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Lead Generation Tips From SEO Experts SEO Houston Pros

March 18, 2019 By SEO Houston Pros Leave a Comment

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT LEAD GENERATION

Part 3

Modern-day search engines are engineered to recognize and reward top-quality content posted on optimized websites. As such, it is not only important to craft content but the content must be of high-quality. To ensure you meet these targets, you can organize a content audit intended to give you insights as to the distribution between leadership and promotional themes.

With regards to thought leadership content, the content must be compelling, insightful, and substantial. It is not just a matter of developing content for the sake of it. Ensure that the content prioritizes content quality and not just quantity. Your content should not just promote you or your products, it needs to be useful.

Moreover, you should promote your content, both visual and non-visual contents, on your social channels. This is especially important for your high-quality and engaging content. As the content continues to engage with the audience and improving viewership/readership, Google and other search engines will consider your content as being valuable content. As a reward for producing high-quality content, they will rank you higher. Additionally, the natural links that you get from your promotional efforts tend to be more valuable than other links. Therefore, make a point of developing useful and informative content.

Website

For all your marketing efforts, you need a place to carry out all your conversions. A well-optimized website is the best place to do this. Endeavors such as convincing prospective customers and or clients to sign up to your newsletter or enter promotions are most effective when done on websites. Importantly, such endeavors help you convert visitors to leads. However, you need to get the content, the layout, the forms, the designs, and Call-to-Action (CTA) right.

Blog

The blog provides the best space for you to foster trust with your potential customers and clients. For starters, the blog is accessible via various internet channels, which makes it search engine optimized.

That being said, you should note that not everyone is readily willing to sign up for a demo or give their email to sign up for the newsletter. The best course of action is to clearly and ask the blog traffic to follow you on the various social media channels you are active. While they follow you on social media, you can use highly engaging content to capture their interest bringing them back to your blog. When they visit your blog several times, they will naturally explore your entire website. This makes your blog an important conversion tool.

Social Media

Social media has been growing tremendously in the recent past resulting in an explosion of information. These days, buyers are using social channels to get reviews of certain products and services, especially through the eyes of influencers and their peers. As such, you can use social networks for branding and exposure, you can use it for lead generation also. Therefore, you should aim to be easily accessible of social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. wherein you can build trust.

Outbound Marketing

While the main interest in marketing has been inbound marketing, the prudent approach is to blend both inbound marketing and outbound marketing. Inbound marketing will unboundedly yield lead generation activities, you still need outbound marketing to bolster your inbound marketing efforts and streamline the target audience.

Inbound marketing is the use of outbound channels to get your content and message to an audience of potential customers and buyers. These efforts are typically made through rented attention, instead of your own attention channels.
On the other hand, when dealing with outbound techniques, you have to make our audience know about you without having met you. As such, the outbound methods are designed to wow your audience, giving your company a stellar image. The massaging in outbound marketing is highly streamlined and it is accompanied by a compelling call-to-action.

This makes outbound marketing very effective; it can push a lead through a funnel very fast to the intended conversion, whether a purchase, a newsletter sign up, or any other end-goal. By combining both inbound marketing and outbound marketing, you can provide the leads with the extra urge to go down the funnel much faster.

The perfect blend of inbound marketing and outbound marketing can potentially skyrocket the number of shares and views you generate. Importantly, this increases the number of potential buyers accessing your message and content.

Email Marketing

Email is another important marketing tool. It is the most popular lead generation tactic that marketers use given its stellar ability to grab the attention of prospects. As such, you should use emails as one of your main communications channels. This will allow you to get your content and message directly to your audience, prospects, and leads.

Display Ads

The main advantage of display ads is the potential to directly reach out to a specific demographic or target a certain behavioral action. However, this means of lead generation allows you to target a specific location or even a specific online publication.

You can also use re-targeting ads which track your leads pattern of behavior on your website. With re-targeting ads, your visitors can be cookied, allowing you to display your ads to them even they visit other websites.

When done properly, display ads can drive leads, pass your message to your target audience, and educate your potential leads. In fact, displayed ads can and are used in every stage of the conversion funnel. You can use display ads to build your audience and brand at the upper stages of the funnel. It can help evaluate and educate your leads in the mid-section of the funnel. Finally, it can improve drive conversion at the bottom of the funnel.

Pay-per-Click Ads

Pay-per-Click better known as PPC is the ads that you are charged with each click of the ad. This model of marketing is usually deployed by search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo on search results pages or even on third-party websites.

On search engine results pages, the PPC ads are displayed in the sponsored section of your results, which is typically located in the top section of the page. Therefore, you can use PPC to grab more attention to website and company. Importantly, you can use PPC to generate high-quality leads. By use relevant and targeted keywords in your ads, your ads will be displayed when your audience search for the keywords.

Call us or contact us today for your free consultation. Visit our blog for more related articles on how to execute the best SEO in Houston! Click here for the fourth installment of this article!

Lead Generation Tips From SEO Experts SEO Houston Pros

March 11, 2019 By SEO Houston Pros Leave a Comment

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT LEAD GENERATION

Part 2

To be successful at lead generation, a lead must be willing to invest in lead nurturing and facets of Middle of Funnel (MOFU) techniques. The MOFU techniques are designed to nurture the already established relationship and create and grow trust by providing high-quality engaging content. Importantly, the techniques should gently guide the lead to making a purchasing.

In recent times, to be successful in lead generation, you have to combine TOFU and MOFU techniques and approaches effectively into a holistic marketing philosophy. Only then can you efficiently convert your leads into paying customers and or clients.

Lead Generation Research

Lead generation tactics are an important part of lead generation. Increasingly, companies are now spending a lot of money to diversify the creative means they can capture their audience’s attention despite all the noise that exists.

Lead Generation Budget Observed Trends

In recent times, we have observed the rise in the net spending on lead generation by marketers. The money is typically used in SEO, website optimization, and social media.

CMO Lead Generation Focus

MarketingSherpa reckons that senior-level marketing executives and CMOs are prioritizing increasing or getting measurable ROI from their marketing efforts. Moreover, they are prioritizing the optimization of marketing and sales funnel over in their lead generation. As such, CMOs are focusing on finding viable methods of improving the quality of the leads generated from their marketing efforts and investments.

Top Lead Generation Challenges

As mentioned above, lead quality is the main priority for marketing executives across the board. However, lead quality is a significant challenge that marketers have to deal with. An IDG study revealed that 61% of the marketers in the study find generating high-quality leads to be a huge challenge.

That being said, marketing executives have to contend with inadequate resources. They have to operate with inadequate budgetary resources, staffing, and inadequate data (both quality and quantity-wise) while still trying to generate quality leads.

Most Effective And Efficient Lead Generation Tactics

Another IDG survey dubbed The B2B Lead Generation Marketing Trends Survey revealed email marketing, corporate websites, tradeshows, and conferences are the most effective and popular lead generation tactics in use today. Conversely, direct mail and print advertising have been identified as the least effective lead generation tactics.

Fundamentals of Lead Generation

To get the fundamental of lead generation right, you need to appreciate that defining a lead is a subjective matter. It all depends on the company involved. Typically, the definition of a lead will depend on a company’s sales cycle. However, a lead is generally defined as a qualified potential buyer who offers a certain level of interest in buying your goods or services. It is important to note that every lead that submits details with you gets something in return; this might be additional information on the products or a convincing offer.

Generally, there are two types of lead generation – inbound and outbound. Nonetheless, the basic principles of recognizing, nurturing, and customer retention remain part and parcel of a comprehensive strategy.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing entails assisting potential customers and/or clients learn about or locate your company, typically before they consider making a purchase. In doing this, you convert this early audience into having a preference for your brand, eventually turning them to a lead and revenue.

In a market where customers are immensely empowered by having ample choices, marketers cannot rely on trade shows, advertisements, cold calling, and other outbound marketing tactics only. Today’s consumers are educated and knowledgeable, and, therefore, require a lot of information. As a marketer, you work is find innovative and creative ways of standing out in the crowd and catching the attention of the audience. To achieve this, you need a good grasp of inbound marketing.

You can achieve this by providing a blend of informative, relevant, and entertaining contents. The goal is to create a relationship with your audience who are also your potential clients. That said, note that creating content is not enough. You need to avail the content to your audience through channels your potential clients use.

We will delve into some of the most effective inbound leads generation:

SEO and Content

Your inbound marketing efforts will quickly hit a brick wall if you do not generate and use the right content. Content marketing, therefore, is a cornerstone to inbound leads generation. Content marketing is at its core creating and disseminating in-depth and useful content in an effort to capture the attention of a well-defined target audience and engage with the audience with the end goal being helping the audience take profitable customer actions.

Email marketing, social media marketing, and other types of marketing thrive on content. Having the right content can get you right in front of the buyers, helping you to gain their trust.

Call us or contact us today for your free consultation. Visit our blog for more related articles on how to execute the best SEO in Houston! Click here for the third installment of this article!

Lead Generation Tips From SEO Experts SEO Houston Pros

March 4, 2019 By SEO Houston Pros Leave a Comment

Everything Important That You Need To Know About The Lead Generation Process

Part 1

The Basics Of Lead Generation

When it comes to lead generation, there is so much to know about the process. However, basically, it is a type of marketing process for energizing and capturing interest for a specific service or product, and then leverage them to develop a sales pipeline. Digital channels are critical for generating leads, and the techniques that are applied to the changes that have continued to evolve over the years. Today we have modern social and online techniques that are available. One notable development is the rise of a “self-directed buyer,” who thrives on the degree of information that is available online. Now we have modern social and online techniques. These new techniques help to create and evaluate prospective leads before they are converted into sales.

Here Is Why Lead Generation Is So Important

The buying process’s new face calls on marketers to come up with fresh ways of getting their messages across to prospective buyers. Up until now mass advertisements and email blasts were acceptable ways to advertise. However, marketers have the new now to do more in order to remain on the radar screen and increase their chances every day of customers being able to find them. After they are discovered, they need to develop close working relationships with customers.

Attention Economics And The Abundance Of Information

The rise of the internet has caused information to be more abundant. Although it is great to have so much information available, it also comes with a challenge. An abundance of information results in the security of attention: this is a basic principle associated with attention economics. Herbert Simon, a pioneer of attention economics and a social scientist, says that in the economic sense, that information obviously consumes its recipients’ attention. And it has changed the buying process. Now, buyers have so much information that is available to them, and in an attempt to not be influenced, buyers are continuing to ignore or reject a majority of these messages. They instead rely on personal research in order to learn more about a topic that interests them.

The New Buying Process

IN the past, in the age of information scarcity, lead generation involved marketing, which was the process of finding out the name of prospective buyers and then converting the information into sales. Buyers then relied on engaging with sales agents to assist them with making a decision. On the other hand, the sales agent might be lacking in the knowledge that is needed to convince early stage, uneducated buyers.

The new buying process, by contrast, the new buying process involves buyers doing their own prospective research online where they search for resources that can help them make the right decisions. They rely on search engines, other online channels, and social media for obtaining more information on a specific service or products. They are well-equipped before they ever engage with a sales person.

That is why businesses need to ensure that have a solid digital presence. This new buying process puts the vendor on the tail end of the buyer journey of the consumer since they have obtained the information that would have received when they were in contract earlier with the seller. So they are more of their own experts.

Any business that has a well-developed lead generation strategy will stand a much better chance of earning a potential buyer’s total trust and sparking their interests before reaching the final stage of meeting with the vendor. This also saves stress and the waste of time for the sales team with a reduced need for cold-calling. It is an easier process when you have solid leads for your sales, and you ultimately will get faster and higher conversations of the leads into revenue.

Rented Attention and Owned Attention

Currently, the buying process is experiencing a shift away from “renter attention” and over to “owned attention” instead, due to attention scarcity. Before now the common practice was to apply a marketing strategy that thrived on rental attention, i.e. attention that is built by other individuals. For example. renting a space at a tradeshow or purchasing an aad in a magazine. however, those are less expensive now, due to information overload. So more needs to be done to gain the buyers’ attention, maybe a combination of refined attention and owned attention – to archive results from the lead generation efforts that you make.

IN order to build attention for yourself, the only way to do that now is to establish yourself as a trustor advisor for your prospective buyers. This can be done through constantly creating and disseminating thought leadership and valuable content. When done correctly, it will help to increase your chances of your lead generating success instead of being a very complex buying environment that we are in now.

Leading Down The Sales Funnel

It is critical that you understand that the current process demands you do more than simply convert a new lead into a sale. A business needs to go beyond marketing at the Top of the Funnel. If you consider that noo every new lead will purchase something tat the moment, then you will understand that there is the need to retain your leads, so that they don’t get ignored, lost, or snapped up y the competition.

Call us or contact us today for your free consultation. Visit our blog for more related articles on how to execute the best SEO in Houston! Click here for the second installment of this article!

Is Houston SEO Fading Out?

February 25, 2019 By SEO Houston Pros Leave a Comment

Is Search Engine Optimization Dead

Every single day there are changes taking place within the digital world. This leads to business owners wondering what they should focus on in order to get their website ranked high in the search engines results pages. The major driving force for traffic is content, but if that’s really the case, then does SEO still matter? What is its future and is it dead?

A Little Background Into SEO

SEO was far more simple in the internet’s early stages. People could easily throw around a few keywords on their website and have it found when someone went to Google and typed in those keywords. In the old days, search engines mainly focused on keywords when they were considering how they would rank websites.

Times have changed and what people were doing in the old days can ruin your site’s chances of ranking high in the results. Thanks to online marketers who have learnt to game the system, what worked no longer works. In fact, keyword stuffing is frowned upon and is one of the worst things you can do when creating content for your website.

Algorithms Are Here To Stay

Google has been waging a silent war with the goal of making sure high quality content is being found when users are searching for stuff. There are new algorithms that have been created with the purpose of finding the most relevant content possible. These algorithms take in various considerations when ranking websites, and this includes content, social media signals, back-links, formatting and much more.

Artificial Intelligence

AI, short for artificial intelligence, has been playing a crucial role in SEO. However, leveraging AI for SEO purposes can require a lot of money and time. If you’re a small business who has major corporations as your competition, then you have a small chance of getting to the top of the results pages. If you have deep pockets, then you might have a chance.

Info Blocking Is Prevalent

Google has technology that can block certain keywords from appearing in its results. This means it is tough to figure out where organic traffic is coming from. Five or so years ago “not provided” keywords might have been reported in analytics as 20 or less percent, but that number is easily over 90 percent. This means figuring out what keywords you should use is challenging.

SEO Tips

A lot of people feel like they are tackling an impossible task when it comes to keeping up with the changes Google makes on a regular basis. This is why you need to focus on implementing SEO best practices, which can still help you get more traffic. However, you’ll want to reconsider what you’re doing if SEO is the only thing you are doing.

The bottom line is SEO is still important, but what SEO does has changed a lot. This is why regular SEO audits are a must, but you should also focus on always improving the content you create. Engagement is another factor to take into consideration, so do your best to gain traction with your content when publishing it on social media.

Do you want to improve your site’s ranking in the search engines results pages? Of course you do. That’s why you should contact us today. Feel free to request a quote and ask us any questions you may have.

Call us or contact us today for your free consultation. Visit our blog for more related articles on how to execute the best SEO in Houston!

What’s Your Digital Marketing Campaign Budget?

February 18, 2019 By SEO Houston Pros Leave a Comment

Tips For Determining Your Marketing Budget

It can be an overwhelming task to determine your yearly marketing budget, especially when the digital marketing revolution is considered. This is especially true for startups or small businesses that know they need to spread the word about their brand but are lacking in the knowledge and resources needed to compete effectively. Marketing is still an effective way of increasing awareness of your brand and driving sales. Although it is free, you should not just use social media as the only platform that you use for your company’s marketing efforts. It is necessary to invest in a broader range of options in order to increase your customer base and grow your business.

Playing with the Percentages

However, it is also important to not spend a lot of money on the wrong things. So how can you determine the amount that you should spend? Although there is no definite number – for small business marketing the standard percentage for allocations ranges from 8 to 13% of total gross income. Businesses with high market share and with great reputations can afford to spend less. Businesses that have been in existence for less than 5 years need to increase the amount of their marketing investment in order to make any kind of impact on their industry. Your company’s size, in addition to your current sales amount, also will influence your final marketing budget allocation. Whenever you are using a percentage model in order to determine your budget it won’t ever be a fixed amount, since it will continue to expand as your business does. Also, it helps to nip in the bud any potential overspending. The method only should be applied when your current margins are over 10 to 12% (This approach wouldn’t be ideal if you are currently operating at a loss).

A fixed budget method could also be used where you come up with a figure and then devise a strategic marketing plan to maximize the resources that you currently have.

Learn from Your Competitors

It is essential to research the competition to determine what their marketing budgets are (or you can try asking business owners who have businesses that are of a similar size to yours, how much they spend). Take a look at the marketing efforts of your competitors and how they link to their advertising expenses. Just make sure you are comparing apples with apples rather than looking at an industry giant when you happen to be a small business. Always keep in mind that before deploying a marketing campaign you need to have researched your target audience and segmented it, so that you know precisely who you are “speaking” to and where they can be found.

Calculate Your CLV

A key metric that you need to understand before determining what your final marketing budget is going to be, is your customer lifetime value (CLV). That figure refers to how much each of your new customers is worth to our company over the long term. Once you know what that figure is, that can help you to determine how much money you are willing to spend on your marketing to obtain new customers and how much to retain your current customers. There are a number of different complex calculations that can be made in order to arrive at that figure. These include such elements as customer’s average lifespan, customer value, purchase frequency, and average order value. Once you know what your CLV is, you will be able to accurately forecast what your marketing spend should be so that you won’t ever spend more on obtaining a customer than what their lifetime value is.

Showing Up In All Of The Wrong Places

The most significant calculation that you will need to make is what your return on investment (ROI) is for the marketing efforts that you choose to do. Whatever you spend on your ads will have be bring in double the amount in revenue, otherwise that means you are spending too much money on your advertising, in all of the wrong places. It is essential to evaluate the challenges and successes of all of your marketing campaigns in order to determine what is really working. Once your conversion creating initiatives are repeated, you can increase your ROI. When the data from your marketing efforts is analyzed, it can help you predict next year’s marketing spend rather easily.

How Much Of A Risk Taker Are You?

At times businesses make the decision to use an aggressive marketing strategy which requires a large investment, but potentially has big rewards associated with it (without needing to break the bank). In order to achieve revenue growth, you need to have a decent marketing budget along with an effective strategy. It is a difficult but necessary task. If you spend only a small amount on your marketing, then your product may be invisible, but if you spend too much money you won’t have any ROI when your campaign ends. Whatever amount of money you decide to spend make sure that you testing and analyze your data constantly so that you can make improvements. You will need to continue to tweak your campaigns in order to eliminate low performing campaigns and build on your successes.

If you are currently struggling on how to create a strategy with your available resources or determine what an appropriate marketing budget is for you, we can assist you with seeing the forest for the trees. Call us today to see who we can help you with your critical marketing needs.

Call us or contact us today for your free consultation. Visit our blog for more related articles on how to execute the best SEO in Houston!

Keyword Tips From Houston SEO Experts

February 11, 2019 By SEO Houston Pros Leave a Comment

GOOGLE ADS KEYWORD TIPS

Google AdWords has become an important digital marketing option that a brand can benefit from. If you try to get into it without having a net, then you might end up spending a lot of money. You will need to invest time and effort in doing keywords research because it plays a big role in the success of any campaign. Below are some great tips to help you get started with Google AdWords.

HOW GOOGLE ADWORDS WORK

Google AdWords will leverage the keywords you choose and get your ad in front of the right people. When you set up the d, you will be asked to place a cost-per-click (CPC) bid for each of the keywords. The bid is the maximum amount you are willing to pay for every click.

The actual cost of the click will be determined by the competition you have for the keywords. If you were to place a bid of $0.20 and another person bids $0.19, then you are going to pay for the full amount to have the ad placed. If the only competition bids $0.14, then you are going to pay $0.15. You will be paying one cent more than the highest bid until it reaches your maximum. If you bid $5 per click, you could end up paying just $0.15 for every click.

Another important thing to know – once you have started to get impressions (this is the number of times the ad has been placed) you will develop a click-through rate (CTR). The higher the CTR rate, the lower the cost per click. A higher CTR rate means that your ad is relevant, and Google rewards you. What this means is that if you have a higher CTR than your competitor, your ad will be placed before theirs even if they have a slightly higher bid.

NEVER SKIMP OUT ON KEYWORD RESEARCH

The keyword strategy should be an ongoing thing. With time, you will be able to see how the campaigns are performing. You will still need a solid foundation that you are going to build on.

It is a good idea to use a tool like WordTracker when doing keyword research. It is a good tool that has become an industry standard, and there is a 7-day free trial, which gives you the chance of trying it out and seeing whether it works for you. Tools like these will help you in determining the keywords that you can use for the AdWords campaign. Choose a tool that you find easy to use and provides the most value.

There are free keyword tools that you can use, but many of them have limited features. Example a tool like an Overture will only show results on Yahoo, which will not be of help because you are interested in Google. When it comes to tools for your campaign, you always get what you pay for.

These tools are good, but they are not going to do the keyword research for you. There are a lot of things you will still need to figure on your own. You should list down keywords and phrases then go and use these tools to see which ones are the best. Everything might not go as perfectly as you thought when getting started, but you will notice some improvements with time.

Give us a call if you ever need help with keyword research.

Call us or contact us today for your free consultation. Visit our blog for more related articles on how to execute the best SEO in Houston!

SEO, SEM, PPC… What In The Digital Marketing Is The Difference?!

February 5, 2019 By SEO Houston Pros Leave a Comment

What Makes SEO, SEM, And PPC Different From Each Other?

The realm of digital marketing has quite a few acronyms being thrown about, and trying to keep up with it all can make your head hurt. What do all these acronyms mean? Are they really that important? Do you really need to know them? All of these are great questions, but based on what you personally do or how you do things, then it might be really important for you to find such answers. With that being said, keep reading to learn three of some of the most-frequent acronyms you come across a bunch and find out how they can apply to you.

SEO: What Is It?

The acronym of SEO stands for search engine optimization. In short, SEO is a bucket of various strategies people use to make websites rank higher in search engines. This is crucial, because when online users type keywords or search phrases that relate to your niche, then you’d like them to come across your site. When your business is more visible to search engines, then you get more unpaid and organic traffic directed towards your site from the search engines.

SEM: What Is It?

The acronym of SEM is short for search engine marketing. In essence, it’s how you use paid digital advertising online to get traffic. SEM is also sometimes just called paid search, but whatever you call it, it can involve a number of various digital advertising activities, like paid search ads and PPC, which can be called pay-per-call or pay-per-click. Google AdWords is probably the most highly visible SEM engine, but there are also Yahoo Search Ads and Bing Ads among other options.

PPC: What Is It?

The acronym of PPC is short for pay-per-click, and sometimes pay-per-call if a phone call is what winds up being taken. It can also be known as cost-per-click or CPC, which is a method wherein the advertiser pays for any results generated by its digital advertising. In such cases, you only get charged when users actually click on ads.

PPC ads get served based off of bids which you determine, as you pick the keywords you’d like to rank for whenever you set up your ad. That just means that you aren’t able to pay more for your ads just to have it served extra times over your competition. You put your bid in, and then the search engine will decide the relevance and validity of your ads in terms of search queries.

SEO, SEM, And PPC: Similarities And Differences

The one thing that all three of them share is that each is a great way to get traffic coming to your website and building up your brand. All of them are online marketing techniques, so they all land under the same broad umbrella. The biggest differences between them is that while SEO is always unpaid advertising, it technically falls under the purview of SEM, even though SEM usually refers to actually paid marketing efforts. PPC is just a kind of paid advertising technique. All three of them work well with one another, but SEO is the basis which brings them all together. If you don’t have good SEO, then your paid efforts are going to deliver results which you need to be viable or bring you a good ROI.

How’s Your Website Doing?

If your current online presence isn’t living up to your hopes and dreams, then SEO, SEM, and even PPC can bring you a lot of improvement. We’re an industry-leading SEO agency, and we’d relish the chance to demonstrate what we might do for your website. Contact us right away to arrange for your SEO consultation and evaluation, free of both cost and obligation.

Call us or contact us today for your free consultation. Visit our blog for more related articles on how to execute the best SEO in Houston!

Does Your Houston SEO Content Go To Your Site Or Somewhere Else

January 28, 2019 By SEO Houston Pros Leave a Comment

Where Does Your Content Belong – Your Site or Others? (Part 2)

Cons:

The first con is that you’re driving traffic towards somebody else’s site thanks to your content. For that matter, your reputation might wind up being influenced by the reputation that the hosting site has. Also, that hosting site might shut down, and your content can get pulled at any given moment.

The following are a handful of pros and cons to consider if you choose to keep your content at home on your very own site:

Pros:

To start with, your site will enjoy traffic without having to have a middleman involved. You’ll also be in total control over your content. Any link building you do for your content will only help your site, rather than someone else’s. Also, you are boosting the authority status and level of your site.

Cons:

If you get penalized by any means, then your chances of getting traffic after the penalty will go down. If your site doesn’t get decent traffic or rank very well, then your content might not generate much ROI for you. Based on your site’s demographics, your audience might not be as diverse as you would like. If your site isn’t popular, then you might be losing the chance to draw in links.

Kinds Of Content And Where They Usually Go

There are three primary kinds of common content. Each one has a particular place where it is best put as well as reasons why.

Evergreen Content That Gets Updated: This is the kind of content that typically should stay on your site unless it gets no traffic at all. It’s just a lot easier to stay in control of updates. I personally like how evergreen content can draw in some really great links, so I’d just as soon have those pointed at my own site and not someone else’s since not all backlinks are the same. For instance, if I set up a site that sells vintage record players, and I put together a how-to guide that goes over setting those up, using them, and even doing basic maintenance and repairs, with text content in step-by-step format with videos to boot, that’s not something I’d want on someone else’s site. That’s premium content I want staying ‘home’.

One-Time Pieces: If you’re able to find a place that’s really relevant for a one-time piece, I’d suggest putting it there rather than your own site. For instance, if you write content about great WordPress plug-ins, find a site about WordPress blogs or even web design, especially if you don’t have a site that’s about these topics.

Resource Lists: Try to keep the main lists on your own site, where it’s a lot easier to update things. What you can do for other sites is contribute portions of that list or just slightly different lists. For instance, if you have a list of the best free WordPress plug-ins, keep that on your own web design site if you have one, but do a related list like the “Top 5 Premium WordPress Plug-Ins of 2019” for a different site.

Never neglect social platforms. You can generate lots of good traffic at sites like Medium and LinkedIn. Tweet out news and tips through Twitter, and engage people directly on Facebook. All these platforms help you get traffic as well as feedback, thanks to any comments posted about your content.

Content isn’t just about articles anymore. You can do survey results, slide decks, case studies, podcasts, podcast transcripts, infographics, and a lot more. Keep things mixed up, since all content can bring in great traffic, and that’s what’s most essential when it’s all said and done.

Call us or contact us today for your free consultation. Visit our blog for more related articles on how to execute the best SEO in Houston! Click here for the first article in this series.

Does Your Houston SEO Content Go To Your Site Or Somewhere Else

January 25, 2019 By SEO Houston Pros Leave a Comment

Where Does Your Content Belong – Your Site or Others? (Part 1)

In the past few weeks, I’ve participated in an informative dialogue with some other pros in the search engine optimization (SEO) game. The subject under debate has been the proper place for your site’s promotional content. Does it belong on your own site, or should you send it out into the wilds of the internet?

Is the answer immediately obvious to you? It was to a lot of my colleagues. By a slight majority, I think, the most popular opinion on this subject is that your best content belongs on your own site.

But the dissenting voices in our dialogue raised a lot of excellent points. There are some surprisingly strong arguments in favor of producing premium content for sites other than your own. Webmasters who are operating on a shoestring, without the funds available for a full-time writing staff, like the idea of soliciting guest bloggers. And to match them, a lot of hungry bloggers are looking to publicize themselves and score some quality links by writing for sites owned by other people. Some webmasters look for seasoned writers to contribute content so that their site gets a little credibility boost.

In point of fact, I myself tend to come down on the “send your content out into the world” side of the fence. It’s not that I don’t see the value of posting great content to your own site – that’s really not arguable. But I like the idea of all the extra benefits my content can unlock when I place it on other sites. It scares me more traffic and creates new leads that I might be able to turn into clients.

I’m thoroughly comfortable with placing my content on someone else’s site. I’m an advocate for this strategy for the best possible reason: It works for me.

My Search Engine Land column generates a steady supply of leads on its own. It also gets me a fair amount of online exposure, interviews, roundups, and guest posts.

To tell the honest truth, my rankings have fallen off considerably from where they used to be. Want to know the surprising thing? I haven’t had a corresponding dip in inbound traffic. Admittedly, my traffic is a lot more up-and-down. I get a lot more attention when I publish and a lot less when I haven’t. The average is about the same, though. And the flow of leads has done more than hold steady; I’m actually getting more than I used to.

This is a big advantage worth considering: The way I publish content now, I’d still be generating traffic and leads even if my site went “poof.” The amount would probably fall off, though. Right now I still get 30 percent of my traffic via organic search results. Referrals come in third.

What’s my takeaway from the numbers: My own site is still the place to publish my very best content. I’m willing to send good stuff off to someone else, but I remain selfish with the content I’ve really sweated bullets over.

Offsite Content Placement: The Pros And Cons

When we leave the hypotheticals and talk about where YOU should be publishing, I advise you to use your current traffic numbers as your foremost guidepost. If referrals are paying big dividends, you should consider moving more of your content offsite. If organic search is still your bread and butter, your site deserves the lion’s share of your attention.

Let’s break down the advantages and drawbacks of placing content on other sites:

Pros

Exposure to a different audience unlocks the potential for new leads.
Spreading your expertise around gains you authority in a wider community.
Getting your content into newsletters and roundups broadens your reach even further.
The more you publish offsite, the better-protected you are against a catastrophic failure of your own site.

Call us or contact us today for your free consultation. Visit our blog for more related articles on how to execute the best SEO in Houston! Click here for the second article in this series.

Houston SEO Experts Prioritize Based On Impact

January 23, 2019 By SEO Houston Pros Leave a Comment

Ways To Prioritize SEO Tasks By Impact SHP P2

In many ways, SEOs often rely on different departments in order to become successful. We need to become aware of resources that are available, followed by adjusting when necessary.

Aligning Recommendations With Business Goals

It may seem obvious to match up with your business goals, yet it is important that you drive results which will have an impact on your overall organization. Are you achieving this yet? Or are the recommendations you use just focused on improving revenue and organic traffic.

I need to be honest. I was once 100% guilty when it came to offering recommendations to help an SEO program that did not align necessarily with the goals of the organization. This is one of those traps that you can easily fall into.

Look at Client B that we mentioned above. In the initial stages of a program, we first identified our main keyword set and the content types we needed in order to improve and drive visibility. Everyone involved agreed until such stage that we started to build the content.

Everyone understood that they needed the content, yet many felt it didn’t really match up with their current strategy and existing campaigns.

From here the 3 blog posts just sat with more content that went unpublished, until a couple of months down the line.

We began asking them more questions and becoming more integrated with their demand-gen calendar. It was discovered that the 3 blog posts that went unpublished matched up perfectly with their next upcoming campaign.

It was something very easy to overlook. This content matched up to the SEO program, but it was not the ideal fit at the time when they needed it.

You need to ensure you understand the team’s objectives that are responsible for SEO along with objectives of supporting teams along with the overall business.

Avoid Jumping At The Latest Thing

A few weeks back I provided a presentation that involved the common SEO mistakes that people make. One mistake included overacting to Google along with its many changes and updates.

I really get it. When Google starts to alert you that you need to make your site secure or it will start to warn users, its time to pay attention. Yet when Google is telling you to make the site secure, but then it is unable to determine a way to differentiate between non-secured and secured versions, it can become very frustrating.

Do you remember Google Plus? Authorship? Or even the 300-character meta descriptions?

We need to make sure what we are recommending is making sense for businesses. We cannot provide a recommendation just because Google is telling us to.

Now I am in no way saying your website should not be secure or that it shouldn’t be mobile-friendly and fast. But I am suggesting that your current mobile traffic may be insignificant, which means you should not be spending 90% of your valuable time focusing on mobile strategies.

Below is another classic example:

When AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) launched, it appeared like it was something easy to do. It was definitely built for the publishers, but it was Yoast that made it easy, and for this reason, it soon formed a portion of our technical standard recs. Yet what about people that are not on WordPress? And the ones with custom CMS ( Content Management System) that need to hire developers in order to build-out AMP functionality. Was it really worth it?

In fact, it wasn’t. The webmaster in this particular case did not publish a lot of fresh and new content, and the overall numbers in mobile traffic were somewhat small. An, even more, telltale sign, was the mobile search-results linked to the core terms did not contain the AMP results.

In this particular case, Google said “Jump” when there wasn’t any reason to jump.

Final Thoughts

To put it simply, success should be regarded as a type of moving target, where the world we live in today is constantly saying ” What have you done for me lately?” Programs have the ability to change over a year and in some cases even in 6 months. As SEOs, we should continuously measure, adjust and keep our strategies aligned with changing landscapes.

Keep in mind that even though you would like to make sure everything is fixed, this is not always a possibility. Assist your teams to become successful in the way of prioritizing tasks and helping them to gain an understanding on what will have a direct impact along with offering recommendations which are built on the objectives of the business.

Call us or contact us today for your free consultation. Visit our blog for more related articles on how to execute the best SEO in Houston! Click here for the first article in this series.