Seven Steps to Improving Your Business’s Twitter Results

Actor Donald Glover says it well, “If you’re on Twitter, what you’re saying is, ‘I’m important enough for you to care what I think.’ ”

True for a celebrity, perhaps, but just as true for an individual and for a business. Twitter’s slogan is, “It’s what’s happening.” There’s a subtle statement made by the fact of being on Twitter. It’s the suggestion that you’re in the moment, that you matter, that you have something to say that’s worth watching for.

With those thoughts in mind, we funnel this down to just business considerations of Twitter. With no further ado, here are seven steps to make your business’s Twitter account shine:

tweet pic
This is a tweet from our agency’s own Tweet feed. Twitter gives a business an opportunity to take the outside public inside its operations. You can share your values, your personality, your competitive advantages. These help break down possible resistance to your business’s appeal.

1. Set Goals

If you’re at, say, 200 followers on Twitter, set yourself a goal of getting to 1,000 followers. Give yourself a year or two. And remember that you don’t have to have huge followings to get some good out of your Twitter presence. Hashtags, for one thing, will flag and funnel prospects your way, and you can also run advertising on Twitter that will expose prospects to your offerings.

2. Employ Imagery

Don’t run text-only tweets exclusively. Add a photo below your tweet or, for a more professional look, create a graphic that has text embedded in it. This makes for a more shareable post. But even when you create an attractive, professional-looking graphic, think about placing a line of text with it. (That is, text that is not a part of the graphic itself.) Why do this? Because you’ll want your post to show up in people’s searches of Twitter, and unless there is freestanding text in your post, there will be no words to match up against those searchers’ search terms. Words that are embedded in (placed upon) an illustration or photo are not searchable by Twitter. If you want to share a link, then you’ll want the link to be click-able, and that only happens if the link is above the graphic, not displayed within the graphic as text. Also, you’ll want to include hashtags in some of your posts, and hashtags must be in the freestanding text that is not displayed in your graphic. See this example, below.

Sample tweet from @jemullymedia
This tweet from our @JemullyMedia feed includes hashtags, a backlink, and a graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In this example, the keywords Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace, as well as the hashtagged terms #free, #website, and #cost are all included in the hope of attracting searchers on Twitter who are interested in these topics.

3. Be Engaging

Some businesses, in their Twitter embodiments, maintain a highly corporate look that is all graphics (and these generally with very refined, highly standardized design elements), with (usually) no text-only tweets. That’s fine for a major corporation, but then large corporations tend to be somewhat starched and they don’t generally present themselves as chatty, candid, or casual. If you examine the tweets by large corporations, you’ll see that they have relatively low levels of engagement. I’ve charted a statistic on some of them—retweets per 1,000 followers—and their numbers can be amazingly low. But major corporations are (mostly) not there to accomplish the same ends as small businesses, so if you’re a small business, don’t be afraid to inject text-only tweets, and @reply tweets, and shout-outs, and especially retweets of other accounts’ messages. These are all things that major corporations rarely do, if ever. But major corporations do not necessarily look upon Twitter as a customer-growth or demand-growth proposition. For them, it’s more about staying visible and looking branded across all channels. You, however, as a small or medium-sized business, want to attract potential customers. So get out there and mix it up!

4. Schedule Your Tweets

There’s an additional reason for scheduling your tweets, beyond just the idea of getting many of them done in advance. There’s the pure efficiency that comes with scheduling tweets, especially when you planning to tweet the same material multiple times. In Hootsuite, for instance, one can click the “save” button to preserve a freshly constructed tweet in “draft” mode. So once you have scheduled the tweet, you simply re-open the draft and schedule it for yet another date (and so on, repeatedly, as often as needed). If a Twitter account is going to display a particular tweet eight different times, for instance, then this draft function is a huge time saver. We sometimes like to make minor tweaks on the fly each time we schedule it—changing, say, the hashtags or the textual message or the graphic (don’t forget to use graphics with your tweets when you can).

A graphic illustrating a marketing tip, shared in a Twitter feed.
For our own company Twitter account, we’ve created Tips that we trickle into our feed. We have built some 150 such tips so far. This one links readers to a blogpost, but many such tips don’t. They are a reader service for our followers.

5. Up Your Posting Game

Of all the most popular social media platforms, Twitter is most forgiving on the issue of repeating posts. Today, you’ll find many Twitter authorities urging marketers to be quite liberal in re-posting content. Twitter is a “noisy” platform and the half-life of a tweet is a mere 8 minutes, by at least one estimate. I’ve also heard sources say it’s 14 minutes—either way, it’s probably safe to say it’s less than 20 minutes. That’s not to say that someone should repeat a post in 20 minutes. By no means. But if you want a tweet to be seen by most of your followers, then multiple transmissions of it are necessary.

How many? Again, the estimates vary, but the figures do seem to cluster around 10 (times per tweet). We advise that you spread those out. If the message is evergreen enough, then the freshness-factor is not so critical, and in such a case, one ought to spread the repetitions out at least several days apart. We’re not averse to running repeated messages on consecutive days, but if you are only going to repeat a message, say, ten times altogether, then putting weeks between transmissions is even better. We also have some tweets that run once a month for, say, a year. If the content has value and isn’t time-sensitive, make the most of it.

Sources such as Hubspot recommend that online marketers apply a 40/60 rule to content creation. Forty percent of one’s time is to be spent creating the content, and 60 percent of one’s time is to be spent sharing the content, repurposing it, or promoting it.

sample tweet
Install your Twitter app on your phone and use it to snap pix on the fly to post immediately as live tweets. This one was shared during one of our team meetings. Twitter is all about immediacy.

6. Think “80/20”

Note: The “80/20” rule is not to be confused with the “40/60” rule from the previous tip.

Remember, with social media, you are replacing and bypassing traditional media. Eighty percent of your messaging should be informative or entertaining—not sales-y. In the old world of traditional media, the media outlet itself assembled and held the audience, and marketers simply pushed sales messages, nothing more. But in social media, the account itself has to do both jobs—gathering and retaining an audience, and selling. And so, 80% of your effort ought to be dedicated to obtaining and holding a following, without pushing a sales message. We often encounter clients who, in their early days with us, voice their insistence to be constantly selling. Some of them want to see a sales pitch in every post. They’re not always comfortable with spending time or money on efforts that are not directly tied to a sales pitch. But the practice of selling constantly is at odds with building a brand that retains a following. Who wants to be sold 100 percent of the time? Social media is reciprocal, not unilateral. It helps, then, to remind others that social media is media. To support ads, media must offer something of value to the audience. It has to function as media, as well as marketing. In some capacity, it needs to do the same work that traditional media did.

7. Consider Hiring A Social Media Manager

For brands that reach a certain size, or that desire a certain level of activity, it may become essential to hire a digital agency or solo professional to manage social media messaging and engagement. It might be the most cost-effective thing you can do. Some business owners cannot spend the necessary amount of time to nourish their social presence when they also have a company to run. We know from experience that we can grow clients’ accounts and make good things happen for them. Any business looking to get its feet wet on Twitter can do well for itself by following the first six steps guide, but at a certain point, when you’ve started to see that growth, bringing in a little outside help can be just the thing you need to scale up your social media efforts accordingly.

Twitter Tips and Tricks for Businesses

Here at jemully.com, we get a lot of mileage out of Twitter, both on our own Twitter account and on our clients’ accounts as well. That activity spawns a lot of ideas for blogposts like this one. You’ll find below some miscellaneous tips and tricks for getting more out of your company’s Twitter account.

Before we venture into some tactics, let me dispel a myth. It’s not necessary to have a huge following on Twitter to enjoy some success there. Any Twitter newcomer is bombarded with reminders that some Twitter accounts reach gigantic followings. The very big accounts are very visible on Twitter. In 2017, Katy Perry set a Twitter milestone by becoming the first person to reach 100 million followers on the site.

But the biggest Twitter accounts operate in a sphere that the rest of us can safely ignore. We need to follow certain practices that those mega-accounts never need follow.

One of those practices is called “growth hacking.” It’s the activity of building one’s following. Companies that are not household names are likely to find that their follower count does not increase very quickly unless one “primes the pump,” so to speak. At least in the early going. And you might find that it is a useful tactic that you might never want to relinquish entirely.

Hack Your Way

The better known an individual or organization is, the less it needs to growth hack on Twitter. I’ve noticed that many Twitter experts, those dispensing advice, have been mum on the subject of growth hacking, the practice of building one’s following. They do not often suggest a follow-first practice (the most common form of growth hacking). Maybe they feel it’s beneath them to reach out to potential connections. But it works. And it even gets employed by some Twitter accounts that are prominent-but-not-celebrity-status.

During the week I was writing this blogpost, I was followed on Twitter by Kim Garst (@kimgarst, one of the top experts on Twitter practices). It wasn’t the first time, either. I’ve not followed Kim Garst back, but that’s because she has posted more than 300,000 times, and I don’t follow back people who pour that much into my feed. But my point is this: if someone as prominent as Kim Garst (who has more than 600,000 followers), practices a follow-first strategy, then people like me probably ought to do so too. And I do.

Link, Link, Link

And while we’re on the subject of Kim Garst, I’ll note that when I looked at her feed just now, the majority of posts are messages that take a follower to her website, via a backlink. That is largely the strategy on Twitter.com. It’s to get people from the site to a website. Or to a Facebook page. In other words, to some platform where business (or your conversion of choice) can be transacted more easily, or where email addresses can be captured, or where (at least) online traffic and online domain authority can be built. So links are vitally important in Twitter content.

Savvy marketers look at Twitter as a place for making connections with people. That’s because people are much more approachable in this chatty platform. And connections here are easily made. In his book Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, Gary Vaynerchuk says, “Twitter is a marketer’s dream come true because it allows you to initiate a relationship with your customer.” Then, for many marketers, it becomes a process of expanding the relationship with the contact, getting him or her connected on other levels as well.

But as we said already, huge followings are not strictly necessary on Twitter. They are nice to have, but we can still do well for ourselves with small follower counts. One reason why that is true is because of Twitter’s search function. If we are using the keywords that people want to track, they will find us via search. That can mean a search of just any terms or a search of hashtagged terms. On the @JemullyMedia account, a great deal (maybe half) of the engagement we get is with Twitter accounts who are not (yet) followers of ours. They find our content and like it or retweet it—or simply follow us after having encountered it.

Make the “Notifications” Tab Your Secret Weapon

When we say this, it’s important for you to understand that we’re not talking about your own Notifications tab on your own Twitter account. We’re talking about the Notifications tabs on your contacts’ accounts. It’s those tabs that you want to make your secret weapon. Get on your prospective clients’ radar by listing them (putting them on a Twitter list) and retweeting them occasionally, or at least occasionally liking one of their posts. Any time you engage with them, you’ll show up in their notifications tab—and seeing you there, they’ll think of you favorably.

If you don’t like filling up your tweetstream with retweets of others’ posts, then just hit “like.” But remember that retweets are really where it’s at for any serious Twitter user. A retweet is social sharing. That’s where the most good is being done—for you, when you are retweeted; and for your connections, when you retweet them. Social sharing leverages social media in a far more powerful way than mere “liking” or “favoriting” does.

Tool Time

Lastly, know your tools, and employ them when appropriate. Here are four to get you started.

Use IFTTT. This acronym (it stands for “If This, Then That”) is the name of a tool that allows you to connect your favorite apps together so you can get the most out of them. For instance, you can connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts, so when you like something on Facebook, you automatically share it as a Twitter tweet. You can also connect Google Drive and Twitter, so you can automatically save all your new followers in a spreadsheet. IFTTT describes itself as a “free way to get all your apps and devices talking to each other. Not everything on the internet plays nice, so we’re on a mission to build a more connected world.” Find it at ifttt.com.

Sync your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts. When you sync your Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, not only are you able to track your connections from LinkedIn and follow them on Twitter, but also you can share content across both social networks at the same time. Your status updates in LinkedIn can display as tweets on Twitter. And your tweets (all of them, if you desire) can post automatically on LinkedIn, or you can click the option to be selective, in which case only those tweets that contain the #in hashtag will display on LinkedIn. For more information, go here.

Hashtagify.com is a site that helps you find what hashtags are relevant in your field of interest. Employing the right hashtags can be a big step toward putting you in the right conversations. Twitter’s slogan is “It’s What’s Happening,” and that descriptor is particularly apt. Twitter is very much about real-time occurrences and conversations. Tapping into those exchanges is a great way to leverage the platform.

Create lead generation cards. Twitter’s Lead Generation Cards allow you to attach a form into your tweets and integrate it with your email marketing provider, which means people can sign up to your email list without even having to leave Twitter. This is an effective technique to start generating more leads.

There. These suggestions could keep you busy for a while. And if you need more, come to our blog at jemully.com/blog and search the term “Twitter.” You’ll find plenty more there to get your synapses firing! Happy tweeting!

 

The Do’s And Don’ts Of SEO

dos dont's seo best practices

Search engines are constantly evolving, which means optimizing for them is always in a state of flux. This article amounts to a best practices guide to SEO for 2018. Read on for our SEO Do’s and Don’ts, and be on your way to glorious SERP performance.

DO

Test Your Search Performance On Multiple Devices

Searchers use many different devices to find our websites, and different browsers on different devices can yield different results. Each business will have it’s own distribution of referrals, but it’s always a good idea to check your search performance for your top keywords on multiple devices to make sure devoted users of specific devices aren’t missing out on your content.

Optimize For Your Target Market

“Know your target market,” an oldie, but a goodie. Tailor your content and pick your keywords with your ideal target market in mind. Each demographic has characteristics that we need to be aware of as marketers. If you’re going after the college crowd, make sure your content and keywords are relevant to what’s on the typical student’s radar. Beyond the subject matter, do your homework so you can tap into the phraseology, language, and style of content that your target audience favors.

Strive For Content With Quality Editorial And Quality Structure

Quality content can mean a few different things. First, it definitely helps if your content is well-written, and capably edited. Finding an engaging tone can be even more important, still. Structure is another highly visible aspect of your content that can make or break you. For example, if your target market likes list-icles or infographics, then giving them the type of content they want can be just as important as how well it’s written. Put equal thought into all of the elements that make for quality content.

Craft A Frequently Asked Questions Page (FAQ)

If you have a business, then people probably ask you questions about it from time to time. Any question about your industry that you are sick of being asked in real life is probably the right kind of thing to provide on your FAQ page. These kinds of insights, basic as they might seem to the business owner, are the kinds of things that can build credibility and a sense of engagement in your web visitors. If you’re looking to take your FAQ game to the next level, try weaving your most important keywords into your questions and answers. Even if nobody’s actually asking these questions, FAQs can be the perfect devices for presenting your company’s unique qualities.

Optimize For SERP Feature Friendiness

Rich Snippets, Knowledge Panels, Featured Snippets, Answer Boxes; the list of features that a given SERP may incorporate is long. Optimizing various pieces of content throughout your site for an appropriate SERP feature can give you a boost to be displayed more prominently. Here is a quick guide that can get you started.

Link Your Social Efforts To Your Website

At Jemully, we treat a client’s website as the primary hub of their digital presence. Social media is also extremely important, but it should serve the purpose of promoting your website, which is the best platform for fully leveraging your brand. Another way to think about a website is like a city, which makes various social sites the outlying smaller towns and suburbs. The city will always have the most roads leading in and out. The smaller towns will have some, but these roads ultimately lead to the city. The “roads in and out” concept, or links, is an indicator of the size and influence of a site. Ensuring that your website is your greatest presence, and directing searchers to it from other platforms will increase the profile and visibility of your site over time.

Know Your SEO Tools

There are a lot of great free SEO tools out there. They can help you up your game whether you are a neophyte or a seasoned pro. I’ve been writing about SEO for a few years now, and hadn’t even heard of these, but they’re worth checking out for those needing a boost.

Hone Your PR Game

This one takes some expertise, but is well worth doing if you can manage it. Searchers do not always want branded content, but companies (or experts, preferably) can insert themselves into a farther reaching context through public relations initiatives. Is there a trend sweeping your industry? Is there regional, national, or even global issue that pertains to your expertise? Finding a way to put your company in a larger context, and even juxtaposing your comments with those of other recognizable experts, is a neat way to puff up your brand in a way that is not strictly self-serving. This tip is more of an advanced content marketing strategy than an SEO hack, but if done well, it can put you in front of more eyes.

DON’T

Neglect Your Metadata

Headings. Alt tags. Custom URLs. Snippets. All the little things we pay attention to when entering content into our CMS that generally go unseen by the end-readers. Unseen by them, maybe, but most definitely seen by Google (or your search engine of choice). Mind your metadata.

Forget About Voice Search

As searchers continue to use voice commands on their phones, and as smart speakers find their way into a greater number of households, voice search is becoming less of a novelty, and more of the way things are done. Anecdotal evidence suggests that younger audiences, ones who have grown up with voice-tech, are using more naturalistic and conversational search terms. Keep this trend in mind, and as always, know your target market when optimizing.

Test queries and keywords using as many different technologies as you have access to. Keeping an eye on the differing results from device to device will lend additional perspective. And remember:

  • Google Home uses Google data
  • Siri uses Bing data
  • Alexa uses Bing and Amazon data

Only Target The Keywords You Aspire To

Sure, every company wants to be at the top of their search-engine results page (SERP), but that’s not always realistic. The more competitive your field, the harder it is to conquer the search results. If you are struggling, it’s OK! Start smaller by making sure you at least own the SERPs for keywords that are specifically relevant to your individual company. Make sure you dominate searches for your company name, and maybe even searches for your industry plus your city. Start small, carve out your niche, and with strong content marketing, you can make a dent in the broader SERPS in time.

Create A Keyword-Optimized Page And Call It A Day

While each page on your site should be optimized for its own unique keyword, one page is not generally going to be enough for Google to create a strong association between your site and that word. It sounds like a catch-22, but think about it like this: you must convince Google that your site is relevant to a particular keyword. A single content-rich page devoted to a key word is a nice start, but if you only mention that keyword on that one page, then that’s not going to be enough to convince Google. Think of a keyword-devoted page as that keyword’s house. That keyword is still going to want to hang out with other keywords. Each keyword has its own “house,” but that doesn’t mean they can’t visit another keyword’s house. Intermingling a keyword throughout your site will help demonstrate that the keyword in question is of integral value to the site, and vice versa. Make sure all of your best keywords have their own house, but let them visit their friends too.

Forget That Different SERPs Have Different Quirks

Some highly contested SERPs feature paid ads, others don’t. Some have a fancy knowledge panel on the right hand side. Some have space reserved for e-shopping listings. There are many variations, and recognizing the features that pop up on your desired SERPs can lend insight into the type of content that can improve your standing, and maybe even reveal some opportunities.

Let Your Page Load Time Creep Too High

“Three seconds or bust!” is a guideline offered by many SEO websites as a maximum page load time. If you page takes longer than three seconds to load, it might seriously hinder your SERP performance. Whether it is a major ranking factor for Google searches or not, think of it as a facet of UX (user experience). Slower sites are going to provide a less satisfying experience to searchers, which is something that Google ultimately does respond to. There are plenty of free tools (here is one from Google), so try a few of them out to be sure that you’re pages aren’t loading too slowly.

Scoff At Mobile-Friendliness

We’ve written several pieces about the importance of optimizing for mobile. You may read them here. Pertaining specifically to search, SERPs had, in the past, been organized and delivered based on the device used by the searcher. Mobile users would see results that were optimized for mobile, while desktop users would potentially see a less-filtered SERP. For more than a year, Google has switched to mobile-first indexing for ALL devices. Sites not optimized for mobile are still indexed, but if there is a mobile version of a site, then that is the one indexed. It’s just another indication of how search engine queries are handled. Mobile is important. It should be considered in all website matters.

Thanks to a number of great sources of SEO news and content including: Chief Content Officer, Search Engine Land.

The 7 Deadly Sins of Online Marketing

7 deadly sins of online marketing
Sin is defined in the original biblical language as “missing the mark.”  It is we when do not live in a way that embodies the goodness for which we were made. A “deadly” sin could be further defined as being so far off the mark that our behavior becomes damaging to the point of being destructive. When we apply the term “deadly sins” to the topic of marketing, it means we are “missing the mark” and even partaking in some practices and behaviors that turn out to be destructive to our objectives and goals. Could you be committing any of the 7 deadly sins of online marketing?Continue reading

Why People Follow Brands on Social Media

Amidst the low quality selfies, hilarious pet videos, and mouth-watering cooking tutorials, social media users in recent years have found a new kind of post on their feeds. This post, if done right, simultaneously advertises and entertains, capturing the user’s brand loyalty as well as their spending dollars. Brands, realizing the opportunities that come with social media, have pounced on the chance to put their products or services directly in their customers’ news feeds. With 78% of consumers relying on companies’ social media posts to help them make purchasing decisions, according to a study done by Forbes, it’s not all that surprising that people would choose to mix their social sharing and shopping research on the same platform. But what compels a user to follow a brand in the first place?

Why do people follow brands? Incentives

As much as we’d like to think that consumers are following our page for a good laugh or the informational content we spend hours producing, it turns out there is a little more to it. Before they can become a loyal and engaged user, there has to be good reason for them to click the “follow” button. A whopping 56% of social media users surveyed by MarketingSherpa said they originally followed brands to see promotions or coupons regularly. In a similar vein, 44% said they followed to enter a contest, get a discount, or win a gift card. Evidently, many are most interested in what companies have to offer them.

Incentives really serve two purposes. First, they attract new users to follow your account, buy your products, or (ideally) both. Second, they keep loyal customers coming back again and again – an equally important task. Discounts or promotions serve as reminders to consumers, positioning your brand at the top of their minds.

Why do people follow brands? Content

According to the same Marketing Sherpa survey, less than half of all consumers (38%) follow a brand for their informational content. Those how-to posts, reviews, and tip sheets you slave over? Apparently they’re not as alluring as the twenty-percent-off coupon that takes you a few minutes to throw together. Even fewer (31%) follow for entertaining content such as funny videos, memes, or bits of pop culture. But don’t let this discourage you, as informational or entertaining content serves its own purpose in attracting and keeping the right customer. As we discussed in our 80/20 Rule of Content Marketing post, all of your social media efforts are in vain if you are not aware of and catering to your target market. While a discount will get you a new follower, your content is ultimately what will determine whether or not they stick around after the promotion is over.

Good content is what turns your brand’s account from a bulletin board of coupons to a social page where users can stay engaged.

♦♦♦

In the delicious and complicated soup that is social media marketing, it’s important to remember that each ingredient gives your social platform a different flavor. Pushing out too many incentives can make your brand seem impersonal, but too much informational or entertaining content might allow customers to forget that you have something to sell them. Striking a balance between the two gives you the best chance of accomplishing the dual goal of attracting a large following and keeping them coming back for more.

Why SEO And Content Marketing Are Much The Same Thing

SEO and Content Marketing Pie

Nearly three decades into the game, SEO is now practically synonymous with content marketing.

The trick of ranking atop Google’s results pages has been reduced to a few simple truths: size, content, and targeting. Search engines will no longer bend to our wills; we must bend over backwards for search engine users.

In the early days of the Internet, search engine optimization (SEO) resembled the Wild West. Outlaws resorted to all manner of nefarious tactics to improve their search ranking and visibility. Such tactics included keyword stuffing, bait-and-switch, and other “black hat” methods that would be considered spam today. These practices have been rooted out in the name of reader service. They simply don’t work anymore—the loopholes have been closed. The logic behind Google and other engines closing these loopholes is simple: provide a better user experience.

Remember: Google, and the concept of SEO itself, does not revolve around who ranks at the top. It’s all about granting ease of access to the content that best serves readers. It’s an end-user product rather than a marketing platform, and thinking in these terms is helpful when evaluating the content we publish.

Internet users scouring various search engines for answers know what they’re looking for. Sometimes it takes a few searches, but they know it when they see it. Users don’t want pages that use metadata to misrepresent what the content is actually about, and they definitely do not want spam. The better results a search engine like Google can provide its users, the more likely they are to use Google the next time. Rendering dishonest SEO practices obsolete is simply a part of the natural evolution of a search engine. “Better search results” precludes weaker or misrepresented web content.

The “outlaws of Internets past” held that SEO was all just a game. One could simply work the system in place at the time and reap huge rewards. The game has changed. With Google effectively acting as a world power now, there is no more latitude for playing around. Getting to the top of the first page for high-competition keywords is not a matter of paying your way to the top (that’s what Google AdWords is for), nor is it something that can be attained through savvy trickery. The game is now entirely above the table, rather than below it. The only way to sneak an ace up your sleeve is to be a huge brand or content farm.

And for the rest of us with average-sized websites and strictly regional brand awareness? We can’t all be Internet giants, but we can become elite at integrating our marketing communications and expertly targeting our specific niches.

The SEO Pie

It helps to think of your SEO efforts as working in concert with the rest of your digital marketing efforts. While trickery is not a valid SEO method anymore, on-page optimization is only one slice of your SEO Pie. On-page is still important, but without an overarching strategy encompassing your web content, social media, advertising, etc., you are only working with a small portion of the pie and should adjust your expectations accordingly.

The SEO Pie - Jemully Media

As marketers, strategy and goal-setting are so vital to what we do. Remember, goal-setting is not as simple as “sales.” Marketing campaigns can raise brand awareness, educate the public, entertain, and lead to many different calls-to-action. Without a specific set of goals, it’s easy to fall into the trap of repeating yourself over and over. Instead, try to design your efforts strategically and with specific goals in mind. The difference is that goals represent a finish line, but selling is never finished. While “sales” and “success” can often look like the same thing, it is important to delineate the two.

It’s difficult to have major SEO success without orchestrating all of your digital marketing efforts around it. First things first; you need an overarching digital strategy. Next, you can’t be worried about SEO unless you have a website, preferably one meeting modern criteria such as mobile-friendliness. Tailoring your web content to your audience using appropriate landing pages and a company blog comes next. Don’t forget about links! Building a strong portfolio of inbound links through social media and email marketing are oft-forgotten ingredients of SEO.

Do you use Google AdWords or Facebook Ads? They may not be traditional forms of SEO, but they regularly deliver traffic to your site’s landing pages. Landing pages work best when they are built and targeted with skill and intent. The better your most important landing pages are, the better your SEO will be.

SEO And Content Marketing

Speaking of landing pages, they are typically your interior pages, containing your meatiest content. Knowing your business’s most valuable long-tail keywords (the three-or-four-plus-word queries that tend to bring people to your landing pages) is emerging as the best way to own your niche, and become a champion targeter. A sound SEO strategy should include building at least one well-written and optimized page tailored toward every long-tail phrase that is important to your business. If you don’t know what those long-tail keywords and phrases are, then spend a some time getting to know your web visitors. Get to know your niche!

In today’s SEO landscape, questions demand not just answers but relevant answers. This means there is now a great deal of overlap between relevance, content marketing, and SEO.

How many pieces of your SEO pie are you using? We want to know!

The 80/20 Rule of Content Marketing

Jemully Media - The 80/20 rule in content marketing

The 80/20 Rule of Marketing

Or: Why constantly promoting yourself and your services can have the opposite effect.

One of the best ways to explain the 20/20 rule of marketing is to imagine a scenario where you are hanging out with your friends. What if you only talked about ONE thing… every single time you hung out. And that one thing was something you were trying to sell to them. YIKES! Probably not the best way to keep friends, right? Perhaps you would be lucky if those same friend would hang out if you only talked about what you were sellingt 80% of the time. Then you could engage in conversation about other topics 20% of the time. How about, an even better idea. What if you switched the 80/20 rule around and most of the time you could talk about mutually entertaining and enjoyable subjects, leaving only 20% of the time to promote your product? 

The same idea holds true for social media practices. If a company only posts about their products and services, their friends and followers may quickly tire of hearing about it. Ideally, companies will intersperse this type of information among other content that is a little more personal and engaging. Just as your friends want to learn more about you, a company’s following typically wants more than just a sales message.

At Jemully, we encourage our clients to follow the “80/20” rule for social media marketing. In fact, we recommend the 80/20 marketing mix for all of your content marketing. This rule says only 20% of the content will directly promote your products or services. The other 80% can be topics related to your brand, or things that you have strategically planned that your audience will enjoy. We can adjust these percentages, depending on the client, but it is a good rule of thumb. You are more likely to get engagement on your posts if they vary in type. It makes your sales pitch less likely to be tuned out by your audience.

20 percent self-promotion and 80 percent other content

 

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Using Long-Tail Keywords In Your Web Content

how long-tail keywords help your SEO

Long-Tail Keywords (LTKs) can be your secret SEO weapon for attracting highly specific and actionable traffic.

As anyone not privy to Google’s ever-evolving search engine crawling algorithm can (and should) tell you, SEO (search engine optimization) is a long-term commitment and the process is never finished. Text-based content, meta descriptions, image descriptions, headings, URLs, links… there are an awful lot of factors and knowing the list is an essential part of the uphill battle. Here, we are focusing on one specific and unheralded element of SEO: The Long-Tail Keyword.

But first…

Keywords

While they are not officially designated like the items listed above, keywords woven throughout your site, and the relevance and richness they lend your content, are ultimately the most important factor in SEO. Search engines (Google) seek to find the results that best match a Googler’s inquiry. Google is really good at finding the best results. That’s why it’s so popular. The best results (websites) are those best able to demonstrate to Google’s crawling non-human bots that they have the best and most relevant content. So basically, if you want to show up on the results page when someone searches for “shoes,” your website better be all about shoes, or at least have a lot of shoe-related content.

Over the years, there have been loopholes and cheats that enterprising webmasters have found to artificially boost their SEO. For example; cramming an unnatural amount of keywords into a page, or using trendy keywords in content that had otherwise nothing to do with those particular trends. These practices and many others are always snuffed out by Google’s crawlers, which are constantly improving because—you guessed it—negating shady practices ultimately helps yield better search results to Googlers. Again, Google is very good at this, which is why Google is far and away the top search engine, owning an estimated 70% of the global search engine market.Continue reading

Facebook Notes or Facebook Instant Articles?

facebook instant articles and notes

Facebook Instant Articles or Facebook Notes—which should your business use?

With marketers continuously looking for new ways to leverage their content marketing strategies, all developments in publishing platforms must be evaluated. Facebook is a social media giant and an influential marketing platform. Despite its ubiquity, Facebook offers features that are undervalued for content marketing purposes. Those features? Facebook Notes and Facebook Instant Articles. First, let’s very simply define each tool. Then, we will explore the highlights with pro-con lists.Continue reading