Rellify's Blog

By Dan Duke — You need your content to be seen by a specific audience, to generate quality leads, and to encourage those leads to become customers. Everyone does. But not everyone knows how to use SEO writing to craft messages to accomplish that.

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SEO writing means creating content for two very different audiences. The first audience is the people looking for answers from Google and other search engines. The second audience is the search engines themselves, and content should be structured to make it easy for them to find and assess.

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SEO writing involves a lot of moving parts. We will cover a lot in this article, and will start with the thing that's at the heart of the matter: content quality.

Content quality

Content quality determines how well a piece of writing communicates its message to its audience. High-quality content is clear, accurate, and easy to understand. It's relevant to your target audience and satisfies their search intent. It also delivers reliable, expert-level insights and information. Blog posts with high content quality can help to establish credibility, build trust, and attract and retain readers

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Content quality helps to drive search engine rankings and increase the chances of getting shared and linked to by other websites. Producing high-quality content is one of the most important of all SEO strategies.

What is SEO writing?

SEO writing focuses on producing content that is optimized for search engines so it has a better chance of ranking well and being more visible to more people.

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It's a close cousin to content optimization, which is creating content with the depth and expertise necessary to answer a user's query on a search engine. Content optimization gives readers something worth finding and SEO writing increases that content's chances of being found. They go hand in hand, and there is some overlap between the two.

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Both processes start with researching and identifying target keywords that are relevant to the topic and can act as the theme of an article that has a good chance to rank well. These often are long-tail keywords, keywords that closely reflect the specific intent and wording that people use in online searches. They have good search volume, which indicates an opportunity to reach people, but are not competing with broad, overarching terms that will be tough to rank high in.

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Writers then use related keywords strategically in the text, subheads, and other parts of the article. Keyword density helps search engines determine that the content will provide the answers people are looking for.

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To excel at SEO writing, we need to understand how search engines work and what ranking factors are used to rank websites. We must consider what is motivating the people searching for information. Are they just beginning to research a product or service? Are they ready to buy? What problem is causing them to search for answers? By satisfying those demands, good SEO writing can help you reach your target customers and drive more traffic to a website.

Why is getting on Google’s first page so important?

Google is the most widely used, largest search engine in the world. Appearing on the first page of Google's organic search results significantly increases the visibility of a website. The higher your content ranks in Google searches, the higher the click-through rate (CTR) will be. Users not only find your content, but click on it and go to your website.

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According to research by Sistrix on Google and CTR, 28.5% of Google users click the first organic result. The second position gets 15.7%, and the third position gets 11%. The click-through rate for results beyond the 10th organic ranking were so low that Sistrex didn't even bother to analyze them.

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Appearing on the first page of Google search results not only gets you organic traffic, but also helps build credibility and name recognition with potential customers.

9 must-follow SEO writing rules

To produce high-quality content and boost your organic traffic, add these techniques to your writing process. Content is the key to driving more traffic to your site.‍

Have a plan for topics and keywords

Before writing anything, you should have a plan for your content. We call it content ideation. You should know the goals for this content and your target readers. Do the research necessary to develop a list of topics, using search volume and keyword difficulty.

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Before writing blog posts for each topic, identify the target keywords and related words that you will optimize for. Keyword research can help you create content that's relevant and focused on the topics most important to your business, website, and audience. We mentioned long-tail keywords earlier, but here's an important fact. The Sistrix study also showed that when people searched for long-tail keywords on Google, the results included fewer featured snippets, boxes, and other items that take attention away from organic results. So using long-tail keywords for your content means users will will see fewer distracting features from Google and a higher proportion of organic results.

Use keywords in your on-page SEO elements

Use your identified keywords strategically in your content's meta tags — the title, meta description, and headings — as well as the body of your content. On-page SEO includes a wide range of techniques for tailoring your site and each page to gain the most traffic. This particular technique helps search engines understand the content's topic and rank it more highly on search engine results pages.

Write for people

Your content should be informative and engaging, providing value to readers and addressing their needs and interests. This can help to build trust and credibility with your audience and improve user engagement. Use a clear structure and formatting to make the article easy to read and understand. Subheadings, bullet points, and short paragraphs break up the text and make it easier to scan.‍

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Artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT have come a long way. But they aren't sophisticated enough to cover all the SEO bases while addressing topics with creativity and the specific voice suited to a target customer. You want to write content with natural language that seamlessly includes relevant keywords. At the end of the day, quality content is king.

Develop a strategy for backlinks

Link-building, an essential part of off-page SEO, involves acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own site. These links, called backlinks or inbound links, are a ranking factor for Google SERPs. Backlinks from well-respected sites show search engines that your website is reputable, trustworthy, and authoritative. Search engines see such links as a vote of confidence for your site.

Use external and internal links

Use internal links to send readers from one article on your site to other relevant content. This can improve the user experience on your site and keep people there longer. They also make it easier for search engines to discover, crawl, and index your pages. Show Google that you're not a one-trick-pony by directing them to other great content on your site.

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External links send readers from your site to another authoritative source to get more information. Avoid sending them to your competitor's site and choose only relevant, authoritative sites for external links.

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In either case, use a keyword or phrase whenever possible as your anchor text, which appears as the highlighted text users can click on. You'll want to choose anchor text that reflects the language in the meta title of the linked article.

Produce evergreen content

Evergreen content is material you post on your website that is optimized to offer value and rank high in search engine results for a long period of time. It provides in-depth information that’s relevant to a user’s search on core topics. Because the content stays meaningful and useful for years, it gives consistent content marketing results.

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Evergreen pieces save you time and energy. You write them once and update them occasionally, and they give you a strong, lasting return on your investment (ROI).

Optimize images and other media

Images and other media can play a valuable role in SEO content. Use your focus keyword in the image alt data — fields that provide captions and otherwise describe the images. This helps search engines understand the content of your images and media, as well as give you credit for them.

Regularly update and refresh your content

Search engines prioritize fresh, up-to-date, quality content. In addition, the Google algorithms for search change from time to time. To stay current and relevant, and to react to changes in search engines and marketing, regularly update and refresh your content.

Monitor and analyze your performance

Use SEO tools, analytics, and KPIs (key performance indicators) to monitor the performance of your content. This can help you understand what is working well and what can be improved. Then, you can make changes to your content and SEO strategy as needed to pull up your SEO metrics, such as bounce rate, page speed, domain authority, and backlinks.

Apply technical SEO

Remember when we mentioned at the beginning of this article that SEO writing has a lot of moving parts? In addition to everything else we've talked about, there is the matter of of technical SEO. There are dozens of details to attend to regarding content, site architecture, structure, and other factors that help search engines and website users find, assess, and enjoy your content. Here are a few key elements that will augment your efforts at great SEO writing.

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• Site speed and performance. Optimize your page load times and minimize your server response times. You can also leverage caching techniques and image optimization to improve the user experience. This helps keep bounce rates low, too. If you're doing site updates or maintenance, implement 301 redirects to keep the website easy to navigate for both crawlers and visitors. A website with too many 404 errors will inevitably have poor SEO.
• Mobile optimization. The website should use responsive design and operate well on different devices and screen sizes.
• Indexing and crawling. Make sure search engine bots are able to crawl and index the website effectively by properly using robots.txt, meta robots tags, and XML sitemaps.
• Schema markup. Add structured data to help search engines understand the content and context of web pages.
• Canonicalization. Avoid duplicate content issues by using canonical tags and setting preferred URLs.

SEO writing tools

Every SEO writer should be familiar with tools to help bridge the gap between content creation and optimization. Here are a few common tools for content writers.‍

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• Keyword research and analysis tools. These tools can help you identify the most relevant and valuable keywords or phrases to target in your content. They can also provide data on the search volume and competition for search queries and important keywords. This kind of data can help you understand how to use the words effectively in your content. Examples include Rellify, Semrush, Ahrefs, and Keywords Everywhere.
• Content creation and editing tools. These tools can help you create and edit your content. Features can include spell check, grammar check, and suggestions for improving the readability of your text. Examples include Grammarly and OneLook Reverse Dictionary.
• SEO optimization tools. These tools can provide suggestions for improving the use of keywords. They can also help optimize the structure and formatting of content and implement other factors affecting your search engine rankings. Examples include Rellify, SEO Surfer, and Frase.
• Analytics and reporting tools. These tools can help you track the performance of your content in organic search results. They can provide data on your rankings, traffic, and other metrics. The information can help you understand exactly how your content is performing. It can also help address what changes you can make to improve your search engine rankings. Examples include Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Moz, and SemRush.
• Collaboration and project management tools. These tools can help you coordinate and communicate effectively. They're especially useful if you are working with a team on your SEO-friendly content. These platforms can provide features like shared calendars, task lists, and document sharing to help manage projects and work efficiently. Examples include Asana, ClickUp, Monday, and Trello.‍

What skills should an SEO writer have?

To become a complete SEO content writer, you need to offer more than good writing and editing. Develop or sharpen these skills:

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• Research and keyword analysis. Learn to research and identify target keywords or phrases that rank and are relevant to your content. You should also be able to analyze keyword data like search volume and keyword difficulty to understand how to use guide content creation.
• Understanding of search engine algorithms. Become an expert on how search engines work and what factors they consider when ranking content. This knowledge will help you write blog posts that account for factors like topic relevance, SEO, readability, and expert authority.
• Flexibility and adaptability. Learn to adapt your writing style and approach for different clients and projects. Be prepared to adjust your SEO writing based on changes to search engine algorithms and best practices.
• Strong communication skills. Communicate effectively with clients, team members, and other stakeholders. That will help you meet the needs and requirements of each project and connect with each target audience. Also, you might work with clients who have different levels of expertise in SEO content and will need to communication with them at different levels.  

Get help with SEO writing from the experts

As you can see, SEO writing is an important part of content strategy, but it's not an easy thing to master. Writing simultaneously for search engines and people can challenge even experienced SEO writers. That’s why so many businesses have found success by combining dynamic new technology with human expertise. That's where Rellify comes in.

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Our content management system can help you create the right content now with AI-driven content strategy for your best topics. With our winning blend of technology and human capabilities, Rellify covers the entire lifecycle of the content creation process. Rellify's expertise carries through ideation, keyword research, writing, deployment, continuous monitoring, and everything in between.

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There are plenty of ways to get your message out there. Whether you have a website, webpage, blog post, email campaign, whitepaper, or social media presence, it needs to be found. No matter your inbound marketing challenge, learn how to achieve more search visibility in less time by booking a meeting today.

What is a content marketing platform, and should you use one to propel your marketing efforts? We’ll get into the nuances of great content and the benefits of joining a content marketing platform. But first, there’s a fundamental question to consider.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing means getting your message to your target audience. The use of media has always been essential. The current state of the digital age further broadens the scope of factors and possibilities. Blogs, social media, email, and search engines can be a bottomless pit. Naturally, you don’t want to reach just anyone on the internet. You want to make sure your message reaches the right people. Your content needs to be topic-specific and provide added value for users through entertainment, information, personalization, or knowledge.

Why do we use content marketing?

Because it works! Content marketing provides a meaningful way for customers to engage with your brand positively. If you publish quality, relevant content, you serve people who want to learn more about your brand and work. As a result, the content analytics you track will improve. You’ll see more leads, followers, views, conversions, and more.

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Content marketing is no secret in the industry. According to the Content Marketing Institute, over 91% of B2B companies use content marketing. And of the 9% who aren’t using content marketing, more than half plan to implement content marketing in the future. From these statistics alone, it’s clear that content platforms are essential tools for brand management and strengthening an online presence.

What is a content marketing platform?

A content marketing platform (CMP) is a software solution that helps businesses and marketers streamline their content marketing processes. Ultimately, it aims to help clients drive awareness, leads, and revenue from their content to their brand.

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Many software tools fall under the umbrella of “content marketing platforms.” Any utility or website that helps content marketers create, organize, optimize, and distribute content can be a content marketing platform. If an app or website enables you to brainstorm content ideas, implement a content strategy, or even monitor how your content performs after publishing, it’s a content marketing platform.

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CMPs can provide functions ranging from keyword and topic ideation andcontent creation to social media management, and everything in between. Some marketing platforms offer marketing automation across various channels to streamline your workflow. Others support your efforts to devise a solid SEO strategy as a part of a larger content marketing strategy. Content marketers often use several platforms as part of their digital strategy since many offer complementary functionality.

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4 questions to ask before adopting a content marketing platform

Now that you have an overview of CMPs, it’s up to you to decide. Which ones will benefit your marketing efforts and help you achieve your goals? There’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to content marketing software. Social platforms might be crucial for a B2C company that handles lots of social media marketing, for example. However, the same top marketing platforms might not provide strong ROI for a B2B business targeting a specific niche.

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Before you invest in a marketing platform for your content, here are a few questions to ask.

Who (and where) is my target audience?

Be as specific as possible. Consider standard attributes such as age, gender, income, and location. You also want to consider where your target audience shops and what they do in their free time. Do they spend more time online on their phones or their desktop? The more specific you make your target audience, the more precisely you can target them with your content marketing platform.

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‍Let’s say you’re a B2C company selling shoes to Gen-Z. You’ll probably want to look into marketing platforms that can boost your social media performance on platforms like Instagram. You’ll need a different approach if you’re a B2B company with a focused niche like industrial safety ladders. Creating high-fidelity evergreen articles might be much more integral to your strategy. Regardless of your target audience, the right CMP can help you create content they’ll want to engage with.

What are my goals and challenges?

How will your product help your consumer? Is your goal to generate more sales? Create more brand awareness? Establish yourself as a leader in your field? Make sure your goals are measurable by setting benchmarks. How will you know if you have met your goals? For example, are you trying to increase website traffic by 25%? Increase sales by 10%? What unique challenges does your organization face in the realm of digital marketing? Low website traffic? Poor communication between team members? Write it all down and keep it at the forefront of your mind as you begin weighing your options.

What is my budget?

If you’re a small startup with limited resources, some content marketing platforms might be cost-prohibitive. At the same time, you get what you pay for when it comes to quality content. So you could get a better ROI from a more expensive, quality platform than a less expensive one. This concept is especially true when it comes to paying for ads on social media platforms or Google ads. You will see better engagement, more impressions, and stronger conversions from quality content that does well organically. But you can incorporate both paid and organic search in your marketing strategy.

What tools do I need to reach my audience?

Do you need engaging social content across multiple channels? Then invest in content platforms that will empower you to produce quality graphics. Additionally, find marketers who can ensure you’re using the right message across the proper channels. You probably would need scheduling functionality with a calendar planning tool to efficiently plan all your posts across marketing channels.

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Do you need to improve engagement within your email marketing campaigns? The right tools will let you send quality emails and monitor their performance.

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Do you need web content and blog posts to fill out your site? Invest in a content performance platform that helps you produce and monitor evergreen content that will result in high search engine results.

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What is the best content performance platform?

We're glad you asked.

Rellify

Since search marketing is the backbone of relevance in the digital world, the most valuable tool you can use in content marketing is Rellify. Rellify is a comprehensive all-in-one content marketing platform that uses machine learning to identify topics, subtopics, and keywords that will help your content be better found on search engines. But Rellify's data-driven, AI-advised path doesn't just work to get you more web traffic, but better traffic without relying on paid promotion.

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Rellify also helps organizations establish a sustainable content performance strategy to support corporate goals. Besides the advanced tools it uses, Rellify stands out because it is a full-service performance platform. Not only can you develop valuable content in real-time with collaborators, but also monitor its performance with analytics and composable architecture so you can keep track of your chosen KPIs.Rellify operates with a six-pronged approach:

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• Discover topics that will be highly relevant to your target audience.
• Plan a content strategy. Make data-driven strategic decisions based on a custom-AI subject-matter expert trained on your relevant focus topics.
• Smart briefs. Create smart briefs using sophisticated AI prompts with just a few mouse clicks and get more relevant generative results.
• Write content honed by AI and SEO tools (including an R-score which helps conceptualize your content's effectiveness). With collaborative editing, writer and editor can work together in real time to polish your articles.
• Publish reviewed and approved articles directly to your CMS or export them as HTML.
• Monitor the success of your content based on pages and topics and compare it with your competition. Optimize your articles for search engine results with detailed AI suggestions. Never miss an opportunity to improve your content!

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Rellify's latest and greatest innovation is the Relliverse™, an in-house, customized, AI subject matter expert that shows your team the best content opportunities. With a custom Relliverse™, Rellify can quickly crawl huge volumes of your top competitors' content, as well as your own, analyzing the strengths and weaknesses. Then, Rellify suggests how exactly your content can best be focused and crafted in order to outpace and outrank your competition on search engines.

Revolutionize your marketing with a content marketing platform

If you’ve assessed your company’s content marketing needs, you’re ready to decide on a platform. No matter your company’s unique challenges, the right content marketing tool is out there. If you're looking for a marketing tool with customized solutions that leverage the integration of machine learning and AI to produce and optimize content that will climb the search engine rankings, then Rellify is the way to go. Contact a Rellify expert today for a demo and price quote for your organization's specific needs. With multiple tiers of service offerings, you're able to find the exact solution for your business.

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About the author

Jayne Schultheis has been in the business of crafting and optimizing articles for five years and has seen Rellify change the game since its inception. With strategic research, a strong voice, and a sharp eye for detail, she's helped many Rellify customers connect with their target audiences.

The evergreen content she writes helps companies achieve long-term gains in search results

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Her subject expertise and experience covers a wide range of topics, including tech, finance, food, family, travel, psychology, human resources, health, business, retail products, and education.

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If you're looking for a Rellify expert to wield a mighty pen (well, keyboard) and craft real, optimized content that will get great results, Jayne's your person.

By Dan Duke — Long-tail keywords can be a powerful part of a successful search engine optimization strategy. Because they speak to the search intent of users, they can help you reach people who are not just browsing for info but ready to take action.

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Keywords are one of the top Google ranking factors, and expert use of long-tail keywords should be part of any online content strategy. In this article, we'll explain why they are so powerful and how they can be used to boost search engine rankings. But first, let's review the fundamentals.

What are long-tail keywords?

Long-tail keywords are more specific than other keywords, and generally have a lower search volume than broader keywords. The thing that matters is the specificity, not the number of words, although they are typically over two or three words in length.

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They tend to be longer than two or three words because it takes more words to be more specific, but there is no set rule for the length. ‍In fact, the phrase long-tail keyword doesn't really come from the number of words. It comes from a common way of illustrating how they work.

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Imagine that you are looking at the profile of a kangaroo. The creature stands tall and looks to the left. His very, very long tail tapers off to the right. Draw a line from his toes to his head and label it "internet search volume." Label the horizontal line from his toes to the tip of his tail as "the number of search queries."

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Research shows that 60.7% of search volume or search demand is found in our friend's heads and shoulders. All that traffic is generated by a tiny number of keywords, 0.16%.

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The other roughly 40% of search traffic is represented by the sloping back and tapering tail of the kangaroo. This percentage involves millions of less popular search terms, keywords, and strings of words.

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Long-tail keywords got the name because they are in the long tail of the kangaroo. In the terminology of on-page SEO, the opposite of the long-tail is called a "head term" or a "short tail."

‍Go where the competition doesn't

Clearly, long-tail phrases don't generate as much search volume as head terms. But here's a little SEO strategy tip: They can benefit your business and bring you more website traffic. A tremendous amount of competition is trying to climb to the top of SERPs for head terms. To establish the domain authority necessary to rank at or near the top for search terms like "money" or "cars" takes resources far beyond most businesses.

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Instead, you can focus your content marketing by identifying long-tail keywords that don't have such intense competition and that are specific to your business.

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Even while targeting lower search volumes, keyword-rich content can bring excellent search results. By developing content that is relevant to your target audience, you can efficiently reduce your bounce rate, improve your click-through rates, and earn higher conversion rates.

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For example, Google's search results for "ice cream" bring billions of hits. It's a "head term" that could give marketers brain freeze. The top SERPs include brand names, recipes, trends (such as product recalls), and general information.

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A related phrase — ice cream shop — is a little more specific. We've moved away from the head term. The top results are more likely to be shops that sell ice cream, review sites, and news articles about ice cream shops. From the added word "shop," Google's search engine algorithms infer that users are looking for places to buy ice cream, and its page rankings reflect that.

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If you refine that search — ice cream shop Pittsburgh — that longer long-tail keyword gets similar results, but they are more specific. The shops are all in Pittsburgh, the reviews and news are all from that city. If you choose an even more specific phrase — ice cream shop fifth avenue Pittsburgh — the results show a similar refocusing.

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Someone doing that last search probably is interested in buying ice cream on Fifth Avenue in Pittsburgh. If you sell ice cream on Fifth Avenue in Pittsburgh, you could try to get more website traffic with content using "head terms." But a better marketing strategy would be to create content about the products and services you offer on Fifth Avenue in Pittsburgh and to make sure your site makes your location, hours and tasty treats perfectly clear to search engines and ice cream lovers alike.

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National and international brands have "won" the head keywords, like "ice cream." But long-tail keywords allow countless opportunities for smaller players to use content creation for niche targeting.

How do I develop and execute long-tail SEO?

Long-tail keywords are one of the most important SEO tools available. Most SEO campaigns use them to achieve three goals:‍

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• Increase organic traffic
• Improve conversions
• Build brand loyalty

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Notice anything about these goals, as well as the example in the previous section about ice cream-related keywords? They mirror the customer journey. People use different search terms as they move from researching toward buying and, possibly, advocating for a product. Long-tail keywords can be chosen to reach people in different stages of that journey and move them to the next stage.

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It takes a sophisticated understanding of content optimization to make the most of these powerful phrases. That's why many businesses turn to Rellify for help.

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First, we can develop a Relliverse™, providing you with a custom-AI subject-matter expert trained on your relevant focus topics. We'll do a gap analysis to identify your best content opportunities — finding the places where you and your competitors don't have relevant content that has a good chance to perform well. In other words, we can point to topics with lower search volume that can be "hidden gems" — especially where the competition does not have content or visibility in that area.

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Our AI-powered tools, whether you use them yourself for keyword research or have our experts use them for you, can give clear, actionable information on a wide range of factors, including:

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• Keyword difficulty. We show how difficult it would be to outrank competitors in Google’s top 20 for a keyword.
• Search volume. We provide estimates of monthly searches to help you assess potential search engine traffic for a keyword.
• Average ranking. This shows how well your content, and that of your competitors, is performing.

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Once we've established the best keywords to target, Rellify can take you with one click to extensive lists of articles based on those keywords. We can help you develop a comprehensive strategy for creating blog posts targeting those keywords. It's not enough to simply create content. It must be properly structured and organized on your site to gain the maximum value and provide the best user experience.

Long-tail keywords and user intent

When you choose keywords and create content, keep user intent in mind. ‍Search queries fall into three categories based on intent:

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• Transactional. The user wants to find a site and do something, often make a purchase. The user has decided to do something, or is all but ready to.
• Informational. The user wants to know something about a topic. Businesses can appeal to these users with relevant, in-depth content that includes a call-to-action that moves them into the transactional column.
• Navigational. The user wants to go to a particular website. If it’s not your site, there’s almost nothing you can do to pull them your way.

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These categories help to illustrate why it's important to target the right traffic, not just any traffic.

How to use long-tail keywords

Whether you write long-form content, listicles, or FAQs, the way you use keywords in your content impacts your success.

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Keyword placement is an important concept. To achieve full page optimization, place your long-tail keywords in strategic spots, such as:

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• The beginning of a blog post. Help bots and readers get off to a quick, solid start.
• Meta tags. The meta title and meta description of your article tell search bots what you are focusing on. Try to use the keyword at the beginning of the title and description, or as close to it as possible.
• Headings and subheadings. This reinforces the relevance of the article.
• URLs. This helps readers and search engines navigate your site and understand its organization.
• Image titles and alt text. These are text fields associated with photographs and illustrations in your content. They also help to show the relevance of your content.
• Anchor text. This is the clickable text in a hyperlink. When you link to a related article on your site, use the long-tail keyword for that article as your anchor text. If you can get backlinks for your articles — links from another authoritative site to your site — ask them to use the main keyword for each article.
• Social media. The use of long-tail keywords will boost the effectiveness of that content in the same way it helps your website content.

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On the other hand, it's counterproductive to try to force your keywords into an article too often. Keyword density is a measure of how often keywords are used in an article. Google used to penalize articles and sites that engaged in keyword stuffing, which involved cramming keywords into articles artificially to boost rankings. Now, it's more of an issue for readers. While there is no specific ideal keyword density, a range of 1-3% is generally recommended.

How do I find long-tail keywords for SEO?

To find the long-tail keywords that can gain you a competitive advantage, you need to conduct keyword research. This is a big part of every SEO strategy.

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In addition to Rellify's comprehensive platform, several tools for keyword research are available at a range of prices, including some that are free.

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‍Google Analytics is one of the best free keyword search tools available. You can use it to track the traffic coming into your website and understand what keywords drove that specific traffic. In addition, Google Trends can show you what keywords are hot at the moment.

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‍‍SemRush is a popular paid keyword search tool, and ‍Moz has also gained a large fanbase over the years.

Simple ways to do long-tail keyword research

Let's return to our ice cream shop example. We already know that something like “ice cream shop Main Street” is a possible long-tail keyword. Let’s try to identify three more.

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One easy method is to use Google search. Simply go to Google’s home page and begin to type “ice cream” into the search bar. Google's autocomplete suggestions will list long-tail keywords that are generating a lot of activity. These suggestions can help you develop content that people are, literally, searching for.

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Likewise, the bottom of the first page of a Google search offers Related Searches. This is a list of long-tail keywords related to your query.

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Another method is to use Google Analytics. Once you log in to your dashboard, you can click on Traffic Sources and then Keywords. From there, you will set up a goal, which can then be used to help you analyze your traffic data. Click on Goal Set Up and include as few or as many keywords as you have discovered. Over time, you will be able to see the conversion rates for each one. You can use this information to determine which ones are bringing in the most traffic.

‍Getting help from experts

Long-tail keywords are the bread and butter of a sound SEO strategy for finding and converting qualified leads. People searching for these specific phrases have a specific user intent in mind. You can easily address their needs with tailored SEO pages or blog posts on your website.

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If you’re ready to improve your SEO strategy, contact Rellify to learn what high-performing relevant content based on AI-assisted keyword research can do for you.

By Jayne Schultheis – Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence (AI) that involves giving computers the ability to learn by analyzing data and past experiences without explicit programming. Computers use algorithms to find patterns within and from data to solve problems and make predictions.

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‍In a typical day, the average person might use several different machine learning systems. These could be simple, utility-based applications, like turning on a Roomba vacuum to clean a room. Or you could use machine learning for more complex tasks, like asking ChatGPT, OpenAI's NLP chatbot, to give you a gluten-free recipe for chocolate chip cookies in the pirate vernacular. Yes, we tried that prompt today.

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You also can use machine learning to drive a content marketing campaign — from analyzing your competitors' content and your own to finding the best topics for content to crafting that content to rank well in online searches.

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Even though machine learning seems new and modern, it’s based on the work of scientists from as far back as the 1700s.

When did machine learning start?

The first instances of machine learning go back to 1763, when an essay was published on the work of Thomas Bayes, a British statistician and minister. Bayes showed a way to update the probability of something based on new data, laying the groundwork for machine learning.

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In the years after WWII, Alan Turing, considered the Father of Computer Science, applied this principle within the context of machines. He gave a 1947 lecture describing a “machine that can learn from experience.” Three years later, he developed his own learning machine, an ancestor of the modern computer. In 1952, Arthur Samuel wrote the first learning program for IBM. It involved a checkers game, and he later coined the term “machine learning” in 1959.

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Today, with advances like neural networks, machines can function similarly to the human brain. Machine learning models have evolved to the point where they can predict patterns in human behavior and recognize voices and faces.

What’s the difference between AI and machine learning?

The father of artificial intelligence, John McCarthy, defined AI as “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs.” For McCarthy, AI could also be considered a way that computers assist humans in reaching a specific goal.

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Traditional programming involves coding rules and instructions for a computer to follow explicitly to perform a specific task. It relies on a programmer's understanding of the problem to craft algorithms and logic that dictate how the program behaves.

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Machine learning takes this concept a bit deeper. It’s a subset of AI that allows computers to learn from data and patterns without being directly programmed to do so. The machines can make predictions by observing datasets and teach themselves to get better at doing so. As a result of this automation, companies that use machine learning notice an uptick in human productivity.

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What are some examples of machine learning?

The Google algorithms are some of the most widely-used applications of machine learning techniques. Google trained its machines to scour all of the massive amounts of websites online, and recognize patterns. Its machine learning algorithms use natural language processing to break down the context of larger articles. That way, when you search for a term, Google provides relevant data placed in the proper context, rather than random pages stuffed with keywords.

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Some of its algorithms offer personalization with location tracking. For example, if you search for “Pizza near me,” the input from the algorithm has been trained to identify map patterns and locations. That way, it can predict the right place to send users.

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But that type of machine learning is pretty self-evident and has been around for decades now. What's notable is how the rapid proliferation of machine learning has brought it into almost every sector of commerce, science, and technology.

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In genomics, machine learning techniques aid in gene sequencing, identifying genetic mutations, and predicting disease susceptibility. In climate science, it is used to analyze climate data and predict weather patterns.

Rellify's unique use of machine learning

In content marketing, machine learning has created a revolution. Nearly every SaaS tool mentions that it uses AI technology to perform article topic selection, write articles, and carry out other functions. But while AI can help to make decisions, human intelligence still matters, as does the quality of data.

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That’s why Rellify’s machine learning process is so transformative. Rather than using generic website data from the entire Internet, Rellify has a new weapon: a custom Relliverse™. This in-house subject matter expert can research your business, industry, and competitors' offerings.

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Rellify then applies deep learning tools to this data, which is unique to your business and target audience. We build exclusive neural networks and deliver clusters of topics and keywords that provide a unique visualization of what's most relevant to your business and customers.

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Rellify's content marketing platform then enables writers and editors to craft engaging content, using AI tools every step of the way. Or, if you prefer, you can create an online marketing campaign with a few clicks and generate content automatically. What used to take weeks can be done, thanks to AI, in minutes.

Are there different types of machine learning?

Machine learning is only as good as your data set. So depending on the type of data you’re using, as well as your goals, you can break machine learning down into three general categories: supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning.

Supervised learning

Supervised machine learning uses data sets that are well-labeled with clear input and output variables. The machines apply this data to predict the output of new data, often with the help of support vector machines for classification, regression analysis, and identifying outliers. In this model, you give machines input and output variables since you have a sense of what results to expect from the data.

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‍Facial recognition technology is a popular application of supervised learning. Companies like Apple or Facebook have trained machines to identify faces. When you take a new picture, thus adding to a database of millions of faces, the machines can predict the identity with accuracy.

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If you’re using unlabeled data, unsupervised machine learning is a better tool for validation of your data set. Unsupervised learning uses algorithms to identify unlabeled clusters of data.

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One practical use of unsupervised learning would be the recommendation engines for online shopping or music services. Algorithms can identify big patterns in the data and implement segmentation and categorization. For example, people who like watching "Star Wars" movies might also like "The Mandalorian," versus a Jane Austen period piece. (Although it's true that many people might enjoy both.) Unsupervised learning is used in your social media feeds and to generate personalized product recommendations when you shop online.

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Reinforcement learning

Reinforcement learning is a dynamic process that incorporates a trial-and-error approach to train machines. Engineers and data scientists use it when they need to make a decision point and have several options to choose from. A room-cleaning robot uses reinforcement learning because once it bumps into one obstacle, it can choose several different directions based on the environment. The data set (the room layout) might constantly change, causing the machine to constantly adjust its trajectory.

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The Learning to Run project from deepsense.ai in collaboration with Stanford University is a more complex example of reinforcement learning. They created a computer model that had to learn all of the nuanced motions of an active runner. The machine learning tools had to follow a sequence of dynamic events to create movement like jumping. The successful project could lead to the design of better prosthetic devices to help real people walk.

Neural networks and deep learning

Deep learning is one of the most talked-about machine learning applications. We won’t dive deep into the details here, but we'll cover a few basics so you can get started.

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‍Deep learning is considered scalable because it is not as dependent on human intervention and can tackle large data sets. It’s a type of supervised machine-learning algorithm that consists of neural networks designed to mimic the human brain.  The “deep” part of deep machine learning comes from the multiple layers of neural networks.

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These artificial neural networks are a means for reinforcement learning. Like other forms of machine learning, they receive data, recognize patterns, and predict the outputs for similar data. They have a layer that receives data, a layer for output data, and several other connected layers where computation occurs.

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The ethical implications of machine learning

The use of machine learning (ML) raises several ethical implications, including issues related to bias, privacy, transparency, accountability, and fairness. Addressing these concerns will further the responsible development and use of ML systems.

Bias

ML models can inherit biases present in the data they are trained on. This, unfortunately, can lead to unfair or discriminatory outcomes against certain demographic groups. To address bias:

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• Consider the potential impacts of ML systems on different demographic groups.

• Conduct thorough bias assessments on training data and model outputs.

• Employ techniques such as fairness-aware learning algorithms to counter biases.

• Promote diversity and inclusivity in the teams developing and validating ML systems.

• Engage with marginalized communities and stakeholders to understand their concerns and perspectives.

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Privacy

ML systems often process large amounts of sensitive data, raising concerns about privacy infringement. Techniques like these can help protect individuals' privacy:

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• Use robust data protection measures, including encryption and access controls.

• Restrict data collection and retention to only what is necessary for the ML task.

• Obtain informed consent from individuals before using their data.

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Transparency, explainability, and accountability

Many ML algorithms, such as deep neural networks, are often complicated. This makes it challenging to understand their decision-making process. Lack of transparency can lead to distrust and hinder accountability. To combat this:

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• Use interpretable ML models when possible, such as decision trees or linear models.

• Provide explanations for model predictions.

• Document the entire ML pipeline, including data sources, preprocessing steps, and model architecture.

• Define clear roles and responsibilities for stakeholders involved in development and deployment.

• Conduct regular audits and evaluations of ML systems to monitor performance and compliance with ethical guidelines.

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Rellify and machine learning

Rellify uses deep learning to comb through large sets of data from around the Internet. Then, it provides a custom content roadmap, generative AI tools, and monitoring capabilities so you can seamlessly create and refine content that will resonate with your customer base.

With Rellify's unique AI capabilities, you can create and implement a content marketing plan that will boost your SEO. That means you'll get more (relevant) web traffic, leads, and loyal customers. Still curious about how a custom Relliverse™ works? We'd be happy to give you a demo, free of charge! Contact a Rellify expert today to find out how our groundbreaking platform expertly uses machine learning to maximize the returns on your marketing efforts.

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About the author

Jayne Schultheis has been in the business of crafting and optimizing articles for five years and has seen Rellify change the game since its inception. With strategic research, a strong voice, and a sharp eye for detail, she's helped many Rellify customers connect with their target audiences. The evergreen content she writes helps companies achieve long-term gains in search results Her subject expertise and experience covers a wide range of topics, including tech, finance, food, family, travel, psychology, human resources, health, business, retail products, and education. If you're looking for a Rellify expert to wield a mighty pen (well, keyboard) and craft real, optimized content that will get great results, Jayne's your person.

By Jayne Schultheis - A successful content marketing strategy can help your company achieve its business goals. But how do you get started? Read on for eight steps to create a content marketing strategy that delivers results.

Why does your company need a content marketing strategy?

The simple answer is that an effective content marketing strategy delivers results. The benefits of content marketing include increased organic traffic, improved brand awareness, an engaged target audience, and improved authority and expertise in your industry. One 2017 report found that content marketing generates three times as many leads as outbound marketing but costs about 60% less.

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Digital marketing efforts have disrupted and outpaced traditional marketing. You can't build an impactful brand presence with a newsletter sent by snail mail. Instead, you need a marketing strategy that identifies and uses several content marketing channels. You might include SEO content on websites, content promotion on social media, email marketing campaigns, or all of the above.

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Amid the vast quantities of generic AI content, savvy marketers are moving towards a more robust content marketing strategy. Cranking out content that no one ever sees is a recipe for failure. Instead, AI can be used to determine the most effective way to both craft and distribute your content to be read by the right people. That is the way to gather leads and increase sales.

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‍The bottom line: a content marketing strategy can deliver solid results for less money than outbound marketing. That's why content marketers are investing a considerable amount of resources into these efforts.

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What are the essential elements of a content marketing strategy?

A successful content marketing strategy will incorporate these eight elements:

1. Know your mission, vision and values
2. Identify your target audience
3. Audit your existing content
4. Choose a content management platform
5. Establish appropriate KPIs
6. Create an editorial plan
7. Publish your work
8. Analyze your results

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Know your mission, vision, and values

You can’t begin to craft a successful content creation strategy, if you don’t know who you are and what your central mission is. When somebody asks you what your company does or what problem it solves, you should be ready with a clear, succinct answer. That will give your marketing backbone and character.

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If you’re a seasoned industry leader and you’re struggling to develop a content strategy, go back to basics and remember your company “why.” Look at your mission and values. Remind yourself of why you’re doing the work you do. Then make sure your entire content team catches that vision so they can create. content that resonates with your end user.

Identify your target audience

You can’t craft a compelling message if you don't know who you are trying to reach. Think about who your end user is and how they interact with your brand. You might have more than one target audience.

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Do competitive research to help form your strategy and find potential partnership opportunities. With Rellify's integrated AI capabilities, you can discover and analyze what your competitors are using to reach your target audience. We also will help you find gaps in their content that you can exploit. In the initial stages of topic ideation within a custom Relliverse™, our AI crawls the Internet in a targeted way — building a database of all the content surrounding your niche product/service and showing how it is resonating with online searchers.

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This type of research provides valuable information about what your target audience is looking for. It also can help you understand where they're most likely to encounter and positively interact with your content.

Audit your existing content

Before you embark on a new content strategy, you need to undergo a content audit on the assets you already have. Does this content line up with your goals? Is it appealing to your target audience? Is your content repurposed for channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google and direct mail — where your audience can find you? What’s working, and what’s not?

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‍Content audits typically break down into three distinct categories: the content itself, the placement of your content, and the audience fit (i.e., is your content reaching the people you want to in the way that you want to?)

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Which social media posts have performed well with your audience? Which blog posts are reaching potential customers through organic search? If you’ve done paid search, evaluate those metrics — what worked and what didn’t? You might find after a content audit that you should remove or repurpose underperforming articles.

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Your content audit should also include a technical SEO audit. That’s where you make sure your page speed is fast and performs well on mobile search and desktop.

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Rellify provides thorough audits of website content as a service for clients, providing insights and suggestions to help inform strategy. Not only do our experts look at technical SEO, they also can evaluate your content's effectiveness when it comes to the topic ideation and messaging itself. Once you know what's working and what's not working, it becomes much clearer how to shape your marketing strategy to drive sales.

Choose a content management platform

A content management platform can be an instrumental component in organizing and delivering content for any digital marketer. Here are three examples of content marketing platforms that can help you achieve great results:

• Atlassian (including Trello/Jira/Confluence). These platforms help simplify communication between team members, especially when scheduling posts, recapping meetings, or brainstorming new ideas.
• WordPress. The most widespread publishing tool. WordPress allows you to schedule, write, and publish articles. You can also add plug-ins for extra analytic data.
• Rellify. The first-ever content intelligence platform, Rellify helps users from the content ideation process all the way through analytics by combining the best attributes of human expertise and machine learning

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Set key performance indicators

Now, it’s time to figure out which key performance indicators (KPIs) really matter for your goals. Choose a few to focus on, like improving your return on investment (ROI), lowering your cost of acquisition for new users, or increasing your Google impressions and click-through rate.

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If you choose too many KPIs, you risk getting overwhelmed and not accomplishing anything. Or, if your goals are vague, like "making more money," you won't be able to interpret the results usefully.

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The first task when defining your KPIs is determining your baseline performance. That will give you a foundation for setting realistic goals and gauging the results. Remember, the KPIs for your KPIs is that they be achievable and measurable.

Create an editorial plan

The Rellify platform helps you organize your editorial plan with its scheduling feature. Our interactive calendar enables clear and efficient organization and movement of your content from its planning phases to publishing and monitoring.

Your editorial plan serves as the backbone for creating and distributing relevant content. It will help you:

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• Stay on track with publishing content regularly.
• Develop your marketing budget and stick to it.
• Measure your KPI.
• Avoid publishing too many articles on the same topics.

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Publishing editorial plan

If you plan on blogging long-form content, choose a few core topics you want to write about and determine how frequently you wish to post. This is where Rellify's topic ideation can be helpful. It will show you the most relevant topics for your target audience and categorize them appropriately.

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Social editorial plan

Once you have completed the editorial component of your content marketing strategy, you can start planning your social editorial calendar. If you’re selling a physical product, your blog articles will likely have strong visuals to be shared as social content, so they’ll probably be appropriate across all social channels. Look for user-generated content from people using your product and reshare them on visual platforms like Pinterest and Instagram. Pair your visual content with great copywriting or give a behind-the-scenes look at your company.

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Be creative and unafraid to switch things up with this part of your content marketing strategy.

Create and publish your work

The next part of your successful content marketing plan is to create the content.

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Rellify specializes in helping to write content that will engage readers and rank at or near the top of online searches. Start by implementing AI-assisted content ideation and keyword clustering within a custom Relliverse. That enables you to craft content that's exactly in line with the information your target audience is searching for. Our writing platform furnishes the tools that allow people to generate content with AI at the touch of a button or write it themselves with various AI-powered tools.

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Remember to use a Call to Action (CTA) in your articles. They are vital for increasing conversion rates. This can be as simple as “Buy Now!” or “Click to Chat!” To write a good CTA, start with exactly what you would like the consumer to do. This could be download, shop, subscribe, click, order, or something else. Be persuasive and create a sense of urgency. Making something a “limited time offer” can motivate potential customers to act right away. Your web design should make it easy for a consumer to respond. The website should make it obvious where to click or where to find the form you would like them to fill out.

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Don't be afraid of innovation. Create multimedia assets by incorporating video, quizzes, polls, infographics, and photographs. Mix up the forms of your content to include e-books, Q&As, how-tos, guest blogs, live chats, customer testimonials, success stories, case studies, and others. Creative marketing efforts can help you stand out from the competition. It doesn't have to be expensive, either. You can re-purpose content you already have.

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For example, rather than publishing this article and relevant graphics once on the website, we’ll share links on LinkedIn. One week we might share an infographic, another a quote, and another one might be a link to the full article. Publishing the same content in different ways across different channels is a great way to maximize its impact.

Analyze the results

What gets measured gets done, and considering the blood, sweat, and tears that go into high-quality content, you want to make sure it’s working. The analysis isn’t about eliminating failure but understanding what works, what doesn’t, and why.

You’ll have several approaches, depending on your content marketing plan. These may include:

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• Google Analytics. This tool will let you know how different blog posts and articles on your website are performing. Other tools might also be able to give you SERPs data, but Google Analytics tends to be the most accurate.
• Hubspot. This platform can provide you with lots of insights, depending on which features you’re using for your marketing strategy. Hubspot can give you data on article views or social media insights, if you’re using it to publish your content. It also provides robust information on email open and click-through rates.
• Rellify. Rellify is proud to offer our robust "Monitor" feature. Provide the appropriate URL for your new content and when it is indexed by Google, we’ll start monitoring — all within the Rellify platform.
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Monitoring results helps keep existing content relevant. Doing keyword research periodically can yield big dividends since the terms your customers use will change over time. Simply updating a post by refreshing the keywords can help keep it at the top of search pages and yield a more steady stream of high-quality leads to your website.

How can I improve my content marketing strategy?

Carefully review these eight steps to see which parts of your content marketing strategy seem to be working well and which parts need improvement.

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Unfortunately, you never quite finish improving your content marketing strategy. Sometimes Google will change a key algorithm and your traffic will unexpectedly plummet. New technology or social platforms might impact the way you disseminate content. Or you might find that your consumers’ preferences change.

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Whatever the case, no matter how outstanding your content marketing strategy is today, it might need tweaks tomorrow. Be open to staying on top of your messaging and the surrounding digital marketplace.

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Rellify your content marketing strategy

Keeping up with all of the necessary components of a content marketing strategy can be challenging, from content creation to planning to analysis. So if your content team needs help, be sure to contact the experts at Rellify. We combine the best of human expertise and machine learning to deliver a strong content marketing strategy and results for our clients. Rellify's groundbreaking Relliverse™ uses machine learning to provide a thorough and custom digital roadmap for achieving your content marketing goals. Interested in a demo? Contact one of the experts at Rellify today!

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As the digital world disrupts many formerly tried-and-true marketing channels, content marketing has become increasingly important. But what is it, exactly? And how can you incorporate various types of content into your overall marketing strategy?

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Read on for everything you need to know about content marketing. But first, let's start with the basics.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing encompasses two major components: content creation and the distribution of that content through various channels, like social media, emails, or websites. Pieces of content can include written, spoken, and visually produced materials that often support the goals of a company or nonprofit.

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‍Content marketers basically have the same overall goal: to produce quality information about their company and get it into the hands of current and potential clients. They want to create content, ideally create engaging content, that gets to the right people. So they create a strategic marketing approach to get this content out to guarantee profitable customer action.

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But the way that each content marketing team achieves that result might look significantly different. One content marketer might rely heavily on social media marketing incorporating user-generated content into their strategy. Another might depend on well-researched white papers that they will distribute through an email network.

The content marketing industry

The specifics of your content marketing plan don't really matter, and they'll probably evolve. Newer industry trends might also influence your content marketing strategy. But as long as you understand your message and create material about your message, other people receive, understand, and take action, you're doing it right.

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Nearly 90% of all marketing agencies have dedicated content marketing teams. So the content marketing world can be a pretty vast network of people. And given that most content marketers anticipate their budgets to increase this year, according to a 2021 study by the Content Marketing Institute, this type of marketing will continue to matter in the coming years.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text css=""]

What is the role of content marketing?

Content marketing efforts provide a meaningful way for brands to interact with their customers through various forms of content. Content ideas and actions will look different depending on the types of customers brands want to reach and where these users are in their customer journey. For example, an eye-catching social post might be ideal for attracting new customers, but it's probably not the type of content you want to use for more established customers who have been depending on your insights for years.

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The benefits of content marketing are pretty numerous, including increased brand awareness, a better understanding of your corporate goals and offerings, and information that compels the readers to take action.

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How do you do content marketing?

There's not necessarily a one-size-fits-all approach to content marketing. But no matter how you do it, there are five steps to help you master the basics of content marketing.

1. Know your business. You need to understand your product or business and determine what your overall goals might be.
2. Know your audience. Who are your potential clients, and how can you reach them?
3. Create the right marketing assets for that audience. You might need different assets and content types for various buyer personas.
4. Distribute those assets through the right channels. You've got to get your compelling content in the places your audience will be.
5. Analyze your results. What's working and what's not?

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It doesn't matter whether you're sending regular newsletters over email or cute reels on Instagram. If your target audience engages with your brand, you're doing it right!

What are some content marketing examples?

While blogs and articles are the most frequently discussed forms of content in "content marketing," content could encompass anything from infographics to videos or even podcasts.

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Here are a few of the most common forms of content marketing, all of which can be highly beneficial marketing tools as part of your overall content strategy. Especially if you're just starting, don't be afraid to try out several forms of content marketing to see what works for your brand and audience.

Blogs

These can be short or long and are a great interactive way for customers to interact with a new potential customer or faithful, loyal customers. Sometimes companies will use blogs to answer customer questions. Other times, they'll write evergreen content related to a critical issue the audience cares about.

Long-form content

You can describe anything over 1,000 words as "long-form content." This data often lives on blogs, articles, and white papers. Long-form content gives readers a more in-depth look at specific insights or goals a company has and has become increasingly important for search engine optimization. It's an excellent way for brands to showcase their unique insights and expertise.

A few tips for content marketing tips for written forms

No matter where you are in the blogging or writing process, here are a few tips to make sure your blogging efforts are effective content marketing for your brand and audience.

• Post consistently on topics related to your business that your audience cares about. You're better off posting a few quality blogs that are well-researched and engaging and posting once a week or so, than posting sub-par information.
• You can post educational content related to your subject area or brand to let your readers know your expertise.
• Optimize your blog for search engines. You want to make sure new users are learning about your blog.
• Your posts should address common questions your readers have regarding your product and industry.
• Aim for quality over quantity. Writing can be such an effective content marketing tool, but bad writing will cripple any content marketing campaign.

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Videos

Whether they're expert interviews or short animated explainer clips, video can be valuable content to have in your arsenal. Be smart about using video as part of your overall content marketing strategy. Video can be a compelling form of content marketing, but a poorly produced or conceived video can backfire. You don't have to invest in ridiculous editing equipment for high production quality, but your videos need to look good and make sense.

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When done well, video has the power to explain complex concepts or showcase products in ways that can be highly appealing and relatable to potential customers.

Infographics

These specific images with details or charts about the company can exist within other types of channels, like a blog or white paper. Other times, they'll stand independently as a post on a social media channel. But regardless of where you find an infographic, it's a powerful way to convey complex data in a simple format. It's also a tremendous business asset that you can place on several forms, from PowerPoint presentations to LinkedIn posts or even within a promotional video.

Content marketing channels

How do you let people know about all of your great content? Through one of many content marketing channels. Most effective content strategies will utilize several of these channels to achieve their business goals.

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If you're not sure where to start, set up a company website and social media account on platforms that are relevant to your business. That way, potential customers can and your content marketing materials online.

Website

Your website doesn't have to be fancy with many videos and graphics. If anything, those bells and whistles might actually slow down your site speed and detract from your overall content marketing work. But a simple and effective website, complete with sections discussing your company and vision, how people can reach you, and even including a blog with more informative pieces, can be an ideal content marketing channel.

Email campaigns

If you have the email addresses of loyal customers or even purchase email lists, you can send your digital marketing materials to that list. Use discretion when sending email and especially if you use a paid list. Many users only feel annoyed to receive an unwanted daily newsletter in their inbox from a brand they might never have heard of. On the other hand, loyal customers who have invested in your brand might really love special offers and announcements from your company.

Direct mail

This form of traditional marketing has been around for years and can be a very effective strategy for marketers. It involves sending letters, catalogs, coupons, or any written and visual content marketing materials to your targeted audience.

Social media

Whether you're sharing an infographic on Instagram, a short video on TikTok, or an article on LinkedIn, social media platforms offer many helpful ways of distributing your valuable content.

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They help you develop a strong relationship with your consumers since social posts tend to be more interactive than other content channels. Not only are customers engaging with your brand, but they're also interacting with each other and building a sense of community. If appropriate, you can also incorporate user-generated content into your social media post. It will give your content a more authentic feel.

Which social channels are the right ones for your business?

Clearly, the right content marketing forms on social media differ depending on the platform, audience, and marketing goals. A B2B financial company will probably have better success running a LinkedIn campaign with quality long-form content and infographics than it would from a campaign with silly TikTok videos trying too hard to be hip.

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When considering social media channels for content marketing, content marketers should first consider these questions.

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• What is the goal of my marketing campaign?
• Do I have a clearly defined audience, and what types of social media is that audience engaging with?
• What's the best fit for my audience?

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There's nothing wrong with trying out several different content marketing strategies. Just be sure you're measuring those results to see where you should spend time and what's not helping you get your message across.

Paid marketing campaigns

You can run a paid marketing campaign across any of these channels, and they can be a fantastic way to supplement your content marketing efforts. Whether you boost your blog articles on Facebook, promote your app in an app store, or sponsor an ad in a podcast, paid advertising campaigns can help to supplement your existing content marketing efforts.

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While these tactics can be effective, especially on search advertising, organic results almost always outperform paid search. That's not to say paid searches can't be extremely helpful at increasing your distribution, but the overwhelming majority of searchers click on the first organic link.

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What do you share for a paid campaign? Start by looking at what's already performing well among your loyal supporters. What worked on social? Which emails have high click-through rates? Then refine that and bring it to a broad audience through your paid campaign.

What is good content marketing?

Any content marketing that connects with your target audience counts as "good content marketing."But while several types of content marketing can be effective, quality content marketing efforts generally include the following.

1. Fresh content posted on a regular basis. It's not enough to write one blog post and hope it goes viral. Your brand and content should stay fresh in your prospective and existing customers' minds.
2. Incorporates editorial calendars. Don't just haphazardly add articles to your blog. Set aside some time each month to make a monthly content calendar that allows you to create relevant content across strategic topic areas.
3. Utilizes an effective email marketing strategy. When used strategically, email lists can be a fantastic way to reach your target audience.
4. Effective use of visuals. A picture is worth 1,000 words, and visual content can be an extremely effective marketing technique. Just remember to add relevant titles and labels to your photos for search engine optimization.
5. SEO-Optimized content. Organic search can be a wonderful way to get users to your site, and your content marketing strategy needs to consider technical elements of SEO that support your great writing and articles.
6. Evaluated consistently with analytics. There's no shortage of tools or analytical metrics for digital marketing efforts. Check out how many people are opening your emails, and which ones have a better open rate. Which piece of content is getting to the top of SERPs, and how are users responding after coming to your website? Are you getting strong conversions from inbound marketing efforts?

Extra content marketing resources

Creating content can be a struggle for even the most seasoned content marketers. Making consistent content that resonates with your target audience and has the highest reach across digital media channels can be even more challenging.

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But content marketing success is possible, especially if you have the right help! If you need additional resources to create high-quality content that gets seen on search engines and connects with your audience, give the experts at rellify a call. They combine the best of human knowledge with machine learning that's specifically tailored for your business so that you can take your content marketing efforts to the next level.

What should content teams focus on to see the results they're looking for? Alan Edgett, Founder and CEO of The Gig Agency, recently addressed this topic and others in his recent rellify webinar, "How to Use Data to Drive Your Content Marketing Performance.

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"After his initial presentation, Edgett held a Q&A session and discussed data tracking, AB testing, focus areas and best practices for content teams, and more! This transcript has been edited from the original video.

Stats that matter for content teams

What is the most important stat that people should be looking for [in long-form content] in terms of whether they're succeeding or failing in their content marketing efforts?

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Alan Edgett: If you can't easily repurpose and slice and dice your content, then in effect, you're creating more work for everybody else; your paid acquisition marketers have to make their own ad, and your SEO marketers may not be happy, etc. The ability to utilize one piece of content for the organization in multiple areas helps alleviate some of that pressure.

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But it depends on the primary goal. I would either focus on impact. Or, (if I was being judged on lead generation performance and I was the content marketer), I would look at some of those engagement metrics. For example, time spent, scroll rate, or trying to find keys for why or how or where my content was being impactful. If it's a video, it's a little more obvious because you get the viewing metrics. But I would focus on content that is performing well and engaging its audience.

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‍Finding the right strategy for content teams

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‍And again, it doesn't even have to be on-platform; it could be off-platform: if I take this video over to LinkedIn, does it get any engagement at all? Are there any likes or shares? Try to quickly sort through and try to figure out why a particular piece of content is getting more engagement than others, and then focus your efforts. That is one way to alleviate the burden of producing content. In digital marketing, we're all under the demands of, "I need to fill this entire content calendar." But the truth of the matter is, is we're trying to create a good content strategy, not just a high amount of content.

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Make sure that you are contributing to your goal and you're not just producing content for the sake of producing. I see a lot of people that have hundreds of blog posts, and they still rank poorly in SEO. That should not happen. So, what does that mean? You are not accomplishing your goal, and you need to revisit it.

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Quantity is not helping you, and you need to slow down and focus more. On the other hand, I see people all the time that produce landing pages that don't generate the lead. So again, if the goal of that content is lead generation, you need to learn why that landing page isn't working. Test, test, test - three, four, five, six, seven different versions - so that you can find one that works rather than just continuing to do what you've done.

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UTM tagging and source data

If UTMs (Urchin Tracking Modules) are being used to capture the original lead source, will UTM tagging on-site links overwrite the original source data?

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Alan Edgett: Yes. Generally, if your website's constructed in a certain way, the last UTM will probably be stored. I try not to do that. I think it is important knowledge to capture the UTMs where the traffic came from. Like Facebook - let's get all those UTMs and store them. Then if they go through internal processes that add UTMs, we'd like to store that in a separate area. So, that's just a little bit of configuration for your web, HubSpot, or CRM marketers to think about.

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The same phenomenon happens when users come from LinkedIn: they browse, they go away, then they Google you, then they come back to your site. Oftentimes in B2B, they'll fill out a form from Google, go away for two weeks, and go cold. You might resuscitate that lead with a LinkedIn ad, then they come back and fill out the form again. And usually, CRM/marketing automation programs always store that last UTM. But, that does not give credit to the first UTM that sourced them, so we like to try to store our UTMs in an array.

Avoiding content marketing pitfalls

What are some common pitfalls content marketers can fall into if they have a very lean content team, i.e., they're the only content person?

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Alan Edgett: Not knowing the goal or target audience of your content creation is probably the biggest problem. I see sometimes content marketers are told, "Hey, we need a newsletter." What is the goal of the newsletter? Is it re-engaging current users or getting conversions? Am I just trying to get engagement, or is it trying to lead gen a user who's not quite filled out a form, but they gave us their email? Where are they in the funnel? Those are all totally different newsletters.

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Try to define and choose your goal wisely because then you can choose your key performance indicators that go with it. I see a lot of content people who are advised to just do the best they can. Or maybe they're told, "Here are the ten topics that the CEO wants us to talk about." They don't know why, and they don't know how they're being judged. So they just go about producing these ten pieces of content (that takes them quite a long time). Then three months later, everyone yells at them. "We're not getting leads," and they weren't even told that they were supposed to be generating leads from that content.

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So, the biggest pitfall I see with a content team is they hurry up and produce without knowing why or what they're getting judged on. Make sure everyone agrees on the KPI and the judgment of that particular piece of content.

Competitor tips for content teams

If you want to look at your competition and say, "How are they doing in content marketing? What is working for them, and what isn't?" What are some basic things people can do?

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Alan Edgett: Participate in your competitors' social points of presence, whether it's Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. There is a lot to learn from what your competitors are doing in their social media marketing. If they're getting engagement and you're not getting engagement, start there. Potentially their topics are more interesting, or the way they're writing is more interesting. It could be that they're the largest established competitor, or they have a bigger audience. Try to sort through that.

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‍Analyze the competition

‍Draft off this and see which of their pieces are failing and which of their pieces are getting some engagement on the social side. Also, on the paid side, make sure you understand how your competitors are using their Google search ads. Understand what landing pages and what content they're driving into. Don't always just look at their main website because performance pages sometimes are different, and they're testing things over there. Identify where they like to test and what they're testing.

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A landing page does not survive the month if it sucks. So, if your competitors are still using a landing page multiple months in a row, either they're total idiots, or it's a good landing page, and you should learn from it. Especially if they're a bigger brand, it's probably working. I always look at competitive landing pages or even just the big boys in the industry of all industries. It doesn't matter what [industry] you are – go find the big players. Look at their landing pages and see what kind of taglines they're using, how they're describing their benefits, and pay attention to their user experience because you'll learn a lot.

Best analytic tools for content teams

Do you have any favorite analytics tools for AB testing? Are there any tips for doing it faster than normal?

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Alan Edgett: I do! If you have money, I like AB Tasty. If you don't have money, use Google Optimize. It's free, so you can't go wrong, and it's not a bad tool! If you have a lot of money, Optimize is fantastic, but AB Tasty is about half the cost and does just the job. For testing, keep it simple. People forget all the time that testing takes time and traffic. If you're testing your home page and your home page gets fifty thousand visitors a month or so, you can do a test or two every week. But if you're testing a lower-level blog page that gets three hundred visitors in a month, you can do one test every two months. Be realistic on what you're going to test, and don't test multiple things on a page.

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Understand the difference between multivariate testing and AB testing. If you're going to do AB testing, you're at a high level; you're trying to determine different macro approaches. "Does macro approach A work better than macro approach B?" You are not able to determine whether the single line of text was better because you're trying to keep it at a high level. For example, I've got two landing pages competing with my Medicare client: one with a doctor on it and a whole bunch of text, and one with a regular consumer. I'm not judging it on the lower-level pieces of text. To do that, I would need to do a multivariate test. But AB is important here. And so, what is my hypothesis? "Doctor" is better than "consumer." People trust the doctor.

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‍A/B testingIt's that kind of high-level learning. Once you get through the test, of course, now you can take "doctor." Put her on all the pages, and test the next thing, the tagline. And so that's how you keep the variables simple so that you don't get confused. You do not want to try to test the new tagline with the doctor and a different tagline with a consumer. That violates the Google principle, right?

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You don't know which of those two was pulling. Keep your test simple and high-level if you're doing AB. If you have a lot of traffic and you can get over into multivariate with a tool like AB Tasty or Google Optimize, then you can set up cells where you are testing different taglines and different pictures, all at the same time and it will sort that out for you. Understand how complex you're capable of going based on what level of traffic and kind of what tools you have.

What's a good starting point for content teams?

Take someone that's just getting started. Let's say they've been focused on the content side of things and not the data side of things, and now they want to balance it out and focus on the analytics data a little bit more. Where is the best place to start?

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Alan Edgett: I would start with your target audience and their persona; Where does your persona want to consume your content? Make sure your content is there. How does that persona want to consume your content? Video, text, long-form vs. short-form content? What marketing channels is your target audience on? For starters, try to figure out where your persona would like to engage with you. Then look into how they would like to engage with you and steal from your competitors' knowledge. See what they're doing because they might already know the answer. That might start to help you start to narrow down where and how best to serve them the best customer experience with relevance.

More resources for content teams

As the most successful content teams know, you don't have to go it alone. If you need more assistance crafting your content strategy, be sure to contact the experts at Rellify. They have lots of experience helping content teams across various industries create meaningful content that connects with the target audience.

By Dan Duke – Understanding natural language processing and the way it informs machine learning can dramatically improve your content marketing efforts. Read on to learn all about this tool and how it can help drive a greater audience to your company.

What is Natural Language Processing?

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a tool that uses computer science, AI concepts, linguistics, and data to allow computers to understand human language – both written and verbal. It converts written or spoken words into data and makes it possible for devices to communicate with each other.

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These connected devices have changed our world – think of the "smart home," for example – allowing us to use voice-based or text-based solutions (from our phones, typically) to complete actions from a distance, whether that's turning on the lights, adding to your grocery list, or setting the temperature on the hot tub. Verbal command capability and chatbots (query management) have joined the scene, along with climate control devices (thermostats) and home monitoring devices (security systems).

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We may not be aware that the response to our inquiry is generated by an algorithm, the driving force behind NLP, but it often is. NLP offers the ability to program computers to analyze vast amounts of data from natural language. It allows us to use data from chatbots, social media posts, documents, and website pages. This tool is finding its way into marketing as well, and that’s what we’re going to discuss.

The importance of natural language processing

NLP allows machines to understand human language through complex comprehension. It bridges the human-to-machine gap by using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to process text and the spoken word. It’s a form of AI that manipulates and interprets human language using computational linguistics (the parsing out of parts of speech and words into data).

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NLP consists of two branches. First is Natural Language Understanding (NLU). This extracts the meanings of words by studying the relationships between them. Then, Natural Language Generation (NLG) transforms data into understandable language, writing sentences and even paragraphs that are appropriate, well-constructed, and often personalized.

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NLP allows computers to create responses for chatbots and virtual assistants, write subject lines for emails, and even compose advertising copy and marketing tools. Here’s how to think about it: NLU focuses on your computer’s ability to read and listen (speech-to-text processing), and NLG allows it to write and speak (text-to-speech). Both are part of NLP.

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NLP is everywhere:

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• Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs) answer customer questions.
• Voice assistants like Siri respond to commands.
• Marketers use it to create custom content, personalize or push specific promotions, and personalize offerings to the taste of a particular shopper.
• Auto-complete and auto-correct functions in texting help you write and sometimes drive you nuts.
• Machine translation tools clue you into words from other languages.

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Even brick-and-mortar stores can take advantage by customizing individual stores’ landing pages to show local hours of operation, addresses, directions, and additional information.

How does NLP work?

How in the world can a machine understand the spoken or written word? Well, it’s all about linguistic analysis. Natural language processing allows a computer to translate spoken or written words into data, including all of our colloquialisms, regionalisms, misspellings, and abbreviations. It’s astonishing, really, that this can be done, given all of our personalizations of speech. This is where computational linguistics comes into play. Programs can break down any text into four parts: tokens, semantic information, syntactic information, and context information. The computer deals with each piece separately.

Tokenization

This is where it all starts. Segmentation is the first step of breaking down human language into units that a computer can understand. Tokens are typically words, subwords, or characters. Tokenization is a fundamental pre-processing step, enabling computers to understand and analyze human language.

Semantic information

This is the actual meaning of a specific word.  You can interpret a sentence like “He is enjoying the date” in different ways, depending on the meaning of “date.” Is the gentleman out on the town with a friend or chewing fruit from a palm tree? Knowing which form of the word “date” to use — knowing the relevant definition in this specific instance — is critical in understanding the meaning of that sentence.

Syntax information

This refers to the sentence structure. We’ve moved from the word level to the phrase level. “Sarah died peacefully with her family on September 4.” Oh my – how many people died?  The whole family, or just Sarah? That’s an important distinction! How can a computer figure that out?

Context information

The relationship of words, phrases, or sentences to each other is the key here. How should it be understood if someone says, “Man, that’s hot!” Is the item’s temperature high? Or is the speaker describing something fashionable or something to be desired? So how can a machine be taught to analyze these distinctions? It’s not hard to teach a system to understand the basic rules and patterns of a language — that’s the science of linguistic computation. It just takes a lot of time. And (as we saw in the “hot” example above), the rules can’t always keep up with the evolution and revisions of language.

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The earliest text-mining systems were based entirely on patterns and rules, but as NLP and machine learning evolved, hybrid machine learning grew. Hybrid machine learning uses those same rules and patterns in both supervised and unsupervised models, and there are several different versions, using low-, mid-, and high-level text functioning. At the low level are the first processes that consider any input text. They turn the unstructured text into data. At the middle level are the text analytics that extract the content (Who’s speaking? What’s being said? What is being talked about?). At the high level is the sentiment analysis.

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As we’ve seen, the meanings of words change with the speaker’s intent and the listener’s expectations.  Machine learning and NLP offer solid solutions for analyzing words, but each system must be tuned or trained to match the user’s needs.

Growing from GPT-3 to GPT-4

OpenAI, an AI research and deployment company, has made significant advancements in the field. Its GPT-1 and GPT-2, the first and second versions of the Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, were the original forays. GPT-3 represented a giant leap and is still available for free. It can:

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• Use internet data to generate text.
• Take a small bit of input text and generate a large amount of sophisticated machine-generated text.
• Analyze and input a piece of language and predict what the writer or speaker meant to infer.

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GPT-3 can be trained, for example, to compose tweets or press releases or even computer code. GPT-3 uses (NLG) to create easily understood responses. Chatbots often use this. Some businesses use it to develop copy for headlines, scripts, and summarizations. And some online content marketing services use it to generate keywords automatically. GPT-3 has brought deep learning, a form of machine learning, and other artificial intelligence tools into everyday use, fueling social media copywriting and content generation.

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GPT-4, available with a monthly subscription, has further broadened and strengthened the use of NLP. This version is not “just a language model.” It also can consider the visual world by including images as an additional input type. This means that Chat GPT-4 can generate text outputs based on combined text and image inputs.

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The implications of this shift are substantial. Chat GPT-4 can generate captions for images, classify visible elements within images, and even analyze the content of images.

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Another one of the most significant distinctions between GPT 4 is that it's both more creative and reliable. It also can respond accurately to more nuanced prompting, and its multilingual capabilities make it more versatile and inclusive.

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It's also able to process text on a much larger scale. Chat GPT-3 had a maximum context length of 4,096 tokens, while the Chat GPT-4-32K variant can handle 32,768 tokens.

Content marketing and NLP

Natural language processing can be a vital component of a content marketing plan, given its many uses. Highlights include:

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• Analyzing content for sentiment
• Helping to determine which keywords will be most relevant
• Writing product descriptions for digital commerce sites
• Helping to develop a marketing strategy by assessing the content of a particular client or by performing a content audit
• Refining chatbot functions to enable the gathering of solid leads.

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And it is a growing science. A Fortune Business Insights report estimates that the value of the global NLP market will grow from $29.71 billion in 2024 to $158.04 billion in 2032.

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‍The e-commerce company Alibaba’s digital marketing wing (Alimama) offers an AI-powered tool for copywriting that uses NLP from millions of language samples to generate copy. The tool is easy to use. An advertiser inserts a link to a product page and clicks the button (Produce Smart Copy) to receive content ideas. The data scientists at Alimama report that the system can produce up to 20,000 lines of copy per second.

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The ability to "Produce Smart Copy" — across a variety of ad formats for posters, web banners, headlines, and product pages — can make copywriting more efficient. Brands and companies using the service can even decide the tone of their copy. Alimama reports that users can choose between long or short, “promotional, fun, poetic, or heartwarming” pieces of copy. Here are some other ways that you can use AI tools to strengthen your business’ reach:

Content sentiment and content analysis

How can a computer determine a customer’s sentiment? Well, it’s a two-pronged process that uses AI for both content analysis and sentiment analysis.

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‍Content analysis is the objective and quantitative assessment of a text-based, visual, or aural message. Researchers analyze each message scientifically.

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‍Sentiment analysis is the science of interpreting and classifying a user’s emotions about a specific brand, product, or service by using text analysis. Generally, the analysis determines whether the sentiment is positive, negative, or neutral.

The power of the internet and its reach into our lives has offered a vast amount of analyzable content gleaned from blogs, social media, YouTube, and websites. The software can recognize patterns without human input.

Determine your keywords

For the strongest search engine optimization (SEO), the right keywords are essential. NLP tools, like the ones Rellify uses, can help you choose keywords that increase your site’s traffic and attract just the right audience — readers who will turn into leads and customers.

Develop your content marketing strategy

Using NLP-based AI tools, you can perform a content audit to review all of the content on your site.  Repeat this practice regularly — every two months or so — to ensure that your content is up-to-date. Review your posts on social media and web pages to determine how your target audience perceives your customer service.

Use a lead-generator chatbot

Familiarize yourself with this NLP/NLG tool; you may find that it’s a helpful utility. For example, a chatbot can help you identify potential prospects and garner their interest in your products or services by asking questions, conducting surveys, and offering quizzes.  When a user visits your site, the bot can learn why. Some businesses use the information users give to chatbots to complement their email efforts, strengthen the customer experience, and qualify leads by asking specific questions or offering specific tools, all of which can increase their return on investment (ROI).

Text classification

Text classification, in the context of NLP, refers to the task of automatically categorizing text documents or phrases into predefined categories or classes. This type of is technique used in NLP applications, including:

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• Sentiment analysis
• Spam detection
• Content tagging
• Topic categorization

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All of these are valuable use cases, but let's take a closer at a specific type of text classification employed by NLPs — topic categorization.

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Rule-based classification in topic categorization

This can be a super helpful tool, especially if your business deals with large volumes of data that would take a human much longer to comb through.

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Rule-based techniques use a set of manually constructed language rules to categorize text into groups. These rules tell the system to classify text into a particular category based on the content of a text by using semantically relevant text elements. An antecedent or pattern and a projected category make up each rule.

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For example, imagine you have tons of new articles, and your goal is to assign them to relevant categories such as Parenting, Health, School, etc.

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With a rule-based classification system, you will do a human review of a couple of documents to come up with linguistic rules like this one:

• If the document contains words such as doctor, wellness, remedies, or medicine, it belongs to the Health group (class).

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Rule-based systems can be refined over time and are understandable to humans. However, there are certain drawbacks to this strategy.

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These systems, to begin with, demand in-depth expertise in the field. They take a lot of time since creating rules for a complicated system can be difficult and frequently requires extensive study and testing.

The Power of Natural Language Processing

A digital transformation is taking place on a global scale, and you can use these NLP tools to strengthen your bottom line. Rellify seamlessly uses NLP and other Artificial Intelligence tools within its platform, allowing you to find topics and keywords that will resonate best with your target audience. Our AI capabilities can then help you write content that will naturally rank well on search engines. With an exclusive and custom Relliverse™, we use our NLP tools to crawl huge volumes of data specific to you, your competitors, and your market. Through machine learning and NLP, we'll help you create your own content or generate it automatically. The platform even uses AI to provide helpful guidance in SEO. Our "R-score" changes in real time as you write and edit to help you create relevant content.

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Wondering how it all works? Schedule a consultation or demo with a Rellify expert, free of charge, and find out exactly how Rellify can supercharge your content marketing efforts.

By Dan Duke — Let’s face it; search engine optimization has a language all its own. Understanding and using these SEO terms effectively, however, empowers businesses to create content that connects with potential clients and customers.

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So how can you unlock this unique vocabulary and recharge your online content marketing? In this guide, we'll review the terms, their meanings, and the power of the tools and practices they describe. We'll focus on essential SEO terms that can lead to a successful content strategy.

Essential SEO terms

Keywords

Keywords are the words or phrases that people type into a search engine to find what they are looking for. (Or, for voice search, the words they speak into a smartphone or smart speaker.) If a website wants to boost traffic, it needs to use the right keywords in the right spots in its content. Some examples of where to place them are:

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• Early in the text, to indicate the relevance of the content.
• The meta description, to give users a quick summary.
• The page title and headings, to help readers and search engines quickly assess the content.
• Any alt text, which is placed with photos to describe what they show for the benefit of sight-impaired users as well as search engines.

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Keywords are essential to SEO strategy because they signal to search engines that the content will address a searcher’s question. Content marketers employ a variation called long-tail keywords. These are phrases people use when searching for specific information. Long-tail keywords have lower search volume, but the searchers using them tend to be more intent on taking action based on the search results.

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Content marketing managers, editors, and writers strive to create keyword-rich content that will be relevant in search engine algorithms. They must not overdo it, however.

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A blog post with too much keyword density might be flagged as keyword stuffing or spamming and can result in punishment by Google or lower rankings in Google SERPs. This is an example of black hat SEO.

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Thorough keyword research will identify a focus keyword (possibly a long-tail keyword), keyword phrases, keyword questions, and a list of must-have keywords. Using platforms and services such as Rellify helps a business post SEO-friendly content that will rank high in organic search results.

SERPs

A Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) is what appears on your screen when you do an online search. On Google, the top of the page might offer a paid ad, sponsored content, or a featured snippet. These SERP features are the search engine’s attempt to answer the query before the searcher clicks into a web page. Common features are:

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• Knowledge cards. A box that answers a simple question, such as “Who won the Super Bowl in 1979?”
• Featured snippets. An excerpt from one of the top organic results that succinctly answers a query.
• Shopping results. A roundup of paid ads.
• People also asked. A list of questions related to the query with organic links to answers.

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The first organic search result — the content with the best ranking — shows a web page that should best answer the user's question. It also gets the most clicks. One of the main goals of content creation is to claim one of the first three spots for the right keywords. About 75% of all clicks go to the top three results. Web pages that appear on the second page or beyond receive relatively few clicks, if any.

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That’s why relevance is so important in creating content.

Ranking factors

Ranking factors are the criteria applied by search engines when indexing web pages to decide where a page will fall in the SERPs. Google uses algorithms, which are complex formulas or sets of rules, to crawl web pages. These crawlers, or bots, constantly go from site to site, and revisit sites, using algorithms to analyze websites and decide which ones provide relevant content.

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Google doesn't provide a comprehensive list of the ranking factors built into its algorithms. SEO experts agree, however, that ranking factors include the quality of content, backlinks, user friendliness, technical SEO, mobile optimization, social media links, and keyword optimization.

One of the best things you can focus on with your content strategy is having relevant content that helps answer searchers’ questions and stands the test of time. And remember, Google and other search engines are constantly updating their algorithms, which affects the ranking factors. This is why it is good to stay in tune with future-facing SEO tools and update content regularly.

Meta description

A meta description summarizes a web page’s content in one or two sentences — about the length of a tweet. It usually appears on SERPs along with the URL and the title.

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It's not a direct ranking factor, but a well-crafted meta description can improve the chances that someone will click on the link to your web page. That, in turn, can boost your rankings. Google might also use a meta description as a featured snippet, which also will boost your traffic. These summarizations are marked with HTML coding to make it easy for web crawlers to find and assess them.

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A content marketer can improve the click-through rate by writing a meta description that:

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• Includes keywords. Using the focus keyword at the beginning of the text helps, too.
• Uses active, engaging language.
• Emphasizes the relevance of the content.

User experience

User experience, or UX, refers to users’ interactions and impressions during their time on a web page. This is an element of on-page SEO.

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Website developers must keep this in mind, because Google certainly does. Some crucial factors when creating a quality user experience are:

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• Easy-to-read text
• Clear call-to-action buttons or designs
• High-quality images and graphics
• Pages that load quickly
• A home page that's easy to navigate
• A mobile-first website

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A website owner should dig deep into the mindset of its target customers when considering what bells and whistles — if any — to include on a site.

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A satisfying user experience can have long-term positive effects on the success of a website in search results. Essential signals that indicate a positive user experience are click-through rate, visit duration, return-to-SERP rate, and the highly coveted conversion rate.

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You don’t want a clunky website to overshadow your great content. Instead, your great work should make the audience feel welcomed and comfortable.

On-page SEO

We just mention page speed as part of a good user experience. That's also an element of on-page SEO — the optimization of individual web pages to improve their search engine rankings and attract the target audience. It also involves things like:

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• Relevant, authoritative content
• Keyword usage
• Meta tags
• Alt tags
• Internal linking  

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Its effectiveness can be measured through metrics such as keyword rankings, organic traffic, and  the bounce rate — the percentage of visitors who leave the site after viewing just one page.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO involves factors outside of the website itself that affect its search engine rankings. It primarily focuses on building high-quality backlinks (also called inbound links) from other reputable sites. When web crawlers see that reputable sites link to pages on your site, it gives you more credibility for providing good answers. Social media marketing and online brand mentions are other important factors. The effectiveness of off-page SEO can be measured through metrics like link building, domain authority, referral traffic, and social signals, which collectively indicate the website’s credibility and popularity on the internet.

Local SEO

Local SEO is part of off-page SEO. It focuses on search results for location-specific queries, helping businesses attract customers from their geographic area. It involves strategies like optimizing Google My Business listings, using local keywords, and acquiring customer reviews. How do you measure the effectiveness of local SEO? Through metrics such as local search rankings, online reviews and ratings, local citation volume, and the amount of traffic from local searches.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to the optimization of a website’s infrastructure to enable search engines to crawl and index it effectively, boosting overall performance and user experience. Key elements include:

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• Configuring the robots.txt file to guide search engine bots.
• Creating and submitting an XML sitemap to outline the website’s structure.
• Implementing canonical tags to avoid duplicate content issues.
• Setting up 301 redirects to the primary version of a given URL. If, for example, your preferred version is https://www.abc.com, any other versions should 301 redirect to that version.
• Migrating your website to HTTPS protocol. Hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS) protects your visitors’ data in the exchange between their web browser and your website. 
• Using structured data to give bots information about your pages and their content. One of the most common types of structured data is called schema markup.

Domain authority

Domain authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz, a provider of SEO tools. It indicates how likely a website is to rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). A Domain Authority score can range from 1 to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank. For example, Wikipedia.org has a domain authority of 94 and Facebook.com is scored at 96.

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In general terms, it is an assessment of the overall authority and trustworthiness of a domain. It's heavily influenced by backlinks. However, things like age, history, formatting, and quality of content count, too.

SEO tools

Dozens of web analytics tools are available. Many of them have a free, beginner's level. Look for the right balance of price, features, and usability. Here are a few examples:

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• Ahrefs. A comprehensive SEO toolset that includes features such as site audits, keyword research, backlink analysis, and rank tracking.
• SEMrush. Another all-in-one website analytics tool that offers features like keyword research, competitor analysis, site audits, rank tracking, backlink analysis and content optimization.
• Google Search Console. A free tool provided by Google that helps monitor and maintain your site’s presence in Google Search results. Its dashboard provides insights into search volume, indexing status, and keyword performance.
• Google Analytics. While primarily a web analytics tool, Google Analytics offers valuable insights for SEO, including organic search traffic analytics, user behavior data, and conversion tracking.

Integrate more SEO terms into your strategy

SEO covers multitudes of terms and tactics. Some businesses find it overwhelming to keep up. To make the most of your marketing resources, you can rely on Rellify.

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We remove the guesswork from content creation and enable you to decide what topics to cover by furnishing you with a Relliverse™. Your custom-AI subject-matter expert is generated by deep machine learning that's attuned to your business sector and target audience.

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And you can use our detailed AI guidance to optimize your content for search engine results. That, along with our built-in monitoring dashboard, means you never miss an opportunity to improve your content.

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Curious about how Rellify can revolutionize your content strategy, production, and monitoring? Schedule a free demo with one of our experts today!

Would you believe us if we said NLP, NLU, and NLG are already a part of your daily life and probably part of your business as well?

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These acronyms stand for "natural language processing," "natural language understanding," and "natural language generation," respectively, and they're all used within the context of AI (Artificial Intelligence) technology that you encounter daily.

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These processes are used everywhere: in the results of your online searches, in voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, and in chatbot conversations that offer a personal assistant to help answer questions. And it’s a strong ally for businesses that need to respond to a variety of customers, all at once, with personalized information.

What is natural language processing?

Natural language processing (NLP) is a branch of AI that focuses on enabling computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language in a way that is both natural and meaningful. NLP involves the interaction between computers and humans using natural language. It encompasses a wide range of tasks, including:

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1. Text understanding. This involves tasks such as parsing, sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, and text classification. The goal is to extract meaning from text data.
2. Text generation. NLP can also be used to generate human-like text, such as in chatbots, language translation, and summarization systems.
3. Speech recognition. NLP techniques are applied to convert spoken language into text, enabling systems like virtual assistants to understand and respond to spoken commands.
4. Language translation. NLP is used extensively in machine translation systems, allowing the translation of text from one language to another.
5. Question answering. NLP techniques are applied to understand questions posed in natural language and provide accurate answers from a given dataset or knowledge base.

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NLP systems typically involve techniques from computational linguistics, machine learning, and deep learning, among other disciplines. These systems learn from large amounts of annotated data and are trained to perform specific tasks related to understanding and generating natural language.

What is natural language understanding?

Natural language understanding (NLU) is a subfield of NLP that focuses on the comprehension of human language by computers. While NLP broadly covers the entire spectrum of tasks related to processing natural language, NLU specifically deals with the understanding aspect.

Here's a breakdown of what AI text analysis with NLU involves:

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• Semantic understanding. NLU is used to extract meaning from text or speech. This includes tasks such as identifying entities (people, places, organizations), recognizing relationships between entities, understanding sentiment, and grasping the overall context of a piece of text.
• Syntactic analysis. NLU involves analyzing the structure of sentences to understand the relationships between words, phrases, and clauses. This includes tasks such as parsing sentences to identify grammatical structure, understanding word order, and recognizing parts of speech.
• Pragmatic understanding. NLU considers the pragmatic aspects of language, such as understanding implied meaning, recognizing metaphors, and interpreting context-dependent language.
• Disambiguation. NLU systems must be able to recognize and resolve ambiguities in language. This includes clarifying between words with multiple meanings, interpreting pronouns correctly, and understanding the intended meaning of ambiguous phrases.
• Contextual understanding. These systems aim to understand language in context. This involves considering the broader context of a conversation or document to accurately interpret meaning and make informed decisions.

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NLU is a crucial component of many applications, including virtual AI assistants, chatbots, sentiment analysis systems, machine translation, and information retrieval systems. This is the type of technology that would be valuable to a college professor interested in using an AI content detector tool to scan students' work. It's looking for patterns in language that indicate a student has used an AI generator to instantly produce an essay they waited until 11:30 p.m. to start.

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By enabling computers to understand human language at a deeper level, NLU systems can provide more natural and effective interactions between humans and machines, and even help combat AI misuse.

What is natural language generation?

Natural language generation (NLG) is another key aspect of NLP, focusing on the generation of human-like text or speech by computers. Unlike NLU, which involves extracting meaning from human language, NLG involves the generation of language output.

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Here's a look at what NLG entails:

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• Content planning. NLG systems typically start by planning the content they need to generate. This may involve selecting relevant information from a database, organizing the information into a coherent structure, and determining the main points to convey in the generated text.
• Text structuring. NLG systems then structure the generated text according to linguistic conventions. This involves organizing sentences and paragraphs in a logical order, providing coherence and cohesion, and applying appropriate style.
• Linguistic realization. NLG systems convert the planned content into natural language text or speech. This involves selecting words and phrases, inflecting verbs, conjugating nouns, and applying grammatical rules to generate grammatically correct and fluent output.
• Stylistic variation. NLG systems may also incorporate stylistic variation to produce text with different tones, registers, or styles.
• Personalization. Some NLG systems can personalize generated content based on individual preferences or characteristics. This may involve incorporating user-specific information, adapting the language to match the user's profile, or tailoring the content to suit the user's needs or interests. For example, they may generate formal language for in-house business memos, conversational language for chatbots, or persuasive language for marketing materials.

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But how can you best make use of these new tools?

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What are some examples of natural language generation?

NLG has plenty of applications, including:

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• automated report generation
• automated chatbots
• chats with virtual assistants
• content generation for websites and marketing materials
• language translation
• accessibility tools for generating alternative formats of text or speech.

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By enabling computers to generate human-like language, NLG systems can automate the creation of content, streamline communication processes, and enhance user experiences in human-computer interaction

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When Siri, Alexa, or Cortana answer your questions, they’re using Natural Language Generation and other programming to translate text into a spoken form.

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When “Sam, your personal assistant” responds to your written query (perhaps as you’re waiting for a live person to respond), the company's software is using chatbot technology to interpret what you have typed and then to respond with an appropriate message through NLG technology. The software searches for keywords in your questions, and then uses specific applications to generate pre-written answers based on the frequency of their usage.

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That’s a lot to consider, sure, but there’s an easy way to understand the distinctions between these various forms of AI. It’s so much more than Robotic Processing Automation, a form of business process automation technology used to do repetitive, low-value work.

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Thanks to the data scientists who’ve done all the research and much of the work for us, NLG is revolutionary for marketers hoping to personalize responses using natural language to clients.

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You may have heard of (or used) one of the most prolific generators of AI content, ChatGPT. OpenAI, a San Francisco-based research lab, created GPT-4, the latest version. The most sophisticated NLG model, GPT-4, or Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4, can write poetry, prose, and even computer coding that is hard to distinguish from that created by humans. The fourth version of this AI tool is 10 times more advanced than GPT-3. It has huge improvements in data processing speed, language comprehension, and its ability to process visual and audio input.

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How can businesses use NLP, NLU, and NLG for marketing?

We are likely to see more and more Natural Language Processing as AI technology is integrated into every aspect of marketing and business. Businesses in many sectors benefit from the sophistication that NLP, NLU, and NLG allow them to offer clients and customers:

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NLP in content marketing

This is one of Rellify's specialties. Its state-of-the-art platform uses NLP in all three of these aspects of your content pipeline, ensuring the best and most efficient use of this technology.

1. Competitive analysis. NLP can analyze competitors' content to identify gaps, uncover emerging trends, and benchmark performance. This insight can inform content strategy and help businesses differentiate their offerings.
2. Content optimization. NLP systems can optimize content for search engines by analyzing keyword usage, readability, and semantic relevance. This includes tasks such as keyword extraction, entity recognition, and sentiment analysis to ensure that content aligns with SEO best practices.
3. Content creation. NLP can assist in generating content ideas by analyzing trending topics, keyword research, and competitor analysis. It can also automate tasks such as content summarization, topic clustering, and content curation, helping marketers identify relevant content opportunities.

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NLU in content marketing

This branch of NLP focuses on the nuances of understanding human language.

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1. Audience understanding. NLU enables marketers to better understand their target audience by analyzing social media conversations, customer feedback, and online reviews. By understanding audience sentiments, preferences, and pain points, marketers can create more relevant and engaging content.
2. Content personalization. NLU techniques can personalize content for different audience segments based on their interests, demographics, and behavior. This includes dynamically generating content variations, such as email subject lines, article headlines, and product recommendations, to resonate with specific audiences.
3. Content distribution. NLU can optimize content distribution strategies by analyzing audience engagement metrics and identifying the most effective channels and timing for content delivery. This helps marketers reach their target audience more effectively and maximize the impact of their content.

NLG in content marketing

This is the aspect of NLP we're most familiar with — the conversational chatbots and ChatGPTs. But it's so much more than just a fun tool, it's a game-changer for online marketing.

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1. Content generation. NLG can automate the creation of various content formats, including blog posts, articles, social media posts, and product descriptions. Marketers can use NLG to scale content production, generate content variations, and maintain consistency across channels.
2. Email marketing. NLG can personalize email marketing campaigns by generating personalized email subject lines, body copy, and product recommendations. This helps marketers increase open rates, click-through rates, and conversions by delivering more relevant and engaging content to subscribers.
3. Content localization. NLG can assist in translating and localizing content for different markets and languages. By generating localized versions of content, marketers can expand their reach and connect with global audiences more effectively.

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By leveraging NLP, NLU, and NLG in content marketing, businesses can create more impactful content, better understand their audience, and drive engagement and conversions across various digital channels.

Put NLP, NLU, and NLG to work for your content marketing

Rellify has strategically leveraged these types of AI within all aspects of the content marketing pipeline, from keyword and topic research to content generation and monitoring. With the latest offering — a custom Relliverse, you can use NLP to crawl large volumes of content throughout the web, and use its expertise to find topics and keywords that best match your target customers' niche search engine queries. Then, you'll be ready to knock your competition out of the water with relevant, optimized, and well-written (or generated) content.

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Contact a Rellify expert today to find out how it uses Intelligence Augmentation, machine learning, and NLP to create uniquely optimized content that naturally ranks high in search engine results. We'll even give you a free demo of the platform and the unparalleled capabilities of a custom Relliverse. What are you waiting for? Revolutionize your content strategy and processes today!