Six SEO Facts About All High-Ranking Content

While search engine optimization (SEO) has become a common term in the online marketing lexicon, many folks will struggle to tell you exactly how SEO helps bring relevant traffic to the client—and marketers are at a severe disadvantage without that knowledge.

6 facts about high-ranking SEO contentOur relationship to technology is rapidly evolving, and Google’s SEO algorithms have steadily adapted in response to our behavior.

The good news is SEO analysts from across the web regularly gather some pretty revealing statistical data about which key factors help or hinder the performance of an article, page, or post.

So what are these SEO factors, and why should content creators and marketers pay attention to them if they want to increase their digital presence and performance? Here are six high-impact areas to focus on with SEO efforts.

Mobile Friendliness
Content Length
SEO Generates Leads
Long-Tail Keywords Perform Best
Video Content Is Growing
Images Improve Rankings

As such, there’s been extra focus on making sites more mobile-friendly over the past few years. In fact, Google rewards mobile-friendly sites with a higher search engine results page (SERP) position and penalizes the sites that aren’t.

In order to stay in the mix, a website must be designed to make its material friendly for mobile users. This is no longer just a matter of user experience. Without mobile-friendly design, your online presence will take a hit and it will be reflected in your traffic numbers!

According to Statista, mobile web traffic accounted for 38.7% of total North American web traffic in November 2018. If well over one-third of potential customers are visiting your site from their phones, it has to be easy to navigate!

#2. Content Length

Fact: Longer content (1000 words +) will attract more interaction from potential customers.

A 2016 study from Backlinko found that the average first-page result on Google clocked in at 1,890 words. Generally, high-performing content will be over 1,000 words in length.

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15 Questions to Ask When Hiring an SEO Professional (Seriously)

Organic (non-paid) search is the largest single source of visits for most B2B websites. The majority of sites generate between 40% and two-thirds of their total traffic from search. Making sure your site is as highly visible as possible in search and maximizing visits requires professional SEO help—whether that comes from inside your company, or from an expert SEO consultant or agency.

If you’re hiring SEO expertise from the outside, how do you make sure you’ve found the best expert or agency for your needs?

How to hire an SEO expert

First, ask other business owners and marketing leaders, in your network or your favorite LinkedIn group, for references. These are often your best leads.

Second, do some online research. But beware of guides written by SEO professionals that are really more about why you should hire them than about making the best choice. (Since I’ve now left the consulting world, nope, back at it—but this post is still my most objective guidance.)

Third, once you have a short list of SEO consultants or agencies to consider, ask them the following 15 questions to help ensure you select a resource who can both meet your needs and is someone you’ll enjoy working with.

1) What are the most important factors in search engine ranking, and how will you help me get better results?
This isn’t really a question of knowledge (any experienced SEO pro should be able to answer without fumbling for words). Rather, it’s question designed to get at the consultant’s communication skills. Can they provide not only an accurate explanation, but also answer in a way you understand clearly? Or do they excessively throw out jargon and acronyms?

Good answer: something about how two factors—relevance and authority—form the fundamental underpinnings of search ranking; something about the hundreds of individual elements Google and other search engines use in determining rank; something about the three pillars of SEO (technical, content, and off-page); and perhaps something about how certain fundamental practices remain constant (e.g., writing to solve specific problems for specific types of people) even as search engine algorithms continually evolve.

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How to Master YouTube SEO, in 10 Easy Steps

sk a lot of marketers about their YouTube SEO strategy, and you’ll get a blank stare.

Most marketers invest in optimizing their website SEO, but they miss the massive opportunity to rank their video content on YouTube. YouTube SEO may seem complicated, but if you’ve ever Googled how to do something mundane, you likely already understand it.

For example, I recently decided to make a fennel and herb stuffing. But there was one problem. When I pulled out a giant bunch of fennel, I realized I had absolutely no idea what to do with it. So, of course, I Googled “how do I chop a fennel bulb?” This is what I found:

YouTube thrives because it serves content viewers want, keeping them engaged. It has evolved to bury all things boring, irrelevant, and misleading with ruthless efficiency.

That’s why you need to make it easy for YouTube to understand why your content is relevant to a particular topic.

Perfecting your YouTube SEO strategy

A great YouTube SEO strategy takes 10 relatively easy steps. And like all things SEO, it begins with the all mighty keyword.

1. Identify your target keywords

Identifying your target keywords is step one in the content development process. Doing this first will allow you to organically build them into your content. Remember, everything in your video is searchable (more on that later). If you neglect keywords during the briefing and scripting phase, you’ve already missed an opportunity to help your videos rank.

Use a keyword tool like TubeBuddy or SEMRush to make sure you’re picking keywords that people will search for, but also aren’t so saturated that your video would never stand a chance (good luck getting that generic makeup tutorial to rank).

Since both Google and YouTube leverage semantic search, you want to focus on keywords that relate to a specific “query”, or question someone is trying to answer—like how to chop a fennel bulb.

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The Biggest SEO Mistake Content Marketers Make

This summer, I conducted empathy interviews a bunch of our clients and prospects to understand their content marketing challenges. One big pain point: SEO.

SEO remains a huge part of content marketing, as it should be. High-ranking content creates long-term value for your brand. It’s a key part of what Tomasz Tunguz calls the compounding returns of content marketing.

When you invest in content and a strong SEO strategy, you drive more and more valuable traffic to your site over time, resulting in compounding returns on your content marketing investment.

The problem with SEO is that many companies’ content SEO strategy looks like this:

Step 1: The content team creates a pretty good article.

Step 2: They pass it off to the SEO team, who stuff the piece with a bunch of keywords that make it nearly unreadable and press publish.

Step 3: The content team cries, and the piece doesn’t perform well against search anyway BECAUSE THAT’S NOT HOW SEO WORKS ANYMORE.

Even in 2020, I see this same mistake made over and over again. Instead, marketers should:

A) Factor a target keyword into content planning and production from the beginning, so that it’s naturally integrated into the piece. Since Google has shifted to semantic search, you want to focus on long-tail keywords associated with a question that someone’s trying to answer. (i.e., “What makes good content marketing,” “content marketing tips”). By answering the question at hand, you build SEO into the editorial process and avoid keyword stuffing.

B) Prioritize quality over everything else. Nowadays, Google prioritizes backlinks and E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) ratings in their rankings. The easiest way to drive both of those up is to create interesting content with original research and reporting related to your industry. You need to create content that inspires people to link, share, and spend time on page. And you need Google to see you as an expert in the core topics you’re covering.

In 2020, this is what matters. Traditional keyword stuffing is now terrible for your SEO. And mediocre content that won’t earn links is essentially worthless. Focus on publishing original research and reporting that helps answer your audience’s big questions. Focus on quality over quantity. Bring your SEO team in at the beginning of the content planning process—and then politely kick them out of the editing room. If you do that, I promise: You’ll see greater SEO results this year.

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There lots of SEO tool suites available to help marketing and SEO pros more effectively manage their search optimization efforts and analyze competitors.

SEO tools - Serpstat vs SEMrushBut two of the most popular SEO tools are Serpstat and SEMRush. Although at first glance the tools offer similar features, on closer inspection it’s clear there are crucial differences which could impact both your search campaign and your wallet.

Here’s a comparison and analysis of the important features of both Serpstat and SEMrush.

UPDATE: Serpstat recently announced a pricing change and “last chance sale” ending June 10. Get the details here.

Starting with the main feature of each tool, both Serpstat and SEMrush allow for easy-to-use and in-depth keyword research of both your own domain and those of competitors.

Each tool offers a variety of data from rank based on geographic region to keyword information on both SEO and PPC campaigns.

Serpstat provides information on over 180 million domains, compared to SEMrush’s 87 million. Serpstat also retains information on over 168 million ads.

Evaluate Keyword by Difficulty

Both tools offer visual representations of organic keyword ranking difficulty, with colors and numbers detailing the metrics for each individual keyword.

Each tool also highlights competing sites that are currently ranking for the keywords; enabling you to work out which keywords are actually worth chasing.

It’s worth noting that Serpstat offers an interesting feature called “Missing Keywords”. This highlights competitor pages ranking in the top 10 ranking positions for keywords you’re  missing, enabling to potentially get an easy advantage when you need it.

Sort Keywords by Topic

Again, both tools include this feature, though under different names.

In SEMrush, you’ll find this under “keyword magic tool”; in Serpstat, this is simply named “keyword clustering tool.”

Both tool features allow users to easily divide and filter keywords by topic, intention, and implication.

Serpstat arguably has the edge in this area as it also analyses meaningful connections between keywords, which are then split into intelligent hierarchies.

It also has a text analytics function which allows for a content analysis of your site alongside competitor websites.

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The 3 Most Successful Content Marketing Case Studies I Know Of

While innovation and thinking outside the box are important for success in marketing, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel every time. By studying the best content marketing case studies, we can learn the most effective techniques and take inspiration to use in our own content marketing strategy.

Quick Takeaways:

There’s a lot to learn from studying the most successful content marketing examples.
It’s not always easy to get executive buy-in for content marketing.

You can usually prove the content marketing business case with a small budget and a limited timeframe.
Capgemini

Consulting company Capgemini had a problem. The awareness of their brand was low and they needed to boost the reputation of their consultants. Despite working with some of the world’s top brands including KPMG, Deloitte, and Accenture, revenue growth was slow and they were falling behind their competitors.

The executives at Capgemini believed the answer to their lackluster marketing efforts was to invest in paid advertising in golf magazines and airports, and even to sponsor a professional golfer. They’d seen their competitors carry out this strategy with apparent success.

However, digital advertising and brand campaign manager Rena Patel was of a different opinion. She’d tried this type of expensive marketing before and had seen disappointing results. Rena had also realized the brand was not engaging with its customers and that this proposed strategy was even further from the interests of their customers. Capgemini customers were not interested in golf, and most didn’t even know the names of the famous golfers that the brand executives wanted to sponsor.

Instead, she set out a content marketing plan that would engage Capgemini with its target audience at a much lower budget. She set the goal of attracting nearly a million new visitors to the website and put her own reputation and job on the line by taking full responsibility for the strategy.

The content marketing strategy for Capgemini revolved around a storytelling website. This site answered some of the real questions and challenges of the brand’s customers on topics such as Big Data and the Cloud.

After one year, the site achieved Rena’s original goal of delivering nearly one million new visitors to the brand website. They also attracted over 100,000 new followers to their LinkedIn page, as well as 1.8 million shares of their content. In fact, this content marketing strategy was responsible for generating nearly $1 million in sales in just the first year, and an even more impressive $5 million in its second year. It’s now estimated that the content marketing program pioneered by Rena is brining in the company a staggering $20 million a year.

You can read more about Rena’s content marketing strategy for Capgemini in the book Mean People Suck.

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Business Marketing Strategy Basics: How to Learn Copywriting

Copywriters are one of the most essential people to add to your marketing team to help skyrocket your business and sales. But what about when you don’t have it in the budget yet or are unable to find someone to write your copy? Well, now is the perfect time to learn the skill that has made many of business owners successful over the years.

Marketers have often reported significant increases in their sales when they’ve consciously applied copywriting methods. You don’t have to be an expert for this to work for you. Keep reading to find out how to learn to copywrite to take your business to the next level.

Study Great Copywriters

If you want to be great, you need to learn from some of the greatest. This is one of the best methods on how to learn to Copywrite. You’ll get a chance to see different philosophies, lessons and rules about learning the skill from people who have generated millions using it.

Some of the lessons may seem a little outdated because most of the best copywriters started years ago. However, most of the information still applies because human nature in marketing psychology hasn’t really changed at its core. And, there are some general rules of thumb that will never go out of style.

Here are some masters of the craft to begin your studies with:

John Caples
David Ogilvy
Eugene Schwartz
Gary Halbert
Robert Collier

Get familiar with their work and copywriting basics then apply what you’ve learned.

Forget School Grammar Rules

Yes, this is an actual fact on how to learn to Copywrite. The problem is when you’re writing sales copy, grammar rules aren’t the main focus of making or breaking a sale. The rule against not beginning a sentence with “but” or “and” doesn’t really matter much in the offline or online copywriting world.

And there are plenty of other grammatical rules that a lot of copywriters don’t need to worry about in order to write compelling copy. Because the whole point of writing copy is to get your readers to do, think or feel something. It’s not for them to comb through your words with a red pen.

This isn’t an excuse for unnecessarily poor grammar or spelling habits. But you can loosen up a bit to make the copy more natural and easier to read.

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