On-page SEO fights back

Over recent years, with the increased popularity of content marketing and social, off-page SEO has has taken all the limelight.

Whilst flicking through the decks from the recent BrightonSEO 2013 conference, I enjoyed this presentation from Lisa Myers on on-page SEO. Oft-forgotten, there have been some great developments in this area which can really impact your on-page work. Personally, I'm a massive fan of the Structured Data Mark Up helper from Google in WMT which makes enriching your on-page content so easy.

#BrightonSEO 2013 - On Page SEO & Marketing from Lisa Myers

2014 digital marketing trends

The online marketing mentor, "Dangerous" Dave Chaffey, has released his thoughts on 2014 Marketing Trends.

As with many of his musings, he's split the trends along his Plan to RACE approach which looks at different stages of the marketing approach

Reach

Act

Convert

Engage

A few partner points which pick out some of what I see as the key areas for me over the next year.

Growth hacking

I actually hate the term "growth hacking". Not for its buzzwordiness, but for its connotations of coding skills. These aren't really required at all in my opinion, although a willingness to embrace tech and some lateral thinking around technology certainly is. 

But, regardless of my feelings on the term, it's the sort of analytics-lead, conversion rate optimisation that I think we need to be adopting in the work we do. I also like the way that it encourages us to move away from "meak tweaking" and into other areas like influencing product set up, pricing etc to achieve the best result.

Be a growth hacker. Measure things, optimise things, stick your nose into things that aren't normally your domain and make them work better.

CXM (customer experience management)

Many businesses are awful at this, everyone working in their silos. I'm guilty of the same. Such a missed opportunity.

Attribution models

Nothing too new here, I already dabble a bit in this area of GA (should do more), but it did remind me of this interesting benchmarking tool from Google which looks at how different channels influence differently between industries.

Content marketing

Again, we all know the theory here and it's only going to get more important to marketing departments in the next year. So, does your team produce "epic" or "nuclear" content for marketing? Is your business prepared to do that

Also, I think this quote is spot on - "Of course Content Marketing is two words and I think marketers’ efforts often focus too much on the Content rather than the Marketing". This is why there are so many business Twitter accounts with only a handful of users.

What I really like about this whole post is that most of the points aren't about flashy new tools or crazy new approaches (apart from Google Glass which I suspect won't play a major role in my marleting efforts in 2014!). 

The majority are simply about doing digital marketing right - setting goals, measuring, optimising, identifying your audience and using the right tools to reach them.