Bay Area Online Marketing Tips

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No matter what field you are in, chances are you’ve come across the term ‘content marketing’ and want to learn more about the buzzword that has taken over SEO and Digital Marketing.

Whether you’re a contractor, law firm, medical professional or retailer, you know that ranking high in Google organic search is important for website traffic, customer growth and the overall bottom line: more sales. The good news is, you don’t need to be a marketing professional to provide content that your audience finds helpful and worthy of sharing with their social circles.

So how does this content and SEO come together? Think of content marketing as content that people want to read, and SEO as targeted search term content that search engines can read.

For example, “We are great painters.” If you place this text with an image of a house, you would be implying that you are a great house painter. But you’re making the search engines guess what type of painter you are. Do you you paint homes, or a photo of a painting you did, or your nail shop where you paint nails, or an auto painter that works out of the house garage, etc. And where is it that you paint? Help search engines out by using text like “We are great Bay Area home painters.”

Taking this to the extreme… For a long time, SEO professionals were primarily concerned with stuffing websites with text content, links and keywords that readers truthfully found distracting and not helpful at all. Google picked up on this and changed their algorithms to weed out the websites that aren’t providing good content with a good user experience. This allowed for less cluttered web pages. A good website will still have all the needed content, but better parsed out as you want it or need it. This can be done with better navigation and the use of more pages.

Relevant, Quality and Authoritative content. How’s it measured?

• Relevant – Probably measured by words on site (H1, H2, titles, text, etc.) and visitor time on website.
• Quality – Probably measured by shares and likes
• Authoritative – Probably the above measurements, plus links to the page from like topic websites.

We’ll assume that you know your business, so relevant content is not an issue. Lets move on to quality and authoritative for a moment. Consider the questions that your customers are asking. Think about conversations in the office, on-site, or online via social media sites. It’s important to remember that your customer is more likely to search for an answer on Google, than they are to ask you, the professional.

A content marketer’s job is to create content that clearly addresses these questions via a web page, blog post or social media post, so that search engines find you while searching for the next Googler’s query on that subject. If your user experience is good (page downloads fast, media works, easy-to-read and useful information), the visitor is more likely to stay and read everything. BAM, you have quality! The visitor is more likely to share. “Look what I found everybody, the answer!”

Now if your content is so useful and accurate that Forbes and the US Gov’t links to your content, you get “authority” points.

The bottom line is: Content Marketers need to understand how their customers are searching for what they want, then provide the accurate content solution in an easy-to-find and easy-to-read way that pleases the user and thereby Google.

Leverage Social Media for Search Engine Optimization

Develop solutions across several platforms including your website, Google Plus and relevant communities, YouTube, Pinterest, etc. Google’s search algorithm focuses on the relevancy (and authority) of your content, so make sure it holds some problem-solving authority.

Note: No one knows 100% how Google measures and ranks websites. There’s only some limited factual info available. The SEO Pros and content writers have to use their common sense and past experiences. The information above is our best judgement.

For help with SEO, content writing or social media marketing, call the pros at SEO PRO, today at 510-276-9902 or fill out our online contact form here on our website.

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