Kevin Gibbons is founder and CEO of Re:signal – a strategy-driven SEO and content marketing agency in London.
Winner of 15x UK/EU Search Awards, he was named search personality of the year at the UK Search Awards (2018) and listed in BIMA’s top 100 people shaping the digital industry (CEO and leaders category) in 2019.
He has helped to grow Re:signal into a fast growth digital marketing agency, as recognised by Deloitte Fast 50 UK & EMEA (2017) and the FT 1000 fastest growing companies in Europe (2018). Working with clients including Expedia, Auto Trader, Pottery Barn and Deloitte.
Kevin has spoken at over 100 events internationally over the last 10 years, including; Search Marketing Expo (SMX), Pubcon, ClickZ / SES, BrightonSEO, SAScon, State of Search, Reykjavik Internet Marketing Conference (RIMC), Content Marketing Association (CMA), Performance Marketing Insights, SEMCamp and many more…
Columnist writer at Econsultancy, Search Engine Watch, The Drum, Fast Company and Search Engine Land. Judge at US / MENA Search Awards, The Drum Content Awards and DADI Awards.
Content marketing is hard.
Actually, let me clarify that a bit…GREAT content marketing is hard!
One of the biggest reasons why it’s so hard nowadays is that there are just SO many choices. Every single day, I see blog posts, columns, tweets and updates telling me the million different things that I HAVE TO BE DOING…
I recently spent a long weekend in Rome. While I was there, I was surrounded by art, by masterpieces. Creativity was everywhere.
From the painters I walked by in the promenade, to the Sistine Chapel and Coliseum, to the artful way dishes are put together. You could tell everything was created with such passion, precision, and focus.
We don’t have time anymore to produce work of that quality.
(image via Flickr)
We live in such a fast-paced world of meetings, emails, notifications and various other tasks that we simply can’t find the time to sit down and really focus. All these tools designed to help us work, actually do everything but.
On top of this, there’s other day-to-day pressures. You’re below targets, your boss is unhappy, they wanted results yesterday, and so on, and so on…
At least that’s the perception. What we say as an excuse.
But those painters in the promenade, they sit in a crowded area and are able to focus on nothing but their work. No people watching, no phone checking, no incoming emails.
It’s still possible to create a masterpiece. It just requires patience and focus a lot of us don’t want to deal with.
Michelangelo didn’t finish Pope Julius II’s tomb until 40 years after he started, needing to start over or pivot several times. He worked on the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling for 3 years, enduring numerous difficulties and grueling day-to-day work.
That kind of dedication doesn’t mesh with today’s content culture, where there are 1,400 new blog posts published each minute.
But in order to create masterpiece content, you need to work like a master.
The works Michelangelo produced were truly world-class masterpieces. The level of detail put into the Sistine Chapel is unbelievable.
“The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways.” –
I find the challenge with local search marketing is that you need to put yourself into the shoes of the local business in order to really focus on what is best for their business.
You have to consider any issues and constraints of a small business, the importance of measuring around real world goals and making suggestions as actionable as possible so that changes can make an impact in the short-to-medium term, not just long-term.
Here’s what I would do if I ran a local company in Putney!
British Airways have been producing some incredible campaigns recently. I often think the term “content marketing”
Despite content frequently being looked at as the answer, that doesn’t mean that it’s always the first solution for your business.
I’m often asked the question “why great content matters”, and that can be very difficult to answer, mainly because despite running a large number of content campaigns for clients, it’s never a question we would start with first.
Going back a step, it has to be about strategy. You really need to think about your business goals and marketing objectives.
This could be anything from:
Looking back at Google’s algorithm updates over the last 12 months, I think we’re seeing a very similar trend:
When you think about Penguin and Panda updates in this way — in combination with the huge range of brand and social signals that Google are getting much better at reading and bringing into their algorithm — it becomes clear that human engagement and activity is starting to have a much greater impact on search results.
That to me is the biggest shift — it’s now much more about building high quality links as a by-product of great content. Look at page authority in many ways, more than you would domain. If you have an active audience there, it’s relevant to readers or users;
I spent last week in Tampa at the BlueGlassX conference. Upon returning from BlueGlass LA earlier this year, I said it was the best conference I’d ever been to, so I knew what to expect this time. BlueGlass LA was not only a great learning experience, but also was a pivotal point for me in deciding to join BlueGlass.
It was great to see things from the other side by presenting at the event, and now being a part of BlueGlass. I really appreciate all of the hard work and planning that goes on behind the scenes.
I learned a lot during the event. There were some truly great actionable takeaways. Although there are already great recapposts, I wanted to share some of the most useful tips and soundbites I found tweetable during the event. Here are my 90 takeaway tips from BlueGlassX in the form of tweets:
Strategy
When people start content marketing initiatives, they often have lots of new, exciting ideas and brainstorms about how they can generate lots of social attention, influence the influencers, and attract high-quality links.
However, it can be very easy to get carried away with all of these new ideas and concepts and forget that the best content for your brand, might already exist….
The first step for us, in any content marketing project, is to perform a content audit.
This allows us to:
I remember finding Greg Boser’s post on SERP profiling extremely valuable last year, so I’m going to take you through the process we would use for content auditing. This uses Quaturo as an example. We have a very new site, which helps to keep things simple for now, and hopefully it’s a useful way to show how we would approach content auditing.
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© 2019 Resignal. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy
