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The Hidden Value Of A Long-Tail Content Strategy

Marc Baumann · August 24, 2016 ·

As mentioned in my previous post, I would like to share the slides with you that I’ve created for my presentation of the webinar organized by PR News, titled “SEO Strategies That Will Help Your Message Find The Right Audience”.

At the essence of my talk, I highlighted the value of strategic content building that should be an integral part of every company’s digital marketing plan, and I’ve shared tips, tricks and tools how the focus on tail terms and topics that will yield the highest return on investment.

For those who are not familiar with the term: “Long tail” terms are queries or key phrases that are more specific (and usually longer) than more common “head” keywords. Although tail terms have lower search volume, they comprise the majority (~70%) of all search queries overall. they are significantly less competitive and have proven to convert at significantly higher rates than head terms. As a result, any Content Strategy that utilizes tail terms as it cornerstone will result in a more successful and sustainable online growth for its business.

Here is my presentation:

In a nutshell – it addresses the following topics:

What are the benefits of Organic Search (SEO) to a company?
How can any team (including yours) influence SEO?
Why is content he most effective lever?
4 questions you should ask yourself before planning a content initiative
Choosing the right content for your business goals
Why going “Long-Tail”? What is its (hidden) value?
8 crucial steps for your action plan
Tips & tools for evaluating and improving your existing content
Best Practices for creating new content that converts
How to promote your content
How to measure the impact of your content initiative
Case Study of a successful long-tail content initiative: Amazon.com
Final takeaways

Hope these inputs are as useful as they were to the participants of the PRnews webinar. Based on the feedback, they were well received.

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Join Me For This SEO Strategy Webinar!

Marc Baumann · August 20, 2016 ·

I am happy to announce that I will be one of the speakers of an upcoming webinar titled “SEO Strategies That Will Help Your Message Find The Right Audience”. The webinar is organized by PR News Group, a leading go-to online source that serves over 150,000 PR, communications and marketing professionals at corporations, agencies, and nonprofits in the United States.

The three of us will not only give a comprehensive overview of the recent trends and changes in Search Engine Optimization and Search, but also provide actionable tips and tricks how any team in a smaller or bigger corporation can influence and collaborate on initiatives that help brands to maximize their reach, visibility, website traffic and online revenues.

My presentation will specifically focus on the value of Content Strategy, Content Development and Content Promotion / Amplification as essential SEO levers, and I will share tactics, tricks, and tools that are helpful for any team that can contribute to the content generation, storytelling and messaging efforts of a company.

Based on this, I’m convinced that this webinar is not only beneficial for PR & Communications experts, but for any professional in the Digital space that wants his / her employer to be successful online.

Here is all the info you need to know:

Webinar: “SEO Strategies That Will Help Your Message Find The Right Audience”
Date: August 23, 2016 from 1-3:30 pm EST / 10am-12.30 pm PST
Cost: $399
Registration: via this Webinar page

I would be thrilled if you can join me.

FYI: I will also summarize my presentation and share the slides on this blog after this digital event – so check back soon!

With Quality Content Comes SEO Success

Marc Baumann · May 20, 2016 ·

Time and time again, I hear search marketing managers of big brands say, “I need more SEO content.” Heck, maybe you’ve heard an SEO say it.

The truth: It’s not “SEO content” a brand or website needs.

So, what do we need?

Rich, informative, compelling high quality content brings users to a website and keeps users responding. It also provides the search engines with value when that content is SEO-friendly. Rather than needing SEO content, we really need quality content that engages users but we cannot forget about what the search engines want, how the engines view content, and the techniques plus finesse required to optimize content.

The Factors for SEO Success — Content ranks high in the SEO Success Pyramid

How Quality Content Can Make an SEO Difference

Look at the New York Times. The publication, known as one of the best newspapers in the world, once turned down the opportunity to buy Google for $1 million because it didn’t consider the internet a part of its business. In 2005, the paper acknowledged the importance of the web, hired a team of SEO experts, trained editorial staff and marketing teams in SEO and started to optimize its entire website for better search engine performance.

Since the inception of the SEO program, the NYT’s referral traffic from the search engines has grown 300%. The site has experienced an average of 60% traffic growth per year and a significant increase in user engagement and time spent on the site.

Keyword Research and Intelligence

Developing quality content requires research and analysis of keywords that should be included in your content. There are several free tools for keyword suggestions and research that give considerably less depth than subscription-based services but can still be a helpful starting point. For example, there are free versions of Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker.

A relatively new and less known tool for research is Google’s Wonder Wheel. You’ll find it by doing a Google search for any keyword, clicking on the “Show options” link in the top blue bar of the search results page. A left side bar full of additional search options will open and near the bottom you’ll find a link for the Wonder Wheel. It’s a fantastic tool which allows you to discover a wide range of relevant keywords or extensions which are related to your business and industry.

Too Many Keywords and You Might Get Rejected

Your content should be keyword-rich. It should include targeted keywords that match the theme of your website. But don’t overdo it. Like eating too much at Thanksgiving, you’ll regret stuffing your content with keywords. The search engines will view your content as spammy and potentially block your website from appearing in results.

Furthermore, your readers will notice too. They might not realize content has been keyword-stuffed but they’ll notice your content is not appealing.

Making Your Content Stand Out

While you don’t want your website to stand out for being stuffed with keywords, your site can stand out in other ways and in a positive manner. One of those ways is for your website to have unique, fresh, and informative content. This helps keep clients and/or prospects on your site (stickiness factor) and also increases the likelihood of getting quality links from other relevant and topic-related sites.

Posting fresh topic-related content gets users coming back to your website. It also helps bait the search engines’ spiders to crawl your site.

Theming and Latent Semantic Indexing

You also have to make sure you create content that helps the search engines understand the theme of your website. If your website is about financial advice for small businesses, it should be well-structured around this topic. Include content and pages with relevant keywords and steer clear from off-topic articles about surfing or middle-eastern cuisine (even if you’re a surfing zealot and a known foodie).

The search engines have a sophisticated method called latent semantic indexing (LSI) for indexing and retrieving your web pages. With this technology, they are able to look beyond the direct matches between content and search query text to understand the context of a website’s content. As a result, littering your content with a particular target keyword is not enough and may affect your search engine rankings poorly.

7 Tips How To Own Your Search Engine Position Rankings

Marc Baumann · January 19, 2016 ·

Julia Angwin wrote a great article in today’s edition of the Wall Street Journal, about SERPs (search engine position ranking) and controlling your reputation online. She writes that among the top spots result in the search results for her name has been an (in her opinion dissatisfying) article she wrote four years ago.

Since he was about to publish her new book and wanted to make this unflatering article disappear from the the Top 10 of her SERPs, she explored various options how to achieve that. Her insights mentioned in this piece are part of ‘SEO 101’ and illustrate the Do’s and Don’ts when trying to control your online reputation (since Google is the dominant search engine in the U.S. and most other markets, she’s focusses her story on the ‘Big G’).

These are my favorite six takeaways from Angwin’s article:

1. It’s extremely difficult to remove items from Google search results. Persue other others. Only if you can prove that another site has stolen your social security, credit card or bank-account numbers and posted them online, the search company might consider to remove the offending data. In that case it’s still recommended that you contact the owner of that site directly.

2. You should take control of your own web presence. Create original content that is compelling to readers and can be easily accessed by search engines – and you’re in the right direction to be in charge of your reputation online.

3. Develop a linking strategy. Get incoming links from relevant and authoritative and websites. (In Angwin’s case, this certainly paid off.)

4. Make search result with the annoying content disappear with your social media efforts. Increase your online visibility by creating accounts at social bookmarking sites (Del.icio.us, Furl, Stumble Upon), social networking profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace and micro-blogging sites like Twitter. Talk about your expertise, share insights, thoughts, web finds and other links with others.

5. It’s the crawlability, stupid! A beautiful website with tons of stunning pictures doesn’t do the trick. You need high-quality content which can be easily be crawled by the major search engines.

6. Don’t forget the meta information on your site. You know, texts like the “title tag,” which is displayed at the top of the Web browser and describes the page to a search engine. Often forgotten by noobs, but crucial.

7. You can work to boost your results, and then lose control in an instant. Even if you think that you did a great SEO job, your work is never done. Among many reasons: the search engine constantly update their algorithms, other web content than texts is becoming more and more important (videos, music, podcasts, etc.), your competitors (who are trying to grab the top spots of the same keyword like you) never sleep.

Do you have other suggestions on how to get control of your own SERPs? Leave a comment!

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Interview With Blogging Guru Darren Rowse

Marc Baumann · September 27, 2015 ·

As I mentioned in my previous post, the thing which surprised me most about my experience at this year’s Blog World Expo in Las Vegas is the fact that all the attendees – including the famous and successful A-Bloggers – were super cool, friendly and willing share many blogging “secrets”.

As a long time fan and avid reader of the infamous blog Problogger, I am especially pleased that Blogging expert Darren Rowse was kind enough to give me a couple of minutes of his valuable time, accepted to be “dragged” to a quiet conference room and willing share his wisdom about blogging in a one on one interview (ca. 5 minutes).

In this interview, I ask him

1. Why you should start blogging today
2. What his most important advice about maintaining a blog is
3. What his personal biggest rewards of blogging were so far
4. If microblogging (the latest trend) will become bigger than old fashioned blogging
5. What the future of online media is (mainstream media vs. blog networks)
6. If he will still be interested in blogging in 5 years.

For those who don’t know Darren: He is one of the world’s most popular and respected authorities for blogging, the voice behind the no. 1 blog for blogging tips, Problogger, and the Vice President of training and development at B5 Media, one of the largest blog networks on the planet (which he launched with three fellow bloggers in 2005).

Besides Problogger, he also blogs at Digital Photography School, a blog with tips and product reviews around digital photography. According to Wikipedia, these two blogs get around 15,000-20,000 page views a day and over $20,000 in total ad revenue a month. (Impressive numbers, I have to say!)

If you’re interested to get more of Darren’s useful blogging tips, I highly recommend that you read his (and co-author Chris Garrett’s) recently published book “Problogger: Secrets Blogging to A Six-Figure Income”. It’s contains a wealth of valuable information how to start a blog, increase your readershop and make money with it. (Darren himself became a Six-Figure Blogger in September 2005)

Another tip: Follow Darren on Twitter (@problogger). It’s worth it!