BrightonSEO in April was bigger and better than before. There were so many tips and take aways that can be implemented immediately. Here is a recap of some of the content marketing and link building tips.

Out with the Old, in with the Niche: Content for the Moments That Matter

On the main stage was Marcus Tober. He said that the General Ranking Factors have ended and it no longer applies. He will explain the reasons why using data. Marcus also said that page load time is highly relevant. It has a positive effect on the user experience even more so now than ever before.

Word count

• On average word count is getting longer, but is this applicable to all industries.
• That is why Searchmetrics started talking about niche ranking factors in 2016.

Niche Ranking Factors

• Niche give us precision
• First thing we need to think about is micro data
• niche vs niche
• You cannot generalise the microdata
• Recipes use lots of micro data.

• Does schema make sense for Dating? Probably not.
• How does micro data look in your industry?

Content

• Content is not just text, it could be white page, it could be video.
• Divorce, Fitness and wine content.
• Pages that rank well in the fitness space have lots of videos.
• But this is not the same for divorce or wine.
• You do not get fit by reading, but you do by doing, hence why in the fitness industry, videos work well.

Text structure

• It is important to have one long paragraph or structure it well.
• In the wine industry, they do not use a lot of text or paragraphs.
• Depending on your audience, structure your text differently.
• In the divorce Industry, they want a lot of text and structured well.

Social signals

• Does this ranking factor affect the industry? Is it a ranking factor.
• Dating vs divorce
• Dating has a super positive correlation with social signals.
• But if look at divorce, no one wants to share divorce content. That is why all ranking factors in the past do not work. Need to look at your industry.

Images

• The number of images you need to use in your content, depends on the industry.
• For example in the Furniture industry, they like lots of nice images.

What can you do based on the ranking factors?

• Content specialisation in your niche is very important.
• Foe example about.com started in the mid 1990s and they produced a lot of content.
• They built a lot of subdomains on about.com eg guitars.about.com so really built a huge monster around these categories but over the years, they dropped in visibility.
• So they know you need to specialise. Brands for different purposes. Eg lifewire for electronics. content.

Update your content

Getting rid of content – deleting content is hard. You are deleting what you have, but getting rid opens up new possibilities, Google can crawl your content Don’t cannibalise instead, capitalise.

How to Unleash the Power of Unique Content

Eleni Cashell gave a great presentation about Duplicate content. Eleni is the UK Editor from Hot Courses.

Eleni said that anyone can implement this strategy (she will say in the presentation). Before Eleni started, the content was provided by the universities.

There were two problems with this:

1. Not great for consistency, confusing for users
2. Universities in particular, had a v small marketing team, nothing provided was unique. Therefore there was duplicate content.

Why is duplicate content so bad? 29% of the internet has duplicated content.

Content that sits on more than 1 URL..

Why is it bad?

• Google finds it confusing, they do not know what version to include or exclude.
• They do not which version to rank.
• Search engines do not like to send traffic to same content to duplicate URLs.
• At Hot Courses, the wrong version on the content was ranking – they got this wrong.

Unique content is king

• You need it long and unique.
• It is the most important to have, written specifically for that article and for that place.

Where is the duplicate content coming from?

• You will get it from your clients.
• Press releases – they go to thousands of other people, so if you do not make it relevant to your audience, then it will be duplicate content.
• Product descriptions:
• Freelancers – slightly less likely but can happen. They are probably pitching to more than just you.
• Use copyscape.com to see if you have duplicate content.

How can you make sure you don’t have duplicate content?

• Just don’t have it. It is as simple as that.
• Another way to stop duplicate content is redirect to the canonical URL.
• Pick the primary canonical URL and use cross domain canonical link elements
• Redirect duplicate content URLs to the proper ones.

Clean up your content

• So do an audit – go through your website, what is duplicate and what is not.
• Assemble your team, you need someone in content and sales.
• A point of content is anyone who provides the content for you.

So five step started pack

• Comms – how you going to communication internally and externally about the content
• Create – what are you going to do? Rewrite it? Who will write it, who will do this?
• Who does it affect? – who will be impacted the most and how much money do you need, do you need any more people to help? People it affects is crucial to the success of this. How does Eleni know this? She gave hers 2 weeks notice and they were so made.
• The worse ones were the people who did not understand, so needed to have a good comms plan.
• Cost
• Resources

Now write clear and concise and strict guidelines. Circulate this internally and externally

• Give people a deadline and then if you do not hit the deadline, then tough. Project needs to keep going.
• Set clear rules about what they can and cannot do.
• Make it clear that it will benefit – make v. v v clear.
• Have a single point of contact.
• Also have a template, so can have feedback, allow people toc come back to you.
• Shout about the content.
• Keep an eye on the traffic, It is not an overnight success. Hot Courses  had a 107% increase in entrances. And now the team is all behind her.
• But have regular chats, communicating about this will have successful strategy
• Get your kick ass team
• Form game plan
• Create guidelines – make strict and easy
• Tell clients/agencies
• Create a shared doc everyone can use
• Promote and be proud
• Keep eye on traffic
• And evolve it

Steve Rayson & Giles Palmer – How Metrics and Data Drive Content Effectiveness

The post BrightonSEO April 2018 – Content Marketing and SEO Tips appeared first on SEO Jo Blogs.