Google heavily considers the overall user experience for your website ranking. You can produce the best content, utilize an excellent inbound marketing strategy, but it will mean very little if the act of using your site is an absolute nightmare.

The information your website contains only matters if your average user can benefit from it in a reasonable, efficient manner. For that reason, we're here to show you how to improve SEO with user experience factors in mind.

What is User Experience Design?

User experience design determines the type of encounter a person will have when interacting with a website or piece of software.

The goal of all UX design is to create your software or a website in a way that makes that experience simple, intuitive, and enjoyable for the user. It should be simple to navigate, easy to access key information, and be pleasant for the user to interact with and look upon.

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How Does the User Experience and SEO Interact?

To answer this question, we first must understand that SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of improving a website's content and appearance to increase its visibility within search engine results pages (SERPs).

While Google's search algorithm is not fully understood by the public, we do know that it uses hundreds of ranking factors when determining the overall quality of a site's SEO. Among these are positive user signals that it uses to determine whether or not users are satisfied and benefit from the site's user experience.

If a website does not feature a quality user experience, then the likelihood of that user using or staying on the site drops dramatically. Google's algorithm notices these trends, understands that the UX is poor, and then reflects this by significantly lowering the site's search ranking. If the site is not proving to be useful to users, there's no reason for Google to continue suggesting it to users over superior websites.

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With this in mind, let's explore the positive user signals that Google looks for when determining the quality of a site's UX. Then, we'll walk you through the UX SEO best practices and show you how to improve website UX like a professional.

Positive User Signals for a Healthy UX

If you want to improve your site's UX in the eyes of your audience, you need to understand which metrics are valuable for feedback and analysis. When designing and testing new layouts or website content, keep an eye on these user signals to determine if your UX trends are n a positive or negative direction.

1. Repeat Traffic

New visitors are important for growth, but repeat traffic is a strong indicator that your website offers something worth revisiting. If your repeat traffic is low, consider that the content on your website might be interesting or helpful to your audience. There may be aspects of your UX that make browsing the information on your website less than enjoyable.

2. Bounce Rate

Bounce Rate refers to how often a new visitor quickly exits your domain. Users generally “bounce” away for the following reasons:

• The website does not offer information that is relevant to the search query
• The content is uninteresting or unhelpful
• It’s too difficult to find any relevant information
• The website design is unappealing
• It’s difficult to navigate the website
• The site contains intrusive or invasive advertisements

Tracking this metric can go hand-in-hand with your repeat traffic. If your repeat traffic is low and your bounce rate is high, then it's time to investigate and remedy the errors that are present in your site's UX.

3. Organic CTR

Organic CTR, or organic clickthrough rate refers to the rate at which users access your domain through an organic search. This is as opposed to discovering your website by clicking on paid advertisements.

A high organic CTR can be an indicator that your site provides a pleasant UX and is worthy of a higher search ranking. Sites with strong organic CTR tend to appear on the first page of Google search results.

4. Healthy Backlinks Profile

A backlink refers to any link that exists on an external domain and directs the user to your website. Acquiring backlinks is an important part of building your SEO, but only if those backlinks come from high-quality, trustworthy domains.

Think of using backlinks as identifying which websites you would like to be in your neighborhood. If the sites backlinking to yours are from a trusted neighborhood, then Google will have greater confidence that your site offers a high-quality experience. Conversely, if your backlinks are from low-quality or toxicā  domains, it can negatively impact your SEO.

How to Improve Website UX and SEO?

Now that you understand UX and the ranking signals, let's dive into the strategies you can implement to start improving your user experience today.

1. Keep Your Site Navigation Simple and Convenient

Improving your user experience should often prove intuitive. As someone who browses the internet yourself, you already know the features that you enjoy on your favorite websites. Among these is a simple and elegant approach to site navigation.

Regardless of how many web pages your website contains, users should be able to easily keep track of the navigation. At any point, it should be convenient for a user to quickly trace their steps back to a page that contains the information that's most relevant to them. There are a few key ways to improve this process.

First, the header of your website should contain a navigational map that points users to your primary pages. Notice the navigation menu at the top of our website as an example:-

This menu clearly segments all of the pages on our website by using the most relevant category names. When you hover over a particular area, you can then preview the subcategories that apply to that main category only. Additionally, every category contains a brief description to help direct you to your ideal location. However, there are additional ways you can help improve your navigation.

If you click on our brand logo, you will always navigate back to the home page. This is a common tactic for every webmaster to help users quickly get back to their initial starting point. In addition to this, we segment two call-to-actions that are relevant to new and returning visitors. Login allows our users to quickly access their accounts. The “Try Now” provides a convenient way for new users to test out our platform and learn more.

Finally, the navigation menu is always present on top of the page regardless of where you scroll. This provides a better user experience by ensuring that users do not get lost and the next page is always within reach.

Improving Your Website Content

2. Create Content That Serves Users, Not Search Engines

In previous times, it was the strategy of SEO specialists and content writers to create content that heavily features target keywords. While using keywords is by no means an issue, the resulting content was often stilted and existed to help boost search rankings. With improvements in technology, particularly Natural Language Processing, this is no longer the case.

Google realizes that the way we previously tried speaking to machines is not entirely compatible with human ideas or conversation. For this reason, their algorithm is now able to better understand the true intention behind a search query and provide real answers as results, not just content that contains the keyword.

For this reason, you are highly encouraged to create content that effectively answers the questions and concerns of your target audience. Your words should reflect the way you would speak to your customers, both in syntax and tone. Researching and utilizing keywords is still the best way to connect your content with audiences, but they should be used in a way that is natural and services the user first.

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Similarly, you should not necessarily mandate a content maximum length for your web pages. While it is true that longer articles perform better, this is because those longer content pieces contain greater information that goes further in-depth than your typical blog post. Writing 3,000 words is not an excuse to stuff keywords as much as possible.

3. Clearly Outline Your Content with Well-Defined Headlines

A healthy way to boost your SEO and improve your UX is to create a clear outline of the page's content. Unless a person is sitting down to read a novel, they're unlikely to dedicate their full attention to reading a high volume of content. They're even less likely to do so if they cannot be sure what the content discusses.

For this reason, you should utilize the header attribute when defining what your content discusses for new visitors. If you check out the most popular, top-ranking search results, you'll find that virtually every page features this design.

Content creators should utilize the primary or H1 header for titles. Not only does it explain the content in large text to users, but it's also the first thing search engine crawlers see when exploring new pages. Secondary and tertiary topics should feature H2 and H3 tags respectively to help segment new ideas, but illustrate the lesser importance compared to the H1.

Users will be able to quickly comb through a page of content and quickly identify the information that's most interesting to them by the headline. Empowering your users this way is exactly what you want to achieve to provide a better user experience for SEO.

4. Summarize Key Data Points

Even if the content length is not an issue for some visitors, they may face issues with information retention. For this reason, you can further improve the UX and enhance your content by effectively summarizing key data points.

Authors often do this by distilling their ideas into bulleted or numbered lists for users to review. You can either do this at the end of a dense or lengthy section or feature it within your conclusions at the end of the article. Again, improving your user experience is about finding ways to make your content as user-friendly and accessible as possible.

5. Empower Your Content with Visual Media

Not every user absorbs information the same way, and your website should attempt to address this if you want to improve your UX. We highly recommend improving the content on your various web pages by implementing visual media such as images, GIFs, or videos when applicable.

These supplemental forms of information provide alternative ways for users to quickly grab onto and absorb information about your brand. If a person is unwilling or unable to read through a heavy amount of text, they may be able to grab the bullet points from an effective infographic or a catchy video.

Providing unique ways for your users to interact with and engage with your website will help to drive all of the positive user signals discussed above. Because you are providing a better user experience to a wider variety of visitors, your SEO will improve and so will your search engine rankings.

Improving the Web Page Experience

6. Optimize Your Load Times ASAP

The speed at which a webpage loads is critical to providing a quality user experience. Pingdom suggests that the average page loading time is roughly 3.21 seconds. Furthermore, pages that take longer than this load see a dramatic increase in their bounce rate. In the same study, a page taking merely five seconds to load sees an average bounce rate of approximately 38%.

What this tells us is that users highly value their time and equate poor load times to a poor user experience. Your website might feature the best design and the greatest content the world has ever seen, but it matters little if it takes too long to deliver. That sharp increase in your bounce rate will impair your SEO and tell search engines to stop providing your site as a result to its users.

You can utilize Google's PageSpeed Insights tool to gain critical feedback on how your website performs. It will also include recommendations for optimizations based on the severity of the issue.

For broad strokes as to what you can do to improve your loading times, follow these tips:

• Use lightweight images and optimize them for faster loading
• Host any video content on an external server
• Minify your website’s code to improve request times
• Eliminate dead or outdated code
• Use simple, lightweight page templates
• Enable browser caching to assist returning visitors

You can learn more about how to improve your website speed by checking out our in-depth article on the subject here.

7. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

Using the desktop PC as a primary browsing device is a relic of the past. While they still have their uses and are critical for work environments, casual audiences are turning to their mobile phones for their internet experiences. It's estimated by studies that as much as 55% of all worldwide web traffic occurs through mobile devices.

Why does this matter when it comes to your user experience?

The technological limitations of a mobile device will greatly impact both the performance and appearance of your web pages. First, the viewport of a mobile device drastically reduces the amount of content that can effectively appear on a page. If you do not design your website with this in mind, you're alienating more than half of your potential audience.

You can account for this segment of your audience in one of two ways. The first is to keep your webpage design simple and utilize a layout that allows for quality viewing on both desktop and mobile. However, this can often handcuff you regarding your options when you want to take advantage of a more powerful device.

The second option is to design a mobile version of your site that's more lightweight. You can utilize AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) to ensure that these versions of your web pages can benefit from accelerated mobile load times. You'll want to avoid incorporating large files on the page and defer the loading of any content that does not need to be in the immediate view of the user.

To ensure mobile responsiveness:

• Customize the page layout for smaller viewport
• Resize important page elements such as buttons and CTAs
• Use a font size that is easily readable, but doesn’t overwhelm the page
• Use themes designed to be mobile-ready
• Use a lightweight CSS
• Do not implement intrusive pop-ups

8. Utilize 301 Redirects

A 301 redirect helps your website by directing users that are trying to access non-existent pages to the new, updated page. Redirects are a natural part of the internet and Google will not penalize you for broken links pointing to your site from external domains. It is, however, your responsibility to improve your UX by getting traffic to the correct destination.

You can implement both permanent redirects and temporary redirects depending on your business needs. A redirect does add a minuscule amount of time to the loading process, but it is far better to ensure that a potential lead can access your brand’s content reliably. Failure to utilize redirects won’t harm you, but all of that potential traffic goes to waste and does not benefit you as a positive user signal.

Google provides help with SEO documentation on how to implement the various types of redirects here.

9. Make Your 404 Error Pages Informative

A 404 error is another type of common page error that every user encounters online. A 404 occurs when a web browser is unsuccessful in obtaining website data from a server request. This can occur for several reasons including:

• The page is down for maintenance
• The page no longer exists
• You changed the page URL
• User error in entering the correct URL

A default 404 page provides no details and will usually suggest reloading the browser. The problem is, a 404 usually means that the page doesn't exist and the browser will simply yield a 404 in perpetuity. Instead, you can create custom 404 pages and utilize them to inform your audience and improve your site's user experience.

Creating a custom 404 page is a simple process and involves creating a new, simplistic page that's excluded from Google search results. This will allow you to have full control over the design including images, appearance, and further navigation options. Most importantly, it can educate the user on why the 404 occurred. It can then provide similar benefits to 301 redirects by getting users to a more ideal location.

When designing a custom 404 page, keep it simple. Only advise the user on what they need to know including why the error occurred and where they can go to access the information they want.

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A popular CMS such as WordPress will provide you with plugins that can simplify the process of using a custom 404 redirect with no coding expertise required. For other custom websites, you’ll need to get a bit more involved:

1. After creating your 404 page, save it as an HTML file. Remember to name the file something that you and your team can easily remember for future access.
2. Locate your website’s root directory and upload the HTML file.
3. Next, locate the website’s .htaccess file. This is a file that Apache web servers use to help in customizing a site’s directory. Open the file. (Note: If your directory lacks this file, you can create a basic one using a text editor on your PC. Remember to name it “.htaccess”.
4. Within the file, enter “ErrorDocument 404 / “YourFileNameHere”. “YourFileNameHere” will contain the actual name of your HTML file. Save your changes. (If you created a new .htaccess file, you will need to also upload this to the root directory).

As with any website design changes, test that your new 404 page works correctly before republishing your website.

User Experience and SEO - Improve Both to Improve Your Rankings!

Not only does Google look for the best information possible, but it also seeks to deliver that information reliably and effectively to its users. When looking to improve your SEO and search rankings, you need to ensure that you provide a user experience that satisfies the visitor's needs and is worthy of Google's recommendation.

Consumers are savvy and simply want to receive direct answers to their questions effectively. A simple website that provides concise content, a clean layout, and lightning-fast load speeds are certain to gain more traction online than a cumbersome, bloated mess. A site that earns organic clicks, shares, and repeat traffic is the type of site that conquers search engine results pages.

You can't have a site with strong SEO without providing a top-tier user experience. Utilizing these tips will help to drive the positive user signals that Google looks for including low bounce rate, high CTR, repeat traffic, backlinks, and higher session duration. You earn these by catering to users first so that search engines can perform their job more effectively.

Content marketing is the indisputable king of driving organic and paid sales. If you don't emphasize content, you're doomed to failure.

SEO-driven content marketing is the key to helping Google recognize you and improving your search rankings. SEO acts as the blueprint to determine how we should create our content so that search engines can deliver the message to the right audience. The more efficient we are with targeting users, the more likely we are to improve our sales.

In this article, we're going to dive into the types of content marketing that exist along with their unique purposes for existing. Then, we'll deliver an SEO content marketing strategy to drive leads and sales to your business like never before.

What Are the Types of SEO Content Marketing?

When we discuss content marketing and sales, we can be speaking about several different types of content marketing that are deployed for different purposes. Examples of these are as follows:

1. Blog Content

Blogs provide many open-ended opportunities for content creation. These are articles that you will use to drive organic traffic to your site by creating topics based on popular keywords or focusing on trending news. Blogs are meant to provide informational content. However, they can naturally present opportunities to highlight your products and services and explain how they fit in with the topic of the article.

2. Social Media Content

Social media is also a multipurpose content creation tool that allows for shorter, less informal conversations with your audience. You can highlight products or promotions, provide quick takes on trending topics, promote blog content, or tell stories with images or videos. With this, you'll want to take advantage of platform-specific content creation tools to fit in better with your target audience.

3. PPC Ads and Landing Pages

This type of content is meant to highly target your audience to push conversions. We typically use these marketing tools to gather and segment leads or to drive sales on a specific item or promotion. The content is still key here as it educates customers, alleviates pressing concerns, and creates a sense of FOMO that helps capture important marketing data.

4. Videos

Videos can include content from all of the above but differ greatly in how it is presented and received. A Social Media Week study suggests that 78% of people watch videos every week and 55% watch them every day. Seeing and hearing information is much more dynamic, and videos allow audiences to associate your material with a friendly face. You can use videos for social proof, to provide visual education, or to create short snippets that are primed for widespread sharing and viewing.

5. Podcasts

Podcasts are still young as a medium but are growing at a rapid pace. Insider Intelligence claims that by the end of 2021, monthly US podcast listeners will reach 117.8 million. This form of talk radio allows brands to discuss long-form content in a way that allows listeners to feel like they are a part of the conversation. It's also widely accessible as users can consume the content from their mobile devices wherever they are at any time.

The SEO-Driven Content Marketing Strategy to Drive Leads and Sales

With all the types of content marketing and their purposes fresh in your mind, let's dive into our SEO marketing strategy example. This step-by-step process will help you establish your goals, create engaging topics, and track your key performance indicators for marketing success.

1. Realize Your Brand's Ideal Customer

A common problem, especially for newer companies, is that they make the mistake of attempting to appeal to the largest audience possible. After all, it makes sense that more clicks would lead to more sales. However, what happens is that your content tends to be incredibly vague, neutral in personality, and doesn't offer strong appeal to anyone. You're left with a lukewarm audience and will look for alternative brands that manage to light their fire.

Instead, you need to think about the particular type of customer that's most likely to benefit greatly from your offerings. You will think about why this person needs your product, the type of problems they face, the questions they may have, and the concerns that will need alleviating. By tapping into this buyer persona and walking a mile in their shoes, you're better prepared to create content that would appeal specifically to them.

Creating relevant and engaging content that feels highly personalized is the true key to building visitor retention. When your content feels personal to them and empowers them to solve a particular issue, it establishes trust and rapport between them and your brand. This type of confidence converts one-time visitors into repeat visitors and window-shopping leads into customers.

2. Determine Your Immediate Goals and Select Your KPIs

It's always an excellent business strategy to clearly define your goals and expectations for any marketing campaign you pursue. SEO content marketing can serve a variety of purposes and you want to ensure that yours is working properly toward your goals.

While our ultimate goal is to generate more sales with our content, it may not be the immediate goal we need to achieve. For example, a newer brand with little online presence will greatly benefit from using content to build brand awareness. While it's possible to gain some sales from cold customers, it's not a reliable or healthy way to do business in the long term. Instead, you'll want to set expectations that your content will serve to increase traffic and improve awareness for the first few months.

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On the other hand, your goals may be defined by setting micro-conversions along your organic traffic pipeline. Some may utilize a series of blog posts to push attention to specific product pages and aim to see an increase in clicks from the blog to that page. If our content strategy helps us achieve this goal, we then know we are one step closer to converting an everyday reader into a customer.

Our goals serve to define how we want to structure our content and the types of things we need to emphasize within it. Once you establish your immediate goals, you'll want to select the key performance indicators that are most important to you. If you primarily want to improve your readership, you'll want to focus on key performance indicators such as website traffic, page clicks, average session duration, or subscriber count.

Analytics is the key to getting the most out of any type of digital marketing strategy. But, it's easy to get lost in all the data if you don't have a plan. Make defining your goals and KPIs an early part of your SEO content marketing strategy to avoid future analysis issues.

3. Dig Deep for Your Topic and Keyword Research

You defined your perfect customer, clearly outlined your business goals, and determined the scale you will use to gauge your performance. Now, it’s time to determine what you need to write about and how to compose it. This is where the “SEO” part of “SEO Content Marketing” comes into play.

4. Researching Keywords

Your keyword research will lay the foundation for the topics you will select. Not only will keyword research reveal the volume of search traffic that each receives, but the nature of the keyword itself can also expose the user's intent. Popular SEO tools such as SEMRush and Moz Keyword Explorer can not only help you analyze keywords relevant to your industry but can also suggest topics based on the terms that you select.

However, don't just pick high-volume keywords and run. It's essential to know that three primary keyword types describe user intent: navigational, informational, and transactional.

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Navigational keywords are words or phrases that users enter to navigate to a specific destination on the web. Examples of these are “DashClicks” or “Amazon.”

Informational keywords express the user’s desire to learn about a particular subject. These generally come in the form of questions with words such as “how,” “what,” or “why.”

Finally, transactional keywords express an intent to buy a product. These might include words or phrases such as “where to buy,” “cheapest” as in cheapest product, or “best” as in best product.

Understanding the intention behind using a keyword will better help you determine two things: the type of content you should create with the keyword and whether or not the keyword can help you find the right audience to meet your goals. Furthermore, because we identified our ideal buyer persona first, we understand which types of keywords will best help us serve our audience to drive leads and sales.

5. Generating Engaging Topics

While researching keywords is the ideal place to start, there are also other ways to generate high-quality topics. Our first recommendation is to get involved and active on forums and Q&A websites. Sites such as Quora can help you target popular informational keywords as users already pose their thoughts in the form of questions. Finding questions with a high amount of traffic can clue you in on the fact that people need expert help with the subject.

Industry-relevant forums or subreddits are also an excellent way to keep an eye on what your audience is discussing on the internet. It’s ideal for you to stay active and look for opportunities to help your audience and correct misinformation. Furthermore, you can build awareness of your content by actually posting responses and sharing a link to your content directly within the forum. Not only does it help you to send that traffic to your site, but it can build rapport and trust by meeting users on their level.

Google Trends can also be a handy tool for keeping an eye on the most widely searched keywords in a particular geographic region. You simply enter a keyword and allow the tool to generate data such as interest over time. However, you want to focus on the “Related Topics” and “Related Queries” at the bottom of the page. In our example search for “Content Marketing,” we see possible bases for topics such as “content marketing startups” and “content marketing analytics.”

6. Identify What Works for Competitors

Our final tip for content generation strategies is to closely examine competitors that currently implement a great content strategy. Rather than worrying about who's ahead in the content game, think of this as an advantage that can tell you what performs well with the audience you also want to target.

Pay attention to the type of content they create, the typical article length, and their headline structure. Also, look into where and how often they implement their target keywords. If you find that your content creation efforts are failing to generate traffic, then look at what works and stop trying to reinvent the wheel. In many cases, creating better content than your competitor is simply attacking the same topics they doing it in an improved manner that's unique to your brand.

7. Implement a Company-Wide Content Calendar

If you want your content to consistently generate leads and sales, you need to implement a content calendar as soon as possible.

This serves a variety of purposes, but the primary benefit is that your team will always have a visual of all of your scheduled content months ahead of time. This helps your team to plan their efforts accordingly to avoid missing deadlines or to avoid gaps in posting. Being consistent is essential for every type of content creator. This study from Marcom suggests that a fragmented content schedule can lower revenue by as much as 11%.

An easily accessible content calendar also helps drive creativity and coordination between otherwise separate teams. While content marketing is important, it's one piece to your overall marketing puzzle. You ultimately want all of your marketing materials for your brand to synergize and support one another. Allowing your employees to keep track of planned content simplifies this process.

Finally, planning a calendar will allow you to coordinate key team members for specific types of content throughout the year. When and how you publish content can be just as important as what it is. Rather than expecting team members to drop tasks and prioritize sudden ideas, you can ensure optimal efficiency by planning as much as you can ahead. Efficiency also allows you to generate high-quality content at a higher output.

8. Build Content with SEO Best Practices in Mind

SEO and content are two vital parts of the overall puzzle. Prioritizing one and leaving the other as an afterthought will not get you the results you are looking for. Instead of writing and posting just any idea, you want to build your content from the ground up with best SEO practices first. This will ensure that your content reads as natural and clean without awkward keyword phrases or headlines that plague so much of the internet's content.

9. Create a Content Style Guide

You can ensure that all of your content is built for SEO by creating a style guide that all of your content writers must use. This will dictate the standardized writing style you want to use, the tone of voice you want to express, and address other issues such as crediting sources or using profanity. This will promote uniformity in your brand's content regardless of who is writing.

For each content piece, we recommend creating guidelines before you begin. This SEO skeleton will dictate important parts of the content such as headlines, where and how often to implement keywords, and present opportunities for internal linking. The more specific these guidelines are the better as it creates a clearly defined image of the product, which leads to more efficient work.

10. Content Length

The content length may vary depending on the nature of the subject and where you are posting it. For blog content, more is generally better for SEO and you should aim for 2-3,000 words. You can produce quality content with less, but fewer words present fewer opportunities for search engines to pick up keywords.

Rather than necessarily worrying about the length, focus instead on whether or not the content fully meets every possible user need or expectation. A bulk of internet content tends to be thin or surface level, and, therefore, gets very little traction online. Give yourself enough time to create quality and you'll find that even simple topics can raise many questions and concerns that your readers will want to be answered. How well you answer those concerns will directly impact how likely they are to convert.

11. Break It Up with Subheaders

Modern writers and SEOs typically outline all content with keyword-rich headlines. These primary headlines, known as H1s, not only help your readers but also help search engines to understand what the content is trying to express.

There are additional subheaders (H2-H4) that can further segment portions of your content for easier reading. The reality is that most readers typically will not read an entire long-form article in one sitting. If you present a wall of text with no images or headers to provide a pause, you're likely to see your bounce rate increase.

Instead, you can help readers get the most out of your article by clearly defining each section with the appropriate subheader. This way, readers are free to skim through and focus on the sections that are most interesting to them. The subheader also provides a necessary break to absorb what you've already read and an easy way to remember where you left off for continued reading.

12. Internal Linking

Link building is a powerful SEO strategy that can improve your website metrics and SEO across the board. When writing content, be mindful of how the topic can relate to other content on your website. For example, in an introductory article about SEO, you won't have time or room to get too in-depth on backlink strategies. However, you can include an internal link naturally when broaching the subject to another blog post that discusses the subject in greater detail.

The benefit of this is that it ensures your content meets the needs of every type of reader. The internal link is not disruptive or intrusive and simply allows the user to learn more if they desire. When the user moves from one piece of content to the next, it increases the average duration of that session. The longer time a user spends on your website, the more time you have to convince the lead to become a customer.

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You're not limited to internally linking from blog to blog. If the opportunity presents itself naturally, you can clue customers into the products or services you offer. However, ensure that you only do this in a non-disruptive way so that it does not betray the original purpose of the article. Otherwise, Google will recognize this and penalize your site for misleading content.

13. Properly Credit External Sources

Don't be afraid to utilize widely accepted information from other sources within your content. However, you must always credit the source, typically by linking to the site where you obtained the information. Not only will this help you to avoid plagiarization, but it shows the reader that your brand is trustworthy and willing to give credit where credit is due.

The external source will generally be happy to let you use their data as they get a backlink in return. Ideally, you'll also want to create content that's worthy of quoting and linking back to other sources online. Those backlinks to your site create new access points for audiences to discover your brand. It's another way of demonstrating how content creation can be worthwhile and drive the number of potential leads and sales you can obtain organically.

14. Promote Your Content Like You Want Leads and Sales

One of the worst things you can do is put a strong effort into a content piece only to post it and never look at it again. While you will get some clicks from organic search, it's a waste to let your content stagnate when you can use other platforms and strategies to promote it.

A popular method of getting more eyes on your content is by integrating an email list for your website. Those who are interested in the latest updates and offers from your brand can simply enter their email. With this address in hand, you can send regular notifications to your subscribers about new content that might help them or be of interest. You can increase the effectiveness of this strategy by further segmenting your audience by interest, age, and demographics.

Social media is also prime real estate for sharing all of your content. This is another way that the content calendar we explored above can prove vital. Not only can your social media team curate unique types of content based on the content you create elsewhere, but they can also plan ahead to fill content gaps by promoting new blog posts or news blasts that you publish on your website.

Finally, paid ads can be an effective way to promote important website content. While PPC ads are commonly used for things like sales funnels, they can also be a low-cost way to gain additional impressions and build brand awareness with new audiences. While paid ads will take from your marketing budget upfront, the idea is that you will attract new users that will visit your website organically moving forward.

15. If It's Not Performing, Analyze and Refine

With how in-depth and precise marketing analytics can be in 2021, there's very little reason why you should settle for poor-performing content. This step calls back to earlier in the article when we expressed the importance of having clearly-defined goals and key performance indicators. If your SEO content marketing strategy is proving effective, you should see these metrics gradually improve with time.

If months go by and you are not seeing improvements to website traffic or retention, the error most assuredly lies within the content. You can approximate the exact issues with your strategy by implementing A/B tests or utilizing heatmaps within Google Analytics. If you notice that users are spending time at the start of the page and bouncing away in a similar area, you can start experimenting with content changes. When tests reveal which performs better, you'll gain valuable insights into how you need to formulate future content.

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When it comes to generating sales from your new leads, we also recommend setting up micro-conversions that are specific to your organic traffic pipeline. The buyer journey does not go from a blog post to checkout but demonstrates several steps in between. You may want to set smaller tracked goals like page-to-page clicks, adding items to the cart, entering payment, and completing checkout. The goals with the lowest conversion rates will reveal the aspects of your content that require additional work.

To summarize, you’ll generally want to keep a close eye on these KPIs:

• Organic web traffic
• Email list signups
• Impressions on social media
• Average session duration
• Bounce rate
• Goal conversion rates (especially for custom goals)
• Overall search ranking
• Newly acquired backlinks from high-quality sites

Conclusion

SEO content marketing is a long-term strategy that is proven to boost lead growth for small businesses over time. While your initial growth may be small, remember that the cost of a comprehensive content marketing strategy is very little when compared to paid alternatives. SERPWatch tells us that content creation costs 62% less and happens to generate 3x as many leads as outbound marketing.

To summarize, you can drive leads and sales by doing content marketing the right way. You should spare no effort when performing topic and keyword research. Always look to compare to competitor strategies that are regularly taking up the top slots on search engine results pages. Look to the content they create as a template and aim to do it better. Analyze, test, and refine, and your KPIs will improve with a commitment to consistency.

Increasing your organic traffic is the most cost-effective way to improve your brand reputation and drive your conversion rates. However, you won’t be able to compete with the top-ranking websites on Google without a comprehensive SEO strategy that can connect you with interested audiences.

The good news is that even small, local businesses can improve their organic clicks by consistently following several key steps. Below, we’ll explore how you can start building a successful organic traffic pipeline in five steps that can improve your ROI for years to come.

What are the Advantages of Getting Organic Traffic?

Every business benefits from organic traffic as it is the best way to drastically increase your ROI. Users can discover your website, gather information, and purchase products or services without ever clicking on a paid advertisement or promotion. In other words, these are sales that come to you at a minimal cost-per-click.

Furthermore, your ability to qualify your customers will drastically improve as your organic traffic pipeline improves with time. All of your traffic accesses your website with the use of keywords. When you design content to target certain keywords, you will also be able to understand the true intent behind using those keywords.

If someone uses informational keywords, you understand that they are very early in the sales pipeline and need to be nurtured before attempting to close a sale. Likewise, users searching for transactional keywords are already primed to buy. This natural insight into your audience will allow you to better refine your pipeline and get better results out of the traffic your receive.

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Finally, a strong organic traffic strategy can potentially drive competing websites out of the equation. As you consistently serve your audience’s needs, you’ll gain even more traffic, drive conversions, and earn customer loyalty. All of this is a formula to drive your website to the top of search rankings, making you the prime choice over the competitor websites ranked beneath you.

If you want these benefits for your brand, continue reading to learn our five steps for building a successful organic traffic pipeline.

1. Spy on Your Competitor’s Strategy

It’s not devious to spy on a competitor’s strategy, it’s simply smart business. If another business in your industry has cracked the code on how to earn one of the top spots on search engine results pages, you need to pay close attention to what they’re doing.

Google does not favor websites by happenstance. Every result on the first page is utilizing a comprehensive and effective SEO strategy that is consistently driving organic traffic to their domain. Beyond the volume of daily traffic, Google is also closely examining the quality of content to retrieve the best matching answer to a user’s search query.

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While we’ve made very obvious efforts to illustrate the power of content and SEO in our past articles, it bears reiterating here. Your competitors attract more organic traffic than you because their content, both on their main pages and their blog, contains elements that are clearly working with your shared audience. If you’ve been implementing a content strategy for an ample of time with no real results, you’ll want to discern what is different or unique about the content your competitor creates.

Websites that receive high amounts of organic traffic typically can target an audience’s most pressing questions or concerns. In addition to observing the type of content and the quality, consider how they choose to implement their target keywords throughout the article. By taking note of what is indisputably working, you can plan to make changes when it comes to your own content creation methods.

However, you don’t simply want to imitate what your competitor creates verbatim. Doing so is what is known as content scraping, which means that it’s primarily derivative of other content on the web that’s of higher value and quality. Instead, you’ll want to use your knowledge of your customer base and the industry to determine the potential flaws in their content strategy that you can exploit. In other words, what can you help your audience with or answer in a better way than the competitor has on their website?

You never want to remain static when it comes to content creation. Constantly analyzing your content performance with Google Analytics can alert you to when articles or posts simply aren’t performing. If your article is based on a topic that’s commonly written about, observe how other content is unique and why it is outperforming yours. Latch on to the tactics that appeal to your niche and then use them in a way that highlights your unique perspective and insight into your industry.

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2. Attack User Questions with Your Content

Using user questions as a basis for your content serves a very specific purpose in that it has a much stronger opportunity to match user intent. If a person asks Google, “how can I acquire more backlinks?”, then you can precisely curate your target to aid that user in their very specific request.

Compare this to a general search such as “SEO tips”, which leaves it very open-ended as to what you could potentially write about. While writing an article on meta descriptions technically qualifies as an SEO tip, it doesn’t help the user in the example above and therefore won’t earn you the click as it doesn’t match the user’s true intent behind their search.

Basing your articles off of popular user questions not only helps you to better serve your audience, but they often boast much higher conversion rates. This is because the long-tail keyword typically demonstrates that the customer is further along in their buyer journey and showing interest in making a purchase. Compare this to our example “SEO tips” keyword that is more about general information in nature.

Be aware that when you research your long-tail keywords, you’ll likely see a much lower search volume than those shorter, informational keywords. However, don’t make the common mistake and ignore this step in your organic traffic pipeline strategy. Lower competition provides an opportunity to exploit this niche. Because you now have the knowledge to match your content to this strong buyer intent, the quality of your organic traffic will be substantially higher even if the overall volume is initially lower.

Where to Find Popular User Questions?

If you’re unsure of where to start, you won’t have to look far to get questions to utilize as topics. You can start by entering industry-relevant keywords into a Google search and looking at what appears in the “People Also Ask” section of most search engine results pages. There are also sites like Quora that exist to provide answers to popular user questions regarding any topic.

You can also reverse engineer topics from popular keywords that might not take the form of a question. For example, if users are searching for information about a specific GPU error, you can infer that they are effectively asking questions about what the error is or how they can fix it. With that in mind, you can begin to formulate topics that directly address the user’s need for information on the topic.

Finally, you should take note of the issues that come up in your everyday customer interactions. We produce countless articles for the DashClicks blog that directly address the questions individuals have when it comes to the marketing services fulfilled for their site. By answering these questions in detail with our content, our audience can educate and empower themselves without needing to ask for additional assistance.

Remember that gaining lots of clicks and traffic will matter very little if it’s not improving your ROI and simply increasing your bounce rate. By focusing on improving the quality of your traffic, your site’s overall SEO will improve. Maintain consistency with this strategy and your organic traffic and ranking will increase naturally with time.

3. Create More Access Points to Your Website

Your primary focus for improving organic traffic is carefully curating the content on your website. However, regardless of your efforts, the user will ultimately only be able to discover your brand by accessing your domain either through a direct URL or from SERPs. If you’re having difficulty cracking the first page on Google, you’ll find it difficult to improve your organic traffic. Because of this, you’ll want to focus on creating new ways for users to access your domain through external sources. Several SEO strategies allow you to do this.

• Content Aggregator Sites

The first is to sign your website up for every website aggregator that applies to your business or blog. These are excellent ways to gain additional circulation of your content by leveraging the traffic that the aggregator website organically receives. For example, Google News aggregates the best news-related content for users all in one place. While it won’t guarantee the click, it provides additional visibility off-page that you wouldn’t normally receive.

Other popular websites can serve as blog content aggregators, but you’ll need to research what’s available by industry niche. More general content aggregators exist such as Mix, Digg, or Reddit. These sites exist to serve the consumer by helping them cut through the noise and discover material that serves their interests. Sharing your posts in the appropriate sections of these sites can boost your visibility and potentially attract additional shares.

• Get Connected on Social Media

You’ll also want to get your content circulating to the social media websites that are most relevant to your brand. Certain platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram cater to the consumer whereas a site like LinkedIn primarily serves B2B businesses. In either case, these platforms provide a unique way for communities to connect.

You will not only be able to communicate with and learn from your target audience, but you can connect with influencers and like-minded content creators that can eventually aid in promoting content on your website. In this way, you’ll gain access to new audiences and potentially forge longstanding partnerships that can earn you valuable backlinks. Each share of your content on social media platforms creates a new way for organic traffic to access your domain.

• Guest Blogging

Finally, creating unique, high-quality blog content for websites other than your own is an excellent way to acquire backlinks and attract more organic traffic. With a little bit of outreach, you can discover opportunities to partner up with other websites that serve content that is relevant to your area of expertise. This provides mutual benefits for the website owner and your brand.

Guest blogging benefits the other website owner by giving them access to a unique voice and perspective that they otherwise cannot provide on their own. Your unique content comes with a built-in perceived value due to your experience, licenses, education, and other qualifying factors. It also adds variety to their content selection, which can attract more organic traffic.

On the opposite side, you get to plug your name, your brand, and your domain on another website. Think of it as performing your act in front of an entirely new audience at a new venue. The audience is already qualified as interested in your content and is therefore likely to engage with anything you create. Along with that content, you get to link back to your website and gain some of that organic traffic for yourself. This not only has the potential to boost your search rankings but can potentially blog or email list subscribers, as well.

4. Repurpose Your Best Blog Content in Video Form

No matter how excellent your website content is, there are always going to be audiences that simply won’t read long-form posts. However, that doesn’t mean that these individuals are not interested in what you have to offer. You simply need to create new ways to convey your message to those who consume content differently.

This is why some of the best content creators on the internet have a strategy to make all of their content go the distance. While a giant company may have the resources to have a dedicated video content team, most operate a bit more efficiently. You can utilize a lengthy blog post and convert the information into a script. Grab the person that you want to be the face of your brand and let them present the information to your audience in a new way. You get to interact with different sections of your audience in a new way without too much additional work.

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We also recommend breaking up lengthier posts into several smaller videos that can serve as excellent, bite-sized content for social media sharing. A quick video on a timeline is one of the most effective ways to attract the attention of new audiences without asking too much of their time. As long as the content quality is there, users will be happy to like and share, creating additional entry points for organic traffic to access your company website.

5. Be Aggressively Consistent with Your Content

Finally, one of the best ways to increase organic traffic is to simply be consistent with how you post and share content online. Too often, website owners start experimenting with SEO and blogging only to be inconsistent with their posting and give up on everything prematurely. Even a great SEO strategy will take months to produce results for a website that has no prior basis for search ranking results.

If you only have the resources to write one blog post a week, then choose a day and deliver the content on that day without fail. Audience retention relies heavily on scheduling and patterns. When you promise to deliver something, but are typically late or don’t come through at all, it will annoy and put off users from visiting your website again. After all, why should they give you their time if you won’t give them yours?

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Regarding how often you should post, the general rule is that more is better. A popular HubSpot study indicates that blogs with 16 posts or more a month generate 3.5x as much traffic as those who post less. More posts mean more opportunities to appeal to different topical interests, which is how you get more organic traffic on your site.

However, the type of content and the length will also play a factor. If you’re keen to share important industry updates or news that your consumers care about, you should post daily to appear as an authority instead of being behind the times. However, if you’re posting lengthy, dense informational pieces, you may want to scale back to give your audience more time to consume the material you post. In other words, you’ll need to make a judgment call on what plays best with your audience’s needs.

We also recommend getting your audience involved and polling your active readers about how much new content they would like to see every week or every month. Ultimately, you’ll want to stick to a formula that allows your team to make the best content possible with the resources you have. Should your business scale and allow for more content creation, you can scale up your content strategy to gain more organic traffic when your budget allows.

Start Building a Successful Organic Traffic Pipeline Today!

While these steps are straightforward to understand, the process of deploying them typically is not. The time and dedication that a strong organic traffic strategy requires is an understandable concern for smaller businesses that need to start turning a profit as soon as possible. For these reasons, marketing strategies such as PPC campaigns or email campaigns will always be valuable.

However, the overarching goal for every business should be to improve your organic traffic and your ROI. This will never be possible without a dedicated content creation strategy that serves customer needs and fulfills a void left by your competitors. With the way the ranking algorithm goes, there are no real shortcuts around implementing best SEO practices and posting on a consistent schedule.

As long as you implement these steps when creating your content, you can expect to see a steady increase in your website’s organic traffic in time. Particularly, emphasizing questions and looking for long-tail, transactional keywords will ensure that those organic clicks result in better conversion rates.

Additionally, never produce content in a vacuum. Every marketing strategy worth its salt is driven by analytical feedback. Ensure that your team is utilizing tools like Google Analytics to keep an eye on how your content is performing. Increases in page traffic, average session duration, and even additional pages visited can be strong indicators that your content is performing well. If you aren’t getting results, double back and observe what your competitors are doing and what you can improve before abandoning your work altogether.

Don’t lose heart if your organic traffic pipeline isn’t earning the ideal results just yet. Every great online brand starts where you are. Do your research, formulate a plan that incorporates these steps, and happy writing!

More local businesses are turning to digital marketing strategies to generate leads and traffic than ever before. At the same time, the technologies and tactics being employed are rapidly changing and will continue to evolve into the year 2022 and beyond.

Your business needs a strategy to stay a few leaps ahead of the competition. If you're wondering what digital marketing techniques you should employ in 2022, continue reading through our list of insights and tips below:

1. Start Optimizing Website Pages for Voice Search

While not a brand-new technology, AI assistants and voice search tools are present everywhere and are changing the way we discover information on the web. More users are turning to these virtual assistants as their accuracy and reliability become more improved with each new iteration. Today, a person can find a local business in seconds by simply asking their mobile device for the best solution to their problem in the area.

The question becomes - how do you optimize a website page for voice search technologies? If you've already implemented an excellent SEO strategy based on the best-known practices, you're already off to a good start. This includes adding a healthy amount of high-quality, relevant content to the page, focusing on primary and tertiary keywords, and optimizing your metadata.

To understand how voice search impacts SEO, we need to examine how a person typically employs voice search. When you type a query into Google with a keyboard, you typically truncate your entry into the minimum number of keywords necessary. For example, you might search for the best Thai restaurant in the area by typing “best thai food.” Google already knows your location through your device and generates all of the relevant businesses local to your area.

When we search with voice search, we typically ask a question as if we were talking to a real person. Instead of the above query, the user might ask “Where can I get Thai food?” The technology actually works by taking that spoken query, converting it to text, and performing the search automatically. In other words, a voice search typically sees users focusing on long-form questions and long-tail keywords that might not currently be a focus in your SEO strategy.

Finally, consider creating an FAQ page that accounts for common concerns presented to you by your customers. Because voice search is so commonly in the form of a question, providing quick, succinct answers on this page can be a recipe for success if you want your responses to be chosen.

Accounting for this conversational way of gathering information should be a focus of your content now and into 2022. You still need to ensure that your content is clear, accurate, and tailored to your audience. However, customers are looking to get more familiar and personable with brands. Optimizing your content to present a more conversational tone can not only help your SEO, but build authenticity and rapport with your customers.

2. Implement Structured Data

Structured data, otherwise referred to as schema markup, is an advanced SEO tactic that effectively classifies the content on a page with relevant tags. These clues help search engines quickly identify what sections of content mean, so that they can better deliver the best information for highly-targeted searches. Structured data will also help you to better deliver your content in the voice search queries discussed above.

Google offers helpful documentation to assist webmasters with understanding structured data and how to properly implement it within your site's HTML code. There are three types of notation you can use to implement structured data, but JSON-LD is the recommended format for most websites.

Structured data not only classifies snippets of a webpage, but can actually nest other items in groups to demonstrate how these variables relate to one another. Instead of necessarily looking at the content itself and attempting to make sense of it, it can employ this outline and quickly understand the full picture.

If you look at an example search, you will see examples of structured data already being used by other major websites and publications.

If you search for Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy film, Google is automatically able to identify the right result with relevant information thanks to the clues provided in the page's HTML. It understands that we want to find the 2014 film. Without a markup that classifies the content as a film, Google may have pulled up results pertaining to the comic books instead.

Below the meta description, we see additional data highlights that likely do not appear in a search result for one of your own web pages. This page nests additional structured data within the film classifier and tags the budget, production company, box office, and producer. Google is able to grab these key data points and generate them in the search result snippet because the structured data helps it understand what this data is and how it is relevant to the original search query. This results in a much more attractive and highly valuable search result to attract more clicks.

By marking up your pages with structured data, you can help Google deliver the best information to your inquiring customers. If they want to know if you sell a product, that product will appear immediately along with any additional nested data. If they want to know your specific pricing, they can find the answer to that question with a search through keyboard or voice search with ease. This reliability builds customer confidence and will push your conversions to new levels in the coming year.

3. Start Employing AI-Automated Marketing Tools

The top business owners and marketers are already accelerating their workflow by employing artificial intelligence and machine learning tools. These allow you to effectively automate countless tasks that would otherwise require additional time, effort, and budget that your team could be devoted elsewhere.

Platforms like DashClicks offer software that can automate the process of managing your sales pipelines, gathering analytics, and communicating with the contacts in your CRM. Instead of manually gathering new leads from your latest landing page, organizing them, and qualifying them, you can utilize these automated tools to qualify your leads from the start, add the worthwhile ones to your contacts, reach out with templated emails, and assign them to the best sales representative without pressing an additional button.

This machine learning is especially vital when it comes to analyzing and optimizing your latest campaigns. Every marketer worth their salt is employing tools and platforms such as Google Analytics or Facebook Ads to automatically gather metrics and insights regarding their creatives and audience engagement. These types of platforms generate millions through ad revenue and are eager to provide you with all of the data you need to ensure your marketing efforts are a success.

With all of these tedious elements taken care of by machines, your experts will have more time and freedom to focus on the things they do best. Your salespeople will have a list of the hottest leads along with qualifying data that can better help them close the deal. Your paid ads managers will have access to information such as demographics, clickthrough rate, custom goal conversions, and heat maps to understand what aspects of an ad are connecting with audiences and which need to be improved.

All of these tools allow your team members to be more agile and produce better content and media as a result.

4. Start Segmenting Your Audience

While your broader audience is made up of individuals interested in your products or services, not all of these people will be exactly the same persona. There are a lot of factors that naturally segment your audience into smaller groups such as household income, age, sex, race, education, or interests that can impact the exact way that a consumer chooses to engage with your brand.

Because no two people are the same, it makes sense that you shouldn't market to different groups the same way, either. This is why we recommend that every business begin to take efforts to further qualify and segment their overall audience for improved marketing success in 2022. This digital marketing technique will aid you in creating highly personalized, tailor-made ads and content that will improve your conversion rate within that specific audience segment.

Your current ads may feel cold, robotic, and designed simply to get your name out there. By taking the time to closely approximate who you may be sending your message to, you greatly increase your chance of converting. A segment-targeted message will feel much more personalized and evoke the feeling of having a one on one conversation with a representative from your brand.

5. Create and Promote More Video Content

Audiences are demanding more high-quality video content from brands and the statistics are there to support that fact. A near-unanimous 93% of marketers expressed that video content is now an important part of their marketing strategy. Regarding the actual ROI, 86% of website owners said that video improved traffic, while 78% said that it played a direct part in increasing sales.

Video content can include content for YouTube, social media, your website, or specifically for ads and landing pages. You can also effectively repurpose existing content you've created for your blog or an eBook to create compelling video that appeals to broader audiences. You don't necessarily need to spend thousands on professional equipment, either, as most mobile phones support audio and video quality that's more than sufficient for a quick video.

Creating video content is also the ideal way to capture the attention of audiences in an era where such a thing is becoming more of a rare commodity. Your average consumer is not as likely to engage with high amounts of text that require careful attention to extract key details. However, a video provides much more dynamic engagement that allows the user to feel as though you are speaking and presenting to them personally.

There are also AI-assisted tools and platforms like Synthesia that can generate personalized videos from only a script. Video creation and editing is more accessible than ever, and it will be a vital strategy for you to add to your list of the latest digital marketing techniques for 2022.

6. Place More of an Emphasis on Local Search

Local search is always a high priority for small, local businesses, but the events of the 2020 pandemic are continuing to ripple throughout everything we do to this day. While more consumers started to do their shopping online for the first time, we are now feeling a whiplash effect that sees buyers once again looking for local alternatives to purchase products and services.

There are a number of ways you can utilize SEO tactics to boost brand awareness among those in your immediate geographic location. Be sure to leverage your location whenever possible in your content to appeal to those nearby. Additionally, look into creating and optimizing your business profile within online directories, particularly Google My Business.

Your GMB profile should contain your address, phone number, email, hours of operation, shop images, and a description of your products or services. Be sure to always keep this profile up-to-date if you change your hours to comply with local or state regulations regarding pandemic hours. Keeping your profile accurate and optimized will make your business much more likely to appear near the top of search results. Users will have everything they need to make immediate contact with your business.

7. Partner with Influencers That Can Elevate Your Brand

Every business needs someone to be their face, so that there is a person rather than a faceless organization for customers to connect with. A popular strategy that businesses are using more than ever is partnering with online influencers to gain additional publicity and traffic.

These influencers are individuals that have already cultivated a notable online following for a number of reasons. The most common reason is that these individuals are existing content creators that represent themselves and are able to make one-to-one connections with other like-minded individuals around the web.

You can take advantage of the trust this person has with their community and grant the influencer the opportunity to promote your brand. Brands will generally agree upon a form of compensation for the promotion as well as access to your products or services for them to try before agreeing to the deal. In fact, it is a federal regulation that an influencer cannot promote something that they do not have actual experience in using.

Regulations also mandate that companies and influencers clearly disclose the nature of the advertisement. However, these influencers always have the option to refuse to promote something that they do not believe in or support. Because the influencer already has rapport and trust with their audience, their audience is more likely to trust any brands that they happen to feature on their various channels.

Influencer marketing is inexpensive but effectively allows you to take advantage of built-in audiences that are already qualified and show interest in what your business offers. For this reason, you should primarily look to partner with influencers who already create content that's either directly or tangentially related to the nature of your business. This type of marketing can work for unrelated brands, but there's a greater chance that the promotion will feel disingenuous or stilted due to the lack of relationship between your brand and the content the influencer creates.

Take Advantage of the Latest Digital Marketing Techniques for Success in 2022!

Leveraging these cutting-edge strategies will aid your brand in staying ahead of the competition in the year to come. Take advantage of the increased focus on local businesses by tailoring your content around the way people ask questions and search. If you have yet to do so, be sure to create and complete your Google My Business profile to ensure that your business is listed among your local peers.

Streamline your workflow by taking advantage of the countless AI-driven automation tools that are now available to marketers and businesses. These types of tools can even allow you to create compelling video content for little to no cost that drives both traffic and conversions. If your business lacks the resources or ability to accomplish these tasks, consider using the DashClicks platform, where our team of experts can implement these techniques on behalf of your brand.

Your marketing efforts are pointless without strong digital branding.

It's an all too often occurrence that companies consult us for marketing services, yet lack an identity, a voice, or unique value propositions that differentiate them in any way from their numerous competitors. Still, they try and exhaust their valuable marketing budget only to realize too late that their strategies just aren't working with no understanding of why.

We want to help your company find its voice. Below, we'll examine seven principles for strong digital branding strategies in 2022 that can help you find your audience, achieve your goals, and establish a reliable pathway to future success.

1. A Brand Represents Real People and Communities

A company's primary purpose for existing is to generate profit and provide income to its employees. However, these are basic needs for every person on the planet and hardly a convincing motive to encourage others to spend their hard-earned dollars on your products or services. If you spend all of your time trying to hard-sell your audience without appealing to any sort of motive or emotion, they're going to walk right past you.

This is the reason why branding exists. A digital media branding strategy allows a company to be more than a cold, money-making vehicle. It's an opportunity to represent the unique and talented individuals that make your services possible. Audiences are just as interested in who provides the service and why as they are in the product or service itself.

More importantly, the people that embody that brand are an extension of the communities they aim to service. When you build a company, it's likely around a shared belief that others can benefit from what your team provides. To confidently know what a community need is to know why they need it and what types of problems they face on a daily basis. Because you understand those problems and face them yourself, you are a part of that community as much as you are the people providing the solution.

Instead of aiming for mass appeal to generate maximum profit, understand that your company exists to find its niche. The individuals and the collective that make your brand have a place among real people in your community. Your job is to understand exactly how your company complements those people and uplifts them as opposed to simply taking.

This type of genuine connection is the sort of thing that fosters the trust and loyalty that lays the foundation for a successful brand. No one can appeal to everyone and it's a wasted effort to ever try. Instead, look at the individuals who embody your company, understand their values, and look for those in your community that can connect with those ideas on an emotional level.

2. What Distinguishes You from the Competitor?

A vital part of analyzing your community is closely examining other local businesses. Particularly, you want to focus on direct competition that markets the same products or services that your brand does. You cannot create a realistic or dependable plan without understanding the strategies that others use to be successful with the same target audience.

Not only does competitor analysis help you with strategy development, but it can illuminate key areas that you can utilize to elevate and distinguish your brand from others.

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As a basic example, two brands might exist to sell a piece of technology. Brand A emphasizes its branding to support the everyman and promote value, while Brand B utilizes branding that emphasizes luxury and status. What typically ends up happening is that both brands are able to find their niche and succeed even though they are competitors in the same industry. With effective branding, both are able to further segment audiences with similar needs to focus on their unique community.

Of course, your brand can emphasize other unique elements depending on the communities you aim to serve. Understanding what you can use requires you to understand the real problems that your audience faces, how your competitor aims to solve them (or fails to understand them), and what your brand values over the opposing solution.

3. Tell a Story and Find Your Voice

If you look closely at how the top brands market themselves online, you'll find that storytelling lies at the heart of their success. That storytelling not only applies to the ongoing history of the minds that make up your brand, but of the people that buy your products and keep your success going.

You'll quickly discover that even with a strong sense of branding and a great strategy, it's easy to get lost in the flood of digital marketing. Despite your best efforts, every person on the web is absolutely inundated with marketing emails, display ads, interruption ads on videos, and much more. In the age of media overload, an impression may only last as long as it takes to see another ad from another brand.

Understand marketers need to find new ways to penetrate the noise. One of the most successful ways of doing this is to foster an emotional connection with the audience. While someone may not remember the words written or spoken in an advertisement, they will remember a profound feeling if there is one to be had.

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Telling a story is not only an effective way of forging emotional connections, but it is a guaranteed way to authenticate and differentiate your team. No two people are the same, and even competitive entrepreneurs in the same industry may have two completely unique stories to tell in how they got to where they are. That journey along with the understanding of their hard work and passion to serve others will go a long way in helping your audience to connect an emotion with your brand. When there's brand storytelling, there's a feeling a person will forever associate with your brand identity as opposed to forgettable words that change with the times.

It's also not just what your story contains, but the voice you use to tell it. Does your brand foster a no-nonsense, professional, get-it-done attitude? Or, does it promote a relaxed, humorous tone that reminds the audience to laugh and enjoy the little things? While something like a brand voice might seem simple, that's exactly why it's so effective. Simple is easy to understand and absorb. Be sure that your story and voice are authentic to who you are and people will thank you for it.

4. Content Defines a Brand's Digital Marketing Strategy

If you spend any time at all studying digital marketing, you will inevitably learn the phrase Content is king. This is because the content is the driving force behind every digital marketing tactic from paid advertising campaigns to blogging. However, it's also a powerful tool for promoting and growing your brand in an effort to engage with more prospects and customers.

Your content must always contain a consistent, reliable voice for your audience to identify. In this way, your audience connects with the brand in a similar way that we all do with people. If someone presents oneself as a trustworthy, dependable, and funny individual consistently, we will eventually trust that the individual is who they claim to be. Conversely, if that same person fluctuates in personality upon each meeting, it makes us hesitant, distrusting, and uneasy in their presence.

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Regardless of how you choose to voice your brand, consistency is ultimately the key. The repetition gives you a better opportunity to create a following with the right community and will ensure that your brand generates highly-qualified leads instead of connecting with disinterested persons.

Furthermore, content marketing is a strategy that will not only boost your SEO and website ranking, but gives your audience further opportunities to discover and explore your brand. Longform blog posts provide a unique platform for you to express new stories, ideas, and information that fosters the connection you want between brand and audience.

Not only will unique, branded content builds brand awareness, but it will also foster loyalty among those who identify with you and play a large part in driving future conversions.

Remember that content and how it defines your brand applies to everything you publish online. Don't try to present a sudden shift in personality or tone in an effort to capture more leads on that new landing page. Stay true to who you are, what your brand values, and the value you can provide to the audience that needs your company's products or services.

5. Marketers Don't Define Your Brand, They Support It

This idea is not necessarily about developing your brand identity, but how you can most effectively express it throughout the digital media landscape. If you choose to leverage the help of expert marketing agencies, understand that it is not their role to create or define your brand, but to expertly present it to your target audience online.

What occurs at an alarming rate is that businesses will solicit the help of marketers to begin scaling or driving conversions. However, when it comes time to complete their onboarding, they have no brand identity of note to express. What we're left with are a cold list of products or services or an offer that promises nothing of note aside from discounts or savings.

While it's not necessarily your responsibility to know exactly how to leverage digital marketing tactics, it is your responsibility to understand how you want your brand to be represented. Leaving an outside source or partner to define your brand for you is the definition of unauthentic, which goes against the previous principles discussed in this article. What results is tension and conflict between two partners that should be elevating one another toward greater success than they could not otherwise achieve on their own.

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Instead, you need to be an active collaborator in your own marketing success. While you won't be the one creating your ad sets or writing your landing pages, you should be highly critical of any elements that do not meet the image and voice standards that you and your team have set for your brand. Your marketing collaborators will feed off of this critical feedback and further improve their processes as they become more understanding of your branding.

You will retain creative control and work with your new partners to communicate what your brand needs to express. The marketing experts on the other side can then synthesize that messaging into well-written articles, highly-engaging ads, and high-converting call-to-actions that get actual results. When those leads arrive at your door, you seal the deal by doing what you do best - being the embodiment of your brand.

6. Always Manage Your Reputation Online

When you start to promote your brand online, you become something tangible for audiences and other businesses to act upon. You'll quickly discover that if you do not take the initiative to define your brand, others will be more than happy to do it for you. What results is that new audiences will make pre-determinations about your brand and company values regardless of what you have to say otherwise.

You can find examples of this even at the top level when using the Google search engine. We typed in what's in McDonald's meat? and looked at the top results. What we found is that the website Mashed takes the top result in answering this question with the McDonald's brand itself falling second.

The clear and pressing issue for McDonald's is that an outside identity now has the power to define one of their products, a major element of their branding. Curious parties will generally select the first result in Google, meaning that this website gets the opportunity to create their image of the McDonald's brand instead of McDonald's itself.

Effective digital branding and marketing tactics require you to stay in control of the narrative at all times. This example not only illustrates the importance of utilizing strong branding principles, but also emphasizes the need for a complete digital marketing strategy including great content and search engine optimization. While this niche example likely has very little impact on this giant corporation's bottom line, it can definitely harm smaller businesses that have yet to cement their footing in the digital landscape.

You not only need to look out for external content sources, but also the opinions of previous or existing customers. Word of mouth spreads quickly in the age of social media and users can find data quickly about your business within online directories, aggregator websites, and social media platforms. Several mediocre or low-star reviews can also impact brand perception without so much as a word for others looking for a quick solution.

However, you can fight back and retain control of the narrative by managing your reputation among customers. Part of your digital marketing and branding strategy should be to respond to and oversee reviews and testimonials regarding your business online. If a customer expresses dissatisfaction or a clear issue, make an honest effort to understand and solve the problem. Not only can the overall interaction boost positive perception for that one individual, but your actions will be seen by every other user scrutinizing your reputation.

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Don't forget about your positive reviews, either. Let your satisfied customers know that they are valued and appreciated, and watch as they spread the good word about your brand to others.

7. Continue to Evolve

Finally, it's important to know that the land of digital marketing is a rapidly evolving landscape. The strategies that were effective five years ago are long outdated, and what works today may not work at the same time next year.

While your core branding, identity, and values won't change, the manner in which you deliver your message will. To ensure that your company is able to establish generational success, you'll need to constantly be aware of how new and existing audiences are able to discover information about the brands they choose to do business with online. If there's a more convenient way to learn, audiences will find it. It's the brands that not only stay on top of, but ahead of these trends that leap ahead of the pack and claim the number one spot.

Conclusion - Take These Digital Branding Strategies with You Into the New Year!

The brand identity is not just a box you need to check to start marketing online. It's the single most powerful tool you'll use to both identify yourself to audiences and distinguish yourself from the competitor they may also be examining. It represents both the individual and the collective that embody your company's values and its desire to aid the community with its unique solutions.

Identify who you are, decide upon the voice and tone you want to use, and look for engaging ways to tell your personal story. Manage your reputation and don't let others define your brand for you. By remaining consistent and authentic with whom you want to appeal, you will find naturally discover your niche and your audience will come to you.

Content marketing is more competitive than ever. While 78% of organizations are approaching content strategically, more than half do not or are not able to due to workflow issues, lack of resources, and failure to prioritize either.

In this article, we want to show you how to scale content creation with minimal to moderate time and monetary investments. You’ll improve your team workflow, the quality, and the quantity of your posts, and learn how to repurpose content for widespread marketing success.

How to Create a Step-by-Step Workflow for Content Marketing?

Many businesses make the mistake of failing to allocate the appropriate number of personnel and resources to creating great content. You are often seeing one individual left with the responsibility of researching keywords and topics, writing 3,000+ words, proofreading their own content, finding or creating graphics, uploading the content, addressing SEO, etc.

Not only does this overburden make it impossible to scale content creation, but it also ensures that each of these processes is not optimized and lowers the quality of your post overall. While you may have staffers that are capable of these tasks with varying degrees of skill, you want an expert to oversee the various steps of content creation to ensure the best results possible. By breaking down the process of content creation into multiple steps, you can better visualize the process and delegate tasks as necessary to your team.

The typical process of creating a single post entails the following:

SEO Keyword & Topic Research →  Gathering Data to Outline the Post →  Writing the Post →  Editing the Post →  Creating Graphics or Selecting Images →  Formatting the Post on the Site →  Proofreading & QA →  Revisions →  SEO Page Optimization → Schedule for Publishing → Scheduling Your Emails or Social Posts for Content Sharing

Assigning all of these tasks to one individual is not ideal for scaling. Instead, take each step as a unique task and assign it to a person that is capable of accomplishing the task efficiently. For our team, we lean on our SEO specialists to perform research well in advance. This gives us a content calendar complete with keyword research so that our writers can plan their writing efforts.

Graphics and images are also assigned to an appropriate specialist capable of producing high-quality content. Assigning a separate individual for editing and/or QA provides a highly-valued second or third look to remedy all errors. An SEO specialist will then format and schedule the post, while ensuring that the page itself follows SEO best practices on the front and back-end. Finally, the social media team can utilize our calendar to coordinate their posting to promote the latest posts.

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By appropriately divvying up your workflow, you ensure that your experts can do what they do best, while giving your writers more time to produce additional posts. Your workflow does not need to mimic ours, but instead should reflect adequate use of the resources your company has at its disposal.

1. Research in Advance and Create a Content Calendar

With your new and updated workflow processes, you'll need to start generating your keywords and topics well in advance to avoid unwanted interruptions. Your old method of looking for one or two topics at a time will do little more than leaving other members of your team with no ability to help push the content creation process further.

Instead, you need to create your company's content calendar immediately. This can be an actual calendar or a company-wide spreadsheet that details numerous topics and the supporting keyword research. We recommend dedicating several days to research, so that your writers and media team can plan months in advance if necessary. Instead of listing 2-3 posts at a time, start thinking 2-3 months worth of posts at a time.

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The content calendar provides a host of benefits including the assurance that you will always have new posts moving through your workflow pipeline. As your writers push their post for editing and graphic creation, they can begin working on the next post immediately. This reliability works its way to each team member and ensures that no backup occurs that could delay your posting strategy.

A calendar also allows your team to better visualize opportunities to enhance your strategy beyond the benefits of a single post. Many companies utilize an approach called clustering where multiple posts within a given period relate to a central idea or theme. It's easy to internally link these posts due to their relevancy and helps promote returning visitors that express interest in the initial post. This type of momentum is what you need to ensure that you get the necessary readership to support your content scaling.

Visualizing your future posts in advance also allows your team to identify any potential problems long before they interrupt your processes. If you identify a problem with your calendar at any point, it's easy enough to supplement these posts with others that are planned for a different date.

In short, the content calendar allows for clear and effective communication between all departments. Communication prevents issues and work delays, which presents the greatest opportunity for the successful scaling of content creation.

2. Write on Topics with Firsthand Experience

The best way to ensure that your content is unique and of high quality is to allow your writers to focus on topics where they possess firsthand experience. While it's not always a possibility, it provides a litany of benefits that are key to expediting the process of scaling your content marketing.

If you were to ask a writer what type of content they like to write best, it is certainly going to be materially related to a subject to which they have familiarity. If someone is an expert in programming custom style sheets, it would take little to no research to create a quality piece of helpful, informative content that demonstrates their expertise in the area. Conversely, that expert would likely have a very difficult time writing something authoritative about HVAC equipment without additional, extensive research.

There's nothing inherently wrong with the latter approach. In fact, most content on the internet is created this way as companies lack the ability to write or the resources to create content with firsthand knowledge and experience. However, performing that research effectively enough for content adds a substantial amount of time to your content creation workflow. What can hurt worse is that content written from a third-party perspective is generally apparent as nothing can substitute for hands-on knowledge. It will be that much more difficult to tap into what that audience wants, so that you can answer their most pressing questions.

For that reason, you may want to rethink who on your team can fulfill the role of a writer. For example, an article on advanced SEO tactics would fare better if scribed by an actual SEO expert on your team. You'll still have your editors and QA personnel available to ensure that the piece is presentable for audiences. In exchange, you'll have the unique insight of a seasoned expert, which is far more valuable to your success than a particular writing style.

3. Where You Lack Experience, Do Your Research

The reality is that many companies will lack the resources to write content with firsthand experience, at least all of the time. However, you can still give your content the best chance of success by using your content calendar and looking into future topics well in advance. Rather than starting on a foreign topic a week in advance, give your writers what they need, so that they can appear as authoritative as possible on the subject matter.

If this is your business situation, you'll want to revisit your own workflow process we explored in step one. You'll want to account for this additional research time and incorporate it into your regular process. Failure to create content that demonstrates authority and is backed by the appropriate sources will do little more than clutter your blog and harm your overall website value.

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Your writers should also look to work with an expert for an opportunity to ask questions and get a little hands-on. For example, if an HVAC business from the previous example hires a freelancer, it would be worthwhile for them to work closely with the content creation team to ensure they have a strong understanding of the topic they are writing about. The expert can provide the unique insights you need, while your writers can adequately translate their thoughts into well-written articles.

An alternative method is to network and partner with experts on the subject matter that do have the time and resources to write content. This not only provides your blog with excellent, unique content, but presents new opportunities to establish relationships and support a link-building strategy. These types of partnerships aren't typically paid, but are transactional by providing guest content for one another to obtain the coveted SEO benefits.

4. Start Writing Content with an Outline

The act of writing a content piece requires deliberate strategy and planning. Making the mistake of starting with a blank document and attempting to write beginning to end will likely result in a confused mess of unrelated thoughts. Even if there are good ideas to be found within, it will be difficult to trace a throughline and even harder to focus your ideas around the relevant keywords.

Instead, you should always begin the process of writing by creating a solid outline of what the article will contain. This way, you can plan your ideas out in a list even if it is initially disorganized and unstructured. I, personally, will create bullet points that capture the key concepts that should be expressed for the topic at hand. With a clear visual, I can look for any elements that may be lacking and look for ways to incorporate them into the overall picture. After I'm satisfied with the elements I have, I then look to align them in a way that helps the content flow naturally to the reader.

SEO experts recommend a blog post to contain at least 3,000 words of high-quality content in order to boost the page value. With our outline, that large document suddenly becomes many, interconnected smaller ideas that are more approachable. While you build out these ideas, you'll keep your guideline handy to ensure you're writing those thoughts in a way that connects to other ideas and the greater subject. Even if you need to step away from the article and create it over the course of a few days, your guideline will always ensure that you stay on track.

An outline not only helps you to stay on task, but ensures that your content complies with SEO best practices. This outline should contain each of your H1 headers, any H2s or H3s if applicable, which keywords to highlight in each section, and any other technical notes of importance. The outline creates the blueprint and all that's left to do is fill in the blanks with your ideas.

5. Expand Your Team with Content Creation Experts

We broke up our typical content workflow in the first step, so that we could determine who we needed on our team at this point. With your content calendar planned, your research complete, and the content written, you're well on your way to publishing your content. However, instead of leaving your writer to deal with the technical aspects of finalizing the post, you need to delegate the remaining tasks to content creation experts that can help you get the most mileage possible out of your article. If you do not have these individuals on your team, you need to start looking if you want to take scaling your content creation seriously.

The number of people your content department needs depends entirely on how large you plan to scale and how quickly. Skilled individuals that are able to focus completely on content marketing may be able to generate several high-quality posts per week so long as the necessary roles are covered. You are likely looking at writers, editors, graphic designers, SEOs, social media managers, and a project manager to oversee everything. It's possible to see some of these areas fulfilled by one individual, but consider the impact it may have on your unique team and their ability to produce.

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An expanded team will enable your writers to focus on writing to the best of their ability. Your graphics experts will boost the value of your content by creating unique images instead of using boring, stock photography. Your SEOs will ensure your website receives the maximum benefits, and your social media expert will look to boost your post around the web.

6. Utilize a Variety of Content Delivery Methods

When you invest all of the above time and resources into creating high-quality content, it's a waste to let it die after hitting publish. The top-ranked websites for content generation utilize the strategy of repurposing their high-performing content for use on other channels and in different formats.

Think of a great piece of video content you love that's well scripted and well-rehearsed. There's an excellent chance that the script, or at least parts of it, began as a blog post. Efficient companies do not generally have teams creating editorial content, video content, and social media content separately. Instead, they repurpose ideas that they've already put together and reformat them to fit a different medium. A high-performing blog post that's run its course can suddenly get a new lease on life as a well-edited YouTube video.

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Understand that despite your best efforts, even your greatest content may not appeal to your entire audience in long, written form. By converting your hard work into unique formats such as videos, PDF eBooks, an email series, or a series of social posts, you get more out of your investment by reaching out to new audiences.

The key to successful scaling is increasing your output and returns while spending as little additional resources as possible. Therefore, you need to capitalize on the various content delivery methods available to help you maximize your ROI out of each new piece of content that comes out of that department.

7. Revise Your Outdated Content

Carrying on from the point above, you don't want your existing, older content to go to waste either. Furthermore, older content that's outdated or contains irrelevant or inaccurate information can actually harm your website's overall SEO value. It's in your best interest to ensure your content team dedicates time to revisiting and revising older content on your website or social media channels.

Revising older content requires a minimal time investment. As long as the article was previously well-researched and optimized, the bulk of the content should still be applicable in the current time period. Instead, you'll want to comb through the content and look for any facts or figures that have since changed since the time of posting. Additionally, you could update the article with news or discoveries that directly impact the material that is discussed in the body.

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This is especially important for content that previously performed well and has tremendous SEO value. When users search for that keyword, there's a great chance your article will still appear high on search engine results pages. Google will recognize updates to the page and potentially push your article higher among its list of relevant content. You can also alert users that may have previously read the post that it contains new content by adding Updated or YEAR Update to the page or post title.

Keeping an organized content calendar for every year or every period will help you to easily keep track of any content you have that's relevant to a topic or keyword you're researching. If there is an opportunity to boost your existing content library by making simple updates, you need to do so to continue extracting additional ROI.

8. Optimize Your Content for All Devices

Most, if not all of your company's content creation likely occurs on a desktop or laptop device. However, those engaging with your content may utilize technology with much smaller viewports and slower processing such as mobile devices or tablets. For this reason, you must ensure that your content, videos, and web pages are optimized for on-the-go viewing.

In fact, a Statista study indicates that over 50% of all worldwide web traffic comes specifically from mobile devices. As content generally takes longer to load on mobile, especially if it's complete with high-quality images or video, your content creation must include mobile optimization to ensure your scaling efforts are worthwhile.

To make your mobile experience better, be sure to highlight your most important ideas in smaller paragraphs that can fit completely on a mobile viewport. You can also utilize lazy loading methods to hide bigger files such as photos from view until the reader scrolls closer to that section of the article. If possible, you'll want to use AMP (accelerated mobile pages) to enhance the content viewing experience.

If you're unsure if your page is properly optimized for a mobile experience, be sure to use Google's free tools such as the Mobile-Friendly Test. You can enter any URL and the software will automatically scan for errors and recommend options for improving your performance and eliminating errors.

Scaling Content Production with These Easy-to-Follow Steps!

By following these guidelines, any business can begin to take steps to scale its content creation. These ideas will guide you along the process of not only coming up with and writing new topics but how to squeeze every last bit of engagement you can out of both your new and old content.

If you take nothing else away from this post, ensure that you have a plan in place both via a monthly content calendar and through a guideline for each individual piece of content. To enable your writers to create at a high volume without sacrificing quality, you'll need to expand your content creation team to include experts in SEO, editing, graphic design, content planning, and content promotion be it through email marketing or social media.

To become a content powerhouse, make sure your library is a living, breathing entity that continues to foster engagement and empower the community. If you create content worth reading, it will take a life of its own and continue to circulate around the web. The more engagement you attract, the easier it will be to continue growing your audience and to justify expanding your content team even further.