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.

Business marketing is competitive. It can feel exponentially more difficult for small businesses that lack the budget or resources that large enterprises possess for massive outreach.

Digital marketing doesn't have to be a nightmare for small teams and companies. Take a look at our list of 17 actionable marketing tips that will help small businesses gain more traffic and conversions online in 2021.

1. Pinpoint Your Target Audience

If you take nothing else away from this article, know that precisely identifying your target audience is essential for any other marketing channel to have a positive impact on your business.

The reason why emphasizes this is that many small businesses fall into the trap of using their limited budget to pay a local marketing team for their service. What they often end up with is an increase in web traffic, which is exciting at first, only to realize that they have earned no additional conversions or sales with their spending.

It doesn't take a tremendous amount of effort to boost numbers like traffic or clicks that can mostly amount to vanity. What takes more effort is taking that traffic, filtering out the noise, and discovering the individuals who are actually interested in or could benefit from your products or services. If you haven't created a clear picture of who your target audience is, it may be easier to determine who is not your target audience.

When you perform research for your content creation, you'll likely see high search volume for a wide variety of topics that can appeal to a wide variety of people. However, you only want to focus on the keywords and topics that would serve an actual customer. An example of this might be a photography company that makes the mistake of focusing heavily on creating content that discusses the technical aspects of what they do. However, this type of content would primarily appeal to fellow photographers or other photography businesses. A better approach might be to focus on creating content that addresses the needs and concerns of your target audience, such as email marketing for photographers which can help them understand the benefits of working with you.

Due to the misunderstanding of search intent for those keywords, they're not likely to see any sales. Instead, their content should be focusing on the needs of customers. In this case, they would want to think about content that would appeal to audiences that need professional photography such as the newly engaged, brand-new parents, or parents of high school graduates. This better describes the desired buyer persona and provides a foundation for whom to pursue with all future marketing endeavors.

With this in mind, it is worth taking the time to create your own buyer persona. This starts at an individual level and allows you to think about why this person would want to buy your services. Consider their needs, their wants, and what they would rightfully expect out of your product or service. Then, begin formulating a pitch that indisputably describes your brand as the solution to their problem.

2. Use SEO to Optimize Every Page on Your Website

SEO is an effective, but a long-term marketing strategy that every business should consider employing online. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of editing and updating your website both on the front-end and back-end in an effort to rank higher within Google search results.

Google utilizes a highly-sophisticated algorithm that automatically crawls through every page on your website. It will examine everything that a webpage features including the written content, images, URL structure, hyperlinks, metadata, and much more. The more optimized your web page is, the better the algorithm is able to understand what type of content you are offering with each page. As this understanding improves, it is better able to serve this page to users who are searching for this type of content online.

Search engine optimization is a cost-effective marketing strategy, but the process is quite deep and requires a level of expertise to implement correctly. Marketers are consistently discovering new techniques and opportunities to further improve a web page's search value. However, here are some basic principles to provide you an overview of what you need to do to get started:

• Perform extensive keyword research and select terms that yield a high search volume and a reasonable cost-per-click
• Create a map of your site and choose which keywords you want to be the focus on each page
• Create high-quality content that matches the search intent behind each keyword you choose. The amount of words required depends on the page subject matter, but anything less than 1,000 words is too little and can be flagged as thin content.
• Update your site navigation and ensure that each page has a clear, easy-to-read URL
• Ensure that the website is fully responsive and optimized for mobile viewing. Use tools like Google Search Console and Google PageSpeed Insights for this purpose.
• Complete the SEO data for each webpage including writing your own custom meta descriptions that contain the primary keyword.

This is merely the basics of what is required for SEO best practices. If you would like to learn more, you can read about how to create an SEO-friendly website here. You can also learn more about how you can have our team fulfill your website SEO by heading over to the DashClicks storefront and examining our pricing plans.

3. Create a Content Blog and Post Regularly

After you've optimized your existing website pages and filled them with great content, you need to keep moving to push your rankings higher. One of the most effective ways to do this is to continue creating high-quality, SEO-optimized content that targets different aspects of your audience's various needs.

You can do this by adding a content blog or news feed to your website. This will provide you with endless additional opportunities to create meaningful content that targets new keywords for search rankings. You can and should also utilize this content to naturally present your business as a solution to the issues or problems being discussed in an article. At the same time, the reader also obtains something of value for no cost that can help them make educated purchasing decisions or solve the problem themselves entirely.

Content blog posts can vary greatly in length, but the average website owner should look to write as many as 3,000 words or more in a post if possible. Shorter content can and does work for some creators, but this generally works more often with those who already have an understood value associated with their brand or the author's name.

It's for this reason that many blog networks utilize the same person as the author of every blog post. However, the chances are that this person writes a very small amount of the content if they write any of it at all. The name simply gets used as this is the person that audience associates with the brand, which brings us to our next tip:

4. Get Someone to be the Face of Your Brand

Audiences get savvier every day when it comes to recognizing the tools and tricks used by marketers to earn their attention. They recognize that a business exists primarily to make money from the consumer, which doesn't exactly start you off on the basis of trust. For this reason, you should utilize a sole individual to be the face of your brand with most communications.

People want to purchase, but they don't want to be taken advantage of. They want to build relationships, not just become another transaction. Whenever the audience is able to attach a face and a voice to what they're reading, the content suddenly acquires a completely new tone of approachability that would not exist otherwise.

You don't need to do any further research than looking at some of the top brands that employ this strategy. While he was still with us, Steve Jobs embodied this philosophy for Apple. He commanded attention at every company event and was largely responsible for the success of many Apple products we use today. Other examples of this include Phil Spencer at Microsoft's Xbox and Kim Kardashian as the face of her own beauty supply line.

However, you don't need to be world-famous to become the face of your own brand. These individuals didn't become famous until the company made their product world-renowned. What you do need is someone who is known for being sociable, charismatic and a great salesperson. It's great if your head writer fits this bill as they're the one creating the content, but other company leaders can fit the bill if appropriate.

If you're not comfortable using anyone at your company to fit your desired voice, you can employ someone outside of the company as a spokesperson. While big-budget companies can afford to pay celebrities and famous actors, a wide variety of companies large and small now turn to social media influencers to great effect. This is because these individuals already have built-in followings with trust already established. They then transfer that trust to any brands or products they promote using their own social media accounts. Be sure to follow the proper legal guidelines when taking this route to avoid any unwanted issues.

Whichever route you choose will produce better results than attempting to emerge as a robotic, faceless entity. It will be tough for your small business to break out and get noticed, so make it easier by getting personable with your audience whenever possible.

5. Create an Email List

A widely used strategy by businesses of all sizes is to incorporate an email listing somewhere on the website. Signing up is completely free for users and generally promises news updates, exclusive offers, or some other type of incentive in exchange for the email. Obtaining a list of emails from your prospects is critical for marketing success.

Whenever you acquire a list of emails from a percentage of users that visit your site, you have a self-made directory of better-qualified targets. The reason for this is that the user demonstrates an extra level of interest in their willingness to exchange their personal data to learn more about your offerings. With the email added to your CRM, you can now start making a plan to create highly-targeted email advertisements that turn prospects into conversions.

While you won't personally email every person that signs up, you can utilize tools to automatically personalize an email based on the contact information you received during the signup process. When an email from your brand appears in their inbox, they see a highly personalized letter addressed to them informing them of whatever offer or update you have to share. As we discussed in the section above, personalizing your communications has a huge impact on a person's willingness to do business with you.

• Nurture Your Signups

Emails are also the best way to keep your brand fresh in a person's mind long after they stopped visiting your website. Even if some time has passed, it's easier to convince a previously interested person to commit to future purchases than someone that has no experience interacting with your brand. Sometimes all it takes is the right email with the right offer at the right time to score an easy sale.

With that said, you need to stay on top of your email list and continue to nurture those who sign up. You can do this in a variety of ways including sharing weekly business or store updates, providing exclusive offers to members, or giving early access to product or service promotions. You can also experiment with other tactics such as writing and providing exclusive content at set intervals or asking them to provide direct feedback on how to improve their experience.

• Segment Your Email List

Studies indicate that further segmenting those who sign up for your email list can produce higher positive results than using standard emails for everyone. By segmentation, we mean to categorize every person who signs up by certain factors including location, age, sex, and interests. You can either require these details or present them as options during the signup process.

When you have these details on your side, you gain a clearer picture of the buyer persona. With that on your side, you can create multiple types of emails for your various lists that cater more to their personality or interests. The more refined you can make your targeting, the better chance you have of getting the person to interact. The link to the studies above indicates that segmented emails get 10.44% higher open rates and 15.69% higher click-throughs.

Do what it takes to make your email listing appear attractive and obtain those details. Understand exactly who your audience is and watch your conversion rate begin to climb.

6. Sign Up for Every Business Listing Directory

Business directories are a free and easy way to gain some additional brand recognition while acquiring some valuable backlinks for SEO. A backlink is any hyperlink that exists on another site that links back to another website. Whenever a Google-trusted website provides a backlink to your domain, Google sees this as a vote of confidence that the information provided on your domain is accurate.

The number of directory listings available to you depends on where your business is located. Popular examples of these websites include Yelp, Yellow Pages, and Foursquare. None may be more important than Google My Business, which allows you to register and detail your business directly within your Google account. When you fully optimize your GMB profile and improve your site rankings, you stand a chance of having your website appear in Google's local 3-pack any time a user searches for keywords relevant to your business.

There are also a number of automated tools online that can automate the process of creating directory listings like Yext. DashClicks also offers a similar listings manager service within its platform as an add-on subscription within the Analytics application.

You can learn more about link-building strategies and how they impact your website's SEO here.

7. Manage Your Customer Reviews Online

While we're on the subject of business listings, know that it's vital for small businesses to proactively manage their customer reviews online. These testimonials can have a substantial positive or negative impact on your brand reputation. However, by being proactive online, you can manage your reputation even in situations where you discover unflattering comments about your business on a website.

You'll want to look out for these reviews and testimonials on all of the business listings we suggested you sign up for above. Other sites that allow audiences to submit reviews are social media websites, industry aggregators, and sites like the Better Business Bureau. Customers have the legal right to leave an honest review of their experience with your business regardless of the impact it has on your success.

However, these websites are aware of how subjective a review can be. Disgruntled individuals can also leave inaccurate reviews for no other reason than to stir up trouble and cause headaches for your employees. In these cases, it's important for your team to respond to these reviews in a respectable, professional manner.

If your team or an employee was in the wrong, apologize for the mistake and offer a possible explanation for what happened. Validating the user's opinion and offering to touch base and correct the issue can go a long way with managing your reputation. In some cases, the customer may update their review. Even if they do not, other users will see that your brand remains active and shows concern for the customer's wellbeing.

In the event that a review is inaccurate, dishonest, or otherwise needlessly harmful, you can actually present your case to the website team. If they decide that the review does not represent an accurate picture of your business, they may remove the negative review entirely. They may also do this for outdated reviews that lower your overall score so long as you have a consistently positive history of customer service since then.

Your ratings and history matter to more than just public perception. When your pages are being rated for quality, Google Quality Page Raters may look into your testimonials to inquire more about your expertise and trustworthiness as a brand. Maintaining a positive public persona is important for all of these reasons, which is why this is a great tip to follow for every small business.

8. Explore Paid Digital Advertising

Paid digital advertising, sometimes referred to as pay-per-click advertising, is an effective way of obtaining an immediate ROI. This is especially important for smaller businesses that are getting started as you need to start turning a profit as soon as possible. While we highly advocate for the strategies mentioned above, the time they can take to get results is less desirable than what a PPC campaign can offer.

Facebook is by and large the most accessible platform for creating and managing your paid ads. The cost-per-click remains fairly low regardless of the industry and the reach the platform offers is unparalleled on social networks. Statista reports that the platform possesses as many as 1.93 billion daily active users. While you'll still need to work to find your target audience, that number presents a lot of potential business opportunities for any brand. Furthermore, you can cross-post your ads to Facebook and Instagram simultaneously.

That's not all that's out there, however. Google also offers a paid ads management platform and is considered by some to be the pinnacle for paid advertising. You can also pay for ads on Bing, Twitter, Amazon, LinkedIn, and a wide variety of additional platforms.

These platforms allow businesses of all sizes to advertise by setting your desired amount for monthly ad spend. You'll need to devote some of that budget to discovery campaigns, which allow you to gather the data you need for further audience targeting. Much of this is now driven by AI automation that uses more or less of your ad spend depending on how your ads are performing. If you're not getting results in a reasonable amount of time, the platform will automatically dial back your ad spend to avoid wasting your money.

These platforms also offer built-in analytics and A/B testing tools, so that you can better track what aspects of your campaign perform well and which do not. Rather than just scrapping your hard work on an ad entirely, testing and tracking the results can help you pinpoint weaknesses in copy, page design, headlines, and other key areas. It will then automatically shift your ad spend to advertisements that are pulling in the best results.

It may be intimidating to start spending money when you're just getting started, but it's by far the most effective way to start gaining traction for your small business quickly. In the meantime, have your team focus on implementing those organic SEO strategies. With time and a great strategy, you'll start earning those organic clicks that can allow you to start spending less on paid advertising.

9. Give Away Free Items to Encourage Signups and Future Purchases

We touched on this idea when discussing email lists, but free item giveaways are an effective way of attracting new audiences. They can be implemented in a variety of different ways across different marketing channels depending on the immediate goal. Free items included with offers in paid advertising are often referred to as lead magnets. This is essentially a bonus incentive to sweeten the offer and encourage those on the fence to become genuine prospects.

However, it's important that the free item you give away is immediately related to your business and the offer at hand. You will often see brands giving away completely unrelated items such as a tablet or speaker. These types of giveaways genuinely provide an immediate burst in engagement, but none of those new signups or follows actually represent your target audience. They simply want the free item and show no other indicators that they are a qualified potential customer.

Instead, try to include something of value that matches a would-be buyer's intent. For example, if someone discovers a paid ad and landing page when browsing for landscaping services, that business would want to provide something related to landscaping, lawn maintenance, or outdoor property improvement. This could be something as simple as a free eBook that provides tips on how to keep your lawn and plants healthy in between professional visits. They sign up to get the exclusive content but do not have to commit to a purchasing decision. In exchange, you get a new contact for your email list and can begin segmented targeting from there.

Free giveaways don't always have to be items, either. Promising X dollars or a percentage off the product or service being discussed. You can then sell the merits of the advertised item and convince the prospect that the discount or offer is too good to miss out on. You can boost your signups further by describing the offer as exclusive or limited-time only. This creates the sense of urgency you need to get more leads.

10. Track Your Marketing Efforts with Analytics

Implementing marketing strategies without any sort of feedback is a senseless endeavor. Every action you take requires resources and funds. Without any sort of actionable data, you won't know if your methods are working until it's far too late. Instead, you need to take advantage of the free and paid marketing analytics tools that are available to agencies and small business owners.

These tools will keep track of a variety of metrics including daily website visits, page clicks, average session duration, likes, shares, and much more. More advanced tools even provide heat maps that will indicate what content is receiving the most attention based upon what spends the most time in the user's viewport.

The general metrics you'll want to measure for your website can be tracked for free with the Google Analytics tool. It's free to create an account and your data can be integrated into a wide variety of marketing and CRM platforms available to businesses around the internet, including DashClicks.

Image Source- Analytics Dashboard on DashClicks

Other marketing platforms will have their own analytics available to business owners that have accounts. Social media platforms will track analytics such as likes, shares, impressions, and monthly follows. The paid ads software available within those same platforms will keep track of your spending, clickthrough rate, conversions, and much more.

All of your analytics trackings are entirely automated with these tools. It will be up to your team to take the collected data and make sense of it as it applies to your unique business goals. You can alert yourself to issues with your website or marketing strategies and investigate what can be done to correct a particular issue. Understanding a problem is the first step in creating an effective solution, which is why analytics are a marketer's best friend.

11. Complete Regular Data Clean Ups

As marketing becomes increasingly reliant on customer data and analytics, it's essential to ensure that your data is accurate and up-to-date. Even small amounts of irrelevant or inaccurate data can begin to skew your results and begin the process of shifting your business away from an accurate buyer persona. This is why you need to make the effort to cleanse your data of unwanted data at least once a month.

The most basic thing you will want to do is to scan your CRM to ensure that your information is up-to-date. Life changes happen and your emails or telemarketing efforts can go to waste if you're spending time pursuing connections that are no longer up-to-date. You should purge these outdated contacts or at least the data that's inaccurate. If you're able to touch base in another way, ask the contact for their updated details so that they don't miss out on the latest offers.

You may also acquire invalid or incomplete data if your process of data collection doesn't match your strategy. This can happen if your different departments are not on the same page and using the same workflow formula. By checking your data regularly, you can easily identify these errors sooner than later. You will also be able to devise a plan to see your entire team better coordinated so that your marketing data is uniform across the company.

12. Treat Each Social Platform as a New Marketing Channel

55% of surveyed individuals claimed that they learn about new brands primarily through social media platforms according to a Sprout Social study. Billions of people utilize at least one of many social media platforms making it a premier location to build and advertise your brand.

While most small businesses won't dispute us on the power of social media, many go about utilizing these networks in the wrong way. Social media marketing takes commitment and should see an expert overseeing your accounts throughout the day. Because many teams lack the funds or resources to achieve this, they utilize cheap, crossposting tools such as HootSuite or Sendible. The problem with publishing a one-size-fits-all post across multiple platforms is that it fails to consider the unique demographics that utilize different platforms for different reasons.

For example, Instagram happens to be most widely used by women and those between the ages of 18-29. Meanwhile, LinkedIn attracts a professional audience, primarily those of ages 30-49. Research further segments social media platform audiences by education, income levels, race, and living areas. If you knew that specific locations didn't cater to your target demographic, you wouldn't bother marketing in those areas.

Likewise, your marketing approach will vary depending on the type of demographic. With this data on your side, you should devise unique strategies for each social platform in an effort to obtain the best results. For key updates and news about your brand, crossposting will do fine. However, you need to get up close and personal with each platform's unique audiences if you want to make genuine connections the right way.

13. Boost or Promote Your High-Performing Posts (and Rethink the Bad Ones)

It takes time to curate excellent content, whether it be for your blog or for social media. The trouble is that even a great post deserving attention is not guaranteed to get you results. Whenever a post does attract a significant amount of organic attention, you need to boost those posts to get as much mileage out of it as possible.

The way that social media works are that the more attention your content receives, the more likely it is to be seen by others. Content that earns likes earns shares, and the more shares a post has, the more likes it continues to earn. It will continue to propagate and grow in popularity until it reaches its natural peak. Social media platforms offer you the option to give a post a paid boost, which guarantees a set number of additional impressions to help that cycle last longer.

You can boost posts starting at $1 per day and can continue to increase your budget depending on the number of new users you would like to reach. It’s a quick, fast way to get some additional eyes on your content.

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The alternative is to promote a post that you want to gain additional traction. This allows you to create an advertisement within an existing campaign that directs users back to the content you want to promote. The added benefit of promoting a post is that the data gathered from the promotion will help feed the machine learning algorithm that’s already working in your campaign. The more data you gather from your posts and ads, the better you will be able to target specific audiences in the future.

Whichever method you choose, you’ll want to focus your efforts on the posts that are already performing well. Boosting a post with no activity will do very little and simply won’t be worth the ROI. Instead, re-examine your lesser posts and look for opportunities to improve the content within. It’s worth looking for new opportunities to represent the content you consider great before scrapping the idea altogether.

14. Repurpose Successful Content on Other Channels

If you’re new to marketing, there’s a secret we should let you in on. Excellent salespeople and marketers repurpose previously successful content all the time to great effect. It’s a sensible decision as well, as creating the ideal content takes time, effort, and resources. If you write an excellent, high-quality post that makes an impression, it’s a waste to let the positive impacts end there.

Instead, you can take that same content and find new methods of distributing the information across other marketing channels. For example, a 3,500 world article can easily be broken down into more palatable posts for different audiences. If that content contains multiple headlines that contain educational tips, you can distill that information into multiple social media posts that could carry your social media content throughout a set period.

Key elements from a blog post can also be used to create wonderful, engaging infographics that provide excellent visuals. The users still grasp the key ideas you researched and wrote but receive in a manner that’s even more shareable and engaging. You could convert the post into a script for a video or video series. Taking your ideas even further and formatting them into a PDF with custom-made graphics can also leave you with a well-crafted eBook to share with your email list or to use as a lead magnet in paid campaigns.

There are numerous possibilities for you to repurpose content that proves to be a hit with one section of your audience. It’s smart business to find ways to continuously utilize existing resources to maximize your ROI.

15. Eliminate Marketing Tactics That Don’t Work (But Don’t Give Up Prematurely)

If a marketing strategy is not working, then you need to know when it’s time to call it quits. While all of the unique marketing channels and strategies we pitch can and have worked for small businesses across all industries, it’s not a set guarantee. Every business is unique and has its own goals that need to be accomplished within its set time frame. While you can’t make money without spending it on advertising, you also need to know when it’s time to eliminate a tactic that just isn’t getting results.

Think of the primary audience that buys your products or services. If you primarily cater to a much younger audience, then researched blog posts may not be your most effective course of action. Research indicates that those types of users spend more time on social media and are more likely to engage in short-form content or engage with a dynamic paid advertisement. It’s not that blog content doesn’t work (in fact, we love it), it’s that you need to use your limited resources in areas that best help you achieve your goals.

The big asterisk on this tip is that you need to give a marketing tactic the appropriate amount of time to take effect. All too often business clients complain that SEO simply doesn’t work or get them more conversions. When you investigate, you’ll most likely find that the SEO work is improperly implemented or that they’ve only been doing it for a month or two at most. All knowledge indicates that even an excellent SEO strategy can take upwards of six months to truly take effect. Prematurely canning an SEO campaign you’ve spent time and money on will amount to little more than unnecessary waste.

Likewise, paid ad campaigns on a fresh account may take upwards of a month to properly gather and collect data about your target audience. Turning off a campaign after a couple of weeks is premature, cancels out the machine learning process thus far, and leaves you empty-handed and poorer for the venture.

Understand a marketing tactic before you implement and understand the timetable. After allowing the strategy an honest chance to create an impact, you can then analyze the results and look for where things went wrong. There are a remarkable number of analytics software available at your disposal for this purpose. If the data supports your claim that the job isn’t getting done, then you can look to cut out tactics that aren’t positively impacting your business.

16. Develop an Excellent Customer Service Strategy

Providing excellent customer service is one of the best ways to nurture potential customers and retain existing ones. Even a sour initial experience reported by a customer can turn positive when your team provides customer care and effective solutions promptly.

According to a Microsoft report, 69% of U.S. respondents said that customer service was important when choosing brand loyalty. 57% said that their expectations for customer service were now higher than they were in the previous year.

However, it’s not enough to simply show courtesy with your business’s customer service. Customer service also needs to be near-immediate in a digital world of immediate satisfaction. There are hundreds of businesses at any given moment vying for the same attention of customers, and if you can’t provide an answer or solution, another brand will.

It’s for this reason that small businesses are placing more emphasis than ever on developing an excellent customer service strategy. Not only are brands growing their customer service teams, but they’re also turning to automated solutions such as online chatbots. These AI assistants can help manage customer churn by providing an immediate connection. They’re capable of instantly locating answers to basic issues, which can often be enough to promote customer satisfaction.

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For more complicated issues, these assistants can identify the nature of the request and arm your team with the appropriate information before making contact. This enables your team to better prepare for the interaction and ultimately leads to a higher rate of customer approval.

Bear in mind that positive customer experiences are also reflected in online customer testimonials as discussed in point seven. A history of positive reviews describing your level of care and assistance can be advertising in and of itself for your small business. Likewise, poor customer care can lead to extremely negative reviews that are difficult to scrub away from your business profile.

17. Take Advantage of Marketing Automation Tools

Speaking of AI assistants, automation tools are changing the way marketers work forever. The bulk of all previously manual, tedious work can now be performed more efficiently and more accurately than ever by machine-learning algorithms. You can instantly gather analytics, auto-update your CRM for contacts and sales pipelines, and distribute funds automatically across your various marketing channels.

The more work that can be accomplished by virtual assistants, the more time you have to focus on doing what you do best – running your business. Depending on your needs, there are platforms that can help you build landing pages, create ads, create and automatically update workflows, and even write content. For the small monthly cost of a subscription, you could save countless hours and avoid costly mistakes by leaving your tasks up to automation.

DashClicks is an example of an automated marketing and task management platform. You can consolidate all of your contacts and deals data into one place, integrate other marketing channels like Google and social, create a beautiful website in minutes, and automatically assign leads to your sales reps as they come in through your marketing campaigns. All of your automation pool your data into one place, distribute it to the appropriate teams and leave your departments to focus on getting results.

Conclusion – Marketing Tips for Small Businesses in 2021

These tips cover a wide variety of marketing channels that can benefit your brand and change the way you advertise. While some are critical such as finding your audience, selecting the right marketing channels, and refining your task management, others can grant varying degrees of success depending on your goals, time allotment, and resources available.

Digital marketing is an ever-evolving landscape, which makes it essential for small businesses to stay in the know to remain successful. Follow these helpful tips today and start getting the results you need to be successful scale, and dominate the local scene.

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Out of all of Google's search engine ranking factors, link building stands side-by-side with content as the most important. Despite this fact, it is one of the most underutilized practices in SEO.

This is in no small part due to how difficult it can be to acquire valuable backlinks. It's one of the few strategies that, at least in some part, is partially out of your control. That's why most companies tend to focus exclusively on the content and internal linking on their side.

Link building doesn't need to be an impossible task. In this article, we'll provide a list of 9 easy local link-building tactics you can employ, so that your site can benefit from this powerful SEO strategy.

What is Link Building in Marketing?

Link building is a marketing strategy that involves acquiring a number of webpage links from both internal and external sources to your domain. Links that direct from one page to another within your own website are referred to as internal links. Whenever another website refers to a page on your domain, this is known as a backlink.

What Are the Benefits of Link Building?

As mentioned above, acquiring a healthy number of backlinks is one of the top-ranking factors in Google search results. However, acquiring backlinks from any old site won't suffice. Your backlinks need to come from quality, trusted sources in the eyes of Google's algorithm. In other words, if a high-ranking website links back to your site, the algorithm sees this as a vote of confidence in your favor.

The more backlinks you acquire from these types of sources, the more authority gets shared with your domain. The trick is that you still need to create compelling content of your own and utilize best SEO practices to be worthy of that backlink. Otherwise, a link back to your website could actually harm the other domain if your website is not up to par.

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In addition to being a direct ranking factor, having a link to your domain on high-traffic pages around the web will promote additional traffic to your site. Just with how you create new content pages to rank for additional keywords, the more gateways to your site that exist online, the more opportunities you have to improve your number of daily visitors.

The same concept also applies to internal linking. While internal linking won't give you the benefits of shared confidence, it's proven to increase the average duration of a session and the number of pages visited in a single session. This is because you are providing similar, relevant content to users in a natural way.

9 Easy Local Link Building Tactics

Now that you understand the powerful benefits of an effective link-building strategy, it's time to examine how we can acquire local links back to our domain. Some of these will integrate seamlessly with your overall SEO strategy if you're using best practices, while others will require some additional outreach within your community.

1. Create Content Worth Sharing

This is the most logical starting point and is one of the best ways to provide something of value in exchange for the link. Consider that the primary reason that anyone links back to a site is to share a compelling article or video they discovered. By creating interesting, unique content, you stand a better chance of seeing others spread your domain online. This applies to both individual users and other website owners that are sourcing the web for compelling content.

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Excellent content should appear both on your main website pages and your blog. If your website currently does not feature a blog, you should consider creating one. It's a personal platform that you can utilize to share a variety of content including industry news, opinions, the latest research, or other captivating topics. It's also a premier opportunity for you to build a library of data that builds your reputation and establishes your brand as an industry thought leader.

For acquiring local backlinks, in particular, try to feature pieces regularly that are relevant to your immediate surrounding area. Be sure to feature locations, features, and values that are specific to residents in that area. Google will identify the content, how it correlates to the local area, and provide that material to users searching for your topic in that zip code and surrounding regions.

Not only will locally-relevant content provide your website a boost in local rankings, but it presents opportunities for other local websites or businesses to pick up your content and feature it if it applies to their own site. You can also take a proactive approach by reaching out to those websites yourself and presenting your content should you find natural opportunities for it to benefit you both. Any time that another site features your content (even just excerpts), you have the right to request a backlink.

2. Get Your Site Featured on High-Ranking Aggregator Websites

There are hundreds of websites online that exist primarily to aggregate local business websites that are specific to a certain industry. You can try this yourself by entering Fort Lauderdale Marketingā  or Miami Doctorsā  in Google right now. This will pull up a variety of results including both direct links to specific businesses as well as directories.

Most of these aggregators provide convenient ways for you to sign your business up on their website. You'll need to provide the appropriate proof that you own and registered the business, but doing so will earn you an easy backlink to your website. These types of sites rank high and demonstrate high authority with Google as they are designed to primarily accomplish one task. These types of backlinks will always be reliable and you should make an effort to register your website with as many of them as possible.

For other high-ranking sites, you generally can't expect to get a backlink from a direct competitor. Doing so would be counterintuitive as it would direct their website traffic to yours, possibly resulting in lost business. Instead, high-ranking websites that deal with a similar subject matter, but do not necessarily sell the products or services you do, could still present a possibility to feature your content on their site as discussed above.

3. Fix the 404 Errors on Your Website

Many website owners make the mistake of failing to correct 404 errors found on their website. A 404 error is whenever a browser makes contact with the website server, but the server is unable to find the content being requested through the hyperlink. This is most commonly the result of the page no longer existing or the content being moved to a slightly altered URL.

The reason this often gets overlooked is because they do not negatively impact your SEO. Google explicitly states in their guidelines: 404's don't harm your site's indexing or ranking. Additionally, a 404 will likely not be very common on your end so long as you are managing your website and updating your links appropriately when changing URLs.

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However, a 404 does have an impact when another site backlinks to your site and vice versa. For example, if you backlink to an education article on a peer website, and that page returns a 404, it can then hurt your SEO. Likewise, if a website is giving you a backlink to a page that no longer exists, it hurts their SEO and you also do not gain the value offered through the backlink.

While fixing the URLs causing 404s on your own site is easy enough to fix, it can possibly prove a challenge to fix backlinks found on other websites. The simplest method is to simply email the website owner and explain the situation. By having them update their backlink to the correct URL, you will both benefit as you gain back the link and the referring website will no longer be harming their site's SEO.

Alternatively, you can set up a 301 redirect in the event that you cannot get the webmaster to update the URL. This will prove necessary if a piece of content on your site goes viral, for example. Instead of attempting to do the impossible and fix every single referring hyperlink, you can set up a permanent 301 redirect that sends all users attempting to access the nonexistent page to the correct one.

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Though it can take the server a bit longer to process the request, Google does not hold this against you as you cannot reasonably be held accountable for every broken URL that exists online. Therefore, you can feel free to set up as many 301 redirects as necessary so long as the situation calls for it. Once those links begin directing users back to your website, you'll retain the value previously gained from those hard-earned backlinks.

4. Sign Up for Online Directory Listings

Similar to the aggregators mentioned in tactic two, the internet features a wide number of local directories that categorize and list businesses by the industry for their users. These function as search engines that list out addresses, phone numbers, emails, business hours, customer testimonials, and much more. They are excellent resources for managing your reputation online.

They're also a quick and easy way to acquire a number of backlinks from high-ranking website domains. Examples of these sites include Yelp, Foursquare, Yellow Pages, Apple Maps, and Google My Business. A complete and optimized GMB profile also offers the potential to see your website featured in the local pack within Google search results. This shows the three most relevant businesses above all search results including paid advertisements.

Local directory listings can boost traffic to your website through additional channels, drive your call and email volume, and pinpoint your exact map location to users that prefer to do business in person.

5. Analyze Your Competitors' Link Building Strategies

Every high-quality SEO strategy involves some level of competitor research. These are not necessarily similar brands that sell the same products or services as your brand. Instead, they are the websites that are vying for the same keyword search rankings that your website is through content marketing, link building, and paid advertisements.

Many SEO tools will provide ways for you to check on competitor backlinks including SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Ubersuggest. Most of these backlinks will primarily consist of local directories and aggregators like we mentioned above in our previous tactics. What remains will likely be blogging networks or other local organizations. You'll also be able to view how much traffic they're gaining from each backlink to determine which ones actually get results.

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Rather than viewing the backlinks your competitors have as lost opportunities, look at them as a blueprint of which ones to pursue and which ones aren't worth your time. Remember that these referring domains are in the business of providing great content to their visitors, not partnering with or promoting any one business. If you see that a domain is channeling high amounts of traffic to a competitor, check out their site and look for opportunities to collaborate and earn your domain a valuable backlink.

Analyzing competitor backlink strategies will not only point out the high-value referring domains but will also show you what they're actually doing to earn those backlinks. This can vary depending upon your industry. If guest blogging seems to perform well for your peers, then you should dedicate some of your team's efforts into creating powerful content that is unique and exclusive for those referring domains.

However, don't make the mistake of cutting corners on your approach. Google both values backlinks and understands that businesses will look for the cheapest, quickest way possible to acquire them. Ensure that content you feature on other sites is distinct, of high quality, and is appropriate for that referring website to feature. Otherwise, these types of backlinks will do very little to boost your SEO.

6. Don't Forget About Your Internal Links

If you search the web to learn about backlinks and internal links, you'll find compelling arguments about which is stronger. The truth is that both very much have their place in SEO and support your website in different ways. While high-quality backlinks are seen as a transference of trust from one domain to the other, internal links help search algorithms better understand the layout of content on your website.

The primary focus of your internal links should be on pages deep within the site layout, primarily blog pages. This is because your core website pages already have a clearly identified navigational map at the top of the website. In addition to this, your home page is already the most likely to receive plenty of links from other sources.

You also do not want to make the mistake of linking too often to your Contact page. This page usually serves one purpose - to provide or collect contact details. It generally does not contain a high amount of SEO-optimized content and will do very little to boost your site's overall SEO value.

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Instead, you want to use your internal links to help Google's search algorithm understand how your different content pages relate to one another. This creates an interconnected map or web, which Google can use to get a complete picture of what your brand offers and how it is unique from other websites that deal with similar content. You can also manually communicate which pages you want to have a higher value but linking back to that page more often within your website.

However, be sure to avoid link stuffing and consider ways to utilize internal links in a way that feels natural to the reader. For example, if an article touches on a topic that relates to, but isn't critical to the main subject, you can provide an internal link to an article that explores that mentioned topic further. You are merely suggesting the opportunity to learn more to the reader while mapping out how the two topics relate to one another to the search algorithm. It becomes more challenging as you scale your campaign. Realistically speaking, building hundreds of internal links can seem like an endless task. This is where a reliable internal link checker becomes invaluable. It scans all your pages and identifies opportunities to insert relevant internal links. All you need to do is review these suggestions and, once approved, the tool will automatically deploy the new internal links.

7. Leverage Social Media for Additional Link Building

Social media is all about building connections. Unfortunately, businesses fail to respect or make time to leverage social media as a marketing strategy effectively. You've likely been witness to countless automated posts that appear robotic, lifeless, and automated. That's because they are.

Instead, a great social media strategy requires a proactive approach to building connections just as you would in your day-to-day life. The only difference is that your goal is to connect with like-minded brands, outlets, bloggers, and influencers that can help get the word out about your website's content. The question is, how can you use social media to start gaining new backlinks?

The simplest way is to start engaging with the content shared by the people you want to follow you. This includes commenting, liking, sharing, and doing other things that can help them drive their own engagement. The people managing those social media accounts will notice and, if they're also proactive, start digging into your website and brand.

If those social media accounts take notice of your content and find it worthy of sharing, they may do so without any additional work. In most cases, you'll need to do some additional outreach and ask about opportunities to develop a mutually beneficial relationship for both of you. You won't only be investing in those relationships, but can gain benefits by seeing your content widely shared by their followers, and so on. With a genuine, organic strategy, everyone can win on social media.

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You can also get more eyes on your content pages by making sure to leverage hashtags and trending topics when appropriate. However, don't make the mistake of forcing your content into areas of social media where it doesn't really belong. Social media users are aware of brands online, and you can develop a bad reputation quickly for dishonesty and deceptiveness. It's easy to make this mistake, but much harder to undo the damage once it's done.

8. Sponsor Local Activity Groups or Teams

Your local community has numerous link-building opportunities waiting for the right business to approach them. Consider the number of local communities and groups that require funding and sponsorships in order to provide meaningful experiences to children, students, athletes, and more. Most of these groups and organizations utilize one or more business partnerships to accomplish this.

In exchange, you receive premium local advertising online and offline by acting as a sponsor for these groups. Consider this is a low-cost addition to your marketing budget that helps spread brand awareness while simultaneously aiding your community in a meaningful way. In return for that sponsorship, you can generally work out agreements to see your business listed as a sponsor on their website, which earns you a backlink.

Serving as a benefactor to the community may also in some cases earn you a spotlight with local newspapers or magazines that need to report on the latest community happenings. It relies on the same principle as content sharing online. By providing something of value that you have to others in need, they can provide something of value back to your brand and everybody wins.

9. Guest Blog for Other High-Ranking Websites

This is another link-building strategy that focuses on social outreach. Rather than working out a partnership or dealing with another website, you can offer your services to provide exclusive, unique content that gets posted to their domain only. As long as you utilize your brand, your resume, and your expertise, webmasters may be thrilled at the opportunity to have a local expert create valuable content that they may not be able to create themselves.

This works both at the local level and at the international level online. You may have seen examples of guest blogs when visiting one of your favorite news or blogging networks. You can identify a guest article by looking for a brief excerpt that highlights the author, briefly describes their background and links back to their website. While you won't get to use the content for your own domain, you do not only get the backlink, but you get a brand-new platform to sell yourself by offering your unique insights as an expert in the industry.

Guest blogging can not only be an effective way to earn backlinks from trusted sources but can also help you acquire a following from audiences mutually interested in both parties. Some of the best content creators online are able to amass a huge following simply by looking for opportunities to spread their name and brand wherever they possibly can online.

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You can also look for high-profile content creators and work out arrangements to guest blog for one another. This connection not only gets you both access to new and distinct content but can further expand the target audience for both parties without any real drawbacks or downsides to your overall marketing strategy.

Use These 9 Easy Local Link Building Tactics to Boost Your SEO Now!

Don't make the mistake of overlooking link building. Collecting a number of backlinks and internal links where appropriate can prove to be a foundational piece of a successful SEO strategy. Be sure to stick to the fundamentals that we know work and slowly expand your reach to others online so long as your content team and social media teams have the means to do so.

At its core, the secret to acquiring quality backlinks is simply by creating high-quality content that's worthy of reading and sharing. So long as you stick to best SEO practices and ensure that your domain is healthy in the eyes of Google's search algorithm, other webmasters will likely be happy to explore opportunities that benefit both parties and will help you climb in the search rankings.

A website blog is a vital part of any SEO or digital marketing strategy. It has the potential to increase traffic, build brand awareness, drive sales, aid your customers, and establish you as an authority in your industry. However, when done incorrectly, your blog content can also provide little more than add additional pages to your website that clutter up your directory.

In this post, we're going to show you the fundamentals of how to create a winning blog content strategy in 7 steps. This will entail the processes of devising, researching, writing, and tracking your blog performance for the best results possible.

How to Create a Winning Blog Content Strategy?

According to a Content Marketing Institute study, 60% of businesses with a chalked-out content strategy reported achieving significant results, compared to only 32% who didn't have any specific plan.

Here are a few easy steps to create a winning blog content strategy:-

1. Decide on the Primary Focus of Your Blog

While you want to create a blog with good intentions, you need to consider why you will be writing and publishing posts. Of course, the primary goal is to increase conversions. However, your business success matters very little to those who will be visiting and reading your regular posts.

However, that doesn't mean that your blog should completely avoid any promotional intent. What we are looking for lies within a cross-section of what your audience wants to learn about and what your brand provides to alleviate those issues. Great content will not only educate customers on matters related to your field but should naturally lead them to conclude that your brand provides a valuable service that improves their life.

The easiest place to start is to ask yourself why readers would want to read your content. Consider the questions they ask and problems they search for when using Google. If you’re a personal trainer, your potential clients likely search for topics such as “how to lose weight.” As an authority in health and fitness, you could write a month’s worth of blog posts describing exercises and dietary tips that you would provide for your clients. If you work in business and finance, your audience may benefit more from the latest updates and trends related to that field.

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Your answer to “why” will differentiate depending on your industry and the nature of your brand. However, the common theme is understanding the biggest problems that your customers face. Your blog then provides real, actionable information and solutions to customers that provide true value and boost your reputation.

During your process of deciding the purpose of your blog, attempt to come up with several unique solutions. This is because where you finally arrive will depend upon the research you perform in the next few steps.

2. Understand the Strategy of Your Competitors

As with many aspects of your business strategy, you need to be highly aware of what your competitors provide to your shared audience with their blog. Bear in mind that a blog content competitor may not be the same as a direct business competitor. There will be websites online that target mutual keywords with their articles, but do not necessarily sell or provide products or services that your business does. Nonetheless, these will be the challenges in your way that will make you work for your traffic and keyword rankings.

With this in mind, your team should take a few hours to review blogs on a wide variety of websites related to the matters you want to write about. Look at the topics they focus on, how they outline their content, and how they compile every article within the blog. You are looking for any opportunities for your blog to provide something completely new and unique.

By pinpointing an approach that distinguishes you from your blog content competitors, you're already starting off with a unique value proposition. While audiences can find all kinds of articles based upon their query, they'll only be able to get your brand's different outlook on your website only. This is beneficial as it not only provides a strong foundation for keyword research but will actually allow your content to coexist and succeed independently of others.

Many brands make the mistake of adding blogs to their website only to copy the same old content you can find anywhere almost verbatim. It will take time, but look for those niche opportunities to create something unique. Even changing up the tone and attitude your company takes toward a topic versus competitors can provide a fresh, enriching experience for your readers.

3. Perform Extensive Keyword and Topic Research

Keyword research is your bread and butter when it comes to developing your blog content strategy. There are a variety of tools you can utilize to do this including SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Moz. These keywords serve as the basis for all topics you will choose to write about for your new blog.

While researching keywords takes time, it doesn't need to be overly complex. Consider the main focus of your business and its industry. Then, begin to create a list of items that are immediately relevant to the products or services you provide. You won't even need to come up with topics from these words or phrases, as most SEO software will also do this for you.

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For example, a local computer repair company might list out keyword ideas such as:

• Computer
• Hard Drive
• Graphics Card
• RAM
• Power Supply

When you enter these keywords into an SEO tool, you’ll receive a variety of information from Google including average search volume, the number of clicks, the average cost-per-click, and the keyword difficulty (how hard it is to rank for a said keyword). There is generally also a place for search suggestions and questions that show what types of questions users ask containing that keyword. Suddenly “graphics card” can turn into strong topics such as “How do I choose the best graphics card,” or, “how to repair a graphics card.” Because this local computer repair company has a lot of expertise in this area, these can prove to be high-value topics to write about if the keyword difficulty is appropriate.

A way to research topics outside of SEO tools is to get in touch with your audience directly. Social media is another component of a successful digital marketing strategy that allows you to communicate with your customers and audience at any time. Customers are generally more than happy to share their input about a service, a brand, or simply a problem that's related to your area of expertise. These issues could translate into great topics as your audience is explicitly communicating their desire to learn more in that area.

While keyword difficulty doesn't mean you necessarily should avoid a keyword, it will give you an accurate picture of how likely you are to rank for it. This is especially true for websites and blogs that are new and have no history with Google's search algorithm. For starting out, you'll want to shoot for topics that are of reasonable difficulty, show a high search volume and click-through rate, and provide a lower cost-per-click. You can still choose to write about higher-difficulty topics, but it will take time and consistent effort, which leads us into our next step.

4. Build a Content Calendar

You've decided on the focus of your blog, performed the keyword research, and generated a lengthy list of topics. Rather than just assigning your team articles to write, you should instead collaborate and create a content calendar for your company's digital marketing plan.

A content calendar offers a variety of benefits not just for your writing team, but for all arms of your marketing ventures. It is a monthly calendar where you can schedule due dates for topics, dates for posting, and the assigned team member. By keeping a strict outline of your regular blog posts, you can avoid issues such as duplicated or similar articles. Your writers will also have ample notice of what's due to ensure that your blog is always on time and up-to-date.

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Scheduling out your topics will also make it easier to visualize opportunities to group up subjects or create themes for your readers. As an example, let's revisit our local computer repair company above.

They started their blog with an article titled “How to Repair a Graphics Card.” Based on the remaining keywords, they may also be able to write “How to Repair” articles on a variety of computer component keywords. All of these articles are related, which creates an ongoing theme that teaches readers how to work with a variety of computer components. As a result, readers that engaged with the first post have a greater likelihood of engaging with future, related articles. This can create the ongoing momentum you’re looking for with your content blog.

Grouping articles like this also naturally lends your blog to internal linking strategies. This is an SEO retention strategy to keep visitors on your site for longer by linking to additional pages that feature similar content to what they are reading.

Content calendars can also help you coordinate with other aspects of your content marketing such as social media. It's that much easier to scout opportunities to promote and share blog posts on your social accounts when your various topics are outlined ahead of time. Your social media team can look for opportunities to generate shared traffic between your social accounts and your blog by capitalizing on grouped topic themes.

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Finally, a content calendar also provides you with a visualization of other events throughout the year that you may overlook. Keeping your blog articles timely is the best way to avoid inadvertently making your blog appear static or outdated. Content marketing in 2021 is a dynamic endeavor and coordinating your content with trending topics is the best way to keep active audiences engaged.

5. Create Your Content Bible

While the previous steps focused on the development of the blog itself, this step will futureproof the process of how your writing team creates the actual content. These are the rules that your team creates that dictate the structure, flow, and style rules for every article that goes up on your website's blog. While the idea of creating your own content bible or style guide sounds overwhelming, know that most publications use either the existing Chicago Manual of Style or AP Style as the foundation.

If you're unfamiliar, a stylebook is a list of guidelines for how content creators should utilize text, grammar, punctuation, sources, and other miscellaneous rules. However, every brand still needs its own style guidelines for additional matters. These can include what tones or attitudes are acceptable to use, whether or not explicit content is acceptable, how humor should be handled, etc.

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A style guide can make the difference between an amateur blog that casually features new articles and a professional writing outlet. It will ensure consistency across all of your pieces regardless of the writer and make your content easy to navigate for repeat readers.

It will also expedite the process of content creation by providing a template for all content as opposed to asking your writers to operate from a blank slate. The better they understand what you want from them, the more efficient content creation will be.Ā  This benefit will also apply to new writers that come into your company long after your blog is up and running.

6. Reinforce Your Written Content with Media

Everyday society shifts more and more to visual media as opposed to written text. Chances are that if you post a blog on your website that consists of text only, your readership numbers are going to be extremely low if not nonexistent. This is less of an indicator of the quality of your writing and more about the impact that original graphics have on marketing. That impact becomes exceedingly important for long-form articles where it becomes increasingly difficult to retain someone's attention.

Original, custom-made graphics tend to generate the best results. However, investing in an account with a stock photo website such as Shutterstock or 123RF is a quick, cost-effective way to get your hands on quality, copyright-free images to use in your blog articles. Any visual will offer positive results by injecting color and meaningful breaks from larger ideas throughout the body. Using best practices with these images will also present additional minor opportunities to boost your on-page SEO and potential search rankings.

In addition to images, alternative forms of media can have profound impacts on your traffic and conversion rates. This includes custom infographics that colorfully summarize and illustrate the key takeaways of your articles. It can also include personally-made and edited videos that in some way support the core message of the written content. You can further minimize your bounce rate by notifying readers that there is an infographic or video within the title or the beginning of the article.

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7. Track Results and Adjust Your Content Plan as Necessary

Content marketing is indeed a long-term marketing endeavor, but that doesn't mean you can't start tracking your performance immediately. The process may not be as clear-cut as calculating your ROI on your latest paid ad campaign, but it's possible when you know which metrics to examine.

You can start by using free tools like Google Analytics to keep a close eye on the traffic that visits your website. You'll be able to analyze which channels visitors use to discover your site as well as what keywords they are using in search. If you capitalize on high-volume keywords and use best practices to provide high-quality content, you should start to see an organic traffic increase with time. If you are not seeing an increase in visitors from your targeted keywords, it can be a sign that your content strategy requires a revisit.

Another indicator of your blog performance to look out for is the number of signups you have on your mailing list. There are few indicators more indicative of your audience's level of interest in the content you create. Your website and blog should feature some way to subscribe to the blog or sign up to receive notifications of new posts.

Additional ways to measure your blog's impact are to monitor the average time on page and average pages per session by the user. A 3,000+ word article takes on average ten minutes or longer to read, but your sessions will likely be shorter due to skimming. If the user is also making an effort to visit more pages, it can be an indicator of interest in the content you provide.

Finally, you can track the performance of specific blogs by setting up custom goals within Google Analytics. This is practical when the article aims to not only inform but to drive visitors to perform some sort of action. This could include filling out a form or making a purchase within the store. You'll be able to track which users complete this goal when accessing the site through the blog post. Be sure to provide plenty of call-to-actions in these types of posts to ensure your goal conversion rate is a proper indicator of your content quality.

If one or more of these indicators shows less than desirable results, then it will be time for you to revisit your content strategy. Experiment with new types of content or survey your audience on social media to learn more about what type of content they'd like to see. In addition to this, use tools like Google's People Also Ask to look into commonly searched questions that are related to your targeted keywords.

How to Create A Winning Blog Content Strategy Conclusion?

The biggest mistake we see people make when approaching their blog is not giving it the attentive and consistent strategy it deserves. Understand that even a great content blog will take up to six months to gain traction when starting from scratch. However, your results will vary depending on how effective your blog content strategy is for your brand.

Research your content competitors and look for any window of opportunity to differentiate your blog from others online. This unique foundation will lend itself to creating new and original content that serves your readers even when your competitors target the same keywords. Try to focus on keywords with a lower difficulty that still demonstrates a high search volume. Don't hesitate to look at commonly searched questions on Google to gain topic ideas or utilize the additional features within your chosen SEO tool.

After you narrow down what you need to write about, start to schedule those ideas into a content calendar. Stick to this plan as much as possible, but allow for flexibility to account for real-world events or trends that might be relevant to your industry. Then, create a style guide for your present and future writing team to ensure quality throughout every new article. Be sure to support all of your written content with engaging high-quality media that lends itself to shareability.

Finally, track your key performance indicators using Google Analytics. Pay attention to figures such as traffic, average time per session, additional page views, and your conversion rates for any relevant custom goals. Give your strategy the appropriate amount of time, then make adjustments if the analytics don't support your current approach.

With consistent effort and an honest approach to your content, you can create a winning blog content strategy that elevates your website above the rest in Google search rankings.

While we often regard Google's search algorithm as mysterious and unknowable, the answers to how to improve your site rankings are outlined in Google's Quality Raters Guidelines. This document contains nearly two hundred pages of clear-cut rules and examples of what a webmaster should do to improve the quality of every web page that they own.

In this document, we want to simplify these guidelines and help readers understand: what are Google's quality content guidelines and what you can do to start upgrading your site quality and score for improved rankings on search engine results pages.

What Are Google Quality Raters Guidelines?

Google's Search Quality Rating Program requires raters selected by their team to review and score every website that appears in Google search results.

The Quality Raters Guidelines provide the fundamental rules and expectations of what on-page content should provide, how to provide a quality user experience and the types of harmful or misleading content that need to be avoided. The purpose for doing this is to ensure that a website represents the people in your language and rating locale and provides helpful original information.

The entire rulebook exists for both Google's internal use as well as for public review in an effort to create a better internet for all users. It covers everything a website owner needs to know including webpage content guidelines, recommended URL and site layout rules, factors for grading reputation and authority, and how to properly implement ad content.

Who Selects Google's Quality Raters?

Google generally hires its quality raters sometimes directly, but often through third-party agencies. Because AI technology is not sophisticated enough to safely and accurately review all websites, the company still requires human interaction to finalize its quality ratings.

Those hired receive training on the quality guidelines. They will receive a wide variety of queries, perform a Google search, and begin the process of grading ranked websites for quality and relevancy to the original searched term or phrase. However, they do not do this entirely on their own, as they receive support from Google's online tools to help maintain accuracy and consistency throughout the scoring process.

Quality rating is a never-ending, ongoing process that sees raters from all over the world assessing websites relevant to their language and location.

What Should an SEO Know About Google's Quality Raters Guidelines?

Now that we understand why the guidelines exist and who enforces them, we need to look at what information an SEO should extract from the document. Below, we'll dive into some of the key takeaways that you should be mindful of when performing SEO work for your own website or for a client:-

1. Focus on the Principles of E-A-T

EAT is an acronym that stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Google considers these principles to be some of the most important factors when assigning a website a quality ranking score. These impact every aspect of the content you produce both directly and indirectly.

You can implement EAT signals throughout your website in a variety of ways. For starters, your company's About page should provide users with a clear understanding of what your company provides, who provides the products or services, and what makes those individuals qualified to be experts in that particular industry. By providing a history of experience, government-issued licenses or certifications, and/or degrees issued by an educational institution, quality raters can assume that the content on your site is much more likely to be accurate and factual.

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There are also many industries that face additional scrutiny from Google in this area. These are known as YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) sites that deal with areas of life such as health, medicine, finances, business, and the news. While all misinformation is harmful, misleading unsuspecting users in these areas can prove particularly harmful, which is what Google wants to avoid. They have a built-in obligation to play their part in managing the distribution of false, clickbaity, or misleading data.

Every page of your website including blog articles will be judged with EAT in mind by a rater. Their goal is to determine the purpose of the page (if there is one), the expertise and authority level of the content creator, and how trustworthy the content and the creator are. The level of expertise required for grading relies heavily on the topic being discussed. For example, a page discussing rumors about the latest release from a musical artist bears less weight than a page offering explicit medical advice to sick individuals. For a clearer picture, Google provides these examples:

An important item to take away from these examples is “high-quality content,” otherwise referred to as “High-Quality MC.” The definition for this varies depending on the nature and purpose of the page/site.

For news, high-quality MC consists of original reports that are in-depth, investigative and require significant time and skill to produce. It includes a list of primary and secondary sources and meets all professional journalistic standards.

For art, the material is original and produced by one or more talented creators. The art produced requires a significant level of skill and time investment.

For general, informational sites, the content should be accurate, clear, and professionally presented. It should represent the expert consensus and not deviate to unsubstantiated or false claims. The criteria for what constitutes expert consensus varies depending on the subject matter. In all cases, the material must be accurate and easy-to-understand, while meeting all expected standards for that field.

Regardless of the content you write, but particularly if you are YMYL, focus on supplying a healthy amount of EAT indicators throughout the site. This can include mentioning not only the author's name but providing a brief summary of their qualifications and experience with the subject matter. Provide citations and sources for researched information and link to any referential websites whenever applicable. Post licenses or certifications somewhere on the site such as the footer, which is always visible. Finally, avoid posting any claims that are not widely accepted as factual. If this is unavoidable, take care to make it abundantly clear that this information is still under scientific and professional scrutiny.

2. Know What Constitutes as Low-Quality Content

While we've reviewed what satisfies EAT and high quality, it can be useful to know what Google raters see as low-quality content. Here is a brief summary of what the document states.

Low-quality content is any material that fails to demonstrate the appropriate level of expertise, authority, or trustworthiness. In addition to this, the content features exaggerated, unsubstantiated, or outright false claims that can easily be disproved with industry research. Finally, a low-quality page features a very low amount of content on page regardless of how factual or well-written it may be.

What can add to your low-quality score is having a reputation for providing unreliable or false information. This means that a competent article can be brought down by having a history of low-quality content associated with the website. Another attribute of low-quality content is any content that is clouded or distracted by direct advertisements. In other words, your blog content is not necessarily the place to push your latest sales promotion when trying to provide helpful, informational material.

Low-quality content is also any material that is plagiarized. Plagiarized content is not original, provides no unique value to users that can't be found elsewhere, and steals clicks away from the true creator. This does not apply to licensed copy on your site. For example, if multiple eCommerce stores distribute and sell the same brand-name product, a mandated product description does not necessarily register as duplicated content. All other content must contain thoughts that are original to the writer.

Finally, do not write or promote content on the site that is harmful to one's self or to others. This could include depictions of graphic violence or gore, pornography, drug use, hateful or pointed content, or anything that trivializes traumatic events. Website owners have a responsibility to provide fair, worthwhile experiences for every user regardless of their age, race, experience, capabilities, religion, or mental status.

3. Ensure That Content Matches the User Intent Behind the Keyword

Google's search algorithm gets better every day at understanding the context and intent behind a search query. This is important as we often utilize unclear search terms. The search intent can also have more than one meaning depending on the person and the area of the world they are located in. You can find this in Part 2 of the Guidelines or section 12.0.

For an SEO, it's easy to go after keywords with easy competition and high search volume. However, it's essential that the content you create for those keywords matches the search intent. Google stresses the importance of user search intent and motivations can change over time. An example the document provides is how the term “apple” can apply to a company, a location, a food, and a person. The intent behind the search and what other supplementary terms they may use in their search can help dictate what type of content will suit their needs.

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In most cases when creating content, the intent will be self-evident based upon where you are. However, since your content needs to communicate with a search algorithm, it's important to ensure that you're always focused on the search intent behind the keyword. This helps your webpage to appear only in the most relevant search results, which can earn you a higher quality score overall.

4. Manage Your Online Reputation with Customers

If Google quality raters were left to create a score for your brand based upon the content on your own website, the chances are that most websites would receive a great score. After all, why wouldn't you want to boast yourself as authoritative or trustworthy online when you're trying to build a following and close sales? Thankfully, your website is not the only source of information about your brand.

Reputation management is a vital part of your marketing and SEO strategy in the digital world. The more you interact with users around the world, the more opportunities others will have to write reviews, provide testimonials, or even create content about their experience with your brand.

Quality raters look to your history with others to gain a more clear assessment of your EAT indicators. They are not only looking to see how many stars you earn out of five on average, but also at what users comment on in their testimonials. A two-out of a five-star rating doesn't look great, but mentions of poor customer service, scams, or otherwise dishonest behavior are what corroborate the information for the final assessment. This can also work in the favor of the brand if they are ever subject to dishonest reviews or “review bombing,” when other information points to the contrary in regard to your reputation.

You can boost your score by being an active participant when it comes to your business reputation online. Take efforts to list your company on directory websites such as Google My Business, Yelp!, or Yellow Pages. You submit your company's information such as an address, phone number, and email, and the directory acts as an additional source to connect with your brand. Your willingness to provide platforms for customers to leave their honest feedback will help you both at the customer level and among those rating your site.

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Brands can also boost their reputation score by sharing a social proof on their website, product pages, and social media pages. Particularly with the latter, raters can see how your team interacts with followers in real-time. All of this will not only help your SEO directly but will provide a more coherent picture of how well your brand adheres to EAT. If you have a high rating, show willingness to resolve customer issues, and have a strong history of personal interactions, you can count on your site score being graded higher.

5. Review What Peers Think of Your Site or Brand

In addition to what your customers think, peers in your industry can also have a positive or negative impact on your brand reputation. This is primarily communicated through backlinking, a popular SEO strategy that networks reputable brands through high-quality content and sharing.

Whenever a website meets Google's guidelines, they receive a high-quality website score. Therefore, they are seen as trusted and reputable in regard to the material they post and share with audiences. When a trusted site chooses to share content from another site or link back to the source, they are referencing their earned trust and authority to the new website. Because users trust the original website, it can be safe to assume that the new website is worthy of trust, also.

This is the primary reasoning behind backlinking strategies for SEO. By acquiring a list of healthy backlinks, you can augment your own site score and search rankings. However, this also works the other way whenever sites with poor scores and reputation backlink to your site. This is unfortunately a common occurrence as it was once a black-hat SEO strategy to spam links on pages with low-quality content in order to accrue backlinks. In these instances, it's your responsibility to identify these domains, request that these links be removed, or submit a disavow request to Google.

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On the same note, if high-scoring websites are adding your domain to their disavow list, this is an indication that the content on your site is not up to standard. High-ranking websites do not want to see their score harmed by low-quality sites, so a disavow pointed at your domain is a sign that you and your brand do not satisfy EAT indicators.

6. Ensure Your Website is Functional and Responsive

This begins to deviate slightly from the on-page text, but still plays a significant role in how your website is scored. The ability to readily access and consume the content on your website is just as important as the content itself. If your webpage contains broken links to sources, broken video players, or an image that's no longer available, this will harm your quality score.

This applies to mobile browsing experiences as well as desktop ones. Google has outright stated that mobile-friendliness will boost the ranking of a website over those who are not mobile-friendly. Thankfully, they also provide a free tool that can check any domain for mobile responsiveness, existing errors, and how to correct them. For feedback on how to improve general site errors or site speed, you can also use free tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and Google Search Console.

Taking the time to address the errors listed by these will improve your site's performance in all areas. Not only is Google's goal to fill the information with high-quality information, but it is to ensure that all users can access that data at any time regardless of the device used or connectivity.

7. Avoid Using Invasive or Obstructive Ads

Pages that utilize obstructive or invasive ads are also detrimental to the user experience. The Guidelines state that a page is untrustworthy if the webmaster makes it difficult or otherwise obscures the main content with advertisements, no matter how relevant they may be. The occasional pop-up is not exactly an offense, but it is recommended to keep ad content separate from informational content.

Low-rated pages are also described as featuring ads that are difficult or impossible to close or push users away from the main content. Your score will also be impacted if you use interstitial pages to promote advertisements in-between load times. These sites are deemed untrustworthy as the focus becomes on ads as opposed to the described content. This is deceptive, coercive, and harmful to the user experience.

The guidelines simply recommend using your best judgment when choosing to implement ads or monetization features on a webpage. Ensure that you are doing everything in your power to promote a better experience on your website and avoid taking advantage of or misleading readers.

8. Create Content That Meets Your Audience's Needs

Finally, part three of the guidelines list scoring criteria for how well your page meets the needs of the user. Your goal is to receive a score of “Fully Meets,” meaning that your search result provides unambiguous content that satisfies all aspects of the search intent. Not only should your content be accurate, but should directed to any relevant resources that can help the user take action in regard to their search query.

How your content is graded depends on the nature of the result block. While most results appear as a link and a meta description, Google also can provide results as snippets, maps, or other special content formats. For example, if you search for movies playing near you, a special content block appears showing movie posters, titles, and genres. This would be scored differently than a general result block for most websites.

By general search result, we refer to using a term with the objective of reaching that website. The example query the guidelines provide is “amazon,” which simply yields www.amazon.com as the top result. The result block shows the website name, a meta description, and indicates to the user that it offers a mobile-friendly version. This gets a “Fully Meets” score as the user needs no other results to reach their objective.

However, if someone searches for “mexican food,” your search result will need more to reach the highest score. Results that are listed with Google My Business benefit the most as the block contains a Google Maps location, pictures of the business, an address, a phone number, email, the website home page, menu items, customer reviews, and everything else you need to make a decision. A business that provides all of this will score higher than a business that is missing some of these crucial pieces of information.

Please refer to  13.2.1 of the guidelines for a lengthy list of examples. Your goal is highly-dependent not only on the nature of your business but on the types of keywords being used in the search. Earning as many “Fully Meets” or “Highly Meets” scores for your pages as possible will boost your overall site score and ranking.

Conclusion - Google's Quality Raters Guidelines for SEOs!

Though the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines are designed primarily for raters and employees of Google, you should consistently reference the material as an SEO to improve your site score. However, here is a list of the key takeaways to bear in mind when creating and improving your website pages:

• Ensure content is lengthy and of high quality (Follow the E-A-T principles)
• Content is clear, easy to access, and avoids obstructive pop-ups or ads
• The content carefully matches the intent behind the keyword
• Demonstrate your expertise throughout your site along with social proof
• Build and monitor your reputation offsite through directories and backlinking
• Be mindful of your mobile readers
• Try to meet all of the user’s needs within your search results block

As long as you make an honest effort to adhere to these principles for quality content, you should always receive favorable scores from Google's quality raters. Additionally, remember that content creation and SEO is an ongoing endeavor and you should take care to revisit previous pages and make regular updates to ensure that you're always following the provided guidelines.

The most prominent social media challenges include declining engagement rates and organic reach vs. increasing ad cost. With plummeting organic reach on leading social platforms, brands struggle to achieve their goals within their budgets.

According to a Trust Insights study, the average engagement rate for unpaid branded content on Instagram stands at just 0.3% now, meaning, for every 1000 followers, only 3.1 of them will engage with your content.

Forget about the engagement rate of the content on Instagram; the influencer industry on Instagram is also taking a nosedive. In a study conducted by trust insights in 2019, influencers' median engagement rate for more than half a million unpaid posts saw a 41% drop in just one year.

In this scenario, growing social presence and getting authentic followers can become a severe concern for businesses and marketers.

Instagram automation tools can efficiently speed up the process of adding followers and growing your social presence. However, here is a word of caution before you begin using the automation tools. Use only the legit tools to grow your account, and don't spam your followers.

This article discusses the best practices of Instagram automation, so you can drive engagement and accomplish your social media goals.

What is Instagram Automation?

Instagram automation enables you to manage your account, interact with users, and complete tasks using third-party software without the need for any human interference.

Instagram automation tools are of the following two types broadly:

1. Service that takes over your direct interaction with users, such as likes and comments.
2. Service that automates Instagram backend features such as reporting, publishing, and analytics.

Let’s talk about Instagram bots. You can easily sense bot activity in your account if you notice disappearing followers, mysterious story views, or spam comments. So, putting your Instagram interactions on autopilot can be risky and lead to spammy activities.

Instagram declared its “war on bots” years ago. The platform even went to the extent of shutting down many such bots or Instagram automation tools that violated its protocols and best practices. In 2017, they shut down a popular automation tool Instagress

On August 13, 2020, Instagram introduced new authenticity measures on the platform. Instagram announced that they only wanted to see authentic content on the platform from real people and not bots trying to mislead you. They began asking people to confirm their identities, especially when they observed a potential inauthentic behavior.

Even though bots don't enjoy a good reputation, it doesn't mean that all tools are spammy.

The second type of automation tool includes the tools that work at the backend and undertake post scheduling and publishing tasks. And here is some good news about these toolsāyou can freely use them without worrying about spam or a penalty from the platform.

With the help of these tools, you can automate your posts according to the slots when your audience is most active on the platform. During these slots, the users have the time to uncover hashtags, helping you expand your reach.

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How to Automate Your Instagram Marketing for Better Engagement?

Here are the seven tips to automate your Instagram marketing to grow your account faster:-

1. Leverage the Benefits of Story Mention Automations

If you're on Instagram, you'll get lots of story mentions. If you reply to them in masses, you can generate lots of engagement. Automatic and personalized responses help you build instant connections and get more story mentions. As a result, your account grows faster, and you can easily nurture relationships.

Through automated story mentions, you can enter people in a contest. It also allows you to create promotional offers and attract even more mentions. Through these story-mentions, you can virtually respond to everyone who mentions you in their story.

These crafted messages can be stored in the automation tool and sent as soon as someone mentions you. People appreciate this kind gesture and personal touch, which helps you build customer loyalty and establish yourself as an Instagram star personality.

You can use MobileMonkey and set up story mentions in it. All you need to do is first go to your Instagram account and link it to a Facebook Business Page and then to MobileMonkey and follow the instructions.

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2. Streamline Posts Scheduling

Now, you can easily schedule posts in advance on Instagram using its post scheduler feature known as Instagram Creator Studio. The tool helps you control your online presence, manage messages, and monitor growth. The batch scheduling feature will save you time.

Creator studio has many features, and one of its prominent features is its professional dashboard which allows you to monitor your success on the platform. It will also help you find educational content shared by Instagram. The growth insights will also help you understand which content is performing and attracting people to your account.

The platform's best feature is its advanced post scheduler, which allows you to follow your content calendar by scheduling posts for Instagram Feed and Instagram TV. It offers a calendar view and is quite addictive.

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3. Grow Your Account through DM Response Automation

As your Instagram account grows, the number of direct messages also increases. It feels nice that many people want to speak to you. You can use this favorable opportunity to create a loyal fan base. Still, it's also annoying because you don't have the time to answer every message individually.

It's a common tendency to ignore these messages, but this is not a standard practice if you are a serious entrepreneur or individual. According to a study by Media Brief, 75% of the customers want to talk to the brands through private messages.

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Automated direct messaging feature allows you to do many things, including:

• Schedule automated welcome messages to users who DM you
• Send bot-generated automatic replies to Instagram DMs. These are based on keyword triggers.
• Send FAQ answers in DMs using bots.

Even though these generic messages may look like spam in some cases, these can be an excellent way to add calls to action to numerous Instagram comments.

The best way to take advantage of using automated DMs is to ask the users to leave a comment with a specific keyword if they want to download a free eBook, report, or white paper.

This strategy will naturally lead to better engagement, lead generation, and increase the audience on autopilot.

Here’s how you do it:

1. Link your Instagram account to a Facebook Business Page, then connect it with MobileMonkey.
2. Sign in to your MobileMonkey account. Go to “Chatbot” and then click “Chat starters” on the top bar.
3. Go to “Instagram Welcomer” and follow the instructions.
4. Write the message you want users to receive when they DM you on Instagram. You are free to choose elements and widgets like attachments, forms, and images, etc.

See the preview and send it.

4. Create Drip Campaigns Messages in Instagram

Email drip campaigns are pretty effective, and you can leverage them on Instagram, too.

Instagram’s drip campaign feature helps you take advantage of the standard automated DM response to increase engagement on the platform.

So, with a drip campaign, you don’t just send a DM; you can share links to your landing pages, blogs, and other content assets, increasing brand awareness and engagement. This activity should go on for several days to achieve tangible results.

You can split the activity in the following manner:

• After you receive their first message, share some educational links about your brand.
• Your next marketing message a few days after your first interaction may contain some social proof. You can share a case study or user review for the purpose.
• Once you’re able to grab their attention, ask them to subscribe to your newsletter or offer them a tool or a free trial.

You can also power your Instagram drip campaigns by launching a lead nurturing campaign or sending an upsell campaign.

You can also try sending onboarding and educational messages to engage users. Another way to utilize drip emails is to ask questions for retargeting.

How to setup Instagram drip campaign:

• Choose “Campaigns” from the top bar and click “Drip Campaigns.”
• Create a new “Drip Campaign.”
• Choose the social platform.
• Choose the audience.
• Choose a schedule for your campaign messages and time interval to send those messages.
• Create messages along with follow-up messages for a 24 hours cycle. If a user responds, another 24-hour cycle starts.

5. Automate Comment Replies

You can leverage comments to go viral on Instagram. Moreover, you can encourage and increase comments on your posts by responding to the existing user comments. More comments lead to more views. Automation allows you to do it in a personalized manner.

You can set it up in the following manner:-

1. First, link your Instagram account to a Facebook Business Page, then connect it with MobileMonkey.
2. Sign in to your Mobile Money account>>Go to “Chatbot“>> “Chat starters.”
3. Go to “Instagram comment guard“>> Create a new one.
4. Choose from the two options the Comment Guard will work with, i.e., “All Posts” and “Specific Instagram Post.”

Now, you can decide how to respond.

These options include “respond to all comments” and “respond only to comments that contain the following keywords.”

5. You can put a cap on the frequency cap if a user posts multiple comments.

Craft a message for the users who comment on your Instagram post. You are free to choose elements and widgets like attachments, forms, and images, etc.

6. See the preview and send it.

6. Utilize Instagram Guides for Lead Nurturing

Instagram Guides were introduced for health and wellness businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic and are a new Instagram feature. Later, it was rolled out to all users.

Through these guides, you can share helpful, scrollable curated content and tips in an easy-to-digest format. It makes otherwise lengthy and complex content easy to share and consume.

Three types of guides are prevalent on Instagramāposts, places, and products. You can share guides in stories as well to amplify their reach. You can't precisely term it as automation, but Instagram guides help marketers amplify their reach in a big way.

First, guides are a boon for businesses on a shoestring budget as it's a free tool. Instagram does the heavy lifting of designing your brand pages and guiding you through content promotion.

Secondly, the curation style of guides makes them engaging and easy to share. Instagram guides are highly informative; therefore, you can use them to educate new customers about your brand and how your products add value to their life.

You can use this feature hassle-free because you can set it and forget it. It will help you create enormous content to engage users without putting in the extra effort.

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Instagram Guides also make content delivery flexible by giving you a choice of the types of formats. For example, you can convert your text-based articles into slideshows and add images and videos tutorials. You can also create video tutorials that can walk users through the process.

7. Integrate With Short Video Apps Such as Tiktok

Cross promoting on social media amplifies your reach and gives you access to various low-hanging fruits in marketing, such as brand awareness, lead generation, and lead nurturing.

You can easily share your Instagram content on TikTok through the following steps:

Select “Edit profile” in TikTok>> “Instagram“>>Enter your user name>> Click connect

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You're ready to share your content now. For example, you can repost your Instagram Reels on TikTok. Don't forget to remove watermarks, though. Follow the platform guidelines. Make sure the content you share is ideal for both audiences.

What Features of Instagram Can I Automate?

As discussed above, you can automate many elements using Instagram automation tools. So, you can:

1. Like and comment on posts
2. Respond to story mentions
3. Schedule posts
4. Send automatic responses to DMs

Conclusion

Instagram automation makes your life easier by preventing you from doing repetitive menial tasks and helps you achieve your marketing goals. You can instead use that free time for other crucial business functions like outreach and developing content.

Instagram automation allows you to manage the backend and front-end social media tasks without manual or virtual assistance. If it becomes a routine, it will boost your productivity and help you build strong community links and loyalty.