What Inbound Marketing Agencies Are Doing Wrong & How to Fix It- Part 1
Over the last 2 years I’ve worked with a handful of inbound marketing agencies.
I like how inbound marketing works with blogging, social media, and seo, all areas I have a lot of experience with, unfortunately, I’ve seen some things agencies are doing wrong, or at the very least, they could improve.
Are You Posting Useless Content To ‘Help’ SEO for Your Clients?
Based on keyword optimization and density, not on providing useful information to visitors.
If you’ve been watching inbound or content marketing at all, you’ll notice that the BIG thing is publishing content, as often as possible. The more often you tend to post on your blog or website, the more visitors you will see from Google (in my experience).
However, agencies like to get this content cheap, because it adds up in price. To do this, they outsource to bulk content providers. The problem is, the costs stay low because the content isn’t very good, much of the content is rehashed from other content on the website, and switching out to a new keyword.
Consider the following example of rehashed content:
Keyword or Focus Topic- honda car dealership
Just about any city in America has a Honda car dealership right down the road. Within 20 minutes of your home, you can find every model, in a variety of colors.Your Honday car dealership will also have a website where you can look at inventory online, fill out an application, and get pre-approved. The websites will also have educational material to make it easier to make a decision on what to buy.
Use the contact form on your Honda car dealership website to have a salesman get back to you as soon as possible.
And, this one:
Keyword or Focus Topic- jacksonville honda dealership
The Jacksonville Honda Dealership is home to every model of Honda, with a wide variety of colors. If you live in the Jacksonville area, you can easily make the drive within 25 minutes.The nice thing about having the Jacksonville Honda Dealership so close is that you can come by anytime to see what we have in stock. If you can’t make the drive today, check out the website.
Online you’ll find educational material, that helps you make the best decision for your family. You can also contact us and a salesman will get back to you as soon as possible.
The difference between these pieces of content is it is rearranged, and a different keyword is used in each one.
The problem is, the website is full of the same rehashed content, again and again, with different keywords on each page to bring in visitors.
For now it might be working for some, not particularly for the agency I saw it with, but since I signed on to help them, they have switched to real content writers, focused on explaining topics, not optimizing for a keyword.
Is There A Lack of Linking From Your Content?
Internal and external linking are more important as back-linking has become more dangerous.
You’ll see that my average blog post has several links to other pieces of content on my site, and tools or other authority sites in social media.
But, a lot of content managers are still holding back on linking, perhaps using 1 link to an internal page, and 1 at the most to an external. Some, aren’t using any internal links at all.
The problem: As back-linking is a sticky topic now, due to Google algorithm updates, one of the places you can definitely get links is on your own content.
Optimizing your site is one of the places you can control, and while it only plays a small part in results, that small part can still be a big deal.
What to do: Make it look natural, if you use a keyword that another blog post is focused on, link to it, but keep the links to 1 per 200 words or so.
This isn’t a strict guideline, but something that works for me as it looks less cluttered and doesn’t overwhelm.
This strengthens your signals to Google showing you wrote certain blog posts for certain topics, plus I hear that internal linking helps with allowing search engines like Google to spider your site (and index it).
Is Your Inbound Agency Completely Ignoring or Under-Using Social Media?
Hubspot has dozens of guides discussing using social media for inbound marketing, yet, so many agencies aren’t doing it, or are using it so little, it isn’t helping campaigns. From my point of view (a social media fanatic), it’s sad, because there are so many opportunities.
If there was nothing to social media, why would Hubspot put so much into it? Why would they provide so much information, integrate it with their tools, run twitter chats and Linkedin groups, etc?
Think about it. It works, it is useful and inbound marketing should put more effort into it, because when it is added to a campaign, results skyrocket (I’ve seen it happen).
The problem: So much focus is going into running each client’s content, landing pages, email marketing, and reporting, that social is left out, or less involved.
Social media actually plays a part in all of these, but really makes a difference in client content distribution, using social bookmarking.
An agency’s client’s website needs people to see the content being written, and content distribution helps. When you combine the power of social media communities with content distribution on bookmarking sites, results can be seen from 3x to 5x the traffic.
Worried about leads? Social media can bring in up to 13% more leads than other marketing efforts. But if you aren’t doing it right, a lot of things can go wrong- banned accounts, banned domains, lack of customer service, etc.
There is a LOT to Inbound Marketing
It’s difficult for anyone to get it all right, which is why it can be expensive, or at least have several experts involved on each project. But when you combine the SEO power of Inbound marketing with Social media your results will improve.
Give it a shot, make the time, get help from an expert, and compare results. If I can help at all, see my prices for helping agencies like yours on my agency pricing page.
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I get a lot of “guest post” request on content where I know that people are just trying to get crap content on my site for their client. Not happening. Great post Mary!
Thanks Wade. I get some people asking to get on my blog too, from different industries! I don’t get it. I know they want to get links out there, but I’m not going to bring down my quality for it. People have to do better.
I actually think rehashed content can actually hurt you because it diminishes the value of marketing to anyone but the search engines. And I think you make a great point about under utilizing social media.
The cool thing about social media is there is always more you can do, and in a 1000 different creative directions.
I think that is the good and bad about so many directions, where do you start, how do you choose? I would say choose where you can excel and over deliver, nothing else is worth it.
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