Blog - Antarsia Marketing | Atlanta Content Marketing COmpany

How Zombie Pages Hurt SEO

Wed, 09 Sep 2020 19:38:29 GMT

Why “Zombie Pages” Might Be Eating Your Site’s Performance Alive

They’re coming to eat your brains! Well, maybe not your brains so much as the products of your mind and your hard effort. They’re called “zombie pages,” and they can gnaw away a huge chunk of your website’s traffic without you even noticing. Having too many zombie pages shambling about can also be a big reason why you aren’t ranking on search engines.

Worst of all, like a true zombie plague, a zombie page doesn’t just keep to itself. If you ignore them too long, the infection could spread!

Zombie pages have no soul and no value to visitors. They exist because of a mindless desire to rank for certain keywords. Others might serve as a placeholder page someone once thought was necessary but that really serves no purpose in navigation. In both scenarios, these types of pages hurt your performance metrics. Since they don’t contain the information people are looking for when they search, they also get ignored by search engines.

The only way to handle zombie pages is to quarantine them. Once you identify the “infected” pages hurting your performance, you can take measures to bring them back to life. Or, if it’s a page that really doesn’t need to exist any more, you can put it out of its misery.

So, are you ready to start the zombie hunt? Well, as an experienced web content writing company in Atlanta, we feel qualified to say we’re expert zombie slayers. Read on to learn what, exactly, zombie pages are, as well as 3 easy steps you can take to exterminate those pesky zombies once and for all using some smart content pruning.

So What Are “Zombie Pages” in Terms of SEO?

The interpretation of “zombie pages” varies, but nearly all definitions refer to them as pages with stale content and stagnating performance. Over time, their performance decays so bad that they end up as “dead pages,” meaning that they are rarely seen by anyone.

Since search engines use performance metrics like traffic volume or pages viewed per visit as ranking signals , a dead page may be shoved back to the fifth page of Google… or get de-indexed altogether.

What separates a “zombie” page from typical a “dead” page, though, is that just like in the movies these pages are the living dead. See, a normal dead page exists on some far away corner of your site. It could be a blog from six years ago no one remembers or an obscure product listing no one buys. Yeah it’s dead, but it’s not exactly getting attention stinking up the place, either.

But living dead pages do get some measure of attention. They could be a years-old version of a main navigation page that offers no value. Or, they could be outdated pages website owners try to keep on life support with occasional updates.

Zombie pages are therefore dangerous to SEO because they represent missed opportunities. If a main navigation page isn’t worth looking at , people won’t bother to click deeper into the site to look at more specific information. One page’s poor structure or poor performance thus causes others to suffer.

Pages that suck up your time and effort just to deliver bad results can also act like an undead parasite. You give them your energy, and they offer nothing in return.

Either way, zombie pages are dead pages that just refuse to die. They feed off the performance signals of other pages, draining their energy, and they siphon off your personal resources when you try to maintain them.

So, how do you get rid of zombies? Go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for all of this to blow over? Nope! You identify which pages are zombies and decide what to do next accordingly.

Here’s how to get rid of your zombie problem in three steps before they can take over the rest of your site.

Step 1: Identify Signs of Infection

The performance difference between healthy pages and dead/undead pages is easy to spot. Take a look at the following metrics:

Total visits (Pageviews)
Unique Pageviews
Avg. Time on Page
Bounce Rate
Exit rate
Pages per session (Pages/Session)

Pageviews can quickly separate poor performers from the rest of the pack, but don’t think of them as inherently valuable. You want visits from users who stick around and don’t bounce quickly from the page. Aim for a high number of views per session . Think quality over quantity.

Step 2: Put Your Corpses to Rest

Performance metrics let you know which pages are dragging your site down, which allows you to then revisit your overall website strategy and consider whether certain pages are well and truly dead. They may no longer serve a function, or they may have always been a page that failed to earn attention. If so: RIP.

You can effectively put these dead pages to rest by deleting their HTML files and removing their listing on your sitemap. Do your best to probe around for other pages that link to these pages and remove the link or change it to a more appropriate URL.

Even still, there may be links to the dead page you might not know about. To resolve this issue, you can instruct a browser to retrieve what’s known as a 410 error: “Page no longer exists” This error is different from a 404 “not found” error since a 410 shows the page did exist but was removed.

Or, you can decide to instruct a 301 redirect to a more important area of the site. 301 redirects are especially helpful if the zombie page has valuable backlinks you don’t want to lose.

Step 3: Triage Your Zombie Pages

Ok you’ve dealt with your dead pages’ desiccated remains, but what about the undead?

Deciding how to handle your individual zombies is up to you. You can:

Completely redo the page , using quality content and best practices. This strategy works well for pages that have an important purpose in navigation but don’t deliver on value.
Make the page an organ donor by taking chunks of its content and putting it into other higher or lower-level pages. This strategy works for pages that have some good content or minor purpose but don’t deserve their own URL.
Bring new life to the page by adding more quality content and double-checking all your technical SEO elements. You can also try to boost the page’s performance by pointing more internal links to it from higher-up in navigation, giving it outbound links, or earning backlinks from other websites.
Send the page to oblivion where it belongs using either a 410 or a 301 redirect. Sometimes, there’s no salvaging a page despite our best efforts. You’ll need to account for the missing page somehow by revising your navigation path and peppering information it once provided (if any) throughout other areas of the site.

Determining which of these strategies to use depends on your overall website content strategy. If you’re having trouble identifying which course of action is best or how to handle your zombie pages, you can always look to a qualified web content writing company in Atlanta to handle your content pruning needs.

Do Not Fear the Zombies. Do Not Pity Them. Be Ruthless.

The key to addressing the zombie pandemic is to cut off the infection before it spreads. Beware the “ sunk cost fallacy ” remorse you may feel dealing with pages you don’t have the heart to kill. Your choices should always look to the future — what’s the best decision for you site moving forward?

If You Need Help, Look to a Web Content Writing Company in Atlanta

And if you can’t bring yourself to get rid of your zombies or even identify where they lurk, know that we at Antarsia Marketing are here for you. We want you website to function as a healthy, holistic unit that helps you earn both search engine rankings and great on-page performance.

Ready to take the next step towards revolutionizing your site? Take a look at our Atlanta web writing services , and then contact us today !

Why Isn’t My Website Ranking?

pwatson (Paul Watson) — Wed, 26 Aug 2020 18:48:24 GMT

12 Reasons Search Engines Are Passing You By

Your website is your most important asset. It’s far and away the most common way that potential clients and customers will find you. It makes sense, then, that if your site isn’t showing up well in Google search results (as well as the results of Bing, DuckGoGo and other search engines), there’s a good chance you won’t be getting much new business any time soon.

Search for any industry or service, and you’ll find millions of search results. If you want your business to succeed, you have to rank well for your ideal keywords — really, you need to rank on the first page. Why? Because nearly 80% of people never move past the first page of search results.

If your website isn’t ranking well, and you aren’t seeing any positive movement in your rankings when you check your analytics, here are just 12 possible reasons search engines are passing you by:

The Technical Aspects

1. The Site Isn’t Indexed Properly

Depending on what kind of website builder you used, it may or may not have been automatically sent for indexing when it was launched. If your site isn’t indexed, it essentially doesn’t exist in Google’s eyes. And if it doesn’t exist, well, it can’t be ranked, can it?

To check whether your site is indexed, simply go to Google and type in “site:yoursitename.com” (obviously replacing “yoursitename.com” with your site’s URL). All the pages that are indexed will appear in the search results. If your site isn’t indexed, don’t fret; there’s an easy fix.

Go to Google Search Console and submit a sitemap (yeah, a sitemap is vital to your site — build one ASAP if you don’t have one! ) or use the fetch tool to have Google recrawl your site. Both methods take a bit of time to complete on Google’s end, so be patient.

2. You Don’t Have an SSL Certificate

An SSL certificate tells Google and other search engines, as well as potential clients and customers, that your site is safe to use. It appears in the search bar as “https” instead of “http,” as secure sites will have a “lock” icon before the URL. Google gives a slight boost to sites with an SSL certificate, but that’s not the only advantage.

In 2018, Chrome 68 was released , which marked any sites without an SSL certificate as “unsafe.” Other browsers quickly followed suit, and now, if your site doesn’t have an SSL certificate, users have to go through a few steps to access your “unsafe” site. Obviously, this is not an ideal situation of your security is lacking.

Depending on what service you used to make your site, you may automatically have an SSL certificate. If not, they’re easy to buy and install . Though they are expensive, an SSL certificate is one of the most important assets you can have.

3. Your Site Isn’t Mobile-friendly

In 2015, Google sent the SEO community into a frenzy by announcing “Mobilegeddon.” Essentially, they announced that sites without mobile-friendly designs would be heavily penalized. Though it wasn’t the catastrophe that was predicted, having a mobile-friendly site is crucial to your success.

Mobilegeddon was brought on by the fact that, in the same year, Google announced that mobile devices took over as the top devices on which people conducted searches. It still holds true. Whipping out your phone or tablet to get a bit of information is usually a whole lot easier than pulling out your laptop or finding a desktop computer.

Most website builders will either create a mobile version of your site for you, or will give you the option to create one. If not, be sure to work with an experienced web designer to create a beautiful, easy-to-use mobile site.

4. Your Site Is Just… Bad

You’ve seen them: Sites that make you feel like you just stepped back into the 1990s the moment they load. You may have come across sites that seem to take five years to load. Or, they are so poorly designed, trying to navigate anywhere is a nightmare. If your site fits any of these descriptions, it’s time to rethink your strategy.

Your site should be fast, easy to use and aesthetically pleasing. Anything less, and you run the real risk of your potential customers finding a different company to do business with. The good news is, reworking your site (or building a new one from the ground up) is easier than ever.

The most common website building and hosting option is WordPress, but WordPress can be complex for those who aren’t technologically-savvy. Other providers like SquareSpace, WoCode and Wix are much simpler, but have fewer technical options for fine-tuning your site. Explore all of your options, including hiring a website developer , to create a site that’s a joy to use, rather than a chore.

The Content Aspects

1. Your Website Has Hardly Any Content

Let’s get this out of the way: Content is one of the most important aspects of your site. More and more, Google is looking for sites that don’t just sell to customers but provide them with helpful information as well. If your site is lacking content, there’s a good chance Google will just skip over your site without a second thought.

First and foremost, you need content on your main pages (home page, service pages, etc.). Tell visitors what you do, and why you’re the best option among all your competitors to do it. If website visitors don’t understand who you are and what you do, then they have no reason to give you their business.

Once your main site has been beefed up with good content, you need to support those pages with blogs, FAQs, a glossary and other types of content. By creating blogs and other assets, you tell Google that you know what you’re talking about, and you attract more people to your site who are looking for information — both good ways to improve your rankings.

2. Your Website’s Content Is Never Updated

One factor search engines really love is new or updated content. Having fresh content shows that you care about your website — and that you care about your users’ experience. One of the easiest ways to keep things fresh is by consistently writing new blogs about your company, your industry, tips for your audience, new techniques they should consider, and even recent relevant news in some cases (more on that in the next section).

However, you don’t have to write completely new content to keep your site fresh. SEO industry expert Brian Dean explains on his site that updating older content can have terrific effects on your site. Something as simple as updating your page headers and graphics can act as fresh content, at least in Google’s eyes.

It’s important to note that there’s no definitive answer for how often you should be publishing fresh content on your site. Some sites see benefits of posting multiple times a day, while others find value in posting a couple times a month. No matter the frequency, make it a habit to publish on a relatively normal schedule — if for no other reason than so your visitors know when to expect new information.

3. Your Site’s Content Is Poor Quality

A few years back, a great content strategy was to find a news story relevant to your industry, rewrite the article so it was “unique” content, then throw in a call-to-action at the end of the blog and call it a day. This was an easy way to keep fresh content on your site without much work or time investment. However, Google quickly caught on to this strategy, and it’s virtually useless now.

What’s always important to keep in mind is that there are no long-term shortcuts for website content. If you manage to find or create a shortcut, know that Google will quickly shut it down, and the content you created will likely be deemed poor quality — and won’t count for much of anything. Google wants content that provides new ideas, or at least a fresh take on older ideas.

Of course, writing original news stories yourself about happenings in your industry or company is always a good idea. But consider what your readers want. If you’re considered a thought leader, then write deep, meaningful blogs and pages. On the other hand, quick how-to guides can often provide just as much value. It all comes down to delivering the information your site visitors want to read.

4. Your Content Is “Over-Optimized”

This is much less of an issue than it was five to seven years ago, but the problem still exists, so it’s still worth mentioning. Your content should never be so filled with keywords and phrases that it’s a struggle to read. “Over-optimizing” your content seems like a good idea on the surface, but keyword stuffing has been penalized by Google for at least a decade.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use keywords whenever they fit organically. But just sticking them in your content (or, even worse, placing them on a page with “invisible text”) is a big no-no. Google sees straight through that, and will almost always penalize you for it. It may take a while, but rest assured: Google will catch up with your tactics.

Other Aspects to Consider

Your Metadata Isn’t Optimized Properly: Your meta descriptions, title tags and other metadata should all include keywords and variations of keywords you want to rank for. If it doesn’t, don’t be surprised if you don’t show up on search results.
You Haven’t Addressed Penalties from Google: Google Search Console is your best friend when you’re building and maintaining a site. With this tool, you can keep tabs on everything going on with your site — including Google penalties. You need to address these penalties as soon as possible , or your rankings will suffer.
You’re Focusing on the Wrong Competitors: If you run a small business, you may dream about taking down the top corporations in your industry. But these aren’t your true competitors — at least not yet. You need to focus on those who offer the same services as you in your target area, and are about the same size as you, before you set your sights on national competitors.
You Have Few to No Quality Backlinks: Backlinks are links on other sites that point back to your own website and content. They show Google that others trust and advocate for what you’re saying. If you have no backlinks, you don’t have much authority in your industry (according to Google, at least). However, poor quality backlinks, such as backlinks on scam sites, can be quite damaging to your reputation, and should be disavowed immediately .

New Paragraph

5 Real Ways Content Marketing Helps Your Business Thrive

Wed, 19 Aug 2020 19:07:41 GMT

In an always-online world, content marketing separates businesses that succeed from those that fail.

Wireless networks and smartphones have put the internet in our pockets wherever we go. As people increasingly seek information at all times, your business’s online presence matters. A lot.

97% of people who know something about your business will want to research what it can offer. People with needs who know nothing about your business can discover how you can help them through online channels like Google search, YouTube, or Yelp.

Without a strategy to manage these online content channels, the content you put out there could be aimless and ineffective. Your words might fail to accurately capture what makes your brand special. Or, worse, you can fail to make a positive impression and lose big opportunities to competitors.

On the other hand, having a great content strategy or the help of a content writing agency in Atlanta can provide the following five concrete benefits to your branding and your bottom line:

1. Get Found on Search Engines by Potential Customers

Google is not only the #1 search engine but also the #1 website, period . Millions of people visit Google every day as the first step in their online journey. They use the search engine to answer questions, find information, or just seek out a brief distraction.

85% of consumers say they are likely to use Google for product information or ideas , making it the most popular online channel for pre-purchase research.

Google prefers ranking websites with fresh, high-quality content . The more up-to-date your content is and the more markers of quality it can cultivate, the more likely you are to rank for the search engine queries your potential customers are using.

This net effect is why search engine optimization (SEO) requires a stream of great content in addition to technical know-how.

2. Ensure You Have the Information People Need to Close a Sale

Getting discovered and achieving brand awareness are just the first steps in a closed sale. A potential customer will need to evaluate your offerings in greater detail before they will be willing to commit to a purchase. Or, they may just need answers for simple questions like, “Will this business be open if I come by now?”

Incomplete or inaccurate information frustrates these curious consumers. Their impatience can quickly lead them to a competitor so they can get the information they need.

One recent survey found that 80% of consumers say they automatically lose trust in a business that lists incorrect details online , and 94% say they would be frustrated by this.

Your business website likewise has to provide an adequate experience before it can earn someone’s business. The same survey mentioned 91% of consumers want access to informative content, and over half (57%) wouldn’t recommend a business that had a poorly-optimized site design.

3. Reduce Advertising and Lead Gen Costs

Relative to the immediate flash-in-the-pan results advertising promises, content marketing aims to set the stage for long-term, significant returns.

One reason content marketing can frustrate some business owners is that it’s like gardening: you’re sowing the seeds of quality content to gradually build a bountiful resource. Consumers will want to engage with this online garden ripe knowledge, and search engines will want to rank it.

This approach takes time, but it’s actually far more effective than traditional advertising.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing generates three times the number of leads as outbound marketing techniques, like paid advertising. And, on average, it costs 62% less!

4. A More Complete and Consistent Business Presence Online

Another important facet to content marketing is that it remains focused on the long term. The efforts you take today combine with the efforts you make tomorrow, creating a fertile flowerbed for easy wins.

In other words, the more you put into content marketing, the more you get out in increasing amounts over time.

This cumulative effect is particularly obvious when it comes to your brand’s reputation. Businesses with sparse website content may have trouble getting discovered or convincing visitors to enter the marketing funnel.

Sites with good content earn trust as well as traffic signals that can help you rank. Trusted sites can then win over even larger groups of leads while building stronger relationships with long-time customers.

None of these gradual benefits can be earned without a consistent dedication to quality and a focus on your long-term strategy for online success.

5. Reinforce the Investments You’re Already Making in Your Business

If your business is already doing what you think it needs to do to be successful, having a complete content strategy can help bolster those efforts.

For instance, if you have a great local radio campaign that piques interest in your brand, you want customer leads to arrive at a well-crafted and persuasive website.

If you want customers to submit their emails to your marketing list, you need to tantalize them with valuable content or the promise of helpful updates. Otherwise, only a small fraction of visitors will leave contact information, possibly meaning they’re out of your funnel forever.

Or, if you’ve crafted an outstanding e-commerce system for your website that lets you sign up new customers at all hours of the day, you’ll want that effective website to rank for relevant keywords. If you can’t rank, you’re only producing a fraction of the sales you’re capable of!

In this way, great content writing is like the icing on an already delicious cake. Most people will appreciate what it adds, and to some people it will be their favorite thing about your business.

Find Content Marketing Success With a Premier Content Writing Agency in Atlanta

We at Antarsia Marketing are incredibly passionate about content marketing. For us, it’s not just a way to make a buck. It’s our craft — something we want to perfect and to use to make an impact on others’ lives. We have the high attention to detail and long-term vision your website content needs to find cumulative success.

So if you want to attain all of the benefits of content marketing we just listed above along with many, many more, drop us a line . Your first blog is free, so it’s not like you have anything to lose!

Take a Look at Our Atlanta Content Writing Services , and Reach Out to Our Expert Atlanta Content Writing Team Today!

The 8 SEO Ranking Factors that (Actually) Matter

Wed, 12 Aug 2020 17:35:08 GMT

SEO advice can often be like nutrition advice: Everyone is opinionated, but few people actually point to hard data to back up their assertions. What you can find in both is that a “do or die” tenet actually turns out to not be that big of a deal. Or, something a self-proclaimed expert glosses over turns out to be far more important than anything else they chose to focus on.

So it comes down to sorting the bullmess from the facts, with acknowledgement given to where the edge cases lie.

We’re here to shovel aside a mountain’s worth of baloney to help you focus on the ranking signals that matter most to your SEO ranking. You can safely make any of these eight ranking factors — and preferably all — a priority when trying to figure out how to improve your website ranking on Google and other search engines.

1. Crawlable Code

We don’t want spider crawling all over our business under normal circumstances, but Google’s metaphorical spiders are the exception. More formally called “search engine index programs,” these AI-controlled bots need to scan your site’s code in order for it to be indexed and capable of appearing on Google.

Making your website more “crawlable” (now there’s a creepy word!) involves a few dozen HTML programming best practices . The most important are:

Have a working robots.txt file
Create a sitemap (preferably .xml)
Ensure you don’t have specific tags or markup preventing indexing (most commonly noindex tags)
Fix broken links and server errors

You can use Google Search Console to scan your website and ensure that it has everything you need to get it indexed and help it rank.

2. Site Hierarchy

If your website has more than a handful of pages, you’ll want to pay very close attention to how they’re organized. Proper site structure not only makes your site easier to navigate, it also informs search engine crawlers of what’s most important and what’s most relevant to certain keywords.

For instance, if you’re a beauty products business that wants to rank for “bath bombs,” then you don’t want to stick your list of bath bombs under an “other” or “gifts” category. You’d ideally give them their own page and place them logically under a parent page for bath or hygiene products. This structure lets Google and your audience find the page more easily while communicating that the product is important enough to your business that it deserves its own page.

Don’t take this advice to mean that you need a million pages or a super-rigid site structure, though. Prioritize what you want to rank, and focus on making navigation intuitive for human beings to make life easier on the search engine robots at the same time.

3. Keyword Emphasis in Domain URL and Title Tags

Don’t forget your title tags! These show up on the tab in your browser to let you know which page is which when you have multiple tabs open. More importantly, at least to search engines, is that these tags also act as the header search users will see when deciding what to click upon.

A well-written title tag not only encourages click-through (more on that in a bit), it also helps Google’s AI decide which site to rank first when there’s a roughly even match.

Having a keyword right there in your domain can help, too, but don’t make a gimmick out of it. If you’re a law firm in Florida, then “floridapersonalinjuryattorneys.com” can make sense from an audience perspective, but “wherecanifindalawyerinflorida.com” makes less sense unless you happen to be a lead generation site rather than a law firm.

Of course, you may also want to consider using your company name in your URL. But if your brand isn’t well-known or your company name is hard to spell (guilty!), using a URL with a keyword is a great alternative.

4. Site Speed, Security and Mobile Friendliness

Nope! We’re still not onto content, yet. While well-written content is critical for your website , you can’t even hope to rank unless you meet the bare-minimum expectations for site usability.

In brief:

Check your website’s PageSpeed report . People tend to back out of slow sites, so Google wants to rank them lower.
Check your website’s mobile friendly report . Over half of searches come from mobile, these days, and sites with a poor experience get punished by both users and ranking algorithms
Register for an SSL certificate to give your domain an HTTPS designation . Just do it!

5. Competent Content

You definitely want your content to be above-average quality, but the first priority is to make it free from common spelling errors, grammar mistakes, or other issues that dramatically hurt readability.

Organize your content logically using headers, and break up large blocks of text into smaller paragraphs, preferably punctuated with lists, images, or other forms of graphics to prevent monotony.

Even if they're just silly gifs

Go beyond these minimums by using high-quality content that abides by Google’s EAT standards , which stand for:

Expertise: Write content that’s within your wheelhouse as a business, professional, or engaged hobbyist. Google wants to rank content that is relevant to the domain’s overall specialization or its community interests.
Authority: Build your audience with credible content that doesn’t attempt to deceive or use “clickbait” tactics. Appeal to studies, statistics, and quotes from subject matter experts to back up that your assertions are accurate, when possible.
Trust: Trust comes from technical elements like having SSL certificates as well as trust signals, such as shares, positive reviews, and regular content updates. Trust goes down when you keyword stuff, make unwanted redirects, or trigger high bounce rates.

6. Audience Signals (Keep Them Reading and Sharing)

Finally, we’re onto metrics you can actively measure! If you can meet the low bar set by all of the above requirements, Google will then attempt to rank you against your peers according to a number of metrics. These metrics tend to indicate that audiences like the content they read and would recommend it to others.

The first measure of audience engagement is your click-through rate (CTR). It measures the ratio of people who see your domain listed on the SERP (search engine results page) compared to how many people clicked on it.

Your bounce rate complements your CTR by telling Google how many people clicked and actually read the content in full. A high bounce rate sends negative signals, while a low bounce rate coupled with a high CTR encourages up-ranking. Generally, a good bounce rate is around 50%, but that really depends on the type of website you run.

Monitor your CTR and bounce rate to get an indication of whether your title tag and meta entice clicks from the SERP and whether your audience enjoyed what they got once they clicked.

Shares via Facebook and Twitter act as backlinks and positive EAT indicators, so make sure to implement widgets that make sharing super easy, and monitor your share rates to optimize your content strategy over time.

7. Backlinks

Your backlink profile determines who is linking to your site, both in terms of quality and quantity. Earning links from established domains with high EAT scores and high traffic offers the biggest boost in terms of SEO rankability.

In fact, improving your backlink profile might be the single most-effective way to help your website climb the ranks while boosting the visibility of each new piece of content you produce.

So why didn’t we mention it first? Mind your business, that’s why!

Really, though, it’s because we want to emphasize again that you have to meet the minimum level of competence before you can benefit from strategies like earning backlinks. If you somehow get shares from sites with huge traffic and authority, but your pages are a mess, your content’s weak, and your audience sends strong dislike signals, then you won’t benefit from the link boost.

8. Keyword Optimization

We consider keyword usage dead last in the “most important ranking signals” heap. Having a sensible keyword strategy is, of course, critically important for improving rank, but Google and other search engines won’t excuse quality issues no matter how well you implement keywords in your content.

Explaining the best strategy for keyword optimization would best be served by its own post — which we’ll do soon! — but to summarize:

Research keywords by looking to your own Search Console reports for referring domains from search engine queries
Aim for natural use of keywords in your text that make sense grammatically
Use your target keyword with the highest frequency, but complement it with semantically related keywords to reach out to long tail search queries
Vary your internal link anchor text so it’s not always a verbatim keyword match, again to appease long tail queries
Don’t sacrifice anything recommended in the above sections for the sake of jamming in a few extra keywords; Google will notice, and your audience will be unhappy

Get Some Help Monitoring Ranking Signals and Optimizing From a Professional Digital Marketing Company in Atlanta

Managing all of the above ranking factors while producing a steady stream of fresh content can be tough, even for the most well-staffed business.

Sometimes it can pay off to enlist the help of seasoned experts who know how to tweak your site to make it easier to crawl while helping you earn shares, backlinks, and other positive signals that help your website rank higher, faster.

Find out what you could be achieving when you contact us today to learn about our professional content writing services in Atlanta . Heck, we’ll even throw in a free blog!

If you have any questions, comments, or cantankerous complaints about any of the above recommendations or anything on the site, really, reach out to us in the comments. Good luck!

You Can’t Fake Grill Marks, and You Can’t Fake Quality Content

Wed, 05 Aug 2020 17:53:46 GMT

Good Content Has Grill Marks: How to Bring Out Emergent Writing Qualities Through Craft

Summer weather is here, and good smells are coming off of grills in backyards all around the country. Cooking on my own grill recently gave me a realization: good food bears obvious marks of quality, such as grill marks. Grill marks don’t add any flavor of their own, but they show you that good flavor is there.

Similarly, good content can show markers of quality that are clear from the moment you read it. But those markers only emerge when you put work into the content’s fundamental parts. Focus on each component when you write, and the sum of all those individual parts can produce telltale signs of quality, just like grill marks.

Grill marks show you that there’s an extra zest that awaits you inside a delicious morsel, like a juicy piece of marinated chicken. You can listen to the grill master describe the seasonings he used or the time and temperature he cooked it at, but the real sign of goodness is right there on the meat. You can see it sizzling, and those grill marks along the side let you know that the piece of chicken (or portabella or whatever you like) was cooked to perfection.

While those grill marks can tell a story of delicious food ahead, they have to be earned through the right process. Simply overcooking the meat or — gasp! — using pre-cooked meat with fake grill marks emblazoned on the side makes those promised flavors all a lie.

It's the exact same thing when content tries to pass itself as polished and ready to be devoured by knowledge hungry audiences. That polish has to come from actual attention to detail. Otherwise, as soon as readers sink their teeth into the piece, they may find that it’s bland, boring, and not worth their time.

In other words, the work you put into writing shows through the final completed piece in the form of certain markers of quality , just like grill marks. Those markers of quality have to emerge naturally. Taking shortcuts and ignoring fundamentals leads to a disappointing experience.

"The work you put into writing shows through the final completed piece in the form of certain markers of quality, just like grill marks."

This is the lesson we took with us when we decided to start our own Atlanta content writing agency. We know what good work looks like, and we know what process you need to get to that point.

We can help you get to that point, too, by following our 5 tips for getting genuine content quality that you’ll find below. But the first thing you have to realize is that it takes time, effort, education, and a bit of trial-and-error to earn your grill marks — because there are no shortcuts when it comes to genuine craft.

Know Why Markers of Quality Matter

There are a few reasons someone might take shortcuts that are on the same level as putting fake grill marks on a piece of frozen food. Someone might be trying to save time while still making the product look like a thing people are familiar with, for one. Or a company might want to make a boat-load of money selling a cheap product that’s an ersatz copy of a higher quality one. These motives may sound sleazy, but they are sort of understandable for a business that wants to save time or money.

What’s less understandable is when someone thinks that the end product doesn’t get its grill marks from, uh, grilling . It’s like cooking a hamburger in a pan and trying to sear the grill marks on with a soldering iron. From a content writing perspective, it’d be like separating a blog into a dozen of headings with no rhyme or reason to it other than someone once said “good content has many subheadings.”

You must know fundamentally why certain tips for writing exist in the first place. Subheadings are meant to keep the reader’s thoughts organized and also guide them to the right section if they want to skip ahead. If you don’t break up your article logically, they can feel lost or frustrated. If you remember that subheadings act like signposts to show readers, “hey, you’re headed in the right direction for the information you need,” then you can organize your work in a way that feels natural to read.

Emergent Qualities Take Time to Create, and They Often Show Up Late

A second unforgivable mistake is that someone might panic and think that they’re doing something wrong just because the grill marks haven’t shown up yet — despite the fact that they’re less than 50% through the process.

To bring the metaphor back to writing again, this is like a client who panics that their blog hasn’t doubled search engine referral traffic after just a few days of going live. They want that traffic, dammit!, because they heard website traffic is a good thing to have.

What they forget is that site traffic doesn’t bring revenue; customer leads do. In their rush to get to some idealized end result, they forget the reason that marker of quality (high traffic) is desirable in the first place. So they try to take shortcuts, but they end up short circuiting the entire process.

To illustrate this point, let me tell you a quick story about making carnitas. Carnitas, in case you didn’t know, are a traditional Mexican preparation of pork shoulder that is absolutely exquisite. They’re crispy yet fatty enough to melt in your mouth. Good carnitas are also bursting with subtle flavor.

Knowing this — and knowing pork shoulder was very cheap on sale — I decided to make carnitas on my own. The recipe I followed was fairly involved and demanded a few hours of kitchen labor. I knew this, but nevertheless I freaked out about halfway through the process.

What was I making? It sure as hell didn’t look like carnitas when I pulled the seared pork off the stove. Instead, I had delicious-smelling crispy chunks that were marinated but still likely underseasoned. It likewise didn’t look like carnitas when I set these chunks to float in an oil bath in my oven with bay leaves and orange wedges. When have you ever seen an orange in carnitas?

I resigned myself to a fate of having a pork dinner that was acceptably tasty but did not resemble true, taco-ready carnitas in the slightest bit. But then the oven dinged, and the meat was pulled from its well-seasoned bath to cool. I then dropped a few chunks in a bowl and began to shred them with two forks.

Reader, I was greeted with one of the most pleasant and rewarding experiences of my life. I had, in fact, made carnitas. And they were brilliant.

Follow the process. Put in the work. Have faith that your vision will turn out. And know that if you do actually somehow fail, you can always rely on the knowledge of others to have a better chance at succeeding the next go round.

Don’t Confuse Emergent Markers of Quality for Actual Quality

Writing is pretty darn hard, and it’s something we really don’t have a great vocabulary for. Hence, using these cooking metaphors helps you understand the difference between “good,” delicious writing you eat up and can’t get enough of versus “terrible” writing that leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

But let’s set aside those metaphors and talk turkey, erm, grammar and style. All across the web you’ll see style tips to improve your content. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you might take these tips a little too literally and end up messing up your ability to actually improve your content quality.

Here’s an example: “Write in short sentences and paragraphs to make your content skimmable.” Simple, right? Not really! Short paragraphs look good visually, but your reader still has to be able to follow what the heck you’re saying.

The purpose of short paragraphs isn’t just creating white space, but rather forcing you to move quickly from one idea to the next. If you move through ideas quickly, and use strong topic sentences , your reader can still understand what you’re trying to get across even if they only read a sentence or so from each section.

In other words, short paragraphs don’t automatically make your writing more readable. It’s actually the reverse: readable content tends to have short paragraphs.

Here’s another bit of advice often given to content writers: “Make your content actionable, and have a strong call to action at the end.”

To some businesses, writing in an actionable way means being pushy or condescending. “Don’t write with your laptop on fire!” I tell you, with a wink and a nod, pretending to be helpful.

Instead, you should always think like a member of your audience and try to help them take the next step after reading. Offer them value; don’t bark orders.

"You should always think like a member of your audience and try to help them take the next step after reading. Offer them value; don’t bark orders."

These are just two examples of how to use content writing tips to strengthen your fundamentals rather than put the cart before the horse.

5 Real Tips to Help You Improve Content Quality Through Genuine Writing Craft From an Atlanta Content Writing Agency

Well that was a lot of words, but it all serves to make a single point: good writing takes patience to create, and it certainly helps to know what you’re doing. Obviously getting to that point requires learning, practice, and a willingness to try, try again if you happen to fail. There are no shortcuts!

In that vein, here are 5 genuine tips we can offer to help you improve your overall content quality — in the guise of cooking metaphors, of course.

Try Lots of Different Flavors: You can’t write well if you don’t read. You won’t have a frame of reference to work from, and you won’t have as strong or clear of a vision of what the end product looks like.
Don’t Burn the Garlic (Courtesy of Ivan Brunetti ): You can experiment all you want with a medium as long as you don’t screw up the fundamentals. Lots of people making Italian food overcook raw garlic, which makes the whole dish rancid. Get the garlic right, and you can add almost anything on top (within reason) and it’ll work.
Taste Your Food: The biggest sin in writing is to not edit your own work. Give it a read. See how it flows. Watch out for awkward phrasings and especially errors.
Cook for the Tastes of the People You Serve: You aren’t writing your content for you to read; it’s for your audience. Serve them something you think they’ll like, even if it’s not your personal favorite flavor.
Season Your Food: Don’t just slap in the same sentences or metaphors. Spice it up! Try new things. Copy flavors from other writing you like. The best dishes are a fusion of the chef’s influences, their intuition, and improvisation using the ingredients you have on hand.

That’s far from “all there is to it,” but these tips will help get you in the right mindset and enable you to focus on the things that genuinely matter in your writing — not just the superficial.

After all, those grill marks aren’t ever put on there on purpose; they’re earned as a side effect of the care that goes into genuine, quality craftsmanship.

Want a blog filled to the brim with quality content your audience will eat right up? Work with our experienced writers! Take a look at our available content writing services to get started.

What Makes Website Content “Good”?

pwatson (Paul Watson) — Wed, 29 Jul 2020 19:59:07 GMT

As Google and other search engines have continuously changed their algorithms through the years, one aspect is becoming more and more evident: Quality content is one of the most important factors on your website.

But what the heck does that even mean to the average business looking to improve their search engine ranking?

It means the tricks of yesteryear just don’t work anymore. Ask anyone in the business seven to eight years ago, and they’d tell you the easiest way to rank was to cram as many keywords into a piece of content as possible and not worry about if the content makes sense. As long as Google saw all those keywords, you’d have a good chance of ranking for them.

Not so anymore.

Google is smart. Trying to “keyword stuff” just won’t work anymore. Instead, Google wants content that’s unique, informative and useful to your visitors. If you don’t meet that criteria, not only could you not rank, but Google could actually penalize your site .

To clarify further, Google looks for three factors when it comes to content: Expertise, Authority, and Trust (E-A-T).

E: EXPERTISE

Chances are, you are pretty knowledgeable in your industry. In fact, you might call yourself an expert. That expertise has to come through in your content. If you speak from your personal experience and demonstrate you know what you’re talking about, Google will be more likely to consider you an expert.

So what’s that look like? Let’s look at attorneys. Attorneys are expected to give insight into local laws, industry jargon, etc. because they’re experts on it. However, if you run a fashion blog, giving “legal advice” won’t do you any favors, because Google probably won’t see you as an expert on that topic to begin with.

Takeaway: Google perceives content to be of a higher quality when it’s relevant to the website’s overall niche or industry vertical. Try to create a robust library of content that covers your industry knowledge and frequently asked questions. Recognize that content topics “outside your wheelhouse” are less likely to compete for high ranks.

A: AUTHORITY

Authority is, perhaps, one of the hardest attributes to attain — or even figure out how to. CNN, Facebook and highly-visited industry sites are good examples of authority sites. So how do you build the authority of your own site? While there are no exact parameters set, the most common way is build your audience.

This happens a few ways. Maybe your content gets shared around on social media, and tons of people visit your site. Or, you may get a powerful backlink from an authority site, driving visitors to you. Bottom line is, you can’t cheat your way to the top here. You have to create awesome, engaging content that drives visitors. Plain and simple.

Takeaway: Authority doesn’t come easy, and it must be earned. Start by trying to drive traffic through regular content updates. Avoid “clickbait” tactics, though, like gimmicky headlines. The more time people spend on your site and share it, the more authority you build.

T: TRUST

Trust is a multi-faceted factor. One of the best ways to show Google that people trust your business is to have plenty of positive reviews — especially on third-party sites. However, your content also has a good bit to do with your online trustworthiness.

The general rule is that you want to keep fresh content on your site. This not only gives visitors an incentive to keep coming back, but it also shows Google that you’re relevant. The combination of repeat visitors plus relevance demonstrates to Google that people trust you and your brand.

Takeaway: Keep your site active and your highest-traffic pages updated. Remind customers to leave reviews, and follow up with them to avoid bad sentiments later on. Also, avoid tactics like keyword stuffing or deceptive wordings, which can lead to a bad audience experience and possible Google penalties.

What Happens When You EAT?

Google wants to know that people want to visit your site, and that your site deserves to be visited. When its algorithms see that you are an expert in your industry and have a large audience that trusts you, there’s a greater chance that you’ll be pushed up the rankings.

After all, Google’s main goal is to show the most relevant, helpful sites when a query is made. And if you’re clearly a great resource for people, then Google will want to send more people your way.

While there is plenty of technical work you have to do on the backend of your site, creating amazing content that your potential audience will want to read is one of the most important things you can do. Otherwise, you may as well be creating a site for robots — which Google hates !

Come Feast with Us!

If writing really isn’t your thing, or you just don’t have time to create website content, don’t worry. The content writing experts at Antarsia Marketing have your back. From blog content to case studies and everything in between, our content creators have years of experience in a variety of different industries, and we can help you EAT your way to the top of the rankings.