The world of digital marketing is vast and ever-changing. Every day, new content filled with insights on how to create strategies, improve performance, tap into Google’s algorithm, and keep up with social media trends is published for our viewing pleasure. But with so many new things for our minds to consume, how do we stay in the loop?
As a group of digital marketers, my team and I thought the same thing: “If only we had a summary of interesting topics and takeaways from other experts to save time researching the industry…” And then we decided to do it ourselves.
Get ready to jump into some highlights from interesting articles covering a myriad of topics in the digital sphere each month! I’ll be presenting the main ideas from each blog and then will share any comments, questions, and concerns I might have. Without further ado, here’s January’s digital marketing round-up.
1. How to Improve Organic Clickthrough for Your Content from Moz
Ann Smarty, who works at Moz, outlines several methods for controlling the way Google presents your site in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). As results pages are “becoming more diverse and interactive,” elements like snippets (search, structured, and rich), URL paths, titles, descriptions, images, and more are incorporated into making your content stand out among the competition. Optimizing for these helps ensure that no matter how Google decides to format results, you will have the necessary tools to entice users to click through. Overall, I enjoyed Smarty’s take on improving organic CTR and will definitely be trying out some of her recommendations!
2. Why Entity Search Is Necessary for SEO Success from Search Engine Land
As Google’s algorithm grows and evolves to produce more accurate SERPs, it’s important to optimize content for entity search by “integrating verified semantic elements into your web infrastructure, eliminating ambiguous language in your content, and engaging searcher interests in context” as noted by Corey Patterson. These steps help Google get a full picture of exactly what your content is conveying and fill in gaps. Personally, I had yet to hear about entity search as a concept and more popular topics related to SEO overshadow entity search. It’s extremely important though and good marketers are already practicing optimizing for entity search without knowing there’s a name for it.
3. A Must-Have Web Accessibility Checklist for Digital Marketers from Search Engine Watch
Creating accessible websites and content for those with disabilities and optimizing content to break down language barriers is an essential goal for marketers. Despite 15% of the world’s population being disabled, the world wide web doesn’t have many regulations for accessibility standards. Optimizing ALT text, color contrast, voice recognition, heading tags, and implementing multilingual SEO reaching more audiences provides better user experience and works in favor of your brand image. I believe everyone has the right to accessible information and using plugins to assist in the process is a great first step in bridging the gap.
4. 10 Social Media Trends That’ll Be Huge in 2022 from LaterBlog
In this blog, Monique Thomas covers the top 10 trends to look forward to in social media for this new year. Among her mentions are some persisting trends from last year, such as an emphasis on mental health content, memes, diversity and accountability, using social media for discovering brands, and brands utilizing TikTok. The hot takes? Posts will act as a form of actual currency to purchase goods, LinkedIn will become home to mega influencers, feed aesthetics are becoming less filtered, Reels and vertical videos are here to stay, and the creator economy will boom. I can definitely see these trends playing out in 2022 but maybe there are some more interesting ones that will push the envelope.
5. How Experts Measure Writing Quality & Content Performance from Semrush
Jakub Zielinski dives into Semrush’s research on must-have qualities of great writing. The results noted were quite basic: use an appropriate writing tone, focus on providing value, explore the topic in-depth, remember good grammar, and display your native fluency in whatever language you’re writing in. The last one was somewhat interesting to note although none of these are groundbreaking. As far as tracking performance metrics on each piece of content, your organic traffic, social media traffic, time spent on page, and engagement rates are listed.
Although there are only five articles in this month’s highlight, there is so much more content out there for you to explore. I encourage branching out to find more topics that interest you when time isn’t a constraint! The research process of finding out what’s new in the industry can be exciting and the great thing is, you can have your own opinions. Agreeing with every idea on the internet isn’t necessary or even possible. Use their thoughts as a starting point for growing yours and then share your conclusions to keep the community growing. With that being said, feel free to disagree with me and stay tuned for next month’s list of impressions!
