Search Marketing Sage

The days of PR and marketing living separate lives are over. When you think about it, they both have one common goal: promotion. And with the ever-growing importance of content marketing and the increasing role social media is playing in how content appears in search results, the overlap between PR and SEO strategies is a natural one that cannot be ignored.

How can marketers and PR pros alike leverage this to their benefit and create a truly integrated PR and SEO strategy? This will be the topic du jour at tomorrow’s Search Mojo webinar, The Convergence of PR and SEO: Harnessing the Power of Content, Social and Search.

Are you contributing guest posts to other blogs? It may seem counter-intuitive to write for other blogs other than your own, but there are actually huge benefits to be reaped from guest blogging, both for your company and yourself, such as:

• Reaching a larger target audience
• Attracting more leads for your company
• Building fruitful business relationships
• Gaining big SEO points

In this post, which is part one of a two-part series, I’m going to go into more detail about these benefits so you can see why taking your content outside of your own four virtual walls can deliver massive results for your business.

It’s National Tell A Story Day tomorrow, April 27th – and as a marketer, I love to tell stories. Ultimately, that is what your content should be doing: telling a story your customers can understand and relate to. But the biggest mistake we as marketers can make in our content is telling a story about our companies and products, and NOT our customers. You must know what challenges they have, how what you’re selling will help them with that challenge, and then create content that shows them this while making them the hero of your story.

I recently participated in a panel of very smart marketers at the Mid-Atlantic Marketing Summit, and we talked about how Google’s Penguin and Panda algorithm updates created a fundamental shift in how we view content creation. All of a sudden, we needed to create content that was useful and people liked to read (gasp!), rather than just content to feed the Google monster and get rankings. So, the way we approached SEO also shifted – no more over-optimization practices, just good content that was not only searchable, but shareable.

But that doesn’t mean that SEO goes completely out the window when creating content. You can still optimize, just don’t over-optimize. You want to make sure that Google is still indexing your content correctly and for the proper keywords. Here are some tips to ensure your content is telling Google the right story:

So you think you’ve heard all there is to know about content marketing and why it’s such an important part of your digital marketing strategy. You’ve seen the case studies demonstrating how content converts prospects into leads and leads into customers, and the statistics showing how marketers are making content marketing a top priority. You’ve read about all the different types of content you need to be creating. You’re convinced already, and trust me, I’m right there with you. This is exactly what I thought heading into the Digital Content Marketing session today at DemandCon San Francisco – what other new ideas could I possibly glean from this session?

I was wrong. And pleasantly surprised.

Here’s what I learned today, and the most important thing you need to know if you plan to enter the big, bright world of content marketing: you need an editor, and a good one.

Marketers are increasingly looking to video as a major content marketing priority, making video marketing their top area for investment in 2012. It will continue to be a top priority in 2013, with video considered an effective content marketing tactic by 58% of marketers, according to the Content Marketing Institute’s report 2013 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends.

With the right strategy in place, video content can be a highly effective content marketing tactic. Whether you’re already creating videos, or want to start creating them, it’s important to make sure they’re properly optimized for search. We’ve created this checklist of video SEO tactics to ensure they get the search engine exposure they deserve.