Content marketing and SEO go hand-in-hand, like fries and a milkshake or peanut butter and jelly. It’s not the brightest idea to do one without the other. The issue is that SEO is a dynamic and tumultuous enterprise. As the rules of the SEO game continually shift, your content marketing strategy needs to similarly adjust. Enter: topic clusters.

Content audits help you understand how each piece of content on your website fits into the marketing funnel. You can also gauge the effectiveness of your content as part of your marketing strategy when you conduct a thorough, site-wide content audit, but doing so can be an intimidating, complex undertaking. Here’s what you need to know.

Reports from market research firm Forrester show that a well-designed UX can increase a website’s conversion rate by up to 400 percent. With numbers like that, it’s no surprise that UX design is a perennial topic in marketing circles! But today, we’d like to go beyond these basic principles and review a newer way to look at the UX: Anticipatory design (AD).

Getting seen by your target audience is no small feat. You're competing with hundreds, if not thousands, of competitors in your industry all vying for the same eyeballs. It's why just having a website up isn't enough, and why SEO is such a vital part of any marketing strategy.

But what good are all your efforts to be seen if Google and other search engines don't even realize you're there?

The concept of inbound marketing revolves around the exchange of information – businesses provide helpful content that website visitors are searching for in exchange for personal information that converts them into leads and ultimately into customers. When putting the approach into practice, “producing good content” is a great place to start, but it doesn’t quite encapsulate the nuances of a well-crafted, targeted content marketing strategy.

A solid inbound marketing strategy begins with target market (or buyer persona) data and a plan to produce and distribute the content that each buyer needs at just the right time. Critical to developing that plan is the concept of the buying cycle i.e. the buyer’s journey.

Renowned author and UX expert Steve Krug is renowned for a reason: He knows what makes a good user experience. As we’ve discussed, a central tenet of the UX is creating simple web interfaces that are compelling, easy to understand, and most of all, intuitive. These are lofty goals to reach for those unfamiliar with the web development process, but for designers, it all begins in one place: The wireframe.

While hindsight can be 20-20, there’s no substitute for proper planning. There’s a lot that goes into designing a website, but one frequently overlooked aspect is search engine optimization (SEO). Many forget that SEO should be part of the initial process rather than a mere afterthought, and that mistake can cripple marketing efforts and render websites ineffective shortly after launch.

The customer experience is the most important element influencing your business’s success, and today’s customer experience centers around the company website. Conversion rates improve when a well-crafted user experience is aesthetically pleasing, intuitive, and improves customer loyalty, so it’s in your best interests to make sure UX design surpasses customer expectations.

The traditional website development process typically attempts to solve the problems of a company’s current site; whether it has outdated content or broken links, needs a refreshed look and feel, lacks the latest features and functionality, or because it’s no longer generating the right kind of leads for your business. The pages are developed independently based on the content that’s there and in isolation of other pages within the site.

Around this time last year, we did a roundup of the top SEO trends in 2018 that website owners could use to improve their page rankings. We hope you took some of those tips on board and managed to improve your SERP results over the past year!

As we’re now in Q4 of 2018, we figured it’d be the perfect time to do another SEO roundup—this time discussing seven of the best SEO practices you can use to boost your results as we move into 2019.