to cater to this SEO trend in 2018, it’s important to produce content that provides short, precise yet accurate answers that coincide with long-tail keyword and/or voice search inquiries. Consider revamping your FAQ and Q&A sections to make it easier for Google to find relevant information it can relay back to your customers.
4. The Optimization Of Intention
One of the most unique SEO trends to watch for in the second half of 2018 is the optimization of intent. Google will be switching up its search algorithm so that one of the biggest driving factors for rankings will depend on the intention of the keyword.
In other words, if a keyword has a clear intent for buying, such as, “cheap iPhone cases,” Google will place e-commerce sites higher in the search results -- even higher than major, authoritative media sites. This helps avoid searchers looking to buy something and finding a news story written about “cheap iPhone cases.” On the other hand, Google will prioritize those highly authoritative, major media sites for keywords that have a clear intent for information, such as, “the worst cheap iPhone cases in 2018.”
So, you’ll have to be slightly wiser with the keywords you choose to use within your SEO marketing strategy in order to optimize for searchers’ intent.
5. User Experience Remains At The Top Of The List
While this SEO trend isn’t new for 2018, it’s still worth mentioning because of its importance. Google will continue to focus on user experience to help determine which websites to show in search engine result pages.
It’s crucial to remain on top of your site’s speed, context, relevancy and quality of content, while also being aware of your visitors’ browsing habits, so you can make any necessary changes. For example, if your visitors abandon your site after 30 seconds or you have a high bounce rate, this will affect your SEO ranking. So, stay on top of those analytics reports!
SEO is an ever-changing system that is crucial to your online success. It’s imperative to stay current with the SEO trends well throughout your years of operation to ensure your website coincides with the requirements of Google. The good news is that, as long as you follow the SEO trends mentioned, you’re set for 2018 -- that is unless Google changes things again.

Reference:https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2018/07/23/mid-year-review-the-five-seo-trends-taking-shape-in-2018/#38624f491080

13 Important SEO Facts That CEOs Need to Know

Organic search engine optimization (SEO) has enough specialization and technical aspects that it can be overwhelming to the C-suite.
Or, worse yet, over-simplified and thought to be something easy and that can be done quickly leading to unmet expectations.
The mysterious nature of SEO can lead to misunderstanding and frustration for CEOs.
Understanding the high-level principles and some of the important aspects of SEO success can set the right expectations with executives.
Here are 13 key things that every CEO needs to understand about SEO.

1. Layout of the SERP

The search engine results page (SERP) has evolved a lot over the past several years.
It used to provide a standard layout with a few different variations that always included the “10 blue links” for the organic results and included ads above and to the side. Plus, news, map, or other content relevant to the search query.
Now, we see varying layouts that are intended to provide an optimal experience on a mobile device and cascade to desktops and other sizes.
The number of ads varies and other information is pulled into the SERP ahead of organic results. You don’t always see 10 organic results and sometimes they are pushed way down the page or mixed in with other content.
First step first, know what you’re looking at in the anatomy of the SERP understanding what is paid, what is organic, and what sources all of the other items come from including local listings, video, images, news, shopping ads, and more.

2. Results & Timing Expectations

SEO doesn’t offer the same level of instant gratification of paid search. While there are low-hanging-fruit terms and easy wins, in most cases, SEO is a long-term play.
For competitive queries, hard work and time have to be invested to move up in the rankings. Search engine algorithm updates and competitor updates create a moving target that takes time and discipline to achieve.
While SEO professionals are trained to not make guarantees and carefully set performance expectations, it is safe to say that we’re talking about months for lesser competitive terms and longer (sometimes much longer) to achieve top results for competitive queries.
Assuming we’re following the search engines’ guidelines, our limits are in areas of collaboration and resources put into the effort.

3. Influence over the Search Engines

When we’re not seeing the search rankings and results we hope and expect, we can’t simply call Google and pressure for better positioning.
Unfortunately, organic search isn’t like getting support for Google Ads, Google My Business, Analytics, or other products. This is a service Google provides to its users – those that use the search engine. It owes us nothing.
SEO professionals gain a lot of information and knowledge through experience, industry sources like Search Engine Journal, and hearing directly from the search engine representatives themselves.
Ultimately, though, we have no individual sway over the search engines or algorithms.

4. Meta Tags

No one area of SEO holds the magical power to influence rankings. Context and addressing the wide range of factors have the most impact.
Meta tags are still sometimes asked about or mentioned as the first thing someone thinks of when asked about SEO.
Yes, you should optimize the title and meta description tags for your site.
No, those items alone don’t have much impact if that’s all you do.
SEO is about so much more than just tags.

5. Submitting Pages

Another old-school tactic that is, fortunately, being asked about and mentioned less than it used to is “submitting to Google.”
Google has recently removed the form where you can submit URLs to it. In the past, a part of getting content indexed was to submit the URLs of new or updated pages through a form. That practice became obsolete when XML sitemaps went into use.
More importantly, submitting to Google and indexing is important to ensure that content is known about, but is not a ranking factor itself.
Focus on submitting and getting stuff indexed needs to be prioritized after creating good content that is worthy of being at the top of the SERPs.

6. Brand vs. Generic Terms

It’s important to have high rankings on brand terms (including misspellings). In most cases, if the brand name is unique, it will naturally rank well for searches containing it.
When looking at organic search rankings and traffic reporting, it’s important to differentiate brand and generic performance.
If you’re investing heavily in SEO and still only getting results from your brand terms over time, you’ll want to take a deeper look at the overall strategy.
By setting up reporting formats to separate brand and generic, you can get a clearer picture of the impact of SEO efforts versus having it diluted by being put into one aggregate bucket.

7. Algorithm Variables & Machine Learning

There is definitely an algorithm that determines what sites rank in what order in each search engine. However, the focus on specific variables and chasing the magic formula as a strategy has faded over the past few years.
With machine learning rolling out to the Google algorithm, we know that the same variables, weights, and rules don’t apply evenly for every search query.
Even if we did know the exact full extent of each algorithm variable, the fact that machine learning is in place and can create a different scale for each query is enough evidence that we should be spending our time on investing in better content and building context rather than trying to find ways to leverage just a few variables.

8. Quality of Content

Content quality has been talked about for a long time.
What does quality mean? It means webpages that have copy, images, video, and interactive elements that engage the user.
Content that drives social media mentions, shares, and clicks. It drives longer time on the page and often more pages per visit.
Beyond those metrics, it provides value to the user and they, in turn, share it, link to it, and further engage with it beyond the initial impression.
Focusing on making all content “quality” content is critical to compete in the evolving competitive landscape.

9. Technical, On-Page & Off-Page

SEO can be categorized into three areas:

• Technical: Website optimizations that don’t always directly impact rankings, but are necessary to allow your content to be indexed and found and to not hold back your site in any way. Examples can be robots.txt, XML sitemaps, canonical tags, 301 redirects, DNS settings, site speed, mobile friendliness, and duplicate content, schema markup
• On-page: Optimization of the elements that you can on a webpage and throughout a website. Examples include the URL, title tag, meta description tag, heading tags, body copy, and image alt attributes.
• Off-page (or external): Optimization of the external signals of quality including high-quality backlinks pointing to the site, unlinked brand mentions, social media engagement, and local citations.

10. Indexing

Indexing issues can hurt your SEO efforts.
As Beau Pedraza put it in Your Indexed Pages Are Going Down – 5 Possible Reasons Why: “Pages that aren’t indexed can’t rank.”
One reason you may have indexing issues is because the search engine can’t crawl it. This automated process of discovering content is what leads to the indexing of that content.
Ensuring that the search engines can access all of your content, as well as knowing the priority and hierarchy of it and the context of how pages and sections relate to each other, are the important aspects for SEO.

11. Rinse & Repeat

SEO is not a one-time thing. It is a process that requires commitment and discipline.
Think of SEO as constant testing.
We’re never going to have the perfect formula or be done.
The word “optimization” is important as we’re working to become least imperfect or to stand out as higher quality and authority in status compared to our competitive peers.
Spending six months to come up with the perfectly optimized website or updates and rolling them out to mixed returns can be deflating.
However, if of the impression and mindset of working in a more agile manner rolling out updates and tactical items on an ongoing basis with the understanding that you’ll come back and revisit on a regular basis can lead to incremental and long-term success.

12. Time Commitment

It takes time to optimize.
Each of the three areas of SEO requires commitment and often the help of others in functional areas adjacent to the role of the SEO person.
Often IT, marketing, paid search, web design, web development, copywriters, and more are needed and aren’t all at the immediate disposal of the SEO lead.
In addition to the time needed to collaborate and effect the three areas of SEO, the rinse and repeat process requires patience as it may take multiple rounds of body copy and tag updates (working in concert) to see movement in the rankings.
One-time SEO thinking as dangerous.

13. Resources Commitment

The days of SEO practitioners working in silos are long gone.
We often need the help and support of other people and departments to help us with the aspects of the website and content we need updated.
SEO needs a seat at the marketing table as it can’t be done in a separate ecosystem like paid search and social media (to a degree) can.
Committing to an investment in SEO is the start, but isn’t the end. The SEO lead will likely need updates that involve other resources internally or external hard costs to be able to fully execute the strategy.

Conclusion

There’s a lot of jargon and mystic when the topic of SEO comes up.
SEO is an effective digital marketing channel that, when invested in and understood, can lead to tremendous ROI and growth.
Through a basic understanding of the important concepts that CEOs need to know, the potential of SEO can be unlocked in terms of commitment through time, resources, and proper expectations.


Reference:https://www.searchenginejournal.com/what-every-ceo-needs-to-understand-about-seo/264929/?ver=264929X3

10 Conversion Copy Tips Every SEO Writer Needs to Know

As long as you nail your SEO, your writing quality can come in second place. Right?
…Nope! Stop right now!
Many times, good SEO writing is forgotten by the traditional SEO writer.
That includes forgetting about engaging and thus converting a reader to your side – whether that means list sign-ups, opt-ins, or some other action.
That’s a sad mistake.
Sometimes, engaging copy is better than SEO.
Google’s standards demand useful, quality, engaging copy over any other factor – including optimizing your content, optimizing your images, and even making sure your site is mobile-friendly.
Writing for users is more important than writing for machines and algorithms.

 
In particular, Google relies on two acronyms to sift the high-quality content from the clunky, useless, low-quality stuff:

• E.A.T.
• Y.M.Y.L.

How Does Google Judge Good Content? They’ve Put it in Acronyms: E.A.T. and Y.M.Y.L.

We first learned these acronyms when Google released their Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines in 2015.
Google’s human ranking evaluators use them to help determine a page’s level of quality.

• E.A.T. stands for “Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness” – High-quality content contains all three of these factors, no matter the topic or industry.Y.M.Y.L stands for “Your Money or Your Life” – This is content that could affect the reader’s happiness, health, finances, or well-being. If it’s low-quality, it could hurt the reader in more ways than oneThese acronyms are a good indicator of what’s important to Google.
  It’s certainly not SEO in that top spot; it’s the user experience.
  This is why you need better copy, and thus better content, that engages and converts your readers.
  (Learn more about E.A.T., Y.M.Y.L., and Google’s guidelines.)
  

  10 Conversion Copy Tips for Better, More Human-Friendly SEO Content

  How can you get better, user-oriented copy?
  Try implementing any of these conversion copy techniques.
  

  1. Structure Your Copy Like Building a House

  Thinking of the major points in your copy as separate entities is a mistake.
  Instead, you should try to link your ideas together in a coherent way.
  Think of it like building a house.
  First, you lay the foundation for your main point in the intro. As you move through each section to the conclusion, the points should build on each other and work together, like how supports, framing, and beams hold up a house’s walls and roof.
  To link your ideas and points together more coherently, do these things:
  Use transition phrases to move from one section to the other.
  
  • Explain how various points are related, or how they tie together or make sense when put in context.
  • Move from the least-complicated points to the most-complicated to help your reader build knowledge about the topic.
  
  

  2. Understand Your Target Reader’s Level of Awareness

  After making your copy easy to follow, you can boost user-friendliness by writing to the exact user who will need your content.
  Each visitor to your page has a varying level of awareness about their problem and your solution. Eugene Schwartz defined five levels of consumer awareness:
• Unaware: The consumer has no idea there is a problem at all.
• Problem aware: They know what the problem is, but not how to solve it.
• Solution aware: They know what the problem is, and they know which solution they want, but they don’t know if you can deliver.
• Product aware: The consumer knows what you sell, but is on the fence about whether it’s the right choice.
• Most aware: The consumer knows your product and is ready to buy for the right price.

For effective copy, map your content to the type of reader awareness you want to target.
Then, write the copy for them.

3. Spend More Time Crafting Your Intro

Crafting your introduction is equally as important as any other factor for creating compelling, useful content that converts.
Spend more time on it to perfect your hook, and implement these techniques:

• Put your opening sentence on one line (doing this forces you to take a good look at it and evaluate whether it’s attention-getting and captivating enough).
• Self-edit ruthlessly (ax filler words like “very” and “really,” and make sure sentences are clear, direct, and concise).
• State the “why” of your content piece without wasting time – why should the reader care?

4. Break Up Your Content!

One of the easiest ways to make your content more user-friendly is to break it up.
Focus on shorter paragraphs and more line breaks between them.
There should be lots of white space around your content, as well as markers that differentiate the various types of information in the piece:

• Headers.
• Subheaders.
• Numbered and bulleted lists.
• Bold/italic text.

Staring at electronic screens for long periods strains the eyes.
When you break up your content, you give your readers’ eyes a break.
Remember, this isn’t AP English class. Many of the basics you learned there for structuring and writing essays don’t apply to online writing.

5. Stay Current on Headline Best-Practices

As an SEO writer, you already know that including your target keyword in the headline is a must.
But, if that’s all you’re doing, you need to do more.
For starters, keep abreast of the latest research on types of headlines and which get the most clicks, the most shares, or the most follow-through from readers.
For instance, BuzzSumo updates their headline research regularly with new insights and stats. Their most comprehensive data is found in their analysis of 100 million article headlines, which was updated in 2017.
Implement the latest research in your headline writing to help make yours as tempting as possible for the modern reader.

6. Write Actionable Copy

Actionable copy is a type of writing that makes the reader feel like you’re right next to them.
It’s happening now. It’s immediate, direct, and pointed.
You’re taking the reader by the hand and leading them on a journey. You’re telling them what to do and how to do it.
How do you write actionable copy?

• Give direct commands. Tell your readers what to do using action verbs.
• Write in second-person, active voice, present tense. You’re reading an example of it at this very moment.
  • On the other hand, past-tense writing happened in the past. It was over and done with long before you started reading. It sounds like this:
    • SEO writers should have given blog readers more reasons to stay on the page beyond good SEO.
  • The above sentence also uses third-person voice, which you should avoid. (It talks about the reader rather than to the reader.)

This SmartBlogger post on writer’s block by Hennecke Duistermaat has excellent examples of actionable copy:

7. Use Lots of ‘You’ Language

Here’s one of the most important tips on this list:
Do not forget your audience.
If you start writing and immediately hone in on optimization/making the copy amazing for search engines, you’ll lose your readers in the process.
Where are they?
You should be imagining them sitting in front of you, a crowd of attentive faces you must keep onboard and interested.
If they have instead flown from your mind, stop.
Put the audience front-and-center by using lots of “you” language.

• Don’t say it like this: “In this post, I will explain how to correctly optimize meta descriptions.”
• Say it like THIS: “Do you want to learn how to optimize meta descriptions? Better SEO is waiting if you follow along.”

Note that I nixed the personal pronoun “I” and reworded it with “you” language.
This way, I’m no longer talking about myself; I’m talking to the reader/about their issues.
THAT is what you want.

8. Mine Your Vocabulary for Better Verbs & Adjectives

This tip is all about not settling for mediocre wording. It’s about self-editing on a sentence level to make your entire piece shine brighter.
Mediocre verbs and adjectives are non-committal, don’t provide a clear picture of what you mean, and make your writing look and sound lackluster.
Strong verbs and adjectives, on the other hand, give your writing pop, fizz, and energy, which readers love.
Words to avoid and replace in your writing:

• Thing/things: Be more specific. What “thing” are you talking about? Use that word, instead.
• Very + adjective: Any instance of very + an adjective can be replaced with a stronger word that paints a descriptive picture.
  • For instance, instead of saying “very pretty,” say “beautiful,” “gorgeous,” or “stunning.”
• Adverb + weak verb: Instead of pumping up a weak verb with an adverb, find a stronger verb that does the job.
  • For example, instead of saying “She ran quickly across the field,” say “She sprinted,” “She flew,” or “She rocketed across the field.”

9. Write Good CTAs

One of the integral pieces of good conversion copy is a strong call-to-action.
The CTA provides direction, encouragement, inspiration, and motivation (or all of the above) for your readers to take the action you want.
Arguably, a powerful CTA is what turns an ordinary, SEO blog post into a workhorse for any brand.
Don’t write content without providing direction on what you want the reader to do after they have finished reading. A good CTA:

• Is direct and straightforward.
• Is persuasive and powerful.
• Includes action verbs
• Talks to the reader.
• May inspire or motivate them to follow up on the action you want.

Look at this blog post from CoSchedule (“How to Pin a Tweet That Makes the Most of Your Content”) for inspiration.
The end of the post contains no less than three different instances of CTAs:

10. Use Impactful Sentences to Close Blog Posts

If the conclusions of your blog posts and articles peter out with something like a sigh and a shrug, you’ll never stay in the reader’s mind long enough to make an impact.
And, if you make no impact, your content won’t do anything, either. It won’t compel the reader to action, it won’t inspire them, and it won’t make them think deeply – all things you should want it to do.
To accomplish a stunning conclusion, try crafting it with an emphasis on the last one or two sentences. Make them count:

• Reiterate your main point, but drive it home.
• Leave the reader with a memorable image or idea related to the main point.
• End on a question for the reader that inspires them.
• Look toward the future and encourage the reader to do the same.

An example of a great, impactful ending to a blog comes from Stephanie Stahl and her post for Content Marketing Institute, “4 Secrets of Great Storytellers”:

SEO Is SO Much More Than Keywords, Links & Code

Optimization is an integral chunk of making online content work. It helps your content get seen, shared, and discovered, which ultimately helps your brand.
The major takeaway, however, is this:
SEO is nothing without user-friendly, high-quality copy.
If you’re an SEO writer and have forgotten your most important critics – your human readers – it’s time to refocus. (Google is not the entity you need to impress.)
Get back to the human side of SEO, hone your copy, and the rewards are sure to follow.


Reference:https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-writer-conversion-copy-tips/265005/

The Definitive Local SEO Guide for Beginners

There are many misconceptions about local SEO strategy, tactics, and what should be happening when you put together a campaign.
When approaching any local SEO endeavor, it’s best to approach with the mindset of not gaming Google, but using proven, holistic optimization best practices that will help your site stand the test of time.
This guide will walk you through every part of the local SEO process, from beginning to end, starting with a local competition analysis.
From there, we’ll talk about the building blocks of local SEO:

• Keyword targeting.
• Technical SEO.
• Content.
• Links.

Let’s get started.

Local Competition Analysis

A local competition analysis can make or break your local SEO campaign.
By analyzing your competition, you can find out about the most important things they are doing to achieve organic results.
From this competition analysis, you can move forward knowing that the information you have will help you achieve the results you’re looking for.

By looking at content, it is possible to figure out:

• What topics the competition is writing about.
• How many words they’re writing on average.
• The frequency of their content updates.

Going through this process helps you gain a clear understanding of what they are doing so you can adapt your content strategy and beat theirs accordingly.
By looking at links, it is possible to figure out things like:

• How many links the competition is getting.
• What kind of links.
• Where they’re getting their links from.
• How often they are getting links.
• When they are usually getting their links.

By looking at on-site factors like on-page optimization, it is also possible to develop a strategy that will outlast and beat their local strategy.
The factors you analyze in this local competition analysis will help you create a winning strategy.

Factors to Include in a Local Competition Analysis

Focusing on your market, your niche, and your locale, you will want to perform a deep local competition analysis.
On the surface, a local competition analysis will include the following factors:

• Content.
• Links.
• On-page SEO.

Diving deeper, the local competition analysis should include the following in order to gain a clear picture of the local competitiveness of the market.
Please make note that not all of these factors will increase local rankings – some will, but they are here in order to help you create a winning local strategy based on everything the competition is doing.

Links

• Local SEO Directories.
• Niche local sites.
• Editorial local links.
• Chamber of Commerce links.
• Local .GOV links.
• Local .EDU links.

Content

• Who is writing the content?
• What is the content about?
• When is the content being written?
• Where is the content focused (locally)?
• Why is the content being written?
• How many social shares is the content getting?

On-Page Technical SEO

• High quality, validated HTML and CSS coding.
• Schema.org coding for local SEO.
• Locally-optimized title tags.
• Locally-optimized meta descriptions.
• Locally-optimized URLs.
• Locally-optimized on-page copy with tight topical and keyword focus.

What You Want to Obtain During the Competition Analysis

This competition analysis should focus on the top 10 results on Google.
Do a search for your local area + keyword phrase in an industry you are targeting (e.g., “Orange County personal injury lawyers”).
Use a combination of link analysis tools like Google Search Console, Majestic, SEMrush, Raven Tools, and Ahrefs; export all the data; put together that data; and analyze the link profile.
I recommend using at least two or three link profile analysis tools because single tools by themselves do not always have all of the data available.
What you are looking for in this link profile are things like:

Local SEO Directories

• What directories do these sites have?
• What niche local links do these sites have?
• What kind of editorial local links do these sites have?
• Do these sites have any chamber of commerce links, and if so, which ones?
• Do these sites have any local .gov or .edu links?

Directories still work as a linking tactic, if it is done with high enough quality links and they don’t all appear to be spam.
Really, though, it’s just a directory – pretty self-explanatory here.
You’re looking for directories that aren’t all ad spam, meaning they do not contain many, many ads above the fold, and the ads don’t interfere with people looking for the link. The directories are generally clean, of high quality, and can drive high authority link equity.

Niche Local Sites

Niche local sites are those sites in your industry that are local authorities on their topics.
They can be anything from animal rights organizations to charities to other sites that will help lend an air of authority when they link to you.
The main idea when going after these links is to ensure that they are of high quality and not spammy in any way.
These sites can also take on the guise of local partners. Please note that I am not advocating link exchanges in this way, because that is a bad idea. I am advocating for creating partnerships with other local businesses in order to obtain links that will help your site in the SERPs.
What we are trying to do is gauge the feasibility of beating the site in the search results. We don’t want to actually copy their link profile.
By gauging ranking feasibility, it will be much easier to determine an overall linking strategy afterward.
And the reason we don’t want to copy their link profile is this: I can’t be there to guide you every step of the way.
If you slip up and optimize with a low-quality link, you could eventually get yourself a penalty by getting too many of them. It is very easy to continue old habits once you start.

Chamber of Commerce Links

Chamber links are essential to good local SEO.
They provide high authority, can be a great partner-type link, and can also refer local business.
However, it is important to note that not every Chamber of Commerce link will be a .gov.

Local .gov and .edu Links

These links can be anything from local government offices or charities to local schools.
The fact that they are .gov and .edu links are all just a major bonus.
Things have not changed regarding the weight of .gov and .edu links.
They still tend to be some of the highest quality links available.

Content Considerations for the Competitor Analysis

When gathering data for the local competitor analysis, it is important to consider things like:

• Who is writing the content?
• What is the content about?
• When is the content being written?
• Where is the content focused locally?
• Why is the content being written?

All of the above factors will help determine the content you will ultimately put on the site, and how to go from there.
Please note that Google’s John Mueller has stated that content doesn’t have to be long content in order to rank well:

“There’s no minimum length, and there’s no minimum number of articles a day that you have to post, nor even a minimum number of pages on a website. In most cases, quality is better than quantity. Our algorithms explicitly try to find and recommend websites that provide content that’s of high quality, unique, and compelling to users. Don’t fill your site with low-quality content, instead, work on making sure that your site is the absolute best of its kind.”

On-Page Technical SEO

Basic URL Best Practices Are Still King

This means: always makes sure your site is crawlable from a local standpoint.
When using highly targeted, niche keyword phrases, use them in the URL as you name your page.
If your site is not crawlable and technically accurate, you can’t expect Google to be able to rank it appropriately.

High Quality, Validated HTML & CSS Coding

Yes, I realize what most SEOs are going to say: high quality, valid HTML and CSS coding does not matter.
While Google doesn’t have any such requirements in place, high quality coding does matter and can help rankings significantly as a quality attribute.
When you code correctly, you reduce the chance of the browser having to “guess” what you’re trying to have it render.
When you code and develop a website correctly, you reduce page speed and browser render speed.
Page load time is one Google ranking factor we all know about.

Regardless, high quality, validated HTML and CSS coding should always be the end result of your site’s development work.
If your competitors’ sites in the competitor analysis do not have such validation or high quality coding in their framework, then you have an attribute you can use against them – make sure your site’s coding and page speed is far better than theirs in all areas: well-optimized code, make server bottlenecks non-existent, etc.

Schema.org Coding for Local SEO

Schema.org coding should be on every website that has Schema data type information on it.
It is crucial to getting that site to show up in rich snippets and the carousels of Google’s search results.
If those sites don’t have schema markup for the data types that are present on your site, here is yet another useful ranking signal you can optimize for toward your benefit.

Locally Optimized Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, URLs

Every site being optimized on a local basis should have locally focused title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs.
What does locally focused mean?
This means if you are trying to optimize for keyword phrases like “Garden Grove personal injury lawyer” you should be using the city name in your target keywords.
Here’s an example of locally optimized title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs:

Locally Optimized On-Page Copy With Tight Topical and Keyword Focus

In the competitor analysis, you are also looking for competitors who may or may not have locally optimized on-page copy with tight topical and keyword focus.
This will tell you what the competition is actually doing for that on-page optimization.

Cheating With Your Competitor Research

If you really want to get nitty-gritty with the competitor research, I highly suggest performing an audit of your competitor sites with Screaming Frog.
Just set the Screaming Frog settings to your desired specifications, crawl each competitor site, and after you export the Excel spreadsheet data, filter out all of the data so that only the titles, meta description, and URLs are showing up.
You can even look up what they are doing to their H1 tags as well.
Looking at all of this useful data will show you exactly what your competition is doing on-site – and will help you make yours better.

Keyword Research

Start With Locally Focused Versions of Keywords Your Clients are Actually Looking For

Keywords and topical relevance are important factors to ensuring that your on-page optimization is properly targeted and fully optimized.
When you perform keyword research, you’re looking for keywords that have a good search volume (above 70 or so average searches per month is a healthy number to shoot for), have lower competition, and are highly targeted.
A locally focused version of a keyword phrase for lawyers may be “Fountain Valley personal injury lawyers.”
If you try targeting personal injury lawyers by itself without a local focus, good luck. It will take massive amounts of links, authority building, and market penetration in order to expand to the type of reach that you want your marketing to accomplish.
When doing keyword research like this, it’s also important to consider the size of the market.
If you don’t consider the size of a market like Los Angeles (with millions of pages in Google’s index and businesses that have already built up their authority), you will be in for a rude awakening if you promise a client they will see rankings in Los Angeles within three months. Not going to happen.
It will likely take a year or more to achieve results on the first page of Google in a market the size of Los Angeles – assuming you have what it takes to beat the competition at their link acquisition and other SEO efforts.

Get Good Search Volume, Lower Competition, Highly Targeted Niche Keywords

Good search volume, lower competition, highly targeted niche keywords are diamonds in the rough.
These keyword phrases will usually bring the most sought-after improvement to an important metric for your client: conversions.
While lower competition is nice, good search volume should be at the top of your list when performing local keyword research.
The higher the search volume, the higher the interest searchers have in that topic.
If you don’t pay attention to search volume, you may get lucky with a couple of conversions. But that kind of luck will run out eventually.
Solid research is at the helm of any SEO endeavor.
Highly targeted niche keywords are those keywords that are targeted toward people who are performing searches for specific things within your industry. You have to dive deep into the details of your industry when trying to unearth these keyword gems.
For example, if you know that people frequently perform searches for lawyers in Fountain Valley for auto accidents, you would want to use a keyword phrase like “Fountain Valley auto accident attorney.”
If you know that people frequently perform searches for specialized items in a particular industry, there is usually intent and questions behind those searches.
By analyzing and thinking through the potential intent of people searching for these phrases, it’s possible to build a keyword list that includes questions about these topics that you can use to build even further, deeper, highly targeted topical content pages. These types of pages can end up being real converters for your client.
The reason behind performing keyword research this deep is that you can then figure out what keywords are going to perform best for your client as a result.

Create Content That Will Entice Searches and Bring Traffic to Your Site

Using these keywords, you can then build a content editorial calendar focused around these topics.
Once you have these topic ideas and a plan with goals set to create these articles by such and such a date, you can start really driving local SEO performance through these types of keyword phrases.
This is only one solution of several.
I encourage you to experiment with this solution and find your own methods of developing lists of highly targeted, highly focused keyword phrases.
From these keyword phrases, you can develop content that even the savviest industry regulars will love.
This is what will help you grow that success metric that your client is counting on.

Content: What Not to Do for Local SEO

It’s important to discuss some of the things you should not do, while also discussing what you should do.
Sometimes, bad habits creep in that never should when you are performing the SEO properly.
These include things like Wikipedia-type content, not being focused enough with your content, not being unique enough with your content, and keyword-stuffing.

Avoid, Avoid, Avoid Wikipedia-Type Content

I get it. You can’t visit the location, so the easiest thing to do is use Wikipedia-type content, write about the county seat, change a few words, and forget about it.
The problem with this approach: it has been done several million (billion?) times already.
The real estate industry does it, the law industry does it. Everybody does it.
The problem with this type of content is that the quality has become so diluted, thanks to millions of people copying and pasting, that it provides little or no value.
Instead, the best thing to do is to take the content, perform your research, rewrite it in a quality way, and provide something of unique value that the reader will enjoy.
Former Googler Maile Ohye talked about this during SEJ Summit 2016 in Santa Monica:

“Focus on delighting your user.”

I can’t think of any area of content writing that this applies to more so than local SEO content. Create this content in that way with the end goal of delighting your user in mind.

Create Your Content With a Niche, Local Focus

Just like how we created keywords with a niche, local focus, we want to make sure that we create our content with the same focus in mind.
Create content in a way that aspires to this niche, local-focus content, while also focusing on what people in the industry want (all the information we learned from our competitor research earlier).
This content should be highly targeted and specific, being tailored to the end SEO goal in mind.
You wouldn’t want to create informational text-based content when videos are all that’s necessary. And you wouldn’t want to create 10,000-word articles on sites where the only information people are searching for are local brick-and-mortar businesses.
The key is to tailor your content to that niche with the proper local and topical focus that creates a high-quality experience for users who are searching for these topics.
It is pointless to just create bland, uninteresting content that reads like Wikipedia content. That won’t delight your user.
Put more thought and effort into creating your content and make sure that it fulfills all of these goals, as well as your end SEO goal.

Create Unique Content Per Page, and Per Site

It is extremely easy to fall into a trap of creating the same content per page, and the same content from site to site.
I get it. You hate writing. You don’t wanna do it, you’d rather focus on SEO.
What are you doing in SEO if you hate writing? It boggles the mind!
Anyway…
When creating localized content it is important that this content from local page to local page is unique and provides unique value.
Don’t just create bland, uninteresting content where the only thing that you change from page to page is the local keyword phrase. That is no longer going to work as a good content strategy.
Instead, you may end up finding yourself struggling to rank well if you do that enough.
The other pitfall is creating the same content per site. This can happen especially if you operate an agency that has clients throughout the same entire niche (e.g., legal, real estate).
It can be especially challenging to come up with unique content where there are only so many ways you can say things in law.
But, by doing the work to come up with unique, stellar content ideas that resonate with your website’s audience, you won’t have to constantly come up with content that sounds awful in its 100th variation.

Stay Conversational, Natural, and Avoid Keyword-Stuffing

Finding success on Google hasn’t changed much over the past 15 or so years, even with the introduction of RankBrain:

• Write your content using natural language.
• Focus on your user.
• Don’t keyword stuff.

Links for Local SEO

Local SEO ranking factors typically are centered around on-page and off-page factors with a razor focus on local.
Just like content, links are an important part of local SEO ranking factors.
In the beginning, it is important to perform an analysis of the site and figure out where it’s at locally.
Using a tool like Whitespark or BrightLocal can help you perform a local analysis of your site’s link profile. I would recommend starting here and building on that.
If you have some local citations already, but not all, then you know where you need to be to get all of the others. But, if you have never done link acquisition for local SEO before, then it can be quite the daunting task to go after all of these local citations.

Including the Correct N.A.P. Information, Every Time

When claiming your local profiles and obtaining local SEO citations, it is important to make sure that your NAP info (Name, Address, Phone number) are all exactly the same.
Don’t use Ste., Suite, and # in various instances of submitting the information on your site.
This isn’t going to result in improved performance.
In fact, it can actually sink your ship because this introduces too many noisy local ranking signals.
We want to make sure that your links and citations are as strong as they can be.
So, if your address is:
Some Business, Inc.
123 Standard Way Suite 400
Costa Mesa, CA 92626
Don’t submit it as:
Some Business, Incorporated
123 Standard Way, Ste. 400
Costa Mesa, CA 92626
Or:
Some Business, Ltd (when there isn’t an Ltd)
123 Standard Way, #400
Costa Mesa, CA 92626

Claiming Your Local Profiles & Local SEO Citations

When you first start out with claiming your local SEO citations, you may be asking: OK, so where do I start?
Ideally, you should be sifting through the competitor research we performed earlier and looking at your competitor’s link profiles.
By examining link profiles thoroughly, it can generally be a good way to figure out what local sites your competition is using.
However, I say “generally” because doing it that way can only go so far: not every local site is going to have the URL local.business.com in it, and others will have regular .com domains.
That’s why I recommend using in-depth competition research along with tools as mentioned above.

Final Thoughts on Local SEO

At the heart of it, local SEO isn’t all that much different from organic SEO. Keywords, content, and links are the heart of your optimization strategy.
The difference comes when you consider the part of local SEO where the local focus comes into play.
It’s so important to approach these strategies with a holistic, relationship-building approach in mind.
The wrong approach to take on any of these tactics is a constant strong-arm approach that results in a penalty for your site.
Focus on:

• Link acquisition, not link manipulation.
• Delighting the user, not stuffing your content with keywords.
• Creating a compelling user experience, not haphazardly designed digital ecosystems.

In short, if you build it with high enough quality, the people you want to attract will come.

Reference:https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-guide/beginners-guide-local-seo/