seo Archives - Michael Dillon

February 21, 2017

Two Vital Elements that Might Be Missing from Your Content (and Precisely Where to Add Them)

It’s taken you more than 10 hours to write a blog post. You’ve researched the topic to the nth degree. You’ve edited it to within an inch of its life. Now it’s time to get it out into the world! You excitedly press Publish, and … even days later … crickets. Heartbreaking, right? We all like to think that the amount of effort we invest in creating a piece of content directly correlates to how deeply it resonates with readers . But, experience has repeatedly shown this is not the case. So, what’s the deciding factor if it’s not effort? Luck? Timing? Skill? Yes, the factors above do play a part. But, more often than not, it comes down to these two elements: If your content doesn’t hook readers in the first few sentences, it doesn’t matter how good the rest of it is, you’ve lost them. If you […]

How to Use Psychology to Create High-Performing Content

When email marketing first started becoming popular in the late 1990s, it was possible to get open rates over 80 percent . When AdWords started getting traction, you could buy clicks for high-volume keywords at very low cost. In the early days of content marketing, it was easy to rank in search. As time goes on, you have to deal with more and more competition, which makes it harder to stand out. It’s not as easy to rank or drive leads as it used to be. But, there’s a deeper, more pernicious aspect of aging marketing channels that people rarely talk about: As more and more content gets created, it gets harder to make your company sound different from its competitors. Related: The 3 Types of Marketing Emails That Nobody Has Opened in Years One of the reasons for this is that we tend to look to our competition, […]

33 Tips to Build a Memorable Online Brand

“If you’re not on the internet. You don’t exist.” Seth Godin said that – or maybe it was Winston Churchill? Whoever it was, they had a point. Dramatic? Definitely, but not any less true. If someone Google’s (it’s a verb now, right?) your business and it doesn’t show up, then you’re as good as dead. But you already know this. You’ve been doing the online branding thing for a while now and it’s not working! Your brand doesn’t have that many followers on social media or maybe it does, but they’re not converting. Or maybe you don’t know this stuff, and are just preparing to hop onto this whole online marketing train everyone keeps talking about. Either way, you’ll be able to find some helpful tips in this post. These tips are probably not going to be a magic cure for your branding problems (it’s not a 12 step […]

5 Ways to Level Up Your Content Marketing Maturity

Large or small. Growing or dwindling resources. New or experienced in the content marketing realm. Every organization is at a different stage in their content marketing maturity, looking for innovative and even practical ways to bring their efforts to the next level. But as the old adage goes, you have to walk before you run—and that couldn’t be more true when it comes to growing your content marketing maturity. Simply put. In order to grow your content marketing maturity, you have to understand where you’re at and create a strategy to get to the next step. Using TopRank Marketing’s own content marketing maturity model —developed by CEO Lee Odden —below we offer insights to help you determine your current level of maturity, as well as tips to help you move on to the next. #1 – Stasis Stasis is the ground-level of our content marketing maturity model, with marketers […]

Your Essential Guide to Internal Content Linking

22Today, it’s easy to get caught up in the glitzy, glamorous SEO tricks and tactics that are flooding the web. SEOs and marketers everywhere are focused deeply on things like site audits and the latest and greatest in Google algorithm updates, and that’s all well and good, but sometimes it means that the simpler and, often, more critical fundamentals get overlooked. One of these overlooked SEO components is internal linking. If you think of SEO as a house, internal linking is the framework of that house. Internal linking provides the flow of traffic, allows you to navigate the space from room to room, and makes the space comfortable and intuitive. When you think of it this way, why would you build a blog without internal linking? Unfortunately, many people do. (And yes – if you look closely, you’ll notice I internal linked above!) In addition to making your web […]

5 Under-the-Radar Social Media Studies to Make You A Smarter Marketer

Written by Alfred Lua We are very grateful for all the research that has been done on social media. Social media studies have given us great ideas to improve our social media marketing , helped us understand the psychology behind social media behaviors , and made us better marketers . To help you better understand the ever-changing social media landscape, we jumped into the latest social media research papers, hoping to discover some under-the-radar insights to help supercharge your social media marketing strategy as we head into 2017. In this post, I’d love to share what we discovered and bring you some insightful and surprising social media studies of 2016, sharing the key findings and actionable takeaways you can try today. If any of these studies inspired you with more ideas to experiment with, I’d love to hear from you! 5 Under-the-Radar Social Media Studies to Make You A […]