Latest Posts
The Content Marketing Bar Has Been Raised
Content marketing is where it’s at. Slowly but surely, brands and businesses of all sizes and in all industries are realizing this and are throwing their hat in the ring. This means that the content marketing bar has been raised and it’s becoming harder and harder to stand out among all of the c...
Just Enough SEO Knowledge to Be Dangerous
In my experience, the site owners that "goes it alone" when it comes to SEO fall into three distinct categories. Category A - they take their time and move cautiously, make small changes here and there and just let what happens happen. Category B - they hire an SEO firm and let them handle most of t...
How Small Businesses Have a Content Marketing Advantage
Small businesses often have limited marketing budgets in comparison to their large business counterparts. But that doesn’t mean that small business owners should just sit back and think that they can’t compete with the big guys. This is especially true when it comes to online content marketing, ...
Create a Content Series to Maintain Engagement
In case you weren’t aware, Google pays attention to bounce rate as one of its many, many search algorithm signals. That means that if someone lands on your content and immediately clicks away, Google takes note. Many things can lead to a bounce but one of thing that could lead to a bounce that you...
What Does B2B Really Mean?
At the MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum, held here in Boston in early October, Seth Lieberman of SnapApp had a great point during his presentation that really stuck with me. "B2B does not mean 'boring to boring.'" Since the conference catered to B2B marketers, who don't get to typically work in th...
What Your Target Audience Expects From Your Content
First thing's first, when it comes to publishing content online, you need to remember who you are writing it for. Your primary target audience is prospects and current customers, not the search engines. Yes, it’s important to consider SEO and incorporate keywords naturally where you can but the co...
Use Your Business Blog as Bait
When developing your blogging strategy, it’s important to understand the purpose of your business blog. A business blog should be designed to lure target audience members to your content and as a result, to your business website. You may think of bait as what we put on the hook to attract and catc...
3 Things to Know About Your Target Audience Before Creating Content
Online marketing today is all about content, content, and more content. This might lead you to believe that quantity is what matters. But content isn’t for your bosses that are focused on hitting quotas and it’s not for the search engines to improve your SEO (even though that is an important ind...
SEO Clients Can’t Disappear From the Process
If you’re in the market to hire an SEO firm, here’s one important thing that you need to understand: you will need to be an active participant in the SEO process. If you think that you’re outsourcing the work so that you don’t have to deal with it and you can just review monthly reports you ...
Are You Producing “Nontent?”
Back in early October I had the opportunity to attend the B2B Marketing Forurm, put on by MarketingProfs, here in Boston. It was two days of fantastic sessions geared specifically for B2B marketers and I mostly attended sessions dedicated to content marketing. One of the sessions, entitled "How NOT ...
How Your Email Newsletter Can Help SEO
An email newsletter is an important component of an online marketing campaign. Sending out a newsletter on a regular basis is a great way to communicate with target audience members and stay top of mind. But did you also know that your email newsletter could indirectly help your SEO? That is, if you...
SEO Tricks To Not Fall For!
It's unfortunate that a few bad apples have given the SEO industry a bad name. Most SEO consultants and agencies do their best to provide excellent customer service, advice, and white hat SEO recommendations to help their clients achieve real and lasting SEO success. Sadly, there are always going to...
Outsourced or In House Social Media: Why Not Both?
When it comes to social media marketing and the decision to do the work in house or outsource to an agency, it doesn’t have to be one or the other. Have you ever considered taking a joint-effort approach? Combining your in house strengths with the strengths of an outsourced agency? Here are 4...
Questions to Answer While Developing a Blog Strategy
If you’re just getting started with blogging, the first step is obviously to hire a developer to integrate a blog platform with an easy to use CMS into your website. As the developer is working on that, you should get started on creating a blog strategy. Once the blog is up and running it’s in y...
Are Your Links Helping You Stand Out?
As part of our link building strategy development process for clients, we often look at competitor link profiles to see how our clients stack up. Are they way behind, way ahead, or on par with their toughest competition? Not that inbound links are the only thing that matters when it comes to SEO, bu...
The Internet Is Immediate. SEO Is Not.
One of the hardest things for site owners to wrap their heads around, especially those struggling with a penalty, is that SEO is not an immediate form of marketing. The work you do today doesn't help you today...or even next week. Sometimes it takes months to feel the true effects of your SEO work. ...
Blog on a Daily Basis (If You Can)
According to HubSpot’s 2013 State of Inbound Marketing Report: Seventy-nine percent of companies who have a blog report a positive ROI for inbound marketing this year, compared with just 20% of those companies that do not have a blog. In fact, 82% of marketers who blog on a daily basis acquired...
Is Your Content Covering the Whole B2B Buying Cycle?
If you’re a B2B marketer looking to grab the attention of B2B decision makers that would be interested in your product or service, there’s no better way to do so than to be publishing quality online content on a regular basis. This excerpt from a Forbes article says it all: Consumers tune...
Google Pushed Penguin 3.0 Live
On October 19th Google officially confirmed they pushed Penguin 3.0 live. Even though it's called Penguin 3.0 it's actually the 6th iteration of the link spam fighting algorithm update. This is the first time Google has updated Penguin in almost exactly a year, so many site owners have their fingers...
Facebook Is Still King of the Social Jungle
A lot of people are experiencing Facebook burnout. The social giant has been around for nearly ten years and has undergone major transformations in that time. What started out a social connection site for Harvard students has morphed into the largest social network in the world! For better or worse,...
Blogging is the Top Content Priority With a Limited Budget
Wouldn’t it be nice to have an unlimited marketing budget? You could spend as much as you wanted on content creation, distribution, and promotion. You could hire the best content writers that could produce a steady stream of blog posts, press releases, white papers, case studies, etc. in order to ...
Google Never Told Us to Stop Link Building
There’s a lot of talk in SEO circles about how SEO has changed and it’s more about content marketing and social media today instead of link building. While it’s absolutely true that content marketing and social media are important pieces of the puzzle, link building is arguably still a piece o...
3 Reasons To Hire an SEO Firm Instead of an In-House Employee
When you do finally get the green light to really ramp up your SEO program you have one of two options; you can either hire an SEO firm to manage and guide your campaign, or you can pull it all in-house and hire a new SEO manager. There are pros and cons to both options, but here are three reasons w...
Do Your LinkedIn Groups Research to Increase Visibility
According to the 2014 edition of the Power Formula LinkedIn overview based on data from a survey of 896 active users from around the world, people are joining LinkedIn Groups, but they just aren’t joining too many of them. The highest percentage (33.1%) of users is a member of 1-9 Groups. The sec...
Why Readers Lose Interest in Your Content
Ongoing content creation, publication, and distribution have become crucial components of online marketing success. Great content has the potential to increase not only website traffic and social media follower counts, but over the long term is what nurtures leads and generates sales. Some companies...
Are You Thinking About Content User Experience?
As a content marketer you may think that you’re doing everything right. You spend ample time creating content in different formats (blog posts, articles, white papers, videos, etc.) because you know that people have different content consumption preferences. You’re working hard at building up yo...
Use Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools Together
Every business needs to have a website today. That’s obvious. While there are still some stragglers, most companies have at least a very basic website. However, the number of business website owners that don’t have any sort of Analytics set up on the site is shocking. If you have a website, don...
No SEO Firm Can Guarantee Organic Results
A few weeks ago we were having a call with a new client about getting their SEO up and running and one thing their Director of Sales kept hitting us for was a number; what kind of organic success could their site expect within our 6 month contract? Obviously sales guys live and die by numbers, so it...
The Google Force Field
When you live and breathe SEO like we do it's easy to forget that most business people, both big and small, don't play in the SEO sandbox at all. We often get asked questions that to us seem like, "well, duh," but to a small business owner or even a VP of Marketing that never delved into SEO before,...
What is a “Natural” Link?
In a perfect SEO world, the kind that Google would like us all to live and work in anyway, a “natural” link is one that the site owner had zero hand in actually creating. They didn’t ask for it, barter for it, submit something for it, and so forth—it was totally created by someone on the li...
Facebook Updates: Include Links But Don’t Ask People to Click
Not too long ago guest blogging was a popular SEO link-building tactic. Write a guest post for a website, include a link back to your site, and improve your link portfolio. It was a “win win” scenario. The website that published the guest post was getting content to keep the site active and the ...
Guest Blog Posting Tips to Keep You Out of Trouble
Not too long ago guest blogging was a popular SEO link building tactic. Write a guest post for a website, include a link back to your site, and improve your link portfolio. It was a “win win” scenario. The website that published the guest post was getting content to keep the site active and the ...
Is Your SEO Firm a Disaster Waiting to Happen?
Over the last few years Brick Marketing has talked with many site owners who have burned by their SEO firms. Some were paying a monthly “maintenance” fee but no work other than pulling keyword-ranking reports was getting done. Others would go months without hearing from their SEO firm, even if t...
Do’s and Don’ts of Responding to Negative Social Media Comments
If you’re willing to put the time in, social media is great for business. It serves as an outlet to inform your target audience, gain exposure, and make connections. Yet, it’s not always going to be sunshine and rainbows. A social media page opens your business up to receiving comments of any va...
The Potential Fallout of Cutting Back on Facebook Posts
Marketers know that Facebook marketing isn’t as easy or straightforward as it should be. Ideally, the process would be simple. You create a company page, share status updates via that page, and those updates show up in the News Feeds of people that have “Liked” you. But this is Facebook, and t...
Make the Most of Your LinkedIn Posts
First things first, If you want to succeed in online marketing today, you need to be creating quality content on a regular basis and sharing that content with a social following that should steadily increase over time. In the B2B sector specifically, perhaps the most important social channel to be d...
That Old Blog Post is Worth More Than You Think!
When you publish a new blog post and promote it across your social channels there is usually a flurry of activity. It gets shared, Liked, tweeted, read-through, and more. But within a day or two (unless that post goes viral) the traffic and activity usually falls off. The organic value of that post ...
Content is For Your Target Audience First, SEO Second
Any good SEO company is going to tout the benefits of producing high quality content on a regular basis for SEO purposes. Content is what fuels an SEO campaign, generates natural inbound links, and improves social media efforts. However, it’s important to note that ultimately, content needs to be ...
Link Building Is Really About Relationships
Moz recently put out a new guide to link building, which anyone relatively new to SEO should check out! One of the things I really appreciated is how much the author wrote about the human element of link building--people create links because they see some value in doing so. Having a relationship wi...
Does Your Website Have a Clear Focus?
When we receive an inquiry from a prospective client, the first thing we do is take a look at their website since that’s where we’ll be spending the majority of our time. If it’s not almost immediately clear what the company does or what products they sell, we already have hesitations about wo...
Responding to Comments is Part of a Social Marketing Campaign
There is so much more to a social media marketing campaign than merely setting up the company page and adding a bio and maybe a few pictures. Yet that’s all that so many companies do! A company social media page needs to be an active and engaging entity. That means that it needs to be updated ofte...
3 Places to Find New Linking Opportunities
In today's world of SEO, easy-win linking opportunities are getting fewer and farther in-between. While there are some great easy-win linking opportunities to be had when you first set out, most easy-win links tend to be junk; they are low-quality sites, they have no real editorial process in place ...
Why B2Bs Should Be Using Facebook, Not Just LinkedIn
There’s no question that B2Bs should be active on LinkedIn. After all it’s a social network with a business focus. People sign in to their LinkedIn account to read business related articles, make business connections, and update their professional profile. That’s why it’s no surprise that in...
5 Qualities of the Best Guest Blog Posts
Guest blog posting might not be the SEO link-building tactic that it once was, but that’s actually a good thing! It’s weeding out the low quality “just for links” posts. The people/businesses that have kept guest blog posting in their content marketing strategies are doing it for the right r...
How to Conduct an SEO Friendly Website Content Audit
As a business evolves, its website needs to evolve along with it. A website redesign is recommended every few years to keep things fresh, but what also needs to stay fresh is the website content. When redesigning a website, it’s a good time to conduct a content audit too so that the new site launc...
5 Things to Do When Curating Content for Social Media
Online marketing is about content. Specifically in the B2B sector, content is what gains brand visibility and generates leads. Every company should be creating content, publishing it on the company blog, and sharing it in social media. Of course, creating quality content is no easy task. It requ...
SEO Is Long Term…So Are You Willing to Wait?
Just the other day I was talking with a client whose site was hit by a penalty after they made drastic changes to the content on their homepage. They recently (within the last two weeks) reverted back to the old content in hopes that would undo the penalty. Just the other day they emailed me, asking...
What Makes Content “Share Worthy”?
Content creation doesn’t come easy. It takes a lot of time, effort, and resources to create quality content. If you’re investing so much in content, you obviously want to get the absolute most out of it. To some, the goal is to create content that will “go viral”. Let’s be honest here, of ...
3 Ways to Be a Better Business Blogger
There is no denying that business blogging is a huge part of being a successful online brand. The content you produce not only helps you grow your organic presence, but it also builds your brand's reputation, helps your site earn links naturally, feeds your social media presence, and more. But being...
3 Ways to Get More Twitter Followers
Twitter can be used to gain visibility and as a lead generation tool for businesses. Sure, Twitter has lots of noise to compete with, but that just means that a Twitter strategy requires some time and effort. Simply obtaining a Twitter handle, uploading an image of your logo, adding a brief descript...