Introduction to Social Media: Understanding Your Platforms

September 19, 2018

Social Media is a term that has become synonymous with modern day marketing tactics. The days of E-Blasts, conference brochures, and mailing lists aren’t over, but it’s clear there are more channels than ever to communicate to clients and candidates alike.

According to the Demand Gen Report, 47% of buyers viewed 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep.

This stat rings true with our approach to talent attraction on social platforms and is a focus in our introduction to social media. Social media is an integral component of our strategy to increase attention to our brand. Social platforms allow for ease of distribution, for various types of content, and when used correctly, can prime clients and candidates for your sales team.

30 Minute How-To Guide: Check out this webinar to learn how you can build your brand on LinkedIn ➢

Twitter

336 million monthly active users
280 Characters, Previously 140 Characters
Ideal length is 120-130 characters
Content options: Short form. Blogs. eBooks. GIFs. Company Posts.

Short and sweet. Twitter is not your platform for long posts or an avenue to hard sell your services. This is a platform for sharing information quickly with the goal to lead clients and candidates to your content. Some examples of content that can be incorporated with a Twitter post include:

Company Events
News or Blogs
eBooks
Salary Guides
Community Involvement

Click-through-rate (CTR) will be the main parameter for success on Twitter. We don’t post to post, we want targeted engagement. Sharing relevant information quickly, and lead people specifically to the landing pages, gated content or blogs you’ve selected. Buffer ran a study focusing on CTR, and how clicks correlate to length of posts. As you’ll see below in their data, you’re going to want to stick to staying short with around 120-130 characters.

(Photo Credit Via Buffer)

#Hashtags. It is not a necessity but with specific posts #Hashtags can increase potential for engagement. Hashtags work very similarly to SEO optimized keywords on your website. Not there yet? Catch up on keywords, and loop back here when you finish up.

Here’s an example. When you attend your next conference, check to see the hashtag they are using. The hashtag will help attendees clearly interpret that the post is running with the conference, and when the user clicks the hashtag they will view all posts with that hashtag.

For that very reason, hashtags can be a great way to curate all posts associated with your event. Just don’t forget, short and sweet on Twitter. Buffer ran a study on the ideal hashtag limit, finding a negative response when multiple hashtags are used.

(Photo Credit Via Buffer)

540 million users, with 256 million monthly active users.
Professional headline: 100-120 characters
Content options: Industry news. Gated Content. Event promotion. Thought leadership.
Shine some light on your company culture and industry expertise. Empower your employees to share and comment on company posts. Post company offers, promotions or short videos from your Execs.

LinkedIn is the primary social media outlet for staffing and recruiting alike. Having an up-to-date account is crucial, but your interactions and the types of posts you’re sharing can be the difference between successful posts and a missed opportunity.

Company posts can be a great first step towards finding consistency of posts. Coordinate with other employees on your team, reposting their shared posts, commenting on posts and beginning the dialogue. It’s a tough expectation to assume interaction and comments on each of your posts. Establishing a cadence where your fellow employees can engage within your comments is a quick way to portray your posts as relevant and lead to connections interacting with you.

Improve Your Social Game with Parqa Marketing

Utilizing the power of Twitter and LinkedIn can give your recruiting firm a big boost in brand awareness. Want to learn more about how your can grow both your personal brand and the brand of your recruiting firm? Check out our latest webinar, where Parqa CEO Tony Sorensen shared how he grew his recruiting company’s LinkedIn followers from 0 to 20,000+ in just five years.

[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]Watch Parqa’s Free 30-Minute Webinar: Growing Your Personal Brand on LinkedIn For Recruiters. LinkedIn is the go-to social network for recruiters, it’s never been more important to make sure your personal brand stands out online. Learn how to grow your business, and gain traction on LinkedIn, in this 30-Minute How-To Guide for Recruiters.

Why Recruiting Firms Should Hire a Digital Marketing Agency that Specializes in the Recruiting Industry

August 23, 2018

If you had to decide between hiring a digital marketing agency that knows the recruiting industry, or a digital marketing agency that does not specialize but happens to be local, who would you choose?

Let me ask you this: does your recruiting firm specialize? By market? By niche? Probably. If you’ve led a recruiting firm for much time at all, you know that your chances for winning a search are much improved if you specialize in your client’s specific need. Why?

You know the types of candidates they need. Also, you know the trends in their market or industry niche. You are a thought leader in their space — an expert. You have more insight into what their company needs and can deliver better candidates than someone who is a generic recruiter (I’m betting).

I once had someone tell me years ago that “a recruiter is a recruiter is a recruiter” – implying that a recruiter who has developed a good skill set can recruit for any position. While this may be true technically, it’s not the most important consideration when it comes to being selected by the company searching for talent. In that company’s mind, if they’re hiring a CFO and they have the option to choose between a generalist recruiter or a finance & accounting executive search recruiter in their market with 20 years of experience, whom do you think they’re going to select? Right. The expert.

Webinar On-demand: Watch this webinar to learn how you can implement content marketing into your strategy ➢

Why Is It Important to Hire a Digital Marketing Agency Who Knows the Recruiting Industry?

I’ve talked to hundreds of recruiting firm leaders across the country, and I’m losing track of how many tell me they hired a digital marketing agency in the past that didn’t know the difference between candidates vs. clients. The marketing agency they hired drove website traffic and even leads, but there was a disconnect between why a recruiting agency might want to attract clients, not candidates (or vice versa if you are in a candidate-driven market like IT Consulting). They thought it was all the same. Traffic. And we both know that could not be further from the truth. Those are very different audiences.

At Parqa, we were created within a $17M executive search and consulting firm. Our whole team has experience managing marketing campaigns for recruiting companies. I’ve personally had the opportunity to manage marketing in-house at recruiting firms for the past 7 of my 10 years, specializing in marketing/branding/PR/communications. Our CEO Tony Sorensen is a 20-year recruiting industry leader who has successfully grown two recruiting companies from the ground up, $20M and $17M (and growing). From creating respected recruiting firms from ground zero to rebranding already existing recruiting firms and starting over, we’ve seen it all. Also, we’re a little nerdy about it.

Why? Well, we’ve struggled through the challenges of setting up a PPC campaign on Google, only to have candidate leads fill out our contact forms rather than client leads. That was years ago. We’ve now determined best practices to ensure the highest level of accuracy with attracting qualified leads. As a little history, Tony was dabbling with SEO and PPC back in 2007, which is ancient for digital marketing, and even more unheard of for a recruiting firm.

Industry-Specific Best Practices Matter

The recruiting industry as a whole is not at the forefront of marketing innovation, but most recruiting firms realize that it’s a changing world, and if you’re not building your credibility online, you’re missing opportunities. Moreover, if you happen to be the top 5% of the market that’s doing more than merely the marketing basics, you’re a diamond in the rough—and I’d love the opportunity to see your online presence and meet whoever is owning that because that’s no small feat!

Whether you’re right at the beginning of growing your brand through content marketing, or you’re in conversations about marketing automation, having a team in your back pocket that knows the recruiting industry as well as you do, will propel you into the next phase of your company. In fact, it will streamline the process and keep you on the cutting edge of the recruiting industry.

How does that help you? Credibility. Without it, you may not get a callback. Without it, you may not be found at all. With it, you open up the door of possibilities of attracting more relevant clients (or candidates based on your business goals). Now that is worth your time to explore!

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5 Tips to Inspire Your Team and Yourself, to Blog

August 22, 2018

As a business owner of a recruiting firm, digital marketing might still be a new concept for you. Ten years ago, your marketing efforts consisted of posting ads in your local Yellow Pages and scraping the early versions of online job boards for leads to cold call. Wow.. how the landscape changed. If your firm has been slow to adapt, you might be struggling to grow your business.

There are tons of digital marketing strategies that recruiters can deploy to grow their business. One of the cheapest and easiest tactics is to install a culture of blogging with your team.

Webinar On-demand: Watch this webinar to learn how you can implement content marketing into your strategy ➢

Picture this scenario: you’re talking with a fellow owner and they tell you they partnered with a digital marketing agency. The agency is helping them with blogging, social media engagement, building a new website, and optimizing their content for SEO. Intrigued, you head back to the office and decide it’s time to dip your toes into the digital world and write a blog about something you are passionate about in your industry. Energized by the process, you get the great idea that everyone in your firm should participate in the blogging process as a way to build your firm’s brand.

What a great idea! But how are you going to get everyone on board and engaged in the blogging effort?

Here are 5 tips to inspire your team (and secretly maybe even yourself) to blog.

1. Start with the Why

Tell your employees WHY you are asking them to take on this new task. What is the purpose? Taking three hours away from the phones and client meetings to write doesn’t automatically sound appealing to recruiters working on commission. Here a couple of examples WHY it is important for your employees to blog.

Build their personal brand in the digital marketplace: Blogs can be seen by potential clients and candidates on the company website, LinkedIn, and Facebook. If people don’t know who your recruiters are, how are they going to call them?
Build their reputation as an industry expert: You know that your employees are rock stars in their fields, now you need to spread the word. If your team blogs about pain points in their respective recruiting verticals, people in that vertical will gain valuable insight into the industry and recognize the expertise of both the employee who wrote the blog and your firm’s brand in general.
Increase brand visibility: We all know marketing is not free and that we can never get in front of enough people in the recruiting industry. Through blogging, your employees have the opportunity to market themselves for no cost to them or the company.

2. Tie Blogging to Tangible Business Results

In our search and consulting sister company, Versique, we track both activity metrics and financial results of individual team members to help them grow their business. If you’re new to digital marketing, work with some of your peers or check out our website to get stats around the effectiveness of building an online presence.

One of our expert recruiters has closed 25% of their business the last 4 years from building their online presence. That is well over $300,000 in search fees.
One of our thought leaders recently posted a blog on LinkedIn. In the first 24 hours, they had 52 likes and the post had been viewed 3,668 times. How many networking events would you have to attend to get in front of 3,668 people?

3. Create a Content Calendar

No one wants to be in the middle of a huge search and have the owner of their company fly into their office and demand a blog be written by the end of the week because they forgot to tell you a week ago. Don’t be that type of leader. Create a content calendar so your team can be properly prepared.

Creating a calendar for your team that is 4-6 weeks out allows your employees to ask questions, raise concerns, and do some research on a topic. It will also allow the employee time to balance the ebbs & flows of the recruiting business or pick a slow time to set aside a block of a few hours to sit down and write. On top of helping the employee, a content calendar will also create group accountability and collaboration for the company as a whole.

4. Involve Your Team in Topic Generation

I know for me picking the topic is sometimes the hardest part of the blogging process, but that doesn’t mean you should just hand out a list of topics to your employees because the topics are important to you. It is integral that your employees are an active participant in generating topics. A few reasons why it’s so important to include:

They are building their expertise in their vertical – they should know what the pain points are for their current clients.
If your team members are going to get excited about writing, they should pick a topic they are passionate about and own it.
It will help them to think critically about how they can add more value and expertise to their clients.
You will get a more diverse range of topics with everyone contributing.

5. Lead by Example

Planning a strategy is great, but execution is the key to success. As the owner and leader of your firm, it is easy to set the strategy for your employees and move on to the next visionary idea that will change your business. When you establish the blogging strategy and calendar, make sure you lead by example by making yourself a regular contributor.

Additionally, maintain an active role in assisting your employees with their blogging efforts. Sit down with your employees and discuss topics or help them troubleshoot any hurdles they are having.

But it all starts with you. If you’re not meeting your deadlines, it’s hard to expect that your team will.

Next Steps:

Blogging is an EXCELLENT way to get you and your team started in building up the brand of your firm, and the individual brands of your employees. When ramping up your in-house blogging consider the above simple tips to keep you on track to execute.

Want to learn more about giving your B2B marketing a boost?

Learn how Parqa can transform the way you approach digital marketing.

The Importance of Local SEO and Why You Should be Investing There

August 21, 2018

More than 50 percent of search queries globally now come from mobile devices. As a result, more and more searchers are looking for local businesses when they’re on the go.

Local SEO can help your business stand out in search results, increasing your chance of being seen by potential customers. In this article you’ll learn about what Local SEO is, why it’s important, and how to use those local ranking factors to rise to the top of organic results.

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO is SEO for location-based searches. This means a physical address or location is a required for a business to show up in a local search as a result. It helps businesses promote their products and services to local customers at the exact time they’re looking for them.

Local SEO strategies range from including your website and business information on your website to claiming your Google My Business listing to creating/claiming your business in various online directories (i.e. Yelp, Yellowpages, HotFrog, etc.)

NOTE: There are some local SEO ranking factors and optimizations tactics that are universal across all types of businesses/ organizations, however, there are also ones that vary based on business type.

Why is Local SEO Important?

Millions of customers conduct local searches every day to find the top local businesses in their area (both services and products). By investing in Local SEO you can help increase your chances of being seen by potential customers.

Highly Targeted and Timely

There are two main reasons why users do local searches, to:

1.) Find a specific business

2.) Find a local service or product at a local store

Local SEO provides potential customers the information that they want (targeted), when they want it (timely), and where they want it (within SERPs), making Local SEO both efficient and extremely cost-effective.

There are also many users who don’t have a specific business in mind when they execute their search for local services and products. Local SEO helps better position your business and promote your services/ product offerings to local customers when they’re looking for your type of business.

Mobile Searches Continue to Grow

According to official Google statements, “more than 50 percent of search queries globally now come from mobile devices, however it could be as high as 60 percent.”

As more and more customers use their mobile phones to find the best local businesses while they’re on the go, showing up in the ‘local 3-pack’ (we’ll talk about this more later) and having relevant business/location information within search results has become even more important.

On average, 61% of people doing a local search on their phone end up calling the business.

It’s a free Source of Advertisement

It’s free to claim your listing on Google My Business, Bing Places for Business, Yahoo Local and hundreds of other online business directories, but that may not be the case forever. While it is a somewhat time consuming process, it’s worth it to reach highly targeted, high converting in-market prospects.

Drop in ‘near me’/ Geographic Modifiers in Searches

“Over the last two years, comparable searches WITHOUT ‘near me’ have grown by 150 percent” – Google, June 2017

This shift towards dropping location modifiers is “because people know and expect Google to deliver results that will be relevant to their location.” They assume that Google now knows when a search has local intent. This further emphasizes the importance of claiming your Google My Business page, and other alike online directory listings.

Rank Higher in Search Engine Results

Have you ever done a google search and seen this (see right). This is known as the “local pack”, it showcases local businesses and stores relevant to the search query/term you entered, in this case it’s “barbershops.”

The goal behind the ‘local pack’ is to provide users with better information about the top local search results (i.e. images, photos, reviews, prices, etc.)

In 2015, Google cut the number of ‘local pack’ results from seven to three. While this change benefited those businesses 1.) with multiple stores across the world 2.) businesses that were already ranking in the first three spots within the ‘local pack’, it made local SEO even more important.

Today, local SEO can help your business appear in Google’s local 3-pack, which is one of the most coveted spots when it comes to search engine results.

“44% of people who performed a local search clicked on a local 3-pack listing, while only 8% chose to load more local results” – MOZ

“95% of smartphone users have used their device to perform local searches, out of which 61% called the business and 59% visited” – Forbes

“70% of mobile users click to call a business directly from Google search results using their mobile phones”
– Search Engine Watch

Adding an SEO company to your marketing team will not only boost your local SEO but also increase your organic search engine rankings for your site. Every small business or multi-location company can benefit greatly from using Local SEO optimization strategies.

“Only about 44% of businesses have claimed their Google My Business listing”
– Local Marketing Institute

Have you claimed your Google My Business? If not, this means you as a business/company have the opportunity to jump ahead of your competition and take advantage of local SEO services and boost your businesses local online presence, before competitors catch on. No matter what type of business you own/work for, from recruiting firms and plumbers to accountants and construction workers, Local SEO can improve business. Set up your company and website for easy sales with Local SEO, opening conversion opportunities to eager customers, helping you make more money.

Why Use Parqa Marketing

Local SEO companies help you to position your business on search engines and other digital marketing platforms/directories so you’re seen by potential customers — on their terms.

Parqa is a Digital Marketing Agency that specializes in SEO, SEM, Local Search Optimization, Marketing Automation, Social Media and Content Marketing. We build strategy to grow your brand and drive leads through a variety of inbound marketing tactics. See how our experts can help your business grow through search engine optimization.

Growing Your Personal Brand on LinkedIn for Recruiters

August 14, 2018

About the Webinar

Parqa’s Founder, Tony Sorensen shares exactly how he and Versique Search & Consulting went from 0 to 20,000+ followers on LinkedIn, and how you can too. This is a can’t-miss webinar for staffing firm owners and recruiters, both new and experienced!

In the webinar, we’ll discuss:

How employer branding impacts your ability to attract top talent
A simple trick to make your bio jump off the page
How to position your firm and build your brand’s story

Presenter:

Tony Sorensen

CEO & OWNER, PARQA

Tony Sorensen is the founding visionary of Parqa. As a 20-year veteran and thought leader in the staffing/consulting and executive search industries Tony is an industry expert on a national level.

Tony is energized by the opportunity to pour his knowledge and expertise back into the industry, to help other staffing & recruiting firms find success through proven marketing strategies and tactics by traveling the country speaking at national conferences (i.e. NAPS National Conference, ASA (American Staffing Association), The Pinnacle Society, NYSA (New York Staffing Association), TechServe Alliance, etc. & regularly contributing to well-known industry publications (i.e. EMInfo, the Star Tribune, the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal, and several others.

How To Inject Some Much-Needed Fun into Your B2B Blog

July 24, 2018

B2B blogs have a terrible tendency to be dry, boring, and informal. Why are most B2B blogs so yawn-inducing?

Some of the blame lays at the feet of B2B business owners, who often become overly concerned about scaring customers away by showcasing personality. Then there’s the content-for-the-sake-of-content mentality that prevails in the industry, where many companies have been falsely told that if they publish blogs consistently, regardless of how aimless or poorly written the content is, they will increase their traffic.

This misguided mindset leads to a whole glut of boring content being published merely to feed the unending appetite of search engines, instead of to achieve the primary goal of content marketing—to educate and inform your existing and potential customers.

The blame game isn’t important but slapping some fun and excitement into your B2B content is. You want your blog content to be insightful and informative, but you also want to keep your readers from falling asleep on their keyboards while they read your stuff.

Watch On-demand: Check out this webinar to learn how you can implement content marketing into your strategy ➢

Here’s some tips for injecting some fun into your B2B blog.

Have a Voice

First and foremost, give your content a voice. What is voice in terms of writing? It’s the distinct personality, style, or point of view that a writing possesses. A strong authorial voice will leap off the screen and capture the attention of your reader.

I commonly hear people say that you can’t make boring topics fun, but it’s simply not true. By applying a unique voice to your writing, you can inject some life and character into any subject, regardless of how interesting or uninteresting you feel it may be.

For example, we can all agree that there is nothing inherently interesting about a person drinking a glass of water, right? To demonstrate the power of voice, here is two messages that have the same literal meaning, but vary greatly due to voice:

Boring Voice: Jill was thirsty, so she drank some water.
Boring

Fun Voice: Jill guzzled water straight from the faucet in a desperate attempt to quench her thirst.

Both sentences describe what is otherwise a boring event of someone drinking some water. The first one gives us a matter-as-fact account that leaves the reader with no questions or interest in learning more.

But in the second example the reader is left with several questions—why is she so thirsty? Why didn’t she use a glass? Why is she drinking yucky faucet water in a post-Brita world?

Deploy First Person

Another common contributor to boring content is third-person POV. Using third person is very standard in business writing, as it separates the person writing the content from the opinions being expressed in the writing. But while third person is safer, it creates distance between the writer and the reader, which often results in dull writing.

Don’t be scared to deploy first-person POV in your B2B content, especially in blogging. First person is more intimate, authentic, and confident than third person. By result, blogs written in the first person will sound more conversational and address the reader more directly.

If for no other reason, write in the first person because your audience is being inundated with third person. If they read five top-of-funnel blogs about a topic, and four of them are written in third person and one is in first, the first-person blog is going to have the inside edge on standing out.

Take Some Chances

B2C brands simply have a more energetic and lively reputation than B2B, which makes it seem like B2C marketing is more fun-filled than B2B. Some of that is a consequence of the end product inherently being more interesting for B2C brands, after all when Don Draper and the copywriters of Sterling Cooper were devising scotch-soaked campaigns on the hit show Mad Men, they were doing so for massive B2C brands like Life Cereal, Kodak, and Chevrolet, not for finance & accounting firms or IT software suppliers.

But B2B brands don’t have to let B2C brands have all the fun. Instead, take note of their courage to try new things and apply that lesson to your content strategy.

Buck the status quo every once and while and take some chances with your content. While a B2B audience is typically a bit more conservative than a B2C one, that doesn’t mean you can’t throw in a pop culture reference every so often or toss some gifs into the equation. By taking some chances in how you write your blogs, you’re going to make the experience more fun to write, and possibly, you’ll identify that it will make your audience more engaged. But you won’t know until you try.

Writing the same boring B2B blogs over and over is no fun for you to write and certainly isn’t fun for your audience to read. Take note of some of the tips I put forth in this blog the next time to sit down to punch up a blog and see if you don’t stumble into a more intriguing blog.

Want to learn more about giving your B2B marketing a boost? Learn how Parqa can transform the way you approach digital marketing.

What would you do if you knew your website was working for you?

Why Develop a Recruiting Agency Website with SEO?

July 20, 2018

I recently had a recruiting firm owner ask me why he needed SEO for his website, since his previous website development firm told him they made his website SEO friendly already. After a little digging, it was easy for me to see what happened to him is what happens to MOST people who hire a development agency and don’t ask specific questions about SEO.

The website was set up well for SEO, as in it had a plugin installed for SEO, but there had not been any SEO tactics applied to the website at all. This is not really the fault of the development firm, as their sweet spot is development (not SEO), nor did they sell it any other way. They know “SEO friendly” doesn’t mean “SEO optimized” …but the business owner didn’t.

Most people don’t.

SEO For Your Website: 101 {That Everyone Wishes They Knew}

When we create a website, we include a full SEO process to ensure your website informs the search engines what you DO and ultimately what you want to rank for. Our SEO Discovery Process includes keyword research, a content map, a technical website audit, and a competitor audit.

Each of these research processes provide valuable insights into what people are searching for, what the search volume is for those particular keywords, what others are doing in your industry that is working well (or not so well), and ultimately what you need to do to your website and online presence to make sure you are represented online in searches.

Watch On-demand: Check out this webinar to learn how you can implement content marketing into your strategy ➢

SEO gets technical pretty quickly, and at the end of the day, a recruiting firm owner’s top priority isn’t diving into the details of digital marketing and search engine optimization. Rather, it’s making sure you’re out there networking, getting new business, filling roles, and managing your team’s success in making placements. And if you’re working ON your business rather than IN your business, you may be thinking more and more about how to get your marketing to work for you.

Why is it important to make sure your website is optimized for SEO?

Story Time: How A Hiring Manager Initial Meeting is Similar to a Google Search

Well, imagine walking into a potential client’s office. You’ve secured a meeting with the hiring manager who has an open role, and you’re going to tell them about your company, your experience, and why you are the best person to fill their role. Let’s say the role is for a CFO. Let’s say you claim to be able to fill any role in any industry, nationwide. That’s your pitch.

Your meeting ends. Let’s say the next person to meet with that hiring manager is a recruiting firm owner right down the street from the company who specializes in placing Accounting & Finance professionals in senior level and C-level roles. That’s all they do. And they do it well. Who do you think is going to get the search?

Now let’s bring it back to your website. If a hiring manager or candidate needs your service (but they don’t know you, and don’t have a good resource, or haven’t had luck with their current partnership), they are going to ask Google.

What do you think they are going to type in? Let’s use the same hiring manager as an example. Do you think she is going to type in “Recruiter”? Not likely. She is probably going to type in something like “Finance Recruiter <My City>” or even “CFO Executive Search <My City>”. Now this could be REALLY good for you, or REALLY bad for you.

If you don’t specialize in that area, it’s not likely your website has content around those keywords, so it’s not likely you are going to rank for that search at all. No chance of being found. (PS, we all know the importance of focusing on a niche industry and/or market is a whole different conversation.)

But let’s say you DO focus on that niche, and you ARE in that city…you should come up in that search! Right? Maybe…if your website has been optimized for content relevant to your niche. If you have no pages on your website that talk about those keywords (e.g., practice area pages, blog articles, job posts, other content), Google may not even know that’s what you do. The key here is that it doesn’t necessarily matter how credible you are, and it doesn’t even matter if you close 95% of the searches you go after—you are going to have a difficult time having those conversations to close those searches if people cannot FIND you online in the first place.

There is Hope to Get Found Online…And We’ve Discovered It!

Don’t worry, there is hope! And it’s not that difficult to attain. Start with a conversation with our team. We’ll review your website to see if you’re set up well for SEO (and thus, see if you are in a position to have Google know what you do, and ultimately get found by people looking for your services). And if you’re not…then join the club. No, really. Most recruiting agency websites…in fact MOST websites in general, are not set up with the technical SEO and the content needed to get found properly online. And it’s easy to fix.

We’ve worked with many companies across the country and have helped improve their website traffic for inbound clients (or candidates), based on their business needs. It’s as critical (more in fact if you think about the potential reach), as training your recruiters on doing their job well. Make your website work for you, not against you.

What would you do if you knew your website was working for you?

woman typing on laptop with succulent on desk

The 3 Steps to Blogging for Business

July 17, 2018

1. Creating Quality Content

The Why of Content?

The goal is to create content that provides informed answers to the questions of your industry. Blogging when done with a purpose, attracts business to you. The elusive, ready-to-chat, qualified leads. When users are searching for content online, they are selecting specific keywords or asking a specific question they would like answered. To do this well, you will need your blogs to be both reflective of your industry experience and understanding of your end customer’s questions.

You are an expert of your field—whether it feels that way every day or not. As the expert, what you identify as industry pain points is a great starting point for creating content that will resonate. But sometimes that expertise can blind you from identifying easy content that does not feel as relevant to your own questions. Remember, you are the expert. Whether you are new to your field of work or a veteran, it is crucial to remember that your reader/customer is not always informed to the same extent you are.

Related Post: How to Create Content That Sticks ➢

Using Google AdWords for Blog Topic Ideas

While your own experience in the industry is a great place to start, there are tools available to help you generate ideas for blog topics. Google AdWords is a tool we recommend for identifying your top performing pages. It also lets you review competitors most successful blogs as well. No, do not just repeat what’s working. Use this as a guide, something that shows you what topics are currently performing well – and vice versa – which topics aren’t resonating with your customer.

Make It Easy for Google to Find Your Blog

Blogging is a phenomenal way to drive traffic. However, the traffic potential of blogging hinges on your focus and understanding of on-page SEO [Search Engine Optimization]. As your customer uses Google to answer their question, Google’s algorithm is determined to find the most highly-relevant content for a specific search. In a competitive market, chances are you aren’t the only company out there with some answers. If you work with Google and prioritize on-page SEO, that is the “secret sauce” that puts you in a good position to rank high and capture organic traffic.

Watch On-demand: Check out this webinar to learn how you can implement content marketing into your strategy ➢

2. Promoting Your Content

Where to Promote?

So great, your blog is answering difficult questions and is optimized for your selected keywords, AND you rank competitively on Google. Still not getting the traffic you like? Where to next?

Social platforms and e-marketing are opportunities to amplify your best content. By getting your brand in front of more people, you’ll increase your leads. Let’s review how LinkedIn and E-Blasts will assist you in driving web traffic that leads to conversions and sales.

Note: LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter can all be utilized as both Paid and Unpaid Advertising platforms.

Unpaid LinkedIn Promotions

This is simply creating a brand online. Whether it’s your own personal page or a company page, there is no charge for posting and sharing with your network. If you are still in the process of growing your own personal brand, look into joining LinkedIn groups as an option to get your activity and content in front of more eyes.

LinkedIn Paid Promotions

If you are looking for a more tailored audience, utilize LinkedIn Ad manager. Narrow your target audience down to the specific demographic that you identify as an ideal customer. There may be trial and error at first and that’s part of the process. LinkedIn provides countless filters that you can alter until you find your target market. This may vary for different content types.

E-Blasting Blogs

We will use that hard-earned list of contacts from trade shows, client happy hours, your local association, etc. You worked on building relationships and paid a premium for these contacts. Set a cadence for a newsletter, compiling all that work you put into your blog into a format that communicates that value to your end-customer.

Blogs answer the questions your prospects are asking. Use this to build rapport and a relationship with your prospect list. Don’t just send another salesy piece of collateral, boasting about your brand, or jamming all your products and services in one email. Blogs allow you to send tangible value to your prospects, answering questions about problems they need answered today.

3. Quantifying Success with Analytics

Google Assistant

Utilize Google as a tool to assist in tracking, and more importantly, identifying your successes and challenges with blogging. Google Analytics is FREE – check out the demo account here. It is a phenomenal tool to help you identify what works, and what might need some more work.

Below is a quick guide to some of the most important website metrics that you can analyze with Google Analytics.

Website Metrics

Page Traffic [or] Blog Traffic: How many people landed on that webpage?

Bounce Rate: Are users getting to your pages then leaving immediately?

Keywords: Does Google Analytics rank your keywords as relevant search terms?

Social Metrics

Impressions: How many people saw your personal or company post on your blog?

CTR [Click-Through-Rate]: Out of all those people that saw it, how many clicked your link?

Engagement: Are people interacting with your social posts? Liking, commenting, sharing on their own accounts? That might seem basic, yet crucial in gaining exposure.

Related Post: Google Analytics 101 ➢

Next Steps

Still trying to make sense of it all? Check out our webinar, where Parqa’s CEO Tony Sorensen outlines “the why” to blogging, content marketing, and how Parqa incorporates an inbound strategy to differentiate their clients.

Schedule a call with a content strategist on the Parqa Digital Marketing team. We’re here to chat, brainstorm startegy and answer any questions you might have on your first steps towards a 2018 Inbound Strategy.

two men looking at their laptop in a lounge

Gated Content vs. Ungated Content: When to Use Each

June 28, 2018

When building out a plan to grow your business through digital marketing, you’re going to need to include a way to capture leads once visitors land on your website. For better or worse, the internet is powered by a certain kind of digital currency. No, I’m not talking about Bitcoin, I’m talking about email.

Whenever you fill out a form on a website and give out your email address, you’re exchanging your email address for information. Your email address is the digital currency that allows you to transact with a website for educational content–this is how marketers generate leads online from website visitors. The content behind these forms are what marketers call gated content.

Watch On-demand: Check out this webinar to learn how you can implement content marketing into your strategy ➢

What is Gated Content?

Gated content is educational content that is so valuable to website visitors that they’re willing to give up their email address in order to get it.

Sounds like a good deal, right? If you give up your email address, you get a copy of an eBook for free. You get the eBook, and marketers gain the ability to contact you as well as learn more about you—your business, your goals, and your challenges. What could be the downside?

Search Engines and Gated Content

Unfortunately, gated content doesn’t help to drive search engine traffic as Google can’t crawl content that you’ve placed behind a form. Think Lord of the Rings, “You Shall Not Pass.” You’ve spent hours creating a great piece of content that your audience will love just to find out that it won’t help with SEO. So clearly we’ll have to make a tradeoff, right?

While gated content is the lifeblood of inbound marketing, it does have its downside—Google can’t crawl content that is hidden behind your web form–I know, gasp! This is why they call it gated content. From Google’s perspective, this makes sense, if searchers aren’t able to find the content they’re looking for on Google, then it makes for a bad-user experience for searchers.

It reminds of my days doing research in college, I’d search for industry reports while doing market research, but would quickly find that the search results led me to pages that provided only a brief preview of the information I was looking for. To gain access to the full report, I’d need to pay for it.

Like most college students, I didn’t have $900 to shell out for secondary research data, so I found myself frustrated with the results and went back to the drawing board. Thankfully, there were tons of search results so after a few pages of clicking, I found the information I was looking for.

Related Post: How to Create Content That Sticks ➢

When Does It Make Sense to Use Gated Content?

While organic traffic to your website is great for your page views, it doesn’t help you understand who your visitors are or if they come back to engage in any of your other content.

Because of the vast amounts of information available on the internet, clients and candidates are more informed than ever before—typically viewing more than 5 pieces of content before making a buying decision. For better or worse, creating content that visitors want to engage in is the only way to generate and nurture leads from your website.

By creating gated content that your audience is interested in like salary guides, or how-tos, they’ll gain valuable information and insights from the content and you’ll be able to reach out to them in the future with updated information and new content—a win-win for both sides. But therein lies the problem, Google can’t crawl gated content, so we still need to provide content that is crawlable by Google to drive new traffic and help searchers find your website.

When to Use Ungated Content

Since search engines aren’t able to crawl your gated content, it can be a bit of a balancing act between when and when not to use gated content—the answer lies in your goals. If you need to drive more organic traffic to your website, then it doesn’t make sense to gate the content. This is why you don’t typically see company blogs, websites, or social media posts hidden behind a form—you want Google to bring you traffic, if Google can’t find you, you won’t benefit from search traffic.

Can Gated Content Drive Organic Results?

If you notice your website is driving a lot of organic traffic, but you’re not getting enough leads from the content that you are creating, it is time to implement some longer-form pieces of content that will help your audience move further along in the buyer’s journey.

There is an exception to this rule, but it’s a bit trickier to pull off. In a recent study conducted by HubSpot, they found that gating html pages that are crawlable by Google actually increased organic traffic and conversion rates. Remember that gated content is important for generating leads, but typically does not benefit your organic traffic.

To learn more about how content marketing and when to use gated content to grow your business, check out our recent webinar recording.

coworkers together on redesigning website plan

Redesigning Your Website? Why You Need to Work with an SEO Firm

June 4, 2018

Why Do I Need an SEO Firm?

When redesigning your website, it is vital to take SEO into consideration. If your website isn’t easy for Google to crawl, doesn’t provide a simple UX, and portray trust to your customers, no amount of keyword optimization or SEO magic is going to help you improve search engine rankings, grow your online presence or increase online leads/ revenue.

To ensure your new site will resonate with your targeted audience — and to save yourself from costly headaches down the road — SEO needs to be integrated into your website redesign strategy from the beginning.

SEO is not just about optimizing page titles and on-page content, it’s about all the factors that help you improve your search-engine rankings and online presence, and YOUR WEBSITE EXPERIENCE is #1.

You can partner with a website design/development agency, but without an experienced SEO company/specialist you’re going to have to make significant changes after your new website has been created.

What is SEO?

SEO is anything that impacts potential links, any input that engines use to rank pages. Anything that people or technology does to influence those ranking elements is what the practice of SEO is about.

– Rand Fishkin, Moz

Your Website Redesign & SEO

While you may want to try and save money by pausing your retainer with your SEO partner during your website redesign, you’re likely going to end up paying more in the long run because of the significant changes that will probably need to be made from a website UX perspective. Changes include: adding CTA’s, URL/folder structure, keyword optimized URLs, H1 vs H2 title tags, internal linking, content that builds trust with readers, etc.)

Myself, along with other digital marketing and SEO experts can’t emphasize enough the importance of incorporating SEO into the redesign of your website:

“If you don’t have SEO in mind from the initial strategy session, you’re going to lose what you took so much time and effort to build. Everything from the structure of your website to the meta description of your website pages is important and should be taken into consideration.”

-Laura Hogan, OverGo Studio

“All too often, when we’re brought in for SEO work on a redesign, it’s often late in the process, such as when the site is being coded or even totally complete. The advice that usually needs to be passed on at this point will most likely cost the company much more in design, coding, and more.”

-Jeff Ferguson, Fang Digital Marketing

Like many small-to-mid-sized business owners, you might wonder why your digital marketing firm is talking about your website’s UX. The overall design experience of your website, as well as its mobile friendliness, is a ranking factor for Google. Plus, in order for SEO and PPC to be effective in helping you grow your business and generate leads, your website has to provide a great UX to visitors and establish trust.

“SEO is neuropsychology. SEO is conversion rate optimization. SEO is social media. SEO is user experience and design. SEO is branding. SEO is analytics. SEO is product. SEO is advertising. SEO is public relations. The fill-in-the-blank is SEO if that blank is anything that affects any input directly or indirectly.”

-Rand Fishkin, MOZ

Related Post: What is SEO? – Beyond the Keywords ➢

Isn’t My Website Good Enough?

‘Good Enough’ won’t cut it when it comes to your website’s UX

A few reasons why having a good UX matters:

A poorly designed website can impact the trust users have in your business.
A poorly designed website can deter visitors from buying your products or services.
A poorly designed website can impact if users will share your content.

Conclusion

If you choose to hire a web-design company or freelance designer for your small to mid-sized business, you should be sure to also choose an individual or SEO firm to partner with during the redesign process. They will help ensure SEO best practices will be properly integrated into your new website from the beginning. This will save you time, and money, down the road.

Digital Marketing Strategy

Twitter

LinkedIn

Improve Your Social Game with Parqa Marketing

Why Is It Important to Hire a Digital Marketing Agency Who Knows the Recruiting Industry?

Industry-Specific Best Practices Matter

1. Start with the Why

2. Tie Blogging to Tangible Business Results

3. Create a Content Calendar

4. Involve Your Team in Topic Generation

5. Lead by Example

Next Steps:

What is Local SEO?

Why is Local SEO Important?

Highly Targeted and Timely

Mobile Searches Continue to Grow

It’s a free Source of Advertisement

Drop in ‘near me’/ Geographic Modifiers in Searches

Rank Higher in Search Engine Results

Why Use Parqa Marketing

About the Webinar

Presenter:

Tony Sorensen

Have a Voice

Deploy First Person

Take Some Chances

SEO For Your Website: 101 {That Everyone Wishes They Knew}

Story Time: How A Hiring Manager Initial Meeting is Similar to a Google Search

There is Hope to Get Found Online…And We’ve Discovered It!

1. Creating Quality Content

The Why of Content?

Using Google AdWords for Blog Topic Ideas

Make It Easy for Google to Find Your Blog

2. Promoting Your Content

Where to Promote?

Unpaid LinkedIn Promotions

LinkedIn Paid Promotions

E-Blasting Blogs

3. Quantifying Success with Analytics

Google Assistant

Website Metrics

Social Metrics

Next Steps

What is Gated Content?

Search Engines and Gated Content

When Does It Make Sense to Use Gated Content?

When to Use Ungated Content

Can Gated Content Drive Organic Results?

Why Do I Need an SEO Firm?

Your Website Redesign & SEO

Isn’t My Website Good Enough?

Conclusion

Related Posts

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