5 Tips to Get Off the Content Marketing Struggle Bus & Create Content Your Audience Will Love

The young man at the back of the ballroom in the Santa Monica, Calif., Loews hotel has a question he's been burning to ask, having held it for more than an hour as I delivered a presentation on why content marketing is invaluable for search.

When the time comes for Q&A, he nearly leaps out of his chair before announcing that he's asking a question for pretty much the entire room.

"How do I know what content I should create?" he asks. "I work at a small company. We have a team of content people, but we're typically told what to write without having any idea if it's what people want to read from us."

When asked what the results of their two blog posts per week was, his answer told a tale I hear I often: "No one reads it. We don't know if that's because of the message or because [it's the] wrong audience for the content we're sharing."

In fishing and hunting circles, there's a saying that rings true today, tomorrow, and everyday: "If you want to land trophy animals, you have to hunt in places where trophy animals reside."

Content marketing is not much different.

If you want to ensure that the right audience consumes the content you design, create and share, you have to "hunt" where they are. But to do so successfully, you must first know what they desire in the way of bait (content).

For those of us who've been involved in content marketing for a while now, this all sounds like fairly simplistic, 101-level stuff. But consider this: While we as marketers and technologists have access to sundry tools and platforms that help us discern all sorts of information, most small and mid-size business owners — and the folks who work at small and mid-size businesses — often lack the resources for most of the tools that could help flatten the learning curve for "What content should I create?"

If you spend any time fishing around online, you know very well that the problem isn't going away soon.

For small and mid-size business looking to tackle this challenge, I detail a few tips below that I frequently share during presentations and that seem to work well for clients and prospects alike.

Content Gating: When, Whether, and How to Put Your Content Behind an Email/Form Capture

Have you ever considered gating your content to get leads? Whether you choose to have open-access content or gate it to gather information, there are benefits and drawbacks you should be aware of. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand weighs the pros and cons of each approach and shares some tips for improving your process, regardless of whichever route you go.

Penguin 4.0: Was It Worth the Wait?

For almost two years (707 days, to be precise), one question has dominated the SEO conversation: “When will Google update Penguin?” Today, we finally have the answer. Google announced that a Penguin update is rolling out and that Penguin is now operating in real-time.

September has been a very volatile month for the SERPs (more on that later in the post), but here’s what we’re seeing in MozCast for the past two weeks, including last night:

New Google Ranking Factors and Algorithm Update in April Month

What a month we had. Google released updates one after the other close to 60 algos in little over four weeks. From now onwards fooling Google that our website is popular and valuable by stuffing with keywords, duplicating content and building junk links is almost over.

For over a decade, Big Google was watching how seo companies were manipulating the algorithms set by it to our advantage. Google published in its blog the changes and tweaks made in algorithm in the month of April. Let us look at below:

Authoritative content: Google claims that with a modified signal it can identity authoritative content. This is still unclear how Google concludes ones content is authoritative. My guess is through number of social signals like tweets, likes and plus. Also the author of content displayed through rel=author that is through Google + profile. Influence in ranking changes of this update: No Idea.

Keyword Classifier: A big blow for the stuffers and spammers. High usage of keywords in the web page is the old mantra and certainly a strategy to rank high in Google. Google has better technology to detect keyword stuffing. Influence in ranking changes of this update: Huge.

Domain Diversity: Unlike in past, Google, Now, has limited the ratio of showing the same webpage for multiple search terms. Instead of targeting 10 to 15 high search volume and competitive keywords in homepage we can concentrate on sub pages. Websites that are getting high rankings for many keywords have given way to other websites. The keywords have cut down to 5 to 8 keywords for a website. Influence in ranking changes of this update: Medium.

• Google finds relevancy among paginated results and ranks the website. It articulates the phrases from different pages that has continuity in content from one to other and ranks the keyword.
• Penalizes anchor text over optimization. Targeting same anchor text for higher rankings. Think once again. Vary the anchor texts.
• Ranking for the fresh results. This helps largely to the online new websites, publishing domains, portal sites.
• Ranks for unique descriptive and meaningful title tags. Keyword stuffing in Title and Metags may sink your website to the new level of abyss.

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