Sorry. I’ve been MIA for awhile in terms of blogging. One of my biggest challenges is making time to blog. At first I was very enthusiastic about it and was able to knock out at least a blog per week. Well, that was a hard pace to sustain, obviously, which brings up my next subject.
Over last couple of months we have talked about building your website, on-page optimization, and social media marketing. During that time Google has updated both the Penguin and Panda releases and just last week they released the new disavow tool for those of us who have been notified that there are undesirable links on our sites.
I get it. You’re in the insurance business and you don’t really care about rel=”cannonical” HTTP Headers, or no follow back links, so I’ll cut to the chase. These Google updates matter because they effect the tactics and the strategy involved in helping you reach your internet marketing goals. I look at 50-100 insurance websites per day, many of them new, and in a lot of cases they are new versions of the old brochure style website. If you are going to use a local webmaster, or ad agency to set up your site, please make sure they know what they are doing. If your website isn’t set up correctly so that Google can crawl it for relevance, all the external marketing in the world isn’t going to help you. So, that’s job one…is your website properly optimized. You can use Freegrader or SEO Quake to do a quick on-page evaluation of your site. Both tools are very good and they’re FREE.
Once you are sure your website has the proper on-page optimization you are free to move on to external marketing. First know what the goal is. Lead generation, brand awareness, sales, traffic, thought leadership? For example, if you are interested in leads then your content should be relevant to the keyword on the page promoting the product you are trying to sell.
Why content? Content builds links, authority, rank and reputation all of which are important in terms of reaching your
Ok, what is content? What does that mean? Content includes blogs, social media posts, articles, white papers, videos, and press releases. In a perfect world you would all of it as often as possible. But the world is not perfect and resources are limited so you have too determine your goals, calculate your budget, and execute accordingly.
According to a recent study published by BtoB the top content methods are still social media and articles followed by newsletters, blogs, case studies, white papers and videos.
Start with any combination of the top ten and you can’t go wrong. If you are not sure where or how to post your content to get the best return, outsource it to a firm that understands your business. Click this link to find out more. Remember, goal first, on-page optimization second, quality of content third, placement of content fourth and quantity of content last. The quality and quantity will be determined by the allocation of your budget. Happy selling. As always, thoughts and comments are welcome.