SEO and content marketing are constantly transforming with evolving technologies and consumer behavior trends. What worked for SEO yesterday may not work today as search engine algorithms are continuously being altered. Content marketing strategies that were relevant in 2017 maybe obsolete this year as new channels have emerged and been adopted by your consumers.
To find the latest SEO and content marketing tips, we asked 5 content marketing influencers the following questions. Read further to see what they had to say.
1. Which channels in your experience give the best ROI for content marketing?
2. Your top 2 tips on picking great keywords for content marketing.
3. Is SEO still relevant? If yes, what top 2 things should businesses focus their SEO efforts on.
But before we delve into their answers, let’s meet our content marketing experts.
Mark W. Schaefer
Executive Director, Schaefer Marketing Solutions, Author at Businesses Grow, Author of Known
Erik Qualman
Erik Qualman is a Bestselling Author and Motivational Speaker on Digital Leadership
Ted Rubin
CMO/Advisor, Photofy, author of Return on Relationships (#RonR)
John Boitnott
CEO, Boitnott Consulting LLC, Author at VentureBeat, USA Today and FastCompany
Marc Guberti
Podcast host, Breakthrough Success, Columnist at Westchester Business Journal
Jonathan Gebauer
Serial entrepreneur, marketing consultant, and a marketing blogger and podcaster at The Social Ms.
1. Mark W. Schaefer
1. Which channels in your experience give the best ROI for content marketing?
We must be careful to define “ROI” as purely a financial term. I often hear people say “there are many kinds of ROI,” which is incorrect and won’t provide you much credibility with business leaders.
So your real question is finding a way to determine the true financial impact for content efforts and this is always very, very difficult and there is no standard effort for every company.
I prefer to discuss content effectiveness in terms of “business benefits” such as brand awareness, customer service, and most important, ignition of customer conversations. We live in an era when the customer is the marketing department and putting great content in their hands is a key way to help them to help us!
2. Your top 2 tips on picking great keywords for content marketing.
I think content can either help with SEO or build a voice of authority, but probably no both. Personally, I believe that a keyword strategy that fuels SEO benefits relatively few companies, especially in crowded niches.
But content can help you become found in other ways. How did you find me to ask me to do this interview? I assure you it had nothing to do with and keyword I am dominating. It’s because I have provided thought-provoking and insightful blog posts, podcasts, and books for 10 years. I am known because of my presence, authority, and reputation established through content – not any SEO advantage I might have.
Should you focus on or authority? It depends on your goal, your resources, and the competition in your niche. This is a long answer to say I really have no keyword strategy because I am too busy thinking up new ideas that will enlighten and challenge my readers.
3. Is SEO still relevant? If yes, what top 2 things should businesses focus their SEO efforts on.
As I said, SEO benefits relatively few businesses. Allow me to provide a brief example.
I have been working with a healthcare-related company that has solutions to ease the suffering caused by many diseases. They are a small company with limited resources for content and marketing. They would like to rank high for many relevant topics but in a search query, all the results are naturally dominated by content kingpins such as Web MD or perhaps Mayo Clinic. These sites so thoroughly dominate the search results there is absolutely no hope for a competitor to show up on page one of the results.
There are many other ways for a smaller business to get noticed and attract relevant visitors to a website, but in this case, and perhaps most cases, SEO is not the answer.
The problem will get further complicated with the advent of smart speakers.
So before spending a lot on SEO get an accurate picture of the realistic opportunities before plotting out your strategy.
2. Erik Qualman
1. Which channels in your experience give the best ROI for content marketing?
The best channel is the channel where your audience and the potential audience already engage. If your content is about teenage video games than Twitch, Snapchat, and Instagram are good plays. If your content is about enterprise-grade security than LinkedIn is probably your best bet. For me personally, since I own an animation studio YouTube works great for our content. On the author side of things engaging with readers via Instagram and Twitter has been the most successful.
2. Your top 2 tips on picking great keywords for content marketing.
1. A good mantra is always for the the 4th most popular word. This is something we learned when I was the Head of Marketing at Travelzoo. Instead of going for the top keywords Airfare, Airfare Sales, Cheap Travel, we hyper-focused on a word that was more in line with our brand and that we could own! Let everyone else fight over the top keywords and hope to get 50 million visits. We were going to focus on owning a very large keyword that was in line with our brand so that we were almost guaranteed to get 10 million visits. That’s why you see a term like Digital Leadership hyperlinked in my bio.
2. Be in the mindset of flow versus forced. Produce the content first without a mindset of I have to have this keyword in here and then treat a tool like Google Trends like a thesaurus.
3. Is SEO still relevant? If yes, what top 2 things should businesses focus their SEO efforts on.
Yes, it’s relevant! My two pieces of advice
1. Don’t chase the Google algorithm, rather focus on what’s of value to your viewer/reader. If you have good content and good usability it will also find the algorithm since that’s what Google’s algorithm is predicated on.
2. Don’t forget rule #1
3. Ted Rubin
For me it is not necessarily about the channels, but about strategy, and execution. Here are a few things to consider in addition to just posting articles and working the straight SEO angle…
User-Friendly Navigation: Keeping your blog easy to navigate with intuitive category labels will help people find the information they seek much faster. Also, make it easy for readers to leave comments and share your posts on various channels that will help lead others back to you.
Look for Holes in Your Competition: Take a look at your competition’s blogs and websites. Are there content holes they’ve missed that you can take advantage of? Ways to add value not already available and help you stand out. Those consistently provide lots of content have a bigger chance of attracting people who are actively looking for information.
Don’t Close Your Comments: Don’t close the door for people to leave comments on your blog; doing so leaves the impression that you only care about what you have to say and are not willing to be responsive to others. Seth Godin can do it, and it sure works for him, but until you are playing in that league, don’t go there.
Commenting on Other Blogs: Look for other blogs in your industry that have a good amount of traffic and comments, and contribute a comment, but only if you think you can add value to the conversation. Be careful not to promote your blog here; just add some insight, and do it on a regular basis. Make seeking out and commenting on other blogs a part of your daily activities. The more you contribute to the conversation happening around you, the more you’ll be seen as a thought-leader (and people will click on your link to check you out).
Syndicate, syndicate, syndicate… share your content via all social channels always including Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn, which also makes it easy for others to share. And don’t be afraid to do it more than once periodically sharing old posts via your social channels, especially those that were well received. Also let others freely repost your content with a link back to the original post.
Welcome to the ‘Age of Influence,’ where anyone can build an audience and effect change, advocate brands, build relationships and make a difference.
4. John Boitnott
1. Which channels in your experience give the best ROI for content marketing?
The best channels are blogging and guest blogging, as well as article placement, thought leadership pieces for major online publications related to your industry. The ROI is high because audiences readily go to these channels for expert advice and the investment costs are typically very low compared to paid content channels.
2. Your top 2 tips on picking great keywords for content marketing.
My tips are – think of phrases within commonly asked questions from your audience or the related answers. Focus on what your audience is thinking about and start with those keywords. The second tip is to use keyword tools like SEMRush, which deliver keyword data and locate keywords related to the main search terms you are using.
3. Is SEO still relevant? If yes, what top 2 things should businesses focus their SEO efforts on.
SEO is still relevant and a critical tactic to use within marketing. Two things to focus on include optimize for mobile because more searches are being done on mobile devices than ever before. There are specific SEO tactics for mobile that will be different than desktop or laptop searches. Have a mobile-first index and responsive design for your mobile site. Then, make sure your search listing has plenty of information, adding things like hours, location, features, and product/service descriptions.
5. Marc Guberti
1. Which channels in your experience give the best ROI for content marketing?
Regarding social media, Twitter is best for organic and Facebook is best for paid. You can also do a lot with Facebook Groups. Regarding the different ways you can produce content, videos bring forth the biggest ROI, especially if you repurpose your videos into podcast episodes.z
2. Your top 2 tips on picking great keywords for content marketing.
Use Google’s Keyword Planner to find keywords that have decent volume with low competition.
Pay attention to what keywords your competitors are using, but make sure you’re focusing on long tail keywords.
3. Is SEO still relevant? If yes, what top 2 things should businesses focus their SEO efforts on.
It’s not the first thing you should be doing. Building relationships, cultivating a community, and creating content are more important. With that said, SEO is still important once you build the foundation. Businesses should focus on putting out detailed and engaging content that is filled with inbound and outbound links.
6. Jonathan Gebauer
1. Which channels in your experience give the best ROI for content marketing?
This really depends on the situation you are in, your budget, and most importantly, the time you are willing to invest.
If you are in a niche that is not already overflowing with content, SEO has a really high ROI and results are only months out, but if the competition is really high, it can take years to be competitive. One channel that I find always works is Twitter because of the widespread discussions around any topic on there. For content distribution, Twitter can really give you a steady, targeted traffic stream – it’s not the massive traffic you can get from going viral, but you can get enough traffic to have make an impact for your business easily.
Pinterest is also very important for any marketing tactic right now because of the high acceptance for branded content on the network.
2. Your top 2 tips on picking great keywords for content marketing.
In my opinion, keyword selection is being more and more replaced by topic selection. Search engines are getting cleverer and more topic-oriented – and mobile searches and especially voice searches are helping this trend. Searches like “What is …?” are becoming more popular, and it will become very beneficial to have content for that.
With more and more niches becoming saturated with content, long-tail keyword tactics are becoming more important for SEO success.
3. Is SEO still relevant? If yes, what top 2 things should businesses focus their SEO efforts on.
No, SEO is totally not relevant anymore… Just kidding 😉
SEO will be relevant for a long time, but it will change. The growing focus on mobile searches was the last change we had to adapt to, the next change will be the focus on voice searches. It’s hard to say what will come after that – but with growing competition in the SEO area, marketers have to watch trends closely to be able to adapt as soon as a trend becomes visible.
The oversaturation with content means marketers need to spend more time identifying opportunities that are still valuable. Focusing on highly targeted long-tail opportunities is one way to deal with that, another is focusing on continually updating your content to improve its value with time.
With growing advertising costs, SEO will become even more relevant in the coming years.
Wrap
Content marketing and SEO are fast-paced marketing disciplines that demand marketers to learn quickly and stay updated on ever-changing trends. This post is an interview of 5 content marketing experts who have excellent insights that you can use to transform your content marketing and SEO.