Timothy Carter

When it comes to content marketing, SEO, and link building, there are dozens of important elements in play. But some are more critical than others. Anchor text certainly falls into the critical category. But do you know how to leverage on-site and off-site anchor text to your advantage in SEO? The anchor text variations that you use when linking to your web page are a crucial component of any SEO strategy. This is because search engines will use the anchor text variation as one ranking factor in determining how relevant a link is to the content on your site. In this article, we’ll discuss everything there is to know about proper anchor text variation, including exact match anchor text and how it can impact the SEO of your website. What is Anchor Text? Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink. The anchor text can either be descriptive or generic, but it should always accurately reflect what the page being linked to contains. For example: “our company” vs. “click here”. Your website’s ranking on Google will depend largely upon how many links your site has and how relevant those links are when it comes to incoming traffic (i.e., whether they contain quality keyword phrases). The more high-quality backlinks you have pointing to your site, the higher likelihood that search engine rankings for your site content will improve over time – this is known as building an SEO foundation with link equity! On the HTML code side of things, it looks like this: On the user-facing side of things, it looks like this: Best SEO agency If it weren’t for anchor text, you’d have to write out the exact web address each time you wanted to link users to another linked page or resource. They would then need to copy and paste that link into their web browser. Anchor text provides a clickable shortcut that’s both aesthetically pleasing and convenient. But it goes far beyond looks. Anchor text is ultimately one of the top factors in the link building process. Why is Anchor Text Important for SEO? Anchor text is vitally important for SEO because it tells search engines what your website’s content is about. This ensures that your web pages will rank higher in SERPs (search engine result pages) as a result of the keywords you optimize them with and help provide more clarity to any potential visitor who lands on one of these web pages through organic or paid traffic channels. Ultimately, this all comes back to high-quality links. Higher quality anchors mean better rankings from authoritative sites – which means an ideal situation like higher click-through rates and conversion rates over time. Anchor text serves a variety of purposes and can be utilized in numerous ways, but the two biggest benefits – in terms of link building – are as follows: More link juice Google uses anchor text to help determine the relevancy of a link. So, while overly optimized keyword strings are no longer a best practice, keywords still matter to an extent – so long as they’re natural. The right anchor text can feed more link juice to the page being linked to. Some would even say it’s the single most important factor for backlinks (outside of the domain authority of the referring domain). Better clickability It’s not all about technical SEO. There’s also a practical aspect of anchor text. The right anchor text makes a link more attractive to human users and, as a result, more clickable. This drives traffic and engagement. (The benefits of which may include direct sales, but also enhanced SEO signals.) The Evolution of Anchor Text Anchor text has played a valuable role in SEO since, well, the origins of search engines. But that’s not to say things have stayed the same over the last couple of decades. Anchor text, much like every element of SEO, has undergone significant shifts over the past few years. Prior to 2011, keyword-rich anchor text was considered a best practice. If your keyword was “yummy chocolate brownies,” you were instructed to use anchor text like: Yummy chocolate brownies Buy yummy chocolate brownies Yummy chocolate brownies buy Buy yummy chocolate brownies online For more info on yummy chocolate brownies visit: yummychocolatebrownies.com Yummy chocolate brownies: yummychoclatebrownies.com Image link alt=yummychocolatebrownies The entire goal was to exploit the Google algorithm. There was nothing dishonest about this – it’s just the way the game worked back in those days. Some savvy SEO experts would find out what made the algorithm tick, and everyone would jump on. SEO was about manipulating the algorithm. Unfortunately, this came at the expense of user experience. It was possible to over-optimize with exact match anchor text and achieve impressive SERP rankings, yet have links that looked obnoxious, spammy, and out of place. Google saw webmasters manipulating anchor text and decided to make some major changes. In April 2012, the first Penguin update was released. And for anyone using the same keyword rich anchor text, rankings plummeted. And when rankings began to fall, so did traffic, and revenue. The whole cookie crumbled overnight. Ever since that first Penguin update, Google has continued to emphasize user experience, while implementing requirements that dissuade spammers from gaming the system. Anchor text is just as important today as it’s ever been – especially from an SEO perspective. It just looks a little different than it did 10 years ago. It includes ratios that are natural, including the surrounding text around the backlink and not just the anchor text in the link itself. What is Anchor Text Ratio? Anchor text ratio is the proportion of links on a website that uses any given keyword. This metric can be used to understand how prevalent keywords are in your SEO strategy and whether or not you need more content relating to those terms. The goal should always be an average anchor text ratio of about 20%. This means that for every 100 optimized pages, there will typically be about 20% with

A link exchange is an agreement between two sites to share and exchange links with each other for mutual benefit. While it was once a common practice of even the most sophisticated link building campaign, it now is considered a link scheme. Reciprocal links include benefits, concerns, and flat-out risks. Here we’ll discuss: Google policies surrounding link exchanges Link exchange best practices Risks of reciprocal links or excessive link exchanges Some benefits of link exchanges Let’s go! The Link Exchange in Practice When building links for your site, the goal is to seek out reputable and authenticated sites to backlink to in order to share your content with them and theirs with you. This helps to organically generate traffic to your site, improve your ranking on Google, as referral traffic is a valuable metric, and improve your reputation as a business. This can be done in quite a few ways, from sourcing content on social media to having guest posts done that are then shared by others, to finding broken links and replacing them with new and fresh ones. Link exchange requests to other webmasters or website owners is one of many link building strategies. It is essentially an agreement between your own website and another party to share with each other. Sounds great right, mutual benefit for all? The truth is that these agreements function much like any other agreement out there. They are reliant on both parties to fulfill their end of the bargain. This can be a problem when one site is merely attempting to piggyback off of another’s work. If you think of it like getting a roommate, you expect the roommate to pay their portion of the rent, respect your boundaries, and clean up after themselves. Only, after the first couple of months, the common areas are a mess, they keep stealing your stuff, and they never pay their half of the rent and always claim “I’m good for it.” This is the problem with link exchanges, if you enter into one for the sole purpose of link building, you may find the relationship to not only, not be beneficial, but downright detrimental to your site in the first place. There are also issues with Google and policies on link abusing and other issues that we’ll go into, but for now, let’s talk about how to prevent a bad link exchange. Google Is Anti-Reciprocal Link Building This is one of the most important points you need to remember if you’re thinking seriously about reciprocal link agreements: According to Google’s webmaster guidelines, Google considers excessively exchanging links with others to be a type of “link scheme.” Too much reciprocal linking is against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines because it could be seen as a form of unfairly manipulating Google’s ranking system. If you get caught violating Google’s policies, your site may be penalized, potentially rendering your links as useless as your old Hotmail account. This is the most important statement in this entire post! Per Google’s webmaster guidelines, reciprocal linking is highly risky. Period!  To avoid Google’s wrath and disdain for link building, start small when deciding how many weekly or monthly reciprocal links you and another site owner will include in your content. You can increase the number over time if you find there are no significant consequences. More importantly, make sure your reciprocal link building strategy is based on sharing links when it makes sense to do so. When you link to someone else’s site (and vice versa), it should be because there’s a practical reason to do so in that context. Don’t randomly link to an article on “10 Celebrities You Didn’t Know Were Raised in Orphanages” in a blog entry about “10 Kitchen Hacks You MUST TRY.” All that said, this isn’t meant to discourage you from giving reciprocal linking a try. Those who’ve researched the topic have found that many high-ranking sites across a range of topics feature at least some reciprocal links. While this doesn’t necessarily confirm that reciprocal links will help a site grow, it does give some reason to believe reciprocal links aren’t inherently harmful to a site’s ranking. But, you may find the opposite to be the case and that Google could eventually end up punishing reciprocal links in the future (and not just ignoring them). Avoiding a Bad Link Exchange As we talked about at the beginning, all link-building efforts, including link exchanges, should be done with the intent to improve the traffic to your site. Simply adding backlinks willy nilly will do nothing but overpopulate your web pages and eventually send up red flags to Google. Even though we were talking about bad agreements between exchange partners, there are other things to look out for as well. There are millions of sites on the web and forming a link exchange with lots of them would likely be as simple as containing the domain admin and asking, but that doesn’t mean that’s what you should do. The first thing to consider is that whatever you want to backlink to is relevant, informative, and beneficial to your users. Linking to a list of your favorite restaurants in Denver isn’t going to help your business when you sell boating accessories (maybe if your customers are hungry and live in Denver, but we doubt that much of your traffic fits that description). Instead, focus on relevancy first. There are many ways to do this. Using indexes, RSS Feeds, social media, Q&A forums, and other spaces to find information and links that are relevant to your business will help you with getting the link-building part of the process rolling. Once you have loads of relevant links, use a content management system to get and keep it all organized. Having subdividers that specify content niche and other factors can help as well. You’ll want to keep this list updated as you go along because link building in SEO is an ongoing process. Out of all the hundreds or even thousands of links,

If you don’t know the importance of a great domain name yet, then you’ve been missing out. Domain names send a message and set the tone for your brand and your business. Not only that, selecting the right one can be quite lucrative both in practice and if you ever decide to sell it. That doesn’t mean just anything will work however, there are a number of dos and don’ts when it comes to creating a domain name. If you want a truly great one that will make your brand recognizable, you’ll want to follow some of the key strategies that we’re going to go over here in this guide. Not only tell you about the most expensive domains ever sold, but we’re also going to enlighten you on just what makes them great, and how to capture some of that greatness for yourself so that you too can make the most of the internet. Creating a Great Domain Name For Yourself Domains do more than just name your website, they represent your brand, your products, and your intentions as a business. Creating a great domain name is more than just picking something catchy that folks can remember, though that is part of it in some cases. Your first consideration should be the top-level domain (TLD) you choose. You may already know this, but TLDs have a trust hierarchy to them. Not only is there a trust hierarchy, but there is less recognition the further you go down the list of top-level domains. Knowing which ones are the most trusted and recognizable by users is likely your first step to creating an outstanding domain name of your own. Try a .Com Name First The top of the TLD heap in the United States is the .com domain. While other countries typically use a shortened abbreviation of their country’s name, such as .jp for Japan and .ca for Canada, for some strange reason, that trait never took in the United States. This means that if you’re looking for the most trustworthy and recognizable top-level domain you can get, then .com is the one you look for first. The hierarchy of trust trends downward from there in the United States, but if you’re looking to do business in another country, such as China for instance, then you want a domestic domain to facilitate marketing and growth in that market. It can be tougher for U.S. websites to rank in other countries, particularly those where search engines perform differently than the Google we are all used to. The best domains are usually .com domains but all is not lost if you cannot get one. Just be mindful that the further down the list of TLDs you go, the less trustworthy they are considered. Some industry-specific TLDs like .tv fair well because they are relevant to the business or entity they are attached to. This is similar to the domains .org and .edu which are tied to specific entities. Keep it Simple Like we’ve talked about, the name you choose matters a lot in terms of whether your domain has value. It has to be easy to remember, relevant and relatable. It must also do this in as few characters as possible. Think of it from a logical perspective using real-world examples. Google is only six letters (not including the TLD) your bank, social media, and other things are all under ten characters. There’s a valid reason behind this. Users don’t want long complicated names, they want things that are easy to remember and that signify something to them. You wouldn’t name your website antidisestablismentarianism.com and expect folks to remember it or want to type it into a search bar either. Users don’t like special characters either. The rule of thumb is simple words that have meaning and are ten letters or less. If you can stick to this formula and still display your brand, then you’re on track to having a great domain name like the ones on our list later in this guide. On Brand is Best Your domain name can be considered something of a signifier of what you do. Say, for instance, that you sold shoes, if you owned the domain shoes.com, chances are this would be a popular domain, it would be valued highly, and more importantly, people would know exactly what they are getting when they click. However, if you sell tires and you own shoes.com then you might want to consider selling that domain, because not only is it not on-brand for your business, you’re likely to wind up with some seriously confused and aggravated users. When we say “on brand”, we mean, relevant to what you do. If you can’t get a name that says exactly what you do in a word, then another descriptor may work too. For example, to go back to shoes, if you can’t get shoes.com then you can try other synonyms such as footwear.com. This still gets the point across of what you do, it ticks the box of ten letters, and it’s easy to remember. Don’t Steal We probably don’t need to say this, but we will anyway, check before you register. No, we’re not talking about hotel check-in, we’re talking about registering your domain name. Just because a particular name isn’t taken under a particular TLD doesn’t mean it isn’t a copyrighted brand name that someone else is using. Companies will often trademark terms related to their business without actually establishing a domain name associated with it. Do your homework and don’t infringe on anyone else’s rights in the process of building your brand. A trademark fight is not something a business wants to deal with. The Most Expensive Domain Names Ever Sold For this list, we’re ranking them by the actual dollar amount they sold for, not for how good or bad the name is. Along with each name, we’ll describe why it sold for that amount. 1. Business.com – $345 Million Yes, you are in fact reading

Your organic website traffic is typically derived from one of the following sources: Direct Traffic – someone keying-in your website URL without finding you through another means Referral Traffic – a broad channel that includes social, news, blogs, etc. Email Traffic – traffic from your cold and subscribed email campaigns Social Traffic – a more narrow referral channel that could include Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. Paid Traffic – could include PPC services for Google, Facebook, etc. Organic Traffic – derived from a search on Google or even Bing AI Traffic – traffic from ChatGPT (now Chat.com) and other generative AI engines Of all the sources of traffic online–when it works properly–organic traffic is the most efficient and scalable, regardless of your company’s stage of growth. It is also relatively inexpensive compared to some of the other traffic sources. One of the most important concepts associated with SEO to drive organic search traffic is the number of people visiting your site from search engines and their associated stickiness or “dwell time”. But what exactly is organic traffic, and how does it work in the context of SEO? Let’s dive in! What is Organic Traffic? Organic traffic, put simply, is traffic that comes from Google and other search engines’ search engine results pages (SERPs). Think of it this way; you search for a given topic, like “bike repair shops,” and you see a list of search results. You click on one of those results to visit the brand’s website. You now count as an organic visitor and will be included as part of the brand’s total organic traffic. Source: Google As much as 53.3 percent of all traffic on the web comes from organic search, so it’s one of the most valuable channels to capitalize on. How to Increase Organic Traffic Because organic traffic is valuable, working toward growing it can be extremely beneficial for overall sales and revenue. While there are industry, promotional and platform nuances to increase organic traffic, the fundamentals are industry agnostic: Create Phenomenal Content. If you want to outrank big companies for particular keywords, you need to create content that is leagues above competitors looking to rank their web pages for your same keywords. Promote Your Phenomenal Content. While simple in principle, this is the very essence of the difficulty of SEO and link building. Content can be promoted through email, but the outreach should lead to backlinks and brand mentions from other relevant quality websites. We cover how to garner more organic traffic to your website in our Comprehensive Guide to Content Marketing here. Why Is Organic Traffic Valuable? Source: Ahrefs Why all the fuss about organic traffic? Well, for starters, all traffic to your website is good for your site, generally speaking. If your site has a 2 percent conversion rate and you make $150 on average per sale, the difference between 1,000 visitors and 10,000 visitors is the difference between $3,000 and $30,000 in revenue. Increasing your organic traffic will increase your total revenue (and help you achieve your other goals). Organic traffic is especially relevant for two main reasons: 1. It’s relevant. By increasing your organic rankings for relevant keyword terms and avoiding optimization for irrelevant terms, you can control the types of people who visit you organically. In other words, you can make sure your visitors are within your target demographics and at the right phase of the buying cycle. 2. It’s (somewhat) within your control. Technically, it’s possible to increase organic traffic numbers in any category, but more organic traffic to your website is especially accessible thanks to SEO. Organic Traffic as Part of SEO Source: Google Analytics Let’s take a closer look at how organic traffic functions as a byproduct of an SEO campaign. SEO, in case you aren’t familiar, is a combination of different strategies and tactics, all of which are intended to increase your rankings in search engines. These can be broadly categorized as followed: High-level strategy. First, you’ll have to consider your high-level strategy. For example, do you want to avoid competition by targeting local keywords, or compete on a national level? Which demographics are you targeting? Will you use a combination of head keywords and long-tail phrases? If so, which ones are most important? Keyword research is vital at this stage. Technical on page SEO. There are many technical factors that can influence how your site ranks (and how it functions for your users). Generally, Google and other search engines reward sites that are built efficiently and according to best practices. Sites that load quickly, sites that are mobile optimized, and sites that are easy to crawl all have a massive advantage, such that technical optimization is a practical prerequisite if you want any chance of ranking. Onsite content. You’ll also need a consistent stream of high-quality onsite content. This will help you build authority for your website, and simultaneously allow you to target specific keywords and phrases. These pages also serve as material that can rank in SERPs. Link building and offsite content. Link building, often with the help of offsite content, allows you to earn and construct links pointing back to your domain, increasing your authority (and therefore your capacity to rank). It’s also a way to generate referral traffic. While it’s technically possible to optimize for search engines without link building, for most brands, it’s a practical necessity if you want to rank. For more on link building checkout our Link Builder’s Guide to SEO. There are literally more than 200 ranking signals that Google uses to formulate organic search results, so consider these high-level assessments as just the tip of the iceberg. As you follow these SEO strategies, you’ll increase your domain authority and page-level authority—trustworthiness scores that let Google and other search engines know you’re worth ranking. You’ll also increase your relevance for specific keywords and phrases. Over time, you’ll rank higher for those terms when people search for them. The higher you rank, the better, with sharply diminishing returns

As a criminal lawyer, you want to help your potential clients – and you also want to grow your client base. To do that, you need more visibility. And in today’s largely digital world, the best way to achieve more visibility is to earn higher rankings in search engines like Google. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the way to do it. But how exactly does SEO for criminal lawyers work? And how should you practice it? Why Choose SEO as a Criminal Defense Lawyer? First, why would you choose SEO as your primary marketing strategy as a criminal lawyer? SEO is a way of getting your name and your law firm’s website higher and more visible in search engine results pages (SERPs). These days, when people have criminal law problems, they often turn to the internet first. They search for things like “felony defense” and misdemeanor defense,” looking for criminal defense lawyers like you who can help them with information and consultations. When you rank higher, you get more visibility and traffic. With more visibility and traffic, it’s only natural that you’ll attract more potential clients. SEO is advantageous not only because It helps you generate more traffic and revenue, but also because it’s relatively inexpensive. Building a solid lawyer SEO strategy does require investment and patience, but with the right strategy, it can pay off enormously. The Big Picture: Your Criminal Defense Law SEO Strategy SEO is a long-term strategy designed to help you gradually build authority and rise to the top of the rankings. Broadly speaking, you’ll need to focus on both the trustworthiness/authoritativeness of your website and the relevance of your website to your target demographics. In pursuit of this, you’ll need to invest in and develop at least the following elements:       Strategy. First, you need a direction for your marketing strategy for your criminal defense law firm. There are many criminal defense lawyers competing for the top slots of Google, so how are you going to stand apart? And how are you going to make sure you see a positive return on investment (ROI)? Keyword research and competitive research are critical for your success here.       Technical onsite SEO. If you want to rise to the top of Google’s rankings, your website needs to be technically polished. Your website should be SEO friendly and user friendly, with excellent performance metrics.       Onsite content development. Content has long been the heart of SEO, and it should still be the foundation of your criminal defense law SEO strategy. It’s an opportunity to not only optimize for specific keywords but also show off your authority and expertise.       Offsite content and link building. You’ll also need to think about link building and, by extension, offsite content development. Links function as votes of confidence in the eyes of Google and other search engines; the more links you have and the more powerful those links are, the more authoritative you’ll be seen to be. However, you need to build links in natural ways that are valuable to users. To this end, one of the best strategies you can use is offsite content development.       Analysis and adjustment. Finally, you’ll need to spend time analyzing your performance metrics and adjusting your approach. Tweaking pages, tweaking keyword choices, and iteratively advancing your strategy will lead you to better results in the future. Criminal Defense Law Firm SEO Strategy: Keyword Research and Planning Before you start developing content or building links, you need to spend some time doing research and planning your campaign. One of the most important elements here is to figure out which keywords are going to be most valuable to your criminal law practice. Strong keywords are highly relevant to both your criminal defense lawyer practice and your target audience. They also have relatively high search volume and low competition, as highly contested keywords can often be excessively expensive to pursue. Examples of foundational “head” keywords for a criminal defense law firm SEO strategy include things like:       Felony Defense       Misdemeanor Defense       Prosecution       White-Collar Crime       Drug Offenses       Violent Crimes However, it’s also a good idea to optimize for long tail keyword phrases, like “how to find a good criminal lawyer.” Long tail phrases are longer, less commonly searched, and much less competitive when compared to head keywords. In the most competitive niches, like SEO for personal injury law, the long tail is the way to go. Ideally, you’ll have a list of at least a dozen target keywords with which you can begin your criminal defense marketing campaign. Technical Onsite SEO for Criminal Defense Lawyers Technical onsite SEO is a collection of tactics designed to make your website more functional, better for users, and more polished in the eyes of Google. Technically optimized websites have a distinct advantage over their poorly optimized counterparts in criminal defense SEO. These are some of the most important items to consider.       Indexing/discoverability. Before your website can appear in Google Search results, it must be crawled (by Google’s web-crawling bots) and indexed. Accordingly, you need to make sure that your website is accessible and easy for Google to crawl. If there’s anything blocking Google from crawling or indexing your website, it’s not going to be able to rank.       Navigation and page organization. You should pay close attention to your page organization and internal navigation, as Google prioritizes intuitively structured websites. For example, you might have a “Criminal Defense” section of your website with pages like “Felony Defense,” “Misdemeanor Defense,” “White-Collar Crime,” “Drug Offenses,” and “Violent Crimes” under it. You could have a separate section for “Prosecution,” with separate relevant pages underneath it.       Page speed optimization. Faster websites tend to rank higher than slower websites, so you’ll need to spend at least some time on page speed optimization. Even

Defined simply, content marketing is: 1. The Creation of Quality Content  2. The Promotion of Quality Content  In this, step-by-step, all-in-one guide to planning and launching a content marketing strategy you will learn that good content marketing strategy includes both on and off-site content creation and on and off-site content promotion. And they’re almost never mutually exclusive. For instance, video content marketing for Youtube would fit into both the created and promoted buckets. You might create a quality blog post and then promote it by PR and link building outreach, then create more content off-site to link back to your original post. In reality, content marketing may more appropriately look like this: The who, what, when, where why and how you create and promote your content is how one develops the ideal content marketing strategy for success. In order to create and promote, you need to understand your ideal customer persona, where they are online and how to promote to them. In other words, you will need to have the necessary skills to be an adept content marketer. Only then will you gain a true edge or competitive advantage. For instance, a Shopify ecommerce store will have a very different creation and promotion strategy than a local tax attorney or tax service business. How to Plan Your Content Marketing Strategy There are some important reasons why you should plan a content strategy—by which I mean a formally written document—that outlines your plans for success. According to research from the Content Marketing Institute, there are four main factors responsible for differentiating self-described “successful” content marketers from self-described “unsuccessful” content marketers. (Image Source: Content Marketing Institute) The Content “Research Phase” Let’s move on to the actual steps you’ll need to take to draft your content strategy. First, you’re going to need raw information. Remember what I said about needing to have more objective information, rather than relying on your own assumptions and instincts? This is the stage of the process you’ll use to get that information. There are several types of research you’ll need to perform, each with their own challenges and tactics. Your end goal is to walk away with enough raw material and data to inform your strategic decisions. When doing content marketing research, you can use keyword research tools or the unique data provided from organizations like Content Marketing Institute. Let’s take a look at some of the most important research areas: Market research Market research is what you’ll use to identify and understand your target audience. Your target audience will be the ones reading your content, supporting it through social sharing, and eventually becoming customers. Hopefully, you already have a solid idea of who your clearly defined audience is—but don’t make assumptions yet. Take your time evaluating different demographics and how they might relate to your brand and already have brand awareness based on your content marketing. There are several ways you can do this; for example, you can rely on government-drawn census data to learn more about the buying habits and dispositions of your key demographics (and demographics you may not have previously considered), or you can leverage recent industry studies or market research companies to dig deeper into more specific information. Google Trends and Content Marketing Institute are great tools for engaging in custom research on trending keywords as well as research insight from articles on the company website. Device usage You’ll also need to pay attention to what types of devices your target audience is going to be using. For the most part, you’ll find that there’s a great diversity here. More users are opting for multi-platform access to content, switching between desktop devices, tablets, and smartphones throughout the day. Image Source: ComScore (via smartinsights.com) Still, you’ll find that your demographics and your industry likely favor one device more than the others. You’ll need to make your content compatible with all devices, but you might bear one in mind more than the others. Preferred media types Don’t neglect things like images, videos, and audio streams. Beyond that, there are multiple methods of serving these mediums, such as various channels and file types, and many formatting variables, such as length and overall presentation. Most content marketing strategies will benefit from using multiple of these media types simultaneously, but the only way to figure out which ones are best for you (and your audience) is to research it. Competitive research Competitive research adds another layer of sophistication to your research phase. So far, you’ve been researching what audience segments you’ll be focusing on and what types of content they might like to see. This is good information, but it’s all theoretical. Competitive research helps you see content marketing in a live environment—and in your niche, no less. Make a list of your direct and indirect competitors, and take a look at what they’re doing for their own content marketing campaigns. Keyword research Keyword research is specifically done for SEO, though even if you don’t plan on investing heavily in an independent SEO campaign, it’s worth doing. Here, your goal is to uncover various keywords and keyword phrases that might serve as good targets for content topics. (Image Source: ahrefs) Again, keep any keyword insights you find here in balance; your primary goal is to produce good content. Write for readers, not for search engines. Setting Content Marketing Goals & Establishing a Timeline Once you’ve done enough research to give you a broad understanding of your clearly defined audience, your competitive position, and your niche, you can start drawing up the main goals of your campaign—as well as a timeline in which you’ll meet those goals. The long-term nature of content marketing Before you get too ambitious, you need to realize the long-term nature of content marketing. You can’t use content marketing as a get-rich-quick scheme, nor can you use it as a short-term boost for your brand awareness. If you’re going to get involved with content, you need to have a long-term focus. Budgetary considerations Ideally,