inbound content and seo

If you’re reading this, you likely already know what a big fan I am of great content in content marketing. It’s like saying, “Julia likes coffee” (understatement), or, “the sun is shining” (also a drastic understatement 89.9% of the year in Austin, Texas). And specifically, what a fan I am of the SEO side of it all. (Just read my piece studying the effects of hitting 1,000 blogs on the Write Blog to find out.) Why? Well, to recap, I’ve been blogging on our site for six years. It’s become our primary form of marketing. And it’s brought qualified leads our way. They’re so qualified that they’re ready to spend 5 figures without batting an eye – sometimes on the first order. They know what they need, and because they found our highly-relevant content piece high in the SERPs answering their question, they were convinced we were the answer. We’re an anomaly in our industry because we are what we sell. We know that what we sell, works. Because we’re a content agency fueled by the high-performing content we create. Mic drop. No other writing agency has the organic content focus we have. We’re 3-5% more visible in Google than all of our competitors. This organic visibility is how we net 99% of our best customers. I first started Express Writers on a mission to band together writers that could help me create my own content. The idea for the modern writing force we now have in our agency was born from a need I had. The rest was all hard work. That was the starting point: and it’s fired up a major movement we’ve been able to maintain in our industry. So, I’ve always loved SEO and inbound content. But… Did these online marketing fundamentals really just get ten times more important? Am I blowing smoke because I simply love these techniques? Not at all. Keep reading for my thoughts. Inbound Content & SEO Just Got 10x More Important. {The Case Study} Part One: The Death of a Guest Platform Spells Fear and Trouble for Those Focused on Real Estate that Isn’t Yours. “I write for HuffingtonPost!” Just became “I wrote for HuffingtonPost,” last week on Thursday. Ripples on the news of the Contributor network shutdown, a pulling-the-plug act for more than 100,000 “free” authors, ran through social media like giant waves, ebbing and flowing to instantly become old news the next day (let’s face it: that’s the nature of good old social media). I learned about it when Josh Steimle, founder of MWI, tagged me in a LinkedIn post:   My initial thoughts to the Contributor shutdown: 1.) Honestly, my posts were not getting a ton of traction except for one really good one (my story) that launched over a year ago. Since then I’ve had lackluster exposure on all posts I published. 2.) I heard straight from the amazing Aaron Orendorrf that HuffPost was actually doing some sly no-follow on all their Contributor content so it wouldn’t show up in search. So that’s why I could never find my HuffPost story when I Googled it! 3.) Can’t say I’m not disappointed, though. If this was how they started and exponentially grew their platform, through the free contributor base, this just dissed everyone that helped them grow from nothing. And that’s not cool. You never diss the people that gave you the reason for who you are today. But let’s go into a wider picture for a moment. If you were publishing on HuffPost Contributor platform, you were publishing on real estate that wasn’t yours. And if you can’t lay an ownership claim to the site, you can’t get too upset if the person who actually did manage and own it did what they wanted to do. Frankly, it’s their site. Not yours. The same thinking even applies to Facebook algorithms, social media platform updates… they get to decide because they run it. They own it. You don’t own that platform. So, this fear factor, the “when-are-they-going-to-change/remove/do & how will that affect my content there,” applies to many platforms. Let’s call it “brand fear” for now. Think about all the platforms brand fear applies to. Medium. LinkedIn. Every other guest blog and publication on the planet. Every social media platform on the planet. The only platform brand fear doesn’t apply to? Your site. You own your site. You get to say when it shuts down, or when it’s online. When you add content, and what content to add. How it looks. Presentation. How your content looks. How well your content gets indexed (how well you optimize it). Etc. So… Start publishing to your site, NOW. Focus on it. Don’t have one? Get one. I teach this heavily in my course – your site is your real estate. Make sure you’re investing in your own real estate. That way when a platform goes down and takes your content with it, you won’t be in big trouble. Part Two: Many Platform Changes for Social Media and the Death of “Fads” Means Tried-and-True Just Got More Certain If you didn’t know, Facebook algorithms are like a weathercock in high winds these days. They’re all over the place. Read more about the massive Facebook algorithm change in my blog here. One side-effect of all the Facebook algorithm changes is that Facebook business page reach could be at an all-time low. Research from Social@Ogilvy shows that for Pages with more than 500,000 Likes, organic reach could be as low as 2%. This is probably more like 1% for non-video posts these days. Instead of just “posting” average content in a typical fashion to your Facebook page, try: Don’t schedule Facebook page posts from a tool: Directly post yourself, and get creative about what you want to tell people. Don’t schedule from a tool unless you have to. Tag a feeling: When I tagged “feeling happy” from my Facebook page, that post had the most reach of all my page posts out of that week. Try saving your Instagram or Snapchat stories and uploading them to your Facebook page as … Read more