Are you a member of and active in social media groups, to further your online marketing and social media traction?
If not, it’s likely that you’re missing out on huge amounts of social media results in both potential traffic and leads. There are literally millions of social media groups on sites like Google+, LinkedIn, and Facebook and if you’re not using them to your advantage, now is the perfect time to get started.
I’ve experienced big benefits by joining and participating in a wide variety of social media groups the past several months—with a lot more eyeballs and engagement on my content than if I’d just shared a post on my social account.
How to Get Killer Social Media Traction By Joining Social Media Groups
Here’s what you need to know.
How Do Private Social Media Groups Work, Exactly?
A private social media group is exactly what it sounds like, a private, members-only group on a social media platform. The group is created and controlled by a moderator. These moderators control what types of content are shared as well as how people comment and interact with one another. Well-run groups are focused on sharing valuable information rather than promotional content and are generally aimed at enhancing the goals of the group members.
For example, I’ve joined the Digital Marketing Questions group on Facebook, and B2B Content Marketing on Linkedin. These are just two out of maybe 40 now that I’m a member of. Just by searching writing, marketing, or content marketing in LinkedIn’s search bar, and Facebook’s search bar, sorting by the Groups category, there are literally hundreds that are good matches for me. And every time I participate inside these groups, by sharing a useful piece of content or infographic I created (for example), I get direct eyeballs on my content from the actual, real people users in that private group. It’s a good thing.
4 Key Benefits of Joining Private Social Media Groups
Private social media groups are a very different platform from many other types of social media interaction. Notably, they’re on a niche-focused platform, and are private groups of like-minded individuals into one concentrated place. Because of this, when you interact in a private social media groups, you gain instant access to almost instantaneous benefits that will start rolling in:
1. Traffic to your website
One of the best advantages of interacting in private social media groups is that you can use the group to direct traffic back to your website. This allows you to earn more customers and make more sales.
2. Higher conversions
When you build relationships on private social media groups, you can easily produce higher conversion rates for your company. By building personal relationships, you build overall brand awareness and encourage more conversions for your site.
3. Increased brand awareness
One of the main benefits of interacting in private social media groups (Especially when you start your own) is that you can easily build brand awareness for your company. This helps you reach new customers and make more sales.
4. Ease of communication
Social media groups are a great place for easy communication with other like-minded individuals. When you become a member of a group, you can easily share content, offer input, ask for input from other members, and share your own personal content.
The Rise of Social Media Groups
As it stands now, there is a social media group for virtually every niche. From motherhood to marketing and beyond, private groups are an effective way for like-minded individuals to come together to discuss industry business and happenings. Because of this, they’ve become a popular platform for marketing. When marketers engage in social media groups correctly, it’s easy to do everything from building relationships to earning highly qualified leads, which creates a great environment for making sales, launching new products, and getting high-quality industry feedback.
To Build or to Join?
When it comes to social media groups you can either build one or join one. These approaches both have their strengths and their weaknesses. If you’re a new marketer who is just getting started with private social groups, you may choose to join a pre-established group until you get the hang of things enough that you feel confident starting your own group. (I started one a few weeks ago, Learn Online Writing.) This allows you to see how a private social media group is moderated, what types of content are shared, and how often other group members post: and get the most social media traction.
If you’re an experienced marketer or have used private social media groups before, feel free to start your own! Starting your own group has the distinct benefit of providing you with a tailor-made community that you control, which is ideal for people who want to increase brand recognition or poll their audience for ideas on things like products, marketing, and distribution.
Choosing a Social Media Platform
When it comes to social media platforms for private groups, the three most popular are Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn.
Facebook
Facebook is great for people who want to build and maintain an active social media marketing strategy. The fact that it is the largest social media platform in the world makes it ideal for people who want to reach large audiences. Additionally, its laid-back, casual tone makes it great for testing new ideas, polling users, and sharing content on a broad-scale level.
Google+
Google+ allows users to share photos, videos, links, and content in the same laid-back, carefree way as Facebook. Google+ also allows for “circles,” which allow people to divide their followers into smaller group-like segments. This is perfect for targeting content, sharing information with select groups, and offering special discounts and information to certain users.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a fantastic platform for users who want to interact with other industry professionals. As a general rule, it’s a more formal platform than both Google+ and Facebook, which makes it a fantastic choice for marketers who want to distribute content to other like-minded individuals in the industry.
Spend all your time on those three—they’re the best networks to find the best groups. I divide up my time equally between G+ and Facebook, and spend the most time on LinkedIn, just a little time per day to share good content I’ve created, using relevant titles and hashtags inside the group.
How to Find Your Perfect-Fit Groups and Interact With Them
It’s easy to find a wide selection of private groups on most major social media sites. The first step is to choose which social media platform you want to interact on. Once you’ve done that, you’ll have to branch out into the following steps.
1. Find the Right Group For You
Again, there is a social media group for virtually every need. From inbound marketing to sales to social media-specific discussions, you can find any niche specialty you want on a social media platform.
In light of this, the first step to effective group interaction is to find the niche groups that are relevant to what you want to do. It’s impossible to interact well in 40 groups, so it’s wise to start with 2-3 you are truly excited about. It’s fine to ramp up memberships though. Even though I’m a member of 40 groups, I truly participate in maybe 20.
As a general rule, you can locate groups via the search bar at the top of the social media platform page or through searching for groups your friends and connections are involved with. You can also search for groups by specialty or focus. Once you find a group you’re interested in, you can read the group description to determine how closely it meets your needs and, if you like it, you can send a request to the group moderator asking to join the group.
The type of platform you’re on is important, too. If a lot of your “friends” and “client types” are on Facebook, choose groups there. In fact, that’s where I spend most of my time–even more than G+ and LinkedIn, although those are also great places for groups. However, if you’re more of a LinkedIn user, there are a ton of groups with thousands of members to start participating in. Find your platform of choice and choose one to really focus on. Diluting too much means you won’t do as well. You might as well stick to one area and do well at it.
Remember as soon as you join a group to read the rules. Very important so you can know how and what to post (some don’t allow promotional posts except on Follow Me Fridays, for example).
2. Be Interactive
Once you’ve found a group you love, it’s important to begin interacting. Making the most of a private social media group is just like maintaining a website or any other social media profile: you need to interact with it actively in order to make it worth it. Do this by responding to posts you find interesting, making your own posts, answering comments, and asking and answering questions. This helps prove that you’re an active piece of the group and helps you build your reputation as a notable group member.
3. Provide Value
If you join a group for the sole purpose of selling a product, two things are likely to happen: first, you may be kicked out. Many groups have rules and regulations about what kind of content you can and can’t post. In most cases, promotional content is forbidden expect on certain days or in certain sections of the group.
In short, don’t spam.
You can provide value when you post a relevant blog that thoroughly addresses an issue the group is all about. For example, in Digital Marketing Questions, I posted this on a Monday morning:
“Are you telling your story accurately this year? Find out how to bring storytelling into your marketing for great results, in my post today! In the comments, tell me what you think about storytelling in content marketing.”
I was following the semi-promotional allowance of the group, so it wasn’t spammy; and people liked the post, subsequently reading and sharing my blog. I do this as well in relevant LinkedIn and G+ groups: I share what is relevant to the group, inside the group.
Next, don’t post a ton. Even if it’s useful, people don’t want to see a ton of content flooding their home feed. Remember, know group rules.
Remember that being a part of a social media group requires you to build relationships, which is best done by seeking to provide legitimate value to your readers. This means sharing high-quality information, providing helpful input, and helping point users to other sources of information when you can.
4. Branch Out
Once you’ve been a part of a social media group for a while, you can take your interaction to the next level by either starting your own group or getting involved in social media groups on other platforms.
This helps you expand your reach and branch out into other populations of customers and experts. This, in turn, helps you establish yourself as an expert in the field and become an industry leader.
Conclusion
There’s no doubt that interacting in private social media groups is one of the best ways to build a name for your company, earn yourself more connections, make more sales, and generate more leads. Social media traction never got so good.
Cool chicks from Mean Girls who knew how to socialize. Be like them.
When you choose the social media platform you favor and get involved with private groups within it, you can earn great returns for your company and your brand. To produce these results for your company, it’s wise to begin interacting in private social media groups today.
And finally…
I just created a group on Facebook, Learn Online Writing, a couple weeks ago. We’re close to member 100! Come join us!
Imagine this: you’re an NFL player headed into the biggest game of the season. Everything is riding on you and your coach’s expectations are high. Your teammates are depending upon you. You’re out on the field now and they all look to you for direction and, guess what? You don’t have any because you never took the time to develop a pre-game strategy.
That would never happen, right? Right. In sports, strategy is everything and it would be crazy to enter a game without knowing how you wanted to play it. Believe it or not, the same goes for content.
When it comes to your small business, developing a content strategy is an important step toward success. From drawing customers to helping you establish yourself as an authority, content strategy is the foundation upon which everything else is built.
You can build yourself upon content, as a business–with a good strategy.
A Guide to Small Business Content Strategy: 12 Essential Tips
Here’s what you need to know about small business content marketing and how you can make yours better.
How Do You Define Content?
First things first – what is content? To put it simply, content is the material you produce to further your company’s goals. In many cases, it acts as the vessel for content marketing, a practice within which companies use content to create and distribute valuable information to their fans, customers, and readers, thus driving profitable customer interaction and helping establish themselves as authorities in the field.
According to a recent Content Marketing Institute report, 86% of small businesses are currently using content marketing and 40% say that the approach is effective for their companies.
5 Key Types of Must-Have Content: Strategy for the Small Business
When you’re building your small business, one of the most important things you can do is take some time to invest in content. While it may seem more important to jump right into selling, focusing on building content first will produce higher-quality results in the long run.
Here’s are the five main types of content you should build when you start your business:
1. A blog
Blogs are huge right now and they’re not fixing to slow down any time soon. Companies that build and maintain a blog earn more leads, gain visibility, establish themselves as authorities in their industry, and expand their customer base at light-speed. In fact, marketers who prioritize blogging are 13x more likely to see a positive ROI than those who don’t.
This is due in large part to the fact that blogs are a great way to help your company get found online. According to HubSpot, customers will undertake 85% of their company relationships without ever talking to a human by 2020. This means that it’s hugely beneficial and important for companies to start blogging as soon as they start functioning.
2. A web page
Think of a web page as your home base: it helps people learn more about your company, gives you a great place to showcase new products, goods, and services, allows customers to locate your contact information, reviews, and purchasing options, and provides a platform that all of your other content can meet on.
There are many different options for building a small business web page, and in most cases, it can be done for only a few bucks in only a few minutes. Most platforms today allow for drag-and-drop website building, which makes designing a beautiful page easy, even if you’re not a pro.
3. Great keywords
If you’re doing anything online, you’ll need to learn about search engine optimization (SEO). Specifically, you’ll need to learn about keyword research and how it can benefit your company. In order to rank well in Google’s indexes and make yourself more visible online, you’ll need to research and target relevant keywords. This helps you appear prominently for relevant search queries and ensures that customers looking for a company like yours can find you easily.
4. Social media
While Google still rules the roost, it’s important to remember that social media platforms are search engines, too. If a customer is attracted to your brand or products, it’s likely that person will search for you using social media. If they can’t find you, it’s likely you’ll miss out on business.
If customers can find you, though, they’re more likely to engage with your company. For this reason, it’s important to focus on building up a social media presence from the get-go. This means selecting 1-2 social media platforms (Facebook and Instagram, for example) and building your presence there. This allows you to expand your reach with your customers and make more connections.
5. A buyer persona
Before any of the above tips can work out well for you, you’ll need to establish your buyer persona. A buyer persona defines who you’re trying to sell a product to and why. It looks at your target demographic and answers questions like: who are these people? How old are they? Where do they live? How much money do they make each year? What are they worried about? Knowing the answers to these questions is a fantastic way to set yourself up for success and to target your content marketing more effectively from the beginning.
Building Your Content Strategy: 7 Actionable Tips
Now that you’ve got some types of content to work with, it’s time to start building out your content strategy into a functional machine that helps you drive sales. Here are seven key steps.
1. Segment your audience
You used buyer personas to identify your audience, but now it’s time to segment them into individual groups. If you’re like most companies, you have several sets of populations you’re trying to target. In fact, Content Marketing Institute reports that the average small business targets four separate segments of customers. Segmenting your customer base will allow you to target each segment more efficiently and to tailor your content accordingly.
2. Decide on your topics
What do you want your content to do? How is it going to achieve that goal? The one true way to ensure that your content is successful is to ensure that the topics of your content are interesting, valuable, and relevant for your customers.
To gain ideas for topics, look at things like your FAQ section – are there repeated questions there that you can turn into a lengthy blog series? You’ll also find a whole host of ideas on question and answer sites like Quora or by using a service like BuzzSumo, which will allow you to find and track the top-performing content in your industry. In the process, you may even find that brainstorming topic ideas helps you come up with new keywords, which paves the way for a SEO and visibility boost.
3. Define your objective
According to QuickSprout, you can define your blogging objectives by asking yourself the following six questions:
Do you want to drive physical traffic to your office or retail location?
Do you want to increase leads or generate sales?
Do you want to entice prospects to visit you from outside of your local area?
Do you want to draw in overseas clients?
Do you want to educate your readers on your company’s mission?
Do you want to provide your customers with business updates?
Do you want to build and strengthen your brand?
Now – these are all great questions, but in order to truly define your blogging objectives, you should only be identifying with two or three of these objectives. Any more than that is a recipe for content marketing disaster and a sure way to wind up being disorganized and ineffective. Pick a few objectives and stick to them for the most focused strategy possible.
4. Make the delivery exciting
Content, content everywhere, and not a delivery method in site! Now that you’ve decided on what you’re going to write and for whom you’re going to write it, you’ll have to think about how you’re going to get it to your target audience. The average small business uses 12 different content distribution tactics. Often, these tactics include methods like the following:
Social media
Blogs
Newsletters
Videos
In-person events
Visual content, including infographics and photos
Webinars
White papers
No matter how you choose to distribute your content, it’s important to ensure that you vary the method. This helps prevent people from becoming bored with your content and, most importantly, ensures that people can find your content because you continue to place it in the places they frequent. Keep in mind that the average small business uses 6 separate social media platforms for content distribution.
5. Create a content calendar
Now that you’ve built the bones of your content strategy, you need to focus on bringing it to life. You can do this by building an editorial calendar. An editorial calendar is the ultimate organizational tool for small business bloggers worldwide and when used correctly, can help you plan all of the following details for your content:
Date
Distribution channel
Content type
Reader type
Seasonal content
Trending content
Content creators
Budget
An editorial calendar is meant to be a fluid thing and will likely change as your business grows and shifts. The important thing, however, is that you develop one and that you keep it going as you continue to hone your content strategy. Doing this will allow you to create real, organized content. In other words: an editorial calendar is one of the single best tools you can use to make your content successful.
6. Create, create, create
It’s tough to have a content strategy without – you guessed it – content. That said, you’ll need to dedicate some time simply to creating content. Write about the topics you’ve brainstormed and put your fresh new content out there for your customers. Keep tabs on your content by monitoring user comments, social shares, and interaction in order to get a feel for what performs best and what seems to get no reaction. While it seems simple, a great deal of constructing an efficient content strategy is simply trial and error. By getting out into the game, you’ll quickly learn what you need to do.
7. Track your results
It’s impossible to know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been. That’s why it is so important to track the results of your content creation efforts. CMI reports that 87% of small businesses state that lead generation is the priority for their entire content strategy.
If that rings true for your company, you can track the success of your content by metrics like social media activity, web traffic (67% of small businesses report that this is their most important content marketing success metric), and lead sources. Doing this allows you to plan, execute, and measure accordingly, which in turn allows you to adjust your content strategy as you go along, creating a bombproof strategy that promises to serve your company well for all of its days.
It’s Time to Start Rocking Your Small Business Content Strategy
According to the CMI report, 74% of marketers are creating more content this year than they were one year ago. This is likely due to the fact that content has proven time and time again to be one of the most effective forms of marketing material. From providing a way for your customers to interact with your company to offering a platform on which you can provide value and relevance to your readers, content is a hugely important piece of any small business’ success. Fortunately, when you take these 12 tips to heart, you can quickly develop a content strategy that allows you to stand out from the crowd and succeed in small business content marketing.
Need great content to fill your content marketing? Check out our Content Shop.
You’ve probably heard of Snapchat: the funky video messaging app that allows your friends to send you ten second clips of the action at Walmart or a dog doing something funny.
But did you know that Snapchat is good for more than just hilarious and short-lived videos and photo? In fact, hundreds of companies are getting in on the Snapchat revolution and some experts are even calling it the future of social.
Gary Vaynerchuk, a top marketer, entrepreneur, and someone I like to follow regularly, says that “every marketer should at least be familiar with Snapchat.” He’s also warned us: “don’t be on the wrong side of history,” and “get into Snapchat before you miss your chance entirely.”
This begs the questions “Why?” and “How?” and, in the face of other popular livestream apps like Periscope and Meerkat, “Is it really worth it?”
The Snapchat Rage: Worth it or Not for Businesses?
Here’s what you need to know about the Snapchat revolution.
Snapchat by the Numbers
According to NewsCred, Snapchat might be quite a bit bigger than you thought. The service currently has more than 100 million daily users and upwards of 8,796 photos are shared every second on the Snapchat platform. What’s more, users watch an average of 6 billion videos every single day and 54% of users engage with Snapchat daily.
With all that traffic, it’s no wonder that companies are beginning to flock to the app. NewsCred goes on to report that a huge 30% of agencies, brands, and media planners are planning to include Snapchat content in the advertising campaigns they run surrounding the Super Bowl. One of the reasons Snapchat is becoming popular among so many brands is the fact that it is incredibly user-friendly.
For example, vertical viewing is now one of the most popular forms of mobile interaction and it accounts for 29% of the total time people spend on their screens. Because Snapchat was born in the world of vertical viewing, it’s hugely popular among people who consume video content on their phones. In fact, Snapchat users are nine times as likely to watch ads in full on the platform simply because they don’t have to rotate their phones.
Snapchat and Millennial Consumers
Snapchat is and has always been dominated by Millennials. The platform was founded by a 24-year old and Millennials account for upwards of 71% of the Platform’s regular users. This is important due to the fact that Millennials are currently the most powerful market group in the world, with an annual spending power of upwards of $2.45 trillion.
What’s more, Millennials are the largest group of smartphone owners in the U.S., with more than 85% of the population owning smartphones and 41% of them using their smartphones to make purchases on a regular basis. Thanks to the instant-access nature of Snapchat, it’s clear that this app may be one of the best ways for marketers to gain access to the lives and pocketbooks of Millennial customers.
How Companies Use Snapchat: The H&M Example
Now that it’s clear why Snapchat is such an appealing way for companies to deliver content to a younger audience, let’s consider which companies have already used the platform effectively. For an example, consider H&M Poland.
H&M caters to a predominantly Millennial group of customers, but they took their already effective marketing one step further when they recently partnered with an exclusive party organizer called Boiler Room. To publicize the partnership, promote engagement with their “H&M Loves Music” line, and draw customers to an upcoming event, H&M used Snapchat to launch the first ever “Urban Chase” campaign in Poland.
To do this, the company hid tickets to an upcoming sold-out Boiler Room event in their stores and then used Snapchat to dispense messages and hints that would allow a few of their lucky followers to find the tickets. This simple strategy not only publicized the event, but it drew users to H&M’s Snapchat account and provided a ton of positive publicity for the event. In fact, H&M gained 943 Snapchat followers through the campaign, enticed 200 people to participate in the game, reached 3.8 million unique users, and earned 344,000 livestreams. If that’s not brand success on Snapchat, I’m not sure what is.
The Verdict: Is Snapchat Worth all the Buzz?
For companies who want to find a successful means of displaying ads, distributing content, and engaging with the Millennial audience, Snapchat is a fantastic platform. While social media platforms are popping up everywhere nowadays, Snapchat has exhibited its staying power: It’s currently the third most popular social app among the Millennial market and it shows no signs of phasing out anytime soon.
When thinking about Snapchat, it’s also wise to consider the fact that, even though social media platforms continue to change, the rules of engagement within them do not. To put it another way: Snapchat is indicative of a trend that’s been building for years – successful content in today’s marketing environment is consumer-driven. While the technology used to deliver that message may change in the coming years, the rules of the game won’t, which means that Snapchat is a fantastic place to hone marketing skills and connect with users right now.
While there are certain companies for whom Snapchat may not be a good fit (those targeting an older marketing group, for example) the H&M example goes to show that companies targeting a Millennial audience can do well to begin engaging on the platform.
In today’s world, consumers want to interact with their favorite brands via social media and Snapchat is an innovative and effective way for companies to provide that. Within the next several years, it’s likely that we will see Snapchat continue to evolve. The platform will likely begin to offer new services and marketers who want to be successful in the Millennial market will need to creatively adapt their marketing strategy in order to provide quality Snapchat content their users will love.
Need social media content and/or management for your brand? Check out our Social Media Services!
Site authority (with alternative terms like domain authority, or page authority) refers to the quality of a website online and the amount of authority, trust, or gain it has in the rankings. In other words, it’s a big deal for marketers looking to boost their web presence.
Think: higher site authority = more traffic + high rank in Google’s SERPs. Site authority itself based on several different factors. As a general rule, the stronger those factors are, the stronger your site is likely to be. And guess what ties in? Fundamentally, good content. We’re about to discuss all the major tips and tricks you need to know to maintain, boost and grow your overall site authority, so keep reading.
A Guide To Boosting Your Site Authority
If you’re looking to boost your site authority in 2016, here’s what you need to know. Let’s delve in!
Defining Site Authority
Site authority is a ranking metric that determines how authoritative and trustworthy your site is. Site authority is based on a variety of factors, including link profiles (how many links point to your site and how well-known and respected those links are), content strength, page design, and other trust factors. And, site authority can be improved or damaged as a result of changes to these factors.
The main term for this, domain authority, was actually developed by Moz as part of their MozBar DA algorithm, and is a metric using their algorithm from 1-100 that says how strong your website authority is. Here’s an example of the Moz DA in action, calculating the DA of a YouTube video for “boxer training tips.” Incidentially, it calculates YouTubeitself, so the DA is a whopping 100.
Have you seen Google’s recent 160-page doc released November of 2015 that defines search guidelines? I broke it down in our major blog post here, as well.
6 Key Steps to Improving Your Site Authority
As I mentioned earlier, site authority is not something that is rigid and unmovable. Google is constantly evaluating a site’s authority levels, so it’s not uncommon for these rankings to fluctuate based upon improvements or decreases in a site.
Like a brain that constantly works, Google is continually updating and working, always keeping an eye on your site and overall quality.
So there are many things you can and should do to bring up your site authority. Follow our key six steps for better site authority rankings now and in the future.
Step #1: Publish fresh content
Fresh content is a powerful tool in the world of SEO. This is true for several reasons. For one, every fresh page you publish is one more that Google can index. This provides you more opportunities to get your content in front of viewers and rank well in Google’s SERPs.
Additionally, Google loves fresh content and has been displaying a blatant bias toward fresh content for years now. This is because Google knows that its users crave fresh content and, as such, the search engine giant is happy to rank sites that publish ample amounts of fresh content higher than those that go without updates for months.
Be fresh. Fresh is good.
In fact, HubSpot has found that companies that publish more than 16 blog posts each month earn an average of 3.5xas much traffic as companies that publish between 0-4 blog posts each month. (I mean, I could have told you that. I’ve blogged over 600 times on our site and see a huge amount of growing traffic.) Also, those results hold true for both B2B companies and B2C companies.
To freshen up your content, you can do a few things:
First (and most obviously) you can publish new content. To do this effectively, you’ll want to focus on targeting keywords that provide fresh results or writing about hyper-current events in your industry.
The second option is to update older content. This is a common go-to for many SEOs and, when done correctly, can help you get the most out of your existing material. Maybe your old content used to rank in the top two or three SERP spots but now it’s stuck in the lower half of the page. In cases like this, a simple update will commonly solve the problem. There are many guides on how to update old content, but as a general rule, you’ll want to add new details, update anything that’s no longer factual, and seek to make it relevant to today’s readers.
Finally, you may consider publishing a regularly updated series if your content focuses on industries that change constantly, like sports. Because sports news changes on a daily or weekly basis, a page that isn’t being updated continually is nearly useless. For this reason, sites that focus on these types of topics can easily increase their site authority by offering regular, real-time updates on the industry.
While fresh content is all well and good, there are some things you’ll have to remember.
The first is that publishing fresh content does not mean simply publishing the same content (or even very similar content) over and over again. This places you at huge risk of being down-ranked by Google’s algorithms and failing to truly meet your users’ needs.
With that in mind, focus on providing valuable information and helping users answer questions or solve problems every time you publish fresh content. You should also keep in mind that creating and publishing expert content (as per Google’s recently released Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines) can help you gain increased site authority. While it seems simple, this step will go a long way toward increasing your site authority.
Step #2: Create landing pages
Landing pages do exactly what they promise: they give readers a place to land. While landing pages are used for a variety of purposes, you’ll commonly see them used to offer specific information, simplify complex concepts (a promotion, for example), or provide a one-stop shop that allows audiences to gain the information they need to convert.
Landing pages are especially important for marketers who use PPC ads, affiliate links, or a variety of channels to produce and direct traffic. When used properly, landing pages can go a long way toward increasing your SEO and site authority.
Despite their effectiveness, however, many marketers beg out of creating landing pages because they’re believed to be too difficult or too time-consuming. Fortunately, the popularity of innovative new tools has kicked those excuses to the curb. Nowadays, even marketers who have never made a landing page before can create a beautiful one via drag-and-drop building platforms like Unbounce.
Here’s an example of a very simple landing page we created for my upcoming book, So You Think You Can Write?
4 Major Benefits of Landing Pages
1. Audience division: One of the primary strengths of landing pages is that they allow you to segregate your audience and deliver targeted content accordingly. With landing pages, you can organize traffic according to source (social media vs. PPC advertising) and customize your message to different groups of customers.
2. Higher conversion rates: Landing pages generally serve one specific purpose. Often, this purpose is to drive conversions. Landing pages are commonly more effective at producing conversions than main website pages due to the fact that they offer short, to-the-point information on a product or destination. Because of this, they promote higher conversion rates and more revenue.
3. Easy testing: Landing pages make A/B testing absurdly simple. By setting up two separate landing pages and measuring the impact of each, you can quickly discover what works for your customers and what doesn’t.
4. Data gathering: Landing pages are the perfect place to gather metrics like visitor, conversion, and bounce rates. This allows you to hone your marketing and increase your ROI.
Creating Landing Pages: 5 Foundational Steps
When it comes to actually creating landing pages, it’s helpful to have a plan. First of all, you’ll need to know what you want your landing pages to achieve. Secondly, you’ll need to have some plan for how you’ll measure the effectiveness of the landing page, be it built-in metrics or user polling. Once you’ve got those things in place, follow these steps:
1. Create a custom URL: When creating the URL for your landing page, it’s important to be as specific as possible. Don’t go overboard stuffing the URL with keywords, but do seek to tell your users exactly what the landing page is doing. This is especially important if you’re building multiple landings pages for different purposes.
2. Keep your branding consistent: Even though it is separate from your main site, a landing page should still be consistent with your overall branding. Keep your branding consistent in your landing page in order to provide a continuous experience for users and decrease the risk of a higher bounce rate. (Notice how we did this in our landing page for my book above.)
3. Make it simple: When it comes to landing pages, the simpler the page is, the better it will perform. A landing page is not a place to try an edgy new design. Instead, it should be clean, straightforward, and conversion-friendly. Remember: users will be more than happy to leave your landing page if they can’t find what they’re looking for, so you’re safest keeping it direct.
4. Master your copy: The main purpose of a landing page is impact, right? And what better place to provide impact than your body copy? To get the most bang for your buck from your body copy, you’ll need to keep it short, simple, and to the point. Once you’ve written it, check and re-check it for typos, unclear wording, or misleading information. All of the body copy on your landing page should be written with user value in mind. This means it should all answer questions and focus on integrating relevant keywords.
5. Measure your results: Once you’ve built your page and all of the associated content for it, it’s time to measure the results. Depending upon the goal of your landing page, this can be done by analyzing things like traffic or visitor rates, conversion rates, or shares. If you’re not seeing the results you want to, don’t be afraid to update the page. Landing pages are made to be fluid and adjustable and it may well take some trial-and-error before you find the landing page formula that works for you.
Step #3: Nurture your metas
Meta tags are the small bits of text that provide details about a page’s content. Although they don’t appear on the page itself (they are only featured in the page’s code) they can have a big impact on SEO and page authority.
There are four major types of metas. These are:
Meta Keywords Attribute: Meta keywords attribute is a group of keywords that are relevant to a page.
Title Tag: The title tag is the text that appears at the top of a page and which search engines regard as the title of a page.
Meta Description Attribute: The meta description attribute is a quick, succinct description of the page.
Meta Robots Attribute: The meta robots attribute tells page crawlers what they should do with a page.
How To Create or Improve Your Metas: A Brief Guide
To improve the strength of your metas, the first thing to remember is that you’ll need to fill each of them out as completely as possible. Each meta generally features a character limit (70 characters for page titles, 160 characters for descriptions, and fewer than 10 keyword phrases for meta keywords) and it’s important to bump against those limits but not exceed them.
Next, you’ll need to remember to include your keyword phrases naturally throughout your metas. As with all things, you’ll want to stay away from keyword stuffing and focus, instead, on distributing keywords naturally throughout content.
Finally, you’ll want to use a CTA in your meta description. While this is not common knowledge for many marketers, it’s an important step. A good guideline for this is to begin your meta descriptions with a question and finish them with an answer to the question. This can help boost user interest and improve click rates.
Example of a good meta description, with the meta tag keywords “compounding blog posts” used naturally inside:
Learn how compounding blog posts can maximize your blog efforts enormously, gaining you more traction month after month. We’ll discuss in this blog guide.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, it’s likely that you understand why building and maintaining a blog is so important for your site authority. Blogging for business has many benefits, not the least of which is that it has the potential to send massive traffic back to your website. Blogging for business also helps you increase your conversion rates, establish authority on the web, and produce long-term traffic results. Plus, blogging is free, simple, and fun if you do it right.
To get the maximum effect from your blog, you’ll want to focus on two things: how often you should blog and how long each blog post should be.
According to HubSpot, the first of those two things depends largely on the size of your company. Here’s what they recommend:
Small Companies (1-10 employees): According to HubSpot data, small companies saw the largest jump in traffic when they published more than 11 blogs each month. To be specific, companies that blogged 11 times or more per month earned 3x as much traffic as companies that published only one post a month and twice as much traffic as companies that published between 2-5 blogs a month.
Medium Companies (26-200 employees): The same holds true for companies in the mid-size range. When these companies published more than 11 blogs each month, they saw twice as much traffic as companies that blogged only once a month.
Large Companies (201+ employees): Large companies more than 11 blogs per month saw an average of 3.5x more traffic than companies publishing only 0-1 blog posts per month.
Now, when it comes to content length, there are several good guidelines to go by.
According to Buzzsumo and Neil Patel, blog posts that are more than 1,500 words long generally get more shares. I personally have seen much more results from long content. On that same note, however, there are times when you’ll want to break a complex topic into a series of serialized, short posts to increase long-term traffic.
While it’s true that longer content generally earns more traffic, it’s important to remember that there is no “one-size-fits-all” rule about content length and that the length of a blog post will depend largely upon its goal, purpose, and topic. Generally, more complex topics require longer posts and vise-versa.
Step #5: Get visual
Including visual content in your website is by far one of the best and easiest ways to improve your site’s traffic and, ergo, its authority rankings. This is due to the popularity and easy digestibility of visual content. According to HubSpot, 90% of all the information the brain receives on a daily basis is visual and the human brain is able to process visual information at a rate 60,000x faster than it is textual information. Additionally, posts that feature videos earn 3x as many links as video-less posts and viewers spend an average of 100% more time on pages that feature videos.
In light of this, it’s clear that including visual content in your marketing strategy is an important step to boosting your site authority and earning yourself more visitors. There are many simple ways to add visual content to your website. You can choose to include high-quality stock images from a site like Shutterstock.com or add videos, memes, or your own photography to your page. Doing this enhances the visual interest of your site and increases the likelihood that it will be shared across the web.
The key types of visual content are:
Images: Fantastic for breaking up body text and adding some visual interest to a page of content, images can greatly increase your page’s shares and helps users fully understand your topic. The use of images is especially important in our currently text-saturated content environment. Use a tool (my favorite is Canva) to create beautiful images (with Canva, via a simple drag-and-drop interface).
Videos: There’s no question that videos are the visual content of the future. Quick, simple, informative, and interesting, videos can be used for everything from tutorials to customer service. According to Moz, posts that feature videos earn an average of 300% more inbound links, so it’s well worth your time to begin including them in your content.
Memes: Memes rose to prominence as a funny form of visual content that was popularized by sites like Buzzfeed. Today, memes are a refreshing way to break up your content and create something with a high likelihood of going viral.
Screenshots: Screenshots are a fantastic way to illustrate a concept to your users and can be especially helpful in blog posts that are how-to or tutorial-focused. Snap a screenshot of a new platform you’re offering tips on using or the difference in page analytics. Doing this can help your users fully grasp the concept at hand.
Step #6: Include infographics
Yes, infographics are visual content, but in a way they’re a league all their own. Infographics take the informative nature of textual content and combine it with the appealing nature of visual content to form a power-packed image designed to earn shares and go viral. Perfect for everything from complex industry knowledge to silly facts, infographics are a fantastic way to transmit a large amount of information to your readers in a short, condensed format.
Infographics boast many unique values, including the fact that they can help you increase traffic to your site, provide an easily scannable form of content for users, provide compelling visual content users want to interact with and convey expert understanding of a topic.
You’ve probably seen infographics before but even if you’ve never created one, you have a few options. First, you can hire a designer to do it for you. This option may be more expensive than the DIY-approach, but it will often generate a much more put-together product, which is what you want if you’re including infographics as a way to boost your site authority.
If that’s not your style, you can always opt to create one using one of the many free infographic creation services on the web today. No matter what you choose to do, including infographics in your content marketing is a solid way to increase your site authority and boost your shares. In fact, Unbounce has found that publishers who make use of infographics grow their traffic an average of 12% over those who don’t. Additionally, 65% of people classify themselves as visual learners, which means that infographics are a fantastic way to help users absorb information.
Want to go a step beyond infographics? We created a gifographic and it gained massive shares. Check out this guide we wrote on how and why to create a gifographic.
Need infographic services? We have a professional team on board to design, and our writers are trained in writing expert infographic copy. Buy here!
Conclusion
Now is a great time to focus on improving your site authority–don’t wait till the next first-of-the-year or even the next month.
If growing in online rankings is on your to-do list, we’ve just given you some great key steps to get you started. From focusing on publishing and refreshing content to optimizing your meta tags and including appealing visual content in your marketing strategy, there are many things you can do to increase your visitor rates and boost your site’s overall authority.
While many people regard site authority as a stagnant and immovable measurement, it’s actually quite easy to improve by focusing on accommodating user needs, providing valuable content, offering an intuitive and easy to navigate site design, and being willing to adjust your strategy as needed.
Whether you’re an old pro or a new SEO just getting started, these tips can help you earn the site authority ranking you truly deserve.
Feel like something is missing from this guide? Let me know in the comments below!
For many years, “keyword density” was the holy grail of SEO content.
There have been dozens, if not hundreds of theories on what the optimal keyword density is, from formulas produced to strict guidelines on how writers should be using it in SEO content daily.
No one knows better than me. I came from the old Google days (pre-2012) when online writers were sometimes treated as the minions of SEO black hats. It was rough: we had to stuff in those keywords like nobody’s business, no matter how much they read awkwardly.
According to many industry experts, however, keyword density has now completely died today.
Is that true? Let’s chat about it.
What Really is Keyword Density?
Keyword density is the measurement that indicates how many times a keyword appears in a piece of content (i.e. blog, web page) versus the total number of words in the piece. Keywords were counted within content, headings, meta descriptions, image names and alt tags to provide what many experts believed for many years was a better user experience.
Keyword density was calculated by the number of times a specific keyword was included in content, divided by the total number of words in an analyzed text, x one hundred. For example: 10 keywords in 500 words = 2% keyword density.
Here’s an official chart showing the formula:
Photo courtesy sycosure.com
This formula, while it may seem meaningless today, was very popular in and around 2011 and was widely believed to be the “right” way to do SEO content.
As I mentioned earlier, I remember the days of stuffing my SEO content with keywords and counting said density, and it was rough. Marketers in 2011 thought creating 50 articles on this exact keyword “payday loan Atlanta Georgia” was a good idea, and those keywords stuffed in made the content like the most overstuffed Thanksgiving turkey you ever saw.
Now as you and any good content marketer knows, today’s content is more about peoplethan keywords.
And that’s the real reason we don’t count our keywords any more.
Let’s explore further why keyword density is officially dead.
The Keyword Density Booby Trap
According to Moz, companies that focus too much on attaining a certain keyword density often run the risk of ruining content, slaughtering credibility, annoying readers, and earning themselves all too many “back” clicks. Strong words, right?
Unfortunately, Moz is right. It stands to reason that keyword density may be one of the great SEO myths of our day. While keyword density is meant to create a more readable document, more often than not it simply destroys the legibility and readability of content, creating low conversion rates and poor user experience.
Why, then, have we been taught that keyword density is the end-all-be-all of SEO and high-quality content? For one, many people were taught to believe that keyword density is how search engines determine the relevance of a given page.
This couldn’t be further from the truth. According to Moz, if search engines focused solely on keyword density to rank pages, all content creators would need to do is repeat the keyword phrase of choice over and over again in order to rank well in Google. And, trust us, Google is not that stupid.
In fact, it’s likely that Google evolved beyond that in the late 90’s. That said, it’s unwise to use density as a reliable metric in today’s search climate. Most reputable keyword tools have already kicked it to the curb. In order to rank pages, Google does take keywords into account but the actual density doesn’t matter nearly as much as we’ve always believed it does.
The Pitfalls of Keyword Density
When you really think about it, keyword density is a fluid term. To have a certain number of keywords in a piece of content is one thing, but to attain the correct relative position and dispersion of keywords throughout the document is entirely another.
The traditional measure of keyword density fails to take into account things like how many documents are relevant for a given keyword or how the piece of content targeting the keyword uses things like internal linking, webpage structure, user experience (including how long users interact with a page and what the page’s bounce rate is), domain age, and back links.
Yes: Keyword Density is Now Confirmed as a Useless Metric
Because of this, keyword density is essentially a useless metric which many industry leaders believe is a complete waste of time. According to Moz, “people who chase some mystical on-page keyword density are probably doing more harm than good.”
This update allowed Google to process search results based on semantic search, which evaluates results based on their ability to match user intent, rather than ranking them by keyword density and other Boolean measurements.
As soon as Hummingbird came out, marketers began to re-evaluate their relationships with keyword density. Specifically, many marketers began wondering if keyword density mattered as much as they had always thought it did. Overwhelmingly, the answer was “no.”
Before semantic search, Google used metrics like keywords and linking architecture to determine which pages were the best match to a reader’s intent and query. Once the search engine had evaluated these things, it returned rank-ordered results that were based largely upon how well the page’s keywords matched to the number of links within the site as a whole. More keywords, more positive evaluation, generally.
This led to the rise of keyword density and to many marketers beginning to see keyword density as one of the best ways to rank well in Google. This, in turn, led not only to a craze with keyword density but also to black-hat SEO tactics like keyword stuffing and predatory linking strategies.
Semantic Search De-Values the Keyword “Overstuffing” Density
Fortunately, the introduction of Hummingbird altered the playing field in a big way. One of the main things Hummingbird did was use semantic search principals to make keyword stuffing and misleading linking strategies too difficult and expensive to pursue.
Because Hummingbird evaluates content based on its relevance and value to a reader, it actually looks at contextual relevancy (the words around your keywords) more than it does your keywords themselves. This allows the search engine to determine which pages best match user intent and are most likely to be relevant to a reader.
Because Hummingbird understands that the correlation between themes, videos, and topics is more important than the number of times a given keyword appears in a piece of content, it ranks pages that place an increased focus on context higher than it does pages that focus mainly on keywords. Because of this, many marketers have been proclaiming the death of keyword density for years.
5 Post-Hummingbird Keyword Truths
Now that we’ve discussed semantic search, it’s important to think about what exactly, keywords are doing in today’s society.
So, here are the five golden truths of today’s modern keyword rules:
1. Keywords are tools to discover a user’s intent
Just because keyword density doesn’t truly matter any longer, keywords are still important. Instead of being measured against a meaningless metric, however, they’re now used to determine what a user is looking for. This means that all the words in a query are important but that the connection between them is now the focus.
2. Keyword density is dead
We can talk about it openly now – keyword density truly is dead. Content that is created with the goal of satisfying a set keyword density number generally isn’t catering to user needs and we know that, in 2016 and beyond, value, relevance, and interest are the most important metrics search engines are using to evaluate content.
3. Keyword research isn’t as important as user intent
Knowing which keywords will rank well is one thing but knowing what the intent behind those keywords is is entirely another. As search engine algorithms continue to get smarter, it’s imperative that marketers learn to focus on providing content that caters to a user’s intent rather than a set of obscure (and outdated) ranking algorithms.
4. Use natural synonyms
Now more than ever, readers are happy to leave if your content feels spammy or forced. This means that instead of stuffing your content with keywords, you need to employ natural synonyms in a comfortable way. This makes your content feel varied, unique, and interesting.
5. Focus on quality over anything else
SEO is a little bit like fashion: there’s always a new trend on the horizon. When you buck the trends, though, and focus instead on providing lasting, valuable content that fits your reader’s needs, you can begin to create more sustainable content that helps meet your user’s needs.
A Better Way: 3 Modern Keyword Tips
If keyword density is dead (and it is), what remains? Ideally, writing content boils down to using a natural language pattern that revolves around keywords, nouns, verbs, and synonyms. This is where a page gets its true meaning and value
In this type of construct, keywords are not nearly as important as the words that surround them. For example, “Apple” could refer to the tasty, crispy fruit or the world-famous tech company. With that in mind, there are a few ways to proceed into the post-keyword age. Here’s what we recommend:
1. Use keywords in the headline
Your on-page content is very important. With that in mind, it’s important to learn how to use keywords correctly in your headline. This is not because SEO requires you to master flawless keyword placement or to use your keywords in your H1 and H2 tags. In fact, many experts say that it truly doesn’t matter if you use keywords in you H1 and H2. Rather, the reason this is so important, is that people click on your page expecting to wind up on a page featuring the same headline as the one they clicked in the SERPs. If this doesn’t happen, they’ll happily click the “back” button in order to find a page that they believe more closely matches their queries.
This is called “pogo-sticking” and it’s a real problem in SEO. When people navigate from SERPs to a page, back to the SERPs several times, the search engine gets the distinct message that people aren’t happy with the provided search results. This causes the search engine to down-rank a set page or assume that its relevance and value aren’t up to par. Fortunately, this isn’t fixed by stuffing more keywords into your text, but rather by using them correctly in order to create a relevant, valuable page that your readers appreciate.
2. Choose user experience over keyword density
If you have a choice between using your keyword phrase a set number of times or providing a great user experience, you should always, always choose the latter. This is especially important in light of Google’s recent Hummingbird update, which allowed the search engine to become incredibly sophisticated about how it evaluates text and the relevance and contextual value of it.
In light of updates like these, it’s no longer web pages with the “correct” level of keyword relevance that are winning the race, but pages that offer the best and most sophisticated content that most closely matches the intent and desires of the searcher. In light of this, it’s more important to connect the concepts and vocabulary that a search engine associates with a certain concept and to use those things to make your content strong, valuable, and interesting.
3. Provide unique content
This is the battle cry for content creators everywhere: in order to be valuable, your content needs to be unique, but what is unique content really? To put it simply, unique content is content that provides helpful information to users packaged in a neat and exciting little package. To be clear, this means more than just providing content that doesn’t exist anywhere else on the web: it also means providing content that offers a unique information and value that a reader can’t find anywhere else. This, in turn, involves using keywords in a unique and specific way that allows them to enhance rather than downgrade your text.
Conclusion
Keyword density is dead, and we might as well mourn it now. Fortunately, the passing of this useless metric frees us up to focus on more important things, like providing an outstanding user experience and writing content that caters to our users, rather than to some useless ranking metric that nobody truly cares about, anyway.
We never stuff our content with keywords. Order your correctly optimized, reader-friendly SEO content from our Content Shop.
