In 2013, most businesses realise the importance of content. That’s why so many SEO agencies are repositioning themselves as content agencies, or at least offering it as a primary product. Our Content Marketing courses used to attract mainly bloggers, but since the Panda and Penguin Google updates we have seen a large increase in SEOs wanting to learn about content.
Yet this mass conversion to content brings up some issues – there is too much noise. Most businesses are still stuck in an outdated content strategy – regular, mediocre quality blog posts with little intent. The content is happening, but is it working?
With content at the forefront of so many marketing strategies, it seems at first glance that big businesses have a massive advantage. Whole in-house marketing teams as well as high profile agencies on hand to craft incredible content. How does a small business compete against this with a 1-3 person marketing team?
Big Evergreen Content
The idea for this post was sparked by Hannah Smith‘s talk at BrightonSEO ‘Go Big or Go Home’ (excellent write up on State of Search), which prompted me to revisit Dr. Pete’s SEOmoz post at the end of last year ‘Why Big Content Is Worth the Risk’. Both Hannah and Dr. Pete explain why big content is necessary and how it can help your business stand out in a very crowded world of below par blog posts:
“We all want the low-hanging fruit, but let’s be honest – the low-hanging fruit is rotten, bruised, and covered with the grubby fingerprints of all the other spoiled brats pawing at it.”
The consensus of both the talk and the post is that big content takes around 40 hours to produce. Hannah compared this to an average 12 hours for ‘small content’ but I think that’s a huge overestimation for the majority of businesses. James Carson recently alerted Twitter to the existence of a job ad for an agency looking for a Marketing Executive who for £18,000 a year had to write 25 blog posts a day. That’s well over 6,000 articles a year on a range of topics, written by somebody with little knowledge about the subject and obviously no research.
With that much noise, it’s important to be different to break through, and that’s where big content comes in. But I’m going to go a step further and ask you to consider another element - sustainability. Another popular topic at BrightonSEO, and a common phrase in marketing blogs at the moment is Evergreen Content.
In the rest of this post I’m going to try and convince you why your content should be both big and evergreen for the holy grail of content marketing.
Mobile search is big business. In fact, it’s set to overtake desktop search by the end of this year.
Whether it’s finding your nearest pub or finding out what’s on TV, mobile search is increasingly becoming a ubiquitous feature in our lives. It’s essential then for SEOs to work with mobile in mind, which requires added considerations.
Regardless of whether you opt for a mobile or responsive site, two of those considerations that do have an impact on your SEO efforts are the loading speed of the site and how easy it is to navigate, both of which we emphasise on our 1-day Mobile SEO Training.
These factors are essential as a means to providing the sort of quality experience your users expect. According to a Google Study, 81% of mobile searches are driven by speed and convenience. In that sense, if your site isn’t quick and easy for the user, then you’re not providing what they want and they’ll move on.
On the other hand, if the site is fast to load and simple to use, you’ll be keeping your users happy. And if your users are happy, you’re (generally) going to be keeping Google happy.
So what can you do to help speed up your site and improve the way users access it?
Make It Accessible
This first tip is less about the technical minutiae of your site than it is about good customer service.
Most devices these days have a touchscreen interface, so having a text-heavy site with tiny buttons that are suited to a mouse-click rather than a tap is probably not the best idea. This goes for responsive and mobile-only sites.
So BrightonSEO has come and gone. This year was the biggest event yet with events and talks running in a multitrack format. Kelvin Newman organised everything, as he has done in the past, so a big thank you goes to him.
Unfortunately, the multitrack format meant choosing between presentations and rooms so I decided to stick with the main hall for the day. Because I’m particularly hip and happening, I thought I’d keep a diary and note down all the cool stuff that happened throughout the day.
This is that diary (in case you didn’t work that out).
BrightonSEO is a great event for learning new things and keeping up-to-date with a constantly developing industry. Of course to be totally up-to-date, you need to know about how mobile search is affecting SEO efforts, in which case you need our brand new Mobile SEO Course.
So anyway, join me on my voyage of discovery through the wonderful world of BrightonSEO:
BrightonSEO 12/04/13
9:00 – Arrived at the Brighton Dome, lots of people already here. Park myself as close to the main hall doors as possible and read all the pre-emptive tweets circulating on the #BrightonSEO hashtag… because I’m that cool.
9:30 – Notice more and more people are positioning themselves close to the hall doors. Preparing to get sprinting when they open to get a front seat.
9:50 – Doors open, no need to sprint as it seems no one else is too bothered about being at the front. #amitookeen?
In this first session of the brilliant Brighton SEO, we were lucky enough to get the opportunity to hear some ex-Google employees answer questions posed by the audience.
Hearing details about Google’s processes straight from the horse’s mouth is like gold-dust to SEOs but for an up-to-date understanding of the direction that the industry is headed, you can’t beat our Mobile SEO Course!
Google Team Structure
First up they were asked about the structure of the teams at Google.
The teams are split into algorithmic and manualsearch engineers. The algorithmic side take a big-picture approach while the manual side (in which our ex-Googlers were working) take a more detailed and case-specific approach.
We’re pleased to announce our second monthly promotion to follow on from the highly successful Heather Buckley photo competition.
We have an amazing prize on offer this time – a year’s Gold membership to Majestic SEO!
To stand a chance of winning, we want you to get creative and submit your SEO-themed Haikus on Google+ by April 30th.
Of course if you feel you need to brush up on your SEO knowledge first, you should come on our SEO Courses. If you’re already an expert our Email Marketing Course can help you target customers further afield where local search might be affecting results.
How to Enter
Post a status to Google+ with your SEO Haiku and tag #SEOHaiku , Silicon Beach Training and Majestic SEO; to do that, here’s an easy code for you to copy and paste at the top of your post -
I want to win a 1 Year +116909231634801462927 Gold Subscription! Here is my entry to the #SEOHaiku competition curated by +117251439496728241850
Add your amazing Haiku
Don’t forget to circle us too!
Here’s my example:
It’s as easy as that – just remember to make your post public!
Good SEO is becoming less about code and more about people, but what’s the best way to impress people?
Good customer service.
Technical SEO will always be important, but it’s not enough to beat your competitors to those top spots in search engines.
As we have seen over the past few years, Google are going after sites to penalise webmasters who try and gain an advantage using techniques aimed at bots and not humans.
Google wants the web to be about people and will always go out of their way to favour businesses that recognise and embrace this. That’s why we believe social, content and trust signals are becoming ever more important – as we emphasise on our SEO courses.
The problem is that a lot of businesses are now trying to trick these signals instead with tactics like fan buying, low quality guest posts, content for content’s sake etc.
None of these spammy tactics are helping businesses in any way other maybe gaining higher SERP placement briefly. Fake fans won’t buy anything and not only do people not want to read bad content but it will actually turn them away from your brand. Do you want your brand to be associated with hastily botched together blog posts covering the same thing over and over again? Thought not.
In this post I’m going to discuss one tactic for increasing human signals that wouldn’t normally be considered as SEO – customer service.
Assuming you already have the perfect user experience on your site, an incredible content strategy and an award-winning social media team, what else can you do to show Google (and other search engines) how great your business is? Read the rest of "Good Customer Service = Good SEO"
After coming on our InDesign eBook course you’ll be able to create and publish your eBook; but what’s the next step? Ideally you want people to read it, which means that it’s time to begin the marketing process.
As much as you’d like to think you’ll have people queuing at the virtual door to download your book, the likelihood is no one will know about it unless you tell them about it.
So how would you even begin to go about marketing an eBook? Let’s assume you have a decent site and blog (if not you ought to come on our 1-day Blogging and Content Marketing course to find out why it’s essential!) as a base from which to ‘flaunt your wares’.
A good start, especially for a product like this, is to embrace social media. Used alongside content marketing and email marketing, social media marketing can be an effective tool to market an eBook.
Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt has been in the news a lot recently. Firstly he has a new book coming out, “The Digital Age”, from which The Wall Street Journal“leaked” the following quote:
“Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.”
Secondly, he’s announced that he is about to sell 42% of his Google stock (worth more than $2.5 billion).
As with any story about Google, the conspiracy theorists have come out in force to guess at what these two moves mean.
Marketing blog The Drumclaimed that Schmidt’s verification quote is ‘confirmation’ that Google+ is to become a ‘search priority’ in future and that this is part of Google’s on-going battle with other social networks.
They’ve made the assumption that what Schmidt calls verification is the same as Google verification. With Google products you can verify yourself as an author, a publisher, a business, a place.
It didn’t take long for certain SEO blog commenters to connect this to Schmidt’s stock sale, believing that the move towards ‘Google verification’ will force businesses to buy more ads, increasing the value of said stock.
Of course, as SEOs it is always important to listen to Google employees, especially those at the top. As one of the top dogs at Google, Schmidt’s personal views are always going to trickle down to those below him. The first piece of advice on our SEO courses is to go and read everything that Google has published about SEO!
Mobile search is big business. In fact, it’s set to overtake desktop search by the end of this year.
Good SEO is becoming less about code and more about people, but what’s the best way to impress people?
