Black History

Nowadays, many businesses leverage search engine optimization (SEO) to boost their credibility, visibility and trustworthiness online. With the online market being so highly competitive and oversaturated, it’s important for companies to have a reliable way to stand out and become more visible. One of the best ways to do that is through SEO. That being said, one of the major activities for SEO is link building. Efficient link building helps you build relevancy as an industry expert.

It also helps you expand your reach on the market and gives potency to your content. Not only that, but high-quality backlinks share the first place with content as the most important factor for rankings on search engines, such as Google. That being said, creating high-quality backlinks requires a good link building strategy and the right approach that will yield value to your business. Here are a few tips for creating such a successful link building strategy.



1.Know your target audience well

Understanding your target audience is the key to having a successful link building strategy. The main reason is that you must craft links and content that is in accordance with your audiences’ preferences and likings. Otherwise, you’re simply wasting time on building irrelevant links that won’t yield any interest or drive more traffic to your website for that matter.

Therefore, you should conduct some thorough market research and find out as much as you can about your audience. For instance, who they are, what their interests are, what their needs and expectations are, as well as what their core demographics are. That will tell you more about what type of content to create for both your audience and for your link building campaign.

2.Seek out relevant sources for your links

When creating quality backlinks, it’s important to do so on credible and reputable sources. The main reason is that the more credibility and domain authority your sources have, the more credibility you gain in return. Not only that, but you must also target sources, such as websites and blogs your target audience visits or follows.

That way, the links you build on those sources will be more efficient and will engage your audience and help you build awareness. A good way to start would be to identify good guest posting sources. By becoming a contributor on relevant blogs, you ensure that your audience notices and shows interest in you. In addition, you’re positioning yourself as an expert, which will help you build trust with your audience.

lf Sales and Marketing were a manufacturing operation starting with raw materials — leads — and ending up with 5% to 20% in a deliverable product — won sales — it would soon be shut down to determine what is wrong.

However, companies continue to spend untold dollars on lead generation efforts ultimately doomed to fail.

Lack of lead management impacts lead conversion and ROI

I think the major cause for poor lead conversion and ROI is the lack of lead management, also known

 as passing unqualified leads, or marketing qualified leads (MQLs), directly to sales reps.



Lack of lead management impacts lead conversion and ROI

I think the major cause for poor lead conversion and ROI is the lack of lead management, also known as passing unqualified leads, or marketing qualified leads (MQLs), directly to sales reps.

MarketingSherpa captured some of the key lead management issues in the B2B Marketing Benchmark Report. Of the 1,745 marketers surveyed, the research showed the following:

b2b lead management, Introduction to Lead Management68% of study participants have not identified their Sales and Marketing Funnel

61% send all leads directly to Sales; however, only 27% of those leads will be qualified

79% have not established lead scoring

65% have not established lead nurturing

In my own experience working with companies, I’ve found the top issues include:

Marketing qualified leads (MQLs aka inquiries) have been sent to salespeople without qualifying them first or sending leads to Sales based on lead scoring alone.

A lead nurturing program has not been implemented.

Sales has not been given the means to hand leads back to marketing to re-engage for further work or nurturing on their behalf.

One of the things we’re really proud of at KoMarketing is the length of our client relationships. While we have clients who have only been with us for a year or two, we have others who have been with us for over 12 years. In the digital era where things change on a dime, that’s pretty amazing!

The thing is, we view our programs as real partnerships. At the end of the day, we are only successful if our clients are successful.

Now, you might be thinking, “Casie, I thought this was a blog post, not a sales pitch?”. Bear with me. See, one of the reasons we’ve had these long-lasting relationships is because our clients help us deliver results. They ensure we have the right information, the right tools, and the support we need.



And that’s the key.

For businesses that are currently working with a B2B digital marketing agency or looking to work with one in the future, there are a few things you can do to create a successful partnership. Let’s take a look.


Communicate Expectations

The majority of programs fail because there is a breakdown in communication, specifically when it comes to expectations. Be clear in what you are looking to get out of the program and how you expect the program to run.

For example, if you have a certain number of leads you need to acquire in a quarter, make sure your agency knows what that number is. This will determine the type of tactics they use and how aggressive they need to be. It can also dictate budgets.

Here’s another example – If you want content written in a certain voice, be clear in what that voice is. Provide your agency with brand guidelines, examples of existing content, and don’t hesitate to connect them with the communications team or SMEs who can provide more insights into how things should be written.

The more clear and direct everyone is in their expectations, the better off everyone will be. Our most successful programs stem from having clear expectations set at the beginning of the program and reiterated and adjusted as needed. Don’t hesitate to speak up.

Done correctly, implementing sound SEO strategies can spread brand awareness, improve search engine results, and drastically increase the quantity and quality of your inbound traffic — all of which lead to more conversions, more leads, and more revenue. 

Unfortunately, most companies either aren’t familiar with SEO, don’t understand its importance, or blatantly ignore proven best practices — and it shows. In one sense, this is a real shame because a little SEO love can go a long way. On the other, it’s super awesome because it presents a golden opportunity for your organization to optimize your digital properties and get ahead of the competition. 

Regardless of where you’re at in your digital marketing journey, it’s important to understand common SEO mistakes and how to correct them. So, today, we’re going to run through five of the most common SEO issues and offer simple advice on how to fix each problem.  



1) Missing Meta Descriptions

Mistake: Sure, meta descriptions don’t directly influence search engine results page (SERP) rankings. However, search engine algorithms rely heavily on their interpretation of how visitors are experiencing a given page, which means you need to be writing for a human audience — not for an unknown mathematical equation. 

If a user reads your meta description on a SERP, clicks through to the page, and is greeted with totally unexpected and irrelevant content, they’re likely going to bounce — which is a negative SEO metric that will damage your efforts over time.

Solution:  You need to write concise and direct meta descriptions that accurately describe the content of each page. Try to keep the length of your copy at less than 160 characters to ensure your description fits on the SERP. At the same time, include enough information to describe the content sufficiently and compel your users to click through to the page. 

For best results, be sure to include your focus keyword in the meta description in a way that feels relevant and organic. Google will bold these keywords on the SERP when they match your users’ queries to reinforce the fact that they are relevant searches, giving you an additional advantage over your competitors.

Lastly, never use the same meta description copy for multiple pages. Duplicate content and meta information confuse users and search engines alike, which could lead to poor user experiences and a steep decline in clicks, time on page, and conversions.

2) Keyword Stuffing

Mistake: Keyword stuffing is an outdated and shortsighted SEO technique designed to trick the search engines into ranking organic content higher on SERPs. The premise is simple: overload your page with keywords to emphasize the message of the page. The problem is in the execution, as keyword stuffing always leads to odd and irregular phrasing with very little value and a terrible experience for the user. 

Optimization is the process of serving unique experiences to each individual in your digital space by tailoring content and design to their specific needs and preferences. According to Forrester, continuous optimization is “an analytics-driven approach that seeks to leverage every customer interaction to evolve the understanding of the customer, which is in turn used to evolve and optimize current and future customer experiences.” In today's age, optimizing your digital presence to meet the needs of consumers is vital in promoting new sales, customer loyalty, and business growth.

Why Is It So Difficult to Achieve?

Often times, while some members of an organization may wish to start moving toward optimization, there are factors that actually prohibit their ability to achieve it. Common challenges that businesses are faced with include lack of data available and the misconception that all visitors are the same. It’s important to understand that every user is unique, and not everyone will engage with content or experiences in the same way across digital channels (think email, website, and mobile apps). Without an ample amount of data, decisions tend to be based upon opinions and hypotheses rather than factual evidence.



So, Why Should Your Business Care About Optimization?
By utilizing a testing strategy to reach optimization, businesses are able to use data as evidence in deciding what content, designs, and experiences will resonate with people most in order to create better-performing user experiences across the board. There are a plethora of reasons as to why businesses should adopt an optimization strategy, but here are a few of the most common reasons:

1) An optimized UX on your website or app shortens the path to conversion for your visitors.

Consumers are constantly looking for the quickest and easiest ways to accomplish tasks, and optimizing the user experience is vital in helping users accomplish this. By testing and collecting data to determine exactly how users interact across digital platforms, organizations are armed with the facts around how to convert visitors quickly, easily, and seamlessly without a conscious thought from the user.

2) Gathering actionable insights allows your business to keep up in an ever-changing marketplace.

Gathering actionable insights is where data collection becomes a true game changer. Monitoring users on a website allows a great deal of information to be gathered, and based on user behavior, areas of opportunity and areas of strength can be identified extremely quickly. This allows business to turn data into knowledge and power, to eliminate the guesswork when planning for future designs and experiences.

3) Cross-channel enablement enhances your ability to foster brand equity.

By testing, collecting data, and gathering actionable insights, business are able to start moving toward a cross-channel approach. Serving users consistent experiences across digital channels not only helps increase brand awareness, but it fosters the idea of brand loyalty and the ability for visitors to remain connect and engaged with specific products or brands that are of interest.

Many organizations then started placing high hopes that all their knowledge management woes would have found their savior. If Wikipedia can be as good as Britannica, we could replace all our outdated corporate knowledge repositories with wikis. The wisdom of crowds would run its magic, and we’d have high quality and up-to-date content we can rely upon.



Image by Octavio Rojas via Flickr

Six years later, we can safely say that the predicted wiki utopia never materialized. Was that just a collective hallucination caused by too many consultants who drank a lot of the Kool-Aid 2.0? How come that Wikipedia is even more successful today than back then (6th most accessed site worldwide), but a good chunk of our corporate wikis are moribund and abandoned, with content that’s often worse than the ones created by our decades old, expert-based, top-down traditional processes? Was Wikipedia just the exception that proved the rule? Is the Britannica model really outdated? Keep reading, and you may find that the actual answer is a bit of the above, but with a significant twist.

Before showing any numbers to show the success of Wikipedia, just take a look at Wikistream, an impressive visualization of what’s happening in Wikipedia right now. Here’s a snapshot as a teaser, but I highly recommend you to click in the link above for the real deal:

As you can see, at any given moment there is an incredible number of editors frantically updating Wikipedia. Thus, it’s no wonder that enough of interesting and high-quality content is produced to convince more than 400 million unique people to visit it every month. Here’s Google’s estimate on the number of monthly visitors for the top sites on the web (excluding themselves):

Now, take a look at this second stat: in the English version of Wikipedia, you have approximately 23 editors (generously defined as people with 5 or more contributions) per million speakers (1.5 billion, counting the ones with English as a second language). If I did the math right, that means approximately 35,000 editors who contributed to almost 4 million articles there.

Running a successful PPC campaign for a B2B technology company goes beyond coming up with a robust set of keywords to bid on. With search queries from potential customers changing at such a fast pace in the industry, it is essential to not only determine when an ad should appear, but also when it shouldn’t.

This is where highly targeted negative keyword lists come into play.

Negative keywords are words and phrases that shouldn’t be associated with a company’s products and services. When negative keywords are added to a PPC campaign, ads will not be served if those words are part of the user’s search query. This will save a company money by avoiding being shown on irrelevant search queries.

With Google’s most recent changes to the match types, it is now more important than ever for technology companies to have a fine tuned, carefully vetted, negative keyword list.

In this blog post, we will be discussing five tactics for developing negative keyword lists that need to be considered for B2B technology companies before launching a new PPC campaign.




Specific Industries

It is essential to understand how to align keyword targets to applicable industry verticals. More than likely, companies are not trying to target every paid search campaign to every type of industry. Understanding specific industries of focus will not only impact keyword bidding, ad copy, and landing pages, but also the negative keyword associated with ad visibility.

For example, if a management planning software vendor is focused on the financial industry, the following keywords should be negative to avoid inaccurate placement:

“Real Estate”
“Accounting”
“Marketing”
“Construction”
Current Events

Technology is always changing, especially when it comes to current events. Sudden changes in the news can affect what people are searching for. If the news topic aligns with a company’s keywords, it could lead to a huge jump in impressions, a decrease in CTR, and lots of irrelevant traffic coming to the site.

Geographic Targeting

Not all technology companies can have the widespread reach of Apple or Google. Companies start small and can expand when it’s the right move. In the meantime, it is important that users from non-serviced areas don’t see the ad.

While geographic targeting will help mitigate the amount of traffic from specific states/countries, a comprehensive negative list of states and cities of where a company doesn’t operate is important to implement as well.