Effective SEO and Content Marketing

The Ultimate Guide for Maximizing Free Web Traffic

Nicholas Papagiannis

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119628873
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Get beyond the basics and see how modern-day users are reimaging the SEO process

SEO is often underutilized and overlooked across the marketing realm today. SEO is not merely trying to improve your website ranking on Google, but it can spark and optimize ideas. Above all it can help improve the amount of free traffic coming to your web properties.This book provides you with a comprehensive approach to make sure marketing spend is utilized as effectively as possible and deliver the best ROI for your brand and business.

Maximizing your organic (free) traffic channels should be a top priority and this book will provide you with insight on how to do that. From working with social media influencers to steering creative ideas and campaigns, modern day SEO requires a full-service perspective of marketing and its processes.

• General education on SEO and organic content marking
• Understanding which search engines to focus on
• How SEO and content can solve business problems
• Building a new brand through SEO and content
• Identifying who your true competitors are
• Which Analytics reports you should be regularly monitoring
• How to establish research channels that can inform your business initiatives
• Building personas and audience purchase journeys
• Prioritizing locations, demographics and countries
• What needs to be in place to maximize free traffic levels to your brands assets
• Understanding all the key tasks and attributes for an effective content program
• Data-Driven Content: Detailed instruction on how to use data to inform content responses, ideas and asset types
• Understanding different content asset types from standard items like articles to highly advanced assets like films, podcasts, white papers and other assets
• Calculating ROI for SEO and Content initiatives
• Small business marketing via content and SEO and having the right small business mindset for success
• Website and content design considerations (accessibility, principles of marketing)
• Optimizing for the future and looking at other search venues
• • Amazon Optimization
  • YouTube Optimization
  • App Store Optimization (ASO)
  • Podcast Optimization
  • Optimizing Blogs and other off-site content
• Prepping and optimizing for the newest technologies, including voice search, artificial intelligence, and content discovery vehicles
• How to build an optimization path and programs that drive results and manage risks

In addition to learning the most effective processes to structure your SEO, you will have access to bonus materials that accompany this book which will include worksheets, checklists, creative brief examples, quizzes, and best interview questions when hiring an SEO specialist. Modern-day marketers, business owners, and brand managers, this book is for you!

CHAPTER 1
Getting on the Same Page

The goal of this book is to provide marketers and business leaders with an understanding of how to gather and optimize free traffic to their brand. This book is designed to offer an exponential return on investment. If you follow the tactics laid out in this book, I am confident that you will see significant increases in traffic and revenue.

The ensuing chapters of this book will provide a roadmap and understanding of how to best optimize your overall web presence through search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing, as well as how to raise your organic traffic footprint and performance. There are many books on the market that speak to SEO and content marketing, but they do not speak to both. SEO and content marketing depend on each other these days. This is because of the way Google's algorithm works and the way digital marketing and user experience have evolved. Do not focus on one without the other.

This book is essentially a guide for how to leverage both sciences to create a higher amount of free traffic to your brands. It is a framework that modern-day marketers should know, and it's a low-cost way for business owners and marketers to gather a basic understanding and skill set and learn how to provide exponential traffic and marketing effectiveness to their clients and businesses.

Free Traffic

Capturing free, high-quality, high-qualified traffic is a core function and goal of an effective digital marketing strategy. Getting free traffic is not an easy thing. There are many levers that need to be pulled and optimized. Free traffic can benefit an overall marketing program in a lot of ways, especially if there are paid or media tactics involved. The levers of free traffic can help boost paid media performance as well. There are many instances where applying organic optimization techniques through SEO, user experience, content, and other organic strategies can yield a better sales conversion process, more search engine keyword rankings, and stronger traffic levels.

However, it's not easy to make all the free traffic cylinders work well together. There are several things that are required.

Responsive Teams

You need a cooperative IT and website management team. This is necessary so that optimization recommendations can be quickly implemented and rolled live. Oftentimes, IT can prove to be a hindrance in implementing recommendations that ultimately fueled better website performance and traffic. The more responsive the IT team is in making changes quickly, the better the performance output can be.

Strong SEO

You also need a strong SEO expert. Over the years, I've come across many different types of SEO experts. Some were strong technically and only technically, while some were strong on the content side. Some are not strong in either and are generally unhelpful. As we will discuss later in this book, the SEO strategist is the quarterback for a lot of the tactics that generate free traffic. It's important you have a strong quarterback who bridges the gap between technical and content opportunities. Additionally, SEO experts should be well-versed in emerging search channels like social media sites, Amazon, and other platforms beyond your website.

User Experience Expertise

It's extremely important to have a well-seasoned and strong user experience expert. A lot of the conversion or sales process online can be hindered by bad user experience techniques. As the user experience transforms from devices to other things like voice or conversational commerce, it's important to have a strong user experience expert who is well-versed in these channels and can stay in tune with emerging channels to better position your site for changing user behavior and dates.

Ongoing Content Production

Content production is critical. Having a strong content team that is able to create content quickly and effectively is paramount to having a successful free traffic or organic traffic program for your brand. Content, as we’ll get into later, essentially creates your free traffic footprint and is necessary for capturing organic traffic. Think of content as a fishing net. The larger it is, the more fish you're going to catch. It's no secret that news sites tend to drive the most traffic because they are constantly pushing out new content and have a strong content discovery and promotional strategy in place. All these things help sites with a large amount of content and web pages capture the most free traffic around. Back in the day these were called content farms, but now many of those low-quality content farms have dissolved, and high-quality websites that offer a broad spectrum of quality content tend to capture the most free traffic these days.

Strong Analytics

Digital marketers require strong analytics. Data-driven initiatives and content have become the norm nowadays. For a marketer to showcase their effectiveness, there have to be data points and evidence around performance. Strong data analytics and experts are critical to the organic and free traffic process. This book will discuss the different processes needed for achieving strong SEO and content marketing results. A core lever to the organic traffic process is having strong analytics with a frequent cadence of reporting to inform the types of content users are interested in and the effectiveness of your brand's content. It also shows whether the traffic coming to your side is incrementally growing from free channels as a result of good SEO and effective content marketing. Without analytics, you will be a ship lost at sea.

Data-Driven Culture

We live in a data world, and it's imperative that creative ideas and concepts begin with data. Data should inform the ideation stage, and the analytics team should provide this to help ideation and creative concepting.

Process Management

Marketing projects live and die depending on process management. Marketing projects have gotten more complex and technical, which require detailed planning, communication, and process execution. Brands need dedicated and strong project or process managers.

If you're a brand that cannot provide these levers, it is better to wait on free content initiatives like SEO and content marketing, whose results will be severely impacted and compromised. Instead, I would increase the budget for paid media and paid advertisements and focus more on a paid traffic strategy. Paid strategies are clearly more costly, but they do work and provide short-term workarounds until you get your free traffic levers and infrastructure in place.

Learning SEO

I remember my first foray into a search marketing agency, where I was initially a project manager. Search engine optimization seemed so complicated and foreign to me. My manager at the time said some people get it, but most people don't. He rolled his eyes and I felt like taking a gulp, little did he know I thought I was destined to be one of those people who don't get it. At the time I felt I would never understand all the different terminology, the algorithm factors, the definition of content, and the different website management systems. It seemed so overwhelmingly complex, and I w...