Content Marketing SEO – Arturo Marimón at Clinic SEO Barcelona 2013

Written by Fernando Maciá

Arturo Marimón (@arturomarimon) of SEOcom.

I’m going to talk about content marketing focused on SEO. John Deere started content marketing by publishing an agricultural magazine in 1895 and that was the predecessor of content marketing.

Today, content affects conversion, ranking and popularity. Through content marketing we can get natural links and social mentions. Penguin is an algorithm change that penalizes forced link structures. This has changed the SEO landscape radically.

Penguin is an aggressive algorithm. As soon as you go a little too far, you are penalized. Most of the penalized websites have not managed to get out of the penalty.

It is a blow to Google’s table that penalizes artificial links, so content marketing pursues the same results but in a natural way. Beware of agencies that continue to use the same strategies as before: you will get caught.

The best way to be natural is to be natural. You don’t have to spend time and resources to fool Google. Dedicate those resources to generating content.

The content strategy allows you to achieve the results we are looking for.

Fifteen commandments for Content Marketing:

1. You will love your content marketing plan above all else.

The plan sets objectives, resources, milestones, KPIs… Even if it’s bad, it’s better than not having it at all.

Three possible mistakes when developing a plan: that it slows you down, that you think this is the secret of SEO and thirdly, that you are looking for perfection.

Content marketing is one leg, but without structure it doesn’t work. Better to be timely than perfect. You have to publish fast and take advantage of the opportunity. The search for perfection should not limit you in the generation of content.

Your content marketing plan changes: a tagline helps guide you and helps you make decisions when you need to.

2. Who is your customer?

We must identify our customers, our fanboys. With this community we can begin to build something bigger. You have to scan the networks and what they say about you on the Internet, what they say about you, about your products, about your competition…

McDonalds is the king of junk food (now fighting with Ikea). They have set up a page where you can receive criticism and respond. By doing so, they get to rank for these reviews before other websites, and this allows them to control. They also get lots and lots of links from lots of domains. They get a lot of natural popularity with their own site. And they get a lot of repercussion.

3. You need a great team

Designers, SEO, writers, etc. You have to invest in the equipment or you have to hire an agency that has it. It is not going to work if the secretary is the one who saves.

4. What is not measured cannot be improved.

The strategy must be measured in order to improve. In the end, it is the same as CRO. You analyze, formulate hypotheses, test, apply, analyze and enhance what works and discard what does not. If you can’t measure it, don’t do it.

KPIs: unique visitors, geographic orientation, devices, bounces, shares, likes, votes, page views, positions…

Not all content needs the same KPIs. Relevant indicators must be applied for each type of content.

Brands like us to fish with dynamite, but there is some content that is fly fishing. Or we can throw out fodder to grow the community before we throw in the dynamite.

5. Don’t talk about yourself.

This is not about advertising, about talking about your brand. Some of the content may be self-centered, but people don’t admit that you are always talking about yourself. This is people talking to people. It is necessary to be clear about this so as not to deviate, end up in publicity and lose the trust of the community.

6. Pareto’s Law

80% follow the plan. 20% bet on a crazy idea.

7. Title is more than SEO.

Forget about SEO when generating the title. It’s fine to optimize the title for a Web page, but not for the content. I want to position my services and products, but not my blog, because it doesn’t convert. The objective of the title is to attract people, to get people to visit my content.

A good headline is the difference between a thousand people or a million people reading my content, Pariser of Upworthy. They are content curators but it works much better for them. They have gotten many, many more views of a video just by changing the title of a video. They write 25 different headlines for each story. Their theory is that the first 14 or 15 are descriptive. From there, the last ten are the good ones. Using a tool, they test them to discover the most viral.

8. Think different.

It goes through the din of mediocrity.

If you are not a big brand, you must be very creative in order to achieve visibility. In a year or two, there will be a saturation of mediocre content. You have to get people’s attention and stand out from that mediocrity. Do more, give more than they ask for, more than they expect, to get their attention.

People love the attention from Amazon or Zappos because they give more, and so they get success. It has to be done very, very well.

Arturo shows the SEOcom Error 404 page very funny. It is very good. If you want to see it, go to www.seocom.es/404.

When they launched the 404 page, they got more hits than any other page.

9. Hot content

We can develop posts, interviews, contests, resource lists, eBook, event coverage, Meme, create a SEO clinic. Any type of content strategy can give you repercussion. It is to generate dynamic content. Nobody makes infographics anymore: it’s from 2009. They are now interactive.

10. Be mobile, my friend.

More than 30% of visits are already from cell phones. Does your content look good on mobile? 40% of e-mails are opened on mobiles and social networks are visited from mobiles.

11. Original Content

We need something extraordinary, not just original content. The story of the books are based on others, it changes how they tell it. We have to create something new in the way we do it. Copy, transform, combine…

Arturo plays a very funny video of Crocodile Dundee talking about Content Marketing.

Create something and take risks. If you don’t get excited, if you don’t take risks, it doesn’t work.

12. Impact and seduce fast

You have one second to make an impact. Take good care of it: image, first paragraph, etc.

13. Don’t be boring

You are the first filter. If you don’t like what you do, it doesn’t go. If your team isn’t excited about it, it’s no good.

14. Newsjacking

Content in real time, at the moment, taking advantage of waves that occur in social networks. When the wave rises, that’s when you have to do it and you get the impact.

This is what happened to us with the post about Salvados and the online corporate reputation crisis with Mercadona.

You have to be quick and original.

15. Tools love

Love your tools. You need good tools to manage and monitor a decent content marketing campaign: Trapit, Amplicate, Followerwonk….