What blogs do you read? This is one of the first questions we ask in an interview—whether it’s an interview for a new Vital employee or an interview with a new client.

The blogs that someone reads speaks volumes about how informed they are, and if they are paying attention to the digital marketing industry. It’s also important to know that digital marketing tactics are constantly changing and keeping up with industry trends is incredibly important to remain competitive.

Reading articles by highly-regarded marketers can help you and your team stay abreast of the latest changes in the digital marketing world and implement forward-thinking strategies that will attract more leads and convert more customers.

5 Blogs That Are Required Reading at Vital

There are a lot of great marketing blogs out there. But there are five that are REALLY great and at Vital they are required daily reading. Yes, they’re that important.

1. Moz Whiteboard Friday 

Rand Fishkin is one of the top SEO industry voices. His Whiteboard Friday series is 15 minutes of actionable marketing tips that will help everyone on your digital marketing team—designers, devs, writers, SEOs, etc. Here at Vital, we never miss a Whiteboard Friday and frequently visit their four blogs:

• Moz Blog
• YouMoz (blogs about SEO, written and submitted by Moz users)
• Rand’s Blog (Moz Co-founder Rand Fishkin’s blog)
• Dev Blog (SEO information specific for developers)

Rand is a top thought leader in the industry for a reason: He has a distinctly accessible and engaging approach to explaining search engine optimization and he has the experience and knowledge to back up the information he’s sharing.

2. Nielsen Norman Group

The NNGroup is known for user experience, and their blog is filled with takeaways and learnings from their thousands of tests. Their content is a pairing of best practices and data to back up their claims.

Some of our favorite topics are:

• eCommerce
• Mobile
• Email
• Navigation
• Writing

3. Backlinko (Brian Dean)

Brian Dean is known for exhaustive blogs that provide readers with specific and actionable tips. Mostly focused on SEO and link building, this blog is a must-read for marketers looking to improve their distribution tactics.

Brian is known for updating his older posts with updated content, so don’t hesitate to comb through his older posts.

4. Kissmetrics

Kissmetrics is focused on tactics for improving conversions through your sales funnel—from top of the funnel to sales conversions to closing sales. Since they’re an analytics company, their content is always backed with data that has most likely been gathered through exhaustive testing.

5. ConversionXL (CXL)

Since CRO plays such an important roll in digital marketing, this blog is constantly a topic of discussion at the office. CXL is focused on optimizing conversions through analysis and various testing tactics that you can implement on your website and in your emails.

More Awesome Blogs

We’ve talked before, in reference to inbound marketing, about not relying on just one source for all of your information. At Vital, experience and industry insights gained from reading and listening to several thought leaders (day in and day out), help us create winning digital marketing strategies that satisfy our team, but more importantly our clients.

In addition to our top five blogs, here are nine additional blogs that are on the Vital RSS feed.

• Search Engine Journal — The wide range of bloggers offering varying perspectives on Search Engine Journal, makes for an interesting read that keeps you thinking.
• Search Engine Land — Search Engine Journal publishes several blog posts per day. Give them a quick scan and click on the articles that seem relevant.
• Quick Sprout — Neil Patel is a respected online marketing and traffic expert (co-founded Crazy Egg, Kissmetrics, etc.), and QuickSprout is his blog. A lot of great traffic and analytics info here.
• Search Engine Watch — Like Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Land, SEWatch posts tons of articles per day across many search engine-specific topics.
• Copyblogger — You’ll learn quickly that most SEO work involves writing, and Copyblogger is a wonderful SEO writing resource.
• Yoast — Yoast is the maker of a very popular WordPress SEO plugin that runs your posts and pages through an SEO score-checker to make sure your site is SEO optimized.
• Google Analytics Blog — While Google is notoriously mum about their own algorithm specifics, it’s still helpful to get the official updates right from the source.
• Unbounce — As the name implies, Unbounce is all about getting more visitors and keeping them on your site longer.
• ExactTarget Blog — This is a marketing blog from Salesforce, a popular CRM software, and focuses on SEO from a marketing and customer retention perspective.

Pro Tip: Using an RSS subscription service like Feedly allows you to see how often an article has been shared on that service, so you can skip to the most popular articles when you’re crunched for time.

Bonus SEO sources

Staying aware of what’s going on with SEO and search traffic trends definitely takes investment, but you’ll be a much more effective marketer with this knowledge in your back pocket.

SEO Subreddit

While not a blog, Reddit’s SEO subreddit is a great place to get SEO news. Part of Reddit’s popularity (and one of the reasons it can be difficult to parse for those new to the site) is that the site is, as Mashable’s Matt Silverman puts it, “a self-correcting marketplace of ideas that’s nearly impervious to marketers.” Certainly not everything posted will be relevant to you as a marketing director, but it can be a very useful and candid window into the world of SEO, so it’s worth checking out periodically.

Have questions for our President of SEO or anyone else on the Vital inbound team? Drop us a line. We live and breathe digital marketing, and love helping our clients rise to the top.