Category: Search Engine Optimization

SEO Content Writing

SEO Isn’t Just About Quality Content

Posted on | by The AD Leaf Studio Vegas NV
Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

Over time, those who are unfamiliar to advanced search engine optimization (SEO) strategies have the perception that the quality of written SEO content is the most important factor to being top ranked on search engines. This perception isn’t entirely incorrect. However, it is misleading and can cause a casual SEO strategist to focus the wrong factors.

When you search a keyword on Google, or another search engine, and click onto a specific result, you’re most likely going to judge the page you land on based on different needs. Does the web page give you the content you were specifically looking for? Is the page easy enough to navigate and view? Does the content actually peak your interest, and does it seem accurate? In terms of quality content, many of these questions are very important to answer. They overall impact the experience of a website’s visitor and how search engines can measure the worth of the page.These elements are important for writing quality, but don’t do much for the actual optimization robots are looking for when indexing websites.

What Is SEO Actually About?

Other than writing quality SEO content, optimization done both on-page and off-page largely factors into what can rank a website greatly on a search engine. Here are the other factors that truly determine SEO success:

Time

SEO is all about time. It is not a process that is completed within a simple couple hours. It can take months, and almost years to gradually build ranking for multiple keywords. It can take a long time to build links externally, that are meant to support your website overall. Gradually and slowly, search engines will discover all connections you are trying to build within your website (from possible internal links), or even links you may have created on other websites that connect back to your site.

Link Building

Search engines could care less about content either being the best or worst if the content itself is not being found through a proper link. If your audience cannot link to it, search engines are very unlikely to even rank it and this will result to no traffic being driven to your website. Think of it this way: The more people can link back to a certain piece of content, the better its chances are of actually ranking for a specific related keyword. Quality links truly do matter, and they can sometimes push a link that has been stuck at position 5 to position 1 on search engines.

HTML Tags

Meta tags, such as title tags, meta descriptions, and keywords, are extremely important. Title tags and meta descriptions are the first impression a possible visitor could have on a specific web page you have ranked. What is displayed in the SERP can make or break whether a person clicks on your website or not.

Source of Content

Link building can play a big factor in giving a website high domain authority. But why is domain authority important? Google will give priority in ranking to those websites that have built such authority and credibility over time. When optimizing a new page, if the website already has high domain authority, they already have a huge head-start in SEO.

Other Factors

Other factors that could affect search engine ranking involve simply having more spend on using better SEO tools, or having a bigger ream of people working on the factors listed above. Another factor is also simple luck. Despite a lack of optimization of SEO strategies, some websites have specific pages ranked up well.

 

Writing the best SEO content may not be the only way to get your web page top ranked. Overall, SEO is a competition of strategy ‒ strategies that are achieved by multiple levels of optimization. However, perseverance and patience are important and are almost key to such a competition.

Digital Marketing Strategy

Why Businesses Need Digital Marketing To Survive COVID-19

Posted on | by The AD Leaf Studio Vegas NV
Content Writing, Email Marketing, Graphic Design, Marketing, Pay Per Click, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Website Design

Why Businesses Need A Digital Marketing Strategy To Survive COVID-19

In the coming months, businesses of all sizes are going to become extra reliant than ever on their digital marketing strategy. Without wanting to sound too much like a killjoy, in many cases, it will be the deciding factor in whether they make it through the tough times that are ahead. 

The unparalleled, and almost-total disappearance of all channels related to live events and conferences, and the increasing barriers on face-to-face business, pose an enormous challenge to any business model. 

B2B companies, in particular, rely on the annual circuit of trade shows and exhibitions to network and build customer relations. In industries that are not digital-native, they may also be less sophisticated in their digital growth and customer relations strategies. Especially in the case of smaller businesses that are used to getting new customers strictly word-of-mouth referrals or on the strength of a hard-won reputation, their loss is going to come as a shock if it hasn’t already.

Larger companies are now finding themselves in the position of having potentially lost millions of dollars from canceled events alone. They won’t claw back the hours of time and expense spent on preparations for this year, but insurance and flexible cancellation policies are going to leave them with some marketing budget to reassign. Digital Marketing in any aspect is likely going to be the clear and obvious choice here, and companies that may not so much as had a Facebook page before will need to move into social media marketing, content marketing, SEO, and even influencer-led campaigns. 

This, of course, means there are opportunities out there for the taking and a key factor in resilience is adaptability. If it’s standard in your industry to go out and meet new customers face-to-face before you do business, adapting may mean opening new channels over web or social media platforms where introductions can be made and relationship fostered. In the coming months, you prospective clients are going to be less open to the idea of letting you walk through the door and shake their hand, and no-one really has any idea how long this will last and whether this will lead to longer-term change. 

We are going to be in some uncertain times, but with the increase of remote working and a collaborative approach, companies are going to turn to digital channels and embrace the transformation. There has already been a real spike in the last few weeks from companies wishing to create or update their websites, launch new social media channels and campaigns focused on home-workers and a real focus on using influencers and SEO to reach new audiences. 

Being confined to the office — or even the home — rather than on the road on sales visits or at events, means marketers are going to have more time to develop digital marketing strategies. This means researching where your customers can be found online, and how different approaches and tactics might impact your success. If your organization previously put minimal efforts into digital channels, now is going to be a prime time to revisit them. That could be as simple as giving your website or social media pages a refresh, or a more innovative approach. 

A key point to note is that a lot of corporate entities use up about 50-60% of their marketing budgets on events. When things go back to normal, budgets will most likely be going back to those live face-to-face events, but if organizations can see the benefits and opportunities that digital marketing can offer, they might understand the benefit of adding it to their long-term marketing strategy. 

Channels such as Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn Live are going to be crucial moving forward as the ability to connect with a targeted audience real-time is very beneficial, if not essential. 

It’s certainly true that the coming weeks, or months – or however long this situation lasts – will be a challenging time for any company that isn’t ready to think about how they will replace the opportunities that have been lost. 

As long as businesses can approach the shift to digital marketing strategically, there’s no reason why it should just serve as an emergency fill-in but could carry on providing long-term value when the world eventually gets back to normal. And of course, this would make companies more resilient to deal with any future pandemics. Do you need help with your Digital Marketing Strategy? Looking to take your social media or SEO to the next step? Contact the team at The AD Leaf ® Marketing Firm and learn how you can grow with us today and weather the storm that is COVID-19!

Marketing Agency

5 Reasons To Hire A Marketing Agency VS An In-House Team

Posted on | by The AD Leaf Studio Vegas NV
Content Writing, Email Marketing, Graphic Design, IT Services, Marketing, Pay Per Click, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Website Design

Should you hire a Marketing Agency or build an in-house team?

In today’s digital landscape, there is no shortage of marketing options for businesses. From freelancers and marketing agencies to hiring your own in-house team, companies have more choices than ever before, specifically when it comes to online marketing. As your business grows, you will need to consider how your marketing will be handled, including whether to hire new employees and build an internal marketing team or empower your brand through a Marketing Agency.

While each has its own advantages, a full-service Marketing Agency provides substantial value to large, medium, and even small businesses. They strive to build cohesive and effective brands, put organizations in front of their customers and audience, and drive sales through awareness.

5 Reasons to Hire A Marketing Agency

1. Unparalleled Experience

Why piece together individual talents when you can hire an experienced Marketing Agency to handle everything for you? One of the major advantages of hiring a Marketing Agency is a professional experience. In fact, a good agency will have specific knowledge in a wide range of industries and markets, along with experience facing a diverse range of scenarios and challenges never encountered by many newer business owners. Having a knowledgeable and experienced staff at your side can produce immediate results for owners, helping to quickly get your marketing efforts off the ground.

2. Broader Skillsets

It can be difficult to locate suitable in-house employees with branding and marketing skills such as SEO and graphic design. By hiring a Marketing Agency, you’ll not only have the necessary tools to achieve your vision for success but a suite of creative services at your fingertips.

For example, a full-service Marketing Agency can assist clients in everything from rebranding their company image and website, developing their print and direct mail campaigns, and creating a social strategy to boost SEO and PPC campaigns. With a Marketing Agency, a client may choose to utilize one service or all them–whereas, with an in-house team, businesses are limited in what they can achieve.

3. Fresh Perspective & Inspiration

Another major advantage of hiring a Marketing Agency is a new perspective. A marketing team can help inject new life into marketing efforts, helping to identify unseen opportunities and enhance current campaigns. One example is social media marketing. With more companies looking to broaden their social reach through sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, a Marketing Agency can significantly enhance a brand’s approach to social media, including how they’re perceived by their audience.

4. Speed, Efficiency, and Consistency

As an up-and-coming business owner, you’ll be forced to wear several hats when getting your business off the ground. Generally speaking, this will almost include tackling aspects of the business you’re unfamiliar with, such as branding and digital marketing. With only so much time in the day, it’s important your marketing approach doesn’t suffer from time restraints or inexperience. Hiring a Marketing Agency can easily solve this dilemma.

5. More Affordable Than Hiring In-House

The cost of hiring and maintaining a team of in-house marketers can be very expensive. For smaller businesses, this expense may be too much to afford.
One of the more surprising benefits of hiring a Marketing Agency is cost-effectiveness. Along with providing a plethora of knowledge, experience, and skillset, a Marketing Agency is almost always more affordable compared to hiring a full-time marketing team. For example, after hiring a marketing manager, web designer, graphic designer, content writer, and social media manager, the total cost can reach upwards of multiple six figures a year! And that’s not even including the cost of employee benefits.

Marketing is the heart and soul of any business. At The AD Leaf ®, we’ve spent the last 25 years working with a diverse range of clients — from healthcare and technology to governmental, law enforcement and consumer goods — to perfect our approach to marketing, advertising, and branding. From strategic creative direction to engaging digital marketing, our extensive marketing team is here to handle every aspect of your business.

Want to enhance your content marketing? Looking to take your social media to the next step? Contact the team at The AD Leaf ® Marketing Firm and learn how you can grow with us today!

SEO Specialists

What’s Going On With Google’s New Featured Snippet Update?

Posted on | by The AD Leaf Studio Vegas NV
Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

Google had released a significant update for featured snippets on January 22, 2020. This overall update affects the first page of search results, and the organic traffic following featured snippets. However, what exactly happened and how will this affect search engine optimization (SEO)?

In the past, Google used to give any ranked URL two spots on their search engine results pages, which are also called SERPs. This would occur when a URL was ranked with a featured snippet, which is also called position zero as it would appear ranked above position one on any average search result. However, this no longer occurs with Google’s newest update on featured snippets. In fact, if a URL shows up as a featured snippet, Google will no longer duplicate and show the URL on any position past position zero. This entire procress is called deduplication, which is when Google removes duplicated URLs from SERPs containing featured snippets.

Google’s SearchLiaison posted the following facts about deduplication on Twitter:

 

Performance reports will not change at all as a result of deduplication, as Google SearchLiaison had explained. Basically, if a site loses position one of organic search but is still a featured snippet, it will still be considered rank one on any performance report.

However, how will this update affect any SEO efforts overall?

SeoClarity conducted some research to see how search ranking has been affected. Prior to the final update, the research revealed that 28% of duplicate listings appeared in the search results’ second position to any featured snippet. In addition, the following graph reveals that the ranking positions of the duplicate listing for about 250,000 keywords that had been found on featured snippets:

Google’s Featured Snippet Changes & Impact on Organic Traffic [STUDY]

 

However, now that sites on featured snippets have been deduplicated the first page of search results, SEO specialists and site owners are wondering how organic traffic and SEO will be affected overall. Luckily, with seoClarity’s study of traffic, they have found that traffic has been consistent from the lat 14 days to the final implementation of the Featured Snippet Update (from approximately January 10, 2020 to January 23, 2020). So, SEO specialists and site owners can relax as there is no significant change.

This is a good sign so far for all those who are concerned. Yet, it will be interesting to see if Google implements any changes relating to this situation, over the upcoming months. Be sure to contact The AD Leaf ® Marketing Firm for more information on the services our SEO specialists provide.

Social Media Marketing

Three Tips to Help Your Writing Not Suck

Posted on | by The AD Leaf Studio Vegas NV
Content Writing, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

So you are about to publish your client’s next post on their social media platforms. You skim it one last time, slide the mouse over the longed-for “publish” button, and…click.

It’s away.

Transmitted.

Flying through the internet.

Public. Seen. Exposed.

 

But what happens if you don’t have a basic understanding of composing well written and compelling copy? Failing to proofread your own work can be detrimental to the success of the client you are representing, and the firm you work with. We are professionals here, so the way in which we conduct our work, including our written conduct, should reflect this! But if you do not have a frame of reference and some basic best practices under your belt, and you publish your work…who knows what could happen.

See, if you are in Social Media Marketing, you most likely have to face this obviously large giant, glaring down at you. It’s up to you and up to me to develop our skill set so we can slay that giant, and prosper everyone around us. While it’s true that people make mistakes, as professionals, it is our goal to prosper others, we need to do everything we can to ensure that our work is the best it can be, and there are plenty of smiles not fading under a metaphorical sun.

So how can we better engage with our audience, produce eye-catching content, and keep the smile alive? Below are 3 tips for writing better, stronger content.

  1. Grammarly – This one is basic but absolutely essential. Grammarly is a free extension that you can download (they also have a Pro version that you can pay for) that is essentially spell-checker. As you are creating copy for your clients and you are typing furiously across the keyboard, it will gently point out when you misspell a word. There is nothing worse than composing an email, an important response, or even worse…a social media post, and finding a glaring typo. The dread! Typos create an unprofessional view of not only yourself but also the clients you are representing. This is one problem that can be easily resolved by downloading the Grammarly extension. It’s free and keeps your content looking that much more professional for your client base.
  2. Open Loops – I remember watching The Office a couple of years back. There was an episode where Jim and Pam finally (and quite scandalously if I might add) kiss. It was the long anticipated moment that we all deep down hoped for because they were so obviously into each other, and well…Roy was not the nicest guy. But then the episode cut and  at that point, I thought to myself, “Wait, what? Do they get together? Will they date? Will Roy punch Jim in his face?” So naturally, I binge-watched the next 10 episodes. Why did I do this? This was not an accident. The producers created a psychological effect called an Open Loop which “pulled” me to want to watch the next episode (or 10). The lack of resolution made me continue. Resolution is something we all crave. We can implement this same psychological principle to generate more leads. We need to create Open Loops within our copy that was to pull the audience to “watch 10 more episodes” of whatever “show” you are playing. Create a question or something that draws the reader in to continue reading by dangling something in front of them without giving everything upfront. This is an Open Loop.
  3. Star, Chain, Hook – The Star is you/your business/what you offer. The Chain is the surrounding, supporting evidence that validates the Star. Lastly, the Hook is the call to action. The key ingredient in this writing formula is the chain. The chain is the supporting facts/statistics/analytics/evidence that validates you and what you are offering (the Star). This is the factual and emotional argument that you are right, and your audience needs to join you. These facts form a chain that envelopes you to your future clients. This is where the call to action comes in. So you’ve presented the Star (you as a company or your services) and you have also laid out the Chain (the facts as to why going with you is more advantageous) and now it’s time for the Call to Action. At this point, you want to gently put pressure to encourage your readers to make a decision. Like Voldemort from Harry Potter. Just kidding. But you get the idea. Present who you are. Lay out the chain links of why you are the winner to go with, and then ask them to join your dark army.

Let’s say you are representing a coffee company’s social media campaign. What does this company’s definition of success look like? This is the motivation behind the star you are presenting to the public. This is the question that you are answering for others. Why should they buy their coffee? Figure this out, and present the star proudly and confidently to the general public. After this shiny beautiful star is presented, it’s time to reinforce why it’s the best coffee. It’s time to describe, link by link, evidence by evidence, why their coffee is the best. You could describe the low carbon footprint the company makes, the exquisite attention to detail they pour over every cup of coffee they make, and the social impact they strive to achieve. Lastly, the hook. A hook grabs people. Now we lay before our audience not only the reasons why this coffee is better than all others, but the reason they need it. This coffee is ethically sourced. This coffee supports these farmers. This coffee is the way coffee is supposed to be made. These hooks are nudging people to make a choice. This choice can be blatant: “Come on by today” or it can be not as obvious “We are open all day Saturday”. The choice is yours as you factor in other elements from your campaign.

With these 3 principals, your copywriting skills will hit the stratosphere! There are an endless plethora of social media marketing resources out there that are available. A lot of this content was inspired from content on Buffer’s website which is another great resource for those wanting to learn.

The marketing game is entirely other-centric. Our job is to help you and your job do well. To win. And because when you win, we win. By being proactive, we close the gap in preventing mistakes, creating better content, crushing the competitors, and making the world a better place. Let’s get writing!