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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Twitter is the perfect place for your business to connect with customers and potential customers. Most brands use Twitter to keep in touch with their fans in real time, but the third most popular social network (310 million unique visitors each month isn’t too shabby!) has a lot more to offer than this simple benefit.
Savvy businesses use Twitter to:
People spend an average of 170 minutes per month on Twitter, which is roughly 5-6 minutes a day, so to successfully grab a user’s attention, you’ll need to Tweet multiple times a day. Doing that manually is near impossible because it’s very time-consuming to write, post, monitor, read, retweet and reply to everything that’s going on, but with the right social media tools you can hit that target and reach your marketing goals.
Here are 10 content marketing tools that will help you increase your Twitter engagement:
What better way to relate to your audience than with quality articles. DrumUp is a social media content marketing and employee advocacy platform that lets you curate content from a large variety of sources, schedule social media posts on multiple accounts, and create/schedule custom posts. You can even add your favorite RSS feeds and save posts to your content library to make sharing easier.
This app provides you with fresh content on a daily basis and comes with a one-click scheduling feature that saves you a ton of time. Additionally, it recommends smart hashtags for your content to help you get seen more. Sharing helpful posts, videos or infographics with your audience — from your iPhone, Android or Chrome extension — is more likely to start a discussion and you can turn your employees into brand advocates with DrumUp’s employee advocacy program.
TweetDeck is an all-in-one Twitter management tool that is particularly useful for audience engagement. You can keep track of multiple accounts, topics, hashtags and mentions — all in one convenient place. You can see when users are talking about your brand and respond to them instantly without leaving the dashboard. Plus you can create Twitter lists, monitor analytics and trends, and export custom timelines to your website. This is one of the best tools for real-time Twitter management.
If you host Twitter chats on a regular basis to talk to your audience, Nurph is a great tool to use. You can instantly start a real-time video-to-video Twitter conversation by sending invitations with hashtags to your followers through text, audio and video. Unlike Periscope, Twitter’s live streaming video mobile app, which is not exactly social (yes, brands who broadcast live can interact with their audience but that’s not the same as a conversation), Nurph allows “free-flowing group chats.” And if that’s not enough, Nurph also offers sound effects and emojis.
With this platform, you can integrate hashtags, replay chats in real time and get insights into your community. Once the chat is done, you can use the post-chat analytics feature to find out details like most influential participants, most active participants, most re-tweeted tweets and much more. In case your subscribers tend to forget, you can also send SMS reminders.
Bit.ly, a link management platform, is mostly known as a URL shortening service (especially helpful on Twitter where every character counts), but it has so much more to offer. You can shorten or create custom URLs and share them across multiple platforms and then track the link you shared via a bitmark to find out which ones work best for your audience — the stats page will show you how many people clicked on it, shared it, and which websites are driving traffic. This is helpful for boosting engagement as you can target a specific set of people with certain links.
The tool also provides analytics so you can monitor and improve what and when you share — just add a plus sign (+) to the end of a bitmark and you’ll be able to see statistics for that URL. It also adapts to different platforms, detects when a user is on mobile or not and guides them accordingly, and can be integrated with 75 publishing platforms.
Hashtagify is an app that gives you information about any hashtag. Once you enter a hashtag, a word or a phrase, the tool can find up to 500 related hashtags. It can also find the most influential people for your hashtag. It offers four main features: the Hashtags Lab, Users Lab, Hashtagify Library and the Hashtags Cafe.
The Lab can be used to find, track and analyze any hashtag. The Users Lab suggests the best hashtags for you by analyzing your previous tweets and you can find influencers by tracking hashtags. The Library contains over 40 million hashtags to choose from and gives you stats about any given one. And the Cafe is the ultimate hashtag suggestions tool as it prioritizes hashtags by analyzing your tweets. It can also deliver suggested hashtags through email to make it easier for you to use. This tool is great for finding the target audience in your niche and interacting with them.
Visual content is a must on social media because it is more likely to capture and hold the audience’s attention. Piktochart is a simple tool that helps you create visual content in a matter of minutes and share it on multiple social media accounts. All you have to do is follow a simple process – choose a template that matches your style or message (they have over 500), add images, data, icons, text or videos, customize font and color, and voila! When you’ve perfected your infographic or pie chart, you can share it on multiple platforms, create presentations or simply download it for later.
Commun.it is a valuable tool to build relationships by providing insights into your Twitter community. You can manage multiple profiles, know who to follow or unfollow, identify key influencers and monitor hashtags. It separates the real information from all the noise and gives you the ability to prioritize your Twitter tasks by dividing users into three categories: Influencers, Supporters and Engaged Members, depending on multiple factors. You can then browse through these categories and establish your target audience and influencers. The tool also provides free analytics and allows you to invite your colleagues to manage your community and see reports.
Note: Audiense was formerly called SocialBro.
Audiense is all about audience insight. It’s a combination of various tools that can enhance your community management by giving you a much more precise understanding of your community, including what kind of content they like, gender ratios, languages spoken, influential people who follow you, and so much more. With all this information, you can make informed decisions about your audience instead of guessing. You can also target them better by using Ad and Direct Message campaigns. It is a paid tool but if you’re serious about marketing, this platform can be an amazing resource.
As your Twitter account grows and your brand becomes more popular, managing your followers is a lot more difficult. ManageFlitter is “the most powerful Twitter bio search on the planet” and suggests users that you can follow (or unfollow) based on various factors. For example, it will identify people who are inactive, don’t follow you back, have no profile picture, etc, so that you can remove them from your list. It also features PowerPost, an in-app tool that shows you the best time to post in order to be visible to your target audience, analytics, and you can manage multiple accounts.
SocialRank is a tool to identify whom you should attempt to get to retweet you by using your connections to boost your social presence. It essentially uses the Halo Effect by providing you with endorsements from your followers. If X Brand is following you and I love X Brand, then that automatically makes me more prone to seeing you in a favorable light. Co-founder Alex Taub calls it “endorsements for the 99%.”
SocialRank sorts your followers into 5 categories — Most Valuable, Best Followers, Most Engaged, Most Followed and Alphabetical — so you can easily decide who is worth starting conversations with. You can also target specific groups of users by sorting followers through geographical location, verified accounts and interests.
These 10 tools are valuable resources for businesses looking to form relationships with their customers as well as a wider audience — provided that you know how to use them right. Keep in mind that you don’t have to use all of them; experiment a little to discover which ones suit you best.
In addition to these 10 tools, here are 10 useful tips to help you rock your presence on Twitter:
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!
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Welcome to another episode of Growth Bites. Today we’re talking about how to get started with Internet marketing whether you’re a small business owner or working for a start-up.
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