Our marketing team has spent months exploring the nuances of generative AI in digital marketing contexts through client meetings and hands-on experiences. We’ve seen what AI marketing tools can do, and trust me when I say it’s something marketers can’t ignore anymore. 

If you’re looking for ways to supercharge your growth marketing with AI marketing tools, I have some ideas for you. Here’s what I believe to be some of the most effective ways to leverage AI technology for better results as you promote your brand this year.

Smart Ways to Leverage AI Tools

Below are several key insights I've gathered that can transform each marketing campaign you put together. (And as a marketer, I don’t use that word lightly.) Keep in mind as you read that the goal isn’t to replace you or your staff but to help AI and marketing automation work for you. 

These suggestions are inspired by insights taken from a recent live webinar hosted by myself and our Chief Strategy Officer Emma Kessinger on Navigating the AI Landscape. You can find the webinar in its entirety at that link. 

Alright. Let’s dive in!

1. Use AI Note-Taking for Enhanced Meeting Engagement

Tools like Fathom have revolutionized how we handle meetings as a team. Again, the goal here is to expedite and enhance ongoing activities as a growth marketing agency, and having a competent note-taking AI application has been a key factor in easing the everyday gruntwork.

One of those activities is interviewing subject-matter experts. Adding expert analysis and opinions to your content has become really important for any good growth marketing strategy, but gathering that information can be time-consuming. 

Using AI note-taking tools allows us to automatically capture and organize SME meeting notes. We found this doesn’t just help you take notes faster. When I’ve done this, even with in-person clients, Fathom has allowed me to stay engaged in the conversation. I can focus, knowing that when it’s done, I’ll have all of the notes recorded and even highlighted at important points.

2. Capture Content Creation Tone with Claude AI

Streamlining note-taking is a pretty obvious use of AI (even though we’ve found you need to be thoughtful about how you implement it). However, you can also confidently use the right AI tools when creating content for clients, too. 

You can use tools like Gemini, Perplexity, and ChatGPT—and I’ll talk about some of those in a minute. Personally, though, I need to start with my favorite. I’ve found Claude is the best way to handle something as personality-driven as branded content, making it a game-changer for marketers. 

This is because the AI platform excels at capturing perspective. Trust me when I say that Claude is exceptionally good at capturing tones and voices. We used it for parts of our email newsletter and found it was actually helping us expand our content precision and resonance. 

For instance, we trained it on different brand voices, like “professional with a sense of humor” and “a little bit of snark.” By testing our prompts across different email subject lines, we found that our customer engagement went up with more punny subject lines.

As with all good AI tools, Claude doesn’t thrive in a vacuum. You have to tell it the “role and the goal” in each prompt if you want that personality to come through. Still, for me, Claude is one of the best options to maintain a professional, individualistic, and approachable branded writing style, whether you’re composing an email, summarizing lengthy content, or anything in between.

3. Conduct Research and Data Analysis with ChatGPT

Content creation and growth marketing strategy are multi-faceted. In the same way that you wouldn’t work with one single person to strategize, develop, and execute an entire marketing campaign, you shouldn’t use a single AI marketing tool, either. Something like Claude might be great for tone, but when it comes time to dig deep into that customer data or market research, I still say ChatGPT is one of the best options out there—especially if you’re springing for the paid version.

The OG AI tool is great at analyzing data sets and spreadsheets. From conducting product research to the ability to drop a URL into the search bar to analyze an entire website, ChatGPT is great at aggregating information from multiple sources, analyzing that information, and then synthesizing it into understandable takeaways. 

ChatGPT also excels at breaking down complex concepts. If you’re trying to understand nuanced elements of a growth marketing campaign or a client’s product functionality, it can help break things down. It’s even a great assistant for personal things, like car shopping or, from my own experience, helping your child with her math homework.

4. Experiment With Visual Content Creation with Adobe Photoshop AI

Text-based AI tools are common, and most people are more comfortable with them. But I’ve found most people are neglecting the visual side of AI tools. In a year where AI is expected to shift from experimentation to targeted execution, expect more comprehensive applications of AI to follow, including more sophisticated forms of visual AI content generators.

There are already several options out there. Traditional tools like Canva have built-in AI features. Sora just released a text-to-video AI solution in December of 2024. My favorite option, so far, though, is the generative AI features in Photoshop, which remain one of the premiere ways to produce realistic computer-based visuals.

This is perfect for creating quick custom graphics. It’s ideal when you’re trying to generate website imagery to support text pieces or sales pages, too. It can also help with making minor design adjustments when you don’t have a full-time designer on staff. We even use the tool on our own website at Relevance to refresh our images.

5. Content Analysis Tools

Relevance has always been big on content audits. You have to be willing to give your existing content a hard look and decide where to optimize and where to delete things if they aren’t performing well.

Not surprisingly, AI is making major inroads in the content analysis side of things, as well. Specialized tools like MarketMuse and SEOmonitor are streamlining this side of long-term content marketing by automating content quality assessments, keyword research, keyword grouping, assessing topical authority—you name it. 

As you create content, let AI ease the burden of babysitting it over time. You can create prompts and even use an AI-powered tool with built-in features specifically designed to help you prune bad content and optimize the good stuff. Tools like SEOMonitor can help you clarify topical authority. You can also use AI to identify content gaps and page optimization opportunities. This area is less defined than content creation. Don’t be afraid to be creative as you look for ways to use AI tools to manage your content over time. 

Embracing AI in Growth Marketing

AI is changing things quickly, but marketing is still a necessary part of business. Don’t let the disruption discourage you. Look for ways to embrace AI as part of your daily marketing activity.

At Relevance, we have learned that you always need to look for the latest marketing AI tools, try them out, and then see if and how they can help your internal activities. If you can learn to thrive in that kind of ongoing evolutionary process, you’ll be able to recapture that momentum and transform your brand from a reactionary follower to an industry leader.

If you’re looking for help integrating artificial intelligence into your growth marketing plans, contact our team at Relevance. We can set you up with a FREE strategy session to look at your best options and help you chart a profitable path to growth.

The post Supercharging Your Growth Marketing With AI Marketing Tools appeared first on RELEVANCE.

I’ve found that website SEO vectorization is one of the key elements to optimizing a SEO strategy in 2025. Here are some insights that our team has found through recent Google leaks and ongoing research and data analysis. They underline how important vectorizing your website is for your content marketing strategy to succeed moving forward.

What Does It Mean to Vectorize Your Website?

Let’s start with the obvious question: What does it mean to vectorize your website in the first place? 

The mathematical term sounds overwhelming, but in reality, it’s a fairly simple concept. All vectorization means is that you are looking at points of data to see how closely all of your content connects.

Vectorizing your site builds a mathematical 3D model structure for your content. It creates a visual representation by assigning everything a data point — something called vector embedding — and then plots where each item lives on your site in relation to one another. 

Once you’ve thoroughly plotted out your site, you can compare data points between pieces of content to see how closely related they are. This is super important, as it gives you, in essence, a “Google filter” that shows you how the biggest search engine of them all likely views your content. 

Once you’ve vectorized your site, you can review what are called cosine similarities. This is another mathematical term that measures the similarity between two things. Consider, for instance, a vector embedding for the word “cat” on your website. Another vector embedding for the word “kitten” should show up as relatively close to cat because of their close similarity. In contrast, the word “dog” would be less strongly related to cat, while a word like “rocket” or “philosophy” would be even further away in your model.

Why Is Vectorizing Your Website Important Today?

Why do vectorization and cosine similarities matter? Because the recent Google Docs Leak from earlier in 2024 revealed that this is how Google, at its base level, is getting search results. That’s right. Google is vectorizing websites — and so should anyone who wants to rank as a top search result.

SEO vectorization shows whether your content is clustered around areas that you consider topical authorities for your brand. It ensures that you’re staying in these topical swim lanes and that you don’t have outlier content holding you back. 

Here are five more ways that our team has found vectorizing your website can boost your SEO in 2025.

1. Understanding Where Your Topical Authority Stands Right Now

Owning topical authority has been a central part of the content game for years now. However, it’s difficult to know if you’re actually accomplishing that in the eyes of a search engine. SEO vectorization gives you a clearer picture of where your site stands at any given moment. 

One example that comes to mind is an email platform company that we worked with. They sent us a list of 10 or so ideas of what they thought were their areas of topical authority. At the same time, we came up with our own list based on the data we had from their site. 

We compared the lists to identify what they were hoping for and measured that against the reality that the vector database had revealed from across their site. We looked at what they, up until then, had hoped was their topical authority against how Google was actually grouping their content together. 

This contrast of hope versus the reality of data analytics helped open their eyes to where their content was off the mark, underperforming, or simply an outlier. From there, we helped to strengthen known areas of authority and came up with new topic ideas where they were needed. This process is key in building up your topical authority in the important areas, which will in turn help your SEO performance.

2. Map Where You Want Topical Authority to Go

Another benefit of vectorizing your website is figuring out where to take your content in the future. If, for instance, you’re creating a new service line or product, this can help you understand how you already cover a particular topic. From there, you can map out next steps to strengthen this fresh area of local authority that you want to rank for.

I’ve been diving into this for Relevance’s own site in recent months. We vectorized our site to analyze it and see where it stood at the moment (see the previous step). Then, we used that data to be proactive by overhauling our blog strategy.

We considered baseline data to see where we were actually considered a strong authority compared to where we wanted to go. We also found areas that were weak or that we hadn’t previously realized we wanted to rank for and focused on those niches in our content creation and optimization. This can help with prioritizing areas of focus for your content team, guiding your content optimization efforts as well as broader ideas of topical areas you want to own in the future.

3. Finding Areas of Opportunity

Vectorization also shines a light on the areas where you think you’re shining out — but, in reality, you simply aren’t. 

A great example of this is a multi-state insurance agency that we are currently working with. When we vectorized their site, we found that their content in connection with an entire state was marked as “anomalous content.” This was a state where they had specific product offerings and wanted to rank as an authority. This realization opened up the opportunity to create targeted, state-specific content that strengthened their ranking in that geographic area. 

4. Cleaning Up Site Content

Vectorization can also help you clean up your site. If you’re getting a ton of anomalous content in your vectorization report, it may be a sign that you need to do some trimming.

You can use your vector embeddings to find where cosine similarities are weaker. Once you identify these off-brand areas of your content map, you can decide if you need to strengthen them (like in the previous point), optimize them through things like keyword mapping and internal linking, or simply delete them as outliers that are detracting from your site’s main topical focus.

5. Understanding How Google Sees Your Site

Finally, vectorization gives you a broader perspective of how Google sees your website. This helps you create meaningful, optimized SEO initiatives that are backed by clear data.

This also helps you reinforce your topical authority in the eyes of Google. 

It is a surgical rather than a broad approach to SEO that trims, reinforces, and adds to your vectorized site in ways that reinforce your primary messaging. This can send the message that you’re staying in your swim lane and encourage Google’s algorithm to keep you high in the rankings that you want to own.

Using Vectorization to Own SEO in 2025

Vectorization is a big part of how Google search views your site and ranks its content. That’s why, as we’ve learned about its critical importance in recent months, we’ve woven it into the services we offer clients.

Relevance has used tools like Screaming Frog and our own internal code to help us vectorize client sites and look for pieces of content that are related to the search queries that matter for their brand. We identify outliers, too, and either build them up, optimize them, or remove them.

The result is a clean, targeted SEO content strategy that packs a punch in a world where most SEOs are spinning their wheels. If you want to see how our system works in action, contact us for a free strategy session. Together, we can see how site vectorization can improve your brand’s SEO, traffic, and, ultimately, your bottom line.

The post Vectorizing Your Website: How It Can Boost Your SEO Efforts appeared first on RELEVANCE.

In the two years since the launch of ChatGPT, generative AI has soaked up a significant portion of the search engine traffic that used to go to traditional SERPs. This has prompted content creators to adapt their search engine optimization tactics to include another element in the optimization calculation: Generative Engine Optimization or GEO. 

This emphasis on GEO and SEO is happening now because AI search already works — and it’s gaining momentum. Generative search may not be able to address everything, but its solutions are at least as good as a standard search engine in many situations.

The question is, how can content creators and marketing leaders incorporate GEO into their marketing strategies? Here’s what you need to know about this new and exciting area of the Internet.

What Generative AI Tools Are Impacting the Marketplace?

Before we dig into the ways you can incorporate GEO into your traditional SEO strategy, let’s look at some of the Generative AI tools transforming the marketplace. This isn’t just for fun. It sheds light on an important new reality of GEO marketing: we aren’t exclusively catering to Google rankings anymore.

 Honestly, we’re not even catering to Google anymore.

You can get answers from an AI tool that has nothing to do with Google’s search engine. We already mentioned ChatGPT, which is focused on providing human-like, conversational answers to questions.

Perplexity is another one that emphasizes concise, fact-based, and cited responses. Gemini and Google AI Overviews blend search-based results with AI-generated text summaries. Microsoft’s Copilot is a productivity-based AI tool that optimizes work experiences. 

These are just a few of the big AI platforms. And don’t misunderstand. Google is still the biggest fish in the pond. It just isn’t the only fish worth caring about anymore. There are countless others both in existence and coming down the pipeline. The era of machine learning and AI technology providing answers to search queries has officially dawned, folks.

The most important difference between the results provided by these generative AI tools and traditional SEO tools is that you aren’t trying to rank at the top of a list. You want your text to be incorporated into an AI-generated answer (and thus featured as a source for that answer). 

Google AI Overviews, for instance, include “cards” that show where it sourced its information. These showcase multiple sources and are displayed along with the AI text to allow users to dig deeper into an answer if they wish.

How to Optimize User Experience with Generative Engines

The question for marketers and content creators is how to incorporate this new generative AI reality into their marketing strategy creation. 

1. Hone in on User Intent

User intent is the driving force behind AI responses. These are intended to personalize responses for specific user queries. Make sure every piece of content you create has a strong emphasis on how it serves the user.

For example, you trying to inform on a simple concept? This is something likely to be pulled into a Google AI overview, so write your content knowing that. Get straight to the point quickly and clearly.

2. Study AI Responses: 

AI responses aren’t mysterious. They’re right there, available for everyone to see. Use that to your advantage. Study how AI responds to topics where you are an authority. Then, optimize your content to provide information that is easy to incorporate into those AI solutions. 

Review the keywords that are important to your business and evaluate which have AI overviews showing up for them. Once you know what is being prioritized by AI overview, you can adjust and update content accordingly.

3. Remember E-E-A-T: 

E-E-A-T content is Google’s acronym for high-quality content. It must flash expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness. In other words, make sure your content strategy is relentless in its pursuit of providing exceptional and insightful solutions for your target audience.

The best content and most authoritative brands will show up in generative engines, so make sure you’re priming your content and your brand to be just that with E-E-A-T tactics.

4. Optimize Content: 

Optimization remains essential, but its specifics are changing (or at least expanding). Along with traditional SEO, generative engine content optimization should focus on holistic messaging. In addition to comprehensively and clearly communicating important information, this includes a range of keywords that relate to the core subject and should be backed by solid technical GEO (which basically follows technical SEO practices). 

Investing in a GEO Future

Search engines aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. However, the Google-dominated, search-driven behaviors of the past are quickly becoming obsolete. In their place, we are seeing a rapid rise in AI-driven search engines that are already dominating top-of-funnel questions and answers. 

Gartner predicts that traditional search engine volume could drop by a quarter in the next couple of years. This is because generative search and AI-driven tools are working. They may not have all of the answers. Still, they are siphoning away a significant portion of search queries — especially for simple things, like how to convert from imperial to metric measurements or what continent Montana is located on.Generative search is gaining momentum, which means businesses must react now if they want to stay ahead of this technological revolution. If you need help understanding generative engine optimization and how it integrates with search engine optimization practices, our team at Relevance can help. Reach out for a free strategy session, and together, we can make sure you stay ahead of this epic-defining shift in the online marketing world.

The post Generative Engine Optimization: What Is GEO and What Should You Do About It? appeared first on RELEVANCE.

The online healthcare industry can be brutal. Competition is fierce, and major healthcare providers like the Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins, or government organizations like the CDC typically win that coveted #1 spot in the SERPs. 

So what can you do to stand out in such a tough space? As with most things in life, I think one of the best ways to find the answer is from the experience of others.

Four Takeaways From Our Telehealth Growth Marketing Experience 

To succeed in digitally marketing themselves, small and mid-size brands in the healthcare industry must build credibility through consistent, strong content marketing. They must invest in high-quality, targeted educational libraries that align with their core mission and that use SEO strategies to help show up in search engine results.

How do I know this works? Because I’ve seen it up close and personal over a 5-year span.

Here are four takeaways on how critical that content and SEO marketing strategy is in healthcare marketing. They come from a case study where we helped a telehealth company rank better for key commercial terms. 

1. Always Start With Thorough Research

I’m going to assume you operate in the healthcare industry. Picture this with me for a second. Imagine a patient comes in, and you a healthcare provider hand them a prescription without even looking at them or saying a word. 

Crazy, right? If you don’t skip the diagnosis stage for your patients, you shouldn’t do so with your SEO strategy or content marketing, either.

That’s why, when we started working with the telehealth brand, we performed an SEO audit, did keyword research, crawled their site, and observed their existing paid campaigns and social media marketing. We wanted to understand where they stood, their strengths and weaknesses, and their technical foundation.

We always do this because you have to know where you currently stand if you want to set goals and strategies that will work — and trust me when I say that this is a very important part of the process. Too often, we’ve seen brands balk at paying for strategy. They want to jump to the visible, measurable stuff. The problem is, if you don’t research and strategize, your action plan will inherently be weak, uninspired, and possibly even flawed. If you want to know where you should place the most value in the process, it’s here, in your strategy.

In this case, we found the brand had a solid foundation for building topical authority in the health space, but it wasn’t perfect. For instance, they had a robust FAQ library, but it was on ZenDesk, not their site, which meant they were missing out on SEO and traffic benefits. Their content was also limited in scope, they lacked internal linking, and they weren’t maximizing the impact of their existing content.

The Takeaway: Always start with a thorough analysis of where you are if you want to maximize your chances of getting to where you want to go. You will miss key optimization opportunities on a site if you don’t first review your current state.

2. Identify and Go After the Big Opportunities

Marketing used to be a fairly limited activity. In the digital marketing age, you have limitless opportunities. From SEO and back-end optimization to email, social, on-site, and digital PR, there is an endless list of owned, earned, and paid ways to promote your brand.

The question is, where should you direct your limited resources?

In the case of our telehealth client, we looked at the site by service line to see where traffic was coming from. We pulled in keyword research to identify targets based on these service lines, too. At the same time, we studied other areas of existing healthcare marketing to see what was working and what wasn’t.

Our goal was to tie in all of this information to ensure we were reinforcing and building on what was already working in their digital marketing strategy. If you silo your marketing effort, you’ll end up wasting resources and, at times, even working against yourself. Instead, use a holistic, knowledgeable approach to figure out the best places where you can put fresh emphasis and focus.

With our client, we found their core service line was actually capturing a decent amount of bottom-of-funnel (or BoFu) traffic. That was great news, and we were able to use it to direct our attention to improving middle- and top-of-funnel marketing in that area. 

We applied a similar approach to auxiliary service lines and found plenty of opportunities for additional improvement. We evaluated each one’s ROI, such as average cart value, one-time vs repeat purchases, and lifetime value, and set our priorities based on that information.

The Takeaway: Don't put your efforts into something that won't have a chance of performing well. Always invest in improving and complementing the marketing that is already working. But make sure you’ve reviewed core information to create a strong, data-backed strategy.

3. Figure Out Your Starting Point

All of this leads you to your starting point. (I know, it’s easy to feel exhausted just getting here, but hear me out. It’s worth it!) 

Once you’ve studied your current situation and invested in finding and prioritizing opportunities, you’ve set the stage. Now, it’s time to pick your starting point. Some primary factors to consider when choosing include:

• Figuring out if your content is educational, helpful, and following E-E-A-T best practices. 
• Ensuring your content is focused on topical areas where you want to build brand awareness and industry authority. (Optimize or eliminate everything else.)
• Determining how much traffic you’re getting and where in the funnel you need to focus on increasing those numbers.
• Assessing your backlink portfolio and considering where you can feed that credibility through third-party validation from authoritative sites.

Use your assessments from sections one and two to guide how you choose from this list. 

With our telehealth brand work, we found, along with a healthy content library, the brand already had a solid foundation for SEO. They were also using pay-per-click, internal and external PR functions, and a conversion rate optimization agency and social media team. 

In other words, all of the pieces for success were there, and we didn’t need to reinvent the wheel. We just needed to orchestrate everything so that it produced the synergy and results they were looking for.

The Takeaway: When shaping digital healthcare marketing strategy, don’t reinvent what’s working. Perfect it. And ensure all areas of marketing are supporting each other so any one area isn’t working in a silo.

4. Focus On the End User

So far, my advice has been about technical elements, gauging metrics, and observing marketing activities. My final thought is to focus on the end user throughout your detailed planning. Everything else is important, but you always want the user in mind while you’re considering them.

SEO is the best example of where this can go astray. It’s tempting to focus on search engine results when using SEO. But that isn’t the goal. SEO works with content marketing to improve the user experience. The goal should always be to use search engine optimization to get your healthcare services and content in front of the right people.

That means you want to create a comprehensive library of robust SEO content that meets user needs at all stages of the funnel. You can use it to secure backlinks from external outlets, create social media content, and boost your credibility—but always keep that end user in mind.

By doing that, we were able to not just provide our telehealth client with genuinely good, optimized content but also ensure that it spoke to customer needs and pain points, serving their audience at every step.

The Takeaway: Always keep the end-user in mind. Write for the reader instead of a search engine if you want to actually create useful content that will engage and help people.

The Results of Good Healthcare Content Marketing and SEO Strategy

Okay, so if you do all of these things I’m recommending, what does it look like? What does it accomplish? After three years spent creating 146 online pieces and seeing 700 assets and links for our telehealth client, here are a few of the biggest takeaways:

• They had a 119% increase in conversion rate.
• They experienced a 254% bump in pageviews on optimized pages.
• They saw a 358% climb in the number of terms that were ranking #1 in Google SERPs.
• They had a 142% growth spurt in terms of ranking 2nd to 10th in those SERPs.

I also noticed that over the course of the partnership, new services ranked quicker for important terms as they benefited from the synergy of the site’s overall success. This is key to show that if you focus and put the effort in one topical authority area at a time, you’ll be rewarded when it comes time to move to the next.

Learning and Moving Forward to Greater Success

As we look back, there are also a few things I’ve learned from the telehealth case study that I think we could have done better. 

For instance, I wish we could have created more content in those three years to match their expanding service lines. I also wish we could have added more first-person perspectives from healthcare providers, clinicians, and patients. 

These aren’t shortcomings. Every marketing strategy requires some sacrifice. As the marketing world evolves, though, it’s always important to have these in mind as we form each new plan moving forward. 

As you look over the four lessons above, what stands out to you? Where are you already killing it with your healthcare digital marketing strategy? Where can you use some help? If you find you’re looking for a partner as you sort through things, reach out for a free strategy session with our team at Relevance. We can shed light on your current situation and orient you toward future success, even in an industry as crowded as healthcare.

The post Healthcare Digital Marketing: How We Used Content + SEO to Grow a Telehealth Brand's Traffic appeared first on RELEVANCE.

While an important part of healthcare marketing, though, SEO in the healthcare industry isn’t easy. In fact, it can be downright challenging — and limited, too. 

Most business sites need to take a long-term approach to begin ranking well in the SERPs. Even then, they typically won’t outperform industry-leading publications, such as .org sites like Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic or .gov sites like the CDC.

With so little wiggle room, healthcare companies have to excel in their medical SEO if they want to boost their brand in the digital marketing landscape. Here are seven tips to help you do just that.

1. Get a Thorough Understanding of Your Goals

SEO takes time. You often won’t see results for months. The last thing you want to do is get those results and find that all this time they didn’t align with your mission or current marketing initiatives.

What are your goals at the moment, especially as they relate to SEO? Do you need more visibility online? Are you trying to drive more traffic to your site? Do you need to increase conversions? Does your brand need greater credibility in the eyes of consumers?

Clarify your mission and objectives first. Then use that information to guide each step you take as you create and execute a healthcare SEO strategy.

2. Invest in E-E-A-T Content

Winning the SEO battle is never easy. In the healthcare industry, it is especially difficult. Why? Because you’re talking about YMYL (your money, your life) content, which Google is extra careful to analyze when ranking. 

As a healthcare provider, you want to clearly demonstrate your credibility through E-E-A-T content. The acronym stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. 

Put yourself in your audience’s shoes. If you have a medical concern or question, you want to go to a company that you can trust, right? By creating helpful, educational content, you establish your company as that trusted brand.

In the case of healthcare, you should go even further by backing each piece with accredited professionals. Optimally, you would have them author the piece, infusing their first-hand clinical experiences (there’s your first “E”) into the narrative. Each piece they byline should link to their bio on the site listing their credentials and explaining why they are a trusted expert (there’s your second “E”) on the subject.  

If you can’t find a provider willing to write a piece of content, don’t fret—there are alternative options that can still help build your authority. For example, a telehealth client I worked with didn’t have providers that would byline content, but a medical professional would review each piece for factual and clinical accuracy. However, this review process wasn’t noted on their site. I asked them to include a tag that said “medically reviewed by [provider name]” and the date it was most recently reviewed to help support E-E-A-T efforts. Doing so helped build trust with their audience and contributed to ranking improvements.

3. Hone in on Your Topical Authority

There are many aspects and nuances to every field, including healthcare. Where do you have unique health information and insights that you can offer?

As you create your SEO-optimized content marketing strategy, make sure you stay focused on the areas and healthcare services that you want to be known for. Don’t stray too far from the formula.

Google’s SEO document leak in early 2024 shows that sitewide topical relevance matters. If you use generic messaging, your brand will never stand out. Stay focused on what you’re good at. 

With that same telehealth client, I even saw that ranking in the SERPs was easier in other health-related topical authority areas once we owned one healthcare-specific area. You should be able to rank quicker in other related areas if you dedicate the time and resources to building topical authority in one core area first.

4. Gather Multiple Perspectives

Healthcare content marketing is more than a professional sharing advice with patients. You want to hear from multiple perspectives. (That’s why we have the classic “let me get a second opinion” line in so many medical situations, right?)

In the case of medical SEO, you can seek out multiple professional opinions, but in many cases, some of the best content can come directly from your patients.

Look for stories that reinforce your company’s success and what you’re able to offer your clientele or patients. Use things like reviews to build trust, make your brand more relatable, and turn your site into a trusted source in the online healthcare community.

5. User Experience Matters With SEO

Good website optimization goes beyond well-crafted content. Healthcare content needs to be practical. It is the last place you want to bury a lede or drag things down with sluggish load speed or complex navigation. It also includes things like interactions, mobile friendliness, and site architecture.

If you want your healthcare website to attract organic traffic, you need to maintain a quality user experience (UX). This starts with technical SEO elements like page speed, load times, and image sizes. 

Good calls to action (CTAs) are also important for engagement. Provide intuitive navigation, easy-to-find information, and accessible-friendly options so that everyone who finds your content through the SERPs has a positive and insightful experience.

6. Optimize Local SEO

Many healthcare operations are local. Hospitals serve geographic regions. So do doctor’s offices, dental practices, and urgent care clinics.

If you have a local aspect to your healthcare organization, you want to make sure it’s optimized to help potential patients closest to you find you. An urgent care center in Oakland, California won’t be able to help much if it’s the top result for someone with a medical emergency searching for local support in Miami. 

You can improve your local SEO by including geographic information (like an address) across your website. You can also use Google Map Pack to ensure you show up in the local listings by geographic location, too. Claim your Google My Business listing, as well, and then fill in your information to encourage the search giant to target local search results to your site.

7. Invest in Quality Backlinks

As you build your healthcare website’s SEO through educational, high-quality on-site content, you also want to consider backlinks. These happen when a third-party site links to a piece of your content.

Good backlinks are best when they are on important keywords (called anchor text) and link to content that closely matches search intent. For instance, you could link to a CPR instruction page on the words “CPR manual” or something similar. 

For the healthcare client I mentioned above, backlinks were a way for us to support the visibility goals for some important keywords. However, we weren’t just expecting backlinks alone to move the needle—we were most successful and saw the most significant increases in ranking overall when we executed a comprehensive onsite content strategy in tandem.

Once you have great content, look for digital PR opportunities to get your business mentioned and linked to on quality industry websites and publications. Getting backlinks from respectable healthcare websites boosts your credibility and can make sure you’re getting the most out of your SEO efforts.

Using SEO to Shine Out in the Healthcare World

Healthcare is an important, high-demand field. However, there is a lot of competition on a local, regional, national, and even international level.

Effective SEO is a key tool that can make your healthcare business shine. It can help your audience find your content in their search results, click through, and then work their way down your online marketing content funnel.

If you aren’t sure what that funnel looks like, or you need help crafting an SEO strategy in the first place, feel free to reach out for a free strategy session. Our team of growth marketing experts can help you manage the pitfalls of this high-stakes YMYL field, craft elite E-E-A-T content, and ultimately crush your healthcare marketing goals.

The post Healthcare SEO: How to Boost Your Visibility in the SERPs appeared first on RELEVANCE.

A solid B2B content strategy helps with brand awareness and repeat exposure for your target audience. It provides more touchpoints in the form of educational material that can help your potential customers, establish your authority in your industry, and encourage retention and repeat business.

Need help improving your B2B content marketing strategy? No worries. We’ve got you.

1. Evaluate Your Goals and Research

All marketing should be backed up by clear goals. What do you want to accomplish by marketing? Are you trying to gain brand awareness? Do you need to nurture more leads? 

Understanding your overall B2B marketing objectives can help you set effective goals for your content marketing strategy. If you want to build awareness, you can create content that emphasizes thought leadership. If you need more traffic, content focused on assisting SERP rankings should be a priority. If you’re trying to retain or recapture customers, how-to’s and other customer support content can be a winner.

Along with understanding your goals, you want to conduct research. You may think you know your audience, but is that information fleshed out and up to date from a digital marketing perspective? Take a fresh look at who you’re catering to with your content. Try to answer these questions:

• What demographics do your customers fall within?
• What are your customers’ most common pain points that you can help them solve?
• What keywords and phrases do your customers search for the most often? 

You can use Google’s “People also ask” (PAA) as a starting point for your research. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is another great way to glean customer insights and learn how your audience behaves and interacts with your existing content.

2. Conduct a Content Audit

Before you begin creating B2B content (which is a time and resource-intensive activity), make sure your existing content is up to date. The best way to do this is to conduct a content audit.

Start by reviewing the B2B content you already have. Is it organized, formatted with consistency, and well laid out? Does it stick to your primary areas of expertise? (This is a big deal, especially after what we learned from Google’s documentation leak.) Does your B2B content answer customer pain points and highlight benefits as well as features?

Consider what kind of content you have, too. Blog posts are a great top-of-funnel strategy. But do you have gated content, like case studies, demos, webinars, and e-books, to guide a potential customer down the sales funnel? Along with on-site content, set up off-site channels like social media and email.

As you audit, don’t be afraid to optimize or even delete existing pieces of B2B content that are not performing well. Set up tools like SEOMonitor (a favorite of ours), SEMRush, or Ahrefs to see how your quality content performs in the SERPs. Use GA4 and Google Search Console to expand those data sets and see if organic traffic from content is converting when it gets to your site.

3. Create B2B Content

Once you’ve evaluated the content you do have, consider what you’re missing. For example, if you have a lot of top-of-funnel B2B content, such as social media posts, 101 blogs, and how-to explainers, you may want to create something more targeted to guide users down the sales funnel. Also, ensure all of these posts are interlinked, feed into each other, and have solid touch points, like email marketing drip campaigns, that work together to move readers down the sales funnel and encourage them to take the right actions.

As you figure out your B2B content creation strategy, stay focused on your area of expertise. Center all of your content on “pillars” or “clusters” that display comprehensive coverage of focused messages that are integral to your business. Demonstrate your knowledge, as well, to meet Google’s E-E-A-T standards (experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness).

If you’re having trouble coming up with relevant content ideas, you can use a tool like Buzzsumo or AnswerthePublic to generate ideas based on your keywords and content needs. You can often get quality content ideas from existing customer feedback and competitor research, as well.

4. Distribute, Analyze, Iterate, and Optimize

As you create quality content, you need to think about how you’ll get it in front of the right audience. The key is to set up an effective content distribution strategy.

What channels best reach your audience? What social media platforms do they use? Do they engage with e-books? Workshops? Emails? Discord communities? 

Hone your distribution network and then share your content as it is published. If you create something longer, like an e-book, use it to create supplemental checklists, blogs, and social posts based on pieces of the information. 

Once you’ve distributed your content, track it. Use analytics and SEO tools to see how your content performs in the SERPs. Observe how it converts and what kind of traffic it gets over time, too. (It can take a few months before onsite content performance becomes consistently.)

As you gather data, start conducting quarterly content performance audits to look for weak points. If content isn’t performing, how can you optimize it to give it a better chance for success? This is an area where working with a growth marketing agency can help. An informed third-party perspective can call out where content is coming up short and what you can do to create high-quality pieces that can perform for the long term.

Building an Effective B2B Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing is an important part of B2B activity. If you want your products or services to resonate with the business clientele you target, make sure to back it up with a thoughtful, comprehensive, and engaging content library. If you’re struggling to create an actionable B2B marketing strategy, we can help. Contact our team for a free strategy session. Together, we can get your B2B marketing strategy moving in the right direction.

The post B2B Content Marketing: How to Be a More Effective Content Marketer appeared first on RELEVANCE.

And Google? The biggest search engine of them all has upended the marketing industry yet again by introducing AI at scale in the form of AI Overviews (AIO). 

Let’s take a look at these new generative AI snippets at the top of many SERPs, why they’re important, and what you can do to make the most of them in your marketing strategy.

What are AI Overviews?

AI Overviews are Google’s official term for what it previously referred to as Search Generative Experience (SGE). After developing the AI search experience in its Search Labs since early 2023, Google rolled out SGE results to the public on May 14, 2024, and relabeled them as AI Overviews.

The new experience adds an AI-generated response to the top of the Google SERP. This takes several third-party search results and creates an amalgamated response that best answers a user’s query.

Why Prioritize AI Overview?

AI Overview is a major turning point for online marketing. It takes a front-and-center position in the primary vehicle that drives so much activity across the internet. This is especially true for top-of-funnel (TOF) queries.

AI Overview can provide accurate, informative, and tailored results for basic questions. If someone needs to know a preliminary concept, such as “What is SEO” or “What does SaaS mean?” They can get a quick answer, and, in many cases, their search ends right there at the top of the SERP.

Fortunately, marketers can get in on the action right in the AIO. Google displays the primary sources that it uses to formulate an AI response in the form of “cards” that sit just under the initial response. In the search engine’s own words, 

 

“AI Overviews show links to resources that support the information in the snapshot, and explore the topic further. This allows people to dig deeper and discover a diverse range of content from publishers, creators, retailers, businesses, and more, and use the information they find to advance their tasks.”

We’re still learning how these links are selected. What we do know is that a large majority of carded AIO links were not top-ranking content. This indicates that AI Overviews operate with a different set of ranking factors from the traditional Google algorithm and anyone can show up in these snippets.

When you make it into an AIO result, it can lead to clickthroughs to your site. Even if that isn’t the case, it helps with brand recognition, which can build trust for later inquiries that move further down the sales funnel.

How to Make the Most of Google AI Overview

It’s easy to understand the game-changing nature of Google’s AI Overview. The question is: 

How do you get your content and links featured in AI Overview snippets? 

Google reports that its system automatically decides who ranks. It also says creators don’t need to do anything different and should just continue with business as usual. 

However, we’ve done some extra digging, and we think SEOs and marketers hoping to rank in AIO results can maximize their chances with a few basic steps.

1. Understand Where You Stand

Make sure you invest in AIO with a content plan in place. What are the keywords you’re targeting? Does AI show up for related queries? If so, what content is it pulling from? Compare this to the content you already have ranking. Make sure this is part of a holistic marketing plan that takes everything from social media to paid campaigns into account, too.

2. Optimize and Delete

As you review your content, consider what is and isn’t working. What pieces could use optimization to help them move up the SERPS toward that top AIO carded position? Are some pieces cannibalizing one another or failing to perform, in general? In that case, consider deleting them entirely.

3. Create Helpful Content

Never underestimate user intent. As you review your content, don’t just look at the stats. Consider how each piece is genuinely helping its target audience. Google’s Helpful Content update in 2023 put an added emphasis on content user value. Don’t sacrifice value for quantity. Make sure every piece you have ranking is clear and direct and leaves a searcher with a positive user experience.

4. Deliver Perspectives

In the past, 101 content has been streamlined and generic. Now, AIO is pulling on a growing number of perspectives and viewpoints to round out basic TOF information. In fact, user-generated content (UGC) is having a moment. Google is paying Reddit tens of millions of dollars per year to access its user data, which represents an infinite number of personal perspectives and insights. Add yours to the mix. If you have something unique to say, speak up. It will give your content a better chance to cut through the white noise.

5. Publish Original Data

Regurgitating existing information is no longer helpful. You might be able to present a basic concept better than the next guy, but you can’t outperform the tailored responses of an generative AI answer. Instead, look for ways to release your own owned data. Use research, polls, stats, and any other first-party data sources to help you stand out. This can go beyond AIO and even help you land helpful backlinks and meaningful digital PR.

6. Hone in on Your Specialty

What do you want to be known for as a company? Try to clarify and streamline this focus and then hone in on that message. Only publish content in the topical areas you want to rank for. Pushing into those niche messages will help Google recognize you as an industry leader worthy of AIO contribution.

7. Secure Backlinks

Backlinks have been the bread and butter of SEO activity for years — and they remain important in the age of AI Overviews. In fact, in light of the recent Google documentation leak, we now backlinks and link building are important ranking factors. This makes sense, as it indicates that a website is a trusted authority and resource. Keep investing in a backlinking strategy. These will continue to be important for a long time to come.

8. Analyze and Optimize

You saw this one coming, right? It’s always important to track and analyze your AI Overview initiatives over time. Watch AIO as it evolves and look at your marketing outcomes. Even if you’re doing well, consider how you can do better. Regular iteration and optimization are key to ongoing success.

Thriving in the Age of AIO

AI Overview is here and it is only going to become more embedded in the Google search experience. Are you taking advantage of it yet? Use the tips above to set the stage for AIO success — and remember to stay holistic in your approach. 

If you need help differentiating and optimizing your growth marketing goals, reach out for a free strategy session. Our team can help you stay up-to-date and optimized, even in a digital marketplace that is in such a constant state of evolution.

The post Surviving and Thriving in the Age of AI Overview appeared first on RELEVANCE.

As the term implies, the most obvious YMYL category would either be health and finance. However, the categorization can also apply to things like legal advice, news and politics, parenting and child development, personal safety, real estate, and even education and employment.

If you’re creating YMYL content, it’s important to be thoughtful about every piece you develop. Google search uses YMYL SEO guidelines as part of its standard for how it ranks content quality to ensure that these important pages never sacrifice accuracy for SEO.

This makes it hard for YMYL websites, but if you have genuine, high-value YMYL content, you can (and should) ensure that Google Search can find it and present it to your target audience. Below are seven tips to help you address YMYL SEO optimization in an honest, transparent, and effective manner for your content marketing.

1. Always Be Helpful

YMYL content is inherently helpful. When addressing something important like mental health or financial welfare, you should always seek to provide genuine value to your readers. Be helpful to humans first and optimized for search engines second.

The good news here is that Google’s Helpful Content Update has raised the bar for all content across the internet. Everything needs to be helpful now, and the more value you offer your readers, the higher you’re likely to rank in the SERPs.

2. Use Quality Links to Enhance Value

Link building is a common SEO strategy. Backlinks come from third-party sites. Internal links interconnect your own owned content. External links point outward from your site to third-party resources. That last option is a particularly effective way to enhance YMYL SEO.

As you source external links, look for high-authority websites with quality information. Often, sites with .edu or .gov URLs are considered high quality. Major news sites like Forbes and Deadline or health sites like Cleveland Clinic and Mayo Clinic are also typically safe. By using quality links, you connect your YMYL site to reputable sources capable of furthering the conversation. This sends the signal that you’re invested in creating honest and transparent solutions for those with real-world problems.

3. Follow E-E-A-T Standards

E-E-A-T (often simplified to EEAT) is a set of Google content quality standards that stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These are all traits that you want to exhibit in all content—but especially YMYL resources.

YMYL topics naturally address important concerns. As such, you want to ensure that you are bringing an appropriate degree of quality that can pass the E-E-A-T filter. Expertise and experience are particularly important here, as you want to speak from a position of knowledge and understanding as you help people answer important questions in their lives. The result is better engagement, which can positively impact your SEO.

4. Emphasize Contributors

Subject matter experts (SMEs) are important contributors to YMYL content. This type of content creator has specific knowledge and experience in the areas of business, health, and any other YMYL subjects or categories. 

As far as SEO is concerned, you want to publicize and emphasize SME contributions. Whenever possible, have an article bylined by a credentialed professional. If you can’t do that, at least have it reviewed by a qualified SME and then indicate that in the piece. Once again, this sends the message that you’re doing your YMYL homework and ensuring your content is genuinely helpful.

5. Get Rid of Low-Quality Content

Low-quality content is never helpful for any optimization. With YMYL content, in particular, it can be an search engine optimization killer. In the past, Google has stated (via Forbes), “We have very high Page Quality rating standards for YMYL pages because low-quality YMYL pages could potentially negatively impact a person’s happiness, health, financial stability, or safety.” 

The use of YMYL pages is important enough to justify these stringent standards. As such, it’s wise to proactively review and either optimize or eliminate your low-quality content. Consider performing a content audit every 6 or so months to prioritize high-quality content.

6. Improve Your Brand’s Reputation

A strong brand is a key aspect of the ongoing health of YMYL content. If you can support each piece with a recognizable brand name, image, and reputation, that can develop trust with both consumers and search engines.

With this in mind, consider investing in digital PR to get positive press alongside your SEO efforts. These two marketing tactics can have a synergistic effect when used together and provide digital marketing momentum for your YMYL content.

7. Utilize Social Media, Too

Along with digital PR, use social media marketing to enhance your brand reputation surrounding your YMYL content. Engage with consumers, stoke conversations, help answer questions, and generally spread brand awareness through socials.

By incorporating consistent social media content into your marketing activity, you can build further momentum for your brand. As is the case with digital PR, this can translate to greater SEO impact, even for something as sensitive as YMYL content.

Building SEO Momentum for YMYL SEO

YMYL topics thrive on quality content. They also are notorious for their strict standards and resistance to SEO-focused promotional activity. The better the content, the more likely quality raters will appreciate and reward the site.

However, focusing on SEO tactics that go hand-in-hand with quality content creation can enhance your YMYL SEO while also serving your target audience. If you’re struggling to identify and optimize your YMYL content, our team of content strategy experts at Relevance can help!

As you look for ways to optimize your YMYL pages, remember the golden rule: always put people first and search engines second. If you can do that, the search engine results will speak for themselves.

The post YMYL SEO: How To Make SEO Work For You in the YMYL Space appeared first on RELEVANCE.

It’s easy for SMB (small and medium business) owners and their teams to feel that a full-fledged marketing plan is out of their reach. While they may lack the resources to go toe to toe with larger competitors in the market, though, that makes the strategic planning and guidance of small business marketing efforts that much more valuable.

Let’s go over what it means to create marketing plans for small businesses, why having a small business marketing strategy is so important for success, and how your business can create its own master marketing plan.

What are Marketing Plans for Small Businesses?

A marketing plan, at its most fundamental level, is a series of steps that you can take to promote your brand and its products and services to consumers. In other words, a marketing plan isn’t your actual marketing activity. It’s the strategy or guidelines that you create to set those initiatives in motion. 

In the context of marketing plans for small businesses, this could include anything from creating a website to crafting an email drip campaign, drafting a social media marketing campaign, building credibility through digital PR, and more. A small business marketing plan takes the limited resources of a small business and considers how that entity can effectively reach its target audience with its marketing.

Why are Marketing Plans for Small Businesses Important?

Grasping the goal of a marketing plan is the easy part. For a small business team with finite time and resources, justifying the investment in a marketing plan is where things can bog down.  

It’s tempting to redirect your team’s efforts toward activities with more immediate or tangible results, such as sales or product development. When you take the time to invest in a genuine growth-oriented marketing plan, though, you can provide a long-term blueprint for growth that you simply can’t recreate through other areas of business activity.

The goal of a marketing plan is to create basic parameters, such as a schedule and marketing budget, that help you optimize your promotional resources. Developing the plan itself may require some extra investment, but the benefits are well worth it.  

By planning ahead of time, you give yourself the opportunity to consider all of your marketing options. It also allows you to either establish or revisit key factors, such as your target audience, primary selling points, and your competition. From there, you can decide which marketing activities are the most cost-effective and beneficial for your brand, as well as the order in which you need to execute them.  

For example, a marketing plan might reveal that paying for ongoing PPC (pay-per-click) ads is exorbitant and expensive over the long term. It also may reveal that the money saved from slashing your PPC ads in half allows you to invest in a content marketing strategy. From there, you can plot out the steps required to generate, optimize, and promote that content (see the next section) as an effective way to put your marketing in motion. 

Small business marketing plans also allow you to gauge the ROI of your marketing investments over time. This gives you the ability to make adjustments and maximize results as you go along. It also frees you up to be more creative in your long-term approach to marketing by building on past successes that you otherwise might not have known about.

What Should You Include in Marketing Plans for Small Businesses?

If you’re sold on the concept of developing a marketing plan for your small business but aren’t quite sure where to start, you’ve come to the right place. In the following section, we’ll break

down a step-by-step analysis of how you can turn your marketing ambitions into a solid plan of action that can guide you.

Step 1: Define Your Goals

It’s easy to skip this step, but trust us, you don’t want to do that. Most small business owners think they know their marketing goals — and in a certain sense, that’s true. As an involved executive of a smaller enterprise, you probably have your finger on the pulse of your organization more than most leaders. 

But that proximity to daily operations and activities can also make it easy to cloud out the big-picture stuff at times. Before you establish your marketing plan, take a minute to step back. 

What are you trying to accomplish with your marketing in the next year? What about the next five years? Do you want to generate revenue? Build brand awareness? Increase online visibility? Spark long-term growth? 

Each goal is related to your marketing, but the differences are important. Get each specific marketing goal in place before you flesh out your plan.

Step 2: Identify Your Audience

Your target audience should be the central focal point of your entire operation. When you develop products, you should consider whom they serve. When you bring them to market, you want to consider how to communicate to a select group of consumers that they’re available to solve their problems.

Make sure you have a buyer persona in place that reflects precisely whom you’re trying to market to and what their pain points are. If you’ve already considered what your customer base looks like, use this step to review that data and ensure that it’s informed by up-to-date market research.

Step 3: Consider Resources and Competition

As a final step to set the stage for your planning, review what resources you have available. As a small business, do you have a marketing team, or does that responsibility overlap with other employees (or yourself)? How much time do you have to invest in marketing? What is your marketing budget? What assets do you already have, such as a CRM or social media marketing tools?

Also, consider conducting a fresh round of competitive analysis. You likely did this when you were pulling together your business plan. Go back and observe how your competitors are marketing themselves to your target audience. Note the pros and cons of their efforts.

Step 4: Identify the Marketing Tactics You Can Use

Now comes the marketing magic. Once you’ve considered your goals, target audience, resources, and competition, it’s time to bring it all together. 

Consider the marketing tactics you have available and which ones best meet your current marketing needs. Then, weave these marketing ideas into a plan that considers resources and timelines. A few common marketing tactics that work well for small businesses include:

• Creating a strong website: This becomes your central online presence and a place to host your blogs, user-generated content, landing pages, and other content marketing.
• Optimizing your website: SEO is important. Optimizing your site with long-tail keyword phrases, links, and technical SEO (think metadata, mobile-friendly, etc.) is a powerful way to maximize your content creation efforts.
• Build up off-site marketing: Create a social media presence using platforms your target audience prefers. Nurture email marketing, as well, including drip campaigns, newsletters, and targeted announcements.
• Organize leads in a CRM: As a small business owner, you want to stay organized. When your marketing begins to gain momentum, have a customer relationship management (CRM) platform ready to keep things organized and under control.

Remember, you’re a small business with limited marketing resources. Consider which tactic is particularly relevant to your brand at the moment, and invest in those areas first.

Step 5: Establish Success Metrics and Feedback Loops

Finally, consider how you’ll track your marketing over time. Use tools like Google Analytics 4 to keep tabs on important marketing metrics, such as ranking for brand keywords, measuring organic traffic, and tracking conversions.

Also, request feedback from customers and team members and then use that information to hone your marketing activities moving forward. If you’re unsure how to adapt your plan (or create one in the first place), consider working with a growth marketing agency that can bring a cost-effective degree of experience and knowledge to bear on your brand’s marketing initiatives.

Building Master Marketing Plans for Small Businesses

As a small business, you may have limited time, money, and tools to work with. However, that doesn’t mean investing in a marketing plan isn’t worth it.

On the contrary, creating an effective marketing strategy helps you ensure that every ounce of resources you pour into promoting your business has a purpose. This gives you the best chance of sparking genuine, measurable growth, which can enable you to build larger marketing budgets, plans, and strategies in the future.

The post How To Create Marketing Plans for Small Businesses appeared first on RELEVANCE.

While online public relations is a powerful tool, you can’t engage in digital PR by simply flipping a switch or pressing a button. Often working with a reputable Digital PR agency is the best way to make the most of your outward-facing marketing efforts.

Here are 10 of the top digital PR services to consider in 2024, along with some additional thoughts on how to vet them, other digital PR tools to consider, and answers to some of the top frequently asked questions on the topic. 

Let’s dive in, shall we? 

Top 10 Digital PR Services

First, we have the services themselves. Here they are, along with a few thoughts on their strengths and a quick summary of each service.

1. Relevance

Overview and strengths: A growth marketing agency with a thorough approach to digital PR that integrates the marketing discipline with SEO and content creation to build credibility, visibility, and authority for a brand.

Summary: Relevance (ranked 88th on the 2023 Inc. 5000 list) is a full-service growth marketing agency. Digital PR is a central cog in its strategic approach to holistic marketing. Cultivating earned media helps establish credibility with key demographics and target audience segments.

The marketing experts at Relevance incorporate digital marketing into a larger strategy that also builds up visibility through SEO and authority through content. Effective digital PR on relevant, high-level publications is a synergistic element that helps these other aspects of marketing work together, accelerating a brand’s growth in the process.

2. Adogy

Overview and strengths: A flexible digital PR firm with custom strategies for any size enterprise and a track record of client mentions in high-profile publications.

Summary: As another leading digital PR agency, Adogy’s strength comes from its well-established network of media outlets and journalists. This makes it easy to surround a brand with third-party buzz. 

Adogy leverages high-quality articles to land premium brand placements and mentions. This organically puts the online spotlight on each of their clients. The service’s 90% pitch success rate demonstrates its team’s ability to execute digital PR strategies and create bonafide results.

3. 5th Avenue Brands

Overview and strengths: A PR agency specializing in building brands’ public profiles and thought leadership positioning in the finance, public policy, and B2B tech sectors. 

Summary: Fifth Avenue Brands’ digital PR goal is thought leadership. The agency engages in media relations and financial communications that broadcast brand messaging and build awareness across the finance, public, and tech sectors. 

Led by CEO Richard Lorenzen, 5th Avenue Brand’s team of seasoned PR professionals also engages in strategic planning to take advantage of every marketing opportunity. Risk mitigation and crisis communications are also critical in this area of business and are key aspects of the brand’s digital PR services.

4. BrandYourself

Overview and strengths: A PR firm dedicated to promoting positive messaging while maintaining and enhancing privacy on both personal and company-wide levels.

Summary: At first glance, BrandYourself is a PR agency dedicated to personal branding. However, the company has services for both professionals and their companies. These include strategic support to boost Google placement and build brand awareness. 

Along with these common digital PR offerings, BrandYourself focuses on cleaning up its clients’ social media profiles and overall image. For instance, it removes posts with the potential to damage an individual or brand’s image. The PR agency also helps with PR in the opposite direction by reducing the publicity of key information, such as addresses, birth dates, and contact information, when necessary.

5. Reputation Economy Advisors

Overview and strengths: A PR firm that streamlines and bolsters a brand’s digital PR by building leadership confidence and giving C-suite members insights into and control over the metrics that matter for promotional success.

Summary: Reputation Economy Advisors provides a model of trickle-down digital PR solutions. The company’s veteran PR team focuses on supporting leaders and encouraging them to embrace and champion positive change in the area of brand reputation management. 

The PR firm is focused on easing leadership concerns over reputation management and providing oft-elusive solutions to those risk concerns. It does so by identifying the reputation metrics that matter. From there, it comes alongside leaders and helps them glean actionable insights from that information to guide their brand’s promotional efforts.

6. Terakeet

Overview and strengths: A firm with a focus on digital asset optimization, including an emphasis on digital PR as a way to connect brands with their target audiences.

Summary: Terakeet’s approach to digital PR seeks to reach consumers who are conditioned to tune out traditional advertising. The agency focuses on its OAO (owned asset optimization) framework, which starts with understanding audiences and using that data to create a strategy with actionable insights.

Digital PR enters the picture as part of Terakeet’s prioritization of assets by “degree of control.” The agency seeks to categorize digital content into categories of owned, managed, and leveraged. From there, the goal is to create useful connections between a brand and its target audience by populating the internet with high-quality, high-utility content that resonates with consumers.

7. Digital Olympus

Overview and strengths: A digital PR firm with a link-building focus that seeks to combine topical authority with SEO value.

Summary: Digital PR can impact many aspects of a marketing plan. One of those is SEO backlink strategy, and Digital Olympus specializes in maximizing backlink impact. 

The online PR agency conducts a backlink profile analysis for a brand. From there, it creates a link plan to improve the quality and quantity of links pointing to a brand’s digital assets. Next, the Digital Olympus team outlines requirements, builds out a linking schedule, and monitors link performance to ensure results over time. While this is a specific approach to digital PR, it is a good option for anyone looking to leverage the digital marketing option specifically for link-building purposes.

8. Shout Bravo

Overview and strengths: A synergistic PR brand focused on creating quality content to promote via digital PR and influencer channels.

Summary: For Shout Bravo, everything starts with strong content. The company’s PR experts help brands generate high-quality content (worth “shouting” about). This content is original, optimized for a digital format, and focused on a brand’s target audience. 

Once created, that content becomes a springboard to generate third-party mentions across the internet. This step is conducted in collaboration with influencers and with link-building in mind.

9. Coinbound

Overview and strengths: A digital PR firm and marketing agency that specializes in the web3 and crypto spaces.

Summary: If a company is in a niche market, they may want to consider a digital PR firm that specializes in their specific industry. A good example of this is Coinbound. The digital PR firm is a top option for marketing cryptocurrency and web3-based companies.

Coinbound uses a highly integrated promotional approach with strategies that include PR and earned media. The agency has cultivated industry-specific contacts at many of the digital finance world’s top publishers, influencers, and media outlets. Coinbound may be specific to digital PR in the crypto world, but it is an excellent example of hyper-targeted digital PR services in highly competitive markets.

10. Thrive

Overview and strengths: A digital marketing agency with a fractionalized, á la carte approach to digital PR.

Summary: Thrive is an ideal option for marketing leaders who have an idea of what they want but who don’t have the time to execute their own vision themselves. The digital marketing agency offers a highly fractionalized and comprehensive number of digital marketing services, many of which fall under the digital PR umbrella.

For instance, companies can sign up for social media reputation management, social media management, and link-building services. By mixing and matching needs, they can create a digital PR support plan that helps them reach their brand’s digital PR needs while still maintaining a certain degree of control. 

Other Digital PR Tools to Consider

Digital marketing agencies provide third-party professional support that can shape and guide your public relations efforts. However, there are also many tools that either a partnering agency or your own internal staff can use to enhance your digital PR. Here are a few examples to keep in mind as you craft your digital PR strategy.

Glimpse

What is it? Glimpse is a marketing platform designed to inform and guide content creation. It provides key traffic and trend data that improves the chances that off-site content and mentions perform well.

How does it help with digital PR? Digital PR works best when it’s backed by high-quality, high-value content. This requires a steady stream of content creation that addresses the pain points and interests of your target audience. Glimpse makes it easier to discover those topics and related terms, isolate those with the highest search volume potential, and then focus your content creation in those areas. 

Cision

What is it? Cision is one of the biggest PR platforms on the internet. The tool is designed to generate massive exposure to journalists and media channels, supercharging digital PR efforts in the process.

How does it help with digital PR? One of the biggest challenges of digital PR is getting content out in front of potential third-party outlets. Cision specializes in broadcasting press releases and related time-sensitive promotional content. That way, journalists and media outlets can quickly become aware of and pick up branded stories that interest their readers.

Prowly

What is it? A platform designed to streamline the digital PR process and maximize its results. The one-stop PR tool helps with everything from drafting a press release to pitching to media and monitoring media performance.

How does it help with digital PR? Digital PR is a time-intensive activity. Prowly removes much of the burden of the PR process by helping create, pitch, promote, and track digital PR messaging. It is an ideal efficiency tool that works across countless industries, offering genuine PR content and providing data-driven results.

Muck Rack

What is it? Muck Rack is a tool designed to monitor your brand’s mentions. The Public Relations Management (PRM) platform helps with pitching, monitoring, and reporting digital PR in a single, comprehensive location.

How does it help with digital PR? Digital PR can be difficult to track. As you design and execute a digital PR campaign, these can quickly spiral into dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of earned media mentions. These aren’t all in a single, convenient location. They’re spread across the internet. Muck Rack helps monitor and track these mentions in a single dashboard.

Questions to Ask When Looking for the Best Digital PR Services

With so many tools and services available, it can be difficult to narrow your choices and select the right digital PR partner for your marketing needs. Here are a few questions to ask to help you hone in on the best choice for your brand. 

Do you know what you need from digital PR?

This is a simple initial question that is worth asking before you go out in search of a digital PR service. Even if you don’t have a precise answer, you want to consider what digital PR is to your marketing team, what media coverage you expect to get from it, and what you’re willing to invest in it. This gives you a clearer picture as you begin to vet various agencies.

Does the PR agency have experience in your industry?

Industry experience matters. Even if a digital public relations agency works with companies across various industries, make sure they have at least a rudimentary understanding of your industry and what creates success in that arena.

Does the PR agency utilize digital PR as part of a larger marketing strategy?

Digital PR is a helpful marketing activity. However, when used in a vacuum, it will only get you so far. Make sure a digital PR agency is willing to leverage earned media as part of a larger growth strategy that includes an emphasis on key pillars, including establishing authority, building credibility, and increasing visibility.

Does the PR agency have a clear approach to PR strategy?

Digital PR isn’t a “shoot from the hip” kind of activity. Any good agency will have a clear methodology and proven formulas and frameworks that they have used to generate success in the past.

Is the PR agency up to date on the latest Google updates?

Google is always changing. The brand’s Helpful Content Update in late 2023 unexpectedly upset the traffic for many well-established websites. Further updates in early 2024 are, once again, shaking up the industry. Make sure a PR agency is familiar with the latest updates and key search engine factors, like Google’s E-E-A-T standards.

Does the PR agency have the right connections?

PR starts with good content, but that won’t help if it doesn’t get published on the right platforms. Whether it’s through tools like Cision or Prowly (see tool recommendations above) or connections with high-profile journalists and media outlets, make sure each PR agency you work with has robust, relevant, and impressive connections to help get the word out about your brand.

Can the PR agency track metrics to prove success?

Data-driven marketing is the only kind of marketing that you can trust. A PR service should always be able to prove its impact on your brand through rock-solid data. The specific metrics may vary from one situation and agency to the next, and that’s fine. Just make sure you’re comfortable with how they can prove their success over time.

Frequently Asked Questions about Digital PR Services

Something as complex as partnering with a third-party agency for digital PR always creates an endless stream of questions. Here are some of the most common inquiries, along with some basic answers.

• What services should be included with PR? A good PR agency should come with proven strategies and frameworks, established media relationships, content marketing capabilities, and clear metrics for tracking results.
• What are successful PR metrics to measure? The ROI of PR is hard to measure — but not impossible. Factors like consistent mentions, improved Google ranking, and increased credibility help gauge the ongoing success of digital public relations.
• How much do digital PR services cost? Unfortunately, this isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer. At Relevance, we specialize in holistic growth marketing. That means we seek to create an ideal amalgamation of SEO, content marketing, and digital PR services to meet each client’s needs. We have clients that require heavy digital PR strategies, while others don’t need the service at all. If you want a price range, the best option is to get a quote. Reach out now for a free strategy session with our team, and we can explore the digital PR needs, cost, and impact we can provide for your brand.

Digital PR is a complex and nuanced activity. Working with a digital PR agency can help you reduce wasted time and resources and maximize the impact of this powerful online promotional channel.

Use the tips and suggestions above to identify the best digital PR service for your company. Then, reach out and initiate the process of collaborating to ensure your brand is effectively earning media as part of a holistic growth marketing strategy built for maximum long-term impact.

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