Omi Sido

19th February 201719th February 2017

The Sunday Talk – Content Marketing

I am cleaning my car and I am thinking: We never talk about old content clean up. Can old content hurt our SEO?
Yes, it can. And I would give you an example. We all have some leftovers in containers somewhere in the back of our fridge. And those containers may get our attention one day because of the smell they produce. It’s exactly the same when it comes to old content.

Old content can hurt our SEO without us even realizing where the smell comes from. And I would give you an example.
Old content can waste our crawl budget.
Old content could be thin content.
Old content could be duplicate content.
Old content can talk about things that are not relevant anymore to our company’s current direction.

We should all go and clean up our old content before it tanks our SEO rankings. Pay attention to your old content, people.

By the way, I hate cleaning this car.

Google only finds you when everybody else is looking for you.

Saturday morning. it’s almost nine o’clock. Early start of the day. In about five minutes I’m gonna have a chat with Gerry White about a new analytical tool – more visual but I am thinking now when it comes to Content Marketing there is something even better than visual data. And I know you are all asking about more visual data. But as I said when it comes to Content Marketing what’s better than visual data is you actually visualizing how your customer is finding your content. Visualizing how your customer is interacting with your content. Visualizing how the visitor is interacting with your Call to Actions in your content.
Yes, visual data is good but visualizing how a real human being is interacting with your content is even better.

Only you can change your life. I can’t do it for you.

Just coming back from a small meeting with top CEOs in the UK – hence I look like a million bucks. A guy invited me so I can support him with any questions they may have about Technical SEO but the guy was actually talking about Content Marketing trying to convince them Content Marketing does work.
But then everybody in the room was like ‘We are not happy with the ROI (Return on Investment). Our content is a bit too boring because we work in a boring industry. People don’t read our content.’
Obviously, the guy was struggling.
So at one point, I stood up and I asked everybody a very simple question. Is your content any different from your competition?

Suddenly there was a silence in the room.

I went to a guy and I said: According to the newspapers last year you spent 3 million pounds on your Christmas advertising. Three million pounds yet if I go to your website I can see a video on your homepage that costs probably not more than 5 thousand pounds.
S instead of spending 3 million pounds on your Christmas campaign why don’t you invest those 3 million pounds in your content team and then you can produce one video a week so you end up with 52 videos a year talking about your branding talking about your company. it’s not worth it having 10% more visits in December instead of 10% more visits than the previous year.

Another guy was talking about an article they produced and he was like ‘Hey Omi look at this article. The stats. It’s so much different than anything else out there. The competition they never wrote anything like this. So I looked at the article and it was full of stats, numbers. But my question was: Ok this article is talking about rice in inflation next year. What’s gonna be the price of bread? What’s gonna be the price of petrol? What’s gonna be the price of milk?

So you’ve got a good article but you forgot to connect it to your audience. You wrote this article for fellow bankers, not your customers. Yeah, it’s a good article. So instead of starting with numbers – scaring people with numbers they don’t understand why didn’t you just go to your nearest branch – interview some people, show them the numbers, see their reaction, take this reaction and incorporate it in your article.

So the wisdom of this story is:

Content Marketing is all about connecting with your customers on a human level.

Have a good week, guys. And don’t forget to come back to my Sunday Talk next week.
You’ve got the problems. I’ve got the solutions.

8th April 201529th April 2015

How Rich Content Affects Rankings and Conversions

“Rich content counts, creative copy engenders good ranking and there’s no gaming about it” – Peter Hatherley – goo.gl/Tgifzs

Or how Hummingbird changed the Landscape of the Web Forever.

Why did Google launched Hummingbird in the first place?

Well, Google wants to become an answer engine, answering users’ questions rather than providing a list of URLs. This update takes into account relations between words and makes greater use of the Knowledge Graph to provide content .

So I am sorry to say it but everybody is required to up his content writing game in order to produce quality content that aims to solve people’s problems and answer their questions. Yes think about the user first and then start thinking about your ranking ambitions.

A very important note to make here: Align your keywords (don’t forget that I am talking about long-tail keywords ) and content in a way that will best match how people talk and search for your business.
If you are in the bread making business don’t talk about politics.

Relevancy and authority is the new name of the SEO game.

If not convinced read this article by David Amerland called ‘How Visitors Get to Your Website’ here: http://goo.gl/hauGUd.
In other words do not go into the habit of creating “Texts that just talk and talk and talk, and say nothing, or nearly nothing” (Teodora Petkova – http://goo.gl/CfNrps).

The content you create should be relevant, enjoyable and convenient, one that people will be motivated to share in their social media networks.

Recently saw on twitter: “Stories are a quick memorable way to explain what you do, how you do it, for who, and why.”

Content.Content. Content. There’s no more gaming about it.

25th March 201525th March 2015

Lead Generation Strategy Tips

“Your audience no longer wants their attention bought – they want it earned”
SEO tip of the day (via +Tara Jacobsen)

To be successful in your Lead Generation Strategy you have you have to understand that “It All Starts with Content”.Content is the foundation, the base on which you can start building your marketing leads. Whether we are talking about LinkedIn, Free E-Books or White Papers it all starts with valuable, niche oriented content generating quality leads over time.

My 5 top advises when it comes to Lead Generation Strategy:

1. When it comes to content always strive for quality over quantity. (Have you got more ideas on a topic? Perfect. Now is the time to create a series. Don’t try to stuff it all into one post.)

2. Track your content consumption (Key question answered: How often do content consumers turn into leads?). This is the only way to start determining whether the content marketing effort is making financial sense or not.

3. Don’t ever forget about your old content. Just because it isn’t new it does not mean that it’s not relevant and useful anymore. Build an effective marketing presence, even without a huge budget by using your refreshed old content again.
On the other side find your best performing content – old and new – and place a clear highly relevant call to action (CTA) at the bottom. Let me repeat this one again – HIGHLY RELEVANT CTA.

4. Inspire your customers to tell their friends about your goods and services. Give them discounts and other benefits when they do. Don’t forget to incentivize the ‘introduced friend’. Word of mouth is still the best eCommerce lead generation tool ever.

5. Segment your ‘contact’ database. Contact the right people at the right time (by tracking their behaviour). Based on their demographic and physiographic factors mould your message so it correlates with your potential customer’s needs

Now I am leaving you in the hands of Ryan Lynch and his wonderful article called ‘The 4 L’s of a Successful Lead Generation Strategy’.

Enjoy.