Via Scoop.it – Content Marketing Now

Written by David Meerman Scott

One of my favorite videos is HP Invent, which was co-created by Tom Wrigglesworth. I’ve shown this video at many of my speaking gigs because it beautifully captures what HP Workstations are about. The video is not a product pitch. And it is entertaining as heck.

HP – invent from Films & Things on Vimeo.

This HP Invent video has nearly 600,000 views. Imagine that – a video about technology that people actually share!
Via www.webinknow.com

Via Scoop.it – Content Marketing Now

From the Hubspot Blog, by Karen Rubin

HubSpot launches a free new tool to help you evaluate and improve the effectiveness of your entire marketing program.

Since 2006, HubSpot’s award-winning free tool, Website Grader, has graded more than 4 million websites. Website Grader has given marketers advice on how to improve many aspects of their websites and encouraged millions to bring their website presence to the next level, all for free.

But now the time has come to replace Website Grader! A lot has changed since 2006, and these days, marketing is about much more than just your website.

Why is Marketing Grader Replacing Website Grader?

In 2012, marketing is about more than just your website. It’s about social, mobile, blogging, email marketing, lead nurturing, and analytics. As a marketer, you need to be aware of how your marketing impacts your entire sales and marketing funnel from the top of the funnel to the middle of the funnel. Marketing Grader does just this by analyzing all aspects of your marketing efforts and letting you know where you’re succeeding and what you need to spend more time improving.

Read more: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/29274/HubSpot-Launches-Free-Marketing-Grader-Tool-to-Replace-Website-Grader.aspx#ixzz1hBsjpKyg

Read more: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/29274/HubSpot-Launches-Free-Marketing-Grader-Tool-to-Replace-Website-Grader.aspx#ixzz1fnkZP9xW
Via blog.hubspot.com

Pair of Seattle Personal Injury Law Firms Prove the Content Marketing Point

Marketing on the web is just like the old saw from the real estate world: "It’s all about location, location location."

On the web, there are two important meanings when it comes to the word "location."  They both relate to the importance of marketing focus.

First and foremost, a fabulous location is being at the top of Google search results. There is only one way to make that happen–by creating a niche for your business that precisely targets the information needs of your best customers.

Enter the second meaning of "location." Physical location is still important in strengthening your niche. Why? Because, by emphasizing your location, your site is much more likely to do well versus national or global competitors. This can give you a significant competitive advantage.

When you get both of these location elements just right, your website pops to the top. That’s the benefit of relentless focus.

This fact rears its marketing head in the world of law firms–and especially in the realm of personal injury attorneys.

Niche Marketing at Work: Personal Injury Attorneys in Seattle

Smart personal injury attorneys are also great marketers. We know this from their ever present and effective television commercials. Many also do a brilliant online marketing job. In Seattle, Rob Kornfeld of Kornfeld, Trudell, Bowen and LIngenbrink has created a niche website, www.KornfeldLaw.com. This site has a laser focus on personal injury law in the Seattle area.

To understand the danger of lack of focus, I compared Rob Kornfeld’s site to that of another Seattle law firm with a broad set of practice areas, one of which is personal injury. We will call them ABC Law to protect them from my content marketing critique. They are buried so deep in Google results that few clients are likely to find them when they are looking for personal injury attorneys–or any kind of attorney, for that matter.

Here’s why KornfeldLaw.com does so well in search results on Google and ABC Law does so poorly:

KornfeldLaw.com– High Up on the First Page of Google Search for Personal Injury Keywords

• Rob Kornfeld’s site focuses 100% on personal injury. Everything from the header to the copy and the images reinforce that focus.
• His bullet point list of practice areas are all specific types of personal injuries
• His homepage integrates the keyword, personal injury, eight times in text and several more times in images.
• His copy includes additional references to specific instances of personal injuries for which clients will be seeking redress.
• His WordPress website integrates a blog that includes up-to-date mentions of the keyword, personal injury.
• His footer integrates mentions of both personal injury and location specific links.
• He uses video effectively explain exactly how his firm can help personal injury clients to achieve positive results.

ABC Law–by Trying to Be Everything They Are Found Nowhere

• their homepage describes their practice only in the broadest terms.
• They minimize the search engine value of their Seattle location by referring to other states near and far were they are able to do legal work. This may be a good selling point but it reduces their findability significantly. In fact, Seattle gets only three mentions on their homepage.
• Their bullet point list of practice areas is very diverse.
• Neither personal injury nor any other important practice related keyword gets more than a single mention on their homepage.
• Their personal injury landing page says that personal injury is a "major part" of their practice. But, there isn’t enough content on that page to attract either clients or search engines on the hunt for personal injury solutions.
• Their best ranking for any practice related search term is number 25–and that’s for topic that gets almost no searches in the Seattle area

Focus. Focus. Focus: That’s the Way the Top of Google Search Results

"How do I get to Carnegie Hall?" That’s the question from a very old joke to which the answer is, "Practice. Practice. Practice"  that same level of intensity in terms of focus is essential to generating great Google search results.

In traditional marketing, it has always been important to define a niche that is important to an ideal set of customers. In the new world of content marketing online, focus is vital. That’s true both in terms of defining a niche and making sure that your website reflects that niche. Moreover, as a local business, you have an even better chance of doing well when your customers are looking for the solutions that only you can provide in your geographical area.

External links to your site from high quality, relevant websites are one of the best ways to generate great search results.

Why? Because, from Google’s perspective, your site ranks better if lots of your well-respected peers consider your site worth linking to. It’s like being friends with all the cool kids in high school. That makes you popular, too.

Unfortunately, the importance of generating quality links to your site opens the door to nefarious SEO practitioners who send out mass, evidently automated comments to a range of sites that have nothing to do with your company or your online presence.

A perfect example arrived in my e-mail this morning as a link to my article, "Six Reasons Why Your Blog Is Your Most Important Social Media Tool."

The SEO spammer left this absurd and ungrammatical comment:

"I’ve implies looked at it by way of that point of view and happen to be enlightened.  I will have to obtain some extra information and report it back again. Thank you."

I don’t know about you, but that sure doesn’t motivate me to connect with the ‘commenter.’

How to Avoid Falling for This Kind of Black Hat SEO Spam Link Building Technique

1. If an SEO company promises they will get you a ton of links from external sites, make them explain exactly how they will achieve this result.
2. Have them show you one or more examples that illustrate the way they go about delivering those external links.
3. Ask to see actual comments that they have left on sites which, in turn, resulted in an external link.
4. Ask them if they use the automated spamming process–perhaps showing my example of a stupid comment–and see if they think that’s a good idea.  It may well be that they think that kind of stupid comment is actually worthwhile.
5. If you don’t get the right answers to these questions, toss them out the virtual door.

External Links Are Important but You Can’t Get Lots of Them Easily or Overnight.

Convincing other sites to link to you or letting it happen organically will take time.

Here’s a good basic approach:

1. The first and most obvious step is to have great content on your site that is well worth linking to.
2. Keep your content current and relevant for a well-defined set of potential customers within equally well-defined market niches.
3. Research websites and bloggers who cover your content, product, service or knowledge expertise.
4. Subscribe to their RSS feed and/or use Google search tools to deliver regular reports on news items in those topic areas.  That will keep you current and give you the opportunity to connect with the folks from whom you ultimately want links to your site.
5. Begin to participate in the conversations taking place on those sites to demonstrate your knowledge. You will have an opportunity to leave a link to your site to make it easy for bloggers or website content creators to explore your site.
6. You can also send them a polite request, perhaps with an example of your content, to add a link to your site from theirs.

This slow but steady approach works. But it will take time, perhaps several months. Remember, as with so many things in life, if it seems too good to be true, it almost always is.

It’s All about the Maximizing the Frequency of Critical Keywords on Your Homepage

I have believed that integrating the two content marketing components was important since the very beginning of my own online efforts. 

Of course, your content marketing strategy relies on providing relevant, compelling, and frequently updated information that targets your best customers. By integrating a blog into the homepage of your website, you have the opportunity to do exactly that. You can write lots of articles and organize them in a logical way so that your visitors can find exactly what they need quickly.

But, until last week, I seriously underestimated why the integration of those two is so very important to getting found by Google and by your prospects. And, after all, getting found is what makes great content valuable to you and your organization.

Findability Flows Naturally from Homepage/Blog Integration

Because Google sees things somewhat differently than your visitors, your blog posts give you the opportunity to fill your homepage with keywords that make it easy for Google—and, therefore, for visitors to find you.

Why is that?

When you integrate your blog posts with your homepage, you can effectively repeat an astonishingly large number of keywords in a way that seems completely natural both to Google and to your prospective customers.  Moreover, you do not create an egregiously high keyword density that would put search engines on alert for phony, duplicative content.

A standard homepage–even one optimized for search engines–contains primarily static content of a finite length. You can cram only so many keywords and phrases onto that homepage. If you over stuff the page with keywords, you offend both Google and your visitors.

But, as soon as you integrate a substantial number of blog posts into the homepage you have multiple opportunities to showcase the keywords that are most important in search engine optimization.

This insight hit me over the head while I was testing out some new tools using my website as a guinea pig. I tested by searching for the phrase, "content marketing."

On my site, "content marketing" is the overwhelmingly most important keyword phrase that defines what I do to solve my customers problems.  Unless those two words appear frequently, neither Google nor customers will find me.  On the other hand, I would not want to overdo their use.

ContentMarketingToday.com as SEO Test bed

As many of you may know, you can discover how Google sees your site by doing a test search and then looking at the cached version of the page which highlights the key word or phrase that brought Google to your website. Thus, I used "content marketing" to experiment with my site.

I was astonished to see that on my homepage that phrase came up 33 times– and the word content and the word marketing added to the search impact even when they were used separately.

The slice of my homepage below gives you a pretty good idea of keyword frequency:

As I scrolled down the entire homepage, all those yellow highlighted words and phrases really popped out. It became obvious that by integrating my blog with my homepage, "content marketing" naturally occurred very often, but in an entirely natural way.

Remember that your visitors may not scroll all the way down the page, but Google does. Thus, you benefit from all of those keyword instances.  This becomes even more important if you have 3,4, 5 or more essential keywords. You can include each of them with adequate frequency to make an significant SEO difference.

Google likes that integration and your customers will like it, too.

Below, you can compare the typical opportunities to include keywords on a standard homepage and on a homepage that integrates a blog. The added value of the latter becomes pretty obvious when you itemize all the extra opportunities.

Where to put keywords on a standard homepage:

• in the website header
• in the main navigation
• in the headline and subheads of the core homepage content
• in the core homepage content
• in an Seo friendly footer

Within integrated homepage and blog–all of the above and these additional locations:

• in the headline and subhead of each blog post—as an example, that includes 10 articles on my website
• in the body copy of each blog post
• in the categories by which all blog posts are organized
• in a widget that shows most recent posts
• in a widget that shows most popular posts
• in a widget that shows comments on posts

The Content Marketing Keyword Bottom-Line

You must have great content to succeed online. But that’s just the beginning. 

You must be easily findable when Google and your prospects are searching for the keywords that represent information that is most important to them.

By integrating your blog into your homepage, you dramatically increase the number of keywords that you can comfortably include in your content.  In so doing, you simultaneously maximize the probability of outstanding Google search results. 

Lessons from an Eye Doctor Website That’s Not Visible Enough for Search Engines

Of course, your website must provide relevant and compelling content for your prospective customers.

Ideally, that content should combine both text and images to grab your visitors attention and to keep them on your site long enough to get to know and trust you.

Here’s what is less obvious. Google does not see your site exactly the way your visitors see it. As far as Google is concerned, your website is a bunch of text whose structure and formatting make clear what is most important to the visitors who will benefit most from the site’s content.

Therefore, although you may have a beautiful website with strong visual appeal, it will fail in findability, unless Google discovers text information that it sees as truly relevant to a keyword search.

Google Needs to Find Text on Your Website Structured and Prioritized the Way it Wants

While I was doing competitive research for a doctor client, I uncovered  an example of a missed SEO opportunity by examining the website of one of his competitors.  I found it by doing the opposite of what real patients would do. I dug many pages down on Google search results. In fact, among the top keywords, this competitor’s best ranking is #32. For eye doctor, he comes in at #58 and for eye surgery he comes in at #113.  That’s much too deep for most patients who are looking for eye care solutions using the most popular keyword terms.

The problem boils down to failing to give Google the text and structure it needs to generate valuable search results.

Here’s where this eye doctor’s website went off the SEO tracks:

• Critically important descriptive homepage information is contained only in images. There is no text for Google to read that provides the doctor’s name, the name of his practice or how he describes his specialties and his experience. From Google’s perspective, this information does not even exist.
• His website gives low or no homepage visibility to the most important keywords for eye doctors:
• laser eye surgery
• eye surgery
• LASIK surgery
• vision correction
• eye doctor
• cataract surgery
• eye care
• Although interior pages of his website do include a good bit of information about topics such as LASIK surgery and cataract surgery, there are no direct links to either topic on the homepage either in the primary navigation or in core content. Finding this information requires too much digging for both Google and for visitors.
• His HTML title tag does include does include ‘cataract surgery’ and ‘glaucoma,’ but these keywords arrive only after a long introduction with his name and the word, ophthalmologist. The result is that the title tag is too long and the highest-ranking key words come too late for Google to give them adequate importance.
• His HTML description tag does not include any of the critical keywords noted above that visitors and Google would search for.  If this description excludes those keywords, Google naturally assumes that they are not important to the website or to the doctor.

This website is an excellent illustration of the importance of getting search engine optimization right. You may be the best eye doctor or plumber or construction company on the planet. But, if Google has trouble finding you, your target clients won’t be able to find you either.

The secret to search success begins with this: First, create great content that is relevant to your target clients. Then, design your website so that Google can find that content when your target customers are looking for answers to their most pressing questions.

Gulfshore Insurance Shows They Care How the Hottest Issue in a Generation Impacts Their Clients.  Big Bank/Insurance Giant Ignores It.

I think we can all agree that the health insurance reform legislation of 2010 will touch each and every one of us. It will impact both businesses and individuals.

If you are a business owner, it is vital that you understand how it will affect you and your employees.  Why? Because, unless you are a very small business, you will either have to provide healthcare insurance or pay a penalty for failing to do so. You will have to make some tough decisions in the years to come about how to handle your employees’ health insurance needs.

Because of the dramatic impact of this legislation, there is an urgent need for comprehensive and understandable information so that business owners can plan intelligently.

This creates a uniquely powerful opportunity to provide relevant and compelling content for your current and prospective customers. You can demonstrate thought leadership at a time when business owners are desperate to find an information source they can trust.

One local agency is doing exactly that.  Gulfshore Insurance in Naples, Florida is doing a superb job of content marketing at the exact moment that the health insurance paradigm shift looms large for everyone in the United States.

When you go to their website, you can find a broad range of information about the kinds of insurance coverage they provide, how they help you manage risk, and exactly who they are. That is always important.

But, what is urgent right now–and for years to come–is trustworthy content about healthcare reform. Gulfshore Insurance brings that information front and center on their homepage with their Health Reform Tools and Resources link. 

That link leads you to a wealth of information that is both comprehensive and timely. In the case of health reform, timeliness is vital because so much is undecided, in process, and apparently changeable.

The timeline chart below is a great example of the hard work they have done to help their clients understand what’s in store.

In short, Gulfshore Insurance is executing a content marketing strategy that genuinely benefits their customers and will therefore benefit to them well into the future.

Billion-Dollar Bank/Insurance Agency Completely Misses the Same Once-In-A-Lifetime Content Marketing Opportunity

BB&T is a huge regional bank which has in recent years acquired numerous local insurance agencies. In Southwest Florida, they bought an excellent local firm whose management team and employees continue to provide great products and services.

Unfortunately,  they are missing an unprecedented opportunity to show authentic thought leadership. During this turbulent time in American history when healthcare and healthcare insurance is changing forever, they are missing in action online.

If you go to the old local web address or the parent company insurance agency address, you will find absolutely nothing about healthcare reform. Moreover, they have eliminated any kind of local information on the website to tell you about the kinds of professionals that you would deal with in Southwest Florida.  If you drill down several layers, you can find telephone numbers to call but no e-mail or individual contact information. Even worse, they tell you absolutely nothing about the local company.   If I were not already familiar with that company, I would be at a complete loss to know why I should become a client.

The bottom line:

The Good–

• Gulfshore Insurance is showing authentic thought leadership that will resonate with clients and prospects for years to come.
• By providing lots of relevant, localized information, Gulfshore Insurance enables search engines to rank them highly and prospective clients to find them easily .
• Gulfshore Insurance shows up high on the first page of local search results for terms such as health insurance, business insurance, and personal insurance. Great content has a lot to do with that.

The Bad–

• BB&T has lost that same once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to show thought leadership and engender trust.
• They provide almost no information about their local presence in Southwest Florida.
• Their search engine performance is abysmal. Neither their current website address nor the predecessor local website shows up at all when you search for health insurance in Fort Myers or Naples–our two largest local markets.

[Updated Version]

If any self-described search engine expert tells you that comments like the following actual example will get you SEO-friendly links back to your blog or website, I suggest you neither pay for nor follow their advice:

"Great site you have here and great insight. No wonder so many people flock on it with comments. Keep it going. Cheers!"

I must get 10 or more of these junk comments each day on my site and countless more on client sites.  Of course, they never make it live on the web.  Finding ways to build back links is important.  But, these are a complete waste of everyone’s time.

On the other hand,  on my site, I always welcome and always approve genuine, thoughtful, amusing, and even intelligently argued negative comments.

It’s not that much extra work to find blogs and bloggers you enjoy. That’s where your comments can begin real dialogue. If you can add value to the original blog post, your blog or website will almost certainly get a look from the blogger. After that, you may get a comment back and perhaps an inclusion in their blogroll.

Like everything else in life, the only comments worth doing are worth doing well.

P.S.  Great update: A big thank you to a junk commenter (who is apparently in the SEO biz) on this very post who makes my point beautifully, albeit unintentionally with the following ‘comment’:

Search engine optimization that is process of promote site on the search engine like Google. Yahoo. MSN. Thank You .

Another Excellent Infographic Offers Content Marketers a First Baby Step to Findability

Courtesy of PPCBlog.com

If you’re in business today, you have to be on the Internet.  But, being there is barely a beginning.

Once you are on the Internet, it’s vital that your potential customers can find you and your content by searching on Google and other search engines. That’s what SEO is all about.

Before Fretting about SEO, First Get a Clue About How Google Works from PPCBLOG’s Infographic

There have been lots of books white papers, articles and websites devoted to the whole issue of Google and search engine optimization. But for most of business owners and professionals, a basic understanding of how Google works will suffice so that you won’t be bamboozled when some slick-talking SEO sales rep tries to make getting found by Google and the rest sound more complicated than it actually is.

That’s why I love this infographic that takes you on a virtual walk-through of the Google search process. Take five minutes to go through it, you will have a much better understanding of what Google and search engines are all about.

Perhaps this inspiring infographic will also motivate you to create your own visual to illustrate to your potential customers how your business or service works to their benefit.

Check out the full size “How Google Works” infographic at PPCBlog.com

When They Learn How Hard It is to Do It Well,  They Will Turn to You as the Trusted Solution Provider of Choice

If you provide professional or other  services, you and your organization must be expert at what you do. Therefore, with your advice and instruction, your customers can learn to install their own wall-mounted TVs, organize their own closets, create their own business plans or optimize their own sites for search engines, etc., etc.

You might wonder why you’d want to offer that invaluable assistance at no charge. Wouldn’t you be working yourself out of a job by teaching them to do what you do so very well?  Here’s why I think you don’t have to worry.

Jason MacDonald is an SEO expert who provides a marvelous free webinar that shows businesses how to use the “Top Ten FREE SEO Tools for Google.”  He is the founder and Senior SEO Director of the JM Internet Group.

Jason and his team are ultimately selling in-depth SEO information services rather than providing actual search engine optimization.  But, his approach of providing really valuable content for free before asking anyone to pay for his webinars, applies to any of us who have expertise to share and ultimately to sell. That’s especially true when prospective customers could theoretically apply what we teach without needing to hire us.

Here’s my content marketing insight from Jason:

When customers fully understand the scope of what they might consider attempting to do themselves, most of them will want to rely on an expert to do all that hard work.  Even better, because your highly valuable content has proven your expertise and because your willingness to offer it free sets you apart from the crowd, prospects will likely choose you to solve their problem.

I think you’ll find that some of your prospects may attempt to solve their own problems with the advice you provide.  But, most of them will find it way too daunting.  Moreover, I suspect that quite of few of those adventurous types who went off on their own will come slinking back to beg for your help to fix what they broke.

Offer your prospective customers some of your most valuable content for free. It will likely be one of your smartest revenue generators in the new age of content marketing.