By Airon Rodrigues

Creating and setting up a blog for a website is a fundamental piece in generating an on-going stream of content.

What is the downside to blogging? Sure, there are resources involved, but the reward greatly outweighs the cost.

Setting up a blog for SEO means more content. Google adores fresh, unique content because this provides more information to a user when they are browsing a website.

Why Is a Blog Important For SEO?

The answer is simple; search engines value high-quality, unique content because it provides valuable answers to search queries.

According to Andrey Lipattsev, a Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google, content is one of the most important Google ranking factors.

 

Page content is one of the key factors for a website to rank in the search engine rankings. If a website is lacking in content, Google is less likely to offer it as a suggestion because it knows there is a lack of information.

For Google to know what a website is about, it needs content to work with. Publishing on-going content through a blog will result in Google sending bots to crawl the newly published content on the site. The more pages on products and services, the more likely a website is to rank in search results.

Long-Tail Keywords

With more content comes the possibility of including more keywords. Blog posts are a great way to incorporate long tail keywords that aren’t necessarily the primary keywords a website is ranking for.

Long tail keywords are those three and four keyword phrases that are very specific in describing a product or service. These long and obscure keyword phrases can now be used throughout blog posts, helping a website rank for these terms.

As a result, these keyword phrases will become easier to rank for, as they are included on your site as content through a blog post and in addition are relevant and specific to your online presence. When a user now searches for these terms, an effectively optimised blog post will receive the boost it needs, increasing its visibly for a given search query.

 

Blog Posts Drive Traffic To A Website

The great thing about a blog post is that it’s shareable. A blog post can be shared on social media, which results in a number of new visitors being redirected to a website. In addition, it allows the visitor to explore not only past blog posts but also the rest of the website.

Every time a new blog post is created, an opportunity arises for someone to share it through social media on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Pinterest (and more) which all helps expose a website to a new audience.

A great analogy is to think of blogging as fishing. The more hooks you have in the water, the more likely you are to catch a fish. In the same way, as more content is added to a site, more pages become indexed in search engines. This improves organic search visibility and increases website traffic.

Builds Authority

What better way to establish authority in a field than to write a collection of content about it? A blog provides a platform for sharing important industry-related information and insights on an on-going basis. As a website builds authority, it creates trust and familiarity among customers, which positions a brand at the forefront of a customer’s mind (and potential customers) when they are searching for a particular resource, product or service.

Internal Linking

More content also means more opportunities for adding internal links. This creates more pathways for search engine crawlers, which more effectively spreads PageRank throughout your site.

Internal links link from one page to another on the same website.

Internal links help Google crawl a web page faster and easier. In addition, users can also easily navigate from one page to another without having to search for one specific page.

External Links

Creating and distributing blog posts can increase the chances of external links from other websites. An external link is a link that is being directed to a web page from another website.

When you add new content that acts as a resource to others, the chances of inbound links increase as other writers, columnists, journalists, bloggers, and contributors will be more likely to reference and cite that content in their own articles.

Blogging for SEO is one of the key ways to consistently add new content to a website. By doing this, Google knows the website is continuously being updated by providing fresh content.

Struggling to generate content ideas? Read our post on 8 ways to easily generate content ideas and get started today!

By Airon Rodrigues

One of the most important things for any business is communicating and connecting with their audience.

The goal of connecting with an audience is to establish a solid relationship. An easy way to achieve this is through email marketing.

In short, email marketing delivers the right message at the right time to the right audience. And not just any audience, targeted customers.

This is why email marketing work’s best when it’s personalized. An email can be tailored to customer actions so that an email campaign is relevant to their interest.

Why Is Email Marketing Important For A Business?

It Keep’s Your Audience informed: Through regular emails, customers can stay informed. Regardless of the context of the email, the act of reaching out and starting a conversation is a great way to make someone feel valued. Customers who have signed up to an email list have already made a commitment to receive updates. Sending engaging and interesting content is likely to boost engagement with customers.

It Creates Real Time Engagement: Where are emails most likely to be opened and read? On mobile. According to a study by Litmus, 54% of all emails were opened on a mobile device. What this communicates is that customers are reading emails on the go, and emailing them will create real-time engagement.

It’s Easy To Measure An Email Marketing Campaign: Thankfully in 2017, there are tools that can provide answers to who opened an email, which links were clicked, and how many people unsubscribed. This quickly gives an indication of how an email campaign is performing, making it easy measure.

What are some tools?

MailChimp: With a user base of more than 7 million, MailChimp is one of the most popular email tools. This tool allows you to plug in potential keywords or phrases for a subject line and see how well they performed.

Active Campaign: This tool can send personalized messages that align perfectly with customer interests, whether they’re on a website, browsing their inbox, or out-and-about on a mobile device.

Litmus: In terms of testing and tracking individual emails, Litmus is a highly versatile tool through which you can use to test and track email. It can test more than 40 clients and devices in one click!

Campaign Report as seen on Mail Chimp

It’s Affordable: Effectively communicating with a target base of responsive customers for free (or for an affordable price) is hard to turn down. Especially for a small business looking to expand before investing resources into a well-equipped email marketing strategy.

Through Mail Chimp, 12,000 emails can be sent out a month… for free. Vertical Response offers free email marketing up to 4,000 emails a month and 1,000 email contacts. This proves an email campaign can be effective, yet affordable.

Results In Targeted Messaging: Targeted messaging is identifying set groups of customers within a database and messaging them based on previous actions or requests. Have certain customers enquired about a specific product but didn’t go through with the purchase? Have set customers called to schedule an appointment but then canceled and never called again? These specific customers who have demonstrated interested should be targeted with set messaging.

The main idea here is that potential customers are at different stages of the buying cycle.

Some may be in the consideration stage, while others may be at the research and compare stage, and even others in the ready-to-purchase stage. Contacting them based on their current stages is one step closer to a successful marketing strategy.

So, we know email marketing is important and necessary for a business.  However, there are different forms of email campaigns for different customers.

Were all emails created equally?  Not quite, here are the variations:

Welcome Emails: These types of emails are usually automated responses when a new subscriber joins a list or inquiries through an online form. Welcome emails are the first and only chance to make a good first impression. This means standing out from the competition, getting the customers attention, and personalizing the email.

Educational Emails: These types of emails can include blog posts; A newly written blog post on how to increase ROI for a small business can be sent out as an educational email. Even better, a blog post on how to use a new tool can prove to be helpful and valuable content, which is exactly what customers want (and expect).

Lead Nurturing Emails: As mentioned earlier, there’s always that group of potential customers who show initial interest, but then drop off the face of the earth. Where did they go? No one knows. But we can find out.

Ideally, there are two approaches to lead nurturing emails. One is to create a general email about those who have enquired about a specific product and occasionally send out those emails. The second approach is more personal and time-consuming. This involves personalized pitches to individual customers taking into account the customer’s needs and the best way of selling to them.

Social Media Connection Emails: For those looking to grow social media accounts, emails can definitely be a method in doing so. Why? Because the list of contacts has already subscribed to your brand, whether that be on your website or through a blog, so the likelihood of them connecting on social media is likely.

Newsletter Emails: Newsletters are a great way in delivering a large amount of content or information. Because it’s disguised under the name ‘newsletter’ customers expect to see content covering various topics. This is an ideal method for sending out a monthly, or weekly wrap of the latest news or tips in an industry.

Before even sending out a daily, weekly or monthly newsletter, a goal needs to be established. Is the newsletter meant to drive social shares? Is it to increase brand awareness? Or maybe it’s to simply share the latest company news. A newsletter needs to reflect the goal because ultimately, this will determine what kind of content should go into the newsletter.

Re-engagement Emails: Contacting inactive subscribers is one way to revive an audience. The goal of a re-engagement email is to identify customers who haven’t opened or responded to an email in a set amount of time and attempt to gauge a reaction or response. Finding out what was the last thing they responded to and then re-delivering that message can be one way in re-connecting with these long last contacts.

Let’s not forget, Thank You emails. That’s’ right, thanking a customer for a purchase or a desired action. But your probably knew that one already… Still effective!

Remember, testing emails is critical. Sending out untested emails can waste time and resources.

A/B testing plays a key part in testing. Consider running tests around subject lines, calls to action, and what content works best for engaging with your audience.

When it comes to email marketing, strategic and targeted content is key.

Anyone can send out constant emails, but the driving message behind it is everything. The information circulated needs to be well thought out and as always, offer something of value to subscribers.

By Airon Rodrigues

Consistently generating unique content ideas can be challenging. There are many important factors associated with SEO such as on-site optimization, link building, and content distribution. But without quality unique content, a marketing strategy can indeed, fall flat.

But why is unique content so important and valued so highly?

The answer is simple; search engines value high-quality, unique content because it provides valuable answers to search queries.

According to Andrey Lipattsev, a Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google, content is one of the most important Google ranking factors.

 

So how are original, unique content ideas achieved?

General Forums

General forums such as Quora and Yahoo provide insights into what questions people are asking. These are open forums to really knit-pick exactly what topic the content ideas can be focussed on. The goal here is to type in the topic readers are interested in, and then start finding questions that can be used for content ideas.

To do this, search a general topic based on the type of ideas that are needed. Then, use the filtering options on the left to view only topics and select the most relevant topic page from the results. Once on the Topic page, the Topic FAQ ideas will then become visible and useful for new, unique content.

The benefit of this method it that with general forums, come themed forums. For example, if new home design ideas are to be generated, Houzz would be the ideal forum in search of ideas. Vogue is another example of a themed forum which can provide helpful information within the fashion industry. The key here is to identify which themed forum is most relevant to the topic at hand, and use that forum as a platform to generate the latest ideas within that industry.

 

Twitter

There’s more to Twitter than tweeting. Performing keyword searches can help in generating content ideas. Hashtags are a quick way to qualify a topic and to discover trending topics.

Trending topics help in revealing what’s currently relevant, as well as providing various ideas to generate content ideas from. Twitter provides a list of hashtags and keywords that are generating a high level of interest in each location. These ‘trends’ provide a great opportunity to draw inspiration from and can help by remaining a step ahead of competitors with the latest content ideas. If a relevant topic is currently trending, creating content around it is likely to be worthwhile from an SEO and user perspective.

 

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a great tool for generating content ideas and topics. Once a keyword has been inserted and searched, BuzzSumo will present the most popularly shared articles within the last year.

To get started, type in a keyword, which for this example is “Social Media Tips”, and then track down popular content that is being created by industry leaders and/or competitors. BuzzSumo reveals how many times a piece of content has been shared and who the top people sharing it on Twitter were. This makes it easy in deciding where to draw content ideas from because if a particular type of content is popular, it’s currently relevant and trending.

 

Google Suggested Search

Google’s Suggested Search are the results that appear at the bottom of a Google search page. These suggestions are based on the initial search query. In this example, searching for trucker hats provides the following results, which can then be collected and used as content ideas. From one search, we can already see 8 different directions in where to start generating content ideas.

FAQ Pages

FAQ pages are helpful because they provide answers to common questions. But how does it help in generating content ideas? Knowing what people are asking, and more importantly, what common questions are out there, can assist in creating content ideas.  Answering these questions on a web page can, in turn, create valuable, unique content.

To do this, pick a target keyword, then Google the query below:

inurl:faq [target keyword]

Google Keyword Planner Tool

Google’s Keyword Planner is primarily used for keyword research and gathering keyword ideas. However, this tool can also be used for generating content ideas. In the example below, we can see various types of keyword ideas that can easily be developed into a blog post, such as ‘best dark chocolate’ and ‘healthy chocolate brands’.

Another feature here it to submit a URL to Keyword Planner and let the tool crawl a web page to draw different keywords. Submitting a URL which is relevant to what content ideas need to be generated can help.

 

Blog post title generators

Like name generators, blog title generators can provide catchy topics from which ideas can be generated from. There are different tools which can deliver numerous titles (ideas). Simply search for a keyword, and the tool will generate blog post ideas based on popular blog post types.

Blog post title generators are a quick an easy way to generate content ideas. Portent Idea Generator and Content Row are some of the free, popular online tools.

 

Brainstorming

Brainstorming is probably the most common way in generating new ideas because it works. Sitting down with a team, if possible, and throwing ideas together can always get the juices flowing, it’s idea generation in its purest form.

GroupMap is an online tool that can form groups of 2 to 2000 users in the same room or around the world. This tool helps reveal what everyone thinks in an organized and insightful way. Essentially, GroupMap is real-time, online collaborative brainstorming and decision making.

Ideas can come from anywhere. Brilliant ideas have been formed in odd places, meaning there’s no set tool which will provide that golden idea. However, these tools will help you get there. Whether it’s a blog post, article or a new page, the content idea tools mentioned will have a positive impact on the idea generation process.

Now, let’s get brainstorming!