Often, we’ll ask a prospective B2B client, “How long has it been since your last SEO audit?”
While some will answer that they’ve never commissioned a site audit, the ones that have previously had an organic search audit of their site, may say, “Yeah, we did that about five years ago.” That’s simply too long. Likely, too much has changed in those years, not only in terms of the site, but also in the people who care for and feed it.
So, how often should you commission an SEO audit? (more…)
More and more B2B buyers are using mobile devices, like smartphones and tablets, to do purchase research. A Demand Gen Report found that while 99% of B2B buyers use desktop devices to access content, 82% of those B2B buyers also using smartphones to access content. Fifty-six percent of them are using tablets. Those are large percentages. If those B2B buyers are accessing content using mobile devices, they’re certainly using mobile devices for B2B organic search.
Research by BrightEdge found that 35% of the time the top organic search result for a given query will return a different ranking for desktop users than it does for mobile searchers for a given domain.
Okay, what does that mean? (more…)
What could happen if you united content, advertising, media, consumer engagement and consumer insight with an interdisciplinary content marketing strategy? We found out when Julie Fleischer, Director, Data + Content + Media at Kraft Foods delivered her opening keynote remarks earlier this month, The ROI on Content: How Kraft Learned the True Value of Their Content and Rebuilt Their Marketing Around It at Content Marketing World 2014. She shared how Kraft rebuilt marketing around content and transformed how they go to market. Kraft’s content is garnering four times better ROI than paid advertising and is capturing the equivalent of 1.1 billion annual ad impressions. (more…)
Many marketers feel that their industry calls for them to write on topics that won’t easily engage potential customers and index with the search engines. It’s an endless challenge for content marketers in B2B markets to present content in entertaining or engaging ways. But there are some good ways to create interesting content in any industry. Perhaps your industry isn’t what’s boring! (more…)
Some time ago, I took two of my young grandsons to a West Michigan Whitecaps baseball game. The Whitecaps are the Class A farm team for the Detroit Tigers that play ball in my hometown, Grand Rapids. Like many of the minor league venues, the ball game is just part of the entertainment experience. It’s fun. There’s funky food (like a “dietary disaster” 4800 calorie Frito burger—I’m not kidding), contests, door prizes, promotions, and the gamut of seating options—lawn, box, reserved, corporate suites and party decks for hosting private events. That’s where the brand ambassador comes in for Batteries Plus. (more…)
There are many ways for marketers to participate in today’s visual culture. Images have power, even when they are just a vehicle for text. We hope these 10 B2B marketing quotes from a few of the industry’s top experts will brighten your day and inspire you with new ways to establish your brand as a leader in your industry. (more…)
We live in visual culture. This is difficult to overstate. Consider a statistic taken from a recent Jeff Bullas blog post. Get this: “Ten percent of photos taken in human history took place in the last 12 months.” Think about that. At first it sounds insane, but it’s not hard to believe when you consider that 208,300 photos are posted to Facebook every minute (statistic taken from a recent Content Marketing Institute webinar). Almost everyone walks around with a camera in his or her pocket. We’re very attached to images, and if you look around, you start to see just how attached. (more…)
My inbox is full, and I’m willing to bet yours is too. For a while now the content marketing floodgates have been open. But customers, prospects, followers, and friends are opening their browsers and emails and realizing they’re done with “more”. We’re swamped. Newsjacking is an accepted practice because marketers are challenged to generate content with reasonable frequency, so customers see the same repurposed content over and over. The challenge to create more content sometimes overshadows the need for valuable content. It comes down to the classic idiom: quality over quantity. (more…)
By now, you’ve probably either noticed or read in various SEO blog posts and trade articles that title tags in search engine results appear to be a little shorter as of mid-March. Google increased the font size to 18 pixels without increasing space, resulting in fewer characters displayed before truncating titles.
While title tag best practices long held 70 characters in length to be the threshold before titles were truncated, the larger font size now reduces that count to the 55- to 60-character range. But it’s not quite that simple. Google actually uses pixels, not character count in truncation. In fact, that didn’t change. Google also uses Arial, a font with thin and wide characters. Wider characters, capitalization and bold text will consume more title space than thin characters, thus the range. While you probably don’t bold text in title tags, Google does in results for content keywords and search query exact matches. So now, much of what you’ll read suggests limiting title tag width to fewer than 512 pixels—which translates into 55 to 60 viewable characters including spaces. (more…)
It was an interesting online presentation last week—a webinar on webinars. I attended Content Marketing Institute’s (CMI) “The Webinar Benchmark Throwdown, You vs. Your Industry Peers.” CMI Founder Joe Pulizzi moderated and Mark Bornstein, Sr. Director of Content Marketing at ON24, spoke at the hour-long interactive presentation that included quiz questions throughout the webinar to test attendees “webinar smarts.” The session centered on results from ON24’s Annual Webinar Benchmark Report 2013, a pretty extensive study of webinar utilization and performance metrics. I hadn’t read the report prior to the webinar, and I’ll give myself a B+ for correctly answering most of the multiple-choice quiz questions—based solely on my personal webinar attendance experience and behaviors. (more…)
