Digital Marketing - Study Notes:
Content marketing
When your website is technically sound, the next thing to look at is the content on your site. It’s important to understand that search engines rank web pages rather than websites and that every page on your site should be optimized for its topic, which can be a keyword or a set of keywords.
Content marketing is the tactic that we use to grow a website’s relevance and authority in search engines by publishing and promoting great content. It involves the development and sharing of content for the web in order to acquire and sustain customers.
Key concepts around content marketing SEO include layout, organization, format, H1 to H6 tags, word count, and on-page versus off-page weighting considerations. By paying attention to these when developing content, you can improve the chances of the content being discovered when people are searching.
Different content formats may be successfully applied to SEO for visibility in different verticals. These include:
- Web search: Search engines crawl and index content from billions of sites and this is still the source for most search results today. Optimizing text-based website content is fundamental for SEO success.
- Image search: Search engines are increasingly visual, and they require high-quality images to populate these results. Marketers can improve their chances of success by making images prominent within their content and optimizing image tags with common search queries.
- Video search: Search engines are starting to understand the content of videos, but they still need some help to figure out exactly what each video contains. Marketers can add transcripts and keywords to their videos to provide text-based content. This is a growing area of focus for SEO professionals.
- Knowledge graph: The search engine knowledge graphs are a repository of information on a wide range of entities. SEOs should aim to improve the quality of information in their company’s knowledge graph, as this will be used to respond to several search queries. The knowledge graph also typically takes up a large portion of the screen for branded search queries, so it is worth maximizing its impact.
- Rich snippets: These are enriched search results that show additional information from the website. For example, when you search for event tickets, Google is likely to show you rich snippets showing event dates and locations for available tickets.
Clark Boyd
Clark Boyd is CEO and founder of marketing simulations company Novela. He is also a digital strategy consultant, author, and trainer. Over the last 12 years, he has devised and implemented international marketing strategies for brands including American Express, Adidas, and General Motors.
Today, Clark works with business schools at the University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, and Columbia University to design and deliver their executive-education courses on data analytics and digital marketing.
Clark is a certified Google trainer and runs Google workshops across Europe and the Middle East. This year, he has delivered keynote speeches at leadership events in Latin America, Europe, and the US. You can find him on X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, and Slideshare. He writes regularly on Medium and you can subscribe to his email newsletter, hi, tech.
Neil Patel
Neil Patel is the co-founder of NP Digital. The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web, Forbes says he is one of the top 10 marketers, and Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies. Neil is a New York Times bestselling author and was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 35 by the United Nations.
Nikki Lam
Nikki Lam is Senior Director of SEO at Neil Patel Digital, where she oversees the Organic Search offering, leads a growing team of over 20 passionate Search strategists, and assists in award-winning SEO campaigns for NP’s growing roster of enterprise and Fortune 1000 clients.
Joe Williams
Joe Williams teaches search engine optimization at Joe Wills. He holds a degree in Computing Informatics, and he’s been an SEO specialist for over 15 years. He’s consulted and trained many large blue-chip companies including The Guardian, Cosmopolitan, and Sky. He's on a mission to make SEO easy, fun, and profitable. You can catch him on X and LinkedIn.
