Why Do We Need More Quality Content To Get Correlated To Our Web Presence ?

Author : Bharati Ahuja

‘Quality Content ‘ is a term which everyone seems to be focusing on currently for getting a better search presence. SEOs go out of the way to encourage and convince website owners to create a blog and add content and then try to reach out to share that content in order to get more eyeballs to their site. It seems very logical but website owners need to delve deeper to understand the purpose and the logic behind creating and sharing content to get long term quality benefit from this whole process of Content Marketing.

Firstly, the term ‘Content Marketing’ itself is very misleading just as the term ‘link Building’ was misunderstood when Google introduced the ‘PageRank Technology’. Bill Slawski rightly shared on Twitter a few days back...We do not create content to market content but we create content because we want to market the product or service that we are dealing in.

"Content marketing" isn't about marketing your content, but instead about using content to market something!

— Bill Slawski (@bill_slawski) November 20, 2013

Since Content is the medium via which we represent our online persona by expressing our company ideologies, product features, future plans of the company, discuss after sales issues, etc. we need to focus on content.

The Content Marketing Ensemble Of Content Channels And Formats

(Photo credit: AltimeterGroup)



Let us answers a few questions related to Content marketing to understand the true meaning.

• What Is Content Marketing? 
• What Is The Purpose Behind Content Marketing?
• Why Do We Need To Create And Share Quality Content Regularly?
• Does Content Marketing Focus On Selling?

What Is Content Marketing?

Content Marketing refers to creating and publishing of content in various formats and sharing it via various media in order to get more customers and boost sales.

What Is The Purpose Behind Content Marketing?

Though content marketing targets mostly at getting more customers but in the process if managed and executed methodically , meticulously and strategically it helps in brand promotion , communicating with customers and also helps improve goodwill .

Why Do We Need To Create And Share Quality Content Regularly?

Marketing can never be a one time activity. Even the most established business needs to have market presence in some form or another. From the internet perspective there are millions of sites being published on a daily basis and since the potential online customers most of the time reach your site via search engines your online presence faces that much quantum of competition also on a daily basis. As search engines become more and more sophisticated to integrate quality and quantity signals to websites from all over the web in their index the need to keep your web presence updated with more and more relevant information which is informative and knowledgeable becomes increasingly important.

Does Content Marketing Focus On Selling?

The long term objective of any activity related to marketing is to improve sales, increase profits and retain customers . Content Marketing has the potential for achieving all this but when creating content if the focus is only on sales and the content eventually turns out to be in the form of an advertisement then it may not serve the purpose. If the content is informative and offers solutions to the people who have reached the URL of your content via various platforms then it has the potential of reaching out to you, and such a prospect usually requires very less effort to get converted to a buyer (assuming all the content read by him has created a positive image in his mind about the company).



Content Marketing adds more footprints on the web for web presence but also becomes the crux of connecting to people on the web which in the long run help share the word of mouth which is the basis on which decisions are taken by online buyers.

Most of the time people don’t want to listen to what the seller has to say about his product as this is advertising but they want to know what the previous buyers have to say about the product as this becomes the actual feedback about the product or service which has more impact on the decision making process.

As in real life we are what are thoughts are and we share our thoughts via discussions, seminars, exhibitions, road shows , etc. on the internet we need to share our thoughts via blogs, social media sites, videos, comments, reviews, etc. and on the internet majority of the people use search engines to find information hence the search engines have the onus of correlating all these collective signals from the company blogs, social media sites, comments, reviews, etc. and display the search results after calculating the quality parameters to give quality results to its users. The search engines lately have upgraded their algorithms and are constantly upgrading their algorithms to integrate more and more of such signals so it has become mandatory for the website owners to focus on correlating more content to their web presence in very form to have a complete blended search presence.

Hence, the content you create, share or promote gets correlated to your online persona which has the potential of being found by the search engine users whenever they search for information connected to the content your persona is correlated to.

Matt Cutts Asks For Suggestions To Fine Tune Webmaster Tools Further As 2014 Approaches

Every SEO is always on the lookout for some great SEO Tools which will simplify and facilitate the work of optimizing websites. There are many SEO tools available in the market but I am sure every SEO will vouch for the Webmaster Tools and the Google Analytics offered by Google in order to monitor and measure the website’s progress .

Google webmaster tools is part of a marketing effort by Google to reach out to Webmasters and promote Google services. I call it a platform to converse and communicate with Google regarding your website. On this platform Google basically tells you how to help them to keep a track of your website and in return informs you about how your website is being indexed and crawled by the Googlebot.

Improving the features of Google Webmaster Tools is a constant endeavour for Google. The WMT keep on regularly getting upgraded with the latest features.

Since Vanessa Fox started working on Webmaster Central in 2005 till date WMT have been updated several times and as 2014 approaches Matt Cutts has asked everyone on his blog for suggestions to improve the WMT further to take it at a new functional level.

Some things that Matt Cutts could imagine people wanting are:

• Make it easier/faster to claim authorship or do authorship markup.
• Improved reporting of spam, bugs, errors, or issues. Maybe people who do very good spam reports could be “deputized” so their future spam reports would be fast-tracked. Or perhaps a karma, cred, or peer-based system could bubble up the most important issues, bad search results, etc.
• Option to download the web pages that Google has seen from your site, in case a catastrophe like a hard drive failure or a virus takes down your entire website.
• Checklists or help for new businesses that are just starting out.
• Periodic reports with advice on improving areas like mobile or page speed.
• Send Google “fat pings” of content before publishing it on the web, to make it easier for Google to tell where content appeared first on the web.
• Better tools for detecting or reporting duplicate content or scrapers.
• Show pages that don’t validate.
• Show the source pages that link to your 404 pages, so you can contact other sites and ask if they want to fix their broken links.
• Or almost as nice: tell the pages on your website that lead to 404s or broken links, so that site owners can fix their own broken links.
• Better or faster bulk URL removal (maybe pages that match a specific phrase?).
• Refreshing the existing data in Webmaster Tools faster or better.
• Improve robots.txt checker to handle even longer files.
• Ways for site owners to tell us more about their site: anything from country-level data to language to authorship to what content management system (CMS) you use on different parts of the site. That might help Google improve how it crawls different parts of a domain.

If you have any other suggestion as regards the new features wanted for WMT post your comment on http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/webmaster-feature-requests/

SEO Client Conversations : The CC (Client Conversation) Series

I have been working on SEO projects since 2000 and have had many interesting , funny, enriching and mind boggling conversations regarding SEO with the various clients since then. I must say that if SEO and the Web have evolved then alongside the client’s approach to SEO has also evolved and the kind of questions the clients have been asking and seeking answers to has also progressed since 2000.

We keep on reading a lot about the latest algorithm updates, SEO News and almost everything about SEO and related to it but the client side thought process is rarely discussed on the blogosphere. I think if we discuss this and share our conversations then the thoughts and fears of the much involved netizens who read the SEO blogs and also those who are totally unaware about what search and web optimization is all about, will come into the limelight and help us from a SEO third party perspective .

I start this series with one of the conversations I recently had with a reputed client who has since 18 months have been very cooperative and have appreciated the SEO efforts put in by us.



The site statistics are as below since we started working on the site in June 2012

The site statistics after the site started improving after the initial SEO efforts in October is as below:

As you can see that the site despite the Penguin, Panda and the recent launch of the Humming Bird Engine has remained stable and is bound to improve further with the content strategies planned for the future.

But, the fears and questions the client voiced lately is as follows:

Client:

I just came to know that our competitor site is getting more than 1,00,000 visits per month. Please let me know why our site is not doing that well.

( After I went thru the competitor site I came to know that the site was another initiative of a very famous site which had a very good reputation and a very large link profile.)

Me :

Look we cannot compare our site to the one mentioned by you . Despite the fact that the sites relate to the same topics but their external link profile and popularity is very different . The competitor site is benefitting from the reputation and popularity that they have built over a period of 8-10 years. But our site is still 1.5 years old and has to yet gain popularity and a good Word Of Mouth over a period of time. Instead of focusing on how many visits the competitor site is getting let us focus on how to improve the services that we offer online and work on strategies to improve the outreach via social media and blog content . We should also think of how to keep in touch with the existing base of online existing customers . Talking about why the competitor is getting more visits will only mislead us and lower your confidence. Maybe with the kind of TV Ads and offline advertising the competitor is investing in this the no. Of 1,00,000 (Which you consider very high) maybe very low in magnitude as per their expectations.

We cannot judge the success of any campaign with only one metric. If we compare the two sites we know that we do not advertise on TV which requires a very big budget but they do. Their parent company is online since nearly 10 years hence they already have a database of regular visitors and link profiles. But, we are a 2 year old company and did not have any prior online presence and offline presence has been very local – in fact at the city level and not at a national level too. But with the website now the company has a global presence .

Client: 

Yes, but the visits have to increase ...

Me: 

Yes, after achieving the basic objectives of optimizing a site such as sorting the technical issues of the site and completing the major on page tasks like it has been done on the site, we have to work on the social media and content strategies. Our main objective now should be to see that the visitors coming to our site are getting the required answers to their queries as you can see the no. Of landing pages have increased hence the visitors are reaching their destination page with just one or two clicks so we have to see that they get the required information on those pages which have a good recall value and a good first impression so that they recommend it via social media channels and also post reviews. All these signals will not only increase visits via other sources but also improve the search presence and thereby proportionately have a positive effect on the visits via search engines too. Hence, if we work on the quality factors then the visits will increase but if we discuss why we are getting comparatively low visits then we are wasting our time because as compared to our previous presence we are doing quite well so we have to forge ahead in the same direction. We can achieve our goal only if your expectations are realistic and our efforts are in the same direction.

Client:

 I think you are right let us meet next to finalize the social media and content strategies.

The main objective of starting these client conversation series is to share my experiences with other SEOs so that we get a chance to learn from each other and are prepared when we face a similar situation which has already been faced by someone else. Please write to us at info@webpro.in if you would like to share your client conversations on our blog. 

 As an SEO what would be your approach to the situation mentioned above? Please share in the comments below.

I hope these series will be informative and be helpful to our readers.

We Have Moved To Our New Office (Some Pics.)

We are happy to announce that we have moved to our new office.

Our new office address is as follows:

WebPro Technologies
802,Astron Tech Park,
Opp. ISKCON, Satellite Road,
Ahmedabad -380015.

Gujarat.India.

Some Pics. 

Its Diwali and we shall be on leave till the 10th Of November 2013. Hope to get back with enlightened enthusiasm after the Diwali break.

Enjoy your Diwali with lots of lights and love of near and dear ones. Hope Goddess Lakshmi brings in peace and prosperity for all.