Samuel Edwards

The impact of your old content will start to wane over time. Your content is still good, but it’s not great. It’s gotten stale. For some companies, that’s attributable to a lack of new, unique ideas. For others, it’s the product of content exhaustion. No matter the root cause, if you want your content to start exciting people again AND to rank better in search, you’ll need to: Completely re-write existing content that receives little or no traffic OR Update your writing to make your content truly evergreen OR Reuse and repurpose old content into new mediums OR Refresh, update and streamline existing content As the famous Einstein quote reveals, Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them You can’t necessarily fix your stale content problem by applying the same content solutions from your first iteration. Instead, try one of these alternative content strategies to inject new life into your work. Change Your URL Slug, Intros, Titles, Metas & H1/H2/H3 This post was originally published in 2014, but has been refreshed and updated numerous times over the years. Almost nothing remains the same from the original piece: The URL slug is different (but there are 301 redirects implemented). We typically make them shorter, targeting higher-volume search terms. The title and meta description are both different. The intro paragraph and section are completely altered. All the H1 and H2 sections are named differently. Large portions of the text body have been edited, updated. Multiple new internal links have been added. The bulk of the content is mostly the same, but iterations have significantly altered this post over the years. We try to perform content refreshing to about 30-40% of our site’s content on an annual basis. That means that everyday, something changes on one or more of the existing posts on our site. Google loves these types of updates as it shows active engagement and attempts by your team to improve your on-site content. When you have finished Outsource Your Content Outsourcing your content might scare you for two reasons: first, you might be afraid to relinquish control of your brand voice to someone who is unfamiliar with it. Second, you might be worried about the extra budget of paying a new writer to join your team. Fortunately, you don’t necessarily have to pay a writer to cultivate great content, and a divergence from your brand voice—as long as it’s tied to a separate individual brand—could actually be a good thing. Here’s how to handle it. Make an announcement that your company is looking for guest bloggers in the space, and if you already know some prominent guest bloggers, feel free to reach out to them directly. Give them a handful of general guidelines, but for the most part, let them create whatever they feel would be good for your blog—the final edit is yours. Give them author credit and some extra shares on social media, and you’ll end up with brand-new, alternative content for free. Repurpose Your Post Into a Video or Podcast If you’re used to writing all your posts, try experimenting with a new mediums: podcasts and video. High-quality video production takes expensive equipment and technical skills, but putting together a basic monologue-based video is painfully simple. Instead of writing directly about a giving subject, try speaking the information as if giving a lecture. Post the video on your YouTube channel for some extra social media authority, and embed the video into your blog. Then, type out a transcript of the video or podcast and post it as an accompaniment to the feature. That way, you’ll get all the SEO benefits of text, but you’ll have a new medium and a slightly different voice to carry your message. In a sense, it’s an instant refresher course that can liven up your traditional subject matter and diversify your blog. Use Interactive Posts Interactive posts are shorter pieces of content than your traditional how-to articles and news posts. They may require a bit of extra coding, but if you can make them evergreen and valuable for your customers, they’ll last forever and will send you surging up in rankings. There are many types of interactive posts, but two of the most common are calculators and quizzes. Calculators will require user input for a number of different fields, then automatically calculate an answer to a customer question—for example, there are compound interest calculators that will project retirement savings based on a handful of assumptions based on user input. Quizzes, on the other hand, ask a user a series of questions and formulate a response based on their answers—on Facebook, the most shareable quizzes tend to be personality based, such as “which Game of Thrones character are you?” but they have a practical business application as well. For example, you could have a quiz for “which light bulb is best for my kitchen?” or “what type of car should I buy?” to guide users to specific products. Gamification. You can also choose to make your content interactive by gamifying it. Gamification increases website dwell time and enhances user stickiness. Radically Alter Your Content Length This is a fairly simple strategy, but you will be amazed at how much of a difference it makes, especially if you’ve gotten used to adhering to a certain word count. For example, if you’re used to writing standard 800-word posts, eventually you’ll find a rhythm, and for a time that rhythm will be a good thing—you’ll get better at fitting your content into that length. But eventually, it can lead to stale, repetitive, formulaic content. Alternating the length of your content can keep you on your toes and give you more opportunities to change up your process. For example, try writing two posts of 500 words, and then a 2,500 word post before returning to 800 words. Write a Book (or eBook) You don’t necessarily have to publish a book; all you have to do is write in the style of

Video remains an untapped resource for SEO: Videos are consumed more frequently than text Videos have the potential to go viral and drive hoards of eyeballs YouTube remains the second largest search engine, behind Google.com Videos can help you build direct and indirect backlinks Here we discuss how to use video to build links to your website. Let’s dive in! Importance of Link building Source: Moz Whether you know it or not, link building can make or break your SEO and your business in this day and age. Maybe you’re new to link building, maybe you’re an old pro. Either way, SEO best practices are always changing and it’s easy to fall behind or employ outdated tactics that are less effective. You don’t want to waste your time on ineffective practices, do you? Didn’t think so. With that in mind, here is a guide to one of the underutilized methods for effective link building: using video. Video is more pervasive on the internet than you might realize. It’s not all cute cat clips and movie trailers. They’re embedded in websites and emails, shared across all social platforms, and get total watch times with many, many zeros attached. Projections of internet traffic in upcoming years show that live internet video and internet video to TV will both occupy huge chunks of consumer internet traffic. In other words, lots of time will be spent watching videos online. The question is: will the internet audience be watching your videos or your competitor’s? Will credible, valued websites be linking to your video and boosting your SEO? If one thing is certain, it’s that video isn’t going anywhere. So how can you use video to your advantage in building backlinks? Here’s how: You never want to head into a new tactic blind so don’t think that video is any different. Yes, videos can be immensely helpful, but only if you know how to execute them according to your SEO goals. Video Research Take thirty seconds to try and come up with a video idea for your business that will be well received. How confident are you in that idea? Are you sure that it will bring your business to the next level, beating out the competitors? Unless you have some magical powers of determination, you probably don’t just know off the top of your head what works and what doesn’t in the world of internet videos. Just like anything else, you need to do some research as a first step before getting in too deep and realizing you don’t know what you’re doing. Spend some time looking into what kinds of videos succeed, using shares and views as simple success metrics. What style do these videos use? How long are they? What makes them stand out from the millions of hours of other content online? Also, who is your target audience? They’re the people who matter here. If you can find what works, then you can replicate and adapt it to your needs so it works for your business, too. Don’t forget that, while link building is the goal here, other metrics like watch time or the number of shares can also tell you how valuable a given video is to you. Make Your Videos Unique Sure, everyone is a perfectly unique snowflake and all and yet so often people end up making near-identical copies of the things already out there. There’s a fine line between finding the strategies that have worked for other businesses and taking advantage of them and just regurgitating the same stuff. Spoiler alert: your audience doesn’t want to watch a cheap imitation (or even an expensive, well-executed imitation) of a video they’ve already seen. One of the great challenges of creating content for the internet is the speed at which trends and fads come and go. Just putting it out there: you’re probably not quick enough to jump on all the latest trends so don’t waste your time chasing ideas that are already outdated. Look at what’s already published and do something related but unique. Say your business is a home cleaning service and you want to build links by making a video about DIY cleaning techniques. If you open Google and search for those videos, there are probably already hundreds or thousands of them. So instead of just making yet another version, put a twist on it. Make a video about the worst DIY cleaning techniques or cleaning up the biggest messes possible. Dramatic, exaggerated ideas often play well online so long as you actually deliver. One way you don’t want to stand out, though, is by using bad equipment. Lighting and sound. Hear that? One more time. Lighting and sound! You don’t want to spend the time coming up with a great idea, executing it perfectly, and then having the video flop because it has horrible lighting or sound or both. As a rule, bad content is worse than no content. These videos should look professional (and thus reliable) for them to be good link building strategies and just a pleasant experience in general for the audience. Don’t forget about mobile devices, either! You should optimize your videos for desktop and mobile to reach as broad an audience as possible. Now let’s look at the presiding ruler of video platforms: YouTube. Using YouTube for Link Building As you may know, YouTube is the undisputed leader in the field of video platforms. It’s the second most visited website on the internet, behind Google, and clocks billions of hours of video viewing every day. Every single day. If those numbers aren’t standing out to you as a huge potential opportunity, maybe you shouldn’t be in business. Or you at least need to get your eyes checked. Obviously, you’re never going to get all of YouTube’s 1.9 billion users to watch one of your videos or link back to them. Massive numbers of views can be very satisfying and that’s a fair goal to shoot for but remember that we’re

We have assembled a list of 101 different ways you can improve your search rankings, boiling down our SEO knowledge into concrete, executable points that are easy to understand even for a novice. For organizational purposes, these are split into categories: Domain optimization: These are strategies for how to choose, host, and maintain your domain. Global on-site optimization: These are on-page SEO tactics that apply to your entire site, either improving your authority and trustworthiness or ensuring your visibility to search crawlers or search engine rankings. Page-level on-site optimization: These are page-specific on-site updates, internal links, and meta description tags, again either improving your authority and trustworthiness or ensuring your visibility to search crawlers of search engines. Improve SEO Link building: These are strategies to build and earn backlinks, which are crucial for increasing your domain authority and powerful internal link structure. Social Media: Social media marketing can’t increase your rankings organic traffic on organic search results page directly, but it can have a massive bearing on secondary ranking factors. Correctional strategies: These are tactics to fix issues or course-correct a slipping Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy. When it comes to improving SEO, there are dozens of tactics such as good site content, target keyword pages on your site and best practices to bring customers Or site visitors into your blog post or web page, website or eCommerce business in accord with mobile devices UI. Whether your customers are looking for a good restaurant to eat at (local SEO), the name of a trusted tax attorney, or just a random fact about the movie they’re watching—you want them to find you on Google search results or on search engine results. Everybody does. And everybody clicks on one of the first entries in the search engine results pages (SERPs) they find. Wouldn’t it be nice if your site was featured at the top of that list? This is the goal of search engines optimization (SEO) but getting your site to rank that high in search engine ranking—especially in a competitive environment—site’s ranking isn’t exactly straightforward. Google only reveals ambiguous descriptions of how its main algorithm works (to prevent spammers and manipulators), and over the years & infinite SEO efforts, we’ve discovered hundreds of potential ranking signals & perfect keyword research tool. Add in the fact that Google’s search results, Google search console algorithms are always changing and improving, and it’s easy to see why SEO & SEO rankings seems so confusing to so many. Without further ado, let’s dig into these 101 ways to improve your site’s search rankings! Click the links above to access or the links at right or, simply watch the video. The Video includes Topics: Such as local business listings, broken links, web pages, title tag, inbound links, Google analytics, relevant pages, What are high authority sites, request indexing, loading speed & site loads, landing pages & other pages, featured snippets, content management systems such as wordpress.org & other websites. Furthermore: You will also Know About mobile site & mobile usability issues, mobile users, desktop site, local search, high-quality content, relevant queries, site speed, site structure, page titles, first page, page load, existing content, Google images, other search engines, alt tags & image file names. Technical SEO, linking site, dead link/broken link, target keywords & keyword stuffing & what it tells search engines, website traffic & strong SEO strategy, and How you can improve SEO Rankings. Final Words: This post isn’t everything there is to know about SEO or Search Engines, but it is relatively thorough in its approach. With the strategies and tactics, you’ve learned in this guide, you should have enough ammunition to launch and maintain a healthy SEO strategy.

Website dwell time is a ranking factor. Search engines posit that the longer someone stays on your site after finding it through a search, the more likely your page satisfied that user’s query. One solution to improving dwell time on your site and thereby your rankings is gamification. Are you ready to use games on your website to create breakthrough engagement with your visitors? Here we discuss how to use gamification to amplify your SEO strategy & online marketing efforts. What is Gamification? The marketing term “gamification” was coined in 2002 by Nick Pelling, but didn’t become popular until 2010. It describes digital marketing tactics which use gamification elements to drive user engagement with your website, application, or build brand awareness. According to Gartner, more than 70% of the top 2,000 companies are expected to have at least one gamified application by the end of 2014. Research by M2 Research shows that the gamification application, tools, and services market is projected to hit $5.5 billion by 2018. Gamification taps into the human desire for rewards and competition. Users are motivated to compete against others to improve their status (ie, via a leaderboard) within a game. Gamification features allow marketers to apply game mechanics to entice users to take action. These mechanics usually foster competition and exclusive rewards users for reaching goals. Benefits of Gamification: Some of the benefits of gamification include: Education: Gamification can be an effective way to introduce your readers to a new startup or website you are about to launch and market. You can use the game to teach your readers how to use a product before it is launched. Educational games can be an efficient way of collecting information for your business Value while educating people about your product. Engage with your customers: Gamification can help you engage with your customers and provide a frequent reason for them to return to your site. It will help your site to stay top of mind. Compelling data collection: Gamification platforms typically require a visitor to log in with either social media credentials or an email address. After this information is freely given out, it will allow your company to gather data on the visitor as well as track where they go on your website. Gamification achievements can generate plenty of data associated with that account. This data can supply powerful customer engagement information. Feedback can also be collected from games, which can help the company solve real business-related problems. If the feedback is utilized properly, it can also be used as a form of idea generation plucked from a massive number of users. How Gamification Works Most gamification uses certain tactics to get website visitors to participate: Competition can be used to incite website visitors to achieve status and rewards. The status achieved in the games can be used to inspire people to purchase more products and services over time. In some cases, people are willing to spend money to achieve a higher status or additional tokens for gameplay. Gaming elements can be used to make the marketing experience enjoyable to participants. This can provide better results than simply showing advertisements. Gamification allows visitors to participate in the marketing process and keeps them engaged for longer periods of time. Gamification in the Real World Participation is what gamification is all about. Whenever you need to collect information from your clients with a survey, you can use gamification to improve results. By offering rewards such as a discount, coupon, or an offer to win a prize, you can increase the likelihood of participation. Another option is to require a survey question to be answered before proceeding to the next level of the game. Companies have used gamification to: Entice travellers to use frequent flyer miles on a specific airline Reward employees with the highest product knowledge Encourage children to learn more about a given topic Adding Gamification to your Website Whether the goal is to track clicks, test sales, or collect data on surveys, make sure your game is an actionable step in your marketing objectives. Make the primary purpose of the game to collect this information for your marketing needs. In order for gamification to provide long-term user engagement, it needs to help your business. Gamification is about better engagement with your audience and facilitating a more interactive experience with your company’s products and services –Ivo Lukas, CEO and founder of 24Notion. The underlying marketing objective of the game should be something such as encouraging visitors to use a new sales channel, obtaining feedback through surveys, driving new product or service adoption, or increasing the frequency of purchases. Use gamification as a tactic to meet your measurable business goals. A good example of this would be increased engagement and engagement analytics with website visitors. Gamification is far more than simply putting a branded game on your Web site. Track your progress toward achieving business goals in real-time. Don’t create a game for a game’s sake. If gamification is not providing measurable ROI, then you shouldn’t be doing it –Ryan Elkins, CEO and co-founder of actionable. Crossing multiple marketing channels The best gamification platforms cross multiple marketing channels to include social media, online, off-line, and mobile devices. Make sure that the outcomes of the gameplay are available whenever and wherever your visitors want to share them. Allowing your visitors to play the game anytime they want across multiple channels will greatly increase participation. Test, test, and test some more Like any other web content, you should split test your game to see which version of content, videos, graphics, etc. provide greater participation. Split testing can also be a great way to see which awards provide the best engagement. Promote it Take every opportunity to talk about your new game on social media, your website, off-line, and more. Make sure that every visitor has the ability to play your incredible new game and is informed of the rewards that can be achieved. Conclusion Gamification can improve engagement, increase dwell time

Sitemaps are a critical and often overlooked element of your site structure, and they play a crucial role for search engines looking to index information about your site. Major sitemap issues include: Lack of a sitemap or sitemap that’s not submitted to Google Search Console (GSC) Outdated sitemap Overly large or complicated sitemap (a.k.a. sitemap not optimized for a limited crawl budget ) General sitemap code errors (e.g. 301 redirects or 404 errors) If your sitemap falls out of date and you don’t take measures to correct it, you could pay the price with reduced search visibility and therefore, less traffic to your site. Why Sitemaps Are Beneficial Onsite sitemaps are a link on your main site that contain a structured data layout of all your existing pages. They’re crawled by Google and inform the search engine about the remainder of your onsite pages. XML Sitemaps are files that you can build and submit to Google directly. Essentially, these files are a condensed map that lays out the structure and hierarchy of your site. By submitting a sitemap to Google, you’re telling the search engine to review and index the pages of your site—and this is a critical first step when you’re launching something new. Sitemaps are basically instructions that allow search engines to find your pages faster and more accurately. Keeping them updated ensures that Google has the best understanding of your overall website, and the greatest number of your pages are showing up for the appropriate searches. How to Implement a Sitemap If you’re using WordPress as your CMS, then I would suggest the Yoast SEO plugin to create and manage your sitemaps. When it comes to structure, we suggest the simplest sitemap structure possible. For instance, in our sitemap, we have removed many of the extensive sub-sitemaps available in the Yoast plugin, including: Categories Tags Authors (we keep author archives “on” but remove the Author sitemap) Portfolios Templates Downloads Unless we want specific indexation, the only sitemaps we include in our sitemap at SEO.co are for “Pages” and “Posts”: Google only has to crawl the following three pages to access ALL the content on our site: https://seo.co/sitemap_index.xml  (with only two simple links to the other two sitemaps) https://seo.co/post-sitemap.xml  https://seo.co/page-sitemap.xml If you have a shop in Woocommerce with numerous SKUs, then indexing your store products with a separate sitemap is advised. But the ideal sitemap will have the least number of steps for the webcrawlers to get access to the content. Crawlers can be fickle and rarely will crawl (let alone index or re-index) your entire site in a single pass. You can turn off additional sub-maps in the Yoast features: If you’re not on WordPress, you can use a custom XML sitemap generator. I would suggest https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/  for a simple, free solution. The Dangers of an Outdated Sitemap If your sitemap isn’t up-to-date, you could be providing inaccurate data to search engines. Depending on the severity of your inaccuracies, this could have major consequences or minimal impact. For example, if one of your hundred product pages drops off, you won’t see much of an impact. However, if you’ve restructured your entire navigation, search engines could be confused when they attempt to crawl your site, and you may lose indexed pages as a result. In addition to having a smaller number of indexed, searchable pages, your domain authority could even take a hit. The bottom line here is that an outdated sitemap will send outdated information to Google—and while Google, in some cases, is smart enough to make sense of these discrepancies on its own, the safer play is to ensure your sitemaps are always up-to-date. How Your Sitemap Can Become Outdated Sitemaps don’t become obsolete on their own. Only through a deliberate change in your site, usually an increase or decrease in the number of pages, can make your previously submitted sitemap outdated. Keep a close eye on the changes you make to your site, and if you do make a significant change, take efforts to keep your sitemap updated accordingly. Adding and Removing Pages By far the most common reason for a sitemap becoming outdated is the addition or removal of a core page. Even traditional, static websites experience the need for change from time to time—whether that’s the addition of a new service page or the removal of a special offers page that’s no longer relevant. While some regularly updated sections of your website (such as a blog or press page) will be routinely scanned by Google, any major page changes will need to be reflected in an updated sitemap. Redesigning the Site or Navigation Restructuring your site (e.g. into a hub and spoke strategy) will also require an update to your sitemap. In addition to simply listing out the pages of your site, the sitemap is responsible for showcasing the hierarchy of your web presence, outlining the most important pages in a very specific order. If you make major changes to your navigation or restructure your page-based priorities, you’ll need to update your sitemap. Adding or Removing Products or Listings E-commerce sites and sites with classified-style postings (like job opportunities) tend to be the most vulnerable to sitemaps falling into obsolescence. Since most of these sites have large volumes of products and listings, sometimes numbering in the thousands, it’s common for new blog posts to be written and old postings to be taken down. Fortunately, a dynamic sitemap can spare you the pain of manually updating a sitemap every time you make a minor change, but you will have to routinely check to ensure your sitemap is accurate and up-to-date. Sitemap Diagnostics The easiest way to test whether your sitemap is current or outdated is to check it using Google Webmaster Tools. If you haven’t yet uploaded a sitemap here, you can start from scratch. If you need help creating your sitemap from scratch, be sure to read up on Google’s guidelines for building a sitemap. Once submitted, you might encounter errors during the

As a marketing agency serving mid or small-sized businesses, you know how much these business owners rely on you to guide them on where to invest their money and ultimately maximize the return on their campaigns. That seems like a lot of pressure! But, we’re here to tell you a sure-shot way to help your clients earn good profits as the government itself gives tax credits to small businesses. Of course, this isn’t some alien concept. In fact, governments across the world help out businesses or individuals by rewarding them with tax credits. These tax credits cut down the actual taxes that business owners have to pay. The reward in question is a $5000 tax credit on their taxes by the government when they decide to work with you. Sounds exciting, right? But, just hang in there, and we’ll answer all your questions and offer you all the reasons to opt for this incentive. Who Is This Program For? This program can benefit all those who run a marketing agency serving local businesses. According to the IRS Code Section 44, all those small businesses that comply with the ADA and have total revenues of $1,000,000 or less in the previous tax year are eligible for receiving a maximum credit of $5,000. If you work with clients who fulfill these requirements, then each of these clients can get a $5,000 credit. What Type Of Businesses? Marketing agencies that serve local businesses qualify for this program. Such small companies usually fulfill the following two requirements to be eligible for this tax credit: If the business earns US$1 million or less in revenue per year in receipts for the last tax year If the business had less than thirty full-time employees in the last tax year Such clients can qualify for a tax credit for website improvements, marketing campaigns, etc. This serves as a huge advantage for businesses as they get a 50% credit for expenditures over $250, not exceeding a total of $10,250 (or $5,000). How Does The Incentive Work? Are you impressed yet? Let us show you what exactly happens in this campaign and how you can get your clients to qualify for it. It’s as simple as it sounds. As a marketing agency, this is a huge incentive that you can propose to your clients to encourage them to work with you. Say your client owes $20,000 as small business taxes to the government. With a $5,000 tax credit claim, they can subtract this amount from the original tax bill and get the new tax bill that amounts to $15,000. Isn’t it amazing? Business owners struggle to pay taxes, and here the government is literally paying them a portion of it every year when potential clients decide to collaborate with you. With this $5,000 cashback into the business owner’s pocket who works with you, clients will be lining up outside your office to get this benefit, expanding your agency’s business as well. What Does The Government Get Out Of This? We get it. The incentive seems like a too-good-to-be-true move by the government to help small businesses, causing doubts. What do they have to get out of this? Fact is, the incentive is equally beneficial for the government as well! When small businesses start and expand with the government’s help, in return, they help sustain the tax base with business taxes and the employee wages. A possible workforce expansion and the resulting economic growth encourage states, counties, and the federal government to assist these small businesses in various ways. Funding opportunities include research opportunities, grants, beneficial legislation, etc. We have contacted tax planners and attorneys who deal with bills and the legal aspect of any grant regularly to confirm the validity of this claim. And guess what? This tax credit program is totally legit, earning a 100% approval rate from them! How Do Agency Owners Benefit From This? Now you might wonder that this incentive only benefits the clients who work with you and the government. Of course, being a marketing agency, you want some benefit from this other than an increase in clients willing to work with you when you educate them about this grant. And voila! There’s more to the story. You’ll be at the receiving end too in this program because the more you help a company save, the more you’re actually helping them earn and, as a result creating more revenue for yourself too. As a general rule of thumb, a 5% net profit margin is low, a 10% margin is average, and a 20% margin is high. Now let’s assume that the clients you work with have an average net profit margin of 10-20% on their business. When you help them save $5,000 on taxes through the government grant, it becomes equal to giving them $25,000 to $50,000 in revenue. With the reduction in tax and consequent increase in the revenue, you get to put $5,000 into your clients’ pockets directly. However, all of this is only possible as the government subsidizes your collaboration with the clients to get tax reductions when they work with you. Of course, this means that you get to have a share of that since your clients get more benefits by working with you utilizing your SEO service. Not only this, your clients’ success stories will help you bring more clients and establish your digital marketing agency as a successful one. More clients will bring more revenue for you! How Much Does This Program Cost? The $5,000 grant by the government is no doubt beneficial for all those who decide to go for it. However, you have to invest something to get the benefit in return. If your clients decide to take up this service, it will cost them a one-time amount of less than $500. It might sound a lot, but it is nothing compared to the $5,000 amount they can earn each year. The question is, would anyone be willing to pay $500 to get $5,000 in