Common SEO Mistakes – Audit Your SEO Work Says Qamar Zaman SEO Audit Expert

Dallas based SEO & conversion rate optimization / SEO Audit Expert Says Look out!

Optimizing your website and blog for maximum search engine visibility continues to be important, even with the rise of other inbound marketing methods. In fact, content marketing, by far the most popular inbound marketing strategy, relies so much on solid SEO to be truly effective. It helps to think of content marketing as handling the content creation process, while SEO takes care of distribution and acceleration.

But because SEO practices rely on Google’s search engine updates, it also means that marketers must constantly adapt to the changing landscape of search, not to mention the changes in users’ search habits. Still, this doesn’t change the fact that SEO is still on top of many marketers’ priority list of strategies.

Obviously, it’s not easy trying to keep up with the most effective SEO techniques, so much so that many marketers end up making costly SEO mistakes. One way of ‘keeping up’ the smart way is knowing what not to do instead. In this guide, we go over a few of the most common SEO mistakes you should avoid to prevent your website’s search rankings from being hurt.

 

1. You’re Using Irrelevant Keywords

 

The point of using keywords is to make your website, your ads, and all your other content assets relevant.

So the question is: How relevant are your keywords?
One of the most common mistakes that can cripple an SEO campaign is focusing on short generic keywords (with high competition, mind you), and neglecting the value of long-tail keywords.

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While your business’ products and services might fall under one set of keywords that you think might be relevant, it’s also important to consider how your actual potential customers search for your brand and offerings on Google. And more often than not, people do so by using long-tail search terms, which usually fall outside of the typical marketer’s radar.

The key is to be more careful and thorough with your keyword research. Use as many tools as you can, whether it’s Google’s Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Moz, or Google Trends. Better yet, just ask your customers how they found you on Google and what search terms they used.

 

2. You’re Still Spamming Keywords

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Sure, in the old days, you could get away with stuffing your landing pages and blog posts with keywords to game search engines into boosting your rankings. But that was before Penguin and Panda, Google’s search algorithms that effectively ended blackhat SEO techniques and prioritized the creation of original high-quality content to create authority and better rankings.

And even back in the day, such practices were already deemed unethical because they provided little or no value at all to a brand’s customers. Unfortunately, the practice of stuffing content with target keywords continues today, even if Google has made it clear that spammy content will only result in a penalty to rankings.

But don’t get tricked into thinking keywords are the be all and end all of SEO. In fact, keyword placement might soon become irrelevant, with Google employing Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), an indexing method that allows the search engine bots to understand the content topic without the need for signaling them with target keywords.

In other words, a time may come that search engines will be so smart they’ll immediately understand what you’re trying to say in your website content or blog without having to rely on keywords.

 

3. Your Content is Misleading

While keywords should not be your only focus in your SEO efforts, it’s still important to make sure that whatever content you produce is actually related to your target keywords.

Say you want to rank for a certain keyword: restaurants in New York City. That’s fine, but any content you create should also focus on a topic related to that keyword—you can’t write about cookware or shopping tips.

This might seem like common sense, but many marketers actually make the mistake of trying to fit as many topics into a single content asset, which ends up not being relevant to the keywords it’s trying to aim for. A slightly different version of this mistake is to use too many keywords in one piece of content, giving it no direction.

Google wants you to use content that’s actually relevant to the search terms people are using. So if you’re going to use specific keywords, make sure your content answers the needs of people that use those terms when looking for you.

 

4. Your Content Isn’t Original

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If Google’s Panda update made anything clear, it’s that quality will always trump quantity, at least as far as content is concerned.

In the old days, it was common to duplicate or spin text-based content for as many private blog networks (PBNs) and other link farms. It worked for a while before Penguin and Panda too.

Fortunately, that practice has since been banned, resulting in a search engine penalty.

But if you’re smart, you don’t have to worry about best content practices. You’ll have made sure your content is:

• Original
• Well written
• Relevant

Copying and plagiarizing content from other sites is not only unethical, it might also result in your site being banned from the search engine results pages (SERPs). Remember that there are no shortcuts to content marketing.

 

5. You Have Low-Quality Links

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One of Google’s key ranking signals is a healthy link profile that clearly shows your site’s authority. To achieve this, you need high-quality links coming from relevant, high-quality content across a diverse array of sites.

Some key notes on effective link building include the following:

• More than anything, Google cares about how important the sites linking to you are.
• The higher the authority and the older the indexed age of the site, the more weight and influence it has over your rankings.
• Google also cares about the quality of the content your links are coming from—think news articles from media outlets.
• In addition, Google is also looking for diversity in IP links, as an added guarantee that they’re not manufactured from one source.
• Avoid ineffective anchor text. The anchor text should signal both the reader and the search engine about the context and value of the link. So, stay away from the practice of adding a link to the text ‘Click here.’

 

6. You’re Ignoring Your Meta Titles and Descriptions

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The process of optimizing your site and its content for a search engine like Google doesn’t end once you’ve inserted your target keywords into your landing pages and blog posts. Don’t ignore the value of optimizing your meta titles and descriptions, both of which are critical SEO elements that too many marketers ignore.

It’s not exactly a deal breaker for your rankings, but ignoring them means that you’re also ignoring the potential gains your content can get in search visibility. Just know that search engine bots will always crawl a site’s meta data. If it’s done properly, these factors can improve the performance of your landing pages and onsite content.

Likewise, don’t ignore the power of optimizing images. All images on your site and content should have relevant alt tags, which search bots will use to identify the content you have on your page, adding it the information affecting how your pages are indexed.

In Summary

SEO continues to be a crucial component of any inbound marketing strategy, especially on the content marketing side of things. While this guide should help you avoid some common SEO mistakes, be sure that you understand what challenges other marketers have faced in their efforts to improve their rankings. This will help you understand why these mistakes are so common in the first place.

Qamar Zaman offers SEO Audit Services. He can be reached at KISSPR.com

 

 

 

 

Qamar Zaman
Chief Visionary at One SEO Company. An Internet Entrepreneur SEO & lawyer Internet marketing professional & Starbucks Lover.

from Dallas Internet Marketing Blog

SEO Expert Qamar Zaman Explains – 4 Ways Old SEO and New SEO Are Different

Lawyer SEO Expert Qamar Zaman Says, lawyers needs to make sure that they are keeping up with search engines and observing best practices when creating and executing a strategy.

After Panda and Penguin—Google’s sweeping search engine algorithm updates—the landscape of search engine optimization has never been the same since.

To cut the long story short, what used to work wonders back in the old days just doesn’t anymore.

But the good news is that, at its core, the goals and basic tenets of SEO haven’t changed. Sure, some tactics and best practices may be different, but SEO is still about connecting your brand with your target audience by increasing your search rankings.

Perhaps the best way to describe new school SEO is that it’s about optimizing for real people instead of search engines. But then again, this school of thought has already existed even in the old days of SEO.

For law firms, knowing the best practices for modern SEO is now more important than ever, as more and more providers of legal services jockey for online visibility.

So, how do you know which practices to avoid, and which ones you should be spending more time and resources on? Here are a few key differences between old and new SEO, which should tell you everything about the kind approach to take when marketing your law firm.

     1. Today’s SEO is About Engaging Customers, Not Just Rankings

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In the past, the thrust behind SEO was to focus on a few keywords and trying to rank for them on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Some search marketers believed that it didn’t matter how you did it, as long as you managed to grab and keep top rankings on Google.

However, Google’s Penguin and Panda updates saw to it that marketers could no longer game the system with link farming and keyword spamming.

Today, SEO is about managing your brand’s reputation, and making people want to interact with your brand by spreading quality content about your products and services.

For law firms, this means creating content that attracts your target audience and nurturing them until they become your actual clients. If you have this down pat, your rankings should improve through organic sharing/mentions, and natural linking across the Internet.

To put it simply, SEO is now rooted in traditional marketing and public relations, in that you’re trying to build your law firm’s authority through reputation management and savvy PR.

     2. Keywords are Still Important, But They’re Not the Only Thing Going On

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Anyone who’s been engaged in SEO before 2011 knows that for many years, the industry was always focused on one thing: keywords.

In the past, search marketers would focus on just one major keyword, hinging all their efforts on getting ranked for that specific search term, and only that term.

But as search engines continue to get smarter, the goal is now to think of what search engine users think and want when typing into the search engine. This has given rise to semantic SEO, which focuses on keyword intent and long tail keywords.

For law firms, this means the days of gaming Google with keywords are over, with the context behind searches now being taken into account when showing search results. In turn, this means your content has to be topnotch and relevant in order to generate traffic and improve your site’s rankings.

Relevance will be the primary factor affecting how effective your website content is. This will be both a challenge and opportunity for providers of legal services, possibly requiring them to change their website content and marketing campaigns.  But it can also place you in a prime position to beat your competitors in the SERPs.

Read more on semantic search here http://bit.ly/2ho8iQ6+

     3. Content for People, Not Search Engines

Although the concept behind using content to increase search engine rankings was to create content for readers, search marketers nevertheless deviated from its intended purpose.

In the old days, SEO was focused on creating content that would rank on the search engine results pages. This meant that keywords and keyword density took precedence before the actual quality of the content. And so, you had marketers flooding private blog networks with poor-quality and sometimes even plagiarized content stuffed with target keywords.

But Google’s Panda update pretty much put that practice to an end, forcing marketers to realize that content needs to be written for people, as it was always intended.

Law firms thus need to focus on creating content assets that are not only relevant, but also educate and solve their target audience’s problems.

Read my blog post content for people not for bots

     4. Link Building Should Be Natural and Earned

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To be fair, everyone knew what the best practices for link building were, even in the old days of SEO. Search marketers were already aware of black hat link building and that it was pretty much a way to trick search engines into increasing their rankings.

That didn’t stop many people from building links the shady way though. It was all about jamming as many links into content assets whenever possible, and posting them on as many websites as they could. It was pretty much open season for search marketers, which made postings on discussion forms and social bookmarking sites so popular.

But such questionable practices never had a chance of lasting, and so after Panda and Penguin, the only way to build links without suffering penalties is to do it the right way, as everyone should. In other words, links have to be natural and earned.

A link should be the result of forming a relationship between your law firm’s site and a relevant and authoritative party. Of course, there’s no rule prohibiting you from posting on forums and social bookmarking sites like Pinterest or Tumblr, but you should still be very selective on the sites you choose to avoid any penalties.

What Does All This Mean for Law Firms?

As with any other company, your law firm needs to make sure you are keeping up with search engines and observing best practices when creating and executing a strategy. Most of these changes aren’t actual changes in best practices per se, because they’ve actually been recommended since the early days of SEO—so it shouldn’t be too much of an adjustment if you’ve always put your audience first in your SEO efforts.

Still, it’s important to be fluid with your SEO methods and be ready to adapt to trends and changes when they benefit your marketing efforts.

Qamar Zaman is a renowned national SEO expert for lawyers. With his office based in Dallas, Qamar Zaman specializes in conversion rate optimization for law firms. He works with all types of law firms and helps them get improve ROI without increasing more on marketing cost.  

Follow Qamar on Huffington Post

Qamar Zaman
Chief Visionary at One SEO Company. An Internet Entrepreneur SEO & lawyer Internet marketing professional & Starbucks Lover.

from Dallas Internet Marketing Blog

Dallas Social Media Expert Explains – Impactful Social Media Trends in 2016

You should be able to draw some ideas and direction on how to improve your social media campaigns for 2017, says Qamar Zaman a Digital Marketing Expert from Dallas.

One only needs to look back at the state of social media marketing in 2016 to know that it was definitely a watershed year for the industry. It’s common for trends to come and go in the world of inbound marketing, but this year, we had a number of megatrends that made a huge impact on how brands market themselves on social media.

And as 2016 comes to an end, it helps to look back at your strategies and methods applied in 2016, evaluating if they generated positive ROI for your overall campaign.

Try to ask yourself these questions:

• How many social media platforms did you include in your SMM campaign?
• What kind of content assets received the most activity?
• Did you have a distribution strategy?

Remember these questions and your answers and see how they stack up next to the biggest social media marketing hits and trends of 2016.

1. Live Streaming

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Live streaming has been called “the future of social media,” a claim that marketers seem to hear time and time again whenever a new trend comes into town. But this time around, it seems to be the real thing.

Live streaming pretty much blows the notion of video having to be heavily produced and edited to be effective out of the water. With live streaming, just about anyone can leverage the power of video and share whatever they record in real time.

For marketers, it means being able to use video in real time without having to spend on graphics, editing, and other production expenditures. It’s also a great tool for interacting with audiences, especially if you were to hold a question and answer session, a contest, or an interview.

Interest in live streaming apps first started in 2015 with Persicope, which was later acquired by Twitter. And things haven’t slowed down since, with Facebook Live taking the social media world by storm and used by brands to stream events and interact with their audiences in novel ways.

If you’re still skeptical of live streaming, just look at how Buzzfeed held a live stream event where they counted how many rubber band could be wrapped around watermelon until it burst.

Silly? Sure. But it drew it 807,000 viewers in real time. That kind of engagement is the stuff of marketing dreams.

       2. Social Media ‘Stories’

Snapchat’s Stories is the feature that launched the once-fledgling social media platform into the spotlight, where it would become the go-to app for young millennials. YouTube star and filmmaker Casey Neistat chalks up Snapchat’s popularity to its ephemeral nature—he points that it allows users to share a slice of their life in the moment, right then and there.

Snapchat took a while to develop the same kind of audience as Twitter or Facebook (but it does boast of a staggering 10 billion video views daily), so its Stories feature wasn’t really understood by non millennials for a while.

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It did, however, receive a new surge of attention after Instagram unveiled their own Stories feature, which some would say was lifted directly from Snapchat’s.

In any case, Stories offer a new way to tell, well, stories in ways that are very different from traditional videos uploaded on YouTube or Facebook. It’s more raw, more in the now, and more real—qualities that consumers are looking for in an increasingly ad-heavy world.

     3. Mobile, Mobile, Mobile

 

 

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Research from comScore shows that digital media time spent on smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices is now at a staggering 68 percent. Simply put, we’re spending more time consuming digital media on our phones than on any other platform. In contrast, people spend just a third of their total digital time on desktop computers.

We’ve arrived at a point where your next customer is probably going to visit you through a smartphone, so if you still don’t have a mobile-optimized site, you’re placing yourself at a serious disadvantage against your competition.

Mobile usage has always been on a steady rise from as early as 2008, but 2016 was a remarkable year, with several events happening on the mobile front. For example, consider the Pokémon Go craze, which caused people to spend so much time on their phones, some of them even got into car accidents.

For social media marketers, the challenge is to take advantage of this unprecedented immersion in mobile. One way to do that is by ensuring all your content is optimized for mobile devices.

Fortunately, both Google and Facebook have taken steps to make this easier for marketers, releasing Accelerated Mobile Pages and Instant Articles respectively, both of which essentially streamline website pages into faster and simpler versions for mobile screens.

     4. Gamification

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Fun and games were also big factors in the success of many social media apps in 2016. Perhaps the best example can be found in Snapchat’s filters, which transformed your face into animal heads, added a variety of effects (complete with music), and basically made taking selfies much more fun.

In hindsight, it might not have been very interesting to the non-Snapchat crowd, but it was certainly new and never before seen, at least as far as mainstream social media platforms go.

We also saw Facebook with their take on gamification, unveiling a series of new emoji reactions in addition to their like buttons. Even Apple got in on the fun with a new emoji system that allowed you to supersize, predict, and replace emojis.

     5. Influence and Confirmation Bias

In 2016, we also realized just how frighteningly powerful social media is as a platform. You only need to look at how social media played a role in shaping public opinion over the U.S. presidential election. It’s no secret that social media gives users more control over who and what they listen to, which in turn has led people to boxing themselves inside echo chambers where the only information they’re exposed is what they agree with.

The problem is that social media platforms are also rife with fake news—an issue that Facebook vehemently denies had anything to do with the stunning victory of Donald Trump.

In any case, we might expect to see the major social media platforms to take a more proactive approach against fake news. Most recently, we saw Facebook and Google moving to take fake news sites off their ad network. For marketers, this means more attention must be placed on content quality and accuracy if they don’t want to be kicked off or penalized.

In Summary

Ultimately, by reviewing these trends and events, you should be able to draw some ideas and direction on how to improve your social media campaigns for 2017. The way things are going, social media will only continue to grow next year and beyond. Your job is to anticipate what happens next by understanding the course of social media in the past.

Did you read my SEO Forecast for 2017

Qamar Zaman
Chief Visionary at One SEO Company. An Internet Entrepreneur SEO & lawyer Internet marketing professional & Starbucks Lover.

from Dallas Internet Marketing Blog

SEO Forecast for 2017 by SEO Expert Qamar Zaman a Dallas SEO & Lawyer Marketing Expert

Dallas SEO and Lawyer Internet Marketing Expert Qamar Zaman Goes Over 2017 SEO Trends

As the new year approaches we remain skeptical about things that will good on the internet marketing front and help us achieve our digital marketing targets. Does internet of things have any surprise for us in 2017.

2016 was more than eventful.

Mobile internet marketing grew and SEO trends shifted due to constant Google updates.

This has been a feature of the world wide web that has transformed with lightning speed over the years. With the completion of 2016, one may be uneasy of 2017 and how web marketing, particularly SEO trends, will proceed.

SEO is the first marker of internet marketing as it helps to improve the online visibility of your web presence on search engines. It will be beneficial monitor how SEO will progress in 2017.

Forbes contributes its thoughts on what might be the SEO trends in the coming year.

7 Online Marketing Trends That Will Dominate 2017

2016 was an amazing year for online marketing, but the industry never slows down. We haven’t quite hit the end of the year, but it’s time to start thinking about how the industry’s going to change in 2017—and how you can prepare accordingly.

Marketing is a field dominated by those with the foresight to plan ahead, anticipate changes, and jump on trends before your competitors do, so take note of these trends to come and prepare for them. You don’t have to use all of them, but you should be aware of their existence if you want to continue being competitive in your industry.

http://bit.ly/2hh89hC

Mobile has grown over the years and will continue to grow in 2017

Mobile’s growth in the past led way to the prediction of 2016 being the year of the mobile, and it certainly was. The upcoming 2017 will see continual growth as more people adapt to the use of smartphone and mobile tablets.   

• Its Mobile social internet world
• Its Mobile search
• Its about Mobile online purchases
• Its about Mobile online payments

Everyone who searches on the go, does so with a purpose. The intent is to reach a destination, locating a coffee shop, or buying online. The world has adopted a somewhat changed intent as compared to when we used to surf the net through desktops and laptops. We search differently when we are in stage 1 of the buying cycle, education begins  however, we are using mobile handheld devices as compared to desktops.

MORE AND MORE MOBILE

1 purchase on a mobile every 15 seconds in Europe, over 50% of local searches on a smartphone in the world, 50% of internet connections made on mobile in France.  The use of mobile is already preponderant and will intensify in 2017.

The brands and businesses that  improve the appearance responsive to their site will draw all the better their game Also, a complementary pattern emerges. Think of a mixed-use PC / laptop / tablet. As many carriers, that continue to be predominantly used. |Business2Cummunity

Top Mobile Marketing Trends for 2017

The more individuals become contingent to phones, precisely smartphones, the trend of mobile marketing becomes increasingly important and critical for the modern brand. The sooner you understand mobile marketing, the better for your business. With time, few trends have become obvious and approaching towards development of business. Ignoring the trend could damage your business greatly. Here is the list of trends that you might see in 2017.

http://bit.ly/2hh8alT

Video marketing will remain an IMPORTANT internet marketing medium in 2017

Among the types of content that will be used and those that will dominate the internet marketing horizon, VIDEO is and will remain an important online marketing medium.

• YouTube has over a billion users, which is almost a third of the internet population.
• It’s estimated that content delivery network traffic will deliver over half of all internet video traffic by 2019.
• On mobile devices, users spend more than 40 minutes watching videos.

Source |Envato.com

So what are they predicting?

Videos everywhere: Videos in emails, Videos in blogs, even videos in email subject lines? People are consuming videos more than ever, Facebook videos, videos ads, videos in websites etc.

The likelihood for consumers to have multiple devices is growing. Because of this expect in 2017 that cross-device video consumption will increase. Consumers are more likely to seek out videos from multiple different social media channels and websites. On top of that you can expect consumers to be watching video content from a traditional format, while also watching content from a modern format like a phone or tablet at the same time. | Boast.io

7 Video Marketing Trends for 2017 (and What They Mean for You)

Social media is always in flux, and one of the biggest shifts right now is video.

The development of improved mobile technology has enabled widespread video consumption – available always and at anytime. And although video content isn’t new, it’s certainly growing, and will to continue to expand in 2017 and beyond.

Check out the following video statistics reported by Insivia:

• One-third of all online activity is spent watching video
• The average user is exposed to 32.3 videos in a month
• 75% of online video viewers have interacted with an online video ad this month
• 75% of executives watch work related videos on business websites at least once a week
• 36% of online consumers trust video ads

http://bit.ly/2gnq4q1

Closing

Experts keep watch on how things will progress in the world of web marketing. The online marketers who have been, from year to year, working hard can offer expert online marketing advice and can help in carrying over your web marketing to the next year without letting your business disappear online.

About the Author:

Qamar Zaman can help in this transition. Qamar’s web marketing expertise spans over 20 years. He’s helped over 25,000 clients worldwide to achieve online marketing success. Qamar is a Dallas, U.S. based online marketing expert who can be reached at 972-437-8942.  

Follow Qamar Zaman Blog on Huffington Post.

Qamar Zaman
Chief Visionary at One SEO Company. An Internet Entrepreneur SEO & lawyer Internet marketing professional & Starbucks Lover.

from Dallas Internet Marketing Blog

Attorney Marketing Expert Reveals 7 Secrets – Successfully Measure Your Law Firm’s PR Efforts

Lawyer Marketing Expert, Qamar Zaman reveals Secrets for Law Firm to Get More Cases!

In a world that’s more social than ever, the role of public relations in organizations has never been more important. The wrong tweet by a company’s CEO can send stock prices crashing, while a mention by a superstar influencer (think someone like Kim Kardashian) can raise brand awareness in ways that PR professionals working with tight budgets can only dream of.

The need for PR also stems from changing consumer behavior, as more people are actively searching for your products and services on the Internet, reading product reviews, and sharing their customer experience with their online social circles.

Law firms and attorneys are just as affected by this paradigm shift, with today’s clients making a conscious effort to explore their options for providers of legal services. Many attorneys view PR as an unnecessary expenditure that costs too much money, while those who understand its value still want to see numbers and figures to quantify its potential.

As it stands, the global PR Industry is valued at $14 billion as of 2016, but as the role of public relations becomes more prominent, many companies are making the mistake of taking a traditional approach to measuring the ROI of public relations results.

But focusing on the dollar side of your return on investment raises several issues. While there’s no way to guarantee the success of a PR campaign, when it is successful, it raises brand awareness in ways that are hard to quantify. This creates a return on investment that’s beyond the traditional method of measuring ROI on a dollar for dollar basis.  After all, how do you quantify improved brand image brought about by positive representation on digital and traditional media?

So what then are your options for measuring the ROI of your public relations results, and what do you need to accurately quantify your success?

 

• Set Realistic Goals

 

A public relations campaign is only measurable if it’s guided by a strategy. A clearly defined strategy will allow you to identify ideal techniques for reaching your goals. If you’re not sure about your PR goals, just ask yourself what you wish to accomplish with your law firm’s PR campaign.

At the same time, it’s important to set realistic PR goals. Otherwise, you won’t accomplish your objective, much less measure your campaign at all. It’s better to under-promise than over-promise on goals your law firm has no means of achieving.

 

• Get Feedback from Clients

 

Your clients will be the best people to ask if your PR efforts are working and if they understand what you’re trying to do for your firm. More importantly, do they view your public relations in a positive light?

The simplest way to answer these questions is to just ask your clients. Where did they hear about your firm? What part of your communication efforts resonated with them the most? Did they get enough information from the message/s they came across?

 

• Track Press Mentions

 

Another way to gauge your PR’s success is track the amount of press mentions law firm is getting. Of course, these press mentions are more effective if they appear on publications relevant to your potential clients. In addition, press mentions are more valuable if they’re positive in nature. Bad publicity might generate short-term brand awareness, but the larger your company, the more damaging it will be to your brand.

 

• Conduct Market Research

 

In many ways, the goals of public relations closely resemble AIDA marketing and communication model—AIDA stands for “Attention, Interest, Desire and Action.” With PR, it’s to generate awareness, shape customer attitudes and opinions, and inspire action.

Comprehensive research will prove critical in this area. Before launching your PR campaign, identify and track your target audience to see if your PR strategies have a direct or indirect effect on turning them into leads or clients.

 

• Build Relationships

 

At the core of public relations is the process of building relationships—it’s about “relations,” after all. A good PR campaign will seek to create networks with influencers, media outlets, and journalists. In contrast, a great public relations campaign is about building long-term relationships with leads and clients.

Whereas some PR teams often focus on selling the brands they represent, effective PR teams seek to demonstrate how their company’s products and services can serve the media, and through the media, serve the final customer.

 

• Compare the Cost of Advertising

 

If you paid for a placement on a newspaper like The Washington Post or placed an advertisement on CBS, did you get your money’s worth? In other words, was the coverage of the ad comparable to its cost? It might be that you ended up paying too much for ad space but did not receive a proportionate level of coverage.

 

• Analyze Competitors and Compare Your Content

 

Besides the cost of placing ads, it’s also important to evaluate the quality of your ads. It helps to ask yourself these questions when evaluating the quality of your placements:

• How do your ads stack against competing law firms?
• How often do your ads appear compared to your competitors?
• Where do your competitors’ ads appear?
• Are you also placing your ads where your competitors’ ads are?
• What kind of messaging do the ads have?
• Whom are the ads targeted to?

These factors can be used to give your ads and ad coverage a rating (say a scale of 1 to 5), which will then allow you to measure the effectiveness of your PR efforts.

Conclusion

While ROI is an important factor when determining how much time and resources you should invest in public relations, measuring the dollar for dollar return of your PR efforts is not the only way to determine the bottom line. The nature of PR might be hard to quantify with traditional number crunching, but you can still evaluate the value of PR by looking at how it builds brand identity, helps you identify competitors, and builds meaningful relationships with potential clients.

About Qamar Zaman

Qamar Zaman is a Dallas based SEO & Lawyer Marketing Expert  and CEO  for Submit Press Release 123

Follow Qamar Zaman on Huffington Post

Qamar Zaman
Chief Visionary at One SEO Company. An Internet Entrepreneur SEO & lawyer Internet marketing professional & Starbucks Lover.

from Dallas Internet Marketing Blog

PR Budget Tips: How to Make People Talk about Your Brand in Social Media

One of the most challenging part in public relations (if you are a startup or a small business) is on how much money you are willing to spend in PR activities to encourage people to talk about your products or services.  Since budget in PR is often limited, you have to find other alternative ways to create awareness about your brand.  Fortunately, social media is easy to acquire and has been proven as a very effective PR tool if you are on a budget.  In this blog post, I’ll enumerate a few ideas on how to make people talk about your brand in social media.

The Importance of People Talking About Your Brand in Social Media

Since social media is very popular and almost all those who have internet access often use it, the need to get your brand in the very center of where the action happens should be in your top priority.  The good news is, in social media you can do PR activities within your budget.  Because traditional PR is very costly, social media websites are now the best places to make people talk about your products or services.  

When people talk about your brand in social media the probability of increasing its visibility is higher because anything that is hot and trending can always spark interest and discussion.  It’s just like, when a social influencer talk about your brand and his followers talk about it as well, in no time, you’ll just realize that your content become viral and everyone starts talking about your brand.  And, you know that this kind of buzz can help you a lot in building your PR.

How to Encourage People to Talk about Your Brand in Social Media

Now, the important question is, how to encourage people to talk about your products or services in social media if you are not a well-known brand?  This is probably quite challenging because you can’t force people to create a buzz about your business just by asking them.  This is where a bit of strategy and understanding your target audience come in a handy.

1. Create a compelling and controversial content.  Compelling in a way that it has the power to grab people’s attention and stick in their thoughts that would prod them to talk about it to others.  Controversial in a good way that it would encourage them to discuss about it for days.  A good example is featuring current hot and controversial issues that are highly relevant to your target audience.  If you are a SEO company, creating and publishing an Infographic that features studies that show how Fortune 500 businesses managed to earn billions through search engine optimization is definitely a winner.
2. Blog about a very famous person most of your target audience love.  Have you ever asked why entertainment websites are quite popular? It’s because their main topics revolve around very famous celebrities most people love and idolized.  Featuring a very famous SEO celebrity such as Matt Cutts and letting your target audience know the most surprising facts they haven’t known about him yet is a good example.
3. Start a social media contest and encourage influential users to join.  This is quite popular and very effective as well.  You can start by listing social media influencers whose interest are within your niche.  You can start by tapping influential bloggers to join a contest that would measure their online popularity through total number of likes in Facebook.  In the entire duration of the contest, people would surely talk about your brand and will become curious that even their favorite bloggers are patronizing the contest you organized.
4. Pioneer a social cause that is highly relevant to your brand.  A social cause such as a campaign for “free internet everywhere” is highly regarded by many and would surely catch the interest of your target audience.  Pioneering social causes is a way of reaching out to them and make a good impression.  In your campaign, you should encourage social media users to use your official brand hashtag every time they mention about your cause.
5. Promote the use of your official brand hashtag.  People won’t talk about your brand if you remain invisible.  In social media, hashtags are very powerful features that would allow users to become more familiar with your brand’s name.  For example, every time you share a status, a tweet, or a post, always make sure to include your official hashtag and encourage your existing customers to use it as well.

Encouraging people to talk about your brand is no easy task.  It would take more effort and time and there’s no absolute formula to do it right the first time.  The tips above are not direct solutions but just a few ideas on how you do public relations even with a very limited budget.  Good luck!

Qamar Zaman is a SEO Expert based in Dallas, Texas.

Learn more: http://huff.to/2f2TYdw

Qamar Zaman
Chief Visionary at One SEO Company. An Internet Entrepreneur SEO & lawyer Internet marketing professional & Starbucks Lover.

from Dallas Internet Marketing Blog

8 SEO Hacks To Implement This Holiday Season To Boost Sales

8 SEO Tricks You Should Implement NOW To Increase Profits Over the Holidays

October is upon us, which means now is the perfect time for businesses to kick off their holiday marketing campaigns. Seeing as how the months around Christmas have been found to account for at least 19 percent of all annual sales between 2000 to 2014, anyone would be remiss not to put out all stops during this time of the year.

As you’ve probably figured out by now, digital marketing can work wonders for any traditional marketing campaign, augmenting its reach, effectiveness, and ability to build brand awareness. This is especially true when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), which can help retailers reach out to more shoppers and increase profits over the holidays.

The only catch is that it usually takes time for any effects made by implementing SEO to kick in, which means that NOW is the best time to begin any SEO campaign for the holidays.

Below are 8 ideas business owners can start integrating into their own SEO campaigns.

1. Churn Out Holiday Content Today

Source

Now is the perfect time to capitalize on incoming holiday searches by publishing holiday-themed content on your site. Sure, you’ve probably tried making cosmetic changes to your homepage before, maybe even offered some kind of holiday-exclusive product or service package, but what about the written content on your blog?

Naturally, people’s search habits change at different times of the year. During the holidays, most people are in “shopping mode”—between Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas, it’s no surprise why.

Writing content that’s optimized for the holidays allows you to get these searchers on your site. For example, a consumer electronics store can reach out to shoppers by writing blog posts about the following:

• The best smartphone to buy this Christmas
• The best video game console to gift someone
• Best 4K TV to buy on Black Friday

In other words, content geared towards attracting people with buying intent has a higher likelihood of generating more views and conversions. And although people don’t usually start shopping until mid-November all the way to the end of December, you want to start publishing content today to give search engines time to crawl your content assets.

2. Zero In On Holiday Gift Keywords

Of course, you can’t just create holiday content without taking the right holiday and gift keywords into consideration. If you’re a small to medium enterprise (SME), it will be difficult to rank for generic holiday-specific search terms like:

• “great Christmas gifts”
• “holiday gift ideas”
• “husband gift ideas”
• “gifts for mom”

What you can do is focus on long-tail keywords specific to your niche and category. Again, back to the earlier example: you’re a consumer electronics store.

You can target keywords such as “holiday iPhone 7 (insert your city)” or “holiday discount Playstation 4.”

Source

If you don’t know what search terms to play around with, this is where Google’s Keyword Planner tool comes in. You should also consider Google Trends to see trending search terms relevant to your industry.

Once you have your keywords, it’s simply a matter of integrating them across your landing pages and holiday-themed content assets. This shouldn’t be new to you by now, because you’re simply optimizing your site with the holidays in mind.

 3. Run a Holiday PPC Campaign

Source

PPC campaigns are perfect for seasonal promotions. If you want to fast track any gains in visitor traffic and conversions, you can run a PPC campaign on Google AdWords, with your adgroups and ads tailored towards holiday searches, of course.

Nothing will have changed about your target audience or demographic. To continue the previous example, you offer consumers electronics to a target audience made up mostly  of young professionals—nothing about this changes during this holidays.

However, your PPC ads also allow you to reach out to a new set of target buyers who appear only during the holidays. These people give away your products as gifts. Think of parents buying gifts for their kids, or wives looking to buy the latest gadgets for their husbands.

4. Emphasize Great Shipping Options

Source

Try as we might to avoid it, many of us still take part in the annual last minute holiday shopping rush. And you can bet that your customers do the same thing. Everyone knows the holiday season gets hectic, mainly because we’re all trying to beat the clock in some way. Not surprisingly, this mad rush often creates problems with product supply and shipping delays.

SEO best practices can turn this problem into a marketing opportunity. For starters, you can change your homepage company to emphasize that your company also offers in-store pickup, free shipping (perhaps for a minimum value order), and guaranteed shipping among others.

As the holidays get closer, shoppers will be more concerned about time. Your job is to be proactive and show them you’ve got their back. However, the key is to put information about shipping options on your site now to reap any SEO benefits in time for the holidays.

5. Optimize Your Top-performing Pages for the Holidays

If this isn’t your first time doing SEO on your website, you probably already know what your top-performing landing pages are. If not, visit your Google Analytics Landing Page Report to see which pages generate the most views and conversions.

When optimizing your site for the holidays, you want to return to these landing pages and give them a spin for the holidays. For example, if you have an ecommerce site, consider embedding holiday keywords on your bestselling products.

This can be done by including the product in a “holiday gift ideas” page, or better yet, by offering some kind of holiday promotion for the product to generate even more shopper interest.

6. Set Up a Landing Page for Holiday Gift Ideas

Source

One of the easiest ways to generate clicks and conversions on your most popular products is to set up a new section within your site completely dedicated to holiday gifts.

Whether you create a new landing page within an existing category or create a new category altogether, a holiday gift section can serve as the perfect platform for putting holiday-related keywords to work, putting your holiday-optimized content front and center. Having a section that’s highly visible and easy to access is just waiting to be crawled by search engine spiders, which can only be a good thing for your SEO efforts.

Besides making good SEO sense, creating a separate section for holiday gift ideas helps your potential customers find what they want in as little time as possible. In fact, most holiday shoppers don’t even know what they want to buy. Your job is to tell them what to consider, which is exactly what this landing page allows you to do.

7. Upload Your Products on the Big Ecommerce Sites

Source

This may seem like a common sense tactic, but you’d be surprised at just how many online retailers ignore the value of uploading their products on Amazon and eBay.

Leveraging these two ecommerce giants offers two main benefits.

• First, many marketers often forget that these two sites actually have their own search engines, which are just as influential as Google. As you may have figured out by now, these two channels are incredibly popular during the holidays, so it makes perfect sense to take advantage of the opportunity to siphon traffic and sales from these sites into your own.

• Second, increasing the visibility of your products on Amazon and eBay helps to boost your online authority, which in turn improves your ranking on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).

 

• Conduct an SEO Audit to Check Your Site’s Health

The holidays can also serve as the perfect time to conduct an SEO audit or health check of your website.

In the wake of Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm updates, many sites that relied on now-outdated linkbuilding strategies were penalized and took a hit to their rankings on Google’s SERPs.

If this is your first time hearing of these updates, now’s as good a time as any to check your website health, which is as easy as visiting Google’s Webmaster Tools. Webmaster Tools will tell you if you have issues with the following:

• 404 errors
• HTML glitches
• Duplicate pages
• Broken links
• Crawl and index problem
• Slow page speed issues

If you can identify these problems sooner than later, your site should have improved visibility in time for the holiday season.

Conclusion

Although there will always be people who deride the commercialization of the holidays, there’s no denying that the last few months of the year see a disproportionate amount of spending among consumers and businesses themselves. Implementing an SEO campaign early on gives you the advantage of being one of the first movers in your niche. This also gives you more time to prime your site and buyers as they begin mulling their purchase decisions for the holidays.

Remember, with SEO, timing and content are everything. Aim for relevance when creating your holiday-themed content, and always remember to solve your buyers’ problems.

To learn more visit Submit Press Release 123 to drive traffic and conversion to your website.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Qamar Zaman
Chief Visionary at One SEO Company. An Internet Entrepreneur SEO & lawyer Internet marketing professional & Starbucks Lover.

from Dallas Internet Marketing Blog

4 SEO Hacks Designed with Human Behavior in Mind Explained by Qamar Zaman a Dallas SEO

Dallas SEO Expert Qamar Zaman explains 4 SEO Tactics that Optimize Your Site for Real People

When it comes to SEO, one mistake that many marketers tend to make is missing the forest for the trees.

What am I talking about? I’m referring to the tendency of many SEOs to get bogged down by analytics data, clickthrough rates, bounce rates, conversions, and all this technical mumbo jumbo that should not be the be-all and end-all of search engine optimization.

Like any digital marketing strategy or school of thought, SEO is about marketing and promoting your brand to people—people.

Keeping track of hard data is one thing, but focusing only on numbers and stats won’t mean a thing if you don’t understand how your target audience thinks and behaves.

• Why do people visit your site?
• More importantly, why should they?
• What kind of information appeals to them the most?
• How can you help solve their problems?

These are just a few of the questions you need to ask yourself before you even optimize your site for search engines.

As you’re figuring out the answers to these questions, here are a few more hacks to help you create an SEO plan based on your customers’ behavior.

1. Figure Out Who You Should Reach Out To

Source

If you don’t know who your customers are or what factors will turn ordinary people into your customers, you won’t get anywhere with any kind of marketing campaign.

As a business owner, you should be able to figure this out quickly. Otherwise, you need to sit down and think hard about just who will benefit from your brand’s products and services. Very rarely will any business have just one kind of target customer.

This is where buyer personas come in.

This HubSpot write-up offers a succinct definition of what a buyer persona is: “A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.”

The best way to start is to simply talk to your current customers. What do they like about your brand? Your products and services? What problems do your products and services solve?

But how is this relevant to SEO? By understanding who your customers are, it becomes easier to adjust your content and keywords to their specific needs and motivators, which in turn helps speed up the conversion process.

2. Check What Your Competitors Are Doing

Source

Another common practice among almost all consumers is the habit of comparing brands and products before making a purchase decision.

This in itself should give you enough reason to check out what your competition is doing, what tactics they’re employing, and what strategies seem to yield the best return on investment.

• How does their on-site SEO look like?
• What keywords are they using on their landing pages?
• Are they running any PPC ads? Check their copy for keywords and calls to action.
• Do your competitors have a blog? How often do they update it, if at all?

Moz.com’s Open Site Explorer is a powerful tool that helps you determine how well your site is doing compared to others and vice versa.

    3. What Do Your Customers Want?

Source

Once you’ve created your buyer personas, you then need to make sure your SEO campaign reaches out to customers across the different buying stages.

As search engine algorithms continue to evolve in sophistication, gone are the days of simply relying on keyword research to identify potential search terms and phrases your audience would probably use when making search engine queries, and ‘sprinkling’ these keywords across your landing pages and content assets.

For the most part, this helped users find search results they actually found useful. Still, it was far from perfect.

Thankfully, search engines have become smarter and more efficient at determining what search users want—in other words, what their buying intent is. Besides keywords, Google now takes into account the following:

• Device the search query comes from
• The time of day the query is made
• The location of the search user

The goal, of course, is to deliver the most relevant search results possible to users. And this is where your market research and buyer personas come in, helping you optimize your content for users in the different stages of the buying process, also known as a funnel.

For example, you may have someone who has committed to making a purchase, but is still weighing their options about where to best spend their money. Considering this information, you can optimize your content to reflect a bargain for customers that buy from you—it can be a discount, free shipping, or future deals on repeat purchases.

4. Know What Challenges Your Customers Face

Modern SEO has gone from simply cramming in keywords into landing pages and content assets, evolving into a process of solving people’s problems.

More than anything else, customers want information—your job is to give it to them. But you can’t just give them any kind of information. It has to be something that actually solves their problems and concerns, something that’s obviously related to your products and services, of course.

Notice how I keep going back to problems and concerns.

Part of developing buyer personas is knowing what your customers’ pain points are.

These are the issues, concerns, challenges, problems, and desires your customers face—or don’t even know that they’re facing. Once you’ve identified these pain points, you can then work your way towards presenting your products and services (through SEO and content) as having the power to overcome these pain points.

For example, let’s say your business sells used tires.

• One group of customers may be concerned about the quality of used tires—you can work on creating content that promises a warranty or some other strategy to allay their concerns about this issue.

• Yet another group may be concerned about shipping costs—you can perhaps weigh the cost-benefit ratio of offering free shipping, adjusting your content and PPC ad copy as needed.

To put it simply, the goal here is to optimize your content to address the different pain points of your buyer personas.

Conclusion

As mentioned earlier, these SEO tactics all revolve around a common factor: optimizing for people instead of search engines. If you optimize your site and your content with the goal of helping your potential customers, your rankings should improve in time.

Focus on helping your customers and providing them with the information they need. If you’re successful, you not only help solve their problems through your products and services, you also enjoy enhanced visibility on the Google search engine results pages (SERPs).

 

Qamar Zaman Dallas SEO Consultant

Qamar Zaman
Chief Visionary at One SEO Company. An Internet Entrepreneur SEO & lawyer Internet marketing professional & Starbucks Lover.

from Dallas Internet Marketing Blog

Google’s “Possum” Update Shakes-Up Local Search Results

Earlier this month, on September 1 to be exact, the search giant has unleashed another algorithm update that left some businesses scratching their heads because they can’t find their Google My Business listing in local search results anymore.  But, their listings are not actually gone as some have thought.

According to Joy Hawkins in her blog post on SearchEngineLand.com, those Google My Business listings are not gone.  They were just being filtered when the search giant  rolled out their newest update.

So, what really does this newest animal-themed update bring into the most-talked-about search algorithm worldwide?

What is Google “Possum”?

Before we’ll discuss that, we need to clarify first that “Possum” is not the official name for this filter update. This name was just being suggested by fellow digital marketing experts who felt that it’s a fitting name because of what it currently does.  A possum, by the way, for those who are not familiar, is a tree-dwelling Australasian marsupial that typically has a prehensile tail.

The Google “Possum” update tends to filter spammy listings off from local search results (Google Maps Results).  According to Hawkins, the main purpose of this filter update is to help diversify the local results and to eradicate spams from showing up in Google Maps search results.

However, since this is just a filter update, you should not expect to get any types of penalties.

How Google “Possum” Works?

It is quite obvious now that Google Possum specifically targets redundant or spammy local business listings and filter them out so that only the most relevant ones will show up in the SERPS (search engine result pages).

As of this writing, the search giant hasn’t released any official statements yet about this update, thus the following observations from fellow search engine experts and enthusiasts may shed some light on how this newest roll-out has affected how business listings appear in local search results.

“I noticed a big move up for a client which I’m sure is related to this local algo change. Four days ago, according to my Brightlocal ranking report, they were at #30 in maps. As of yesterday, they are at #1 for the same keywords. That’s the first time they have ever been that high in a year of tracking. – Scott ClientClicks

Where before I said organic didn’t seem significantly affected, I have to revise that. I’m now seeing noticeable upticks in organic rankings yet ironically, maps rankings still either down or disappeared for same businesses. – danieljc

“I have found some very strange behavior. Specifically, if I search “nokomis florida mortgage broker” I get a single listing for Gulfside Mortgage Services, but if I look for “nokomis fl mortgage broker” I get a 3 pack (with only two listings, one of which is Gulfside Mortgage Services). A week ago, the first search showed the same findings that are now gone. If I use “nokomis florida mortgage lender” I get the same 2 findings as “nokomis fl mortgage broker” but then add one more to complete the 3 pack.” – Hammer

You can read the rest of the observations here.

Joy Hawkins has also specified the top 5 changes Google Possum has done so far.  They are the following.

• Businesses that fall outside of the physical city limits saw a huge spike in ranking.
• Google is now filtering based on address and affiliation.
• The physical location of the searcher is more important than it was before.
• Search results vary more based on slight variations of the keyword searched.
• The local filter seems to be running more independently from the organic filter.

You may read the rest of Hawkins’s analysis here.

How to Avoid Google Possum?

To avoid your listing getting filtered out by this latest algorithm update, you should make sure that it has no duplicates and it has consistent information across all pages.  Make sure that the details about your business are complete and accurate.

But, before that, the best thing you can do is to register your listing in Google My Business.  This can surely help make it more relevant than the unregistered ones (if there are any) and can lessen the chances of it being filtered out.

Inserting your Google Map address (and embedding the actual map itself) when you publish new content can also help you gain more authority over your listing.

How about you? What are the specific precautions that you are doing now to avoid this latest algorithm update from Google?  You may share them at the comment section below.

 

Media Contact:

Qamar Zaman

OneseoCompany.com

Did Google roll out a Brand Bidding Algorithm Update Last Week, Or Was it Part of Penguin 4.0?

How to Prune Links after Google Penguin?

Google Penguin vs. Google Panda: The Ultimate Google SEO Bout?

Qamar Zaman
Chief Visionary at One SEO Company. An Internet Entrepreneur SEO & lawyer Internet marketing professional & Starbucks Lover.

from Dallas Internet Marketing Blog

Local Marketing Tip – How Law Firms Can Get Testimonials from Your Clients

1. Get all the personal details of your client.  Know your client first and identify the following data about him or her:

• Demographic – Your client’s age, ethnicity, education, household composition, and employment status.
• Type of Occupation – In what sector of the economy your client belongs.  Is she/he jobless or not.
• Psychographic Information – Your client’s personality, values, opinions, interests, and lifestyles.

2. Next, you need to identify what kind of injury he/she suffered.

• Type of injury
• Problems she/he was having before coming to you
• Legal solution that you offered
• Length of time it takes to get the results
• Results from the legal team in-charged

3. Identify the process flow before letting him/her write a Google Review

• Ask the client for a review before paying him/her the settlement
• Make sure she/he has a Gmail account – If the client has, then teach him/her how to write review in Google.  If the client has no account, help them create one in your office.
• Take a photo of your client with his/her permission and have him/her sign a release letter
• Take a video of your client with his/her permission and have him/her sign a release letter

Once you got all the necessary information, you can now proceed in writing a story about the client’s case.  Here are the steps on how to do it.

Steps How to Create a Story

1. Copy your client’s Google Review into Microsoft Word.
2. Add/insert your client’s photo.  Make sure the photo is positioned properly.
3. Upload your client’s video on your YouTube channel.  Make sure you optimize your video post as much as possible by using the right keywords.  Don’t forget to put a personal touch at the description area.
4. Make sure you added the personal information of your client.  But, in case he/she prefers not to have his/her name publicize, then you can just create an alias

5. Don’t forget to also add your client’s injury details in the description area.

Qamar Zaman
Chief Visionary at One SEO Company. An Internet Entrepreneur SEO & lawyer Internet marketing professional & Starbucks Lover.

from Dallas Internet Marketing Blog

Unison between SEO and Content Marketing

Capturing the interest of your target audience and gaining advantage from your competitors in organic search need a dynamic internet marketing strategy.  This can be done if you incorporate SEO into your Content Marketing.

“Think of SEO this way: If a customer-focused content marketing program is the sandwich, then SEO is the mayonnaise. It touches nearly everything and enhances the overall flavor of the sandwich, but on its own, it’s not very appetizing.”| Michele Linn – Content Marketing Institute

Although producing content doesn’t require much technical skills compared to running an SEO campaign, the need to incorporate these two strategies is crucial if you want to achieve your digital marketing goals.

In order to achieve your marketing goals, you should know how to use Content Marketing and SEO together.

How? You will learn this in the later part of the article, but first, you must understand why content marketing is a very crucial part in internet marketing especially for small businesses.

5 Reasons Your Small Business Needs Content Marketing

“Constantly clamoring to grab the attention of prospective customers, small businesses are competing with a lot of noise. Consumers are cutting through clutter by fast-forwarding television shows, subscribing to ad-free digital radio, installing ad-blockers to browse their favorite websites sans-ads and customizing what’s in their social media feeds.

To avoid getting skipped over or ignored, savvy digital marketers must craft messages that their target audience wants to see. When small businesses communicate with their customers by providing information instead of offering a sales pitch, the consumer will listen. The message and the brand is no longer an interruption, but a valued information provider.

There’s a name for this tricky tactic — it’s called content marketing. Content marketing means consistently creating and distributing information that is valuable and relevant to those people within a small business’s target audience. Ultimately, the goal is for your content to entice a consumer to do business with your company.

http://entm.ag/28NtMSQ

But, what’s the use of your content if your target audience can’t even find them? These days majority of internet users use search engines to find information about the products, services, and other things they want to know more about.  If you are not visible in search, then you are losing a big chunk of traffic to your competitors.

SEO helps you gain more visibility in organic searches.  This increases the chances of getting more leads and ultimately, getting more conversions.

Why SEO Is Actually All About Content Marketing

“There’s a bit of confusion over SEO and content marketing. The confusion comes over how SEO and content marketing fit together. Do they fit together? Are they at odds with each other? If so, is it possible to force them together?

In a previous post, I explained why SEO and content marketing are like PB&J. They go together. They just fit. They work well together.

Now, I want to share exactly why that is — why SEO is actually all about content marketing, and vice versa.

Before I share the why of this article, let me be clear about the what — the problem I’m addressing.

The Problem: SEO and content marketing are not integrated.

The crux of the problem is that SEO and content marketing are separated, as if they were two very different things. The truth is, however, that they go together, overlap, cohere, blend.”

Some people think that content marketing eliminates the need for SEO.

http://bit.ly/28LcPKA

The truth is, SEO and Content Marketing work hand in hand with each other.  SEO cannot function without content and content cannot gain wider visibility without SEO.

SEO Is More Than Just Traffic, Conversions & Revenue

There are 4 key elements to an SEO plan developed around a content marketing strategy:

 

• Find out what people want and give it to them.

• Use retargeting lists to communicate with them, even after they leave your site.

• Make special price offers on your product or service if prospects act now.

• Evolve a smart content marketing plan to build content that pulls in your target customers.

 

If you look carefully, there’s nothing there which is “click/traffic” focused. All those tactical SEO elements exist, but grow really powerful when integrated into a bigger plan.

Source: Search Engine Land

We should think of SEO and content as pieces of jigsaw puzzle that fit well together. When integrated well, these two become a powerful tool that can help propel your business to the top.

There’s No SEO Without Content |Business.com

Graham Charlton tells us more about how content and SEO are interrelated in his article:

8 Ways Content Marketing and SEO Can Work Together

“How Content and SEO Can Work Together

There is a school of thought, or at least the perception exists in some quarters, that SEO is merely about creating good content for the search engines to index.

While I’m all for the quality content part, there’s more to it than that. If you haven’t ensured that the on-site SEO groundwork has been done, your content efforts will be wasted.

For example, if your site has a penalty, or Google isn’t indexing pages properly, then you’re going to need some SEO expertise, great content or not. This is why the SEO experts and content teams need to work together. As the stats below show, this isn’t necessarily happening all the time, but there is a desire for closer collaboration.

http://bit.ly/28LcR52

Closing

It is very important that early on in your internet marketing campaign, you already know the crucial roles played by content and SEO in your overall marketing plan.  Integrating them together and incorporating them as a unit can help you in achieving your business goals.

If you wanted to learn how to effectively incorporate Content Marketing and SEO together, you may call Qamar Zaman, a web marketing expert in Dallas.  He has over 15 years experience in helping startups and entrepreneurs grow their businesses through cost-effective digital marketing strategies.

You may call him at 972.437.8942, or visit him at Submit Press Release 123 for an affordable press release distribution.

Qamar Zaman
Chief Visionary at One SEO Company. An Internet Entrepreneur SEO & lawyer Internet marketing professional & Starbucks Lover.

from Dallas Internet Marketing Blog