SEO and Content Marketing Round-up

A Search Engine Optimization SEO round up of curated articles that will enhance your knowledge, provide tips and content marketing strategy. In this article, we’ll lean on HubSpot to fully explain how often every company, entrepreneur or SMB should blog. Written word is still a vital part of content marketing and blogging should still be a central piece of your content marketing and SEO strategy.

Content marketing is also more than what the Google bots are searching for it’s about learning and writing for what your audience wants. Always write for humans! Next we’ll learn how to analyze our SEO efforts in Google Analytics. GA contains valuable data that your business can use to monitor (and improve) SEO performance–from keywords to organic pageviews.It can be overwhelming if you’re not familiar with how to navigate. 15 Ways for Using Google Analytics to Track Your SEO Efforts for Free will guide you through this manageable process.

It’s important to understand that human behavior has shifted in how users read Google’s search engine results page (SERP). There is now more of a pinball pattern. How does your content show up in the SERPs and see if this has an affect on your click-through-rate (CTR).

Lastly, SEMRUSH shows us the latest marketing trends that will help shape next year’s strategy.

How Often Should You (or Your Company) Blog? [New Data]

By Kayla Carmicheal

Starting a blog is tough. Thinking about what to post and how to promote it requires strategic planning. And will your content resonate with and delight your customers?

We haven’t even covered how often companies should post — a factor that can make or break even the greatest of content.

You might be surprised to know that even though there’s a surplus of hard data about why blog posts are integral to marketing, there’s not much on the frequency of posting. This is because, well, it depends.

If ambiguity gets your heart racing, fear not. Here, we’ll offer suggestions and stats to help inform your decision.

How Often Should You Blog?

The frequency of blog posts depends on what’s best for your company. Smaller businesses have found comfort and success posting one to four times a week, while larger companies can push out daily and, sometimes, multiple daily posts.

If you’re a marketing team of one, don’t feel the need to constantly pump out content. If you do, you’ll probably find yourself getting burned out and releasing content that’s not beneficial to you or your audience.

Keeping a schedule when blogging is important for two reasons. First, it builds organic traffic. Next, it helps with brand awareness. We’ll get into why below.

Organic traffic

Blogging is important for SEO if you want to increase visits to your website. But, if you are already posting valuable content, it might benefit you to go back and update that content, especially if after a little while, you want to give certain posts a boost.

Blog post traffic is compounding, which means it gains organic results over time. This is why updating posts are important. This gives you more reads, more recognition, and possibly, more fans.

Brand awareness

Because Google can crawl every page of a website for SEO, every blog post you make has the chance to enhance not only optimization but awareness of your brand. For example, if you’re in the beauty industry and you publish high-quality posts about how to apply eyeliner or mascara, you have the opportunity to be seen in those Google search results.

To build brand loyalty, make sure you’re producing high-quality content. If you’re producing content with images, keywords, and industry-relevant content, you can increase your brand awareness.

So, blogging is still of high importance for brand discovery and building leads. If you’re trying to figure out the right publishing frequency for your team and your business, keep reading.

Blogging Frequency

Blogging frequency ultimately depends on what you aim to accomplish with your blog. So, let’s look at the basics of how often you should blog for what you aim to accomplish.

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Put the Focus on People to Transform Content Marketing

By Michael Brenner

So you thought content marketing was all about the content? If you’re focusing your content marketing strategy on the topics and the different content formats you plan to create, you’re missing a trick. Instead, you should be focusing on the people you’re trying to reach through content marketing.

Quick Takeaways

  • Publishing content on the right topic in the right format is only a small aspect of successful content marketing. For true success, you need to focus on long-term relationship building.
  • Give your audience what they want and aim to provide value.
  • Develop a unique brand voice and forge your own path. There’s no single recipe for good content marketing.

Content Marketing for Humans

There are a variety of approaches you can choose to take when it comes to building your content marketing strategy.

Going back a decade or more, in the early stages of SEO, online marketers were likely to write their content for machines rather than people. It was relatively easy to jump to the top of the search engine rankings with the use of keyword stuffing and other unscrupulous tactics, and so content was seen mainly as a tool for manipulating Google, rather than something useful that people would actually want to read.

As the search engine algorithms became more sophisticated and the basics of web personalization came into play, there was a shift towards a more user-focused approach to SEO. Indeed, brands that didn’t heed warnings against creating low quality “over-optimized” content were penalized by Google.

However, old habits die hard. It’s still common for marketers to base their content marketing strategies around keywords rather than really thinking about the person reading the content.

We’re now entering a new era of content marketing. Users are demanding more from their search results, and advances in technology mean that delivering hyper-personalized experiences is not only possible, but also expected.

At the same time, consumers are losing their trust in big brands and seeking out more authentic relationships. They don’t want to just read your content – they want a real connection.

So how should you respond to this major shift in audience expectations? How can you adjust your strategy to get the most out of your content marketing?

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15 Ways for Using Google Analytics to Track Your SEO Efforts for Free

By Elise Dopson

Did you know that 67% of all clicks go to the first five organic results in a search engine?

SEO is more important than ever. Advertising is getting the big bucks in terms of marketing spend–but people are steering clear of paid ads in search engines in favor of organic results.

So, how do you reach page #1 and be in with the chance of driving even more traffic to your website?

It’s unlikely you’ll do it alone, or that a single strategy will work.

You need to constantly measure your SEO performance, change what isn’t working, and continue with what is.

In fact, there’s probably a free tool that you’re currently using to track your on-site metrics: Google Analytics. That leaves you questioning:

Does Google Analytics Help SEO?

The short answer? Yes.

Google Analytics contains valuable data that your business can use to monitor (and improve) SEO performance–from keywords to organic pageviews.

Here are 15 use cases that show how our experts use Google Analytics for SEO:

  1. Sync your Search Console account
  2. Create SEO-related goals
  3. Use the organic visitors segment
  4. Compare non-organic visitors to organic
  5. Find top-performing content
  6. Look at top-performing landing pages
  7. Use the Content Drilldown report
  8. Add annotations to track content updates
  9. Use the Multi-Channel Funnel report
  10. Track keywords in Google Analytics
  11. Find referral sites
  12. Manage your PPC spend
  13. Check how Google views your website
  14. Create custom dashboards
  15. Set up alerts

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Complex Search-Results Pages Change Search Behavior: The Pinball Pattern

By Kate Moran and Cami Goray

Gone are the days when Google would return a simple list of 10 blue links, each neatly packaged with a URL, blue link, and text snippet. Today, search-engine-results pages (SERPs) are far more complex. The majority of SERPs on major web-search engines like Google and Bing present at least one informational, interactive feature.

The continuously evolving layout of the SERP is shaping how people search. Each new feature affects the distribution of users’ attention on the page. In the old days of web search, users would reliably focus their attention on the first few results at the top of the page and would sequentially move from result to result down the list. (In the research for our first edition of the How People Read on the Web report, we found that in 59% of cases, people scanned the SERP sequentially, from the first results, to the second, and so on, without skipping any results or looking at the right side of the page.)

That linear SERP pattern still exists today, but it’s the exception rather than the rule. Today, we find that people’s attention is distributed on the page and that they process results more nonlinearly than before. We observed so much bouncing between various elements across the page that we can safely define a new SERP-processing gaze pattern — the pinball pattern.

In a pinball pattern, the user scans a results page in a highly nonlinear path, bouncing around between results and SERP features.

Our findings come from the Search Meta-Analysis Project, an analysis of 471 queries made by participants in usability-testing and eye tracking studies that we conducted between 2017 and 2019.

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Identifying Content Marketing Trends to Enhance Your 2020 Strategy

By SEMRUSH

A great marketing strategy cannot be built on bare assumptions, especially when it comes to content.

To keep pace with the industry, content marketers constantly monitor a variety of channels seeking trending topics and hot news.

In our research, we decided to take a look from the inside. We analyzed 2019 Google search queries related to content marketing and the top-performing tweets in English with the hashtag #ContentMarketing posted between January and September 2019.

Why these two channels?

Twitter is a popular platform that has 330 million monthly active users. Each tweet is a short and clear message, and hashtags are used to establish connections between like-minded people and initiate conversation and discussion.

As for search queries, they reflect the topics that people in the industry are concerned with or want to learn more about.

The key findings of the research are presented in the infographic.

Below you’ll find a detailed analysis that will hopefully help you develop a stronger content marketing strategy for 2020.

Read more for the infographic