Content centric search engine optimization

Content-Centric Search

www.nationalpositions.com

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CONTENTCENTRICSEARCH

SEO Strategies to Help Your Business Succeed Online in 2014 and Beyond

A Publication of

http://NATIONALPOSITIONS.COM

https://plus.google.com/107963591354303640180/about

https://www.facebook.com/NationalPositions

https://twitter.com/Natl_Positions

http://www.linkedin.com/company/national-positions



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Content-Centric SearchAuthor: Bernard May, CEO – National Positions

Bernard May is the founder and CEO of National Positions, an industry-leading digital marketing agency based in Agoura Hills, CA. Bernard started National Positions in 2004 out of his garage in Calabasas, California. Ten years later, the company has worked with over 1,500 companies and has over 500 employees, with offices in the US, South America, Europe, South Africa, and India.

Bernard has more than 20 years’ experience in digital marketing for some of the worldwide leaders in technology and innovation. Prior to founding National Positions, Bernard served as Vice President Marketing at First Advantage Corp; Vice President of US Search.com; and Senior Product Manager at Symantec Corp.

Bernard earned a bachelor’s degree in business science from the University of Cape Town and a Masters of Commerce in marketing and information systems from the University of Natal, South Africa.








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TABLE OF CONTENTSSEO 1.0................................................................................................................. 7

Theming Your Content..........................................................................................11

Latent Semantic Indexing Technology..................................................................17

Preparing Your Content Pillar.............................................................................. 22

Buyer Personas....................................................................................................23

Title and Meta Tags..............................................................................................12

SEO Yesterday Versus Today..................................................................................7

INTRODUCTION................................................................................................................... 5

TECHNICALLY OPTIMIZED SEARCH-AWARE DIGITAL ASSETS........................................10

CONTENT PRODUCTION....................................................................................................14

Your Website.........................................................................................................................11

Old SEO Content Techniques No Longer Work...................................................................15The Elements of Great Content............................................................................................15

Developing Great Content....................................................................................................19Becoming an Authority.........................................................................................................20

How to Harness National Positions Technology to Write Better Content..............................16

Rich Snippets.......................................................................................................12Technical SEO......................................................................................................12A Fast-Loading Website........................................................................................13Negative SEO.......................................................................................................13

The Top Page Optimizer Tool...............................................................................18

Content Presentation and Conversion.................................................................................20The Content Pillar (Creating Reusable Content)...................................................................21

Managing the Process of Writing Great Content..................................................................23

The Kapost Content Marketing Platform..............................................................................24

Content Goals.......................................................................................................22

Buying Stages......................................................................................................23

About Kapost........................................................................................................24








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Benefits of Owned Media Channels.....................................................................28

Benefits of Paid Media..........................................................................................30

Benefits of Earned Media.....................................................................................32

CONTENT PROMOTION......................................................................................................25

MEASUREMENT....................................................................................................................33

Owned Media........................................................................................................................27

Paid Media............................................................................................................................29

Earned Media........................................................................................................................31

Challenges of Owned Media Channels................................................................28

Challenges of Paid Media.....................................................................................30

Challenges of Earned Media.................................................................................32

CONCLUSION.......................................................................................................................36

FURTHER READING............................................................................................................38ABOUT NATIONAL POSITIONS............................................................................................39

GET A FREE MARKETING AUDIT.........................................................................................40

Challenges with Content Marketing Scoring........................................................34Measuring the Success of Your Content Marketing Campaign...........................................34

How to Measure Your Most Valuable Content.....................................................35Content Marketing Measurement: A Key Differentiator........................................35






INTRODUCTION

Over the past three years, Google has released over 45 algorithm updates. As a result, old tried-and-tested techniques for delivering organic search results have become obsolete. Gone are the days where one could easily game the Google algorithm and quickly gain first-page results. Today, newer and more effective digital marketing strategies are needed that support and leverage the changes that Google is making. This eBook provides a practical step-by-step guide to building your online organic presence in 2014 and beyond.







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HISTORY OFGOOGLE ALGORITHM UPDATES

Source: http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

GoogleToolbar

Supp.Update Buffy Dewey

Boston

Dominic

Esmerelda

Fritz

Florida

Supp.Index

Cassandra

Panda24

Panda25

HostCrowding

HostCrowding

Penguin2.0

PayDayUpdate

Multi-Week

Update

PandaDance

PandaRecovery

In-depthArticles

Humming-bird

Penguin2.1

UnnamedUpdate

KnowledgeGraph

Expansion

Panda23

Panda22

Panda21

PageLayoutUpdate

Penguin1.3

EMDUpdate

Panda20

Panda3.9.2

Panda3.9.1

Panda3.9

Panda3.8

Penguin1.1

Panda3.6

PenguinUpdate

Panda3.5

Panda3.4

Panda3.4

Panda3.3

VeniceUpdate

Abovethe fold

Panda3.2

Panda3.1

PandaFlux

Panda2.5

Panda2.3

Panda2.2

Panda2.1

Panda2.0

PandaUpdate

AttributionUpdate

Panda 2.4(Global)

FreshnessUpdateCaffeine

SentimentAdj.

MayDay

BigDaddy

Jagger

Gilligan

Bourbon

Allegra

Austin

BrandyFirst

DocumentedGoogleDance

2000 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2010 2011 2012 2013

PageLayout

#3

UnnamedUpdate

PaydayLoan 2.0

Panda4.0

2014

Vince

CaffeinePreview

2009








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SEO Yesterday Versus TodayIn the past, SEO consisted of mostly technical changes; these included title tags, meta tags, internal linking, and site structure. Although content creation was utilized, it was usually content written specifically for top search engine placement and not for end users.

The emphasis has, however, changed. While Onsite and Technical SEO is still important for visibility in search, today it is content and social media that are the core strategies driving exposure on the web. The search engine placement of a brand is largely defined by the brand’s ability to use content to build authority and popularity.

SEO 1.0The days of old SEO are over. You can no longer get rankings by generating lots of low-level inbound links, creating low-quality content, and updating your website with spammy title tags and meta tags.

In fact, many of the techniques that once generated fantastic first-page results are seriously hindering the performance of many websites today.

Google rocked the SEO community by introducing the Penguin 1.0 Algorithm Update in April 2012. Penguin targeted sites that were using spammy and unnatural linking to manufacture top search engine placement. This change, coupled with Panda Updates targeting spammy and thin content, has changed the SEO landscape forever.

These algorithm updates have left marketers confused, angry, and directionless. The effects of these algorithm changes have, in many cases, resulted in Google penalties that have decimated thousands of businesses that depend on organic search engine traffic to generate new business. Not only has this detrimentally affected online businesses, but it has also left most marketers uncertain as to how to restore rankings to previous Penguin 1.0 levels.

This eBook will outline strategies that are Google-friendly and that offer a sustainable solution for generating positive SEO results in 2014 and beyond.

So let us begin by looking at search engine optimization in the past and comparing it to SEO today and in the future.








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TODAY

YESTERDAY TECHNICALSEO

TraditionalSEO

CONTENTMARKETING

SOCIALMEDIA

TECHNICALLYOPTIMIZED

SEARCHASSETS CONTENT

CENTRICSEO







Technically Optimized Search-Aware Digital AssetsEnsuring that your website and all technical assets are optimized for the search engines.

Content ProductionCreating compelling content that will help grow your business.

Content PromotionMarketing your content across your owned and paid media channels, while working to find influencers, bloggers, and journalists to promote your content through earned media.

CONTENT-CENTRIC SEO

Content-Centric Search consists of three elements, each of which is critical to your online organic success. The three factors are:

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2

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TECHNICALLYOPTIMIZEDSEARCH-AWAREDIGITAL ASSETS

An important element of SEO 2.0 is ensuring that all of your digital assets are search-aware. Search-aware means optimizing your content assets (web pages, videos, infographics, etc.) and all of your web properties (your website, your blog, and social media profiles) so that they are easily found and indexed by the search engines.







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YOUR WEBSITE

Theming Your Content

Your website forms the core of all your online marketing activities. The goal for all of your marketing is to drive visitors to your site so they become customers. For that reason, the way you structure your site is extremely important, not only for the search engines, but also for users. Good organization and a clear and intuitive navigation system are vital for rankings as well as for converting visitors into buyers.

One often overlooked but critical factor to your success online is to build your website around content themes. This means building your content around meaningful topics that define your brand. For example, if you sell lighting products you might consider grouping indoor and outdoor lighting as themes. Or you might consider chandeliers, ceiling lights, wall lights and outdoor lights as another way of theming your content. When you structure your site, it is important that products within a theme are interlinked with each other. The interlinking of similar content is one of the most effective ways to show the search engines the depth and breadth of your website’s content.

WEBSITETHEME

SILO 1

CATEGORY1

ARTICLE 1 ARTICLE 1 ARTICLE 1 ARTICLE 2

CATEGORY2

CATEGORY1

CATEGORY2

SILO 2

THEME

SECTION

CATEGORY

CONTENT/PAGE








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Rich Snippets

Technical SEO

Rich Snippets are a markup format that can be inserted into your page code to enable the search engines to crawl and index your site and get “richer” data about your web presence. This richer data can include the author or publisher of content, reviews, recipes, locations, events, and can be displayed to users from the SERPs.

As of 2014, only two rich snippets seem to affect rankings: the Author and Publisher tags that associate a writer or company with a piece of content; location-based snippets impact rankings by enabling the search engines to verify the address of your business.

Having a technically sound website is critical to your success. Broken links, server errors, empty titles tags and canonical errors (duplicate pages with similar or identical content) all contribute to a poor user experience and, thus, hinder your SEO.

At National Positions, we utilize technology that monitors 54 major technical SEO factors. Our team of developers fixes these issues to ensure the site’s technical structure is optimized. There are a few other great SEO tools, such as Raven SEO and Analytics SEO, which help you check your site’s technical health.

Title and Meta TagsTitle tags and meta tags are one of the few original ranking factors that are still important as we move into the new age of Search. Title tags, however, are less important today than they were in the past. Keyword stuffing in title tags should be avoided and rather should be replaced by naturally written tags that help the search engines understand the context of the page.








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A Fast-Loading Website

Negative SEO

In addition to technical errors, poor website load times affect rankings. (If a site loads slowly, it will cause a poor user experience, which is why Google rewards fast-loading sites.) Poor site construction, hosting and server issues all impact load times. Google Webmaster Tools offers insights and tips into load times and how to improve them.

Negative SEO is a new development that webmasters are only starting to understand and address. Negative SEO is defined as factors that hinder your site’s performance. It can be malicious and intentional, as in the case of a competitor adding toxic backlinks back to your site, or innocent and unintentional, as in the case of a webmaster who uses spammy anchor texts or inadvertently creates a site-wide link.

Toxic links is the most common and harmful Negative SEO element; it harms your link profile and can get the search engines to flag you as an SEO spammer. It is imperative to monitor and protect your link profile on a consistent basis, which includes the removal of toxic inbound inks. Toxic links that cannot be removed should be disavowed through Google Webmaster Tools.

Now that we have discussed technical SEO we can move onto the second step in the Content-Centric Search process, Content Production.

CONTENTPRODUCTION

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CONTENT PRODUCTION

In today’s media environment, the traditional dynamics of marketing have been turned on their head. Instead of buying media, marketers and business owners are becoming part of the media. In fact, creating great media (text, videos, infographics and presentations), specifically targeted at your niche is the essence of great online marketing. This is how Content Marketing evolved. In this eBook we will discuss the techniques for building compelling and helpful content and promoting this content to drive quality traffic to your site and new customers from around the web.

In theory, generating quality content sounds simple. Unfortunately, it is just the opposite. Generating quality content is difficult and requires a concerted effort.







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OLD SEO CONTENT TECHNIQUES NO LONGER WORK

THE ELEMENTS OF GREAT CONTENT

Old SEO content techniques didn’t involve much more than using a keyword phrase three to five times every 100 words in the body of an article and putting the keyword in the titles on the page. These types of “engineered to rank” content writing techniques might still work in some cases, but they are dangerous and will be wiped out over time. It is better to write quality content around a theme than to try to trick the search engines through keyword density, frequency, and keyword stuffing.

Content needs to be engaging. One of the biggest mistakes marketers make is to overtly sell their brand and talk about themselves. Creating great content requires you to consider the needs of your readers and provide information they find informative, thoughtful and entertaining.

QUALITYCONTENT

MEMORABLE

UNIQUE

AUDIENCEDRIVEN

NEED-BASED

INFORMATIVE

VIRAL

PERSUASIVE

ENGAGING








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It goes without saying that content needs be unique. That does not mean that everything you write needs to be completely original, but it needs to be presented in a new way and cannot consist of plagiarized material.

Good content needs to be persuasive, it needs to be memorable and, in the best case scenario, go viral with a wide audience. Additonally, content should add value to the search engine results or it will never rank. The best content contains information that visitors are unlikely to know. It answers client questions, it intrigues, it entertains, and it makes readers laugh. The information should be new or at least presented in a new way.

At the end of the day, the most important attribute of great content is that it helps users find what they’re looking for, and aids them as customers in making an informed buying decision.

For many business owners generating great content is daunting. Creative content is a difficult undertaking in which they have little to no experience. Moreover, the expense and time required to generate content leads many business owners to avoid content generation altogether.

This raises the question, is there a way to more easily and efficiently create great content?

HOW TO HARNESS NATIONAL POSITIONS TECHNOLOGYTO WRITE BETTER CONTENTThere are a number of ways to create helpful, engaging content for your brand. One way is to hire industry renowned writers and leverage their expertise and network. But that is expensive and often not a realistic option. A viable alternative is to utilize professional writers who can harness technology to write great content. Utilizing technology comes in two different forms: Utilizing latent semantic indexing tools (to understand the themes to write about) and the Top Page Optimizer tool, to help writers understand the other key factors that will allow content to rank well. We’ll start by discussing the semantic indexing tools.








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Latent Semantic Indexing TechnologyGoogle Hummingbird, the latest version of Google’s search engine, was introduced in late August 2013. The algorithm uses advanced technology to better understand natural search queries by factoring in the context of the search. The Hummingbird search engine was built to take advantage of the growing use of mobile devices, which often alter searchers’ query structure because of the small screen and desire to type something conversational and short.

For example, if you search “Taj” and you are located in Agoura Hills, California, Hummingbird will assume that you are more

likely looking for directions to a local Indian restaurant than for

travel information to the Taj Mahal in India. As a result, the SERPs deliver geo-targeted results for

restaurants and hotels in the surrounding area.

However, if you search “Taj” and you are located in New Jersey, Hummingbird will assume you are looking for the Trump Taj Mahal Hotel & Casino in Atlantic City. As a result, the SERPs deliver a number of results related to the hotel and casino as well as a Knowledge Graph profile of the Trump Taj Mahal.

Taj Hotels Resorts & Palaceswww.tajhotels.com/ Taj Hotels Resorts and PalacesThe group runs the largest hotel chain in the country.Its hotels are in the luxury class. Links to individual hotels.

Taj Mahal Cuisine of India - Encinotajmahaldining.com/ tajmahaldining.com - Taj Mahal offers a full selection of authenticCuisine of India including specialties prepared in a ...

taj

Atlantic City New Jersey Casino Hotels |Trump Taj Mahal....www.trumptaj.com/ Trump Taj MahalFor five star Atlantic City Casino hotels, Trump Taj Mahal CasinoHotel offers restaurants, nightlife and a casino floor ...

Taj Hotels Resorts & Palaceswww.tajhotels.com Taj Hotels Resorts and PalacesThe group runs the largest hotel chain in the country.Its hotels are in the luxury class. Links to individual hotels.

taj








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The Top Page Optimizer ToolAlthough great content is the most important factor determining whether content will show up at the top of the search engines, it is not the only factor. Our Top Page Optimizer technology will review the top pages of your competitors to understand the factors that influence the top placement in the search engines.

Hummingbird is based on semantic queries, so it is important to understand the words that are highly relevant to the context of the search. Our latent semantic indexing (LSI) technology can identify the keywords that are ranking at the top of the search engines for any given phrase. With our technology we can then extract the phrases or themes that are most prevalent in the content. By doing so, we can identify key topics and longtail keywords that can assist good writers in producing quality content that ranks.

YOU HAVE TO IMPROVE YOUR PAGE

The web page meets only 76.9% of the requirements for a top ranking on Google USA for the search term “Cloud Solutions”. It is not likely yet the web page will get a top ranking for “Cloud Solu-tions” on Google USA.

How to get your page in the top 10 results on Google USA:

Improve the elements that are marked with the symbol in the report below until you get a 95% score or more. When your web page gets a 95% score, it will take a maximum of 4 weeks until you can see your page on the first results page on Google USA for the keyword “Cloud Solutions”.








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The Factors considered include:

On page factors, such as URL structures, title tags, meta-tags, internal linking as well as many other secondary on page factors.

Linking is the next important factor to consider. Inbound links to a particular page has and will continue to have a big impact on the success of your content. Today, inbound links need to come from relevant and quality websites to be effective. The context of the page linking back to your content is far more important that the anchor text itself.

Social factors, also known as social signals, are important factors that are only growing in signficance. Social signals include shares, Facebook likes, Google plus ones, re-tweets, pins and other sharing factors.

Rich Snippets, such as author tags, indicate to Google who wrote the content and whether the writer is a credible resource.

Finally, by combining latent semantic indexing to the factors listed above, we have developed a formula that helps us produce content with an excellent chance of meeting the needs of the Google search engine.

DEVELOPING GREAT CONTENTWhen it comes to content, quality is far more important than quantity. One of the most effective ways to generate quality content that’s built around a specific theme is the use of the content pillar. One of the biggest mistakes online brands make is creating content about themselves (i.e. about their products and services). There are literally thousands of pieces of content that talk about features and benefits. Users are much more interested in content written from a consumer’s perspective that tries to meet their own needs, desires, and interests. Only by writing with the consumer in mind can you produce trustworthy and authoritative content. And only by engendering trust do we have a mechanism for attracting new clients.

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BECOMING AN AUTHORITYTo be seen as an authority online you need to be an accepted source of advice in a particular area.

In his book Epic Content Marketing, Joe Pulizzi suggests that finding a niche that you can own is the key to becoming an authority. He gives an example of a pet store owner who decided they could never become an authority in the Pet Supplies marketplace but could instead become an expert in the “Pet Travel Advice Business.”

Irrespective of your industry, there is always some way for you to find something unique about your business that you can own. To become an authority today, you cannot depend on your website alone. You need to make sure that your brand and advice are promoted all around the Web.One of the accepted realities of Search is that quality backlinks to your site remain the Holy Grail.Links from relevant sites validate your brand as a trusted resource, which is why they are such an important ranking factor. The best way to generate backlinks to your site is to develop great content that your visitors love and want to share with others.

CONTENT PRESENTATION AND CONVERSIONThe fact that content needs to be well presented and formatted seems like such an obvious point, but one often overlooked by marketers.

Nothing is worse than a high bounce rate caused by poorly presented content. Make sure that your content utilizes nice formatting with a lot of white space, strong images and multimedia to enhance the user experience.

Here are some further tips:Try to keep sentences short (20 – 35 words)Keep paragraphs short (4 or 5 sentences)Make your article easy to read with sub-heading and bullet pointsUse pictures and diagrams to visualize as much as possible








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THE CONTENT PILLAR (CREATING REUSABLE CONTENT)Creating a scalable content marketing campaign is not easy, but the use of a content pillar makes the process much easier and more effective. A content pillar is defined as an authoritative work on a specific theme that can be broken into many derivative pieces of content to cover multiple topics across all your content and social media channels.

So what does that mean in layman’s terms? It means writing one great piece of content around a niche, industry-specific idea that can be repurposed across many different content types. Examples of content pillars include long-form articles, evergreen content, eBooks, videos, infographics, webinars and presentations.

Each pillar needs a theme. The theme is typically determined by a need that exists for one or more of your customer personas. The pillar should be created not to overtly sell your business, but to establish your brand as an industry leader.

Once a pillar is in place, it can be turned into multiple pieces of content that can be leveraged for many marketing purposes. For example, you can produce various pieces of content for your blog, newsletter list, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Slideshare, YouTube, and more.

Ebook

Source: “The Blueprint of a Modern Marketing Campaign,” Kapost








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Preparing your Content Pillar

Content Goals

A content pillar requires you to deliver a consistent topical theme. The most effective types of themes include questions that may be asked by your audience, such as interesting facts or information. Then, consider how they’ll find you across particular channels. Consider what your audience cares about and how they will interact with you. It is also important to consider why someone would not interact with your content and try to overcome these objections before the content is produced.

Like everything in business, it is important to have goals for your content. These goals might include brand awareness, traffic, link-building and/or lead generation. Every piece of content should have a desired outcome that can be measured.

ORGANIZATIONAL GOALSFOR B2B CONTENT MARKETING

2014 B2B Content Marketing Trends-North America: Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs

Brand AwarenessLead Generation

Customer AcquisitionThought Leadership

EngagementCustomer Retention/Loyalty

Website TrafficLead Management/Nurturing

Sales








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MANAGING THE PROCESS OF WRITING GREAT CONTENT

Buyer Personas

Most modern marketers understand that they need to produce great content to drive customers to their website. However, they realize that a challenge remains - how to successfully manage and publish the content production process in a scalable way.

A content marketing platform makes managing every step of the content process easier. Having an all-in-one platform helps you set your strategy, prioritize your goals, align your resources, and integrate workflow distribution and marketing automation all into an effective content marketing machine.

Of course, content marketing alone is not helpful if you cannot evaluate the success of each piece of content that is written. Understanding the return on investment for each piece of content has historically been a challenge. Now, software exists that can score the success of content so that you can easily understand the benefits or issues related to your content campaign.

We will briefly address the core components of an effective content management platform. Before we do that, however, it’s important to understand how to use buyer personas to identify what type of content your users will want to read and share.

Buyer personas are more than just demographics. Personas are actually examples of your top customers. This includes understanding your customers’ needs and concerns, and where they’re going online to find answers to their questions. Typically, it’s a good idea to limit your personas to just a handful and to build your content around a niche. The niche that you choose should be one that you know you can dominate. Selecting and building content to meet the needs of your personas means that over time you can appeal to passionate readers who will ultimately become customers.

Buying StagesThe key to effective content marketing is to match each of your prospects to each stage in the sales funnel. At each stage in the sales funnel we match the customer’s degree of readiness to buy your products. Typically, the sales funnel will include content targeted toward cold prospects, interested prospects, qualified leads, motivated buyers, colleagues and influencers, and returning customers.








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THE KAPOST CONTENT MARKETING PLATFORMA content marketing platform can help you scale an effective process. The one we recommend is Kapost, a powerful platform for many of the leading brands. National Positions is one of only a few select agencies using Kapost for clients’ campaigns.

About KapostThe Kapost content marketing platform enables companies to effectively produce more compelling content, and to grow traffic and sales. The Kapost platform features include the ability to generate quality content ideas, effectively manage the content production and distribution process, track traffic through influencer relationships and help users make better decisions from insightful analytics. Customers include L’Oreal, Trip Advisor, Fortune and the Discovery Channel. Kapost is located in Boulder, Colorado.






CONTENT PROMOTION

Most marketers find that they can create quality content when they need to. The biggest challenge is how to promote their content so that it is found, shared and converted into new customers.

Content promotion is not impossible. Content is promoted through three channels - owned, earned, and paid media. In this section we will examine the benefits and challenges of each channel.







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PAIDMEDIA

EARNEDMEDIA

OWNEDMEDIA

MEDIA ELEMENTSOF MARKETING

FANS• Mentions• Reviews• Links• Shares

PROSPECTS• Native Ads• Retargeting• Paid Social Media• Paid Influencers• Affiliates

CUSTOMERS• Site• Blog• Email• Social Networks• Mobile Site








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OWNED MEDIAOwned media is a media channel comprised of any web property that you can control and is unique to your brand. Typical examples of fully-owned media include your website and your blog, while partially-owned media include social media profiles on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest. Other partially owned media sites might include your YouTube channel, StumbleUpon, Foursquare, Tumblr, Vimeo, Instagram or Slideshare, Vine, and others.


2014 B2C Content Marketing Trends-North America: Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs

B2B

B2C

91%71%

LinkedIn

85%80%

Twitter

81%89%Facebook

73%72%YouTube

55%55%

Google+

40%19%

SlideShare

34%53%

Pinterest

22%32%

Instagram

22%16%

Vimeo

16%18%Flickr

15%13%

StumbleUpon

14%16%

Foursquare

14%18%Tumblr

14%13%

Vine








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In each case, the common denominator is that you own or control these properties.

Owned media provides you with the ability to extend your brand and build long-term relationships with your audience.

Owned media channels should be chosen based on your target market. If you are a B2B enterprise, LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter might be your best channels. If you are a B2C company, you might rather consider Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest as channels.

BEN

EFIT

S

CH

ALLE

NG

ES

Time: Building an audience takes time and effort.

No Guarantees: There are no guarantees that your strategy will generate traffic or sales on your website.

Reputation Issues: Social networking can open up companies to reputation issues if not handled correctly.

Control: You own and control the channel, which means that you can post content whenever you like.

Low Cost: Owned media channels are either free or inexpensive to own and operate.

Niche: You can use owned media to reach out to very specific niche audiences.

Longevity: These are long-term strategies.

Versatility: Owned media channels offer a variety of different media and mechanisms to promote your content.








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PAID MEDIAPaid media can be a quick and effective way to reach your audience. The challenge with paid media is to find a cost-effective channel that offers you a positive return on investment. When using paid media it is always important to understand your metrics and to vigilantly track the success of each channel. Paid media is most often used to promote your best content. Used wisely, paid media can be an excellent option. The table below shows a few examples of paid media channels and their characteristics.

OutBrain

Needs good content

High-end editorial, articles or blogposts, videos, earned media and positive reviews, slideshows

Young Male Audience

Reddit No traditional advertisingBest for awareness

StumbleUpon

Cool Products

A cheap ad platform for theappropriate product or service

Twitter An effective way to quicklyreach influencers

LinkedinOffers 3 types of ads:Text only, Image and text,Video ads

Facebook Ability to target bydemographic data








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NEF

ITS

CH

ALLE

NG

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Competition: As more and more companies are looking for an alternative to Google Adwords, the competition for paid social media and native advertising has increased. An increase in competition means an increase in cost.

Return on Investment: Social media platforms are new to many advertisers and the return on investment varies.

Credibility: The audiences on social networks can be averse to any advertising. If handled badly, they can actually hurt rather than help your brand.

Immediate gratification: Quickly reach your audience.

Easily scalable: Based on your budget you can quickly find and grow an audience.

Full control: As you are typically paying for a click or an impression, you can control every aspect of your campaign.








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EARNED MEDIAEarned media is a channel defined by the traction your content “earns” organically amongst your online community. Simply put, it is online word of mouth. Earned media consists of backlinks, mentions, social shares, reposts, reviews, recommendations, or content picked up by third party sites, bloggers and journalists.

Earned media should be thought of as online PR for a new age of media. It’s often thought of as the Holy Grail of content marketing. Finding influencers to promote your content, and hopefully link back to your site, is the pinnacle of content marketing success. However, it is not simple. It takes time and effort.

Strategies for a successful earned media campaign include creating a list of influencers, typically industry relevant bloggers or journalists, who may be interested in discussing or including your content on their site. Utilizing software programs such as BuzzStream or Traackr can help to manage the outreach process.

It is often a helpful strategy to track content that goes viral in order to understand its key success factors. At the end of the day, the earned media process is hard and time consuming. It’s important to plan and manage your outreach and tie it to specific goals.








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NEF

ITS

CH

ALLE

NG

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Most credible: As earned media is unpaid, social sharing of your content is more authentic and, thus, valued more highly by the search engines.

Highly effective: Backlinks and traffic from third-party influencers are often very valuable and helpful.

Enduring: Third party content often has a long shelf life and can benefit a site for a very long time.

Little control: As no payment is exchanged, it is beyond your control as to when and how the influencer will use you content.

Hard to measure: It is often harder to track the outcome of an earned media campaign vs. paid or owned media.

Can be negative: You can never be sure whether or not your content will be used in a positive way.






MEASUREMENT

At the end of the day, your content marketing has to serve a greater business purpose. It is important that you have a mechanism to track the effectiveness of your content. Typically, your analytics program is not a sufficient way to measure content effectiveness, and marketers are often lost as to how to evaluate the success of their content marketing initiatives.

In our last section, we will address a key factor to your marketing success: how to measure the return on your content marketing investment.



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MEASURING THE SUCCESS OF YOUR CONTENT MARKETING CAMPAIGN

Challenges With Content Marketing Scoring

A gap exists today between the clear realization that content generates sales and leads, and the ability for marketers to prove through analytics the success of their content marketing activities.

Scoring content is still in its infancy, but sophisticated methods are emerging to offer marketers a clearer content marketing ROI. The first challenge with content scoring is agreeing on metrics that matter. According to the 2014 B2B Content Marketing Trends North America survey, the top four factors that marketers care most about are web traffic, sales lead quality, social shares, and SEO rankings. Unsurprisingly, marketers care mostly about generating more leads but that branding factors such as social shares are still very important.

The next challenge is assigning a value or attribution to each piece of content. Many will agree that the first and last interactions with your content are probably the most important and should be the most heavily weighted. Put another way, the interaction where a prospect first learns about your company and the interaction that pushes that prospect to actually transact with your company are the most important.

Metrics for B2BContent Marketing Success


Web TrafficSales Lead Quality

Social Media SharingSales Lead Quantity

SEO RankingTime Spent on Website

Qualitative Feedback from CustomersInbound Links

Subscriber GrowthBenchmark Lift of Company Awareness

Benchmark Lift of Product/ Service AwarenessIncreased Customer Loyalty

Cross SellingCost Savings

Direct Sales








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Content Measurement: A Key DifferentiatorClosing the gap between content and revenue will be a key differentiator for many marketers. In the world of increased content development and increasingly competitive consumption, understanding where to focus your limited marketing budget is one of the major keys to online success.

How To Measure Your Most Valuable Content

The following methodology for scoring content is put forth by Kapost CEO Toby Murdock. First, identify all pieces of content that you want to score. You would do this by considering each piece of content and the related stage in the buying cycle. Next, assign a weighting to each piece of content based on first interactions, last interactions, and those in-between. You really need a software like Kapost to help with assigning the scoring, as the first and last interactions with content can vary greatly based on how awareness was first generated, as well as thousands of other potential variables. Once you have a score, you can assign a value based on the cost of a qualified lead or sale. You can accomplish this by figuring our the cost of a lead generated through other mechanisms such as paid search or offline lead generation costs. Take each piece of content in your funnel, along with the associated weighting, and divide the cost per lead by the weighting. This will provide you with the relevant value or ROI of each piece of content. As long as you are tracking each piece of content in your sales funnel, you will quickly be able to understand which content pieces generated the most value.






CONCLUSION

The days of quick SEO results are over. The new strategies for successful digital marketing in 2014 and beyond require that you work within, rather than against, the Google guidelines. The solution: Content-Centric Search, which requires an intuitive and well-performing website, great content, scalable and effective content promotion, and a way to effectively measure the performance of your content.

Above all else, Content-Centric Search requires an understanding of your online audience--their questions, concerns, and where they’re looking for answers. Creating great content for your audience will enable you to grow your brand in new and more powerful ways.



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Marketers also understand that creating great content is expensive, and that reusable content is a great way to more cost-effectively address their audiences. This means using content pillars, and working towards content goals.

An effective content strategy includes understanding your personas, and matching these to buying stages. To handle the complexity of content marketing, a platform such as Kapost is needed to manage the everyday writing needs.

Finally, Content-Centric Search is of little use if the content is not read and acted upon by your audience. Marketers need to understand how to harness Owned media, Paid, and Earned media to successfully build a thriving business online. Those that are able to use these ideas, and strategies are the companies that will enjoy the benefits of more traffic, better conversions and ultimately more business online in 2014 and beyond.






FURTHER READING

Joe Pulizzi: Epic Content Marketing: How to Tell a Different Story, Break Through the Clutter, and Win More Customers by Marketing LessJay Baer: Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is About Help Not HypeRoy Peter Clark: How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast TimesChristine Chopyak: Picture Your Business Strategy: Transform Decisions with the Power of VisualsStephanie Diamond: The Visual Marketing RevolutionJocelyn Glei: Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, & Sharpen Your Creative MindDebra Kaye, with Karen Kelly: Red Thread Thinking: Weaving Together Connections for Brilliant Ideas and Profitable InnovationGary Keller, with Jay Papasan: The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary ResultsLee LeFever: The Art of Explanation: Making Your Ideas, Products, and Services Easier to UnderstandDavid Meerman Scott: The New Rules of Marketing & PR (4th edition)Camille Sweeney and Josh Gosfield: The Art of Doing: How Superachievers Do What They Do and How They Do It So WellSusan Weinschenk: 100 Things Every Presenter Needs to Know About PeopleSeth Godin: Permission Marketing Jonah Berger: Contagious: Why Things Catch On Olivier Blanchard: Social Media ROI Robert Cialdini: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion Jeff Rohrs: Audience: Marketing in the Age of Subscribers, Fans, and Followers

ABOUT NATIONALPOSITIONS

National Positions is an industry-leading digital marketing agency based in Agoura Hills, CA. Founded in 2004, National Positions has helped more than 1,500 companies grow their business online. The company has over 500 employees, with offices in the US, South America, Europe, South Africa, and India.

National Positions has won numerous awards for its work, and has been named in Inc. Magazine’s list of fastest-growing privately held companies in the US from 2009-2012. National Positions specializes in Search Engine Optimization, Pay Per Click Advertising, Content Marketing and Social Media Marketing. Some of the brands the company currently services include Wal-Mart, Colgate and Land Rover.



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GET A FREE MARKETING AUDIT!National Positions has helped over 1,500 businesses thrive online. If you’re looking for any help with your online marketing, feel free to get in touch!

Our team of experts is happy to answer any questions you may have about SEO and Content Marketing, including the following:

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