Over the last few weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how blogs work from an SEO perspective and one of the core things I’ve been experimenting with recently is length. Specifically looking at blog word count.
There’s quite a lot of information out there about how long a blog should be and it’s something I’ve been experimenting with recently. Read More
Over the past few years, content marketing has dramatically changed. Or we can say that it has transformed the way businesses interact with their customers. Traditional marketing or advertising methods are no longer effective if you do not offer a characterized content marketing strategy. Today prospects are in search of strong information that helps them make good decisions. Most of the consumers search products and services online before making a purchase. According to one study, 75% of prospects prefer to learn through blogs or articles instead of advertising messages. Read More
(This article was originally written and published in May 2014)
OK, so you’ve paid your fancy web designer a small fortune and you’ve got the whizziest website on the World Wide Web, but your sales haven’t increased and your boss thinks you’re crazy for wasting all that money. Don’t panic! There’s one simple thing you can change to instantly improve your snazzy new website; the content.
Whether it’s content or copywriting, it needs to be good and it needs to be plentiful. Yes, a website needs to look good and it always helps to be innovative, but what you say on your website is even more important than how it looks. As the research is now proving, without well written, relevant and regularly updated content your website will fail to climb in the rankings or to produce those all important conversations. Read More
I spent around 12 months working on quite an intensive content marketing campaign for a company supplying products in the construction industry in the UK and I thought it would be valuable to discuss some of the things I learned during the process. Read More
Following in the footsteps of Facebook and Instagram, Twitter announced yesterday that it will shortly be autoplaying all videos by default, meaning that we can now all look forward to many more wasted hours of our lives watching cats fall down toilets or rhinos making friends with lambs. Read More
Yesterday, I read a really interesting blog post on Search Engine Journal by Tom Demers entitled 5 Reasons Why It’s OK To Mention Competitors In Your Content. Funnily enough, this post struck an instant chord with me, as it almost word for word echoed a conversation I had with one of my clients a week or so ago. So, I thought I’d share it with you so that you can see just how right Tom Demers is about this very valid point!
As the title of the blog suggests, Tom’s post listed 5 reasons why writing about your competitors in your content marketing can be a positive thing; I obviously don’t want to go over everything again that Tom wrote, as he made his points very eloquently and you’re perfectly capable of reading it for yourself. Instead, I’ll give you Tom’s reason’s summarised and then relate them to my client and the answers I gave her. Read More
I’ve watched a little viral miracle occur this week over my social media platforms and it’s got nothing to do with marketers or SEO-ers, but rather with a little boy from Manchester who has – almost single handedly – caused an internet sensation.
It’s practically impossible for even the most seasoned of digital marketers to predict what will go viral or when, and so it’s understandable that this turn of events has left the little boy’s family a little bit dazed; it’s certainly clear from their response that they had absolutely no idea of the impact their little video would have.
And yet really, when I sat down and thought about it, it seemed completely reasonable to me that this should have happened, and not purely because it is such a worthy cause; it genuinely ticks all the boxes for an internet viral success. So, having done said thinking, I thought I’d tell you lot about it too; so here we go, it’s the story of Seth; The Internet Sensation! Read More
I’ve talked about the changing role of SEO Consultants a few times in my previous blogs, but I was talking to a client the other day whilst I was doing a quote and it became obvious quite quickly that this client had misunderstood the role that GrowTraffic would play; hence, I thought that I would reiterate the point. Not that any of my clients ever read my blog but hey, I’ve got nothing better to do. Not! Read More
I’m afraid that, with one thing and another, I’m a little bit behind with my blogs this week and so what I’m about to tell you is actually not one, but two weeks out of date! So much for responsive blogging! But hey, I still think it’s interesting and relevant so I’m going to tell you about it anyway; you’ll just have to forgive me my tardiness. Read More
As the term content marketing grows to be ubiquitous, many of you will find probably find yourself using this technique I’ve been advocating for years, and which David Meerman Scott calls newsjacking. That is to say, finding a breaking news article, injecting your own personal or corporate slant on the story before it’s got to the point where journalists are searching for more information on the piece, thereby naturally getting your perspective into the mainstream media. Read More
The Content Creation MachineAt the beginning of December, I wrote a little blog post about Google and the Law of Unintended Consequences, a phenomena of which Google seem to be particularly susceptible to. I did promise you a Part 2 to that Part 1 however and, as I am a woman of my word, voila!
In Part 1, I discussed the fact that a lot of Google’s algorithm updates/changes – whilst they do deal with certain issues and advance Google’s goal of providing the searcher with the best search results – nevertheless have unintended consequences, which themselves affect the practicalities of search marketing and the implementation of SEO.
One such unintended consequence that has far reaching implications and has greatly shaped the world of SEO lately is the formation of the ever hungry content creation machine. In fact, this is possibly the one biggest factor that rules my life as a Freelance SEO Copywriter; it is both the blessing that acquires work to keep me writing and the curse that chains me to this never ending treadmill of having to constantly create new and interesting online content.
The biggest aspect of SEO now is content creation and it is the one universal piece of advice that we give to every client, no exceptions. Basically, if you want your website to rank highly in the SERPs, whatever your field or business sector, you can no longer just build a lovely shiny new website and then leave it static. Oh no, in this crazy world we currently inhabit, to a greater or lesser degree, you have to regularly generate new, original content and upload it to your site.
You know this, I have written many a blog about this already, but how have we got into this situation? Read More
We’ve all heard the phrase “turnover is vanity, profit is sanity” however it in the world of seo and content marketing “traffic is vanity, lots of traffic is sanity”. Read More
Happy New Year and welcome to my first blog of 2015! Now I know what you’re thinking – your first blog of 2015? January’s nearly over, what have you been doing for the past three weeks? Well, unfortunately for me – and GrowTraffic too, as it turns out – I’ve been having a little holiday courtesy of the NHS and your favourite SEO Consultancy’s rankings have taken a bit of a hit as a consequence.
So I’m going to kick off this year’s blog posts with a little look at what has gone wrong and why; but instead of treating you to my usual 1,500 word moan, I’m going to start as I mean to go on in 2015 by putting my Positive Thinking Hat on and we’ll see what we can all learn from this experience. Let’s look on it as group therapy, and then we can pass around the sick bags once we’ve finished. Read More
I have both written and read many blogs in my time about how you should tailor your blog posts to your ideal customer, the idea being that you research thoroughly who your core customer base is and then envisage a single customer who embodies all the characteristics of that customer base. Kind of like what the politicians do – talk to ‘Middle England’. Read More
Shock horror, Google (only the biggest search engine in the world) is still the biggest source of traffic to your website! Well blow me over backwards. ‘So why are you writing this silly and obvious blog post then?’ I hear you cry! It’s because this headline has been haunting my social media feeds over the past couple of days and the need to get up on my soap box has been slowly creeping up on me again. Lucky you!
This particular episode started on Tuesday 11th November 2014, when that old favourite of mine, Matt Southern, wrote a little blog post for Search Engine Journal, called Google News Continues To Drive More Traffic Than Facebook, in which he in turn referenced another blog post on Digiday, called Google News: still a major traffic driver.
Both of these articles are well written and really interesting so I’m not going to spend my time here repeating them, as you’re all perfectly capable of reading them for yourselves. Having said that, in order to give you a bit of context, I will just have to briefly summarise their main points. Read More
I’ve been a Freelance SEO Copywriter for a good while now, touting my services on a number of different platforms, and one of the first questions that I always get asked is ‘how much do your services cost?’. It’s a fact of life and I understand that, for the majority of small to medium business owners, it is often what decisions are necessarily based on. Usually though, if that’s the first question I’m asked, I know that I’ve already lost the contract. Read More
OK, so as most of you obviously already know (as you live on planet Earth) it was Halloween on Friday and that means that not only did you spend most of last night feeling sick, but your social media feeds were also filled with companies making tenuous links between their product/company and the Eve of All Hallows. Well mine were at any rate.
Now, as I am married to a marketer (for my sins) I obviously know how important it is to use key calendar dates to help fill up your blogging calendar – hell, I’ve even written blogs about how important this is – but when I sat down yesterday morning to have a look at the efforts of my fellow marketers and try to think of something inspirational to blog about, I was attacked by a great big scary Halloweeny monstery thingy, who drained me of all motivation.
It wasn’t as if everything that I saw was bad – some of it was good – but most of it was tenuous at best. So, instead of something inspirational, I present you with this. Lucky you. Read More
In the interests of fair disclosure, I suppose I should probably state, before we go any further, that you’re probably not going to get a fair and balanced article here: as a Freelance Copywriter, I will admit that I may be slightly biased. Bearing that in mind, I’m about to give you 5 good reasons why hiring freelance copywriters is miles better than wasting all your money on expensive agency copywriters. See, not biased in the slightest! Read More
One of the things that most frustrates me in a morning (well, once I’ve got over the frustration of my husband, my child, running out of milk, the school run and my dog, that is) is mass generated emails. They drive me insane, as they pop up, one by one, in my inbox every morning; “Hi there, we just thought you may be interested in our link building process – we generate 5 million links per week for 50p” etc. etc. – argghhh!
I bet you can guess what I do with them too? I sit down and write a personal reply to each one, explaining to them the error of their ways. Only kidding! They go straight in the bin! As do, I would imagine, 99% of every other email that company has sent out in the same ilk too. Read More
GrowTraffic Have Joined Fuel My BlogIn line with our new policy of practicing what we preach, GrowTraffic has joined Fuel My Blog!
Fuel My Blog is a social network for the blogging community; you can not only read our blog but you can also find many other great blogs on almost any subject that interests you. You can even upload your own blog, if you’re also part of the blogging generation.
The great thing about Fuel My Blog is that bloggers are encouraged to make ‘friends’, who can then vote for your blog to boost its profile and increase its readership.
Obviously, we want to increase GrowTraffic’s blog’s readership too, so we’re shamelessly campaigning for your vote to help put the GT blog on the map. If you could spare a moment, then we would be eternally grateful if you could take a moment to sign up to Fuel My Blog and give us your vote.
To show our appreciation, if you let us know once you’ve cast your vote, then we’ll vote for your blog in return – now you can’t say fairer than that, can you? You can email either Rachel at rw@growtraffic.co.uk or Simon at sd@growtraffic.co.uk.
Thank you so much for your support and stay tuned for more amazing GT blogs! Ha!
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