It’s the season of love – at least that’s what they tell me. But who needs wilting roses, stale chocolate and chalky candy hearts when you’ve got the latest Content Marketing Weekly?
That’s right, our weekly roundup of all the content marketing news you need to know is back for the latest edition. This time around, we’ve got link-building strategies, cautionary AdWords tales and a sneak peek at a new Google feature.
Get ready to fall in love with the CM Weekly all over again.
8 Huge Dangers of Shutting Down Your AdWords Account
Paid search can be frustrating at times, but giving up entirely on PPC campaigns may cause even more headaches. Over at Search Engine Journal, Pauline Jakober details some of the problems you’re likely to run into if you shut down your AdWords account or let it languish without any hands-on oversight.
Think you can just walk away scot-free? Consider this:
- Businesses that don’t diligently manage their AdWords accounts fail to weed out irrelevant PPC traffic, resulting in wasted marketing spend.
- If you shut down your AdWords account for several months or even just a few weeks, you might find that your costs per click have gone up when you reopen it.
- In a similar vein, severing ties with your paid search agency only to come crawling back later will cost you in the long run since they’ll put you through an expensive onboarding process all over again.
The main lesson here? Don’t make any rash decisions with your AdWords account. If you close it down and later decide to ramp up your paid search strategy again, you may be in for a rude awakening.
Check out the full story here.
A Link-Building Case Study: Using Brand Mentions and Competitive Linking Tactics
We could all stand to improve our link-building chops. Luckily, Andrew Dennis has us covered. Writing in Search Engine Land, he covers a case study on link-building best practices, covering different tactics like mention links and competitive research.
All in all, I’d say the results of the six-month campaign were pretty successful:
- 64 links secured.
- 43 percent increase in organic traffic.
- 146 percent average improvement in keyword ranking.
- 868 percent increase in organic traffic for geo-specific landing pages.
Follow Dennis’ lead, and you’ll be kicking link-building butt in no time.
Google Is Testing Instagram-Like Stories in Search Results
We like to think of Google as this great innovator, but even it takes inspiration from other companies every once in a while.
Case in point: The tech giant is currently testing a new stories feature – cleverly named AMP stories – similar to those found in Instagram and Snapchat. Of course, Google being Google, it’s not content to simply lift an idea wholesale, but rather, reimagine it entirely.
This Search Engine Journal piece gives a rundown on all the messy details, but the general idea is that media publishers can use AMP stories to create tap-through content just like the kind you might find on those social media platforms. Rather than be confined to a specific app, though, these stories will live on the internet, and other organizations will be able to link back to them.
No word just yet on what this means for content marketers, but like seemingly everything else Google does, it’s sure to have an impact down the road.
Find out more about Google’s *totally original* idea.
What B2B Brands Need to Know to Succeed on LinkedIn
For a lot of B2B companies, LinkedIn is the social media platform of choice. That’s not to kick sand in the face of Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, but LinkedIn shows a lot more engagement potential when you’re trying to reach a sophisticated B2B audience.
If you feel like your company struggles to get the most out of LinkedIn as an engagement tool, take a look at this recent Content Marketing Institute article. Writer Jonathan Crossfield offers up a ton of advice on how to wring more value out of the site.
For instance, Crossfield talks about the importance of always being “on” with LinkedIn. Don’t treat it as an engagement channel that gets attention only when some new campaign is ramping up. Maintaining a constant brand presence on the site is key to success.
He also recommends pumping the brakes a little when trying to get direct conversions off of LinkedIn. It’s unlikely that someone will go straight from reading a LinkedIn blog post to downloading a gated white paper, so don’t get over eager with your CTAs – and don’t be disappointed if you don’t see an immediate uptick in conversions. These things take time.
That’ll wrap things up over here at the CM Weekly for now, but be sure to check back next week for another roundup of all the latest and greatest content marketing news.
