Hey everyone! Today’s episode is with Matthew Barby, Global Head of Growth and SEO at HubSpot, which is an inbound marking and sales platform.
Tune in to hear Matthew share the various SEO strategies he has employed in and outside of HubSpot (plus his most successful campaign to date), how you can write for top publications, and the importance of knowing the fundamentals of link architecture and Google algorithms so you can solve your own SEO problems, not just employ the tactics.
Download podcast transcript [PDF] here: HubSpot’s Global Head of Growth & SEO Explains Why Backlinks Are the Most Effective Factor for Ranking
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Hey everyone, today I share the mic with Dan Reich, Co-founder and CEO of Troops, an artificial intelligence assistance for work.
Tune in to hear Dan discuss his vision behind Troops and how the improving AI capabilities will completely change the way we use CRM software, his struggle with getting Troops on the growth curve and the eventual funding and tie-up they landed with Slack, and his management philosophies and hacks that help him be more productive on a day-to-day basis.
Download podcast transcript [PDF] here: Dan Reich On How Troops Is Building Personal AI Assistants for the Workplace TRANSCRIPT
Time-Stamped Show Notes:
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Resources From This Interview:
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Connect With Eric Siu:
Have you ever had one of those days when that blank piece of paper or screen in front of you was dauntingly staring you down but you were just unable to write? That’s a classic case of writer’s block. I had writer’s block myself just this morning. I was sitting here trying to write my book and I just had nothing to add.
This doesn’t just apply to writing—it happens when you create any kind of content. You could even call it “Creator’s Block.” I struggle at times to come up with fresh, creative ideas for the multitude of things we do every week—one daily podcast for Marketing School, one weekly podcast for Growth Everywhere, new content every week for the Single Grain blog, repurposing material, doing guest posts—it’s a lot of content.
So how do we go about producing at that level consistently? And how do we make sure that we don’t give in to writer’s block?
The most important thing that I do when I’m creating content, and especially when I’m having trouble, is to just start writing. I know that may not sound like the most groundbreaking advice but you have to just start writing, even if you’re simply rambling. Starting is ultimately the hardest part, but it becomes much easier once you’re actually in flow.
Every time I actually get into the flow of writing, I feel good and think, “I should be doing this more.” The hardest part is actually getting yourself to start that process. That’s why I find myself putting these things off.
All too often, the things that should be done are the things you put off most. There’s a resistance against doing things you know you should be doing. A common example for many people would be going to the gym.
Learn More: Best Way to Ideate Blog Post Content
There’s actually a term called “The Resistance,” coined by writer Steven Pressfield and explained by Seth Godin. Godin talks about our “lizard brain,” which fuels our fear and resistance of things that are painful. But these are things we should be doing, such as going to the gym or creating content.
The secret to fighting the resistance is to not give yourself the time to prepare. Get those things done first every day, and it makes your life a lot easier. Make the hardest stuff your priority.
Prioritize your health and help yourself. Prioritize content creation because it helps other people. Think about what you’re truly doing and be deliberate about your actions. I sometimes find myself scrolling through my Twitter feed in the morning, saving stuff to my Pocket so I can read it later. But, honestly, 95% of the stuff I save I don’t end up reading. I’m just killing time.
Think to yourself, “What am I spending my time truly doing? Is it what I really need to be doing?” Don’t confuse mindless consumption with productivity or progress.
Learn More: How to Use the 2-Day Rule to Build Habits and Increase Productivity
When you face writer’s block or creator’s block or whatever block, push against it. Just start writing. It might suck initially, but you have to power through it in order to reach the next stage. Ultimately it lies in your hands to be deliberate and intentional.
Good luck!
This post was adapted from Eric’s Facebook Live videos: Growth 90 – DAILY live broadcasts with Eric Siu on marketing and entrepreneurship. Watch the video version of this post:
Motivational speaker John Maxwell is famous for saying “The fortune is in the follow-up.”
But what does that mean?
If you are doing sales, trying to close a deal or whatever, you usually are not going to get it on the first shot, especially if it’s a high-dollar offer. We’re talking maybe a couple thousand dollars or more, maybe even five figures. You’ll need to get on the phone, you have to talk to people, and there has to be a personal touch to your follow-ups.
But let’s be real: if you’re running any kind of profitable, scaling business, you probably have hundreds of leads (if not clients). Following up with each of them in a personalized manner is ideal, but it isn’t realistic. That’s where email marketing automation comes into play.
Learn More: How to Get Higher Email Open Rates (Without Being Spammy)
We have people who stay on our email list for a year to two that don’t become our clients. We’re talking to people from publicly traded companies who aren’t ready to raise their hand yet. Without any further context, this can be disheartening. But I was just on a call yesterday and one of my prospects said, “I keep opening your emails because they’re actually helpful.”
For our email automation sequence, we don’t just do a fire-and-forget sequence that’s canned or obviously a template.
I love giving our subscribers Growth Everywhere interviews because they’re evergreen stories about how entrepreneurs started out, the struggles they went through and how they overcame them, what customer acquisition channels are actually working for them, etc. There’s value in those interviews for anyone.
Nowadays, everybody needs to be a media brand, so you start with the content first and you figure out what’s evergreen. What type of content will provide value to people over time, whether that’s 5 years down the line or 10 years down the line? Those stories never change.
At the bottom of each email, we have a blog RSS to email sequence. Basically, whenever a new blog post comes out, it’ll push to our email address, and I’ll say at the very bottom: “By the way, if you need marketing help, click here.” Then we’ll track that link, and this actually generates a good amount of conversions. About 1.5% of people on the list sign up for free consultations.
For us, it’s totally worth it because we know a free consultation is worth a little over $300.
If you’re a relatively small business (7 figures per year), you probably don’t need to be looking at HubSpot, Marketo, Eloqua, etc.
Learn More: Cold Emailing: Best Outbound Sales Automation Tools
Now, let me ask you a question: Do you think you should be working on the green, the yellow or the red prospects first?
I think most of you would say that you should be working on the ones that are most likely to close: the green prospects. Now, my argument is that you should be working on the ones that are on the fence, because you can actually push these guys over into the green category or straight into a purchase.
Let’s talk in football terms. Green prospects are literally one yard away from the end zone. Even without your encouragement, they’ll likely take that final step and you’ll have a touchdown on your hands.
Yellow, on-the-fence prospects are at the 10-yard line, which means you’re 10 yards away from scoring a touchdown. The 10-yard line is still a maybe, but the effort you spend on them will make a big difference because they’re already so close relatively speaking (compared to red prospects).
How do you stay on top of these people? How you continue to follow up? SalesforceIQ will track events for people. If we had 50 events from one prospect over the last 30 days, that’s probably a green prospect. They’re visiting our website or interacting with our emails in some way or another multiple times per day.
But if another prospect only has 10-20 events in 30 days, that’s probably a yellow prospect who’s on the fence.
We just did a study on 1 million backlinks on Udemy, and guess what? Three of our long-term yellow prospects—big companies—all got off the fence. One of them said, “Okay, we’re ready to move forward on something now, we’d like to add on services.” Another one had been dormant since August of last year, and now they’re ready to move forward.
It’s doing things like this, where you’re continuing to add value over time without really expecting anything in return, that stands out to your subscribers. Rarely have I ever gotten somebody that flat out says, “Don’t reach out to me anymore.” In fact, I think that’s probably only happened to me once in my life, and we’re talking thousands upon thousands of emails sent.
People appreciate persistence, especially if you’re reaching out to founders or other high-level, VIP-type prospects. Every founder and entrepreneur has gone through a stage where they had to power through things, where they were just being very persistent in the beginning and eventually they got through, so they can recognize your persistence and appreciate it.
So don’t be afraid to follow up with people. Don’t think that you’re being annoying, because the fortune is in the follow-up. The people who follow up the most are the people that win.
I keep going back to Growth Everywhere as an example of persistence paying off. In my first year, I had almost no listeners. By my second year, the numbers had gone up, but not nearly as much as I would have liked. Only by year three did Growth Everywhere’s listener count really begin to take off in a big way.
Learn More: How We Built the Growth Everywhere Podcast to 109,000 Listens per Month
So, be patient. Be patient with content, be patient with SEO, be patient with sales, and you’ll eventually get there. It’s not like I’ve done anything super special – I just kept following up and kept staying consistent.
This post was adapted from Eric’s Facebook Live videos: Growth 90 – DAILY live broadcasts with Eric Siu on marketing and entrepreneurship. Watch the video version of this post:
This post originally appeared on Single Grain, a growth marketing agency focused on scaling customer acquisition.
As marketers, we know that there are a million things we could be working on at any given time: e-books, white papers, blog posts, webinars, paid advertising, e-mail marketing.
They’re all important, but part of running a successful business is about putting your focus on the highest-leverage activities. That’s the stuff that brings you the most bang for your buck — the stuff that helps you justify the ROI of your job to your boss.
One of the highest leverage activities you can spend your time on is optimizing your SEO. If you can get even one of your blog posts ranked at the top of Google for a broad keyword, it could drive thousands more visitors to your site every month.
And if you’ve got the rest of your sales funnel in place, then those thousands of visitors could add up to some significant ROI.
In this post, we’ll cover 20 tactics you can use to boost your SEO rankings.
The best, most efficient way to make your content stand out isn’t by reinventing the wheel — it’s by building a better version of what has already been proven to work.
Instead of trying to create an epic 10x piece of content from scratch, look for the blog posts or videos that already perform well within your niche and build on it. Brian Dean from Backlinko calls this the Skyscraper Technique.
For example, let’s say I wanted to write an article for a new marketing blog about Facebook ads.
First, I’d do some research to figure out which blog posts about Facebook ads have a track record of generating a lot of links. There are a few ways to do this.
I could go on Google, type in a broad search term, and see what ranks near the top.
Or I could type a broad search term into a tool like BuzzSumo and immediately get a list of highly shared content related to my topic.
Next, I’d pick one of those successful pieces of content, and build on it.
One simple way to do this is just by making the post longer. For example, one of the top Google search results for “facebook ad strategies” is an article called “5 Ridiculously Powerful Ad Targeting Strategies.” To build on this idea, you might come up with something like “25 Facebook Ad Strategies to Grow Your Business.”
Another way to improve on existing content is by making it more visually appealing.
For example, this post on Pardot.com ranks at the top of Google for the search term “buyer journey,” mainly because of how the post is designed.
According to Brian Dean, by taking a post that is already proven and building on it, you drastically reduce the likelihood that your content falls flat because you’re writing content that has already worked.
An important factor for getting a post to rank high in the search results is having a lot of other influential people link back to it. One easy way to do this is by mentioning your industry’s influencers in your content.
When other people see their name mentioned somewhere on the Internet, they’re much more inclined to share the piece on their own social media, blogs or newsletters. And because industry influencers usually have large audiences, that means more targeted traffic back to your site.
For example, this entrepreneur curated an e-book full of the best Medium posts of 2015, and then sent it out to all the writers he mentioned within the e-book:
A simple e-mail like this sent to the right influencer could be the “tipping point” that makes your content go viral. In fact, according to Blogging Wizard, with the right approach you can get up to an 80% response rate from the top influencers in your industry.
We all have pages on our blog that perform really well in search, and others that fall on page three, four, or even lower. And the frustrating thing is that some of our low-ranked content may contain amazing material. If only those poor blog posts could get a little push — like a share from an influencer or several more backlinks — they might go viral or rank at the top of SERPs.
One way to give the poor-ranking content a push is by finding the posts on your site that rank higher in Google and adding links within them to the pages that rank lower.
For example, HubSpot ranks pretty high for the search term “content marketing strategy.”
Within this post, they link to multiple articles on their blog about topics like list purchasing and developing a social media content calendar — neither of which rank as high.
This is a great way to give some of your lower ranked content the boost they need to get to the top.
Free Bonus Download: Want to download the PDF version of this post? Get your very own copy of it right here! Click here to download it free.
The best content is the kind that speaks to people’s emotions. Marketers who are able to connect with their audience can build a large audience of loyal readers relatively quickly.
Make sure you understand your market’s deepest hopes, fears and dreams around the subject about which you’re writing. Once you have a good grasp on this, you can weave it into your blog posts to show your audience that you really “get” them.
Steli Efti at Close.io, a SaaS product to help salespeople close more deals, does this really well.
Salespeople have a lot of hopes and fears around their job. For example, they might feel afraid of coming off as too “sleazy” or too fake.
They might be afraid of hearing a bunch of “no” responses from leads.
Or maybe they feel like they have no idea what they’re doing.
Because their content tells emotionally captivating stories that really “hit the spot” for their audience, Close.io’s blog has quickly become one of the go-to resources for salespeople.
Another great example is the Copy Hackers blog. Their content has a lot of personality infused into each post, which helps set the content apart from all the other marketing posts on the web.
Notice how friendly and fun this content sounds:
Businesses in virtually every industry can incorporate great storytelling and personality into their content if they understand their customers at a deep level. Even Pfizer was able to boost sales using this approach, according to this article by Cognitive Edge.
There are always a bunch of new SEO tactics popping up all the time, but at the end of the day, the best way to have your content reach more people is simply by writing stuff that they actually want to read! And one great way to do that is by writing posts that are fun and/or informative and appeal to the readers’ emotions.
Writing long-form content consistently takes a lot of effort. So before you start climbing that mountain, it’s important to ensure that you’re writing content for which people are actually searching.
One easy way to do this is by using the Keyword Planner on Google AdWords. It’s easy to see how many people are searching for a particular keyword, and you can even uncover related keywords to base your articles around.
Another great tool for gauging the number of search results for a particular topic is Google Trends, where you can uncover search trends over time for keywords to see if they’re worth pursuing.
Or you could use BuzzSumo to see the number of shares that certain types of content get and which keywords are getting a high rate of shares.
Moz has a great guide on how to do keyword research for SEO, including how to judge the value of a keyword and understanding how to use long tail keywords.
By creating remarkable, long-form content around keywords that have a high search volume, you make it easier for your blog posts to rank high for a topic and generate a lot of traffic to your website.
Broken link building is one of the most effective white hat strategies you can use to grow your SEO rankings.
The first step is to figure out which websites in your industry have broken links to your own site as well as your competitors’ sites. There are quite a few search term variations you can type into Google to uncover sites with dead links. According to this guide by Neil Patel and Brian Dean, here are some of them:
For example, you can type in “marketing + intitle:resources” to find posts that are filled with a bunch of links.
Next, you’ll have to scour the page to find the broken links. An easy way to do this is by downloading a Chrome plugin called Domain Hunter Plus, which scans pages for dead links.
Once you activate the plugin for a particular page, you’ll get a list of dead links on that page. You can then export the list of links, send it to the site owner, and ask to replace the dead links with your own resources.
Relying on standalone blog posts to drive your SEO rankings is a losing battle.
A few individual pieces of content might appear high up on the search results, but there are better ways to get more mileage out of your blog posts. One tried-and-true way is the hub and spoke strategy.
Through this approach, you create one giant piece of content to function as the page that people land on directly from Google (your “hub”), and from that page, you link to a bunch of other relevant pages on your website (the “spokes”).
Your hub should be something that’s highly shareable, like a meaty post that people bookmark because of how informative it is and how many useful resources it contains. This way, your hub will rise in SEO rankings, and as a result your “spokes” will rise as well.
Copyblogger created a page called “Email Marketing: How to Push Send and Grow Your Business,” and within it, they’ve included supporting posts like “Why Vanity Metrics Are Worthless (and What Really Matters),” “37 Tips for Writing Emails that Get Opened, Read, and Clicked,” and more.
By creating a hub, or a “table of contents”-style guide around a topic in your niche that people can consistently refer to, you’re creating a larger piece of content that will rise higher and higher in search rankings.
And as a result, the content you link to within your hub will rise higher and higher as well.
As I mentioned earlier, mentioning industry influencers in your content is a great way to help your content get more shares.
And roundup posts are an efficient way to do this on a larger scale. In a roundup, you curate posts from experts in your niche and share them with your own readers. This tactic is an easy method to build relationships with the right people in your field, generate a bunch of traffic, and improve your SEO rankings.
According to Crazy Egg, these are a few key characteristics that make a high-quality roundup:
Once you’ve sourced a long list of high-quality links around a topic that your audience wants to know more about, you can ask each influencer to share the post with their own audience.
For example, here’s an e-mail that someone sent to me after including some of my content in a post:
I ended up sharing it with my list of 20,000+ readers.
Free Bonus Download: Want to download the PDF version of this post?Get your very own copy of it right here! Click here to download it free.
Long-tail keywords are keywords that are more specific and “narrow” than broader short tail keywords.
For example, “facebook advertising” is very broad search term, but “facebook advertising for SaaS companies” is much more specific.
It’s natural to create content focused on broad, short tail keywords. We think that because there are a lot of people searching for these more general phrases, we should take take advantage of that. But in reality, creating remarkable content that is focused on long-tail keywords can boost your conversions.
People want solutions that are tailored specifically for their situation. If you create a piece of content called “Facebook Advertising Strategies for B2B SaaS Companies,” you’d make B2B companies feel that you understand their specific situation a lot better than someone who wrote an article called “25 Facebook Ad Strategies to Grow Your Business.”
Even though you would be going after a smaller pie, you would dominate a much larger piece of it.
For more on how to identify and leverage long-tail keywords for SEO, see this guide: How to Identify Long Tail Keywords for Your SEO Campaign.
Whatever strategy you’re pursuing — whether it’s Facebook ads, SEO or anything else — the main point is to drive more prospects along the buyer’s journey to becoming customers.
That’s the main goal of content marketing.
SEO works best when it’s part of that larger content marketing strategy.
According to this guide by Salesforce Pardot (and this image from HubSpot), customers go through the following three stages before deciding to buy:
By creating high-quality content to serve customers at each step of the process, you’ll naturally rank higher in search results while also generating more sales.
Awareness Stage
At the awareness stage, customers are usually conscious that they have a problem, but they have no idea what the right solution looks like.
For example, if you’re selling services to help CEOs improve their content marketing, they might be thinking things like: “Ugh, I don’t want to waste hours and hours writing blog posts if I have no idea what the payoff is going to be” or “I need to outsource this but I don’t know how to figure out who’s the right person to handle it.”
At this stage, 72% of people immediately turn to Google to figure out how to solve their problems. They search for content that hits their specific pain points.
If you’re selling marketing services, a good piece of content to write might be something like “How to Speed Up Your Content Marketing Success.” This way, when customers search for their problem, your blog will be the first one they see.
An example of how HubSpot attracts customers who are in the “awareness” stage.
Interest or Consideration Stage
As potential customers start to gather more information about their problem, they look for ways to solve it in the “interest” phase. At this stage, evidence-based content starts to become a lot more valuable to them.
According to Crystal Clear Communications, 30% of buyers consult white papers at this stage of the process, 29% consult case studies, and 30% of buyer influencers look to detailed technology guides.
Again, if you’re selling marketing services, good content at this stage might sound something like “The Ultimate Guide to Getting More Leads Through SEO.”
You can present these guides at the bottom of your blog posts and ask readers to fill out their e-mail address in order to receive them. This way, you help people transition from the “awareness” phase to the “interest” phase, and you capture their e-mail addresses so that you can send them more content down the road.
HubSpot does this well — when customers start off in the awareness phase searching for something like “how to speed up content marketing results,” HubSpot’s blog post is the first thing they see on Google:
And at the bottom of that post, site visitors can sign up to get a free content strategy planning guide.
Evaluation or Decision Stage
Only after customers have done their research and figured out how to go about solving their problem are they ready to start thinking about purchase options in the “evaluation” phase.
At this stage, they’re trying to decide which service to buy. Good content here might be something like “4 Steps to Picking a Good Marketing Agency,” “Why Some Marketing Agencies Don’t Get Good Results” or something else along those lines. And in these posts, you can strategically position yourself against your competition by “teaching” your audience why you’re better.
Understanding what your customers are searching for at each step of the journey is super important — that way, you can create highly ranked content to help them along the way.
There are a few specific metrics that you can track to measure your overall SEO performance.
For example, one key metric for SEO is the average time that users spend on your content page. If your content is engaging, if it appeals to their emotions, if it’s useful, then readers will stay on the page longer in order to read more of your material. For more on the right metrics to track for your SEO, check out this post by Neil Patel: Quantify Your Results: The 14 Most Important Content Marketing Metrics.
If your website does not provide quality content, visitors will “bounce” off the page and “boomerang” to a competitor’s site.
Keep in mind that there’s no specific number here that can be considered “good” or “bad.” If you’re writing short-form content, for example, then you’re naturally going to have a low average time on your site. Or if you offer a great answer to a reader’s question, you might have a high bounce rate but also a high time on your site.
The number of return visitors is also a good metric to gauge how good your content is. How many readers come back to your site on a regular basis? If you’re sending e-mails to your subscription list regularly, how many people consistently open and click?
This is one of the most useful metrics that you can measure since return visitors are usually the most likely to convert to buyers.
There are a lot of benefits you can get from associating yourself with experts in your industry.
Read More: 5 Steps to Becoming an Expert Content Creator (According to Google’s Phantom Update)
One of the best ways to leverage that association is by interviewing these experts and repurposing the content into a blog post. That way, you can rank high for the expert’s name and siphon off a large audience that searches for them.
For example, Groove did an interview with Neil Patel and repurposed it into a blog post. Now when anyone searches “Neil Patel interview,” Groove shows up at the top of the results.
Venture Hacks did an interview with Sean Ellis, which also ranks at the top of Google for “sean ellis interview.”
By interviewing influencers in your industry and turning it into a blog post, you can attract a chunk of that influencer’s audience to your own site through Google search.
Part of maximizing the effectiveness of your content marketing is repurposing your material as much as you can.
As Neil Patel and Aaron Agius write in QuickSprout’s Complete Guide to Building Your Blog Audience, there are at least seven different ways to repurpose a single blog post. Turn it into a:
This could skyrocket the reach of each post that you write.
Let’s say you published a blog post called “How to Leverage Influencers in Your Content Marketing.” There are tons of different formats into which you can repurpose this content to attract a wider audience.
For starters, you could take that content and make it native for different blogging platforms like Quora, Medium or LinkedIn — which allow anyone to reach a targeted audience of tens of thousands of people if the content is good.
Then, using a tool like Visme, you can take that blog post and turn it into infographic.
Noah Kagan found from analyzing 100 million articles that infographics get shared the most out of all types of content. This means that an infographic could potentially get more than double the reach of a single blog post, which makes it more likely to rank higher in search.
Then you could take the blog post and infographic and combine them into a compelling SlideShare presentation.
If you have a podcast, you could summarize the key points of the blog post in a quick 10-minute audio segment.
With a simple, structured system, you could skyrocket the reach of each piece of content you put out by making it “native” to several other platforms simultaneously, thereby increasing the likelihood that the content will rank high in SERPs.
A simple way to get more reach on your content is just to increase its length.
Longer-form posts are more comprehensive, get shared more frequently, and lead to lower bounce rates — which is why they tend to be ranked higher on Google.
According to serpIQ, average length of posts at the top positions on Google are 2450+ words.
Not only does this help with SEO, but more time spent on your page means you’d be cultivating more trust between you and your audience.
Content that’s visually appealing allows readers to digest a larger amount of information in a shorter period of time. It’s much easier to look at a graph or an infographic that’s well designed than a huge 5,000-word blog post — and as a result, it’s more likely to get shared.
You don’t need to be a design whiz to create content that’s visually appealing either. You could use a tool like Snapguide to create beautiful how-to guides, for example.
Written content is still very important, but the way the content is presented is also important. The more visual, the better.
Free Bonus Download: Want to download the PDF version of this post?Get your very own copy of it right here! Click here to download it free.
According to Commonplaces Interactive, both Google and Bing have reported higher search traffic coming from mobile devices than computers.
That’s why these search engines boost content in search rankings that are mobile friendly.
If you’re not sure whether your site is mobile friendly or not, you can just insert the URL into Google’s Mobile Friendly site analyzer.
The easiest way to make sure that your site doesn’t get penalized in search results for this is by making it responsive. That way, it will “respond” to the device on which it’s being viewed, and won’t encounter any problems on any mobile devices.
By writing original blog posts on major media outlets, you can get a lot more exposure to your own site.
For example, Neil Patel wrote a guest post on Entrepreneur.com.
Within the post, he included multiple links back to his own blog, Quicksprout.
One thing you might want to be wary of is reposting content from your blog to a major media outlet. Although the exposure would be good, Google penalizes duplicate content in search results.
But writing original content for major sites could help build your credibility as well as get more backlinks to your blog. For more on this, check out How to Pitch a Guest Post to Editors at 104 Major Publications by Jon Morrow.
Another quick way to get more backlinks for your blog is by using a service called Help a Reporter Out (HARO). This site is aimed at the tons of journalists out there who are writing stories on various topics and need quotes from experts.
When you sign up for HARO, you’ll get notified every time a journalist who is writing about a topic in your field needs a quote. Then you can send in a quick pitch offering a quote along with your business name and website URL.
This is a great way to get your name and blog on a news media site without having to write a unique guest post.
If you deeply understand your audience’s emotional experience at each stage of the buyer’s journey, you can consistently create high-quality content that not only sits at the top of Google’s SERP, but also drives sales.
The best part is that it’s actually really easy to understand your audience’s emotional pain points.
All you have to do is set up an autoresponder message for everyone who signs up for your e-mail list. As soon as someone subscribes, you can send them something like this:
Hey [name],
I get hundreds of “marketing” e-mails everyday from random companies that are just a pain to sort through.
I want to be different. I want to send you e-mails that you actually look forward to reading.
So to make sure that I send you the best possible content, I wanted to ask you a quick question… What’s the #1 barrier that’s keeping you from [whatever success you’re trying to help them achieve]?
Just “hit reply” to this e-mail and let me know. I read every response.
Thank you,
[your name]
You’d be surprised at how many people pour out their life story in response to that, which helps you to know exactly what’s going through their mind.
It’s even better if you ask for feedback at each stage of the customer journey. Derek Halpern of Social Triggers asks non-buyers for feedback right after they make the decision not to buy from him:
This way, you’ll know exactly how to create the right type of content that resonates at a deep level with your readers, gets shared, and ends up ranking high in the search pages.
This isn’t easy to do, but if you can do it, you’ll skyrocket the reach of your blog. People who invent terminology that catches on in their industry can really boost their SEO rankings.
For example, Brian Dean of Backlinko invented what he calls the Skyscraper Technique, which is a unique approach to creating content.
Now when anyone searches “skyscraper technique” on Google, his name is all over the web on multiple different sites.
To invent your own term, you don’t need to create some crazy new breakthrough idea in your industry. All you need to do is take existing points of view that are already out there, “repackage” them, and make them your own.
For example, Tim Ferriss wasn’t the first ever lifestyle design blogger, but he was the first to package up his ideas into the “Four Hour Work Week.”
Gary Vaynerchuk isn’t the first to talk about understanding the context of social media platforms, but he was the first to position as “Jab Jab Jab Right Hook.”
So there you have it — 20 ways to boost your SEO rankings!
As marketers, there are a lot of tactics out there that we could potentially focus on. But those who get world-class results get them by focusing on high-leverage activities that deliver real long term results.
Now I want to hear from you. What other SEO tips would you recommend? Leave a comment below!
This post originally appeared on Single Grain, a growth marketing agency focused on scaling customer acquisition.
It’s 2017. Do you know where your content is?
Today, nearly 88% of B2B marketers are creating custom content marketing and 76% of marketers plan to produce more content in the future. But many digital marketers are lost when it comes to making a distinction between content that works, and content that doesn’t make an impact.
The traditional sales funnel has been changing to a content marketing funnel, which many brands are still doing their best to figure out. Marketers are now able to support sales in an unprecedented way by targeting each part of the funnel with unique, stage-specific content types that help qualify, nurture, and convert leads into paying customers. Strategic use of content optimization opens up a world of opportunities.
In our experience, lots of companies don’t know how content marketing comes together, and they ask questions like:
What these companies fail to understand is that content creation, when done correctly, isn’t a race against the competition. It’s more like a spectator sport, one in which you watch your leads get closer and closer. In this framework, every piece of content you create is an opportunity to bring a new lead closer to a sale or to inspire an existing customer to take action.
Is content volume important? Absolutely. But content synergy is far more important. In other words, there’s no point in creating 100 blog posts if you’re just going to send all your readers to your homepage.
If you struggle to come up with relevant and interesting material, want new ways to repurpose your curated content, or want to learn how different types of content target different parts of the funnel, this blog post is key to creating an effective content marketing strategy.
Picture the wide top of a funnel. This is where a large number of people might become aware of your products or services. All these people are your leads, or potential customers. As they move through your funnel towards the much narrower neck, many will drop off. A much smaller number of leads will actually make it through the entire funnel.
The purpose of the funnel is to convert as many leads as possible into actual customers who are willing to pay for your products or services.
The traditional sales funnel has three broad stages:
The generic content marketing funnel is similar, but has a fourth broad stage:
The great thing about content marketing is that it can help your business reach users at any stage of this funnel, whether they’re at the top or floating somewhere in the middle. And as leads continue to interact with your business, and your business produces more quality content, you’ll widen the neck of the funnel.
Now for the burning question every marketer wants answered: What kind of content belongs at which stage?
Here’s the expanded four-stage content marketing funnel with different examples of content that is ideal for each of the four stages:
We want to be very clear that this is just our map for content types—there is no real consensus on what types of content work best in each stage because it depends a lot on your sales cycle, your industry, and your audience. There is also a lot of overlap between content types and stages.
That being said, this is the best we’ve figured out for now, and it holds true for the vast majority of companies with successful content marketing campaigns.
Let’s learn more about each type of content, and why it works in its respective stage of the funnel using the startup company Canary, “a complete security system in a single device”, as a case study.
This is the landing page that users see when they go to the Canary website. One of the first things that you’ll notice is how simple it is, with more negative space than text.
Because it’s holiday season right now, a “12 Days of Canary” pop-up appears asking for visitors’ e-mail address to get updates about holiday deals.
This is effective for existing customers who may be coming back for more, or new leads who will make a decision based on the idea of a good deal. It’s straight to the point and quickly guides prospects to where they would be most interested in going.
And if the prospect scrolls down a little further…
Again, there is not much text, but there is a call-to-action to learn more about a collaboration between State Farm and Canary to support first responders, such as arson investigators and training dogs. People who have State Farm Insurance will see an opportunity to save money on insurance, and others will see a company that cares about the men and women who protect us all.
Learn more: 10 Tips for Landing Page Optimization
For completely unqualified prospects who know absolutely nothing about your brand or product, the best types of content are simple landing pages, short introductory or product videos, and infographics. In other words: there should be as little written content as possible.
Keep in mind that no one cares about your company yet. Unqualified leads either don’t know who you are or have never seen any of your stuff. So you need to catch their attention with more riveting types of content.
Video often produces higher search engine optimization and stronger engagement and boosts the chance of a sale by 64–85%. In fact, by 2017, 74% of all web traffic will come from video. Video is also mobile-friendly, which means it puts you in front of the 31 million people who plug into the web via mobile device every day (and that’s just in the U.S.!). Since Canary offers a complete security system that you can access when away from home via an app, it’s essential that they make sure their content is mobile friendly.
A large portion of Canary’s business is selling security cameras, so it’s important that they showcase the high-quality footage that their products can deliver. Their Instagram, with over 5,000 followers, consists mainly of animal videos captured by their security cameras. Prospects can laugh at cute dogs and cats, and see how effective Canary’s product is at the same time.
Once you’ve captured the attention of your leads, the best way to capitalize on this is by steering these potential customers toward qualifying facts or figures and by getting them to start asking themselves whether they should make a purchase. This can be achieved through the smart use of infographics.
All businesses can benefit from incorporating infographics into their marketing strategy. Just look at these stats:
Also called “data visualization,” infographics meet at the intersection of information, illustration, and design to present data that might otherwise be bland and boring in an engaging way.
And, as with videos, infographics are perfect for mobile devices. When there are 44 million more active mobile subscriptions in the world than there are people, ensuring that your content is mobile friendly is something that you can’t afford to neglect.
Your leads have now seen your landing page, found your social media accounts, laughed at your viral videos, and probably looked over a few of your compelling and impeccably designed infographics. And they’re ready for more.
One of the first things a prospect will want to know after deciding that a product or service might be useful is whether they can trust the brand behind it. The best way to build that trust is by establishing domain expertise as a helpful thought leader. And helpful leaders usually offer free advice.
That’s why Canary offers plenty of helpful information across all their marketing channels, starting with a multifaceted blog:
Learn more: How to Write Blog Posts that Actually Convert Readers into Customers
But how will Canary’s prospects find their blog posts? Will they have to visit their website to see what’s new? Nope, that’s where social media kicks in.
92% of marketers stated that a social media strategy was vital for their business because it creates a sense of community engagement. By creating regularly updated content channels on the social platforms where your target audience regularly hangs out, you provide your prospects with easy access to your advice. You also give them a chance to see what other prospects and customers are saying.
A prospect can instantly scan through dozens of eye-catching pics, announcements, and satisfied customer comments. Social media is the quickest, surest way of getting prospects and customers to engage and eventually become brand evangelists (which is why it shows up in the “Delight” stage as well).
The ideal social media strategy includes regularly updating all your business’s social media accounts to maintain a strong and consistent presence on all platforms and catering to your followers as needed. Canary’s Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are all regularly updated with content that is both informative and lighthearted, but still relevant to their brand. They also have their own hashtag, #caughtbycanary, for customers to locate and share snippets of footage caught by their Canary cameras.
You should also have a clear FAQ page on your website to answer the most relevant and common questions they are likely to have before committing to your product or service. Canary includes a section called FAQs: Before You Buy:
Once you’ve demonstrated your helpfulness and expertise without strings, a prospect is going to be far more comfortable with and serious about your brand. But there are still a few more steps they must take before they commit to making a purchase.
You have to convince them that buying from you is the smart thing to do. This usually means providing more qualifying information to assuage their fears. But this information can’t be an infographic. These prospects aren’t leads anymore, and they’re going to start scrutinizing everything a little more closely. In other words, now’s the time to offer long-form, in-depth content like whitepapers, e-books, and even informative webinars.
Learn more: The Ultimate Recipe for Effective Customer Lead Generation
Savvy brands like Canary understand that all marketing is in service of the “Close” and “Delight” stages. And, whenever possible, closing should be a repeat stage. Once a customer pays for their first product, the goal is to make them pay for another product or service, and become a recurring customer.
And the absolute easiest way to close a prospect is through ratings, reviews, testimonials, and case studies. In fact, 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
For a company that sells security technology and home protection, stories about the prevention of break-ins and other crimes can be powerful testimonials. And this is some of the content that Canary features on their blog:
Everyone dreads the idea of someone breaking into their home to steal their possessions while they’re away or threaten their family’s safety if they’re at home. The headline alone targets that feeling and captures the reader’s attention.
But even if a prospect never makes it to their blog, Canary has another big promotion stamped on their landing page:
Names like Forbes and Time Magazine appear, but Oprah takes the spotlight. The “Oprah Effect” can launch even a small, struggling company into stardom after an appearance on her show. Even if your product hasn’t been promoted by Oprah, word-of-mouth recommendations from satisfied customers on social media, Amazon, or Yelp are more than enough.
For prospects that need a bit more convincing to close, you can also use strategic questionnaires and self-assessments. These help “nudge” prospects over the edge into customer territory by showing them just how much they need your help. They also help save you time by qualifying prospects even further, so you can get on the phone with the ones you’re most likely to close.
And if there are prospects you just can’t crack the first time around, you can always get them the next time there’s an opportunity. That’s why it’s so important to set up and maintain an e-mail newsletter. 91% of consumers check their e-mail daily, and 72% of consumers prefer to receive commercial communication via e-mail.
E-mail is also the primary method for keeping in touch with existing customers. It’s how you continue to offer one-time customers helpful, resourceful content to keep the relationship fresh and relevant (until you have a promotion or upsell).
In fact, the “Delight” stage is a lot like what it takes to keep any relationship going. It’s not enough to attract, date, and enter into an official relationship with someone special. If you want to keep their affection, you need to remind them that you care with gifts and shows of affection.
For businesses producing content, this means that you should regularly check in via e-mail with announcements, discounts, and surveys. You should also share (through both social media and e-mail) any new blog posts or whitepapers and e-books that are relevant to your existing customers.
Canary sends its subscribers regular e-mails that contain news and other relevant updates on the company and its products.
By sharing top-of-the-funnel attract and convert content to customers, the content marketing funnel comes full circle. Customers who become e-mail subscribers are essentially passed through a second funnel: the e-mail marketing funnel (supplemented by social media), which eventually turns them into loyal customers and promoters.
Learn more: 5 Case Studies of Successful Marketing Funnels
It goes without saying that Canary’s content marketing strategy isn’t going to work for all companies.
But the beauty of the content marketing funnel is that it can be adapted to any business, no matter what you’re selling. A tech startup and a mid-market retailer may target different parts of the funnel with different types of content, but the general strategy will remain the same.
Use this example of a content marketing funnel as a template and an inspiration for your own content marketing strategy.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on how your brand uses different types of content for the different parts of the funnel. Let us know in the comments below!
Hey everyone, in today’s episode I share the mic with Matt Munson, founder and CEO of Twenty20, a company that provides a photography marketplace for some of the best-looking authentic stock photos and royalty-free images anywhere.
Listen as Matt shares how Twenty20 burned through $10M by trying to scale too quickly and the lessons he learned (including talking about his “failures”), how they built a massive photo catalog of 50M+ images from 300K photographers that Google, Apple & Pinterest use (without advertising for a single photographer!), and how Twenty20 got 1,000 subscribers, 170K in MRR and 10x growth in 1 year.
Download podcast transcript [PDF] here: How Twenty20 Burned $10M and Still Emerged as a Successful Company TRANSCRIPT
Time-Stamped Show Notes:
3 Key Points:
Resources From This Interview:
Leave Some Feedback:
Connect With Eric Siu:
This post originally appeared on Single Grain, a growth marketing agency focused on scaling customer acquisition.
In today’s rapidly shifting world, SEO techniques can change on a dime—and the worst part is that you might not even know it. Hacks that could have won you a front-page result as recently as 2016 are not only obsolete now, but they may even hurt your website’s rankings.
That’s why you need to stay on top of the ball. We spoke with Jacob Warwick, Director of Communications at Skedulo, and Jesse Teske, SEO Manager at YLighting, to get their expert thoughts on the most current SEO tactics in 2017.
Read on for some 9 info-packed tips and techniques to help you get the most out of your SEO game in 2017—and improve your traffic and conversions.
Simply put, engagement is the ability to hold a user’s attention. In SEO terms, it is a measure of the amount of time spent on a page.
Although Google hasn’t officially declared it, there is evidence to suggest that this search engine giant does reward sites with strong user engagement with higher page ranking.
Research from SimilarWeb found a positive correlation between engagement metrics and search rankings and a study of 1 million search results by Backlinko found a similar correlation between bounce rate and rankings.
Google’s reasoning is that if a user spends more time on a page, it’s probably because she found the page useful. And since Google only wants to deliver the best possible results to its users, it will push sites with strong engagement up in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
So how can you improve your site’s engagement? Here are five tactics you can use with your existing content:
Good formatting can instantly improve your page’s readability. This, in turn, can improve your engagement rate. According to an eye-tracking study by Nielsen, the following three formatting tactics can help increase your content readability:
Here’s an example of poor formatting:
Nebraska is filled with internationally recognized attractions that draw large crowds of people every year, without fail. In 1996, some of the most popular places were Fort Robinson State Park (355,000 visitors), Scotts Bluff National Monument (132,166), Arbor Lodge State Historical Park & Museum (100,000), Carhenge (86,598), Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer (60,002), and Buffalo Bill Ranch State Historical Park (28,446).
Here’s an example of the same paragraph, but with good formatting (which improved usability by 124%):
In 1996, six of the most-visited places in Nebraska were:
A “bucket brigade” is a copywriting technique designed to keep capture a reader’s interest and keep them on your page. It essentially involves breaking an idea into multiple sentences, using a trigger word or phrase (as simple as Look: or as lengthy as The secret to great copywriting is this:) and then ending the sentence with a colon.
Look at this example from Backlinko:
Including professional, high-quality images (photos, graphs) throughout your content is an easy yet powerful way to increase engagement. For one, images help you show an idea, not just tell it (a picture tells a thousand words, right?). Secondly, images help you break content into different sections. And finally, people just like pretty pictures.
For example, take a look at how Growth Everywhere uses images to clearly illustrate the step-by-step content in How To Do A Content Cleanup (And Grow Your Organic Traffic):
On Single Grain, charts and screenshots are frequently used to divide up content into separate sections, like this example from The Ultimate Guide to Mobile Advertising:
If you went to journalism school, you know all about the inverted pyramid style of writing:
This method means giving away the most valuable information at the top of the article, and following it up with less important information. If readers tend to scan and rarely make it to the bottom of an article, it makes sense to give them what they want as soon as they land on the page.
Writing well, delivering value, and proper formatting only go so far. Another key part of engagement is lowering your bounce rate, which is the percentage of visitors who land on your website and leave without interacting further. Bounce rates can be raised by a number of factors, from incorrect implementation to poorly designed landing pages.
More often than not, however, high bounce rates result from poor usability and an awkward user experience (UX). While these problems vary from site to site, they are very easily remedied with several popular online tools, such as:
For instance, heat maps are colorful representations of where users have clicked on your site, while scrollmaps show you just how far down the page your users scroll before leaving. With this data, it’s possible to figure out what your best design features (or flaws) are, and correct them accordingly. Here’s an example of a heatmap that shows you where visitors clicked:
In A/B testing, multiple versions of a web page are randomly shown to users, compared against a control page (generally the existing website), and then analyzed for effect. The biggest advantage of a proper A/B testing process is that marketers can understand how even the tiniest changes can positively affect their website, such as moving the buy button to the left or changing its color from red to blue.
Take a look at the sample A/B test below from 5 Important Landing Page Elements You Should be A/B Testing:
In this test, hygiene company L’Axelle is trying out different headlines, pitting a comfort-oriented headline against an action-oriented one. The change is subtle, but it’s there.
It’s clear that A/B testing is an integral part of both the copywriting and the UX design process. The genius of Optimizely is that it massively simplifies something that would otherwise require a team of dedicated, experienced UX designers and researchers to carry out.
But perhaps the biggest draw of Optimize is that it seamlessly integrates with Google Analytics, allowing marketers to further leverage their existing resources. With Optimize, marketers can use existing Analytics metrics as a starting point, which allows them to rely on a familiar interface as they move on to deeper and more complicated experiments.
Here’s a shot of the Google Optimize user screen. Notice that it gives recommendations and suggestions for the optimal interface.
Pro Plan subscribers, however, have the option of receiving the help of UX professionals who will conduct research, analyze user behavior, and measure and benchmark. In this form, User Testing.com offers customers the benefits of an in-house UX team at a fraction of the cost.
With its conversational tone and engaging manner, Krug’s work gets readers into the habit of critically examining and rethinking everything about their websites, including even the tiniest details, like misplaced buttons or unwieldy site maps.
There’s also strong evidence that click-through rates will influence your website’s Google search ranking, though this is difficult to confirm given the company’s secrecy surrounding their algorithms. Either way, improving CTR is absolutely a good investment for the long-term health of your business.
Luckily, there are programs like Google Search Console and Tableau, which allow marketers to identify critical keywords which are performing (or underperforming) for their position, understand why and, most importantly, quickly visualize the terms and pages to target. With these programs, marketers can turn around underperforming terms by rewriting titles and descriptions, thereby increasing CTR and drumming up traffic.
Learn More: 10 Google Search Console Hacks to Boost SEO
A recent study by Backlinko concluded that the longer the content, the higher the likelihood of it ranking at the top of the SERPs.
However, writing 2,000+ words for every blog post is not for everyone; it’s an intensive, time-consuming process. Instead, it’s much easier to take a page from 1,200 words to 2,000 words than to go from 0 words to 2,000 words.
Existing content already has authority and an established readership. So rather than writing something entirely from scratch, it’s much simpler to find a post of yours that is already doing well on Google, refresh it with updated information and extra content, and rely on existing signals to make it rank for terms.
Here’s how you do it. First, under “Search Traffic” in Google Search Console, click on “Search Analytics.”
On this page, check “Position” and select “Pages”:
Try to find pages that are ranking between positions 11-30 on Google. These are ideal candidates for additional content that can increase their rankings.
55% of all keyword searches on Google return at least one video and 82% of those videos are from YouTube. YouTube is also the second most popular search engine with more than 3 billion searches per month, surpassing Bing and Yahoo combined.
Focusing on YouTube SEO will push your website onto the first page on Google and get you traffic from YouTube as well.
The result? Twice the traffic with the same content.
Learn More: The Complete Guide to Youtube SEO
Here is how you can improve your YouTube SEO (after creating your videos, of course):
The filename, the title, the description—all these elements affect your rankings.
Here’s a great example:
Another tactic is to use your keywords at the start of the title, then add a sub-header after a colon to drive clicks. Here’s an example:
At the very least, your title should have 5+ words and include a broad target keyword. This will not only help you rank in SERPs but also get you more clicks on YouTube.
Learn More: 20 Ways to Grow Your SEO Rankings
It can be as short as this example from Growth Everywhere:
Or as long as this example from James Stafford:
This tells Google—as well as your readers—exactly what your video is about. Since most of your competitors aren’t doing it, it will also help you rank way faster.
Like content, longer videos tend to do better in YouTube search.
Try it yourself: type in a popular keyword or topic and see what shows up at the top of the page. For example, here’s what you’ll see when you type in “wordpress”:
Or when you search for “photography tips”:
Try to make your videos at least 5 minutes long. As with written content, longer videos tend to get the most traction.
Learn More: A Youtube Video Marketing Guide to Increase Prospects in Your Funnel
A better video thumbnail won’t necessarily help with your SEO, but like a great headline, it will help you get more clicks. This means that you can often earn more views than higher ranked results, all thanks to your choice of thumbnail.
A strong thumbnail should tell viewers exactly what the video is about. Try to use a compelling image along with a title card. Here’s an example:
Back in 2010, Google announced that it would be using site speed as a ranking factor and since then, Google has consistently emphasized the importance of site speed.
First, it launched the PageSpeed tool to help developers improve site performance, followed by the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project to boost speed on mobile sites.
Recently, it launched another tool called Think with Google to help gauge how responsive (or mobile-friendly) a site is, which includes speed as a parameter.
Clearly, Google wants your website to load faster than it is right now. But how fast?
Unfortunately, the exact definition of “site speed” is open to speculation. According to the surveys done by Akamai and Gomez, nearly half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less. If the site fails to launch in 3 seconds, there is a good chance they’ll abandon it.
You should work on your site’s speed not only to work your way up Google’s rankings, but also to increase conversions. For instance, one survey found that nearly 79% of web shoppers who have trouble with website performance won’t return to the site to buy again.
While improving site speed is a pretty big topic, check out this HubSpot article to improve page load times.
Learn More: Using Google AMP to Boost Site Speed and Mobile Optimization
Images are usually the largest components on any site (in terms of file size). By compressing them, you can often cut down page size by 30-40%.
A quick way to do this is to use Kraken.io. This tool automatically compresses all images uploaded to your WordPress blog. It also has an API to make image compression for non-WordPress sites easier.
Caching is the mechanism for temporarily storing web data such as HTML pages and images in order to reduce bandwidth usage.
If you’re on WordPress, enabling browser caching is as simple as installing a caching plugin like W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache.
For non-WordPress sites, browser caching is a little trickier. One quick way to do it is to change your .htaccess file. Follow the instructions here to learn how to do this.
A CDN is a network of servers based throughout the globe. When visitors access your website, they are delivered the site from a server that is as close to their physical location as possible, thereby improving site speed.
Using a CDN is a easy fix to instantly improve site speed and will have an immediate impact on site performance.
Google is evolving and so is its algorithm. Its objective now is to understand the intention of the users: what users expect, what they are looking for, and more specifically, what search results would best help answer their query.
Plus, for an increasingly large number of queries (19.45% to be exact), Google shows “rich results” that include the best answer at the top of the results:
In 2017, don’t expect your website to end up on the first page of Google simply by creating keyword-focused content. Tom Anthony from Moz concludes, “We need to stop looking at keywords and starting looking at queries.”
In short, you must consider what your users are looking for rather than coming up with different ways that users can phrase a search query. Here are two things in particular you should consider:
What kind of content you’ll create will depend on your audience. The better you know them—their location, age, and likes—the better the content you’ll create (and the better your SEO).
For example, suppose your keyword tool shows that “android” has a lot of search volume. People searching for it could fall into several categories:
Without knowing your target audience, you might end up creating content for all these topics, which would win you neither readers nor good rankings. By building a detailed buyer persona, you’ll be better able to zero in on topics that matter to your readers.
Instead of focusing on standalone keywords, organize all your content into different “themes.”
For example, if you run a website about WordPress, you might have three types of readers:
To target each of these types of readers, you can organize your content into different themes that cover multiple topics, such as:
This is far more reader-friendly than simply creating content for specific keywords.
At the same time—keywords still matter. Organizing content thematically is very important, but it’s a mistake to ignore keywords entirely, given that they serve as signposts to Google’s spiders, signaling topics and giving hints as to the nature of the content on the website.
Still, the keyword aspect of SEO is becoming increasingly difficult with Google Adwords hiding volume data.
Luckily, there are a number of tricks and tools that can help marketers find topics and volume data. Google itself is a good way to get related search ideas. Just type “sushi restaurants in San Francisco” into the search bar of Google Chrome and you’ll be presented with carousels of related images at the bottom of the page, such as the names of specific restaurants or dishes to order.
This is a strong hint for developers to include these topics in their content, or to create pages to leverage these related images.
Read on for some extremely useful tools that can help you find and optimize keywords:
Interestingly, SEMRush also allows users to use a competitive positioning map, where they can see overall website traffic and keywords: Title Boxing boasts 120.9k in search traffic and 15.3k in keywords, far outpacing their closest competitors.
When considering which keyword tools to use, look for something that allows you to monitor a high volume of keywords broken down by relevant themes. Additionally, the best tools must ensure that you can track all your competitors, from large corporations to small, up-and-coming firms.
As always, go for quality and not quantity. It’s better to get 10 conversions from 100 visitors than it is to get 10 conversions from 1,000 visitors. Rather than casting a too-wide net, focus on keywords and topics that are within your niche, ones that you can optimize for and be the authority on. Fill in these gaps and establish yourself as an expert in this smaller field before tackling larger and broader keywords where the competition is much fiercer.
Despite what you might have heard, building backlinks is still crucial for good rankings.
As per Moz, a site’s backlink profile is still the most reliable indicator of its eventual rankings. Another Moz study shows that without backlinks, it is nearly impossible to rank well, even if you have great content.
What has changed is the way you must build backlinks if you want good results. Low-quality links that are easily spammed—blog comments, paid links, etc.—don’t seem to work anymore and can actively harm your site.
Links that are earned—through high-quality content, outreach and influencer marketing—on the other hand, are safe and extremely effective.
Read More: 5 Ways Cold Emailing Can Help Generate Backlinks
A critical part of SEO is reporting and analytics, which are indispensable to improving marketing strategies. By setting up an analytics platform to track both micro and macro events, you can understand your customer’s journey from your sales and marketing funnel.
For instance, what content really appealed to your customer? What part of the website had the most UX issues? Which page was the least (or most) visited, and why?
Having the ability to tie online data back to offline data to get a full 360 view of how your content and marketing is performing.
One great tool to help you do this is Google Datastudio, which helps you aggregate data from multiple sources (rankings, traffic, conversion data) into a single interface. You can even share your data internally or with clients. Most importantly, these metrics can help you determine the effectiveness of your SEO strategy, and whether you need to pivot or change tactics.
Along those lines, always be on the lookout to see what your competitors are doing, and how well it’s working. What techniques are they using? How have they changed their approach? What mistakes have they learned from?
One great tool to see how your competition has changed is Wayback Machine, which allows marketers to access petabytes of archived web pages. By sifting through Wayback Machine’s extensive database, you can track the evolution of your competitor’s brand and web presence, taking note of factors such as changes in UX design or differences in copy from one web version to the next.
Still, you shouldn’t implement something just because your competitor is doing it, whether that’s designing a website a certain way or using specific copy or images. This is especially true for larger websites like Amazon, which have much more leeway with search engines. Thanks to their numerous, highly skilled staff, they can test small changes and measure results with a high degree of accuracy.
If used correctly, Wayback Machine has some interesting lessons to offer any company. Take a look at these two screencaps of Title Boxing. The top picture is a screencap of Title’s homepage from Wayback Machine, circa 2007, while the bottom one is a screencap from 2016.
The differences are pretty clear. In 2007, the web layout was much more cluttered and crowded, with small, hard-to-navigate sidebars squeezing some small, insignificant-looking pictures in the middle advertising daily specials.
In 2016, however, the user experience is much more streamlined. Visitors are greeted with a clear, easy-to-use sidebar at the top, labeled with categories like “Gloves,” “Punching Bags,” and many more. A large, sliding image in the center replaces the tiny, hard-to-notice ads from 2007, allowing buyers to see exactly what is on sale. The new website is almost minimalist, doing away with the previous confused, slightly chaotic format.
Clearly, Title has come a long way when it comes to UX, testing their changes and eventually settling on this new, simpler design. Still, it’s very likely that plenty of testing, design and redesign was put into this process, which is clear when you track their changes through Wayback Machine.
Be strategic about your changes, test them thoroughly, and examine how your competitors’ websites have evolved with Wayback Machine.
SEO and content tips aside, it’s absolutely essential to have a solid website, without worrying about any technical issues that may arise. With that being said, here are some tips and techniques to help you ensure that your website is up to par.
First off, do yourself a favor and switch to HTTPS, the most commonly used, securest version of the old http web protocol. HTTPS is the secure version of HTTP.
It’s a best practice that will help your website boost its SEO presence, stay secure, and make it harder for malicious parties to break in and take advantage of your website.
Granted, transitioning to HTTPS is easier said than done, and requires a multi-step process. When the Atlantic, a highly-regarded, well-established media organization, decided to move to HTTPS in early 2016, the transition was complex. First, content had to be scanned individually, then ported over and checked for compatibility. The process was repeated with ads, and once compatibility and security were ensured, the website slowly went live in order to guard against traffic loss and unforeseen errors.
If you’re a smaller organization, your process will likely be less painstaking or time consuming. All the same, moving to HTTPS is a necessity in a world of cybersecurity threats and heightened SEO and SEM requirements.
AMP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages, began as a Google-backed open initiative to allow publishers to easily create responsive, mobile-optimized content.
Envisioned as a way to quickly render content on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, AMP combines three components:
Since AMP was only incorporated into the search giant’s results in February 2016, the format itself is still fairly new. For those of you who use WordPress, AMP should be much easier to implement than a home-grown CMS from scratch.
Learn More: Using Google AMP Pages to Boost Site Speed and Mobile Optimization
To ensure that Google is crawling your preferred pages and not pages that don’t appear in its index, turn to crawl programs like Deep Crawl or Botify. These SEO crawler programs are similar to Google’s own crawlers and will give you an overview of how your page will perform in SEO rankings.
To help Google understand your data or to show your website smartcards and voice searches, you need to ensure that your semantic markups are correct. Semantic markups are essentially HTML tags which can help emphasize key information on your website.
For instance, a heading tag (H1) can help a crawler understand precisely what your content is about. If you tag “Five Holiday Destinations in Eastern Europe” with a H1, then a crawler will know to sort your blog post under relevant categories, such as holidays or Eastern European travel. In short, edit your semantic markups so that they reflect your data and information as accurately as possible.
Nothing will sink your website faster in search rankings than a 404 error, when a search engine can’t find the desired web page and leads to a dead end. It’s in your interest to fix these broken or missing pages and re-engage your users as soon as you can.
Whatever platform you use, be it Google Analytics or Oracle, take a look at the number of pageviews for your 404 page. Then add URL as a secondary dimension and fix the biggest offenders first. This way, you can boost UX and regain any inbound links from those pages.
Learn More: Data-Backed Best Practices for Building a Killer 404 Page
To make your job easier, there are a number of web browser and WordPress plugins that you can use. We’ve listed a few of them below, along with a brief description of their capabilities and common uses.
Image Source: Ultimate Nofollow
In the digital era, it’s easy to forget that people still visit physical shops and establishments. True, they may use online resources to research, but plenty of commerce is still conducted in real life. If you have a brick-and-mortar business, you can’t neglect local SEO and listings if you want to stay profitable.
As powerful as search engines like Google or Bing are, they still can’t be everywhere at once, and have to rely on additional information from local, on-the-ground sources, which gather, aggregate, and submit relevant data for area businesses. These aggregators will do much of the legwork, pulling information from physical directories (like Yellow Pages) or scanning business registrations.
In a nutshell, bigger search engines will rely on these data aggregators to fill in the gaps of the existing information already in their databases, and will also cross-check to make sure that the facts are up-to-date. Problems arise, however, when aggregators collect out-of-date data, leading a search engine like Google or Bing to list the wrong information, like an old address for your business or a disconnected phone number.
Learn More: How to Do a Comprehensive Local SEO Audit
That’s why it’s critical to ensure that your physical contact information is as current as possible.
The first step is to identify any obsolete information that may be out there. Because Google is the largest search engine, start with Google My Business, its free-to-use listing service, and update your data accordingly. Be sure to list important details like extra locations, the latest opening hours, and what forms of payment are acceptable.
Then, use a local directory management service, which carries out the painstaking, tedious work of scanning countless local directories, interacting with data aggregators, and correcting any old information. The best of these are Moz Local and Yext, which can help you avoid any glaring inconsistencies that can hurt your revenue stream, or even worse, trick Google’s algorithms into thinking that you’re a different business entirely.
Learn More: 10 Free Local SEO Tools for Small Businesses
Next, use your directory management service to hit at least four of the major data aggregator services. While these companies do vary by location, some of the bigger names are Infogroup, Acxiom, and Localeze, all of which provide information on millions of business listings to larger search engines.
From that point on, local search listings should be accurately and automatically updated by your management service.
Carrying out technical SEO for local search engines is a similar process.
You may be questioning the point of optimizing for local search engines, especially given Google’s unquestioned dominance of the search landscape. Even so, local search engines are still extremely useful. After all, if you’re a physical, brick-and-mortar establishment, you will benefit greatly from having in-store visits.
Learn More: How to Get More Reviews for Your Local Business
If you’re a digital business, local searches are still important. One study shows that consumers are 36% more likely to begin with local search engines, rather than general search sources like Google. Even if they’re looking for a digital marketing agency rather than a hardware store, if you don’t optimize for local search results, your business could lose potential customers.
Here are some useful terms and techniques to ensure that you optimize your business for local searches:
First, understand that schema markup is one of the most powerful, least used parts of SEO today. Schema are basically brief snippets of data that can give extra information to search users and search engines. Best of all, schema markups don’t require extra coding, and can be inserted through Schema.org, a rare collaboration between Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
In the case of the example below, the schema gives extra information about showtimes at the following venue:
As you can see, schema is a game-changer: you can make your site more visible in Google and quickly add brief, useful data for the benefit of users.
If you want to go a step further, you can also include a JSON (Javascript Object Notation) injection through Google Tag Manager. JSON is a form of data that is easily read by humans and artificial intelligences alike, and familiar to anyone who has ever used C++, Javascript, Python, and more.
With Google Tag Manager, however, it’s easy to combine schema and JSON together to further boost the strength of your schema, resulting in a higher CTR and visibility, without having to spend precious time and lines of code. Granted, the learning curve is a bit steep for those who aren’t familiar with Javascript or another basic programming language, but once set in place, JSON injections can help execute and put structured data in place simply and efficiently.
Ultimately, SEO is rapidly changing from one year to the next—even from one month to the next. Business owners and marketers have to adapt quickly, but it’s still possible to give your business website the edge on your competition.
Just remember to focus on solid content creation and copywriting fundamentals, engage your viewers deeply, and stay abreast of technical trends like backlinks, SEO health, site speed, and schema.
If all this seems overwhelming—take a deep breath. Taking the effort to understand even the basics of SEO will help your site gain higher click-through rates, engagement, and of course, rankings. In 2017, a little bit of reading and tinkering on your own can still go a very long way.
This post originally appeared on Single Grain, a growth marketing agency focused on scaling customer acquisition.
Stop me if this sounds familiar…
You’ve worked hard on your latest blog post, and it’s finally ready for publication. You take it live on your website, blast it out to Facebook and Twitter, then you sit back and wait for the views and comments to start rolling in. You engage a bit with your audience, but before you know it, it’s time to move on. Your editorial calendar never stops chugging—just as soon as you’ve finished one piece of content, it’s time for the next one.
Now, I’m not going to say that this is totally wrong. If your choices are to do content marketing like this or to not do it at all, then by all means, do content marketing like this.
But if you aren’t satisfied with the results you’re getting, there’s a reason for that. There’s a much more effective way to do content marketing and—as an added bonus—adopting this alternate approach can seriously cut down the amount of time and energy you put into content creation.
Here’s how I go about maximizing the value of my content:
Free Bonus Download: Get more actionable info about creating 10x content not found in this post! Click here to download it free.
I know the title of this post implies that you’re already working with “epic” content. But since so much of what I see online—even long-form posts—is basically rehashed nonsense, this is an important step nonetheless.
So what makes content truly epic? Ask yourself the following questions before you even think about hitting the “Publish” button:
If your answers to these questions reveal any weaknesses, address them before putting your content out into the world.
So, you had a great idea. You wrote about it in a blog post. And now you’re ready to move on? Hold on a second—this kind of “once and done” approach doesn’t serve you or your customers.
You’ve probably got a few avid readers, but most of your website visits likely come from people who encounter your site elsewhere on the web (and click through to one specific piece of content) or from regular fans who check back now and again.
The problem is that, in both of these scenarios, there’s a decent chance that readers who would be interested in your latest posts will miss them—especially if you keep up a rigorous publishing schedule. To increase the odds that they’ll see your work (and to reach those who have different preferences about how they consume content), try repurposing your content using the following formats:
This isn’t it when it comes to repurposing your content, either. Sites like Periscope, Vine, Snapchat, Quora, Google+ and others could all be powerful allies in getting your message shared, depending on your business’s individual aims.
Read More: The Marketer’s Guide to Snapchat
Free Bonus Download: Get more actionable info about creating 10x content not found in this post! Click here to download it free.
In addition to creating new content pieces based on your original idea, be sure that your initial piece gets as much traction as possible by publishing it in as many places as possible.
Now, to be totally clear, I’m not suggesting that you take a single article and post it on every site that’ll have it (although syndicating content to sites like Medium and LinkedIn may be appropriate). That’s 2008-era SEO, when spamming article directories was considered valuable marketing.
Let me give you an example to highlight the difference…
Over on my Growth Everywhere blog, I regularly interview leading growth hackers and marketing experts. Once I’ve completed an interview, I’m not just going to publish the final video to my site and hope for the best. To get as many eyes on it as possible, I’ll also publish it to:
I don’t even spend that much time on sites like YouTube and LinkedIn, but just publishing there can score me 4,000+ YouTube views and 400 website visits from LinkedIn members:
It’s not much, but it’s more than I’d get if I didn’t push my content elsewhere. And over time, it all adds up.
Learn More: A Step-by-Step Checklist For A Successful YouTube Ad Campaign
The last step you want to do to expand the reach of your content is to work with well-established authority figures in your industry.
One of the best ways to do that is to take the content you’ve already published and, assuming it’s high quality, use it to pitch these influencers on potential guest post opportunities on their sites. They’re much more likely to accept your request if you can prove that the content you’ll be contributing is worth their time.
This strategy is part of a larger marketing approach known as “influencer marketing.” And since it deals with the creation of entirely new content—versus using what you’ve already produced—there’s one last tip I want to leave you with.
Before you move on to creating new content pieces, take one last look through your blog post and see if you’ve mentioned any influencers in it. If you have (and you really should have), take a second to message them, let them know about the mention and encourage them to share your work with their followers.
Not everyone will respond to your requests, but you might be surprised by how many do. Brian Dean, founder of the popular Backlinko SEO blog, estimates that he gets an 11% conversion rate on content promotion emails.
So there you have it – four steps that’ll help you get more out of every content piece you create.
Free Bonus Download: Get more actionable info about creating 10x content not found in this post! Click here to download it free.
Are you using strategies like these already? Leave me a comment below sharing how much of a difference content expansion has made for your business’s performance!
In today’s world, all companies need to become media companies. And being a media company means creating content.
But if everyone is playing the content creation game, how do you stand out?
The answer is 10x content.
For a primer on what that means exactly, watch this video from Rand Fishkin:
Creating 10x content isn’t easy, but it’s rewarding. Just take a look at a study of the first page results of Google:
In short, 10x content:
In this post, you’re going to see exceptional examples of 10x content to help give you ideas on how to replicate their success. Bookmark this in case you ever need help coming up with ideas on 10x content!
1. Brian Dean analyzed over 1 million Google search results and shares his learnings
Brian Dean started his SEO blog at a time where it wasn’t cool to start an SEO blog anymore. And yet, he found a way to stand out from the rest of the SEO blogs in the industry because he brought practical, easy-to-digest posts that were loaded with research.
In this specific post, he analyzed over 1 million results to help guide people towards gaining more organic traffic. The page is peppered with helpful statistics and graphs to make it simple and to the point:
SEO is one of those subjects that isn’t black or white. The only thing people can depend on to continue to get an edge on their competitors is to test on their own and learn from the research of others. Research can often be flawed when it’s done in a haphazard way.
Thankfully,every once in awhile people like Brian Dean will come around and make SEO easier for everyone.
Content Length: 3,013 words
Why This Is 10x Content:
2. A Beginner’s Guide to Website Speed Optimization by Kinsta
Page Speed is an important topic that every web company should focus on optimizing. This epic guide isn’t just a blog post, it’s a series of 6 chapters that explains topics such as: what page speed is, how it impacts business success, and how to improve it.
When you first land on the page, you see a custom-designed image above the fold:
As you continue to scroll through the post, you’ll see other designs that complement the content:
Content Length: 10,708 words
Why This Is 10x Content:
3. The Shape of Things To Come – How An Industrial Designer Became Apple’s Greatest Product by Ian Parker
In this truly epic piece, The New Yorker has an in-depth piece on lead Apple designer Johnny Ive. This is a powerhouse biography on the life of Johnny Ive and how he helped create some of the best designs we’ve ever seen. If you’re an Apple fan, this is an article that you’ll gobble up.
Content Length: 16,389 words
Why This Is 10x Content:
4. What if we wanted to get the whole world on clean energy? by Shane Snow
Shane Snow is the founder of Contently and knows content marketing like the back of his hand. The clean energy movement is clearly gaining momentum but the world still needs more education around it, so this long-form article does a good job of breaking down the key concepts into simple-to-understand terms.
The cartoony illustrations also do a good job of adding more perspective to each scenario:
Content Length: 2,585 words
Why This Is 10x Content:
5. What Is Conversion Rate Optimization by Qualaroo
Insights company Qualaroo occupies the first and second spots of organic results for ‘conversion rate optimization’ with two in-depth posts:
Upon clicking through, you’ll find that the page isn’t just an article, it’s a collection of resources. 12 chapters, to be exact:
Each chapter is well-designed and explains conversion rate optimization terminology in a simple way. This is a great example of how you can combine multiple resources to create a mini-series. And bonus points for linking them all together! If you compare this to the third result (Wikipedia), it’s much more comprehensive.
Why This Is 10x Content:
6. The Beginner’s Guide to Online Marketing by Neil Patel
Similar to Qualaroo, Neil Patel has built an epic resource for those looking to get into online marketing. If we do a Google search for ‘online marketing’, we’ll find that he occupies the top organic result:
This is an exceptionally well-designed guide with 14 pages of in-depth content.
Here’s a sneak peak:
These are the types of guides that Neil Patel pays $30,000 for and gives away for free. The result? A top organic search ranking for a heavily trafficked keyword.
Why This Is 10x Content:
7. Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man by Wait But Why
This is a 4-part series of EPIC articles by Wait But Why. If you combined these four, this could basically be a book.
The mini-series is a short biography on Elon’s life and how he plans to tackle seemingly impossible problems. Now, you might be thinking that downloading the audio biography of ‘Elon Musk’ is enough, but actually reading through this might be worth your time.
For one, the writer has a humorous style and it’s easy to read. The illustrations are cute and add to the casual tone of the article.
Content Length of Part 1: 6,504 words
Why This Is 10x Content:
The Kleiner Perkins Internet Trends report is an annual presentation that is shared widely around the Internet. The venture capital firm reveals an abundance of information on where we’re going in terms of technology.
All the data is organized into simple-to-understand graphs and charts. Interesting points are littered throughout the slides.
Content Length: 196 slides
Why This Is 10x Content
9. Microcopy: Tiny Words That Make A Huge Impact On Conversions by ConversionXL
ConversionXL is a blog focused on conversion rate optimization, which can be a dense topic that’s difficult to understand for many. Overall, the blog does a great job of generously linking to every claim or statistic that it cites and is well formatted. The benefit to linking out generously is twofold: a) the reader gets more value/insights, and b) you get a chance to build a relationship with the site that you are linking out to by mentioning that you included them in your content.
This post in particular gives the reader an opportunity to think about how they should be approaching wordsmithing for marketing campaigns. If you Google ‘microcopy’, this post ranks #4 organically.
Content Length: 2,184 words
Why This Is 10x Content:
10. The Management Framework that Propelled LinkedIn to a $20 Billion Company by First Round Capital
Who would’ve thought that a venture capital firm would spend so much time and effort on content marketing? First Round is a VC blog that stands head and shoulders above the rest. Management isn’t a particularly sexy topic because it can seem a bit dense at times, but this post gives an actionable framework broken down into sections so the reader can hone in on what they need to work on and act immediately.
People often like to look for templates or frameworks to impact their lives quickly and this post is a fantastic example. If you Google ‘management framework’, you’ll see that this post sits around the #5 organic ranking.
Content Length: 2,221
Why This Is 10x Content:
11. Slightly More Than 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism by The Atlantic
Here’s an epic curated list of exceptional non-fiction from 2013. It’s literally a list of 100 pieces of 10x content.
Content Length: 7,427
Why This Is 10x Content:
12. 2015 Really Was The Bizarro Peyton Manning Season by FiveThirtyEight
FiveThirtyEight is a statistics blog that shares interesting numbers around topics such as sports and politics. I particularly liked what they’ve done with sports in the past few years as they always distill insights using raw numbers and break them down in an easy-to-understand manner.
The sports industry often has commentators who share anecdotes, and while they’re interesting, nothing gets more to the point than pure numbers. And FiveThirtyEight stands out because its approach to sportswriting is different from the rest.
Why This Is 10x Content:
13. The Ultimate Guide to No-Pain Copywriting (or, Every Copywriting Formula Ever) by Joanna Wiebe of Copy Hackers
You know a piece is EPIC when it has its own table of contents. As a marketer, I see ‘The Ultimate Guide to…’ in headlines quite a bit and most of the time the articles fall short of the headline’s promise. Copywriting is an art that often gets overlooked in the world of marketing (especially in tech).
But if done right, copywriting can be one of the most effective weapons in a company’s arsenal. This is an incredible resource to sharpen your copywriting skills. Who doesn’t like templates that you can implement immediately?
Content Length: 11,888 words
Why This is 10x Content:
Resource pages are basically ‘libraries’ of helpful content for the user. It’s strange because it seems that the search engines favor these sections (perhaps because they’re all in-depth and interlink with one another).
For example, if you Google ‘customer acquisition’, you’ll find that Help Scout has the #1 organic ranking:
Similarly, if you Google ‘customer service’, you’ll find that they rank #3:
The key takeaway: think about building some resource pages for your site to see if you can capitalize on organic traffic.
Here are some great examples:
14. HelpScout Customer Resources – As mentioned above, HelpScout has done a fantastic job of curating its top content. Each post has a custom designed image and is flush with long-form content and helpful links.
(Notice the ‘Chapters’ link in the top right corner.)
Total Resources: 12
Why This Is 10x Content:
15. HubSpot knowledge center – HubSpot is known for producing great content time and time again. Although they have a general resource center, they decided to do something similar to what HelpScout did. They compiled their top resources and built out a well-designed section to make it easy to find their best stuff:
Why This Is 10x Content:
16. How A Car Works
How A Car Works is a complete guide to well…how a car works. From the engine to braking systems to manual gearboxes, it’s all in here in an organized way. If you’re looking for ONE way to put together a resource page, this is the best that I’ve seen thus far.
Upon typing ‘how a car works’, you’ll find that this site occupies the top 2 results. Not too shabby.
On the homepage, I saw 16 sections and I thought to myself ‘each section will probably just be one page of content explaining high-level details’, but that was not the case. After I clicked ‘Transmission’, 14 guides and 127 illustrations popped up!
Talk about epic resource:
Why This Is 10x Content:
17. Startups, this is how design works by Wells Riley
Great design sells itself.
Just look at Apple.
But the meaning of design can be elusive to some (including myself). In this incredibly simple and well-designed resource, Wells Riley explains what exactly design is.
Although the resource is targeted to startups, it might as well be targeted towards the general population. You’ll learn what goes into great design, examples of great design, the different types of design, and much more. I’m not a designer myself but it doesn’t take a great artist to appreciate art.
And that’s what this resource is: a piece of art. It flows well, is unobtrusive, and covers just enough for people to be dangerous when it comes to understanding what design is.
Content Length: 3,483
Why This Is 10x Content:
Interactive content stands out above the rest because of the sheer additional amount of work that it requires in addition to the writing involved.
18. What Percent Are You? by The New York Times
People often like to look at their income as a barometer of where they stand. That’s why The New York Times put together an interactive map where the user can enter in his or her household income and track where they stand in the United States.
Type in ‘what percent am I’ or ‘what percent are you’ into Google and you’ll see this in the top 2 organic results. The NYT is always looking for new subscribers and it’s not a bad play to acquire new financially-minded readers through this piece.
Call it ego bait but hey, it works.
Why This Is 10x Content:
19. The 10 Minute AdWords Management Workouts by KlientBoost
Google AdWords is no new subject and to be frank, it’s not talked about much because there hasn’t been any major innovations in recent years (just small tweaks here and there). KlientBoost did a nice job of making a dense subject fun with its gifographics on how to keep your AdWords account up to par.
Here’s an example of a gifographic created by KlientBoost.com:
Why This Is 10x Content:
20. How Search Engines Work by Google
The #3 organic result in Google for ‘how search engines work’ is by none other than Google. The concept of web crawlers can be a bit overwhelming to understand but Google has done a good job of breaking it down piece by piece.
Why This Is 10x Content:
21 Squatty Potty video ad
Those of you who are familiar with Shark Tank have probably seen the Squatty Potty. For those who aren’t, the Squatty Potty is a stool to help people poop better by switching you into a squatting position when you’re doing your business.
As you can imagine, it’s not easy to educate the entire world on a new way to #2, but Squatty Potty has done it.
Why This Is 10x Content:
As we continue to glide towards peak content, it’s important to take a step back from our current content marketing efforts and ask ourselves whether we’re truly making an impact or not. If we’re producing content for content’s sake or because ‘someone told us to’, we might be better off doing nothing.
The world doesn’t need more content; the world needs more utility provided to it.
One thing is for sure: the game of content marketing is only going to get harder and harder and the best will continue to reap the benefits. Now it’s your turn to make a decision on which side you want to be on. =)
Good luck!
Image Source: SEMRush
Image Source: SEMRush
Image Source: Title Boxing
Image Source: Botify
Image Source: Moz
