Author: Madison Gridley

Do you ever wonder why you can’t seem to get your SEO program off the ground and start ranking better in search results? You might be making one or more of these five common mistakes in content marketing for small businesses.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is of the most critical parts of any business today. As more consumers start their search for products and services online, showing up at the top of search results can drive more business through your door.
But it’s not as simple as just putting up a website. SEO requires the right tools and knowledge to beat out your competition and claim the top spot in searches. Here are some mistakes often seen in content marketing for small businesses.

1. Not optimizing the back end of your website

There are more than 5.46 billion websites online right now, and another 576,000 that go online each day. Search engines have to “crawl” all these sites to find information, and they use bots to do that. Search engines will prioritize websites that are easy to crawl, so effective content marketing for small businesses starts with having a good site structure.
That includes an XML sitemap, meta tags, meta descriptions, quality H1s, fast page load speeds and mobile-optimized browsing. It’s all pretty technical, so it’s usually best to engage a professional to help with this part.

2. Choosing the wrong keywords

There are two types of keywords:

• Short-tail: These are short keyword phrases that most companies think they should target, such as “cars” or “weight loss.” While these account for about 60% of all search demand, they are harder to rank for because of their popularity.
• Long-tail: These are longer phrases that have a lower search volume, but most searches online are actually very specific. In the Ahrefs database, 92.42% of all keywords had fewer than 10 searches per month. If you include keywords with fewer than 100, it’s almost every search online (98.43%).

While you can focus on some shorter keyword phrases, don’t forget to include some more specific long-tail keyword phrases as well.

3. Creating poor-quality content

A well-designed website is important, but even more so is having good content on your site. In addition to the right keywords that help search engines identify what you offer, content should be readable to meet the needs of humans (potential customers) who are browsing your website.

4. Focusing on content only at the beginning

Too many small businesses think of building a website as a one-time deal. Instead, it should be an ongoing activity where you are constantly refreshing your content, posting on a blog, and generating quality links to and from your site.

5. Trying to do it all yourself

Unless you are an expert at SEO and your small business is specifically designed to help others improve their own SEO, chances are you could use some assistance. Small business owners sometimes think that by doing all these tasks themselves, they can save money.
The reality is that engaging with an affordable and effective managed content service provider will present you with quality SEO today and drive more business through your doors tomorrow. Cutting corners or trying to take it all on yourself is leaving money on the table by letting your potential customers go to a competitor who has better SEO.
SEO can either make or break your program. After all, if you don’t optimize these strategies, the likelihood of ranking on search results pages is slim to none. Talk to Tempesta Media today to learn more about our SEO services and how easy it can be to get started with content marketing for small businesses.
Then check out these 100 mistakes businesses make in their content strategy to ensure you give your program the best chance at success.

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Search engine optimization tends to be an enigmatic business goal that is both very easy and very difficult to attain.

It can be very easy because if you post genuine content without trying to manipulate the search engines with keyword cannibalization, you will be rewarded with average SEO rankings.
It can be difficult because search engines are becoming more and more complex every year, so getting a page one ranking on a high volume keyword is becoming harder to do. However, that page one ranking is also becoming more profitable.

Content Marketing Is Changing

2020 has been a hard year for customers and companies alike. It’s also taken us all through a powerful transition to living our lives online. More people consult their doctor, work, shop, and socialize online now more than ever.
Mary Meeker’s report on the topic shows just how much Covid-19 has impacted our use of the internet, which exemplifies the importance of content marketing in 2021. Despite our hardships, it opens a great opportunity for companies to optimize their site, raise their traffic, form a relationship with leads, and raise their ROI.

Your Content Should Be Good To EAT

A major consideration when planning for 2021 is that Google has announced that quality of content will be much more of a factor this year. Semrush gives us a great explanation of how Google determines the quality of content. In short, there are two major factors to consider when creating your content marketing plan.

1. Beneficial Purpose

• All website content should have a beneficial purpose. The content should fulfill the purpose of the page and the page should be created to help users.

1. E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)

• Expertise: The content should be well researched and have either industry or everyday expertise.
• Authoritativeness: The content should frame the company as an industry leader in the topic.
• Trustworthiness: The content should be accurate and honest.

1. Y-M-Y-L (Your Money or Your Life)

• The content should impact the user’s direct finances, safety, health, or happiness.

Make Sure You Are Mobile Friendly

Ensuring that your site, content, and everything in between are easily accessible on all mobile devices is one of the first changes you should make in 2021. This report from CNBC shows that 72.2% of all internet users will be mobile users by 2025. This means that when users access your site on their mobile devices and find it to be damaged or slow, they will instantly click away.
Google has a free mobile testing tool that is extremely useful for any company. However, you should also be checking your bounce rate for each page on your site. A high bounce rate means that something is wrong with this page.

Your Words Have More Power

According to Semrush’s ‘State Of Content Marketing Report’, the length of your content should be much greater in 2021. The report states that articles that are three thousand words or longer get four times the number of shares and three times the amount of traffic.
One of the most difficult aspects of SEO can be building backlinks. Semrush’s report also states that these long-form articles get three and a half more backlinks than shorter articles. Consistently producing long-form content can be especially difficult for some companies, but with Tempesta Media, it doesn’t have to be!

Upgrade Your Content Marketing

Tempesta Media is a content curation service that provides content for your website, social media, and much more! To be fully prepared for the content marketing changes in 2021, many of our customers are ordering long-form, SEO-optimized, thought leadership content to keep up with the new quality-impacting Google updates.
They are also ordering content consultations to get their sites fully reviewed before their content starts. This provides them with all of the website fixes that are outside of Tempesta Media’s capabilities, including a mobile test to ensure users are able to read the content. It also gives them a full list of researched keywords, a content marketing plan for the year, and much more.
With our new implementation of Yoast SEO requirements, Tempesta Media is your content marketing partner that has the capability to scale your subscription depending on how much SEO assistance you need. Let us help you succeed!
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To improve SEO rankings, you can’t just focus on creating content for your audience. You also need to consider search engines and their part in helping traffic reach your site.

You may have heard that one of the benefits of content marketing is that it can improve SEO rankings and, in turn, improve your online traffic. But what does SEO have to do with the content you create? Why should you pay attention to SEO?

You’re not just writing for your readers

The main point to remember when starting your content marketing strategy is that you are not just writing for your audience but also for the search engines. Although you may direct all of the content towards audience engagement, ask yourself: How is your audience finding this content? Through the benefits of content marketing of course!
A search engine’s main purpose is to make sure that the most relevant results appear when someone searches for a term. In order to identify which links are the most relevant, the search engine crawls your site to determine how legitimate your content is. Numerous factors determine the legitimacy of the website, but one of the most important factors is the site’s keywords.

How keywords can impair and improve SEO

When a search engine crawls your site, it wants to understand what you do and what you talk about, and it wants to know that you aren’t trying to trick it. Search engines determine this by crawling your main pages, pillar pages and blog posts for keywords. The hierarchy of the pages, the level of audience engagement, the number of times you use a keyword and the number of times you post new pages tell the search engine everything it wants to know.
Long before search engines were as advanced as they are today, people could simply fill a website with keywords and easily come up as the number one result. Over time, search engines continually updated to prevent people from cheating the system. Now, a search engine will punish you if it finds evidence that you’re trying to trick it into giving your site a high ranking. These tricks can include keyword cannibalization, fraudulent backlinks and obvious keyword manipulation.

Google rewards hard work

SEO is a vital part of any business, but it requires consistent work and attention. The easiest way to avoid any search engine penalties is to be natural with your SEO optimization and put in the work. If you show Google that you are consistently trying to improve SEO for your site, it will reward you over time.
Some ways to naturally optimize your website to improve SEO include:

• Creating a content marketing strategy before implementing anything new on your website.
• Researching how often the leaders in your industry post on their websites and trying to keep up with that frequency as much as possible.
• Researching keywords to find what search terms are getting high traffic and optimizing future content for these keywords.
• Making sure you fill out all metadata correctly before posting to your website.
• Ensuring that all of the images on your website have titles and metatags in order to tell the search engines what is in the image.
• Hiring a company like Tempesta Media to do all of this for you!

In summary

Although it may sound like a lot of work, the benefits of content marketing are worth it. With proper SEO optimization, you can be the first result when someone searches for your industry. Being the first result in a high traffic keyword can make your online conversion rate skyrocket!

Need help?

If you have a content marketing program or are planning one, download our e-book 100 Mistakes Businesses Make When Starting, Optimizing and Scaling Content Marketing Programs.
This e-book will walk you through the mistakes of hundreds of other companies and the challenges they faced in implementing their content marketing programs. To learn more about how Tempesta Media can help you streamline your content creation process and deliver quality content at scale, contact us today.

Don’t let your audience fly blind on your website. A pillar content page clarifies and organizes your offerings. 

On your website, you post about various topics. Usually, these consist of the services your business offers.
For example, let’s say you are an event planner. If your main lines of business are weddings, business events, casual parties and baby showers, you need a way to let search engines know you focus on these four services the most, but overall, you are an event planner. How can you go about this?
When your site is structured to make it easier for search engines to crawl it, they will reward you with higher SEO rankings. The first step to great site structure is creating a pillar content page for each of your main lines of business.

How can I develop a pillar page?

When you’re developing the pillar page, the first thing you need to consider is the topic clusters. Identify your main lines of business and determine whether you have a pillar page any of them. Obviously if you don’t, you’ll need to prioritize, starting with one pillar page for each line of services.
Going back to the event planner example, think of weddings, business events, casual parties and baby showers as topic clusters. These are topics for which you have a lot of content on your site, and they need to be sorted to make it easier for your audience to access them.
So, you’ll have a pillar page for weddings, one for business events, one for casual parties and one for baby showers to condense and clarify each topic. Each of these pillar pages should also include links related to the content, scattered related keywords and other helpful information for your customer.
Pillar content pages are integral because they’re for the search engines and for your customers. That means you’ll want to think of the most common questions and issues your customers would have — ones your pillar pages could provide solutions and answers to.

How long should a pillar page be?

An effective pillar page should be 2,000-3,000 words. Since customers don’t normally read the entire page, the most SEO-relevant information is usually at the top, and the more explanatory text appears at the bottom. However, the biggest point to remember with each pillar page is to scatter all your related keywords throughout.
Let’s use the event planner example again. Say you’re working on a wedding pillar page. You wouldn’t have any business event keywords on that page at all.
Instead, you would scatter words like “bridesmaids,” “wedding event planner,” “bride and groom,” and so on throughout the pillar page so Google understands that this page is for those searching about wedding planners.
Essentially, Google starts with your home page and then goes to the pillar content pages, so make sure your home page contains some of the keywords found within the pillar pages. Google will think, “Wow, I see that you’re talking about event planning, but you’re also talking about weddings. And I can see that you have a lot of wedding-related content, so we’ll rank you high for all the keywords you’re really trying to push in your pillar page.”

How will a pillar page raise my search engine rankings?

The connection between pillar pages and search engine rankings is a relationship that many companies don’t understand, especially when it comes to SEO. To break it down, you really want to look at your search engines first so that your customers can find your pages more easily. Although your pillar pages may not be converting steady leads at the beginning, they will eventually if you have optimized them for SEO.
In fact, pillar content pages are the first step in creating a good SEO site structure. With a good structure, search engines can easily crawl your site and see that you’re regularly updating and posting. Additionally, pillar pages improve your bounce rate because customers tend to spend more time on pages that are longer. Regular posts and updates and a low bounce rate lead to a higher Google trust score, which is the very first metric Google looks at when ranking sites.
To explain further, let’s say you’re looking at Harvard.edu. It has a high trust score because Google understands that Harvard is a proven, trustworthy institution. That’s really what you’re trying to accomplish with your pillar page.
Google also needs to see that you’re talking consistently about the topic on your pillar page. You need to steadily post on your blog about related topics. Google will then trust that you are doing exactly what you’re saying and start ranking you higher.

In summary

A pillar content page is your first step to ranking with search engines, which ultimately results in more visitors, leads and revenue for your business. Continue posting consistently on your site and optimizing your keywords, and you’ll reap the benefits of a strong, informative pillar page.

Need help?

If you have a content marketing program or are planning one, download our e-book 100 Mistakes Businesses Make When Starting, Optimizing and Scaling Content Marketing Programs.
This e-book will walk you through the mistakes of hundreds of other companies and the challenges they faced in implementing their content marketing programs. To learn more about how Tempesta Media can help you streamline your content creation process and deliver quality content at scale, contact us today.