Spam sucks. It sucks in your inbox. It sucks on Twitter and Facebook. It sucks as a canned meat (Ok, it’s really not that bad). But it especially sucks in Google Analytics. Google Analytics (GA) is foundational for any website and the data gleaned for UX, SEO and a lot of other things is extraordinarily […]
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In September of 2014 I participated on a startup marketing panel with a couple of really smart marketers. The conversation ranged from ‘how do we do this marketing thing?’ to ‘what’s next with marketing?’. As the founder of a marketing agency that solely works with B2B software companies, the last question struck a chord. See, […]
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In mid-August the team at Bullhorn reached out to rebuild their website. Their website was built on Drupal, had multiple language sites and consisted of nearly 130 core pages excluding blog posts. Oh, and the timeline was about 6 weeks!
Our goals were to bring a consistent design throughout the site, optimize conversion, go mobile and make it easy for top and mid-funnel visitors to find and consume information.
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It’s one of the hardest parts for any content marketing team. At one time or another, the question will be asked “What the hell do we talk about this week?”.
Uncovering what your potential customers want and need is the foundation of a solid content marketing framework. The goal is to find topics that help prospects perform their jobs better and present that content in a compelling and creative manner.
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In a bygone era (mid-1990s) SEO fell into the realm of developers, webmasters and velociraptors.
All you really needed to do was submit your site for indexing, add the keyword meta tag, tweak HTML and let the spider do the rest of the work.
As search algorithms got better, these technical moves became obsolete and other, more relevant methods adopted for better search results.
Fast forward to today where SEO requires strategy, technical expertise, content skills and PR chops.
Speaking of technical expertise, there are still a number of technical factors that can deep six a site and keep pages from ranking.
Usually, technical factors can be fixed relatively quickly and can turn a site’s visibility around. Also, in my mind, technical factors are things that involve programatic knowledge and not things that are content related (potato patato).
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As I sit at MozCon, I’m reminded of how important SEO is to the overall digital, inbound process. Today, SEO is less of a stand-alone, highly technical activity as it was a few years ago. With the interconnectedness of most digital activities, a discipline like SEO doesn’t exist in a bubble, rather exists in every part of the process. Social interactions, helpful content, site layouts and search visibility all help the bigger conversion picture. The question is “How do you manage the intersection of the disciplines?”
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A question that comes up at nearly every content marketing meeting is “How will we come up with new content?”. For marketers new to creating constant, relevant content this can look like a long desert road.
The good news is there is a simple way to hyper-focus on a topic and cover all its facets. I call this process a topic sprint.
Topic sprints sprung from a design process called, appropriately, a logo sprint. Like topic sprints, logo sprints explore every angle of an idea. Both are meant to produce a lot of ideas in short, focused bursts.
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Before Pandas and Penguins ruled the earth, an SEO copywriter could get away with stuffing keywords, being irrelevant to the user and writing short, choppy posts.
Marketers would pay writers for 300 word posts with 14 instances of a key phrase and then distribute said posts around the web to grow the link profile.
In the modern search engine era, these tactics have been overruled by relevancy; relevancy to the intended reader first and the robots second.
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Understanding that content is the nucleus of everything will help prioritize it’s development. All too often content is seen as an afterthought or simple task, even in the era of content marketing.
And if content is the nucleus of everything we do, then it’s sub-atomic makeup are the elements that make up a content strategy.
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When you strike out on a web design project it’s easy to get buried. New jQuery plugins, CSS3 animations, icon font libraries are all begging to be put to use. On top of that you have UX to consider and information architecture to map.
Web design or re-design projects are perfect opportunities to optimize your visitor’s experience. But all too often a new design is dropped on top of existing architecture and doesn’t address what buyers look for in B2B websites.
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