How to Run Content Marketing With Success in 2015

To design an excellent content strategy, the most important thing (and which very few do), without a doubt, is to start by establishing “where we are headed”. In other words, our goals.

I have been working specifically with content marketing for the past 10 years and if there is something we have learned during this time, is that the difference between those that succeed and those that fail is NOT based on the quantity of resources they are able to invest (money/budget). It is in the clarity in which they define “why” they want to engage in content marketing.

In this article, we would like to share 3 objectives that, in our opinion, are essential and also universal, and can be used by any company in any industry. As an example, we’ll take the case of Boosted, a battery-powered skateboards manufacturer.

First Objective: Product Information

The first and perhaps the most intuitive and familiar goal of a content strategy, is to make your product known. You need to allow potential customers to obtain a greater knowledge of your products. Everything from: “How is it built?,” “How is it used?,” to: “Where can I buy it?”.

For this first objective, content such as “The differences between Boosted’s 3 models,”  “Advantages of using Boosted to commute to work,” and “Boosted’s policies of use and returns” are some of the most common examples.

Also, for SEO, at this first point you will be covering terminology from the brand name itself “Boosted”, to technical variations like “advantages of Boosted,” “parts for building a Boosted,” “requirements for riding a Boosted in public,” etc.

Second Objective: Mark the Problem

All great companies are successful because, at the end of the day, they are solving real, concrete problems of their potential customers, who pay to use their products. The second goal of your content strategy is to focus on the problem your product solves.

This gives us a wider range for creating content. For Boosted, that would mean: “Alternatives to using a car to commute to work,” “The 3 most ecological methods of transport that exist today,” or even “Why using a skateboard is better for our health than a bike.”

The audience reached with this type of content goes further than potential clients, and so, if we compare the conversion rate for this objective with the first we will find a significant decrease. However, by utilizing this method you will have the possibility of reaching people of influence, referrals, the media, and possible boosters for our company as well.

Concerning SEO, the advantage lies in targeting keywords that are broader and go beyond our product itself, specifically with information searches performed by Google users regarding the problem that we are solving, such as: “means of transportation that use batteries for getting around the city.”

Third Objective: Empower your Vision

The final objective is focused on the possibility of “viral” exponential growth in order to build brand awareness. This also means reaching an audience that is beyond our potential direct customers.

An example of this would be the creation of video content about: “Can a battery-powered skateboard move a car?”

The idea behind this last objective is to get the most out of social networks through the virality of what your product can obtain when used in exceptional/extreme situations and moments.

Although for this type of content you will probably see the lowest conversion rate from all the three options mentioned in this article, this is definitely an excellent way to reach people who will later have an influence on potential customers.

In regards to SEO this can also be greatly beneficial. Viral content attracts links, thus increasing your brand’s recognition when it comes to Google and all the other search engines merely by being mentioned.

The single mechanism for implementation

Knowing the “why” behind your content marketing strategy and your goals, it is time to get to work.

Here are my 4 implementation tips for those who wish to start working on their strategy today:

1. Exclusive to experts: What I want to say with this is that all your content needs to be developed by experts. Under no circumstances should your information be poor. There is already too much content in the web that is of poor quality, adding to that accomplishes nothing.

For our blog for example, those who built the product with their own hands, the creators, are the only ones who create content. If they do not have the time to do it, the best thing we found to be is to hire a writer who can observe what they do and what they want to communicate and share through a note/article.

2. Focused on the customers: You should never take for granted your customers. Every question, doubt, concern, inquiry, and suggestion that they have, represents an ideal launching pad for the creation of valuable content. If, for example, a customer wants to know who created the product and where the idea came from, then it is the ideal moment to create an interview with the founders and make known the values, mission, and vision of the company.

This is the best way to create evangelizers for your project that will help you grow more than you imagined in the long run.

3. Do not concentrate on text only: Even though search engines are mainly organized to index text, you should remember that the second largest search engine in the world is YouTube. Thus, creating videos and other formats for content becomes fundamental.

4. The key is patience: As I mentioned, content quality is of utmost importance. However, time is as well. For content marketing, time plays a determining role. It is not the same as hiring a TV ad or an announcement in Google Adwords, which take effect from one day to the next. With content we are talking about seeing results on an average of weeks or even months.

At that brings us to the great overlooked opportunity that content marketing brings – results that do not disappear from one day to the next (a paid announcement, once it is no longer paid, ceases to exist). Effective content will last over time and will bring dividends even a year after being developed.

Content marketing is something organic that needs our patience and dedication.

How to Make Your Blog as Local as Your Business

Let’s face it, local SEO’s and business owners have given up on content and settled for SEO.

Now, I’m not saying that SEO is bad or that no local business can write. But what I am saying is that the industry has prioritized the SEO/ranking value of content over the audience value of our content.

The moment SEO becomes more important than our audience, we have a marketing problem.

Let’s take off our 1,500 word minimum with 2% keyword density blinders and ask ourselves a few simple questions:

• Would I actually read this whole post? If you can’t read the whole article there’s no chance your audience will.
• Would I send a new potential customer a link to my blog? If not, then potential customers visiting your website probably shouldn’t see it either.
• Do my blog posts receive engagement: comments or shares? I’m not talking about fake Gucci handbag comments, but instead, real comments or Facebook shares.

While this is a tough standard, if we don’t have something to aim for what is the point? As a local business or a online marketer working with local SMB’s, the goal for content should be to engage with your audience. Often times, the easiest way to do this is to be local. If your audience is local and you want to gain content traction, be local.

Step 1: Reallocate Your Time

Typically, we allocate the following percentages of time for our blog:

• 5% of our time preparing
• 90% of our time writing
• 5% of our time promoting

For your local blog to perform well, I am suggesting a reallocation of time:

• 20% preparation
• 50% writing
• 30% promotion

If an article was written, but no one reads it was it really written?

Frankly, we often mistakenly think search engines will find our content and then our audience will. This is backwards thinking. Instead, we need to identify the interests of our local audience, craft an exceptional piece of content, and promote the heck out of it.

Step 2. Take a Tour of the Neighborhood

What makes the city or county you do business in unique? What local things or attractions exist that someone from out of town wouldn’t know about?

Tweet this: The goal isn’t to be everybody’s cup of tea, the goal is to be your local audience’s.

Take a tour of the neighborhood and ask yourself, what does my audience care about? What would they share?

The content goal for a local business should be for your business to be the first thing people in your area associate with the service or product you provide.

Think of content as an awareness factor. What is the best way to make my local audience aware of my service or product? The answer: relevance.

We have found that with simply $20 you can promote your content to your local audience and drive hundreds of relevant visits to your website for less than $0.50 cents a click. Outside of relevant, localized content, there are few avenues to drive such traffic.

Tweet this: Set Up remarketing to market to the new audience you are attracting.

Step 3. Choosing and Promoting Your Content

We have taken a tour of the neighborhood and now have a pretty good idea of what makes our area unique. Next, we must decide how often to write and on what.

If we are going to add a little local flavor to our blog it’s important to understand what makes our audience tick. We often simply just write about what we do, but that is rarely the best way to engage with your audience.

The other option we often take is writing for thought leadership. While also fine, most local businesses will not increase sales by writing a post on how they have created a revolutionary new way to repair your fridge.

The core reason why these two approaches and many others fail, is because they are not relevant to your audience and cannot be easily promoted via interest targeting.

A general rule of thumb is that quantity is not as important as quality. Do not try to produce more content than you can produce well.

We want to impact our audience and thus influence our local rankings…not the other way around.

When selecting a topic to write on, back your way into it. Our favorite tool for content promotion and amplification is Facebook ads. So often, we choose our topics based on what interests us instead of what interests our audience. Let’s choose what to write based on who and what we can target.

So, before your write that next post head over to the “boost post” option from a previous post, and look at your audience options.

Ask yourself, what targeting options are available and how can I make sure that my topic fits with my targeting?

Once you have chosen your topic, finding a title worthy of promotion of tough. Luckily, the team over at Portent have created an awesome tool to help you with choosing that next title. Check it out!

If you are having a tough time getting the local juices flowing here are some potential topics:

• 5 Places in ___ that you never knew existed
• Highest rated taco joints in ____
• 10 ways you can tell you’re from ___

What do these topics have to do with your local business to consumer service business? Everything. Your local audience doesn’t care about your post on: “How to Do something in 5 Easy Steps.”

Instead, they care, share, and read about content that is relevant to them. Do you think they will call the plumber or hvac contractors who made them laugh or wrote something engaging about their area? Or do you think they will call the hvac contractors or plumber who they never heard of because their content wasn’t relevant enough to earn a click?

Be ruthless. Make your blog as local and relevant to your audience as possible. If a piece of content cannot be promoted to your local audience don’t write it. If you can’t think of five of your customers that would read it all the way through or share it, don’t write it.

Take a stand for the power of exceptional local content and make your blog as local as your business.

How To Increase Traffic Using Pinterest

If 69% of online consumers are going to Pinterest with intent to purchase items, why not take advantage, and help improve your sales and web traffic with Pinterest? Speaking of visitors, most Pinners, 80% of Pinners, are accessing Pinterest on their phone, which means they’re then being directed to your website mobily (cough *mobilegeddon* cough).

With so many ways to improve traffic and rankings, and now mobile rankings, Pinterest presents a unique opportunity to achieve these goals and become one of the largest traffic drivers in the social realm. Follow these tips to help improve your company Pinterest page, presence, and website traffic.

1. Start With The Basics – Optimizing Your Pinterest Profile

A company Pinterest profile should define who the company is: their goals, passions, and interests. This makes Pinterest one of the best social networks to define a brand, offering consumers an inside look using brand boards and unique pins.

Each board can represent a different service offered, as well as interests the company shares. For example, does your team make a daily trip to the coffeeshop around the corner? Then add a coffee board to row 3 or 4 of your Pinterest profile with snapshots of the crew, as well as popular coffee pins. Anywhere from 12-20 boards are appropriate for a company Pinterest profile. Develop catchy titles, with keywords, for each board and properly source each pin with a connecting URL to the website or blog.

The Pinterest profile description at the top needs to include exactly what a company does, with few keywords. I tend to use the same biography in all of my social profiles to keep consistency and branding throughout. Pinterest is no different. If you’re including brand keywords in the Twitter description, share the same description on Pinterest. Just because you have extra characters, doesn’t mean you have to fill them with keyword stuffing. Make the description natural, yet attractive, giving Pinners a real reason to follow.

2. Verify Your Website, Verify Your Credibility

Pinterest is getting better and better in preventing spammy Pinners from reaching users. One of their methods to the spam-stopping-madness is by offering a “verify your website” button. If you know how to navigate your website’s backend, verifying your website is a synch. Pinterest offers an easy to follow instruction guide for installing a meta tag or uploading an HTML Pinterest file to verify. If a Pinterest profile is verified, it’s more likely to be showed to more Pinners, helping to increase page popularity and click-through.

3. Rich Pins Can Make You Rich

Rich Pins are designed to make the pinning experience more enjoyable for consumers, and more efficient for companies. Instead of trying to stuff every detail about a product in the description, Rich Pins allow proper separation of product detail from a fun, catchy description. It’s a balance between the headline and body text for Pins.

Image Source: Whiteglovesocialmedia.com 

In a study by Shopify, adding prices to pins averaged 1.5 likes, against pins that didn’t have a price at 1.1 likes. Appreciate that 0.4 difference, because as Pinterest pointed out last holiday season, over two million peopleadd a Product Pin to their boards daily. That’s a lot of opportunity, and potential for increasing traffic from a Rich Pin to it’s product page.

Don’t have products to sell? Don’t worry! Pinterest has multiple Rich Pin offers:

• Product Rich Pins
• Recipe Rich Pins
• Movie Rich Pins
• Article Rich Pins
• Place Rich Pins

4. Backlink Your Pins For Increased Traffic

This is a big one, and quite possibly the best way to increase traffic from Pinterest. Keep in mind, there’s a right way to do this and a very wrong Spammy Mc. Spammer type of way to backlink your pins.

On your own pins, not pins off of the popular page, add a relevant url from your website or blog as the pin’s “source”. Include that image on the actual page or have a relevant image that relates to the pin’s description. If you tell me I can learn how to knit in 5 simple steps, don’t send me to a construction company in New York. I’m a San Diegan, we’re very different.

5. Did Someone Say Link Building?

Bloggers and Pinners are bestfriends. Together, they shape cuticles, casseroles, and take cute cat photos. Thousands of bloggers have caught on to the many opportunities Pinterest offers as a traffic source and creates pin-worthy images to attach to posts. With that many bloggers regularly using Pinterest and having Pin It buttons on their website, it’s easy to find different guest posting opportunities through Pinterest’s Guided Search.

In the search bar at the top of Pinterest, type in a relevant topic to your industry (ie: social media). Add a couple of keywords provided by the Guided Search option and let the hundreds of relevant pins and Pinners appear before your eyes. Pins with caption overlays, like descriptions offering, “5 steps to anything”, are most likely going to be bloggers. Click through the pins and follow Pinners to start exploring the many bloggers behind Pinterest, just waiting for your un-automated guest post email. Despite the argued debate, the guest posts and relationships with relevant bloggers can help improve your overall rankings and “site juice”. Just don’t be a Spammy Mc. Spammer!

6. Make Life Easy for Pinners – Install a Pin it Button on Your Website

Make it easy for users to share content directly from your website and add it to their favorite boards with Pin It buttons. The Pin It button can help get more referral traffic to a site when people click on Pins. People save images from a website to Pinterest, allowing more people to discover and repin them. In fact, the average Pin gets 11 repins.

                                  
Each Pinable image on a website needs to have an optimized description and title to further help with rankings. Pinterest will grab the image description and attach it to the pin automatically when a user pins it from a site. Increase ranking chances by providing a keyword-rich description a user is attracted to. You don’t want the Pinner changing your perfectly optimized description to, “I love it!” As much as we love it too, that kind of caption doesn’t do anything for rankings. Provide the Pinner with a relatable caption they’ll want to keep, referencing the company and proper keywords.

7. Attract Who You’re Attracted To

Wedding dress designers could care less about a construction company’s Pinterest page, and even less to join a “Construction Hats” board. Relevancy, as with anything online, is vital to growing engagement and traffic. Search for Pinners that are in your industry, as well as related industries to follow. Take it a step further and interact with the demographic by commenting on their new pins, asking to be a part of their group boards, and hearting your favorite pins they’ve shared. New Pinners will be more likely to visit your company profile, and eventually your website, if they can relate to the business in some way.

8. Pin Blog Images

Blog images make great pins and repins to help increase traffic with. Using photo editing tools, like Picmonkeyor Canva, create different collages, add text overlays, increase the image contrast and quality so it’s unique for Pinterest. Get creative with your Pinterest pins and follow image trends on the popular page to see what’s getting repinned the most. Unsure of what works best on Pinterest? Curalate conducted a Pinterest image study and found the following information about pins on Pinterest:

• “Images that contain less than 30 percent background (e.g. whitespace) are repinned the most.”
• “The most repinned images have multiple colors: Images with multiple dominant colors have 3.25 times more repins per image than images with a single dominant color.”
• “Very light and very dark images are not repinned as often. In fact, the repinning rate for images of medium lightness is 20 times higher than for images that are mostly black, and eight times higher than images that are mostly white.”
• “Brand images without faces receive 23 percent more repins. Less than 1/5 of images on Pinterest today have the presence of faces.”

Image Source: Curalate

9. Promote a Contest With Pins

Pinning images with contest details on Pinterest, while hosting the contest on your website, can help increase traffic from Pinterest to a site. For the “source” of each pin, include the contest page URL so Pinners are redirected to the correct page and are more likely to enter and repin. Uploading pins or pinning directly from a contest page will also encourage traffic from users who normally wouldn’t have visited the page in the first place, especially if repinning is an extra entry into the contest.

Have you noticed a lot of your traffic coming from Pinterest? Share your tips in the comments below!

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.