Writing good content is hard. Putting out content that’s well-researched, well-written, and informative – regularly? If you’re putting in that much effort, you want your hard work to be rewarded.

You wouldn’t dive into a pool without first seeing how deep it is; don’t make the mistake of writing content without checking the water.

Your content’s journey to ranking well starts when you’re planning your content. Whether it’s disregarding the way Google’s algorithms work or missing something fundamental, it’s painfully easy to write great content that still won’t rank.

Here’s how to make sure your content gets recognized for SEO success.

1.      Your content needs to be published regularly.

What Counts as New Content?

‘New content’ refers specifically to content which you have not published before.

Updating old content is valuable if the information is outdated or you see opportunities to improve it. However, updated content does not count as new content. You can even delete old content that isn’t relevant or important.

What Is Publishing “Regularly”?

Try to publish new content at least once per week, but ideally two or three times per week.

Unfortunately, there is no universal best day to publish. Often, Tuesday or Wednesday perform well, but it depends on your industry and audience.

Try measuring engagement via post comments, Google Analytics or social media interactions to figure out your ideal posting schedule. Segment the engagement metric by day of the week and time of day for additional insights. Think about who your audience is, and when they’ll consume your content.

Maybe your U.S. audience likes to check Twitter over their lunch break. You can post your article in the morning and promote it on Twitter around 12 PM EST/9 AM PST to reach both the East and West Coast lunch crowd.

Or, maybe your audience wants to read your content during slow periods at work. Try posting so it will be new during a midweek afternoon.

The only way to know is to get real data.

“I wish,” he sighed, “that there were a more efficient way to do this. Alas!”

That’s A Lot to Keep Track Of.

It can be difficult to keep to a weekly schedule, especially if you’re posting two or three times per week. Knowing when you should schedule posts is important, but so is being prepared to post on schedule. Have content planned, written and approved in advance, so you’ll never be forced to publish before you’re ready or miss your ideal publishing window.

To create a content calendar for planning content and tracking progress, you can make use of a program like Trello, Google Drive (Calendar/Sheets), Microsoft Excel, or one of multiple other options available.

Many platforms with built-in blog integration have an automatic post scheduling option. If there’s a chance you’ll be busy with something else when it’s time to publish, you’re in good hands.

Why Do You Need to Publish Regularly?

Because Google wants to deliver the most useful and up-to-date information, it prioritizes crawling sites which publish regularly. Adding new content signals to Google that your site is worth re-crawling more frequently.

Every new piece of content gives you another opportunity to focus on new, related keywords and increase visibility. Combined with effective content and promotion, this means traffic will increase.

A regular publishing schedule also has a positive effect on your authority, which is both a ranking factor for Google and a factor in your industry reputation. By consistently putting out interesting and useful content, you will become known for providing value and insight. This is often called “thought leadership”: being recognized as an authority within the community.

Your future customer, whose faith in your thought leadership allows him to completely ignore the flood of low-quality content from your competitors.

2. Your content needs to be high-quality.

What Does It Mean to Be High-Quality?

First – Ideal length and depth of content depend entirely on your goal. These are not hard and fast rules, just guidelines for finding your content’s ideal length.

• High SERP rankings: Aim for at least 2,000 words, but even from 3,000-10,000 words, to get the most backlinks. Ideally, these will have heavier research and more valuable insights and takeaways. Of course, if you’re putting in this much effort, always start with keyword research!
• Maximum social shares: 1,000-2,000 words performs best, especially if it’s solving a problem or explaining something interesting. This helps reinforce authority and community engagement.
• Highest engagement: Blogs with under 600 words tend to get the most comments, especially if they’re discussion prompts. But this length won’t help with social shares or SEO, so these blogs should wait until you already have an audience.
• A comfortable middle ground: 750 words tends to perform acceptably across the board.

Try to match the amount of information to the length! Don’t shove 3,000 words’ worth of information into 1000 and omit important context, and don’t bloat your 300-word blurb to 1000 words chasing social shares.

Second – Your content must be relevant to your target audience.

• Keeping a consistent topic helps readers and Google understand what your entire site is about.
• Consider removing older and irrelevant content, and keeping your site to a specific group of topics.

Third – Modern content readers have certain expectations. If you don’t make your writing easy and interesting to read, it effectively has no audience.

• Add visuals or images that reflect the content and add interest. As a starting point, try one image per 300 words to break up sections.
• Most paragraphs should be no longer than three sentences. While it may not look like a block of text on desktop, longer paragraphs are much less pleasant to read on mobile.
• Follow clear writing best practices: use active voice, keep subjects and verbs close together, and vary sentence length.

It’s technically a car, but you wouldn’t rely on it for a road trip. 

Why Does Quality Matter?

In short: Quality reinforces authority.

Search algorithms pay attention to how readers engage with your content. If the overall quality of your content is poor, it is immediately obvious to both your audience and search engine crawlers, and damages your authority with both.

Since people prefer to read high-quality content, gaining the appropriate reputation will help your readership and overall traffic. High-quality articles are also more likely to get valuable backlinks, since they contain worthwhile information. Such responses signal your site’s authority and improve ranking.

3. Your content needs to be properly optimized.

How Do You Optimize Content?

Google uses the words in content to understand its subject, so ensure your content is relevant to the keywords you are targeting. Every industry has top keyword themes. To guide overall on-page content strategy, combine relevant themes with your expertise within these themes.

For your page-by-page strategy, assigning specific keywords to content requires finding an attainable keyword with high search volume.

You can start from either end. Either create content around a high-performing keyword theme, or assign an attainable keyword with lower search volume to an existing piece of content. The latter is what SEOs often refer to as “low-hanging fruit”: longer-tail search terms so relevant to your content that you already rank.

Make sure you only put keywords where it feels natural – don’t shove them in just to have them. This is a cardinal sin of SEO known as “keyword stuffing”. It worked ten years ago, but today Google will penalize you for over-stuffing keywords into copy. Prioritize high-quality writing over keyword density.

Finally, put your content in context by linking to prominent industry sites and articles. Having outbound links to authoritative sites is helpful for your users and raises your authority by extension.

Towns became cities through a combination of accessibility and opportunity.

Let keywords and great content be your site’s railroad and industry.

Conclusion

Optimizing on-page content for SEO isn’t about being the best writer. It’s about balancing best practices with a nuanced understanding of Google’s algorithms, thus reinforcing authority and rankings to grow your online presence.

Looking for an expert in SEO or Paid Media? If your industry authority isn’t receiving the attention it deserves, Titan’s team of experienced analysts can help. Contact us for a free evaluation.

If these content tips helped you, get a weekly roundup of industry trends and important insights delivered to your inbox and subscribe to our newsletter.

SEO can seem confusing or even overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. At first, Google’s algorithms created a Wild West of best practices, but today’s algorithms look for website traits that searchers consider legitimately valuable and authoritative. Many things critical for SEO success relate to the structure of your website itself, from the way it’s built to the tags you use when presenting content.

Here’s how you can make Google happy and satisfy your users at the same time.

1.      Your site must load quickly.

If your site loads at a snail’s pace, Google won’t crawl it completely, it won’t rank well, and your users will leave. Fortunately, there’s a lot of help out there.

This little guy may dream of flying at 550 miles/hour, but he needs to re-evaluate his strategy.

How To Diagnose & Fix Slow Loading Speeds

If you don’t know if your site is slow – or you aren’t sure how to fix it – Google is a great place to start with its free web-based analytics tools. These will give you a sitewide overview, with suggestions for improving speed overall and on the worst pages.

Some useful SEO site tools:

• Input your URL into Google PageSpeed Insights for targeted suggestions to improve and optimize your site’s loading speed. It runs on Lighthouse, a more complex but comprehensive site auditing tool.
• Try using Think With Google’s mobile speed tester, which has some of the same information as PageSpeed Insights in a more accessible package.

To get page-by-page suggestions, your SEO team can generate reports for individual pages using Lighthouse and Google Analytics, and determine if the suggested changes are viable.

Not ready to use these SEO tools? Here are a few easy, important tweaks you can implement:

• Switch to a faster web host.
• Reduce the size of images and files so they load more quickly.
• Avoid unnecessary plugins & extensions.
• If you have enough traffic and budget, start using a Content Delivery Network.

“I never could’ve landed this plane in under three seconds back when I was a snail.”

Why Does Loading Speed Matter?

If your site is too slow, users will leave before it even finishes loading, meaning all your hard work on SEO is wasted.

First – Mobile search is becoming increasingly important. The majority of customer segments use mobile search to find you:

• 75% of all Americans browse the internet using mobile devices.
• In the US, mobile devices account for 56% of all organic search engine visits – a number which increases each year.

Mobile traffic is important for all industries and types of sites, but it’s especially critical for some:

• When consumers search for local information, they are over twice as likely to search with mobile than desktop.
• B2C sees that 65% of online shoppers research products on mobile before making a purchase.

B2B is in almost as deep:

• 50% of Google B2B queries are made on smartphones.
• Mobile plays “a significant role” in purchases for 60% of B2B buyers.

Second – Page load time matters in mobile searches:

• If your page takes over three seconds to load, you’re losing over half your users.
• For each second increase, conversion rates fall up to 20%.
• A mobile site visitor is 123% more likely to bounce on a site that loads in 10 seconds than a site that loads in one.

2.      Your site must be easy to navigate.

If your users look like this, admitting you have a problem is the first step to finding a solution.

How to Improve Your Site’s Navigation

To make your desktop site easier to navigate, make sure you:

• Create a header with links to other important sections.
• Organize the links into logical groups that make them easy to find.
• Fix “orphan” pages (which no other pages link to) by adding internal links.

Mobile sites need all of these done, and also come with another set of challenges. On a small touch screen, navigation is critical. You need to ensure that:

• Text and images are large enough to read without zooming
• Links and buttons are visible and large enough to tap with clumsy fingers.
• If interstitials/overlays must be present, they are easily dismissed.

Check out Google’s guide on making your website mobile-friendly.

Why Does Your Site Need To Be Easy To Navigate?

Google’s bot crawls through your site to look at every page. Then, the pages are indexed so they can be found via search engine. If the bot can’t navigate through your site, Google will not be able to find and index your pages – and they will not appear on the SERP. This means that any page on your website should be easy for your users to find.

“My friend doesn’t understand you, so forget being invited to my birthday party on the SERP’s first page.”

-Google

Mobile Usability and Your Ranking

Here’s another thing to consider: Google values mobile websites so highly that in 2018 it rolled out “Mobile-First” indexing, which prioritizes indexing mobile over desktop sites.

You may find that Google is only indexing your mobile site’s content, which is a problem if your mobile site doesn’t have the same content as your desktop site.

Google also prioritizes pages with mobile versions on the mobile SERP. So, not having a mobile website not only frustrates your customers, but also makes you far less likely to rank well in mobile searches. Don’t buy into fearmongering – it won’t affect your rankings on desktop – but since mobile searches are so important, you can’t afford to let them go.

This shouldn’t be an imposition, since you want a mobile site anyway to keep your customers happy. Just treat your mobile site not as a pared-down version of your desktop site, but as an alternative layout that should still offer full functionality.

These people are literally searching your keywords right now.

Do you want them to settle for your competitors?

3. Your site needs appropriate tags on every page.

Metatags are a crucial element in communicating information to Google and your users. The Internet is full of advice on tags, and there are a lot of them.

Here’s a quick and easy reference to actually useful webpage elements:

Takeaway

Google and Bing work hard to make their ranking algorithms reflect actual usage and people’s preferences. These changes not only benefit your position in the SERPs but make your site more attractive to users. Implementing best practices regarding page speed, ease of navigation, and effective metatag usage will improve user experience and validate your SEO efforts.

If you are having trouble implementing best practices, Titan Growth’s all-star team has experience with all aspects of SEO, from optimizing new websites to encouraging continued growth for established sites. Contact us for a free evaluation or subscribe to our weekly newsletter for industry trends and important insights delivered to your inbox.

PPC Search Trends of 2019

2019 marks an exciting time in the digital marketing world. We are now moving into an era where AI is being successfully integrated into the way account managers structure their ad campaigns. This is especially relevant to the use of AI in personalized marketing, which is continuing to increase in importance as users respond best to relatable messages.

The average consumer has more devices than ever, and the number of ways to reach our audiences is growing in turn. This, and AI integration, give PPC marketers new opportunities to better use the unprecedented amount of data and analytics at their fingertips.

In an effort to prepare for a year saturated with disruptive changes, I’ve touched on some of the top paid search marketing trends to be ready for.

Automation Will Allow PPC Managers To Focus on Strategy

Smart bidding is an automation tool that will take the grunt work off the account manager and allow them to focus on creative strategy.

Each smart bidding strategy is appropriate for a different goal. For example, the ‘Target search page location’ and ‘Target outranking share’ bid strategies allow you to increase visibility and outrank competitors more consistently. ‘Maximize clicks’ allows Google Ads to automatically set your maximum CPC by taking your target daily budget into account.

Target CPA and Target ROAS work similarly to each other in that you set a goal for either metric, and Google Ads uses machine learning to optimize your bids at auction time to hit your goal.

While these paid search tools are incredibly useful for account managers, it is important that these campaigns are closely monitored. A new campaign with little historical data, or skewed conversion data, may not provide accurate information for the machine learning algorithm to make proper bid adjustments.

Furthermore, the user journey can be complicated and unpredictable, often requiring a more granular approach with human control. Speaking on the growth of machine learning in paid search marketing, Frederick Vallaeys of Optmyzr stated, “It won’t be a race to see whether humans or machines are best. It will be a race to see which PPC experts have the best process to leverage the machines to blow away their competition.”

Smart bidding is fast, but it is not as fast and accurate as human intelligence supported by machine learning tools. Paid search account managers: your job is safe – but you will need to incorporate automation into your campaigns to outpace competitors.

Audiences Will Be Prioritized Over Keywords

Know your audience. We’ve all heard it, but this paid search marketing best practice is becoming increasingly imperative as search engine marketers’ focus shifts away from keywords. Knowing your audience and being able to serve them ads that are as relevant and personalized as possible will be very important this year.

If you are a paid search marketer and you have not put together a comprehensive audience targeting strategy, let this serve as a wake-up call.

The search marketers who will be successful in 2019 are those who not only know their audience (and what audiences to exclude), but have successfully segmented them into groups with specifically tailored tactics. If automation is saving you time (which it should), use that time to create highly-optimized customer segments.

Market to Your Audience on Multiple Channels

Our audiences have access to a growing number of platforms on which we can serve them ads.

• There are over 3 billion active social media users.
• The average user has more than 7 different social media accounts.

Users constantly switch between different devices and channels, creating a plethora of opportunities for marketers. Effective PPC marketers are able to bridge the gap between paid search and social media by retargeting users as they consume content on different platforms.

Wesley Maclaggan of Marin Software explains that, “As the worlds of search, social and ecommerce blend together, marketers will need a complete view of the entire customer journey” to plan and measure campaign performance. While it has become easier to create multi-channel campaigns, there is unfortunately no one-size-fits-all model for cross-channel advertising. Because of this, account managers need to build campaigns based on innovative retargeting strategies and closely monitor them to assess performance.

SEO & PPC Go Hand In Hand

Organic and paid search initiatives should be collaboratively approached, rather than as separate silos. For example, paid search reports in the Google Ads interface provide valuable insights for keyword research. You can target competitors’ keywords by analyzing the Auction Insights Report. Boost your organic clickthrough rate by incorporating keywords from top-performing ad copy into the metadata of your high-traffic web pages.

Ad copy that generates a high CTR should also be used as a guide for creating blog content that is relevant to both your audience’s interests and your brand. Similarly, longer tail terms that you rank for organically can be used in your paid search bidding strategies to ensure consistent messaging.

It All Comes Together

The recurring theme in 2019’s critical marketing trends is integration. Machine learning is being integrated into paid search marketing campaigns. Collecting data on your audiences and combining it with your marketing goals is crucial for creating an effective PPC audience targeting strategy. Users must be reached through campaigns that communicate a consistent message on multiple platforms, which are optimized for multiple devices. SEO and PPC strategists must collaborate to make the most efficient use of the data available and to stay ahead of competition.

At Titan Growth, experts in SEO, Paid Media, and Social Media Marketing collaborate to provide the best possible opportunities for the development of our clients’ brands. Learn more about our team and our proprietary TitanBOT technology that gives us and our clients the competitive edge.