Content Marketing

6 WordPress Plugins for Content Marketers

by SEO Savvy April 8th, 2014

WordPress is one of the most popular platforms for inbound marketing for a wealth of reasons: it makes it easy to produce sites that are both attractive and professional, it provides businesses a content management system (CMS) for blogging, search engines love it, and the platform provides a number of valuable plugins. If you are just getting started with blogging and producing content for your business, these plugins can help with creating and optimizing content. Here are a few plugins to test:

SEO Audit by ContentLook

Few web surfers go past the first page of search engine results. By some estimates, nearly half of all site traffic comes from search engines. If you are not showing up near the top, you are missing out on valuable traffic. SEO optimization is key.

The SEO Audit plugin helps you quickly ascertain which parts of your site need work and provides actionable tips to improve your site’s position in the search engine results page. Weekly reports show how your content is working over time. The reports can be downloaded as PDFs and also emailed to members of your content marketing team. This plugin helps you assess your success in blogging, traffic, social media, WordPress optimization, SEO, links and authority.

Social by MailChimp

While search engines remain one of the most important sources of traffic, the traffic you get from social networks can be valuable as well. People are more likely to do business with a company that is responsive on sites like Facebook and Twitter. And, referrals from friends are a powerful tool to build trust and authority.

Social is a lightweight plugin that makes it easy for your readers to interact with your content. You can set Social to automatically put links to your posts on Twitter and Facebook. Tweets can be integrated as comments on your entries, and it allows readers to comment under their Facebook identities. Interactions on Facebook are posted as comments, meaning that the conversation can grow in both places. The plugin can be customized to seamlessly fit your WordPress theme.

Squirrly SEO

Instant advice and analysis makes this a must-have plugin. This tool gives keyword advice as you type your blog posts, helping you optimize to increase traffic. Headline suggestions help you optimize this important part of your blog. The advice sections help you make content that is better for both search engines and human readers. It also sends weekly reports about your blogging, traffic, SEO, social signals, backlinks and authority. Historical data lets you see your progress toward better content marketing.

Instant Suggest

Frequently updated blogs are one of the keys to success in content marketing. According to HubSpot stats from 2012, 92% of respondents who updated more than once a day acquired customers through their blogs; for those who updated monthly, that figure dropped to 66%. But, it can sometimes be difficult to come up with enough ideas to support constant content creation. Instant Suggest’s Article Suggestion Tool helps by supplying links to blog posts and articles in your industry for inspiration. The plugin also suggests keywords and points out possible phrasing and grammar errors. Auto completion of words and frequently used phrases help save time, too.

InboundWriter

When people take to search engines, they are frequently looking for information and solutions. If your blog posts and articles offer answers and solutions, those readers are more likely to become your customers. Plus, by directly addressing a reader problem, you are building content that is valuable for the user, which could lead to more traffic and exposure for you company and brand.

Take, for instance, a company that provides lawn care. A prospect that lives in the company’s area might be looking for a solution that affects your local community. They might search Google for something like: “how do I get rid of dollar weed?” If there is an entry on the company blog that addresses the problem and offers professional solutions, it provides a positive emotional connection and builds trust. These ingredients can lead to a loyal business relationship.

While we can learn what questions our potential customers have by asking current customers about their concerns, finding out directly from search queries is even more valuable. InboundWriter a

llows you to see what surfers are searching for when they research your industry and how different search engine results rank. You can enter a phrase and query for results, or just start writing, and the plugin will start automatically making real-time suggestions about 200 words in.

Editorial Assistant by Zemanta

You’ve spent a lot of time curating exceptional content, so when someone ends up on one of your pages, you want them to keep clicking around within your site. Zemanta’s Editorial Assistant allows you to add related posts and images to your posts. Finding your own content to link out to is easy, as Editorial Assistant does the digging, and adds in the proper credit, if necessary. But arguably the coolest aspect of this plugin is a feature called Link Love, which recommends relevant posts from other bloggers to use for citations; and if you have it installed, it’s recommending your posts to others utilizing the tool, too. In other words, you could get exposure for your content without doing any extra work at all.

Your inbound marketing campaigns live and die by the quality of your content. Use these plugins as tools to help improve the quality and reach of your content marketing strategy.

4 Ways to Improve Content Marketing

by SEO Savvy April 3rd, 2014

Search engines can detect when a business creates content of value versus content that is designed solely to capture web traffic. Scalable link building methods and over-optimizing your website by unnaturally stuffing content with keywords is counterproductive, and likely to land you with penalties from Google. Today, effective content marketing is key for successfully building brands, interacting with customers, and selling products.

Two out of every three businesses currently spend more than 25% of their marketing budget on digital marketing, including content marketing, according Accenture’s CMO Insights Study. However, the same study found that while many marketing executives understand the importance of content marketing, they are “unprepared” and “unsure” how to best leverage this marketing technique for maximum success. Without a clear strategy in place, businesses are ineffectively throwing money at content marketing – and hoping something works.

Follow these four tips to get the most out of your content marketing budget:

#1: Be interactive.
Google’s algorithm updates are capable of detecting “interactivity” of content. How does Google determine if your content is meeting this metric? Content that is shared, reblogged, reposted, emailed, retweeted, and commented upon is considered interactive. In other words, you need to figure out how to use social media to your advantage. To increase your content’s reach, be sure that it is relevant to your clients, original, and creative. Don’t rehash old news; make each story your own.

#2: Solve a problem.
In order to improve your content’s interactivity, it is important to understand what drives your target audience to share information. Solving a problem is one of the most basic and important reasons why individuals share information. Rather than making a sales pitch on your blog, provide how-to instructions or tips that address a common problem faced by your clients or customers. Giving away valuable content for free will not only increase the likelihood that your content is shared, but also build your business’s reputation as an industry thought leader. When clients face another problem, they’ll likely turn to your business for a trusted solution.

#3: Be visual.
Content that includes a picture or infographic is more likely to be shared than a text-only blog post. From Pinterest to Instagram, today’s most popular social networks are increasingly based on visuals. Photos increase user interaction on Facebook. Images shared on the popular social network receive 120 percent more engagement than plain text updates, and the latest format changes reflect images as priority. Don’t hide your best information in a sea of words and numbers. Turn old PowerPoint slides and charts into a compelling infographic. Accompany each blog post with a unique or thought-provoking image. When adding images to a blog post, be sure to add keyword metadata to the image for enhanced SEO.

#4: KISS.
This acronym, which dates back to the 1960s, stands for Keep It Simple, Stupid. The KISS principle can be applied in many circumstances; for example, when you’re creating a piece of content, you want to keep the format as uncomplicated as possible. This is why lists have become so popular; you’ll grab the attention of your readers with a straightforward title, then keep them hooked with easy-to-read bullet points or numbers, subheadings, and brief paragraphs. Everyone is moving so fast on the Internet, jumping from website to social network to blog, that a simple, formulaic post delivers information most effectively.

Like any good marketing strategy, content marketing requires clear goals and benchmarks for success. Content marketing is also a long-term investment. While your business may not see immediate measurable returns, in the long run, effective content marketing will build your brand and improve customer relationships, two critical goals for your business’s marketing success.