Content Marketing – Marketing Agency St. Louis https://www.digitalstrike.com Tue, 30 Sep 2025 20:03:11 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.1 https://www.digitalstrike.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/cropped-ds_logo_favicon-32x32.jpg Content Marketing – Marketing Agency St. Louis https://www.digitalstrike.com 32 32 The Top 5 Benefits of Blogging for SEO and Brand Growth https://www.digitalstrike.com/why-you-should-have-a-blog/ Tue, 30 Sep 2025 17:00:52 +0000 https://digitalstriked.wpengine.com/?p=1227 A blog is the best way to attract potential customers to your site. On average, websites with a blog have 55% more traffic than websites without a blog. In the modern world of search, it’s imperative to run a helpful and informative blog that potential customers can use as a resource. Large and small businesses alike can boost their online presence, encourage inbound links, find new customers, and more with a successful blog. If that’s not enough to convince you to start a blog for your business, here are 5 more benefits of blogging.

Why You Should Have a Blog: 5 Benefits of Blogging

1. Blog Content Fuels Your Site’s SEO

A blog is an easy and affordable way to drive traffic to the rest of your website. You’ve probably heard your SEO specialist say the old adage, “content is king”. This is true now more than ever. Google is looking at the content on your website to decide your site’s search ranking. Content determines where you will rank on Google, but it will also determine if you will be cited in AI. The AI models like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini are looking towards written content, like blogs, to answer user queries. If you want to be cited in this new age of search, you are going to need a blog to build up authority with these models.

Creating helpful and informative content on the topics surrounding your industry will help you attract customers. This is because Google and other search engines’ main goal is to provide users with the best possible user experience. This means serving users the best possible results to their queries, and search engines will reward the sites that help them achieve this goal. If you are able to help Google with answering questions like “how do I fix my leaky sink?” Google will, in turn, rank you well when people search “plumbers near me”. By answering the first question, Google views you as an authoritative and trustworthy source in your industry, so when people are looking for a plumber, you will be at the top of the rankings due to your authority.

It’s crucial that you are adding new content to your site and updating old content on a regular basis. SEO is a long-term investment that will probably never end, but the ROI is so much better than almost any other marketing strategy if it’s done right.

Write content that’s worth reading.

Create posts that prove you are an industry leader. Show off your expertise. Doing so will give your brand credibility and build trust among not just human readers, but also search engines like Google and the AI models.

Content that’s worth reading can include:

  • Reactions to industry-relevant changes, especially if they impact your clients. This is a great way to show how your company will adjust to these changes to help the client.
  • Case studies, especially if they’re populated with lots of easy-to-digest graphics and statistics that showcase how you help your clients.
  • Thought leadership pieces to situate yourself as a leader in your industry. These are the topics that will serve as trust signals for the search engines and position you as an authority figure.
  • Evergreen blog articles, or articles about content that is always going to be relevant to your industry, like a blog about how to fix a leaky pipe for a plumber. These blogs will be available for rankings and searches forever because they will always be relevant.
  • FAQ blogs are blogs that relate to common concerns and questions that your potential customers might have about issues in your industry. These blogs are great ways to showcase expertise and build trust with potential clients. These blogs also improve SEO ranking by allowing you to rank in “People Also Ask” SERPS and AI overviews.

2. A Blog Gives Your Company a Voice

Having a clear voice as a company is an integral part of your brand. Customers connect with and are loyal to brands that have a company voice that resonates with them. A blog on your website is the perfect way to show your customers who you are and what your business values. Having a blog that provides helpful information about your industry in a way that resonates with your target market is a great way to build your brand.

A blog also allows you a space to interact directly with your customers. A comment section below each blog will allow you to answer any questions a client might have, and give you a clear space to showcase your company’s voice in a real client scenario. This is a great way to show potential customers the tone and way you interact with customers. Replying to comments is also a great way to build up trust with your audience AND with search engines. When search engines see comments on a blog post, it signals to them that the post is engaging, boosting your rankings by showing the search engine that your content is engaging and that you are trustworthy.

Use your brand voice and messaging in a helpful and informative blog as a way to build credibility and authority among your target market. This is going to help you generate brand awareness, build authority, and cultivate trust with website visitors.

3. Blogging is a Great Way to Communicate with Potential Customers

If your blog is a helpful source of information regarding the issues in your industry, it will be a great and cost-effective way to reach potential customers. If you want to reach potential customers with your blog, you should focus on writing about your customers’ pain points and concerns. Address these issues in a helpful and authoritative way.

Helping potential customers will allow you to showcase your expertise and build up goodwill with them by meeting them where they are and helping them before they ever spend a dollar with you.

Blogging is a cost-effective way to promote your business to potential customers. Your blogs will attract new visitors to your site, and hopefully, after reading your blog, they will stay on the site and explore your different services or product pages. Running a helpful and informative blog is relatively cheap compared to other advertising tactics, and it is much more effective because potential customers are seeking your advice and expertise rather than you going to them randomly like a billboard or TV ad.

4. Blog Content can be Repurposed

Your blog content can be repurposed and converted to fit different channels and audiences. There are so many different types of content you can convert a single blog post into. You can take a blog and convert it into an infographic for your social media channels to meet customers there. You could convert a blog post into a script for an audio post, podcast, or video to reach customers through those channels.

Converting blog content into these different types of media that you can post on your social media channels will help grow your brand awareness. Users are much more likely to share these types of helpful resources connected to your brand than they are to share your product pages. By investing in a blog, you are investing in a resource for your customer base to access through all different types of channels.

5. Blogs are a Great Way to Build up Your Network

Blogging can grow your network in three ways: showcase your thought leadership, open you up to collaboration opportunities, and build brand awareness from shares. Blog posts are a great way to build up the resumes and portfolios of the individuals writing the blogs. It’s a great idea to have your employees, and even your CEO, write blogs about their views and opinions on the new and relevant topics in your industry. By writing and sharing these posts to their individual networks, your company will be viewed as a thought leader in your industry.

When your blog and company are seen as a thought leader, people will start coming out of the woodwork to collaborate with you. These collaboration opportunities could look like influencers or media outlets reaching out to you for quotes on issues in your industry, or industry blogs offering you the opportunity to guest blog for them. Both of these are great opportunities to grow your brand awareness across new audiences.

A great blog post is likely to generate buzz and a decent amount of shares. People sharing your content with other people is obviously a great way to generate brand awareness, but other websites sharing your content helps your site more than just generating brand awareness. Other websites talking about and linking to your blog provide your site with valuable backlinks, which are extremely helpful to your site’s SEO success. These backlinks will help boost your domain authority and improve your overall search rankings. Click here to learn more about the importance of backlinks.

The Benefits Far Outweigh the Cons

As you’ve just learned, there are so many benefits that your site and brand could be enjoying if you started a blog. Your blog material will become the backbone of your SEO, improving your rankings across the board. You will be able to showcase your company voice to potential and existing customers, showing them who you are, what you believe in, and how you treat customers. You will be able to reach potential customers, offering them a resource before they ever spend a dollar with you. Your blog will provide you with content that you can repurpose to reach different audiences across different channels. Your blog will allow you to grow your personal and your company’s network through shares and collaboration opportunities.

As you can see, the benefits of a blog greatly outweigh the time and effort it takes to strategize and create the content. So, whether you’re looking to start a new blog or revamp your old one, don’t neglect blogging platforms as valuable digital marketing channels; they just might be the backbone behind your digital marketing strategy.

Looking to improve your content strategy? Let Digital Strike work with you to develop a content strategy that will fuel your marketing efforts. Contact us today for a free consultation.

]]>
How Long Does SEO Take to Work? https://www.digitalstrike.com/how-long-does-seo-take-to-show-results/ Fri, 15 Aug 2025 12:00:38 +0000 https://digitalstriked.wpengine.com/?p=1165

How Long Does SEO Take to Work?

Almost every SEO client we have asks us

How long does SEO take for my website to be #1 in Google?”

And it’s a valid question! Sometimes it seems like websites come out of nowhere and are the top-ranking site on multiple keywords and are raking in the organic traffic. Our clients want to know how soon they can reap the benefits of SEO results, too. Unfortunately, the answer is a little complicated and will be different for every client.

Factors that go into the SEO Success Timeline

There are so many different variables to consider. A lot of things go into the “SEO success algorithm”, but taking the time to understand the factors associated with SEO success will help you craft a better SEO strategy and set better goals. While this success algorithm updates regularly, the factors more or less stay the same.  We’ll break these factors into two camps: Business Factors and SEO Factors.

Business Factors

People talking over SEO Strategies
Leadership Support

One of the biggest factors affecting a business’s SEO success is how much buy-in the leadership team has in SEO. Leadership buy-in will dictate the amount of support SEO work receives. If you are thinking about your business and finding that you don’t have buy-in from leadership, it is important to explain to them what SEO is and how your business will benefit from SEO investment.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Another important factor to SEO success is how you and your company are measuring that success. When determining how to measure success, it is important to set goals and define KPIs that align with your business. KPIs will look different for every business, and a local SEO strategy will look different than a national strategy.

For example, if this quarter you are trying to raise organic traffic to your site, a poor KPI would be impressions because this metric doesn’t equate to your goal of increased traffic. The right metric to track in this scenario would be clicks to measure how many people are clicking into your website. Some KPIs take longer to achieve than others. If you were looking to track leads, it would take longer to see success than if you were trying to get more impressions. It’s important to set goals and measure KPIs that equate to your overall business goals, just know that some metrics may have longer time frames to see success than others.

What is going on in your industry

An important factor for SEO is what is going on in your industry and with competitors. If you work in an industry where all of your competitors are super bought into SEO, it will take you longer to see SEO results. To see where your site ranks among competitors, you can use tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs.

Budget and Resources Available

Dollars won’t be able to buy you rankings in SEO. However, the budget, resources, and team at your disposal, when used correctly, will equate to better rankings. This factor goes along with the amount of leadership buy-in you have in SEO campaigns. The amount of financial investment you have in SEO will determine the quality and quantity of SEO tools you subscribe to, if you are able to hire an in-house SEO team, or if you are able to hire an SEO Agency. The budget and resources at your disposal will determine the quality of your SEO initiatives and the time it takes to see success.

SEO Factors

SEO
Crawlability of Your Website

The crawlability of your website is basically how easy it is for search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo to scan and understand your website. It is imperative that your site is free of errors or bugs so that search engines can crawl and index your site with ease. Indexing for your website basically means that the search engines are able to display your site in search results. This is clearly a huge factor to SEO success, because if your site isn’t indexing, you won’t see any impressions, clicks, traffic, or leads.

Backlink Profile

Backlinks are external sites that link to your site. Search engines view these links as other sites endorsing your site and your content. These links are signals to search engines that other people trust your content, so in turn, the search engines trust it too and rank it higher. During the link-building process, make sure that you are acquiring quality links, which will lead to quicker success.

Domain History

The more established a domain is, the better it will perform. This is because the search engines are more likely to trust older websites than new websites, because older domains have a built up history with the search engines. It is more important to pick a domain that aligns with your business than to pick one that is older just because of its age. While domain age is a determinate of success, it is a pretty minor one, so just make sure that your domain aligns with your business.

Keyword Competition

SEO success is dependent on how competitive the keywords you are going after are. When gathering your target keywords during the content creation process, it is important to make sure that the keywords have decent search volume but have a low enough competition score for you to rank well. Shorter keywords are usually harder to rank for than long-tail keywords. For example, if you were trying to rank for “restaurant”, you would have a harder time than if you were trying to rank for “restaurants with mac n cheese open late”. This is because every restaurant is trying to rank for “restaurant” but very few are trying to rank for “restaurants with mac n cheese open late”, making it easier to get better rankings quicker. It is important to uncover these longer-tail keywords during keyword research so you can start converting for these niches quicker.

Search Intent

It is important to make sure that you are catering your new content marketing strategy to align with search trends. When mapping out a content timeline, be sure to look at what users are searching for in your industry at that time. Aligning your content with user intent will help the search engines match your content to search queries. If you are able to stay on the cutting edge of what users are searching for, you will see SEO results sooner.

On-page Optimizations

If the content on your page doesn’t align with the best SEO practices, it will be harder to rank quickly. Consider adding title tags, meta descriptions, keyword integration, internal links, header tags, and schema to your site to optimize it for search engines. The website ranking hinges upon the user experience, so it is imperative that you make your site as user friendly as possible.

Core Web Vitals

User experience is at the core of a lot of Google’s ranking factors, so it is important that you website is running smoothly with no bugs or errors. A technical SEO audit is all about checking your website, making sure that your website is running smoothly and that page speed is high. Users hate slow websites, so in turn, Google hates slow websites. Doing regular website audits and resolving any technical issues on your site will improve user experience and lead to Google holding your site in higher regard. You can check out your core web vitals on Google Search Console, along with tips on how to fix any problems. To see better results quicker, it is imperative that you have a site that is focused on a good user experience.

The Hard Truth about SEO Time Tables

It takes time for your SEO specialist or agency to research your company and industry. It’ll take time to perform the necessary analyses and audits.

And then it’ll take even more time to produce high-quality content that your audience and Google want to see.

That’s only the beginning.

Google will take its sweet time recognizing your website and assigning it to the right authority. It’ll take time for Google to see that you’ve been making changes and then compare the quality of those changes to other websites in the same market.

It’s important for any business owner to know all of this before signing on with a digital marketing agency or hiring an SEO specialist.

Every agency has a ton of stories about clients who quit them after only a few months because they weren’t seeing the results they expected (even after being told that SEO takes time).

Okay, okay, but about how long does SEO take?

You’re never going to get a satisfactory answer to this question because the question assumes that there’s an end to your SEO efforts.

If you want to keep growing your business and your domain authority, you have to keep up the good work. SEO is an investment – like your 401k. Could you get rich faster if you went to Vegas and bet on black at the roulette wheel? Maybe. Could you try a “black hat SEO” method that will improve your rankings in just a few months? I guess. But if you try a get-rankings-quick method, you could end up losing all of the progress you made once Google’s algorithm catches up with you.

Instead, if you stay consistent with your SEO strategy, your efforts will compound over time, and then you’ll be able to enjoy the benefits of your hard work. If you want to see quality results that last, craft an SEO strategy that is centered around crafting high-quality content that users are looking for. Make sure that you build your content strategy around positioning your website as an authority figure using the EEAT guidelines. The quicker your content library is full of high-quality and authoritative content, the quicker you will see SEO rankings climb.

Still looking for a hard number to answer “how long does SEO take?”

I’d say give yourself and the SEO team at least a year before you start asking where the results are. The results you might see after six months of implementing a smart SEO strategy is nothing compared to the results you’ll see after a year. After two years. And so on. Time, commitment, and consistency will get you where you want to be. Stick with the SEO plan, even if you aren’t seeing noticeable results after several months.

SEO is a long-term marketing tactic. It isn’t going to generate sales quickly, but if you’re in it for the long haul, implementing a smart SEO strategy has one of the best ROIs for any business.

If you have any more questions about SEO, check out our Digital Marketing 101 Guide. One of the SEO experts at Digital Strike can help you form an SEO strategy that will generate leads and conversions for your business. Contact us today for a free SEO consultation and learn more about our SEO services.

 
]]>
PPC & SEO: Better Together https://www.digitalstrike.com/how-ppc-affects-organic-results/ Thu, 13 Mar 2025 12:00:52 +0000 https://digitalstriked.wpengine.com/?p=1108 A Digital Marketing Misconception

In digital marketing, one of the most common misunderstandings is that PPC campaigns directly influence organic search rankings. We hear it all the time: “If I spend more on Google Ads, will I rank better in organic listings?” The short answer? No. Google has a metaphorical wall between paid ads and organic search. Its algorithms are designed to surface the most relevant organic search results based on quality content, SEO strategy, and user experience—not based on your cost per click (CPC) or pay per click (PPC) budget.

That said, SEO and PPC do influence each other—just not in the way people often assume.

So… does PPC affect SEO? Not directly. Google’s mission is to deliver the best organic search results possible. Giving advertisers an SEO boost based on ad spend would compromise the integrity of search engine results pages (SERPs). While PPC ads don’t impact organic rankings directly, there are powerful, indirect ways these two strategies complement each other and can drive serious performance improvements when combined.

Let’s break it down.

When SEO and PPC Work Together

It’s not about “SEO vs. PPC.” It’s about how PPC campaigns and SEO campaigns can work in tandem to build a smarter, more effective long-term strategy. Using both unlocks a shared ecosystem of data, messaging, and insights that strengthens your overall online presence.

Here are just a few ways they complement each other:

1. Shared Keyword Strategy & PPC Data

Use specific keyword research data from PPC to inform your organic SEO content. By analyzing search terms, demographics, and click-through rates (CTR) from your paid search efforts, you can find out which target keywords convert best and build SEO content around them. Testing high-intent PPC keywords in paid ads first also helps validate them before building them into a long-term SEO strategy.

2. A/B Testing for Ad Copy & Landing Pages

Use your PPC efforts to test messaging, meta descriptions, and landing pages. The results from A/B testing can guide your SEO team to optimize organic landing pages, improve quality score, and increase engagement.

3. Increased Brand Visibility & CTR

When you appear in both paid ads and organic listings, your brand dominates more real estate on the SERP. This dual presence increases brand awareness and trust, and often lifts CTR for both your PPC ads and your organic search results.

4. More Reliable Metrics & Optimization Opportunities

PPC provides rapid feedback on relevant keyword performance, messaging, and user experience. Combine that with long-term data from SEO tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, and you get a full view of your digital marketing performance—from impressions and CPC to bounce rates and backlinks.

5. Better Return on Investment

Integrating PPC and SEO efforts gives you the flexibility to pursue both immediate results and long-term growth. Use PPC to drive quick conversion rates, while building up organic traffic and authority through content marketing, link building, and optimized web pages.

Why This Matters for Your Business

Whether you’re in ecommerce, real estate, or another competitive vertical, your marketing efforts are more powerful when SEO and PPC strategies are aligned. Using PPC ads to remarket to organic visitors, optimizing for high-quality search terms, and continuously analyzing performance metrics allows you to make better, faster decisions.

And let’s be honest—the more high-quality data you have, the better your results. When PPC and SEO work together, your brand is positioned to deliver a seamless user experience across paid and organic channels.

Final Thought: It’s Not Either/Or. It’s Yes, And…

Don’t fall into the trap of choosing between SEO and paid search. The real power comes from combining them with a cohesive, data-driven digital marketing strategy.

At Digital Strike, we’re experts in crafting search engine optimization and PPC strategies that not only coexist—they thrive together. Whether you’re optimizing content, testing new search ads, or building full-funnel PPC campaigns, we help you reach the right target audience, with the right messaging, at the right time.

Let’s make digital lightning strike for your brand. Contact us today for a free consultation.

Contact us today for a free consultation.

]]>
Push vs. Pull Marketing Content https://www.digitalstrike.com/push-vs-pull-marketing-content/ Tue, 20 Dec 2022 16:27:41 +0000 https://digitalstristg.wpenginepowered.com/?p=3541 Before you create that next piece of content—whether it’s a blog, social media ad, or email newsletter—stop and ask yourself, “Why am I writing this?”

When it comes down to it, there are two main types of marketing content you can write: “push” or “pull.” You may have never considered it this way, but think of it like this:

  • Pull content is primarily created for search engine optimization and is designed to pull your potential target audience to your website from organic search. This type of content, which usually sits on a website, is an important aspect of your inbound marketing strategy because rather than pushing a product, you can instead pull new customers to you and allow them to explore, evaluate, and decide what they want from you, themselves.
  • Push content is primarily created to push prospects towards your website using promotional marketing tactics; for instance, if you want to get a potential customer to read a piece of “pull” content sitting on your site, you may offer a teaser of the information in an email or social media post and then have a link to the website where interested users see it, click it, and then go to the full post to learn more.

To sum up, push content creates intent while pull content captures that intent. 

Why would anyone need to differentiate or think about whether content is “push” or “pull” prior to creating it? The reason is because the success of both types of content requires different marketing approaches and, if not considered upfront, there is an increased chance that it will not perform as desired.

Ask Yourself: Why Are You Writing This?

There are many reasons as to why you may be writing something, whether or not you have consciously or subconsciously put into words the reason. These digital marketing objectives include:

  • Enhancing brand awareness
  • Demonstrating thought leadership
  • Improving search results for a keyword
  • Encouraging downloads from a site
  • Providing high-end technical information on a product
  • Increasing engagement levels with your audience
  • Driving high-quality traffic to a webpage

Whatever the goal may be, it should be clarified to begin with in order to decide which content—either push or pull—is then required to meet the objectives. You choices of content are below:

Examples of Push Marketing

  1. Social media advertising – Paid promotion to support your content on a social network.
  2. Direct marketingPay-per-click (PPC) advertisements on search engines.
  3. Promotional emails/newslettersEmail marketing to push your latest promotions or to push people to read your content on your website.
  4. Email advertisingThe placement of your promotional strategy/content on other people’s emails
  5. Editorial advertising – Offline and digital content on television, newspaper, radio, etc.
  6. Signage – Promotional displays to attract prospects, such as signs, flyers, billboards, point-of-sale displays, etc.
  7. Product endorsement. Displayed product usage by a celebrity, high-profile expert, distributor, or influencer.
  8. Public relations – Press releases, press mentions, or guest-contributed articles that are distributed either by a PR company or on a news website.
  9. BacklinksContent on another website that links to your website using an anchor text.
  10. Referral marketing – Comes from trusted sources in a variety of formats such as ratings, reviews, social media, email, or word-of-mouth.

Examples of Pull Marketing

  1. Landing pageSEO-optimized content designed to pull your potential target audience to your website from organic search.
  2. Blog – Also designed to pull people to your site from organic search, a blog is easily-digestible content on a variety of topics that can be directly—or sometimes indirectly— related to your product or service.
  3. Social media marketingThis content aims to engage visitors providing them with not just sales promotional content but valuable information.
  4. Email content – Valuable and often promotion-free content in which the reader has signed up for an email list.
  5. Whitepapers – Long-form, informational document to promote a product or service that sits on a website but can often be an incentive to download.
  6. Case studies – Persuasive content that uses real-world examples to demonstrate the value of your product, service, or brand.
  7. Video content – Any type of video that offers valuable information related to your product, service, or brand.

Which Should You Choose?

Differences between the two that may help you decide…

The differences between push and pull marketing plans primarily revolve around your relationship to the customer base that you are targeting and the sales goals you are trying to reach. Here are some examples of when one should be used over the other.

  • Goal:
    • Push marketing focuses on short-term sales.
    • Pull marketing builds a target audience over time that’s, in many cases, from scratch.  
  • Demand:
    • Push marketing works with the products that people are already familiar with or have an established interest.
    • Pull marketing can help start demand for a new product where there was little to none to begin with, like if you’re selling something people may have never seen or heard of before.
  • Reputation of the brand
    • Push marketing helps new brands generate buzz in order to get a startup off the ground.
    • Pull marketing works better for more established companies that have customers with brand loyalty.
  • Product type:
    • Push marketing products are already familiar to audiences and usually require little to no researching or comparison shopping. 
    • Pull marketing products may be one-of-a-kind in some ways and therefore may require additional information to learn more.
  • Cost
    • Push marketing may be more expensive, especially if you go the route of using paid advertisements.
    • Pull marketing costs less since so much of it relies on organic search to reach a target market for a particular product.

Questions to Ask When Starting Push Content

When you are considering the forms of push marketing strategies, you want to think about these things first:

  • What is the goal of this content?
    • Are you trying to get an announcement out? Are you trying to help build company culture? Are you sharing something fun you think your target audience may be interested in? The goal should be clearly defined before you start this type of outbound marketing.
  • Where will you be sharing this content?
    • Is it a press release that will be shared across a network of news websites? Is it going to be used in a newsletter? Will it be shared on your brand’s social media marketing channels like Linkedin, Facebook, etc.? Be sure to list all of the areas in which you can promote a piece.

Questions to Ask When Starting Pull Content

When you are considering pull marketing strategies, you want to think about these things first:

  • What is the target keyword phrase?
    • This is the single most important step, without clear direction as to what you are targeting then you should not continue.
  • Is there actual search interest in that keyword phrase?
    • Did you research to see if people are searching on the target keyword phrase? If not, then you are creating content that may rank in a top position but will never really drive any new organic search traffic to the website.
  • Are you using the optimal/searched version of the keyword phrase?
    • What is the specific vernacular of your target audience? Are you using the optimal version of a keyword phrase? This can make a tremendous difference in the ability of the content to rank well.
  • Is there already relevant content on the website for that keyword phrase?
    • Are you cannibalizing current content that may be targeting and/or already ranking for the target keyword phrase? Doing this creates confusion with the search engines and ultimately decreases your chances of getting any of the content to index and rank well.

The Key to Writing Successful Content

Overall, implementing both types of marketing campaigns may be necessary in order to achieve your business objectives and make the most of your marketing efforts. After all, with content being generated and distributed from a wider range of online sources, it will have a stronger support system and will therefore be more effective.

If done well, your content marketing strategy will use pull marketing and push marketing in order to gain better brand awareness, increased customer engagement, improved user experience, and overall higher-quality leads.

Want Help? Get in Touch With Digital Strike

Digital Strike takes a holistic approach to all types of content. We’ll develop a customized content strategy for you that uses a good mix of both push and pull tactics to address any and every stage of the buyer’s journey. 

Useful, helpful content gives prospects the nudge they need to advance researchers → to leads → to paying customers.

….and we can help give them that nudge! Get in touch with Digital Strike now

]]>
Google’s Helpful Content Update, Explained in 2 Parts https://www.digitalstrike.com/googles-helpful-content-update-explained-in-2-parts/ Thu, 08 Sep 2022 19:00:10 +0000 https://digitalstristg.wpenginepowered.com/?p=3448 Another day, another Google update.

The latest core update to the Google algorithm for SERP is here. Curious as to what that means for you and your business? Check out our in-depth review of the new helpful content update, how it affects you, and how we’re helping our clients thrive during this time.

Part 1 – The Algorithm Update

Google’s latest helpful content update prioritizes original content that connects searchers to relevant and accurate information, creating an overall satisfying experience to users.

Specific Algorithm Changes

Google’s search algorithm will now include a helpful content ranking signal, specifically a site-wide signal that Google weighs in among other classifiers to better rank a web page or site. This new signal relates to how helpful—or not—content is to a user’s specific search intent (whether someone is looking to learn something, make a purchase, etc.). The primary goal of this update is to encourage content creators to put people first and machines second.

Currently, this update only applies to English-language searches, although Google plans to roll out this update to other languages in the future.

Part 2 – Quality Content Boogaloo

Let’s dig into what putting people first really looks like when writing content (and beyond).

What Counts as “Helpful Content”?

Let’s start by identifying what helpful content is not.

Unhelpful content, according to this new update, prioritizes anything other than what human readers want. It can include low-quality content, or content that is inaccurate, duplicated, poorly written, doesn’t answer a query, and/or unnecessarily long, written for the purpose of hitting an arbitrary word count instead of staying concise and on topic. It can also include content that is unoriginal, or content that merely summarizes what someone else has said and doesn’t add anything new or of value to a topic.

The saying “one bad apple ruins the bushel” applies to Google’s latest content update. Namely, low-quality content can negatively impact your entire web site’s ranking in Google search results. Having even a few low-quality web pages can tank your entire site’s domain authority and individual web pagesSERP rankings.

Irrelevant content doesn’t offer readers the satisfying experience they crave. To get the SERP results you want and give readers what they are hungry for, offer up a smorgasbord of good, helpful content for your readers to E A T up.

E A T Helpful Content

Remembering to E A T (Expertise Authority Trustworthiness) can help you produce content users actually want to consume.

  • Expertise – Write about what you know—not just what you think will rank well—and cite your sources. (Tip – Cite only high-quality, relevant sources.)
  • Authority Establish yourself as an authority by sticking to what you know, staying up to date on industry trends, and producing original content. (Tip – High-quality backlinks signal to Google and readers that you are an industry expert.)
  • Trustworthiness – Consistently produce reliable, accurate, relevant original content, and people will come to accept that your brand is trustworthy. (Tip – Cut unhelpful, poor-quality content from your site.)

Write for People

Avoid a site-wide catastrophe by writing less for robots and more for human searchers (a novel concept, we know). This type of content is what Google refers to as “people-first content,” or content that is written foremost with human readers in mind, not search engine optimization and search engine traffic. Prioritizing people-first content doesn’t mean you should abandon SEO best practices entirely; it simply means that these practices take a backseat to real human users.

Combining a people-first approach with a comprehensive SEO strategy can offer top-notch user experiences that will leave people coming back to your site for more. And trust us—Google will take notice of that and reward you for it!

People First, Always

Today’s tech standards put sci-fi of the past to shame. Some of the newest gizmos to grace the digital marketing world include content-writing software. While this software is quick and cheap, it removes something critical from the writing process: the human element.

And that human element is something that can absolutely make or break a new site or web page with the new helpful content update.

Let’s put it another way. Even with recent strides in machine-learning tech, current AI is nowhere near what it needs to be to create the high-quality content that readers (and Google) will love. The best way to create people-first content? By hiring real people!

But we don’t think that being people first ends with content.

We pride ourselves on our people-first approach at Digital Strike – Targeted Marketing. To us, being people first means:

In today’s digital world, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s important and drown in a sea of data. We stay afloat by putting people first, always.

Update: Google has launched another Google Helpful Content Update in 2023 we did a full breakdown on it here.

]]>
Understanding User Intent (Without a Psychology Degree) https://www.digitalstrike.com/understanding-user-intent-without-a-psychology-degree/ Thu, 25 Aug 2022 15:45:32 +0000 https://digitalstristg.wpenginepowered.com/?p=3391 Life is often one big mystery, but figuring out what customers and search users are really looking for doesn’t have to be mysterious at all. And once you understand user intent, you can maximize your content marketing strategies and e-commerce campaigns as well as speak to your target audiences better than ever before.

Sounds pretty good, right?

Right!

Let’s break it down.

What is User Intent?

Also known as:

  • Search intent
  • Buyer intent
  • Query intent

As a digital marketer, it is crucial to guess the intent behind a consumer’s actions as they go through the buyer’s journey. This way, you can customize your ads, landing pages, websites, email and social media campaigns, and more to be more relevant to a specific user search query. And the more relevant your copy and campaigns are to a specific search intent, the more likely you are to see the click-throughs and conversions you want.

In other words, you want to understand why someone is searching for something online. Is the user looking for a new iPad (i.e., to buy something)? Is the person looking up information about the Great Emu War (i.e., to gather information)? Knowing the answer to these questions can guide how you shape yourself as an authority to search users: you have all the answers and solutions they need—all they need to do is click on your ads and content!

(It’s also critical to match intent since it will play a key role in Google’s search algorithm for its Helpful Content update.)

5 Types of User Intent

First things first: there are different types of search intent! Top digital marketers know how to craft different campaigns and copy that are relevant to each type of intent.

The five main types of search intent are as follows:

1. Informational Intent

Informational queries are by searchers who want information. Informational search query examples include “What is NATO?” and “Why are Apple iPhones so good?” Informational searches are often the first step someone takes in the buyer’s journey; it is the stage when someone is first beginning to understand a subject or realize that there is a problem (that you can ultimately solve by marketing your services or products).

  • Examples – “Queen Elizabeth net worth.” “Why are Samsung Galaxies so good?”
  • Stage in the buyer’s journey – Beginning.
  • Customer awareness – Customers are just now becoming aware of issues and ideas.
  • Tip – As users gain awareness of a certain issue (e.g., they don’t have a quality cell phone), make sure to establish yourself as an authority on the issue. That way, the users will trust your information and come back to your website at a later time (and hopefully become a customer or brand advocate).

2. Commercial Intent

Commercial search queries are completed by people looking for the best products and brands. For example, commercial queries can be something like “best Apple iPads.” They are the next step users take along the buyer’s journey after collecting information and want to explore potential solutions, services and products. However, people at this stage are not quite ready to fully commit to a purchase.

  • Examples – “Best Samsung Galaxy cell phones.” “What are the best streaming services?”
  • Stage in the buyer’s journey – Middle.
  • Customer awareness – User becomes aware of a product, service, brand, or solution.
  • Tip – At this stage, users are now realizing that they need a solution to some problem (e.g., they need a cell phone they can trust). Be sure to emphasize in either your ad copy or web page that your product or service is the solution to the users’ woes (e.g., writing a web page that highlights your business, service, or product’s benefits and ease of use to potential customers).

3. Transactional Intent

People complete transactional queries when they are looking to complete a purchase. One example of a transactional search query is “Apple iPhones for sale.” At this stage in the buyer’s journey, someone is ready to complete a purchase.

  • Examples – “Samsung Galaxy for sale.” “Buy a life-size cutout of Bernie Sanders.”
  • Stage in the buyer’s journey – End.
  • Customer awareness – Customer is now aware of and committed to a product, brand, service, or solution.
  • Tip – Make a strong call-to-action (CTA) in both your ads (e.g., Get 50% off your next Samsung Galaxy!) and your product pages/landing pages (e.g., Feel the Bern with this Life-Size Senator Sanders Cutout!), so potential customers are encouraged to become actual customers.

4. Navigational Intent

People complete navigational queries when they want to go to certain web pages or specific websites. Simply typing in “Reddit login” or the like is an example of a navigational search query.

  • Examples – “Tumblr login.” “Etsy.”
  • Customer awareness – People are aware of a brand, product, service, or solution.
  • Tip – Make sure to provide a quality user experience to potential customers by providing them with high-quality content, easy-to-use interfaces, and the like. Taking advantage of SERP features like featured snippets can also help you perform better on search engine results pages (SERPs) by helping users (and search algorithms) better understand what your content is about.

5. Local Search Intent

People complete local search intent queries when they want to find a specific product or service near their physical location, such as “Where can I find a McDonald’s near me?”

Do Your Campaigns Match Intent?

The following metrics can help you discover if your organic content strategy, SEO strategy, or paid campaigns are relevant to certain queries—and how you can maximize your efforts for the right user intent.

Bounce Rate

Definition Bounce rate refers to how many people (expressed as a %) leave your website without completing any action. The higher this rate, the higher the odds are that you are not optimizing your page for that user’s intent.

Solution to High Bounce Rates – Look at other metrics to see what, exactly, about your campaign and landing page is not aligning with query intent. Alternatively, your website could be offering a poor user experience due to any number of issues (like slow loading times), which leads to users leaving your page quickly. In this case, the solution is simple: improve your site’s user experience to reduce bouncing.

Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Position

Definition SERP position is what position a page holds on a given search platform’s results page, or the page that appears after someone completes a search query. The higher your SERP position, the better optimized your page is for a certain search term (and the more likely you are to get better click-through rates[link to CTR blog when published], organic traffic, and conversions).

Solution to Poor SERP Positions – A low SERP position indicates that you need to change your SEO strategy, which can take many different shapes: conducting keyword research for terms with better search volume, optimizing current pages for your chosen keyword, crafting more trustworthy content, creating a better user experience for site visitors, and more.

Conversion Rate

DefinitionConversion refers to how many people on your page complete a desired task, such as completing a purchase. Conversion rate refers to how many conversions you have divided by the total number of visitors to your page. Low conversion rates can indicate that there is a mismatch between search intent and the copy/experience you are providing users.

Solution to Low Conversion Rates – Say, for example, you are running a PPC campaign with the intent to sell life-size Bernie Sanders cardboard cutouts. Your landing page is designed to get users to buy this particular masterpiece. You are optimizing the page for the key term “Bernie Sanders.” You notice, however, that you are not getting the conversions you want.

A low conversion rate tells you that your target keyword/phrase, “Bernie Sanders,” is not aligning with what you want your page to accomplish (sell cutouts). In other words, you assumed incorrectly that people searching for this term were looking to buy this cardboard king, or that they had transactional intent. Your conversion rate suggests that the keyword intent of this term was not transactional, but likely informational instead.

One solution could be to change your target keyword to something that you believe is coming from users with transactional intent, such as “Bernie Sanders merch.”

Final Thoughts

People are complicated, which means understanding user intent can be a tricky business. We’ve been in this business for years, which means we have experience with guessing intent and maximizing marketing efforts for different kinds of intent. Need some assistance decoding what people are really after online (and how you can use that to your advantage)? Give us a call—we’d love to help your campaigns thrive.

]]>
What Makes Content Authoritative? 5 Ways to Rank Well https://www.digitalstrike.com/what-makes-content-authoritative-5-ways-to-rank-well/ Wed, 19 Jan 2022 22:05:36 +0000 https://digitalstristg.wpenginepowered.com/?p=3209 You want your site to rank well on any given search engine results page (SERP). One of the best ways to achieve that? Have incredible, authoritative content. But just what makes content “authoritative” anyway?

Leave the guesswork out of SERP positions. Learn what authoritative content means and how you can improve any page’s authority through a thorough content marketing plan.

5 Ways to Make Authoritative Content

Several factors mesh together to make a piece of content authoritative in the eyes of Google and other search engines. What typically matter most, however, are:

  • Relevancy
  • Readability
  • Speed
  • Trustworthiness
  • Links

Improvements to any of the factors mentioned above may help push your page in SERP position.

1. Relevancy

When you ask questions online, which pages do you go to for answers? The ones that have the answers you need right away, or the ones that bury the answers under mountains of irrelevant content? We’re going to guess you chose the former, and that’s the type of content that search engines prioritize.

After all, users want results that answer their questions quickly, correctly, and in an easy-to-understand manner. These components help make content authoritative in the eyes of Google and other search engines.

To make your page appear higher in SERPs for your chosen keyword, you need to do two things:

  1. Take the time to thoroughly research a topic.
  2. See what it is that users want to know.

For example, if people are searching for “cat toys,” what does your target audience want to know? Where to buy toys, which ones are safe, or what toys to get for kittens? All of the above? Who is asking these questions?

Take the time to decide who your audience is and what their questions are. This process will help you know how to best organize and optimize your content for your chosen audience and keywords. It can also help you better target your audience if you are running paid search campaigns on your content.

TF-IDF

Platforms like Google know if your page is relevant to someone’s query by using term frequency-inverse document frequency, or TF-IDF. TF-IDF shows what words or phrases are of central importance to your page. In other words, pages that contain your target keyword and related phrases at a certain frequency are more likely to have higher SERP positions for that target keyword.

It’s important to understand that this does not mean that you should shove your keyword and similar (but awkwardly worded) phrases into your document, a technique known as keyword stuffing. Google and other search engines will actually penalize you for this practice.

A better approach is to make sure your document contains your target keyword and relevant phrases in ways that feel natural.

2. Readability

People don’t just want relevant information. They want well-written content that is grammatically correct, organized, and easy to read. That means you need to pay attention to the details when crafting your page.

For starters, don’t ignore grammar, spelling, and punctuation. In fact, one Website Planet study found that pages riddled with typos have an 85% higher bounce rate (rate at which people leave the page) than pages without errors. In the study, this bounce rate translated to users spending 8% less time on a typo-filled page compared to clean pages.

You also need to keep everything organized. Make sure that your page uses proper headings and content is ordered in a sensible way. That helps readers find the information they need easily and can even help them find related content, all of which may give them a better page experience. In fact, well-organized content that allows users to easily jump between relevant pages on your site may increase the total time they spend on your site (which is great news for you).

Finally, write to your audience’s level. There are fortunately plenty of affordable tools, such as Readable, that rate your content’s readability using tests like the Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid readability tests. Adjust how complicated your writing is based on these results.

For example, your page is not going to be relevant to your target audience if they are 8th-grade students and the content is written at a postgraduate level. In these cases, there’s some truth to the old saying that you shouldn’t use a $5 word when a 50-cent one will do. In addition to adjusting the words you use, you can also use active voice more often and simplify sentence structure to adjust readability.

3. Speed

Google loves pages that load quickly. Google’s Core Web Vitals update means that your page’s SERP ranking takes a hit if it loads slowly.

Users like swift load times, too. In fact, research shows that users are likely to leave your page within seconds if it does not load properly. That means you want everything on your page optimized to load as soon as possible so that you can reduce bounce rates.

4. Trustworthiness

If you’re looking for medical information online, are you more likely to trust an article from Mayo Clinic or someone unknown, uncredentialed person’s blog?

Your site’s overall trustworthiness can help establish it as an authority in the industry. There are plenty of ways to increase the credibility of your site, including:

  • Consistently host factually accurate content, so users know they can trust all of your content.
  • Provide full bios (with pictures!) for the site’s team, such as editors. These bios show your users that your site’s content is produced by real people with credentials, not a bot.
  • Create a fully fleshed-out About Us page with a real-world location for your company. People want to know that your company is legitimate and that it has a mission relevant to the site’s content.

Links also play a key role in establishing site and page trustworthiness, both for search engines and users.

5. Links

Links are the lifeblood of your site; you can’t have a healthy page without them. There are two primary kinds of links, internal and external, and they are both important for improving your content’s authority.

Internal Links

Internal links are links between pages within your site. These links should use relevant anchor texts (the words you hyperlink) and connect to pages with similar or related content. When used properly, internal links help Google better understand what a page’s content is all about. This knowledge may mean that Google can better determine if your content is relevant to search queries.

External Links

External links are links between sites. Ideally, your content has links to other reputable sites (outgoing or outbound links) and links to it from other sites (inbound links or backlinks).

Outbound links to reputable sites can increase your content’s authority by showing that you have done your research.

For example, say you are writing a page about the seasonal flu. Users want to know that you know what you are talking about; citing your sources is one of the best ways to achieve that trust. That means using the World Health Organization or CDC as references can lend trustworthiness and authority to your content.

Just remember that you want outbound links to open in a new page, as that can reduce bounce rates from your own site and increase users’ total time spent on your page.

Just as you link to other sites, so too can other sites link back to your site. These backlinks lend an incredible amount of authority to both your website and the specific content the other site is linking to. If you establish yourself as a reliable resource in your industry, backlinks should come to your content naturally.

And you need these backlinks to come organically. Buying backlinks is frowned upon by Google and other major search engines. If search engines discover that you are buying backlinks, it can mean that your site is severely punished.

WANT AUTHORITATIVE CONTENT? CONTACT THE EXPERTS

At the end of the day, content’s authority primarily comes from it being relevant and easy to read; it should be designed to answer a user’s search query in a straightforward, easily digestible manner. Optimizing the page, links, and more all help the page “score better” on search platforms, but all the optimization in the world cannot make up for poorly written content.

The solution? Don’t skimp out on the actual writing process. Learn your target audience and research your topic thoroughly. Craft content that is useful to them, is full of quality links, and ultimately provides them with a quality experience. Not only will your users be grateful, but, over time, search engines will reward your page by pushing it up their SERP rankings.

If you want specific guidance on how to improve your page’s SERP position, contact us here at Digital Strike. We can run a full analysis of your site and content’s health and help you get started on improving your content’s authority.

]]>
Content Migration Grows Site Traffic By 211% https://www.digitalstrike.com/content-migration-strategy/ Thu, 05 Dec 2019 22:46:33 +0000 http://dry-number.flywheelsites.com/?p=2045 At Digital Strike, we often partner with companies that express a number of needs. Sometimes, those needs can only be fulfilled by content — but not by necessarily writing it.

Sometimes, the blending of content — or the outright removal of it — is the best solution.

And it can have glorious benefits.

Google BERT Update Changes the Content Game (Again)

To Google, content is still king. But the manner in which you acknowledge your highness is evolving. Google’s recent BERT update, which stresses the need to publish content that uses natural language to more effectively speak to a site visitor’s intent, has changed the game for many online publishers. Prior to this update, the concern was ridding your site of content Google may deem too thin — or, of little value.

Need help with your content strategy? We can help.

No longer do you need — or should you — write as much quality content as possible on every single keyword that pertains to your business, product, or service.

Simply put, it’s not necessary.

Better to have a trimmer and more efficient site that doles out valuable information in fewer pages than to fatten things up with a series of thin pages that cover similar topics.

Old Content Strategy Meets Challenges

Based in Hermann, Mo., Fundraising Brick assists companies and non-profit organizations with the execution of fundraising campaigns by providing bricks and tiles that are engraved with custom messaging to create memorials, walkways, walls, etc.

Two years ago, they approached us with a problem.

Despite their best efforts to fill each page of the site with very topical, high-quality content, performance still lagged. Organic rankings were relegated to the depths of Google and, as a result, a severe lack of leads translated into sluggish sales.

They appeared to be doing everything right, but something was off.

Old School Meets New School

Google has ordered that publishers focus on quality content, and Fundraising Brick was obeying.

So, what was wrong?

Because a mass amount of content had been produced to satiate Google’s demands, the FB site began to sag under the pressure of its own weight, bloated with a stack of pages that made it to the light day, but just sat there, collecting dust from non-visits.

We needed to eliminate that bloat — or at least reduce it through consolidation — so that the site could be ushered into a new era, one that would feature a more streamlined structure.

Need help with your content strategy? We can help.

The solution was a content migration.

In early 2018, we discussed the idea of this migration with FB and expressed the many benefits that could follow. The idea was, we did not want to disparage the content that had already been written; we simply wanted to stress the importance of blending like content into a single page to create more a more logical, valuable, and impactful experience for both Google and the users of the site.

We started by funneling similar pages into categorized silos and suggested the client move content from the weaker pages of each silo to the strongest, based on multiple factors, including number of inbound links, organic ranking, etc.

Each of the pages that had content removed was then 301 redirected to its corresponding parent page to transfer on any existing authority.

As a result of the migration, FB was able to not only condense a number of pages to make the site structure more efficient, but the company also retained a healthy amount of the content it had worked so hard to create years prior.

And, as you might guess, this has paid off handsomely in terms of both traffic and sales.

What The?

Not unlike many of our clients, FB needed results at a minimal cost. We were able to meet those needs with a content migration that continues to show dividends years later.

Here are the some of the results of the migration:

  • More than 211% increase in organic monthly traffic
  • Record-high number of leads (160) during October 2019 – during their slow season
  • Number of keywords ranked in top three positions of Google increased by 14 times

No content improvements will ever produce immediate results, especially one on the scale of a sitewide migration, but the long-term payoff can be considerable.

Here’s visual evidence of the benefit FB has experienced since the migration got underway in January of 2018.

content-migration-fundraising-brick-2

After a record month in October of 2019, FB has reported that the leads have continued to pour in. We have also begun to revamp the content that was retained in the migration to better meet Google’s post-BERT standards, which has only increased organic rankings and resulted in more leads.

Conclusion

If you, like FB, followed Google’s early content rules by producing scores of high-quality verbiage for your site, you may very well benefit from a migration.

It’s a minimally invasive, potentially very cost-effective way of removing some of the unintended content bloat of your site, and the rewards can be a more enriching visitor experience.

And, as we see, this can result in improved rankings in Google and a chance at more leads and increased sales.

]]>
Content + Links: Why You Need Both to Succeed Digitally https://www.digitalstrike.com/seo-success/ Sat, 30 Nov 2019 21:36:31 +0000 http://dry-number.flywheelsites.com/?p=2039 To succeed in today’s digital world, your site needs to contain valuable content and earn quality inbound links.

The most important word in that sentence is “and.” Performing well online is not a matter of publishing quality content or earning quality backlinks. One cannot thrive — or even live — without the other.

The two go hand-in-hand.

Content that provides its readers with value is excellent, but it’s not as excellent as it could be if no one finds it within Google’s search results. Conversely, achieving high rankings on the back of a few authoritative backlinks is quite the feat, but it will be all for naught if the content of your site isn’t effective enough to convert the traffic.

Even still, to what extent is the balance of valuable content and quality inbound links necessary for the online success of your business?

To single out the importance of another word, it’s very necessary.

 A Quick History Lesson of Content + Links 

For as long as Google has been around, the content on a site and the number of links inbound to that site have been the two main criteria in determining where it will rank.

The only difference between then and now is the degree of difficulty in getting the two to work in harmony. There was once a time when all of this SEO stuff wasn’t so hard.

From its infancy to not all that long ago, Google consistently struggled to keep up with the evolving black-hat tactics of website owners, webmasters, illegitimate (and some legitimate, unfortunately) search engine optimization professionals, and really anyone with enough technical know-how and the minimal time commitment to create spam.

A little keyword-stuffing here. A little link-farming there. Mix in some patience, and viola, first-page rankings!

And often, as a result, what Google presented end-users for a wide-ranging variety of searches was only mediocre at best and, at worst, downright atrocious.

Though the struggle still remains in some cases, Google has become more efficient in leveraging its resources to clean things up.

Over the past decade-plus, the search engine leader has stiffened considerably in its crusade against spam to produce a better experience for all, rolling out a constant stream of significant, game-changing algorithms designed to hold quality above quantity — and make examples of those who continue to try to game the system and take the easy way out.

At one point, Google unveiled in ultimate transparency its spam-scrubbing efforts, showing real-live examples of sites that had met the qualifications for removal from its search index.

These advances have made it tougher for those who choose not to put in the work to circumvent quality standards, but they have also upped the expectations for the rest of the field.

Nowadays, you either agree to go all-in with a comprehensive, holistic online approach or you surrender to the inevitable.

The Delicate Balance of Content + Links

Achieving this balance is not for the faint of heart.

It requires planning, effort, and, perhaps above all, patience. The shortcuts to SEO success that once existed have been demolished.

When planning your strategy, it’s important to shut out the noise that implies one factor should be assessed more weight than the other. As we’ve written in this space before, links are still the number one factor in achieving high rankings in Google, but we’ve also covered how auditing your site’s content to align with Google’s standards can spur more audience engagement, which validates those high rankings and leads to sustained success through increased conversions, sales, and revenue.

Treat your content and linking efforts equally, and you’ll be successful. But don’t take us for our work, even though we think we’re pretty trustworthy!

Let’s look at some real-world examples of how strongly quality content and authoritative links need one another.

The Content-Only Approach

The recent release of Google’s BERT update may forever change the manner in which publishers approach content to address search intent, but it does not diminish the role that links will play in giving this new-wave content a platform on the first page SERPs.

No matter how good your content is, you still need links to tell Google that your site is authoritative enough to garner robust rankings.

Take the curious case of Upper Ranks’ David Farkas, whose efforts to quantify the ongoing importance of links we detailed not long ago.

Over the course of 18 months, Farkas conducted an experiment that he hoped would validate this concept. What he found was astounding.

Ready to get serious about content marketing?

Using a brand-new site, Farkas spent six months littering it with nearly 30 pieces of high-quality content, only to be disappointed when the site generated virtually no traffic within the following six months.

It was clear that the site was not going to make it on the merit of its content alone. It needed inbound links, and badly. Farkas knew it, but even he could not have predicted the eventual impact of what was to come.

The last six-month segment of Farkas’ experiment was used to execute an ambitious link-building outreach campaign, in which he was ultimately able to secure 100 inbound links to his site, including several from .gov and .edu domains, both very high in authority.

By the time the experiment had concluded, the site ranked within the first five positions of Google for nearly 1,200 keywords and more than 9,600 terms overall.

Case settled.

The Links-Only Approach

We often work with companies who, in addition to wanting to improve existing efforts, have a need to fill gaps within their SEM strategy. Sometimes, that gap is paid search or website design, and others it’s an end of the content/links spectrum that has gone unaddressed.

A client we currently work with today came to us with a gap that could only be filled by content.

The two years prior to the partnership, this company had focused solely on enhancing the authority of the website by building referring domains as a way to increase the number of inbound links. This approach generated traffic, but the results quickly stagnated and stayed that way.

In other words, it wasn’t altogether unsuccessful, but the focus excluded a mandatory part of the equation. Like Farkas, our client realized the need to marry the concepts of content and links, and we were happy to help forge the union.

Content creation efforts started in earnest this past July. Within a month, results started to become apparent, as site traffic grew by more than 37% thanks to the high-quality content joining forces with what was already a considerable amount of domain authority.

And that was just the beginning.

Increases in revenue began to assume the same upward curve as site traffic.

By the end of October, the client had reported an additional 26,000 new starts to their process, resulting in more than $2.2 million in additional revenue.

What’s your link-building strategy look like?

Make no mistake, though: These content efforts involved a little more than simply dotting a page with a few related keywords.

The key was blending various important industry-related terms with simple language that spoke directly to the reader — both acknowledging questions and problems he or she had and faced and then layering in answers and solutions to tie it all together.

The icing on the cake was sprinkling in citations of supporting facts, such as survey results, government studies, research papers, etc.

In Google’s eyes, the valuable content on this site now validated the authoritative inbound links that had been created prior, turning the light green for a move up in the rankings.

The modern key to unlocking the power of content extends beyond keyword density. You want to write topically, of course, but if Google is going to value your content, it has to be able to confirm that your content is first providing value to those who are reading it.

And this means that what you write has to accomplish three things:

  • Convey Expertise
  • Portray Authority
  • Instill Trust

This is what Google calls its E-A-T rating, only it’s not really a scoring system that’s used to rate content.

It’s more or less a model used to help guide employees at Google in manually reviewing content on the Web to determine its value.

If your content satisfies the three requirements of this E-A-T model, Google will be more inclined to rank it prominently in search results, just as it did with the content that was created for our client.

Conclusion

Today, if you want to succeed online, you have to play by Google’s rules: produce valuable content on your site that attracts quality inbound links.

Executing this formula is challenging, but that’s a good thing. Nothing worth doing right is easy.

This challenge presents new and existing opportunities. Use it to improve your content sitewide and enhance your customer experience with increased levels of expertise, authority, and trust. Better experiences lead to more inbound links, which means higher rankings in Google.

And this partnership of content and links, when equal respect is given to each, will result in a higher rate of engagement, more conversions, and increased revenue for your business.

 

]]>
The Most Important Email Regulations You Should Know About https://www.digitalstrike.com/email-regulations/ Thu, 06 Dec 2018 16:36:23 +0000 http://dry-number.flywheelsites.com/?p=1792 Sometimes it seems like the Internet is the Wild Wild West, and we’re all mysterious sharpshooters operating outside the law just trying to survive in this tougher world.

Wild West
You don’t look like you’re from around these here parts. Gif credit

But in reality, email marketers have to operate inside international email regulations when we send out our newsletters and drip campaigns. Some, like CAN-SPAM, have been around so long that email marketers probably don’t even think about it anymore — they just know how to follow it. But newer ones like CASL and GDPR might require further studying before you know them like the back of your hand.

You might think that email regulations will make an email marketer’s life more difficult. However, email marketing only works if your audience actually wants to hear from you. Email regulations do their best to keep everyone’s information safe and inboxes unclogged.

Email marketing can return an impressive ROI, but you don’t want to get sued or blacklisted because you didn’t know about a new law. Let’s take a look at the most critical email regulations you should know about.

1. CAN-SPAM

Unfortunately for a lot of people, CAN-SPAM doesn’t mean that you’re allowed to spam everyone. In 2003, the US Congress passed CAN-SPAM, which is the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act.

If you’re using an email service provider like Mailchimp or Constant Contact, then there are systems put in place that make it difficult to violate CAN-SPAM.

The main requirements are:

Don’t use false or misleading header information

Your “from,” “to,” “reply-to,” and routing information must be accurate and clearly identify who is sending the message. If you are misleading in that regard, you are violating CAN-SPAM.

For example, if you put a different name in the “From” to make it seem like it’s someone’s grandma emailing them instead of a company, then that is both incredibly misleading and in violation of CAN-SPAM.

Don’t use deceptive subject lines

When you work in email marketing, writing subject lines people will open is half the battle. But you also have to take into consideration the CAN-SPAM requirement of avoiding deceptive subject lines.

Sure, you could probably get more opens if you lie in the subject line, but it isn’t going to help you in the long run. Not only is it violating the law, but it doesn’t exactly make your audience trust you or want to open your emails ever again. For example, if you’re adding “Re:” to the subject line to make it look like they’ve emailed with you before, that’s deceiving your audience. If you say “Open for a 50% off coupon!” in the subject line, and then you don’t include that coupon in the email, you will be marked as a deceiver.

Tell recipients where you are

The email has to include your valid, physical postal address. Email service providers like Mailchimp or Constant Contact make this regulation easy to comply with by automatically adding it to the footer of your email for you. When you set up your account with them, they require this information from you, and then they’ll take care of the footer information.

Honor opt-out and unsubscribe requests promptly

Most systems these days can take people off your list immediately if they get an unsubscribe lists, but some people are still doing it manually, or maybe they’re using an older system that is programmed to clean their lists only a few times a month.

Not only is honoring unsubscribe requests quickly a good idea from a customer service and user experience perspective — there is nothing more annoying than unsubscribing from something and still receiving emails from them — but it’s also the law.

You have to be able to process opt-out requests within 30 days of the request, but we suggest you do it immediately.

Monitor what others are doing on your behalf

If you hire another company to handle your email marketing (like us! Hi!), you can’t contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law.

Both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that actually sends the message may be held legally responsible.

2. CASL

Canada got into the email regulation game in 2014 when they passed Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL). If you’re in Canada or you send emails to Canadian residents, you need to comply with CASL.

CASL regulations apply to any “Commercial Electronic Message (CEM)” sent from or to Canadian devices in Canada.

The legislation defines a CEM as any message that:

  • is in an electronic format
  • is sent to an electronic address
  • contains a message encouraging recipients to take part in some type of commercial activity

CASL defines two types of consent: implied and express.

Let’s take a look at both types of consent.

Implied Consent

Implied consent is a looser interpretation, whereas express consent requires action from both sender and recipient.

Consent is implied when:

  • the recipient purchased a product or service with your organization in the past 24 months
  • you are a registered charity or political organization, and the recipient has made a donation or gift, volunteered, or attended a meeting organized by you
  • a professional message is sent to someone whose email address was given to you or is conspicuously published, or who have published or told you that they don’t have unsolicited messages

If they don’t meet the above criteria, then you need express consent before you can send campaigns to them.

Express consent

Consent is considered “express” if there is a written or oral agreement from the recipient to receive specific types of messages.

Express content is considered valid if the following information is included:

  • a clear and concise description of your purpose in obtaining consent
  • a description of the messages you’ll be sending
  • the requester’s (i.e., your) name and contact information
  • a statement that the recipient may unsubscribe at any time

Additional CASL requirements

  1. You must retain a record of consent confirmations
  2. When requesting consent, checkboxes cannot be pre-filled to suggest consent. Each subscriber must check the boxes themselves for the consent to be valid.
  3. All messages sent must include your name, the person on whose behalf you’re sending (if any), your physical mailing address, and your telephone number, email address, or website URL.
  4. All messages sent after consent must also include an unsubscribe mechanism, and unsubscribes must be processed within ten days.

3. GDPR

Remember around May 2018 when your email inbox was full of privacy policy updates?

That was the GDPR’s fault.

The GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation. It’s Europe’s new framework for data protection laws.

GDPR changes how businesses and public sector organizations can handle their customer information, and it gives individuals more control over their information.

Understanding the new GDPR requirements can be daunting, so let’s take a look at some of the key requirements.

Lawful, fair, and transparent processing

Companies that process personal data have to treat the data lawfully, fairly, and transparently. But what do those words even mean in this context?

  • Lawful means that all processing must have a legitimate purpose.
  • Fair means companies take responsibility and don’t process data for any other purpose than legitimate and necessary purposes. For instance, they may save data for tax purposes or if it’s necessary for the service you’re providing. Illegitimate reasons to keep someone’s information includes saving a customer’s payment information after you’ve already processed it and no longer need it.
  • Transparent means that the companies must inform data subjects (A.K.A. people whose data they have) about the processing activities on their personal data.

Limitation of purpose, data, and storage

Companies are only allowed to process and collect data that is necessary, and they cannot keep personal data once the processing purpose is completed.

Data subject rights

People have the right to ask a company what information it has about them and what the company does with that information. They also have the right to ask for a correction, object to processing, lodge a complaint, or ask for their personal data to be deleted or transferred.

Consent

If a company intends to process your personal data beyond the legitimate purpose for which the data was collected, the company must obtain clear and explicit consent from you. The consent must be documented, and you can withdraw your consent at any time.

Data Protection Officer

If an organization requires a significant amount of personal data processing, the organization should assign a Data Protection Officer. They have the responsibility of advising the company about GDPR compliance.

If you don’t know, now you know

Email regulations are one of those things that you probably don’t think much about unless you’re knee-deep in email marketing every day.

There are definitely more email regulations than what we talked about today. But if you’re emailing people in Europe, Canada, and the United States, you need to know about the big three laws above.

And if you need help creating a comprehensive email marketing strategy? Well, you know you can always call Digital Strike for a personalized plan.

]]>