Why You Need SEO to Make Your Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Strategy Thrive

 

Here’s the deal:

An account-based marketing (ABM) approach and a killer SEO strategy go hand in hand.

Now, I want to share exactly why that is – why ABM is actually all about SEO.

1. ABM Needs Keyword Research

Google loves keywords, and they have for a long time.

When you publish keyword-rich content online, you can bet that it’s going to be found by visitors who use the keywords you targeted.

In ABM, keyword-rich content is also a must!

When you brainstorm topics for your ABM content strategy or begin your keyword research, the questions you ask are more or less the same:

1. Who are your target accounts?
2. Why do they need your product or services?
3. What keywords will they use to find your business?
4. What information are they looking for when they consider a purchase?

After you’ve answered these questions, you can use Google Keyword Research tool and group related keywords together. You can also opt to use social listening to determine the topics and content types that your target stakeholders are interested in.

The information you find will determine your keywords and content topics.  

Remember that keyword research should be done regularly. You don’t just do it, and then stop. You need to keep doing it again and again.

After all, the information your account needs changes everyday.

As a result, you need to perform keyword research to stay up-to-date on your account’s needs and constantly evaluate the content that your business has to offer.

This is how ABM and keyword research converge.

2. ABM Needs SEO-Optimized Content

 

There is no such thing as an account-based marketing strategy without content. You need to woo accounts with quality content to get them to buy.

By content, we’re not talking about a bunch of detailed “how-to” articles. While these types of content can get a high-amount of traffic, they’ll never be read by Marketing VPs, Directors or CEOs— the key decision-makers of your target accounts. Instead, they’ll be read by marketing managers at the bottom of the corporate ladder.

So, what kind of content is read by people at the top?

From my experience, all leaders share a common trait; they always want an answer to the “why”  and “how” questions. Why do they need to buy your product or service? How will it help them drive results immediately? How will it benefit their company?

An account-based marketing strategy demands that you write content that can convince these leaders to buy. In turn,  these leaders need this type of content to convince their partners at the grownup table, too.  

Don’t forget to include SEO and keyword-rich headlines. You need to combine your content marketing strategy with your keyword research to get them on top of search engine rankings.

3. ABM Needs Links to Get Landing Pages Found

Here is another thing that ABM needs: Links.

No one would argue that writing good content and contacting clients is a fundamental concept of ABM.

But if your web content and landing pages are not optimized for search engines, you’ll miss out on A LOT. How can your target accounts visit your website? How can they find specific landing pages using search engines?

Obviously, if your SEO is not setup properly, then your target accounts will end up on the site of your competitors.

The only way you can win is to get links from authoritative sites in your niche.

Start by writing guest posts on the sites that your target accounts read. You can even add links to your target accounts’ site in your guest posts.

When you reach out to specific accounts, these posts will come in handy.

4. ABM Needs Social Media Optimization to Reach Out

 

After you’ve created quality content and researched your accounts,  the next step is to reach out.

One of the ways you can break the ice is by connecting with your account’s leaders on social media. You can send the Marketing VP a message on LinkedIn, comment on their posts, or send a tweet. But, they won’t connect with you if your social media accounts are optimized poorly.

Target accounts use your popularity and social media content to gauge your business’ credibility and reputability. This means that your social presence (or lack thereof) will have a direct impact on the accounts’ impression of your business. And, you can bet that they won’t reply to businesses with no social presence.

The only way you can improve your social media is to leverage SEO services and social media management.

Here’s a list of what you need to do:

1. Optimize your  social media content for search engines.
2. Keep your accounts updated to grow your number of followers.
3. Encourage social sharing to build your authority.

Accounts want to connect with high-authority companies that can prove their worth on social media. They are attracted to businesses followed by industry leaders online, and they can only be convinced with quality content that drives them to act.

This is why SEO and social media optimization are a top priority.

Conclusion:

So, let’s recap what we covered today.

Account-based marketing needs SEO.

Clearly, an ABM strategy is only going to be successful if you create content that your accounts can find on Google or on social media. Look at this way: You need to convince accounts that they need you. In order to do this, you need to publish information they need and make sure that information gets found.

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When Will SEO Not Work for Your Business?

I was on a discovery call recently with a potential client, an international business owner.  He is in the food subscription business, and wanted to start doing some SEO.  He had been spending about $20k to $30k every month on Facebook and social media campaigns and wanted to understand how he could leverage search engine optimization to help him gain more traction and increase sales.

When I started looking at his market, we quickly realized that he’s in a business where people are not immediately looking for a subscription box service. It’s more of an impulse buy on part of the consumer.   This equates to a low demand for his solution even though it’s a good one.

When there’s little to no demand for your business or the solution your company offers, this means people are not searching for you or your business solution on Google.  It is in this case where SEO is not likely going to work in the typical way.  SEO campaigns will work, in terms of finding the key words, then binding those words that have search volume to increase rankings and get traffic. In this case, there is not one specific key word that has the ability to focus on gaining traffic.

With that said, we figured out his target audience and who would buy his subscription food service.  We then developed a content marketing strategy that would add value to his customer when they’re looking for specific needs.  We turned his target audience into a media hub for his food delivery service by focusing on consumer needs and wants.

As an advertiser, he has a product by teaming up with other companies and putting products together to sell.  Now, just by talking about their products online they will in turn advertise his product.  This way, it’s a free way for him to get traffic to his audience and advertise his product to them.  That’s going to work tremendously well for his business.

Your business may not be the typical business that has keywords with search volume baked in with demand.  That’s not to say you can’t also find your audience and target some trigger points to meet their actual needs to solve a problem they didn’t know they had.  Using campaigns or events on various scales where people are looking for specific products you work with, and then showcase your product, to get more sales that way.

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Timing is Key – The Best Time for SEO

When is the best time to start SEO for your brand new or newly redesigned website?

I get a lot of customers coming to me with either a current website in need of a redesign or with a newly launched site.  Now you have to understand that most designers, although they will say they will give you an SEO friendly website, know pretty much nothing about SEO.  What they typically do is (if you’re lucky), they’ll keep your existing URL the way it is, so you don’t lose any SEO rankings.  Or the second option is they will do a permanent redirect.

Most people come to me with a new website getting a lot of drop in traffic and slow ranking.  This is because they not only developed a new website and it has new URL links, but they also wiped out all the old URLs, which had rankings.  This says to me that the designer didn’t do proper redirects and the site structure and silos are all off.  The designer is showing now that they did not do proper tags, et cetera.  A lot of technical on-page jargon that a typical web designer, developer, does not understand about SEO.  A lot of the work that may have had success with new the website was all wiped out.  This puts the business is in trouble in terms of their website ranking.

The best time to get an SEO opinion or get someone to help you evaluate is actually before the website launches.  That way, you can have the SEO team do an audit for you and make sure that there’s proper redirects and make sure the site maps are there, the bots and text are there, and all the on-page checklists are done properly.  This should be done before you launch the website to make sure that the website goes smoothly and get the best possible ranking from search engines from the start.

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Get Ten Times the Traffic to Your Website

The easy answer to get more traffic to your website is with more content, because content is king.  One important key, however, is to develop content that people are actually looking for.  The other key is to have multiple content pages for the topic that you service or the product you’re selling.  Each page on your website acts like a fishing line out in the ocean.  The more fishing lines you cast out, the more types of fish you are going to bring in.  What this boils down to in the end is having a lot of content based on the keywords, or the topic, that you specifically want to rank for to bring in the most traffic. That’s the short and easy answer.

Now, a lot of people out there will tell you to “do content marketing,” but that is not the whole picture.  The reason is that the whole picture also includes everyone else doing that. Your competitor can pump out a lot of content and so can you. You can make sure that your own website pages are incredible, but how does Google know to rank you higher than your competition? How would they know when everything looks the same?

The only way any website is able to beat out others in a search engine, is through their algorithm of recognizing your website’s authority and trust.  This is only established through “linked pages.”  That means other websites linking back to your website.  The more links you have to other websites linking back is equal to a vote of confidence for your website. Obviously not every vote is equal.  A link coming back from a government website is obviously going to be a lot more authoritative and trustworthy than a link coming back from a mom’s blog, right?

After you have a ton of content related to your topic, you will want to build up your websites authority and trust.  You can evaluate the analytics and this is where your SEO marketing budget comes into play.  It is the art of building those authorities, increasing the links coming back to your website.  The goal is to make sure that the links are increasing over time for the topics that you are producing.

That is the longer version of successful SEO and the more challenging way to increase traffic.  By having a lot of content and making sure your website’s authority and trust are strong, you will keep the fishing boat afloat in the sea of information.  This allows a much higher ranking of your website in search engines, so that it can be found everywhere, and Google will respect what you do, and rank you properly according to your field or specialty.

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4 First Steps to Grow Your Los Angeles Business Using SEO

Whether you run a B2B or B2C business, search engine optimization can turn your website into a powerful, cost-effective source of leads.

In big cities and metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, the benefits of SEO are even greater than they are in small cities. With a huge population to tap into, ranking even for a “small” keyword is often all it takes to drive a huge volume of prospects and customers to your business.

Just like with most marketing strategies, SEO is just as much about taking action as it is about putting together the perfect strategy. Put continual effort into ranking your website and, even if your gameplan is far from optimal, you’ll still see measurable results.

Below, we’ve put together a simple four-step guide for businesses in the Los Angeles area that are just getting started with SEO. From structuring your website the right way to optimizing your subpages, the steps below will help you begin to generate traffic and leads from organic search.

Understand Your Industry’s Top Search Terms And Keywords

Keywords are the foundation of effective search engine optimization. Without an understanding of the search terms your prospective customers use, it’s extremely difficult to improve your site’s visibility and start generating traffic.

Whether your business is B2B or B2C, the first step you should take in any SEO campaign is to understand the most effective keywords for your business to target.

You can do this using tools like the Google Keyword Planner, or by talking to our expert search engine optimization team.

Keywords can be divided into several categories. We recommend targeting buying keywords, which have more obvious commercial intent than informational keywords, as the foundation of your SEO efforts. You can also target ‘interest keywords’ that are related to your business.

Once you’ve put together a set of keywords that are closely related to the products or services you offer, you can move onto active, on-page optimization.

Optimize Your Sub-pages For Hyper-local Search Keywords

One of the benefits of operating a business in a large metropolis like Los Angeles is that local keywords aren’t limited to the city itself. Instead, you can target a huge range of cities, suburbs and other areas within Southern California in which your business operates.

This is hyper-local targeting — SEO based on suburbs and communities rather than much larger metropolitan areas. When used effectively, it can drive highly targeted traffic to your website and generate some of the most pinpoint accurate leads your business will ever receive.

The best way to optimize your subpages is to create content for each district, suburb or area in which your business operates. For example, if you run a roofing business, you can break your website into specific pages for each ZIP code.

This type of hyper-local targeting lets your business gain traction faster, as ranking for extremely localized terms is much less difficult than ranking for city-wide terms. This can be a great source of leads as you focus on optimizing for shorter-tail, city-wide search keywords in the future.

Build The Foundation For City-wide Keywords As Early As Possible

Ranking for city-wide local keywords such as “los angeles dentist” is a real challenge, especially if your website is new. Not only do you need to compete against bigger businesses — you’re also competing against older, more authoritative and significantly more heavily linked websites.

This makes it important to lay the foundation for city-wide rankings as early as possible, even if you aren’t actively targeting them. By having the local citations, links and other signals as early as possible, you’ll put your website in a far better position to rank for its target keywords one or several years from now.

There’s a saying that “SEO is a marathon, not a sprint.” Just like you’d prepare for a marathon as early as possible, preparing to city-wide keywords several months in advance puts you in a far better position when you decide it’s time to finally take action.

Once You Reach The First Page, Optimize

There are two ways to expand your website’s search presence. The first method is to make your reach as wide as possible by targeting keywords related to the search terms for which you rank, such as “dental implants los angeles” after you rank for “dentist los angeles.”

The second method is to make your reach thin but tall by ranking for a smaller number of search terms, but at a higher position.

Surprisingly, the second method — ranking #1 for a small number of keywords instead of #6 for a large number of keywords — is often the most effective at generating a large volume of leads for your business.

Once your business pops onto the first page for any of its target keywords, make a push to bring it into the top three positions. Traffic on the first page often increases exponentially as you move closer to the top, making it worth putting in the extra time for a top three ranking.

Improve Your Website’s Search Visibility

Our company specializes in finding profitable search keywords and improving your website’s visibility. If you’re new to the world of SEO Los Angeles, our expert team can put together and execute a detailed plan to give your business the search visibility and traffic it deserves.

 

The post 4 First Steps to Grow Your Los Angeles Business Using SEO appeared first on Bliss Drive.

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How to Target and Convert Local Customers Using Your Company Blog

Think of conversion-optimized content and you’ll probably picture your website’s homepage and service-focused landing pages.

While these are the pages that most business owners think of as generating conversions, there are often resources on your website that you can use to turn readers into prospects and convert their attention into real, actionable business leads.

We’re talking about your company’s blog, of course — a highly valuable marketing tool that, for the most part, isn’t used to its full potential.

If you run a B2B business, your blog can be an incredibly valuable marketing tool. Below, we’ve shared some of our favorite ways to convert your blog from a purely informational resource into a highly effective tool for generating leads and driving revenue for your business.

Treat Each Blog Post As A Warm-up For An Informational Resource

People read your blog for several reasons, the most common of which is that they want to learn from you. If you operate a B2B business, this creates a great opportunity to convert readers that seek new information into prospects that can become loyal customers.

One of the easiest ways to do this is through a technique known as a content upgrade.

Content upgrades are long-form guides that stem from a topic you discuss on your blog. Instead of being freely available like blog content, content upgrades are only available to download once a reader opts in to your email list.

In short, they’re tools designed specifically to turn your passive blog readers into real prospects.

The most effective content upgrades exist to answer common questions related to your product or service. For the best results, your content upgrade should be related to the content you write about on your blog.

For example, if you run a trade show exhibition business and write about designing exhibits on your blog, your content upgrade could be an eBook on “How to Design and Operate Your First Trade Show Exhibit.”

This type of content upgrade works so effectively because it touches on a need of your target audience. After all, people reading about trade show exhibiting tips are very likely to have an interest in learning how to design a trade show exhibit.

Each and every person that opts in for your content upgrade is a potential customer. With an effective email and phone-based follow-up routine, you’ll be surprised by how many content upgrade subscribers you can turn into real clients and customers.

Need help thinking of content upgrade ideas? Check online for great content upgrade ideas that you can use to grow your email list and generate new marketing prospects with every blog post you publish.

Add A Live Chat To Your Blog

This is a simple idea that, if done right, can be highly effective at generating leads for your B2B business.

The vast majority of people that come to your blog leave the same way — by closing the tab or window in which they’ve opened your content, and moving on to another task. By adding live chat to your blog, you can extend their interest and turn numerous readers into prospects.

Live chat works best for highly focused, specific blogs that cover a topic in incredible detail. This can mean a focused B2B marketing blog, a blog that covers specific legal problems, or a health and medicine blog that deals with a specific type of medicine.

Since most people that read your blog will have at least some interest in its subject matter, live chat can help you convert passive readers into active prospects — prospects that can often turn into highly valuable sales leads and customers.

Just like with the content upgrade strategy, the key to live chat is that it takes interaction from a passive activity (reading content) and turns it into an active one, letting you establish a working connection with each reader and develop a client or customer relationship.

Is your blog an effective marketing asset?

Many businesses blog simply because they think it’s worth doing. The end result is often a blog that’s packed with content but lacking in focus, making it far less valuable as a marketing asset than a smaller, more specialized blog.

Is your blog an effective marketing asset? Our Los Angeles SEO company specializes in using content to generate leads, inquiries and sales. If you’re interested in developing your site into a source of sales and revenue, our experienced team is always available to help.

 

The post How to Target and Convert Local Customers Using Your Company Blog appeared first on Bliss Drive.

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Simple SEO in Los Angeles: How to Earn Links from Local Businesses

As a small business, it can seem impossible to outrank your larger, more funded competitors for the most popular and profitable search keywords.

While you may not be able to match your larger competitors’ budgets, you do have a very useful advantage: access.

From reaching out to other businesses with special deals and offers to contacting the owners of local organizations, being part of a small business means you can implement a variety of highly effective strategies that are “too small” for your larger competitors.

Below, we’ve listed five of our favorite local link building techniques that your small business in the Los Angeles area can use to increase your search visibility, generate more traffic and bring in clients and customers using SEO.

Offer discounts for customers of local businesses

One of the easiest ways to earn links from other local businesses is to offer a special discount to their customers.

For example, if you own a restaurant in a specific area, you can reach out to doctor’s offices, car mechanics, parking garages, dentists, study centers and other businesses in the area to inform them that you’ll provide a 10% discount for customers that bring their receipt into your store.

This strategy works because it’s a two-way value exchange. Your offer strengthens their unique sales proposition, all while generating leads for your business. Ask them to add the discount to their website and it also becomes a highly effective strategy for building local one-way links.

Hold meetups for local groups and clubs

If your area is home to local meetup groups and clubs, you can offer to host them at your venue either for free or at a heavily discounted rate. You can even sponsor a group and offer a service or product of some kind.

In exchange, you can ask the group or club to list your venue on their website as a sponsor or supporter. This is a great way to build links for cafés, restaurants and bars, all while building a local customer base at the same time.

Create local ‘best of’ lists

Businesses love to be mentioned online, especially on the websites of other businesses in their area. Another easy way to earn links from nearby businesses is to create “best of” lists on your website that catalog the best restaurants, cafés and other local businesses around yours.

Once you’ve completed the list, you can reach out to the businesses mentioned in your content and let them know why you’ve included them. Since social proof is such a useful marketing tool, most local businesses will be happy to mention and link to your list from their own websites.

Host a local event

This is another tip that works extremely well for cafés, restaurants, bars and other venues. If you have a business that can host other people easily, try holding a local event that attracts owners of other local businesses.

Not only can local networking events help you develop new connections — they can also play a part in establishing new partnerships and groups. Promote the event the right way and you can even earn links from local government websites and directories.

Moz has an excellent post on putting this strategy to work that covers the entire process of using local events to build valuable one-way links to your website.

Review local businesses

Finally, one of the easiest ways to earn links from other local businesses is to review them. Most businesses love positive reviews, especially from people in the community. Post a helpful review of a local business and there’s a good chance they’ll link to you to earn some social proof.

Although this strategy can work for any local business, it’s most effective for business in different industries from the subject matter they’re reviewing. If you own a local newspaper or magazine, a series of targeted, detailed reviews can be a tremendous source of highly relevant links.

Do you need help with link building?

Our company specializes in link building and promotion for businesses in Los Angeles County and throughout Southern California. Our expert team can help you think up new SEO Los Angeles link building strategies that improve your rankings, generate more traffic and drive more sales.

 

The post Simple SEO in Los Angeles: How to Earn Links from Local Businesses appeared first on Bliss Drive.

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Targeting LA Neighborhoods via SEO for Leads, Revenue and ROI

Over the last few years, one of the biggest trends in online marketing has been local. Instead of aiming for short tail keywords, businesses have focused on smaller areas, targeting their city for keywords related to products they sell and services they offer.

This is a great strategy for small cities and towns, where prospective customers are more likely to search for city-related geographical keywords than specific neighborhoods.

In big cities like Los Angeles, one of the most effective ways to generate leads, sales and ROI from SEO is to go hyper-local. This level of targeting involves breaking your SEO efforts down into specific neighborhoods and suburbs, instead of city-wide terms.

We’ve implemented hyper-local SEO for many of our clients, always with positive results that, in the majority of cases, exceed those achievable with traditional SEO.

Here are a few reasons why we’re big fans of targeting neighborhoods and hyper-local areas for SEO:

 

• It’s less competitive. Most businesses don’t optimize for their local area, instead opting to compete for “big” local keywords. Since there’s less competition, you can get closer to the top of the search engine results pages and drive more traffic to your website.
  

• It’s faster. Since there’s less competition for hyper-local search keywords than for local keywords, you can build and promote pages that rank within a few months, instead of a few years.
  

• It’s better. Since hyper-local marketing is focused entirely on your immediate area (or the areas your business serves), it tends to generate more specific, focused leads that convert into customers at a higher rate than leads from regular local SEO.
  

• It’s cheap. Because competition is lower, there’s much less of a need to promote your content and spend your budget on traditional outreach and link building campaigns for hyper-local search.
  

• It’s much more targeted. In big cities like Los Angeles, city-wide targeting often results in leads that are outside your service area. With hyper-local SEO, you have more control over the areas in which you market your business.
  

• It’s easy to scale. Once you reach the number one spot for a short tail local keyword, it becomes hard to scale. WIth hyper-local SEO, you can quickly and easily scale to other neighborhoods, districts and suburbs to expand your reach.

One of the biggest advantages of targeting specific neighborhoods is that it’s extremely easy to implement. For most businesses, all that’s needed to reach the front page for hyper-local search keywords is a short, helpful page that covers the specific topic.

Since competition for hyper-local keywords is so much less intense than for local keywords, you can often rank purely on the strength of your website as a whole, with little or no link building or outreach required.

How to identify hyper-local search opportunities?

If you run a service business that operates in a specific area, one of the easiest ways to start a hyper-local SEO campaign is to break the area down into suburbs and sections.

For example, if your business is located in West Los Angeles, you can divide it into sub-cities such as Culver City, Santa Monica and West Hollywood. You can even break it down to target specific neighborhoods, such as Playa del Rey and Venice.

One way to target specific areas is by using ZIP codes. You’d be surprised to learn how many people search for local businesses by adding their ZIP code to a keyword, and how effective a quick mention of a specific ZIP code in your page title can be.

The more specific your targeting is, the smaller your potential audience becomes. However, as your keywords get more and more local, you’ll also find it easier to outrank your competitors for the top spots.

Can your business benefit from hyper-local SEO?

In big cities, hyper-local SEO is a valuable, underutilized source of leads and revenue. Our Los Angeles SEO company specializes in finding and capitalizing on local search opportunities that can help your business drive traffic, leads and sales.

 

The post Targeting LA Neighborhoods via SEO for Leads, Revenue and ROI appeared first on Bliss Drive.

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