Inbound Marketing Blog

In the world we live in, styles and trends are constantly changing, and THANK goodness for that! I’m sure we can all remember a few fashion faux pas committed in our past. The great thing about change is it presents us with an opportunity to revamp ourselves, our wardrobes, and even our blog content.

Over time, our blog posts can become stale, outdated, and inaccurate, but a little TLC can bring them back to life.

Bland, uninspired content is almost as bad as no content at all. You may be struggling to find ways to make your writing more engaging. We put our content masters together to come up with some tips to instantly improve your writing. Listen up—you won’t want to miss this!

The marketing world is full of jargon and acronyms like SEO, CMS, CRM, inbound, outbound... the list goes on and on. In your research, you’ve probably come across some industry thought leaders using terms like Schema markup, microdata, and rich snippets. But what do they mean?

As we scroll through our social newsfeeds at the first of the year, we see posts making bold statements like, “New year, new me.” January is a great time to set goals and start new habits. However, most people tend to leave their resolutions behind after the first few weeks, and they fall back into old habits. But not this year! This year, we’re setting goals to improve our marketing efforts, and we’re sticking to them. This will be our year to drive more traffic and generate more leads. This time, we’re making bold statements like, “New year, new SEO strategy.” If you’re feeling pumped about 2018 and are ready to dive into improving your marketing efforts, then here are some search engine optimization (SEO) trends to look out for.

Have you heard of the term “pillar page” yet? If you work in the content marketing world, you most likely have. If you haven’t, it’s time to familiarize yourself. Content marketers have fairly recently started adopting the topic cluster website organization strategy, and they are beginning to be more proactive about implementing it on websites.

Near the end of 2017, Google made a major change to how they display snippets (AKA meta descriptions) in organic search results. According to a SISTRIX analysis, before mid-November, more than 90% of all-text snippets were only one or two rows (165 characters or less) long. By the beginning of December, over 50% displayed three rows or more (around 300 characters, on average). Google made this update to give searchers better answers to their queries.

What does this mean for the meta descriptions you write for your website pages moving forward? Should you increase the length? Do you need to go back into all of your old pages and make updates? We’ve been asking these same questions, so we looked to some of the world’s leading marketing experts for answers.

Good content is one thing, but good content written for a specific audience takes your marketing to another level. Identifying who you’re trying to reach prior to putting pen to paper will help you to create successful content.

The landscape of search engine optimization is ever-changing. Incorporating keywords throughout your online content the correct way is essential for SEO. So, what is the right way to use keywords on your website? The first rule to remember is to only use keywords in natural, reader-friendly ways. Keyword stuffing will undermine the quality of your content, and search engines may penalize you.

Let’s explore more SEO tips.

In November 2017, Google extended the length of meta description that displays in their search results. A meta description is the short explanation of what a person will find if they click the link to a website. This description can be seen with the website link in search results on Google, Yahoo, or Bing, or on social media platforms (most notably Facebook’s). While meta descriptions aren't a direct Google ranking factor, they do offer searchers insight into what they can find on your site, which will help attract relevant visitors and can affect the click through rate to your website.