The Ultimate Guide to RSS Feeds in 2022
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Are you a business owner who needs to stay current with every news update? While most people have succumbed to having to rely on social media updates, it could be tiring and less effective. This is where RSS feeds come in. It is a wonder why they are less spoken of.
Although RSS feeds are one of the effective ways to improve your brand’s SEO ranking; they are unfortunately, underrated.
This may be because most business owners have no idea about RSS feeds or they don’t understand how it works.
In this article, everything you need to know about RSS feeds including what they are, why they are important, and how they can be utilised to improve your SEO ranking will be discussed. Grab a jotter before you read on!
What Is A RSS Feed?
RSS feeds are recognized to be a handy way of keeping track of new content on websites you are interested in, without having to check them all the time, which in turn, helps you channel your energy and focus on more important things.
RSS, which stands for “Really Simple Syndication” is a format for delivering content from websites to readers. Despite being the most powerful tool to stay on track, it is pretty much a straightforward process.
All you need to do is subscribe to an RSS feed which automatically informs your reader to keep you regularly updated by sending you an alert (usually in the form of an email or a notification), this way, you never miss the chance to remain on the top.
It is typical for a professional SEO consultant to recommend utilising RSS feeds if you need to keep up with your favourite sites but don’t have the time to visit them all every day or if you are constantly on the go.
How Can An RSS Feed Help With SEO?
- RSS feeds have been used to help with SEO for a long time, it’s a surprise why they are becoming abandoned.
In the early days of the internet, keeping up with the ever-changing keyword was challenging for search engines. This issue became bigger, especially with website updates, which would often go unnoticed by the search engines.
To deal with this recurring problem, website owners and bloggers started using RSS Feeds. When a business signs up for RSS Feeds, it provides a way for websites to share their content automatically with other websites. When a website syndicates your RSS Feed, they are essentially saying “We trust this website enough and think you also should”.
It is this trust that helps improve and also determines how SEO rankings will be. By syndicating your content to high-quality websites, you are basically telling the search engine that your website is trustworthy and worth ranking higher than others.
What Are The RSS Feeds SEO Benefits?
Many people seem to be confused about RSS feed SEO benefits. They wonder if RSS feeds, in any way, will help improve their SEO rankings.
Well, now that you know what an RSS feed is, it is also good to know that RSS feeds offer many important SEO benefits not only for website owners but also for readers.
For website owners:
RSS feeds provide a simple way to syndicate content and increase traffic which is an RSS feed SEO benefit all businesses covet.
– When you provide an RSS feed for your content, you are making it relatively easy for readers to subscribe and automatically receive updates when new content is published from your end.
Doing this helps to increase your website traffic and automatically improve your SEO rankings.
For readers:
You don’t have to worry about visiting many websites just to stay current. RSS feeds offer a practical and convenient way to keep up with the latest news and updates from your favourite websites.
– You can stay up-to-date on the latest news and developments in your respective fields by using a variety of tools and readers to customise your RSS feeds to get only the information you are interested in.
How Can I Make My RSS Feed More Effective?
- Although many people are sceptical about RSS feed SEO benefits, using these feeds guarantees an easier process of staying alert in your industry.
- However, if you want to enjoy its benefits to the fullest, here are a few things you can do to make sure your RSS feed is as effective as possible.
- 1. First and foremost, you want to make sure your titles are keyword rich and that they concisely reflect the content of your article. Doing this helps improve your SEO ranking and ensure that your content is being seen by the target audience.
- 2. Secondly, to stay competitive, you have to make sure you are using only top-quality images in your RSS feed. Besides being considered a professional by your readers, these images help to break up the texts into segments to make your content more visually appealing. All of which are significant in improving your SEO ranking.
- 3. Finally, be sure to include an anchor link to your website in your RSS feed. This is encouraged as it helps to redirect readers back to your website and allows them to explore more of what you have to offer.
Are RSS Feeds Important In 2022?
- Yes! Whether as a business owner or a reader, you can’t afford to abandon RSS feeds as they will continue to be an important factor for SEO ranking in 2022 or even more important as long as search engines continue to evolve.
Why not leverage RSS feed SEO benefits now and optimise your content for the best search engine results?
How Can I Get Started With RSS Feeds?
- Ok, so now that you are ready to get started with RSS feeds, do you need some help to show you how? Here’s a quick guide to help you out:
- 1. The first step you need to take is to find an RSS reader. There are many different options available, both for desktop and mobile.
- 2. As an experienced SEO agency, we recommend using Feedly, as this is one of the most popular and user-friendly RSS readers out there.
- Once you have your RSS reader set up, the next step is to have a customised RSS feed. You can do this by adding your favourite websites’ RSS feeds to it.
- It is a very simple process, all you need to do is either look for the orange RSS icon on the website’s homepage and copy the URL into your reader OR search for your favourite website within your RSS reader and simply add it to your feed.
- There you have it! Now that you are subscribed to your favourite websites’ latest content, you get to enjoy it all in one place, with minimal effort.
- Apparently, there are a lot of RSS feed SEO benefits you can’t afford to lose. They not only help your SEO campaign by boosting your ranking, and keeping your site updated, but also help you connect with your audience.
- If you are yet to get started with RSS feeds, start using them today and explore the benefits for yourself.
- Nonetheless, our team of professionals are available for consultations if you need to reach the full potential of your business by utilising only effective strategies that will transform your business into a marketing giant. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us today!
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What Is The Best Way to Rank for Keywords?: Brand vs Non-Brand Strategies
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A lot of small businesses want to rank top in search engines, but don’t know how to go about it. When it comes to SEO, there are a lot of factors to consider, but the most important ones are either the targeted keywords of keywords you are targeting and how you wield the use of brand vs non-brand keywords.
In this article, we will help you solve every bugging question you seem to have about brand vs non-brand keywords. Apart from discussing how to get branded and non-branded searches, we will also teach you how to track them for a better output.
What Are Branded and Non-Branded Keywords?
If you have been trying to rank your website for a while, you must be familiar with brand vs non-brand search.
Branded keywords are those that are specifically related to your company or product while non-branded keywords, on the other hand, are keywords that are generic and can be applied to any business in a given industry.
For example:
- “Apple” is a known keyword typically referred to as the electronics giant, so its non-branded keyword will be “phone”, which is not specific to one brand but is a type of product.
- Another illustration would be the keyword, ” Nike”. Nike is a brand keyword for Nike Company while “running shoes” is an effective term for its non-branded search.
When it comes to SEO, you not only want to use effective strategies but also consult an SEO Agency which is the fastest way to rank top as soon as possible.
The Easiest Ways To Tell Which Keywords Are Branded or Non-Branded?
- There isn’t any hard-and-fast rule for getting maximum results from using branded vs non-branded keywords.
The results are so versatile that sometimes a brand becomes so known that its associated keyword gains as much popularity as the non-branded keyword.
Whereas, there are times when a non-branded keyword becomes so relevant to a particular business that it performs way better than even the brand’s associated keywords.
However, you can effectively use these simple hacks:
1. First and foremost, start by checking the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). If the brand search of a word ranks more, then the word is likely to be branded.
2. The next hack is to use a tool like Google AdWords Keyword Planner or SEMrush to study the monthly search volume of a certain keyword. If the results for a branded search seem to be more, then, people are more likely to search for a specific company or product than they are for a general term.
3. Lastly, you should utilize Google Search results to take a look at the organic search results for a given keyword. The keyword in the first 3 brand results that show up is likely to be branded.
What Are the Benefits And Drawbacks of Each?
A lot of businesses would rather focus on ranking their brand name so they can control the search engine result page (SERP). This is so they can help their potential customers enjoy a seamless experience that ultimately leads to them clicking through to their business website.
However, focusing on this strategy implies that you will have to rely on how much people are aware of your brand and how often they type it into the search bar. This can be a huge challenge, as people often use different alterations of a keyword (or even misspell it) when they are searching.
Non-brand keywords are essentially any other keywords related to your business that you want to rank for. Here, you don’t have to rely on people knowing your brand or typing it into the search bar correctly. All you need to do is to target any relevant and related keywords you want and still rank high on the search engine results pages.
Although, the major drawback here is that you are likely to have more competition so you will have to put extra effort into your research and planning to ensure the right keywords are targeted.
Which Approach Is Better for SEO Ranking: Branded Keywords or Non-Branded Keywords?
Most business owners are stuck between using branded keywords and non-branded keywords. Now the question becomes, “Which approach is better for SEO ranking?”
Nonetheless, the answer to this question isn’t all black and white. This is because having your business show up as a brand or non-brand search heavily depends on a variety of factors, such as the uniqueness of your industry and how competitive your targeted keywords are.
Although, most times, branded keywords are often more effective than non-branded keywords.
Branded keywords are specific to your company or product and are easier to rank because there is less competition. Here, you are targeting people who are already conversant with your brand, are more likely to be interested in what you have to offer and are more likely to convert into customers but you will have to be limited to the number of people looking for your company or specific product.
Non-branded keywords, on the other hand, are less targeted and less effective because there’s more competition, and they’re less likely to generate traffic because they’re not specific to your business. Besides, your ranking is more likely to be affected by consistent changes in search engine algorithms.
What Are Some Effective Brand vs Non-Brand Keyword Strategies?
As much as you want to rank top, you must also try not to use branded words as they can be classified as spammy which will, in turn, affect your SEO ranking. Rather, try sticking to one or two brand keywords for each page and augment them with non-brand keywords.
Which Brand vs Non-Brand Keyword Strategy Is Best for Your Business?
The strategy you end up using has to be dependent on what you are trying to achieve.
– If you need to drag traffic to your website and also increase your brand awareness, then targeting brand keywords is the way to go.
– If all you need is to rank higher for specific products or services, then targeting non-brand keywords is the better strategy.
How Can You Use Both Branded and Non-Branded Keywords in Your SEO Strategy?
Now that you have a better idea of how branded and non-branded searches work, you don’t have to be in a rush, trying to fix things.
You can use both the branded and non-branded keywords in your SEO strategy so you don’t have to choose one to forego the other.
Just pay attention to using the right keywords in the right places. For a better understanding, use these simplified steps as a guide:
1. Using a branded keyword as an anchor text for your website links is the fastest way to improve your website’s SEO ranking for those specific keywords.
2. Utilize non-branded keywords as the focus of your content marketing strategy, if you intend to keep attracting new visitors who are searching for information on those specific keywords.
3. Use a mix of brand and non-brand keywords in your paid search campaigns. This will help you to reach more people who are interested in both types of products or services via brand and non-brand search.
Conslusion
The most effective way to improve your SEO ranking is to use a combination of the aforementioned brand and non-brand strategies. Now that you understand the benefits and drawbacks of these strategies better, choosing the best option for your business may be more confusing. If you’re still not sure which strategy is right for you, our team of SEO experts are ready to review, analyze your data and provide solutions to help you rank top on search engines.
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Ways To Optimise Your Seo Content Using Keyword Clustering
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Without the help of statistical representation, we are aware that the internet contains billions of information spread over one billion websites.
With this, important pieces of information are easily obtained with just a tap on a device. A Google search, for example, will expose an inexhaustible list of web pages relevant to the search query. Usually, people find their answers on the first page of the SERP.
Most web pages derive 75% of their traffic through this process. With these facts, you might want to know how to ensure that your page ends up on the highly coveted first page of the SERP to enjoy massive traffic.
The messiah to this can be summed up in 3 words— Search Engine Optimization (SEO). One of the effective SEO techniques is the use of keywords, and using an SEO expert might come in handy.
Keywords are essential in SEO because they help your page ranking and relevance, thereby increasing web traffic. It is important to know how to cluster keywords effectively while creating SEO content for your webpage.
Before discussing how to use these keywords to your advantage effectively, a definition of SEO and how it operates would give a brief insight.
WHAT IS SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the technique involved in improving a web page to increase its visibility and discoverability by search engines and generate immense traffic through non-paid (organic) search engine results.
When we place a search on a search engine, we are provided with lists of websites ranked from most relevant to the least relevant, and the element that makes a web page the most relevant is nothing but an effective SEO. Although, with the right cash, you can get a high rank (through paid ads).
Google, Youtube, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Yandex, to mention a few, are search engines, a group of software systems designed to scour the World Wide Web to provide us with information relevant to our search.
Considering the billions of information on the internet, how this is possible must be a wonder to us. It is easy. Search engines operate in 3 main steps: crawling, indexing, and ranking.
First, the search engines deploy bots (known as crawlers or spiders) to crawl through all websites and every link to discover different kinds of content. This is called the discovery process.
On completion, the discovered contents are indexed and stored in a massive database which they can retrieve in the future consequent to a search query. In displaying the Search Engine Result Page (SERP), the search engine ranks the results from most relevant to least relevant.
HOW TO USE KEYWORDS FOR EFFECTIVE SEO
- Selection of Relevant Keywords
Before considering where your keywords can be used optimally, the first step of the approach should be selecting the right words.
As easy and trivial as it may sound, this is, in fact, the most important aspect of keyword usage. Using keywords unrelated to your content, irrelevant, and with zero search volume will place your work in a different race entirely instead of what you intended.
Therefore, selecting the right words gives you a fighting chance. It usually involves rigorous research, and you have to answer questions like:
– What do you want to be ranked for?
– What does your audience want?
– What do people search for?
– How many people are searching for it?
There are Keyword Research Tools that help to provide keyword analysis. Some include Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, AnswerThePublic, etc. You have to select three categories of keywords for your content;
– Primary keyword— only one word will be required here because it is the main focus of your content. The title and content must reflect the primary keyword.
– Secondary keywords— several of these words will be required, and they will complement the primary words as words conveying the talking points and variations of the words.
- Using Keywords in Meta Description and SEO Title Tag
When a search is carried out, the first thing that your audience gets to see is your meta description and the SEO title tag.
Whatever is contained in both of them becomes what the search engine displays on the result page. Hence, your ability to generate traffic is dependent on what your meta description and SEO title contain. The meta description summarises the page’s content, and the SEO title tag is not necessarily the title of the main article but the title that you wish to be displayed on the result page.
The SEO tag should be a 160-character-description, and the SEO tag should contain 30-60 characters which must succinctly reflect the page’s content.
- Use the keywords in the article title.
Optimising your content title is essential, as it increases discoverability on the SERPs. You should include these keywords in the first 65 characters of the title to be more effective.
- Use the Relevant Keywords evenly throughout the content
You should include the keywords and variations evenly and naturally while doing this. If the content is bombarded with keywords making readability difficult for readers, the user experience will be negatively affected.
Also, this prevents bots from being able to “crawl” effectively. An effective method of correcting it is by including one primary keyword in every 100 words, which depends on the length of the content.
- Use Keywords in non-textual content.
Relevant keywords in the “alt” attribute for images will increase the visibility of images when related search queries are sent.
- Input Keywords in your Page URL
You might be thinking, “would it not be smart to avoid these formalities and input as many keywords as possible?”
Well, these search engines are smarter than we think. Google, for example, is evolving every day and, as such, making improvements to its systems.
Google can see through the excessive stuffing of words, leading to an eventual penalty. In this case, your page may not be indexed nor ranked, and this is certainly something we do not want.
CONCLUSION
With the rising competition by website owners to be on the first page of SERPs, it is important to know these tips to up your SEO content game.
Keyword clustering is essential if you want to rank higher and enjoy great traffic on your webpage.
However, when you do it wrong, the results could be disastrous due to crawler bots not being able to crawl your site to rank it effectively and readers not reading because the content is not comprehensive.
With this being said, you should know and learn how to use keywords to get the best results from SEO.
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Creative Online Advertising That Can Get You The Customers You Want
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Online advertising has revolutionised the advertising industry in many ways. Before online adverts became a thing, traditional advert methods like billboards, television, newspapers, etc., were used. Now, online advert methods like social media ads, paid search ads, etc., have replaced them.
With this revolutionisation, small business owners can now compete in the same field as big companies, as long as they can play it right.
Online advertising coupled with effective SEO strategies by professionals is important for businesses these days, and it’s the first place to start when advertising in these modern times. Before diving into the intricacies of online advertising, let’s define it explicitly.
WHAT IS ONLINE ADVERTISING, AND WHY DOES YOUR BUSINESS NEED IT?
Online advertising is a type of paid marketing that uses internet-based platforms for advertising products/services to users.
This advertising strategy has become increasingly popular. Two out of three small businesses now use it to generate more leads and get more customers.
It is estimated that spending on online advertising will hit $646 billion by 2024. As of 2020, online advertising spending was estimated to be about $378 billion in 2020.
One key advantage of online advertising is that there are metrics you can keep track of. Unlike traditional advertising methods, online advertising methods allow you to keep track of your ads through the different channels where they’re advertised. This gives you access to beneficial data that helps monitor your spending and keep track of ROI. This data also serves as a guide to know better ad campaigns that work, keep track of the better-performing ads, etc.
Aside from keeping track of metrics, online advertising is also cost-effective. Small businesses can get new customers/prospects while spending way less than what you’d spend for a billboard ad.
Online advertising has become the order of the day, especially now that many of the world’s population own a mobile device, thus having access to the internet. As a small business owner, it is a chance to maximise it. Advertising your product and services online gives you a chance to increase your business’s visibility and boost sales.
TYPES OF ONLINE ADVERTISING
- Social media ads
Social media ads have become a huge market for adverts, especially since over half of the world’s population are users of different social media platforms.
About $153 billion is spent on social media adverts annually, though it might grow to $252.6 billion in 2026.
Examples of social media platforms include Facebook (Meta), LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, etc. Social media ads are done at a cost, depending on the platform used.
It is advisable to run adverts on social media due to its wide audience that promotes brand awareness when your brand is displayed. Other advantages of social media advertising are cost-effectiveness and crazy targeting reach.
- Paid search ads
Paid search ads target searchers who come to different search engines to search for products/services.
They are usually at the top of SERPs and offer a wide targeting reach. Currently, Google has the market with an 85% global market share, though other search engines also offer paid search ad services.
Paid search ads are fantastic because they have a huge reach that guarantees fast traffic and immediate results. However, they can be quite expensive and highly competitive.
- Display ads
They’re also a common form of online ads, and these come in many forms; in-content ads, side-bar ads, pop-up ads, etc. Different companies offer these services, e.g., Google and Taboola. Display ads are quite cheap; however, they usually have a low CTR.
HOW TO CREATE EFFECTIVE ONLINE ADS
Regardless of the brand or services offered, running ads online usually has a similar process. However, the intent is the same; to boost brand awareness and sales. These tips guide you on what to do when running an online ad.
- Set your ad goals
Setting goals helps you have an idea of what you want from your online marketing campaign. They’re also important because they help you keep track of progress and know when something is wrong and how to rectify it.
Besides wanting to make sales, other goals include getting brand awareness, growing social media audience, etc., depending on what you want as a business owner. Ad goals should be realistic and specific. E.g., instead of saying you want to boost sales, you can say you want to boost sales by 10%. This helps you have a clear view of how to achieve the goal through your online ads.
- Know your target audience
After setting your goals, knowing your target audience is the next important thing. An advantage of online advertising is that you target your specific audience instead of just advertising to everyone. This reduces the amount spent on targeting audiences that are not yours and helps you focus on your target audience.
- Budgeting
Budgeting is essential because it helps you determine how much is right to spend on your ads. There are usually some considerations to make when budgeting for your ads. Some of them include;
– Overall marketing budget
– Prices of products/services
– Goals
– Previous results
– Duration of the ads
It is essential to budget accurately because depending on the results obtained from the current one, you might have to increase the budget a bit to get more from it.
- Pick a channel
After ascertaining the above factors, picking out your online ad channel is the next thing to do. This might be a bit tricky, seeing as so many platforms offer ad services out there.
You might already have one in mind, but you need to know if it’s the right pick. You can’t be advertising on Twitter if most of your audience is on Instagram. Another thing is that the platform you’re choosing has to be budget-friendly, depending on your budget.
Overall, stick to one channel for your first online ad campaign. Once you’ve gotten the hang of it, you can branch out.
- Set up your ads and start the campaign
Depending on the method used, whether display or text-format ads, most work happens here to ensure the best ad experience. Writing a compelling ad copy is essential if you’re using a written format. If using display format, then using a high-resolution image is essential.
The bottom line is that your ads have to be of high quality to appeal to people and increase their interest in your brand.
- Make your campaign optimised
Creating your ad campaigns gives you insight and a load of data, which you can optimise to your advantage.
Reviewing your ads every day is ideal for keeping track of changes or ways to improve them. You can also know if the ads didn’t work, change the campaign, or find another suitable ads channel.
CONCLUSION
Running ads is essential for every business, and online advertising has made things easier for everyone.
Keep in mind that your ads should be top-notch because when it’s not done well, it leads to a waste of resources which is detrimental to your business.
It is also important to take note of the channel used, monitor progress and make changes where necessary to get the best out of your ads.
Online adverts have become the lifeblood of every business that wishes to be more visible to their target audience, thus knowing how to manipulate it is best for you as a business owner because it encourages scaling, visibility and more sales.
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All About Marketing Automation
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Marketing is one broad industry that has seen a massive increase with the advancement of technology. As marketing becomes wider and grows more complex, the need for simplicity and ease increases— this is where automation comes in.
As the name implies, marketing automation uses technology to make marketing campaigns easier to run and track their progress. It has become important for marketing to be automated, seeing as there are many things to keep up with concerning marketing.
Having your marketing automated helps you stay on top of your marketing campaigns, giving your customers the best value and helping you know what to change/correct in your existing business model/marketing campaigns, using accurate data tracking and recording to make informed and accurate decisions.
Alternatively, you can check out SEO courses on Clickslice to have a better understanding of how this works.
Marketing automation won’t be complete without certain tools (software) that make it possible. These tools help marketers navigate the best on how to market to their audience, give them insight, track/store data, manage their marketing campaigns automatically and respond to certain queries automatically. This gives business owners/marketers the time to implement more and grow their businesses.
Knowing the right marketing automation tools to use is important to get the best results. These tools make marketing easier and double as CRM tools that give you the best value, improve customer service, and do more for your business to help it scale.
We have created a list of marketing automation tools reviewed highly by successful marketers to help you drive the best results for your business.
EFFECTIVE TOOLS FOR MARKETING AUTOMATION
- Hubspot
Hubspot takes the top spot here because it has been praised by highly successful digital marketers to be a very effective tool both in marketing automation and CRM.
They have a fully-equipped suite for marketers that includes sales software, support software and marketing software— all of which are integrated with their CRM software. This combination makes it possible for companies to have insane marketing productivity and a data catalogue that would not be possible if the marketing operations were done separately.
Once you get the hang of it, the possibilities are endless, which means that using it to automate many tasks helps you save time.
- Omnisend
Omnisend is a marketing automation platform created for e-commerce businesses.
This software tool offers automation workflows that integrate email, SMS, Facebook Messenger, etc. Omnisend also offers an easy UX that makes it possible to create workflows and do different tasks. Businesses also get to enjoy great channel management features, depending on the size of the business.
- Autopilot
Having a beautiful UI gives a pleasant experience when using Autopilot. Their marketing platform is mainly for messaging, and they pride themselves on being the easiest marketing automation platform to use.
They do email, messaging and other automation, but you can also create/send autoresponders.
- Moosend
Moosend caters to majorly e-commerce and SaaS companies.
They offer a high tech software automation tool that enables you to track your website, get customers’ preferences, and create and send the right emails to the customers based on their preferences.
Having this data handy makes it possible to carry out decisions backed by data, thus making better decisions and giving customers better product recommendations. Another commendable thing about Moosend is that they offer free subscription packages for up to 1000 subscribers.
- EngageBay
EngageBay offers a marketing automation tool that integrates email marketing, social media marketing, website chat, etc., for a comprehensive marketing campaign.
They also offer autoresponder services, SMS, abandoned cart reminders, etc., which gives SMEs more value and helps them serve their customers better.
- Pardot
Pardot is one of the software in the Salesforce suite that offers you a wide range of automation services, ranging from automated communication, CRM, email marketing, lead nurturing, etc. One of their unique features is that they offer ROI reporting to make sure that your campaign is on track and enable you to make changes if it is not. They also offer website tracking to get more data for you, which improves your marketing results and reduces time and effort.
- GetResponse
GetResponse offers you automation services for email marketing, landing pages, CRM, and other features. It is typically easy to use, though unlocking some features like complicated conditional logic and marketing automation might make it more complex.
- ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign offers email marketing, marketing automation and CRM services.
While the software might be a bit technical to use, especially for those with low technical capabilities, it offers massive results when you get the hang of it. They have a very dynamic marketing automation technology, and their deliverability is top-notch.
- InfusionSoft (Keap)
This is one of the oldest marketing automation software with top-notch services. Their tools give marketers the best results and help them keep track of important customer data to help them make better decisions and create better campaigns.
- Drip
Drip offers a flexible marketing automation software that, according to them, “helps you put pretty much any marketing strategy in motion”. They target mainly e-commerce companies, and while their forte is email marketing, they also offer multi-channel marketing and other automation workflows.
Drip helps you keep track of customer data and personalisation, making it an ideal marketing automation tool for most e-commerce businesses.
CONCLUSION
The marketing industry has grown massively, and as such, marketing automation has become essential.
There is an increasing demand for tools for marketing automation to help marketers and business owners drive the highly coveted results they need for their marketing.
These marketing automation tools listed not only execute flawlessly but have also been praised by top marketers and used by many companies globally.
It is essential to learn the technicalities of using them to make your marketing campaigns easier and provide you with more data to help improve your campaigns too.
While some may be initially difficult to use, they provide high value and results for the money and effort put into them. So, if you want your business to scale, you might be better off employing the services of a marketing automation tool to help you drive the results you need.
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10 Essential Tips for Your Content Marketing Strategy
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The Internet has grown into a powerful marketing tool, and when it comes to your business, your site can, and should, provide much more than the bare minimum.
Research shows that 59.5% of the global population are active internet users. That’s a ton of opportunity for your brand to tap into and achieve maximum growth for your business.
Powerful content will attract and retain customers. On the other hand, content marketing enables your business to sustain brand loyalty, increase brand awareness and credibility, and build an online community of engaged and responsive customers.
Ultimately, a functional content marketing strategy is a critical component for long-term, sustainable growth. To help you create a successful one, here is a round-up of ten versatile and priceless tips to help you achieve the desired results for your business.
1. Set Measurable Goals
Every content marketing strategy must have clear, concrete, and measurable goals. Simply ‘getting views’ shouldn’t be the business goal. So before you get started, determine what you hope to accomplish with the strategy and create pieces that tie back to that.
Crafting and publishing content is never enough for a marketing strategy. Instead, you must identify your target audience and decide how your content can best serve that group. Additionally, you’ll want to use analytics to ensure your content can reach the right people with aligning search intent. While it’s crucial to write quality content to grow your audience, you must also ensure it ties back to your business.
2. Know Your Audience
Content marketing requires writing articles, blog posts, and graphics that engage and attract the right audience. To do that, you need to understand what your potential customers want. What are their interests? What do they need help with? And what words and phrases do they use to find answers online?
There are many prospective customers for your product, so you can’t go out and interview every one of them. However, you can create a buyer persona and identify what they would need from your products. Alternatively, encourage your current customers to provide feedback, so you will know what they expect from your products. Having a solid understanding of your audience means your content marketing efforts will be more successful.
3. Create for Your Audience
It is not enough to know your audience, you also need to write for them. From topic selection to your final edits, your audience should be at the center of how you present information.
When you’re creating content, you have two primary goals: to educate and help solve a problem. Right from the start, you should select topics that solve for the reader by answering their questions, offering practical resources and tips, and getting them acquainted with what you sell and how you can help. Once a reader continues to come to you as an authoritative source of information, they’ll trust you enough to make you their provider.
4. Stay Relevant
The internet is full of content, with articles, videos, webpages, and media being uploaded every second on an unimaginable scale. 4.4 million new blog posts alone get on the internet across all platforms every day. For this reason, creating evergreen content that remains relevant over extended periods is critical.
Evergreen content drives more traffic and has lower maintenance costs, as you don’t have to keep updating or replacing it. It also sustains high SEO ranks and can be shared on social media for a long time. Once you master the art of writing timeless content, you can ensure your articles, e-books, and tutorials stay relevant for years to come.
5. Narrow Your Focus
As you select the topics you want to write about, you may find yourself coming up with broad, general topics. However, unless you’re ready to spend time creating comprehensive long-form content, you should narrow down each one so that you can cover it entirely.
In addition to making content creation more manageable, this will also help you create more effective topics. It’s better to have ten pages that comprehensively answer a specific question than one page that answers multiple questions, but with minimal explanation, more so if each question deals with a different topic.
6. Understand the Buyer's Journey
A buyer’s journey is the active research process a potential buyer goes through leading up to their purchase. It follows them through the stages of becoming aware of a need, considering different solutions to fulfill that need, and then deciding between them.
As a good content marketer, you should understand that your strategy needs to engage and delight readers at any stage of the journey. While your content should initially attract new visitors to your business, it should also convince hesitant prospects to purchase and encourage customer retention and long-term brand loyalty.
7. Re-purpose Content
It takes time and talent to craft convenient, engaging content. However, you can ensure peak efficiency by recycling existing content. Additionally, repurposing content allows you to reach new audiences. For instance, let’s say your podcast team published a high-performing episode. Why not turn that episode’s topic into a blog post to get the same content to your reader audience? Alternatively, if you created a blog post that performed well, you might consider making a YouTube video on the same topic to reach an audience that prefers video over text.
Repurposing your content will ensure your audience has more than one chance to see it.
8. Research Your Competition
You’re likely not the only business in your industry attempting to attract customers with content, considering that 82% of marketers actively use content marketing. Although this means that you have a lot of competition, it also means that you have the opportunity to see what other people are creating.
Everything you need to know about your top competitors is on their websites. Look at what they are doing with their content strategies and understand their formats, topics, and how their readers are responding. Moreover, this will give you ideas and help you create unique content to better your content marketing strategy.
9. Find a Unique Angle
While your competitors can be substantial sources of topic ideas, you should avoid publishing content that’s too similar to anyone else’s. After all, the goal of content marketing is to provide your customers with personalized information that is not readily available.
Whenever you see a great idea, fight the urge to replicate it by making minor alterations. Instead, see the topic as a starting point, and look for a unique angle to create content. This will keep you from becoming part of the “echo chamber” of content online and create more personalized content for your readers.
10. Monitor Your Progress
It’s easy to merely look at the volume of pages you’ve published and feel like you’ve accomplished something. However, it’s necessary to look at whether or not those pages are actually generating results. As mentioned earlier, you need to set clear goals for your strategy, so as you utilize these content marketing tips and publish content on your site, ensure you regularly monitor your progress against your goals.
Make checking Google Analytics, or another program, part of your routine. Analytics programs carefully monitor, track, watch, and report on the numbers. If things are going well, keep doing what you’re doing, and if not, use that data to revise your strategy to be more effective.
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The Best Free SEO Tools
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Creating online content is increasingly becoming a dominant trend in this era. Even the rate at which people are embracing online content is dazzling. This has increased significantly the need to stand out from the ever-growing crowd of content marketers. This is where SEO comes in.
It’s crucial to have an SEO strategy alongside your content strategy. Doing so will ensure your posts are as optimized as possible, and SEO tools help with that. Some SEO tools are paid, but that doesn’t mean that you have to spend money to rank. There are tons of free SEO tools that are just as powerful as their paid counterparts and can help you drive more traffic.
In this article, we have compiled a list of some of the best free SEO tools. They are categorized into Keyword Research, Link Building, Analytics, and Technical SEO tools that you can use to better your SEO strategy. Let’s get started!
Technical SEO Tools
Technical SEO is essentially the more involved optimization tweaks that help give your content the best chance to rank for relevant keywords and phrases. It allows you to focus on analyzing how well the search engines are crawling and accessing your website. These are some of the best free Technical SEO tools.
Pagespeed Insights
In SEO, speed is everything. The faster your site loads, the better you will rank on search engines, and the more your website’s experience will be enjoyable for visitors. Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool allows you to analyze a specific page’s site speed and user experience. Additionally, it will show you how to fix any errors on the page to help your site load fast. It doesn’t matter if you are optimizing for tablet devices, desktop, or mobile, it will tell you what to fix.
Siteliner
Siteliner is a tool that allows you to find duplicate content within your website. You need to insert your domain, and it crawls up to 250 pages online. It analyzes the percentage of your website that is duplicate content.
It will then tell you which pages have duplicate content and how much percentage they have. You can then analyze each page and make the necessary changes to avoid too much duplicate content on your site.
SEO Analyzer
This tool tells you everything that’s wrong with your pages, from duplicate meta tags to sitemaps. It looks at every crucial factor when it comes to SEO and content creation. It will even tell you your overall site speed and what you need to fix to get the most out of your site. If you register for a free account on SEO Analyzer, this tool automatically checks for errors each week on your behalf.
Keyword Research Tools
Keyword research is a core part of optimizing your site. Keyword Research Tools make it easier to find the right keywords to target and give you the data that you need to rank for them. It is crucial to find and use the right keywords because when you do keyword research poorly, it can complicate your search and slow you down.
Ubbersuggest
Ubersuggest is a free SEO tool that helps users generate new keywords and content ideas. This tool will give you a high-level overview of the keyword you’re searching for. It’s a great tool to use when looking for new ways to fill your social media or content calendar. It shows you how many searches a keyword has had over the last 12 months, all of the keywords your competition ranks for, and suggests content ideas based on the keyword. It is unique in that it provides local keyword suggestions. This is great for sites that are trying to do local SEO.
Google Trends
As the name suggests, this tool helps you track the popularity of topics and trends in your industry over time. It gives you a clear picture of how specific trends change over time and how people’s searching patterns around them change. To use Google Trends, you start by typing in a keyword. Then you’ll see the interest in that topic over time, which regions are most interested, and other keywords that people are searching for related to that query.
Link Building
Search engines are constantly updating their ranking algorithm to deliver relevant results, but backlinking continues to impact rankings significantly. External backlinks from other relevant and trustworthy sites act as a vote of confidence and help you to build your authority. Here are some tools to help you build your Link network.
Ahrefs Backlink Checker
Ahrefs Backlink Checker is a free tool that shows you the top 100 backlinks to any website you search. To use this tool, enter a URL into their search bar, and you’ll see the site’s domain rating, the number of backlinks, and the number of referring domains.
This free tool is great for some light backlink checking, as well as analyzing your competitors. Even though you’re limited to viewing 100 links, it’s still a great place to start. It shows you the total number of backlinks, links from referring domains, the site’s Domain and URL rating.
Mozbar
In SEO, the higher the authority of a site linking to you, the better off you are. MozBar shows you the domain authority and page authority of every page on the web. If you are going to build links effectively and rank higher, focus on the sites with the highest authority.
SEMRush
Similar to the above tools, SEMRush has a free version of its robust tool. SEMRush is not just for link building. It can provide help with keyword research, on-page SEO audits, content optimizations, rank tracking and much more. You just need to create a free account to access these features.
Analytics
If you’re already consistently pumping out engaging content and have a solid distribution strategy in motion, the next step is to do a follow-up. You need to know how that content is performing, who’s visiting your website, and how you can engage your audience so they’ll return. Here are some tools for the job.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the go-to platform for many marketers. It is free, chock-full of features, and comes with the clout of the Google brand name. After you enter the Google Analytics code into your website’s HTML, it measures your goals for you, including which pages a visitor clicks on, how long they stay, and the actions they take. For example, the tool can tell you whether a visitor is sharing the content on social media or clicking on an ad.
Search Console
It’s hard to imagine doing modern SEO without access to the data inside Google’s Search Console. The platform helps you make sure your website or Android app is Google-friendly and shows up in relevant search results. This is the most reliable location for information on how Google crawls and ranks your site and is one of the only places where you can get reliable keyword data.
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Branding Tips For Online Businesses
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A strong and easily recognizable brand is a valuable asset to every entrepreneur. With all the digital noise online, branding can make or break your business. It helps your customers recognize you and your products quickly in an online world full of similar products.
Online branding is especially crucial for service providers who don’t have a tangible product that clients can look at. Instead, customers buy the information you present about the service and the reputation that you’ve built up to support it. Apart from the product, a great brand experience gives consumers another reason to choose you over the competitors. 73% of people prefer brands that personalize the shopping experience. If your brand creates memorable experiences online and adds the value of personally connecting with the customers, they may be willing to pay more. This ultimately translates into more profit for you.
So how does one develop a great online brand experience from an online business? Here are some tips to help you get started and quickly bring you up to date with best branding practices for your online business.
Find Your Voice
The impression that your brand creates is crucial, but you can’t ignore how you convey it. Your company’s “voice” is the language and personality you and your employees use to relay brand messages and reach customers. Brand voice has become more key than ever if you need to stand out from the crowd of digital chatter.
Communicating the values of your brand to all the workers is the first step to consistently presenting a brand to the public. Only 48% of employees believe their leadership team, corporate communications, and marketing departments all speak about their brand with a unique voice.
As you create an online brand, you need to ask yourself: If your brand was a person, what personality traits would they take on, and what would they actively avoid? What phrases and stylistic choices does your brand use consistently? The answers to these questions combine to create your brand voice. You can apply this personality everywhere your brand speaks, including newsletters, social media posts, and internal communications like company announcements and advertising.
Use Social Media Consistently
We all use social media in our day-to-day lives, so there’s comfort with the tools to get started using social media for your online business.
Before social media arrived on the scene, branding essentially took place via word of mouth referrals or through traditional means of advertising. However, social media is one of the most efficient online branding tools you can use these days, and rightfully so. It doesn’t cost anything to create a Facebook Page for your business, start posting on Instagram, or create a presence on Twitter.
You can use social tools for free but the time and effort involved still represent an investment in your business. Take the time to create a social media plan upfront. This ensures all your social efforts support specific business goals, and you don’t lose focus. For example, on Instagram, 7 out of 10 hashtags are branded. And this is a great tool to use to increase your brand recognition. Be attentive and consistent on social media to avoid missing these helpful details.
Start Blogging
Using a blog for branding is hands down one of the best things you can do for your online business. Brands with blogs generate 67% more leads than those without a blog. Blogging clears the difference between branding and marketing practises to grow your business.
Blogs are easy to start, inexpensive, and only require a bit of your time. With your blog, you can easily leverage the power of social media to build brand recognition in your industry and establish an online presence.
Your blog content should be relevant and aimed at improving your business’ income. The effort to keep content and business-critical data fresh is worth it. 61% of people are more likely to buy from a brand that delivers unique content. That is where SEO comes in to help create content that attracts and converts traffic. The content needs to work together to establish a clear, seamless identity without unnecessarily duplicating the same information.
Also, stay updated on what your target audience is looking for, and adjust your approach. At clickslice, we offer SEO training that will go a long way to help you start blogging. If you can read, listen, and watch the latest news in your space, you will be able to connect to your niche and keep your blog content relevant.
Add Credibility With Testimonials
Testimonials are one of the most powerful marketing messages and brand boosters that you can have in your arsenal. Make sure to capitalise on the exceptional customer relationships you already have by gathering and sharing client testimonials and reviews on your website.
If you have received “rock star” testimonials from your customers, you can even tweet them out to your followers and publish them on your Facebook page. Testimonials are much more than an ego boost. They have tremendous power to persuade other people to seek out your business for products and services. Getting real clients to share their experiences boosts your credibility because it shows that your service has been tried and tested by the public.
Consumers naturally trust each other more than they trust just marketing collateral, so testimonials add more weight to the decision they’re trying to make. Encourage consumers who enjoy your product or service to leave a positive review or testimonial. Those initial happy consumers encourage more purchases, which creates more satisfied customers.
Pick Your Colours and Fonts
Once your business is up and running, you’ve got a name down, a consistent tone, and memorable experiences, you’ll need to think about how you’ll visually represent your brand. This is where your colours and typography come in handy.
Colours and Fonts don’t just define the look of your brand. They also convey the feeling you want to communicate and help you make it consistent across your entire brand. Customers are 80% more likely to identify you if you use the same colour patterns consistently on your branding material. You’ll want to choose colours and fonts that differentiate you from direct competitors to avoid confusing consumers.
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Biggest SEO Mistakes To Avoid
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Content marketers have to put in days, even weeks, of hard work and time to prepare content. However, it can be disheartening for a content marketer if the content doesn’t rank in the search engine. If it has happened to you, you understand that it’s not a very good feeling, to say the least. Marketers create content to reach their target audiences and anyone else searching for it.
Many marketers and business owners fail to get results from their search engine optimization efforts because of falling prey to common SEO mistakes. SEO is one of those strategies that you can implement in a few weeks, but it takes time to master. The first five organic results account for 71% of all clicks on searc engines. If you want to compete for high-traffic words and phrases, there are a few mistakes that you must avoid so that you can get that first-page ranking.
Here are the most common SEO mistakes you need to avoid to keep your digital marketing strategy intact.
Failure To Set Goals
It is no surprise that you need clear goals to succeed with SEO. Many business owners and marketers ignore this and run SEO campaigns without goals. They believe that SEO will increase their traffic, and subsequently their sales. The problem is, things are not always quite that simple.
For your SEO efforts to pay off, you need to understand what you want to achieve. Is it better quality traffic, more organic leads, or more sales you’re trying to get? Failure to set your priorities straight from the beginning is like starting a journey without knowing your destination.
For example, you may be attracting thousands of monthly organic users to your website, but only 1% of them end up buying from you. In this case, you’re either driving the wrong traffic to your website, or your website is not effective enough in converting visitors into customers. Without clear goals, you’ll end up with a bunch of vanity metrics and not much else.
Not Using Analytics
SEO isn’t only about massive amounts of free traffic. It’s also about converting the traffic. You may easily get caught up watching which phrases are sending you the most traffic, and then get bummed when you can’t rank for those super-competitive, high-traffic keywords. But traffic isn’t all that matters. Sometimes, lower-traffic phrases will convert better because they’re more specific, and getting first page rankings for several of them can drive sales remarkably.
The only way to find out if your efforts are paying off is to track it. Use an analytics package to set up conversion tracking for your keyword phrases, and then compare them against each other to see what’s producing the best results. Google Analytics is used by 56.8% of all websites to track their progress and know what is holding them back. Knowing will help you better optimize your site as a whole and know which efforts are worth focusing on and which ones you should let go of.
Optimizing For The Wrong Keywords
Selecting and using the wrong keywords is one of the most common mistakes when creating content. For example, it’s easy to fall into the trap of optimizing for global keywords when you only offer services to local customers.
As you create content, it’s best to be as specific as possible. Sometimes you’re better off going for more specific phrases, which lead to quicker rankings and more qualified traffic. Other keywords to avoid are those that only bring in visitors looking for free information, not prospective customers interested in buying something.
Beginners tend to make the mistake of using broad keywords that have lots of competition, maybe with several SEO experts working full-time to defend the first-page ranking. 71% of marketers say using strategic and specific keywords was their number one strategy for SEO. Start with keywords that would probably start producing results immediately. You could then optimize for more competitive keywords as your website grows and gains authority.
Writing Poor Content
People online are searching for informative and quality content that matches their queries. But still, we come across websites that write very poorly written content for the readers. Irrelevant content with ordinary writings standards only harms your rankings.
The two most popular ways of creating a large quantity of content are hiring low paid article writers and using article spinners, software that takes one article and re-words it to make it look like several unique articles to search engines. The content might be well optimized, but you also need to consider the impression it’ll give visitors. Search engines, and more importantly, people can tell whether or not content is unique. If it’s not, you’ll lose trust, and you’ll have a much harder time regaining it.
Quality content has consistently been a factor toward gaining traffic and ranking for your site. Search engines have their users’ best interests at heart, so if your content is below standards or irrelevant, it simply won’t rank.
Poor Use Of Links
To get the best out of SEO, it is essential to include quality external links in the content. Always make sure your external links are from a relevant, high-ranked website with a higher Domain Authority. While there are many easy ways to get a high volume of links, you should emphasise quality.
One link from a popular blog might do more for your search engine rankings than thousands of low-quality directory links. Yes, they’re harder to get, but that’s also why search engines place such trust in them. Link building is one of the two most important signals that Google uses to rank your website for search. They are a more reliable measure of the quality of your website.
Using a call to action, like ‘click here, as your link costs you the opportunity of tailoring your anchor text. However, avoid using similar anchor texts every time you link to a page. It looks funny to visitors and can hurt your search engine rankings. Mix it up and use variations of the phrase. It will look more natural to site visitors and search engines.
At Clickslice, we offer extensive link building services to help you grow your traffic and rank higher on Search Engine Results Pages.
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What is Content Marketing and How Does it Help in SEO
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Are you looking for new ways to improve your website’s search engine rankings and overall SEO? And has it crossed your mind that content marketing might be one possible solution?
SEO, together with content marketing, has changed the digital marketing world. If you’re serious about your SEO, content marketing should definitely be part of your SEO strategy. In this age, SEO without content marketing is like a body without a soul. To be successful, both must go hand in hand. During a 2021 Statista survey carried out among search engine optimization professionals worldwide, 24.6% stated depth and accuracy of content was among the most important factors impacting search rankings.
If you’re wondering if there are any benefits your SEO strategy can reap from content marketing, then you’re in the right place. In this post, what content marketing is, why it’s important for your SEO strategy.
But just before we jump into the interrelationship between SEO and content marketing, let’s look at what the terms actually mean.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization(SEO) is the process by which a website is enhanced to perform better and rank higher in relevant searches. It is a technique of increasing the quality of traffic and attracting maximum visitors to your website.
What is Content Marketing?
On the other hand, content marketing comes down to sharing valuable and relevant content with your audience. That is free content to assist them in solving their problems and understanding more about a topic they’re interested in. It is focused on using valuable and relevant content to drive profitable customer or client action.
How Does Content Marketing Work?
Content marketing offer readers and potential customers informative and useful material that provides insight and value. It utilizes blogs, social media posts, graphics and videos, to attract traffic, keep them engaged, and move them further along the sales funnel.
According to a study by the Contentmarketinginstitute, 76% of marketers employed a strategic approach to managing content in 2019. They used an approach that formalizes the processes that people and technologies needed to scale and deliver content. Most of these marketers attest to the effectiveness of content marketing to drive traffic to a site with the top goals being:
- To support the organization’s goals and criteria for success.
- Improving the customer experience.
- Generating and nurturing business leads.
Content marketing is a mainstay in the revolution from traditional methods of marketing. For example, a traditional ad may only tell the audience what an organization does, whereas content marketing shares relevant knowledge on the matter at hand and actionable insights that help the target audience to understand why they should take action.
How Content Marketing Works Together With SEO
Now let’s delve into some of the benefits of content marketing for SEO and learn the specific ways that an active content marketing plan can grant you an edge over your competitors in terms of search engine rankings.
Keyword Opportunities
Search engines can’t and don’t see websites like you and I do. We can always look at a website with pictures of pet supplies and understand that it’s an eCommerce site peddling leashes, dog bowls, and dog toys. However, search engines like Google have no way of recognizing a website’s purpose unless those words are written somewhere. And that is where content marketing comes in.
The key to SEO success is researching and finding relevant keywords then using them in your content so that you rank higher in the search engine results pages. Astute keywords mainly consist of one or two words. According to Ahrefs, 70.87% of keywords with more than 10,000 monthly searches consist of only one or two words. Using these keywords appropriately and following a strategic approach is fundamental if your content is to rank higher. For one, marketers should never stuff a page with keywords and overoptimize. SEO and content work in perfect balance.
Quality Content
Content marketing requires consistency. Fresh, unique and creative content gets rapidly indexed by search engines and ranks higher than low-value and monotonous content. In fact, according to Carolfoden, 78% of consumers will trust your brand if you create more customized content.
Your content must be able to lure your clients as well as solve a particular issue. As long as you can write influential content by using important keywords and targeting visitors, you are likely to improve on SEO and rank higher. Content quality is the most important factor through which Google determines the relevance of a page and ranks that piece of content. Content marketers brainstorm creative ideas and embed the most important keywords to get content acknowledgement. This is another sure way in which content marketing benefits SEO.
Content Keeps Users on Your Page Longer
If someone is redirected to your website from a search, they can’t find what they are looking for and then they leave right away, it is called a bounce. Usually, the percentage of people who do this on each page on your site is read as your bounce rate.
Google factors metrics like bounce rate into the overall SEO profile on your site. If one of your pages has a very high bounce rate, that’s clearly a sign that there is something wrong with it. According to Forbes, you and your business content have just seven seconds to make that first impression that will encourage users to stick around. Google certainly won’t want to continue ranking a page highly if it’s sending all its visitors right back into the search results.
Content marketing can help you combat a high bounce rate and solve problems like this, especially if it’s done thoughtfully. The longer a user stays on your site, the more they are likely to be converted into loyal brand ambassadors.
Having understood the ways that content marketing can improve your SEO, you may be looking to create a content marketing strategy that both helps your visitors and your site. That’s where we come in. At Clickslice, we are all about making your website obtain high rankings in search engine results. We can incorporate our SEO services with Content marketing to give you an edge over your competition both content wise and in search engine rankings.
