Digital marketing has become a crucial aspect of modern-day businesses, with more and more companies relying on digital marketing techniques to connect with their audience and increase their revenue. However, becoming a great digital marketer takes more than just posting content on social media or running ads on Google. It requires a comprehensive understanding of the industry, a keen eye for detail, and the ability to adapt to ever-changing trends and technologies. In this post, we will discuss some tips on how to become a great digital marketer.
Build A Strong Foundation
To become a great digital marketer, you need to have a strong foundation in marketing principles. You need to understand the four Ps of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion. This knowledge will help you create effective marketing campaigns and strategies that align with your brand’s goals and values. Additionally, it’s essential to understand your target audience’s needs and behaviours, as this information will guide your marketing efforts.
Stay Up To Date With Industry Trends
The digital marketing industry is constantly evolving, with new technologies and trends emerging regularly. To stay ahead of the curve, you need to keep up with these changes and adapt your strategies accordingly. Follow industry blogs and social media accounts, attend webinars and conferences, and read books and articles on the latest marketing trends. This knowledge will help you create innovative campaigns that resonate with your target audience.
Content is the backbone of digital marketing, and creating engaging content is crucial to the success of your campaigns. Your content should be informative, entertaining, and shareable. It should also be tailored to your target audience and align with your brand’s values. Consider using different formats, such as videos, infographics, and podcasts, to appeal to different types of learners.
Utilise Social Media Platforms
Social media platforms are powerful tools for digital marketing, and you should use them to your advantage. Choose the platforms that are most relevant to your target audience and create a consistent brand voice across all of them. Engage with your followers by responding to comments and messages, and use social media analytics to track the success of your campaigns. Additionally, consider using social media influencers to promote your brand and reach a wider audience.
Optimise For Search Engines
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a critical component of digital marketing, as it helps your website rank higher in search engine results pages. To optimize your website, use relevant keywords in your content, optimize your website’s structure and navigation, and ensure that your website is mobile-friendly. Additionally, consider using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to drive traffic to your website.
Track And Analyse Your Results
To be a great digital marketer, you need to track and analyze your results continually. Use tools like Google Analytics to track website traffic, conversion rates, and other key performance indicators (KPIs). This information will help you identify which campaigns are most successful and which ones need improvement. Use this data to adjust your strategies and improve your campaigns continually.
Stay Organised
Digital marketing involves many moving parts, from creating content to analyzing data. To succeed, you must stay organized and prioritise your tasks effectively. Use project management tools like Trello or Asana to keep track of your to-do list and collaborate with team members. Additionally, create a content calendar to plan your content in advance and ensure that it aligns with your brand’s goals and values.
Conclusion
In conclusion, becoming a great digital marketer takes time, effort, and dedication. By building a strong foundation in marketing principles, staying up to date with industry trends, focusing on creating engaging content, utilising social media platforms, optimising for search engines, tracking and analysing your results, and staying organised, you can create effective marketing campaigns that resonate with your target audience and drive business success.
Remember to keep an eye out on our blog page for further tips!
One of the most important parts of being a digital marketer, if not the most important, is use of data. We are lucky enough to live in a world where access to data is easy and instantaneous. For the modern digital marketer, it is also invaluable. In this blog, I will break down how to maximise the digital tools available at your disposal to ensure that your marketing campaigns work as effectively as possible.
What are digital tools?
Digital tools are the modern marketer’s bread and butter. They include any technology that can be used to improve your marketing, whether that be through creation, optimisation, or results. They are important for making marketing processes more secure, stable, consistent, and effective. There are thousands of different tools out there, and determining which ones are right for your and your business is a huge task where the answer might change constantly.
SEO
There are so many options available for maximising SEO to the point where it can be overwhelming. However, finding a good SEO tool is essential for any digital marketer. For base-level SEO, the Yoast plugin on the back end of WordPress is a great starting point. This is especially true for those who don’t specialise in SEO. Yoast gets updated every two weeks with Google’s latest algorithms, making it a reliable choice to start with. Paid plans offer further customisability and features.
But with two million installations, All In One SEO appears to take the prize for the best WordPress SEO plugin. It isn’t free, but it is personalised. It provides you with an actionable checklist so that you can ensure that you aren’t making any common errors.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics can seem like one of the most daunting tools to conquer. But once you have determined your pathways for using it effectively, it can be a fascinating rabbit hole of discovery. This isn’t to mention that the software is free, whilst also being one of the most in-depth metrics tools that exists. For the modern digital marketer, having a baseline understanding of Google Analytics is a business imperative.
Email Marketing
The good news is, options are plentiful. MailChimp is probably the most popular, with an easy to use interface and a very digestible breakdown of how your campaign performed. Mailchimp also allows for integration with a number of other SaaS businesses.
Moosend is another option, which allows you to optimise the customer journey through personalisation and segmentation. We also have Omnisend, which is easy to use and provides a number of automation features.
Automation Tools
Hootsuite, monday.com, Marketo – whatever your choice, automation tools make life exponentially easier for the digital marketer. Rather than recommending any one in particular, I have found that a marketer’s choice of automation tool oftentimes comes down to personal preference. For example, some are daunted by the thousands of options of integrations that monday.com provides. Setting them up can take some practice and technical expertise. However, doing so properly can reduce a marketer’s workload by a significant amount. Others prefer Marketo, as it essentially functions as a one stop-shop for all your automation needs, whether that be via email or something else. Ultimately, finding your automation tool of choice and leveraging it to its maximum is key to building a strong portfolio as a digital marketer.
Pursuing a Level 3 Digital Marketing Apprenticeship will introduce you to all of the above tools. More information on the apprenticeship can be found here, along with a directory of all the other types of marketing apprenticeships available.
For more on this topic, check out Hubspot’s post on the best marketing tools for digital marketers in 2023 here.
So you’ve just started your Digital Marketing apprenticeship, and you’ve been tasked with producing a blog post to help with a client’s SEO… But you have no idea where to start? Fear not, we have created the ultimate Digital Marketing guide to Maximizing a blog post for SEO
SEO can be a very confusing thing to get your head around to begin with, especially if you’ve only just started your digital marketing journey. It’s crucial to remember that SEO is constantly changing from industry to industry, so it’s unfortunately not a one size fits all solution.
That being said, SEO does not have to be all doom and gloom, and there are a few easy steps us Digital marketing professionals can take to optimize your content so that it reaches more people!
1) Digital marketing basics – How do search engines work …
Lets go back to the Digital Marketing basics and look at how search engines work.
There is 3 main processes:
1) Crawling: When someone first enters a query into a search engine such as Google, the search engine will use computer programs known as Crawlers, Spiders, or other bots to pull together relevant information on the internet
2) Indexing: The Crawling bots will then source a mixture of sites, images, maps, videos, and other forms of content and media and produce a list (or index) of sources relevant to the search
3) Ranking: The search engine bots will then look at the relevant results and rank the content in order of relevancy and deliver it to the searcher, this will be based on a mixture of keywords, titles, Paid/organic content, and several other factors
2) How do blog posts help SEO in Digital marketing?
Whilst on your digital marketing journey, it is likely that your clients will ask you to work on their SEO through blogging for them. Some of the main reasons that businesses start and maintain blogs include factors like:
Increasing traffic to websites or social media pages
Good quality blog posts help with search engine ranking
Blogs can result in increased brand awareness
Conversions (Sales, Email subscriptions, Signing up for events..)
Product launches or feature releases
Educational or step-by-step instructional content (Such as infographics or e-books)
When producing high-quality content, blogging can have great long-term impacts and can be a great way to keep traffic coming through to your website for months and years after publishing. High traffic rates can help with SEO by building authority for your website (which we will discuss later in this article) and can help you rank higher on search engines like Google and Bing. This can help you provide great results to your clients throughout your digital marketing journey
Hubspot studies also show that:
Companies who maintain a blog receive 97% more links to their website.
Marketers who prioritize their blog are 13x more likely to see positive ROI.
B2B marketers who blog get 67% more leads than those who don’t.
Websites with blogs have 434% more indexed pages (hint: this is huge for SEO purposes.)
Did you know that HTML and other back-end coding of your website are super important when it comes to SEO?
Throughout your Digital Marketing journey, you may be required to manage your clients website, whoch means you may need to understand the code on the back end of the website to help you maximize your SEO performance. A great place to learn more about simple HTML is Free Code Camp
This is a resource I found helpful when starting my Digital marketing journey, as understanding the basics of coding such as HTML and CSS can make a big difference when it comes to SEO.
But, if you are a beginner, or running a website yourself, a few good places to start are:
Title elements:
Using the HTML5 title element can help search engines determine what content your website provides.
For example:
<title> How to maximize a blog post (4 steps for beginners) <title/>
Here I have embedded my title within the <Title> Element in the HTML code on the backend of my website. This will help Search engines understand what my content is about and therefore bring it up in relevant searches.
According to Moz“Google typically displays the first 50–60 characters of a title tag. If you keep your titles under 60 characters, our research suggests that you can expect about 90% of your titles to display properly.”
Text elements:
Relevant body text should be embodied within the text element in HTML with specific keywords (which we will discuss later) so that search engines can determine what your blog post is about
For example:
<text> Here is a paragraph as an example of how to use the text element within HTML, Using this Element along with relevant Keywords can help search engines determine what your site is about and help it rank highly within Search engines <text/>
Relevancy is important when it comes to SEO, so make sure your body text is relevant to your audience and buyer personas, and that relevant keyword are used.
Meta Descriptions:
Meta descriptions are a HTML attribute that gives Search engines a summary of a web page. Many search engines will present the meta description in search results, just underneath the title.
Although Google has confirmed that Meta Tags don’t have an impact on a site’s SEO, they can increase click-through rates. For this reason, it is worth including them in your HTML
For example:
<head> <meta name=”description”
content=”Here is where you will write a description of your site, blog post or content to be read by search engines and visitors.”></head>
According to Moz – “Meta descriptions can be any length, but Google generally truncates snippets to ~155–160 characters. It’s best to keep meta descriptions long enough that they’re sufficiently descriptive, so we recommend descriptions between 50–160 characters.”
Image Alt attributes:
If you use images on your website, it is important that the coding behind them is relevant.
Images within your website/ blog posts should always have Alt text (alternative text) included within their HTML coding, Alt text is an alternative text that is shown when your website has trouble loading your images to website visitors for certain reasons (i.e poor connection)
Search engines aren’t able to see images the way humans do, so adding Alt text to your images explaining what the image shows allows the search engine to determine what the image is, and can help with SEO ranking.
For example:
<img src=”SEO.Jpeg” alt=”This is where you describe your image”>
The alt element also makes your website more accessible for people who have sight difficulties, as it allows screen readers to provide a description.
To write a good alt text description, make sure you provide a specific description that isn’t too lengthy, but not too vague. You also want to include at least one keyword, but not too many as this can flag up as spam for keyword stuffing (which we will discuss in the keywords section)
4) Use Relevant Keywords
Next, let’s talk about keywords. Keywords themselves are their own topic, so today we will brush over the Digital marketing basics of what keywords are, how to use them, and what to avoid.
What are keywords?
Essentially, your SEO keywords are the words and phrases included in your web content that make it possible for people to find your sites and blog posts on search engines such as Google and Bing.
Implementing good Keywords is important for SEO performance. Without them, your customers will land on the many other pages of your competitors on the internet, rather than yours.
Like most things regarding SEO, Keywords can take a lot of trial and error to find out which words work best at bringing traffic to your website.
Because of this, it’s important to spend time throughout your Digital Marketing career doing in-depth keyword research to find out what sort of words your customers and buyer personas are searching for to find content similar to yours.
A great place to start with Keyword research is by using tools such as:
Google Keyword Planner This tool allows you to input information on your website and pull up analytics on what keywords are working well for your site, as well as what ones to include in the future
Word streams Free Keyword Tool will suggest keywords relevant to your site and show you how competitive they are
Bings Webmasters tool provides several SEO tools, including keyword research tools and analytics
Long-tail keywords
Keywords must be reviewed on a regular basis, and high-volume, competitive keywords that are used by many other businesses similar to yours, can often be replaced with long-tail keywords to target more specific customers.
Long-tail keywords are highly specific and targeted phrases that are commonly searched by your customers.
For example, let’s say you run a Gourmet Bakery based in Kensington, and are releasing a new Blueberry Muffin on your menu. The competitive Keyword – “Blueberry Muffins” could be turned into a long-tailed keyword by changing it to “Gourmet Blueberry Muffins in Kensington”.
These specific phrases are designed not to bring in just any visitor to your site, but exactly the right visitors, who are looking specifically for your product or service. Therefore, it is worth including Long-tailed keywords in your blog posts to reach out to customers who are highly interested in what you have to offer.
How often should I use keywords?
Keywords should be included throughout your content at a normal cadence, that does not seem robotic to the reader. They should appear naturally within your writing, Image alt text, headings, and meta tags.
You mustn’t overuse keywords as this can appear as Keyword stuffing and could flag up as spam, meaning that Search engines will not show your site in search results.
5) Build Authority
When search engines are going through the indexing phase, they take into consideration 3 things. A sites Relevance, a site’s bid value (only necessary if you are using Google Paid ads, which we will discuss in another post), and Authority.
Authority is important as it can change whether your website and content will rank at the top or the bottom of google.
Authority is based on several things:
How many links you have to your blogs that are talked about and shared on social media often
Content that is referred to other websites or blog posts, otherwise known as backlinks. The more backlinks you have from good quality relevant sites, the higher you will rank on search engines.
Content that is cited by other works (for example press links)
Gaining authority is not something that happens overnight, and takes some work. You can help your clients gain authority through your digital marketing efforts with SEO, as compelling, unique, and high-quality content is more likely to be shared by other content creators and social media users than a website alone would.
You can measure your web site’s authority by looking at the link volume, page views, and time spent on different pages of your site.
You can use tools such as Moz’s link explorer to help you discover backlinks to your site, as well as help you discover links that may be damaging your site authority.
This is also a great tool that provides an estimated rank of your site’s overall authority on the internet by looking at the number of unique websites that have backlinks to your content.
Another great way to monitor backlinks is to set up a Google Alert for any mentions of your site throughout Google.
For more Digital marketing and apprenticeship tips and advice, be sure to check out our other blog posts by clicking here
You can also find more information on our social media pages:
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the combination of strategy and science to achieve a better search ranking on pages and websites on search engines. With search being one of the most primary ways a person will discover content online, becoming the top of the list of what a user sees when searching a certain subject online can be fundamental to a organisation being discovered in order to receive traffic on their website or to generate leads for their desired KPI (Key performance indicator).
SEO can come in either “Paid” or “Organic” results and both have very different strategies to come to the same result, making a website/page more visible when on a search engine. “Paid” SEO involves using tools such as Google ads where an organisation or person can enter in keywords and phrases they believe best match their content. When a user enters these keywords and phrases into a search engine, for this example ‘Google’ when using Google Ads the website will be displayed as an ‘ad’ but will be displayed on the top of the user’s results. “Organic” SEO consists of changes that can be made internally on the website or page to optimise elements such as Headings and alt Tags (Descriptions of images used) to help a search engine understand the relevancy to a users search and the website with the desire to reach this audience.
The benefits of SEO
For a typical search query, the number one result will receive 40-60% of the total traffic for that query. This means getting as high up the ranking for a specific search query is fundamental for a organisation/person’s website to have SEO in mind. A study conducted by Chitika Insights (June 2013) reported that 91.5% of Google traffic stays on the first page. This means if SEO is not implemented properly and a Website found on pages further down then page 1, then a huge majority of the target audience could potentially never click on the website via that search query.
Examples of SEO strategies
Creating user-friendly pages – This would mean users will spend more time engaging on your pages, which can increase the ranking in search results. This includes text readability, being mobile and desktop friendly & using images as this can help the visual of website.
Creating content – Content such as Blogs, Guides and Videos. This will generate traffic to the website if the content is high quality and useful to the user and their query search.
Improving the backend of your site – This can come in the form of the speed of your website, where if a user is finding that pages are taking too long to load, they may try to find the answer to their search query elsewhere.
Monitoring and optimizing – Monitoring and optimizing are critical elements of an SEO strategy. They help you maximize your budget by adjusting your plan to ensure you’re getting the most from your strategy, this means checking Metrics (Measurement) such as Traffic, CTR (Click Through Rate) and Bounce Rate.
Main KPIs to be tracking
KPIs (Key Performance Indicator) are situational and are dependent on the specific type of website. These KPIs can be tracked using tools such as Google Analytics. Moreover, these are the top KPIs that could be most relevant to all types of websites:
Average Engagement Time – This means the average time that a user spends using the website’s content that can be found within the website/page.
Conversion Goals By Percent-Based Metrics – This would be suitable for a website which is ran by a business who would have set goals, such as wanting users to make a purchase or joining their mailing list. The results can be put in percentages of how many users clicked on the website to carry out this goal.
New And Returning Users As KPIs – Having returning users would mean that the content on the website/page is of a high standard and is informative or useful to the user. This can be a good indicator if certain pages can be improved upon.
Average Time On Site – This KPI can be used across all types of websites as it is the fundamental purpose of a website to keep users informed or entertained. The higher the average amount of time spent on a website indicates if the content is purposeful or user friendly.
As a digital marketer, your primary role is to define, design, build and implement digital campaigns across online and social media platforms. Creating and tracking campaigns require essential digital tools such as content creation software, design tools and analytic trackers.
This guide will outline the vital tools you need to use, as well as our top recommendations for the best software out there to level up your marketing – let’s begin!
Canva is an Australian graphic design platform, used to
create social media graphics, presentations, posters, documents and other
visual content. It also allows users to upload templates for other marketers to
use.
This is one of my favourite design tools, as it is user-friendly and produces professional content without the cost of a top-end graphic designer. This is great for businesses with a small budget, who prefer to do in-house design rather than out-sourcing.
Canva allows you to collaborate with your team on the same platform, giving you the option to share directly with team members or set permissions on who can edit the content.
The tool is free to use with some features being restricted to a premium plan. This includes but is not limited to:
Removing the background of images
Resizing
Full access to photos, elements and fonts
Canva Pro is £99.99 a year and is limited to one
person. Canva for Teams is £129.90 a year 2+ people.
2. Mailchimp
If you’re one of the 8/10 marketers who use email marketing, Mailchimp is for you!
Mailchimp is a marketing automation platform which is designed for businesses using email to reach their target audience. It’s an all-in-one tool, allowing you to manage mailing lists and create email templates. Being a web-based application means you don’t need to download and install any software to your devices, and instead can use it on any web browser.
If you’re not clued up on everything coding, Mailchimp
offers a range of readymade templates to use in your email campaigns. You can
change colours, fonts and structure without needing to know HTML, CSS, or
JavaScript. This is the perfect fix if your company is without an in-house web designer.
Mailchimp is free to use, with certain features being
restricted to those who pay for the premium plan.
If you’re familiar with WordPress, you will be familiar with Yoast.
Yoast is an SEO plugin, designed to help businesses optimize their websites for search engines. The plugin makes it easy to write titles and description tags inside of website pages. It also shows you a ‘Snippet Preview’ of how the page will look on Google’s search results page.
SEO is all about keyword research and Yoast allows you to set a ‘focus keyphrase’ to analyse the web content on a page. It determines how your content scores on different factors. For example, the length of text, using internal links etc. It then organises these scores using the traffic light system, with helpful tips to improve your rankings.
Yoast is free to use with certain features being locked
for Yoast SEO Premium members at £99 a year.
HubSpot has several marketing tools at hand, with everything you need in one place.
HubSpot offers a full stack of software, including a CRM, Marketing Hub, Sales Hub and a Service Hub. Coined as an ‘all-in-one marketing software’, it provides tools that can help your company with blogging, SEO, social media, email, landing pages and web analytics.
The ‘holy grail’ of inbound marketing, HubSpot’s tools can help you to grow your traffic, convert leads and prove ROI for your inbound marketing campaigns. With everything in one place, it couldn’t be more ideal for a digital marketer.
HubSpot offers a ‘free tools’ package, as well as other
premium packages to unlock more features – starting at £38/month.
Final Thoughts
Marketing doesn’t have to be overwhelming, and with the right digital marketing tools, you can create a marketing strategy with ease. Incorporating social media marketing, search engine optimization, email marketing and consistent content gives your business the best chance to succeed and grow.
Digital tools are always changing, so be sure to keep up with trends and have an updated list of tools at your fingertips.
Is there something we missed? Do you have a great tool that you want to recommend?
Help us keep this list updated by leaving a comment with your favourite digital tools. For more information on digital careers, check out our blog.
Are you looking to create strong content that will rank highly on search engines? If so, you’ve come to the right place. Here, we’ll explore the top 6 tips for keyword research in 2022. No matter what service your site provides, SEO should be at the forefront of every marketing strategy.
Often overlooked, SEO is crucial to ensuring that you drive the right kind of traffic in as high of a volume as you can. What good is a product if you can’t reach the audience you’re marketing to? A major aspect of SEO is keyword optimization and research. By targeting the right keywords for your business, you’ll be able to increase traffic and ultimately conversions.
As well as being an important skill for any entrepreneur, it’s also a crucial knowledge point for any budding marketer. After all, 75% of people never scroll past the first page of Google – so you can see how important it is to shoot for rankings on the first page. Throughout this article, we’ll offer 6 keyword research tips for effective SEO.
What is keyword research?
Before we divulge in our selection of top tips, let’s start with a little introduction on keyword research. What exactly is keyword research? To put it simply, keyword research is the process of researching search terms in order to optimise your site and content for higher rankings on search engines results pages.
How to do keyword research for beginners
If you’re completely new to keyword research, you may appreciate a small guide of things you should be considering when carrying out keyword research. Let’s take a look at things to consider:
Search volume
Is there enough search volume to justify including this keyword? Depending on how niche your topic is, you may struggle to find high volume keywords within your topic. However, you should always aim to include keywords with a higher search volume if possible.
Difficulty
How difficult will it be to rank for this keyword? Keyword research tools will often provide you with a number to gauge how difficult the keyword will be to rank for. Depending on how well established your site is, some keywords with higher difficulties may not be attainable. Some sites will have stronger authority and SERP positioning, making it near impossible to rank against them with a smaller less established site. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. Why not include a range of long tail and short tail keywords with a variety of volume and difficulty?
Relevance
Are the keywords relevant to your content? There are plenty of keywords with a super high volume and low difficulty, but that doesn’t mean you should target them. You should only focus on keywords if they are relevant to your content. For example, a business themed blog targeting food related keywords simply will not work. After all, Google’s main goal is to provide perfect content for users, and adding irrelevant keywords into your content will only signal to Google that your content is not useful to users.
Current SERP results
What pages are currently ranking for your search term? Before you start creating content based on your keyword list, it’s important to scout out the competition. Who holds the top positions, and can your site realistically compete with the current top ranking content? It’s good to use pages which are currently ranking as a baseline for the quality of content you need to produce. By creating an article stronger and longer than what currently holds position 1 for your term, you may be able to overtake it!
Utilise free tools
Depending on how far into your search marketing journey you are, you may not be ready to invest in keyword research tools. While paid tools are very powerful, they aren’t always necessary for smaller businesses or those looking to get a taste of keyword research. Free tools can offer strong insights into keyword difficulty and volume without charging you a fortune. Some useful free keyword research tools include:
Answerthepublic
Wordstream
Google trends
Moz keyword explorer
Semrush
Ubersuggest
Do some independent searching
While this may seem silly, this is actually a fantastic way to determine what users may be searching for. Put yourself in your target audience’s shoes and do some Googling. Oftentimes, one search will spark new ideas and branch out to new keyword ideas for you to look into.
While doing your own Googling, another useful thing to take into account is the autocomplete function on Google’s search bar. This will offer you related terms based on what previous users have searched for. These could prove to be useful keywords in themselves, or may also help you think of new ideas to look into.
Consider the intent of your keywords
When you come across a relevant keyword with a high search volume and low difficulty, it can be tempting to immediately incorporate this into your target keyword list. However, you should always think about the intent behind a keyword before you target it.
Ultimately, we need to find traffic that will convert. If users are landing on our page but we aren’t satisfying their search needs, we are leaving these potential customers with a bad experience on our site. Not to mention the bounce rate that will influence our SERP rankings. If you’re going to target a keyword, make sure that the content you’re providing will fulfil the intent behind a user’s search and answer any questions they may have.
Find synonyms and alternative phrasing
Often overlooked, synonyms and alternative phrasing for keywords can be an incredible way to increase traffic to your site. In a world where we search for things as fast as possible, a lot of us search for things in the shortest way we can. Whether that’s a shortened version of what we’re looking for, or a synonym instead of a full term, there’s search volume behind these terms.
You can include these variations in your content to increase visibility alongside using your main target keywords. Oftentimes these variations can offer a lower search difficulty than a more established standard search term.
Analyse competitor content
As well as analysing the current top ranking content on SERPs, you can also find similar content to what you want to produce and check which keywords it’s currently ranking for. This can help you identify keyword gaps within your own content, and also ensures that you aren’t lacking in any areas that your competitors are performing well in. You can use tools such as Ahrefs to analyse each URL and find out which keywords they’re ranking for.
Always check your content
It’s handy to have your list of keywords on hand when writing, but it’s not uncommon to forget to weave a few in. But don’t worry, there’s an easy way to double check that your content is well optimised. SEO content checker tools such as Yoast will allow you to run your content through the tool and tell you which keywords you’re targeting, along with any gaps that you aren’t utilising.
The Semrush content checker is an incredibly powerful tool for this, and analyses a range of different SEO aspects, even offering an overall score to let you know how strong your content is. Checking your content for keywords is essential before pushing your work live, else you may miss out on potential traffic from missing keywords.
Conclusion
It’s clear that keyword research is an incredibly powerful skill to possess in a world dominated by search engines. We hope that this article has offered some useful insight into the topic, and has left you ready to go do some keyword research of your own.
SurferSEO is a useful tool for digital marketers that are looking to carry out on-page analyses of their sites. The audit tab on the SurferSEO site allows marketers to fully optimise their pages, in an attempt to improve their ranking on the Google SERP. Surfer pulls data from the search engine results page, comparing your content to your top competitors. If you or your company want to improve your on-page SEO, then Surfer could be the tool for you.
This blog post will cover the basics of using SurferSEO and its most beneficial features, including Surfer audits and Surfer content editor. Keep reading if you want to explore the Surfer tool in more detail and find out top tips on how to use the platform effectively.
SurferSEO
Features of a Surfer audit
There are many features of running a Surfer audit that will help you to improve your content, and in turn, improve your page’s ranking on the SERP.
Word count
When you run an audit on your existing page, Surfer will provide you with a suggestion of the ideal word count for your specific title and niche. The suggested word count is based on your top competitor’s content and is a guideline that you should follow to achieve a first-page ranking on the SERP.
Keywords
One of the best features of running a Surfer audit is that they highlight which essential keywords are missing from your page. Keywords are crucial if you want your page to rank highly on the SERP, so the fact Surfer showcases keywords that aren’t on your page is extremely beneficial for digital marketers. By adding missing keywords throughout your audit, your Surfer score will increase. You should aim for a Surfer score of at least 70 if you want to see any improvements in your page’s ranking.
Headings and paragraphs
Surfer suggests how many headings and paragraphs your content should have. The number of headings is important, as if your page has fewer H2s than recommended, it could mean that your page is not covering the topic in its entirety.
SurferSEO Audit
Surfer content editor
Not only can you run audits on existing pages using SurferSEO, but you can also create new content using the optimisation platform. By accessing the content editor tab, you can write your unique content directly onto the Surfer platform, taking full advantage of the features of an audit, such as keyword suggestions.
Surfer Content Editor
Similar to a Surfer audit, the Surfer content editor highlights the recommended word count, heading count, and paragraph count. It also spotlights keywords related to your niche that you should include in your content. Once you have completed your content using Surfer, then you can copy it over to your preferred platform, such as WordPress to publish the page. Remember to clear the formatting once you have copied the content over from Surfer to avoid any faulty code.
Top tips for using Surfer
Here are a few top tips to remember when you start using SurferSEO to either optimise existing content or create new content:
Make sure you set the location as your target geographical demographic. For example, if you want to target an audience based in the UK, set your location as the United Kingdom for your audits and content.
You can change your competitors using the SERP Analyzer tool, to remove sites that have extensive domain authority that will make it hard to rank against.
SurferSEO is a beneficial tool but it isn’t always perfect. If a keyword doesn’t make sense within the context of your article, don’t use it. Use Surfer as a guide but make sure to rely on your own digital marketing knowledge to make informed decisions.
If you are uncertain about how to use certain features on the SurferSEO site, then access the How to Use tab. This tab has a series of blog posts that outline how to use every Surfer tool.
Customer testimonials
Don’t just take it from me. SurferSEO has amassed many 5-star reviews from customers that have used their platform to optimise their own pages. Here is an example of a testimonial left by a previous client:
With NLP words introduced into three, already optimized articles, we managed to reach the top five in Google search for relevant keywords. Within the first month of using Surfer, we recorded 15% organic traffic growth. Now it’s an essential part of our content creation process.
Oksana Kosachenko GetResponse (Via surferseo.com)
Summary
For digital marketers looking to improve their digital marketing strategy, SurferSEO is a beneficial tool that they could incorporate into their marketing plan. SEO specialists can use the audit feature to optimise existing pages, with the intention of improving their ranking in the SERP and increasing the organic traffic to their site. They can also use the content editor feature to create unique and optimised content for their websites. As a digital marketing apprentice, this tool could help you create high-quality content that produces results for your company. It is easy to use and has been proven to help improve organic traffic and SERP ranking.
If you’re new to the world of digital marketing, some of the fancy jargon and terminology can be a tad intimidating. But it doesn’t need to be. We’ve put together our top 5 SEO tips for beginners and apprentices who are struggling to know where to start with their marketing.
Before we go any further, let’s address the elephant in the room. What is SEO? Simply put, it’s an abbreviation for a marketing phrase that you’re likely to come across countless times during the span of your career. So, drum roll please…
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO is the process of driving more organic traffic to your website through free and natural search engine results. It’s all about taking steps to help a website or piece of content rank higher on search engines like Google, whether that’s on-page or off-page.
On-Page: Building content on your site that’s relevant and provides a good user experience.
Off-Page: Enhancing your website’s search engine ranking outside of the site through backlinks. We’ll get to those later.
Let’s get to the juicy stuff.
1. Keyword research
In simple terms, keyword research is the process of discovering words and phrases that people use in search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. Having said that, it’s important to not just choose the first keyword you find. Do your research.
When optimising your website content, you want Google to pick your website for being the most relevant. That’s why it’s important to make sure you’re using appropriate keywords. To find them, you can use any online keyword research tool which will bring you results for the term you searched as well as any similar ones.
Some useful tools include Ahrefs, Ubersuggest and SEMrush. These tools will also tell you more about the search volume and the keyword difficulty too.
Using relevant keywords within your content is part of what’s known as a “white hat strategy”. You’ll create the best content possible and in return build a sustainable audience. However, you want to make sure that you’re not stuffing your keywords. That’s where one of our next SEO tips comes in.
2. Avoid black hat strategies
Black hat strategies refer to going for quick gains and this is a big no-no with the search engines. It involves duplicating content, keyword stuffing, adding invisible keywords, and linking from sites with irrelevant content. Although this may work in the short term, if your website is found to be doing any of this, search engines will penalise you and could even blacklist your site. Don’t do it!
3. Understand user intent
This is an important one. Google puts A LOT of emphasis on intent. It wants to understand what the searcher is looking for when they type something into the search bar. As the content creator, it’s important for you to understand this as well.
Having a clearer idea on what users are searching for is a head start to being able to optimise your web content. Answer the public is a great tool that shows you popular searches and queries that you can then use to create useful content that matches the searcher’s intent. This could be informational, transactional, navigational, or local. Make sure you’re the one providing the user with the right answer.
4. Monitor the results
Next on our list of SEO tips – monitor the results! As with any activity in marketing, you need to make sure that you’re monitoring the results of whatever it is you’re doing. That includes SEO.
If you can see an improvement in your work, great! Keep it going and remember that SEO is a constant marketing activity. You don’t just do it once. You need to keep coming back and checking it.
If you see little improvement or worse, a decrease, then stop. Try some new keywords or maybe a different blog topic. By monitoring the results, you’ll be able to quickly identify any issues.
5. Build trust with backlinks
Backlinks are links from one website to a page on another website. They’re crucial to SEO. Authoritative backlinks are one of the most important signals that Google considers when ranking content. Having high-quality backlinks from reliable sources that are relevant to the content on your website is a recipe for SEO success and building trust. It may take a while to build up, but the results are worth it. Guest posting and creating content that people find useful are the first steps in generating backlinks for your website.
The SEO Tips Takeaway
To conclude, SEO features a variety of activities that need regular and consistent maintenance. That includes researching the right keywords, sticking to respectable techniques, knowing your customer, monitoring results and building trust with backlinks.
For more tips and tricks on how to develop your digital marketing skills and the latest apprenticeship opportunities, keep up to date with our blog.
SEO, also known as search engine optimisation, is the process of improving your website in order to increase its visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs). SEO is vital to every online business, whether you have an e-commerce website or run a blog like us, search engine optimisation can benefit everyone. The better visibility your site has, the more traffic and new visitors you will get to your website, and we all know that increasing organic traffic is one of the most important tasks in digital marketing.
Improve SEO in 5 Easy Steps
Research relevant keywords
Improve website speed
Optimise page content
Optimise title tags and meta descriptions
Build links
Research Relevant Keywords
Keywords are the ‘key’ to successful search engine optimisation. Keywords are used by potential users and customers every day. When you’re using a search engine, what are you searching for? Most of the time you are using keywords to find relevant results, you probably used keywords to find this blog! That is what makes keywords the foundation of SEO.
So how do you perform keyword research? Researching for relevant keywords is easy, there are loads of keyword researching tools available to help you in your search for the perfect keyword list. The first tool we suggest is Google. 5,6 billion searches are done on Google every day, so where is a better place to find keywords. You can use features such as auto-complete search, ‘people also ask’ section, and top search results. These features from Google show what potential customers are searching for, helping you to get in the mind of the customers.
You can also use keyword research sites to help you find the best keywords for your business. The benefit of keyword research sites is that you can see search volume and difficulty. The volume shows you how often that keyword is searched for, this is useful because you want to get a high volume of searches, however, you need to take into account the difficulty of the word. Keyword difficulty refers to how easy it is to rank for that specific keyword. If you are a small business it will be easier for you to rank in SERPs for low volume, low difficulty keywords. One free keyword tool you could use is Uber Suggests.
Once you know which keywords you want to rank for it will make SEO seem a breeze!
Improve Website Speed
Improving website speed can be difficult, that’s why we have one simple tip anyone can do that will help you improve your website speed instantly! This tip is to remove any images that are over 300KB and replace them with images that have a smaller file size. Large file size images take longer to load, this can result in pages that aren’t fully loaded and can also cause page shifting when they finally do load in. So now, you may be wondering how do you make image sizes smaller? It’s easy, there are hundreds of free sites that you can use which will make your images smaller, all you have to do is upload the image. One site we suggest is Reduce Images.
Optimise Page Content
The second step you can take to optimise your page content is to add image alt text. Image alt text is copy that appears in place of the image if that image fails to load, it also helps webpage crawlers understand what the image is showing and how it relates to the content on that page, in turn, this will improve your ranking. Image alt text is important to get right, you want to be detailed while not having too much text. Using keywords in your image alt text can also help with boosting your page rank. Below we have attached an example of good and bad image alt text to give you a better idea of what it should look like.
Bad Alt Text: “cute small dog pink background”
Good Alt Text: “A small Jack Russel dog sitting in front of a pink background”
Optimise Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Optimising a title tag and meta description is just like content optimisation, all you need is relevant keywords for the content. When you have your relevant keywords, you are able to create your title tag. You want this to be similar to the page title, and you want to use similar keywords in your title tag that you use in your page content. Doing this allows search engines to understand the content of your page, and will rank it highly for being consistent in its messaging.
Meta descriptions are harder as they are longer summaries of the page, but make the most of this space. Meta descriptions should keep between 140-160 characters long. This gives you enough room to hit a few keywords and give a brief summary of the contents of the page. When writing your meta description keep in mind your USPs (unique selling points) this is a feature search engines will praise you on. You want your description to be a compelling argument as to why someone should click on it. Below we have added an example of a good and bad meta description.
Good meta description: “Find all of the best phones and tariffs on the official Carphone Warehouse site – Shop Apple, Samsung, Sony and Google for a new phone with all the latest deals”
Bad meta description: “Apple iPhone 6.9” screen touch screen face ID, 11th gen great deals O2, Three and EE. Shop Carphone Warehouse”
Building Links
Last but not least is linking. Building inbound links allows Google to see how trustworthy you are, if you have inbound links coming from big, trustworthy companies, then Google is more likely to see your website as credible and so will increase SERP ranking. One easy way of building these links is through affiliate marketing sites such as Awin. Affiliate marketing is when you gain publishers to put ads on their website for your company, and they get a commission from doing this, these commissions can be from sales made or generated leads. By using affiliate links you are able to communicate with big and trustworthy companies to give a larger online presence to your brand and website. It also allows you to choose whose site you have links on, meaning you can pick websites and pages related to your company.
You can also do external links, this is where you add links on your website to other websites. By doing this you further increase the credibility of your website, while also improving the reader’s experience by providing them with outside references.
In Conclusion
In conclusion, SEO doesn’t have to be as hard as it looks. If you follow these 5 simple steps, whether you’re a business owner or are doing a digital marketing apprenticeship, you can increase organic traffic with ease.
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Having trouble with your web content? As a Digital Marketer
your web content should be the cornerstone of your output. As a result of this it
is crucial that what goes on your website is to a high standard and above all
engaging!
No matter what Content Management System (CMS) you use whether it is WordPress, Joomla or Jadu, this article will help provide an easy-to-follow web content framework for you.
Aims of Web Content
Before you post anything on your website it is important to identify
what the aims and objectives are for that web content. This should have been
agreed in a marketing plan or campaign plan during the planning stage of a project/campaign.
An example of this could be: To provide information on apprenticeships in the
UK to help grow the business.
All content should work together to help reach the agreed goal,
in other words don’t just post for the sake of posting but upload content that
is engaging, original and targeted.
Having a content/project managing plan is helpful to ensure
what you are posting matches the aims.
User Experience
Now you know why you are posting; the next step is thinking how you are posting. You will have heard the phrase ‘customer is king’, this applies to web content too! If the user doesn’t find what you are posting easy to read, engaging and original it is unlucky they will return to your site or content in the future. Using the Yoast plugin’s readability function can help with ensuring your content is of the highest quality and what you may need to improve it. If text is too long and confusing then it may need simplifying, think to yourself can I say this in less words?
You need to ensure all links within your content are up-to-date and working because if someone is sent off your site to the wrong place, they might not find your content trustworthy or could not return. Using website monitoring tools such as SilkTide and Monsido run regular scans of your site’s content and provide reports on spelling mistakes, grammar issues and broken links.
Accessibility within your Web Content
When posting anything to your website you need to take everyone into consideration. As a result of this you provide yourself the biggest possible user base. When including links into your content make sure it is within the text and makes sense instead of just having a ‘click here’ link, as these can cause an issue for those using screen readers on your site. Similarly, if an image has been used Alt-text should be applied to it. Alt-text allows for an image to be described to someone who is using a screen reader on your site, so this will allow them to engage with your content the way you intended.
SEO Optimisation
The next step is to ensure your web content can be found. There is little point to posting content no one is going to see; this is where SEO comes in. You will need to do some keyword research and decide what search terms you want to be found for. Using tools like Google Trends can help you decide if you want to target a highly competitive keyword which will be harder to be found for or a less competitive keyword which will have a lower possible user base. Now you know your keyword you want all the content you post to be SEO Optimised. Using Yoast plugin will help you track how optimised your content is.
Key factors in SEO Optimisation include:
Keyword Density
Meta Description length
Mobile Friendliness
Internal and External Links
Content length
Success of your Web Content
You’ve posted your engaging, optimised and accessible now
what? The next stage is to track the success of your web content. The most
popular tool used by digital marketers is Google Analytics, this is because Google
is the most used search engine, this is what you want to be ranked on.
Google Analytics provides a wide variety of data such as:
Unique Page View
Time on Page
Bounce Rate
Sessions
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) will have been agreed in a marketing plan and these will provide the framework for what you are tracking. An example of a KPI for web content could be: Increase our average page views each month by 20%, this can be achieved with SEO optimising the posts and increasing the rankings.
Conclusion
These tips should help you on your way to posting engaging, optimised and accessible content, to meet those aims! If you would like to know more about any of the topics mentioned within this article, please find out more on our website.
