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Introduction

Cast your eyes over most SEO agencies websites and time and time again they refer to “good quality” content marketing.

We all know that content marketing can help to improve a websites ranking. That’s to say if enough quality blog posts are added a website can increase where it ranks.

Yet what attributes go into making a “good quality” article. Well, we thought it was time to share some of our knowledge.

So, without ado, let our digital marketing agency explain what we believe what factors can allow an article to be deemed as higher quality.

Valuable and useful

Here’s a word that’s used much less, but we would argue is a far better word that should be used to describe how content marketing should be written.

You have to make the content marketing valuable. Yet, we hear you cry, valuable to who?

Well, that’s the simple part. The content marketing must be valuable to your businesses potential customers.

That’s not to say just people that have bought from you, but people who would be interested in your product.

Sometimes the person may never have an intention to buy from you, yet by providing them with an article they find valuable to them, well that can also help a businesses SEO.

For example, you may make a super luxury car, which the price point is set beyond most peoples reach.

Yet, by creating content marketing that is valuable to the people interested in the product, well you guessed it, it can help the businesses seo.

For example, it could:

·        Increase social shares

·        Mean that more backlinks are built to the website

·        Retain readers on your website for longer

·        Reduce the websites bounce rate.

Keywords

Knowing which keywords to write on your business’s website is important. After all, how would anyone be able to find a local seo company, if the website in question offering such services never mentioned online marketing keywords?

Well, exactly Google’s clever algorithm wouldn’t have a clue about what the website is about. Sure, there are some seo consultants that believe that the algorithm is so clever, partly through Google’s Knowledge Graph, and also the Google Hummingbird updates that it would still be able to pick up roughly what the website is about, but sure keywords, if used properly are an essential part of seo.

But, we have to stress this, keywords need to be used in a white hat way, if you are unsure as to what this means, well you do need to consult with a white hat seo company.

Many agencies use Google’s Keyword Planner, and Moz Explorer to help SEO consultants work out which keywords a business should be writing onto their website.  

So, how long should our articles be?

Talk to most agencies just a few years back about how many words they were writing into their articles, and most would come back and say roughly 500 words.

A lot of agencies therefore wrote their articles to 500 word limit. Yet, many respected marketing agencies now think that articles that have a much larger word count, say over 2000 sometimes do better.

Yet, before you start writing articles that ramble on, and on, it’s not worth writing articles just to meet a certain word count.

The reason being is if the work is boring, or does not answer the question the reader wants to find an answer to, the bounce rate is likely to be sky-high.

Why you should learn about the Google Hummingbird updates

Sometimes someone will know roughly what business they want to find, yet not fully know which product they need.

Naturally if someone wanted to find a new washing machine, well that’s straightforward. But what about a more complicated item that someone wishes to find.

So say for example, someone is turning vegan, so they want to find a replacement for milk within their diet.

They may know of a few alternatives to milk, yet not know what products are out there are out there to buy.

Well Google’s algorithm was updated with a major algorithm change which was called “Google Hummingbird update”.

Now, this whole subject would require a rather detailed blog post all on its own to describe the changes that Hummingbird has had on SEO.

Yet, lets just focus here on this one part, that is Google’s algorithm is now so clever it looks at the “intent” of the person wanting to find an answer to a question.

So let’s return back to our person turning vegan, they might not have a clue that oat milk is such an option that a vegan may wish to try.

So when someone searches for, “I am turning vegan, what dairy free milk alternatives are there?”- well nothing in that search string says “oat milk”.

Yet, thanks to Google Hummingbird, and also Google Knowledge graph, Google knows that oat milk is a tasty alternative to milk.

Measure your performance on Google Analytics

Writing content marketing articles is kind of like sending a satellite into orbit. That’s because, we as a business or a marketing agency may think our work is simply brilliant.

The best there is. Yet, we will not know if our work is going to fulfil its mission until its launched.

And content marketing can either be a super useful satellite, or it can become space junk.

Space junk are all those articles that just float around, they have been written by marketing agencies perhaps and don’t really offer a thing to a reader.

They are not valuable, they just cause a mess. So, if you want your businesses SEO to be a sky-rocketing success you have to measure its success.

If the work is floating around, not getting any readers, well, your marketing agency should update the work, make it better, constantly improve it, until it becomes that jet-engine that can propel your website where you would like it to be.

If your wondering how do you measure the success of a business’s content marketing, well you need a Google Analytics account.

Don’t create work just for SEO benefit

This leads us on nicely to this point, don’t write content marketing just for seo benefit.

Sure you may think your giving up loads of time, or paying an seo business a fortune to do the work, so you may want to make sure it has the maximum SEO bang for your money- but this doesn’t work.

If you focus on seo too much, and you ignore the real purpose, which is answering a question your customers have, then your SEO is likely to fail.

You have to make the work valuable, remember?

Google Panda

It’s worth at this point mentioning the Google Panda update, if you are unsure what this is, well you need to read about this.

Backlinks both internal and external

If your writing an article, and you find another article, that you think your readers would be interested in also, why not use a backlink?

Backlinks, and the anchor text must be used in a white hat way.

White hat

All seo efforts, whether by you, or your seo company must be white hat.

Meta titles and meta descriptions

Don’t forget to write detailed meta titles, and meta descriptions.

Don’t over optimise

Don’t over optimise your work, if you are unsure what this means, why not talk to a local marketing agency, like us?

Alt tags

If you have a website that sells hundreds of dog leads, naturally the website will have loads of pictures of dog leads. Yet, most marketing agencies, including ours think that there can be some seo merit in putting a written description of each dog lead, so that the algorithm knows what it is looking at.

For example, purple dog lead, that has diamond detailing.

Google’s Knowledge Graph

Google’s Knowledge Graph is something that you should read about.

How we can help

If you would like help with your businesses seo, then why not give us a ring?

Introduction

So many businesses are now overly focused on creating new blog posts. That’s to say sometimes the old blogs are just left and never updated.

Yet, surely when all that information gets out of date, well, the blog posts will no longer be useful?

So what’s the solution, should businesses be devoting some more time to updating old blog posts?

Well, the simple answer is we think it’s well worth updating a business’s blog posts from time to time. And before you think updating a load of old blog posts sounds like a ton of work, it’s worth bearing in mind there can sometimes be a reward at the end of all this labour.

That’s because a reward can come in the form of an uplift in terms of organic traffic that your company website receives, that’s of course if you update the old blog posts correctly!

So, without further ado, as we sense your itching to get started, let’s have a look at our four top tips for improving your old blog posts.

Rome wasn’t built in a day!

It’s understandable that businesses today will want to improve their businesses SEO as much as possible.

However, as seo is often an ongoing process, and there are so many things that will need to be optimised at once, you have to be clever with you spend your time.

That’s to say before you take the strategy that every single blog post is going to be revamped, you should sit back, and think is that really realistic?

The answer for most businesses is no, no its not! The reason being is that most businesses simply have not got the resources to keep going over old blog posts, and to keep the information up to date.

So, what’s the solution?

We would therefore recommend opening your businesses Google Analytics account, and looking at which pages receive the least number of visitors. Then why not concentrate on improving these pages?

Perhaps the content marketing that isn’t getting read much only has a few paragraphs of text, so in order to improve, you could elaborate a bit more.

On the other end of the spectrum will be those pages on your website that receive the most visitors, why not also see if these could be improved? For example, perhaps some of the information is now up to date, so you could add a section which shows you are updating your company’s old blog posts.

If you haven’t got the foggiest of how to work out which blog posts you need to improve, why not have a look at this great article that has been written by Nick Loper.

Don’t focus too much on the SEO!

You say what! We hear you- you’re thinking this business is an seo agency, yet they are stating don’t worry too much about the SEO!

Well here’s what we mean, sometimes some businesses concentrate too much on trying to improve their seo, that’s when writing their company’s blog posts. This can distract the writer from writing a really good piece of work.

That’s to say some writers are focused too much on placing keywords a set number of times throughout the article. So much so sometimes the article doesn’t flow correctly, and this sort of work may even act to confuse the reader.

Check your blog posts backlinks

You’ve probably already spotted that a lot of blog posts these days contain backlinks. Whether those backlinks lead to an internal page within your website, or externally onto another website, they can sure be useful.

Yet, if you’ve wrote your article some time ago, well its worth checking that those links still work.

For example, perhaps you are a large retailer, let’s say for example you retail bathroom items, so naturally you will have blog posts that talk about bathroom products.

Yet, as everybody knows products can stop being manufactured, or be replaced by another similar item. In which case the backlink may become broken.

So, whilst you are busy improving your businesses content marketing, why not have a click on all the blog posts links, just to make sure they still work?

Technical seo, it’s not something to be ignored

As most SEO’s will tell you, when you get a new website back from a design agency it can often lack the most basic of seo elements.

That’s to say the website designer may have been so focused on getting the homepages appearance right, there may well me no meta titles, meta descriptions, correctly labelled alt tags.

And this can mean that when it comes to adding blog posts, the author may well have followed the same approach. By this we mean none of the title tags have been added, and the meta titles are non-existent-so what you do?

Well, its always worth getting in touch with a respected digital marketing agency, who should be able to recommend ways that technical seo can be applied to old blog posts.

For more help and advice, why not give us a ring?