Inbound Marketing Age

Widely touted as the biggest change to the Google algorithm in years, the BERT update has been the subject of much media attention. But what is it and should content creators be worried about it? 

What is the BERT update?

BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, of course. It’s a technique for NLP (Natural Language Processing) pre-training, developed by engineers at Google that’s now being harnessed to improve the quality and precision of our search engine returns.  

Sadly, despite all the pictures of Bert and Ernie adorning the top of SEO articles - it has nothing to do with Sesame Street.

Are your website designs sensitive enough to modern SEO tactics?

Incorporating SEO best practices into your website from the ground up will help you to increase the quality and volume of website traffic, and deliver a more pleasing user experience for your site visitors.

Follow these tips to build a business website that both bots and people will love.

Image optimisation can heavily influence the way search engines calculate your site rank, and, consequently, control how easy it is for searchers to find your site. Behind-the-scene elements such as page load time and keyword usage come to play here. If you want to be the number one search result for your product or service on Google or other SERPs, you really have to get a reign on your images.

In this post, we take a look at the benefits of a website image audit, and identify a handful of best practices.

Meta descriptions and alt tags. How much time should you dedicate? How long should they be? How often should you use keywords? Are they even a ranking factor? 

The world of metadata can be confusing; best practice seems to change from week to week. Adding fuel to that confusion are recent updates from Hubspot, in which their portal now recommends meta descriptions are less than 150 characters. 

Images are a key component for almost every website - it’s hard to find a page online that doesn’t contain at least one. 

For this reason, image optimisation plays a vital role in B2B website housekeeping. The benefits are plentiful. Optimising your images helps them to rank higher on SERPs, makes them more voice search friendly, funnels higher quality traffic to your page and ultimately improves UX.

With that in mind, alt-text is one of the most obvious places to start.

Struggling for new content ideas? Or just struggling to find the time to write regularly enough? I may have a solution for you. Those old blog posts lurking in your archives - the ones you've either forgotten about or have been rendered obsolete over time - they could be gold dust. 

When it comes to SEO, its ever-changing nature makes it one of the most complex and intricate components of your marketing strategy.

Revolutionary trends will no doubt determine how we interact with search engines in the new year, and consequently, how searchers will find your content.

Websites are a significant business investment, and they demand a considerable amount of your resource to satisfy users and stay ahead of competitors. So putting them in front of the right people at the right time should absolutely be a priority.

If you’re new to SEO, you may wonder why everyone keeps talking about pandas, penguins and hummingbirds.

This exotic line-up of creatures are, in fact, the names given to major updates to Google's ranking algorithm. But what is the Google algorithm and what do you need to know about it?

Featured snippets are becoming a growing area of focus within the competitive and constantly evolving world of search engine optimisation (SEO.)

And, according to HubSpot research, content that is selected to appear as a featured snippet can achieve double the click through rates of organic search results.

A colleague asked me yesterday, “Should I focus more on long-tail keywords or short-tail keywords? Should I be using them differently?”

I have to admit I was floundering a little. With so much changing in SEO, even within the last 6 months, it’s becoming nearly impossible to provide resolute answers to such questions.

But it’s a pretty valid question in the inbound content writing industry. Should we focus on one more than the other? 

Where do B2B marketers start with voice searches?

As individuals, AI assistants and smart speakers such as Alexa and Siri are now a familiar partner in many peoples' everyday search for answers, solutions and content.

But since they’re usually more closely associated with B2C brands, do B2B marketers really need to worry?

Google is notoriously tight-lipped about its ranking factors, and that doesn't look set to change in 2018.

It’s no secret that SEOers base their entire careers on educated guesses, experimentation and speculation.

Will Google ever disclose their algorithms? Who knows.

Will you ever reach page one? With hard work and perseverance, yes.

Topic clusters are an essential content strategy tool to help you simplify your content creation and concentrate your efforts around the manufacturing subjects that matter most to your customers.

In this blog post, we explore how topic clusters work, why they’re so useful for your content strategy and how you can go about creating them.

A poorly devised SEO strategy ahead of a site migration is a recipe for disaster. A site migration in itself can be an extremely onerous task; one that requires considerable planning, consultation and attention to detail. But when SEO is treated as an afterthought, your search engine visibility will be compromised.

Given the right execution strategy, it can happen smoothly, efficiently, and can preserve all that hard-earned SEO. 

Marketing success today, rightly or wrongly, is often determined by your visibility in search engines, and the biggest by far is Google.

Your business could live or die depending on your search results. So getting your SEO right, and ensuring that your buyers find you when they are looking is crucial to success.

But while your competitors are also employing their SEO techniques to lead to their content, what can you do to get ahead in the SEO arms race?

One way is through Google’s rich results, previously known under various names – rich snippets, rich cards or enriched results, Google has now tied them down and called them rich results. But what are they? And how can they help a B2B business?

Great SEO copywriting is the key to thriving online.

But one of the biggest challenges for SEO copywriters is creating content that is favoured by online searchers and search engines.

The job of an SEO copywriter has demanded a variety of disciplines in previous years. Now, it's not enough to write for algorithms. You must write for people first.

This means your writing must speak to your audience's needs and desires, while, at the same time, targeting specific keywords and following SEO best practices.

The way that we search online is evolving. And for many manufacturers, there's a growing realisation that the traditional, keyword-centric, SEO methods that we’ve typically used to drive our content creation efforts may not be delivering the same results that they once did.

So what’s changed? One answer lies in the intent of our online search queries.

When we ask a search engine a question we’re looking to solve a problem. But these days we’re also being increasingly more specific about what it is we want to know.

The way we search online is becoming more nebulous and ambiguous. Voice searches, conversational language and typos are now the norm, but users still expect Google to quickly organise and list the most accurate, helpful and contextually relevant content.

As a result, search engine algorithms are adapting.

Google now favours topic-based content, which is why marketers and SEO experts have responded with a clear cut, definitive approach: pillar pages.

You may have come across the two ways of pointing to a web page when designing your website or blog, but what are the differences, and why should you care?

Well basically, the main reason you should care is because getting it wrong may well affect your search engine ranking and therefore your customer’s ability to find you – which is pretty important.

What is a URL?

Let’s start at the beginning; URL stands for Uniform Resource Locater and it’s a way of pointing to a file on a computer network, and the way to handle that file. A URL can be used as a reference for web pages (http), file transfer (ftp) email (mailto) and many others.

In your browser you will see the URL in the address bar. The address of the blog on our web site for example is:http://www.equinetmedia.com/blog

This breaks down to a protocol – a way of handling the file: http, a hostname: www.equinetmedia.com and a file name: blog.

This is a basic URL. There are additional components that can be added, but this is the basis for all web addresses.

With over a million blog posts written every day, it’s crucial your blogging strategy does nothing but propel you to the front of the crowd.

Silly mistakes can have a negative impact on your online visibility.

If you’re frustrated that your blogging efforts are having little discernible effect on conversion rates, it’s worth checking you haven’t fallen into the trap of committing some of the biggest blogging mistakes.

Google is the master of user experience.

Tirelessly working to update their algorithms, analyse user behaviour, study intent, goals, and gripes to ensure the best experience possible.

And, they do all of this while keeping their staff well-fed and well-kept with ball pits, slides, and free lunches. What gives?!

It’s no accident that Google has cemented its reputation as the internet leader, seeing us through an unforgiving digital revolution.

They don’t get complacent.

We’re highly adaptable creatures, and the way we access and consume content is constantly changing in line with advancements in technology. Equally, the volume of online information is growing, and algorithms have a responsibility to present us with what they deem the top portion of content in a sea of endless web pages.

You may be able to craft the best B2B blog posts on the planet, but if nobody finds them, then all your effort won’t count for very much. In another post I’ve covered the more technical aspects of preparing a B2B blog post for SEO, in this post I am going look at the way you write, and how that affects the way search engines see and display your posts.

It is easy for blog writers to either ignore the benefits of SEO or to get hung up on its supposed complexity. So, what’s the right approach? How can you reap the benefits of good SEO tactics without either falling foul of the hidden rules or spending ages working through a post?

"It's a shift from terms to topics; a shift from longtail keywords, massive spreadsheets, down to just half a dozen topic areas that you as a business can own authoritatively."

Inbound 2016: Christopher O'Donnell, HubSpot Product Spotlight

Keywords: love them or hate them, they need to be factored into your content marketing strategy. But if you've ever pored over a keyword tool, trying to find the perfect combination of high search volume, low difficulty and, of course, relevance, you will know how frustrating this endeavour can be. If you work in a particularly content-saturated market, it can feel as though the chances of your organisation ranking in a Google search are slim to none.

But, with search engines becoming increasingly sophisticated in delivering results to their users' enquiries, should you be considering another approach to SEO? What if the secret to people finding your content online lay less in optimising around a specific word or phrase and more in focusing on writing around a topic or concept?

Anum Hussain, former senior growth marketer at HubSpot, describes "topics over keywords" as the magic formula. So, what does this all mean?

Concerns over the NSA and GCHQ allegedly passing themselves off as Google in order to intercept private Internet communications have been mooted as motivation for the search giants dramatic stepping up recently of ‘encrypted search’, as it purportedly moves to “increase privacy for its users”. The fact that unencrypted data will still be accessible to AdWords customers however (albeit to a lesser extent), has left some questioning the full extent of those motivations.

A colleague of mine once related the story of an Irish friend, who worked for a company that built corporate intranets earlier in the decade. Speaking of her company's website optimisation strategy, she confided in him: “Ah sure, we're calling the stuff we do 'knowledge management' now – everybody else is!”

Thinking you can effectively “own” a search term and part of the traffic it generates was a reasonable policy, right?. “Knowledge management” happened to be a popular search term at the time, and so as long as the business in question delivered a service relevant to the concept, however tangentially, it made sense to capitalise on the number of people searching for that term.

(THIS IS THE VIDEO TRANSCRIPT) Eric Swain (ES): We're back. Now, in our last video, we talked about creating buyer personas and about mapping our content to the buying process. And during that, we touched a little bit on the funnel.

Jeremy Knight (JK): Just a little bit.

ES: OK. Granted, yes. We flashed it up quite a bit. We didn't talk about it a lot. And we promised we would come back, and we would dwell on the funnel a little bit more. And so that's what we're going to do today. We're starting here so the next couple of videos will be on the funnel itself.

In days gone by, B2B SEO and B2C SEO were clearly defined and often mutually exclusive. But today, the line has blurred between what constitutes appropriate, effective marketing for B2B and B2C businesses, and those marketers who can exploit these non-traditional avenues are likely to benefit greatly. Here, we take a look at two perhaps unlikely sites which have much to offer B2B SEO.

Pinterest

Since launching two years ago, Pinterest has gone from strength to strength, as demonstrated by its ranking in the top 60 visited websites in the world (Alexa), and the top 20 in the US.

The concept is simple – users can ‘pin’ images they want to share onto virtual ‘pinboards’ organised by category (Technology, Architecture, Products, Sports etc), or onto their own personal pinboard. They can also ‘re-pin’ other users’ images and videos to their own or public boards – offering much potential for viral marketing success.

A recent report has confirmed that organic search remains at the top of many businesses’ marketing priorities.

The report, ‘Search Marketing: The State of B2B SEO and PPC practices’, by BtoB, found that online search accounts for “half of all digital marketing expenditures” of B2B companies.

This is perhaps not entirely surprising, but it does show that despite a wealth of alternative digital marketing avenues, such as social media, content marketing, eNewsletters and online video, search remains at the heart of businesses’ online efforts.