infoShare '18 flashback: Content? Links? How You Actually Get Them Done Right to Rank

Ace is better then a king

Let’s face 2 most important Google ranking factors. 1st is content, the other one links. Content is king, but not every content. It depends on the amount of traffic it drives to your website. If you ever played cards, you should know that Ace is better then King. What your content should be to become an Ace among others? 

• helpful for users
• offer answers to their questions
• solve users’ problems
• increase their knowledge and skills

Instead of telling how good your product is, try to answer one of those questions:

• why do users need your product?
• what are they going to use it for?
• what problems may they have?

When selling a product or service, it's good to publish content that will help your potential client in using it. Focus on your clients needs, not yours.

80% of sales happen after 5th contact with client.

Blog on your website can be a great place where customers go looking for help. Remember that traffic on your blog won't convert. 80% of sales happen after 5th contact with client. Search volume between awareness and action increase dramatically. There’s a much bigger amount of people looking for informational content than for transactional. Remember, that Google is a big content catalog where users search for information, and they are happy when they find what they’re looking for. Try to make your website visitor happy, and maybe one day he'll become your customer. Both your company and Google needs happy users

less is MORE.

Old content is also worth focusing on. Be sure to check more often google analytics and google search console to find out what your website visitors are looking for. Maybe your old articles are more popular than the fresh ones? On the other side, You should be looking for pages (on your website) out of the top (5-7) and check their search volume. These should be your priorities. Focus on them, it will be much easier to push them up, then to create a new content and promote it. Have in mind, that during the last 4 years, organic CTR for #1 pages gone down by about 10%. The reason why these statistics fell down is the way 1# search result shows in google. It’s almost non-visible because of the way ads are displayed. Not only the ads but also advanced searches (knowledge graphs and direct answers). It’s a kind of a threat, but also an opportunity because you can be eg. #5, and place your website higher than the #1 site.

Focus on identifying your keyword opportunities:

1. Question type queries like: why…, what…, who…, does…,
2. Longer queries that show featured snippets,
3. Higher-volume terms.

Find out what your future clients search for. For example, if your business is selling fitness supplements, you should answer questions like „is creatine healthy?”. Adjusting content to the formats is also a good practice. Placing a list or a table just after the heading may cause that your article will be higher ranked. Consider increasing word count of your content. Word count for top-ranking posts is increasing. During the last few years, an average number of words on the page increased from 1300 (2015) to 1900 (2017). Have it in mind not only when writing new content but also try to update your old articles. Analyse what’s missing, and update your content by adding extra paragraphs.

2500 vs 4000

A case study of one client showed, that extending an article by 1500 words (4000 total now) helped it rise from #8 to #1 for the main keyword. That case shows, that regularly refreshing and extending old articles helps them in performing. But remember that Less is more. There used to be a trend in the SEO industry. People were convinced, that getting as many links as possible will drive their websites higher in rankings. Today we should focus on quality, not quantity. Build good relationships with bloggers, journalists, website owners and then leverage these relationships in multiple ways.

Creative content campaigns

Sometimes your content doesn't have to be strictly connected with your main topics. Awesome contents main goal is to gain much exposure and links. Making an unusual report or ranking may cause that biggest media will write about it and share the original link. Who wouldn't like a massive growth of website traffic? Features of a creative content campaign are:

• the idea: it should not be focused on your regular audience attention, but on media (bloggers, journalists, website owners)
• data: can be original (obtained by a survey) but also can be found somewhere else but shown from a different angle
• attractive graphics: even the most interesting data won’t catch enough attention if shown in non-attractive way
• promotion: share your article where you can, send it via email to journalists, bloggers, and media. Let everyone know that you have a great article

In future, when planning your content marketing strategy, remember this Jay Baer's quote:

If you sell something, you make a customer today, but if you help someone, you create a customer for life.