Fibre Marketing

Category: Quality Content

Capturing Users’ Attention Span With SEO

Posted on by Chloe

When used correctly, SEO is a powerful tool that can drive traffic to your site, boost search engine rankings, build brand awareness, and ultimately, increase sales and revenue. Utilising strategies to improve your SEO can be an effective way to drive growth within your company and achieve your strategic business objectives.

That being said, your SEO strategies will only be effective if you manage to capture your users’ attention quickly. Even though the idea that an average person’s attention span is just 8 seconds has been debunked, it is true that users are less willing to wait around for appealing content. 38% of people will leave a website if the content is unattractive, and it takes just 5 seconds for them to form an opinion about a site overall (according to sweor), meaning that you don’t have long to win users over.

With that in mind, let’s look at some of the top ways to capture users’ attention with SEO in 2020.

Create engaging content

Quality content is key when it comes to capturing your customer’s attention and boosting your search engine rankings. It is no longer enough to simply publish blogs and post the odd status on social media. Your content should be tailored to your intended audience and written in a way that users will find engaging and interesting. For instance, make sure that any blog posts have a well-written introduction that will hook your readers and keep them interested. You should also focus on writing in a way that is natural and friendly. You can capture your users’ attention with content by asking questions, requesting feedback from your customers, and ensuring that your content brings value to the reader.

We also have a number of posts on our blog to help you create valuable content:

Understand your audience

For your content marketing strategy to be successful, you must have a clear understanding of your intended audience. You should conduct thorough audience research to determine who your audience is and how they behave online. It is also important to learn about their marketing preferences – for example, do your customers prefer to read blog posts or watch video content?

Having this insight will allow you to tailor your content and connect with your target customers more effectively. This information can also be used to optimise your website and make your pages more user-friendly and appealing. Overall, understanding your audience will help you learn how to keep your users’ attention using content and SEO.

Focus on your website speed

Website speed is fundamental to SEO and it will be virtually impossible to improve your search engine rankings if you have poor loading speeds. Marketing studies show that web pages that take five seconds to load have a 35% bounce rate. Research has also found that a massive 79% of consumers won’t return to a company if they experience poor website performance. Think about it – there are hundreds of companies online offering similar products and services. With so much choice available, users are less likely to accept issues like slow page loading times. People will simply leave your site and search for an answer to their query elsewhere.

With that in mind, you must optimise your web pages and focus on increasing usability. Some suggestions to help you improve your page load speed include enabling compression, reducing redirects, and improving the service response time.

Remove potential distractions

Your page loading speed is important, but you must also place a special focus on your website design and remove potential distractions. If a user lands on your site and becomes distracted or frustrated by things like pop-ups and redirects, then you are likely to experience a high bounce rate. This will harm your search engine rankings and damage your SEO efforts. You can conduct a website audit to identify any issues with your site that may frustrate your users. On that note, here are some tips to improve your website design:

  • Minimise the number of advertisements and banners displayed on your website.
  • Break up large blocks of text with headings, images, and other visual media.
  • Repair any broken images or links and reduce the number os pop-ups.
  • Make your site easy to navigate and reduce your site’s click depth.

The internet has opened up endless opportunities for businesses to boost sales and revenue through online channels. However, it has also increased competition and your site is likely to become lost online if you have poor SEO. Short attention spans are a particular challenge when it comes to SEO and you must create engaging content that will attract your users and keep them interested. Try implementing the above suggestions to capture your users’ attention and maximise the results of your SEO and digital marketing.

7 Ways to Come Up with Engaging Content Ideas

Posted on by Chloe

In order to create a solid content marketing plan, you need to be coming up with fresh new content ideas constantly.

These ideas need to cover topics your audience loves, solve their problems, answer their questions, address their needs and build loyalty. If that wasn’t enough, you need to make sure these ideas are also good enough that they can boost your Google rankings and continue to grow your business.

It’s certainly not an easy task and pulling a few ideas off the top of your head isn’t almost certainly isn’t going to deliver the results that your business deserves.

If you want to stand out in a crowded market and more effectively market your business, you’ll need to do your research before you start creating your content. Here are seven of the easiest ways you can get started.

1. Ask your audience

Creating content your audience will love is key when it comes to building your business and increasing your search rankings.

For that reason, one of the best ways to get content ideas is to reach out and ask them. Post a question on social media, create a poll or even send an email to your blog subscribers and ask them what they’d like you to help them with.

Not only will this leave them feeling like you care about your customers, it will also help ensure you’re writing for your readers, and not just the search engines.

2. Use your analytics

You can use your Google Analytics, Google Search Console and social media analytics to find out which of your content pieces your audience resonates with the most.

Ask yourself questions such as;

  • Do they prefer your posts on a particular topic?
  • What do they like and share the most?
  • How did they find your site and what keeps them there?

Once you’ve gathered your information, you can use it to create ideas for new content that are likely to generate interest and engagement from your readers and add value.

3. Explore Google’s ‘People Also Ask’ feature

Have you ever done a Google search and, as you scrolled down, noticed a box titled ‘People also ask’ with drop down answers on the page? As the name suggests, this nifty feature uses an algorithm to connect your search term with other similar questions, making it really useful when coming up with new content ideas.

If you use these queries to create your content, and make sure it’s concise and well written, you could improve your rankings and appear here too.

But that’s not all. As Search Engine Watch points out, the People Also Ask feature could also help you develop more long term content plans; “…[People Also Ask] serves a more practical goal, beyond understanding your audience and topic better. If you search Google for your target query enough, you will soon start seeing certain searching patterns.”

4. Look at ‘Answer the Public’

Do you feel overwhelmed when given spreadsheets and big lists of keywords? Then you’ll love Answer the Public.

This tool gathers together current search engine data and uses it to generate phrases and questions that people are actually searching for. Then it gives you the results in a user-friendly mind-map format or easy-to-use data sets that you can instantly use to create new content.

If you haven’t tried it before, we highly recommend that you go ahead and do so.

5. Follow the latest trends

What do people are about at the moment? Are there any trends on social media and in news that are relevant to your business? If so, these can be a great starting point when it comes to generating content ideas. For maximum impact, make sure you don’t just share the news, but also adds something new and relevant to the conversation.

Staying up to date is easy to do. Simply read the news, check social media, research any national/international days relevant to your industry, and subscribe to the useful Google Trends notifications.

6. Check your competition

What are other businesses in your industry or niche creating content about? Have they covered topics you’ve not yet covered?

This can often be a great guide that will spark your inspiration and help identify any topics you’ve forgotten to talk about so far. You can then use this to add even more value to the conversation by perhaps sharing a different option or even going more deeply into a topic.

7. Use Google Search suggestions

Many businesses find they have plenty of general topic ideas for content but they’re not sure exactly how to refine these into high performing pieces of content. A great solution in this case is to turn to Google Search suggestions.

Simply type your core content idea into the search bar and it will suggest related phrases based on what you are searching for.

For example, if we were thinking about creating content on ‘remote working’, we could input these sentences and be given the following:

  • Remote working is bad uk
  • Remote working 2020
  • Remote working jobs

Again, these are based on real keyword searches so are likely to perform well when turned into content.

 

As we mentioned at the start of this post, finding new ideas for engaging content isn’t easy. But by using the tools and tricks we’ve suggested here, you’ll find plenty of inspiration for content that will keep readers and search engines happy.

7 Ways to Give Your Business Blog a Boost

Posted on by Chloe

A business blog helps to drive traffic to your website, showcases your knowledge and authority, and can help convert those casual readers into paying customers.

But you know that because you’re already working hard to create new high-quality content that resonates with your audience, aren’t you?

If you’re averting your eyes and feeling slightly embarrassed at this point, don’t be. Many businesses just like yours aren’t using the power of their blog to get them real results, or they’re making many minor mistakes that could have a huge impact.

But don’t worry. Just by making a few minor changes, you can soon take your blog from average to outstanding. Here are our tips to help you do just that.

1. Focus on your audience

The first thing you need to do when creating content for your blog is to make sure that you’re writing about things that your audience genuinely care about and will find useful.

That way, you’ll know that your content is highly likely to be successful from the moment you hit that ‘publish’ button, and you won’t be just throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping that it sticks.

You’ll also be far more likely to get engagement in the form of comments, likes and, because you’re creating useful content, your audience is far more likely to like and trust you too.

To do this, you need to find out exactly who your audience is and what they want. The best ways to do this include:

  • Creating buyer personas
  • Gathering customer feedback
  • Doing surveys
  • Looking at your FAQs
  • Reviewing your website metrics
  • Researching keywords

From this data, you can narrow down those topics that they most want to learn and then create your content based on these ideas.

2. Create high quality content

These days, it’s not enough to sit down and fire off 500 words of content on a randomly chosen topic. If you want to make your content get results for your business, you need to make sure what you’re sharing is good.

Each piece of content you publish on the internet should be high quality, add maximum value, and showcase your expertise.

This is what Google is looking for when it ranks your website, it’s what your business needs when it comes to building a strong brand, and, most importantly, it’s one of the factors that will keep bringing customers to your (virtual) door.

Some tips you can use to do this include:

  • Choosing a topic your audience will love (see the last tip)
  • Make your writing interesting
  • Speak to your customers in their language
  • Check for spelling mistakes, typos and grammatical errors
  • Always write for readers, not search engines

3. Be consistent

How often do you currently post new content? If you’re like many businesses you aren’t posting as often as you could be.

Although this is completely understandable given the stressful few months we’ve just had, this sporadic posting isn’t doing your search rankings or the popularity of your business blog any favours.

Research has shown that posting new content on a regular basis is key to content marketing success. It’s what gets you noticed by the search engines, what helps you to stand out on social media, and what shows your customers that you care about your audience.

If you can commit to publishing on a certain day each week or month, you’re also more likely to find time in your schedule to get it done, or hire someone to do it for you.

How often you actually post is completely up to you. While the general rule of thumb is ‘the more often, the better’, this is unlikely to be sustainable if you’re a solopreneur or don’t have a large marketing team.

As content marketing experts, HubSpot say, “The frequency of blog posts depends on what’s best for your company. Smaller businesses have found comfort and success posting one to four times a week, while larger companies can push out daily and, sometimes, multiple daily posts.”

The key is to find out what works best for you, then stick to it.

4. Use keywords

Keywords are those words that a user types into the search box when they’re looking for information, and they can be extremely useful when you create blog content.

When the keywords searched match the words found on your website or blog post, Google is more likely to send this person your way.

So how do you know what keywords to include?

Luckily there are a variety of tools that can help you find the keywords that are relevant to your audience. You can then use these words to guide the topics you choose to write about, as well as including them in the posts themselves.

We can also help you research and optimise your keywords and other SEO assets – contact us for help.

But a word of warning – don’t overdo it. If you try to squeeze in too many keywords, you could get penalised by Google.

Instead, keep it natural, and don’t think you need to include the exact same words – synonyms are also effective.

5. Add meta descriptions

If you were to type the keywords ‘Fibre Marketing Cheltenham’ into your search engine, you’d get the following result:

 

 

 

 

As you can see from the screenshot, you’ll see the domain name at the top followed by a nice big title (meta title) then a short description (meta description).

Both the title and the description are known as meta tags.

Every page on your website should have them if you want to improve your online performance. They can substantially improve your SEO efforts, capture your user’s attention, and attract more readers when used correctly.

So, if you haven’t already tweaked yours, now is the perfect time.

6. Format your blog post correctly

With the average attention span getting shorter, it’s more important than ever to make your blog posts as user-friendly as possible.

Fail to do this and your reader might just take a look at your website, find it hard to use, and then click away to your competitor’s website. They won’t bother to read your blog posts because it’s just too much work.

The good news is that it’s very easy to solve this problem. You just need to format your blog post correctly. Here are some tips:

  • Avoid using big blocks of text on your websites
  • Use short paragraphs
  • Split up your content using subheadings
  • Use bullet points and number lists
  • Use subheadings (H1, H2, etc)
  • Include plenty of white space.

7. Learn from your mistakes

It can often take time to see an improvement in search performance and customer engagement, so don’t get frustrated or give up if you don’t get the results you were hoping for.

Be patient and you will often see improvements. If not, simply take a look at your website metrics and see what feedback you can get on what you’ve been doing so far.

For example:

  • How many people are visiting your blog?
  • Are they engaging with it or just clicking away?
  • Which piece of content is performing the best and why do you think this is?
  • How about the worst performing?
  • What does customer feedback tell you?

By using this information, you can tweak your approach so you can start creating the right kind of content for your reader.

As Barack Obama said “The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won’t. It’s whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere.”

Summary

With the coronavirus restrictions starting to ease, now is the perfect time to improve your business blog.

By consistently posting high quality content that you know your reader will find useful, including keywords, getting the formatting right, and tweaking your metadata, you can boost your search rankings and grow your customer base.

If this doesn’t work, continue to make improvements and your efforts will pay off in the long run.

How to Create Great Web Content for SEO

Posted on by Chloe

There is no doubt that the coronavirus pandemic that is going on at the moment is changing the ways that we are working and running our businesses – both temporarily and perhaps in the long-term. Although fewer businesses are able to operate as they normally would, it is important that we all prepare ourselves for when the outbreak is over and the world gets back to ‘normal’.

Despite the fact that you might not be able to do your ‘normal’ work, there is plenty that businesses can be doing in the meantime to be able to bounce back strongly from the impact of COVID-19. And one of those is content marketing and SEO.

This ‘downtime’ can give you the time that you need to create some great web content for your business, give your SEO a boost, and ensure that you are ready to take off again when this is all over.

When you are creating content, there are a few aspects that you should consider to ensure that your content to be as effective as possible:

Write for the User

To determine which web pages rank highly on the SERPs, search engines such as Google have algorithms that will find the pages most relevant to the searcher. The search engines want people to continue to use their services, and so the most important thing for them is to display the pages that are the most relevant and informative to their searchers.

This means that your pages should be written for users and NOT for the search engines. By putting out good quality, informative, and useful content you are more likely to be rewarded with a higher ranking in the SERPs.

Keyword Research

When you are planning a content marketing strategy it is important first to carry out some keyword research.  This means researching the terms that people are likely to use to be able to find your website. There are plenty of tools that you can use to help you to carry out this keyword research, or you can speak to an SEO consultant.

From this keyword research, you can then go on to plan your content, ensuring that these terms or questions are covered in it. It is important, however, that you don’t ‘keyword stuff’ your content – search engines don’t like this and will penalise you for it!

H1 and H2 Tags

It is important that, when you publish SEO copy, you use H1 and H2 tags to help your content to be organised. H1 tags are like the title of a book, and H2 tags are used to break up the content like subtitles. They can help to organise content and ensure that searchers can find what they are looking for quickly and easily – and this is always beneficial in terms of SEO.

You should have just one H1 tag per page and use H2 tags sparingly whilst being as descriptive as possible.

Your Pages

There are several different ways that you can work on your SEO content. You should first ensure that your website is properly optimised. This means making sure that you have up-to-date information, properly optimised product pages, a good ‘about’ page, and a blog section.

Once these pages are fully optimised, you can then go on to think about blog content. The golden rule here is to make your content interesting, informative, entertaining, or authoritative (or preferably all of them!). Some blog ideas include:

  • Articles
  • Interviews
  • Lists
  • Guides
  • Videos
  • Infographics

E-A-T for Good SEO

When it comes to creating the best content for SEO, you should try to comply with the E-A-T rules.

E-A-T stands for:

Expertise – You need to show that you are an expert in your field. You need to show that you know what you are talking about, and this is especially important for professional businesses as opposed to gossip or celebrity websites, for example.

Authoritative – You can use your expertise (or the expertise of your writer) to show that you are an authority in your area. From this, you will become the go-to person for your readers (and potential customers).

Trustworthy – You should make your readers feel that they can trust you – especially if you are hoping that they buy from you! Keep your website strong and clear, informative and secure.

Old Content

Re-purposing your old content is a great way to freshen up your website and help with SEO. You can update any out-of-date information, helping with SEO and making it more attractive to searchers. We also know that Google loves new content – even if it is just re-purposed old content! This also gives you the chance to correct spelling or grammatical errors, fix technical issues like broken backlinks – and add new ones, add other media, and add new keywords.

In this time when your other workload might be low, it is the ideal moment to get your website content perfect, to ensure that it is working efficiently for your business through SEO. By incorporating these fundamentals, you can ensure that you are ready to go again as soon as you need to.

The Importance of Creating Content During the Coronavirus Outbreak

Posted on by Chloe

The coronavirus pandemic that the world is experiencing at the moment is affecting everything about our daily lives – from how much we can see our loved ones, to how we are working.

For many businesses, this is a worrying time as they try to contend with changes in people’s consumption and spending habits, to looking after their staff and protecting them both in terms of their health and financially, and of course, considering the implications of potentially having high percentages of staff off sick at any given time.

Although it might not be ‘business as usual’, it is important for businesses to prepare for when the outbreak is over. Just because you might not be able to operate as normal, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be working on certain aspects of your business – and that your competitors aren’t sitting around idle!

The world of marketing, for example, doesn’t stop. In fact, online marketing has never been more important as more people begin to operate and communicate online. And one major aspect of online marketing is content creation.

Content Creation for Marketing During COVID-19

As fewer people are travelling, fewer people are out of the house and fewer people are visiting events, offline marketing is becoming less effective than before. Likewise, the world as a whole is spending more time online, looking for information and to be entertained – in other words, looking for content.

Content marketing concerns the creation of content, firstly enabling businesses to communicate clearly and accurately with their customers – and potential customers, but also to help them to establish themselves as a source of useful and reliable information, getting to the top of those all-important SERPs, and building their reputation. Content marketing is a great way to ensure that you are effectively marketing your business, not being left behind your competitors, whilst also being able to communicate effectively with your customer base.

Keep Customers Informed

It is important to keep your customers informed as to how your business is reacting to the coronavirus outbreak. It is not only good business practice but can also help to build relationships with your existing and potential customers. There are several ways that you can do this through your website, including:

  • Making announcements on your website with regards to the measures that you are taking to help your customers and staff to get through this difficult time
  • Adding to your FAQ section to cover questions that customers might have regarding how your business is dealing with COVID-19 – food hygiene or customer contact questions, for example
  • Updating opening hours, delivery options and contact phone numbers or emails to avoid frustration
  • Consider what people might want to know about your business in relation to COVID-19 and answer these queries in your content

Google My Business, Local SEO and Reviews

Google has also changed some of its rules for the duration of the outbreak and it is important that you adapt to these changes.

They have announced that they are changing Google My Business profiles, so that businesses can now change some of the details about how they are operating, including their opening hours and whether they do deliveries.

Google has also disabled the ability for people to write business reviews. It is important to allow your customers to communicate any problems that they have directly to you, so you should consider a different solution for the time being.

Social Media

Social media is a great way to show the more personal side of your business to the world. It is an excellent way to engage with your customers and reach out to new ones and show your fun side. Some of the most successful businesses in terms of social media are devising ways to get their customers involved, respond quickly to actions and if they’re lucky, go viral…

Email

Email gives you as a business direct access to someone’s letterbox and this can be a very valuable tool. What you need to do, however, is make sure that any emails that you send out are not deleted before they are even read, and stand out from the rest of the many emails that most of us receive each day about ‘what we’re doing about coronavirus’…

Try adding a personal touch, making it light-hearted, interesting, and human. Remember that a lot of people have a bit more time on their hands than normal and take this all into consideration when you are thinking about what you are going to put in your email.

Although your business might not be functioning as it normally does, it is important that you adapt how you are working to help your business to still be as effective as possible, and still be seen. And content marketing is a great place to start.

Back to Basics: Building Your Content Marketing Strategy

Posted on by Chloe

Developing a rock-solid content marketing strategy is essential when it comes to marketing your business online. It helps you to focus on the unique needs of your customers, allows you to connect with them more effectively and get the results that you are looking for.

Without it, there’s simply no way you can be sure of success.

Even if your content is smoking hot and provides a ton of value to your target audience, there’ll be no way of knowing if you’ve invested your time and money wisely. It’s akin to playing roulette with the future of your business.

However, we understand that it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the mere thought of building a content marketing strategy. That’s why we’ve decided to put together this short guide for you. You’ll learn how to get the fundamentals of building a content marketing strategy so you can reap the rewards.

Here’s what’s we’ll cover:

Step 1: Outline your goals

Step 2: Decide how you will measure your performance

Step 3: Create buyer personas

Step 4: Assess your current position

Step 5: Decide on your content channels & content types

Step 6: Identify and allocate resources

Step 7: Create a content calendar

Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

Step 1: Outline your goals

Start by deciding what is most important to your business and developing a set of content marketing goals.

Do this and you’ll develop a laser-like focus on what matters most to your business and increase the chances of achieving what you set out to do. You won’t waste time. You won’t waste money. But you will get results.

Your goals depend entirely on the unique needs of your business and where you currently are in terms of growth. Startups, for example, will often develop a vastly different set of goals to an established business with a great reputation.

That’s why it’s so important to consider what matters to you at this point in time. Do you want to increase revenue? Drive more business to your website? Boost engagement? Build authority in your field?

Whilst doing this, it’s a good idea to consult your team for suggestions on how you can grow your business. They usually have insight into specific areas of your business that you might not.

Once you have put together a few ideas, also consider how these could potentially benefit your clients and your business.

Step 2: Decide how you will measure your performance

The only way to understand whether you are achieving your goals is to develop a series of KPIs (key performance indicators) that will tell you whether all that hard work is paying off. These usually include measuring things like:

  • Mentions, shares, likes and comments
  • Time on page
  • website/ webpage traffic
  • Newsletter sign ups
  • Lead magnet signups
  • Revenue targets

By tracking this data, you will also be able to better develop your content marketing strategy and display the right information if you need to develop regular reports.

Step 3: Create buyer personas

You’d never try to teach a 10-year-old kid about the water cycle by using the kind of language or even content you’d find in a university lecture hall for adults, would you?

The same goes for when you create your content.

You need to understand exactly who you’re talking to and what they need so you can create your content with them in mind and become more strategic. It also vastly improves your chances of getting results.

This idea is echoed by content marketing experts The Content Marketing Institute who say;

“In light of what your customers likely look for in the content they choose to consume — not to mention Google’s ever-changing algorithms that aim to keep online content relevant and of a high quality — you can’t go wrong if you follow this golden rule: Write compelling content about the things your target audience would be most interested in.”

In content marketing, you do this by creating something called a buyer persona or customer avatar.

By gathering data on a range of factors such as key demographics (age, gender, education, income, etc) and factors such as interests, problems, preferred social media channels and so on, you’ll be able to better understand your customer and create content for them. You can find this kind of information from any analytics your business currently uses. Customer feedback, reviews and surveys also play a big part in the process.

Step 4: Assess your current position

By now you’ve figured out your goals, key metrics you want to track and who your customers are. Your next step is figuring out where you’re starting from.

Conduct a content audit, looking at what you already have including blog posts, guest posts, videos, and so on. Then consider how effective this content is by asking yourself:

This will enable you to better understand what improvements need to be made and help you identify your strategy moving forward.

Step 5: Decide on your content channels & content types

By doing this research, you should now understand who your audience is and what their needs are better. This will help you develop your content marketing strategy further and decide what type of content you should create and where.

Technology is continually developing, so trends are likely to come and go. However, blogging should remain a core part of your content marketing strategy, provided that you’re always creating highly actionable, high-quality and very useful content.

It’s also worth considering video marketing and live streaming as these look set to grow over the coming months and years.

Step 6: Identify and allocate resources

There’s no point creating a rockstar content marketing strategy if you don’t end up delivering the goods. That’s why you should make sure you plan the delivery phase as much as building your content marketing blueprint.

Yes, it might be dull, we know. But it’s the only way you can ensure you achieve those content marketing goals and continue to grow your business. Consider the following:

  • Who will be in charge of producing and maintaining the content?
  • What tools and resources will you need?
  • What will the workflow look like?
  • Are there any tools that you could use to simplify and streamline your workflow?

Step 7: Create a content calendar

The final step in building a content marketing strategy is planning the content itself. But beware- it’s not enough just to throw a few content ideas onto a spreadsheet and be done with it all. You need to be strategic.

Decide first how often you want to publish this new content and what channels you will be using to market this content. Once you’ve done this, you can plan exactly what to plan and when.

Many businesses are tempted to skip this step and end up struggling when they realise that they have just a day or two to come up with an idea and to create it. Don’t let this happen to you!

First gather your content ideas by brainstorming, looking at customer feedback, reviewing your FAQs, looking at keyword search terms and asking your colleagues. Then you can slot them into your content calendar and stay ahead, reduce your stress and be more likely to crush those content marketing goals.

Building a content marketing strategy can be complex and time-consuming. But any investment you make at this stage pays off significantly in the long term. Work through these steps and you will create a robust content marketing strategy that gets you results.

If you’d prefer to hire an expert, reach out to our team here at Fibre Marketing. We’d love to help.

All You Need To Know About BERT: Google’s Latest Update

Posted on by Chloe

Last Friday, Google announced a major algorithm update that is being referred to by SEO experts as one of the most important updates in the past five years. The BERT update is thought to impact around 1 in 10 search queries and has been rolled out in Google Search over the past week. Below, we are going to discuss everything you need to know about the BERT algorithm update and how it could impact your SEO strategies.

What is the Google BERT update?

Google state that BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) algorithm is a neural network-based technique for natural language processing.

Essentially, BERT helps Google recognise natural language and understand what words in a sentence mean to the user. This helps search engines better understand the intentions behind queries and provide users with more useful and relevant information.

Why was the update brought in?

According to Google, this update will aid complicated search queries that depend largely on context. Google said in their blog: “These improvements are oriented around improving language understanding, particularly for more natural language/conversational queries, as BERT is able to help search better understand the nuance and context of words in Searches and better match those queries with helpful results. You can search in a way that feels natural for you.” The BERT update means that Google Search has gotten better at understanding more prolonged and more conversational queries, thus improving the overall user experience.

Search Engine Journal provides a useful example of how the BERT update has improved search engine results. They state: “ In New England, the word “cow” in the context of fishing means a large striped bass.” They go on to describe how they typed the phrase, “how to catch a cow fishing” in Google and were provided with results related to livestock and cows, despite using the word “fishing” to provide context.

Now, following the BERT update, the same query brought up search results that are related to fishing and bass in particular. They conclude: “The BERT algorithm appeared to have understood the context of the word “fishing” as important and changed the search results to focus on fishing-related web pages.”

How does the update affect SEO?

Since last week, Google has been using the BERT algorithm to display search results. It has been confirmed that the new algorithm will impact around 10% of all search queries entered on Google Search.

This update will also affect Featured Snippets as Google will select different content from sites to display in their snippets, as previously, in many queries the snippets displayed were not that useful. Now, because of BERT, users will see featured snippets that will actually answer the posed question.

The BERT algorithm update has not been designed to punish sites, it simply aims to improve how Google understands search queries and user intent. Google has in fact already stated that there is no real way to optimise for the BERT update – Google’s Danny Sullivan tweeted: “There is nothing to optimise for with BERT, nor anything for anyone to be rethinking. The fundamentals of us seeking to reward great content remain unchanged.”

However, it’s clear that the new update will not favour sites with poorly written content. This means that all businesses can benefit from implementing strategies to improve the quality of their on-site content in order to get a boost in the rankings while avoiding being trampled by the new update. According to Google’s E-A-T guidelines, content creators should be writing for human enjoyment and real people, rather than focusing on writing for search engines.

How can I improve the quality of my content?

If you noticed a decline in your search engine rankings and organic traffic in the past week or so, then it’s likely that your site has been affected by the BERT update. As mentioned above, there isn’t really a simple answer for optimising in order to avoid a traffic decline. Primarily, there is nothing you can do.

But looking at your content may help. The update is more content-focused so technical improvements to your site are unlikely to improve your rankings. One of the main ways to boost your search engine rankings is by implementing strategies to improve the quality of your content in order to further meet Google’s guidelines.

With that in mind, here are some simple ways to enhance your on-site content and increase organic traffic to your site:

  • Update the content on your site regularly and ensure that it’s well-written, informative, and relevant. Remember to write for real people rather than machines.
  • Work with an SEO consultancy to create effective content strategies. SEO experts can work with you to build brand authority, improve search engine page rankings, and generate increased traffic flow and quality leads to your website.
  • Use a variety of different content on your site and experiment with various marketing techniques to engage as many users as possible.
  • Use natural internal linking within your content to help your website rank higher in search engine results.
  • While BERT is not directly linked to E-A-T, they do vaguely fit together as E-A-T guidelines strongly affect how Google reads your content – therefore, ensure that your site works with these factors.

Final thoughts

It is clear that the BERT algorithm update has had a significant impact on search queries – according to a press release by Google, BERT represents one of the biggest improvements in five years.

Overall, Google’s aim with updates is to enhance the user experience. BERT allows users to find relevant information quicker and use Google Search to find more satisfying results.

Remember, there is no real way for businesses to optimise their websites for the update – the best and most effective strategy you can implement is producing regular high-quality content that has been written to engage and inform your readership, thus improving your search engine rankings.

Author Authority in Search: Does it Matter to Google?

Posted on by Ella

The ability of author reputation to influence page rank has been an ongoing dispute for many years. Google Authorship was a feature that appeared in Google search results for around three years, from June 2011 until August 2014. The feature allowed and encouraged content creators to identify themselves when posting a piece of content – be it a blog post, article or other type of web-based copy – by displaying a profile image and linking to their Google Plus account. Theoretically, this aimed to help authors stand out in the SERP and bolster their click-through-rate. The Google Authorship markup fell under Google’s E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) umbrella, whereby the verification of authors on the internet would improve users’ overall search experience.

Unfortunately, the Google Authorship initiative retired in August 2014 when Google removed all author photos in their mission to better marry the user experience with mobile and desktop search – which involved decluttering the search page. Google had also established that participation in the authorship markup was extremely low (almost non-existent in many verticals), with searchers receiving little to no value from the addition. It was reported that when the markup was removed, there was little difference in ‘click behaviour’ on the search results page than when the authorship feature was in play.

However, conversations around author authority in the SEO space have since crept back into the headlines. In July there was an interesting discussion on Twitter surrounding the weight of author authority in the health industry. Google’s John Mueller referenced YMYL sites as an example of why authorship is a necessary factor to consider when publishing or reading sensitive content, such as online medical advice. He mentioned that if you are writing about a topic on health and you’re not an expert in that field, then you’re already starting off on a “shaky foundation.” He added that it makes sense for writers to find experts to write or review the content so that it is “correct and trustworthy.” Despite this, there is still little evidence to suggest that content authorship is a ranking factor in Google search. However this doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t an important element. In fact, many people believe that author authority has a number of benefits. With this in mind, let’s look at some of the evidence for and against the importance of author authority in Google search.

Considerations for content authorship

There was renewed interest in the impact of author authority on Google search following Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines (SQRG) update back in July 2018. Under these guidelines, web pages could appear higher in the search results if they rank highly in Google’s three attributes of content quality – Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. An addition to the July 2018 update was the inclusion of content creators as part of the measure of content quality. On assumption, this could imply that the reputation and expertise of the author is still an important component of the overall E-A-T rating.

What’s more (while this has not been confirmed), should Google want to identify and evaluate authors on the web according to the E-A-T specification, using something like Machine-Readable Entity IDs (MREIDs) would be essential. Google is constantly looking for ways to enhance the user experience, so it makes sense that at some point Google will begin to look for signs of authoritative and reputable authorship on content pages. For that reason, it’s advisable that publishers only accept content from creators with good reputations who have experience in the specified field. Publishers should also give preference to content creators who have a clear, positive presence online i.e. creators with active social media accounts.

The authorship veto

Back in August 2014 Google removed the ability for publishers to display the author’s name, photograph and the number of Google Plus circles the author had been added to. Once the Google Authorship feature was removed, many marketers and publishers no longer resonated with the importance of content authorship. What’s more, as mentioned above, Google has publically declared that content authorship is not a ranking factor. According to information on searchenginejournal.com – “Google’s John Mueller has clarified that the search engine’s algorithms do not look at author reputation when ranking websites.” For that reason, many businesses don’t consider it an important factor in their marketing efforts.

Final thoughts

There is little evidence to support both sides of the authority debate. However, this doesn’t mean that it’s not an important factor to consider in your marketing efforts – there is certainly no harm in providing a quality, transparent and accountable author reputation to your content. It’s also important to keep in mind that Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines could update at any point in the near future and perhaps include author authority as a ranking factor.

Why quality content is important for any website

Posted on by Fibre Agency

No matter the niche your business may fill, whether you’re a stay at home mom blogging about the latest and greatest in baby products, or trying to make waves selling your new e-book online, you need an online presence if you want to succeed in today’s business world. Even if it’s physical products you’re peddling, having a great website that has quality content is an absolutely essential part of a successful business strategy. Quality content isn’t easy to come by, and it can be well worth paying for a professional service to take care of it for you.

What do we mean exactly by quality? This topic is more or less limitless, but there are a few main criteria which should be fulfilled.

Firstly, it must be well written. If it’s not, it will destroy any air of professionalism on your site. If you have a great service but can’t describe it in proper prose, you won’t sell it, and it’s as simple as that.services-webdesign-optimized

Second, it has to be relevant and targeted to the right people. People have a pretty limited attention span as it is, so few if any are going to be inclined to sift through pages of vague and ineffectual content. You need to address the potential customers or visitors that you actually want to attract, and stay on the topics that will keep them interested and reading. This ties into the last and most important criterion, which is that the content must provide actual value. If it’s not worth something to the target audience, get rid of it. We humans are generally more intuitive than we’re given credit for, and if most of your content is worthless prevarication then don’t expect a lot of traffic.

Just as people become more and more attuned to separating the wheat from the chaff of web content due to the sheer amount of it out here, search engines do too. It used to be the case that you could simply stuff a heap of keywords into your content, Google or similar would find your site, and voila, lots of traffic and then money.

Nowadays, not so much. Although keyword stuffing does work to some extent, Google and similar sites (although does anyone use those?) are constantly iterating their algorithms to be ever more sophisticated and able to avoid such nefarious tactics.

So not only will high-quality writing attract more people by virtue of being well written and informative, but search engines will rank these pages higher as well, which again leads to more traffic from the right kind of people. And those who do read and use your website will be much more likely to come back.

So committing to consistently having top tier content is the long term play, and it’s important to keep producing content that’s fresh and useful to ensure repeat visitors to your site.

Given that everyone and their mother now has a website, there is simply an enormous amount of content out there to compete with. To make your website stand out takes a professional service which is committed to consistently producing great content. With the rise of services like Squarespace almost anyone can commission a half-decent website, but filling it with quality content is another task entirely. It’s altogether too easy to focus on making a site look good while neglecting the meat of the project. If you want success for your website, it’s truly vital in the current environment to fill it with premium web content.