Content Marketing Tips and Tactics for Small Business SEO
Last year's The Lego Movie was a box-office hit. It was also a "100-minute toy commercial" and an "awesome piece of content marketing" for the privately held company that manufactures the colorful plastic bricks.
Content marketing, as The Lego Movie illustrates, is not "just about blogging," said Kevin Mullett, director of visibility and social media for MarketSnare. Content marketing today is everywherejust check out the products and services featured in HGTV programs, he added. And content marketing has been around for more than 100 years, harkening back to the magazine for farmers Deere & Co. began producing in 1895.
The Furrow, John Deere & Co.'s magazine for farmers, is one of the oldest examples of content marketing.
Mullett spoke at the March 2015 Search Marketing Expo West conference in San Jose, Calif. In a session entitled Content Marketing & Promotion to Drive Quality Links, he and other two other speakers offered tips for small and midsized businesses on how to use content to increase backlinks to their websites. Earned backlinks can help your site get more targeted traffic, increase conversions of prospects into customers, and drive up its ranking in search engine results.
Here are some of the other session highlights and key takeaways the three speakers offered.
Every website has two audiences: humans and search engine bots that index the content, Mullet said. Humans read your content to learn. Bots crawl the content to see if it's good, relevant, and if the website itself is structurally sound. "If you want to earn shares and citations and get backlinks, you have to impress both audiences," Mullett explained.
He said there are two things to remember for your content strategy.
1. Your content should solve problems. Answer your customers' questions, evoke emotion, and entertain with content. Chances are the content that answers your customers' questions or provides them a useful tool, such as a calculator, will earn backlinks. In turn, the links help your site "build relevancy and authority," Mullett said. Ask your front-line peopletelephone support staff or your sales forcewhich questions customers typically ask. Check to see whether your website clearly answers those questions.
2. Being useful helps make your site "algorithm-proof." Because useful content tends to attract backlinks, it helps makes your website less susceptible to future Google algorithm changes, according to Mullett. (Recent algorithm updates known as Panda and Penguin have penalized some sites with shady links or poor content by pushing them down in search result rankings.)
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Content Marketing Tips and Tactics for Small Business SEO