SEO

In marketing, social networks present additional channels of communication. They are places where your potential customers spend a lot of time. Most of them love shopping and to engage with their favorite businesses in many ways. It would be illogical to miss this opportunity for brand exposure and sales growth.

Still, its hardly efficient to be present on all of the social networks, time and money-wise. So, different social networks are offering different promotions and different audiences.

Well, there is one exception which is Facebook. It is almost like a universal network. Most importantly along with Google, it offers the most powerful online ads platform. 

A LinkedIn business page is also a must-have nowadays. It’s an awesome platform where you can show your brand values, recruit new quality employees and create a possible network of business partners. 

All the other networks are unnecessary but each brings a number of benefits and is unique for every type of business.

Start by identifying your goals and creating a social identity

The first step anywhere is establishing and defining goals. With defined goals, it is easy to measure success and react quickly if your campaign is not producing satisfying results. 

Without goals, it would be hard to truly measure success and return of investment. Also, sales results are not everything. For a new business or e-commerce on the market, it’s equally important to let people in your geographical area known that you exist. 

Your social network goals have to be inlined with a wide digital marketing strategy. That way the efforts you put in social networks are going directly toward achieving wider business goals. Of course, most of us here work for ourselves. This is more important for bigger companies because your budget and overall ROI depends on the success of your digital marketing strategy. 

S.M.A.R.T Goal is a good metric to follow when establishing goals. It means: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bond.

Content strategy

There are many misconceptions about how to create an effective and unique content strategy. Most advice that you can find over the internet is useless. Because they are not giving you actual advice about how to create quality content. Something that will organically spark interest in people.

There is no social strategy or tool that will help you with content creation. When it comes to tools, all I can tell you is that social calendar tools like Sprout Social can offer some help thanks to their listening tools. Listening tools will give you an insight into your content. More importantly, you will see what your main competitors and industry leaders are posting. What type of posts are the most popular and have the biggest engagement? 

This can help you with strategy and to quickly learn about new industry trends. 

So, then how to have good content?

Good content should not be about your product most of the time. You don’t want to annoy people with constant product promotions as well. 

Tons of people would not follow someone’s Facebook business page unless they really like their content.

Many social media managers are trying to solve this problem by Googling funny images, memes, gifs, famous people’s quotes and such. This will get them some likes maybe even some really popular posts. Problem is that you can’t earn money with likes. You need to attract people who are interested in your brand or that will get interested because of your brand values. You don’t want to attract some random people who like your image just because it’s funny. That image doesn’t say anything about your brand. 

They will have no knowledge of your brand or desire to even see who posts it. 

Ideally, visitors and followers of your social media channel should only be customers or potential customers. 

The story will not be any better if a professional marketing agency is managing your channel. They have graphic designers, video editors, and social media managers… They will make a content strategy for a month in advance. So, they will make like 3 posts a week presenting your product in different situations. It looks nice and all but…it’s boring and does not represent your brand values. Just pushy promotional content. 

So, will you finally tell us what to post????

You had to understand the bad practices first. Now… finally… and the answer is very simple. Communicate your brand values.

This is what I do first when I create a social media strategy for a client. I ask their manager or we try to establish brand values together. Write down 5 to 10 values that a brand should project. Those are universal human values, it’s not about a product at all.

Then you just create content for every one of those values. Some will fixture more often and some content you will share only a few times a month. It will also depend on the social networks that you have chosen.

Let me show you an example, so you will understand this better:

Let’s say that you are managing a Facebook page for a company that makes homemade honey. 

What are your values?

Home Made – product comes from nature and is transferred to jars cheerfully and by worker’s hand. 

Healthy Food – food is organic from healthy honey bees. You do not put any sweeteners or anything that those industrial makers are doing. 

Old People’s Wisdom – Old people have experience, wisdom and see solutions that young people do not see. 

Returning to Nature – Getting away from the noisy, polluted urban environments. 

Ethno Culture– the beauty of historic music, craftsmanship, recipes and such.

Good All Times– nostalgia for the times when everything was more natural and organic. 

Childhood– back to a much happier times

So, what content we can create from this?

• An old image of something historically important that happened in one of your country’s cities or smaller towns. Just a photo and a short copy. Then make an ad from a post and promote it only to people from that town area. They will like the photo and will appreciate your brand for mentioning their hometown.

• An old women’s short life story and her advice. Similar to ‘’Humans of New York’’ Facebook page.

• Image of an old workshop, talking about a grandfather always working on something. An emotional hook.

• An old recipe, video from someone’s actual home. Nobody has to talk about your product. It can be used in a recipe sometimes.

• Ask people to share their old images. Or images where they use your product in a right way. 

• share images of interesting destinations from your country.

I could write many more of these post ideas. Point is, that you can see how an organic non-promotional content can be created from brand values. Your business page now has a soul. It is different from others and people do not feel like they will be bombarded with promotional, uninteresting content.

Actually, they will look forward to seeing your next post. 

The art of SEO is rapidly changing all the time. It depends on many factors, mostly from Google. If Google makes changes in its policy, about what will affect website ranking and authority, many of our SEO strategies will be obsolete.

Google also works on improving its algorithms and crawlers. So, they can be smarter in detecting any SEO scams.

Rules for good SEO optimization

1. Content Quality

Content quality plays a bigger role every year. As I mentioned, Google crawlers are becoming smarter and more sophisticated. So, you have to create content that is thoughtful, detailed, intelligent and possibly above anyone in the industry. You should create content having your readers in mind and not SEO.

These are some basic content SEO rules that you need to satisfy:

1. Pages have to be created with your readers and the customer experience in mind.

2. Do not make false claims or content in general.

3. Think about what makes your website unique, interesting and different from other websites from the same geographical area.

4. Your website has to tell your company’s story with a unique voice.

5. Try to avoid any suspicious services and programs that offer SEO content optimization help.

2. What type of content does Google appreciate?

Google loves deep and meaningful content. A quality article from 500 to 1500 words. So, do not purposely try to drag out your text or put as many keywords as possible. Your article has to have a substance.

What this means is that you should write recommendations, advice, make your own analysis, thought-provoking pieces and create relevant topics.

Keywords are still important and relevant as ever before. Still, making sure that your content is natural and pleasing to your readers is more important for SEO. Because this is what Google algorithms are searching for today. So, you can’t overcrowd your text with keywords or force certain topics in any way. You can be sure that Google is classifying your article in the right category and it will show it in an appropriate search result.

Promote your content through online ads, newsletters, and social media. It will not attract people by itself, no matter how good it is!

3. Optimize your webpages for appropriate keywords

Do not focus on your main keyword, instead, try to think about what keywords people could Google search, that is connected to your content. So, it’s all about knowing as many keywords and synonyms for your main keywords as possible. This is a golden rule for content marketing.

The most important tool for Google rankings is called – SERP. Under those new rules, the top place in Google rankings is #0. This is a featured snippet that will be shown above the top search pages.

A featured snippet allows people to learn a lot more about the website and its content without leaving the Google search page. Therefore, SERP is being used as a bait for people to click on that website. Google wants to produce the most relevant search results possible. So, it’s in Google’s interest that people click on the most relevant and quality page possible.

Basically, SERP is ‘’El Dorado’’ for every business website owner. 

4. How to have a chance to touch this SEO perfection?

Go straight to the point – do not write long, main topic unrelated intro. Give people relevant information and talk about what interests them throughout all the articles. Do what I did in this blog. 

Research Keywords – make sure that your copywriter or SEO expert creates a keyword plan and conducts research about the topic. Therefore, you can write about keywords that are relevant to your topic but are not covered by your competition.

Make list articles – Google loves any type of list and numbering. It makes article analysis much easier. People love it too. They can scroll the article with ease and read what is most interesting to them.

Frequently asked questions – incredibly effective with a clear goal of answering questions. Google likes it as well because it is easy to judge the quality of that article. Also, it’s your opportunity to answer any questions about the product that is potentially tricky with a well-thought-out answer.

Links – Links are great for Google crawler’s easy indexing and a better understanding of the relevancy of your content. Google actually states that links and backlinks are the most important factors for ranking websites # 1 i # 2.

The creation of a quality backlink network should be key to your SEO strategy in 2020.

5. There are a few types of links you should be focused on!

1. Editorial Links present quality backlinks that you get if you have great content.
It is so important that you don’t ask others for links. Instead they are linking your content willingly. This means that you have a quality content that other people in the industry value. For Google its the most important type of feedback about your content quality.

2. PBN – Private Blog Network – This is part of the so-called Grey Hat SEO. It’s not illegal per se but you are playing with fire. Why is that? Well, the idea is to create a network of websites that you will take over and fill with quality content. The Internet is full of people willing to sell you expiring or developed domains. Along with a domain you are automatically absorbing their website rank as well and therefore boosting your own Google rank and authority. Keep in mind that Google constantly searches for illegal PBNs. Even worse your competitors are looking at your backlinks as well. So, you must be really careful when using PBNs. It’s also a very expensive SEO strategy.

RankBrain – This is Google’s machine-learning artificial intelligence system that tries to implement an interpretation model for a better understanding of content.

In simple terms, it’s an algorithm that should help Google to have a better understanding of the context within your text. RankBrain uses a system of synonyms for keywords in your article, to better understand the content and its meaning.

Google is talking about RankBrain since 2015. At the end of 2019, we still don’t know much about it. Sadly there is not much that we can do to trick or abuse this system in any way.

In fact, RankBrain conforms what I was telling you about the quality of content. With this sophisticated algorithm, keywords have become much less significant for SEO.

Is there anything else that would be useful to know about SEO?
Well… yes but you probably know that already. For a better page rank, take care about the text that you are writing in meta tags and headline. Also, take care about image optimization and description, mobile version of your website and its performance.

All of them are helping Google to understand what your website and content are all about. A smooth functioning, a well-optimized website is a key for achieving a good Page Rank.