Marketing Trend: Data Driven Content

Looking to make your marketing efforts a little more streamlined? Or just trying to create content that is easy to scale, right for your audience and optimized for search purposes? Data-driven content is the way to go. The biggest hurdle for most marketers is leaving the creative brain behind and getting into a quantitative mindset that allows you to look at your metrics and analyze how to improve those numbers and statistics.

It may sound scary, but using data can really improve your content, SEO and more. Try these tips and tricks from JBH: The Content Agency to get started!

If you still aren’t convinced that data is changing the way marketers think and execute their strategies, take a look at these examples that prove that data-driven marketing and content can work in any industry.

Fitness Tracking: Jawbone

Because fitness tracker Jawbone’s purpose is to collect data for consumer use, it makes sense that their marketing efforts are also highly data-driven. By collecting the data from their customers, the content that is produced is much more relevant to the lifestyles of the entire user base.

Music: Spotify

Spotify users see curated playlists and song suggestions based on their listening history, and via this post from 2013, it’s clear to see that Spotify doesn’t take their analytics lightly. Spotify also has a “Found Them First” feature, that lets you know if you were an early listener of emerging artists that are now big.

Home Search: Trulia, Zillow

Zillow and Trulia are two giants when it comes to online house hunting, but also when it comes to using data to improve customer experience. From amassing crime data to pricing and neighborhood demographics, the data compiled on these sites and individually compiled from users’ browsing sessions can help homebuyers find the perfect place.

Ridesharing: Uber

Ridesharing app Uber does the typical promotional posts and company updates but also uses the data they compile to create great human interest pieces, like this article. The data Uber uses to create content used for both societal and human nature research.

Data drives the world. How will you use it to create better content?  

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Why Email Marketing Shouldn’t Be Forgotten

Since the beginning of the internet, email has been one of the top ways we communicate. Regardless of the inception of chat apps, texting, and social media, email usage consistently grows each year. Despite these statistics, email marketing isn’t the main focus of many businesses, which is a shame for many reasons. With email marketing you can grow your business easily. Not convinced? Check out these reasons why email marketing should be a part of your marketing and sales strategies.

Mobile

Email can be accessed in a number of ways, and with at least half of US cellphone users accessing their email on their phones along with the ability for email to be accessed on tablets and other mobile devices, email can reach customers on a much larger scale that incurs less cost than SMS marketing.

Coupons and Bargain Hunters

Sending special offers and coupons to customers through email can cause a hesitant buyer to go through with a purchase. Driving engagement with customers is one of the most effective ways that email drives sales. Free shipping, and “buy one, get one” offers are shown to be the most attractive to customers, and with these offers you can increase conversion even within time constraints.

Versatility

Because email marketing is such a customizable marketing tool, it is extremely easy to not only use it for multiple purposes but also to combine it with the rest of your marketing tactics. Creating an integrated marketing strategy with email is one of the easiest ways to maintain the strength of your marketing efforts.

Investment

A recent study found that 85% of US retailers consider email marketing one of the most effective ways to reach customers. With the ability to reach gigantic numbers of customers for a very low price, matched with the effectiveness of this tactic, it’s no wonder that businesses feel that email marketing is worth so much. If doing email blitzes on your own sounds daunting, there are many tools that you can use to develop a highly effective email campaign. These are some of the top resources on the market.

1. MailChimp
2. Constant Contact
3. HubSpot

How have you used email marketing to grow your business? Do you have tools to make it easier? Let me know in comments!

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Best Marketing Apps for Small Business

Larger enterprises have the luxury of having several hands on deck helping with different aspects like marketing or sales. However, we all know that small business owners wear different hats, sometimes all of the hats. In order to streamline processes for busy entrepreneurs and small business owners here is a list of free easy to use apps to help with online marketing.

Asana

Asana is a platform designed to help businesses track work from projects, to conversations, to diversified notification types. The app is a dream for all the multitasking entrepreneurs that delegate or need to delegate work with their team. Streamlined processes and transparent work flow are some favorite features.

Google (Docs/Messenger)

Google Docs is a one of the most efficient ways for teams to share content. From slides, spreadsheets, documents, email and messenger Google is the one stop shop. Business partners and employees can collaborate and chat all in real time.

Facebook Pages Manager

Facebook is currently one of the biggest and cheapest ways to market your business online. Having a business page that is active and engaged is imperative for your business. The Facebook app is a simple and convenient way for keeping on top of scheduled posts, and answering direct messages from customers in a timely manner.

Twitter

Twitter has been having a pretty tumultuous time in the social media realm but don’t let that deter you. One of the fastest ways to go viral, easiest ways to be engaged with your audience, and staying in touch with current events is still Twitter. The app is one of the easiest to use with great UI/UX and a small learning curve.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the place to be especially if you run a B2B business. Although it can be difficult to reach an outside market, and despite ads being a bit pricey, LinkedIn is one of the most reputable social media platforms. It brings a large sense of legitimacy, and can help you find targeted leads. The app can have a bit of a learning curve but is manageable after a few uses.

Instagram

Instagram is one of the fastest growing social media platforms right now. In the past few years they have added features that include business pages, live video sharing, and simple searchability. It’s a great place to showcase company branding and culture all in a sleek and clean app that’s extremely user friendly.

Fiverr

Fiverr is for all the entrepreneurs that sometimes need to outsource some duties. It’s an amazing marketplace to find nearly every kind of serve for your business for literally any price range. The website and app can be a little confusing to maneuver at first, as there are quite a few moving parts, but it’s well worth it.

Canva

Canva is made to help all the design challenged entrepreneurs create practical, aesthetically pleasing and professional looking images for social content, print material or email blasts. Canva has created templates for beginners and opened up a platform with enough artistic freedoms to those with a better understanding of design, or those who want to to learn.

MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the world’s largest email marketing services. Email marketing is still considered one of the top tools in the marketing world, and MailChimp makes the process of sending out those campaigns easier than ever. With an easy to navigate website and app, Email marketing is made accessible even for beginners.

Mashable

Mashable is one of my favorite websites for keeping your ear to the ground as it relates to all things business, tech, social media, popular culture and where they all collide. Keeping up with the times is a great way to stay ahead of popular trends, find curated content and stay engaged with your customers.

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Make Email Essential to Your Content Marketing Strategy

If you go to any internet marketing event, you’ll be sure to hear one thing over and over again: content marketing. This hot new art and science of being an effective brand publisher is more than just a trend; it’s the atomic bomb of all marketing.

As content marketing rises in importance, email marketing is also becoming a tried and true channel for reaching people where they gather every day: their inbox. Why? Because people are constantly checking their email. According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing yields an estimated 4,300% ROI.

While these seemingly separate practice areas of content marketing and email marketing are marching forward in parallel, they’re actually on a collision course.

The intersection of content marketing and email marketing is delivering branded editorial content via email. Here’s the big opportunity: Use email to re-engage users with personalized content selected based on their history and demonstrated interests across other digital channels.

So, why does content marketing deserve special treatment? Branded editorial has some very distinct challenges and opportunities that set it apart from typical promos and offers:

• Content is has a long shelf life. The best brand content never expires. This is because people who are interested in a topic, say Garden Homes, are likely to be interested in that subject for an extended period of time.

• Content has a ton of meta data. Editorial content has many words and a variety of formats, so there’s much more meta data that can be used to select it.

• Brands have a lot of it. The best content marketers have hundreds of pieces of content. A content personalization solution needs to be able to analyze, classify, reformat and target large volumes of content.

The same thinking applies across categories. For example, consider Delta Faucet, who through its Inspired Living hub offers a range of how-tos, design ideas and trend articles. They knew that their content portfolio covered a wide range of interests that didn’t fit neatly into a one-size-fits-all or segment based approach. So, by individually personalizing their overall content experience, Delta Faucet has been able to drive a nearly 30% lift in engagement.

The best content marketers are now thinking about email and content as connective tissue for the broader digital saga. Leveraging data across channels to develop a predictive approach to content selection—in email as well as other channels—is proving to be an essential technique for driving repeat engagement and ultimately building long-lived relationships with customers.

But, how does this method of cross-channel content sequencing actually impact your email marketing efforts though? One major, US grocery brand recently added such personalized content to their email newsletter programs—leveraging past topic interests in other channels—and saw up to a 180% lift in the email click-to-open rate. Importantly, they reduced the time needed to manually curate editorial sections of email by 99%.

How can your brand start moving the needle on this front? Here are three steps the best brands are taking to unify their email and content strategies in the most optimal ways:

• Audit your content. It sounds basic, but it’s absolutely essential to have a complete and comprehensive understanding of your content portfolio. Key questions: How many pieces are there? What formats and lengths are represented? What types of topics and subtopics are reflected and how often are you publishing?

• Audit your email. In other words, know what you’re sending. Key questions: What is your brand’s total email footprint? For any given type of subscriber what does the totality of volume and types of email look like? Which email products are best poised for including or featuring personalized content selections and which ones should potentially be exempt?

• Define success. You want to make your content and email marketing strategies work together better and deliver a more personalized experience. What does actual success look like and what are the key metrics that tell you you’re doing well?

Bringing the two worlds of content marketing and email marketing together to support each other can be highly beneficial and it can help your brand capitalize on two of the most important practice areas of modern marketing. By taking a data-driven approach and pursuing a well-defined marketing technology roadmap, today’s modern marketers can effectively serve their customers better than ever.

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Best-Selling Book Announcement: Professional Performance 360: Special Edition: Success

“Together We Can Change The World” —Steve Renner

Steve Renner, Internet marketing pioneer, motivational speaker, and “member of the National Academy Of Best Selling Authors”, decided long ago that he “wanted to be an Internet Service provider.”

“When I look back on my life over the last 17 years,” says Steve, “it’s like I have always been on this Quest. I’ve always been searching for something, although I may not know exactly what it will be until I get there.”

“[T]hrough sheer hard work, determination, and a burning desire to succeed,” he continues, “I have build a successful global business, and achieved personal financial success far beyond my wildest expectations.”

Apart from being an Internet marketing pioneer, Steve is also an avid and skilled writer.

Says Steve: “One of my passions is writing. So, I have joined the efforts of other authors to share my insights and the ‘my learnings’.”

Now, Steve joins fellow luminaries Richard Bronson, Pa Joof, Perminder Chohan, Ken Nunn, Betsi Bixby, Nosh Marzbani, and many others to bring you more of his “my learnings” in an essential marketing bible, Professional Performance 360: Special Edition: Success(CelebrityPress® LLC, 2016), available now for $34.99 on Amazon.

“And I know as sure as I am standing here today, that I know that I will make this dream a reality.”

What’s more, when you buy the book, “you’ll get hundreds of dollars of bonuses.”

Professional Performance 360: Special Edition: Success is much more than a book; it’s a lifestyle, a guru. The invaluable knowledge gathered in Professional Performance 360: Special Edition: Success will provide YOU with the tools to excel in this ever-changing industry.

Or, like contributor Napolean Hill eloquently puts it: “You can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed.”

Perhaps the Professional Performance 360: Special Edition: Success official description says it best: “The reader may note that it is no different mindset to set aspirations for lofty goals or down-to-earth ones. In fact, some experts need to work their way up to higher goals while others have a mindset to go for broke-and both make it work!”

Steve is honored to be part of this incredible, life-changing volume.

“Seventeen years ago,” he says, “I started with a dream to help people to improve their lives with the power of the Internet. I am living proof that you achieve your dreams; and if I can do it I know that anyone can. Now the future is up to you. Follow your dreams, and never give up, and you can make your dreams a reality.”

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Top Free Digital Marketing Tools to Help Reach Your Customers

Every smart entrepreneur understands the hustle of digital marketing. Trends change quicker then you can finish this sentence and in order to keep up, businesses, big or small, have to change right along with them. If you’re a small business, you may not have the time or access to premium tools so instead, you must turn to scrappy solutions to get your products out there. For that reason, I compiled a list of free tools that can add value to any company, not matter the size or experience.

First, let’s start with the most important aspect of any marketing campaign (so you can truly utilize these tools effectively): the customer. The customer, or user, is the one who ultimately decides if a search result or content on your website is relevant and of high quality. Although having keywords on your blog is important, the days of stuffing keywords into a page thoughtlessly, hoping to rank high in a Google search, is over. The algorithms are much more sophisticated then they use to be at understanding high-quality (hard links, original content) and relevant content. For that reason, given enough time, the best stuff on the interent (highly original content) will emerge on top. Users will then see it, engage with it, and further it’s visibility on Google.

Seth Godin puts it best: “marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.”

This is why it’s so important to understand your audience. When you understand who they are, what they’re interested in, and how they search online, you can deliver personal and relevant content no matter what social channel you’re on. These tools will help you effectively understand who your customer is online so you can be there with them throughout their journey.

Google Analytics

GA is the most widely used website analytics platform on the market and there’s a big reason why. It has tons of features for identifying target customers:

Demographics (Age, Gender)

Geo (Language, Location)

Behavior (New vs. Returning, Frequency & Recency, Engagement)

Technology (Browser & OS, Network)

Mobile (Devices)

Interests (Affinity Categories, In-Market Segments), and much more.

Think with Google

When you plug in your industry, business size, and region, this website tool will help you uncover various marketing channels that your customers are most likely to use (and in what order) throughout their purchase. It also helps you uncover how your various marketing campaigns may have a different impact on your customers and understand what percentage of users view Generic Paid Search (and other channels such as Brand Paid Search, Email, Referral, Social, Organic, etc.) at the beginning, middle, and end of their search journey.

Followerwonk

This tool digs into Twitter analytics so you can see audience insights, search bios, compare users, analyze Twitter accounts, track and sort followers, and much more. With the free version, you can view social authority rankings, see followers and their locations, and know when followers are active.

Answer The Public

This is a great tool for keyword search. You can plug in any keywords and see the real life questions about your product, website, or service. The questions are broken up into who, what, when, where, why, which, are, and how modifiers. On of the many features includes being able to view a master list of questions in alphabetical order, and export them for your own use.

Keyword Tool

This online keyword tool uses Google Autocomplete to generate hundred of relevant long-tail keywords for any topic. Other features include toggling between Google, YouTube, Amazon, and the App store. You can also change geographic location and language setting very easily.

Google Keyword Planner

In premium, this Planner allows to search for keyword ideas, get historical keyword statistics, check out the performance of a list of keywords, and create a new keyword list by multiplying several lists of keywords together. This tool will help you understand how often a user is searching for a term on a monthly average.

Google Trends

This type of tool shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to its total search-volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages. Two highlight features include a graph showing search-term trends, and popular statistics by countries, regions, cities, and language. This terms can then be easily compared in order to understand how your site, product, or service stack up against the competition.

Share Tally

This simple tool allows you to tally up how many times a URL has been shared across almost any social media platform or website that allows you to bookmark or share (reddit, pocket, etc.).

In summary, there are so many tools out there for identifying and reach your audience online, it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle. Start with the tools above and see where they take you.

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20 Content Marketing Tools for the Successful Blogger

You don’t have to be a MacGyver these days to figure out how to create and market great content. So, throw away your paperclips and Juicy Fruit­­­ and keep reading. Beautifully crafted mullet aside, the MacGyver’s of the marketing world, so to speak, have the right tools for the job. From planning a post to adding visual interest, they obtain a stylish array of improvised gadgetry sure to turn the heads of any prospective consumer.

Conception

Every good content marketer begins with an audience and keyword search. They look at who the consumer is, what their interests are, and for what they tend to search. Afterwards, they will take their findings and implement them into a post. Check out these five tools to help you generate some ideas:

1. Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator

2. Portent’s Content Idea Generator

3. TweakYourBIZ’s Title Generator

4. BuiltVisible’s Content Discovery Tool

5. Buzzsumo’s Top Performing Posts

Headline Optimization

Your headline is one of the most important aspects of any blog post. It is essentially what grabs a reader’s attention. If isn’t easy to read and compelling, you’re most likely to be skipped. So, rather than spend countless hours coming up the perfect headline, try these tools out:

6. CoSchedule Headline Analyzer

7. ShareThrough Headline Analyzer

8. KingSumo Headlines

Writing

You know whom you’re targeting and you’ve got the perfect headline, now, it’s time to focus. Hopefully, you’ve got yourself a team of smart, independent copywriters drafting up content for you every other day. If you don’t, you’re missing out. Big time. Nonetheless, here are a few tools that will help focus your writing efforts:

9. Freedom

10. FocusWriter

11. StayFocused

12. Zen-Cast

Readability

So, you’ve written your first blog post, but what to do next? Now, it’s time to go over the Four C’s of Quality Content: Clear, Concise, Coherent, and Correct. Without all four elements, you’re readers will probably feel confused within the first couple of sentences. Luckily, there are tools to ensure your post is up to snuff:

13. Word2CleanHTML

14. The Hemingway App

15. Readability Test Tool

Imagery

A compelling image is just as important as an eye-catching headline, if not more. Your featured image should be high in resolution, relative, and sexy. I don’t care if it’s an article on a game of chess, find or create an image of a chessboard that could make Beyoncé look like a pot of boiling onions. In your quest for the perfect image, here a few amazing tools to help you along:

16. Pixaby

17. Stocksnap

18. rgbstock

19. Pixlr

20. Canva

Feeling ready to take on your own blog or revamp an old one? Allow those MacGyver instincts to kick in and tighten your tool belt—your readers are in for a great piece of work. You can see, in order to get something done, you don’t always need to buy the most expensive tool on the market. Sometimes all you need is a paperclip and a piece of chewing gum. In other words, see what’s on hand and whether it works for you. What other content marketing tools do you find are the most useful?

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Fundamentals of a Good Marketing Strategy

A good marketing strategy is the difference between a failing business and one that is thriving. A successful business is one that understands the fundamentals of a prosperous marketing strategy. In short, it’s important that your business knows the right techniques that will enable your business to have that best opportunities in terms of increasing sales and having an advantage over the competition. Any marketing strategy will consist of long-term activities that help develop strong brand awareness. So, what are the fundamentals of a good marketing strategy?

Identify Your Target Audience

Who are you trying to reach in your marketing efforts? What is their interest? Where do they live? It’s important to narrow your marketing efforts for your most prospective customers. When you get a clear understanding of who your target customer is, you’ll be able to adjust the overall style of your marketing strategy to suit that particular person. Your ads, blogs, and social media will be more focused and relevant to their needs and interests. Thus creating a strong, loyal connection.

Grow Your Brand Awareness

A goal for any business is to gain trust and brand awareness within their target audience. There are multiple ways to do this, but knowing which marketing techniques work for your business is crucial. More than likely, starting with the basics (website, high-quality blog posts, videos, ads, social media) is going to build a nice central following. In order to further brand awareness you’re going to have to zero in on what type of content, video, ad, and social media garners more of a response from your particular following.

Offer a Unique Advantage

What does your business have over other businesses? What makes your company, well, your company? Unless your product/service is extremely rare, which is bloody unlikely, you’ll have to think of an angle for your particular product/service in order to distinguish yourself from the pack. Perhaps what sets you a part is the charity to which you donate a fraction of your proceeds or unbeatable prices. It doesn’t have to be a plethora of ideas, it can be just one simple trait, or even a unique business perspective.

Communicate with Your Customer

The connection you make with your target audience is an important aspect of a successful marketing strategy. Thankfully, the vast number of social media platforms makes staying connected with your audience very easy. Answer FAQs via Twitter or Facebook Live, introduce new products via Instagram, offer exclusive tips about how to use your product via Snapchat—the opportunities are seemingly endless. The number of monitoring applications is neither in short supply. Take full advantage of behavioral analytics to gain further insight into your customers’ deepest desires.

Remain Active

So you’ve identified your audience, developed your reach, offered a unique advantage, and communicate on a regular basis—now what? Connect all prior fundamentals with activities. These should include advertising, online presence, seminars, webinars, promotions, giveaways, interviews, emails, etc. There really is no shortage of activities that will keep you in constant contact with your customer. Plan a monthly schedule of activities with deadlines to ensure engagement.

There certainly are no short cuts when achieving the proper marketing strategy. Be ready to invest time, effort, money, and a good amount of patience. But don’t expect to be able to do all of this by yourself. Form a smart, efficient marketing team that will keep the strategy rolling along effectively. They are your bread and butter. Take care of them and they will be sure to take care of your business.

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Inspiring TED Talks for the Internet Marketer

TED, an acronym for Technology, Entertainment, and Design is a set of global conferences run by the private, nonprofit Sapling Foundation. Under the slogan, “Ideas Worth Spreading”, TED talks address a wide range of subjects “within the research and practice of science and culture, often through storytelling.” These talks are offered for free viewing online at Ted.com, YouTube, and also via their mobile app. Many talks are lead by the biggest thinkers of our time such as, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Jane Goodall, and more. Only about 18-minutes long, they make for great listening during work commutes, coffee breaks or eating lunch.

TED archives feature a variety of topics ranging from jaw dropping new technologies to postmodern realizations. They also include amazing ideas about Internet marketing for the small and large business owner. Ideas people can actually implement into their business plans. So, without further ado, here are the 5 best TED Talks on marketing:

1. Seth Godin: How to Get Your Ideas to Spread

Marketing guru Seth Godin tells us why bizarre ideas are more successful at getting our attention then boring ones. He says that marketing is less about the product and more about the sales strategy—how you get an idea to spread.

2. Sheena Iyengar: How to Make Choosing Easier

Psycho-economist Sheena Iyengar reveals that when consumers have too many options, they often will purchase fewer products and become less engaged. Iyngar demonstrates how businesses can improve the experiences of choosing with four techniques: cut, concretization, categorization, and condition for complexity.

3. John Gerzema: The Post-Crisis Consumer

Marketing whiz John Gerzema tells us how ever since the “The Great Unwind” of 2008 (a.k.a the U.S. financial crisis), consumers purchasing habits have changed from anxiety to action. Essentially, less spending money means consumers now choose products that are intuitive to their needs. Gerzema reveals how businesses can and have evolved to connect with thoughtful spending.

4. Malcolm Gladwell: Choice, Happiness, and Spaghetti Sauce

In this TED talk, bestselling author of “Blink” and “The Tipping Point”, Malcolm Gladwell shows us the nature of choice and happiness. He reveals that by embracing diversity of taste and preferences, businesses can discover a niche market that can increase sales.

5. Dan Cobley: What Physics Taught Me About Marketing

This remarkable marketing presentation by Google Marketing Director, Dan Cobley shows how the laws of physics resemble basic marketing concepts, for example: acceleration equals force over mass. He brings unlikely bedfellows—Newton’s second law, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the scientific method and the second law of thermodynamics—to explain the fundamental theories of branding.

If these talks don’t inspire your own marketing techniques, perhaps you’re in the wrong business. I have found them to be personally invigorating—like diving into an icy bath of revelation. If you’re like me and want to hear more motivating talks on marketing visit TED.com. What are some of your favorite talks?

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Rev up Your SEO with These Daily Habits

Have you ever wondered why some sites rank higher in Google then others? Well, before we get into why SEO is important to your online business, it might be useful for you to understand how a search engine functions. Search engines have a couple main functions: crawling and building an index, and providing users with a ranked list of websites they’ve determined are the most relevant. But how do search engines determine relevance and popularity? There are hundreds of factors, but search engines usually determine a site’s popularity by the value of its information. The engines use algorithms, often composed of hundreds of variables, to sort through information, ranking quality over quantity.

So how do you make sure your content search engine is optimized? One key factor is staying in the know about any algorithms that Google has updated. Here are a few blogs you can follow to keep up with SEO:

SEMrush Blog is the world’s leading competitive research service for online marketing. For marketers, by marketers.

Moz Blog is more than an SEO consulting company. They are “the industry’s top wizards, doctors, and other experts offer their best advice, research, how-tos, and insights—all in the name of helping you level-up your SEO and online marketing skills.”

Search Engine Roundtable reports the most interesting threads taking place at the search engine marketing forums. Their mission is to provide a single source of the most interesting threads covered at the SEM forms for readers.

Search Engine Land is a leading daily publication that covers all aspects of the SEM industry. They also feature articles by experts across all digital marketing disciplines, which are filled with practical tips, tactics and strategies for running a successful marketing program.

Google Webmaster Central is the “official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index.” This is a great source of any upcoming updates from Google.

If you’re feeling a little “information overload”, don’t worry; SEO is a constantly changing environment so you need only learn a few things at a time.

Another factor is listening to your analytics and ranking tools. There’s no such thing as an all-inclusive marketing tool. Good SEO experts make it a habit to look at top sites and see what strategies they’re using. They experiment a little, but never stray from the numbers. They also look at the SEMrush report in order to see who’s winning and losing.

Great SEO artists are doers. Not only do they strategize and crunch numbers all day, they make projects happen. Here’s just a few ways you can implement a project quickly:

• Create a PowerPoint that showcases any analytics backing potential gains.

• Include a coercive case showing promise for ROI.

• Set a timeline with routine check-ups.

SEO professionals know that one of the primary ways search engines decide which pages should rank well is by looking at the links on those pages. This is why building links is just as important as having quality content. Search engines want to rewards sites with “hard links” (trustworthy, diverse, and relevant), which take effort to gain. A guest post in a high-ranking publication is an example of a hard link.

Another great habit you can make is to anticipate keyword searches to your site. This is why its important to know your audience. If you sell lamps, SEO nubes may assume customers are searching for products using that word. But, maybe they’re searching for other words, too?

Fortunately, Google AdWords Keyword Tool is here to help. You can enter a word and see how often people search for that word and those similar. It’s important to understand this because although 10 million people are searching for “lamp”, 15 million are looking up “magic fire torch”.

Last, but certainly not least, a good SEO professional will understand and implement quality content into a site. Your customers and especially Google want to read great, original content about a topic, rather than phrases used over and over again. That tactic simply doesn’t work for today’s highly intricate algorithms. Sure, you can plug in valuable keywords, but the content as a whole should be a compelling read for anyone. It’s important that content creation is valued and praised in any marketing team’s agenda. Otherwise, your site may be missing out on countless potential clients.

SEO experts never cease to improve the quality of the content on the website, the backlink profile, their technical knowledge, or communication skills. As the algorithms evolve, so should they, working hard to make sure your site is up to snuff.

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