According to Google: The New Rules for SEO

Despite its forays into advertising, email and social media, Google’s tremendous success is predicated largely on its effectiveness as a search tool. When you type a term into the Google search bar, you get hundreds, thousands or even millions of relevant results in an instant. To deliver those results, the search engine giant relies on powerful algorithms that rank sites for quality, authority and relevance to the search string. Continue reading

Buying Buzz: Can Paid Social Media Work?

When they want a larger market share, many companies loosen their purse strings and buy it. Through advertising and direct mail, businesses can become part of their customers’ conversation and widen their market. Social media marketing has historically been a subtler force; because most social media channels such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are free, they haven’t constituted a major, direct part of the marketing budget. While companies paid their content creation team to tweet and maintain a Facebook page, paid social media wasn’t a part of the picture until relatively recently. Continue reading

Tell, Don’t Sell: Giving Back to Your Customers

The hard sell has its place, but it isn’t on your blog or in your feature articles. Your customers see hundreds of ads in just a few hours on their computers, and if you focus on selling, your message becomes part of the cacophony. Telling, not selling, gives your current and future customers a break from the constant flow of advertising. Ads eventually get tuned out, but information retains its allure.

One reason that “tell, don’t sell” content works especially well in an online context is that your customers already know what they want and are actively seeking the solution to a problem. They most likely found you through a search engine or through word of mouth on social media channels. If they weren’t looking for what you offer, they wouldn’t have Googled you. Because they’re already in the market for your product, you don’t have to give them a push into your virtual storefront; you only need to showcase what you have and let your customers do the rest. Continue reading

Why It’s Impossible to Make Viral Marketing Happen

Every business dreams of having a video or article go viral, spreading like a beneficial bout of the flu and reaching millions or even billions without spending an extra dollar on marketing. When it happens, it’s electrifying; you’re deluged with visitors, your phone won’t stop ringing and your site analytics scramble for new parameters to track the geometric rise in site traffic. Like a bolt of lightning, you can’t predict where it’ll strike – but you can increase your chances of drawing that lightning. Continue reading

Putting Your SEO Strategy to the Test

Email marketers rely on A/B split testing to refine their future campaigns. By discovering which messages produce the best results, they fine-tune their approach with each newsletter and get closer to the moving target of the perfect delivery. With SEO content, that kind of variable testing isn’t typically possible – at least, not on your primary live site. You have two options for road-testing your SEO strategy: feeder sites and simultaneous SEO strategy tests on a single evolving page such as your blog. Continue reading

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