My Blog My Blog

What is Latent Semantic Indexing & Why Does it Matter for Your SEO Strategy?

Technical SEO
June 30, 2020/by
What is Latent Semantic Indexing & Why Does it Matter for Your SEO Strategy? If you're anything like me, you probably read the title of this post and thought, "Latent semantic indexing ... wait, what is that?" Latent semantic indexing (LSI, for short) can be an overwhelming and confusing term for anyone hearing it for the first time. Luckily, although it sounds like something that requires a degree in computer science, it's actually a concept you're already probably familiar with — particularly if you have some basic knowledge of keywords and their close relationship with search engine optimization (SEO). In this post, we'll define LSI and how the process can potentially benefit your overall SEO strategy, take a closer look at ways to find LSI-driven keywords, and outline how to add these keywords into your content. Let's dive right in, shall we? Access Now: Technical SEO Glossary What is latent semantic indexing? Latent Semantic Indexing, also known as latent semantic analysis, is a mathematical practice that helps classify and retrieve information on particular key terms and concepts using singular value decomposition (SVD). Through SVD, search engines are able to scan through unstructured data and identify any relationships between these terms and their context to better index these records for users online. Before SVD, it was rather difficult for computers to try and grasp differences between synonyms or semantic changes. To help paint a picture, take the words "silly" and "string". When separated, these words represent two very independent definitions, but...
Read Full Story

9 LinkedIn Ad Case Studies That Marketers Can Learn From

LinkedIn Marketing
June 29, 2020/by
9 LinkedIn Ad Case Studies That Marketers Can Learn From When you think about social media marketing, what's the first platform that comes to mind? For many marketers, it's probably Facebook or Instagram. But if I were to pick one, I'd go with LinkedIn. Why? Well, first, LinkedIn is an amazing platform to use for brand awareness. Their Business Solutions offer a variety of ad types, like photo or video. Ads are visible to the platform's 630 million users, and the unique optimization tools, like audience targeting, ensure Ads reach qualified leads. Second, LinkedIn's Business Solutions are expansive. There's a lot of opportunity for ad customization and budgeting — which is helpful if you’re not quite sure which ad is right for your strategy. That's where my third reason for loving LinkedIn comes in: case studies. Case studies often explain the thinking, process, and analysis behind how a team or business uses a product or solution. Marketing case studies usually focus on specific verticals, industries, or solutions. Want to learn more about LinkedIn Ads? Their case studies are a good place to start. Let’s walk through a few. LinkedIn Ads Case Studies These case studies will dive into every ad type LinkedIn has to offer and what those corresponding campaigns look like. LinkedIn offers four ad types: Dynamic, Sponsored, Text, and Message. Dynamic Ads change based on the interests of LinkedIn members. They come in four formats and offer the most opportunity for personalization. Use this ad type,...
Read Full Story

How to Be a Better Marketer Through Mindfulness and Meditation

Work Life Balance
June 27, 2020/by
How to Be a Better Marketer Through Mindfulness and Meditation Let’s get this out into the open: I bite my nails. Or at least I did. (Kinda gross, right?) But a few summers ago, I watched as my then three-year-old son chomped down on his fingernail. That was it. The final kick in the butt I needed to see to finally stop a decades-old bad habit. Little did I know that in my quest to stop biting my nails, I’d unlock something much bigger for myself -- both personally and professionally. It was mindfulness. According to the folks at U-Cal Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, mindfulness is about "maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment."  For me, mindfulness has helped me make better decisions, listen more, and above all, be present. Amidst the chaos of our busy, multi-screen, too-many-browser-bookmarked lives, it helps me return to a more centered self. More and more, people are embracing both big and small mindfulness tactics. So, what can you do to get in on the goodness? I'll tell you. Here's how I met mindfulness.  Consulting a Mindfulness Expert I knew that guided meditation and hypnosis was probably a good bet to kick the nail-biting habit. So, I reached out to Paul Gustafson, a Boston-area consulting hypnotist. Gustafson helps people -- via guided meditation and hypnotic suggestion -- with anything from quitting smoking to overcoming a fear of flying. I sat down with him for three, 30-minute sessions where he...
Read Full Story

The Plain-English Guide to Negative Keywords

PPC
June 26, 2020/by
The Plain-English Guide to Negative Keywords When I woke up this morning, I groggily shuffled to my kitchen, where I made a distressing discovery: I was out of coffee grounds. Suddenly full of energy, and wanting to remedy the situation as quickly as possible, I frantically ran to my desk, opened my laptop, and typed "ground coffee beans" into Google. I received numerous results: coffee alternatives, drip coffee beans, coffee bean blends, listicles about coffee grounds, and even a list of nearby coffee places. But even though I was given all of this information, I still hadn't found what I needed. So, I continued. After scrolling through recipes that use ground coffee beans, and a section labelled, "Research ground coffee beans," I finally located a section where I could purchase ground coffee beans! When I secured my refill, I thought about all of the options I'd been given for "ground coffee beans," and how many ads I clicked on or ignored because they didn't match my search intent. "Imagine advertising coffee and wasting ad spend from queries like mine," I thought. "Surely," I thought, "There must be a marketing method you can use to avoid this scenario." The answer? Negative keywords. Also known as a negative match, negative keywords make sure that certain words or phrases don't trigger an ad being shown on a SERP or website. This improves targeting: When you prevent keywords from being associated with an ad, you can be more certain that it will...
Read Full Story

8 Common Integrated Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Integrated Marketing
June 26, 2020/by
8 Common Integrated Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them Back in the 1930's, something called the Rule of 7 developed in the movie industry. According to this golden rule, a prospect needs to “hear” an advertiser’s message at least seven times before they’ll take action – such as going to watch Gone with the Wind in 1939. At that time, advertisers of Gone with the Wind distributed their campaigns across a few core channels: namely print, billboards, and radio. But now? The channel options for marketers have skyrocketed. Marketers can engage their audience and inspire action with a huge range of channels used in tandem — both online and offline. For instance, let's say there's a mattress company that has just designed a revolutionary new waterbed. Upon the model's release, sales are less than stellar, and the business is struggling to make headway in the unforgiving, dog-eat-dog world known more commonly as the waterbed industry. The company decides it needs to make a concentrated effort to stand out and looks to its marketing department for answers. The marketers at the company decide to promote a contest — one where consumers submit videos of themselves drinking individual glasses of water in creative ways. Whoever submits the video deemed most creative wins a free waterbed and an all-expense-paid trip to Water Country — the preeminent waterpark in the greater Portsmouth, New Hampshire area. To enact this campaign, the company sends out promotional email blasts to its subscribers. Its blog writers place...
Read Full Story

How to Hire a Freelance Web Developer

Website Development
June 26, 2020/by
How to Hire a Freelance Web Developer So your company is growing. Things are exciting. Everyone is motivated and ideas are coming in from left and right. Then it happens. You say something along the lines of, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could build ? It would cut costs/generate a ton of new leads/change the way we operate.” The team is rallying around the idea, the boss is giving you the wink and the gun, everything feels right in the world -- until the dread hits. Who’s going to build it? Hiring your first freelance developer can seem difficult, but it doesn’t need to be. With the right plan in place and an understanding of your company’s needs, finding the right freelancer for the job can be a largely painless process. I’ve worked on both sides of this equation as an independent, freelance web developer and as someone who’s run a large development team. Follow these steps to make the process smoother for both you and your new freelance partner. How to Hire a Freelance Web Developer First, ask yourself: What do I need? Before identifying a freelancer to work with, you should first know what you’re asking for. This should always be step number one. Are you looking to update some images on a web page? Do you need an entirely new site? Is it a mobile app? Is something wrong with your analytics? Do you need a new tool created? The answer to any of...
Read Full Story

What is the Purpose of Marketing? [FAQ]

Marketing Strategy
June 25, 2020/by
What is the Purpose of Marketing? Dictionary.com defines marketing as, "the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising." If you work in a marketing role like I do, it's probably difficult for you to define marketing even though you see and use it every day -- the term marketing is a bit all-encompassing and variable for a straightforward definition. This definition feels unhelpful. The selling part, for instance, overlaps a little too snuggly with a "what is sales" definition, and the word advertising makes me think of Mad Men brainstorming sessions. But upon digging deeper, I began seeing that actually, marketing does overlap heavily with advertising and sales. Marketing is present in all stages of the business, beginning to end. At first, I wondered why marketing was a necessary component during product development, or a sales pitch, or retail distribution. But it makes sense when you think about it -- marketers have the firmest finger on the pulse of your consumer persona. The purpose of marketing is to research and analyze your consumers all the time, conduct focus groups, send out surveys, study online shopping habits, and ask one underlying question: "Where, when, and how does our consumer want to communicate with our business?" Modern marketing began in the 1950s when people started to use more than just print media to endorse a product. As TV -- and soon, the internet -- entered households, marketers could conduct entire campaigns...
Read Full Story

A Beginner’s Guide to Retargeting Ads

Retargeting
June 24, 2020/by
A Beginner's Guide to Retargeting Ads We'd all like to think that every single person that comes in contact with our business follows a very straight and orderly path to purchase. Someone visits our site for the first time, fills out a form to download an ebook, then becomes interested in talking with a sales rep, all in one session on your website. Minutes later, the sales rep reaches out to this lead, and before you know it, the lead is becoming a customer, handing over their credit card to purchase something from your company. But in reality, the buyer's journey is probably not so linear. People pop over to your website, then leave. Two months later, they discover your latest blog article, and then decide to download that ebook. A few days after that, they decide to check out another blog post. Maybe a week later they decide to get in touch with Sales, and it takes several more weeks of meetings and discussions to come to a decision to buy. Same end result, but the process is a little more convoluted. So marketers need to be prepared to help their buyers through that convoluted process. One great way to do that is with retargeting ads. If you've never used retargeting before, don't worry — in the following post, we'll go through the basics of how retargeting works, explain how you can use it to support your larger marketing goals, and even outline an example of a...
Read Full Story

10 Ways to Make Your Blog Post Interactive

Content Types
June 24, 2020/by
10 Ways to Make Your Blog Post Interactive Static marketing content is as outdated as print-only newspapers. Just as day-old newspapers become litter in the streets, static digital content is useless to the average reader. With such an inundation of static marketing content, one piece hardly stands out from others, meaning brands blend and ideas fade. Readers crave the dynamic nature of interactive digital content. An ion Interactive study measured the success and general feeling from marketers regarding interactive content. In terms of effectiveness, 93% of marketers say interactive media is great at educating buyers; 88% say it's effective at differentiating brands, whereas static was found to be only 55% effective. Not convinced yet? Did you know that interactive content also drives 2X more conversions than static content? Despite these numbers, many marketers shy away from interactive content. It might be because it has a reputation for being expensive and labor-intensive. But that is an unfair reputation. Creating interactive elements is, in fact, easy, fast and even free. These ten tools allow you to start immediately interacting with customers, which draws them in, converts at higher rates and gives feedback to improve your business. 1. PlayBuzz The original PlayBuzz site is for the average Internet user interested in which Hogwarts house they belong to or testing their knowledge about 1990s TV shows. However, PlayBuzz's business site is tailored to empowering companies to generate an interactive feature, embed it in their marketing content and watch user engagement rise and their...
Read Full Story