Great Online Marketing Articles, November 2017

Here’s a rundown of several excellent articles with important information for Internet marketing professionals.

• SEO — Search Engine Optimization Statistics from HubSpot. Any strategy, tactic or op-ed article improves with data. This article provides a slew of statistics, with their sources, across the full range of Internet marketing niches.

• SEO — From Search Engine Journal, a failure story instead of a success story: Our Skyscraper Technique Failure & the Lessons We Learned. Olga Mykhoparkina’s frank assessment is quite instructive, proving that the latest and greatest strategies aren’t always what they’re cracked up to be.

• Local SEO — How have local ranking factors changed in 2017? You might be in for a few surprises. By the way, at Straight North, we’re pondering our recent local SEO data, and it tracks with much of what is reported in this article.

• Copywriting — From the CXL blog, Using Luntz’s Words That Work to Ignite Your Web Copy gives copywriters easy-to-remember, fundamental principles for creating consistently persuasive copy. The examples make the lessons sink in.

• Content Marketing — Less is more. Do You Really Need Another Blog Post? Why Content Marketing Needs More Flexibility argues that content marketers are over-reliant on blogs, and need to shift focus to other content forms. All marketers, especially bloggers, need to realize content consumption preferences are changing.

• UX — Kara Pernice of the Nielsen Norman Group discusses F-Shaped Pattern of Reading on the Web: Misunderstood, But Still Relevant (Even on Mobile). An extremely deep and thought-provoking analysis of why users employ certain scanning patterns. It turns out the F-pattern is not ideal for users or marketers — but there are techniques we can use to encourage other, better scanning patterns.