Mediastreet
Tag

SEO Content

Browsing
In News

Product-Led Content: Weave Your Product into SEO Content

No Comments

By Ali Faagba

If you’ve ever gone from reading a blog post to signing up for a free trial of any software after conducting a Google search, you’ve encountered product-led SEO content.

It departs from the previous online marketing strategy of generating marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) before passing them on to the sales team to convert. Because most content is intended to drive business goals, the product should be contextually woven into the content to drive awareness and sales, according to the understanding of product-led content.

As a result, the leads generated by product-led content immediately become product-qualified leads (PQLs), which are a more potent set of leads than MQLs.

This post will teach you everything you need to know about product-led SEO content, with real-world examples from brands that are succeeding with it.

What does product-led SEO content mean?

Product-led SEO content is the type of content that connects your product with a potential buyer via organic search ranking. It strategically positions your product as part of a solution you’re telling a reader about, piquing their interest to try it out.

It encourages visitors to try your product rather than simply providing you with their contact information. Product-led content is preferable because research shows that 87% of MQLs do not convert despite the best efforts of your sales reps.

Consider this: how many times have you signed up for a newsletter because you enjoyed the content you’d just read or because you wanted to gain access to a new one? If you’re like the majority of people, you’d say several times.

But did you sign up to buy something? The answer is most likely no. Now, flip the coin and consider your intention if you signed up to try out a product.

The idea is that product-led content is the most aligned with purchase intent.

Benefits of product-led SEO content

Here are the benefits of product-led SEO content.

It brings more potential customers

Product-led content is superior because it corresponds to buyer intent and thus attracts more prospective buyers.

As you’ll see later in this post, you can’t have product-led content unless you understand why the potential reader might need your product.

It shortens the sales cycle

The traditional sales cycle is 84 days long, according to HubSpot. During this time, a prospect discovers a problem, searches for a solution, discovers your product, compares it to other options, and either uses it or goes with the competitors.

However, with product-led SEO content, you can showcase your product as a solution to their problem so that they will be compelled to try it out. This assists them in making a decision and, as a result, reduces the amount of time they spend going back and forth in your pipeline.

It’s cost-effective

Going after contacts whose intent they don’t know is a costly exercise for the sales team. This takes phone calls, emails, and sometimes face-to-face meetings, and, most importantly, time.

Product-led content, on the other hand, encourages your prospects to purchase your product or contact your sales team.

It limits competition

Anyone who tries your product or schedules a demo knows right away if it is a good fit for them. Some steps in the purchasing process, such as alternative considerations, may be eliminated as a result.

Contrast this with someone who simply downloaded an ebook or subscribed to your newsletter. Even if your sales team makes every effort to convert them, it is natural for them to progress to the stage of product comparison, which may push you out of the race.

With that said, let’s get into the specifics.

Steps to write successful product-led SEO content

In this section, I’ll walk you through the process of creating product-led SEO content that drives sales.

Understand the product

If you find yourself writing about a product, you’re probably a marketer or content writer tasked with selling it. This indicates that you are not an expert in that product or industry. The first step should be to close the knowledge gap.

Remember that product-led content is all about incorporating a product into an article contextually. A closer look at the article will reveal information about the buyer personas as well as the product.

Why? Because the product’s owners understood there was a problem to be solved and for whom it was being solved when they built that product.

This is why the product discovery call is the best way to learn about the relationship between:

  • The product
  • The problem it solves
  • Whom it solves it for

Knowing all of this will assist you in determining who you are targeting and what search terms they will use on search engines. The following are the questions to ask to learn everything you need to know:

  • What problem does your product solve?
  • Why was it built in the first place?
  • What are the strongest use cases?
  • Who are the primary target users?
  • What are their pain points?
  • Who are the competitors?
  • What does your product do better than the competition, and how’s it different?

You can discuss this with the founder, the CEO, the sales manager, or even the head of marketing. Just make sure you’re gaining your knowledge from an insider. If possible, you can also speak to the existing customers to tap into their firsthand experience.

And, because the majority of this work is dependent on the success of this first step, don’t stop there. Do the following as well:

Find relevant queries: You’ve already thought of some of the research they might be doing that is relevant to your product, so take it a step further by researching those keywords on Google Trends, Also Asked, Keyword Chef, and Answer the Public. This can provide you with a wealth of information about what your audience is looking for and their stages of awareness.

Find data to validate (or invalidate) your convictions: This boils down to two steps: first, go to where they are and find out what they are talking about. For example, many marketing conversations take place on LinkedIn, whereas many political conversations take place on Twitter and Facebook. Second, use customer research tools such as SparkToro.

Study the review sites: Look for your competitors on review sites like G2 and learn about the issues their customers are having. Looking closely, you’ll see how you can credibly position your product as a better alternative.

Outline your buyer personas and ideal customer profile

If you are a B2B company and your product is aimed at other businesses, you must define your ideal customer profile (ICP). Identify your buyer personas if you’re a B2C company.

An ICP is a fictitious representation of a company that needs your solutions, whereas a buyer persona is the ideal individual customer who will most likely purchase from you.

An ICP will include information on the following:

  • Company size
  • Industry
  • Geographical location
  • Revenue

A buyer persona, on the other hand, will include details about:

  • Demographic (age, gender, marital status, education, occupation, etc.)
  • Online behavior (preferred social media, favorite influencers, trends, interests, etc.)
  • Challenges
  • Goals

That brings us to the next step: determining your target audience. To accomplish this, you should gather information from existing customers in three ways:

  • Obtain quantitative information from surveys.
  • Customers should be interviewed.
  • Obtain information from the sales team.

Conduct keyword research

Keyword research is an essential component of product-led SEO content. It allows you to validate all of your previous findings, such as whether a keyword is worth pursuing or not.

It also suggests additional potential keywords for you to consider. It also reveals important information, such as the competition’s backlink profile, the keywords they rank for, long-tail and short-tail keywords, keyword difficulty, and more.

Look for keywords that will give you a better chance of ranking, especially if your industry is highly competitive. To put it another way, look for long-tail keywords. This may sound like a cliche to you right now, but it’s important to understand.

Long-tail keywords, just to be clear, are those with low search volume and competition. These keywords are more specific and commercial in nature than informative. This article is an example of long-tail keywords: best Anyword alternatives.

These should be your top priorities because a searcher at this stage is in the consideration stage and is more likely to purchase than, say, someone searching for how to write an essay, a long-tail keyword.

The bottom line is to understand buyer intent and find low-hanging fruits that’ll bring you traffic and money quickly.

To further understand search intent, take a look at this table by Foundation Inc.:

Pro tip: You can also consider zero-volume keywords if you strongly feel that some of your prospects might be looking for them. In recent days, I have seen a lot of marketing leaders encourage this.

In my experience, many zero-volume keywords generate traffic, and their posts rank for keywords other than the ones they originally targeted. According to Ubersuggest, this post, Writesonic vs Copy AI, has 20 monthly search volumes and ten, according to Ahrefs.

However, after taking the risk of writing and publishing it, it now receives nearly 200 visitors per month, with over a thousand impressions.

Furthermore, Google has said that 25% of search queries on its search engine are new. That’s another reason you shouldn’t always mind keyword research data when planning your content calendar.

Use a product-led approach to prioritize content

Keyword research is no longer sufficient. Focus on commercial-intent keywords that can contextually feature your product as a solution to maximize your resources.

Take it from Ahrefs, which happens to be a keyword research tool.

Assume you work with user onboarding software. The third column in the table below lists some of the potential topics for your blog.

How to use in-app communication to increase retention
Some examples of good in-app communication
How to find users through SEO
Blogging for your business

Now, define the criteria for scoring the topics and determining their importance to your business.

This is indispensable because people can’t execute in-app communication without your product. How to use in-app communication to increase retention
This is very useful because to apply any of these examples, they’ll probably need your product. Some examples of good in-app communication
This isn’t going to lead to sales, but you can mention your product since they’ll eventually need to communicate with users in-app. How to find users through SEO
This is completely irrelevant, but it freshens up your website and can also bring traffic and create awareness. Blogging for your business

The next step is to add points blog post topic based on those criteria. Here is an example:

3 This is indispensable because people can’t execute in-app communication without your product How to use in-app communication to increase retention
2 This is very useful because to apply any of these examples; they’ll probably need your product Some examples of good in-app communication
1 This is going to lead to sales, but you can mention your product since they’ll eventually need to communicate with them in-app How to find users through SEO
1 This is completely irrelevant, but it freshens up your website and can also bring traffic and create awareness. Blogging for your business

As you can see, the one that accumulates 3 points has the highest score, which you should focus on. This is because they are directly related to your product and can result in immediate users and revenue for your company.

Conduct SERPs analysis

It is critical to consult existing literature in your industry to write better content. Concentrate on what your competitors have been doing on Google, which will help you create content that outperforms theirs.

Examine the top ten articles on Google—which appear to be nine these days. Examine how they were put together. Things to look into here include the following:

  • Are they how-to guides?
  • Are they listicles?
  • Are they a mix of both?
  • What are the key points they cover?
  • How in-depth are they?
  • What new insights can you add to the topic?
  • What can you do better?

The last two questions are the most important, and they are the reason you are performing the SERP analysis in the first place.

Being able to answer these critically and excellently will not only give you a better chance of ranking but also of delighting and convincing your site visitors.

Pro tip: Many SEO experts advise you not to copy your competitors, but this is exactly what you should do occasionally. This does not mean you should copy their content, but rather the strategy of the top three Google articles. Google understands that search query based on their format.

Copy everything you can, including their headline, H-tags, meta descriptions, conclusion, and FAQs. Then tweak it to make it more unique and better. If your product-led SEO is about ranking on Google, you can’t dare to be too different.

Strategically weave the product into the content

You’ve laid a solid foundation for writing your product-led SEO content with everything you’ve done. The writing exercise has now begun.

To create truly product-led content, you must first demonstrate a thorough understanding of the subject matter and your audience’s problems.

It’s not uncommon for people to recommend CoSchedule Headline Studio for this step. While it’s a fantastic tool, I doubt it will help you in this situation. Sweat it out and think it through.

For SEO purposes, you may want to include your target keywords in the first paragraph or the first 100 words. However, for the sake of your audience, disregard this in your first draft. Ignore generic introductions such as “do you want to solve XYZ problems?” In all honesty, they are looking for a solution, which is why they have arrived at your website. Don’t bother them with that.

Also, unless you have an awe-inspiring and relevant story to tell, don’t tell them a theoretical story and then ask if it struck a chord with them. Many writers do this for the sake of storytelling, but it’s frequently too generic to have any real impact. Only a few writers have the creativity to create something like this.

Understanding your audience’s level of awareness will also help you write an excellent introduction. So you ask yourself: What is their level of awareness, and where are they in the buyer’s journey? For example, are they looking for a new solution right now, or are they already comparing options?

All of your previous research would have given you a better understanding of who your target audience is. As a result, you should understand the problem they are attempting to solve and use that to hook them in your introduction.

In the introduction, frame the problem as clearly as possible while remaining natural.

Take a look at this introduction, for example:

There is no pretentious storytelling or any questions that’ll most likely annoy the reader rather than hook them in—just a direct capture of the reader’s challenge and a transition into the solution.

And when it’s time to recommend a product they can use to solve their problems, don’t forget these three things:

Don’t be salesy: Avoid being pushy by offering your product gently. And, if there is another popular product in your industry that they may have heard of, suggest it subtly as well. Then figure out how to show them where your product shines and why they should choose it over the alternative.

I like how Trevor.io does it on their blog. Here is an example:

Show screenshots: In product-led SEO content for SaaS, screenshots are essential. You want to sharpen your reader’s senses of what’s in your product and how it works. Of course, you can also use GIFs and short video clips if necessary.

Tell them what to do: When you’ve finished positioning your brand as a potential solution, don’t forget to include a call to action (CTA). Tell them what you want them to do, whether it’s to sign up for a free trial or schedule a demo, as you saw Trevor do in the screenshot above.

Optimize your product-led SEO content for search engines

Now that the work of writing helpful content has been done, it’s time to optimize your content for search engines.

There are two ways to do this: you can do it manually or use content optimization tools, such as Surfer SEO and Clearscope.

Here is a quick highlight of what content optimization involves:

  • Use the key phrase in the introduction or the first 100 words
  • Use the key phrase in the subheadings, i.e., H2, H3, etc.
  • Optimize title tags
  • Optimize your images by adding alt text
  • Link internally
  • Link to an external, authoritative source
  • Use the primary keyword and related key phrases strategically throughout your content
  • Use your keyword in your URL
  • Optimize your meta description with your keyphrase

Let’s wrap it up

Product-led SEO content is an excellent way to save money while capturing the types of leads your company needs most. This is because it mostly corresponds to buying intent and eliminates a lot of back and forth in your purchasing process.

You are more likely to fill your pipeline with good leads if you demonstrate a thorough understanding of your audience’s pain points and show them, rather than tell them, how your product can help them solve them.

Featured Image Credit: Photo by Sam Lion; Pexels

By Ali Faagba

Author’s bio: Ali Faagba is a conversion-driven content writer and content marketer for Product-led SaaS brands. He owns and runs Content Marketing Profit, his product-led content and SEO play ground.

Sourced from readwrite

Read More
By
In News

12 Actionable Steps to Drive Newsletter Growth with SEO Content

No Comments

By Lauren Fox

At Brafton, we’ve found our newsletter subscribers to be our best, most engaged audience. These are our people. They live and breathe content marketing, just as we do. Some even partner with us to create and execute awesome content marketing campaigns for their brands.

Over the last two and a half years, we’ve placed a significant emphasis on growing this subscriber base, and we’ve achieved a 170% increase (and counting!) across 84 countries.

Newsletter subscriptions coming from organic search traffic.

If you’re reading this article, you’re probably looking for ways to grow your newsletter list, too.

SEO blog content has been the foundation for our growth. How does it work? Simple: We create blog content that ranks highly in search, and we make it super easy (and tempting) for readers to subscribe to our newsletter once they visit our blog.

While the concept seems straightforward, the effort is anything but.

Read on to learn how to get users from your website onto your newsletter list, and why email marketing and SEO work so well together.

Part 1: Attracting potential subscribers to your site

The first part of this newsletter growth process is actually getting your potential newsletter subscribers to your website. Here are 5 solid strategies for doing just that:

1. Keyword research

Our blog has been around since April 2010. We’ve published over 7,500 articles in those 12 years.

That’s a lot of content.

But it wasn’t until we rolled out a data-led keyword research and content creation strategy in 2018 that we started seeing significant traction with organic traffic growth:

I won’t go into detail about the strategy we used to get there (you can read about it here), but I will wax poetic about the importance of keyword research and topic selection if you’re looking to grow your blog — and your newsletter subscriber list as a result.

Keyword selection is crucial.

If you don’t choose the right topics to write about, you won’t rank highly in search results. And if you’re not showing up in search, no one is going to come to your website to read your content — or to subscribe to read more from your brand.

2. Great content writing

Great content is your foot in the door with your next potential newsletter subscriber. In an ideal scenario, they come to your site, they read your content, they’re incredibly impressed, and they happily enter their email address to get more of the same from your brand directly into their inbox.

Writing great content not only gets you to appear more often in search and improves your organic visibility, but it’s also the best way to convince a reader to sign up for your newsletter.

What do I mean when I say “write great content?” Well, there’s a creative and scientific element to this part of the process, and we do it because it works:

Using the briefing process we developed, and an extremely talented pool of in-house writers, we’re able to create content that comprehensively covers all potential subtopics and answers all potential questions a searcher might have about the target keyword. In effect, we attempt to use data to create the most comprehensive content on the web for each topic we choose to cover.

This keeps us competitive and ranking well in SERPs, which means more chances for a searcher to land on our blog and subscribe to our newsletter.

3. Content reoptimization

Sometimes the content we create gets old. It becomes outdated and stale, or new competitors create better content than ours and start outranking us.

Reoptimizing a piece of content helps us attract more potential newsletter subscribers to our blog in two main ways:

  1. By reoptimizing the blog content, we improve our ranking for our target keyword and, as a result, we start getting more clicks to the page for the targeted audience searching that term.
  2. By improving the comprehensiveness of the piece by covering more topics, we rank for a larger number of variant keywords and then drive more clicks to the page.

Here’s the data from a blog post that was underperforming before we did a reoptimization on March 30, 2021, and what newsletter subscription goal completions looked like after the reoptimization, year-over-year:

An increase in newsletter subscription goal completions YoY from a content reoptimization.

Even though the increase in total subscriptions here is relatively small, this was just for a single blog post. Imagine doing this for 50 blog posts a year. At scale, it can make an impact.

4. Audio/visuals in blog content

Some people are just more visual learners than others. They prefer eye-catching infographics and video tutorials over hundreds of words of straight-up written content. And I’m not just saying this without any actual data to back up my claim.

We’ve consistently found that blogs with infographics drive more clicks to our site (compared to blogs that do not feature infographics).

Even though our blogs with infographics make up just ~3% of all of our blog pages, they generate 25% of all the clicks to our blog pages and 21% of all the impressions generated by blogs in search:

They also have a higher CTR (2.0% vs 1.6%) and a better average keyword position (22.4 vs 30.2):

Finally, they tend to generate more backlinks organically:

Blog post: The Anatomy of a Marketing Ideation Workshop (Infographic)

How does this impact our newsletter list growth?

These pages drive more clicks, rank better in search and get linked back to more often. All of these results drive a bigger audience of potential newsletter subscribers to our website to read our content and click “Subscribe.”

5. Pillar pages

When it comes to attracting an organic search audience that is highly likely to subscribe to our newsletter, one of the top strategies we’ve rolled out in the last year is our pillar page strategy.

Over the course of 2021, we published five of these long-form guides. They’re a cross between a blog post and a landing page — and they are search-targeted.

Example of a pillar page targeting the keyword “what is content creation.”

Compared to our blog content, users coming to the site to view these pages tend to bounce less, view more pages per session and subscribe to our newsletter at a higher rate (1.11% vs 0.38%):

I’m not recommending you completely ditch your blog strategy for pillar pages, but they are a great supplemental way to generate more newsletter subscribers per page.

Part 2: Improving on-site newsletter conversion (CRO)

We’ve discussed plenty of ways to improve the content on the page to attract more visitors from organic search. But what happens once they get there? How do we actually get visitors to convert from first-time readers to weekly email subscribers?

Enter: Conversion rate optimization!

CRO is all about finding ways to get site visitors from reading your blog in their browser to receiving your content directly in their inbox. (Which is the ultimate goal, of course). Read on for four on-page elements that’ll likely improve your newsletter subscription conversion rates:

6. Pop-up form

There’s a reason why nearly every site you visit on the web has an annoying pop-up form asking you to subscribe to their newsletter. It’s because it works.

There was a time when our blog didn’t have a pop-up form (back around 2017). We decided to run a test and added the first iteration of our pop-up form, which looked like this:

Here are the results we saw:

  • Daily subscriptions without pop-up: 1.59
  • Daily subscriptions with pop-up: 8.32
  • Change: +532%

We happily kept that pop-up form in its place and never looked back.

In the years since we originally implemented the pop-up, we’ve modified how it behaves so that it’s more likely to capture a form fill. We:

  • Redesigned the pop-up to be slightly more clear in terms of what the user is signing up for.
  • Adjusted the timing on the pop-up. It used to come up too soon for the reader to make any real judgment on whether they might want to subscribe. We decided to go with 30 seconds, as this time is enough for the user to get the flavour of the post, but still retains most of the users (as we found they start to drop off after 45 seconds).

These may seem like small modifications, but cumulatively they improve the chances that we’re serving the pop-up form at the exact right time for a reader.

We’ve also learned over the years that the more ways website visitors have to subscribe to our newsletter, the better. Here are 3 more elements that we’ve included on-page to drive up our subscription rate:

7. Sticky sidebar

This is one of my favourite CTA elements and I think it really personalizes the experience for the reader on a blog. The sticky sidebar follows you down the page as you read, and the “Subscribe” CTA is always present on the screen. It’s not overly distracting, but it does make it super easy for the reader to subscribe at any time (even if they’ve closed the pop-up form).

There was a period when we removed this sidebar from our blog pages and our newsletter conversion rate plummeted. It ticked back up once we added the sidebar back to the page. Lesson learned!

8. Inline subscribe CTA

We started embedding a CTA directly into each blog post. Its design is meant to not be too interruptive, but it’s present as yet another way for users to subscribe.

This inline CTA is included once per blog post, around 50% down the page. We intentionally do not place it too close to the end of the article. This improves our chances of catching someone once they’ve read a significant portion of the content but won’t be missed if they don’t finish reading the entire piece.

9. Dedicated newsletter sign-up page + nav link

As a final on-site CRO element, we launched a dedicated landing page to promote our newsletter:

Like any good conversion landing page, it succinctly (and persuasively, we hope) explains what subscribers get by entering their contact information.

And if they’re not yet convinced, we’ve included a sampling of some of our best blog content for them to peruse before they make the final decision to subscribe:

Every single element on this page is geared toward prompting users to fill out the form.

We use this landing page as a standalone promotional tool both on site and through external channels (paid and organic alike).

  • We advertise the page on Google and social platforms.
  • We share a link to this page in our email marketing — so friends of subscribers can easily subscribe.
  • We even give it a prominent spot in our main navigation:

You may think it’s not worth it to add a “Subscribe” button to your main navigation — it’s pretty important real estate, after all — but it will get you more newsletter subscribers organically as users land on and navigate through your site.

And people do actually navigate to this page and subscribe this way. Since launching the page in January 2021, it accounted for 17.64% of our total on-site newsletter goal completions (in 2021) with a whopping 24.12% conversion rate.

All the on-site elements I’ve covered may seem like tiny, insignificant changes but they 1) took significant research, analysis and effort to implement, and 2) they worked.

Since adding these elements in 2021, we have doubled our newsletter subscription conversion rate:

Small changes can yield big results — and every new newsletter subscriber makes a difference.

Part 3: Enhancing subscriber engagement

Now that we’ve looked at ways to grow your subscriber list and improve your subscription conversion rate, I want to switch gears and talk about what happens once someone does subscribe — and how content is invaluable to and inseparable from newsletter marketing.

Content is what fuels newsletter marketing. You cannot have one without the other. Sure, you can technically run a newsletter that solely shares external sources, but without some sort of original content to include in the email, you’re not going to retain subscribers for very long.

As I mentioned earlier, our newsletter audience is our best, most engaged audience. We hear time and time again about how much they like the content we produce. We like to reward them with even more great content.

Here are the primary ways we’ve kept our newsletter audience engaged with content:

10. Downloadable content & webinars

By offering different types of content, like downloadable assets (eBooks and white papers) and live-streamed webinars and workshops, we’re giving our audience more ways to connect with our brand.

They can dive deeper into a specific topic in their own time with a white paper, or get their real-time questions answered with a webinar or workshop.

From a marketing results perspective, we can see which contacts are most engaged with the content we’re offering by tracking email click-through rate, downloads and webinar sign-ups. It also gives us important insights into which topics and formats work best to improve user experience, and we can double down on those content types in the future.

11. Surveys

One of my favourite ways we’ve connected with our newsletter audience over the years is through surveys.

We ask them questions like:

  • What types of content marketing resources do you want more of?
  • What’s your favourite area of content marketing to learn about?
  • How do you rate your skill level with content marketing (and other areas of marketing)?
  • What are your favourite hobbies outside of content marketing?

The feedback they provide is invaluable to our marketing efforts. It’s one of the best ways to know exactly what our newsletter audience wants from us.

If you’re ever unsure about what your audience thinks of your newsletter, or where you might be lacking, a survey is arguably your best resource for those answers. And it doesn’t need to be a complex multi-question survey either — it can be a simple “How are we doing?” button you include in each send.

12. New layout for better user experience

We’ve also changed the look and feel of our weekly newsletter over the years. And we continually work to improve the user experience with these design updates.

Our newest iteration from 2021 contains a variety of sections based on what we’ve found to be most useful for our audience:

  • A roundup of recently published blog posts.
  • A rotating featured content section where we can promote our latest infographic, job opening or employee spotlight.
  • A visual CTA to promote an eBook download or a webinar registration.

My favourite sections of our newsletter are:

Recommended reading

Here, we share industry-related content from other brands in the space. Even if we didn’t create the content ourselves, we want to provide these additional resources to help our audience stay ahead of the content marketing curve. The hope is that they get everything they need (content marketing-wise) from our newsletter, and keep opening up our emails week after week.

Subscribe CTA: “Did you get this email from a friend?”

This section links out to our newsletter subscribe landing page. It’s here to help folks subscribe to our newsletter if it’s been forwarded to them from a friend. People forward emails all the time, and this way, we’ve built in an easy way to encourage new readers to subscribe to our content. It’s a CTA that doesn’t change week to week, so it doesn’t take any effort to maintain, but it’s there to organically generate more newsletter subscribers.

And it does: We’ve found that 10% of people who subscribe via email do so on this page coming from the newsletter.

When determining the best newsletter content and layout for your brand, it’s always most important to do what works best for your audience. You may not achieve the perfect newsletter format right out of the gate, but over time, and by gathering feedback (via surveys or organically through email replies), you’ll get closer to giving them exactly what they want.

When I talk about enhancing newsletter engagement, our goal has always been the same: Be the best possible content marketing resource for our audience. As a result, we’ll get their attention and their loyalty, and possibly even their referral to a friend or colleague — and that helps us continue to grow our subscriber base.

Conclusion

Newsletter marketing has been at the core of Brafton’s marketing strategy for many years now, and we’ve found time and time again that there is plenty of reason to reinvest our efforts into this growth.

I hope the methods I’ve shared have inspired you with plenty of ways to grow your own newsletter list.

Because once you’ve got those readers subscribed, you’ll be unstoppable.

By Lauren Fox

Lauren Fox is the Director of Marketing at Brafton. She has grown the Brafton blog from 30K to 230K monthly visitors and tripled its newsletter subscriber base over the course of three years. Her expertise ranges from content research and planning to performance analysis, with a focus on content strategy.

Sourced from MOZ

Read More
By
In News

How to Create Quality SEO Content: 7 Simple Steps to get Started

No Comments

By

Unique SEO content is the heart & soul of every blogging business. Whether you sell products and services online or have an affiliate marketing website, you need to consistently come up with fresh content that people are searching for. This is the basic idea behind SEO content.

But coming up with unique content is not easy. Especially for new writers who don’t know what SEO content is, to begin with. It can become quite difficult for bloggers to create quality content that gets ranked.

In this detailed guide, we are going to talk about the basic steps that can help you create quality SEO content for your blog.

If you follow the guidelines that we are going to go through in this article, you’d be able to create High Quality, Engaging SEO content for your blog on a consistent basis.

Why Do you Need to Create SEO Optimized Content for your Blog?

Creating quality content is the only way you can make your online platform visible in search engines. Google and all the major search engines use content as the most important ranking factor for a website.

It doesn’t matter what niche you are working on; you need SEO content if you want to rank at the top for the searches related to your niche. Creating search engine optimized content is the only way for you to do that.

You need to find what people are searching for and then you need to create content around the query that answers the question in the best possible way. This is what creating SEO Content all about.

Creating SEO Content – Step by Step Guide

Writing quality content is about rising above the noise. With every query that you write in the search engines, you get thousands of websites talking about the same idea. And if you want to make your place among the sites that you see on the first page as per your query, you’ve got to create content that is

  • More Informative
  • More Valuable
  • More Engaging

You create content like that, and you can be sure that search engines would pick your piece of content up and rank it at the top of their SERPs.

So, without further ado, let’s get started and talk about the steps you can use to create quality SEO content for your blog

Step 1: Keywords Research

Keywords research should be your first step when beginning to write content for your blog. The basic idea behind keyword research is, you need to find out the keywords or phrases that people are searching for and then create content around that keyword. But where do you find keywords to write content for your niche?

Well, there are multiple ways you can do that. If you can afford one, we recommend using a paid keywords research tool like Ahrefs or KWFinder.

When looking for keywords, you need to go for long-tail keywords that have a high search volume and low difficulty. Long-tail keywords are phrases with 2 or more words.

Now, if you can’t afford a paid keywords research tool, you can use Google Autocomplete to get an idea about the things people are searching for in your niche. This won’t give you the search volume, but you should be able to get a lot of phrases that you can use to get started with your content.

Step 2: Add Keyword of Relevant Phrases in the Title

Once you have found a keyword with high search volume and low difficulty, you need to start writing content on it. But don’t just start right away. You first need to come up with a title for your content. It is important that you take your time here.

You need to be careful when coming up with the title of your content because it can make or break the success of your content. The title is the first thing that shows up on google. If your title is not SEO optimized, Google would not make it appear on SERPs.

You can optimize the title of your content by adding the keyword in the title of your content. When you add the keyword in the title of your content, it makes the title seem relevant to the query that people are looking the answers for and it makes your content come off as optimized in the eyes of search engines.

Step 3: Structure Your Content the Right Way

A well-structured article will always do better on search engines than the one that is poorly structured. Even if you have extremely valuable content, if you fail to organize and structure it properly, your audience just won’t want to read it.

Here are some tips that can help you structure your content in a way that would make it easier for your audience to read

  • Use properly headings for title and subheadings
  • Break your content up into smaller paragraphs
  • Add bullet points to lists
  • Use standard fonts and font sizes
  • Analyse the readability of the content

Asking for a review of your content from an unbiased source can be quite helpful. Use a conversational tone and try to make things as simple as possible. Your ultimate goal should be to make your content as easily readable as you possibly can.

Step 4: Write for the Audience

Once you have created the outline of your content, you need to start adding in the content. Here, the most common mistake that beginner writers make is keyword stuffing.

Keyword stuffing happens when you add the focused keyword in your content more times than is recommended. This makes the content overly optimized and search engines mark it as spammy and don’t rank it on the SERPs.

When writing content, make sure that you are writing for the audience and not search engines. You need to come up with content that is user-friendly as well as search engine friendly.

A rule of thumb is to use the main keyword in the first 100 words of the content. The keyword should look perfectly natural when placed in the content. After that, you need to make sure that you add the keyword in the content as per the recommended keyword density. The bottom line is, keep the content natural and informative. This is the only way you can create content that works.

There is some powerful content rewriting tools that you can use to create quality SEO content for your blog in a short amount of time. You can use the sentence rewriter online by SEO Tools Centre to come up with unique, engaging and natural content for your blog.

Step 5: Use Different Content Mediums on your Blog

Although writing textual content is the most important thing that you need to focus on when creating quality SEO content, it is not the only thing. You need to utilize all other content mediums available out there to ensure that your content stands out from the crowd.

You need to add images, graphics, videos, and other forms of relevant content with the text that you have written. Adding these different types of content will add to the credibility of your content and it will also make it look more optimized.

When adding videos and images to your blog, use your focused keyword in the title to add an additional layer of optimization to your content. By using graphics and visuals, you can make your content look more engaging which will have a great impact on the bounce rate of your website.

Step 6: Format Content to Win Google Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are the blocks of information that show up at the top of search engines when you type in a search query. Google is always trying to improve the user experience by offering answers to user queries in the fastest way possible. This is the idea behind featured snippets.

And the best part is, your content can appear in the featured snippets, even if you don’t rank at the top of the search engine. You just need to format your content in a way that makes it eligible for it to appear in the Google Features Snippets.

Here is how you can make your content appear in the Features Snippets

  • Keep the central idea of your content to the point
  • Properly structure your content
  • Use bullet points and lists in your content
  • Add useful data and stats to your content

Step 7: Proofread your Content to make it Better

Once you are done writing your SEO content, you need to make sure that you proofread it to get rid of any mistakes that you might have made in the content. You can run your content through a grammar checking program to quickly find the mistakes. You can also use the online plagiarism fixer by SEOMagnifier to fix and check for plagiarism in your content.

Make sure to read the content with a fresh mind a few hours after you are done writing. The thing with writing content is, you can always make it better. You can always improve it and make it more engaging. Rereading what you have written is the best way you can do that.

When you proofread your content, you can see the areas where you are lacking. You can get an idea about your current writing skills and you can learn the frequent mistakes that you’ve been making. After that, it is just about getting around these mistakes and making sure that you don’t make the same mistakes again.

Final Words

SEO optimized content can give your online platform the edge that it needs over your competition. Also, you need to keep coming up with helpful content for your audience if you want your blog to stay relevant and dominate the search engines.

The SEO content creation process that we have talked about here will help you do just that. Go over the SEO content writing process that we have talked about here to consistently come up with unique content for your blog.      

Feature Image Credit: pixelcreatures on Pixabay

By  

Sourced from INFLUENCIVE

Read More
By
In News

Digital Marketing in 2021: A Holistic Strategy You’ve Never Heard Before

No Comments

By Devansh Khetrapal

Aren’t you tired of skimming through the internet and not being able to find a Digital Marketing Strategy that would help you scale up your business and generate steady growth? We were all looking for that magic pill, until now!

What I’m about to share with you is a thought process most elite marketers wouldn’t dare to talk about, just so that they can keep the cream to themselves. I started researching about this a year ago and the information I’ve gathered during this period is every last drop of the good stuff that I’ve shared below.

The Holy Trinity of Digital Marketing

Did you know that global B2C eCommerce sales are expected to reach $4.5 trillion by 2021? As more and more businesses are growing, Digital Marketing Experts are constantly calibrating and testing their own strategies to stand out and grow.

However, no matter how unconventional their methods may be, you don’t need to worry. All you have to do is optimize the following 3 aspects of your website and you’re bound to see substantial growth.

Traffic

One of the main focuses of a Digital Marketing Strategy is to drive traffic to your website, and not just any traffic, but relevant traffic. In order to make sure that happens, you have to incorporate keywords throughout your landing page that are relevant to what you’re selling, whether directly or indirectly.

There are 2 ways to drive traffic to your website:-

Paid Traffic

Let’s be honest. Most of the niches are highly saturated and in order to stand out, you either have to come up with something entirely new so you’ll organically thrive or advertise your services. Most successful businesses rely on both. However, advertising seems to be an effective revenue-generating tool if done right.

A good advertisement involves a headline that hooks, and a landing page with an attractive banner and sufficient information about your product.

There are 5 typical sources wherefrom you can drive paid traffic to your website:-

  • Display Ads – The ones that you see when you’re reading a blog. They’re around the edges, adjacent to the blog, usually in a square or rectangular box.
  • Search Engine Ads – The ones that pop on top of other search results. They look like the first search results but you see a little “ad” icon to signify that it’s an advertisement.
  • Discovery Ads – If you’re ever scrolling on Google, YouTube, or Gmail, then you have come across a Discovery ad. On YouTube, it has a panel with an image and “Learn More” is written below it. In Gmail, you’ll find it in Social and Promotion Tabs.
  • Sponsored Content – When you’re reading a blog and there’s a panel that looks like another blog but it’s actually a landing page, which could be anything from a blog to a product advertisement.
  • Influencer Marketing – Using social media influencers to promote your product. Lately, this has become just as mainstream as other forms of advertising.

Organic Traffic

When someone discovers your business on the internet when you didn’t advertise it, it means you were able to drive traffic organically on your website. Growing your business organically is a discipline in itself. The fact that people were able to discover you organically, indicates that you did a good job with SEO.

People find you either when they’re searching for you (or for similar services) on Google, or on Social Media platforms (could be Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc). According to Search Engine Journal, 70% of the links people click on are Organic. Even though ads work, it’s clear that a lot of people just skip the first 3 links on Google because we habitually understand that they’re advertisements.

How Do I Maximize Traffic On My Website?

Create a Keyword Database

In generating both organic and paid traffic, you require keywords that resonate with your target audience. What most people underestimate is the power that these keywords hold. Using tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc will help you find the right keywords by offering several parameters.

Any SEO expert can tell you that you should use keywords with high search volume and low keyword difficulty, but knowing what keywords to target is a refined process, and if you’re serious about your business, then here’s what you should do:-

Make 5 columns in an excel sheet. One for the keywords, and the other 4 for “Intent”, “Relevance”, “Trending”, and “IRT Score”. Refer to the excel sheet below:-

In the above image, I have taken an example of a web development company and used 4 keywords. Each of these has been assigned a corresponding score between 1 to 4 and has been totalled in the column IRT score. Let me explain what these are and what their implications are:-

  • Intent – This signifies how transactional is the intent of the keyword. If the keyword is highly transactional, it has a score of 4, and if it’s not at all transactional, it has a score of 1. In the above image, the keyword “Hire Web Developer” is highly transactional, and the keyword “ReactJS vs Laravel” isn’t transactional at all and hence, they’ve been assigned scores 4 and 1 respectively.
  • Relevance – This will signify how relevant the keyword is for you. If the keyword has a product or service that you offer, then you may rate it between 1 to 4 in terms of relevance. In the above image, the keyword “Hire a .Net Developer” is rated as 1 because the web development company isn’t relevant to the kind of development services they’re offering.
  • Trending – The more the keyword is trending on Google or any other search engine, the higher will be its trending score and vice versa. In the above image, “ReactJS vs Laravel” is a keyword that has a significantly high search volume on Google and hence, has a trending score of 3.
  • IRT Score – IRT is simply the aggregate score of the columns “Intent”, “Relevance”, and “Trending”.

If you make a list of all the relevant keywords, you can segregate and prioritize them on the basis of these 3 parameters. The IRT score will serve as an extremely quick and reliable guide since the higher the IRT score, the more important the keyword will be for you.

Optimize Technical Performance

Did you know that the first 5 seconds of page-load time have the highest impact on the conversion rate? According to Portent, website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load-time.

Optimizing page loading speed is only a factor and not a Digital Marketing Strategy in itself. However, improving the overall architecture of your website can help you make sure that your target audience doesn’t wander away from your landing page. Besides, the longer the page load time, the worse it is for SEO performance.

Here’s are some questions you need to ask yourself:-

  • Are internal pages getting enough internal link votes?
    The internal pages of your website should have at least 10 internal links. The more links, the more will be the Page Authority.
  • Are all pages 3 (or less) clicks deep?
    No pages should be more than 3-clicks deep. This is to make sure that your pages are being crawled and indexed well. For Google, more clicks mean less valuable, and vice versa.
  • Are all internal links using effective anchor text?
    Always use exact match anchor text with your links. Here’s a catch though – If you have a huge site, you will end up using several internal links for a keyword in pursuit of site navigation, in which case you need to dial down on external links. You need to make sure that you avoid getting external links otherwise it will lead to over-optimization of the anchor text. Eg. if you have 1000 internal links for “chamomile tea”, be less aggressive on having external links with the same anchor text.
  • Are there any pages with existing backlinks?
    Your top internal linking targets should be pages with high Page Authority. You can boost the page authority by linking pages that already have high authority.

Create Intelligent SEO Content

Having intelligent SEO content serves you in 2 ways – It will help you rank your content and will be interesting to read as well. Most writers can’t get the right mix of these 2 tangents in their content.

Ideally, 80% of your content should be keyword targeted and 20% of it should be a link bait (designed to attract backlinks). This is a long-term strategy to improve the Domain Authority of your website. This means that you’ll be able to rank on highly competitive keywords.

Here are the steps you need to follow:-

  • Select a qualified keyword – We already discussed this in the above header “creating a keyword database”.
  • Map the keyword to an existing page – If you don’t have a page targeting this qualified keyword, create a new one. Update and optimize the existing pages before creating a new page.
  • Only target one keyword on one page – If you have multiple pages targeting the same keyword, you either consolidate those pages, and/or delete or redirect the pages that don’t have good quality content.
  • Create an SEO content brief – In the SEO content brief you’ll hand over to your writer, you can mention the estimated value of this keyword (CPC x clicks), the SERP features that need to be kept in mind, the estimated organic CTR of the keyword, target word count, search intent, how many backlinks you need to rank, etc.

Conversions

Did you know that 92% of your website visitors aren’t ready to buy? We’ve talked about how you can generate traffic to your website to generate more leads, but that wouldn’t mean anything if your leads aren’t getting converted.

What you need to do is nurture these visitors until they become a qualified lead. The majority of those remaining 8% visitors are highly motivated to buy, so even if you use decent keyword targeting and copywriting, you can easily convert these. However, to get the rest 92% on board, you need to create a nurture sequence.

Here’s what you need to do:-

Create a Lead Magnet

Anything that incentivizes the visitor to sign up for your email list is called a lead magnet. It could simply be a free training webinar, a video series, or an ebook. The key is to keep these incentives really simple.

Segregate the Qualified and Unqualified Leads

Just because some visitors signed up via email, doesn’t mean they’re qualified. You can find out which leads qualify and which don’t by using 2 ways:-

  • New Subscriber Survey – This can include all the basic questions relevant to your target customer.
  • Use Trigger Links – Send a welcome email with 2 or 3 links and when the subscriber clicks on one of those, they get tagged based on what they clicked. For example, if you send an email saying “What best describes you?” and give 2 or 3 options, and based on what they click on, they get tagged accordingly, so that you can send them relevant content from that moment on. You can use Drip to accomplish this.

Created Automated Nurture Sequence

Now that you’ve qualified those leads and have segregated them into relevant categories, it’s time to nurture them. You have to accept the fact that leads convert instantly. Realistically, you have to treat them as if they don’t plan on buying for the next 6 – 12 months.

You can lay back and take your time to plan how you can add value to these people’s lives every now and then during this period. What you should do is to create an automated nurture sequence and send them value-added material, which will develop trust over time. Next thing you know, they’ll already be sold.

If the nurture sequence is solid, then these leads will be moved into a different automated sequence. This is highly dependent on your business model, but with a successful digital marketing strategy, the goal is to gradually build up and pitch them when the time is right.

Remarketing

You already understand that 92% of your website visitors aren’t interested in buying anything, so basically, they’re just bouncing away from your website without taking any action. This means that there’s so much untapped potential that you’re missing out on, unless you’re remarketing.

Remarketing is the way to reach those 92% by reaching them even when they aren’t on your website. This can be achieved through the following ways:-

Enable Tracking Pixel

A tracking pixel is an HTML code snippet that is loaded when a user visits a website or opens an email. It is useful for tracking user behaviour and conversions. At a bare minimum, you should have Google and Facebook tracking enabled on your website. Depending on the nature of your business, you could enable it on Bing, Instagram, Quora, Reddit, or even TikTok.

Create Intent-Based Campaigns

Based on what pages a visitor is viewing, you can understand their intent and should target advertisements that are designed accordingly. For example, if someone visits your website, read a blog, and just exit, then you shouldn’t advertise to them to buy your service right away.

What you can do instead is move them down your sales funnel and target with a lead magnet that’s related to the blog that they were reading. Heck, you can even split test your visitors, see what induces a favourable response for you and then use that as the main campaign.

Wrapping Up

If you were trying to understand how to reduce marketing costs, I wouldn’t blame you. All these tools can be costly and when you’re starting out, it can be an unexpectedly high expense. You can rely on free tools or consult a Digital Marketing Expert as well.

Hopefully, this Digital Marketing strategy served as an all-encompassing guide for you to understand how marketing really works, and how vast the role of relevant targeting can be. You can do your own litmus test to figure out what works for you.

By Devansh Khetrapal

View full profile ›

Sourced from Business 2 Community

 

 

Read More
By
In News

Pain-Point SEO: How to Produce SEO Content That Drives Conversions

No Comments

By Benji Hyam

If you were to look inside your Google Analytics right now, chances are that a majority of the traffic on your blog comes from 2-5 blog posts.

If you have goals set up in Google Analytics, and you’re measuring product or service conversions that come directly from content, chances are that a majority of your first-click and last-click conversions also come from a few blog posts.

What’s interesting though is rarely do the posts with the highest volume of traffic, have the highest volume of conversions.

Analytics 14
The highlighted posts are posts with a low conversion rate. These posts don’t follow one of our five frameworks below – they rank for keywords, but the keywords don’t have intent. The posts not highlighted have much higher conversion rates and the terms they’re ranking for follow one of our frameworks and do have intent. A conversion rate of .2% – .4% is what we typically consider “good” for conversions from blog post to product-related signup for most software or service businesses. Anything above that is great.

So what’s the disconnect?

It’s that head terms or high volume queries are typically the terms that target the top of funnel for your product or service – they have more people searching for them, but less of the searches have purchase intent.

On average, keywords with lower volumes are typically the terms that target the middle or bottom of the funnel – they have fewer people searching for them but higher purchase intent.

There are cases where you can go after keywords that have both high volume and have purchase intent – those are optimal, but typically there aren’t too many to target.

While many companies are focused on ranking for high-volume keywords in their content marketing because of the traffic potential, we tend to prioritize lower-volume, high intent keywords because the conversion potential is much greater than going after high volume keywords.

For example, continuing from the screenshot above, here is the 16th highest traffic article in that time period, bringing in only 1,612 pageviews in that period, but an amazing 39 product signups for this SaaS company.

Analytics 15

Additional benefits: the lower-volume, high-intent keywords are much easier to rank for, most of your competition is focused on the high-volume instead of high intent keywords, and they tend to outperform the highly competitive keywords from a conversion perspective (the main goal).

The following strategy is specifically for B2B SaaS businesses (some of the strategies can also work for services businesses as well). Ranking for high-volume keywords may work well if your main goal is to generate traffic (ad or impression based content sites – media), newsletter or email signups (personal or email list based blogs- course sites), or any other business where top of funnel traffic is valuable. So in this article, when we say “conversions” we mean product-related signup or form fills, not an email or newsletter opt-in.

In this post, I’m going to explain how we come up with SEO-driven content ideas that generate leads and signups by not going after high volume head keywords. I’ll share some examples of frameworks that tend to do well from a conversion perspective and I’ll share some examples from blogs that we run that show why we take this approach vs. the approach that most agencies and content marketers take.

Our Keyword Strategy = Pain-Point Driven Instead of Volume-Driven SEO

Let’s say that you’re doing content marketing for a SaaS company that targets salespeople as the customer (broad target audience, I know, but it’s just for the sake of the example).

Many marketers take a keyword-first approach to content marketing.

They research some keywords that they think salespeople would be interested in and end up coming up with a keyword list that looks something like this:

keyword strategy

Then they prioritize what keywords to target based on which keywords have the highest volume (traffic potential) and which ones are easiest to rank for (low competition).

They do this because oftentimes their metric of success is a % increase in traffic, not leads/signups growth. The why behind this is a discussion for another post :).

Then blog posts start being produced that go after these high-volume keywords and if everything works you may notice that traffic starts to increase.

But what about the leads and signups from those posts?

Oftentimes, you don’t see a measurable amount of leads and signups coming from those blog posts topics because this strategy is designed to increase traffic, but doesn’t take the intent of the searcher into account.

We think this volume-based keywords strategy for content marketing is backwards.

Instead, the approach that we use to come up with SEO-driven content ideas is inverted. We start with the intent of a buyer (the pain point of a customer), then we find keywords and topics that discuss solutions to the problem the searcher is trying to solve.

2018 08 30 21 24 49

By doing SEO from a pain point first approach vs. a keyword-first approach, we can map the intent of the search to the buyer’s journey and have a better predictor of which SEO posts will generate leads and signups, instead of just measuring which posts will generate traffic.

Our Process for Coming up with SEO Topics That Drive Leads and Signups

Now that you understand the differences between going after high-volume keywords vs. pain-point driven SEO, let’s dive into our exact process for ideating topics that generate leads.

The content frameworks we’ve found are the highest converting for SEO content

Before I explain how to come up with the ideas for your own company, I think it’s important to share the frameworks we use to create high-converting SEO content.

Here are the five frameworks (or article types) that we use. Below, I’ll explain how to come up with the ideas to prioritize for each of the article types.

  1. Comparison posts – this framework objectively compares your product or service to your top competitors. Here’s an example
  2. Best product or service lists – this framework helps searchers discover the best products or services in the category they’re searching for. Here’s an example
  3. Alternatives to X – this framework helps searchers discover alternatives to your competitors products. Here’s an example
  4. Articles that talk about pricing – This framework talks about pricing of your own product or service (if you have this hidden) – you could also do this for your competitors if they’re not forward about pricing. Here’s an example from a hubspot agency
  5. Product or Service Use Cases – this framework helps searchers figure out how to solve a problem they have and presents your product or service as a potential solution  – ie. how to increase leads from content marketing (note the subtle tie-ins to SEMrush throughout the post).

Ideating on high-converting topics for SEO

Now that you know the frameworks that you should be thinking about, I want to share how you get the ideas that fit into the frameworks.

Essentially, all of the ideas should come from your prospects and your customers. If you’ve been a follower of our site for a long time, you’ll know our entire strategy starts with having a in-depth understanding of your customers. If you know your customers inside and out, you’ll be able to come up with content ideas that your competitors won’t target because they’ll be focused on traffic while you’ll be focused on helping your customers and future customers solve problems.

By knowing who your prospects/customers view as your competitors, what problems your prospects/customers think your product or service solves, what features or parts of your service your customers get the most value from, how your customers describe your product or service and the value they get from it, you should be able to come up with content ideas that convert 2x to 5x higher than other content.

Survey questions to ask to identify conversion focused SEO topics to write about

Here are some questions to ask your customers via in-person interviews, phone calls, and surveys to help you identify high intent keywords to target:

1. What was the problem you were looking to solve before stumbling across our product or service?

This question helps you identify what keywords to target when someone is researching for a solution to the problem that your product or service solves.

2. If our product/service were no longer to exist, what product/service would you use as an alternative?

This question helps you identify who your customers view as your competition.

3. How would you describe our product/service to a friend who knew nothing about us?

This question helps you identify how your customers would describe your product to a friend – maybe they describe what you do differently than you describe it – it’s important to figure this out so you can capture search volume for terms you might not be thinking of.

4. What are the top 3 benefits that you receive from our product/service?

This question helps you identify the top use cases and benefits that customers get from your product or service.

5. If you were to research our product or service, what would you search for?

This question helps you identify the terms that your customers would search for to find your product/service.

Make sure that all of these questions have open ended responses. You don’t want to lead people to an answer, you want them to share their thoughts with you. You should see a wide range of responses and then you want to prioritize responses that you get multiple times.

Once you have the answers to these questions, it’ll help you figure out the specific ideas to apply to each framework.

For example, if a majority of respondents say the biggest benefits they get from your product or service are increasing qualified leads to sales teams, increasing sales pipeline, and closing more deals, then you might want to create articles on those topics that walk people in-depth through various ways they can accomplish those things (your product or service might be one solution to their problem- you’ll need to include other valuable ones as well).

Another example, if a majority of respondents say that if your product was no longer to exist, they’d use Hubspot or Marketo, then you might want to create blog posts that compare your product to Hubspot and Marketo, and weigh the pros and cons of using your product vs. theres.

Hopefully you get how this works from here… (if not, feel free to leave a question/comment below)

Case Study: Going after long-tail high intent keywords beats out high-volume keywords

Now for some proof that this approach works.

Over the past year, we’ve been testing different frameworks across clients – narratives (stories), case studies, data posts, as well as the five frameworks above. Across multiple clients, we’ve seen these frameworks outperform some of the other content from a conversion perspective.

Because we started seeing these trends emerge, we thought we’d share the strategy with you.

The following analytics screenshot is from one of the SaaS companies we work with. This report is looking at organic traffic, the page that they landed on from organic search and the number of last-click conversions to that article.

To protect our client’s data, I’ve grayed out the URL of the article and in its place, I’ve put a description of the article.

All of the other numbers are left as is. conversion focused SEO driven content

Now what’s important to note here is that not all organic traffic is created equal from a conversion perspective. If you look at blog post #1 and #2 here, you’ll notice that they get almost the identical level of traffic, but #2 gets far lower conversions.

This is because the blog post #2 ranks for a keyword the target audience would search for, in this case a sales related keyword, however, the post doesn’t follow one of our five frameworks and the intent of the post doesn’t tie into the need or value that the product offers.

What’s also important to note is that to help increase conversions for each of our blog posts, we use in-article CTAs that are contextual to the post.

For example, if we were to write a post about best CRM tools, the post would have a CTA that says something to the effect of “Looking for a CRM tool for your small business? Try a free trial of X tool for 30 days, free.”

Another thing to note is that the highest converting blog post also has the lowest level of traffic, but that post uses one of the highest intent frameworks: comparing competitive products. When we originally did keyword research for this comparison term, multiple the SEO tools showed zero search volume behind the long-tail keyword.

Let me repeat this point because it’s important: The post with the largest number of conversions in the screenshot below targeted a keyword that tools like Ahrefs and Moz showed as having zero search volume.

Most marketers would just move on and not write a post on this topic.

But while the traffic doesn’t compare to the rest of the posts on the list here, the post dwarfs most others from a conversion standpoint.

Now, let’s look at GA’s model comparison tool to see the top converting blog posts that we’ve produced from January 1 – August 29th, to see which of the content frameworks yield the highest amount of new trial signups, when also factoring in first-click conversions.

top converting blog posts growandconvert

We can see here that the highest converting posts use the frameworks above. Only three of the top 10 posts are what we consider “top of the funnel” articles and they make up only 10% of conversions.

That’s crazy. 90% of the conversions from these top 10 articles are from one of the 5 simple high-product-intent frameworks we listed above.

What you should take away from this

We’re not saying that you should only produce SEO content that falls within those five frameworks, but what we are saying is that we’ve noticed trends across multiple clients, that when you produce pain-point driven content that use those five frameworks to target long-tail keywords, we’ve seen conversion numbers that are much higher than other content that ranks.

Therefore, we think you should prioritize producing those pieces of content before going after terms that are high volume / low competition in your category or that your target audience would potentially be interested in reading about.

Once you feel like you’ve exhausted all of the potential long-tail keywords using the five frameworks, then it makes sense to take a broader approach to finding higher volume keywords in your category and that your target audience would potentially read.

In addition, using this strategy effectively also depends how strong your domain is. If you’re just starting out with content marketing, then targeting these types of posts may not work well for you because other sites with stronger domain authority will outrank you. If that’s the case, it may make sense to focus on building your site authority first, or producing these posts, and then simultaneously focusing on building domain authority.

When it comes to conversions, as you’ll see from the last screenshot we shared above, this is not the only type of content that will generate conversions. Even stories that we’ve produced that have nothing to do with the product or service you offer, but does tie in with the category, and has helpful advice has yielded conversions. So it’s important not to only focus on these content types, but to mix in various types of content frameworks – content that targets the top of funnel, middle and bottom of the funnel.

 

By Benji Hyam

Sourced from Grow and Convert

 

 

Read More
By