Crucial Things SEO Marketers Need to Remember

Search engine optimization is vital to effective marketing online. So important that according to a studyconducted by the National Retail Foundation, search marketing was the most effective source of obtaining new customers for 85% of retailers in 2014. That’s a huge percentage of goals achieved thanks to SEOs. In order to keep results like these high, while maintaining sanity, it’s important to remind yourself of the following.

Mobile is Life

We all knew #Mobilegeddon was coming, it was only a matter of time. Just think for a second how many times a week you pull out your cell to search for the nearest thai restaurant, and then check their reviews, and then check-in on Facebook and Foursquare, and then search for the best ice cream shop… and so on.

Image Source: Smart Insights

Mobile is becoming a leading source for many websites, as it should, and is quickly exceeding desktop views. Last week, Google published a post stating mobile search surpassed desktop in over 10 different countries, US being one of them. With data like that it only makes sense that we stop looking back, and begin looking forward to the many opportunities mobile presents itself. Whether the next big update is #tabletgeddon or #idontknowyetgeddon, technology will continue to advance and Google will continue to enhance the search experience.

Mobile Tips:

• Make sure every bit of your website is responsive on both mobile and tablet. Test internally on coworker’s devices, as well as check outside the office under different IP addresses making sure there aren’t any broken links or loading issues.
• The site load speed needs to be faster than ever to keep the attention of mobile users. Mobile users are less patient than desktop users so don’t clog a site with large file sizes that take forever to load.
• Company newsletters need to be mobile-friendly, as well.
• Use mobile tracking for data and to test efforts.

Organic is King

Just over half of website traffic for the top industries come from organic search results. This gives hope to the diehard SEOs who have been tracking SERPS since day one and to small business owners who don’t have large Adwords budgets. Organic as a leading traffic source is what every SEO strives to achieve and as long as SEO is performed correctly, content is engaging, and checks and balances are performed, it is achievable.

Organic Tips:

• Stop spammy the cyberworld with irrelevant requests. Instead, ceate real relationships with industry leaders and partners.
• Optimize page titles and descriptions with the type of keywords that make users want to click.
• Create compelling content that people actually want to share.
• Avoid trying to trick Google and learn to just respect the internet gods.

Image Source: Search Engine Land

What Keywords Really Mean

Keywords used to mean stuffing. Unfortunately, to some they still do. Long, LONG gone are the days of inserting keywords into as many places on one page as possible and here are the days of quality content. Although most SEOs are aware of the switch and how to properly use keywords, they’re still not working in harmony with their content team to develop SEO-friendly and engaging content.

In a test performed by Google, synonyms affect 70 percent of user searches across the more than 100 languages. Based on that analysis, for every 50 queries only one bad synonym appeared. That means using that same set of keywords over and over again isn’t doing anything except creating an unreadable experience for the user. Google continues to use keywords to identify what your website represents and the message each page is trying to portray, but overstuffing content with a surplus of keywords will only hurt the user experience and rankings.

Thanks to the Hummingbird update, Google is smart enough to know which synonyms match a page’s message and better understand exactly what a user is looking for without needing 20 of the same keywords.

Keyword Tips

• Research what people are searching for using question and answer sites like Quora.
• Add to the conversation with keywords, instead of trying to start a new conversation.
• Use 2-3 words as keyword phrases to help decrease bidding prices and increase competitiveness.
• Create several different keyword lists and update them frequently using keyword research data.

Things Will Keep Changing

Change can be scary, especially when your career depends on its success. As an SEO you have to adapt quickly to whatever the next algorithm change or update is. It’s essential to pay attention and follow industry blogs filled with updates before they’re released and tips for surviving the changes.

Here are a few great SEO blogs to follow:

• The Google Blog
• Search Engine Land
• HubSpot
• AuthorityLabs
• SEMrush

Don’t Be Afraid to Start Over

It’s easy to get wrapped up in todos and forget about the bigger picture. Every marketer, whether an SEO or a Social Media Guru, is marketing to a specific audience with a specific goal in mind. If the current strategy you’re working on isn’t helping you achieve that goal, drop it. The idea of restrategizing your SEO plan is completely overwhelming, but not effectively improving yours or your client’s rankings and goals is even worse.

Stay Up to Date with Tools

You can never have too many tools, unless you’re a marketer. With thousands of tools available for online marketers, it can be difficult to sift through the quality versus quantity of tools you need to accomplish your SEO tasks. A company can end up spending hundreds, even thousands of dollars dissecting their perfect set of tools. Along the way they’ve not only invested marketing dollars, but several man-hours testing a program.

AuthorityLabs is one of those handy one-stop-shop tools that makes it easy to monitor what you need as an SEO.

• Track competitor domains side by side with your own sites to gain valuable competitive insights.
• Daily rank checking is provided on all accounts to give you the best opportunity to react to changes in the search results.
• Track search results at the city or postal code level for the most accurate and granular reporting available.
• Easily add domains or pages to be tracked from any country and language offered by Google, Yahoo! and Bing.

Marketers & SEOs Are The Same Person

Ever feel like you wear a million hats to work? That’s because you do. Online marketers are required to have knowledge in multiple realms of marketing, from basic SEO to posting on Facebook. We all have specialties that we perform best in, but usually end up overlapping with content, social, and SEO.

As stressful as this is, it’s a positive thing that benefits our companies and clients when we combine multiple skills. An SEO is not just a data driven nerd behind a computer (don’t hate me SEOs), but a quality marketer with the same business goals as you in mind.

5 Objects Your Business Should Be Tracking

There are tons of valuable stories in the data about your brand. Stories that can inform you about how your brand is perceived by the public. Stories about what your potential customers really need. Stories about how your competitors connect with the marketplace.

No matter how big or how small your business is, there are data sets that you should be tracking on a regular basis. This article will highlight what your business should be tracking, and how that information can be tracked.

Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is simply an indication of how well known your business is in your industry and in the general public. Tracking this important information can be tricky and is often difficult to place a value on. Although it is important to gage how you brand is growing over time, awareness is only indicative of business potential and not a particular sales conversion in itself. For this reason, many brands don’t spend time and resources tracking what they consider to be a soft metric. But without awareness, there is no further potential for business. Brand awareness is what gets the ball rolling.

Tracking Brand Awareness

• Growth of social following is an indication of awareness. Digging into the specifics of who is following your brand is an indication of how you rate within certain niches. Are your followers really potential customers? Are they useless bot accounts? Don’t simply count heads and call it good for brand awareness, determine who exactly is becoming aware.
• Growth of searches for branded terms is also an indication of awareness. Keep track of how you rank for your branded terms on both desktop and mobile. Depending on you business, even though mobile visitors might not convert, mobile traffic on branded terms may indicate people in research mode. Dig deeper to understand how people get to know your brand.

Reputation (Brand Sentiment)

Any brand that has had issues with maintaining a good reputation will tell you very quickly that negative brand perception will have a negative impact on your ability to do business. The flip-side of that coin is that when there’s lots of positive buzz about your brand, people actively making the effort to sing your praises for excellent service, other potential customers are drawn to your business. It is important, therefore, to regularly monitor brand mentions for both positive and negative sentiment.

Tracking Reputation

• Keep an eye on both tagged and untagged mentions of your brand across social media. This may mean tracking channels that you aren’t active on. Remember to check common misspellings of your brand name when tracking these mentions. Tools like Buzzmetrics, Trackur, Brands Eye, and Nuvi offer a variety of options and price points to fit your needs.
• Keep an eye on what else might show up in search for your brand. Has a seriously disgruntled former employee or customer started a website bashing your brand? What about blog articles mentioning your brand are they positive or negative? It’s not enough to simply track your page rankings for branded terms. You need to watch what the whole page of results may be communicating about your brand.

Competitive Intelligence

Take reputation monitoring a step further by keeping an eye on your competitors. This information will give you insight into where your competitors are successfully spreading their messages. It can also highlight where the gaps in their communications open doors of opportunity for you. Public sentiment about these brands can also guide you to more and better opportunities within your industry.

Tracking Competitors

• While the process is much the same as tracking your own brand reputation in social with both tagged and untagged mentions of your competitors, this is STRICTLY a listening exercise. Do not use this exercise to bash other brands in your space. This information should not be used directly against a competitor in the public eye.
• Make sure that you are tracking how your competitors are ranking in search on the keywords and terms most important to you. Regularly research what other relevant terms may be driving traffic to competitor sites rather than yours.

Community Discourse

People and search engines are becoming more sophisticated about how they interpret online conversations. Those conversations beyond the direct relationship with your brand or your competitors are critical to understanding the deeper needs of customers and advocates. Social listening has evolved beyond listening to conversations about your industry to include other items of interest common to your communities.

Tracking Community

• Time should be devoted on a regular basis to understanding new and existing followers. Sort existing followers into Twitter lists and Google+ circles so that you can get a custom feed from your community. Read and engage with those feeds. When someone new follows your brand, take a moment to add them to a feed and investigate some of the content they’ve shared in the past. Community is more than just how this group gathers around your brand.
• Based on your wider social listening, what sets of keywords can you begin to track and optimize? What are the common terms used for voice search on a mobile device? How well does new content that includes broader community topics drive traffic? Are there co-created content opportunities surfacing in the listening process?

Influencer Authority

A critical aspect of link building is the influencers working to link to your brand. Those influencers need to truly know their stuff and demonstrate that both their social communities and the search engines recognize their relevant contribution on important topics.

Tracking Influencers

• Keep tabs not only on the active social channels and number of followers for potential influencers, but how truly relevant those audiences are to your brand. If a potential influencer has a huge following of cat lovers due to cat memes, your accounting software isn’t going to get much traction with that community even though the influencer is an accountant. How actively does an influencer’s community share content? Do they just consume or do they share?
• How does search-driven traffic stack up to social-driven traffic? Does a potential influencer have the search clout for the long haul or does their influence only last as long as there is social buzz?

All of these data points require tracking and reporting of search and social data. Make sure that you have the tools for the job.

Crucial Things Social Media Marketers Need to Remember

Social media is everything. An obsessive habit, a communication portal for businesses and customers, a gateway to increasing links and online purchases, a consistent lead producer, and so much more. Social media marketers are well aware of this and the heavy burdens that come with managing company social profiles.

Not only is a brand exposed to the possibility of bashing, but several crises now exist due to social media and the demand for presence. Through all the chaos of managing a company’s brand online, there are many rewards: engagement with new fans, the first sale from Facebook, content shared virally on Twitter, etc.

Image Source: Dazeinfo.com

Business 2 Community organized an impressive list of online marketing statistics last December. Of the many, these social stats sum up the struggle, benefits, and why social media is such a vital part of online marketing.

• “Interesting content” is one of the top three reasons people follow brands on social media. (NewsCred)
• 47% of Americans say Facebook is their #1 influencer of purchases. (Jeff Bullas)
• 63% of millennials say they stay updated on brands using social networks and 51% say social opinions influence their purchase decisions; and 46% rely on social when making online purchases. (leaderswest Digital Marketing Journal)
• 34% of marketers use Twitter to successfully generate leads. (Jeff Bullas)

You can keep afloat through the social media updates, crises, and changes with these tips:

Optimize Social Profiles

As much as this should be a given, it’s so easily forgotten. Each social network offers different opportunities to optimize a company profile. Twitter allows hashtags in the description and tracks keywords to filter specific search results for accounts, photos, videos, and more. Facebook gives you plenty of opportunity to properly insert business information with specific hours, categories, address, short/long descriptions, etc. Don’t miss out on opportunities to connect locally and with potential new clients by forgetting to optimize your company’s social pages.

Optimizing Tips

• Verify your Pinterest profile by verifying your website. There are two different ways to verify, with an HTML tag or a meta on the website. Once verified, a bright red check mark appears next to the website, giving users a more comforting feel that this is indeed the real Kim Kardashian Pinterest page.
• Optimize Twitter images. Twitter automatically reduces images to 440 x 220 pixels. If the large image you were planning to attach with a tweet won’t be attractive that small, choose a different image that will appeal to Tweeters and the pixel requirements.

Pay Attention to Analytics

Almost every social network is now providing it’s own analytics for businesses. This leaves very little reasoning to why you’re still posting at 12:15pm everyday when Facebook has data to prove your fans are engaging best at 6:30pm. Scheduling tools like Sprout Social, Hootsuite, and Followerwonk also provide great analytics that further help analyze what fans are engaging best with.

Analytics Tips

• Perform weekly social media reports that analyze each social network’s progress. The report should track how many fans/followers, increase/decrease of engagement, published posts, link clicks, etc.
• Analyze goals with results. If the goal of a company Facebook page was initially to address concerns with products and act as a customer service funnel, then analyze how often the page is receiving such engagement. Is it the type of engagement you expected? Are you responding accordingly and in a timely manner?

Time is Always of the Essence

On Monday I spent about 10 minutes writing a complaint on a company’s Facebook page regarding an experience I just had. As someone who manages several company social pages, I know the quickest way to get a response from a company is when a complaint is right smack on a client’s Facebook page, just waiting for comments from others to add on.

It’s been four days now and still no response. This is a very big, corporate company with locations internationally and a large social team who’s been posting new posts since my complaint was posted. As a user, and former customer, I’m now even more upset. Imagine how your clients and customers feel when you don’t message them back on Twitter in a timely matter.

Urgency Tips:

• Respond to engagement within 24 hours. If the engagement is negative, respond as soon as possible to help resolve the situation.
• Create notifications to notify you each time engagement is received. Connect the notifications to the email address you check most, and push notifications through your cell, as well.

Reach Your Demographic

There’s nothing worse for a user than wanting to like and engage with your brand, but being turned off by your irrelevant posts. If your audience is primarily made up of millennials, use fun, high contrast imagery that they’re attracted to. Whereas if you’re trying to sell life insurance policies to 50+ year old couples you’ll want to use stock images of people in their 40s.

Conduct research, and then do more research, about what your demographic likes and what your competition is doing. Checking with your competitors who have similar demographics will inspire you with new ideas and avoid the trial and error of what works and what doesn’t.

Demographic Tips:

• Understand what your demographic likes. Clearly you’ve done enough research to define your demographic that you should know what kind of things your demographic enjoys. Incorporate your company with those types of interests to appeal to them with similar types of posts, images, and content.
• Pinterest isn’t the perfect social network for every company. Just as LinkedIn is great for scouting potential employees and leads, Pinterest is perfect for eCommerce, fashion, and restaurants. Have a brand presence on all social networks, but concentrate your main efforts on the networks your audience will engage with most.

Humanize the Tone and Message

This isn’t 2025; we’re not all robots. Let’s communicate to our customers on social like we do in person, using real dialogue. Phrases like, “Call Today!” and “Get Yours Now!” are typical calls to action that bombard customers with an unrelatable sales feel. Sales-speak can be great when spoken correctly, but isn’t always appropriate for social media. Converse with fans and produce thought-provoking engagement they want to interact with.

Image Source: Social Media Explorer

Humanizing Tips:

• Define the tone. Does your brand want to be playful, sarcastic, arrogant or persuasive? Choose a tone and stick with it when posting on social. Followers will respect the consistency of your tone, even if it doesn’t 100% match their own.
• Define the voice. A company’s voice is different than it’s tone. The voice is the more definitive style of the brand, whereas the tone is that extra spice you add to your already spicy burrito.

Handle Social Media Crises With a Stiff Drink

No one ever said managing social media pages would be easy. When a crisis hits, and they will, break open that bottle of whiskey that’s been collecting dust and get your typing fingers ready. You’ll have a lot of communicating to do.

Image Source: Pinterest

Crises Tips

• Know the difference between a standard consumer complaint and a social media crisis. When a group of fans who dislike your company create multiple social pages to badmouth and spread lies on Facebook,using your logo, that’s a crisis.
• Attack where the attack began. If the issue began on Twitter and quickly spread to Facebook and Tumblr, respond appropriately to the Tweeters, then the Facebookers, and Tumblrs. Your sincere apology needs to be seen where the comment was first made.
• Avoid an automated response. Copy and paste is not the answer to social media crisis. A real person needs to respond from the company and address concerns, either leaving their actual name as a signature or “Management”. Come up with a solution to the problem and respond uniquely to each comment.

Have a tip you can’t live without for social media management? Comment below and share your best strategies and ideas for surviving social media!

Tweets in Mobile Search

As of May 19th, the first tweets in Google search results since the new agreement between Twitter and the search giant began displaying in mobile searches. The first iteration of the roll-out is only for mobile and is currently limited to the US. Google indicates that Twitter content will eventually be available in desktop searches and worldwide as the year continues.

In an article for this publication back in late April, I highlighted how digital marketers might take advantage of these ongoing developments. While most of the strategies and tactics still hold, I need to address one item and take a look at what the opportunities provided by the current display of Tweets in the Google SERPs.

Since we weren’t certain at the time of publication about how Google might present tweets, I suggested the following:

There are several things to consider in order to optimize branded tweets showing up in results for search queries. First, your branded avatar may or may not show up as part of the search results. Don’t count on brand recognition based on the visual. Make sure that your Twitter handle is clearly identifiable. This is sometimes a challenge given the character limits of Twitter usernames, but it’s incredibly important that you find a way to easily identify your brand by your handle alone. This not only impacts your brand’s tweets, but also any relevant tweets that mention your brand’s handle. Make sure that when others tweet about you that anyone viewing that tweet will know it was your brand mentioned.

The rationale behind an easily identifiable Twitter handle is still important, but we can now delve into how avatars, photos, and other rich media play a roll in Twitter search results.The primo search placement is Tweets in the media rich carousel near the top of mobile search results. Like this result for a search on my Android phone for Matt Cutts.

As you can see, we get Matt’s name, his Twitter handle, his avatar, and a feature of an image he had recently shared at the time of this search query. Not all searches trigger a rich media result like this, however. Nor do they show up in the same ranking position for every search.

While searches for Danny Sullivan and Marty Weintraub both triggered carousel results, we got Danny’s personal account and Marty’s company account. Neither of the results ranking at the very top of the SERPs. The only top of the list result I could trigger for people in our industry was for myself. Please note here the importance of a clearly identifiable twitter handle, since the featured tweet in this result mentions @authoritylabs.

As you can see, I did these searches while logged into my Google account. I suspect that the sorting of results has something to do with that. But that continues to make your Google+ connections to your community an important factor, especially in mobile search results. Searches for publications also resulted in a mixed bag for me.

Here AuthorityLabs and Search Engine Journal did NOT trigger the carousel, just a mention of the branded twitter accounts. Here I can point out that we do get the proper name and the Twitter handle but no avatar or actual tweets. The search for Search Engine Land did trigger the carousel, but there were no photos in their twitter stream at the time of my query.

As you can see, the images generated in the higher ranking G+ results are more eye-catching than the Tweets featured in the carousel.

Depending on the popularity of a topic a hashtag search might trigger the carousel, but for the industry hashtags I tried, Google mobile search gave me a basic link to tweets about the #LocalSEO and #MobileSEO tags.

Although these results are only available in mobile search and are difficult to predict how exactly your brand’s Twitter content might show up in a Google search, it is still in your brand’s best interest to keep the possible variations in mind when posting to Twitter. Branding of both your account name and handle are still important, especially if the search does not trigger the media rich carousel.Making use of native Twitter images and video certainly makes carousel results stand out from the rest of the mobile results on the page. The eye-catching images are likely to lead to more clicks and engagement.

Although markups within your site that generate automatic media rich Twitter cards in Twitter are extremely valuable to engagement on Twitter, I did not see any signs of Google pulling the additional media all the way through to the carousel results. This means that you might have to adjust how often you share an image along with a link, rather than relying on the Twitter cards generated by the markups on your site. Some testing will be in order to determine when and how often to forego some clickthrough on tweets linking to your site in order to draw in a new audience from Google search.

Crucial Things Content Marketers Need to Remember

Content is queen, and always will be. So, how do we survive it’s evolution over time? How can content marketers be ahead of the game, while maintaining sanity and avoiding writers block? Each content marketer needs to have a solid strategy and set of rules to go by. Yet, according to Forbes only 32 percent of content marketers actually believe they’re executing an effective strategy. Let’s change that percentage and better content marketing for all with these helpful reminders and rules to live by.

Rethink What Content Really Is

The idea of content marketing is much larger than blog posts and email newsletters. Infographics, videos, memes, and visual imagery has expanded the variety of content that marketers have to work with. Depending upon the audience and goals, different content will help you reach different goals. For example, infographics can help with link building and memes can help with engagement. Avoid sticking with just one content type and expand your content horizons.

Image Source: SEO Resource Guide

Understand The Difference Between Semantic Search and Keyword Stuffing

What the heck is semantic search? Techopedia has a fancy definition for the term:

Semantic Search is a data searching technique in a which a search query aims to not only find keywords, but to determine the intent and contextual meaning of the the words a person is using for search.

In basic terms, this means understanding what a person is actually searching for, despite their spelling errors and misplaced commas. It’s giving a user search results that they were looking for, but didn’t know exactly how to ask.

Keyword stuffing on the other hand is an effort to match these semantic search terms and place such terms inside content, whether or not it makes sense to do so. Google refers to this as an attempt to manipulate a site’s rankings. To make matters even worse, keyword stuffing creates a negative user experience, ultimately hindering the content and it’s chances of being shared.

Somewhere in the middle between semantic search and keyword stuffing is a happy place for content marketers. Create content that people are searching for, without irrelevant keyword stuffing. Naturally write content that converts by answering questions that are already being asked.

Optimize Content

If you’re blog/website is WordPress based, there are several different plug-ins to assist with optimizing each page, especially each blog post. With over 3,500 reviews and a 4.7 rating, SEO Yoast is a great plug-in to help add SEO to your content. Giving bots the information they need you can add keywords, title tags, image descriptions, metas, and more. For basic content optimization, follow these steps:

• Insert your keyword in the heading and subhead. The content’s heading needs to be captivating, as well as include a primary keyword, informing both the reader and Google what the content is about. Don’t forget your header tags!
• Include meta tags and descriptions. In 150-160 characters, summarize what the content is about, including your primary keyword. This is your opportunity to entice readers to click on your link in search engines, giving searchers a solid reason to click on your link.
  <head>
  <meta name=”description” content=”This is an example of a meta description. This will often show up in search results.”>
  </head>
• A/B test different headlines. Some headlines perform better than others and the best ones are the hardest to create. The recipe to a perfect headline is hidden somewhere deep in the Caribbean, only a small few of us will actually ever find it. Draft 2-3 different headlines that captivate, and summarize, and test them with your audience.

Dont Phoget Hoe 2 Rite

• Grammar nazis are everywhere. Writing in a hurry, it can be easy to forget an apostrophe here or an oxford comma there. Take your time to know your grammar and it’s proper punctuation. Reread your content until you’re blue in the face, and then pass it along to someone else for proof reading. Your coworkers won’t mind.
• Bullet points are your friend. We no longer have time to read lengthy paragraphs and run-on sentences. Summarize your main points using bullets to help keep the reader’s attention, while giving them the most important information.
• No One Likes a Lengthy Marvin. If your analytics tells you people are spending anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes on your 1,500 word blog post, it’s safe to assume you’re post is too long. Create your post lengths to satisfy your readers, not bore them with wordy content.

Sharing is Caring

Content doesn’t sell itself. Some of your best sharing assets are sitting next to you. Encourage coworkers and employees to share their own content, as well as each others, on their social media accounts. Using your employees and coworkers to leverage sharing can help increase virality, views, and ultimately website clicks.

Image Source: Buffer Social

What Makes Great Content

Great content is difficult to come by nowadays. Just about anyone has the ability to create a social media page or website and start publishing content. What separates the good from the bad?

• Do the readers have a reason to share? Sharing is caring, especially with content. No one creates content with intentions for it to just sit in the cyberworld, seen by no eyes or bots. Content marketers put so much of their heart and soul into developing great content. They want it to be read by many, and hopefully influence impactful decisions. In order for that to happen, you must give readers what they want, thought-provoking content they can share with friends, family and coworkers.
• Are you answering anyone’s questions? People want answers, that’s why we search online, call a friend, or ask a family member when we have a question we don’t know the answer to. Not only do we crave other people’s opinions, but insist on their explanations and expertise. A retail associate at H&M has a better chance of answering a question about what kind of bathing suit to buy this summer, over asking the department manager at Home Depot. Emphasize your specific expertise through publishing thought-provoking content. Research what kind of questions are being asked and answer them, using your own experience, knowledge, and research.
• Does your content tell a story, or give an explanation? How-tos make great content pieces and are easily shared. Step 1, step 2, and step 3 are all vital steps to painting your cabinet with chevron stripes, but what story can you add with the steps? Do chevron stripes remind you of your Grandpa’s old convertible that had red apple stripes alongside the bed? Readers want a story to be relatable and humanized, as much as they want the steps.

Write To Your Demographic, Not For

Only 13% of adults are reading at a proficient reading level. If you’re a high level writer, kudos, and your readers may be closer to a third grade reading level (sad, but true), are you reaching them? Adjust your content to suit their needs and understanding. Use Readability-Score to discover how complex your content is and if your readers will be able to comprehend the message.

Tools Are Your Friend

Content marketing tools like Quora and AuthorityLab’s now provided tool help inspire new ideas for content topics. Other tools like Buffer, MailChimp, and PRWeb help deliver your content to the right people. Manage all of your content marketing efforts with platforms like Trello, Wunderlist, and Evernote. Polish it off with writing tools Contently and Writers Access and be on your way to producing top notch content.

How do you stay a successful content marketer? Comment your best practices and favorite content marketing tools below!