SEO Tips: News Values & Brand Values All Count on Google

Content marketing is the hot thing now for many companies. It isn’t rocket science, but it requires you apply newsroom values and discipline to make it work well. Fact is, there’s no quick fix, SEO isn’t a `black art,’ it is a skill set rooted in journalism.

You need trained journalists because your brand is competing with media outlets for P1 on Google. It’s a shark pool out there.

If you want your content on Page 1 of Google, recruit an SEO trained, experienced writer. It works.

You could cut corners, use an outside agency or freelancer who syndicates blogs and re-writes press releases in a keyword-stuffed kinda way, circa 2009. But it probably isn’t going to work.

So read the papers, watch the TV news, use Google Trends, Alerts, trade journals, websites, forums and Twitter to see what’s hot in search volumes. Both within your business niche and the wider economy.

Never forget human nature; people are greedy, they love something for nothing, like PPI compensation, dodgy insurance claims, cheaper petrol, designer clothes reduced by 50% in the Debenhams Sale, or vouchers for a free meal at their local restaurant.

Give them news about freebies, shops going bust and selling stock cheap, big brands dishing out voucher codes.

NOT ALL CONTENT IS LINKBAIT

You need some values, something beyond keywords.

This is where most companies lose the plot because they often see content as essentially subservient to commercial needs – every article has to make money, or gather data.

Good content can get your brand a top position on Google’s search pages.

But business is about brands too, and the trust you build into a brand has a tangible, cash value. Ask John Lewis, M&S, Aston Martin, Apple, the BBC, or Moneysupermarket.com who paid Martin Lewis £87 million for Moneysaving Expert, because readers TRUSTED what they read there.

Give your readers true value; like the knowledge to avoid online scams, or ways to buy something expensive that bit cheaper than your neighbour. People want knowledge and the internet is a knowledge economy, still developing its true potential and power.

In a decade there will be no UK High Streets as we understand them now.

There will be leisure shopping experiences, places that are fun, pleasant, safe and packed with major brands. But we will make all our essential, everyday, `distress’ purchases online. Content marketing will ease the sting of that impersonal process, empower some consumers with wisdom and expose the shabbier, more obviously dubious companies.

We live in interesting times, chronicle them.

SEO Case Study: News Values Really Do Matter After Penguin

After Google’s recent Panda and Penguin updates, the relevance and timing of your content is even more important in SEO terms. Keyword density in the text, tags, alt tags on your photos, keyword rich H1/H2 headings and authorship all matter too.

But good journalism matters. It can get your content to position 2, Page 1 of Google for a highly searched term.

The bad news is that a news related spike in traffic doesn’t last. But the upside is that once you understand more about how Google’s algorithm has changed in 2012, you can produce topical, well written content and get on Page 1.

Or you can syndicate some tedious PR/cheap blogs online. It’s up to you.

CASE STUDY; IS COMET CLOSING DOWN?

Recently, news broke that the receivers were due to be called in at Comet electricals. I put together a short news story which was headlined `Comet On The Brink; Spend Your Vouchers ASAP.’

Always read the news before you create your content, but get your story uploaded as fast as possible. Surf that traffic wave.

That isn’t a keyword optimised headline. It’s a human headline. When people are scared of losing money, they pay attention.

However I added a H2 sub heading in the body copy, along the lines of `Is There a Comet Closing Down Sale?’

Again, this ticks the human nature box. People are greedy, and they love to profit from the misfortunes of others. But I also guessed that the phrase would be a high volume search term the moment the receivers were called in at Comet.

The story was uploaded on a Friday lunchtime.

GOOD TRAFFIC SPIKE? HELL YES

Friday saw 980 visitors – 88% of all traffic was to the Comet story.

Saturday and Sunday saw a drop in page position on P1 of Google. Mostly we were overtaken by `old media’ sites, such as daily papers. Partly I would guess Google sees their massive traffic compared to our site and there’s the question of trust – our site was founded back in March. The national papers have been online for a decade or more.

Traffic dropped to about 650 per day over the weekend. We updated the story on Monday, then posted another story once Comet administrators announced that vouchers and gift cards WOULD be accepted again in stores.

The net result over the week was an overall rise of 100% in search engine impressions – our content became more visible with Google. Our traffic was up around 120% for the week.

POINTS WORTH NOTING

You cannot search Google Insights, or use any other tools to monitor a traffic spike that hasn’t happened yet. If a volcano erupts, a shop goes bust, or a new product is launched you often need a journalist’s instinct for the likely search terms.

Don’t forget other Google channels; You Tube, Images, Google News.

To get indexed on Google News you need to add an author biog page to your site. Get your authors blogging and active on social networks. Here’s where you can find me on Twitter andLinkedIn

In terms of site referrals to the Comet story, Facebook was far and away the most successful. Twitter second – but Twitter users are more fickle and spend less time on the page, plus `bounce’ at a much higher rate.

News is tough. It requires planning, lots of reading, accurate research (you may be sued) and money – good writers have to be paid more than the pittance that outsourced `Copyscape farms’ cost the typical UK business.

You might not always guess right when it comes to news stories. I certainly don’t. But when it all comes together your site will gain new readers and guess what? Some of them stick around, or come back next week to see your moneysaving news.

Greed is also good SEO; understand human nature and you can add the magic keywords. Sometimes.

As Gordon Gekko noted in Wall Street; Greed is good. Greed is also good SEO.

How To Get Your New Website to Page 1 on Google

I work for LBM Marketing in Cheshire and we recently launched Watch My Wallet, a new consumer advice, moneysaving tips web magazine.

When I studied SEO and social media marketing at Salford University for three months back in 2012, I learned a few useful strategies for optimising websites, especially content. This is important because Google puts new websites in a kind of sandbox – a holding pen if you like – while it works out how trustworthy, useful and original your content is.

Obviously factors such as the structure of the site, clean IP address and many more are important, but nothing helps to boost your site’s early page rank so much as links via social media, news outlets or getting individual articles ranked highly on commonly searched keywords.

START WITH A PLAN BASED ON HUMAN NATURE

People search for a variety of reasons but using Google Insights & Trends, setting up Google Alerts, using Rippla to gauge newsworthy stories and many other tools will help you form a plan for your site itself and the content within its pages.

Choose a topical story, get a trained writer to produce keyword rich content and tag it in your CMS - it will boost your page rank.

For example we researched pet insurance terms, listed the top keywords over 3-12 months, checked typical `modifiers’ and cross-referenced that with news stories.

We found that Lloyds TSB withdrew pet cover for older pets in Feb 2012, plus we saw `reduce pet food bills’ was a common search phrase. We put them together and three weeks after launching the site, we had position 1, page 1 on google for our article.

OK, it isn’t always that easy – we didn’t get that lucky with every article, but we did get page 1 results for seven articles within 17 days after launch – got to be happy with that

PR STILL HAS VALUE

We had a low budget PR campaign, based around syndicating press releases about topics such as `saving money on travel into London for Olympics 2012.’  That got us a backlink from the San Francisco Chronicle and other newswire services within a week of being sent out.

As petrol prices increased and the tanker drivers strike caused more searches for reducing driving into London costs, we found the original article on `cheapest ways to drive into London‘ picked up more interest through late March. That was lucky, sometimes Google works out like that.

Links from major news sites are worth having. Why? Well when your website is new you have to prove to Google it isn’t a scam/pills/porn site – it has to build trust and authority, partly through decent quality link traffic. Newspaper, radio and good blog links matter, so devote some time and money to chasing them.

GO SOCIAL, TRACK LINKS

The Watch My Wallet logo - your branding is important in the long term, so hire a good graphic designer.

We established Twitter, Pinterest, Google + and Facebook pages for Watch My Wallet. Facebook performed the best in terms of referral, closely followed by Twitter. Open a bitly account and shrink your page urls, bitly will track visits by each article or feature link for you – you can compare those to your Analytics stats.

Google + is really only worth doing to please Google by the way. It’s like a gym; many people are members, few actually use it.

We found the `8 Ways to Reduce Your Pet Food Bills’ story performed well on social media, especially Twitter. This kind of story gets people talking, so use that `Twitter rage’ factor to get links to your content. My personal feeling is you should NOT automate Twitter content, but put the man hours in.

Be a real human, be nice, it gets a better quality follower and that’s what you need to convert people in the long run. Your brand values MUST be paramount, not your follower numbers.

USE A CMS THAT IS CUSTOMISABLE

One final point; your content CMS must – absolutely MUST – have the facility to add keywords and a unique keyword description for each article or story. Tag photos and videos too, never miss a chance to define your content. It works.

Our Watch My Wallet developer has chosen Umbraco and it is performing well. Easy to use when uploading a variety of features each day too with details like default sizes for images within stories. Anything that makes your site look professional builds reader trust, so use a good CMS.

If you have any SEO tips for brand new websites, post them below – I’m always keen to learn more!  ;-)

 

 

Decline of the High Street needs radical thinking

Yesterday’s newspapers reported that Mary Portas has suggested our empty High Streets could be filled with market stalls to bring them back to life. Not a bad idea, but if people simply aren’t shopping in a town because they feel it’s an unpleasant place to be, then what’s the point of having 50 market traders setting up pitch?

Shops and the offices above them are clearing out

I spent an hour this afternoon walking around Altrincham in Cheshire. It was frankly grey, dirty and depressing.

Once thriving, Altrincham is now a mix of abandoned offices, bankrupt independent house related businesses and charity shops, with the last remaining big name retailers hanging on grimly until the bitter end. Trouble is, our whole way of life has changed – that isn’t due to a recession, it’s down to technology.

Once M&S, WH Smith and a few big name banks pull out, Altrincham will be finished, at least as far as shopping goes. In terms of office space, it’s already game over – we simply do not work in 9-5.30pm`office jobs’ in large numbers any longer…at least not outside of London.

Online retail, the rise of home working, outsourced freelance consultants and `destination shopping’ via Malls, has all but killed off the traditional High Street in Britain – it’s time for some radical ideas.

MAKE OUR TOWNS SAFE, CLEAN AND UNIQUE

It sounds obvious, but so many small towns are woefully neglected. The councils basically took all the business rates in the good times and used them to gamble their pension funds in Iceland. The country I mean, not the frozen food retailer. If small towns have pleasant `quarters’ where traffic is minimal and people feel safe to wander, stop and chat, sit on the pavement and have a coffee etc that would be a start. Fix the pavement first though…

Next up, we need to offer rent protected retail space in `quarters’ where food shoppers, vinyl record collectors, shoe lovers, vintage clothing buyers, or someone who needs their computer fixed can find a cluster of vibrant, small businesses. Councils can support such businesses with `fairs’ or themed festivals four or five times a year as well – use social media to bring a buzz, some excitement to the town itself.

We need a law that protects small towns from the invasion of the charity shops – they need to make up no more than 10% of the retail space on any given street. Independent bookshops, music, clothing, shoe and other retailers cannot compete with charity shops – and we need small traders to revive small towns. Big business will never do it, charities simply soak up the budget shopper revenues – that has to change.

On the same lines, small cafes and independent restaurants should be paying 50% of the business rates of the big brand food chains. The chains have the advantage of buying food in bulk and outsourcing everything from accounts to HR, so let’s level the food business playing field. Anyone selling food which is produced locally – within 10 miles – gets a further 10% off. That encourages local farmers to sell their produce locally.

BRING THE PEOPLE BACK INTO OUR TOWNS

Much of the abandoned office space in small towns should be converted into low cost housing. You could even convert many old fashioned Victorian pubs into very nice flats. There is plenty of housing demand, so we should offer interest free loans to those who can find 10K to invest in refurbishing or converting an office into a flat.

Very few people can save up 30-50K for a deposit on a house, but 10K is achievable. In the same way that credit unions offer loans to those who save, councils could offer `housing unions’ similar support as part of their local regeneration plans.

If you give people a chance to create a decent home from what is basically sound, but neglected office/shop stock, for an affordable price, they will come. They will build it.

Britain's pubs are closing as our lifestyles change forever

Finally, promote your unique small town identity. If the area has a history tell that story, promote festivals, make something happen. Use Foursquare, Facebook and Groupon to offer people real incentives to physically `check in’ to your High Street – embrace the internet, don’t fight it.

Small towns cannot compete with the Trafford Centres or Westfields. Neither can they halt the inevitable rise of online retailing. To survive they have to offer more than just `distress’ shopping experiences and the chance of a £60 parking fine.

It’s time to rebuild our towns and make them interesting, friendly places to live and work in once again. It’s going to be a long,  slow process, but if politicians can stop squabbling over the last few million in business rates and think laterally, there’s a glimmer of hope.

Agree, disagree or got an idea to revive your town? Post your comments or tweet me @npointsocial