You can implement all the advanced optimizations and even  ‘buy’ the highest-quality backlinks out there. But, if your content is low-quality, you won’t get far with your SEO.

On the other hand, SEO is also very important for content marketing. Ranking on the first page—or better, top 3 spot—of Google SERP remains one of the most reliable organic traffic sources for your content.

In short, content marketing and SEO are inseparable, and it’s best to plan the two together as an integrated strategy to get the best possible results in getting organic traffic, generating leads, and finally, converting these qualified leads into sales.

Step-by-Step Guide To SEO Content Marketing Strategy

Below, we will discuss all the necessary steps that I use in my B2B SEO services to implement content marketing and optimize content for SEO, beginning with the first step.

Step 1: Define Content Marketing Objectives

Before anything else, it’s very important to first define the objectives—or goals— of your content marketing and SEO strategy.

Your content marketing goals should align well with your marketing goals, as well as your overall business objectives. Defining these goals is very important, so we can build the right strategic framework to pursue these goals.

The main principles are that your SEO content marketing goals should be:

• Specific: clear enough to understand and to implement.
• Realistic: in a sense of, attainable. This is important to maintain a sense of achievement and maintain your morale (and your team’s). Breakdown big goals into smaller milestones, if necessary.
• Measurable: you can assign KPIs and evaluate key metrics to measure the content marketing performance according to these objectives.

With those being said, here are some common SEO content marketing objectives you might want to apply to your own:

• • Establish credibility and trust. A common objective for SEO content marketing, and a pretty obvious one. Consistent publication of relevant content can help establish your position as the thought leader in your industry.

• Attract new prospects. Also an important objective. Compelling and valuable content can attract new potential leads. This is mainly done by publishing content that gets shared a lot on social media—and if possible, go viral—.
• Educate prospects and customers. Inform potential leads and existing customers about your product/service. It can also be about solutions to your audience’s pain points (not directly discussing your product).
• Persuade people to buy. Here, the content is designed to handle sales objections, so content might talk about why your product is worth the hefty price, or a case study on how your service can save more money in the long run.
• Tell a story. All content should essentially aim to be a storytelling medium.
• Maximize retention/loyalty: content marketing is one of the most effective channels in maximizing retention. Maintaining existing customers can be more cost-efficient than acquiring new ones, so this can be a very important goal.

This list is certainly not exhaustive, and there can be more objectives you can pursue with SEO content marketing strategy. The important thing is to actually define at least one so we can move forward.

Step 2: Keyword Research

The next step is to find your target keywords according to your objective.

This is mainly done by first defining our ideal audience. The idea is to find keywords that our audience is searching for, and this will be impossible if we don’t know who our audience is, their behavior, needs, and pain points.

We can do this by conducting market research and developing a buyer persona.

The main thing to consider here is to find keywords based on your audience’s search intents, according to your SEO content marketing objective, as discussed in the previous step.

For example, if your objective is to attract new prospects, then you might want to find keywords that are related to informational intent. (Check this guide on different types of search intents and their examples).

You can use various keyword research tools to help you in this process, from the free Google Keyword Planner to relatively affordable ones like KWFinder to premium ones like Ahrefs or SEMRush.

There are three main principles in implementing keyword research:

1. The keyword must be relevant to your audience according to their search intent. This is mainly measured through search volume.
2. The keyword must be valuable for your business, according to your objective. Not all keywords or keyphrases with high enough search volume will be relevant to your objectives.
3. The competition for the keyword(s) must be manageable, according to your available resources and timeline. Some keyword research tools might use metrics like keyword difficulty (KD) or similar ones to measure this.

Make a list of potential keywords according to their priorities, and include related metrics like search volume. We will use this list for the next step.

Step 3: Topic Research and Planning

The next step is about how we can expand the target keywords into topics—and later on, actual content—.

The best, and very accessible approach to do this is to do a quick Google (or your target search engine) search for your target keywords and look at the top-performing content:

• If there’s any rich/featured snippet for the query, take note of this. We will also aim to get this featured snippet (see Step 5: Content Marketing Best Practices for more about this)
• Check at least the top 3 ranking content. If possible, analyze all content on the first page.
• There are two main approaches you can do here:
  • Create something  better than the top ranking content
  • Take a unique angle and create a really different content
• In most cases, creating a unique/different content is somewhat easier since if you want to create a ‘similar but better’ content, you’ll need to be significantly better to get noticed.
• There are various tools that can help you get topic ideas. BuzzSumo, for example, is a popular choice. You can also use various keyword research tools (most notably SEMRush’s Keyword Magic Tool) to help in this aspect.
• Although you can be as creative as you can, make sure the topic aligns with the search intent related to the keyword. For example, if the search intent for a specific keyword is mainly informational (the audience is searching for this query to find solutions/information), then your topic should be informational or educational and not transactional.
• In some cases—for example, when targeting long-tail keywords—, the topic might be fairly obvious (and limited)

Be as creative as possible, but make sure to pay attention to the content’s objectives.

Step 4: Planning Your Content/Editorial Calendar

Remember that SEO is a long-term game. We can’t expect to create a single content, optimize it and get ranked (although there are very rare exceptions), but typically we’ll need to be consistent— both in quantity and quality—for at least 6 to 12 months.

This is why it’s important to create a content calendar—or editorial calendar— to keep track of your content marketing strategy. Ideally, you’d want a year’s worth of content calendar, but you can start with a 6-month calendar at the very least, utilizing Notion templates to streamline the process.

The content calendar should list the following items (not an all-inclusive list):

• The target keyword
• The topic idea and/or working title
• Meta tags, meta description, tags and categories to be used
• CTA (call-to-action) plan
• Who’s in charge of the content (if you have more than one content writers)
• Type of content (blog post, video, podcast, etc.)
• When to publish the content
• Where to publish the content (publication channel)
• How to promote the content
• Where do you plan to get backlinks from
• Status (Started, working, published, etc.)

The more details you include in your content calendar, the better. The idea is to brainstorm topics with SEO expert and consultant and consider all the different aspects beforehand, so the execution will be seamless.

Step 5: Content Marketing Best Practices

It’s time to execute the plan and actually develop your content.

Here, the process might vary (significantly) between individuals and organizations, but below we will list important best practices to pay attention to:

1. In most cases, the content should be non-promotional, except for special content designed for transactional intent (i.e. product tutorial, introducing a new product, etc.)
2. Have a clear structure with your content—introduction, problems/challenges, solutions, conclusion—. You can also follow different structures, and this might also determine the tone (or voice) of your content.
3. The ideal length for the textual content is 1,000 to 2,000 words, but you will also need to maintain quality and engagement. Divide the content into subheadings, at least one subheading every 300 words with no more than 150 words in each paragraph. Maintain readability with a lot of white spaces. 
4. Make sure to use universal, widely understood terms and definitions instead of niche ones. For example, “qualified leads” instead of “MQL/SQL”. If you used specific or unique terms, explain them or provide outbound links to justify their definitions.
5. In general, add outbound links whenever you made any claims or mention data. This is important to establish your content’s credibility.
6. Build a proper internal linking structure between your content pieces. A good internal linking structure can help with crawl and indexing—among other benefits.
7. Implement structured data markup (schema.org) to your content. This will allow your page to be eligible for featured/rich snippet, and also will improve the page’s indexability in general.
8. One of the most important things to focus on is generating backlinks—or inbound links—. We will discuss it a little deeper in the next step.

Again, the key here is maintaining consistency, both in quality and quantity. That is, consistently publishing your content—and generate backlinks but also internal and outbound links—, and maintain the quality and relevance of your content (as well as the quality of your backlinks).

Step 6: Content Promotion and Backlinks Building

How you promote your content is just as important as the content development process, and that’s why we mentioned that you should include your content promotion strategy as a part of your content calendar.

We can use various channels to promote our content, and here are some of the most important ones:

• Social media: fairly obvious, since social media is where the audience is. It can be divided into organic, paid, and influencer promotion.
• Email marketing: still one of the most effective channels with the highest ROI.
• Blog commenting: also including forum commenting, an old-school blogging tactic that can still be effective when done right.
• Paid promotions: from various types of ads to content delivery networks (CDNs) and other channels.

The main principle to hold here is that content promotion has two main purposes: generating organic traffic to your content and building backlinks. Every time you promote your content, aim to get backlinks from relevant and high-quality sources.

It’s also important to note that nowadays, the quality of your backlinks is more important than quantity. In fact, getting too many low-quality backlinks at any given time (i.e. a month) can get you penalized by Google and the other search engines.

In general, getting just 2-4 high-quality backlinks every month is sufficient.

Step 7: Evaluation, Re-optimization, Content Leveraging

As mentioned, content marketing and SEO are long-term tactics.

Typically it will take 2-6 months for a page to climb (slowly) from page 5 to page 1—if we consistently implement all the above optimizations—, and then another 6 months at least to climb to the top 3 or #1 spot.

Thus, it’s very important to constantly monitor our progress during these months, and here are some important areas to evaluate:

• SERP ranking
• Improvements in organic traffic
• Reach and impressions
• Bounce rate and dwell time—how much of your content are they consuming—, other on-site engagement metrics
• Conversion rate, if the content involves CTA
• Technical factors like page load speed and mobile responsiveness
• Backlinks profile

In short, evaluate your content according to all the above steps, monitor its progress using various KPIs and metrics, and re-optimize your content accordingly. If necessary, we can update the content or even change our tactic altogether, depending on the case.

End Words

Textual content—such as blog posts— typically have an average conversion rate is around 0.5% to 1%, which is higher than the CTR of display advertising at ‘only’ 0.46%. Thus, SEO content marketing strategy can be a very cost-efficient channel to generate highly targeted traffic, build an online presence and credibility, grow your remarketing list, and most importantly, a very effective lead generation device.

The post SEO Content Marketing Strategy to Drive Leads and Sales appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Only a select few startups properly plan their content marketing strategy, executes it well and so they can reap the long-term, sustainable benefits.

In this guide, we will learn how we can become the third group. After all, content is king, and any startup who is not planning to implement content marketing properly is, simply put, planning to fail quickly.

Without further ado, let us begin.

What Actually Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing, albeit being a major buzzword in digital marketing for the past decade, is a concept often misunderstood by many people.

First, content marketing is not about discussing your products or services in a piece of content. Instead, content marketing is about publishing really useful, valuable, and relevant content to solve your target audience’s problems.

The question is, how then, we can get people to purchase our product/service via content marketing? Although there can be various different methods, the typical “model” is:

• Attracting people to our website and/or platform to consume our content
• Capture their contact information, a common practice is to offer something valuable (an e-book, research report, free-trial) for free in exchange for their contact information
• Utilizing various lead nurturing campaigns to nurture these prospects until their ready to purchase, essentially reminding them about your brand or your product/service every now and then. For example, via remarketing campaigns, email marketing, continuous publication of content, etc.

So, as you can see, content marketing is more than just the content creation process. How we promote the content to attract our target audience and having a proper B2B lead generation strategy to convert our audience are just as, if not even more important than the content creation process itself.

Content Is Actually Everywhere in Marketing Today

No matter what kinds of marketing strategies you implement, we can’t deny that all kinds of channels and campaigns today will always involve content in them. So, content marketing nowadays should be part of the whole marketing process, not something separate

Making sure you publish high-quality content should be a part of ALL aspects of your marketing, such as:

• Advertising (PPC Ads): obviously for your ad to be effective, you need great content that can capture the audience’s attention.
• Social media marketing: your posts are very important content, and so a proper content marketing strategy is necessary for any social media marketing strategy.
• Public relations (PR): it’s important to note that today’s PR should be about addressing issues the audience actually cares about and not exactly about promoting the business. So, it is essentially content marketing.
• SEO: the core of SEO strategy for startups is content, without consistent publication of high-quality content, you simply won’t rank on Google.

Content Marketing VS Inbound Marketing

What is inbound marketing? Is it similar to content marketing, or?

To answer these questions in a layman’s term, inbound marketing is essentially content marketing combined with content promotion. Mainly, content marketing+SEO.

The term “inbound” comes from the idea of how the content’s purpose is to pull the audience inwards. You publish your content out there addressing your target audience’s needs and pain points, and when they are looking for this information, they can stumble upon your brand.

The traditional marketing efforts like billboards and advertising, on the other hand, are “outbound” in nature. Their objective is to put your message outwards to reach as many people as possible.

The problem with outbound marketing, however, is that it often disrupts your audience’s activity: they want to watch a YouTube video, not see your ads. Inbound marketing, on the other hand, doesn’t disrupt your audience’s activity and thus, will meet less resistance.

Content Strategy VS Content Plan

These three terms are often used interchangeably, but each has its own distinct meaning and different purposes.

Content Strategy

Content strategy, in a nutshell, is about defining your content marketing’s objectives and especially answering how you are going to achieve these objectives. For example, if the content marketing objective is to generate 2,000 more leads in a year through content marketing, then how we can get these leads is the content strategy.

In practice, a startup content strategy often means managing the performance of your existing content, leveraging successful content over time, and repurposing or revamping non-performing ones.

Content Plan

We can say that the content plan is the tactical approach to content strategy: how to appoint resources to achieve each content marketing objective when to publish content, who is going to develop the content, where we will promote the content, and so on. It is important to first have a proper content strategy in place before we can structure a content plan.

Developing Content Strategy: A Step-by-Step Guide

1. Defining Content Marketing Objective(s)

The first step, and arguably the most important one is to define your content marketing goals. Your content marketing objectives should align with your startup’s marketing and business goals. For example, if one of your startup’s goals is to increase your revenue by 30%, then generating 50% more organic traffic via content marketing can be a proper goal.

In principle, your content marketing objectives should be SMART goals, that are:

• Specific: as clear as possible, so your team can properly understand them without any potential understanding. Break down abstract goals into specific ones.
• Measurable: you can attach KPIs to the objective, and you can assign measurable metrics to each KPI.
• Attainable: that is, realistic. This is important to maintain your and your team’s morale by giving them a sense of achievement. Break down big goals into smaller, more attainable milestones if necessary.
• Relevant: your content marketing objective/goal should be valuable for your business. For example, is getting more Instagram followers relevant for your business if you are a B2B solution?
• Timely: you can assign realistic timelines to all the different goals, to make sure timely delivery

In general, there are five common objectives of content marketing for startups:

• Brand awareness: arguably the most common goal of content marketing. To follow the SMART principle, this can be something like “increasing website traffic by 20%”. There are many brand awareness metrics we can measure to help us assign KPIs.
• Customer education: educating potential customers not necessarily about the value of your product or service (although it’s possible), but also educating them about the your brand’s overall credibility.
• Brand loyalty: content can be very powerful in encouraging repeat purchases or to remind past customers about the existence of your brand. The idea here is to publish entertaining and valuable content that can provide additional value outside your product/service, so you effectively build a following to your content which can contribute to your loyal customer base.
• Customer engagement: engagement provides a personality to your brand, giving your company a voice, opinion, and thought leadership. Nowadays, people are more likely to buy from brands they can engage with and trust, so this is a very important objective.
• Talent recruitment: a very important objective for startups that are often struggling with attracting high-quality talents. Use your content to exercise your brand’s credibility, your vision, and company culture. Also, happy employees can be strong advocates and can help improve conversion rates.

It’s important to note that website traffic shouldn’t be the end goal of your content marketing since website traffic on its own won’t produce any value. Instead, website traffic should help the five objectives (or any other specific objectives of your startups).

2. Deciding Who’s Going To Work on The Project

In general, there are three main approaches you can take here to decide who’s going to work on the content marketing project:

• Doing everything by yourself. If you are still a small startup, this is definitely possible. However, obviously this approach is not recommended for a long-term basis since you won’t be able to scale your content marketing effort as your startup grow.
• Outsourcing your content marketing efforts. You can, for example, hire a freelance content marketer or outsource your whole content marketing effort to an agency.
• Building your in-house content marketing team. Probably the most cost-efficient approach, but the initial investment is relatively expensive. Here are some familiar roles in a content marketing team, although your team might look different depending on your startup’s needs:

1. Content creator:– Mainly writers, but can also include content creators in other mediums (scriptwriter for videos, podcasters, etc.). Their role is quite obvious, to produce content.
2. Content/marketing strategist: – To plan the content strategy, including evaluating progress.
3. Editors: – Proofread content, ensuring readability, optimizing layouts and structures, etc.
4. Graphic designers: – An essential part of any content marketing team nowadays. Pretty self-explanatory, they produce graphic content to supplement the main content according to the startup’s objectives
5. Videographers: – Also essential today if you want to put your effort into video marketing. The role is to shoot and edit video content according to the startup’s needs.
6. Analyst: – Analyze the performance of your content, evaluate your current strategy, and work with the startup marketing consultant to adjust your strategy

3. Identifying Your Target Audience

The next crucial step is to identify your target audience.

The main purpose of your content marketing—as we’ve established above— is to bring in leads and prospects that hopefully can convert into paying customers. So, your content marketing won’t bring any value to your business unless it’s properly targeted to the right audience.

For example, if you bring in a million unique traffic to your website, but only a thousand of them are from your ideal audience, we can’t really say our content strategy is effective.

On the other hand, knowing who your target audience is, their behaviors, needs, and pain points can significantly help you determine what kind of topics to cover and keywords to target.

Ideally, you should develop a buyer persona in this stage, but here are some of the most important factors to consider in identifying your ideal audience:

• Demographics factors: gender, age, ethnicity, location, income level, job, and so on
• Psychographics factors: their interests, habits, beliefs, hobbies, and so on
• Pain points: the problem the audience is currently facing that your product/service can help solve
• Obstacles/challenges: their common obstacles in finding your product or service
• Information gathering behavior: how they typically attempt to find information when they try to find a solution to their problems.
• Content preference: content medium and/or structure that is preferred by this ideal audience
• Your solution: how your content can help this target audience to find the solution to their problem and get the information they are searching for

Also, remember that there might be more than one ideal audience groups that are worth pursuing. For example, there is obviously the primary target audience: those with the highest chance to purchase your product or service. In general, your most if not all of your content efforts must be tailored to target this specific audience.

However, people that are less ‘ideal’ and almost make the cut also deserve your attention. We can consider them as the secondary audience, and they typically require more “push” and convincing. You might want to use a different approach and strategy to target this audience.

To summarize: find your target audience, know their problems, and develop content to help them with these problems.

4. Decide On Content Types

Remember that content is no longer about writing blog posts, but there are plenty of different content types that can be published in various different platforms. There are obviously YouTube videos, Instagram posts, podcasts, and many different forms of textual content (ebooks, research reports, case studies, and so on).

So, how should we choose the right type(s) for our startup? In general, it should depend on your target audience’s preference.

For example, if your target audience spends a lot of time watching YouTube videos, then you should invest your content effort on YouTube. If they are active on Instagram, then produce content on the platform that can drive the audience to your website.

The better you can understand your target audience, the better you can align different content types with their behaviors and needs. In general, here are the common content types you can consider:

• Blog Post: both short and long-form blogs. Yes, even today, people do read content that is relevant to them. You could develop content like:

1. 1. 1. Long-form ultimate guides. Depending on your product or service, this can be very effective in driving more people to your site.
      2. Long ad copy on Facebook ads can drive more engagements and lower CPA
      3. In-depth, step-by-step guides that are relevant for your target audience
      4. Short-form content (i.e. Medium posts) can work, but generally, you’d need a built-in way to promote it or the content must be really unique with valuable information

• Original research:

1. 1. 1. Unique, in-depth research: more time-consuming to create, obviously, but can generate really good results
      2. Reference content:  If you can create content that becomes the go-to-reference in your niche, then you can generate a lot of traffic
      3. Opinion content: opinion-forming journalism, also quite difficult and time-consuming to create, but can be very powerful

• Videos: how-to videos, entertaining videos, short videos on social media, and so on
• Podcasts: rapidly gaining popularity in the past year, podcasts can be a great medium for certain products and services

• Case studies and testimonials: case studies for mainly B2B businesses, and user testimonials for B2C businesses (but can be the other way around).

• Checklist guise: a modification of step-by-step guide, and can be a great form of content that drives a lot of engagement (and often gets shared a lot).

• Infographics: although infographics are no longer as effective as they were especially in generating backlinks, they are still a very powerful form of content especially if we can properly visualize information or data.

Obviously you can mix and match your content types according to your audience’s needs, and you can also use several forms of content in a single piece (i.e. embedded video in the middle of a blog post).

5. Develop Your Content Promotion Strategy

Before you even develop your content, it’s very important to determine the right promotional channels for your content.

No matter how good and valuable your content is for your audience, it won’t bring any value to your business unless someone (and preferably a lot of people) consumes it. So, how you promote the content is just as, if not even more important than the content development process.

Here are some of the most important channels to promote your content:

• SEO: content that ranks on the first page of Google’s SERP gets the most traffic, and so SEO is still the most effective and cost-efficient channel to promote your content. According to the top SEO experts, high-quality content is also the most important factor in SEO success, and so they are inseparable to each other,
• Email marketing: one of the most effective channels to promote various forms of content. The main idea of promoting content marketing via email is you can feed one content among the other to your audience to increase conversion rates, maintaining consistency.
• Social media marketing: including organic social media efforts (building your own followers and spread your promotions), paid social media advertising, and influencer marketing. Social is where our audience is nowadays, so it would only make sense to use the channel in our promotional effort.

There are obviously other channels you can use to promote your content, like third-party distribution channels (content syndication), guest posting, and other efforts. What’s important is to actually have a working content promotion strategy and stick to it.

6. Content Creation

While content creation is a very broad and deep subject on its own, but in general here are the main steps to follow:

1. Keyword Research

Since as mentioned, SEO is the most effective way to promote your content, then we should begin our content creation phase with proper keyword research.

In general, there are three main principles in implementing your keyword research: :

• It must be relevant to your target audience, signified with high enough search volume
• It must be relevant and valuable for your business.
• The competition for the keyword is manageable based on your timeline and resources.

2. Decide a Topic: Expand the target keyword into an actual topic.

3. Choose a Publishing Date:

4. Develop an outline

5. Develop a draft

6.  Edit/forward to the editor as needed

7. Plan a Content Calendar

Content marketing is a long-term game.

We can’t expect to just publish a single content and reap the results (yes, there are cases when a piece of content went viral, but it’s rare). In most cases, consistency both in quantity and quality as well as working with startup SEO consultant is the secret to your content SEO success.

Thus, you need to plan a content calendar to keep track of your progress. It will include things like:

1. The publishing date
2. The target keyword
3. Topic/working title
4. META description, tags, and categories to be used
5. Who’s going to work on the content
6. Format/type of content
7. Where are you going to distribute the content

The more details you can include in the content calendar, the better. Ideally, plan a year’s worth of content calendar if possible, but a few months’ worth of calendar is always better than nothing.

8. Establish KPI and Measure Your Progress

The last step of developing a content marketing strategy for your startup is to set up a system to measure your progress. That is, setting up KPIs to know whether your content marketing is on the right track.

Your KPIs should be based on your content marketing objective as discussed in the very first step. Here are the common KPIs for content marketing:

1. Lead generation, for example, get a specific number of new email subscribers
2. Increase in organic traffic to your website
3. Reach a specific amount of revenue increase within a specific timeframe
4. Engagements and shares on social media

Then, we can measure the performance of our content marketing strategy like:

• Google SERP ranking
• Bounce rate and dwell time—how much of your content are they consuming—, other on-site engagement metrics
• Conversion rate, if the content involves CTA
• Reach and impressions
• Improvements in organic traffic
• Technical factors like page load speed and mobile responsiveness
• Backlinks profile

Evaluate your content according to your KPIs and your content marketing objectives, and re-optimize your content strategy accordingly.

Summing Up

Content marketing can be a cost-effective strategy to generate targeted traffic and leads, which can be very beneficial for any startup business.

With the steps we have discussed above, you should be able to create a successful content marketing strategy for startups and small businesses. Content marketing can effectively build your online presence, establish your position as the thought leader in your industry, and a very powerful way to generate leads.

The post Most Effective Content Marketing Strategy for Startups appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Online marketing, in particular, is fluid and constantly changing, and you need to constantly update and adjust your strategy.

It’s important to read blogs, news updates, articles, and newsletters that focus on marketing trends so that you aren’t left behind. To start you off, here a few big ways marketing will be different in 2026.

Content Comes In Many Forms

Content marketing is mostly driven by having a successful blog and rolling out email newsletters but there are other forms of content which are becoming increasingly popular with consumers, especially the younger crowd.

Video and live video content are just two examples of how you can use different forms of content to reach consumers.

However, it goes a lot deeper than that. Take memes and GIFs as examples.

They are extremely popular with millennials. If used correctly, they can be an effective tool for creating a connection with your target audience, especially on social media.

Quick surveys and quizzes, how-to guides, whitepapers, ebooks, cartoons, and webinars are some additional ideas of types of content you may want to use.

Vlogs can be used to create a personal connection with your audience, and podcasts are useful for reaching those who love to consume new information on-the-go.

Of course, not all of the above forms of content will be applicable to your business. Everything will depend on your industry and target demographic; for example, if you are targeting professionals, whitepapers would be a better choice than memes and GIFs.

Voice Search and Voice SEO

Google users are using voice commands to conduct online searches. By 2026, it is estimated that 50 percent of all searches will be voice searches.

This will affect, among other things, how marketing professionals will need to approach SEO.

Instead of simply targeting keywords, you will need to target search terms that are likely to be used by people conducting voice searches. Not only it has the capacity to generate quick traffic but also signifies a strong on-page designing of the website.

As such, try incorporating questions and “natural language” keyword phrases in your content.

In addition, if you operate an ecommerce site, you should allow users to search for products through a voice search. Make sure that your search engine can detect and interpret natural language and is optimized for bringing up the best-match products.

The Rise of the Chatbots

Chatbots, that are AI driven application, offer consumers many benefits, such as 24/7 customer service, quick answers and solutions, ease of approach, and convenience.

Having a chatbot option on your website can increase customer satisfaction and retention rates.

Many businesses are starting to incorporate a small chatbot popup in the bottom right corners of their site. Ecommerce businesses especially are already leveraging on AI potential. Customers can interact with the bots and get answers to questions; if needed, they can be connected with a live representative

Chatbots are more for just customer service. In an age when getting a good opening rate on your emails can seem like a difficult task, Facebook messenger chatbots may offer a solution.

The average email open rate is around 24 percent. For ecommerce businesses, it’s around 78 percent. Facebook Messenger chatbots, on the other hand, can get you an open rate of 88 percent.

Keeping Up With the Platforms

Facebook is still King of the Social Media. However, that doesn’t mean it will always stay that way.

According to Pew Research, many young Americans are changing the nature of their relationships with Facebook.

As many as 44 percent of millennials have deleted the Facebook app from their phone over the past year, while 42 percent of all adult users said that they had taken a break from checking Facebook for several weeks or more.

Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, Quora, Kik, and Vimeo are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to alternative social networks. It’s important to continually pay attention to new and emerging social apps.

Remarketing and Customer Lifecycles

Remarketing and retargeting are becoming increasingly popular among marketing professionals. The click-through-rate of a retargeted ad is 10x more, on average, than regular ads.

Remarketing is available on many platforms, including Facebook and Google Adwords. You can target people who have already visited your site, signed up to your list, or clicked on one of your previous ads.

It’s also important to put more focus on customer retention. The acquisition cost of new customers is five times that of retaining existing customers.

More Social Contact

It’s time to up your social game.

Social media should be personal. Your profile shouldn’t just be a brand pushing its products and website links, but rather it should have a personal tone to it.

You can connect with your customers by adapting a fun tone, posting interesting and/or humorous content such as memes or GIFs, giving followers behind-the-scene peeks into your business, and using live video.

Having the management or even the CEO active on social media will also help increase trust.

Of course, make sure to actively reply to customers who reach out to you or tweet to you with problems or complaints. Many millennials prefer to use social media as their preferred customer service channel.

You should also try to encourage engagement by posting questions and asking for opinions.

Secure Data and Privacy

With more and more large companies and platforms facing scrutiny over their privacy policies and what they do with users’ data, it’s important that you take steps to protect your customer data.

This ties into a previous point, where we mentioned that many Facebook users have deleted the app from their phones or taken a break from using it.

One of the things that may have led to this was the news of the massive data breach that affected nearly 50 million Facebook users in September.

Wrapping It Up

Marketing professionals need to constantly be on top of the game and be ready to go with the flow.

By adjusting your marketing strategy in 2026 to take into account the above-mentioned trends, you will stay one step ahead of your competition.

The post Will 2026 Be Any Different For Marketing Professionals? Know What to Expect appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

SEO, on the other hand, is one of the most effective channels in generating organic traffic and building online awareness, making it a very important aspect of a company’s digital marketing strategy.

In this guide, we will learn about how we can use SEO strategy to improve organic traffic, generate leads, and ultimately, drive revenue. But first, let us discuss some key facts of why SEO might be relatively unique compared to other niches.

Whether it’s a B2B company selling SaaS (Software as a Service) solution or you are a direct-to-consumer company, ensuring you have a proper online presence can either make or break your business.

Building 7-Figure Companies With SEO

Learn how founders, CEOs, execs and thought leaders use SEO and Content Marketing to grow B2B, SaaS, technology and startup companies from zero to 7 and 8-figure revenue.

How Incapsula Doubles Their Business Year Over Year With SEO, Content Marketing and CRO

Content Marketing and SEO are the main customer acquisition channels that helped Incapsula achieve:

• Market Capitalization: $1.5 billion
• Protects: 5,000,000+ websites
• #1 customer acquisition channel: Content Marketing and SEO
• Year over year growth: 100%

Learn more

How Content Marketing and SEO Helped BuildFire Become a 7-Figure ARR SaaS Company

Content marketing, the first page rankings on Google and SEO helped BuildFire to grow to where they are at right now:

• Revenue: 7 Figure Company
• Customers: 1000, Powering over 10,000+ apps in the App Store
• Main customer acquisition channel: organic SEO
• Organic Traffic: 140,000 visitors/month

Learn more

How SEO Helped Time Doctor Become a 7 Figure SaaS Company and Generate 20,000 Trials Per Month

SEO and content marketing are the only lead generation channels for Time Doctor and helped them to generate:

• Revenue: 7 Figure Company
• Customer Acquisition: 20,000 trials/month, 7000 customers/month
• Main customer acquisition channel: organic SEO
• Revenue growth: 10% MoM

Learn more

What Is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is essentially a series of optimizations made inside and outside our website, so the site can rank higher in Google’s and the other search engines’ SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

SERP ranking, however, isn’t and shouldn’t be the end goal of SEO strategy. Instead, it’s just a means of an end in increasing organic traffic. More website traffic, in turn, will help us in achieving other objectives like generating more leads, building digital awareness, and getting more conversions.

Google, as the biggest and most popular search engine, is obviously the main focus of most SEO strategies, but we can also target other search engines like Bing or Yahoo!

We can divide SEO into two different categories: off-page SEO and on-page SEO.

On-Page SEO refers to optimizations that are done inside your website, which can include optimizing your content, the website’s technical (coding) performance, and other aspects.

Off-page SEO is optimizations done outside the website, which mainly involves building the site’s credibility, trust signals, and authority by getting more backlinks/inbound links (more on this later) and social signals.

To be clear, we need to implement both types of optimizations to achieve the desired SEO results.

How exactly? We will discuss it below.

How SEO Actually Works

To really understand how SEO works, we have to discuss several different elements:

The SERP

SERP stands for Search Engines Results Page, which is, the page displayed by the search engine when we search for a specific query.

For example, when we search for “SERP” query, this is the SERP page:

The objective of SEO strategy is to achieve a higher organic search ranking, and if possible, the #1 ranking spot. In the above example, that is the spot right below the “People also ask” box.

It’s very important to consider the fact that 95% of users won’t go past the first page of SERPs. So, getting on the first page of Google SERP is the most important priority of SEO strategy.

However, Google’s SERP has significantly evolved since its actual launch back in 1996, more than two decades ago. Back then, it was pretty simple: paid search ads on top and organic results right below them.

Here is how the SERP for the query “when is the 2025 election” is today:

As you can see, it’s way more complicated. On the above example, there are several different elements included in the SERP:

1. Featured snippet box to inform us about the Date (the direct answer to the search query)
2. Knowledge panel on the sidebar. In this example, a result from Wikipedia
3. The “People Also Ask” box featuring 4 questions
4. The “Top Stories” section featuring video results

Only after all of these elements, we are presented with the organic search result.

What will this mean? Organic ranking is now not the only available objective/priority for SEO strategy. We can also aim to get ranked as a featured snippet or to be featured on the “People Also Ask” questions.

The Anatomy of the Ranking Process

How does Google (and the other search engines) actually rank the websites as the search results?

Understanding the answer to this question can significantly help in really understanding the concept of SEO.

First, according to Google’s own statement, its mission is to deliver the most relevant and reliable information for the human audience. SEO strategy is, to put simply, a way to optimize our website and our content to align with this mission.

So, Google rank content based on its relevance and reliability in meeting the user’s search intent, and here is how the ranking process basically works:

1. Google and other search engines involve the use of web crawlers or search bots, essentially an automated software that will visit all the different websites on the internet. Thus, we often refer to this process as “crawling the page/web”.
2. Google then add the crawled pages to its index. This process is called the indexation process.
3. Based on its algorithm  (more on this later), Google considers all the different ranking factors and shows the most reliable and relevant results from its index when the user enters a search query.

We will have a more in-depth discussion on the ranking algorithms and especially ranking factors/ranking signals below.

Top SEO Ranking Factors in 2025

To be clear, Google features a very complex ranking algorithm and will take account of more than 200 different SEO ranking factors. However, back in 2016, so quite recently, Google basically confirmed its top three ranking factors: Link Profile, Content quality, and User Experience metrics.

1. Link Profile

It’s important to understand that a website’s link profile is not only about backlinks, although backlinks are indeed the most important element of the link profile. Instead, there are three different types of links that will affect your site’s SEO performance:

• Internal links: links from one page of your site to another page(s).
• Outbound links: also called outgoing links, which are links from your pages to third-party websites
• Inbound links: more commonly known as backlinks, links coming to your page(s) from third-party sources

As established above, inbound links are the most important of the three in determining your site’s ranking.

We can think of inbound links or backlinks as the vote of confidence in the digital world. When a website links to your content, they are saying that your page is reliable, credible, and trustworthy. When the link is coming from a relevant, high-quality website, it’s like getting a recommendation letter from a famous person in your industry (read: it’s very valuable).

Nowadays the quality of the backlinks is significantly more important than quantity. In fact, getting too many low-quality backlinks at any given time might get your site penalized by Google.

While inbound links are the most important of the three, that’s not saying outbound links and internal links are not important:

• Outbound links and proper internal linking structure can help improve your site’s relevance. Linking to an authoritative site, for example, can tell Google that you are a legitimate content creator for a specific topic. A proper internal linking practice can also help Google with the indexation process.
• Proper external links essentially tell Google about the niche/industry you are in, the topic you are covering, the potential competitors, and so on. In short, you are helping the search engines to index and structure the whole internet.
• Linking to relevant content (that is already ranking) can provide additional value for your audience (which can indirectly affect ranking).
• When you link to others, you let the other party notice your site and your content. In the future, they might return the favor and link your content. In short, this can be the start of a fruitful relationship.

2. Content Quality

The quality of your content is the center of your SaaS SEO strategy, period. No amount of SEO optimizations and state-of-the-art strategy can help low-quality content. Think of SEO strategy as a way to amplify the performance of high-quality and relevant content and not the other way around.

In the past, SEO content is solely about optimizing the content for the target keywords, and thus we aim for a certain keyword density. It’s very important to understand that today, SEO strategy is no longer solely about keyword optimization.

Instead, the most important thing to focus on is whether your content can meet the user’s search intent. In general, there are four different types of search intent:

• Informational intent. The user is simply looking for information. For example, a user might look for information about SEO by using the “what is SEO” search query. In this case, we can provide educational or informational content to meet this user’s needs.
• Transactional intent. Here, the user is searching for a product/service with the intention to buy. Nowadays, however,  people might search directly on Amazon when they have transactional intent. This intent is usually identified when the user uses “buy” in their query.
• Comparison and Investigation. The user has the intention to buy in the future or is considering to make the purchase by comparing different products/services, check for online reviews, etc. When a user uses queries like “compare” or “review”, it is a strong sign they are having this intent.
• Navigational intent. Users with this intent are trying to get to a specific website. For example, we might type “Instagram” in the search bar for convenience’s sake.

In a software company environment, the user can have all four of these search intents with various queries, so it’s very important to develop a wide variety of content to cover all of these intents.

Google is getting better and better at recognizing how content can cater to a specific intent. Google BERT, the latest algorithm update, allows Google to better understand the context of long-tail, complex queries.

Content optimization for SEO is a very complex subject, but in general, it’s about being better than the other ranking content. Do a quick Google search of your target keyword (more on this later), and analyze the top-ranking pages (if possible, analyze all pages featured on the first page of the SERP). We generally have two options:

• Develop better, longer, more in-depth content than these competitors.
• Be different, and cover the keyword from a unique angle.

Which one is easier? In most cases—if the opportunity presents itself—, being unique is relatively easier, but not saying it’s easy.

Content quality and relevance are extremely related to backlinks (as discussed above). Good content will always get linked, sooner or later. On the other hand, no amount of promotion can help low-quality content that is not relevant to get authoritative backlinks.

3. User Experience Metrics

To reiterate, Google search’s mission is to provide relevant and reliable search results for its user, and the Google search algorithm is constantly being improved to achieve this mission.

One of Google’s major improvements in accordance with this objective is the introduction of Google RankBrain. RankBrain is Google’s first AI-based algorithm that is launched in 2016, and with its machine learning capability, Google is now getting better at measuring and recognizing these user-experience metrics in real-time:

• Bounce rate: the percentage of visitors that leave your site after viewing just one page (single page visit). It can be after one second or one hour, what matters is they leave after just a single page.
• Dwell time: that is, how long a visitor spends on your site. They can view just one page or 100 pages, but this metric is about the total time spent.
• Click-through rate (CTR): the percentage of users that click on SERP results and visit the website

These three metrics combined, essentially provide Google with the information whether your site is relevant for the user, according to the user’s search query and search intent.

Summary: It’s All About Content

To summarize, all three metrics above are centered on one thing: your content quality and relevance. As we will discuss in the rest of this guide, content optimization will be the center of B2B SEO strategy.

Step By Step Guide To SEO Strategy

Step 1: Define SEO Objective

It’s very important to remember that SEO is not a cheat engine or holy-grail tactic to beat the search engine algorithm, but as established above, it’s a series of optimization to align our site and our content with the search engine’s mission to provide more relevant information for the users.

On the other hand, we have also mentioned that SERP ranking shouldn’t be the end goal of SEO strategy, but just a means to an end for objectives like:

• Organic traffic: referring to unpaid website traffic coming from clicks on SERP results. Even if organic traffic is not your end goal, you simply can’t get anything on your site without any traffic. So, in most cases, organic traffic should be one of your main SEO objectives.
• Brand presence: with more people visiting your website and consuming your content, you can improve brand awareness and (perceived) credibility.
• Generate more leads: the website is still the most important lead generation device. The main idea is to convert some of the organic traffic into qualified prospects.
• Sales conversion: pretty self-explanatory, generate more sales on the website. Especially important for eCommerce sites or sites with an affiliate marketing objective.
• Online reputation management (ORM): maintain a positive online presence, mainly by ranking well on branded keywords.
• Customer support and education: publish and promote informational content that can help educate your audience about your product/service or your niche/industry.

You can chase more than one SEO objectives, but make sure that all your goals follow these important principles:

• Specific: the objective must be clear and comprehensive, and can be communicated easily with your team members
• Realistic: that is, attainable. If necessary, break down big goals into smaller milestones to give yourself (and your team members) a sense of achievement with each milestone
• Measurable: define KPIs and measurable metrics for each objective. We should be able to measure the SEO campaign’s performance and progress in accordance with the target objectives.

Make sure to define and list proper objectives that align well with your marketing goals and overall business objectives. For example, if your company’s marketing objective is to generate 30% more leads, then your SEO campaign should aim to help this objective.

Step 2: Site Audit For SEO

The next step is to assess the site’s current state in relation to SEO performance.

We do this by performing an SEO site audit to figure out current on-site and off-site optimizations, as well as technical SEO factors.

Site audit for SEO is a very broad subject on its own, and we won’t give it much justice discussing it here.

However, here are some of the important areas to check in this step:

1. Check Your Site’s Crawlability and Indexability

As we’ve established above, not indexed by Google=your site won’t rank at all, period.

So, make sure Google can crawl your site properly, recognize all of your content pages, and index all of the pages properly. Here are some important things to focus on:

• A proper XML sitemap that lists all your pages
• Make sure your URL is accessible and use HTTPS/ SSL security
• Proper optimization of your robots.txt file
• Use Google Se0arch Console and check your site for possible crawl errors

2. Proper URL Optimizations

We have briefly discussed the importance of enabling HTTPS above, and a secure website URL is now an important SEO ranking factor. Also, pay attention to potential issues like:

• Linking to insecure pages
• Make sure to use canonical URL on your original content to avoid duplication issues
• Make sure your URL is readable, short and to the point. Ensure both the search engines and the human audience can properly understand the URL. Include your target keyword when you can, but do it naturally
• Make sure your SSL security certificate is valid
• Check all your pages and your content, and make sure they are all secure

3. Title Tags and META Descriptions

Title tags and META descriptions are the information displayed on the SERP search result.

For example, for the query “what is software company”, here is the top result

“Software company – Wikipedia” is the Title Tag of the page, and below the URL we can see the META description of the website as the snippet.

As you can see, this information will ultimately determine whether or not the user will visit your site (click-through rate). As discussed, CTR is now an important ranking factor. Various SEO tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs, and Screaming Frog, among others, can help us analyze all the various page titles and META descriptions.

The main principle in optimizing these titles and descriptions is to include your keyword(s) as naturally as possible and focus on delivering comprehensive, valuable, and engaging information for the human audience.

4. Content Structure and Optimization

Use proper header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc. ) to ensure easier indexation by Google. A proper structure will let Google know which aspect of the content is the most important or least important.

Check whether embedded images are properly optimized, such as:

• A comprehensive, descriptive filename
• Properly compressed so they don’t slow down the page
• Have proper alt texts or alt tags, to provide information about the image to the search engine
• Links to the images should work as intended

Again, SEO tools with audit features like SEMrush or Ahrefs can help find and troubleshoot image optimization issues.

5. Mobile-Friendliness

It’s no secret that since 2015, Google only prioritizes mobile-friendly sites to rank. If your site is not yet mobile-responsive or mobile-friendly, it will significantly hurt your chance to get ranked and featured as a rich snippet.

Use Google’s mobile-friendly test tool to assess whether your site is already mobile-friendly. We will discuss how to ensure your site is mobile-responsive further below as we discuss on-site optimizations.

6. Load Speed

Your page’s load speed will affect dwell time and bounce rate (as discussed above, both are ranking factors). According to Google, if your site loads longer than 3 seconds, more than half of mobile visitors will bounce.

There are various factors that can affect your site’s load times, from image sizes and compressions, proper usage and amount of scripts, server response time, and so on. Again, we will further discuss how to improve our site’s load speed in the on-site optimizations section below.

You can use various tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix to help assess your page’s current load speed and identify potential issues.

7. Structured Data Markup

Structured data or schema.org markup is essentially a practice of assigning properties and attributes to all the different elements in our page/content, to provide Google with the relevant information about your site’s content.

The main advantage of implementing structured data markup is that your site is now eligible to be ranked as a featured snippet. However, proper structured data markup implementation can also help with crawling and indexing purposes.

Again, you can use Google’s structured data testing tool to check your site’s current state regarding structured data markup.

Again, SEO site audit is a very broad subject, and this shouldn’t be an all-inclusive list. The main idea is to figure out our site’s current state in relation to SEO performance, so we can plan our SEO strategy ahead.

Step 3: Keyword Research and Keyword Optimization Plan

One of the key aspects of SEO strategy is finding the right keyword(s) to target. Although we have mentioned that SEO today is no longer solely about keyword optimization, the right keyword research is still very important.

With that being said, here are some important considerations for proper keyword research:

• Understanding your target audience: their needs, behaviors, pain points, and especially, the search intent. The better you can understand your audience, the better you can find your target keywords.
• Always refer back to your SEO objectives and goals. That is, these keywords must help you achieve the objectives and not the other way around. For example, if your SEO objective is to generate more leads, then, in general, you’d want to aim for keywords targeting informative intent to attract potential prospects.
• When trying to find your keyword opportunities, here are the important principles:
  • The keyword must be relevant and valuable for your target audience, according to their search intent(s). We can usually evaluate the monthly search volume for the keyword to measure this aspect.
  • The keyword, no matter how popular/relevant for the target audience, must also be relevant for your business/industry.
  • Based on the available resources and your objective’s timeline, the competition for the target keyword must be manageable. Some SEO tools might be able to measure this aspect via metrics like keyword difficulty or similar ones.

There are various keyword research tools that can help you in this aspect, from free ones like Google Keyword Planner and UberSuggests to premium, all-in-one SEO tools like Moz Pro, Ahrefs, and SEMrush, among others.

Make a list of all the possible target keywords and set your priorities. If required, divide them by your SEO objectives and possible search intents.

Step 4: SERP Analysis

More than 40% of search queries now involve a featured snippet in their SERPs, positioned above the top organic spot. There’s also the “People Also Ask” box just below it, and the knowledge panel on the side.

In short, it’s quite possible that the top organic spot is not the only available ‘target’ for your keywords: while being featured as a rich snippet might not guarantee organic traffic (zero-click search), it might provide various benefits in achieving your SEO objectives. For example, being featured as a rich snippet for key questions and definitions related to your niche can be a really good branding opportunity.

On the other hand, it’s also important to find keywords with a high potential organic click-through rate (CTR)s. They should be your main priority in generating organic traffic to achieve your SEO objectives.

So, do a Google search for your target keywords and analyze the SERPs (or you can use various tools to help you). This practice will be related to the next step.

Step 5: Competitive Analysis

SEO is, by nature, a competition where you try to rank higher than your competitors, so competitive analysis should be an important part of the whole SEO strategy.

The most basic thing to do here is to Google your target keywords, as discussed in the previous step and check the ranking competitors. Check at least the top 3 competitors for each keyword, but if you can, check for all the sites featured on the first page of the SERP.

Check how the content pieces are structured, how optimized (SEO-wise) the content is, their approach for the keywords, and so on. Imitate and improve upon what they already did well, and fix what they did wrong. Our job is to beat these competitors, and there are generally two different ways to do it:

1. Create a (significantly) better content: more in-depth, longer, and better than all of these competitors’.
2. Be different: take a unique stance and cover the keyword from a different angle.

Being unique—when the opportunity presents itself—, is generally an easier approach (but that’s not saying it’s easy).  When you are targeting a very popular and competitive keyword, creating just a slightly better content simply won’t do the job.

For example, when the target keyword is “best software company in India”, the first page of SERP might be filled with pages with lists covering the top 10 to 30 software companies in India. In this case, would creating another “top 10” list cut it? Probably not. Your list must be significantly better, or you might need to create a really big list covering 50 or even 100 different companies. Pretty hard? In most cases, yes.

On the other hand, if you can find an opportunity to use a unique angle to cover the keyword, you might get more attention, get more backlinks in the process, and climb the SERP faster.

Step 6: Content Strategy and Planning

Content is the core of SEO strategy, period.

This statement is even more relevant today: Google’s ranking algorithm is getting better in understanding the quality of your content, and its relevance to the target keyword and the search intent.

To be frank, there’s no shortcut in getting the desired SEO results besides actually having high-quality and relevant content. SEO optimizations will only amplify the performance of an already performing content and on the other hand, no amount of tactics and optimizations can help a low-quality content.

So, a proper content marketing plan will significantly help your whole SEO effort. Here are some important areas to consider when planning your content strategy:

1. If you have a content development team, decide the PIC for each content (for example, writer A for content A, etc.)
2. Refer back to your target keywords, and plan how you’ll expand each of them into actual topics.
3. Plan the channels where you are going to distribute the content:
   1. Your own blog
   2. Guest post opportunity on third-party sites
   3. Publication platforms like Medium and other sites
   4. Video streaming platforms like YouTube for video content
   5. Email newsletter
4. Plan a schedule of when you are going to publish the content (and how frequent).
5. Develop a content calendar that lists:
   1. Date of content publication
   2. Content creator (author)
   3. The topic or working title
   4. Target keyword
   5. Description of the content
   6. Content objective
   7. Publication/distribution channel
   8. CTA and lead magnet plan (if any)
   9. Ideas/references/mood board
   10. Working status (WIP, published, etc.)
6. Execute and evaluate the content plan:
   1. The overall tone of the content, its quality, how it compares against the competition
   2. The content’s performance according to the objective(s)
   3. The overall execution of the editorial calendar

Depending on the performance, you might want to adjust your content plan according to your SEO objective.

Also, remember that it’s about your content quality and relevance to your human audience. Include your target keywords naturally, but don’t focus on keyword density. Focus on delivering comprehensive content with good readability.

Step 7: Link Building

It’s no secret that backlinks are the most important ranking factor in SEO. As we have established above, the quality of these backlinks is more important than quantity.

The quality of your backlinks, in general, directly proportionate to the source site’s authority. You can use various tools like Moz’s Domain Authority checker to check the authority of the source sites.

Again, the secret of getting high-quality backlinks is the quality of your content. If your content is good and contains relevant information, you will get linked sooner or later. On the other hand, no amount of effort can help low-quality content without substance—at least, without getting penalized—.

There are, however, tactics and methods we can use to amplify the performance of your quality content, such as:

1. Promoting Your Content

Yes, the quality of your content is extremely important in getting these backlinks. However, no matter how good your content is, it won’t bring any value—SEO or otherwise— when nobody actually knows about it.

Content promotion is arguably even more important than the content creation process:

1. It obviously helps in generating organic traffic to your website, which can help in achieving your SEO strategy goals and marketing objectives.
2. Proper promotion can also help in generating more backlinks in the process. More backlinks will improve SERP ranking, which in turn, will also generate more organic traffic.

Thus, promote your content via all the available channels, and whenever you can, aim to get inbound links or backlinks in the process. For example, when you work with influencers to promote your content via influencer marketing, you might also ask them for a backlink from their website.

To summarize, use all potential channels to get high-quality backlinks.

2. Create Linkable Content

Think about it, what’s the reason to provide a backlink to another site? Typically, here are the most common reasons:

• Citing a source site when we make an informational claim (i.e. 30% of surveyed users are…..)
• When we use a term that is related to the content but might not be understood by all of your visitors. For example, in this content covering SEO, we might need to provide a link to another site when we first mention “ranking factor” or “backlink”
• When we include images, infographics, etc.

So, we can simply include these types of information and data in our content:

1. Original, previously unpublished information like an original research report, datasheet, case study, etc. is very linkable
2. Visually aesthetic images, infographics, and photos
3. Data roundup content, when done properly, can generate a lot of backlinks

Remember that you don’t need to be too aggressive in getting these backlinks. Focus on quality, not quantity, and in general, you’d only need to build 3 to 5 high-quality backlinks for each page.

Step 8: Social Media and SEO

While social signals are not a direct ranking factor for SEO, they can indirectly affect your SEO performance.

As we have discussed, link profile, content quality, and UX metrics are the most important ranking factors, and social media performance can help in all three:

1. Social media is where the audience is with more than 3 billion daily active users. More social media exposure will translate to more opportunities to get backlinks
2. Social media is a great place to conduct market research so you can better understand your audience. Meaning, it can help you in developing better content.
3. Social media can allow you to promote your content directly to those who have developed an interest, so it can improve dwell time and minimize bounce rate.

So, how should we optimize our social media content to help your SEO, here are a few tips:

• Post regularly and maintain the quality of your content. Make sure your social media profiles are active.
• Maintain a consistent image/tone for your profile. When opportunities present themselves, include a link to your content.
• Use relevant bio for your profiles.
• Make sure your posts are engaging. Use attractive images when you can.
• Proper, appropriate hashtags.
• Make sure your content is shareable and social media-friendly

Step 7: On-Site Optimizations

In general, there are three important aspects of achieving SEO success:

• Making sure your content is valuable so it can get high-quality backlinks and get a lot of engagement from the audience
• Making sure your site is performing as intended to improve user experience, keeping your site visitors as long as possible (higher average dwell time.)
• Ensuring Google can crawl and index your site. When your site is not indexed, it won’t rank, period.

The first aspect regarding content is mainly covered in the previous steps. This step, on the other hand, is about the second and third aspects.

While on-site website optimizations are very broad subject on its own, here are some of the most important things to focus on:

• Your site’s load speed:
  • Use a website template that is optimized for speed
  • Leverage browser caching
  • Make sure to use proper image and file compression
  • Reduce the use of redirects
  • Improve server response time (might involve changing to a better hosting service or a dedicated server.)
  • Minify CSS and remove render-blocking sprit
• Make sure your site is mobile-responsive.
• Ensure your site is indexed faster and properly by Google. You might want to follow this guide.
• Implement proper structured data markup. This can provide Google with more information to index your site and allow your site to be viable for a featured snippet.
• Optimize the content structure
• Optimize your site’s structure and interface (layout, navigation menus, etc.)
• Test everything regularly on as many devices as possible.

Optimize your site so both Google and the human audience can recognize the contained information properly, and also make sure to maintain content quality.

Step 8: Evaluation and Re-Optimization

The last but not least step is to evaluate and monitor your SEO campaign’s progress.

It’s very important to understand that SEO is a long-term game and not a get-rich quick scheme. In general, it would take 6 to 18 months of continuous efforts before we can see any significant result (i.e. featured on the first page of SERP).

Thus, it’s very important to monitor your SEO performance by evaluating these key areas:

• SERP ranking for each keyword. It should climb progressively overtime. If there’s a sudden decline, you should adjust your strategy.
• Organic traffic. Should also increase steadily according to ranking performance.
• Impressions and organic reach.
• Conversion rate, especially when the page involves lead magnets or CTAs.
• User experience metrics: dwell time, bounce rate, organic CTR
• Page load speed
• Mobile responsiveness
• Link profile, especially backlinks profile, but also outbound links and internal linking structure
• Content structure, layout, readability

Evaluate your site and your pages according to these key metrics (and more, depending on your SEO objective), and adjust your strategy accordingly.

SEO FAQs and Tips

What Is SEO

Stands for Search Engine Optimization, is essentially a series of optimization of your website (both on-site and off-site) to rank higher on organic SERP by optimizing three key areas:

• Making sure your page’s content is valuable and relevant for your human audience
• Optimizing user experience and engagement, to keep site visitors for as long as possible
• Ensuring Google can properly crawl and index your site by optimizing the technical factors of your site

The main objective of SEO strategy is to improve organic traffic to the website.

What is SERP

Stands for Search Engine Results Page. The page displayed by Google and the other search engines after you enter a search query.

SEO VS SEM

SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing, which includes both SEO and PPC (Pay-Per-Click) search advertising.

PPC VS SEO

PPC advertising is paid ads displayed on the top of SERP for a certain keyword/search query. The term PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click, referring to the pricing model for the advertising where the user only needs to pay for the ad each time someone clicks on it.

Why SEO is Important?

Getting more website traffic remains one of the most important goals to pursue for any business, and SEO remains one of the most effective approaches in generating more (organic/unpaid) website traffic. You might want to check this article on the importance of SEO for a more concise answer.

Are SERPs Personalized?

In some cases, yes. Google does track various things related to your online activity from your device’s location to your search history to browsing and purchase history, and can provide a personalized search result for the user. You can search in a private browser window or incognito window to get the ‘original’ SERP.

Is SEO Dead?

Seemingly every year, there are always news and articles proclaiming the death of SEO, but in truth, SEO is alive and well.

It’s true, however, that SEO has significantly changed over the years, and some SEO strategies, tactics and practices are really ‘dead’, that is, used to work but don’t work anymore. For example, keyword stuffing used to be the common practice in pre-2011 SEO, but can get us penalized nowadays.

There are, however, SEO practices that still work effectively, including those we have discussed above.

End Words

Whether you are a B2B company targeting professionals from other companies, or a direct-to-consumer B2C company, SEO should be the core of your digital marketing strategy.

Getting website traffic is very important in a tech-embedded software environment, and hiring an SEO expert remains one of the most effective ways of generating organic traffic. In turn, more organic traffic can translate to more converted prospects and ultimately, more sales conversions for your website product.

The post How To Create a Successful SEO Strategy appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

So, it’s important to get as many advantages as you can to stay ahead of the competition, and fortunately nowadays there are many marketing tools designed for content marketing that can help you in various areas.

Here, we will discuss five of the best content marketing tools available. Each has their own specific feature set, and will cater to a different purpose.

Let us begin.

1. Best All-In-One Research Tool: SEMRush

SEMRush is best known as one of the most popular SEO tools, especially for its excellent keyword research features.

However, SEMRush is actually a very powerful tool for content marketing with a wide range of possible applications, for instance:

Keyword Magic Tool: search for keywords that are relevant for your business and often searched by your audience. Since SEO is an integral aspect of content marketing, this is a very important feature to have.
Topic Research: Simply enter your keywords and SEMRush will provide various suggestions to find a topic to work with.
SEO Optimization: suggestions for various SEO optimizations. Again, SEO is a very important aspect of content marketing.

Content Audit: evaluating various aspects of your content, especially regarding user experience.
Analytics: monitor your brand performance, social media engagement, and many other important metrics
Backlinks Profile: check your competitors’ backlinks profile, which can be useful in getting our own inbound links

SEMRush is especially useful for keyword research purposes, both to find keywords for your own content and to check your competitors’ target keywords. A great, all-around tool to assist you content marketing.

Pricing: Pro ($99.95/month), Guru ($199.95/month), Business ($399.95/month). No free plan, but free trial available.

2. Best Content Curation Tool: BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is one of the most important tools for content marketing with two core features:

Content curation: find out what kind of content is trending in your niche, across various social media networks. BuzzSumo will also display various useful metrics like engagement metrics, backlinks profile, etc.
Influencer analytics: giving insights about key influencers for a certain niche. This can be very useful for content promotion purposes, as well as to get backlinks from key influencers that might be related to our content

As a tool, BuzzSumo is relatively simple with just a few features—but it is really good at what it does.

Content curation is often the most difficult and lengthy process in formulating a content marketing strategy, and with BuzzSumo we can tackle this issue with just a few simple clicks.

Simply enter your keyword, and BuzzSumo will show the most shared content for the keyword across different social media networks. BuzzSumo will also show useful metrics for the content.

Nowadays, building relationships with other influencers to promote your content is very important, and BuzzSumo is also one of the best tools to gain insights about key influencers.

Pricing: Pro ($79/month), Plus ($139/month), Large ($239/month), custom plan available.

3. Best Content Organizer Tool: CoSchedule

CoSchedule is actually a full-fledged marketing organizer suite with many different features from asset management organizer to social media management tool, each ‘feature’ is priced differently or you can also get the full marketing suite package starting from $150/month.

However, here we will especially focus on CoSchedule’s content organizer feature. In a nutshell, Coschedule content organizer is an editorial calendar where we can plan our content schedule, and view all the different schedules in one place. This can be very useful if we plan to publish many different content in various different platforms (different social media networks, your blog, etc.).

CoSchedule offers seamless integration with other important content marketing platforms from WordPress to Google Docs to Evernote, among others.

We can also use CoSchedule as a collaboration tool if you have several content marketers in your team. You can post comments on your schedule, and ask questions to easily communicate within your team without sending any emails.

Pricing: Growth ($60/month) for 3 users, Professional ($250/month) 5 users, custom Enterprise plan tailored for your needs available

4. Best Conversion Optimization Tool: Convert Pro

No matter how good your content is, it won’t bring any value unless it can convert visitors into prospects, and ultimately, paying customers. This, will turn your content marketing into an effective lead generation device.

Convert Pro is a WordPress plugin known as one of the most effective lead generation plugins available, with some powerful features such as:

• Easily create call-to-actions (CTAs) for your content
• Build an email list
• Implement a lead magnet offer in your content
• A/B testing
• Seamless integration with various CRMs and email marketing tools
• Integration with Google Analytics to monitor the performance of your content
• Drive traffic to your website and promote videos
• User segmentation features to easily group different audience for better targeting
• So, if your website is WordPress based and you want an effective lead generation from your content marketing, Convert Pro is a must-have plugin considering its pretty reasonable price.

It’s also a lightweight plugin that won’t slow down your website, and as a paid plugin, you get a dedicated customer service and tutorials to help you get the most of ConverPro.

Pricing: $99 annually or $399 one-time payment, Agency bundle for $249/year or $699 one-time

5. Best Content Optimization Tool: CrazyEgg

We can be fairly subjective in assessing the quality and performance of our own content—especially if we are the content creator.

This is where a website performance analytics like CrazyEgg can fill the gap.

CrazyEgg offers the standard heat map analytics feature to check where your visitors are clicking on your website, as well as other useful analytics features like confetti report, scroll maps, and overlay maps, among other. Tracking all these metrics will provide you with a very powerful insight in evaluating your content’s performance.

You can monitor different ‘heat’ by browser/device, referral pages, and country, to evaluate in content’s performance in detail for specific situations (i.e. your content might not perform well in mobile devices).

So, you can reposition high-performing content to more popular areas of your website, and you can also re-optimize underperforming content.

CrazyEgg, with all the powerful features, is very easy to use where everything is displayed visually, and you can view all the useful metrics with just a single click on a specific area of your website.

Pricing: Basic ($24/month) for 30,000 page views and 100 recordings/month, 1 website; Standard ($49/month) for 75,000 page views and 500 recordings/month, 3 websites; Plus for 150,000 page views and 1,000 recordings/month, unlimited websites

6. Best All-in-One AI Content Workspace: Narrato

When you’re scaling up content production, the biggest concern is usually the content quality. If it’s the same for you, Narrato AI is the solution. It is a powerful content creation and marketing software that is capable of consistently generating high-quality content at scale.

It comes with tons of other features for managing your entire marketing operations. Here is a quick look at these –

• AI Content Genie for automated content creation. This AI feature on the platform auto-generates social media and blog content based on relevant themes.
• AI Content Assistant: 100+ AI and SEO tools for creating any kind of content, from blog posts, social media posts, copy, and even AI images and memes. It also offers advanced AI tools for content ideation, keyword research, SEO and content optimization. For any specific needs, there’s an option to create custom AI templates.
• Content planner and scheduler: Global content calendar and automated content publishing support for numerous platforms or CMS. You can also use Narrato’s API and custom integrations to publish content on other platforms/CMS.
• Content planning tools: Custom style guides and content templates.
• Collaboration features: In-line comments, messages, and @mentions.
• Project management: Searchable repository of content, custom content workflows, workflow automation, and task assignment.
• Content team and freelancer management: Onboard your content team and choose the right access level. Manage in-house content team and also freelance writers.

Pricing: Plans include Pro at $36 per month and Business at $76 (both include 4 user seats). Custom pricing plan is available if you want more or less of anything.

End Words

Content marketing is not only about the content creation process. Other aspects of content marketing from content promotion to the research/curation process to content scheduling, are often overlooked but yet, equally important.

The five tools we have discussed above, each covered different aspects of content marketing. In our opinion, they are the best available today according to their respective functionality.

While content marketing is now very competitive, these tools can help you up your game to deliver better value for your audience.

The post Top 5 Content Marketing Tools For Business Success appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

However, with so many different online marketing tools available, it’s sometimes hard to know where to start. This is why in this opportunity, we have compiled 25 of the best options used by marketing consultants on a daily basis.

We will divide these tools into categories, according to their core features. Let us begin by discussing what’s arguably the most important category: marketing analytics tools.

Analytics Tools

Arguably, half (or more) of good marketing efforts is about proper understanding of your audience—so, analytics—.

With that being said, having the right analytics tools in your marketing arsenal is a must, and here are the best ones available today:

1. Google Analytics

A fairly obvious choice, but a very important one nonetheless.

The best part of Google Analytics is that it is totally free. Well, there’s the ultra premium Google Analytics 360 that can cost more than $100,000 annually, but for most small to mid-sized businesses (and even most large businesses), the standard version is more than enough.

Google Analytics allows us to analyze various performance metrics on our website, especially regarding our audience. These metrics include audience demographics, keywords/search queries, actions taken by visitors, bounce rate, and so on.

2. Built-In Social Media Analytics

Too often we look in other places while what we need is already on our hands. Most major social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter, among others, offer their own built-in analytics. More often than not, they are actually the best compared to other third-party social media analytics tools for the respective platforms.

The key to social media marketing is properly understanding your audience and how you can fulfill their needs, and tracking various user metrics with these built-in tools will help you in this aspect.

3. MixPanel

MixPanel is often considered as the main competitor/alternative of Google Analytics because indeed, both of them have similar core functionalities—at least on the surface—. However, there are several major differences where we can use MixPanel for different purposes.

For instance, Google Analytics mainly works by tracking user’s behavior around page views, while with MixPanel we can track various visitor actions—or “events”. MixPanel can update real-time data regarding these actions in mere seconds.

Meaning, if your marketing revolves around tracking real-time data like conversions, first-trial registrations, and so on, MixPanel can be a better choice.

4. Sumo

Formerly known as SumoMe, Sumo is an excellent all-in-one suite of analytic tools covering many different areas. Sumo especially focuses on content-related metrics like showing where your visitors click on your site, how much of your content they actually read, and so on.

If your marketing is content-heavy, Sumo is a great analytics tool to help optimize your content, increasing your site’s traffic and conversions in the process.

Besides its analytics function, Sumo also covers useful automation features like the email list builder and easy-to-use CTA buttons. A very useful tool especially for blogs and websites with heavy focus on content.

5. Whatagraph

Whatagraph is a comprehensive marketing data platform designed to help marketers easily understand and present data from various sources. It simplifies the process of creating intuitive reports and demonstrating the ROI of marketing campaigns.

The platform enables seamless connection to a wide range of data sources. Users can transform and prepare data for intuitive visualizations, create stunning presentations with a user-friendly drag-and-drop dashboard, and automate the sharing of reports. With over 45 integrations, Whatagraph makes generating reports using your existing data sources straightforward. Notable integrations include MailChimp, Semrush, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, TikTok Ads, Google Sheets, BigQuery, Ahrefs, GA4, and more.

Pricing options include the ‘Essential’ plan, starting at $249 monthly. This plan includes up to 20 source credits, 5 users, access to pre-made templates, more than 45 integrations, and the capability to transfer data to BigQuery, among other features. For more demanding users, ‘Advanced’ and ‘Custom’ plans are available. These offer additional source credits and users, custom branding, and a consolidated dashboard feature that provides a unified view of all your clients’ KPIs.

Social Media Marketing Tools

In the world dominated by social media, obviously we can’t miss social media marketing in our marketing efforts. Thankfully, a lot of useful—if not, powerful— tools are available to assist us here, such as:

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is certainly one of the most popular social media marketing tools available, with the core feature of monitoring and scheduling all your social media profiles in one streamlined dashboard.

Besides its automation functionalities, Hootsuite also offers analytics features to track the performance of your social media campaigns. The key feature, however, is the ability to schedule hundreds of posts of at once to automate your social media presence.

2. Buffer

Often compared to Hootsuite and with good reasons, mainly because both of them are centered on post-scheduling and automation.

Admittedly, Hootsuite offers more features, integrations, and even more supported platforms. However, this also means that Buffer is a simpler tool that is easier to use.

Buffer also offers analytics features, that is also simpler and focused on the performance of your posts.

3. Tailwind

Tailwind especially focuses on Instagram and Pinterest, and you can use it to schedule posts, monitor conversations, finding interesting content, and as usual, analyze your performance, among others.

The scheduling and automation features are pretty handy, as you can create an optimal schedule while using the analytics data like engagement, reach, and traffic.

With Instagram being one of the most popular social media platform today, Tailwind is a great choice if your business is active on both Pinterest and Instagram.

4. Socialbakers

An A.I.-driven social media marketing tool that especially focuses on analyzing audience behavior. With Socialbakers, you can custom-tailor your posts with more personalizations, improving engagement and conversion in the process.

Socialbakers is also capable of managing different social media platforms in one dashboard, complete with a real-time analytics feature.

With personalizations becoming increasingly important nowadays, Socialbakers is an excellent tool that can help you understand your audience better.

SEO and Content Marketing Tools

Yes, SEO is still alive and well, if not even more important than ever with the saturated market. However, it is also true that SEO has evolved to be more complicated than ever, and this is where these tools can help you.

It is also worth noting that SEO and content marketing are inseparable from each other. So, here are some of the best SEO and content marketing tools suggested by SEO expert Mike:

1. Yoast SEO

If your site is WordPress-based, Yoast is an excellent plugin that can “crawl” your website or blog, give suggestions where you can manually optimize your site, and give automated optimizations in some aspects.

This allows Google an easier time to index your site, as well as optimizing other important technical aspects like keyword density, meta description optimization, readability, and many others.

A very useful SEO tool so you don’t have to manually assess your site every time.

2. Feedly

Content monitoring is a very important aspect of content marketing: by knowing what’s currently trending and what kinds of content are effective, we can properly develop our own content.

With that being said, Feedly is simply one of the best content monitoring tools available. It’s easy to use with its intuitive and minimalist interface, and you can easily customize your preference to get the content you need.

3. Google Alerts

Google Alerts, as the name suggests, will send an alert to your email when a certain topic or keyword showed up on the web, according to your preference.

This is very useful when you are monitoring a certain topic or keyword. You can also get alerts when someone mentioned your brand, or even your competitors. This will be useful in monitoring the current trends, engagements, and your overall brand awareness.

Again, monitoring other content pieces is often the best approach in planning your own content marketing, and Google Alerts as a totally-free tool is a must.

4. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is an A.I.-powered content tool offering a pretty well-rounded set of features. However it focuses on topic suggestion by analyzing topics and/or your competition.

For instance, BuzzSumo can analyze the most shared content of your chosen topic on different social media platforms, this can give you a great insight on what kinds of content to develop. You can also check what kinds of content shared by your chosen influencers, which can really help in building relationships and getting those valuable backlinks.

BuzzSumo has been one of the most popular content marketing tools for some time, and with great reasons. Very well-rounded and very useful for content research and topic generation.

5. Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is technically a tool designed for Google Adwords—Google’s keyword-based advertising publication—, but is very useful for content marketing and SEO purposes. Why? Simply because it’s so good at what it does: researching and planning keywords.

With Google Keyword Planner, you an especially find out about the search volume of your target keywords, how the trend changes over time, and suggestions for topics and other keywords.

Again, being a totally free tool, there’s simply no reason not to use Google Keyword Planner.

6. Moz Link Explorer

Formerly known as Open Site Explorer, Link Explorer is a totally free tool from Moz to check domain and page authority, as well as backlinks profile.

Domain authority, in a nutshell, is a metric developed by Moz to predict a website’s SEO performance—namely, how high it will rank on the search engine result page (SERP). It’s not 100% accurate, so we will need to take it with a grain of salt, but it’s still useful to assess your current optimizations.

You can also use Link Explorer to analyze your competitors’ websites, which can be a vital step in your overall SEO efforts.

7. Social Mention

Similar to Google Alerts, but as the name suggests, this tool focuses on social media mentions. With Social Mention, you can keep track of the social media presence of your brand, listen to the conversations, and analyze your current performance to make your improvements.

Social Mention is also very easy to use: simply type in your search query, and you’ll get various data for the query like reach, sentiment, engagement levels, and so on.

8. SEMRush and/or Ahrefs

SEMRush and Ahrefs are similar tools—and direct competitors— to each other with similar core functionality: keyword research. Both also offer similar pricing ranges starting at $99/month. Being the “premium” keyword research tools, they offer more features compared to Google Keyword Planner, and so they are worth a shot if you are serious about keyword research.

While they offer similar core features in many ways, generally SEMRush a little better at keyword research, while Ahrefs is stronger in the backlinks research aspect.

Email Marketing and Automation Tools

Even in 2015 with all the newer marketing channels, platforms, and technologies, email marketing is still one of the most effective promotional channels out there. One of the biggest reasons is the fact that a huge majority of people simply prefer email messages to receive promotional messages from brands.

So, email marketing is still very important, and with the increasing demands for personalizations, also comes a great number of email automation tools.

Here are some of the best email marketing tools available today:

1. Omnisend

Omnisend is an email marketing and automation tool created mainly for ecommerce brands. It helps businesses run email, SMS, and push notification campaigns from one place, which makes it a good choice for stores that want to keep their marketing simple and organized. The interface is also easy to understand, so it works well both for beginners and for growing teams. Another good thing about Omnisend is that it offers useful automation features built for online stores. You can set up ready-made workflows for welcome emails, abandoned carts, order updates, and follow-up messages, which can save time and help increase sales. It also comes with signup forms, audience segmentation, and product recommendations, making it a practical option for ecommerce marketing.

2. SendinBlue

SendinBlue is a well-rounded tool dedicated for email and SMS marketing. It comes with a minimalist interface that is very easy to use, making it an ideal tool even for email marketing beginners.

Another good thing about SendinBlue is that the free version is actually useful. You can input unlimited contacts on the database, which is a huge plus, and you can send up to 9,000 emails per month. For most small businesses, this number is enough, and the premium plan is fairly affordable, starting from $25/month for 40,000 emails/month.

3. ConvertKit

ConvertKit is designed with the focus for content marketing, for bloggers, podcasters, Youtubers, and other content producers.

With that being said, ConvertKit is especially focused on user experience, ease of use, and personalization. You can create attractive forms and CTAs, as well as personalized emails for individual email subscribers.

ConvertKit is also great in its automation features that are easy to understand even for complete beginners. There’s a visual automation builder where we can build our automation campaign with just our mouse clicks.

4. Drip

Drip focuses on ecommerce CRM, so there are unique features to help convert site visitors into email subscribers, and in turn,into purchasing customers. So, Drip is especially focused on generating conversions, especially by sending automated email at the right time based on the prospect’s behavior and intent.

For example, we can analyze important behaviors like returning visitors, abandoning carts, people who took a certain actions, and so on to custom tailor the messages and plan a schedule.

Drip also offers great third-party integrations, for example, the ability to display Facebook Ads.

5. MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing tools available today, and for its reasons.

For instance, MailChimp is very well-rounded with various features like automation, landing pages creation, smart scheduling to send your emails at the right time. It also offers excellent integration with popular third-party platforms. For example, you can easily integrate MailChimp with your WordPress-based site and ecommerce platforms.

Another reason why MailChimp is so popular is its affordability. The free plan allows you to list 2,000 subscribers and send 12,000 emails per month, while the paid plans are offered from just $10 monthly. There are also some good Mailchimp alternatives that can be a better fit for your business.

6. Aweber

A very important aspect of email marketing is actually building that email list—the lead generation phase—. Yet, too often marketers focused on the process of email marketing than actually building a list, and this is where AWeber can help you.

You get all the essential features to grow your email list in AWeber, while there are also the usual email marketing tool features like drag-and-drop newsletter builder, automating features, and conversion focused signup forms.

Landing Page Tools

A very important aspect of digital marketing is the conversion-focused landing page. This is where you convert visitors into qualified leads and convert leads into actual, paying customers.

Thankfully, nowadays there are various tools can can help you design and optimize your landing pages, such as:

1. Unbounce

Unbounce is a pretty well-rounded landing page builder where you can build, test, and optimize custom landing pages as well as other useful features like building a website pop-up.

Very easy to use with its drag-and-drop approach, a lot of built-in templates, and great integration with various popular marketing tools like WordPress, AWeber, and MailChimp, among others.

2. GetResponse

As the name suggest, GetResponse is especially focused on conversion optimizations. With GetResponse, you can easily set-up a high-converting landing pages that is also mobile-responsive (which is very important nowadays).

GetResponse also features built-in analytics and A/B testing feature. Excellent third-party integrations with Facebook and Adwords, among other platforms, and there are also useful extra features like a webinar builder and email marketing tools.

3. HubSpot

HubSpot is a popular choice not only as a landing page builder, but as a well-rounded digital marketing tool.

For instance, you can build, modify, and optimize a website some scratch without any IT knowledge, and same goes with the landing page builder. HubSpot is easy to use and the extra features from SEO and content creation tools to A/B testing features to lead capture form builder are great for those who need an all-in-one marketing tool.

A downside for HubSpot is that it’s fairly expensive, but you can just your tier package according to your needs.

4. Leadpages

Another popular landing page builder choice where you can easily build a landing page with a drag and drop approach.

A lot of (more than 160) templates, great integration with 40+ marketing tools, and is relatively easy to use. The form builder is also very intuitive and you can use it to create high-converting forms.

Leadpages is relatively old and the interface is relatively outdated, but offers some nice features with an affordable price.

End Words

Obviously, there are still many more digital marketing tools available on the market, and even categories that haven’t been listed on this guide. However, these recommendations can give you a good starting place to understand how to invest wisely in digital marketing tools, according to your business’s needs and purposes.

The post 25 of The Best Digital Marketing Tools appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

So, in this guide, we will cover all aspects of the content marketing strategy for technology, startup and software companies: from figuring out your audience to planning your topics to creating conversion devices for your content pieces. Yet, let us first discuss the main differences between B2B and B2C content marketing tactics.

B2B VS B2C Content Marketing

Content marketing, in a nutshell, is how you use content to attract new audience, converting the audience into prospects, and ultimately, into paying customers.

With a proper content marketing, you can establish credibility, a very expensive asset in this saturated digital age. Why? Because simply, people only buy from brands they can trust. If you publish valuable, relevant content regularly, you can establish your position as the expert/thought leader of your industry, which is the principle of inbound marketing.

The main difference between B2C and B2B content marketing planning, obviously, is the audience. With B2C content marketing, you are dealing with personal customers, while with B2B content, you are dealing with businesses, or professionals within the businesses. This main difference will further gives fruit into several important differences, namely:

• B2C audiences are mainly influenced by emotion, while B2B audiences are mainly influenced by logical information, although this is not absolute
• The purchase process of B2B businesses tend to be longer than B2C consumers, meaning, generally you will need more content pieces to nurture a B2B audience
• There can be several different decision-makers in your target companies, and each of them can have different roles with different needs. Your content pieces should address each of these roles, and so B2B content marketing must be more diversified.
• B2C content marketing is more effective for brand awareness purposes, while B2B content marketing plan is more focused towards results (conversion)

Obviously, there are other differences, but these four we have discussed above are the most crucial ones. So, based on those differences, B2B content pieces are required to be more engaging, valuable, relevant, and developed with professional-quality.

Planning and Executing Content Marketing Strategy for Your Technology, Software and Startup Company

Now that we’ve understood the main principles of B2B content marketing, and the differences to B2C content marketing, let us further discuss how to develop a content marketing strategy for technology and software companies.

1. Finding and Understanding Your Audience

It’s impossible to please everyone: our time is limited, our resources are limited, and our manpower is limited. This is why it’s very important to focus on an ideal audience.

Here are some key considerations before we delve further into this subject:

1. Your core value proposition

Remember that people aren’t essentially buying your product or software, but rather the benefits tied to it. Identify the single, most important value about your product or service. If you can define the extra features and benefits, that’s fine, but don’t let these extra features dilute your judgment about the most important benefit.

2. Who would benefit most from that value?

Now that you’ve defined your core value, you will need to find out who, or at least, which companies will benefit the most from this value. For example, if your product is aimed at improving productivity, you might want to target startups with fast-paced growth.

3. Your unique value

What makes your business unique compared to your competitors? What should be the reason your audience will purchase from you and not from your competition? This can be a lower price tag, but remember that your competitor can always lower their price as well. Identify your unique value, and build your business (and content marketing) around it.

Based on those three considerations, here are some targeting approaches you can implement:

• Start by defining your target companies

If you are a B2B technology, startup and software company, your customers will be companies and organizations. List all possible target companies and pick 3 or 5 biggest/most relevant ones. Research these companies thoroughly, especially their key decision-makers.

Each company can have more than one decision-maker, and by studying these key companies, you can have a clearer picture of ideal roles you should target. If possible, segment this audience according to the various stages of the marketing funnel.

• Using analytics and available data

If your brand (and especially site) is not totally new, you should be able to use analytics data to analyze your current visitors. You can use Google Analytics or other analytics tools like Mixpanel or KISSmetrics to do this.

Then, you can take notes of the important metrics. You might want to check out this guide by Tech Funnel listing all the important metrics in tracking qualified audiences.

With this data, you can learn a lot about your site visitors, from basic demographics like gender and age, and more in-depth behavior and interest data from the topics they are interested in, what time they are active on your site, what device are they using (mobile/desktop/tablet), and so on.

Understanding this data will be useful not only for your startup content marketing strategy, but for your overall marketing and business strategies you can apply for your tech or software business. Here are some key metrics to observe:

• Demographics: fairly obvious, for example, if your main target audience is millennial women working in California between the age of 25-34, you can figure out how to develop content for this group.

• Behavior: there have been arguments that behavioral targeting is now more important than demographics targeting. The better you can understand your audience’s behavior, the better you can tailor your content. Check out this guide by Google on how to use Analytics to analyze behavior.

• Keywords: analyzing keywords that bring these visitors to your blog/site will be extremely beneficial for your startup digital marketing planning. You can plan out topics to target keywords that have brought results.

• Interest: you can use Google Analytics data to track the social channels that bring visitors to your site. Then you can use the analytics feature on each social media channel to find their interests. You might want to check this guide to learn more about this aspect.

In short, with this approach, we analyze various data of our current visitors and readers to develop better content. Obviously we can’t use this approach if your site is brand new, but you can analyze your closest competitors’ data for a similar effect.

• Developing reader persona

Reader persona, similar to buyer persona, is a fictional model of your ideal reader. So, as opposed to the previous approach where you use the available data to understand your current audience, here you analyze possibilities to create your most ideal future audience.

One way to do this is by analyzing your business and marketing goals, and finding the audience with the highest possibilities in helping you to achieve those goals.

Another approach is to analyze various data, similar to the previous discussion, and use this data to shape your ideal reader. Developing a reader persona can be a pretty broad subject on its own, and you might want to check out this guide by Neil Patel on developing a data-driven reader persona.

2. Planning Your Topics

One of the biggest challenges in developing a content marketing strategy for tech and startup businesses is consistency. A proper content marketing is not about just one or two high-quality content pages, but you will need to publish a lot of content blogs, articles and pages in various forms, while maintaining consistency in quality.

The best way to tackle this issue is to plan your topics ahead, or better, develop a 6 to 12 months editorial calendar. At the very least, you should aim for two to three content pieces per month. The more the merrier, as long as you can maintain quality.

Here are key steps to consider when planning your topics:

• Keyword research

In this saturated digital marketing world, thousands of content pieces are being published every single day. No matter how good your content is, you won’t get any value from it unless it’s visible to your audience.

One of the best ways to achieve content visibility for software companies is through SEO, and this is why targeting the right keywords is important. In general, you should target keywords that are:

1. Valuable for your business and relevant to what you are offering.
2. Have enough search volume (people are actually searching these keywords).
3. Ranking for these keywords is possible (manageable competition/keyword difficulty).

Then, you can develop topics to target these keywords. You might want to check out our previous guide on keyword research here.

• Social Monitoring

Another indicator you can use in planning your topics is to see the current trends in social media channels: what topics are currently talked about, what’s being shared the most, what’s the popular hashtags, and so on.

There are various marketing tools that can do this, but the most popular one is BuzzSumo. With BuzzSumo, for example, you can collect real-time data from all major social networks according to your industry/niche, and you will be given a list of popular topics with the most traction in your niche.

Using this data, you can either aim to make better content on the topic or use a different approach to cover the topic. Obviously, since you are measuring trends, this approach will be limited to a time frame.

To tackle this, you can first develop a content calendar using the keyword research approach, and use social monitoring to fine-tune it. For example, if you see a topic that was planned for December is trending today in June, you can move it forward. You can also stick to your initial content calendar while developing another content to cover the trend.

• User Intent Prediction

Every activity on the internet from searching to browsing to making a transaction has an intention behind it. This is the concept of user intent, and there are three basic user intent types:

1. Navigational: when you are aiming to get to a specific website
2. Informational: when you are searching for information
3. Transactional: when you are looking to make a purchase

In a B2B sales cycle, it is important to understand that user intent can move progressively according to their position in the sales cycle or marketing funnel. Let’s use an example to illustrate this:

Let’s say you are a marketing manager in a company, and you are currently searching for information on improving your team’s productivity. Your intent here is informational but you are not yet looking for a specific product. Here, a marketing automation tool company can target you with content like “how marketing automation tools can improve productivity”, covering the benefits and main features of marketing automation tools.

Then, after reading the content, you are now interested in buying a marketing automation tool and decided to research your options. Notice your intent has shifted here, and in this stage, content like “best marketing automation tools comparison” can appeal to you.

As you can see, the better you understand the various user intent, the better you can plan your topics. Here are several principles to consider when using this approach:

• The more expensive your product is, the longer your sales cycle will be, and thus generally more people will be involved in the purchase decision
• Understand your sales process, how a typical user usually stumble upon your product and their key considerations until they finally make a the purchase
• Understand the unique values of your product compared to your competitors
• Develop content pieces according to the possible user intents.

3. Validating Your Content

Now that you’ve planned your topics and probably developed a content calendar, it’s time to validate your topics. We all know creating content can be a painful, arduous process. So, we have to make sure our efforts, time, and resources are going to the right ones.

Thankfully, with social media as well as other channels, we can validate our content by using simple social experiments. For example:

• You can create a simple infographic covering a topic, and post in on social media to see number of shares, etc.
• Develop simple, short, but valuable content and post in on social media or over email marketing.
• Use A/B testing to test various aspects of your content from headlines to forms to images and videos.
• Surveys and one-on-one interviews are always effective.

The idea is, don’t blindly produce any content and let your precious time and/or money go to waste. Make sure to focus on topics that actually matter.

4. Planning Content Promotion

Planning and actually developing the content is actually only half the job done. As we have mentioned, excellent content won’t bring value unless people (and ideally, a lot of people) are consuming it.

This is why it is very important to plan how you are going to distribute and promote the content.

As we have discussed briefly above, optimizing your content for B2B SEO with the aim of increasing your organic reach is very effective. However, that’s not the only effective way to promote your content, and here are some tactics you might want to consider:

• Social media marketing

Social media is how many people finding out news, new products, new places, and especially, contents. So, it’s fairly obvious that social media will be a very effective channel for your content promotion.

Take notes, however, that organic social media reach has been in decline for some time now, and you will most likely need to invest on paid social advertising.

• Influencer marketing

The key here is finding the right influencers of the B2B industry you are in, that will align well with your content. Influencer marketing on the B2B environment is still less common than the B2C counterpart, but it can still be very effective when done right.

• Email marketing

You can use email marketing to promote your content, while on the other hand a valuable content can help improve the performance of your email marketing.

The idea here is to deliver the right content, to the right people, at exactly the right time, and we can do it by implementing drip marketing.

5. Planning Conversion Device

Now that your audience is consuming your content, what then? Obviously, for your content pieces to be effective, they must be able to convert your readers, either from readers to prospects or from prospects into actual, paying customers.

There are several different approaches to do this, and here are some of the most effective ones:

• Offering free but valuable, in-depth content in exchange of the user’s contact information (mainly email address), a pretty common but effective tactic
• Offering free-trial of your product, free sample, or discount within the content, using a sense of urgency.
• Using a comprehensive, in-depth content about your product and its unique values to encourage them to purchase. This can be effective, but you will need to find the right balance between being informative and hard-selling.
• Use social proof like testimonies, user reviews, etc. within your content. A common approach is to develop a video highlighting these social proofs.

End Words

The most important aspect of any B2B content marketing plan is finding and understanding your ideal audience: always aim to provide value by offering solutions to their problems or presenting new information to improve their businesses. If you are looking for professional content marketing and SEO check my SEO services for startups.

Remember that the key here is consistency: regularly publish your content pieces, yet maintain the quality. Monitor your progress, evaluate your results, and use the data to develop even better content in the future.

The post Content Marketing Strategy for Technology, Software and Startup Companies to Grow Traffic and Revenue appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

There are many different guides for keyword research available. The thing is, each of them offers completely different instructions, that may end up confusing you in the end. This is mainly caused by the fact that keyword research for a certain business might need a different approach when compared to other companies, due to many factors.

So, here we will try to discuss a framework of keyword research that can be applied to any company. Before we begin, however, let us discuss the main concept of keyword research.

The Concept of Keyword Research

Keyword research, in a nutshell, is the process of finding the keyword(s) you want to rank for.

There are three main concerns in finding these keywords:

• How relevant the keyword is for your business. For example, if you are a restaurant business, sports-related keywords are probably not relevant
• Are many people searching for the keyword? Even if the keyword is relevant, it won’t bring much value if not too many people are searching it. This is what referred by “search volume”
• How difficult it is to rank for the keyword (keyword difficulty and/or competition). Also, the more competitive the keyword is, the more expensive the CPC (cost-per-click) for paid search ads.

Although these three factors are the most important ones, there are other concepts we should understand when discussing keyword research. Here are some of them:

• Generally the shorter the keywords (or key phrases) are, the more competition you’ll have. So, long-tail keywords are generally less competitive than short-tail ones.
• Focus keyword, or main keyword, is the keyword we deemed as the most important, and our main goal is to rank for this keyword.During keyword research, finding the focus keyword is your priority.
• Behind every keyword or search query is a deeper concept we know as search intent. Which is, the actual goal of the searcher. Knowing the search intent can further maximize your SEO result.

The Importance of Keyword Research

Here is the deal: sometimes the words or phrases we use to describe our brand, product, or service don’t really align with the phrases our audience are using. When this mismatch happens, your potential prospects simply can’t find your product, service, or content.

This often happens when you have a unique product description: for example, you are a restaurant which, in essence, is selling sandwiches, but you call your sandwiches “healthy bars”. If you’re solely focusing on “healthy bars” as your keyword and not on “sandwiches” and its variants, your potential audience might not be able to find you through search engines.

So, we are back to the three key factors we have discussed above: we should focus our optimization efforts on phrases and words that people actually use.

The 3-Step Keyword Research Tactic

Below, you will find the keyword research method used by SEO expert Mike, which comprises of just four steps. Obviously this is not the only tactic available, and further below we will also discuss some other tips to maximize your keyword (and topic) research results.

1. Define Keyword Research Goal(s)

Above, we have mentioned why keyword research is important, and three important factors to consider when performing keyword research.

Here, we will expand that concept: to have a successful keyword research, you must first define your goals. The key here is truly understand your business and your audience, and align those two to find the right keywords.

Here are some important questions to ask in this step:

• What is your business?
• What is your website about? (Can be similar to the first question, but can be different)
• What is your unique proposition?
• What promises do you make on your site?
• What niche are you in?
• How can you be a thought leader/expert in that niche?
• How usually your audience find your business (or your competitors?)
• What are your audience’s common problems?
• What is your audience’s need?

And so on. The more (proper) questions you have, and the more detailed your answers are, the better you can define your goal(s).

2. Understanding Your Audience’s Search Intent

We have briefly discussed the concept of search intent above, but how can we effectively utilize it to maximize our SEO results?

Whenever someone (including us) searched something, we are aiming to get something, the search query is just a mean to an end. Generally, there are four different types of search intents:

1. Transactional intent

Here, the aim of the searcher is simply to make a purchase, and finding the best possible location to make that transaction. This can be finding the best restaurant near you at the moment, finding an online product to buy, or even creating a new email account.

2. Commercial Investigation Intent

Quite similar to transactional intent, but here people are researching and comparing different products or services before making a purchase. For example, you are looking to buy a new book but you can only purchase one. Here, you are searching for different reviews and recommendations before you decide on a book.

3. Navigational Intent

Navigational queries are simply performed with the aim to visit a specific website, but the searcher don’t know the specific URL. So, usually the search queries here are the name (or close variants) of a website.

4. Informational Intent

People are looking for a specific information or an answer for their question. This can be finding directions to a destination, finding solutions for a specific problem, finding out the score of last night’s football game, and so on. Most of the queries here are non-commercial, people are not looking to make a purchase but to find an answer.

After we’ve understood those four different intents, ask yourself what are the intents of your potential audience before they usually find a site (or product/service) like yours?

For example, if you are a SaaS company selling a marketing automation tool, some of your prospects might directly look for your site after a colleague’s recommendation (navigational/transactional intent). Some other can stumble upon your site when researching for different products similar to yours (commercial investigation intent). Some others might be looking for a solution for their business issue, and stumbled upon your content (informational intent).

As we can see, the SaaS business can have potential audiences from all four different intents, and so this business must optimize different keywords covering all those intents to maximize visibility.

However, there are cases where a business might only get traffic from one or two intent types. For example, it’s quite uncommon for people to directly visit a restaurant’s website with an informational intent, usually they’ll first visit a food blog instead.

Finding out the search intents of your potential audience will be a core step in deciding on your keyword(s).

3. Make a List of Keywords and Possible Topics

This is probably the most important step, but this step won’t be as effective without a thorough understanding and execution of the two previous steps. If you skipped to this section, we strongly encourage you to go back to step 1.

There are many different approaches you can use in this step, that’s why your goals (step 1) and your understanding of your audience (step 2) are important to limit your options.

Remember the three main principles of keyword research we have discussed at the beginning of the article:relevancy, search volume, and competition. Based on these principles, here are a few approaches we can do in this step:

1. Start From a Single Focus Keyword

Depending on your business model and industry, there will be main, focus keywords that can define your niche or industry. For example, if you are a digital marketing consultant, your focus keyword can be “digital marketing tactics”. If you are an ecommerce site selling smart home technologies, your focus keyword can be “smart home”, “smart home tech reviews”, and so on.

With this approach, we can first figure out this main focus keyword, and then we can find more keywords related to this focus keyword. For example, if your focus keyword is “digital marketing tactics”, you can try to find related, even long-tail keywords with enough relevancy, search volume, and reasonable competition.

2. Monetization Approach

This approach is useful for blogs and sites that are mainly aimed to generate money from the blog itself (not selling ecommerce products, not directed as an inbound marketing channel for the main business, etc.).

In this method, we find a product, service or offer we can monetize, and then we try to find keywords or queries related to this product/service with enough search volume.

A good example here is for affiliate marketing blogs, commonly covering products from Amazon or ClickBank. For example, there is an affiliate marketing opportunity for a product named X, which is a smart home hub product. In this case, we can target keywords like “smart home assistant reviews”, “best smart home hub”, and so on.

3. Using The Available Data to Generate Keywords

There are at least four ways you can use the available data to find your keywords:

1. See what keywords you already rank for. Also, check out keywords where you are ranked on the second or third page, where you can optimize them with just a little boost
2. See the keywords your competitors are ranking for. You can aim to compete on these keywords or use them as your inspiration to find other keywords
3. Based on number one and two, you can use keyword suggestion tools like UberSuggest, Soovle, and others to generate keyword ideas
4. Manual keyword research by truly understanding your niche. For example, if your main niche is basketball, keyword suggestion tools might not suggest keywords like “best slam dunk” or “best Michael Jordan highlights”, you will need to think them manually.

For these three approaches, you can use various tools from Google Search Console, Adwords Keyword Planner to third-party tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs to assist you. The fourth approach, however, is a little different, as it will rely on your expertise and experience regarding your niche.

The key to success in this step is a thorough understanding about your niche/industry, and your audience. The more you know about your niche, and the more you understand your audience, the more precise and relevant your keywords will be.

Important Keyword Metrics To Understand

There are literally millions of keywords and key phrases to choose from. So, how can we determine the “right” ones? Above, we have discussed that there are three main factors to consider: relevancy, search volume, and competition. These metrics below will help you measure those three factors:

1. Search Volume

We have repeatedly mentioned the term “search volume” above. However, what actually is it? The search volume as a metric refers to the overall number of searches of a given keyword, usually measured monthly. So, a search volume of 10,000 will mean 10,000 searches a month.

The important question is, how high a search volume can be considered decent? The answer will depend upon several factors, especially your niche and your market size. Generally, search volume around 800-1,000 and above is worth pursuing.

2. Clicks

Even when the search volume is high, it won’t bring much value when not many users are actually clicking the link. This especially happens of search queries where Google display featured or rich snippets.

Generally, aim for keywords with at least 50-60% clicks over the search volume. If not, it’s probably not worth it.

3. Competition/Difficulty

The more popular and specific the keyword is, the more competition you will have. Measuring competition can be difficult, and more often than not, you will need to manually research the keywords by Googling it, looking at the top-ranking content pieces, and so on.

Third-party tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs do offer keyword difficulty metrics, mainly based on the backlink profile on each keyword.

4. Cost-per-click (CPC)

CPC is more important for PPC advertisers than for SEO purposes. However, if the CPC is high, it is a strong indicator of a valuable keyword, especially if you value commercial intent.

If you want to measure CPC accurately, make sure to monitor it on Adwords dashboard instead of third-party tools. This is mainly because CPC fluctuates a lot over time, and third-party tools often only offer a snapshot of the data.

End Words

Keyword research is a rather tricky subject: it is fairly simple to understand, but can be really tough to implement as it also involves a lot of manual fine tunings and guessworks.

However, by using the framework we have shared above, you can have an easier time in executing your keyword research.

In the end, keyword research is about priority: SEO can be time and resource-consuming, and you should prioritize the keyword(s) that will bring more value to your business. Keep that in mind when choosing the right keywords, and keep evaluating your progress.

The post Your Ultimate Guide to Keyword Research appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

For example, the common perception is that B2B content should always be technical and informative, limiting creativity. However, that isn’t always the case, as we will discuss in this guide.

Here, we will discuss all the ins and outs of B2B content marketing strategy, and how to generate more leads with it. First, however, let us discuss the differences between B2B and B2C content marketing strategies.

B2B VS B2C Content Marketing

Why does content marketing differ between the B2B and B2C? Because the audiences, and especially how they make the purchase decisions are also different.

We all have been a B2C consumer in one way or another. When, for example, we are considering purchasing a new smartphone, what is the typical buyer’s journey? Most of the time, it’s something like this:

• A company launched a new smartphone model, and we saw the trailer or read the announcement article (we consumed content that piqued our interest)
• If we do have the budget, we then consider purchasing the phone. If not, we are going to wait and see.
• Depending on your interest level, you might check different reviews about the phone, as well as competing products. Sometimes during this “research” period, we ends up picking another phone.
• The decision is made, and we make the purchase.

Both B2C and B2B purchase decisions are made to fulfill a (perceived) need. However, the main difference is that in a B2B purchase, the buyer will also consider tangible profitability. So, although both B2B and B2C purchases will use logic and emotion, in general B2C purchases are more emotional, while B2B purchases are more logical.

Although B2B purchase processes will vary depending on the business types (both the seller and buyer), size, and many other factors, in general it will look something like this:

• B2B purchases typically began when a business (the buyer) encountered some problems. An employee will then look for possible solutions for this problem (they might directly search for products to solve this issue, or just look for information).
• During this “research”, this employee stumbled upon a product, which they consider as a possible solution. They might check the features of the product, online reviews, or even contact the sales representative for further inquiry.
• This employee will then discuss the prospect of buying this product with their higher ups. Probably they will also research other alternatives for the product.
• When all the higher ups agree, the purchase finally happens.

As you can see, another clear difference between B2C and B2B purchases is the number of people involved in the decision. In a B2B purchase, multiple people with different roles can be involved, which might require different marketing approaches. For example, a marketing executive might be interested in the benefits of the product, while an IT executive might prefer a breakdown of technical features.

So, what will this mean to our approach in B2B marketing? Here are some important consideration:

• B2B marketing must target all the possible buyer personas, each with their role and behavior.
• The core of B2B marketing is communicating our product/service’s abilities to provide solution(s) for specific problems.
• We must be prepared in discussing profitability, and communicate how our product/service can provide tangible value.
• Depending on your product/service, communicating the technical aspect of your product might be necessary.

B2B Content Marketing, Step-By-Step

Based on the principles discussed above, we can design the proper B2B content marketing strategy to accommodate our audience. Here are the key steps we can do in achieving this:

1. Knowing and Understanding Your Audiences

In B2B businesses, we are targeting other companies, and within these target companies we can have several roles involved in the purchase decision. So, when identifying our audience, there are at least three different layers of considerations:

• Your ideal target companies. Different organizations will have different goals. The idea here is to find the right companies where your product/service can help in achieving their goals.
• Key decision makers within the company. Again, this can include different roles with different needs and preferences.
• Key prospects—for lack of better words—, which is, the person/role who are most likely to find out about your product/service first. For example, if you are selling a tech product, the IT manager might be your most ideal prospect. On the other hand, if you are selling a marketing tool, you should be targeting marketing managers and officers.

Carefully consider these three layers, and develop the proper buyer personas accordingly. The better you understand your audience and their needs, the better you can plan your content.

2. Having The Right Mindset

Without defining proper and realistic goals, we can’t have a proper content marketing plan in place. Be as specific as possible. For the most of us, the goal is to get as many people consuming the content as possible, which in turn can be converted as paying customers.

But how can we achieve this? There are several facts we should consider:

• The market is getting really saturated. There are a lot of businesses promoting their products and services every single day through various channels. Getting our voice heard amidst all these noises will be more and more difficult.
• People will only purchase from brands they trust. This is even more true in the B2B environment where—again— profitability is the main consideration.
• Tell a compelling story. Even the most technical and complex content can be engaging. It’s no use being informative when people fell asleep when reading your content.

In short, yes, our ultimate goal is to get more people to buy our products or services, but we can only do it by building credibility and trust. So, avoid hard-selling, but be informative and deliver value to your audience. This way, slowly but surely, we can establish our position as the thought leader/expert of our industry.

3. Keyword Research

Based on the target audience you’ve figured out above, the next step is to find the target keywords that are searched by these audience groups. While keyword research can be complicated at first glance, here are the key principles to consider:

• First and foremost, the keyword(s) should align with your brand value and benefit your business goal in the long-run. While you can target keywords that will guarantee lead generation, it won’t be sustainable if the keywords don’t align well with your brand.
• In general, you should look for keywords that are relevant for both your business and your audience, with high enough search volume, yet manageable competition. Aiming for overly popular keywords with excessive competition be very difficult (and expensive), so the key here is finding the right balance
• Consider different layers of audiences discussed above when looking for different keywords. Remember that each of these groups can have different needs and will search for different queries.
• Your aim in content marketing shouldn’t always be about selling your product and service, but to build trust and credibility.

4. Expand Your Keywords Into Topics

We can expand a single keyword into virtually an endless amount of possible topics.

On one hand, this can be an advantage since we can develop a lot of content targeting the same keyword. However, too many options can often lead to confusion, so we’ll have to be careful here.

So, when planning your topics, here are some key principles you can consider:

• Remember that properly understanding your audience is key. This way, you can plan topics that they are interested in, and content that will ultimately provide value.
• Nowadays, there are various tools that can help you in this aspect like BuzzSumo, Link Bait generator and Hubspot’s blog ideas generator, to name a few. Use these tools to your advantage.
• Consider topic clustering, which is, creating a big content covering one big idea, and smaller content pieces covering the details. For example, you can have a pillar content covering “digital marketing” in general, and then cluster content pieces covering “SEO”, “content marketing”, and “social media marketing” which are linked to the pillar content. This will help increase your relevance in the eyes of Google, as well as your human readers.

5. Editorial Calendar

If you are serious about your content marketing, it is wise to develop a marketing calendar. Your content calendar should describe what (the topics you’ll cover), why (why it’s relevant for which audience), when (when this content will be published), where (the channel where you’ll publish your content), and how (how you will promote the content).

Content marketing by itself is a long-term game, so ideally you should plan an editorial calendar for at least six months to one year. We haven’t covered the where and how mentioned above, and so we will discuss in on the next steps.

6. Content Development

Now that we’ve figured out the target keywords and expanded them into topics, it’s time to actually develop the content according to the content calendar.

Nowadays, it’s important to consider that there are various forms of content we can use, four being the major ones:

• Text, pretty self-explanatory, ranging from blog posts to ebook to whitepaper among other forms
• Images, from shareable images and photos to infographics
• Audio, mainly podcast, which is increasingly popular as a medium nowadays
• Video, from the popular YouTube videos to live streaming to webinar

You can cover the different topics with various forms of content, and you can also integrate different forms in just one piece of content.

There are two main benefits in doing this:

1. Even in B2B environment, fewer people are huge readers. With this layered content, you can attract those that prefer infographics, videos, and podcasts
2. A textual content can be monotone and boring even for the most avid readers. Using images or even videos can help break this.

While content creation can have many different approaches and involve many different techniques,  here are the main principles to focus on in a B2B content creation:

• Remember that as discussed above, B2B marketing is about providing our audience with facts that our product/service can provide a tangible benefit. Let this concept translate into your content marketing: make sure your content is factual and informative.
• Your goal is not only for someone to click the content (through an interesting title or click-baiting), but for them to consume your content as much as possible, get value, and trust your business. Make sure your content is engaging throughout the whole piece.
• Remember the different groups of audiences, and always make sure that the content will provide value for the respective audience.

There is no one surefire way to develop perfect content, and you’ll have to experiment with different approaches that will fit your brand. Remember, however, that your goal is to establish trust, so develop your content with that purpose in mind.

7. Optimizing Conversion

It is important to realize that website visitors that came to consume your content are not necessarily equal to leads or prospects. We have to convert these visitors into actual prospects by capturing their contact information.

There are several different approaches we can use here:

• Using lead magnet, which is essentially, offering something valuable for free in exchange for the audience’s email address. A common approach in content marketing is to offer in-depth content (ebook, whitepaper, etc.) regarding the topic covered in the article.
• Directly offer CTAs within the content, for example, by saying “don’t forget to subscribe to our email newsletter” within the closing section of the article.
• You can use other elements within the page (which are essentially outside the content) to capture leads. For example, by using a CTA button beside the content.

Lead generation can be tricky and difficult, and without it your content marketing won’t bring any value. You might want to schedule a call with B2B marketing consultant to develop your marketing strategy.

8. Content Promotion

No matter how good your content is, it won’t bring value unless your audience actually consumes the content.

A common misconception is thinking that content marketing is only about publishing great content pieces. However, promoting your content is just as, if not even more important.

Here, we are dealing with how and where. There are various ways to promote your content, and there are various promotional channels in achieving this feat.

In general, however, the best way to promote your content is through B2B SEO. By letting this piece of content climb higher on the search engine results page, more people will be aware of the content.

While SEO is a pretty broad subject on its own, in general, there are only three key elements of SEO strategy:

1. The quality of your content, and how relevant it is to the target keyword.
2. Inbound links (or backlinks), especially from quality sources.
3. Technical aspects from page load speed to mobile-responsiveness to structured data markup, among others. You can check this technical SEO checklist for this aspect.

Backlinks are especially important here, because when we are promoting our content in other channels, we can also get more backlinks in the process, for example:

• By using influencer marketing to promote our content, we can get backlinks from the influencer
• Guest posting, another common content marketing approach where we can also get backlinks
• Social media marketing, where any shares for our content can count as social signal
• Even through various forms of online advertising, the more people consume our content, the higher the chance we’ll get more backlinks from them

In short, treat each piece of content as a landing page, promote them individually and aim to get more backlinks in the process. The backlinks—especially quality backlinks— will in turn improve your ranking on the search engine results, which will also translate to more traffic.

As we can see, content promotion is not a singular effort, but rather a continuous effort where multiple channels work together.

9. Monitoring and Re-Optimization

Our business, the market, and the industry are always evolving, and so must our content also evolve.

So, here we must monitor the performance(s) of our content pieces, and make adjustments when necessary.

Just because content is not performing well at the moment, doesn’t mean we should just ditch it or leave it as it is. There are various approaches where we can use this content in further achieving our goals:

• Update the content. We can update the information with newer ones, while we can also re-optimize the technical aspects.
• Leverage in other forms. Sometimes, a content that’s not working in its current form can be re-made in others. For example, if a blog post is not performing well, maybe creating a video of the same content will generate better results.
• Adding other forms. For example, you can add images and videos to textual content to enhance its performance.

Depending on the situation, you might also need to adjust other factors like targeting new keywords or adding more internal links. The idea is, monitor your progress and adjust when necessary.

End Words

In implementing B2B content marketing strategy, remember that the end goal is not simply more website traffic or even a higher SEO ranking, but rather, more customers. You can download my SEO Growth Program on B2B SEO service page to learn more about my approach to content marketing strategy. So, make sure your content fulfills the purpose of establishing your credibility and encouraging conversions.

Another thing to remember here is that content marketing is a long-term game, so the key here is consistency both in quality and quantity. Regularly monitor your progress, and adjust your strategy whenever necessary.

The post B2B Content Marketing: How To Get More Leads and Conversions With Your Content appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Ian shared impressive SEO and content marketing results that they were able to achieve since they launched in 2015.

BuildFire Revenue, Customers and Marketing Numbers

• Revenue: Seven Figure Company
• Customers: 1000, Powering over 10,000+ apps in the App Store
• Main customer acquisition channel: Content Marketing and SEO
• Publishing 2 blog posts/week
• Content team: 5 writers
• Organic Traffic: 140,000 visitors/month

You can listen to the full interview where Ian Blair reveals the numbers and discusses how content marketing and SEO helped with initial exposure and became their #1 customer acquisition channel.

Ian: I think first it starts off with just finding effective channels to grow. It’s always a daunting task when you’re first starting your company because no one knows about you. You have zero revenue in the door and it’s just like a behemoth task. Like how on earth am I going to get there? It just first starts off with like bite size chunks and you’ve got to let the world know that you’re out there. For us, we chose content marketing as our initial growth channel and it’s been phenomenal for us. It’s really propelled us to where we’re at today. We also started off with a little bit of PR in the beginning. I’d say every company gets a bit lucky when you first get started and that was definitely the case for us. We did a PR release I think with like business like News Wire, one of those. We actually got featured on Business News Daily and what was awesome was there was people would search for like best mobile app builders out there. Since obviously you know Business News Daily has been around for a long time, they have great domain authority and we were at the top of the article. Basically we were pretty much dominating the search results because anyone would click on that, we’d be right at the top and we’d be just driving so much traffic to our site. That was just huge for our initial growth and initial traction and that was able, we were able to catch up with our own organic rate things and building our own domain authority so sometimes you get lucky and that was definitely the case for us in the beginning a little bit. But it’s just a lot of hard work and determination trying to figure out what are the most efficient levers for you.

 

Eric: Yeah so PR, obviously PR can be a huge spike kind of a boom or bust type of thing and I think what I want to focus on a little more is the content marketing aspect because that’s what a lot of people are talking about and obviously we know it’s the consistency that gets you there. When you’re starting from, I guess I should start first by asking, what’s working well for you in terms of content marketing right now and how are you promoting the content?

 

Ian: I think content marketing really starts off with having efficient and smart keyword research. You want to know what you want to go after and where is it realistic for you to rank. There’s so many tools out there for doing keyword research. You know Moz just came out with a great new keyword tool where you can see what the opportunity is, what the relevancy is. For us, it really just started off as what are great terms that we might able to rank for that are relevant to our audience? One of our highest performing articles has been a free app promotion so I think we have like … I don’t know, at this point we’ve just been growing and growing. It’s probably like over fifty creative ways to promote your app and that’s like we rank number one for app promotion, that’s been like an example of like an article that early on there wasn’t much competition for. We saw that we could rank for it and we just wrote an amazing piece of content and it’s been a consistent driver of traffic for us. We have lots of those examples where we find and it’s almost kind of like Brian Dean’s method of building skyscraper content. You go out there, you find the keyword you want and then what’s ranking at the top and then just absolutely crush that piece of content and you know, you’re bringing a lot of value to people, that’s going to rank. It’s just kind of like a methodical, if you kind of take like the approach of like paid advertising for example. Where you get data really quick and you iterate, kind of take that same methodology and bring it to content marketing. I think a lot of people, they just put stuff out and they’re like okay maybe like what’s the actual results on it. I think having like a methodology to be able to track progress and success is hugely important. For content marketing, that’s been one of our main approaches to it.

 

Eric: What are the main I guess KPI’s for your content marketing efforts?

 

Ian: Really we’re looking at, I mean at the end of the day, we want people to sign up for free trials for app builder so we’re tracking how many people are coming into our site, how many of those are converting to free trials and also like how many people are signing up for our email list because we want to have an audience. As you get bigger and having an audience it’s really helpful for putting out a lot more content. It’s really like just a matter of building your audience and how many free trials are we signing up.

 

Eric: Right. I think something, you know I think those metrics are perfect. Right? A lot of people are like oh you know let’s get more visitors, let’s get more page views but I think going with emails on free trials, that ties a lot closer to the bottom line at the end of the day.

 

Ian: Yeah.

 

Eric: But just rewinding a second I should say, I think a lot of people, you talk about people producing content just for the sake of producing content because everybody is talking about content marketing right? But a lot of people tend to forget about the research portion. Like you actually have to do the keyword research, you have to actually look at what the market is doing at the same time, maybe even look at Google Trends. I think that’s a forgotten piece of the puzzle and I think the fact that you guys are covering that aspect and you guys are succeeding just adds more validation to that.

 

Ian: Yeah. The whole keyword research process isn’t easy. It takes time and it takes a lot of brainstorming but I think with the wealth of information and tools out there, it’s been made easier. I think everything in business requires planning, right? If you want to be successful, you’ve got to have a plan, a strategy and like the ability to measure if it’s working or not working. I think if you just take those fundamental principles, like it can be massively successful. If there’s any information gap, like okay I don’t know how to plan content really well or I don’t know how to write great content or where ever you have a deficiency, there’s other people who have you know closed that knowledge gap. I think it’s really important in the whole online marketing space just to like stay super relevant, see what you know people who are really successful, like what are they doing, how can we take some of their methodologies and bring them into our own company? Right? Yeah I mean everything just fundamentally starts from that initial planning phase.

 

Eric: Right. You mentioned Brian Dean. You talked about the skyscraper technique. I think that’s something everyone can pick up from, right? You just look at what’s already preforming out there and then you just kind of ten x it.
Ian: Yeah.

 

Eric: Yeah I mean there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that and it certainly works. But I guess another question for you would be, since content marketing is working well for you, why aren’t you driving or are you driving I should ask, are you driving paid advertising to that content if it’s converting well?

 

Ian: Yeah that’s a good question. We’ve experimented a little bit with paid advertising on some of our posts. You know doing like promoted posts on Facebook. I’d say as a start up we have limited bandwidth and I think as we grow more and I think like just have the ability to focus on more channels, we’ll probably look into something like that and I know some people have been super super successful with that. Like the whole paid Facebook advertising, you know posts might do well or you could be attracting people through a lead magnet. I’ve seen some other companies doing like really really well with that and I think that’s exciting to see the potential of Facebook. I’d say the difference between Facebook advertising and Google Ad Words is that Google Ad Words is fulfillment. Right? People are going if you’re going to try and rank for something or you know have ads for something, people are already searching for it. People already kind of know what they’re looking for where like Facebook is really unique because there’s demand generation. Right? Products you might not have ever heard about and you know we can target people who might be interested in it. I think the mobile app building space is a very early market and not too many know that you can actually go online and build a sweet app for your business or if you have an idea, turn that into app right? I think it’s going to be really cool once we start to fire on all cylinders in that space but we just haven’t gotten to the point where we’re like all right, let’s go full bored and have a huge effort towards that.

 

Eric: Right. Okay. Now, I think you know a question people might have also, because content marketing is such a big channel for you guys right now, how is your content marketing team organized first of all?

 

Ian: Yeah so we actually started using a really cool tool lately and I think it’s helped a lot with our organization. We use CoSchedule and basically it allows us to have our whole content marketing calendar, right? Basically the way we start is we have like okay, what’s the keyword we’re going to go after. Right so kind of back to that initial finding like what’s the opportunity for it and how are we going to measure success for that and we plan those out on the calendar and it makes it pretty easy to get like a big picture, a quick picture of like you know what’s the next month going to look like in terms of content. We basically manage and schedule all of our content marketing efforts through there, with the research and planning. Then we have a whole team of writers that we hired that will work on the particular piece that they’re most qualified to write about.

 

Eric: Got it. How many writers did you say you had again?

 

Ian: We have about five right now but we worked with probably fifteen writers. I think you’ve got to test along the way. You can see like past results and what they’ve done. They might be a good fit for your organization but you might want to test them out for three to five articles and see how it performs and one thing we’ve always tried to do is just weed out the lowest common denominator and work with just writers who have been really successful with us.

 

Eric: Great. These are contractors?
Ian: They’re all contractors correct.

Learn What SEO and Content Marketing Strategies BuildFire Use to Drive Traffic and Revenue

To complete the overview of BuildFire content marketing and SEO I recorded a short video with a deep dive in their rankings, traffic, blog posts and Conversion Rate Optimization. Watch it to learn more about their content marketing and SEO strategy that helped them grow to a seven-figure company. You can apply the same strategies to your brand and accelerate your traffic growth, leads, sales and revenue.

Notes and highlights from the video:

• BuildFire started link-building mid-2014 and their backlink profile has been steadily growing over time.
• Organic traffic chart has the same trajectory as backlinks charts. That proves that backlinks are an important ranking factor and BuildFire has been focusing on quality, not quantity.
• Over the course of the last 5 years, they created backlinks from 3,200 new domains and published over 300 blog posts.
• That helped them to rank for 90,000 new keywords (an increase from 1.6K to 92K ranked keywords). The number of keywords that rank on the first page of Google had increased from 220 to 15000.
• Over the last 5 years, organic traffic from Google increased from 2,300 to 140,000 visitors per month. An average traffic increase is 100% year over year.
• Since they offer 30-day trial with no credit card required we can assume they have a pretty high conversion rate of around 8%.
• Their content marketing strategy for the blog post includes keyword research and writing long-form blog posts. They’ve written over 300 blog posts and some of the best performing posts have backlinks from over 100 domains.
• Each post targets specific keywords that their prospects would search online and most likely to convert to a client. Here are a few examples:
• They rank in the top 4 worldwide for the keyword “how to make an app” with 27,000 searches per month just in the US as well as other 1532 similar keywords and driving 19,000 monthly visitors. To achieve that they’ve built links to that post from 113 domains. With an average conversion rate of 8% (they don’t ask for a credit card) that’s 1520 trials/month from that single blog post.
• They also rank top 3 worldwide for keyword “mobile app development” with 7700 searches per month in the US only as well as 238 similar keywords and driving 2300 monthly visitors to that page. To achieve that they’ve created links to that post on 54 sites. With an average conversion rate of 8% (since they don’t ask for a credit card) that’s 184 trails/month from that single blog post.
• Overall they have first-page ranking for almost everything related to app development, app statistics, mobile trends and mobile marketing

Takeaways and Next Step

SEO and content marketing worked well for BuildFire and helped them to grow to a seven-figure company. Their marketing team executed a well-planned content strategy that helped them attract 140,000 monthly targeted visitors and convert them into trials and clients with effective conversion rate optimization techniques. You can use their strategy and my teardown as an example to build your own SEO campaign as SEO works the same way for any industry, keywords, type of product whenever it’s B2B, B2C or SaaS.

To make SEO work for your business and reach your revenue targets make sure you follow the 4 step process:

1. Perform keyword analysis to find what your prospects are searching for on Google.
2. Create SEO optimized pages (home page, internal service/product pages, blog posts, case studies) targeting those keywords.
3. Build quality, relevant contextual links to your home, internal and blog post pages
4. Track your rankings, metrics, conversion rate and continuously optimize performance and CRO

My 60-second commercial

I’m an SEO expert and marketing consultant who helps SaaS, Technology and B2B companies like BuildFire to grow traffic, leads and revenue with SEO, content marketing, CRO and other marketing techniques and channels.

Do you want me to review your or your competitors’ business and website to learn how you should use SEO to grow leads and revenue? Drop me an email at hi@mikekhorev.com

To discover more about my approach to SEO for SaaS and learn what it’s like working with me, check my SEO Growth Program. You can also book a call to review your website and project 1 on 1 and see if we might be a good fit working together.

The post How Content Marketing and SEO Helped BuildFire Become a 7-Figure ARR SaaS Company appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.