Let’s stay on top of our marketing game in 2022. First order of the new year – planning goals. When thinking about SEO content marketing in relation to your business goals, it might not be clear how important it is. Yes, good content will take you far, but good SEO-enriched content will take you even further. Companies that fail to tie their content goals to their business goals are what Rand Fishkin, a marketing expert and the co-founder and CEO of SparkToro, calls “one of the biggest problems in marketing.”
Tying your goals will not only give you more clarity on your specific marketing strategy needs and the tactics to get you there, but will also help you figure out which areas of marketing you may want to invest in. Since marketing is a costly investment, you need to ensure you’re getting the most for what you pay for. According to a marketing report done by Hubspot, in 2021, 63% of marketers planned to increase their budget. To no surprise, SEO was also the second-most prioritized approach. You might be wondering— how can I incorporate SEO to reach my goals? The following tactics will help guide you in the right direction.
Tactic 1: Make Your Headline Engaging
It may seem simple, but it’s surprising to see how frequently content authors miss the mark on the headline of an asset they have invested heavily in – only to make it less appealing for users to click on. In a recent SparkToro webinar led by Rand Fishkin and Amanda Natividad, they advise writing the headline of the content piece first. Headlines are the first negotiation tool to win over your audience. The people that click on your title and stay engaged in the article, are assisting Google in deciding where the content piece will rank in a search result. Start with having the goal of your article in mind. For example, in this article, our goal was to increase traffic from a company’s “decision-makers” by informing them how content marketing and SEO could be worth the investment. Thus, the title, “Score A 2022 SEO Content Marketing Strategy That’ll Meet Your Goals,” would be fitting.
At Saltwater Collective we recommend including the following in titles:
Your targeted keyword(s)
Emotion-evoking words
Clear and easy to understand
Encompass the overall goal/spirit of the story
Remember, headlines are“the face of the business,” so make sure it catches the attention of your audience without being spammy and still balances the importance of integrating the right keywords to drive the success of your SEO campaign like awareness or traffic generation. One of the first things we do at Saltwater is to find keywords that a targeted audience would be searching for. An in-depth keyword analysis will further lead us to a selection of the right keyword based on the goals we’re reaching for.
Tactic 2: Writing Readable SEO Content
After you have thought of the perfect title, use an outline for your content. In the SparkToro presentation, Fishkin provides an effective content outline called the hook, line, and sinker. The purpose of this outline is to grab attention, deliver a promise, and leave something for the reader to ponder or take with them. This will help deliver great content while improving SEO ranking. Below, you will see we even used the hook, line, and sinker in this article.
Hook:
Let’s stay on top of our marketing game in 2022. First order of the new year – planning goals. When thinking about SEO content marketing in relation to your business goals, it might not be clear how important it is. Yes, good content will take you far, but good SEO-enriched content will take you even further.
Line:
You might be wondering— how can I incorporate SEO to reach my goals? The following tactics will help guide you in the right direction.
Sinker:
Notice what we did here? We used the tips within this blog post to create the post you’re reading.
At Saltwater Collective, we like to use the following method to increase readability:
Use bullets/lists to help skimmers.
Posts containing at least one list per every 500 words of plain text get 70% more traffic than posts without lists. See what we did there? (A recommendation by Semrush.)
Use descriptive subheadings (H2-H6) for hierarchy.
Use images to break up the text.
Use simple words that everyone can understand.
Use short sentences and paragraphs to avoid “walls of text.”
Use a large font to help readers avoid eye strain.
Write as you speak to make things more entertaining and conversational.
Tactic 3: Leverage All Page Optimization Opportunities
In addition to an enticing headline and readable content, the meta title, meta description, and heading tags go hand in hand with winning over your audience. Ensure these elements reflect the style and tone of the heading you worked so hard to craft. At Saltwater Collective we suggest that the meta title tag be descriptive and include your primary keyword in a meaningful way. As for the Meta description tag, make it informative and compelling enough to entice searchers to choose your page above all others. Within the content, use descriptive, relevant, and keyword-rich headings to help break up the page into sections and ensure they are tagged appropriately (H1 – H6).
Tactic 4: Delivering Your SEO Content
Notice what we did here? We used the tips within this blog post to create the post you’re reading. And LOOKEY HERE – our post made its way to the exact audience we wanted – YOU (hopefully). The same can be done with any topic you choose to write about. You can find opportunities to increase content marketing efforts by adding your perspective on specific topics that align with your business goals. This can be done by leveraging tools to create an alert that will send you a notification when a topic you’re interested in is mentioned in the news. We also suggest sharing the piece on social media with others that could build on it. The article, “20 Places You Should Be Sharing Your Content” offers additional content-sharing ideas.
Tactic 5: Monitor Your Performance
Once you’ve applied this new content marketing strategy and dispersed it to your ideal audience, check the performance of your efforts in relation to the KPIs selected. SEO and content marketing are long-term strategies, so don’t be discouraged if you don’t see immediate results. At Saltwater we like to allow at least two months for search engines to fully interpret changes to a site or new copy added. Based on performance, tweak old content if needed and remember to apply this strategy to new content.
We hope you see success with this strategy and that next year you find you’re creating even bigger goals! Looking for additional marketing insight? Check out the Saltwater Collective blog for the latest and greatest on industry trends and marketing wisdom.
So, you just spent a boatload on video marketing. Can people actually find your videos?
Getting Started:
Why use this guide?
Video marketing requires a significant investment of both time and budget, yet most marketers fail to make the most out of their videos. By following the optimization strategies outlined in this guide, you will ensure your videos perform well in search engines and deliver better results.
But first, set your KPIs.
Be sure to identify your key performance indicators to measure the success of your video asset or webpage prior to publishing. Whether you are prioritizing impressions or conversions, for example, will determine how you use this guide.
You know your content best
Every team is different! This guide is intentionally over-prescriptive, so pare it down where necessary to meet your unique needs.
Video Production Strategy
It’s important to think strategically through the entire video production and script writing process, keeping two main goals in mind:
As you plan your video, here are some things to keep in mind:
Begin your video with a brief summary of the video, what will be in it, and when.
After your summary, jump immediately into your most useful content.
20% of people will start your video and leave within 10 seconds! Use your best content up front to keep people engaged.
Use teasers and ‘open loops’ throughout the video to preview things that will come up later in the video and ignite curiosity in your viewers.
There is no magic or optimal video length, despite what experts may say. Just focus on creating the best video you can.
Perform competitor research and emulate video length for those ranking the best in a YouTube search related to your topic/target keyword.
Section 2: Audience Interaction
Video Comments: Is your audience commenting on your videos?
Comment volume and frequency sends a strong signal to YouTube’s ranking algorithm and is directly correlated with ranking improvement. The more comments the better.
It’s important to encourage viewers to comment throughout the video, not just at the beginning or the end.
When possible, reply to the comments you receive using your target keyword as well as relevant and semantically related language. (We’ll talk more about target keywords below. See? An open loop!)
Post-Viewing Subscribers: Are people subscribing after watching your videos?
Having a viewer subscribe to your channel after they watch your video is another strong signal to YouTube’s ranking algorithm that your videos are high quality, and should be shown to more viewers.
Be sure to encourage viewers to subscribe to your channel at the end of your video.
Video Shares Across Social: Are people sharing your video with friends and family?
Encourage viewers to share your video across social platforms.
YouTube can see where a video is being shared and awards your video a ranking boost when your videos draw from another social network to YouTube.
Thumbs Up/ Thumbs Down: Do people thumb up or thumb down, or rate, your content?
Whether it’s a thumbs up or a thumbs down, YouTube cares that your video generated some sort of reaction.
Thumbs down DOES NOT hurt rankings.
Thumbs up can help your video’s discoverability, since it helps your video show up on recommended videos feeds.
Click-Through Rate (CTR): Do people click on your video when searching for a keyword?
YouTube knows when someone searches for your keyword then clicks on your video
The higher your CTR, the better.
If you are getting a high CTR, YouTube will give your video a boost in average position.
Section 3: BOGY Strategy
Use the colors Blue, Orange, Green and Yellow (BOGY) in your thumbnail images for your videos.
These colors contrast the best with YouTube’s platform design and result in your video commanding more attention in relation to other potential options for a viewer to click on.
As you can see in the example below, the bright green thumbnail image is the first to draw your attention.
Keyword Research & Selection
Through keyword research, determine the focus keywords that you want your video to rank for. Select one primary keyword and up to two supporting keywords. Your primary keyword should represent your most important business objective, where your supporting keywords are more descriptive variations of your primary keyword. Primary keywords are typically higher in search volume and appeal to a broader audience, where your supporting keywords are meant to target your niche. When paired together for optimization efforts, this should result in more visibility for the optimal audience. In the next section, you’ll learn how and where to use these keywords.
For a full overview of how this is done well, check out this blog post from our friends at Swell Media.
Optimization Checklist
Section 1: Title, Description, and Tags
Target Keyword:
Videos should be targeting specific keywords.
It is important to say the focus keywords in your video enabling its appearance in the transcription.
Organizing your target keywords in tiers can help determine where and when they should be deployed.
Video Title:
The title should be readable, compelling, and command attention.
40–50 character limit.
Use capitalization, parenthesis, brackets, or numbers to draw attention.
Video Description:
The video’s description will be shown in search and should provide a concise summary of what a viewer will see.
5,000 character limit.
Use at least 250 words minimum.
The first 2 sentences (roughly 160 characters) act as a meta description, are shown within search results and should have an instance of the primary keywords.
Include links to your social media accounts, newsletters, articles, and other websites. (linking table below)
Don’t be afraid to be aggressive in the promotion of specific assets or web pages
Video Tags:
Tags should should include focus keywords and their variationsCategories that your video may fall under.
Section 2: Linking
Linking within various elements of a YouTube video and its supporting channel page helps search engines draw correlations between the video’s content and the organization who posted it. These links also help funnel viewers to areas where they can learn more about your company or consume campaign-specific material. In the optimization template linked at the bottom of the page is a table to help organize all important links so you can refer back to them during the video creation and optimization process.
Access a sharable version of this guide below to get the most out of your videos.
Google recently announced that their web browser, Chrome, will start to block mixed content on web pages. This update is slated to take effect in December 2019 and will be rolled out to the Chrome 79 version first, but will eventually move to block all mixed content by default.
The takeaway: If your website has mixed content, this content will be blocked in a way that your users won’t be able to access it.
What is Mixed Content?
Mixed content is an issue that occurs when a secure web page (HTTPS) contains elements like images, videos, stylesheets, or scripts that are served through an insecure link (HTTP). Having both HTTP and HTTPS content loading to display the same page is where the name “mixed content” comes from. As you can see in the example below, although this site has a secure URL (HTTPS), the video contained in the hero and the image within the right rail are both being pulled from a non-secure location (HTTP), resulting in “mixed content”.
What Does a Site With Mixed Content Look Like?
If a website has mixed content, Google will present the user with a warning message like those shown below prior to them entering the site from Google search results. This can discourage visitors from entering what may be a perfectly safe site and therefor result in a potential drop in organic visibility, traffic, and engagement.
Two types of warning messages that Chrome users will begin seeing more of.
How to Fix a Mixed Content Issue?
The first step in
fixing mixed content issues is the purchase and implementation of an SSL
certificate. These are used to confirm the identity of a website by thoroughly
validating the website owner. This is typically done through the hosting
provider for your website.
Once the SSL certificate is implemented, you can simply change your URLs to HTTPS versions. This process will vary depending on how your site is built and what CMS is used. It’s important to note that a redirect from the old URL to the new URL should be put in place to ensure users can still arrive at the revised URL if entering the old version. Redirects also help preserve and pass any earned SEO value to the new URL.
How Can Saltwater Help?
Saltwater is the trusted SEO partner to many organizations. As part of any SEO relationship, our team routinely crawls your site to identify and remediate any new issues as quickly as possible.
If you have any concerns about your website, security, or how the Saltwater Digital Marketing team can work with you to address mixed content, please contact us.
