Once upon a time, the key to marketing was meeting people where they were naturally gathering and using interesting graphics. Today, the world of marketing has changed. What worked for marketing gurus in the past no longer works for today’s industry.
Meeting people where they’re naturally gathering currently means marketing to an online audience. Online marketing takes a whole different set of tools. One important tool for online marketing is understanding how search engines work.
Search engine optimization (SEO)–the practice through which you make content crawlable and indexable by search engines–is key to online marketing. Here are some SEO marketing tips to help you increase organic traffic viewing and responding to your online marketing.
Load Times Are Key
In the old days of marketing, high-resolution, interesting graphics were a marketer’s dream. You wanted bright, moving images and flashing lights to capture peoples’ attention. But when it comes to online marketing, the opposite is true.
This is because online audiences want their content near-instantaneously. High-resolution graphics and complicated gifs and scripts will slow a website down. And if a website is slow, it will tank, even if the content is amazing. That’s why SEO best practices encourage compressing image files and making web scripts less complicated.
Content Length
When newspaper ads charged per word, it was evident to most marketing specialists that the key to a successful ad was to tell the best story in the fewest words possible. When it comes to online marketing, the ideal content length is a little more murky.
Do a quick search on the best length for blog posts, and you’ll see arguments both for short, “scannable” blog posts and for long-form “pillar content.” So what is the ideal content length for online marketing? There’s no easy answer, but there are some SEO best practices you can consider to help you make your determination.
Mobile Optimization
More than 50% of web searches occur on mobile devices like cell phones and tablets, and that number is growing every day. People who are searching for content on their phones are generally looking for quick answers to their questions. They want content that they can skim while using the restroom or standing in line.
That’s why, when you’re looking at making a website more mobile-friendly, you’ll find tips about using lots of headings and subheadings and making paragraphs no more than four typed lines of text long. You’ll also read that you should use things like bullet points to break up your text and make it easier to skim.
While this is all true, and you should care about making your content skimmable, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write longform content.
Pillar Content & Backlinks
Long-form content that provides high-quality information and is better than anything written by the competition has its place online. If you write the best, most well-researched piece of content on a given subject, then when other people write on a similar or tertiary subject, they’ll link to your content because you’re an expert on the subject.
Search engines take these backlinks seriously. Pillar content tends to be the content that continues to drive traffic to your site consistently over time because people keep re-linking to the content and re-sharing it.
Pillar content is also a great place to rank for keywords that you’re not ranking for elsewhere on your website. These are the articles that you want to drive to the top of search engines.
A good way to combine mobile best practices with creating pillar content is to create shorter blog posts on a consistent basis that are skimmable. When you get four or five of these blog posts on a similar subject, combine them into one evergreen piece of pillar content, and then redirect any backlinks that were going to those shorter pieces to the larger piece.
This allows you to regularly update your blog with mobile-friendly blog posts and build some backlinks over time while also working towards having a few larger pieces of pillar content on your website.
Another option is to use expired domains that already have backlinks attached to them in order to give your web traffic a boost. Have a look at this SEO marketing practice to see if it’s right for you.
Other SEO Marketing Tips
Online marketing should involve creating a sales funnel that will drive traffic to a website and ultimately generate sales. This may mean using a combination of Facebook ads, blog posts, and product pages to generate sales.
A good online marketing specialist understands SEO best practices at every step of the sales funnel in order to generate sales. Keep in mind that content is king online. Marketing is no longer limited to a single banner ad or Facebook advertisement. Instead, in order to make your online marketing stand out, you need to be creating high-quality content on a consistent basis.