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Writing for Rankings: Why Reaching Your SEO Goals is Nearly Impossible Without a Professional and Trusted Content Strategy Team

The principles of search engine optimization (SEO) are the driving force behind a lot of what we do here at Leverage Digital. Online visibility is paramount for a successful digital marketing campaign, because without a strong foundation for your digital imprint, it’s increasingly difficult to plan effective cross-platform campaigns that truly unlock your brand’s potential.

Without a dedicated team of content strategists to produce consistent, compelling copy, it can be virtually impossible to truly nudge your Google search ranking in the right direction. A company with poor search rankings is similar to a person stranded in the middle of the ocean. You know that person is out there, splashing around helplessly waiting to be discovered, but no matter how much time you spend searching, you simply can’t find them.

Most businesses are familiar with the concept of SEO and possess a vague understanding of how this valuable metric is determined, but they don’t realize that creating effective content to drive web traffic is a multi-step process that requires a skilled team of experienced content strategists.

What is a Content Strategist?

Imagine a writer who not only possesses the verbal skills to clearly state the things you want to say, but also possesses a fundamental understanding of your target audience, what they want to read, and how to best deliver it to their digital display. Doesn’t sound like your typical writer, does it? That’s because a content strategist is more than writer, they are a vital cog in your SEO campaign.

While brainstorming topics for your SEO campaign, our content strategists discuss your brand and its objectives so every piece of content is relevant to your target audience while enriching the value of your website. When news related to your company or industry is published, our content team adjusts your content accordingly to ensure that users searching about these timely topics are directed to your website first. If you need a specific topic covered, our content strategists will research information about your topic and write an original thought piece supported by legitimate sources.

Familiarity with Your Brand is Vital

Hiring writers to create content for your SEO campaign might help you produce articles and blog posts for your site, but if this content has no value to your target audience, it won’t matter. An effective content team is composed of content strategists who possess a fundamental understanding of SEO, strong writing skills, and the foresight to plan content that will cover topics and target keywords actively searched by your customers.

Moreover, a content team must be intimately familiar with the brand they are producing content for. This is one of the major benefits of using a trusted team of content strategists. Sometimes, when you outsource SEO copywriting to a third party, they turn around and flip your content again to a contracted remote employee or even worse, a random contractor from services like Fiverr or Upwork.

At Leverage Digital, our content strategists build familiarity with your brand over time, ensuring that your content grows increasingly relevant to your target audience with each passing day. How can a writer who is only just being introduced to your business compete with a seasoned writer who has spent months or even years getting to know and writing for your brand?

Writers are also researchers, but when your clients are in verticals like real estate and legal services, it can be difficult to find writers who can reliably take technical ideas, understand them, and then simplify them for readers. Our team meets every day to write for our clients. By sharing the burden of dense research and complementing each other’s skill set, our team ensures that your content aligns perfectly with your brand.

Multi-Step Editing Ensures Every Article is Worth Paying For

A thorough editing process that puts more than one set of eyes on a piece of content will help you avoid costly typos and errors. There’s a reason newspapers and magazines have editors to revise and polish articles before publication. Readers notice gaffes, and they love to point out errors for the rest of your audience. At Leverage Digital, we utilize a comprehensive editing process to ensure that every piece of content is checked for grammar, syntax, accuracy, format, and style multiple times before it is presented to your audience.

Marketing Your Brand Online Relies on A+ Content

Quality content is hard to find. In a world of clickbait articles and hastily thrown together SlideShare presentations, readers are actively searching for resources that answer their questions and teach them about relevant topics. If you truly care about your customers, you want to ensure that your content is rigorously researched, skillfully written, and thoroughly edited every time. This level of consistency is almost impossible to achieve without a dedicated team of content strategists.

Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs and author of Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Ridiculously Good Content, understands that content needs to “be specific enough to be believable and universal enough to be relevant.”

Producing content that accomplishes these two goals requires a dedicated team who lives and breathes content; a team who knows your brand and possesses a personal understanding of your objectives. We don’t see how content production can be skillfully executed any other way.

Are you unable to meet your SEO goals because your website lacks content, or your content is inconsistent and poorly written? At Leverage Digital, our in-house team of professional content strategists can improve your search visibility, and position your company as an industry thought leader, resulting in more traffic, engagement, and conversions through your website.

Ready to partner with an award-winning agency that delivers results? Let’s get started.
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How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy From Your Existing SEO Content

If your brand has a successful SEO strategy, you are most likely publishing engaging content that your customers find valuable. Have you ever stopped to consider that the same great content you’re using for SEO could be repurposed for social media, email marketing, white papers, and even e-books? Well, it can, and the content marketing experts at Leverage Digital can help you, but before we proceed an important point should be made: SEO is content marketing.

SEO is Content Marketing

In addition to increasing search engine visibility, SEO content should be relevant and valuable to your target audience, and provide solutions to their problems. The cumulative effect of this results in more traffic being driven to your website, better user engagement, increased conversions, and ultimately more customers. These are all goals of content marketing as well, but SEO and content marketing are often discussed in silos, when in actuality they work hand-in-hand to promote your brand.

To emphasize this disconnect, according to Sunil Rajaraman, the founder and chief executive (CEO) of Scripted.com, marketers are willing to pay $1.95 more per word for “thought leadership” content than they are willing to pay for “SEO” content.

One can assume this lack of perceived value for SEO content is a result of all the clickbait that has perpetuated as SEO over the years, but our approach to SEO is vastly different. At Leverage Digital, our SEO content provides your target audience with valuable, well-researched resources that help customers build familiarity with your brand and gain a firm grasp of your services. Google recognizes good content, and it rewards your site for hosting it with superior visibility that trumps your competitors.

When you consider the fact that SEO is content marketing with the added benefit of increased search visibility, it’s becomes clear that SEO content is an effective and valuable strategy for driving more traffic to your website, but that’s just the beginning. Our agency only writes SEO content with substance, content that you can derive value from again and again. Let’s look at the various ways your SEO content can be repurposed.

Share on Social Media

Since your brand is already publishing content that is relevant and valuable to your customers, share this same content across all social media platforms where your customers are active. Because your SEO content should be relevant and valuable to your target audience, posting to social media should naturally result in organic shares.

Your brand may already share curated content on social media, but that’s only helping other brands achieve their content marketing goals. We recommend that you scale down on sharing content that promotes other brands, and in its place, share content designed to drive visitors back to your brand’s website.

With this strategy, repurposed content not only increases your website’s search visibility, but also increases its social visibility, resulting in a twofold increase in traffic to your brand’s website.

Promote Through Email Marketing

In addition to social media, promote your SEO content through email marketing, but never include the whole article. Use a teaser with a compelling headline to entice your readers to click through to your brand’s website where they can finish reading the article. From here, they will be presented with targeted content aimed at driving further engagement with your website.

Many brands send out monthly or quarterly emails bogged down with too much information about recent accomplishments, such as awards won, projects completed, new hires made, and so on. The problem with this strategy is that it provides a lot of information that’s useless to customers. It’s good to let customers know how well your brand is doing every once in a while, but the bulk of your email marketing should provide customers with information they can actually learn from and use.

Keep in mind that content marketing is not only intended to drive new customers, but is also intended to encourage repeat customers as well — an area where email marketing is very effective.

Convert Content into White Papers and E-Books

Finally, downloadable white papers and e-books are great for generating leads from your brand’s website. So, take the last six months or more of SEO content from your ongoing campaign and repurpose it into downloadable white papers or compile it into an e-book.
Providing website visitors with free white papers and e-books not only allows you to generate leads, but also assists in positioning your brand as a thought leader in its respective industry.

We recommend promoting your white papers and e-books through social media and email marketing, too. Give readers just enough information to whet their appetites, followed by a call to action to visit your brand’s website where they can download the complete whitepaper or e-book. If you’re interested in developing white papers or e-books from your SEO content, our agency can help.

Conclusion

While content written for SEO purposes is intended to increase a website’s search visibility, you can promote that same great content through other channels, such as social media and email, as well as repurpose it into downloadable whitepapers and e-books. The end result is less work, increased engagement, and a better overall content marketing strategy.

Are you failing to produce enough content to meet your SEO goals? At Leverage Digital, we understand that a successful SEO campaign depends on content, so we focus on creating valuable content that you can use in a variety of ways to drive web traffic, engagement, and conversions through your website.

Ready to partner with an award-winning agency that delivers results? Let’s get started.
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5 Timeless Fonts for Your Daily Visual Content Needs

In an increasingly visual world, it’s imperative that we never underestimate the power of typography. Designers have a virtually inexhaustible reservoir of fonts to choose from, so for inexperienced designers, choosing the “perfect” font to communicate a brand’s message can be a stress-inducing process.

Books on typography, like Simon Garfield’s Just My Type and Steven Heller’s Scripts, tell us that typography goes far beyond the litany of two-dimensional fonts occupying space in your Adobe Typekit. Typography includes photography and visuals that convey a message through language. After all, typography; whether you take a traditional or modern approach, is all about translating your message to your audience as clearly as possible.

Unfortunately, not all fonts are created equal. Certain fonts have been future-proofed through widespread adoption over time, like Times New Roman and Arial. These fonts are Typekit-essentials suitable for a wide breadth of tasks, but when selecting fonts for visual content, it’s important to consider adding these five timeless fonts to your repertoire.

Helvetica

Italicized Helvetica can be an alluring typeface, but as seen here, its standard form is a neat font for conveying your brand’s message in a variety of ways.

 

You can’t talk about typography without bringing up Helvetica. With a diverse array of applications for writing and advertising, Helvetica is arguably the most popular font in the world. Since its inception in 1957 by Swiss typeface designers Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffman, Helvetica has a reached cult status among advertisers and marketers. Helvetica is notable for being inspired by the neo-grotesque typefaces designed in the 19th century by German and Swiss designers.

Today, Helvetica is an integral part of every designer’s Typekit. It has virtually unlimited uses and always manages to leave an immutable impression on the viewer. Helvetica’s popularity is universally recognized in the design community. In fact, there’s even a documentary film called Helvetica that chronicles the rise and sustained popularity of the iconic typeface.

Lato


In this faux indie film poster, Lato’s simplicity and readability was utilized for the slogan and the copyright information.

 

The typographic classification, Sans Serif, is reserved for casual, easy-going, and personable fonts. In Summer 2010, Warsaw-based designer Łukasz Dziedzic introduced the world to the Lato typeface family. The standard Lato font can be best described as a remix of Arial focused on leaning out each letter into a more elegant proportion. Lato fonts are open source and can be used without any limitations. It is a very neutral font that is well-suited to a variety of tasks including text overlays for visual content, infographics, brochures, and even business cards.

Roman Antique

In this shareable quote, Roman Antique makes for a compelling typeface whether accompanying an image or not.

 

Timeless fonts receive the namesake for one of two reasons:

Reason 1: they have been used regularly throughout time.

Many fonts have proven their efficacy in a variety of roles whether strictly as an appropriately stylized alphabet or to help immortalize a brand such as Coca Cola’s iconic Spencerian Script used by Frank Mason Robinson starting in 1885.

Reason 2: they transport the viewer to a past time.

Victorian and Gothic fonts are two classic examples of fonts that leave an invariably historic impression on the viewer. Typewriter fonts are equally effective when you want to leave an indelible imprint on the viewer. Roman Antique is one such font.

Roman Antique is a murky, typewriter-style font that maintains legibility regardless of scale. The further you increase the font size, the more intricate the detailing in this font becomes. Roman Antique is versatile among typewriter-style fonts, but it’s also effective when used in conjunction with visual content. This font possesses a unique sense of gravity that is readily apparent to the viewer. Whether you want to add depth to a quote aimed at inspiring your audience or need to dress up a piece of content with a classic aesthetic, Roman Antique is a flexible, typewriter-style font that can be used to satisfy an array of typographic objectives.

Bellfort


Bellfort was the perfect, attention-grabbing font for this employee introduction featuring a simple quote.

 

When you need a cohesive font family that spans an array of distinct styles and ideologies, Bellfort is your best option. The dense Bellfort family of fonts features 7 sub-families including regular, rough, press, shadow, press shadow, shadow only, and script which are also divided into four different weights.

The standard Bellfort font is characterized by thick lines and bold verticality. It is a caps-friendly font that looks attractive as informational text, a title, a quote, or something else entirely. When you need to get your message across clearly to a wide audience, Bellfort is a universally lauded font that can help you bring your brand closer to its target audience.

Raleway

Raleway is another versatile Sans Serif font. We used Raleway Heavy to create a bold, eye-catching message with a white drop shadow in the first image. In the second image, we reverted back to a single color version of Raleway Heavy and added a CTA using Raleway Standard.

 

Raleway is a striking font with a strong sense of symmetry and a few unexpected design nuances that help elevate your typography to the next level. Raleway is defined by its balance and boldness. This font is a treat for the eyes and has as many applications as you can imagine. Raleway helps enhance visual content on platforms like Instagram and Facebook by providing a dynamic typeface that is suitable for nearly any tone, motif, or message. Adding a drop shadow to Raleway fonts greatly increases their visual aesthetic and helps create a significant sense of depth to separate your image and typography.

Regardless of the platform, when you publish visual content, you want to be certain that you are conveying your brand’s message as clearly as possible. An in-depth understanding of typography can help you boost engagement with your target audience and convert prospective customers into dedicated followers. By building familiarity with a handful of timeless fonts, you can equip yourself for any future design projects on the horizon.

Are you concerned that your brand is failing to reach its target audience? Does your visual content fall by the wayside without any real engagement? At Leverage Digital, our in-house team of content strategists can help you reach your objectives by evaluating your brand’s goals, developing a personalized content strategy, and executing a 360-degree content campaign. Whether it’s compelling written copy, aesthetic visual content, witty social media posts, or informative videos, our team is equipped with all of the tools you need to boost your brand’s online visibility.

Ready to partner with an award-winning agency that delivers results? Let’s get started.
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Leverage Digital Ranks as One of Tampa Bay’s Largest Advertising Agencies

Recently, the Tampa Bay Business Journal (TBBJ) released its highly awaited list of Largest Tampa Bay Advertising Agencies and Leverage Digital ranked at number 16.

Growing Fish in a Big Pond

The list, locally compiled by TBBJ’s Research Director Chris Erickson, is based on companies’ number of full-time local employees. It also provides information regarding each agency’s specialties, founding year, 2017 revenue, and top local executive. To ascertain the area’s largest advertising agencies, a wide net was cast (just under 6,000 square miles) covering Hernando, Hillsborough, Manatee, Pasco, Pinellas, Polk, and Sarasota counties.

As a young, vibrant company, the Leverage team was proud to place amongst a list of many long-established companies, some founded as early as 1922.

“This is just the beginning,” said Managing Director Jay Taylor, “Leverage Digital’s rapid growth is a testament to the power of results-based digital marketing, strategic data measurement techniques, and a personal touch. We have an all-star team in place and I look forward to seeing the Leverage family continue to grow.”

A Decade Dedicated to Digital

Mr. Taylor, who founded Leverage Digital in 2008, saw the need for a marketing agency that specialized in digital and valued measurable results as well as creativity. At the time, many agencies were focused on traditional advertising and digital marketing was still in its infancy.

Since then, the agency has grown in both size and acclaim, receiving honors for its work from the International Davey Awards, Hermes Awards, W3 Awards, and Communicator Awards, to name a few. In 2018, Leverage was named the 9th fastest growing company owned or led by a University of South Florida alumnus.

The Leverage team is excited to be the 16th largest agency in beautiful Tampa Bay. However, the agency plans to make an even bigger growth-related announcement soon—stay tuned!