Scott Hirsch CEO of Media Direct: Is Your Content Bringing Down the ROI on Your Digital Marketing Efforts?

Understanding how your audience engages with your brand online is an art form, driven largely by your content’s quality. This is particularly true after the recent update by the search gurus at Google, according to Scott Hirsch CEO of Media Direct. Maintaining a clear message that will resonate with your audience begins by consistently providing value to your readers. With Google becoming increasingly interested in the user experience, Scott Hirsch encourages smart marketers to pay more attention to the quality of the content being delivered throughout a consumer’s lifecycle.

Scott Hirsch CEO of Media Direct Shares Tips and Tricks for Improving Google SERP Rankings

For many years, marketers have looked for ways to insert multiple keywords into their online content, such as blog posts, videos, and website pages. The goal was to ensure that Google saw enough top keywords to deliver the content as “relevant” to users. 

“With the latest release of Google’s Bidirectional Coder Representations from Transformers (BERT) natural-language processor, the world’s largest search engine is better able to determine intent instead of relying on keyword stuffing.” According to Scott Hirsch, this translates into an improved experience for all users and a demand for higher-quality content delivered by brands. 

Some tips and tricks for improving your Google SERP rankings from Hirsch include:

• Do not duplicate content within your website or “borrowed” from the website of a competitor
• Ensure that your pages load quickly, as one of the new signals Google is tracking includes page load speed
• Reduce the amount of time needed to load the majority of content on your site, which could mean limiting images or optimizing their sizes
• Keep content in a consistent location without a lot of elements that could potentially shift the layout; this is called limiting Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) by Google

Along with the standard metrics that Google has been optimizing for years, such as relevance, these newer signals are Google’s attempt to identify the most valuable information possible and deliver it to readers.

Great Content Translates Into Exceptional Marketing ROI, Notes Scott Hirsch 

Marketers have an ongoing struggle with measuring the ROI of their efforts, particularly when it comes to tracking the performance of specific pieces of content back to higher-level business metrics such as sales or customer engagement. Scott Hirsch, CEO of Media Direct, notes that his clients are often optimizing incorrect keywords or making other decisions that could negatively impact their marketing ROI. Creating a cohesive strategy around content marketing helps ensure that each piece of content is driving towards the ultimate goal of growing the audience base, engaging more prospects to become buying customers, and maintaining solid relationships with current customers, so they do not shift to another brand.

Scott Hirsch and his team guide brands to take the time to analyze their current digital marketing strategies, looking for opportunities to boost engagements and improve the quality of the content that is being shared across the brand. Creating a more consistent approach to content means that audiences expect a certain level of quality and can trust that your brand’s recommended content will put them in a positive light with their friends and family members. Becoming this trusted source of information for a broader audience is a foundational building block to improving your marketing ROI, and ultimately, your revenue.

Hirsch Warns of the Dangers of Low-Quality Content

It can be tempting to generate large quantities of sub-par blog posts on a wide range of topics, but this can be a dangerous exercise for brands. Once your brand starts this race to the bottom in terms of quality, it can be easy to fall into the trap of simply hammering out content instead of thoughtfully producing valuable information for your audience. Not only will you dilute your brand’s reputation as a leader in your particular field, but you will also run the risk of alienating your current audience. Readers quickly become frustrated when their time is wasted and may overlook good information from your brand simply due to a single poor experience.

While directly measuring the ROI of your marketing efforts is a challenge for many brands, Google’s latest update offers a wide range of tools that can be utilized to determine the perceived quality of content that is being generated by your brand. These include Google Tools such as Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights, Web Vitals Extension, and GTMetrix, which offers details about page load speeds and more. According to Scott Hirsch, CEO of Media Direct, having these tools as a part of your marketing toolkit can help boost your marketing ROI and the engagement of your core audience.