Playing Digital Hide and Seek

The warm fall weather and crunchy leaves always remind me of hide and seek, a game I used to play when I was a child and then again when my kids were little.

Of course, you all know the rules. One person does their best at not being found and the others do their best to search for the hider.

For some reason, this process reminds me of SEO. Just in reverse.

Because to win at the SEO game, your brand needs to come out of hiding by shouting a virtual, "I'm over here!"

And leaving a trail of digital clues that help get you discovered by Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and the other search engines.

So your customers can find you.

Find Me in the Yellow Pages

When I started my first consultancy late in the last century (I always like saying that!), my goal was to get clients and prospects to call me when they needed entertainment publicity.

So I submitted my listing to the annual Yellow Pages directory. I even used a chunk of my budget to pay for a small ad so my company name would pop out when customers doing their analog search.

Unfortunately, I missed the printing deadline and had to wait a whole year for that strategy to work!

I'm glad those days are over.

Now, any brand can launch its website and pretty soon the clicks come pouring in.

OK, I realize digital hide and seek is a lot more complicated than that.

Not to mention super competitive since your startup's playing in a league with the top-ranked pros.

That doesn't mean your business can't make the rankings. You need a good routine and lots of practice.

Master the Front-end of Search

And that includes integrating a discovery mindset into the way you create your content.

First, use good old fashioned empathy to shift your perspective and step into your customers' shoes. What are their problems? How can your business help solve them? What do they need?

Once you figure that out, craft answers to their questions that help and engage them.

And before you hit publish, figure out how you can make your posts appeal to both Bender and Fry—that is, to humans and the bots that index the web.

Consider:

• The keywords and phrases you're using to help with discovery
• Adding in eye-catching headers
• Using bullets and numbers to break up the text
• Making sure it's easy to get around your site
• Adding images with descriptive (alt) text
• And of course sharing it on social and boosting with paid

It's like a puzzle that requires creativity, ingenuity and some technical prowess.

And if you're a digital marketer or communicator, there's no reason you can't build discovery thinking into your content marketing strategy.

Make Your Content Good Enough to E-A-T

Which brings me to this week's Digital Marketing Trends Video.

I cover several SEO concepts marketers need to understand:

• Expertise, Authority and Trust (E-A-T) - three elements Google uses to help it determine how to rank your content.
• Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) - how Google evaluates sites that deal with finance, health and wellness. Hint: E-A-T plays a part.
• Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) - basically the relationship between your keywords and some of the other regularly occurring words in your content, and how that can help your customers find you.

Here's where to watch it ??.

Listen for Clues

Of course, one way to do well at hide and seek is to watch and listen for signals.

And, yes, this may be a bit of a stretch, but it does tie in with my newest LinkedIn Learning course—just released this week.

Social Media Monitoring: Strategies and Skills teaches you how to set up your social listening dashboard and use the insights for research, product ideas, customer service, influencer marketing and spotting and managing issues and crises.

Check it out and let me know what you think. Big thank you to my producer, Max Wong, and content manager, Stephanie Evans for all your ideas and support.

Connect with Martin

Well, you've found your way to the end of issue number 18.

As always, thank you for reading and subscribing! I appreciate you being here.

And please share your own stories about how you took your hidden content out of the shadows so your customers could find and enjoy it.

Be sure to reach out if you have questions about any of the videos in Digital Marketing Trends, or my other LinkedIn Learning courses.

And if you want to find me, follow or connect on LinkedIn or Twitter. (And if you are connecting on LinkedIn, please add a short note so I know how you found me.) Or visit my website and send a message or a question.

Check out the #LiLDigTrends hashtag for quick updates between videos.

And now, you're it!