This week’s marketing question: “Is SEO a thing of the past?”
Key Point: Search engines are re-writing website title tags and the algorithms get more and more sophisticated so it would be easy to think (hope) that search engine optimization work is no longer needed. But it’s not true.
Mark de Grasse explains why SEO is still an integral part of digital marketing.
- People are spending more time online.
- People are asking search engines more questions.
- Consumer spending is on the rise.
- Five million blog posts were published per day in Q1 of 2021.
- Companies who blog get a 13x ROI compared to those who don’t.
More time = more data = more insight into what people are looking for and how they come to your site. Leverage that to increase traffic to your site and to optimize your content for conversions like Buy Now or Subscribe.
SEO is about showing up and standing out.
SEO Tips and Tricks
Orphan pages are indexable pages that have no internal links. This means there are no links to this page from anywhere on your site. These pages are often overlooked in SEO, but they can be a big help in improving your site’s SEO performance.
Ross Simmonds deconstructs how the marketing of Masterclass.com is a masterclass in SEO. Read this for inspiration on how you can adopt their content marketing tactics.
Google’s recent Title Tags Rewrite is leaving some SEO specialists highly strung. What’s a title tag? It’s a piece of HTML that identifies the title of the page, and it often appears in search results as the underlined listing or heading text. SEO specialists spend a lot of time working out the best phrases and words to include in those titles. MOZ explains the 9+ ways Google is rewriting title tags and what lessons we can learn from that.
The official word from Google may be that contributor bios are not a ranking factor, but there is benefit in having clear bylines and information demonstrating expertise in an author’s bio page.
This applies to book publisher sites and author bios used on book detail pages, as well as for blog contributor bylines.
Aim for author bios that are 50-100 words, include job title and function (if applicable), and summarize expertise on the topic, accolades or other information that demonstrates reputation. Link a contributor’s byline to their Author Bio page, which should include the author’s social media profiles and a good photo.
Social media indirectly helps SEO. Links shared across social media increase brand exposure, which in turn can result in people searching for your products and services by name. Hubspot’s “State of Marketing in 2021” report is full of data on where marketers are finding success. Facebook offers the best return on investment. Its advertising tools offer the best options for segmentation. Instagram is second, and I can attest to that. Publishers are seeing lots of follower growth here. The trick is that “link in bio” doesn’t easily drive site traffic. Which is to say, if you are not already using Instagram Shopping, please get on it. Then those shopping links work.
