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Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Reviewing your content

It’s important to maintain your content and make sure it’s following SEO best practices to ensure that you can avoid any penalties. Because SEO is an ever-evolving field, there are some things that may have worked in the past that need to be updated years or months down the road. Regularly review your past and new content for:

  • Internal linking: These are links within your content to other pages on your site. These could be links to other pieces of related content, or product and service pages where users can get more information about how your company can help them with the problem they are experiencing.
  • Call-to-actions: These usually occur at the end of a page, but not always. A call-to-action includes an enticing phrase that leads the user to commit a conversion, such as signing up for an email newsletter or buying a product.
  • Image additions and monitoring: Make sure images are attributed correctly (especially if you are using creative commons) and are still working. Broken images not only result in a poor user experience, but they also are shown to search engines when they crawl your site, which can lead to errors and less exposure in image searches.
  • Broken link monitoring: Broken links make it harder not only for search engines to crawl your website, but users as well. Use SEO tools to scan for broken links. Make sure these are repaired or changed to a working link as soon as possible. In addition, if a piece of content is removed from your site, make sure that content’s URL is redirected to a new page that is closest to the original piece of content using a 301 redirect.

Internal linking

Helps search engines crawl your site

Links make it easier for search engines (and users) to find and crawl your content. Think of links like a spider web or a roadmap that is telling the search engines where to go.

Using proper keyword anchor text ‘hints’ to search engines what the link should be shown for in search results (SERPs).

Helps get links to new pages from established ones

Use site search and search your topics and keywords in content to find additional pieces of content on your site to link to. If you have ‘cornerstone content’ – a major piece of content, for example, an e-book – have the smaller pieces of content, like social media images or blog posts, link to the big pieces.

Allows users to find more information

Internal linking is good for user experience because it allows users to find and discover not only more of your content in general, but to find more information on topics they are interested in. Be sure to only link to pages the user will actually find useful (always adopt a user-first mindset).

So when it is applicable, link to your service or product pages or other pieces of content, like blog posts. Search your website for related content and link to them. However, don’t link just to fit links in. This won’t necessarily harm you SEO-wise (unless you go completely overboard, and put five or more links in a single paragraph consistently), but it’s bad for user experience.

Call-to-actions

You can make any call-to-actions you include SEO-sound by including proper anchor text and ensuring the link isn’t broken.

  • Make sure CTAs reflect current offer: Do you change promotions or have a new piece of content to promote? Go through some of your most popular pieces of content and make sure the CTAs are all correct. As an alternative, you could also use a plugin that automatically updates your CTAs across all posts, but that content in the CTA may not be indexed by Google (depending on the plugin and your website).
  • Verify contact information is correct: If you change your business name, phone number, or other identifying information, make sure it is changed in all the content. Use an SEO tool to search for that phrase on your website to make sure it is correct across all content pages.
  • Tweak according to data: Are you seeing that pages that have service pages within the text convert better than a CTA? Consider testing more in-post linking to see if that drives more conversions. You can view conversion data in Google Analytics (or whatever your analytics dashboard is).

Image monitoring

Make sure that your images aren’t broken and that they accurately represent your content. Here are some other considerations:

  • Alt text can help a website’s images get indexed in the image search results.
  • Highly shareable images are more likely to be shared in social media, which leads to more links pointing to your website.
  • Images break up the content, making it easier to read. This can lead to a higher time on site, more social media shares (because people like sharing images on social media), and can also help comprehension if they include key points, quotes, or takeaways.

Broken link monitoring

When it comes to broken link monitoring, you should be monitoring weekly - and if not weekly, at least monthly - because you need to make sure that any broken links are fixed as soon as possible.

If a search engine is crawling your site and they find a broken link, that’s like a stop sign to them. They might exit your page, they might not index that page, and that can affect what pages on your site are indexed and shown in search results.

This is also frustrating for the user and leads to a bad user experience, as they click on a link expecting to be taken to a different page, and it doesn’t work. Nothing is worse than wanting to learn more about a company’s services, but then finding you’re unable to look at the company’s service page because the link is broken.

How to fix broken links

Follow these steps to fix and moderate broken links:

  • Run a link report using a link checker tool like Majestic
  • Export to Excel
  • Go through report data in Excel and figure out which links to fix
  • Either manually fix links or do 301 redirects for bad links that were moved or where there’s replacement content
  • Schedule regular intervals to repeat the process – for example, monthly or quarterly

As a rule of thumb, you should:

  • Run link checker tools at least monthly to identify broken links
  • Export report and assign task to employee to fix links

Broken link checker tools you can use include:

  • LinkPatrol for WordPress
  • Screaming Frog
  • Majestic
  • Google Webmaster Tools
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Kelsey Jones

Digital Marketing Consultant and Writer

  • 9 years’ experience in SEO and writing for the web
  • 17 years’ experience in HTML
  • Experience writing content for small and large brands
  • US Search Awards Judge 2014, 2015, 2016
  • The Drum US Search Awards Judge 2017
  • Former Executive Editor, Search Engine Journal, 2014-2017

Data protection regulations affect almost all aspects of digital marketing. Therefore, DMI has produced a short course on GDPR for all of our students. If you wish to learn more about GDPR, you can do so here:

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    ABOUT THIS DIGITAL MARKETING MODULE

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    This module covers the key concepts involved in SEO and content marketing. It outlines best practices for researching your SEO content and aligning it with your content strategy. It also covers best practices for creating content in a productive and efficient way, and demonstrates how to evaluate the performance of your content to ensure that it is meeting your content strategy objectives.