Inbound Marketing Strategies for 2019

As we move forward into 2019, it is becoming more and more apparent about what is working for businesses in achieving satisfactory levels of growth. Statistics are showing that establishing a content strategy is becoming an integral part of every business’s growth strategy. 87% of business to business marketing will focus on content as a central inbound marketing tactic. Based on the historic success of increasing traffic and conversions through company websites, businesses are spending more of their marketing budget on content marketing.

Search engine optimization has become more intertwined with content marketing because of the effects specifically structured articles are having on the performance of a website. If SEO companies are using the safest and most reliable methods of ranking websites they are setting the foundation by establishing an effective content strategy.

Content strategies are becoming more relevant in a typical SEO campaign due to what is not working anymore. There was a slew of tactics that were standard practices in an SEO campaign that once worked to improve rankings tremendously and yet through a series of updates to Googles algorithm have lost their effectiveness and in some cases will results in penalties.

Directories are one example of what used to get a lot of positive movement from websites yet now their backlinks are much weaker ranking signals. In fact, there are many directories that will adversely affect your website if they are of low quality.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, there are many directories that will add value to your SEO campaign. The change in value has resulted in a much lower impact on ranking with a higher level of caution being used in deciding which directory in which you choose to place your website.

PBN (Private Blog Network) sites work amazingly well to rank websites yet they have been targeted and present a more serious risk to the health of a website. Before Google began identifying these sites you could essentially rank anything as long as you had enough high authority expired domains to convert into backlinks.

This practice is still widely used but it comes at a steep price. If a website is found to be linked to a PBN site it is penalized. Google states that any website found to be participating in a link scheme will suffer a setback in their ranking and in severe cases can even be de-indexed.

Apart from the risk, a PBN site poses it also takes an enormous amount of time to create in order for it to be effective. In order to build a PBN that flies under the radar, it has to be built without leaving digital footprints. Before a PBN can even be built it takes an enormous amount of time to find expired domains that have quality backlinks with metrics strong enough to increase the authority of your website. Due to the amount of effort to build these websites and STILL run the risk of being penalized, PBN’s have become a less attractive option when considering the alternatives

Executing an effective content strategy will increase traffic and positively impact your ranking. A preliminary objective behind a solid content strategy is to create content that outperforms your competitors. It involves a little research and you can start by tallying up the average word count in the top ten search results.

Produce content that is optimized for voice search. You can incorporate a lot of long tail keywords when you are optimizing your content in the form of questions and answers. Think of how you would search for your product using a voice assistant like Siri, Cortana or Google Assistant. This impacts the relevance of the content you produce by providing exact match answers to searches performed in the form of questions.

Make your content evergreen. Produce content that doesn’t have an expiration date and will stay useful and relevant long into the foreseeable future. For instance, a case study is a form of evergreen content because it provides in-depth analysis with first-hand results. The results of a case study will never change over time so the case study remains timeless-or evergreen. Royal Cup Coffee has published multiple case studies in their blog that serve as timeless posts because the content focuses on the results of program endeavors and the results of those efforts.

Evergreen content can be structured as an interview with an industry professional. The answers and opinions they provide in the interview are unique to the interview and even if they change their stance in the future, the interview is still a standalone event that has no expiration date. Here is an example of an interview with Matt Cutts about what to do if you get a penalty. Although his stance may change in the future the contents of this article will continue to build traffic because it represents a moment in time where he has been recorded as voicing an opinion, which people will return to as a point of reference.

One of the most popular examples of evergreen content is creating an “Ultimate Strategy Guide” or “How-To Guide” which can be done in any industry. For example, this bespoke tailor in Toronto published a guide titled “A Comprehensive Guide To Buying A Bespoke Suit.” The information provided informs buyers about what to expect when going through the process of making a bespoke suit. Visitors find value in useful tips and in-depth explanations that help with a greater understanding of a company, product or service. Using this content strategy not only builds on the technical aspect of driving more traffic to your site but builds trust and confidence in your company brand which results in an increase in conversions.

The idea behind creating evergreen content is to generate more traffic and build links naturally. This happens over time when you have quality content that gets shared. When people find value in something they read it’s natural for them to share it with others. Evergreen content drives more traffic to a website through return visits and by gaining natural backlinks when the pages are shared.

Establishing an effective content strategy begins by identifying what’s working in your industry and what your ideal client is looking to read about. Visitors are more likely to return to a website that provides value through its content and are more likely to purchase from a brand they have grown to trust. Evergreen content will increase conversions and contribute to a variety of positive ranking metrics that build traffic and improve the visibility your website has in the search results.

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