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.

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

A recent Fronetics survey in 2017 found that 62% of B2B buyers relied on the internet as a core resource when searching for new business solutions. A good digital marketing plan links your clients to your offering through social media, blogs, your websites, forums, and mobile communications. Are you doing enough to get your products and brand out there? If not, you can bet your bottom dollar that you’re competitors are.

In this article, we’re highlighting 7 of the most effective digital marketing strategies that software companies need to adapt to maximize their online presence. Let’s start with the most effective one:

1. Invest in SEO

Most tech experts understand the technicalities of putting a usable website together but creating pages that attract good traffic and perform as a refined sales process is a completely different ball game. And it’s a game where the rules are constantly changing. Google releases updates to its search algorithm every day. The best SEO experts will be those with years of experience but are also constantly up to date with the latest changes to Google’s search brain.

The trick with SEO is to focus your efforts on pursuits that’ll yield the greatest gains. The best places to pour most of your long-term attention are:

• Technical and on-page SEO to enhance your website relevance to target keywords
• Creating 4-10 quality backlinks per month
• Content marketing to spread awareness (we’ll get into this more below).
• On-site blog posting at least once a week.

One of the most crucial steps in SEO is getting a first page ranking on search engine results for terms (keywords) that your customers are using to find solutions like yours. Here’s a good list of the best keyword research tools available right now. Once you’ve identified the keywords that are gaining traffic, you can create optimized landing pages, 5-10 quality blogs related to these search phrases, and add links with keywords reach anchor text in your content that point traffic toward your main landing/product pages. This is the main strategy to achieving higher ranks in Google.

2. Paid advertising

In 2016, Google released a report showing us that 28% of online searches convert into a sale. People use Google to search for things they’re ready to buy and paid ads to put your pages at the top of search results. Paid advertising has become the second-best performing lead generation channel for most software and SaaS businesses after organic search and SEO.

Why is it so popular? Paid advertising is scalable, very measurable which makes it predictable, and provides a proven ROI if handled correctly. Google Ads are a great place to start your first campaigns. Besides the standard text ads you’ve no doubt seen at the top of nearly every search you’ve ever conducted, you can also access more advanced retargeting strategies. These features allow you to advertise to users who’ve already visited sites relative to your market or have searched for your specific keywords in the past.

Exploit multiple social channels

Choosing the right social platforms is vital. Here are the world’s largest social networks and what each is good for:

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is highly relevant if your software is primed for the B2B space. Users on LinkedIn are looking for business solutions. A 2017 report by LinkedIn suggested that 80% of B2B marketing leads from social media come through the LinkedIn network.

Facebook and Twitter

These platforms are great for engaging with your target audience and promoting your content. They both offer powerful paid remarketing systems that allow you to grow a following quickly.

YouTube

Youtube has become the second largest search engine after Google so it’s the best place to post video tutorials for your software, webinars, and entertainment content. Video demos and pre roll ad campaign will give people insight into your solution while also actively driving traffic to your website.

4. Outreach and quality link building

Guest blogging is about creating content for other websites that are already receiving large volumes of traffic. You can provide help and guidance on topics within your expertise or offer a new angle on topics that are related to your product. Do it often enough and your posts will expose your brand to large audiences within the software development space. You’ll also have the chance to place a link to your pages from an authority website which is great for SEO.

Landing a guest post on one of the biggest tech blogs out there is a tall order, but there are multiple levels of influential sites you can work with. You can also contribute to different groups on social media platforms like LinkedIn or Facebook. Aim for groups related to the software industry and you could be reaching thousands of potential users that you know are likely to have an interest in your product. This tactic can also be executed by SaaS, software, IT and tech digital marketing consultants who have more experience of doing it the right way. Marketers are facing rising expectations for personalisation and are expected to use at least 18 data sources when building their brand. It can help your audience gain additional context to your work if you include a diverse range of sources when building links. This increases your brand’s credibility and makes your data more authoritative.

5. Create tutorials and guides

Creating content that aims to help people solve problems is a powerful weapon that software development experts can certainly jump on. “How to” tutorials and best practice guides are a must if your solution is complex or tackles a unique problem. Companies look to invest in new software products because they want a means to step ahead of the competition. For companies without in-house development capacity, software development outsourcing offers a way to access specialized expertise while maintaining focus on core business objectives. Whether building from scratch or scaling existing products, partnering with external development teams like Netguru can accelerate time to market. The more you try to position your brand as the answer to their concerns, the more signups you’ll see.

Not only is helpful content great for exposure and awareness, it’s a great way to collect the email addresses of leads. Email marketing is the perfect way to develop deeper connections with your customers. Mailchimp is the largest email marketing platform in the world so it’s a great place to launch your first nurture campaign. You can also check Mailchimp alternatives if you are looking for other features or more affordable pricing.

6. Differentiate your software to others using comparison guides

Developed a product that has a leg up on an existing market leader? Create a webpage comparing your solution to your competitors and optimize that page to rank on the first page of Google and attract search traffic for your competitors brand searches. You’ll feed off the mass of users searching for their brand while exposing the advantages of your new solution as an alternative.

Avoid being too pushy and aim to provide a balanced review to help the reader evaluate the comparison with clarity. Make it obvious that you’re overly biased and you’ll turn people away quickly.

7. Build impactful reviews

You can solicit independent third-party review sites as well as work to increase the level of reviews you gain from users. Search for “software directories” or review sites and add and verify your profile there. Websites with a good number of user reviews will usually rank on the first page of Google because of their affiliation with these giant software companies and their domain authority.. These sites will provide good exposure and increase the credibility of your offering.

Use your content marketing channels to build reviews from real customers. Leverage your social media accounts to actively t ask happy users to review you on certain platforms. You should also be doing this with outbound methods. For example, using your CRM database to build a targeted list of customers, then sending a tailored batch of emails asking your users to leave you a review. Offer incentives like prize draws to increase the number of recipients that bite while ensuring the reviews remain unbiased.

That’s our 7! We hope this list of effective digital marketing strategies for software companies has helped spark a few light bulbs for you. It’s now more important than ever for software companies of all sizes to stand out by upping their digital efforts or working with growth marketing agencies like Northpeak. Knowing your options is half the battle, the other half is actively chasing the ideas on this list!

The post 7 Effective Digital Marketing Strategies for Software Companies appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

The exciting news is now that lots of software and startup companies have made initial efforts to modernize their infrastructures, they’re poised for real growth. If that’s you — if you’ve recently adopted cloud-based CMS and CRM solutions, it’s time to put them to work and start growing 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

Here are six digital marketing strategies and ideas for startups to help you graduate to that next level of digitization in the year ahead.

1. Content Marketing

To make growth happen, startup companies need to build on their initial efforts and begin focusing their digital marketing strategies on broader horizons.

And right now, there’s no horizon more promising and full of potential than the customer experience (CX).

Companies who embrace the CX credo — buyers are customers who expect to be delighted — will win. And what better way to ingratiate your company with purchasing managers than to offer helpful resources that make their job easier. Do this through content marketing.

More than three-quarters of startup companies already have a blog. However, there’s a big difference between simply having a blog and putting it to work as part of a content marketing strategy for your startup company. What you need is a data-driven blog.

Begin by finding out what your buyers need. There are several tools at your disposal for this. First, you can use keyword tools to find what’s trending in your industry. If you’re in the rental industry, for instance, you could then offer unique and creative ideas they might want to implement. These same tools will let you know which topics actually have search traffic and which are in demand so you’re not wasting time producing and promoting content that nobody wants to read.

Secondly, need is driven by pain, so think deeply about your B2B and B2C customers and what they lack, what causes them to ‘suffer’. Then, supply the kind of content that relieves those pain points. Almost half of the buyers consume online content (3-5 pieces) before reaching out to a sales rep. It should be your content they’re consuming. It should also be well-informed since almost all B2B buyers want the content they consume to include input from industry leaders.

Some examples of buyer pain points that you can help alleviate with helpful content:

• they lack information about products
• they struggle to compare products (46 percent of B2B buyers report that it’s difficult to compare products online)
• they struggle to understand new technologies
• they find it hard to stay current with industry developments

2. Inbound Marketing/SEO

A solid base of helpful content can also be the cornerstone of a successful inbound digital marketing for startups. You’ve done the research and produced great content for your buyers for your content marketing campaign. Now make it do double duty by earning some SEO credit.

You’ll need to do some deeper research, however: keyword research that goes deeper and shows you where you could focus your efforts and try to rank. Consider long-tail keywords if your industry is competitive, and write data-driven content that helps your SEO efforts.

Check all SEO statistics.

The trick is to balance SEO content techniques with user experience. SEO content, which employs strategic placement of keywords throughout the content, can come off as awkward. You want good, relevant, resourceful and helpful content that reads well, so keep that balance in mind with all your content. The idea, after all, is to try and get people to create backlinks to your startup website. This can happen in any number of ways, including organically, through guest posting, and via social media promotion. You can check the startup SEO services page to download my SEO growth program that outlines the most common link building and SEO strategies.

3. Social Media Marketing

Because of its rich targeting potential and wide reach, Facebook marketing funnels remains one of the most effective ways to generate leads in B2B and B2C world and should be a part of your startup digital marketing strategy. It’s also It is affordable compared to YouTube influencer costs. Over 60 percent of startup marketers plan to increase their Facebook Advertising efforts, according to a 2025 report.

You’ll need to identify your target persona and the companies you are going after and then create that profile on Facebook Ad Manager.  You can also set up a remarketing pixel and target your website visitors and lookalike audiences to make the profile targeted and relevant. That way, you’ll maximize ROI and, depending on your marketing objectives, you can create campaigns that:

1. generate leads
2. drive traffic
3. increase engagement
4. develop brand awareness
5. install apps
6. increase sales
7. get video views

Other options that are available on Ad Manager dashboard include:

• type of ad (photo ads, video ads, slideshow ads, collection ads, etc)
• campaign objective
• type of audience targeting (Facebook connections, Custom Audiences, Lookalike Audiences)
• budget
• scheduling

4. Responsive Web Design, HTTPS, AMP

Faced with more buyers who expect a better customer experience, B2B players now need to take their cues from B2C and look for ways to delight their buyers wherever they are in the buyer’s journey.

The best place to start is with the company website.

Even a quick spin through the startup galaxy of websites, and you’ll immediately know there’s a lot of room for improvement in the Customer Experience (CX). Here are three ways you can consider adding to your startup digital marketing strategy planning:

1. Responsive Web Design. More and more, buyers are using mobile devices on the job. If your site wasn’t designed to be usable on multiple devices (PC, tablet, phone) then you’re making a bad impression on potential customers (especially Millennials). Don’t be like 94% of startup companies, who have no mobile strategy in place.
2. HTTPS. If you’re not sure why you should have an ‘S’ on your ‘HTTP’, then you should know that HTTPS is a search engine ranking signal now.  Not only will it help your website appear higher in search results and drive more organic traffic, it will also add the green secure lock icon to the browser. Major browsers will start showing a “not secure” warning to all website visitors in the near future if you don’t have SSL installed, so make sure you configure it soon to avoid a higher bounce rate and lower rankings.
3. AMP. Buyers are busy and as a result, necessarily impatient. If your website isn’t loading fast enough, they’re likely to strike your company off their vendor shortlist. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Presence and if your site doesn’t adhere to AMP best practices, you’re not exactly making the customer journey delightful or easy. Aim for more engagement and a smoother experience with a sound AMP strategy. That means fast-loading pages, quick performing scripts, and form submissions that go through faster than you can say ‘jack rabbit’.

5. Marketing Automation

B2B customers typically use six different channels in their buying journey. Almost two-thirds of them will be frustrated by their experiences.

Since you’re now in the business of ‘delighting’ your customers, you’ll want to upgrade your methods wherever you have a point of contact with your customers and leads. Marketing automation should be a part of your digital making strategy for your startup.

Wherever someone may be along the buyer’s journey, you’ll want to help, coax, encourage, and respond to any actions they’re taking in relation to your business. In fact, a major pain point for 40 percent of surveyed buyers is a slow response time from sales reps. Other frustrations included a sluggish reordering process, which troubled almost a third of survey respondents. Automation can help solve those problems and more by spurring communications, offering helpful links, and tying in customized past ordering data for individual customers.

In essence, what you’re doing is transforming your business into one that’s customer-focused. B2B buyers want the following:

• easier communications
• hassle-free reordering process
• help with product comparison

The added benefit of automating your marketing processes is that it helps with consistent messaging across all your platforms: email, digital ads, and other channels where you interact with your leads and customers.

6. Email Marketing

Another natural outgrowth of a strong startup digital marketing strategy is email marketing: exciting and useful new content is a great excuse for an email newsletter. Email marketing magnifies the power of your content marketing efforts when you use carefully selected content aimed at segmented buyers at specific points along the buying decision timeline.

Plus, to get more out of your content budget, you can reuse content in lots of different ways. For example, you can redirect leads back to your website through your carefully planned email campaigns that include snippets from blog posts on your website that pertain to the moment.

Conclusion

It’s no secret that startup companies are still playing catch-up to B2B and B2C companies in the process of digital transformation and marketing strategy. Having embraced the notion that digitization can lead to growth, startup players who’ve transformed their back-end processes and IT infrastructures should now work with a startup marketing agency on implementing marketing strategies for startups outlined in this post. That’s how they’ll begin to capture and delight their prospects who expect a stellar customer experience, just like what they get in the B2C world. Good luck!

The post Digital Marketing Strategies and Ideas for Startups appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Some businesses are better off focusing on SEO strategies instead of relying on PPC. Some others will get more results with PPC, especially when the keyword competition is really though. Some, however, can get the most on getting the best of both worlds.

So, which one is the best for your business? This guide will attempt to help you answer that question. Before we discuss the factors that might affect your decision, however, let us discuss the key differences between PPC and SEO.

Understanding SEO, PPC, and Their Differences

In my previous post, I discussed SEO, especially Google SEO, its benefits, and the working methods. In its essence, Google SEO is optimizing your site to get a high ranking in the organic search result. There are many strategies we can do to achieve this, but the most important ones are optimizing your on and off-site SEO and getting links from quality sites.

So, in its basic principle, you can be successful in SEO for totally free, provided you got the necessary skills and patience. The catch? SEO strategies require a long-term, consistent effort. If you work with SEO expert Mike, expect to wait for 6 to 12 months before you see results, although in some cases, faster success is possible.

On the other hand, as the name suggests, PPC advertising allows you to advertise your pages faster while targetting a specific keyword. Generally, you will pay the advertising fee based on how many clicks are made, hence the name. There are several options if you want to start a PPC campaign: Google Adwords is the most popular choice since we all know the importance of Google search, there is also Bing ads if you want to target Bing, and Yahoo Search Marketing among others.

So, as you might have guessed, PPC offers a faster, often instantaneous results to your campaigns. However, a click to your advertising doesn’t always translate to conversion. If you are not careful with your PPC campaigns, you can actually lose money even when the traffic has increased.

So, in a perfect world, doing both PPC and SEO is the ideal way. However, there are both internal and external factors that can make doing both not beneficial for your business. So, which one is the ideal one for your business? Let us discuss below.

SEO VS PPC: What’s Right For Your Business?

Now that we have covered the major differences between the two, let us discuss several factors you should consider in an SEO VS PPC case.

1. How Expensive Are The Cost-Per-Click (CPC) of Your Keywords?

We have discussed that although PPC is almost always effective in driving traffic, it is not always cost-effective. So, the cost of the PPC advertising of your keywords and the average in your industry will be the first factor to consider.

PPC platforms like Google Adwords or Bing Ads will allow you to bid for what you are willing to pay for a click, hence the name “cost-per-click” or CPC. For example, if you want to target “best restaurant NYC” as your keyword, you could use the Traffic Estimator within the Google’s Keyword Research Tool for free.

So, if necessary, you can also target your competitor’s business name as a keyword. This can be beneficial in a competitive industry. Some keywords can be below a Dollar, but CPC for competitive keywords can be much higher, in some cases above $50 per click.

This guide can be very useful to determine the average CPC for your industry. After you’ve understood how much you will need to spend for PPC, we can consider the next factor.

2. How Large Is Your Available Budget

First things first, you should remember that SEO and CPC is a part of a larger ballgame: your digital marketing strategy. So, your SEO and/or CPC budget will also be a part of your digital marketing budget. If you are still unsure about your marketing budget, this guide can be a good place to start.

As we have mentioned, PPC is not cheap, so expect to start with at least $8 to $10 a day as your budget. If you are not willing to spend that much on PPC advertising, you will need to stick with free SEO tactics, although you will still need to spend on manpower unless you will be doing it yourself.

If you are already successful with SEO and do have a little capital to invest in PPC, however, consider giving it a try. Another major downside of SEO we haven’t yet to mention here is the constant change of Google’s algorithm.

If you rely solely on SEO, your website can lose significant traffic when there’s an algorithm update affecting your current strategy. By investing on PPC, you can mitigate that risk and still get some traffic.

Before you understand more about the ins and outs of PPC, however, we will advise in starting with a small budget. Always track your campaign with Google Analytics, as well as other third-party tools. If your ROI is negative, evaluate your campaign, target keyword, and other related metrics.

This guide by MainPath will help you plan your PPC budget.

3. How Competitive Is The Natural Search Ranking In Your Industry?

If your niche or industry, in general, is very competitive, it might be totally impossible to compete by using SEO alone. For example, some industries have big brands and high-authority websites dominating the SERP (Search Engine Result Page).

To see how competitive the SERP is for your keywords, use the Google’s Keyword Research and PlannerTool. This way, you can determine the difficulty of your competition, as well as the number of advertisers (your competition).

In highly competitive industries, investing on PPC is almost always an absolute necessity.

Bottom Line

By asking the three questions above, you can determine whether SEO or PPC is the better pick for your business. However, as we have mentioned, if your budget allows and if the CPC still permits a positive ROI, consider combining both for better results.

One thing you should remember is that both SEO and PPC have their own respective learning curve. If you decided to invest in one or both of them, make sure to always evaluate your progress and find out where you can do better.

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SEO, by nature, is a competition where you try to outrank other sites. This is why an initial competitive analysis is an essential part of any SEO implementation. When done correctly, you can get valuable insights into how your competitors are approaching their SEO strategy, which can generate various benefits such as:

• Get inspirations and ideas on how to build better content, which backlinks you should pursue and how, and which keywords that can be good opportunities, among other aspects
• Figure out your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, and so you can find out how to outdo or outsmart them
• Find your competitor’s secret tactics and strategies you can “steal”.
• Improve your own SEO strategy based on real, collected data. This way, you avoid assumptions when planning your strategy

These are just some of the benefits you can have by performing an SEO analysis, and in this guide, we will learn how.

We will divide this guide into four major sections, from identifying your key competitors to finally analyzing their backlinks profile. Let us begin with the first one: identifying and validating your competitors.

Identify and Validate Your Competitors

The first step of a successful competitive analysis is knowing whom to analyze, which is this case, your competitors. Depending on the size of your industry, you can have very few to so many competitors.

On the other hand, obviously, we don’t have the time and resources to analyze all of our competitors, and so there are two layers to this step: identify your competitors, and validate the ones that are worth analyzing. First, let us discuss the key principles in identifying your competitors.

1.Identifying Key Competitors

Generally, there are three main approaches to determining your potential, most relevant SEO competitors:

• The obvious industry competitor sites

This can range from the market leaders of your industry, your closest competitors, and so on. Here, you are using common sense and the data you’ve gathered from market research.

• Top sites in your industry

The top sites in your industry can belong to the market leaders, which we have discussed above. However, there are cases when these top sites don’t belong to major brands. You can use Alexa and Similarweb, among other tools to check these top sites.

• Keyword Competitors

This is probably the most accurate approach in relations to SEO. Here, we use keyword research tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush to check our target keywords, and the top ranking sites for these keywords are our competitors. Obviously, here you will need to figure out your target keywords beforehand, and you might want to check out this guide by Backlinko here.

These three are the main approaches in finding your key competitors. Now, how can we validate them to make sure we are using our resources and time for the most important ones? This is where the validation process comes in.

2. Validation

The main approach in validating your SEO competitors is through keyword research: you would want to target competitors that are targeting, or are currently ranking on your target keywords.

To do this, we will need a keyword research tool like SEMRush, Ahrefs, or Google Keyword Planner among other tools, and figure out two things:

• Check your current positions for your target keywords
• Check these competitors’ ranked keywords, their positions, and analyze their content pieces whether they are targeting the same audiences as yours

Based on these, you should prioritize competitors who are targeting the same target keywords as yours. Depending on your available resources, you should focus on three to five key competitors to analyze.

Analyze Your Competitors’ Target Keywords

Now that you’ve selected and validated several key competitors, we should first analyze their target keywords. The purpose of this is to figure out our opportunities: we can decide whether we can target the same keywords or find other opportunities based on this data. There are several factors to consider in this step:

• The keyword difficulty (KD) of the keywords. Even if your competitors are successful with a certain keyword, it’s probably not a good idea to pursue it if the KD is too high.
• Find keyword gaps, which is, keywords where your competitors rank for when your site does not. This can be an effective approach to find new target keywords.
• There can be opportunities in your competitors’ branded keywords. For example, if your competitor, X, is the market leader of your industry, the keyword “X alternative” or “alternative for X” can be good opportunities. Similarly, you might want to target “X vs your brand name” keyword and its alternatives.

You can use keyword research tools like SEMRush of Ahrefs to figure out your competitors’ keywords easily. With these tools, you simply need to enter your competitors’ URL into the search bar, and they will display important metrics like search volume, CPC, and keyword difficulty (KD).

Analyzing Competitors’ Sites and Content

The purpose of this step is to figure out how your competitors are approaching their on-site SEO optimization, which can be divided into two things: their technical on-site optimizations and their content optimizations.

First, let us discuss several important aspects of technical optimizations you should analyze:

• The page’s load speed. It this competitor’s site is currently ranking, especially for popular keywords, you should aim to have similar loading speed, if not faster.
• Mobile-responsiveness. Pretty self-explanatory. You can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool for this.
• Use of Schema.org or other structured data markups.
• URL structure and XML sitemap
• Metadata optimizations, like how your competitors are optimizing their title tags, meta descriptions, and image/video optimizations

As you might have guessed, the purpose of analyzing these technical aspects is so that you can emulate their efforts, or find areas where you can do better than them. With that being said, let’s see what we can analyze in the content department:

• The most important thing to analyze is how they are optimizing the target keyword(s) within the content. Especially pay close attention to their titles and subheadings. Also, analyze their keyword density using various available tools.
• Examine their content types. Are they using videos, images, or podcasts to enhance the textual content?
• How optimized are their landing pages, including sales pages if it’s an e-commerce site.
• The structure of their content. How long is the blog post? How are they maintaining engagement and readability of the content?
• How many links are included in each content for both external and internal links? Analyze how they are using the anchor texts.
• How are they approaching their content according to their audience’s search intent?

To get better SEO results, you should first and foremost aim to create better content than the top-ranking sites. So, this step is especially important. Hire an SEO consultant to analyze how your competitors are approaching their content, analyze their content promotion strategy, and aim to outdo them.

Analyzing Backlinks

Backlinks are still one of the most important ranking signals in SEO. In relations to SEO competitive analysis, there are two main purposes in analyzing your competitors’ backlinks:

1. Figuring out backlinks opportunities. You can aim to get the same backlinks when targeting the same keywords.
2. Figuring out whether pursuing these same links are beneficial for your site. For example, are some backlinks going to be really hard to get yourself? In this case, you would also want to decide on the alternatives.

In most cases, however, it’s a good idea to pursue the same backlinks as your competitors. In theory, you should at least similar results when you have the exact same backlinks profile. However, there are two major factors when determining whether you should pursue the backlinks:

• Links quality. Nowadays, the quality of your links is far more important than quantity. So, you might not want to pursue backlinks that are low in quality.
• Bad links and broken links. Obviously, you should avoid these two. Broken links are simply backlinks from sites or pages that are no longer operational for one reason or another. Bad links are generally purchased links or links built through blackhat tactics.

However, remember that the higher the quality, generally the harder it will be to get the inbound link. You can build a list from these high-quality backlinks, and start building your relationships with these sites until you earn these backlinks. You might want to check out this guide by Backlinko on more about link building tactics.

When analyzing your competitors’ backlinks, here are a few key areas to focus on:

1. Finding backlinks gap

Here, your aim is to find sites which are linking to your competitors’ sites but not yours, especially on pages where you are targeting the same keywords. There are various tools available that can help you in this aspect, and this list by Neil Patel is a good place to start.

2.The number of deep backlinks

Backlinks that are linking to “deep” pages have more value for SEO than a backlink to your landing page or homepage. For example, a backlink that is pointing to a content page can be considered as “deep”.

The goal of this is to find out whether your competitors have a lot of these backlinks. If the answer is yes, you will need to do the same—if not better—to rank for the same keywords. The best way to get these deep backlinks is to develop relevant, high-quality content pieces and build backlinks for each of them.

3. Anchor text usage

In SEO best practices, anchor texts should always be relevant to the content of the linked page. However, using exact-match anchor text too heavily can get you penalized by Google.

So, analyze how your competitors are using their anchor texts, as well as the anchor texts of the backlinks linking to their sites. Check the ratio between exact-match texts and generic anchors, as well as the usage of semantically-related texts.

4. Sitewide backlinks

A sitewide link is, in a nutshell, links placed throughout the whole site, commonly in the sidebar, footer, or header. Using sitewide backlinks aggressively nowadays can induce a Google Penalty due to the Penguin update. However, it can still be effective when done properly. Check out whether your competitors are getting sitewide backlinks, and you can either aim to emulate them or find different opportunities.

5. Redirects

Using 301 redirects is one of the most common (and effective) link building tactics. This is why you should analyze whether your competitors are using redirect tactics to get their backlinks, and find similar opportunities.

There are three different redirects to look for:

• Traditional 301 redirects: where a brand redirects their existing/old site to the new site, generating a backlink in the process.

• Using link shorteners: can be considered a black hat tactic, but is still quite common

• Merger redirects: where your competitor redirects an expired, but still relevant site to their site

6. Hidden links

There might be cases where a competitor is ranking really high, but has very little to no backlinks at all. In this case, there is a high probability that your competitors are hiding their backlinks.

Quite often, these sites are hiding their backlinks because they are using grey hat tactics like using a Private Blog Network (PBN) or even black hat tactics.

End Words: Learning From Your Competitors

As we have mentioned, SEO competitive analysis should be an integral part of any SEO strategy. A proper competitive analysis can provide very valuable information about your competitors’ performances and their strategies to achieve them.

By collecting this data, you can, in turn, plan your own SEO campaign without relying on instincts and assumptions, that will drive better results. As the old saying goes: knowing your enemy is half the battle, and by knowing how your key competitors are approaching their SEO, you have a much better chance in outranking them.

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But even if resources and people differ, big companies may also not understand how to refocus their efforts when it comes to marketing. That means that the two sizes of businesses can use insights from each other in order to put what’s called enterprise marketing to work.

One way to do that for any company is to rely on what’s called the Ansoff matrix. It’s also called the product-market matrix and helps companies evaluate opportunities to increase sales. How are they penetrating the market? How are they developing their products currently? How can they change their market development in the future? And how can they diversify?

This isn’t as simple as it sounds and take some good, hard thinking on the part of executives and marketers. New markets, for example, aren’t as simple as finding a new batch of customers the next town over. It may be as broad thinking as figuring out a whole new product to create a whole new market.

An enterprise marketing expert can help big companies in one of their main challenges: How do they get back to that personal touch that was so ever present when they were small? That matters to people, especially in the age of big tech that feels like you’re just one in a number of millions of email blasts. And remarkably, this is where artificial intelligence can help. What does that whole process look like? This graphic explains it.

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The answer is simple. Almost half of the traffic your page receives comes from mobile devices. I say almost half because it depends on your sector and your target audience. Many sites have more 50% of the traffic that coming from mobile phones.

The Importance Of Mobile Devices For SEO

Do you want your company to appear on the first Google search results? Surely yes. If your page is not adapted to mobile devices, then you forget it. The search engines have become very serious with the user experience and, considering that mobile phones are one of the main means of connection to the Internet at present, it is very important that you adapt.

Google is evolving its algorithms more and more to guarantee users the best mobile browsing it can. You have to optimize your website for SEO and consistently publish top quality posts and adapt it for mobile devices. You must consider mobile devices during SEO.

The Importance Of Mobile Devices For Social Networks

Do you know what the average man use most on his mobile device? He connects to Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Twitter. These are the five most used apps in the world. Do you realize that all of them are social networks? This means that most of the traffic that comes to us from the internet is from mobile devices. If you do not have the web adapted, you will lose most of the traffic. It does not seem like a great business strategy.

The Internet itself is warning us of this. For example, have you seen the design change that LinkedIn launched? Now, its desktop version is much like the mobile version. That is, the big websites are adapting to these devices that have already come to do the opposite: adapt the design of the mobile to the computer and not the reverse that is what has been done so far. You can meet with top app development companies to help you with a mobile application that will be well adapted to your website.

The Importance Of Mobile Devices For Online Advertising

There are many types of online advertisement; on search engines, social networks, YouTube, in apps and many more. We have just seen that most of the network traffic comes from mobile. Again, more than half of the traffic you receive from your advertising will come from mobile devices.

And How Do I Adapt My Website To Mobile Devices?

We do not stop saying that your page has to be adapted to mobile devices. Yes, okay, but what does that mean? It’s pretty simple to check for yourself. Enter your page from your smartphone and browse through it. Can you move easily? Are the buttons big enough for you to give them with your finger? Do you see the text it well? In essence, do you think a user can comfortably navigate your site from your mobile?

As you see, there are many points that you have to take into account. Here I leave a few brushstrokes of the requirements that your page should have so that it can be considered adapted:

• The design must be designed for mobile phones.

It is not right to take the design you already have and redistribute it so that it can be seen on mobile devices. Navigation on these devices has nothing to do with that of a computer. The buttons have to be bigger; it is recommended that there is less text, the easier, the better.

• The loading speed of the page has to be as fast as possible.

Some studies say that if the page takes more than 2 seconds to load, the user gets tired and leaves. For mobile, we are more impatient than on a computer, and we tolerate slower pages less. So much so that Google has taken a new technology so that the pages take less time to load for smartphones (Google AMP) that you can implement on your site.

• Take into account all screen resolutions.

Not all phones have the same size. It is not good for your page to see it well from your Samsung Galaxy 7 inches if then the buttons are dwarfs for a smaller mobile. And do not forget the tablets!

That said, Mobile optimization test from Google analyzes the optimization of your page to mobile devices and tells you in what aspects you can/should improve.

The IOT (Internet Of Things)

If you thought that this mobile phone had evolved very fast, hold on, because this year it seems that the Internet of Things (IoT) is coming strong. Of course, it’s not something new. It is a concept that takes fantasizing for years, and that has already become true with the Smartwatches. However, this is nothing more than a small preview of all that remains to come, and this year 2018 we are not talking about anything else.

What does this mean for your company? That you no longer have to adapt your site to only mobile devices. Now you have to be able to adapt to a watch, a bracelet or even a fridge (if you’re an ecommerce). Online marketing is a sector that has to evolve as fast as the technology that surrounds it and, if it does not succeed, it simply disappears. That’s why we always recommend that you entrust your digital marketing strategy to a specialized agency that is up to date with all the changes that are happening. For your business to prosper in this year 2018, you need to adapt your website for mobile devices because the majority of traffic is now from mobile devices. You can meet with top app development companies to help you with a mobile application that will be well adapted to your website.

Author Bio:

Kenneth Evans is a Content Marketing Strategist for Top App Development Companies, a research platform for app development companies in USA, UK, India, UAE, Australia and around the world. He has been contributing to various blogging platforms and Forums.

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