One of the most effective search engine optimization (SEO) practices for encouraging improved website rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs) is the publication of fresh content on a regular basis. Whether it’s in the form of a blog or other source on your site allocated to the release of informational text content, search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo all favor websites that can provide users with current, relevant, and original information. The most popular tool for regular content additions is a blog utility. These can be integrated into new or existing websites with the help of a marketing and content development agency. At MLT Group LLC, we provide SEO, digital marketing, social media marketing, graphic design, web design, and video production services for a broad range of clients. Our SEO marketing services in Minnesota’s Twin Cities and throughout the region offer a comprehensive range of support for small businesses, nonprofits, local brands, and customers. Our team of marketing experts, writers, graphic designers, project managers, and videographers work with customers to meet their exact needs while following the technical and design trends that improve website quality and SERP rankings to expand audiences and improve conversions.
Content Creation
One aspect of content creation that we work into blogs and informational articles we write for our customers is the idea of newsworthy or timely content. Search engine algorithms approve of websites that stay up to date on their data and user trends. Publishing timely content that will also be attractive and helpful to users will make your website more likely to get a higher ranking from a search query. For example, if a user searches for “best rated toasters,” Google and other search engines will favor sites with blogs that rank the newest toasters. Blogs or articles that are titled “Best Toasters of 2022” or “Top Rated Toasters of 2022, Tested by Chefs,” for instance, will likely improve your ranking for that query.
Headlines
Headlines and title cards are important parts of SEO marketing when it comes to publishing new content, but the use of keywords and having information that is actually helpful to users is important too. The information in your content, the relevance of the data to your brand and audience, and the interest or “humanization” of that data are all important parts of publishing newsworthy, timely stories.
Internal and External Information
When choosing a topic for a timely blog or news article, there can be multiple sources for your information. Having accurate data that can be backed by internal studies, reports, or analytics or by reputable external sources is important because it improves your brand’s credibility, establishes trust with your users, and improves your professional image. However, most of the companies and brands that host websites and publish content to grow their audiences don’t have access to reporters and newsrooms. Many scholarly articles, scientific studies, or other rich, data driven sources of information are housed behind pay walls.
Data
To get the right data for timely stories, you’ll have to tap into the resources you do have at hand. This can include your company’s own operations and expertise, staff knowledge, internal data, public information, surveys and other customer feedback, social media, and many other sources of knowledge, advice, facts, and other statistics that could be useful to your audience. Your internal data resources can provide analytics and statistics that you can use to build relevant information for the contemporary user. In fact, most companies have a rich source of information about their day-to-day operations that many customers might be interested to know.
Transparency
Think about the companies that you purchase goods and services from or the brands that you support. Would it be of interest to you to learn how those goods are made, what training staff is given, how things are cleaned, what equipment is used, or how facilities are maintained? What about the information that guides brands to develop a certain product or build their site tools in a specific way? You can lend some transparency to your company’s operations, expertise, and analytics to give important information to users that will make your brand more likeable to the customer and better ranked on SERPs.
Public Data
Another important resource for data you can use as a foundation for timely content is public data from the municipal, state, or federal governments, data published in open studies, ranking systems, articles, peer reviewed papers, books, journals, and more. Wikipedia is not considered a credible database because it is built with crowd sourced information, but you can often use the Wikipedia resources section of a page to backtrack to references listed that are accredited or legitimized data citations.
Customer Feedback
You can also gather information from users and your own customers by conducting surveys, asking for reviews and feedback, and analyzing user interaction with your brand. By gathering your own data this way, you can prove to readers the reliability of your information by disclosing the numbers and way you learned about the topic for a certain blog or article. There are many ways to gather survey information available to companies today, such as SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, and Google Survey.
Having information to create timely content is key but, you still need to be able to determine its relevancy to users. If your blogs or articles are not relevant to the users that interact with your website, you can lose their attention and your site may seem less relevant to search engines.
Relevance
To determine the relevance of your data, you need to decide if it is serviceable to the reader, contextualized, and localized. In order for your content to be serviceable, it needs to help users in some way. Most companies perform analytics to gather data about their audience demographic. This often includes age, cultural background, location, economic status, and community. If you have a dataset you can use to write content, you need to write around that information to make it helpful to your user demographic. For example, if an appliance company has a group of statistics showing that 80% of homeowners store their toasters off of the counter when not in use, they can use that information to recommend the best toasters in their collection for efficient storage or toasters that cool down the fastest or are the easiest to clean. The company could also gather further information about where their customers most frequently store toasters in the kitchen and relay that in a timely blog post.
Relay News
To generate content that is contextualized, you need to stay in the loop for trends significant to your brand. The purpose of digital marketing with SEO content is not necessarily to break the news to the public, but you can relay news about your brand in the form of industry trends. Think about what’s happening in the world to your business format, your audience, your products, and more. If your brand falls into a niche or industry category, publishing data with regard to the current events and trends of those areas will give that information a strong relevancy because of the way SEO and search engine algorithms work. Continuing with the toaster example, an appliance company could publish content overviewing their most popular toaster models and parallel that with trends in kitchen aesthetics and varying degrees of gadgetry consumers currently desire.
Localization
You can also use localization to make global data or large-scale conclusions gathered from reputable studies accessible to your audience. Localizing data brings it to a community level. For example, if there was the release of a brand-new toaster like a smart phone-controlled, portable, and rechargeable toaster with a USB port (we don’t know if this exists) it could spark conversation among your audience if you write a blog discussing pros, cons, and whether such a device is necessary. Localized content gives users the chance to interact more personally with information and allows you to speak more directly with your audience.
Humanizing the Story
Finally, you need to humanize your story to make it relatable to your living, breathing users. While a search engine will process your data and content based only on merits written into a software algorithm, users will go one step beyond this and process information on an emotional level that can manifest in many ways, including surprise, care, joy, fear, anger, and much more. As humans, we process things in emotional ways naturally even if we are also considering the numbers and logic of informational content. Unlike journalistic news providers who have to report objectively, marketers and brands can instill a humanized aspect to their content with the subjection of emotion in positive, constructive ways.
Pairing data relevant to your brand and your users with a humanized delivery will help you create more successful timely content. To learn more about using these tools for SEO marketing in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, as well as surrounding areas, contact MLT Group at (507) 281-3490 or sales@mltgroup.com today.
If you are a blogger or have a company blog or news feed set up on your website, you know that publishing content regularly is an important part of brand recognition and an effective SEO (search engine optimization) tactic. Not only does Google look for and reward new content, seeing it as a sign of an active site, but you simultaneously grow your digital footprint as the blog posts add static pages to your site. Whether you use your blog as a platform to promote your goods or services, offer news about your company, or provide informational articles that will help users interact with your website, products, and company overall, consistent blog posting is an effective digital marketing strategy. While its effectiveness is undeniable, blog content producers face the facts that it is also a digital marketing strategy that takes dedication and hard work.
Researching topics and writing clear, concise, and interesting blogs consistently takes time and effort. Because of that, it is important for content creators to understand where the balance is between not creating enough and over-creating to the point of time wasting. To discover that balance, creators need to ask how long their blogs should be and how often they should be posting content.
Some companies only need to post one or two 200-word blogs monthly to meet a happy balance. Others may need to post 2,000+ word pieces several times a month in order to achieve their visibility goals. While it can be difficult to find your own middle ground between those dramatically different scenarios, doing some research and comparing your company size and specialty to blogs of a similar operation can help. Most bloggers will find that trial and error is the best way to find their own sweet spot in content creating schedules.
What Counts as “Consistent?”
Consistency is a variable term. What is best in your situation depends entirely on your ability to create content at the scope and frequency that will benefit your website traffic and company, without overdoing it, wasting valuable time, or falling short of your goals. For many small to medium companies, producing 300–500-word blog posts once or twice a month is an ideal consistency. At MLT Group, we have the capabilities to consistently create content, from one blog per month to six or more, for a variety companies ranging from freezer warehouses to bankruptcy firms and disaster restoration companies.
The level of consistency that is right for you also depends on the type of content. If you have in-depth information to provide your audience, longer blogs will be required. Longer blogs might limit your bandwidth for frequency. A manufacturing company with detailed information to provide might spend more time writing each blog, requiring a lower frequency of posting for time management purposes. On the other side of that coin, a company like a clothing store, with simpler information to provide, may be able to post 100-word blurbs daily.
This is where social media in your digital marketing strategy can pair nicely with consistent blogs for even more effective digital media marketing results. In the example of a company positing lengthy informational blogs infrequently, they might also use social media to post shorter notes with a higher frequency. These could be designed to drive more traffic to their deeper ‘on-site’ blog posts.
Because social media does not require a bevy of information on each post, you can supplement a lower rate of blogs with a higher rate of more superficial social media content. Even if it is superficial, frequent social media posting, and a company’s consistent blogs with rich information, will help get the attention of Google’s SEO algorithm.
Likewise, with the clothing store example, social media can still be paired effectively with blogs. Linking social media to the daily blog post will increase audience range and website traffic, resulting in more sales and more recognition from the Google algorithm.
Overall, no matter what content creating schedule you determine to be the best fit for length and timeline, sticking to it and keeping consistency at the forefront will help you utilize your blog page as a powerful (and virtually free!) digital marketing strategy.
What Does Consistency Do?
So how does consistent blogging as a digital marketing strategy work? There are two main effects that consistent content creating will have on your brand and website.
1. Brand Trust
The more content you create, the more information your audience will know about your brand. Understanding breeds trust, and brand trust is the number one benefit of consistent blogging. If your audience has trust in your brand, you have a stronger opportunity to gain their loyalty. Loyalty means repeated interactions and increased traffic either through marketing promotion or word of mouth.
Consistency in creating content will grow your audience and help you gain the trust and loyalty of customers and supporters. Imagine if the New York Times did not give a daily email update to newsletter subscribers. Those subscribers would be less likely to turn to the Times daily. Providing an update on stories, news snippets, crosswords, and more each day for years has established the New York Times as a go-to email news source for many people.
Additionally, creating content while sticking to a consistent schedule will help your company and blog become authority figures over time. If your audience knows you will be posting on a regular schedule, they can go there for related information and find new content when they expect it. Creating content over time will also help you establish a backlog of blogs containing even more information than just the new content you released that week or month. Becoming an authority on your own brand and the industry you are in through consistent content creating will show an audience that you have integrity and quality. Google and other search engines will notice too, which is why gaining brand trust through consistent content creating is a key SEO tool.
2. SEO
Search engine optimization is a term that describes work done to move your website or blog up as much as possible on the list of search results that Google, Yahoo, Bing, or any other search engine provides users. SEO tools like pay-per-click advertising, keyword targeting, and blogging/content creation are today’s most effective digital marketing strategies.
New content is attractive to the Google algorithm, and since Google is the most utilized search engine, it is a no brainer that establishing and maintaining consistency in your content creation to help your site catch Google’s eye is an important SEO tactic that can drive traffic to your site. Google is so interested in new content partly because it signals an active and authoritative site. Just the kind of site that Google wants to return as a search result for users. Additionally, new content helps keep users on sites for longer, an indicator for user satisfaction in search results.
Not only does consistently created new content get Google’s attention and approval, but it can also help you target which keywords are interacted with the most around content related to your company. User interaction with some blogs over others might help you recognize that one key phrase is bringing in more search traffic than another key phrase, helping you to better target future blogs. Integrating new keywords into blogs will help you continue to discover more keywords that you can incorporate into newer blogs and so on.
Using brand trust gained through a history of continued, consistent content creation to bolster your SEO abilities is the proven effect of making and sticking to a blog schedule. Blogs produced frequently are a digital marketing strategy that can keep your website and company in front of a growing audience and help you grow as a brand.
That takes time and resources to do right, and that’s why you should be thinking about 2020 now. We’re bringing you this series on content development to help you get started.
Our experience in search engine optimization, website development, and content strategies informs these guides to get your online marketing up to speed. We’re not holding back on the secret ingredient to make content marketing work for you. After all, sharing useful content is what makes for the best SEO!
But if you want help with getting started, figuring out where your content strategy stands, or managing your content marketing, send us a message.
Content Development: The Basics
“Content” is the information and stories that you distribute on your website and everywhere else (yes, even offline).
Don’t think about it like standard advertising, where you pitch your product or service. Content supports your lead and customer during every point of the sales life cycle. Content is NOT simply a fancy-looking, SEO’d sales pitch!
There is a variety of goals for content marketing, ranging from building brand awareness to keeping satisfied customers engaged.
What’s most important is this:
Keep your audiences at the forefront of your content. Write and design for your audience. Provide them with real value. Do not simply create content that extols your brand or product and expect it to be effective.
That said, we’ll kick off this series with the basics: the kinds of content you should be thinking about.
What Kinds of Content Should I Create?
From plain old writing to graphical, video, and audio content, different media have different strengths. A smart content strategy makes the most out of each medium and doesn’t waste time with the media irrelevant to the business and target audiences.
Cover of The Medium Is the Massage, a classic study of media from 1967. (The title’s typo is deliberate.)
Written Content
Historically speaking, writing sits on top of the list of most commonly created content on the internet. Engaging and optimized writing is still essential and will be for a long time. Every website has text, most have blog posts, and the right words spread quickly on social media. It is not enough to just type up some random thoughts and call it a day, however.
As the most popular blogs show online marketers, it takes a unique focus, regular creation, and clever marketing to attract the type of attention you need to profit.
No matter what type of written content you include on or off your website, each piece needs the following:
Purpose – It has to mean something to the people you want to read it.
Keywords – No stuffing, just well-researched and intelligent usage.
Value – Give the audience something that actually useful.
Easy structure – If people can’t access it on their phones or read it easily, you lose.
Brand story – Every piece of content must align with your business’s identity.
Integration – No blog post is an island. Use internal and external links to add value.
These six things do not matter to written content alone. If you do not add value, accessibility, and integration to all the content you create, you miss out on a lot of marketing power.
Graphical Content
While a standard stock photo added to a blog post does augment its value by catching more eyes, it hardly represents an effective content marketing strategy that will grow your business.
No one will share stock on their Instagram account. Taking your own photos of events, brand-specific things, and people associated with whatever you offer is far more likely to drive genuine engagement.
When it comes to graphic content for marketing, infographics top the list. They share data in an attractive, attention-grabbing, and understandable way. They are also easy to share, which helps your content go viral… or at least get more clicks than expected.
People are visual creatures, for the most part, so it makes sense to engage your site visitors and targeted consumers with attractive, colorful displays. It’s the same concept of a retail store putting up a big red “SALE” sign, except with a lot more meaning.
Auditory Content
When you go out to the shops or commute to work on public transportation, how many people do you see with earbuds in?
While most may be listening to music, podcast popularity has exploded over the past year. In the digital marketing world, 2019 could be called “Year of the Podcasts.”
Apple’s most popular podcasts showcase great examples of how any brand can use this content type to expand their reach to new markets and cement their place in the minds of existing audience members.
How do you make a podcast that has the opportunity for success?
Get the right equipment. You don’t have to spend a lot, but a dollar store microphone won’t work.
Understand what your audience wants and needs. Ask them.
Organize what you’re going to say for 15-30 minutes. Make sure you know what you’re talking about.
Engage with interesting guests to spice things up.
Stay on schedule. People are more likely to come back if they can count on you.
Video Content
Combine graphics, audio, and written content, and you have one of the most powerful forms of digital content marketing in existence: video. High-quality video production can bring your business to life on the web, and video content will only become more and more prevalent as our digital economy moves into the 2020s.
According to a 2018 survey, 68% of surveyed consumers reported that they most prefer to learn about new products or services through short videos.
Videos explaining your products and services will lead to better audience understanding and retention, and including footage of your offerings and people will increase the persuasive power of your video.
Don’t only imagine that we mean you have to create a YouTube channel and try to go viral. Though YouTube is the second most popular website, it’s not the right platform for every business and audience.
Each of these types of video can add power to your digital marketing:
Educational Video: They can be used to educate your audience about your products and services, teach them a new way to use your product, or inform them about news applicable to your industry. Remember: give your audience real value! Educational and how-to videos can be excellent for this.
Industrial Video: Industrial videos offer plenty of opportunities for stunning visuals: facilities, products, services, staff, and equipment can be shown in action, adding excitement and powerfully illustrating the benefits and professionalism of your business.
Event videography: Whether you’re putting on a conference, company party, or having speaker address an audience, events offer visual opportunities that can make for a great video. The resulting video production can be retained for training, used for promotion, or even streamed on social platforms.
Search Engine Optimization and Content Development
More than 1 trillion searches are entered on Google every year. You need to stand out.
If you follow the basic guidelines for content creation above, you are already ahead of the game. Most web pages or social media posts online never get any attention at all.
Do not allow your content to fade into obscurity. If you want organic search engine traffic, you need to grab one of those top spots on Google. How?
In order to get high ranks, create content that gives people what they actually want.
High traffic, low competition keywords – In marketing, this is often called “the tilt” – the keyphrases that sit at the sweet spot of search volume and competition. Use them appropriately in your content, with special attention to headings, image tags, and anchor text. Use other semantic terms, too. These are related naturally to the topic at hand. If your keyword is “dog training,” you will naturally talk about puppies, leashes, and treats, for example.
Authority content – Remember that you have to give your audience real value. Share new or unique information. Make it entertaining. Help them solve a problem or abolish a pain point they experience.
Do not ignore trends and timely information – Time-sensitive content gets the search engines (and people) interested. Align some of your content with trending topics.
Link responsibly – Internal linking from one post to another on your own site tells Google your content all focuses on similar things that people find valuable. Links from your site to high-authority ones shows that you include great information. Links from high-authority sites to yours are gold.
These days, creating content that search engines love follows much of the same methods that produces what people love, too. That is, after all, what Google and other search engines strive for.
Adding Value to Your Audience’s Lives
People want information. When they type “how do I train my dog?” into a search engine, they expect to get actionable tips that work. They want a solution to their problems. If their dog chews up the rug every time they are left alone for 30 minutes, the owner desperately needs a way to stop it. If your blog post or video delivers the ultimate answer to stop dog rug-chewing, that piece of content will get shared around the internet and attract a lot of other rug-deficient dog owners.
People want entertainment. The massive amount of people on the internet every day want more than answers to their questions. Internet is overtaking TV as the main form of entertainment for much of the world. Give people something to make them laugh, cry, or at least get interested in for a while.
People want a connection. Today, more than ever before, consumers expect to form a type of emotional bond with the brands they support and buy from. Even if you do not directly sell services or products, your brand is your online identity. Those who read, watch, or listen to your content want to feel like an important part of something bigger than themselves.
Smart Content Development for 2020
Keep an eye on our blog to learn more about the different aspects of content development from strategizing to management. You’ll get the prime info and tons of outside resources to set up your own content marketing strategy.
If you want to kickstart this process with an outside team who has the expertise and time to strategize, implement, and manage your content marketing, let us know! MLT Group’s content development team emphasizes personal relationships, easy communication, and smart strategy.
Contact MLT Group for a free audit of your website, and learn how we can work together to boost your digital marketing.
Manufacturing marketing has a ton of room for growth and potential.
Why? Because most manufacturers, machining companies, and engineering companies aren’t great at marketing their own businesses.
This is understandable.
If you work in or own one of these types of businesses, you know this truth: time is of the essence.
You have to meet deadlines, make sure your operations are efficient, and constantly monitor the output of your facilities. Although many of the employees in your business may be knowledgable enough, they just don’t have the time to do things like create content, run PPC ads, promote the business through social media and other marketing channels, or keep track of SEO data to keep growing traffic.
So what’s the best manufacturing marketing solution?
How Agencies and Manufacturers Can Work Together
From time to time, we publish industry-specific guides like our post about real estate SEO.
We write these guides because we’ve gained expertise in working with these types of companies. In the past 18 months, we’ve worked with several companies in the manufacturing space in areas like precision machining, stud welding, and industrial services.
We’ve found that while different strategies are always needed for each individual business, manufacturing companies have some similarities when it comes to growing their business with SEO
Competition
Niches like marketing and SEO are very competitive. Often, you need to create insanely in-depth content and promote the “you know what” out of it to get your content to rank on search engines.
This isn’t the same for manufacturing companies.
We use a tool called Ahrefs to measure how competitive certain keywords are. Take a look at these screenshots from the tool showing the large difference between the keywords in our niche and the keywords in the manufacturing niche.
You still have to use a solid strategy to rank, but there is a pathway to getting a great amount of traffic with a little bit of persistence.
Content Depth and Quality
Often, the type of content that works well in a manufacturing marketing campaign has both depth and quality.
This is especially true for manufacturing companies because:
Many manufacturing techniques, machinery, and processes require an in-depth explanation to understand
Each type of term or phrase used often counts as an LSI keyword, which is a fancy way to say a secondary keyword. In-depth content x industry jargon = a keyword rich piece of content
Most companies who write content for their blogs in the space write thin content, meaning writing in-depth content can help you stand above and beyond the crowd
The Need for a Smart Agency
Most manufacturing companies can benefit from using an agency because of their lack of time to market the business.
Interestingly enough, many companies are convinced an agency can’t help them because they’re not technical experts. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
First, we have a staff of copywriters, many of which focus solely on writing technical content.
Second, we listen. Proper SEO discovery and studying resources can lead to a content campaign that meets SEO needs and maintains technical quality.
Last, we’ll go the extra mile to make sure we understand your business. If that means coming to take a tour of your plant, meeting key employees, and scheduling calls for content until we have the perfect content recipe, that’s what we’ll do.
In the beginning, there is usually some back and forth to get the technical terms right, but after that, our content doesn’t need much editing on your end to be worth publishing.
Want to see how we can improve your website? Fill out the form below for a FREE site audit!
So what are some of the components of a successful campaign?
On-Site SEO
On-site SEO is the process of adding keywords — words people use on Google searches — into important areas of your website like:
Page title
Page content
Image file names
Alt tags
Anchor text for links
The terms themselves aren’t that important.
It’s important to know that your entire website should be covered for SEO. This is especially true for manufacturing companies who run an e-commerce business.
Each product and category page on your website should have on-site SEO as well as keyword rich content on that page:
If you have a larger website, it may take time and money to create content for each and every category and product on your website. Often, we work with companies with large inventories by adding content to a handful of pages to start and gradually add it and boost their SEO with a monthly content creation package.
This way, you can dip your toe into marketing without breaking the bank and steadily grow over time.
Content Marketing For Manufacturing Companies
So why type of content should you create if you want to make a splash as a manufacturing company?
Content marketing for manufacturing companies usually follows a few simple rules of thumb:
Keyword researched topic – Some manufacturing topics get a high amount of traffic, some don’t. We focus on finding a balance between high-traffic keywords and competitive level.
Industry expertise – It’s good to establish a niche and focus on creating content in a narrow area first then going broader over time, e.g., a precision machining companies focusing on aerospace machining to start then branching out to something like medical devices.
Persistence – Creating a large volume of work over time leads to compound rewards. As pages get indexed by Google, they start to rank for more and more keywords.
We provide free marketing proposals and consults that walk you through just the type of content we will create and how it will benefit your site. Each proposal is custom-researched with no cookie-cutter components.
Enter your information into the form below and we’ll have a proposal to you in 48 hours or less:
Website Authority
Website authority factors into search engine rankings.
What is website authority?
Google uses links from other websites to yours to measure the quality of your site.
Each link to your site, called a backlink, is like that site ‘voting’ for yours.
So how do you get more votes?
There are a few different ways we’ll show you:
Directories
Outreach
The rich get richer strategy
Directories
Google likes links from high-quality business directories. They are also a huge part of local SEO.
Manufacturing has many quality directories you can submit your site to like Thomas Net:
Industry-specific directories provide the following benefits:
Topical relevance – Getting backlinks from strong websites matters, but so does getting backlinks from industries in the same niche.
Reputation – High reputation directories provide more authority than low reputation sites. Manufacturing has many high-quality directories to choose from
Real business – Often, you can actually get sales from these directories as customers actually use them to find products and services.
You can also use local directories and general business directories, which help build your authority by:
N.A.P – The more times your name, address, and phone number shows up on the web, the better. These are known as citations
Local signals – If you do have a local manufacturing business or a service area business, using these directories can help with local SEO
Reputation – Google loves industry-specific directories, but it also loves gold-standard general and local directories like chambers or commerce and websites like Localeze.
SEO Outreach
On top of adding your business to quality directories, you can use outreach to get quality backlinks.
Here’s how the process works:
Create stellar content – Your content needs to be worth sharing to get backlinks
Find related websites – Many websites in the space keep resource lists and link pages. Finding them is as simple as doing a Google search like “precision machining + resource list”
Pitch – Send a custom email to each site telling them why your content is great and how it will benefit their website to link to your content
The last point is key. It’s easier to land a backlink if your content adds value to other websites. Google uses outbound links as a ranking factor, too. They want to see that pages link out to other sites and get links back.
They want this because it shows your site is a “resource hub” that makes a good faith effort to give users the right information. Having this mindset when creating and pitching your content makes a huge difference.
Of course, we keep this in mind when we do outreach for you. Just talk to us and we’ll show you exactly how we work.
The Rich Get Richer
Once your pages rank higher, it’s easier for them to stay there.
Often, pieces of content on page one naturally get backlinks.
Think about it.
If you write an article and need to cite sources, you go to Google.
Then, you find the best article on page one to link to.
As your content ranks high on Google, you can improve it to get even more traffic by:
Adding secondary keywords
Expanding the content for length, depth, and quality
After you establish some top ranking pages, you can create more content and link between old and new pieces of content to spread around ‘link power.’
Other Manufacturing Marketing Ideas
We always consider content marketing and SEO the bread and butter for marketing any business. But after you establish yourself on Google, you can use other channels for marketing, too.
Adding more marketing channels leads to more growth.
They can also help your SEO efforts because Google measures user experience, too. A great example is having videos on your site to increase ‘dwell time.’
Here are some other great marketing channels you can use.
Video
Do you have company videos or instructional videos on how to use your technology?
They make a great addition to your campaign because data shows that people like to have more than one medium to enjoy the content.
This video is a great example a manufacturer could draw from:
Paid Advertising
Paid advertising is a bit more complicated than figuring out how much you are charged per click, but it can be a worthwhile investment if done the right way.
Often, we use PPC campaigns at the beginning of an organic SEO campaign.
This option is great for companies who want fast results and a quick way to establish ROI on their marketing efforts. Organic SEO takes time to kick in:
If you want tangible results asap, try a PPC campaign.
Social Media Marketing
Is social media marketing a great route for marketing manufacturing?
It can be if done right.
You can use social media to highlight the quality and innovation of your company. It’s a great way to show how your company grows their expertise over time.
Some great social media marketing ideas in this space are:
Technology – Anytime you create a new technology or process, create a press release and share it on social media
Conferences – Sharing insights gained from attending conference works well on social media. Turn this to a video format for even better results
Employees – Highlight employee achievements shows you’re a forward thinking company who helps smart employees grows. It also makes your employees feel good about themselves. Win-Win.
Conclusion
The manufacturing space has a ton of SEO and marketing potential.
It’s one of the few unsaturated markets out there.
Take advantage of these opportunities and you can grow your traffic, business, and brand all at the same time.
Why did we decide to write an article about marketing principles?
Because we took a look at the top results for “marketing principles” on Google and thought someone needed to do better justice to the topic.
If you’ve studied marketing before, you’ve heard of concepts like:
The 4 P’s
Unique selling proposition
S.W.O.T. analysis
Positioning
The list of dry marketing terms and concepts is endless.
And when it comes to marketing principles, you really want to know what marketing rules you should follow in order to move the needle for your business.
You don’t need a fancy business plan. You need revenue. Powerpoint presentations and boring marketing conferences aren’t going to help you build a brand, develop an audience, and find more customers who want to buy what you have to offer.
What will?
The #1 Marketing Principle You Must Follow to Successfully Grow Your Business
Take a look at this google search for “marketing advice”:
There are nearly a billion results.
There’s no shortage of marketing advice out there. And a lot of it works.
You know what definitely won’t work?
Sitting on your hands…
Reading blog post after blog post about marketing tips and implementing none of them…
Telling yourself next week, next month or next year will finally be the time when you invest in marketing…
Execution trumps creativity every time. You can have the most creative marketing ideas in the world, but if you don’t see them through, who cares?
I don’t know you personally, but I’m guessing you’re either a business owner, marketing employee, as aspiring to do one of the above. You think about improving your marketing or hiring a smart agency to do it, but you sit on the fence and procrastinate.
Why? Because you’re afraid.
Afraid of taking risks.
Afraid of wasting time and money.
Or afraid of all the above combined.
If you want to succeed in marketing, or business in general, you have to understand that fortune favors the bold. You have to invest time, money, or both to take your marketing to the next level.
There’s more competition out there than ever before.
Fortunately, that’s a good thing.
Principle #1 – Saturated Markets Are Good (But Only if You Do This)
Why? Because, to be honest, most of them just aren’t willing to put the same amount of work in as we are and it shows. We’ve checked our competition’s content marketing game and we are up to the challenge.
Even in hyper-competitive industries like marketing, you can pretty much cancel out 90 percent of the field right way. Why? Because pulling off a legitimate content marketing campaign is difficult. Not difficult in that you need to be a genius to do it, but difficult in the fact that it’s time-consuming.
We write a 3 to 5,000-word blog post covering topics in-depth, like advanced PPC tracking, at least once a week. That’s on top of the landing pages we create, ads we run, videos we shoot, and designs we change.
We do this because we know our competitors won’t.
The great news for you? You’re probably not in a niche as competitive as marketing. And you’re competition likely won’t do the work.
If you did just these three things well over time, you’d destroy your competition:
The catch? You’ll have to do it for a while before it pays off in a major way.
But, if you’re in business, you should be thinking long-term.
Principle #2 – “Me Too” Marketing Doesn’t Work
Every business has competitors.
But most businesses make the same mistake when it comes to competing. They try to copy their competitors’ tactics.
Why doesn’t this work?
It doesn’t work because taking the same actions someone else will, at best, get you the same results.
But often, it won’t because you don’t know why your competitors are taking that action in the first place.
It’s important to have your own marketing strategy based on your unique insights like:
Audience – Have you taken the time to understand your ideal audience? Do you know their hopes, dreams, fears, and desires? Until you do, you won’t know how to create the right marketing messages.
Brand – Dollar Shave Club launched their company with a viral video campaign. Their videos used crass language, over the top humor, and theatrics. Another shaving company with a different brand couldn’t pull the same type of campaign off. You need to build your brand with intention and articulate what type of company you want to be then market the business itself.
Goals – Your goals — aside from the obvious like sales — aren’t always going to be the same s your competitors. That’s why you need to clarify what those goals are before you start a content marketing campaign
Your competitors built their own marketing campaigns using these insights; insights that you don’t fully know. Copying their tactics is both inauthentic and ineffective.
Principle #3 – The 10x Rule
Our formula for creating content is simple:
Study what’s out there
Note what the competition does well
Find the gaps they didn’t cover
Create something 10x better
This speaks to the point above about saturation.
You can beat out your competition. But to do that, you have to blow them out of the water. If you’re writing an article about a topic, it should be the best article about that topic on the internet. You should promote it unabashedly — literally send more outreach emails than your competitors.
If you believe in your product, trying to get 1,000% better results through marketing shouldn’t scare you, it should excite you!
Which brings me to our next point…
Principle # 4- No Amount of Marketing Can Solve This Problem
Feathers – Great products that just need a ‘lift’ from marketing
Bricks – Duds that no amount of marketing can “lift”
You see a lot of startup owners making this mistake.
They figure their product just needs a good marketing campaign and it’ll start flying off the shelves.
No amount of marketing will work unless you can answer these questions:
What does your product do and who is it for? – You’d be surprised at how many business owners can’t articulate this
Does anybody want your product? – Often, “revolutionary ideas” that haven’t been thought of before…haven’t been thought of before for a reason. Your product needs a market fit. Content marketing can’t create demand; it only amplifies it
“What’s in it for me?” – This is the question people ask anytime they read your content, learn about your product, or interact with your brand. That’s why knowing your audience on a deep level is important. If you know their problems and the solution your product offers, you can communicate that through marketing.
The number one benefit of having a great product?
You’re excited to promote it. If you know you have something amazing to offer, investing in marketing becomes a triviality.
Principle #5 – Always Lead With This
“People don’t buy drills. They buy holes.”
If you visit a random company website, you can see this mistake being made about 75% of the time.
You see it when the company rambles on about “being in business for 30 years,” or has a long list of features their products or services have.
People don’t care about features. They care about the benefits.
People don’t care about “MPG.” They care about saving money and time.
People don’t buy workout routines. They buy bodies that look good naked.
You care about getting more people who are genuinely interested in your product or service to engage with your brand, turn into leads, and become sales. As a forward-thinking business owner, you want to be seen as the go-to experts in your field with word of mouth of your brand spreading like wildfire.
Go look at your website right now.
Is it feature focused? Or benefits focused?
If it’s the former, it’s time to start creating new content or hiring someone else to do it.
Principle #5 – Never Do This
Michael Jordan used to visit the opposing team’s locker room before games.
He’d walk around, shake hands, smile politely, and make small talk.
Under the surface of his smile was a bit of an evil smirk.
He knew, and his competitors knew, that in his mind he was thinking, “I’m going to destroy all of you.”
See, when you know you’re the best, you don’t focus on your competition, you make them focus on you.
Every minute spent worrying about what your competition doing is a minute you could’ve used to build your own business. This attitude works especially well in content marketing and SEO. You might not have an authoritative site..yet. But you will.
And while you’re building up your authority, you’re focusing on making your product better, your content better, your marketing better.
Then, one day, out of nowhere, you’ll start rising up the rankings and get noticed in your niche. You want others in your industry to think. “Who the hell is this and where the hell did they come from?
Principle # 6 – Adopt This Attitude
Promotion and outreach are huge pieces to the SEO puzzle.
There are an endless amount of guides showing you how to pitch and promote your content, but many miss the fundamental point.
You have to have something worth sharing to promote it well. Jon Morrow, the owner of Smart Blogger, expresses this idea well in his viral blog post – On Mothers, Dying, and Fighting For Your Ideas:
“Writing isn’t about putting words on the page […] It’s about breathing life into something and then working to make sure that life becomes something beautiful.
That means spending ten hours on a post, instead of 30 minutes.
That means writing a guest post every week, instead of one every few months.
That means asking for links without any shame or reservation, not because you lack humility, but because you know down to the depths of your soul that what you’ve done is good.”
It’s much, much, much easier to promote your content when you actually believe in it. This goes back to point #2 about “me too” marketing. You’re not going to want to promote an unexceptional piece of regurgitated content because, deep down, you’re ashamed of it.
You didn’t do your best and the people you want to share it with will smell the low-quality from a mile away. The low-quality mindset you had when creating the post will leak right into the pitches you make when you’re trying to promote it.
The opposite is also true. When you “become so good you can’t be ignored,” people will have no choice but to pay attention.
Principle #7 – Find Balance When Doing This
SEO and marketing are weird in the sense that the people in your network can bounce back and forth between being competitors and colleagues at the same time.
Since getting links from other websites in your niche builds authority, you have to build relationships with people in your niche. At the same time, you also may have some overlap in the keywords you’re trying to rank for.
How do you solve this problem?
Here’s how we look at it:
There’s more than enough room – There are enough search terms available for you to get enough traffic to move the needle for your business.
Be authentic – We only reach out to or link to other sites and site owners we admire and respect. Your “competitors” also add value with the content they create. There’s nothing wrong with showing a little love.
Connection is needed – You need both inbound and outbound links to rank well. That means being cooperative and nice is a prerequisite for being successful at content marketing.
Principle # 8 – Kill Your Darlings
Want to know how to kill your business?
Stay stagnant, don’t innovate, and maintain the status quo.
Whenever you’re thinking about being complacent, think of all the companies who failed to switch things up when their business model or marketing effort became obsolete.
Is your business model going to work 5 years from now? How about 10?
Are you thinking far into the future about how to market your business?
Or are you still relying on your “bread and butter,” — tossing money down the drain in billboard ads and radio spots when you could get 10x better results investing in digital?
Warren Buffet has a saying:
“When the tide goes out you will see who’s swimming naked.”
Principle #9 – Don’t Be “Smarter Than a 5th Grader”
When you write your content, aim to write at about a 5th-grade level.
Use short sentences and simple words.
Don’t use business jargon if you don’t need to.
This goes for the copy you use on your landing pages to writing blog posts.
Simple is better:
If your content is hard to read, people will leave your site
Using jargon makes you look arrogant, not smart
True intelligence makes complex topics easier to understand, not the other way around
Ernest Hemingway is known for his blunt and simple style. There’s even an app named after him that helps you write your content in a simple way.
Principle #10 – Use the “D-Day Approach”
D-Day is one of the most famous moments of world war II.
The good guys sent a bunch of troops to the beaches of Normandy to attack the bad guys.
They sent a large group of soldiers into a small and concentrated area.
They won the battle and secured an important strategic advantage. Taking Normandy allowed them to expand in the right territories and win even more victories. Many say this battle was the beginning of the end of the war.
In your case, you want to concentrate your forces.
If you want to fail, try every marketing tactic in the book all at once.
Now, you do have to experiment with different marketing channels to find one that works. But when you do find one that works, double-down on it. When you’ve mastered it, move onto another tactic.
Principle #11 – Avoid the #1 Marketing Mistake 99% of Business Owners Make
We work with clients. Part of working with clients is steering their minds in the right direction.
A critical piece to this – getting them to stop thinking only about themselves.
Yes, when you build a website, it’s your website. But the website isn’t for you. It’s for your customers.
When you write an about page, the page is about you or your company. But a great about page talks about the benefits you’ll provide your customers.
It’s your business, but you won’t have a business unless you market it for, you know, other people.
Nobody cares about your vision.
They want to know your product can solve their problems.
You have to make sure your marketing speaks to that and that alone.
Go look at your company or personal website right now. Who do you talk about more — yourself or your potential customers?
If it’s the former…we should talk.
Principle #11 – Do The Little Things
Everybody wants to swing for the fences with their marketing.
It’s appealing to write ultimate guides, go viral, and get a ton of followers on social media.
It’s not appealing to do the little things that, combined, can move the needle for content marketing and SEO.
Bill Belichick — 7-time super bowl winning coach — spent a long time as an assistant. He’d do all the grunt work the head coach and others didn’t want to do. And he did it gladly. He’s won many championships from taking advantage of little key moments where he used the experience of hours and hours of watching film.
That’s what the top SEO’s and agencies do, too. Behind the scenes, they’re working on the little things.
You’ll never see them up-front, but the effects are real.
Principle #12 – Never Stay Satisfied
We’ve talked about mastering one marketing channel before you move on to others, but once you’ve mastered that channel, move to the next, and keep doing it until you become a marketing swiss-army knife.
You have to take this omnichannel approach because online marketing continues to evolve.
Once the traffic from SEO starts to roll in, you’ll feel good about your business, but don’t stop there.
Pour gasoline on your marketing fire.
Principle #13 – Stop Believing in This
Do you ever look at your competitors and think they’re just lucky?
They had the right connections.
They built a career off of a few lucky viral hits.
The industry wasn’t saturated when they started.
Blah, blah, blah.
Yes, luck is involved in marketing success (and every other type of success for that matter).
But you can learn how to engineer luck.
The more seeds you plant, the more likely your marketing campaigns will grow. Yes, that means writing (or investing in a writer) in-depth content over and over and over again even if it doesn’t pay off right away. It means scheduling out social media posts as if you had a big following when you actually don’t.
The top players in the field are almost always there because they’ve been at it for a long time. Success, especially content marketing success, takes time, not luck.
Principle #14 – The Only Guaranteed Way to Beat Your Competition
There are no guarantees when it comes to marketing (see the point above).
But, if you want to make a splash and stand out among your competitors, there is one way to do it.
Create something no one would even think of trying to replicate. Make your competitors feel exhausted by even looking at your content and imagining having to create it.
When it comes to regional competitors in our area, other marketing agencies, we just try to take it to a level they don’t want to match. We’re playing the long game. You can, too.
String together a long enough streak of insane pieces of content, and you’ll be too far ahead to lose
Principle #15 – Stop Consuming, Start Creating
About 99% of people read marketing blogs and do nothing with the information.
Many business owners sit on the fence about hiring a marketing firm for years.
There’s a consistent theme running through all the marketing principles we’ve listed — action.
You can’t know all the answers up front.
You discover the secrets of marketing by experimenting. This goes for in-house marketers and agencies.
Too many would be marketing owners are sitting on their hands, slowly letting their businesses get phased out of the future.
Your time is now.
Go.
Principle #16 – The Rich Get Richer
The 80/20 rule states that there will be an asymmetrical relationship with the total amount of resources.
That’s a fancy way of saying a few people reap most of the rewards.
The top 20 percent of blogs get 80 percent of the traffic.
On your own website, the top 20 percent of the pages will get 80 percent of the traffic.
It’s important to stay active and experiment because once you succeed, your success will beget more success.
If you get backlinks to a blog post and it starts to rank on page 1, it will receive backlinks naturally.
If you grow your social media following, your followers will promote your page for you.
Now, at this point, you use the marketing principle above and put your foot on the gas pedal. Once the growth curve goes up, you push even harder. This is how you become a household name and have permanent success.
Principle #17 – Don’t Lie to Yourself
You know what mediocre business owners do? They hire companies that provide “affordable SEO services” and get upset when they don’t get any traffic.
You know what mediocre marketers do? They write a few blog posts with thin content, send a few tweets, do no real blog outreach, and throw their hands in the air when they’re not on the first page of Google.
It’s rare to give an honest effort at marketing and fail completely.
It’s extremely common to give half-assed attempts and fail.
Which type of marketer or business owner are you going to be?
Principle #18 – Forget Everything You Learned in Business School
There is no way to “learn business” other than actually running or working for one.
The type of marketing knowledge provided in business school is mostly worthless. These institutions are decades behind the current landscape of content marketing, digital marketing, and SEO.
Get your hands dirty and forget about the dry jargon they taught you at university.
Principle #19 – Do What Works for You
If you’re better on video than with the written word, shoot videos.
If you don’t like being on camera so much, do audio.
Outsource the work you don’t want to do yourself.
There are many different ways to market your business successfully. But it makes no sense to go against your strengths.
Principle #20 – Use Tools and Data
You can’t build a house without a blueprint and tools.
You can’t run a successful marketing campaign without data and tools to grow your business.
We’re talking more than just Google Analytics here (even though you can gain a massive amount of insights just from this tool).
Don’t be afraid to invest in software to track your marketing results.
And check the data often, but not too often to gain insights from, e.g., six times a day like most marketers do.
Principle #21 – Watch What People Do, Not What They Say
If you polled readers, they’d tell you they don’t like “listicles” or click-bait headlines. Content marketing data says otherwise.
The National Enquirer is still in business for a reason.
People have an outward image they portray and then behave differently in private.
Know the difference, and you can market to them correctly.
Principle #22 – Become a Marketer for Life
You want your career or business to last your whole life, don’t you? Well, at least you want to stay in business or work you love until you retire.
Settle in. This is a long game you’re playing. The marketing wisdom you gain over time will compound like interest in a savings account.
After you get your foot in the door and find some success, commit to developing the skills of influence for the rest of your life.
Principle #23 – Test Emerging Platforms
Around 2012, you could get a ton of organic reach from Facebook. Now, not so much.
In the early days of AdWords, clicks were so cheap the platform was like a money printing machine. Now, not so much.
Some have said LinkedIn is the platform de jour. It’s worth trying to see if you can get in at the right time.
Platforms, strategies, and techniques always come and go. It’s best to test new ones before they get too saturated.
Principle #24 – Focus on Metrics That Matter
Traffic doesn’t matter if it doesn’t convert into leads and sales.
If you’re running an SEO campaign, total organic search traffic matters more than ranking for your favorite keywords.
Having e-mail subscribers means nothing if they are just there to consume free content.
Being data-driven is great, but being insight driven is better. What you do with the data matters more than the data itself.
Principle #25 – Read Marketing Books
All marketing books aren’t created equal, but some stand head and shoulders above the rest. Here are some of our favorites:
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
The Boron Letters
Contagious: Why Things Catch On
On Advertising
Principle #26 – Prepare for Failure in Advance
You will write content that doesn’t rank.
You will send pitches that get rejected.
Money? You’ll definitely invest at times without getting perfect ROI.
But that’s the game of marketing.
Principle #27 – Master the Basics
You can jump on the hottest trends like voice search and A.I., but it would be foolish to do so until you have a basic understanding of things like:
Keyword research
Content creation
Backlink outreach
Simple technical SEO
If you mastered those 4 things alone, you’d be in the top-tier of most marketers because…most aspiring marketers don’t even scratch the surface of those.
These marketing principles aren’t hard, per se, they are just time-consuming.
Consume the time. Do the work.
Principle #28 – Get on Google’s Good Side
Until further notice, Google is the king of online marketing.
It would be wise to use their guidelines and tools to benchmark your success.
When they make a definitive announcement, take it to heart.
When one of their employees gives you advice, take it:
Use their tools like page speed insights and get top grades:
Obvious, yes, but also extremely useful.
Principle #29 – Don’t (Always) Listen to Marketing Gurus
Some marketing techniques and strategies become conventional wisdom, even if they no longer work.
Some people still think you need to add keywords in your meta description (which was never true). Same thing with ‘keyword density.’
Don’t get caught up in tropes. Take advice, yes, but implement it to see what works and try some novel strategies of your own.
Principle #30 – Use the Right Technique at the Right Time
This adds on to the point above.
Marketing rules change depending on the situation.
You’ve heard that content length is a ranking factor. It is.
But that doesn’t mean you should write a 5,000-word essay about “pizza shops in Wichita, KS.” You probably don’t need that much content to rank. A national content marketing and SEO campaign are completely different than a Local SEO campaign.
When in doubt, just study what ranks for the keyword you’re trying to target.
Studying the SERP for search intent is, again, time-consuming but worth it.
Principle #31 – Avoid Shortcuts
It’s all fun and games until your website gets hit with a penalty.
It’s easier to try and siphon money from customers quickly instead of building relationships that increase customer lifetime value.
Marketing advice and live advice have a lot in common.
Don’t try a marketing “crash diet.” Marketing is an attitude and a lifestyle. If you’re sincere about trying to do well, you will. If you’re not, you won’t.
Principle #32 – Learn How to Write Copy (or Hire a Copywriter)
The internet is flooded with bad copy.
Great copy uses simple language based on things your target audience is thinking.
They’re not thinking about how long you’ve been in business. They’re thinking about how your business can help them solve a problem. That’s it. Speaking to anything but that is waste of time, which is why it’s important to learn how to write copy.
Unless you’re in a commodity business, your first instinct shouldn’t be to join the race to the bottom.
When you have a great product and customers believe it will solve their problem, price becomes a triviality.
Don’t lower your prices. Up your marketing.
Principle #34 – Share Your Marketing Vision With Your Team
If you can share the long-term vision and goals with your company or team members, you can get them to invest in it and communication between different departments will be much easier.
Sales and marketing should be on the same page.
SEO and content marketing often requires the help of developers. Keep them in the loop, too.
It’s worth taking time to meet with your team and review your marketing goals.
Not only does this improve tactics, but it also improves morale.
Principle #35 – Don’t be Afraid to be Crazy
Look at this ad:
And this one:
And this one:
Sometimes it pays to try something a little ‘outside the box’
Principle #36 – Talk to Your Customers
How often do you take time to talk to the people who’ve already bought your product or service?
You can get huge insights from talking to your customers.
If you’re in a recurring service based business like we are, talking with your customers more often and asking them about their needs helps them feel “top of mind” and important.
Plus, if you see improvements you can help them make that aren’t covered with your current services, you can sell them to your current customers.
The best customers are often the ones you already have.
Principle #37 – Get In Your Marketing Zone
Here’s what’s going to happen. Once you get traction, you’ll enter a state of ‘marketing flow.’ When all the cylinders are firing — great content, outreach, traffic, social shares, etc — you can stay in that groove for a long time if you actively seek to maintain the momentum.
If you’re the content creator or marketer who’s doing the work yourself, take this a step further in your day to day activities.
If you have the ‘hot hand’ while you’re writing a draft of a blog post, keep going. When doing a tedious task like conversion rate optimization, get into the flow of the monotony until you can find a way to get through that mental wall — kind of like a ‘runners high.’
Consistency and momentum matter most when it comes to marketing. Get in your zone and stay there.
Principle #39 – Have Fun
Business and marketing have a serious purpose. Mainly, to make money.
But that doesn’t mean you have to be boring, ‘corporate’, and dry all the time.
If you actually like marketing, you’ll be a better marketer. If you treat marketing like a chore or an expense instead of an investment, then that’s what it will be.
Connect with your audience more, use humor, have a loose environment with your team (but still get things done).
Yes, writing 5-000 word guides like this isn’t the most fun thing I could possibly be doing, but I love marketing and so does my company.
We can help you feel the same way.
Principle #40 – Pick One Thing Right Now
Reading this entire article would be a waste if you didn’t implement at least one tactic.
Choose the one that seems easiest to implement and go after it.
Time is ticking and the competition is only going to increase.
You’re already, you know, a little bit behind.
Start now. Heck, call 507-281-3490 and start with us!
Conclusion
We could write marketing principles for days, but these are enough to get you started.
What are some of your favorite marketing tips, lessons, and insights?
Why? Because content marketing is one of the best ways to get your company in front of thousands of people and become a household name.
Branding and Content Marketing: The Perfect Marriage
The first benefit of using a content marketing campaign to build your brand is obvious – more traffic, leads, sales, and name recognition.
But did you know that strengthening your brand has positive benefits for your search engine optimization efforts? In a post titled The Future of SEO: It’s Not What You’re Expecting, Neil Patel had this to say about your brand’s impact on SEO:
The EX-CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, talked about how the Internet is becoming a place where false information is thriving. Essentially, the Internet is becoming a cesspool.
He went on to discuss how brands were becoming more important signals whether or not content can be trusted.
[…]
In other words, if you want to do well in the long run, you have to build a brand.
This makes total sense.
A few years back, SEO was pretty simple – find the right keywords, write decent content, get some backlinks, and boom, you could rank your website.
But Google’s mission has been pretty clear – they want to serve up the best possible results to searchers.
You could have a well-optimized site, but the updates to Google’s algorithm keeps making it harder to use simple techniques:
The Penguin Update made low-quality links irrelevant, meaning you had to put real effort into promoting your content
The Panda Update made low-quality content irrelevant, meaning you now have to write content that truly stands out to rank
The Hummingbird Update helped search engines better understand content, meaning techniques like keyword stuffing became irrelevant
Rank Brain ensures you need to have engagement on your website to rank
You can react to their updates in one of two ways – get frazzled and try to keep up or focus on long-term strategies that work.
The long-term strategies that help you grow your online presence fall in line with activities you should be using to build your brand:
Creating content people want to consume
Making sure your website is visually appealing and has a positive user experience
Being consistent with promoting your business online
Spending money on your marketing, like working with an agency or running PPC ads
The bottom line: anything less than in-depth, informative, and entertaining content marketing campaigns won’t work well in 2019.
It’s time to step up your content and branding game at the same time.
Here’s how you do it.
Adopt This Brand-Building Mindset First
Kevin Plank had an absurd dream.
He wanted to compete with Nike.
At the time, Nike is untouchable. To try to compete with them in the sportswear category was insane, but Kevin tried it anyway. And it worked. He also had a unique product to bring to the market – his wick wear technology undershirts. A fullback in college, he grew tired of having to changed soaked shirts during practices and games.
He chose a market segment to focus on — football. You can see Under Armour logos on gear worn in movies like Any Given Sunday and Friday Night Lights. He networked with football teams to feature his gear. Eventually, he expanded the line to feature clothing for different sports and went on to sign major athletes like Stephen Curry to endorse Under Armour products.
There are a few takeaways from his story you can use in your content marketing journey:
Audacity – You have to be bold and audacious to become a player in your niche because there are already entrenched brands in it. You have to believe you can become one of those brands.
Unique – Kevin didn’t try to sell basketball shoes right away. That wouldn’t have worked. When writing content, you need to find a unique angle. Writing “me too” content won’t work.
Long-term thinking – Under Armour was founded in 1996. It took a decade for the company to get real traction. Don’t attempt brand building through content marketing if you’re not in it for the long-haul.
Are you ready to get started?
Let’s move onto the brand building tips.
Build Your Audience
You can’t build a brand without an audience
Your audience is the megaphone for your brand.
When you get more people to know, like, and trust your brand, growing your influence gets easier as your audience grows bigger.
This is true for personal brands and corporate brands.
Corporate brands don’t always consider the importance of having an audience, but that’s because most corporations don’t know how to use content marketing in a creative way.
The ones who succeed, however, do. Take a look at these companies who’ve built large audiences through content marketing and used them to build their brands:
Having your own audience has a number of SEO benefits, too:
Social shares – Google doesn’t outright say social shares effect rankings, but the experts are pretty sure they do. Your audience will share your content for you, sending positive signals to search engines
Dwell time – The longer people spend on your site, the better. If you have an audience of people who love your work, they’ll stay to read your content longer than a stranger
Backlinks – Oftentimes people in your audience will have blogs of their own. Building an audience is one simple way to get inbound links without even having to ask
Let’s look at some audience building tips one by one.
You can still use guest posting to grow your audience — and even for SEO purposes — but you have to do it the right way.
Here are some good pieces of guest-posting advice from the pros:
Choose an engaging blog – A lot of blogs don’t get great engagement. At a minimum, a guest blog you want to post on should have at least some social shares and comments
Write good content – You’d think this wouldn’t have to be said repeatedly. There’s a difference between a “filler content” type of guest post and an amazing one that moves the needle.
Promote – If you publish a guest post, you should be promoting it much harder than the guest blog itself. This builds goodwill with guest blogs and helps you build relationships in your niche
The concept of list-building deserves an ultimate guide of its own.
If you can build an e-mail list of people in your target audience, you can make more sales, get more traffic to your website, and have a group of people willing to evangelize your brand.
You have to make sure you’re building a list for the right reasons, though.
Why focus on converting readers into leads, when you can focus on converting readers directly into customers?
The final verdict: the phrase “the money in the list,” doesn’t always ring true, but you should still consider building one if:
You want to become an “expert” or “thought leader” – E-mail is often the life-blood for expert businesses like authors, coaches, and online course creators
Your product/service takes some “warming up” before the sale – In Tim’s case, he could talk about his SaaS product and get people to sign up directly through the Ahrefs site. In our case – being an agency who comes up with custom packages – it pays to help you get to know us a little bit first 🙂
You run an e-commerce store – Building a large e-mail list comes in handy when marketing an e-commerce store. You can offer special deals and hit sales volume goals with the click of a button
You have a long customer live time value – If your business has the ability to sell to customers over and over again, an e-mail list can help create more recurring revenue.
List Building Tips
To build your e-mail list, you need the following.
A reason for someone to sign-up that’s better than “get free updates”
Offering something valuable for free is still the go-to way to get people to sign-up to your e-mail list.
You’ll need to find a way to drive traffic to your website to get people to sign up to your e-mail list. Some of the best ways to do this are:
SEO and Content Marketing – We’ll discuss this in-depth in a bit, but increasing your organic search traffic and having a website built to convert people into e-mail subscribers is one of the best ways to get more of them
Guest Posting – When you publish a guest post, you should always make sure to add a special offer in your bio to get people to sign up to your list.
Republishing – We’ll dive into this in a second, but there are several sites that will let you republish your work on their platform (without getting spanked by Google)
SEO and Content Marketing
SEO and content marketing helps you build a brand by creating a footprint of your business online.
Every time a piece of content from your site ranks on page 1 of Google, people see your brand name next to the results.
If you rank for many different topics and keywords in your niche, you’ll brand start to become a household name.
The purpose of this section isn’t to guide you the ultimate guide to content marketing and SEO (we’ve already done this here and here).
Instead, we want to talk about some of the behaviors and mindsets you need to become a successful content creator who gets noticed.
The how-to’s and SEO steps are abundant, the willingness to follow through with them and have the following mindsets isn’t.
Be Relentless
Tim Grover trained elite athletes like Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and Dwayne Wade. In his book, Relentless: How to go From Good to Great to Unstoppable he talks about the attitude it takes to become successful in sports, business, and life in general.
The book boils down to being able to exert a ton of effort, for a long period of time, without quitting, while staying hungrier than everyone around you.
Sounds super easy right?
Now, you don’t need to have the psychopathic levels of motivation that the athletes Grover trained had, but you’re going to have to be willing to go through some pain and hardship if you want to build a brand with content marketing.
Why? Because it takes time to rank well and build organic traffic. Google is slow 🙁
If you’re forward thinking and have a little patience, however, you can build a brand that becomes an “overnight success.” One day, your business or brand will be everywhere.
Get Good at a Few Things (80/20 Rule)
There are a lot of ways to market your business and build your brand, but it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle and get stuck in “marketing tactical hell,” where you end up trying a whole bunch of different techniques, none of which work.
Instead, get good at the techniques that move the needle and double-down on them.
At MLT Group our few things are:
Content – We try to write the best article on the topic we’re covering every single time we write a blog post
Links/Relationships – We’re focused on getting high-quality backlinks for both ourselves and our clients. We also aim to do it the right way. Not by spamming people, but building real relationships.
Media – From video to infographics and other media, we realize the importance of having an “omnichannel approach,” but we’re not trying everything in the book, just a handful.
You’d probably do well to focus on these 3 things, too.
Just remember this quote from Bruce Lee when it comes to building a brand through content marketing:
“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”
Watch and Revise
I listened to an episode of the marketing school podcast by Neil Patel and Eric Siu titled “The One Marketing Strategy No One Is Using.”
What was the strategy?
Going back and updating content you already wrote.
This is super unsexy, tedious, and can even be boring, but it’s also a potential game changer.
It’s fun to create new content, but it’s not as much fun to go back and review your entire content marketing campaign to see if it’s working well. These “little things” make the world of difference when it comes to increasing organic traffic. This speaks to being relentless again. Are you (or your agency) really willing to do what it takes to succeed? Sometimes grinding it out is the only way.
The sites shown are great for republishing, but one takes the cake – Medium.
How to Republish Your Work On Medium
Medium is the most popular free publishing platform online.
Even better, it has a feature that helps you avoid a duplicate content penalty:
When you import articles onto Medium, it ads a “rel-canonical” tag to it. That way, search engines know that the original article came from your website. Also, if people link to your Medium article, those links will 301 redirect to your original, giving your website an extra boost of authority.
How to Get More Traffic From Every Post by Republishing on Medium
Build Your Brand Through Blogger Outreach
Blogger outreach is the process of reaching out to other blogs in your niche.
You can use blogger outreach to:
Genuinely pay a compliment to an expert you follow (highly recommended)
Share your content with people who might find it useful
Ask for social media shares
Ask for backlinks
Notice the first two points involve sharing and giving, not asking and begging.
The #1 Rule to Blogger Outreach (That 99% of People Break)
I’m not the first person to write about blogger outreach, but I might be one of the few people to tell you this:
Reach out to people you actually respect and appreciate their work.
This seems like standard, obvious, and basic advice, right?
Unfortunately, most who do blogger outreach don’t even know the people they reach out to. They just want a backlink. They’re not looking to make a long-term connection. They’re not offering up a resource that’s a perfect match to the blog they’re reaching out to.
The good and bad news about blogger outreach? Most people do it very poorly.
This is bad news because a lot of popular bloggers are jaded after getting so many horrible pitches. This is also good news because genuine outreach sticks out like a sore thumb.
Personally, I’ve studied many experts in content marketing because I wanted to get better at it. I don’t have to dig through their blogs and pretend to read one of their articles to reach out to them because, I, you know, actually read their blogs.
When it comes to building a brand, just being a decent person who respects other people’s time puts you in the top 10 percent of the field.
If you want to build a brand by reaching out to other bloggers, keep it simple. You’re not going to win over every person you reach out to.
You don’t have to write essay-length pitches to get noticed (actually, don’t do that.) Just use a simple process of getting to know people in your niche and reaching out to them occasionally over time.
Here are some tips to help you get started.
Write Good Content
Content marketing boils down to a lot of things that shouldn’t need to be said but bear repeating.
If you want to build a brand and become a known player in your industry, take the time to write good content. Our company is in an extremely competitive niche. We can’t write 1,000 word regurgitated articles and expect them to rank on Google. Even if you’re not in a super-competitive niche like marketing, focus on creating the best possible content on your topic.
Here’s the run-down of boxes you need to check:
Content length – Make your content as long as it needs to be. Don’t stuff extra words to make it long and definitely avoid thin content
Insights – Chances are your topic has been covered before but has every single insight been given justice? Probably not. Study your competitors’ content and find angles they haven’t covered yet
Stories – A personal or business story is one thing no one else can copy
Better – A simple test can help you figure out if your content is worth sharing. Read the other posts on the topic and genuinely ask yourself if yours is better. Revise your work until the answer is “yes.”
Effort – Remember, most of your competitors won’t do the work it takes to succeed with content marketing, but you will, right?
Make Yourself Known
Here are some cliff notes from some of the best blog outreach posts online:
Leave genuine comments on other people’s blog posts that show you know what you’re talking about
Make a list of people you want to connect with. Not a creepy list, but a list of people you admire, respect, and want to connect with
Find non-pushy ways to get the attention of influencers in your niche like replying to their tweets or sending them a thank you note via email
If you do pitch another blog — whether for a guest post, share, or backlink – make it succinct and find a way to show them love first
Again, don’t be a spammer or a pushy pitcher. It’s not that hard
Here are some of the best articles on blog outreach you can find online:
If you’re a business owner who’s been researching ways to grow your business online, you’ve heard the term before.
The questions you probably have are:
What is content marketing exactly? – Many publications online throw the term around a bit, but it’s important to understand the true definition of content marketing and how it works
How does content marketing work? – This post will dive deep into the deep ‘how-to’ and step by step methods for building an effective content marketing strategy.
Will it work for my business? – The short answer? Content marketing works for all businesses when it’s done right. Don’t worry, we’ll show you the light.
This post contains the most comprehensive list of content marketing tips on the entire internet. We provided this giant list to give you every option possible to make smart decisions for your business.
Before we dive into the tips, let’s answer the questions above.
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
Put simply, content marketing is a tool to grow your business.
If your efforts aren’t leading to your desired outcome — engagement, leads, or sales — your strategy isn’t working.
Unsuccessful marketers focus on vanity metrics — analytics that do nothing more than boost your ego.
Successful markets focus on leading their customers through the sales process from start to finish and improve their efforts until the entire process works.
How Does Content Marketing Work?
You begin a successful campaign by answering the following questions:
Who is my target audience?
What does my target audience want?
How does my target audience interact with content online?
What types of content drive the desired behavior and results of the customer?
How can we create engaging content for readers that also meets digital marketing standards?
What is the best way to lead customers through the sales process?
And taking the following actions:
Perform target audience and keyword research
Create an initial content strategy
Produce content regularly
Iterate
When you create you create an implement your strategy, you want to track and refine it over time to optimize your results.
Stick with us…
We’ll walk you through tips to answer all these questions and act on the information as soon as possible.
Will Content Marketing Work for My Business?
This question bugs you the most, doesn’t it?
You’re a forward-thinking business owner or marketer. We know this because you’re here searching for useful information.
But, deep down, you might wonder if content marketing will produce results for your business?
Maybe you think you’re in a ‘boring industry.’
Maybe you’re worried about return on investment — is dumping money, time, and resources into your content going to pay off? How can you truly know if it’s paying off? The ROI of content strategies is notoriously hard to track, but there are ways you can do it.
Content marketing works.
It can work for your business.
It’s nothing more than a tool. It’s up to you or the digital marketing agency you work with to use it the right way.
Side note: If you’re working with a digital marketing agency, ask them how their strategies are going to help your business improve its bottom line. Really, drill down on that question because great agencies can answer that question and bad ones can’t.
Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s go over the tips. Feel free to jump around and find ones you think will work for you.
Create a Customer Avatar
Question for you — do you know who your ideal customer is? Do you know his or her hopes, fears, desires, and frustrations? Can you paint a vivid picture of them in your mind?
You need to know your target audience with pinpoint accuracy and a customer avatar can help you define your audience. With a defined audience, you can create targeted strategies.
Some questions you can use to build your customer avatar are:
What keeps them up at night? Finding your target audience’s deep pain points and frustrations can help you highlight them with copywriting and provide solutions
What are their hopes and dreams? You need to know what your client aspires to, not just in terms of your product, but their life in general. This way, you can tie in your product or service with their lifestyle, which builds trust and shows empathy
What end result will your product fulfill for them? There’s a classic marketing quote that goes, “When people buy a drill, they don’t want a drill. They want a hole.” Make your marketing fit that mantra
What other solutions may they have tried?
With this information in hand, you can create a targeted avatar. Then, you use the avatar to write content for your ideal customer. This makes the reader feel like you’re speaking to them personally.
Use This Word Often
This subtle change can skyrocket the results of your content strategy.
The change? Use the word ‘you’ more often.
When you use the word ‘you’ instead of phrases like ‘our customers’ ‘our client’ and [xxxx], you show an investment in the person on the other side of the screen.
Most companies talk about themselves way too much.
Your customers want to know what you can do for them. Keep your content focused on their needs at all times.
Paint the Picture
Imagine you’re at your computer right now.
You receive a notification with a new lead or sale.
Your phone is ringing off the hook with customers calling after finding your company on Google.
Minutes later, you get another notification from your company blog. A reader just commented, “Wow. This is the best content I’ve ever seen. I’m bookmarking it to re-read.”
You think to yourself, “I wished I’d started sooner,” and you’re feeling the same rush of emotions you felt when you hit previous milestones in your business.
And most importantly, when tracking your revenue, you’re seeing numbers that make you wide-eyed.
These are the results you can expect from a successful content marketing campaign.
Now, read the next few sentences:
Our company provides digital marketing solutions, SEO, and web design. We can help your company reach a broader audience online, engage with them, and produce positive results.
One sentence says what the company does. The other paints a picture of how the customer will feel after you’ve transformed part of their life.
Check out the way Ramit Sethi uses the paint the picture technique on his sales page for a personal improvement course:
Read Your Customer’s Mind
Want an easy way to figure out exactly what your customers are thinking and make them feel like you’re reading their mind?
Here’s how you do it:
Research – Read product reviews on sites like Amazon, Quora, Yelp, Google reviews, and Facebook reviews.
Highlight – Find the phrases customers use over and over
Become a psychic – Use their exact words in your copy
Use These Tricks to Measure Content ROI
If you want to get an idea of how much revenue your campaigns drive, use these techniques:
Set $ values – Create a dollar value amount per the desired action. A sale is overt, but you can also measure (on average) how much your leads are worth.
Compare – Using methods like customer acquisition cost (CAC) and customer lifetime value (CLV) you can measure how profitable your leads are.
Copywriting and blogging aren’t the same as academic writing.
When you write for web, use these elements of style to keep your reader moving down the page:
Short sentences
Headings (H1, H2, H3)
Bullet points
Add media in between sections to break up the copy
The Yoast SEO plugin provides a ‘readability score’ to make your content easy to read online:
Use the Skyscraper Technique
The skyscraper technique is simple.
Here’s what you do:
Find the best piece of content about a subject
Write a piece of content that’s 10X better
Reach out to people who linked to and shared the other article and show them yours
The creator of this tactic, Brian Dean, uses it to rank for tough to beat keywords like “Google Ranking Factors.”
Optimize for Click Through Rates
When you perform on-site SEO for your website, you will create a unique meta description that will appear on search engines.
You want to add relevant key phrases to your meta description to rank highly in Google and you also want to make sure your description is compelling.
Why? Because Google’s new Rank Brain algorithm prioritizes click-through rates, meaning they will rank a site with lower authority, but a higher click-through rate than its competitors.
In this post, Neil Patel describes techniques you can use to research your current site pages and optimize them for CTR.
Map Your Content to Lead Customers to the Sales Process
Each customer is at a different awareness stage when they discover your business. They may be unaware of their problem, aware of their problem and wondering if you can solve it, aware of your problem and believe you can solve it, or ready to do business with you because they’re convinced you can solve it.
Leading your customers from lead to customer involves guiding them through the process step-by-step with different pieces of content:
Whitepapers
Blog posts
Videos
Infographics
Landing pages
Service pages
To create an effective content funnel, anticipate which stage of awareness your customer will be at when you create a piece of content and use that content to guide them through to the next step.
Write For Humans, Not Search Engines
While you do want to create content search engines love, you must create content people love too. Google is trending toward prioritizing the user’s experience over the standard SEO techniques.
Writing content people want to read also provides these SEO and digital marketing benefits:
Longer ‘time spent’ on page (a positive ranking factor)
Lower bounce rates (a negative ranking factor)
Social sharing
Higher engagement
Better conversions
Brand awareness through word of mouth
Find Your Citations
If your business has been around for a while, chances are people have mentioned it online. When someone mentions your business online, it counts as a citation for your business. Consider a citation a vote of confidence.
You can search for your citations online and reach out to those who have mentioned you and ask them for a link.
Email marketing is still one of the top tools you can use to grow your business with content marketing.
To bond with your customer and lead them through the funnel of education to sale, you can create a welcome series.
A welcome series provides automated emails that send out in sequence based on when a new lead signs up for your email list.
Sending them an introductory welcome email creates an instant connection, helps customers remember your brand, and creates familiarity when you send them new messages:
This infographic from Spark Page shares excellent details and step for creating the perfect welcome series:
Beef Up Your Content
Numbers don’t lie. And the numbers say long-form content ranks best on Google.
Industry standards used to say the key length per page was 300-500 words, but new data shows the top-ranked content online usually has 1800-2000 words:
When you create long form content, aim to make it the best content about the chosen topic period. You also want to choose an evergreen topic, meaning the topic will be relevant for years to come.
Epic content takes time and effort, which is why it works so well. Few people are willing to put that much effort into their content and the ones who do run laps around the competition.
Use Search Display and Facebook Ads to Gain New Leads
Most companies think about ads the wrong way. Ads aren’t just a tool to get users to buy right away. You can also use ads to draw in casual readers and move them through the stages of awareness we mentioned earlier.
If a customer doesn’t know or trust you, they won’t click on an ad to buy your product or service right away. If, however, you use ads to provide them with something useful, interesting, and free to get their attention, you can build the trust you’ll need to market to them later. Check out these awesome examples of companies using ads to connect with users:
Content marketing requires patience to see the fruits of your efforts.
It may take several months to a year for your post or page to rank on page #1 for Google.
An SEO campaign isn’t considered mature until the one year mark. When you work on a content strategy, think about your long term engagement, sales, and traffic goals then work backward to create a strategy that fits.
When creating a content marketing strategy, think of how you can not only gain a customer but keep them for life. An effective content marketing strategy not only lands new customers but continues to remind them why they purchased in the first place.
Ways to increase engagement for the long with customers and prospects are:
Blogging consistently
Email marketing (both sales and engagement-oriented)
Remarketing ads
Special offers
Active social media
Use This Powerful Ranking Signal
Collecting as many reviews and testimonials from customers and clients has multiple benefits:
Google uses reviews as a ranking signal
Reviews provide ‘social proof’ which show potential customers why they should trust you.
According to research from Bright Local, 91 percent of people surveyed said they read reviews (at least occasionally) and 84 percent say they trust reviews as much as their own friends.
Republish Your Content
You may have heard that duplicate content is a definite no-no. As it turns out, that’s not exactly true.
You can republish your content on other websites as long as you identify the original piece of content with a rel: canonical tag.
Some platforms, like Medium, have this import function built right into the platform:
Even top Google engineer, Matt Cutts, explains how many forms of duplicate content don’t harm your SEO:
Harness the Power of Guest Blogging
Guest blogging on authoritative websites helps you gain quality backlinks, send traffic back to your website, build your email list, and increase your brand awareness.
That is if you do it right.
The aforementioned Google engineer once declared that guest blogging was dead, but he meant that spammy guest blogging was dead.
Given you find a reputable website and create legitimate and useful content, guest blogging is still a top white hat technique businesses can use.
There are many great third party tools and websites you can use to aid your content marketing efforts.
You don’t, however, want to build your business on someone else’s property. This is called digital sharecropping.
Let’s say you decided to add all of your content only to Facebook instead of your own website. If Facebook decides to change its terms of service or delete your page, there’s nothing you can do about it.
Having your own dedicated online real estate and using long term strategies like SEO and email marketing will ensure your content efforts don’t go to waste.
Use Influencer Marketing to Build Your Brand
Influencer marketing is the process of leveraging the fame of celebrities to promote your product. This extends further beyond typical “A-List” celebrities like actors, rock stars, and comedians. There is a large number of social media influencers out there — people who are only famous through their social media platforms — that you can work with to promote your product. Neil Patel has a great guide on launching an influencer marketing campaign.
Spy on Your Competition
There’s a simple recipe you can use to beat out your competition on search engines:
Find out what your competitors are doing well
Do it much better than them
You can use tools like Ahrefs and Buzz Sumo to figure out how your competitors use content marketing. Once you have data on the type of content they create, where their links and engagement come from, and the level of depth they put into their content, you can create better content on the same topics and reach out to everyone who engaged with their content.
It’s that simple.
Create a Maze to Keep Your Readers on Your Website
You can use what’s known as the Wiki Strategy to improve our SEO and keep readers on your website longer.
Here’s a condensed version of the strategy (follow the link to see full):
Create the best content online
Link to reputable sources in your content – Wikipedia is a heavily cited and linked website. Meaning that you never have to leave Wikipedia to find more information. You want to create the same effect with your linking strategy
Find experts to contribute to your site to build the catalog
Promote your content
Track your progress
Repeat
Conclusion
These are just a few of the many content marketing tips you can use to grow your business.
How can you invest in content creation and ensure you get a return on investment (ROI) — even though this is harder to track than metrics like cost per click?
If you’re opting to work with an agency, how can you be sure they’ll deliver?
This guide is meant to be the end-all-be-all when it comes to creating content for your business.
Before we go deep into strategy, you have to get this next part right. In fact, the next section alone will make or break your success.
The Mindset You Need to Become a Content Creation Expert
People don’t talk about this often.
It’s easy enough to read blogs about content marketing.
Doing it and doing it well is a different story.
The funny thing? Content marketing isn’t hard, per se. It’s time-consuming, requires consistency, and only works after you spend a lot of time, effort, and money creating content.
Even if you don’t write the content yourself and hire an agency do to it, realize that not all agencies are created equal.
In fact, the sad truth is that many of them will write “me too” content that doesn’t move the needle. Agencies can be just as guilty at failing to live by the rules of successful content creators.
Rule # 1 – Write 10x, World-Dominating, Head And Shoulders Above the Competition Content
Here’s a guaranteed hack that’ll help you rank better on search engines:
Write content that’s 10x better than your competition.
How can you do this?
Make your content longer and more in-depth:
Add media to your blog posts to make them stand out:
Add novel insights and contradict the advice of your competitors:
Use this Simple Framework to Beat Your Competition:
Study all the competitor results on the search engine results page (SERP)
Note what the ranking pages do well and implement the same techniques in your content
Note what’s missing from your competitor’s content and add it to your content
Aim to create a piece of content that’s 10x better than your competition
Again, this is about the mindset behind SEO. You can think all you want about using a strategy like the Skyscraper Technique, but actually doing it is about 100x harder than reading a blog post about it.
Rule # 2 – Prepare For Obstacles in Advance
Roadblocks are inevitable.
You’ll write content constantly without getting the results you expected.
You’ll invest money that doesn’t pay off in rankings and traffic right away.
At a certain point, you’ll wonder if content marketing is right for your business.
Spoiler alert: it is, but you need the right mindset to make it work.
Here are some simple ways to prepare for these roadblocks in advance:
Plan, plan, plan – From keyword research to creating a content strategy, to adding time-blocks on your calendar to work on content, the more you prepare, the easier content creation will be.
Wait – If you decided to commit to content marketing for a year, wait a year before you judge the success of the campaign. Sure, make adjustments along the way, but commit to seeing the strategy out first before you throw in the towel.
Why – Remember why you started creating content (or hired someone) in the first place. You wanted to grow your business, build your brand, and connect with more people. Focusing on your “why” can help you persist when times get tough.
I’ve seen at least one of his posts garner 750+ comments.
The downside? Putting together such massive guides clearly isn’t the easiest job ever, as Nathan only publishes one post per month on average. Regardless, Nathan is undoubtedly one to watch.
On the flipside, blogs like Search Engine Journal produce multiple blog posts per day.
Both strategies work. Not only that, but quality and quantity don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
A few dozen posts per year provide excellent quantity if all the posts make up for it in quality. Also, you can create great-but-not-insanely-long guides at a faster pace and rank well, too.
If you’re a thought leader, it means you’re one of the “go-to experts” in your space.
Content creation is a great way to establish yourself as a thought leader, but not if you focus on becoming one.
Right now, you should focus on creating the best content you possibly can.
You should promote your content and connect with people in your niche.
Do this for a long enough time, and you’ll earn the right to be called a thought leader. It will be self-evident.
Content marketing has created an awesome path for anyone to demonstrate their expertise.
Sadly, the majority of content creators focus on the prize instead of just doing the work.
Just do the work. Do it often.
The traffic, sales, and admiration will come later.
Don’t worry about those for now.
Now, stick with us to learn about the nuts and bolts of a solid content creation strategy.
Keyword Research 101
Keywords are the life-blood of a content creation campaign.
Have you ever typed something into Google looking for an answer, a location, a service, etc? Those phrases you type in are keywords.
When you do keyword research, you’re looking to find the right phrases to use in the content you create.
So what qualifies as a good keyword?
Here are some good benchmarks to follow:
Search Intent
The keywords you target your content around should match a goal you have for your business. You want to make sure that someone who types in that keyword will be happy to find your site and you’ll be happy they landed there.
We’ll use an example from our industry. We could create content around the keyword “SEO” but it’s a broad and vague keyword. Someone searching for the keyword SEO might be a curious browser, not someone who’s serious about working with an SEO agency.
Something like “content marketing services” matches our goals better. A person searching for that is at least interested in learning about a service we provide.
Or take this blog post, which we targeted around words like “content creation” and “quality SEO content.” Not everybody who reads this post will want to work with us, but that’s not the point. We provide education about SEO and content marketing so that you either:
Decide to work with us
Decide to take our recommendations and use them on your own
Both are good options because they meet our overall goal: being a leader in content marketing and SEO. Helping people for free is a big part of reaching that goal, so creating quality content for free is part of our strategy (and will likely be part of yours too)
Competition
Different niches have different levels of competition.
Marketing is, to say the least, a very competitive space. We’re competing with all the marketing blogs in the world.
If you’re a local plumber in, say, Wichita Kansas, your strategy will be different because your competition will be different.
We will talk about the steps to keyword research shortly, but let’s look at some of the ways you can size up the competition as part of your content creation efforts.
Site Authority
Google doesn’t outright tell us who’s site is the most authoritative.
There are third-party tools that give you a pretty good idea though.
Here’s a screenshot from a tool we like to use, Ahrefs:
Authority Score 101
Take a look at the two numbers on the right, UR and DR. Here is the explanation of what these scores measure directly from Ahrefs:
Domain Rating is a proprietary Ahrefs’ metric that shows the strength of a target website’s total backlink profile (in terms of its size and quality).
URL Rating (UR) shows the strength of a target page’s backlink profile on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 100, with latter being the strongest. Both internal and external links are taken into account when calculating this metric
Domain Rating
Every page on your website has the same Domain Rating (DR) that are based on a few things:
Linking root domains – This just means the total number of websites that link to you. 3 links from three different websites are better than 3 links from the same website. Make sense? Ok good.
Authority of the linking root domains – Quality beats quantity here. 1 link from a high authority domain can be more important than many links from low-quality websites
Link profile – A link profile is all the links you have on your website + how they are linked. A good example to help you understand: a link from a medium authority domain that links out to a handful of other websites can be better than a high authority domain that links out to a ton of other sites. The authority of the whole site, in a way, gets split up by the total number of links. This concept is called “link juice.”
URL Rating
Each page on your website has its own unique URL rating (UR).
Here’s how to think about this. Website pages show up on Google, not entire websites.
Here’s a page on our website that ranks on page one in the search engine results page (SERP):
Google wants the best pages to show up on the SERP for a query (what people type into the search bar). In this case, it’s providing results for people who search for things like “Minneapolis SEO” “Minneapolis SEO company” “Minneapolis SEO agency” etc.
So instead of looking for which websites have the best information about these topics, Google chooses individual pages to show up on the results page.
One of the factors it uses is the authority of individual pages that are targeted for “Minneapolis SEO.”
This authority is measured by UR.
Some of the factors that affect UR are:
Linking root domains to the page – Each website that links to this exact page – https:/www.mltgroup.com/minneapolis-seo.php boosts the authority of the page itself
Linking root domain authority – You want to get links from pages with high DR and UR pointing to pages you want to rank on Google
Internal links – Internal links are links from one page of a website to another page of a website. Why is this important? Internal linking tells Google, “Hey, this page is important!” When you create a page you want to rank, you should link to it from lots of other pages on your website. This screenshot shows how this structure can work
When you’re doing keyword research, you want to think about the authority of the pages who rank for the keywords you’re trying to target.
It’s not an exact science, but here are some rough guidelines:
Low authority sites/pages – If you have a newer website that doesn’t have much authority yet, you want to first focus on keywords that have low to medium authority themselves (low = 10-30)
Medium authority sites/pages – As you create and promote content over time, your site authority increases, making it easier to rank for more competitive keywords (medium = 30-50)
High authority sites/pages – If you publish and promote great content over a long period of time, you can start to rank for highly competitive keywords. High competitive keywords usually get more total traffic volume, which means the number of people who search for that keyword in a month. You will need to write the best quality content possible to rank for these terms (high = 50+).
Other Site Authority Considerations and Tools
Site authority is just one of many metrics you can use to gauge your chances of ranking a page on Google.
Just because your site pages have lower authority than others doesn’t mean you can’t rank them. You just have to go the extra mile to beat out the others.
Here are some ways you can do that:
Write 10x content
Get a handful of top quality backlinks. Nathan Gotch has an excellent backlink guide you can use to get started
Use smart outbound links. We will talk about this in more depth, but the quality of the links you put on your pages that link to other sources can help your page rank, too
Be bold. You won’t succeed in content marketing unless you’re willing to do what others won’t. Sometimes you have to think outside of the box and over deliver. A great example of this: Neil Patel spent tens of thousands of dollars and essentially wrote a book worth of content to rank for “online marketing“
Keyword Research Essentials
Keyword research is a topic that can go into great depth. Here are the cliff notes of a great keyword strategy and some excellent resources you can use to learn more:
Steal your competitor’s keywords – With tools like Ahrefs, Moz, and SEM Rush you can plug your competitor’s URLs into their dashboards to see what keywords they already rank for. Then, you can create better versions of their content to outrank them 🙂
Good old fashioned brainstorming – You know what products and services you sell. You also have an idea of what words people might use to search for products and services in your niche. Start with those as a baseline. Take a pen and pad, write ideas down, and cross-check with keyword research tools
Make up your own damn keywords – If you have a unique strategy or insight that helps people in your niche, create content about it and make up a name for your strategy. It’s a nice hack you can use to get on page 1 fast. Some people go as far as to give their companies a unique name. As their brand gets recognized, they create a total keyword volume out of thin air! Remember earlier when we said to be creative? This is an example of what we meant.
Keyword Research Resources and Tools
The basics are enough to get you started, but if you’re looking for more in-depth resources to start your content creation campaign, these guides will be a ton of help:
On top of doing keyword research, you can perform market research to make your content even better.
Part of this research involves studying your competition.
The other part involves studying your potential customers and people in your target audience.
Study the SERP
We wanted to rank this post for keywords like “quality content” and “SEO” content.
When studying the SERP and the blog posts we found, we noticed a few things in common between the posts and saw ways to create something better.
First, we noticed most of the posts used short tips and tidbits on how to create quality content that was a bit vague:
If you wanted to create content using these tips, you’d have a general idea, but not a step by step process or useful resources.
That’s why we put together step by step information with screenshots, resources, and concrete processes you can use right now to create quality content yourself (and if you don’t have the time, our company will use this exact process for your business.)
We also noticed the posts talked (mostly) about ways to impress Google.
Yes, you have to optimize your content for search engines, but your number one goal is creating content your visitors find useful.
In a later section, you’ll see our step by step process for creating user-focused content.
A final, and really important item, we saw missing was a lack of focus on the content creators themselves.
Nowhere did we find tips on the mindset and tools you need to be a successful content creator.
Or, for business owners looking for content creation help, we didn’t see any tips on finding the right type of agency or content marketer to work with. We included sections on both in our guide.
Studying the SERPs is just one of a few important tasks for content creation.
Stick with us to discover the true keys to content marketing success…
Use The World’s Largest Customer Research Center
If your business doesn’t have a product, service, or content related to something on Amazon, you have a very obscure niche.
Amazon reviews offer great insights you can use to create content.
We looked at some books on content marketing to see what readers thought about books on creating quality content:
Even though we’re writing a single post, we can use insights from book reviews to help make our post more useful.
We looked for 3-star reviews, which usually have a good mix of praise and criticism. We found some interesting insights.
Some readers were looking for relatable ideas for their kind of business instead of the “create epic content to grow a massive company” style content you often see:
This led to us creating a section with examples and scenarios for normal small and medium-sized business owners.
We also noticed many comments about formatting and ease of use for finding information:
We added a table of contents, FAQ section, and worked to make our in-depth guide as simple to read as possible.
We also noticed a theme where readers didn’t feel the content was catered to their experience level:
In our tips section, you’ll see sections for different skill levels.
Customer Research With Quora
Quora is a question and answer platform. Users ask questions about a wide range of subjects. You can plug keywords into Quora to see what questions people are aking in your niche. You can use these insights to create content that answers people’s questions, which can help your posts rank better on Google (remember Google likes user-focused content).
Digging through Quora, we found this question, which led to us creating a section with our top recommended tools:
With the keywords and insights in hand, you can start to plan for the different types of content you can create for your business’s website.
Different Types of Content You Can Create
Different types of content require different strategies to be successful.
If you’re a content marketer (or you’ve hired an SEO agency to help you out), it’s important to know what goal each type of content serves.
If you want to get technical about it, there are lots and lots of different categories content can fit into.
For this guide, we’ll focus on the basics (pro tip: mastering the basics is often better than trying all techniques at once.)
Blog Posts
You’re reading a blog post right now.
Why? Probably because you’re looking for information to help you create your own content or insights you can use to get somebody to do it for you.
Either way, you’re here because you need or want information.
If you don’t think this post is going to deliver what you want, you’ll leave.
If you think the post does deliver want, you’ll read through the whole post, maybe sign up to get even more marketing tips, or reach out to us directly because you want our help.
We write blog posts to educate people about content marketing and SEO.
We want our content to be so in-depth and useful that you can implement the strategies on your own.
Why? Because we’re building our brand as content experts. Getting every single person who reads our posts to buy our services would be nice, but that’s not our goal. Done strategically, creating a company blog can help your businessstand out as an industry leader.
Blog Post Best Practices
If you want your blog to be successful, it has to hit certain benchmarks like:
Intent – Search intent means people who visit your blog post get what they’re expecting. Study the posts that rank well for your target keyword to get insights on intent.
Optimized – Each blog post you write must be optimized for a certain topic or keyword to rank on Google.
Media – Pictures, videos, infographics, and other forms of media keep readers on the page longer. “Dwell time” is a ranking factor search engines use.
With these benchmarks in mind, focus on the content marketing done in your industry. Blog styles and formats vary from industry to industry.
A simple recipe that works for any industry, though: study the blog posts your competitors create and make your content undeniably better.
Service/Product Pages
Services and product pages have a simple goal: get people to buy or request more information.
Your service and product pages should be more focused and, for lack of a better word, aggressive than your blog posts.
Each services page should include:
A Unique Selling Proposition or Tag Line
You have to provide reasons why your product or service is better than the others and communicate it well.
Look at content marketing expert Neil Patel’s service page for his agency, Neil Patel Digital:
He does a couple things well here. The call to action at the top of the page is simple, straightforward, and compelling at the same time. Who doesn’t want more traffic?
On top of that, he displays logos of the companies he’s worked with. Why? Two persuasion techniques are used here: social proof and the power of association.
Social proof is basically evidence of why something is good, e.g., positive book reviews. Us humans like to know other people trust a brand or product before we purchase it. Then there’s the association bias.
Whenever you can, it’s smart to associate yourself with other trusted brands. Who doesn’t know Facebook, Google, and eBay? Neil leverages his partnerships with these companies and it’s persuasive because they’re so well known.
Highlight the Benefits of Your Product/Service
Content creation often boils down to one question:
What’s in it for me?
All the content on your product and services pages should answer that question.
Put yourself in the customer’s shoes for a second. Say they visit one of your services pages and the first paragraph they see is something boring about how your company “was founded in 1965 in a one-room shack” or whatever.
Does that information really drive decision-making? Perhaps, but more often than not business owners use their service and product pages the wrong way – to talk about themselves and talk about the features of their services instead of the benefits.
Nobody cares about the fact your riding mower has x, y, and z capabilities. They care that your lawn mower mows lawns faster!
Focus on the benefits your product or service provides.
As the famous saying goes, “People don’t buy drills, they buy holes.”
Look at this example from Legion Athletics. On a product page for one of their supplements, they start the page by addressing the problem and providing solutions in the form of benefits:
They list all the features of the product on the bottom of the page. Much more time is spent on highlighting the benefits of the product and the transformation it will provide people who buy it.
This is how smart marketing works.
Other Considerations
Many of the guidelines for creating great blog content apply to creating product/service pages:
Content length – Your content has to be as long or longer than the competition to rank. For product/service pages, use images to “break up” the words on the page
Media – See how the video was used in the example above? Adding media to your product/service pages can make them more persuasive and keep people on your pages longer.
Optimization – You’ll need to do keyword research and optimize your product/service pages, too. You can use modifiers to get more clicks like “Buy” “Discount” “20% off” “Free Trial” etc.
Calls to Action – Make sure to prompt readers to either buy or learn more about your product/service in an overt way (see screenshot below)
Landing Pages
When we use the phrase landing pages, we’re talking about highly-target pages that provide readers two options:
Engage by signing up or buying
Leave
You won’t see menus on these pages. You won’t see any links pointing you somewhere else.
These pages are focused.
Landing pages are often used to get e-mail subscribers.
Let’s say you’re running Facebook Ads to get more customers. The last thing you want is to spend money, have them click on your ad, and then leave without subscribing.
This is why most landing pages make it crystal clear what they want you to do next:
Other forms of content exist and are useful. We focused on written content creation for this post because it’s a core type of content you must master.
Once your content marketing campaign is in full swing, you can try other formats to pour gasoline on the fire.
Video
Video can be an excellent content marketing tool. Some people prefer visual content to written because…they don’t like to read all that much! No worries, video is a great way to repurpose your content. Each blog post you publish can be transformed into a video. Each video can be broken up into smaller pieces and shared on platforms like Instagram. You can take one video and feature it across multiple platforms like Youtube, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
One blog post can be turned into several content pieces you can use on social media.
Some examples are:
Sharing links to your post across all social channels
Making quote-cards with visual displays of quotes from your content
Sharing video content across social media platforms
Adding click-to-tweet buttons from your content that share highlighted quotes instantly
There is a lot you can do with social media and content marketing. So much so that there are awesome guides solely dedicated to that process. Check them out:
Most SEO best practices posts don’t tell you anything new.
The posts usually contain the same old SEO information and the writers simply add the current year to the title.
We want to be different.
This post is going to cover the SEO best practices you won’t hear anywhere else.
Above and beyond the normal advice like “create epic content or use the Skyscraper technique” we’re going to look at SEO insights that really move the needle.
Let’s dive in.
The Most Important SEO Best Practice of Them All
The SEO industry has a lot in common with the weight loss, self-help, and finance industries.
Every year, millions of articles come out in these spaces with either the same old advice:
“Count calories”
“Write down your goals”
“Save 20% of your income”
Or there’s a hot new fad everyone wants to jump on:
“Do the Keto diet”
“Wake up at 5 a.m. and meditate”
“Buy cryptocurrencies”
In the case of SEO, the common advice would be something like “perform outreach to get backlinks” and the advice of the day might be in relation to the latest algorithm change.
In all cases, you’re choosing the wrong strategy if you dwell too long on either type of advice.
The most important SEO best practice is simple:
Experiment with new strategies
Analyze your findings
Double down on what works
Instead of reading articles about writing epic content, write epic content (or hire someone to do it) and measure the results.
Instead of watching videos about blogger outreach, take the last piece of content you wrote and promote it as hard as you possibly can.
If you’re a business owner who’s on the fence about working with an agency or getting marketing help, stop reading blog posts about “finding the right agency,” pick one and give them 12 months to build a successful campaign.
SEO has much more to do with implementing sound advice than it does being an expert.
Someone with less SEO knowledge but more commitment can rank their websites higher than the competition. Speaking of…
The Easiest Way to Outshine Your Competition
Imagine you’re a local business owner in Cleveland, Ohio who sells plumbing services.
You think you’re in a “boring” business.
With that belief in mind, you don’t go the extra mile when it comes to marketing. Maybe you try writing some SEO content, but you don’t take it any further.
You can’t see past ranking #1 for “Plumbing services in Ohio.” You have modest goals because you run a modest business in a modest industry.
Instead of doing what every other plumber in the city does and wishing for the best, why not go above and beyond your competition — not just in SEO, but building a brand that stands out in your entire industry.
For local SEO, here are some techniques you can use that most of your competitors won’t:
Write detailed blog posts about interesting ways your business connects with related topics, e.g., your new green plumbing system/fighting climate change
In your case, look for these two simple and easy ways to differentiate yourself from the competition:
Break one of your industries “norms”
Use a content marketing technique that requires either too much money or effort for your competitors to even think of copying
Don’t Start with SEO in mind at all
You’ve heard that backlinking is a key piece of the SEO pie, but what if I told you there were websites earning tens to hundreds of thousands of visitors per month without actively backlinking at all?
Nat Eliason, owner of Cup and Leaf, Growth Machine, and a fascinating personal blog, has been growing his tea blog by using something called the wiki strategy.
Here’s an excerpt from the post discussing the strategy:
The first principle of the strategy is that you should only write something if it’s going to be the best article on that topic on the Internet. Anything less than that is a waste of time. If there is already a better article on the topic out there, then you’re only adding to the infomania pollution of the Internet by publishing yours, so you must only publish something if it is truly the best article on the topic.
Why does this strategy work?
Because it focuses on the user first and SEO second.
Google is not (just) interested in your website’s authority score. It’s interested in whether or not your website — and business as a whole — serves the needs of searchers.
When it comes to creating content, designing your website, creating a site structure, and more, start with the premise that you want to provide the best user experience possible.
This means:
Writing in-depth content that answers readers questions
Having a great user experience
Adding entertaining elements like media
After you’re done, go back in and use the core SEO techniques.
Understand this Core Behavioral SEO Best Practice
Remember when I said SEO and marketing are a lot like finance, weight-loss, and self-improvement?
These industries have another thing in common:
The need to commit to goals.
Consider adding the commitment to your company’s marketing to your list of goals for 2019 and follow through with it.
SEO can take up to a year before it really starts to kick in — just like losing weight or saving money.
This year, consider suspending your judgment and spending a full 12 months — either on your own or with the help of an agency — doing a full scale 100% effort digital marketing campaign.
What would that look like?
Research Keywords to Create Content for a Full Calendar Year
You want to have enough keywords to create as many new pieces of content you decide you need for the next 12 months.
How do you decide how many pieces of content to create? Some useful guides are:
In our article about real estate SEO, we talked about how hard it would be to rank on the first page for a key phrase like “Homes for Sale in Minneapolis,” without a big brand with a lot of authority.
We suggested focusing on less competitive long-tail keywords like “Condos for sale in Stillwater, MN. (Stillwater is a suburb of Minneapolis.
Creating unique pages for these types of key phrases can help you grow your organic traffic as a whole over time.
Use This Obvious But Under-Utilized Technique
There are a ton of articles about ways to verify the quality of your keywords.
One piece of advice many business owners — and even SEOs miss — is taking the time to read and analyze the content that appears on page one.
It seems simple and obvious, but reading and analyzing 10 blog posts or website pages requires time, patience, and effort.
Our analysis found the following.
All the posts in the top 10 results talked about what to do, but not the mindset you need to follow through with SEO best practices:
This led to us creating tips not just about SEO best practices, but the behavior and mindset you need to pull them off.
We also noticed the #1 result came in at about ~1,100 words. Is that really enough word count to explain SEO in detail. We don’t think so, so we doubled the word count with useful information.
But, as of this moment, we’re not trying to become the go-to experts about these topics.
Why?
First, because we focus on providing useful content for business owners and marketing employees, we want to write about topics that are the most actionable for our audience.
We’re not discussing A.I. in strategy meetings with potential clients, so why write about it?
Second, as of this moment, we simply can’t write about those topics with a level of authority we’d feel comfortable with.
This is the exact opposite attitude of many other SEO companies and digital marketing agencies.
They might write a paragraph about artificial intelligence in their blog post, but if you reached out to ask them to build a custom A.I. based digital marketing strategy for you, they wouldn’t be able to do it.
SEO is at the peak of competitiveness in 2019. Writing “me-too” content isn’t going to work. Mentioning topics that are hot and trendy, but you know nothing about, won’t work either.
Focus on becoming the best at what you know and sharing it with your audience. This 80/20 approach will reap massive rewards.
Run Your Content Marketing Campaign, Add Experiments Along the Way, and Double Down on What Works
You have your content planned out for the year, but written content can’t be your only content marketing channel.
You’ll have to use a combination of these channels:
Social Media
Video
Audio
Visual/Graphic content
The goal and steps are simple — test marketing channels and run experiments until you find a channel worth mastering.
You don’t want to throw spaghetti at the wall forever. When you find a channel that works, do it again.
“Everyone who’s ever launched a product—a book, an event, a course—has asked this question. It’s the number-one question every amateur entrepreneur wants answers to. It’s the question I asked after launching my first product.
And it is absolutely the wrong question to ask.
I made the mistake of asking this question to Derek Halpern right after my first successful course launch.
I had released a brand-new course for writers called Tribe Writers. Even though I launched it to a list of less than 2,000 people, I sold over 400 courses and made $25,000… in a week
“What should I build next?” I asked Derek.
“Whaddya, stupid?!” Derek said in his most wonderful New Yorker accent.
“Uh, no?” I said.
“Why would you go build something new when you have a product that is selling?”
“…”
“Let me ask you something,” he continued. “Do you really think everyone who needs this product has heard about it yet?”
“Oh, definitely not.”
“Good. And do you think everyone who has heard about it and is going to buy it has bought it? Or do you think more people on your list will eventually buy it?”
“I think more people will buy it.”
“Ok. So why are you talking about another product? Why don’t you just keep launching this product and learning how to sell it better and better?”
Once you find a marketing channel that works for you – double, triple, or quadruple down on it.
Here are some excellent examples of people doing just that.
Together, they both host the Marketing School podcast where they create a short daily episode about marketing.
At the end of each episode, they use the same call to action – help them reach 1,000,000 subscribers:
They’re building towards an end goal.
They started the podcast as an experiment and doubled-down on it when it worked.
What do other marketers do? They either rest on their laurels or try a new strategy.
You should try new strategies – Eric and Neil both use many other marketing channels – but only after you’ve mastered and optimized a channel or technique that’s working.
Track Everything (And Don’t Forget to Do What I’m About to Tell You)
You want to track the success of your marketing efforts, but that’s not the most important part of a successful campaign.
What is?
Let’s (for the last time) take a look at one of the related industries we talked about earlier — finance.
[…] managing money isn’t necessarily about what you know; it’s how you behave. But that’s not how finance is typically taught or discussed. The finance industry talks too much about what to do, and not enough about what happens in your head when you try to do it.
This quote doesn’t just describe finance, but many other industries including SEO.
Add Sub-Head Here
See, it’s easy to nod your head when you work with an agency and they tell you that SEO takes 12 months.
It’s hard to stick with the campaign after you’re 6 months in, spent $15,000 on the campaign, and haven’t got the flood of traffic you hoped for yet.
Facebook ads seem like a great way to promote your content.
But sticking with them when your ads are bleeding money could mean the difference between disappointment and marketing pay dirt.
Our SEO best practices guide contains much less tactical information and much more behavior-oriented and psychological information.
Why? Because winning the SEO game is about what goes on between your ears, not the techniques themselves.
Trust the process long enough to get real insights.
Conclusion
The SEO best practices that work have nothing to do with simple techniques and strategies. Often, they have more to do with comittment, persistence, and long-term thinking.
What do you think?
Are there any SEO best practices you’d like to add?
If I had a dollar for every time I heard “content is king,” I could retire.
Content marketing works, but it doesn’t work for everyone. The same can be said for SEO, pay per click advertising, and social media marketing.
Marketing channels work, but you have to make them work. It’s easy to throw money at something like PPC ads, but it’s hard to figure out how to get ROI from them.
The good news? You can always fix your content marketing strategy and sometimes it doesn’t take an overhaul — a few simple changes can make all the difference.
Let’s dive into the tips.
The #1 Content Marketing Strategy Mistake 99 Percent of Business Owners Make
Here’s what will happen when you start a content marketing campaign (or hire someone to do it).
At first, your traffic and rankings won’t move much, but after time, they’ll rise up the rankings. Higher rankings mean more traffic and more authority for your website.
When some of your pages start to rank high, they’ll attract backlinks and gain authority on their own.
Why? Because people often Google information to use in their own content and tend to cite results that show up on page 1.
If you write evergreen, in-depth, and useful content, people will link to you naturally, which gives your entire site more authority.
When a single page ranks for one keyword, it will start to rank for other related keywords — these are called LSI keywords.
A single page can rank for dozens, hundreds, or thousands of keywords.
You can go back in and sprinkle these LSI keywords into your content, which will help it rank better overall.
Stop Doing This Immediately
Marketing experts are aplenty in 2019.
They’re all giving the same advice.
People who take that advice give the same advice so on and so forth.
This becomes a content marketing pyramid scheme.
Everyone copies each other, meaning no one is original or has anything truly useful to share.
Did you develop a strategy based on copying your competitors? It’s time to rethink that.
How? Figure out ways to differentiate yourself from the competition.
One Strategy No One Can Copy
Ayetkin Tank, founder of Jotform, writes a blog on Medium.com
What separates him from other people in the space? He tells personal stories. Look at the story he used to open a blog post about the taste of customers:
You can’t replicate someone else’s personal experience. Stories shape the world and humans love learning through stories.
Try to think of ways to inject more narrative into your content strategy.
Do you have unique testimonials and case studies from people who’ve bought your products or services? Use them.
Do you have industry insights you gained from unique experiences? Sprinkle these stories into your content.
Zig When They Zag
Is everyone in your niche writing blog posts? Do more videos.
Are all your competitors on Facebook? Try LinkedIn.
An innovator is simply someone who has tried something other people haven’t.
Always think…what’s the opposite of what your competition is doing. Do that.
It won’t always work, but it helps you think outside the box. With so many businesses creating content, creativity is at a premium.
Kill the Sacred Cows
Fun fact: a lot of conventional wisdom is completely wrong.
People just repeat mantras over and over again until they become accepted.
If you can discredit the “sacred cows” in your industry and provide better solutions, you’ll stand out.
Nat Eliason is a great example of this. In his post about the Wiki Strategy — which includes creating a ton of content with a heavy internal link structure like Wikipedia –, he called out the sacred cow.
He said backlinks and typical SEO optimization aren’t all that important.
According to Nat, as long as you write the best content possible and cite credible sources, you can rank your posts without any backlinks.
Not only does this fly in the face of typical SEO advice. It’s useful and it works.
Here’s the problem, though: some of them just aren’t that good.
The marketing waters are…murky to say the least.
Some agencies have good intentions but can’t execute.
Some are flat out incompetent.
Agencies who can help you create stellar content are the exception, not the rule.
Business owners know this, as many of them have been burned by shoddy SEO and content marketing companies.
Fortunately, there are a few simple ways to find out if you’re working with the right agency.
Check Their Own Content Marketing Skills
We kid you not, there are some content marketing companies who don’t do it very well, or often, for themselves.
Would you take workout advice from someone who is out of shape?
Here are a few tells the agency you’re working with isn’t cut out for the job:
Thin content – content length is a ranking factor. If the company you want to work with doesn’t write 1800+ word long guides and posts, run.
Unoriginal content – read and analyze the style and voice of the content on agency websites. If theirs is dry and drab, why would yours be different?
No proof – if you don’t see reviews, testimonials, and case studies, there’s a good chance there aren’t any
Choosing an agency to help with content marketing is a big decision, don’t make it lightly.
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Your Content Marketing Strategy is Off Target
Everything in your content campaign should strive toward an ultimate goal.
This could be traffic.
Or leads.
Or sales.
Figure out the metrics that make sense and measure the success of your campaign by them.
If you notice the strategy is working, consider this: you’re targeting the wrong people, writing the wrong content, or sending out content at the wrong time.
Targeting the Wrong People
We’re an SEO company.
Naturally, we’d love to rank on the first page of Google for the phrase “SEO.”
But if we did, would it be worth the effort to get there?
Someone searching the phrase “SEO” could be doing so for a number of reasons, many of which have nothing to do with becoming a lead or a sale for you (not that this always matters, but still).
Instead of trying to rank for broad keywords with many different types of search intent, we focus on keywords that complement broader topics like SEO and content marketing.
Long-tail keywords are more targeted and have a narrower audience, meaning you can create content that better matches what searchers are looking for.
Writing the Wrong Content
Each industry has its own standards for content marketing.
If you’re running a Pizza shop in Boise Idaho, you don’t need to write a 3,000-word treatise on pizza toppings to rank well.
If you’re in a competitive and information heavy industry like we are, you’ll have to write 10x content to rank.
Either way – the lesson is the same. See what content is already doing well, emulate what works, and add more to make yours stand out.
Sending Out Content at the Wrong Time
An awareness funnel shows the process people go through before they trust you enough to become a lead or buy your product/service:
If you sent the right content at the wrong stage, it won’t have the effect you want it to have.
This is why it’s important to create a digital marketing strategy from start to finish before you start creating content.
You need each stage of the funnel ready to go when the time comes with the right content for each stage.
Your 1 Track Mind Gets You in Trouble
Creating more content isn’t the solution to all your woes.
Some people think creating a bunch of content will magically make their site explode with traffic and get more sales and customers.
This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Content marketing isn’t just about writing content. It’s about experimenting with different strategies and iterating over time.
Too many marketers and business owners are running on the content treadmill.
It’s time to step away and analyze your results.
Here are some useful tips.
Use This Technique Improve Your Rankings Fast
The easiest way to get more out of your content marketing strategy?
Improve the content you already have.
If you’ve been creating content for a while, odds are you have pages that are ranking well.
Why not just make those pages better?
“Because marketers keep yelling at me to create more content!”
Ok, don’t listen to them. Listen to me.
Make Your Content Visually Stunning and 10x Your UX
Design and user experience play a huge role in SEO and content marketing.
Make sure your website loads lighting fast, has interesting media and use different techniques to make your content appealing.
Look at this example by Ramit Sethi at I Will Teach You to be Rich.
His personal finance ultimate guide goes from bland and boring to exciting, not just with content, but design:
Notice the unique way he breaks up with words with design and adds calls to actions:
If you can think of ways to go above and beyond with design, you can outshine the competition.
Harness the Power of LSI Keywords
Remember earlier when we told you that your blog posts and content pages can rank for more than one keyword at once?
You can take those secondary – LSI Keywords – and add them back into your content.
If you use a tool like Ahrefs, the process is simple.
Enter the URL for a piece of content into the Ahrefs dashboard and click on organic keywords:
Then, find the keywords ranking from positions 4-20 for that keyword (keywords on page 1 and 2 excluding the top 3 positions):
Use the keywords you see and:
Add them to your body content
Add them to headings
Create entire new sections based off of LSI keywords
Remix, Rematch, Combine, Create
You can get a lot more mileage from your content by simply…being more creative.
Content marketing is frustrating when you continue to use the same tired strategies and content over and over again.
The good news? There are plenty of ways to reinvent your content marketing strategy, techniques, and the content itself.
Combine Content
Often, you have too many pieces of content competing for attention because they’re too similar.
Better to just combine them. Nathan Gotch with Gotch SEO calls this The Cake Technique:
Find similar content assets
Choose the most authoritative one
Combine the content and 301 redirect the old URLs to the new, monster-sized content asset
Recycle Content
There’s no rule saying you only have to publish content on your own website.
There are other websites who will let you republish your work on their platform.
Medium is an example of this. It has an important tool that lets you publish your content on Medium without suffering a duplicate content penalty.
The import feature automatically adds a “rel canonical” tag to the republished version of your post, which lets the search engines know which piece of content to rank.
Remix Content
A single blog post can be turned into…
A video:
Several visuals for social media:
An infographic:
And more.
You can use one single piece of content in a variety of ways.
Conclusion
Content marketing is a long game.
You need patience, skills, and lots effort to succeed.
But it can be done. Make these fixes to your content and watch the ranking and traffic roll in over time.
What is your biggest challenge when it comes to creating content for your business?
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