Inbound Marketing Age

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 pernicious 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.