Hi, Lauren Kaye, here with this week’s Content & Coffee with Brafton. Agility is a trademark of successful marketers. The changing nature of the content marketing game requires that you keep your eyes peeled for emerging trends and be ready to jump on the latest bandwagon. This is why buzz phrases like “Content is King” tend to get yawns or eyerolls after they’ve had a run. Read on for the text version, or click play to watch the full video.
But that agility has to translate to a certain stick-to-it-ive-ness and foresight if you’re going to avoid getting dumped by Google. Suppose you were all over link-building when it became popular and hired an SEO who promised all the links your heart could desire. Great at first, but now you have a site jam-packed with questionable references that could be sinking your rankings.
This is what’s coming to light more and more. In the latest Webmaster Help Channel video, Search Engineer Matt Cutts revealed that there’s a lot of gray area where spam is concerned. And some sites that consider themselves the “good guys” might actually be grouped with bad guys if they’ve ever engaged in anything that even has a whiff of being spammy.
Cutts said marketers need to stop chasing an abundance of easy links, and really work to win the few that count. In some regard, he’s hinting that SEOs should sink their teeth in and commit to what they’re doing online with their SEO and content, perhaps cutting back if they’ve spread themselves too thin.
As Google gets better at finding the very best answers to users’ questions, brands will realize that shallow strategies won’t yield the results they used to. But don’t worry – it’s not all bad news today. At last week’s SMX West, Rand Fishkin from Moz said the search scale is finally tipping in brands’ favor and companies are scoring prime real estate in SERPs. So it’s even more important to put your best content forward all the time.
Catch you next week, and happy content marketing!
