Announcing the Credo Digital Marketing Jobs board
For a long time, people have asked me to help them hire full time people. Whether a full time SEO, PPC specialist, or director of marketing, hiring full time people is hard.
Also for a long time I’ve told people that Credo is not a full time recruiting service. We are still not a recruiting service, but today as of today Credo has a brand new Digital Marketing Jobs Board for full-time and part-time marketing jobs.
There is such a need out there to hire good marketers and Inbound has shut down (along with their job board), so there is a gap in the market that Credo can fill.
How to grow a business online in 2018
Do you want to grow your business? Most entrepreneurs and marketers would say that they do. While there are those who are happy with where their business is, or who are afraid to grow it, most people started a business to grow it.
But growth is hard. There are always more things to do than can be done and figuring out what to put your time, money, and effort into can be the hardest part. As they say, the hardest part to anything is getting started.
Instead of giving platitudes, in this article I am going to give you 12 actionable things you can do over the coming months to grow your business.
Is Google’s push towards local good for the consulting world?
Over the last few years, Google has undeniably made a lot of changes to their search results pages (SERPs). If you work in SEO you can probably point out hundreds of small changes, and if you’re just a marketer or an average Joe then you’ve probably felt like “something” is different.
As someone who looks at “consultant” and “agency” search results a lot, as they are a main driver of Credo’s business, I’ve noticed some alarming changes over the last year or so that make me wonder if Google is heading in the right direction in my specific vertical.
My hope is that Google is still trying to do what is best for their users. While they removed “do no evil” from their Code of Conduct in mid May 2018, I have to hope that they are still trying to make the world better instead of just feeding their own beast of a publicly traded company.
How to create a killer content pillar
Whether you’re working for a small business or publisher, what you’re often looking for is a sustainable source in growing their business or traffic.
Blogging is well-known and with content being channel agnostic, it’s important to change your approach based on the changing trends and platforms that serve your audiences. So with this, it’s worth noting the fact that social sharing has declined by 50% in the past 3 years and that Google’s dominance in driving referral traffic to the sites continues to grow.
Regardless of these changes, what can we do to demonstrate a brand’s strong sense of purpose and recognition in their topic expertise?
Develop content pillars.
How to write a good digital marketing project brief
Over the last few years we’ve seen 1,500+ businesses and $14M+ in digital marketing spend come through Credo.
In that time, I’ve learned a lot.
One big lesson I have learned is that many businesses have no idea how to explain what they are looking to accomplish by engaging with an agency/consultant.
Screaming Frog Alternatives
If you’re doing SEO, then you probably know about Screaming Frog. Screaming Frog has long been the gold standard in website crawling for most sites.
But what happens when Screaming Frog isn’t enough for you any more? Are there alternatives to Screaming Frog that you should know about that may suit your needs better?
Absolutely, and that’s what I will cover today.
Why SEO doesn’t get the budget it deserves
If you have ever worked in SEO or tried to get SEO done internally at your company, you know that the challenges are plentiful.
Maybe your head of engineering doesn’t value SEO and thinks all marketers are annoying. Maybe your head of product thinks that all they need to do is build a product that people love more and that’ll grow it. Maybe your executives have had a bad experience and are reluctant to invest any money.
The challenges differ based on where the company, but at the end of the day even when all of the stars align it still feels like pulling teeth to get any reasonable amount of budget.
Why does paid search get huge budgets while SEO teams struggle to get any decent budget?
SEO services are dead.
Generic SEO services are dead. If you sell generic “SEO services” as well as “web design services”, “social media services”, and other generic terms that say nothing about what you actually do, then you will soon be out of business. Or, you will continue the client churn and burn with high acquisition costs for low budget clients who want to pay nothing and get everything.
And this is your own fault because of how you have positioned yourself.
How to use SEMrush to identify and overtake your competitor’s SEO rankings
If you’re looking to dominate the search results for your most important keywords (combination of traffic and profitability as gauged by CPC), then one of the most high-impact activities you can undertake is a complete competitor audit.
You might have a good idea who your main business competitors are, but do you have a good idea who your search results competitors are? And from there, do you know how they are outranking you?
Even if you are not a professional SEO, you can conduct a competitor audit using my favorite tool SEMrush. After you do this audit, you will understand where your gaps (and strengths are) so that you can put together a clear plan for overtaking them in the search results and dominating your niche.
PS there are also many agencies on Credo who can do this for you if you do not have the time to do it. You can start that process here.
Let’s get started. And if you haven’t done it yet, get a 7 day free trial at SEMrush.
5 Marketing Lessons from an Overweight, Aging Professional Baseball Player
Bartolo Colon has been around the block a few times. The professional baseball player’s 21-year career has spanned six presidential terms, survived questionable early-2000s fashion trends (e.g. trucker hats, frosted lip gloss) and lasted longer than Turner Field, the ballpark for the Atlanta Braves from 1997-2016. He’s about to be 45 years old, is much heavier than his 285-pound listed weight and averages a mediocre 86-87 miles per hour on his pitch velocity.
Yet, on April 15, the unassuming Dominican American nearly threw a perfect game against the Houston Astros, owners of one of the most explosive offenses in baseball (and reigning World Series champions). How does he keep doing this? How is he still effective?
Believe it or not, the answers contain several lessons for today’s digital marketers.
Zapier SEO Teardown
You might know Zapier, the connector-of-services SaaS company that is known for being a remote team and making it easy to build integrations between the services you use to run your business. We love Zapier here at Credo and even did an interview about how Zapier has grown with their cofounder Wade Foster. (Full disclosure: Credo is a paying Zapier customer. We were not compensated in any way for this audit).
Because I love Zapier, I want to help them out a bit with an SEO audit about what they can improve to continue to drive growth at their company. I’ll cover four things, similar to what I covered with Drip:
- What Zapier is and how they make money, as SEO should map to business metrics;
- Technical SEO that Zapier needs to do;
- Content marketing opportunities;
- Link audit and opportunities.
Case study: Analyzing Drip’s (@getdrip) SEO migration audit and efforts
If you haven’t heard of it, Drip is an email service provider that allows you to do smart tagging and segmenting of lists to dynamically email your customers based off of their actions and how you have identified them. They’re owned by LeadPages, which is a landing page software company that helps you improve your conversions. (If you want a really interesting interview with Clay Collins, the founder of LeadPages, check out his interview with Chris Ducker here).
I am in the process of moving over to Drip from MailChimp, a change that has been long needed if I am honest. The reasons why I am moving over are better suited for another blog post once I’ve done it and used Drip for a while, but as I have been onboarding onto Drip (which is a fantastic experience by the way) I can’t help but see their site through my SEO brain and identify multiple issues that, if fixed, could really help them out with SEO.
This is the first in a series of case studies about specific companies and how they could do SEO better. I am going to look at each site holistically and recommend what I see as being the highest value changes they can make. Some of them will be audit-like and thus fixes to their current setup, and others will be forward-looking proactive changes and content to develop to help them better target terms that can drive qualified traffic that converts to their site.
CredoCast Season 3 is officially wrapped
I started experimenting with podcasting a few years ago. It’s taken off over the last few years, and over that course of time I’ve somehow racked up over 40 interviews (which you can find all of them here). By the numbers:
- 40 interviews
- Somewhere around 1200 minutes of content produced
I started doing video with this latest season, Season 3.
Getting SEO done in the enterprise, with Kristan Bauer
Kristan Bauer is the former Director of SEO at Zillow, former SEO at Amazon, and has worked on Google properties and some of the other largest sites on the internet as a consultant. She is also a former coworker of mine from Zillow and a brilliant SEO. In this chat we talk about getting SEO done at enterprise companies. We cover structuring SEO as a product, growth teams, how execs can best set up their companies for SEO success, and much much more.
How to use content upgrades to build your email list
If you are publishing content, whether for your business or as an entrepreneurial figurehead, and not capturing subscribers and email addresses then you are leaving a lot of opportunity on the table.
I’ve been an acquisition-focused marketer (SEO, content, PR) for a long time, but only really thought about it in terms of traffic to the site. When you’re hired an SEO, especially a young one, you’re focused on things like rankings and overall organic traffic.
But as I’ve been building Credo and working with other businesses still as an SEO consultant, I’ve become much more focused on what acquisition actually means.
Are you wasting budget on “content marketing”?
Every business today needs to have an online presence. Whether it’s Yelp and Google My Business pages for a local business, listing pages for a real estate company, or pages tailored towards your audience for a SaaS business, you have to be findable online.
And for a lot of businesses, digital content marketing (content marketing is not just online!) makes a lot of sense. You can educate your audience, help them make better decisions about buying, and use it to build a new audience through organic traffic and link acquisition.
Content marketing can be a HUGE win for businesses that invest in it the right way.
SEMrush vs Moz
SEMrush and Moz are two of the most popular tools in the SEO and inbound marketing world. If you’re shopping for a new tool that lets you get insight into how you’re doing with SEO, what to do next to improve, and is easy to use then you might be comparing these two.
So which one is right for you?
Both tools serve specific purposes, but they’re also quite different from each other. As I often tell people, it’s about using the right tool for the job. Not all tools are the same, and not all tools are similarly good for the tasks you need to accomplish.
Let’s look in depth at both and help you make the decision about which one is right for you.
How to find someone’s email address
Sometimes you need to email someone but you don’t have their email address.
Sure, you could go about tweeting at them, or DMing them, or messaging them on LinkedIn for it, but doesn’t that seem a bit counter-intuitive? If you have them there, then why not go ahead and ask your question there?
If your question needs to go via email, then there are a few great ways to find it for free and quickly.
These are my email finding ninja skills that I am sharing with you. I built links professionally for a few years and learned how to find them manually first. Now tools have replaced a lot of that work, but it can still be a fun challenge.
Official WPengine Review from Credo
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I’ve been building and hosting websites since 2008, since the very beginning of my career. While trained as a front end web developer and technical writer in university, I had to learn the ropes of web hosting, servers, and more simply through trial, error, a lot of downtime, and a few wins along the way.
100k YouTube subscribers with 20 videos – How @backlinko identifies unfair advantages
Brian Dean, if you don’t know him, is the founder of Backlinko. Started as an outlet for him to share what he’s learned, he’s built it into an SEO training company that allows him to travel the world and make a positive impact on the SEO world.
In this conversation, we talk about unfair advantages. Brian is a master of identifying unfair advantages and opportunities that allow him to go to the next level.
We talk about:
- How he tried a lot of different approaches (weekly posts, etc)
- How he constantly looks for how he can stand out
- Don’t skate to where the puck is going. Go to where everyone isn’t (Mark Cuban)
- The post that took him 20 hours to put together that helped him stand out in the SEO space
- Why Brian doesn’t think learning to publish constantly really helps you see success.
- How often he thinks you should publish.
- How Brian thinks about unfair advantages in business and life.
- Why publishing every day is not an unfair advantage.
- How Brian has applied the lessons he’s learned about creating high quality blog content to YouTube (he has over 100k subs with just 20 videos)
- Where he gets most of his traffic from on YouTube
- Where the sweet spot is for content – expertise + ability to do high quality content consistently
- How Brian finds new ideas for content
- Which strategy > tactics for Brian and how he focuses his company