Lead generation is at the top of every marketer’s and business owner’s mind. After all, having more leads means better opportunities for making sales. Over the years, many gurus and experts have come forward with different strategies and tactics to increase leads – from social media marketing tips, pay-per-click advertising, SEO strategies, email marketing hacks and, of course, content marketing.

Many tactics boast different results for just about every other business, but in this blog post, we want to show you one of the most effective ways to generate more leads organically, all while building up your brand and taking customers through the Know-Like-Trust cycle.

This method is called the topic cluster method, one of the newest ways to optimize your content strategy. So what exactly are topic clusters, and how can you use the topic cluster method to generate more leads? Let’s take a look.

What are topic clusters?

In 2017, HubSpot revealed the topic cluster method, explaining that it is “where a single ‘pillar’ page acts as the main hub of content for an overarching topic and multiple content pages that are related to that same topic link back to the pillar page and to each other.”

(Image source)

The model came as a result of multiple changes in Google’s algorithm, which has swayed marketers to focus on high-quality content if they want to be rewarded with higher rankings on search engines.

How exactly do topic clusters help boost your SEO efforts? Here’s a quick rundown.

Why use topic clusters?

• It increases web traffic organically. One of the biggest reasons topic clusters work well for content marketers is that you can increase your traffic using an internal linking system. When readers land on a specific page, they can find links to related content on your site. This reduces bounce rates and increases the time visitors spend on your website, thus boosting SEO.
• It helps search engine crawlers prioritize and rank content. When you use topic clusters, you’re linking what’s called “cluster content” to a main pillar page that contains comprehensive information about a certain topic. This allows search engine crawlers to properly organize and prioritize content when ranking your pages.

7 Ways to Use the Topic Cluster Method to Get More Leads

If you’re ready to take your content marketing efforts to the next level, topic clusters are not only easy to execute but provide long-term results. Here are 7 ways you can start using the topic cluster method in your business to get more leads and make more sales – without doubling your marketing budget.

1. Decide on keywords you want to rank for

The first thing you want to do when planning out your topic cluster model is choosing keywords you want to rank for. First choose a main keyword you’ll want to rank. This is the keyword you’ll be using for your pillar article.

As best practice, choose a long tail keyword that’s broad enough to cover multiple topics but still specific enough to allow you to create high-value content clusters. For example, “social media marketing” is a good example of a long tail keyword for your pillar article.

Use a keyword finder like WebCEO’s Keyword Suggestions to choose the phrases and terms for your campaign.

2. Plan out your topic clusters and cluster content

Once you know what keywords you want to rank for, it’s time to plan out your topic clusters and the specific cluster content you’ll be putting up on your site.

Cluster content are individual content pieces you can publish separately as a deep-dive into specific aspects of your pillar article. Calling back our example from before: if you chose “social media marketing” as your pillar article keyword, you can then create cluster content such as “Facebook marketing,” “Instagram marketing,” or even “optimizing social media profiles.”

Pro-tip: you’ll want to create cluster content before building out your pillar article.

3. Create a pillar article

A pillar article will typically have between 3,000 to 5,000 words and is meant to be comprehensive. This is why it’s best to create and publish your cluster content first: afterwards, you can use these to outline, build up, then link to a brand new pillar article page.

Example of how content clusters can build up pillar content using “gum disease” as the overarching topic. (Image source)

4. Do a complete content audit

Just because you’re switching your content marketing model to the topic cluster model doesn’t mean your old content and posts are moot. Chances are you’ve already created several content pieces for your niche, so look through what you’ve already done to see how you can build a topic cluster from this.

Determine whether you have blog posts that can be expanded to become pillar content. Or if you have some highly specific content about a broad topic, you can use that to start building up a brand new pillar page.

Content that used to rank high, but dropped in rankings with time is a good starting option – with a little improvement, it can return to its former glory. Find such pages on your site in the Detailed report in WebCEO’s My Site Rankings tool.

(Click on the image to view it in full size.)

Simply choose Depreciated positions in the Filters and sort the table by the Position column like in the image above. The Web page column will have the pages you might want to update.

5. Sprinkle relevant high-value opt-ins within cluster content

Consider every piece of content in your cluster as a golden opportunity to bring in new leads. So not only are you giving readers a better web experience by linking out towards related content on your site, but you can also offer them added value by letting them opt-in in to receive a free resource, be it a whitepaper, checklist, or eBook.

And because much of your content relates to one another, you can easily increase exposure for the same lead magnet over and over. In advertising, one popular thought is that you ought to expose your ad to consumers multiple times before they take any desired action.

Make your lead magnets visually attractive, and sprinkle them across multiple cluster content. (Image source)

6. Interlink all content together

The most crucial part in the topic cluster method is linking your cluster content to your pillar article and vice versa. You can use your pillar article’s main keyword as the anchor across your cluster content. You can do the same from your pillar articles, or create compelling CTAs to link out to cluster content, i.e. “Click here to read more about the [cluster content topic].”

It’s where the magic happens that allows site crawlers to prioritize your posts and get you ranking higher on Google. That’s why you need to make sure all internal links on your site have descriptive, SEO-friendly anchor texts. Find all your anchor texts in WebCEO’s Link Text Analysis report.

Bonus tip: make sure to try and get as many backlinks to your pillar content as possible to boost your rankings even faster.

7. Consider content gating for certain cluster content

For added measure, you can get more leads to opt-in to your email list using content gating. Several sites and publications make use of this, either as a paywall or a free article you can access after signing up for an account.

This can be particularly helpful for businesses who do step-by-step tutorials or in-depth studies, for example. While we don’t recommend gating all your content – especially as it might leave a bad impression on first-time visitors – consider gating certain cluster content that has highly detailed information that users wouldn’t mind exchanging their emails for. As a litmus test for which content you can gate, ask yourself whether the information you’re giving away is valuable enough that some people may even pay for it. You’ll also want to map out gated and non-gated content with your marketing funnel in mind.

Conclusion

The topic cluster model is one of the best ways to streamline and optimize your current content marketing strategy. And by using the steps above, you can start implementing this method on your own website. Over time, you’ll see your content ranking higher on search engines, all while giving your site visitors better experiences and even added value. Start seeing your rankings rise in in no time!

The post Lead Generation: How to Get More Leads with Content Topic Clusters appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

How come SEO doesn’t work without content marketing? Why do you need both?

When you have only SEO: You get content that appears in search, but users don’t care about it. Do you want site users to be more than just viewers and bystanders? Do content marketing.

When you have only content marketing: You get content that nobody ever finds online. Your content and your audience; do you want these two to meet? Do SEO.

Content marketing is about making your content work and making content that works. With SEO in the equation, there’s also making your content rank. It’s clear that content is at the crux of all of this business, and that a successful union of content marketing and SEO requires fulfilling those three requirements.

And here’s how you meet them.

1. Making the best content

Let’s define “the best content” first. The devil is in the details, so let’s grab him by the horns and drag him out into the light.

• The best for whom? That’s easy: your target audience.
• The best at what? At being what your target audience needs when they use Google (or any other means of search): a solution to a problem, a source of accurate information, entertainment etc.
• If it’s the best, then what is it better than? That would be the best currently existing content, most likely owned by your direct competitors.

So the goal is to create content which has these three traits. All of them, even the third one, boil down to pleasing your audience. How do we do that?

Obviously, in order to be popular with your audience, you need to be intimately familiar with them. What they like and what they don’t, what they want, how they think – that’s the bare minimum. All these things are on your users’ minds every time they search for some specific content and can be summarized in three words: user search intent.

So, how do you satisfy search intent?

• Choose a topic (or a range of related topics) your target audience is interested in. With a variety of topics, you will be able to attract more visitors, but you’ll also risk turning into a jack of all trades and a master of none. Keep educating yourself!
• Create content that isn’t bad. Sounds painfully obvious, but this is the one step you absolutely cannot mess up at any cost. Otherwise your whole campaign will crumble like a house of cards.
• Create unique content. Users don’t want more of the same thing they’ve seen elsewhere. Your site may share a purpose with others, but the rest needs to be special.
• Make your content as in-depth as possible. This is the sort of content that tends to be the most popular, gets the most backlinks, ranks the highest and drives the most traffic. Be careful not to confuse depth with length; a 4000 word long-read might be full of water instead of anything actually useful.
• Anticipate questions that are related to your content’s topic. For example, if a user is looking for an article about getting rid of facial wrinkles, they’ll also want to know about the best diets and skin care products. Additional related information will make your content more in-depth, as well as add more keywords to rank for.

That should help you form a clear vision of what your content should be like. Proceed to create what you envision and make it better than whatever is ranking on Google’s page #1.

The next step is to give your content the ability to convert users.

Converting means making users perform a specific action on your site (such as subscribing or buying a product). As you can imagine, this is one of the most vital parts of content marketing; it’s where you sell your content. For this part, you are going to need careful planning and experience in using websites similar to your own.

• Include your main keywords in the titles, descriptions and URLs.

Not only is this really good for your SEO, it’s also the best way to let the users know you have the content they need.

• Give the users an incentive to perform the desired action.

Users will never do what you ask if they don’t get anything out of it. If they come to solve a problem, say the solution is behind a call-to-action. If they’ll want more content like the page they are viewing, let them know they will have more if they subscribe, and so on.

• Plan out the path from the top of the page to the CTA.

Place yourself in the users’ shoes. How would they use your content? Where would be the best spots to put CTAs?

You can try to play the guessing game, or you can analyze the pages on your site that have already attempted to convert users. Use a heat map generator both on the pages that succeeded and the pages that failed to see what works and what doesn’t.

• Emulate the more successful sites.

Learning from the superior is a sign of wisdom. And the best part about imitating websites with high CTR scores is that they don’t have to be your direct competitors. For example, you can safely pick an ecommerce site which sells different products than yours and see what it does better.

Find what works for others and start doing it on your own site. And if you can make improvements to their tricks, that’s even better. Content creation software tools could help you a lot in the process of planning and producing high-converting content.

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2. Optimizing content for search engines

Content marketing and SEO both play an equally large role in putting your site on the first page of Google. If content marketing can be described as the social aspect of conquering the search, then SEO is the technical aspect. So what do you do on the SEO side of things?

Use keywords that will bring you the most traffic

You can find keywords for your site with WebCEO’s Keyword Suggestions tool. But how do you know a keyword is good?

You know how Google works: you type in a few words, and the search engine shows sites which have them. But the search results don’t always have the exact match of your query; they may have synonyms or even be missing some of the words you used. What does this all mean?

The best keywords have these traits:

• Descriptive and clearly reflecting user search intent. These types of keywords are known as long-tail.
• Semantically related to your main keywords.
• Have a high number of monthly searches (or search volume).

If you have connected your Google Search Console account to your WebCEO project, you can check the effectiveness of your keywords in the Google Search Queries report, namely:

• Average ranking position in Google
• Click-through rates
• Clicks and impressions

Make your site mobile-friendly

Everyone has a mobile phone with an Internet connection these days. To make a long story short, make your website and its content work as well on mobile devices as on PCs – or even better.

• Increase loading speed
• Implement a responsive design
• Leave some space between elements
• Make sure your popups don’t cover too much screen
• Don’t use elements unsupported by mobile devices (such as Flash)

Test your site with WebCEO’s Speed Optimization tool to see how well your site looks – both on mobile and desktop.

Fix technical errors

Promoting a site full of errors is like trying to win a race in a broken car. You’ll never finish first, if at all.

Now, you can’t know when something might break on your site, but you must fix all errors no matter where and when they appear. A few examples of what could happen to your site:

• Broken links (they are especially damaging when they are broken CTAs)
• 404 errors
• Unindexed pages
• Server errors
• Broken page code

Use WebCEO’s Technical Audit tool to check if everything is all right with your site. If there are problems, see to them immediately!

Fix SEO errors

Unlike technical errors, optimization errors don’t cause your site to malfunction; in some cases, they might not affect a user’s experience at all. They simply mean you are squandering your site’s SEO potential. Googlebots can pass over your site and not really know what it’s about if you don’t optimize.

Here are a few examples of SEO errors you can fix to increase your rankings.

• Missing H1 tags
• Missing sitemap
• Missing robots.txt file
• Missing image ALT attributes
• Missing hreflang tag in localized pages
• Blank, overly long or duplicate meta tags

Find these errors on your site with WebCEO’s On-Site Issues Overview tool.

Break your content into segments

Long content can be a chore to take in all at once. If yours is like that, make it easier to consume by dividing it into parts. Here’s what you can use:

• Paragraphs. This is the easiest and most obvious way to improve readability. There’s no limits on how short you can make them; even one-sentence paragraphs work wonders.
• Subheadings. This is the best option SEO-wise. H2, H3 and H4 tags can act as titles for individual segments, which helps both the users and Google understand the structure of your content and what it’s about.
• Images. These are best used when they are relevant in the context, especially when they contain valuable data (such as diagrams).
• Calls-to-action. If there’s just one CTA on a page, some users will never even see it, let alone click on it. Placing a few CTAs throughout the page (where it makes sense in the context, of course) is a good way to boost your conversion rates.

Use high-quality visuals

Pictures and videos are among the decisive elements that shaped the Internet as we know it. They play a major role in driving conversions, too. What are the best ways to use them?

Images:

• Use only high-quality ones (unless there’s a point you want to make with poor quality)
• Set their height and width to the exact size you need, and not a pixel bigger
• Convert them to the format that will yield the smallest file size
• Merge them into a single image where possible

Videos:

• Use only the ones with high-quality visuals and sound
• Host them on other sites like YouTube
• Set them to play automatically where appropriate (for example, above the fold where you don’t want the users to miss it)

Increase site loading speed

Other than helping you rank, site speed is the decisive factor in keeping users on your site. Here’s what you can do:

• Host your site on a powerful server or a content delivery network
• Enable caching in the .htaccess file
• Use compression software such as Gzip
• Minimize your HTML, CSS, JavaScript and other code
• Optimize your images
• Don’t host large files on your own site
• Keep your page redirects to a minimum (the ideal minimum being zero)

Test your site with WebCEO’s Speed Optimization tool and see what needs improvement.

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3. Promoting content

Now comes the “marketing” part of content marketing. Everybody says high-quality content is the key to ranking in Google. And of course, there’s a catch. Even the best tourist content about the Spain doesn’t go places on its own; it needs your help to make it happen.

See, content isn’t restricted to being Internet pages. Content, first and foremost, is information that motivates a person to become your customer. Anything that falls under this definition can be considered as content: an email, a Google ad, a TV commercial, even shouting in the streets. It’s only a matter of reaching your target audience.

Let’s assume you have picked your audience carefully and that your content matches their interests. Here are the next steps.

Build links strategically

Link building is where SEO and content marketing intersect the closest. Everyone will tell you that in order to build links, you need to create high-quality content. But when you try it, the best you get is a few nofollow backlinks from social media. Why does it work for your competitors and not for you?

Because this plan is missing several crucial steps.

You’ll be lucky to get any backlinks by doing nothing other than making content. Other sites, especially the authoritative ones, won’t stumble upon it by chance and just decide to link to it on a whim. The best link building technique is to create content which has value for the audience and for the linking sites.

Simply put, here’s the plan:

1. Expose other sites to your content

2. Give them an incentive to link to it

What possible incentives are there? Here are a few instances when link building turns into a mutually beneficial exchange:

• Your content is a source worth citing in Wikipedia.
• Someone (for example, a blogger or a reporter) is in the process of writing an article. You reach out to them and offer to use your site as a source. One of the sites where you can do that is Connectively.
• “Skyscraper” technique: you create an article and contact someone who links to its less in-depth, outdated version.
• Broken link building: you contact a site linking to a page that doesn’t exist anymore and suggest they link to you instead.
• Creating or sharing viral content on your site, for instance something the folks at Reddit would like.
• Making unique sources of data and statistics (case studies, researches, surveys).
• Creating your own non-stock images.
• Guest blogging.

The most efficient way to build links is to target specific sites where you want to create backlinks. And for that, you need to pick your targets first. Find the most authoritative sites in your niche through Google – or, even better, with WebCEO’s Dangerous Competitors tool.

This tool finds your competitors for your chosen keywords. They are not all going to be your direct business competitors, so you’ll want to cherry-pick the ones who are actually stealing your audience.

Make your site appear in no-click searches

Featured snippets, quick answers, Knowledge Panel, voice search. All of them can generate traffic, but they were mainly designed to give users the content they want without making them click. Even so, if you don’t appear in those search results, someone else will.

The same applies to pay-per-click ads. They occupy so much space above the organic results, it’s a wonder SEO is still relevant.

Fortunately, the requirements for getting featured snippets aren’t very strict – they boil down to using keywords and formatting your content in a distinct way (FAQ, list or table).

Share your content in social media

How else are you going to get traffic from there in the first place?

Still, not all of your social media followers will engage with your content. That’s why you need a large audience: the more followers you have, the better your chances. How do you get more?

• Share your business pages’ content on your own personal pages
• Ask the people you know to share it
• Reply to commenting users
• Reply to the users who PM you (and reply quickly)
• Ask users to comment, like, share and follow
• Be active on other people’s pages
• Share other people’s content on your pages

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Use email outreach

Remember how content comes in many more forms other than site pages? Email is another one of those forms. Quite powerful, too, even despite the risk of getting stuck in spam filters. If you are subscribed to somebody’s updates, you know how true this is.

How do you make this method work for you?

• Have a ton of email addresses in your database. You’ll be lucky if even 5% of them respond to your call to action. The wider the net you cast, the more fish you’ll catch.
• Don’t email to your competitors and irrelevant sites. If the addressees aren’t your target audience, your emails will fail.
• Design an email newsletter. There’s no better way to make your emails unique and your brand recognizable. Quick tip: you can use a free email templates builder to make this process very easy.
• Prepare several good pitches. Don’t just send everyone the same email. If you have options, some of them are certain to work better than others.
• Make new pitches when necessary. There can be all sorts of occasions: Halloween, Christmas, Easter, your site’s anniversary and so on. A special pitch for a special day is a good way to spice things up.

Afterword

It turns out there’s a lot of extra oomph your SEO needs to be effective. You will want to check if your content marketing strategy is working, too. How?

By checking these metrics in Google Analytics.

• Page views (how many times users visit your site)
• Click-through rates (% of users who visit your site after finding it)
• Bounce rates (% of users who leave your site after visiting one page)
• Dwell times (how much time users spend on your site)
• Page depth (how many pages users visit per session)
• User flow (how users browse through your site)
• Goals flow (how users reach your calls-to-action)
• Conversions (% of users who complete calls-to-action)

And, of course, the Google site rankings for your keywords. Those can be seen with WebCEO’s Rank Tracking tool.

But the easiest way to tell if it’s all worked is to check your goals. The desired number of user registrations, the amount of profits, the ranking positions and so on – have you got them? And if you’ve gone above your hoped-for success numbers, how far above was it? If all your hard work has set a trend for growth, that’s how you will know you have become good at content marketing.

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The post Why Your SEO Strategy Isn’t Working (Hint: No Content Marketing) appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

It’s 2024! How are your New Year’s resolutions doing? On my part, I intent to pit my gourmet and sporty sides against each other. Whichever gives up, I know I’ll be the winner (though my dignity might not be).

There are lots of other fun things in my list (like flying across the planet just to pet some cats), but believe it or not, some of them relate to work too – to SEO. New Year, new me, new approach to blogging and content planning. In fact, it’s such a great idea that it should be put into writing.

Rethinking and reviving your content making abilities! If content strategy is about taking action, then content planning is the part that comes before: thinking and preparing. Plot your route first, then speed towards your destination.

With that in mind, we can begin to describe the principles behind SEO content planning.

1. Know your goals and target audience

Every plan needs a clear goal before anything else. An SEO content plan begins with two questions:

1. What kind of users is your content for?
2. What kind of purpose must your content accomplish?

Answering these questions will help you shape your content, giving it the most optimal format, appearance and structure.

Types of users are as many as the stars in the sky, but content goals are easier to define. The most common goals include:

• More clicks;
• More views;
• More subscriptions;
• More sales;
• More publicity;

The list goes on and on. See any goals here that apply to you?

In short: decide what kind of people you want to come to your site and what you want from them. That way, you won’t waste your future efforts on anything unproductive or unnecessary.

2. Understand your target audience’s needs

We can’t really get inside people’s head and see what they want. Although Google gets progressively better at it, to the point it’s kind of scary.

Well, Google can’t read minds (yet), but you can already use its insight to your advantage. Try Googling the stuff you have on your site (for example, cheap cars for sale) and visit the sites that appear on Page #1.

Did you like them? Chances are, your target audience likes them too. Those sites are ranking so high for a reason: more often than not, they will have just the sort of content the users want. Therefore, there should be many topics that could be effective on your own site. You can learn from your mistakes, or you can learn from the best.

But don’t close Google just yet. Other than the organic results, the People Also Ask section is another invaluable source of information – after all, it’s literally in the name. It offers queries directly related to what you’ve just Googled. The autocomplete feature is a bit less reliable, but it’s worth checking, too.

3. Find keywords and use them efficiently

If you know your target audience, you can easily find keywords which match their search intent. The trick is to know which type of search intent your users hold.

Here are the various types of search intent:

• Commercial: when users are looking for something to buy or comparing products (best types of pizza).
• Transactional: when they want to spend money on something specific (order pizza).
• Informational: when they want to learn something (how to decorate home for holidays).
• Navigational: when they want to find a site or a page (Nicolas Cage Twitter).
• Locational: when they want to find a place (car wash near me).
• Seasonal: when they want something related to a time period (Christmas decorations).

You really don’t want to make a mistake here. But as long as you are careful, finding the right keywords will be a walk in the park. Simply use WebCEO’s Keyword Research tool.

You have three different places to look:

• Get Suggestions: enter a keyword and get a long list of related user queries.
• Spy on Competitors: enter another site’s URL and see the list of keywords it uses.
• Top queries: see the user queries that cause your site to appear in search – and how often it happens.

Each tab offers a different way to search for keywords, but the goal is always the same: choose the keywords which reflect user search intent the best. And if they have a high monthly search volume, even better.

If you find a keyword you like, check the box next to it, then press on Actions and click Add selected to Keyword Basket.

(pic)

Keyword Basket can help you in the next step: deciding how and where to use keywords on your site. For example, if you want a keyword to optimize a page for selling shoes, then tag it “shoes” in the Basket. If you a keyword is supposed to convert users, then tag it “conversion”. If necessary, assign multiple tags.

Do the same for all the keywords you use, and you will be able to group and categorize them depending on their effectiveness.

This simple feature will prove especially useful when you implement topic clusters. More on that a bit later.

4. Create every page with a purpose in mind

When you think about it, what exactly is high-quality content? “Useful,” “well-written” and “visually appealing” – but there must be more to it.

Indeed, there’s one decisive factor that separated good content from bad: whether it actually gets results. Which only happens after you release your content. Sounds like a Catch-22, doesn’t it?

Not at all. There is a way to tip the scales in your favor. When you create content, make it serve a clearly defined purpose.

It’s like preparing an entire SEO content plan on a small scale, sized down to a single page.

1. Define your goals for the page. Is it meant to inform, to entertain, to result in a purchase etc.?
2. Define the target audience for your page. What do they need and can you give it to them?
3. Find the appropriate keywords for your page (refer to the types of search intent above).
4. If you want conversions, include a call-to-action along with text and design that will entice the visitors to click.

Be serious about your content’s functionality, and you will be surprised how much difference it makes.

5. Create and develop topic clusters

What is a topic cluster? It’s when you have a very important page on your site and a bunch of other related pages linking to it.

Alternatively, there can be more than one important page at the heart of the cluster. What matters is surrounding them by those other related pages. Doing so signals to search engines which page is the one that should rank higher than the others, as well as offers your visitors additional information.

But that, of course, will require preparing many topics in advance and creating high-quality content around each of them. If you aren’t an expert in your field yet, the best time to start learning is yesterday. The second best time is today.

6. Have a plan for outranking your competitors

Every site has online competitors. Your content, too, will have to fight other sites for Google rankings.

It won’t be easy, but you can take the necessary steps to make it possible.

1. Find your direct competition with WebCEO’s Dangerous Competitors tool. All you need is your ranking keywords – plus location, if your site is for a local business.

2. Analyze their strengths and weaknesses. What they do better than you, what they do worse – it will help you in one-upping them.
3. Pick the easiest competitors to outrank. You don’t need to butt heads with the top search results straight away; it’s okay to start with the ones who are a position or two above you.
4. Prepare superior content. Create new pages or improve what you have – actually, why not both?
5. Promote your content. If you want more options for this step, use WebCEO’s Competitor Backlink Spy to see where your competition gets their backlinks – you may be able to build your own links there too.
6. Rinse and repeat, but with more successful competitors next time.

7. Organize your content production

Whether you work solo or in a team, producing content requires a plan and a schedule.

Naturally, it will be easier for a team where multiple people can fill all the important roles:

• Writer;
• Editor;
• Publisher;
• Visual designer;
• Content distributor;
• Project manager;

Which is a lot of work for a single individual. Do yourself a favor and get other people to help you.

Aside from who does what, you also need to plan when to post each new piece of content. You can easily create an editorial calendar in Google Sheets – or even in Excel, if you insist on working solo.

If you are more of a team person, then you might want to use a project management tool like Trello to keep track of all your team activities and maximize its efficiency.

8. Create a list of must-have elements for your content

The sooner your visitors get active on your money pages, the better, right?

As much as we’d all like our visitors to make a beeline towards the call-to-actions, that just doesn’t happen so easily. Conversions don’t magically happen on their own; your content either makes them happen or it doesn’t.

And to make them more likely to happen, you should remember to make your content engaging and visually appealing.

How? Here are a few examples that have a power over users:

• Call-to-actions (obviously). If your content doesn’t have them, how is it going to be useful to you?
• Readable page URLs. If a page has a URL like example.com/how-to-prank-your-neighbor, anyone can see what it’s about. It inspires trust.
• Eye-catching headings. You know, the ones that go from H1 to H4.
• Table of contents. It collects all the headings in one place and lets users know what they can find on your page.
• Keywords. One in each important place: page title, meta description, URL, headings and so on.
• High quality images. Captions help too, as do ALT texts: accessibility is very important.
• Links to other pages. If you want to create topic clusters, links are an absolute must-have. They are also crucial for customer journey.

Make a checklist for all the things that your content should have. If you post different types of content, you may even end up needing multiple versions of such a checklist.

9. Have a content promotion plan

Creating content on your site is good and all, but it won’t be useful unless people actually see it.

And unfortunately, waiting until you appear on Google’s page #1 is not an option. Who knows when it will finally happen?

Take action first and share your content where people will see it before Google. Here are a few ways to do it:

• Social media;
• Email outreach;
• Guest posting;
• Collaboration projects (that way, you won’t be the only one promoting your stuff).

The more channels you have, the better. Even more so if you’ve carefully picked them to match your niche.

10. Update your old content

Is evergreen content truly evergreen?

That depends on the topic. Some formulas are so tried and tested that they practically never change (like food recipes), but when it comes to things like SEO, things don’t stay the same for long. A few years, maybe, but no more than that.

And then you run into the issue of outdated content. Once a page loses its relevance, it will rank lower and lower, dragging your whole website along. You can’t let that happen.

You have two options:

• Get rid of outdated content by deleting, deindexing or setting up redirects to newer content;
• Update your old content. This option is much more preferable since you retain all the authority your content has accumulated over the years.

You must have a page, or two, or more that are worth updating. If a page is meant to help with a problem that still exists and always will (e.g. how to fix your kitchen sink), then it’s the best candidate for an update. How long has it been since your last content revision? Now may be a good time to find all the outdated pages.

But a real expert can predict what kind of content is likely to become obsolete before it happens. If you can do that, great! Add those pages to your “To be updated in the future” list and keep an eye on the news about their topics.

11. Measure the results of your SEO content plan

Lastly, you need to ensure that your SEO content plan actually works. How can you tell that it does? By monitoring your site’s performance in search, of course.

You have added your site to Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4, right? Great. Then you can track all these metrics:

1. Site rankings. See how well your content ranks in WebCEO’s Rank Tracking tool. To use this tool, just add your ranking keywords and run a scan.

2. Click-through rates and impressions in Google. How often do results from your site appear in search? How often they get clicks? Find out in the Top queries report (clicks and impressions for your keywords) and the Top pages report (for your site’s pages).

3. Click-through rates on your site. To check this metric, you must connect your site to Google Analytics and set up the necessary events (for example, tracking when somebody clicks on your call-to-action). To see your events or create a new one, type ‘Events’ in GA4’s search bar.
4. Bounce rates. Sometimes users won’t be satisfied with your content and leave as soon as they see it. How often does it happen to you? Find out by typing ‘Bounce rate’ in GA4’s search bar. (This feature is really amazing and convenient.)

If you see that your content ranks higher and users clicks more often than they leave, congratulations! You have become a true master of SEO content planning.

Afterword

It’s so much easier to get things done when you are not just winging it. When you know what you want from your content, how to make it work and what you can expect, the road towards your goals becomes much straighter and smoother.

And so, may all your plans, SEO-related and others, be fulfilled in the coming year!

Create your perfect SEO content plan in 2024! Sign Up Free

The post SEO Content Planning: How to Get Better at Making Content appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

A large number of the websites we visit have a blog section. Why do people start blogging and what benefits does this bring to their websites? According to statistics, websites with a blog section receive 97% more backlinks and have 55% more visitors. Moreover, blogs increase a website’s traffic by up to 6 times. These are good enough results so far to confirm that blogging is worth some extra attention.

Why do people prefer reading blog posts, although there are already a lot of articles on the same topics? Why do blogs stand out among other types of content?

The answer is – as usually – pretty simple: it’s in the presentation.

Let’s compare an ordinary manual:

with a blog post:

The difference is significant: while the first one is long and boring and without headers and bullet points, a dull situation which Google Panda doesn’t like, the second is rather short, interesting, and – what really matters – hits the nail on the head, especially if it was written by a practicing expert in a sphere you want to read about.

Blogging is all about success. However, this success consists of more than just words typed in a word processor. You can’t call your content “King” if you haven’t optimized it from top to bottom.

STAGE #1: Preparations

The stage of preparations means: niche and topic determining, title drafting, and target audience identifying:

1. It is important to choose a topic you want to write about and to be sure in your capability to enlighten your visitors. Also, depending on your niche and topic, you will possibly have to maintain an accepted style of writing.

2. Don’t start writing without a title. Try to keep a draft of your upcoming article in mind. This will help you even with keyword usage during the text writing. One title always means a bunch of derived variants, which may sound better, more successful, or brighter, and can give you more ideas about what to cover in your article.

For instance, let’s imagine that you want to name your article “Coca-Cola sounds good for evening relaxation”: here we can write about Coke itself, what type of evenings it suits the most, and why. Some derived variants: “Coca-Cola sounds good for an evening with friends/for a date” and “Coca-Cola is the best choice for a party at home”. Now you can also mention where you can go with friends/girlfriend of boyfriend, and describe specific kinds of activities outside and inside, extending the title’s background. This way you will consider new ideas each time you “touch” the title in your mind or look at it on a Word document page.

3. The target audience may be people of a specific age, gender, nationality, location, occupation, and lifestyle, who already visit your website and those who may be your visitors in the future.

Since these people would be interested in the niche or topic you are going to disclose, you should know more about them. People from different locations may consider the information you are going to present as something to be taken personally, because of their cultural, mental, or religious background. And if you want to study some specific controversial cases, you are better to know who will be for and against your research conclusions and assumptions.

Also, you should know who your current audience is even if you now want to attract an absolutely different group of people. First, you will try to always keep your current readers by your side. Second, an analysis of your ongoing situation will provide you with necessary data for defining people’s needs. Third, information you gather will be your most reliable weapon. You will know what to write, how to write, where to promote your content, and how to present it.

You can get demographic and physiographic data in Google Analytics.

STAGE #2: Keyword Research

Keyword research is key to your content optimization, one of the most important steps a webmaster should take before presenting content. Depending on the niche and topic you’ve chosen, several points have to be taken into account:

• Long tail keywords are more specific than short ones and focused more on the sphere you are writing about. Try to use them more in order to take your place in a narrow circle of a chosen niche. Moreover, while searching for long tail keywords, you will also supply yourself with more interesting information to mention in your blog post. For example, WebCEO’s Keyword Research Tool not only shows you the statistics concerning a keyword’s value, but also presents some variants of queries which are popular among searchers, which can open you up to a topic you haven’t yet read about;

• Look for synonymic keyword phrases – don’t use only one long tail keyword throughout the whole blog post, but instead examine those combinations that are equally successful and will be appropriate in your text. This is rather important because blog posts are longer than several paragraphs and you can’t use one variant again and again. Google will see this as keyword stuffing. Besides, it is always enjoyable to read multifaceted content;
• Keyword research should be all-sided, i.e. check everything, not just one tool, in order to determine which keywords you really need for your blog post.

1. First, you are better to analyze Google results. Google is also able to give you some advice concerning keyword selection. Apart from paid and organic search results it also shows what people seek for in terms of your niche. You can check this in the boxes “People also ask” and “Searches related to…”:

2. Don’t forget to learn about your competitors’ performance backwards and forwards. This refers to everything: keywords they used (which you can also check with WebCEO’s Spy on Competitors Report – it gives you full data regarding your competitors’ keywords which are relevant to your content), topics they covered which are related to yours, posts’ peculiarities in terms of style of writing, material used, and points described, and how popular they are among readers.

To Identify your competitors, you can use two ways:

• Google search, which will show you your top competitors in organic search results:

• WebCEO’s Competitor Metrics Tool will find and sort your competitors by their rankings and other parameters.

STAGE #3: How to Write a Blog Post

Once you have found your keywords and pried for competitors’ secrets, it is easier to start writing. Remember that the answer for a question “how to write a good article and bring traffic?” will always be: provide content of the highest quality. First, Google rewards quality a lot. Second, keywords bring searchers to your website, but the way you present and disclose your idea are key factors for searchers to stay on your website longer and eventually become your users.

Consider the following points during the process of creating your blog post:

• Style

At this point you should be careful.

If your blog post is all about your personal opinion and entertaining others, you can allow yourself a lot of things, which will make your article more interesting. Joke a lot, present the information in the simplest way possible, ask some questions and answer them right away in order to raise any given reader’s curiosity and not to leave them without an explanation. Readers like clarity; with it they will come back again and again.

However, if you are writing for serious research purposes, the above method may not be for you. While it may be really great if you simplify difficult information for readers in order to keep them by your side, don’t go way too far with this. Some niches (especially of a scientific character) are built on terms, definitions, case studies, and so on, that is why our advice is to use those extremely difficult words for a seriously researched article: ordinary people can’t understand them, but at the same time those are keywords for people who are deeply into the topic.

Be simple but at the same time don’t miss a thing.

• Structure

Don’t be cruel in your attitude toward your readers and forget, please, about using plain text with enormous paragraphs, like this:

Source: https://plain-text.co/

If you do this, users will return to the SERP and look for other links, rather than think “yes, that’s definitely what I wanted to read”. To avoid such situations, it will be better to use:

1. Headings;

2. Subheadings – by dividing your topic and outlining the sense of an abstract in a subheading, you help users to navigate;

3. Bullet and numbered lists – these are extremely helpful if you want to bring somebody’s attention to specific points;

4. Small paragraphs – five or six reasonably short sentences will serve you best. Don’t overwhelm readers’ minds;

5. Bold or italic words – a reader perceives information presented in bold as being very important.

A piece of useful advice: put keywords in your heading and subheadings. This will give you more of a chance to be found on the Internet.

• First Paragraph

The first paragraph is essential. By looking at it and reading it, a visitor decides whether to stay on your website or that it is better to go. Your mission is to catch people’s attention in the first sentences. One method to do this is to use questions. By asking various questions, you will make a reader understand what problems concern you and what you are going to talk about in the next couple of paragraphs or pages.

Try to make a question that will be noticeable and intriguing, if it’s possible.

You can also use statistics in answers for these questions. As people tend to believe different authoritative sources and figures, you will get more chances to reassure them of your credibility.

Remember to use keywords in the first paragraph. When we see hints of the information we were looking for, readers will usually decide immediately that they made the right choice in clicking on a specific result (and not bounce).

• Visual Media

Don’t be boring. All those subheadings and bullet lists are well and fine, but people don’t want to see only text. Words, words, and words make us tired and sleepy. So, make the topic you are going to talk about even more interesting than it is, if it is. Videos, images, screenshots, audio files, PDF files, and infographics will rarely be unwelcome. With these forms of content, you will make the reading process more enjoyable and your reputation as an author brighter.

Even if you are writing about a scientific topic, you can add an interview with an expert from your field, as well as some tables, diagrams, or schemes which present relevant statistics or important data.

If you use images, make sure they are optimized. Add keywords to the image titles and alt text in order to get your article to be shown in Google’s vertical search results.

• Length

Blog articles are not academic research works where the word count and overall size are on a big scale. The best length for blog posts is approximately 1200-1600 words. This is neither long nor short but enough to briefly cover a topic. Readers don’t like overly long posts even if they are extremely interesting, because they don’t want to waste a lot of time and prefer to quickly learn new information.

• Links

Whether you are writing something scientific or entertaining you can’t avoid links. They are much more important for your blog post than you may think of them. Try to use authoritative and respectful websites for your research and then link to them. People are unlikely to believe your words for sure if they don’t know your sources well enough. This is also beneficial for you, because this way you won’t be seen by Google as filling your website with suspicious links which may cause harm.

If you already have relevant topic articles written on your website, you can:

1. put them in your text in the form of anchor links to pay readers’ attention to the old posts, and
2. create a list of all links which lead to relevant articles you’ve written. This will be very useful and comfortable for a reader and this will bring more traffic to other posts.

• Reference List

If your article encompasses deep and comprehensive research, you for sure will use or have used a lot of data taken from outside authoritative websites, and even printed materials. Classify the sources and create a reference list at the end of your article.

Why do you need this?

First, Google is watching you and it likes to see good links on your website. Second, if your material can be used for research papers, students will be grateful and will visit again. Third, by making this list you can attract the attention of those websites’ owners whose websites you have taken the information from. If you’ve said something intriguing to them, they may decide to link to you in one of their newer articles.

People are sometimes curious about where an author gets the information presented in a post. They want to know whether to believe the stated information or not, and it doesn’t matter if it is scientific or casual. You will do users a favor and reassure them in the quality of your material if you deploy at least a tiny reference list.

• Conclusions

Your conclusion should be short. You have already discussed everything in your article earlier, so don’t try to retell each piece of information. If you asked some important questions throughout the article, it would be appropriate to provide simple and brief answers for them as a little summary.

• Questions at the End

If you have an audience that has known you for some time and is interested in your content, you can try to talk with them. A simple question at the end of your article about a potential topic your visitors would like to read about next time will provoke a conversation in the comments section. This will raise engagement with your website and attract more attention to your further articles. You can even organize a poll or survey in order to learn what your readers are interested in.

STAGE #4: Formatting and Posting

Table of contents

If your blog post is rather long and it will be difficult and uncomfortable to scroll down for five minutes in order to find a desired part of the article, you can create a table of contents before the text and make anchors like Wikipedia does. This will help users to navigate and to see from the very beginning which points you are going to discuss throughout the post.

Proofreading

This step is critical. Even if you are good enough with grammar and punctuation, before posting you should give your draft to an experienced proofreader. There are two reasons for this:

1. You saw your text a lot of times while you were writing it. You already know each detail and word, and your eyes are so tired, they can’t see what is right and what is not. A proofreader sees almost all your mistakes;
2. A fresh look at your article may give you more ideas and you can then edit your text so it will be better and easier to read.

Hero image

A hero image will be a great beginning for your blog post, especially if you choose a catchy header for it so it will attract a lot of your reader attention. Make it simple, but gorgeous and bright, so people will be pleased to push a “Continue Reading” button and be ready to share your post on social media. Bright colors always “catch” our attention and raise interest, so don’t miss the opportunity to use them.

However, be careful if you take a picture from the Internet, because the punishment for an author’s rights violation can be severe.

SERP view

Snippets at Position 0 receive a huge amount of traffic. Besides properly writing your Schema and Open Graph code, your title tag, meta description, URL – everything should fit your niche and topic AND contain keywords related to it! If you don’t take care of what your Featured Snippets and Knowledge Panels would look like, the odds of being chosen for such wonderful results will go down and any text shown in a Snippet will be random, causing searchers not to visit your website.

We will never be tired of repeating in each paragraph that keywords are essential for your content if you want it to be visible for searchers.

Email notifications

If your users agreed to receive emails from you when they were signing up, you should use this opportunity! Send them notifications about your most important new blog posts with a short review which may push people to read them. Make a little summary for points disclosed and describe the benefits a user can receive after reading.

But never send tons of email notifications, such as more than once per month, because this could be perceived as spam!

May be interesting for…

A little graph you may add to your post could be about whom a new post will be interesting for. This is useful if the title is not specific and the audience of your website is diverse. For example, students, SEO specialists, artists, software engineers, and a long list of professions and kinds of activity. To be more specific, you can write down variants like: “people who are interested in SEO”, “SEO beginners”, and so on.

Why this may be important: You can get clearer analytic data.

When readers see that a certain post is for people of another sphere of interest or kind of activity, they won’t click on it and wait for the next one. You may think that this is sad, because not all readers will check a new post. However, think about it from another point of view. When people visit a page and understand that a post is not for them, they leave immediately. As a result, the bounce rate will be high.

When the desired target audience visits a page with a new post you can learn about them more deeply and identify which topics are really in great demand on your website.

CTAs

The CTA (Call to Action) is your offer. You should not just ask a person to subscribe, but making a proposal he or she can’t refuse. Show what people will get if they decide to follow you; useful pieces of advice, tips & tricks, bonuses, presents, and so on. There is a good possibility readers won’t follow after reading words like “Subscribe to get the latest news.” There are a lot of news sources.

People will prefer to know what extra benefits they will get.

STAGE #5: Blog Post Promotion

Social Media

If you run a website, that’s a great reason for starting your social life! People chill out in social media most of their time so why not be there. If you really work hard on your platforms you will receive great opportunities. People like, share, and comment on content that they like and consider credible.

Create a catchy, bright picture, which fits the article you want to promote, and write a short (one or two sentences) description under it with a link to the blog post. People who are already interested in your content will like it and share. If they leave a comment with questions – answer them, if they praise you – thank them. Be grateful and you will receive a lot.

However, remember that your account should also be dedicated to your niche!

Paid promotion in social media can also bring you some success. For this you will need to find bloggers who are popular enough and work in your niche. Otherwise, you will not get your target audience and you will have no results.

Link Building Strategies

• Broken links

If you know a website that has a broken link to a post on your topic, then connect to the webmaster and politely offer him or her to replace the broken link with one to your blog post.

• Infographics

If your post contains infographics, then try to share it. Readers and webmasters like infographics and they are most likely to post them with a link to your blog page if your infographic is of high quality.

• Skyscraper Technique

If you know that there is an old article on the same topic and you know for sure that you wrote a better and more up-to-date article, you can go to the webmaster of that site and ask to put a link to your blog post with fresher information.

• Link round up

If you get the chance, then take part in a link round-up. They are organized by websites with high domain authority and only great content can take part. This is a really good chance to show your website to the audiences of bigger websites.

• Ask friends

If you have friends who are webmasters, you can ask them to put a link to your blog post on their website.

• You can always use WebCEO’s Content Submission Tool, which will provide a list of places where you can submit your post.

[BONUS] How to Optimize an Infographic

Infographics have, for a long time, been one of the most popular ways to present information. People seek them and SEO experts always outline their value. It has even become a link building strategy: “Make an infographic and share it”.

People adore infographics for the following reasons:

1. They present difficult information in the simplest way;
2. They are bright and pretty – it is a pleasure for users to read those and people remember more information when they see it in images;
3. You will never see tons of information in an infographic – only essential facts without dilution;

Bonus fact: infographics increase traffic by up to 6%.

Optimization:

• Make a really great infographic

This concerns everything: select a topic which can be beneficially outlined with the help of infographics, design your infographic so no reader will be disturbed. You should take care of colors which will not make people’s eyes hurt, comfortable scripts, a general layout, and of course pieces of information which will be used. Everything matters and you should be prepared properly.

• Keyword optimization

Before uploading your infographic, make sure that you’ve done proper keyword research. Since texts in infographics can’t be read by Google, you will have to work on other aspects, like tags and file names, in order to make them visible on the Internet beyond your website’s page.

• SEO

There are some factors you should consider to make your infographic SEO friendly:

1. file size: make your infographic of a small size, but of good quality, and this way it will load fast and readers will not wait for a long time;

2. mobile friendliness: a page with an infographic should be set for mobile devices, because people nowadays prefer to read information from smartphones and tablets;

3. social sharing: set a plugin which will help readers to share your infographic in social media quick and easy; this will bring you more traffic.

IN CONCLUSION, high quality blog posts and infographics are valuable nowadays both for readers and Google. However, they will never be found if you don’t conduct decent optimization and it doesn’t matter how much effort you’ve put in to the infographic itself. Each detail should be perfect and prepared diligently. Start your content optimization with WebCEO’s Keyword Research Tool! Find your best keywords and get more traffic.

The post How to Make Your Content King: Blog Posts & Infographics Optimization appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Content is the common thread tying together SEO and digital marketing. Want your website to be at the top of search results? Make great content. Want to sell something? Make great content. Since that’s where the two goals intersect, it’s clear that superior content is the gateway to greater rewards in each.

And video might just be the winning ticket you were looking for.

Want proof? The most prominent example is YouTube. Video content helped it become a giant on par with Google itself, enough to make YouTube SEO its own thing – to say nothing of all the ad revenue generated there. Video can be packed with more information than any other medium, which makes it such a potent tool in communication. And that’s what SEO, digital business and video marketing are all about: reaching and communicating with your audience.

Need more reasons to start using videos? Don’t worry, we’ve got plenty.

Video Marketing Statistics in 2022

“The 2020s will be the decade of video.” How I wish I had a dollar for every time I’d heard that over the previous decade. I’d have enough to make Elon Musk cry!

Two and some years into the new 20s, how is this prediction holding up? Spoiler alert: very accurate so far. Countless businesses have bet on video content and they did not regret it – quite the opposite, in fact. Numbers can do a great job describing the impact video has had on digital businesses – and, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Here is an infographic: the fruit of Renderforest‘s research on video content and how it has been used by businesses in the 2020s. Below the infographic itself, we are going to highlight the most impressive points.

1. Benefits of video content

Videos are widely used (and that’s an understatement). There are plenty of businesses and marketers to vouch for the benefits. What does the majority say?

Using videos in your marketing campaign increases:

• Return on investment
• Brand awareness
• Lead generation
• Site traffic

Every single thing that matters, as you can see.

85% of businesses use videos in marketing and consider them a vital part of their strategy. What’s more, videos have proven to be especially effective during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to 91% of marketers.

2. Video consumption

They didn’t lie when they said the 2020s would be the era of videos. Halfway and some into 2022, global video traffic is climbing past the 82% mark – as expected. And thanks to such a high percentage, we can see how users prefer their videos:

• 33% of viewers will stop watching a video after 30 seconds. That’s how little time you have to hook them in!
• 25% of viewers finish videos that are over 20 minutes long. Not great, not terrible.
• 75% of viewers prefer horizontal videos to vertical ones.

3. Types of videos

There are many kinds of videos out there. What do businesses prefer? How effective are those preferred kinds at their job?

• Explainer videos: these are used by 62% of businesses, as well as by 82% of B2B businesses. This type of video has an enormous audience: 94% of people who want to know more about the product will watch an explainer video. Also, 93% of millennial viewers love how-to videos.
• Logo animations: they are present in 46% of videos made by businesses, and in 58% of B2B business videos.
• Video ads: they are less common than you’d think. Only 38% of businesses use them!
• Demo videos: these are even less common, employed by 33% of businesses.
• The 3 most popular types of videos are webinars, demos and social videos.
• And the most effective types (as reported by businesses) are informative and entertaining.

4. Videos and platforms

Now, everybody knows YouTube is king when it comes to videos. But what about other places?

It turns out businesses use videos quite effectively on their own sites. Putting a video on a landing page can increase your conversions by up to 80%!

What’s more, having a video on your landing page increases its chances of appearing on Google’s first SERP by 53%. Naturally, that includes homepages.

And here’s my favorite part: videos are effective even in emails!

44% of people are willing to watch a video included in an email. In fact, a video can increase an email’s CTR by up to a whopping 300%.

However, only 25% of businesses use videos in email marketing as of now (partly due to people being cautious about spam in emails, but that’s where verification tools like SPF record checkers come in). Sounds like a powerful, untapped niche you could use!

5. Videos on social media

We’ve seen how effective landing pages and emails can be. But when you want to post a video somewhere, what comes to mind? YouTube first, social media second, right?

Let’s look at the numbers.

• 81% of social media users say videos are their favorite type of content.
• 75% of people are more likely to follow a brand’s page if it has video content.
• For 74% of businesses, their videos receive the most engagement in social media.
• Twitter in particular is going through a video Renaissance of sorts: its video views are 220 times greater in 2022 than last year.
• Lastly, 56% of businesses post at least 5 videos per month on their social media.

Afterword

I think it won’t be long before augmented reality becomes the next booming trend. But for now, video content is king, and these statistics should be enough to convince you. It can be tough to make a good video, but this type of content has the highest ROI – that’s a proven fact.

When you are making a video, have fun! The audience respects professionals who love their work. Enjoy what you do, and the viewers will happily join in for the ride.

Additionally, you can use WebCEO’s SEO content assistant to ensure your video content reaches its maximum potential audience.

The post Video Marketing: The Future of SEO (Infographic) appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

How many times have you heard praises about content marketing as a powerful marketing channel? You surely cannot count it on one hand.

There’s no denying its power to educate people and generate leads, but without an SEO strategy focused on bringing organic traffic, content marketing is just an extra element on your website, waiting to be found and used.

SEO is the best complement that content marketing has, and as such, you can’t ignore it. If you already have a content marketing strategy in place and haven’t developed an SEO plan to go along with it, you need to get started today.

Here’s how you can ensure that your content marketing strategy is SEO-oriented.

1. Analyze your current SEO performance

Start by analyzing your content marketing’s SEO performance, and to do that, you need to carry out an SEO analysis of your entire content operations.

An SEO analysis will show you how your current content performance in Google, what you are doing, and what you need to improve to boost your rankings. The analysis involves:

• Checking where you currently rank in search engines
• Checking your current crawling and indexing performance (i.e., what pages Google can crawl and index, and whether it’s ignoring key pages that you want to rank for)
• Auditing your site for technical and SEO errors
• Finding the backlinks your content has received and their authority
• Comparing how your content performs against its competitors

You can categorize each of the points mentioned above into two groups:

• On-site SEO analysis, which focuses on the way you optimize your pages to provide evidence to Google about the nature of your content.
• Off-site SEO analysis, which covers the backlinks your pages have acquired, their authority, and their nature (i.e., whether they come from natural linking, guest posts, partnerships, etc.).

To take your content marketing analysis even further, you can carry out a SWOT analysis that measures what you are doing right, what you could do to increase your rankings, and what could hinder your future results.

(Source)

2. Organize your keywords strategically

To carry out a successful SEO strategy, you need to implement keyword research—that is, the process of discovering the queries Google’s users use to search in the search engine.

You can put a keyword research process in place with the help of a keyword research tool such as WebCEO, which measures the number of monthly searches, CPC, and trends for each keyword in its database.

You can start your keyword research by adding your website to WebCEO and exporting all the keywords that your website is currently ranking for.

Then, make a list of your top competitors and export the list of keywords they rank for. With all this data, you want to:

• Create categories for your keywords by topic—e.g., all keywords about “tennis shoes” should go within one category, while the ones about “basketball shoes” go in another one.
• Create a backlog of keywords to target those that your competitors are ranking for and your website isn’t—in the future, you want to create content to target these keywords.
• Organize them by volume and CPC—you can create separate tabs for keywords with high volume and low CPC, and vice-versa.

A common mistake you want to avoid making is obsessing about volume exclusively. Intent is as important as volume because you should prioritize conversions (and growing your revenue) over driving traffic.

All keywords can be categorized in three ways:

• Commercial keywords: These keywords have a direct connection with buying—e.g., “buy tennis shoes.”
• Informational keywords: These are keywords where the user wants to find information about a topic—e.g., “what are tennis shoes.”
• Navigational keywords: These are keywords connected to specific brands, locations, and products—e.g., “nike tennis shoes.”

You can create separate tabs for each category or add a column in your keyword plan. In either case, your job is to uncover their hidden intent, which you can do by:

1. Analyzing their nature: Keywords with words like “buy” or “coupon” are commercial in nature; keywords that include words like “how to” or “tutorial” are informational; keywords with specific brands, locations, or products are navigational.
2. Check their CPC: Keywords with high CPC are often commercial in nature, as they convert better, while keywords with low CPC are informational or navigational.

After you have developed your keyword plan, you can start optimizing your pages according to their nature—i.e., adding commercial keywords to commercial pages, and so on.

3. Optimizing your content for SEO

After you have done your entire analysis and keyword research plan, you need to optimize your content both for SEO and quality. This last word is crucial, as marketers often end up over-optimizing their content, which alienates their readers, and this disgusts Google.

According to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, quality content is:

• Unique, valuable, or engaging
• Made for people, not search engine’s bots
• Honest; it doesn’t deceive its readers
• Within Google’s guidelines—i.e., it doesn’t use tricks to manipulate search engine rankings

When you optimize your content for SEO, you want to make sure your content respects these guidelines. Think of your on-site optimization as the act of naturally adding keywords around your page, so Google understands what it’s about while still serving your reader.

Writing with SEO in mind is important, but only if the quality is there. If you feel that the content you produce isn’t clear, valuable, or honest, you need to rethink your content strategy altogether.

Assuming this isn’t the case, you can start carrying out your on-site optimization. Since this process is relatively simple and mechanical, you want to use a checklist that guides your marketers into optimizing the pages the right way.

At the minimum, your checklist should indicate the optimization of the following elements:

• Page Title: These are the titles that show up on the search engine result pages (SERPs). Add your keyword in your title pages.
• Density: This is the number of times a keyword shows up in your content divided by the total amount of words on the page. A good rule of thumb is showing your keyword once every 100 words; more is too much, less can be accepted, especially if you use variations of it (e.g., “buy tennis shoes,” “buy great tennis shoes”).
• Images Alt-Tags: This is a tag you use within your HTML to indicate Google the nature of your images. Add your keyword and their variations in your images’ alt-tag.
• URLs and Internal Links: Add your keywords in your URLs and internal links. If a page is already published, you can create a new page with the keyword in its URL and redirect the old “incorrect” one to the new “correct” one.

Some tools can help you with your on-site optimization, like TextOptimizer, which optimizes your content by adding or removing content from your text to improve your search engine optimization.

4. Develop a content marketing process

Content marketing is a complex process that involves several teams, stakeholders, and tasks. Your SEO optimization shouldn’t be an ad-hoc task you do every few months; it should be part of an on-going process.

The implementation of content marketing requires consistency. You want to balance your content creation and promotion with your SEO plan. For that reason, you need to have a content development process in place.

A content development process explains the steps your team takes to research ideas, prioritize, create, and promote them. It outlines the system your team uses to carry out your content marketing efforts. The one you see below represents the process I use to create content on my site; similarly, your process will show the different steps you take to do the same.

Consider developing a content calendar where you add the keywords you will target in the future with your content, who’s responsible for it, and the goals you set up. Add your keywords before the writer starts writing content; by the time they get to work on their content piece, they will have embedded your SEO in it naturally.

Your content development process will vary greatly depending on your goals, resources, and priorities. To give you an example, your process could look like this:

1. Define a list of keywords to target for the next quarter.
2. Assign content topics to each keyword—alternatively, ask your writers to pitch you topics for each one.
3. Pick a keyword and assign it to the writer. Add a brief that explains what it should be about and the way the piece should be optimized.
4. Set a deadline and ask the writer to start the article.
5. Edit the content for quality and SEO—use the checklist from above.
6. Publish the content and implement your marketing plan, which can include link building and outreach.

5. Leverage the power of guest posting

SEO is straightforward: to attract organic traffic from Google, you need to rank your pages. And from the hundreds of ranking factors Google uses to do so, backlinks continue to be one of the most important.

There are countless link building tactics, but one that continues to work is guest posting—the act of publishing content on third-party sites and getting links from it.

To start your guest posting, take the list of the keywords you came up with previously, and analyze each one in your SEO tool of choice.

Nico Prins explains in his thorough guide on guest posting that you can review the backlink profiles of each keyword using Ahrefs and focus on:

1. The number of referring domains each page in the top result has
2. The number of the referring domains that have a DR 50+ (DR is a metric Ahrefs uses to measure the authority of a domain)

According to Nico Prins, you want to pitch to sites that meet the following criteria:

• It has DR 50+
• It has 3,000+ organic visitors a month
• It has a Trust Flow over 20 (use Majestic SEO TK to measure this)
• It’s niche-relevant

Alternatively, you can use any of the following footprints to find opportunities in your niche:

• “keyword” + “become a contributor”
• “keyword” + “contribute”
• “keyword” + “guest post by”
• “keyword” + “guest post guidelines”
• “keyword” + “submission guidelines”
• “keyword” + “this guest post is from”
• “keyword” + “this guest post was written”
• “keyword” + “this is a guest article”
• “keyword” + “this is a guest post by”
• “keyword” + “write for us”
• “keyword” + inurl:guest-posts
• “keyword” + inurl:write-for-us

Add your chosen keyword where it says “keyword” (including the quotes) and make a list of all the sites you find.

Then, find the editors responsible for managing the content. You can search within each site or use LinkedIn. Before sending a pitch, find their emails with the help of a tool like Hunter.

Your pitch should be simple yet clear; send some ideas that you think their audience will like while showing respect to the editor. Here’s a framework Nico Prins recommends using:

(Source)

When you start writing your guest post, do it as if you were writing for your own site. High-domain authority sites tend to ask for high-quality content, thus to guarantee your content will be published, put quality above links.

One final tip is to use a URL shortener to track your results. With this data, you can analyze the number of visitors you drove from each site. If one site drives lots of referral visitors, you can post more than once and get not only links, but traffic.

Summary

Content marketing will continue to be one of the prime ways companies grow their online presence. When you are designing your content marketing strategy, make sure to optimize it for SEO.

• Start by analyzing your current performance.
• Create a thorough keyword research plan.
• Simultaneously, create a content development process that simplifies the entire content creation and SEO optimization tasks.
• Edit your content for SEO and quality.
• Write guest posts to attract high-quality, relevant links, and rank your pages.

Ensure your content marketing is SEO-focused. Begin by checking how your content ranks in Google.

The post 5 Steps to Befriend Your Content Marketing with SEO appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Long form content is that very thing which Google and searchers appreciate a lot and always look forward to see on websites they often visit. Webmasters with blog sections on their websites tend to maintain the performance of their blogs and sometimes go for “educational” long content writing.

Why is this so?

Simple:

1. Long form content is believed to have more social shares;
2. A work of large, comprehensive research is seen as more valuable and credible rather than a short post of 200-500 words. Actually, nowadays, a 500-word post is not even perceived as a post anymore;
3. It increases your conversion rate.

Those reasons are already beneficial enough for you to pay more attention to long form content. The most popular of them are:

• Guides, which are always in demand not among SEO niche websites only, but in most spheres where it is possible to use this type of format;
• Case Studies are really inspiring “buddies”, which always raise enormous interest among readers, because they tell a story of somebody’s success or failure so you can learn something useful for your business;
• Tutorials took their place under the sun and have been guarding it for a long time already, being one of the easiest means for users to learn how to perform any kind of duty with step by step instructions.

However, it doesn’t matter how well written these types of content are, you should always optimize them adequately. You may write a brilliant, unique, and valuable article, and nobody will read it until you optimize it for search engines.

The process of long form content optimization is pretty similar to other types; however, it still has some peculiarities we are going to disclose.

TIP #1: PICK THE BEST FORMAT

[long form content types difference]

Before you start your monumental work you should make sure you have selected the right type of presentation. Nobody can write “Guide” in a description just because of a whim. A writer has to maintain important “prescriptions” for each type of content as each of them have their own rules:

• A Guide has two important features: fundamental and important. Since guides cover the most essential and primary points of a chosen topic, a writer has to be able to outline them properly. It is important to lead a potential reader from the basics to the top of a niche, explaining in a simple and understandable way enormous pieces of data. A reader should finish reading a guide with a feeling of completeness. It is really great when a reader has no questions concerning a topic you covered; if questions are still in the air – you did not so well, friend.
• For a Case study, must-have characteristics are: interesting and educational. If a writer has chosen a case study to investigate, it has to be entertaining and detailed. Moreover, a writer should be careful with cases he or she is going to choose from. Well known to the audience stories of success are not a great choice. Readers will not even click on “Continue Reading”, because they already know everything. It is better to write about an unknown yet pretty successful case, explaining which tactic was used, why it was fruitful, which cases it fits, and what cons it has. Case studies are beneficial, because if you do one properly a company may leave a link to your website on their page, enriching your backlink profile.
• Tutorials can be described in two words as well: simple and informative. Tutorials may be called “how-to-articles”. People go for tutorials when they can’t perform a duty and need detailed guidance. A useful detail about tutorials is explanations. Authors not only write what a reader should do in the simplest way possible, but also clarify why they need to perform this very step. That is the reason why tutorials have their piece of pie: readers appreciate a simple way of information presentation.

If you are a writer and thinking about a way to cover a topic, please, select the type carefully, because there are lot of dependent points which should be considered and revealed in your text.

TIP #2: LEARN FROM YOUR COMPETITORS

[how to out-do your competitors]

Whatever you are going to write, you will have to think about your competitors! What they write, how they write, where they promote their content – those problems have to be kept in mind if you want to achieve something with your text!  

If you know what your competitors tend to write about and how they do this, it’s time to perform better and better! Write as if you are doing this for the last time in your life. Create content that is so engaging, people will not be able to survive not reading it. Spend as much time as you need for creating material of the highest quality. Put your soul in your writing and people will thank you for this!

Backlinks and traffic are the goals you want to complete. And there are means to make your way easier. Use WebCEO’s Competitor Backlink Spy and learn which websites have already found some value in your competitors and linked to them. Analyze the articles they linked to and figure out what would make the people there start linking to you as well.

Forewarned is forearmed! Having some knowledge about your competitors and their weak sides, you will be more prepared for taking next steps.

TIP #3: DO COPYWRITING LIKE A PRO

[how to present information depending on the type of long form content]

• HOW TO WRITE A GUIDE

The first thing a writer should think about is content. It should be of the highest quality and meet all reader and Google requires in terms of relevancy, uniqueness, authoritative sources, safety links inserted, and language. Your modus operandi should be pretty simple: write better and then get more traffic, backlinks, and unique visitors.

The second thing a writer should think about is the prospective audience’s level of knowledge: whether a guide will be written for a professional or for a beginner. This is important because of the depth of research you are going to do. You can write for a beginner and avoid deep diving into each side of a chosen theme, outlining only essential parts. To the contrary, you can write for a professional and avoid the basics and explanations of the simplest details, because your readers will already know them. For such an audience, you won’t need to waste your time.

The third thing a writer should think about is purpose: guides are written in order to help people to comprehend a sphere or specific side of the sphere which is absolutely new for them and, accordingly, difficult at the beginning. It will not be a great decision to turn off your readers with academic content full of strange terms, complex sentences, and enormous information fragments. Be simple yet educational.

The fourth thing a writer should think about is demand: don’t try to get more traffic by taking the most popular topic for a guide. Yes, guides for beginners will always be popular and highly demanded. However, if you are only starting your way in a specific popular niche and want to introduce yourself decently, do not presume to be on top of the subject matter more than many of you readers, after just a few minutes of research.

The fifth thing a writer should think about is competitors. A simple way to find them is WebCEO’s Rank Tracking Tool which helps to identify your dangerous competitors and shows their rankings:

Let’s take Search Engine Journal, Moz, Ahrefs, Brian Dean, and Neil Patel as examples at this point. Their guides will always be on the first page of the Google SERPs, because:

1. they already have high authority as experts in their field;
2. their guides are already a great example of full optimization;
3. they often hit the nail on the head with their advice.

On already popular topics, you will need to ultimately write better content than your more established competitors for the topic’s keywords.

Think about topics which haven’t received enough attention yet but are still in demand, although not so high. Write about them and get your piece of pie, step by step building your audience and popularity. Don’t forget that every Jack has his Jill.

• HOW TO WRITE A CASE STUDY

The first thing a case study includes is analysis. While writing a case study, a writer has to remember that this is not a simple article where he or she is just describing how things went for a company. No. The analysis should be done. A deep and comprehensive investigation should be part of the writing process. It should also be proven by stats and trustworthy sources, because you must not pull material out of thin air.

The second thing a case study must include is a great story. We are sure readers are already tired of learning about industry giants for the tenth time. Companies and people who are already at the top can be boring subjects for those who have been saturated with content about them. In such cases, you must have a new or even controversial angle.  Or you can write a case study of a company or organization that has not been covered much yet. It may even be your own success story which will serve as an extra advertisement for your business. Look at Brian Dean, who has shown how he achieved his own traffic boost! Great success comes with great stories.

The third thing a case study must include is a plot. After choosing a story to consider, you have to play it. Nobody wants to read about a company that was successful at the beginning and became even more successful after applying a new strategy. Boring. You will be better off choosing a story of a real boom in the industry, i.e. a company that experienced really tough times before dramatically changing its strategy. That type of story is more interesting and raises more trust and emotions in a reader.

The fourth thing a case study must include is statistics. A case study goes hand in hand with figures. People may find your content exciting and well written, but they would also like to see a clear confirmation of your words. Here a writer needs some statistics to persuade a reader that the case study is about something that was successful. Be sure to mention the time period within which everything was accomplished:

The fifth thing a case study must include is instructions. We can also call it a to-do list. This means that a writer not only writes a story of someone’s success, but also applies explanations concerning each step the company took to get results. The consequences and potential losses from contrary decisions will also come in handy for a reader who may take your case study as a role model for his or her business.

• HOW TO WRITE A TUTORIAL

The most necessary aspects of tutorials are understanding and accuracy. In order to write something about a chosen topic you should understand it cover to cover, as well as the consequences of wrongly taken steps. Otherwise you may just waste your time and write something of low value. And you don’t need to do that. Study a topic you are going to write about deeper, check all the various aspects, and only then start to create your content.

The next necessary aspect of tutorials is simplicity. People look for tutorials to comprehend things they don’t understand simply and fast. And if they see an article written in a difficult manner which recalls standard instructions, don’t expect high traffic and visitors returning to your website. Discuss difficult topics in the simplest way.

Another necessary aspect of tutorials is usefulness. A writer may write an excellent tutorial regarding an old TV model’s settings, with beautiful pictures and simple explanations. However, will it be useful when people are watching only Smart TVs? Think carefully about your topic and take into account its demand and potential audience.

The fifth necessary thing about tutorials is length. A big tutorial is okay when we talk about a really huge and tough topic, however, in other cases try to make your article of a standard size, outlining only the important points. People tend to leave a page if they see that they will have to continue reading for a long time.

A common thing for all three types of long form content is target audience identifying. Any writer has to know for whom he or she creates content. This is rather important because of the style of writing, topics disclosed and the chosen niche. When you consider a certain type of person you are going to write for, the odds are you will prepare a more engaging article, which will attract more of your target audience and increase traffic to your website.

Learn your current audience, its age, nationality, location, occupation (if possible), lifestyle, interests, and so on. Google Analytics is a valuable help for you in this case.  

After you learn how to write different types of long format content, we can go to the next tip.

TIP #4: SEO

[how to optimize long form content]

• KEYWORD RESEARCH

Keywords are essential for your existence on the Internet. Conduct this research properly, take perfectly matched keywords, put them in your article, and wait for results. Making the wrong choice of keywords can relegate you to the dark corners of the Internet and you’ll never see the sun on the first page of search engines.

Why do keywords always play an important role in your content optimization?

Basically:

Without them your website, and specifically your article, will be invisible to searchers even though your content may be relevant to their queries! In other words, keywords are responsible for your presence in front of searchers’ eyes.

Results of bad keyword optimization:

You will get lost.

Proper keyword optimization leads to:

Traffic -> Better rankings -> Better organic search result positions.

WebCEO’s Keyword Research Tool is always beside you to help at any moment and find you the best, most winning keywords in a niche your content belongs to.

N/B: Pay attention to long tail keywords and their synonymic analogues. While short tail keywords are not so specific and may belong to several niches at the same time, long tail keywords lead to a particular sphere and outline only places where you can find information which fully meets a search query’s needs.

• STRUCTURAL COMPONENTS AND THEIR FORMATTING

1. Headings

Each type of long form content, whether we speak of guides, case studies, or tutorials, MUST have a heading which is bright, interesting, and disclosing the sense of the content below. It is also important to use a keyword in it so a reader will find you faster and see a match to his or her query already in the Title (seen in the SERPs or in the page Heading! Don’t forget that your heading must be relevant to the content you are going to enlighten; otherwise Google will not be happy about you.

A piece of useful advice: use figures, how-to combinations (extremely successful with tutorials), or questions in headings. For the first variant, this may be the year in which your article is topical, the general number of tools/goods/etc., percentages or general statistics:

2. Subheadings

Subheadings are useful details which will sort out the material you present and drop it into smaller pieces for the sake of convenience. With subheadings, authors outline different semantic parts of the whole article, which also may be of a reader’s concern. It is better to optimize them as independent headings. Put keywords in your subheadings, make them bright and at the same time simple – relevant to searchers’ queries.

For example, here is a really great way of using how-to’s in subheadings which can easily be used as search queries:

3. Paragraphs

First, don’t make paragraphs huge. Small paragraphs with only essential material will bring you more success than enormous units of non-filtered information which people will not even read. Long form content is, by definition, a vast amount of new knowledge, all in one place. Your mission is to make this easy to consume.

Second, paragraphs contain a lot of important information which should and can be optimized not only for ranking success, but also for readers’ convenience which leads to a low bounce rate:

• Sentences: guides may make you write really long and complex sentences depending on the chosen topic, but try not to do this. First, this makes it difficult for a reader to understand the material quickly. Second, long sentences are boring. Of course, there are cases when you can’t be rid of them just because. However, try to split them. A perfect example of such writing model is Brian Dean. Look at this:

Source: https://backlinko.com/skyscraper-technique

Simple, short, yet highly understandable and informative. Even bright, I’d like to say.

• Bullet and numbered lists: readers like them and we advise you to like them too. They help people to pay attention to really important information. Since a guide’s goal is to teach readers, they are perceived in the category of “needful things”, because our eyes see information presented this way as critical. Therefore, readers will catch things easier and remember better. In tutorials, such lists are inevitable as they outline steps to perform;

• Bold, italic, or underlined words or even parts of sentences help a lot during diagonal reading, which is rather popular nowadays. By doing such formatting, a writer outlines parts which are crucial for understanding so the readers will keep them in mind for the sake of further learning;
• Since the above-mentioned formatting is used really often, there are also other ways to properly optimize useful pieces of data for a reader: words or parts of sentences of different colors, and, if it is possible to do on your website, – highlighted text;

4. Type of format

You should decide on the overall format you are going to present your content in: whether it will be an html- or a PDF-article.

An Html format may not give you many variants for designing your text, however, one can read it any time via browser. Also it is easier to “walk” through links if they are inserted in your article.

A PDF-format is not so mobile and comfortable for reading on mobile devices. However, you may design them as you like and readers can save these documents on their desktops or laptops for offline use, which can sometimes be really convenient.

• VISUAL MEDIA

Visual media always makes your content brighter, more interesting, and multifaceted, because different types of visual media may present various sides of data. If your article is filled with something besides plain text, your readers will appreciate this a lot.

Images, screenshots, gifs, and infographics fit any form of content, especially if we are talking about schemes and step-by-step tutorials which need some helpful arrows, circles and so on. They will definitely take your content to a higher level and help people to relax while reading. Infographics are a great match for tutorials and guides, if a process/topic you are going to describe may be transformed into this type of content.

Videos will come in handy for case studies especially. If you have done an interview with the CEO of the company you are going to write about, by all means add this to your article without hesitation. This will make your text even more trustworthy. Also videos are really useful in tutorials, where you can show necessary processes.

With audio files you should be careful, as people are less likely to listen to that. So make sure that your article is full even without the audio.

One more advantage of visual media is they garner important vertical search results! If you optimize your visual media, you will have a chance to be seen in the Google image carousel or as their video selection for the first page. This will bring more traffic to your website! You can easily discover your vertical search results rankings with WebCEO’s Rank Tracking Tool. Besides, with this tool you can also learn if you have been chosen for a Featured Snippet!

• LINKS

It will not be a surprise if you decide to insert links to your article. These may be internal links or those which lead a reader to an outside source. Always remember that links also have an impact on your website positions! Never insert links from untrustworthy, spammy, or suspicious sources. This advice will protect your website, because bad links may cause harm to your website or disturb your visitors. Do your best and work only with the best.  

If you are going to add a link which leads to a related article on your own website, make sure that it is not broken and relevant to the keyword rich anchor text you write for it. This will be beneficial for your older articles, bringing them more traffic. You can easily learn everything about this with WebCEO’s Internal Links Optimization Tool:

and Technical Audit Tool:

If you are writing a case study don’t miss a thing: leave a link to a company’s website. Readers should have an opportunity to check everything by themselves and be sure that you are writing about an existing business. That business will notice you gave them a backlink.

If you are writing a guide with someone else’s statistics, if you mention somebody’s works, or if you quote somebody’s words directly, leave a link to the source you used in order not to violate GDPR rules and possibly perturb your audience.

In tutorials there are a lot of possibilities regarding links:

1. a writer can place links to relevant products readers can use if we are talking about external links;
2. a writer can insert links which lead to related articles, or those which lead to material on a website a reader should know about.

• SNIPPET

Snippet optimization is important both for long and short form content. On the front page of Google, a reader can discover a short description of the content you provide, making it very likely that only your relevant target audience will click further.

To optimize your snippet properly, you should think about the following components:

1. Title tag: the first thing a reader looks at in the SERPs themselves! Remember the part about heading optimization? While the HTML H1 tag is usually the headline people see when they go to your webpage, the Title tag is what they see as the header for your page in the search results. Time to use: keywords, statistics, numbers, questions, and how-to’s;
2. URL: if a URL copies your title, that is even better, because Google outlines words from a searcher’s query in your snippet to show that this is exactly that thing he or she was looking for;
3. Meta description: this is what people see in the search results below the Title of your webpage. Write a short yet informative description about a chosen topic, so readers will get a synopsis of the content they are about to click on and not bounce later.

Well optimized snippet:

• CTAs

The hardest part in the content optimization process is maximizing the number of people who respond to your “Calls to Action.” CTAs must be bright, catchy and short: up to ten or twelve words which should make a person your permanent visitor. The design of a CTA should attract the attention of a reader so he or she will have a desire to, for instance, subscribe. This requires some brain storming on your part.

Remember that your CTA is not just an invitation. This is a highly beneficial offer for a reader to accept with pleasure. Those benefits may be free future guides, presents, discounts (if you sell products or services), and so on.

TIP #5: Promotion

[how to promote your content properly and make it go viral]

The main purpose of your content promotion is to get more backlinks, thus increasing traffic and heightening your website’s domain authority. There are actually plenty of ways you can use to promote any type of format.

The first way, which you can successfully apply, is to conduct various link building strategies. In the case of long form content you can freely use:

• the Skyscraper Technique, which will also help you to beat your competitors by providing superior content they already got backlinks for and getting those backlinks replaced or augmented in your favor;
• build links from broken links, if you know that there is a website with a broken page you can replace with your own;
• your case study may be perfect for guest blogging on a website with higher authority than your site has;
• if your tutorial includes an infographic, bravely complete this and offer to another website in the same niche;
• you can use an interview trick: for example, for your case study you can interview a director from a company chosen and then ask them to leave a link to your study on their official website;
• your case study may fit Connectively; just go there and learn if there any journalists who would like to use your material;
• a link round up on a popular and authoritative website can bring you much success, however, your content has to be of the highest quality;
• you can leave a link to your article on relevant blogs and forums, describing how deep your research is;
• You may have friends who can place links to your site on their website;
• WebCEO’s Content Submission Tool is always ready to suggest and send you to authoritative places where you can submit your material:

You should keep track of your links in order to be sure they weren’t eliminated or their anchor text wasn’t changed. For this you can use WebCEO’s Chosen Links Watch Tool:

Social Media Promotion will always help you to spread your material faster than anything else can and there are a lot of ways to perform this. However, you will not be able to complete this with an unpopular or empty account. You may create a really great post with a bright image, but nobody will pay any attention if you are a newcomer without followers. So make sure you follow lots of relevant people after adding fascinating posts, engage with them and keep track of your performance and regularly update your timelines and profile content.

Ask some successful representatives of your niche to promote your content. You can possibly offer something in exchange. Maybe you can offer to let them guest post on your site or you can offer a backlink to them on your website.

You can use Facebook for a successful promotion. Join groups which are connected to your sphere of activity and then promote your content. If there were any group posts that are related to your content, you can put a link to your own content in the comments section, briefly describing the main points. Also, if you have used any materials or pieces of information for your research, which you attributed in the post itself, you can tag those people who were among the sources. They will pay attention to your article and make you glad you gave them a shout out! They will likely give you a shout out from their social media accounts as a result. Do not forget about hashtags, with which people can find your work in platform searches. And don’t forget to have all your colleagues and friends share and like your social media posts which link to your content.

Track your results and social media engagement with WebCEO’s Social Engagement Tool. Always be aware of your social media performance.

IN CONCLUSION, long form content is always in demand. Deep and comprehensive research is always popular among users and is rewarded by Google. Devote your time and effort to create something valuable and unique in order to bring more traffic and extend your backlink profile with juicy backlinks.

It’s high time to start your journey with by analyzing your competitors’ backlinks! Don’t waste your time; use WebCEO’s Competitor Backlink Spy!

The post Long Form Content Optimization: Guides, Case Studies and Tutorials appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

There’s no content marketing without content. It’s critical to the success of your online business. Content helps drive traffic to your site by making you recognizable to search engines, helps people connect with you, and most importantly, it drives sales. In short, you can never have enough good content.

Yet consistently creating new content is both costly and time-consuming. Generally speaking, it’s worth the investment. But there’s one thing that’s pretty frustrating about the content we write for our blogs and websites: it’s one and done.

For all the time that goes into creating blog content for SEO, it’d be nice if we could do more with it than just post it and then wait for it to cycle down to the bottom of the list, only to be forgotten forever. It’s true that reposting the same content is bad practice. You’ll look lazy to your readers, and search engines will start to think you’re no longer original and relevant.

But you don’t need to repost your content to get more out of it. There are quite a few things you can do that will allow you to make use of the effort you put into creating it in the first place.

Consider the following ways for making old content continue to work.

1. Refresh it

When you load a piece of content up onto your website, remember that in some respects you’re freezing time. Whatever you create is going to reflect your goals and understanding of your audience at that particular moment.

But you and your business are constantly changing and growing. One way to make use of your older content is to go back through it and to optimize it for what you now know about your business.

This is especially true for conversion content. As you move along, you’ll learn more about what works for your audience and what doesn’t. And while you don’t want to repeat yourself over and over again, you do want your content to be as effective as possible in driving sales and conversions.

Go over what you’ve got on your site and change wording, tone, style and voice to reflect what you now know about your audience. This way you don’t need to create any new content, but you will be able to get more out of what you’ve already created in the form of better conversions and sales.

To further support your content refresh and optimization efforts, check out WebCEO’s SEO Content Assistant. This tool can help you identify areas where your content can be improved or updated, ensuring that it continues to perform well in search engine results and engage your audience.

2. Make it up-to-date

We all want our content to be as evergreen as possible. In a perfect world, every piece of content would be comprehensive enough and written in such a way that we would never need to touch it again. But we don’t live in that perfect world.

Things are changing constantly. New research reveals new trends, and people are innovating all the time. Eventually, your content will go stale.

But this doesn’t mean you need to completely redo what you’ve written. In fact, you can often have more success by simply building upon what you’ve already written. For example, you can repost the original blog, and then in a different font or in a different color you can go through and add in content that is new or different from the original.

This will often times resonate better than a new piece because readers who have already read the original will be able to more quickly find out what’s new. Furthermore, new audiences can easily catch up on how things were and how they’ve changed.

Updating posts helps not only in content marketing, but in SEO, too. Google and other search engines like fresh, relevant and timely content, but you can also boost rankings and improve search engine performance by updating and overhauling older content.

This strategy works great with pieces optimized for conversion. For example, if you have a “Best X for Y” page set up to try and drive sales, updating it yearly to include any new trends, new products and new recommendations will help show to your readers that you know what you are talking about and that you are a relevant and authoritative source of information.

3. Expand upon it

Part of the challenge in creating content for a blog or website is determining which topics to pursue. To be successful, you need to spend a lot of time brainstorming topics and then finding people who are capable of writing about them.

If you start to run low on ideas, or need some content to fill your calendar, then consider using your older content for inspiration.

There are two ways you can do this. The first is to simply add depth to the topic. If you put together 1,000 words for one post, maybe you can expand it into two or three thousand. You could create a series, with the original content serving as part one. Subsequent parts would be new content, but everything would be related to the first post.

The second way to do this would be to turn sections of your original content into their own blog posts. When we write for the web, we’re somewhat limited in what we can say because of web readers’ inherently short attention spans. In each section, we try to touch on the most relevant points, leaving out some details so as to prevent being wordy.

For an example, consider this post. We’re discussing different ways to use old content. In each section, we’re going over general ideas so that you, the reader, can learn about the different option available. But we could easily do a post for each section that goes over more specifically how you could optimize, update or expand upon your content.

If you do decide to do this, then it’s worth mentioning that you should focus on the most widely-viewed content on your site. Taking the pieces people already like and expanding upon it is a great way to leverage your content. It will show to your audience you’re receptive to their needs and are willing to spend time to make sure you’re as useful to them as possible.

4. Rewrite (or reuse) it

A key component to the success of any online business is how you generate links. Link building is essential for driving traffic to your site and establishing yourself as an authority. And one of the best ways to do this is to write guest posts for other blogs. This puts you in touch with influencers, and it also helps attract new audiences.

However, as you likely already know, guest posting is hard. There’s lots of competition, and blogs and websites are demanding more and more from their guest contributors. It’s become very challenging to find guest post topics that will be useful and interesting to the audience you’re targeting.

One way to work around this is to take some of your better content and rewrite it for other blogs. Nearly every blog will want original content, but this doesn’t mean you need to come up with a completely new idea. Sites may like what you have to say, so save time and energy by repurposing what you’ve already done so that it will work for other sites.

Another option is to try to get people to repost your content. Many blogs will be willing to post already written blogs with proper citation. This requires an outreach campaign, but it can be very useful for helping you get more out of your content.

5. Convert it to a different format

We’ve been talking almost exclusively about blog posts, but there are many different mediums you can use on the web. One of the best ways you can repurpose your old content is to change its format.

Videos, podcasts and infographics have taken the web by storm. But making them can be costly and time-consuming to make. To save energy, and also to make your old content keep working for you, consider turning an old post into one of these other formats.

Infographics in particular are a great option largely because they are highly-shareable. This makes them a great opportunity for reposting old content. Simply organize the main point into something visual – you even have free tools to help you with that, like Canva Infographic Maker. Then just start promoting what you’ve made through social media.

Thanks to WebCEO’s Social Media Analytics tools, you’ll easily track your social mentions, analyze your social media traffic and see how well your content works for you on Facebook.

Oldie but goodie

Just because content is old doesn’t mean it serves no purpose. While reposting something doesn’t make a lot of sense, there are lots of ways to repurpose existing content to make it keep working for you. Consider using some of these strategies for your blog or website and let your content drive your business to new levels.

The post 5 Ways to Revive Your Old Posts Like a Content Marketing Pro appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

In 2016, 88% of B2B companies were doing some form of content marketing. This number is only going to increase. Optimizing your website for search will help, but it won’t guarantee visibility. This is why you should try to make constantly generated content visible to as many people as possible, on and off your site. And how do we that?

The answer is content distribution. Creating content and waiting for it to rank organically is not sufficient. More so when you are starting out.

No amount of other SEO activity can make up for the benefits of content distribution and the traffic it brings.

Content distribution is not merely about sharing your content on social media or sending it out along with your newsletter. Both these avenues are highly crowded, making it difficult to grab your audience’s attention.

It is time to explore the lesser-known options. Here are a few tips to help you get started:

1. Niche content submission communities

Merely sharing your content on social media alone will not fetch you too much traffic. Most of the time, the visibility of these posts will be limited to your followers. One way to get more out of your social media efforts is to submit your content to pages or groups where your audience members regularly visit.

This could be in the form of discussion threads, dedicated hashtags, Twitter chats, subreddits, groups, pages, etc. The people who follow these conversations are highly engaged. Therefore, the chances of them checking out your content will be higher.

The key here is to make sure you don’t appear too promotional. There are many content submission websites as well which you can take advantage of.

Utilizing WebCEO’s Submission Tool can also help you identify potential websites and communities where your content can be submitted.

2. Optimize your social sharing snippets, cover images, meta description, and the first line of your content

Though this is more of a content creation tip, it plays a key role in content distribution as well. Most of the times, these are your audience’s first touch point with your content. You have to give the audience a reason to go ahead and read it.

Here are a few tips to help you do this:

• Make your cover image more interesting.
• A/B test your social snippets.
• Make your first line interesting and authentic – ask questions, add new and relevant statistics, mention a problem your audience faces regularly and how you are going to solve it, share a personal story, etc.
• Learn to optimize your content for social media using Yoast SEO. Enhancing your content’s visibility on social media can be significantly improved by analyzing your social metrics, which helps in understanding what type of content resonates most with your audience.

3. Optimize share button positions

It is crucial that you place the share buttons above the fold. Keeping it at the beginning or the end is fine, but it is tedious for users to scroll all the way down or up to share your content.

Instead, keep your social share buttons floating, so that it always stays above the fold. The key here is to ensure that it doesn’t obstruct the content or hamper the reading experience, especially on mobile.

• Here’s how to add floating share buttons without any WordPress plugin.
• Here’s how to add floating share buttons with WP plugins for your WordPress SEO needs.

4. Slack communities

Slack is one of the most popular office communication tools available. But that’s not all. With its ever-increasing user base, more and more people are setting up or joining Slack communities.

They are basically Slack channels where people from different organizations come together to discuss and learn more about a specific topic. It could be related to anything from marketing to tech documentation. You can either start a new community or join existing ones.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind while using Slack for distributing content:

• Before you start distributing your content, make sure you build rapport with fellow channel members.
• You need to stay active and interact with fellow channel members regularly.
• Don’t be overtly self-promotional.
• Regularly read articles shared by fellow members and offer your feedback for them.
• Make sure you follow Slack etiquettes while communicating with fellow members.
• Make sure the content you share is relevant and helpful to fellow members.

A few communities that you could check out.

5. Reach out to people who have shared similar content

This is a great way to push your content to a set of people who are more likely to find your content useful. Firstly, pick out a few top ranking pieces of content that deal with the same topic to what you published. Make sure they contain outdated information.

Then, identify people who shared them recently. Reach out to them, saying that you have new and updated content dealing with the same topic and that they might find it useful. The likelihood of them checking out your content and sharing it will definitely be higher.

6. Use the Custom Audience feature

Social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest have a custom audience feature. This allows users to identify and target people who have engaged with your website or your social network pages before. As the audience is interested and familiar with the content you produce, it will be easier for them to click on your ads.

Best Practice – identify people who have visited a particular section of your blog. Then, when you publish similar content, make sure you promote it to that particular section of the audience.

Here’s a guide to Facebook’s custom audience feature.

7. Leverage your mentions

Most of the time when you publish content, you will have a few outbound links. It could be a quote from an influencer, findings from a particular research paper, link to the website of a relevant tool. This helps make your content more trustworthy, helpful, etc.

What we forget is that we can leverage these links to promote our content. Reach out to these people and let them know about the mention. As you’ve done them a favor, this may lead to reciprocity and they may end up promoting your content. You may even get a newsletter mention if the quality of your content is high.

8. Use customer messaging platforms

These tools are mostly used for customer communication. But, they can also be used for content marketing too – right from idea generation to delivering content. These services are normally used by an audience who are engaged and are in need of the content. So, placing their search keywords in your content will definitely improve your SEO.

It can be very helpful for content distribution too. When customers ask for help, don’t restrict your answers to FAQs. Instead, take this opportunity to send them relevant, educational, and motivational content like best practices, real life examples etc. The immediacy and relevancy makes them a great platform to distribute your content.

Here’s how Intercom uses their own tool to do this.

9. Email series

Email is a great channel to distribute your content. Even though newsletters are ideal, getting readers to click is becoming more and more difficult. This is why we should start using an email series every now and then.

When you have written a really helpful article filled with actionable tips, instead of publishing it on your blog, divide it into an email series and send it out to your subscribers. It could be done on a weekly or daily basis. The language used should be that of a 5th grader – simple and clear. The article should not be published on your blog until the series is over. Again, it is all about adding value right in their inbox. And you will want to combine this with call to actions to buy your product or extend their service subscription with you.

You can use tools like MailChimp and ConvertKit to set up such an email series.

Wrapping up

Content distribution needs to be taken seriously. Doing it for its own sake will not cut it anymore. You need to actively find new ways to improve the reach of your content. You will have to be creative and dedicated. Above all, it requires persistence and perseverance.

You shouldn’t stop once you think you have achieved your expectations. You have to keep going on and on. There are always new platforms and techniques waiting to be found.

The post 9 Lesser-Known Content Distribution Tips appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

RankBrain represents one of the most intriguing changes in the world of SEO in the last year. Initially introduced in October 2015, it still remains a mystery for most experts. However, due to numerous studies performed since then, we are able to understand some basics features of this machine learning system.

Even though the name may imply otherwise, its priority is to provide more relevant results to searches that are completely new. After initial trials, people from Google realized that this system is actually great when dealing with ambiguous and poorly defined queries as well as natural language.

History of RankBrain

Have in mind that this is not Google’s first attempt to implement machine learning into their systems. Previously, we could see a similar technology in Google AdWords. Whenever RankBrain needs to assess a page, it focuses on the relevancy of the page itself, similarly to the Google AdWords Quality Score. Based on this score, it places different pages on different positions. Have in mind that the Google AdWords Quality Score doesn’t use external signals such as links. At this point, we are not certain whether RankBrain relies on links when judging content. Also, this system has some similarities with Word2Vec.

Word2Vec was based on a technology called skip-gram and a continuous bag of words. These two models allowed a system to establish a relationship between main words and all neighboring words. Also, Word2Vec was able to embed words into vectors which allowed them to be better understood.

RankBrain works similarly. It is pretty good at establishing semantic relationships and reading user intent. Based on this, we can surmise that RankBrain is at least partially based on Word2Vec technology.

Why was RankBrain introduced in the first place?

There are about 3 billion searches every day. Out of these 3 billion, 15 % are completely unique, never seen before. This amounts to 450 million. RankBrain was invented in order to process these unique queries and give a proper answer to them. The system does this by making an educated guess. Based on all previously accumulated information, it is able to make semantic connections and establish a user’s intent. But, in some cases, even with all its advanced technology backing it up, RankBrain can make a mistake and provide a final user with results that he is not looking for. If that is the case, it will provide a new set of results, hopefully satisfying the individual. This is why it is called machine learning. RankBrain is able to constantly refine its results and improve its suggestions.

Many people think that RankBrain is an artificial intelligence system. This is not the case. It is a machine learning system able to improve itself without any human interference. Through advancement, RankBrain could one day reach the state of “artificial intelligence,” but, there are still too many limitations for this to happen. Google product managers seem to have realized that RankBrain is excellent when dealing with ambiguous and long-tail keywords. Unlike before, when Google would focus on one word within the phrase, RankBrain is able to understand the meaning behind the words and give proper suggestions.

Relationship with Hummingbird

There are many misconceptions when it comes to Hummingbird and RankBrain. The latter is not an algorithm nor does it replace Hummingbird. In fact, these two are separate entities that are meant to work in conjunction. Experts refer to RankBrain as Hummingbird’s modification. Most likely, when processing a query, RankBrain finishes its part of the job and then Hummingbird additionally refines it.

Similarly to Word2Vec and Google AdWords, it is possible that Google took the best out of Hummingbird and implemented it within RankBrain. At this point, we can only speculate. The fact is that Google is very protective of its technology and all we can do at this point is notice similarities and differences between various systems.

RankBrain as the Wild Card of the Google Ranking System

Google has announced that RankBrain has become the number three ranking signal in the short period of its existence. But, there are many questions regarding it. Unlike other ranking signals (more than 200 of them), RankBrain most likely doesn’t represent a direct signal. Instead, it affects the way Google perceives queries and through it, search as a whole. RankBrain is not static. It is constantly improving and refining queries according to its own perception. Additionally, unlike other ranking signals, RankBrain is completely autonomous, able to work without any human interference.

But, keep in mind that this machine learning system still has limited use. It was primarily created in order to help users with unique queries. And to be fair, it is doing a great job. This means that RankBrain will not interfere if there are already valid suggestions available. Perhaps this is the reason why it is only at position three when it comes to ranking signal importance. We have learned that RankBrain can also help out with other long-tail queries, ambiguous keywords and slang. The system will not interfere when there is sufficient data for a query (at least the way we understand).

Nevertheless, this raises some questions. If RankBrain has managed to gain so much importance in so little time, it is quite possible that it will continue increasing in relevance eventually taking over common queries. This could change the whole SEO world.

How Does RankBrain Work?

As we mentioned previously, RankBrain has to embed words into vectors so it can use them properly. After that, all these vectors are put into the same virtual space. This includes all semantically related words that help the system establish relationships. Here is a good example:

In order to weigh the words properly, RankBrain has to understand correlations between them. Some of these semantically close keywords will have more impact on the query while other will have less impact. The importance of a keyword is established based on its distance from the main word. Related keywords that are far away from the main keyword have less importance on the query while those that are close to it, have more importance. Based on this, RankBrain gives priority to different content.

But, that is not all. This is only the part of the equation, the part which we know about. There is probably much more to it given that RankBrain is able to provide answers to some poorly defined questions and other queries that previously presented a problem.

How do you optimize for RankBrain?

At this point in time, there is no point in optimizing for it. Simply put, these queries have too small of a volume for us to bother with them. However, if one day RankBrain takes over a larger chunk of the queries, we should start considering it. Anyway, your main SEO strategy should remain the same; you have to have great content that will attract clicks and make visitors read it. If one day RankBrain becomes the dominant element of Google search, we will have to forget about link building. Instead of off-page, we will have to concentrate more on on-page optimization.

RankBrain works through trials and error. Even though the system performs its own analysis before presenting results to users, that doesn’t mean that users will be satisfied with suggestions. In order for your copy to be successful and to properly optimize it for RankBrain, you will have to focus on things such as click through rate, time spent on page and bounce rate.

According to our presumptions, these statistics are the best measure of visitor satisfaction with a page and at the same time, they send a strong signal to RankBrain regarding relevance. So, if you wish to optimize a page for RankBrain these are our suggestions:

• Create compelling titles and meta descriptions
• Write longer copy
• Include authoritative resources and studies within the text
• Be direct and focus on the user’s benefit
• Make your website responsive

WebCEO’s SEO Content Assistant can help optimize your content to match RankBrain’s preferences, guiding you in crafting relevant content that resonates with your audience and RankBrain’s understanding of relevance.

Have in mind that your article still has to be somewhat important to the query. If it isn’t, RankBrain will not suggest it to a user in the first place. But, if it does, try and make the best out of it, because RankBrain will notice how the customer reacts.

In the future, a visitor will be the one that determines whether a website lives or dies. In that regard, be sure to provide maximum value and the freshest, most relevant information.

Examples of RankBrain

Here is one of the more popular examples of RankBrain in action:

We used the query “What’s the title of the consumer at the highest level of a food chain”. This can be seen as quite an ambiguous query. You might think that Google would answer the query by presenting websites about production, shopping malls, food chains, human as a consumer, prices etc. However, this query is clearly connected to language commonly used in biology textbooks and specifically, the word “highest level” would clearly refer to “predators.” By using its database, RankBrain is able to make a good guess and return results connected to this particular topic.

As it turns out, RankBrain is also good at giving results based on our own browser history and previous searches. Let us use an example with Barack Obama.

In order to get Barack Obama’s age, we can type “How old is President Obama?” Google can easily recognize what we are looking for giving us data on Barack Obama. However, after this query, if we type “How old is his wife?” Google may understand that we are looking for data about Michelle Obama based on our history.

Conclusion

At this point, there are simply too many unknowns. We still cannot properly assess RankBrain or its true potential. It has shown great results so far but that doesn’t mean that Google will give it a greater role than it currently has. One thing is for sure. As always, Google is trying to improve the user experience and create new technologies that will help users get the most relevant results to their queries. In terms of SEO, things may or may not change in the future. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Even if they do change, Google will still be based on a certain technology, technology that can be exploited and optimized for. With this in mind, if you are working within SEO, there is no reason to be concerned.

For tracking how your site’s rankings are affected by RankBrain and other factors, use WebCEO’s Rank Tracking tool. Check your website positions on desktop, smartphone and tablet: the results may differ dramatically!

Additionally, to ensure your SEO strategies are comprehensive and up-to-date, explore WebCEO’s Online SEO tools to cover all your bases from on-page optimization to backlink analysis.

The post RankBrain – the Wild Card of the Google Search Ranking System appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.