Getting your website into the top ten search results on keywords alone might sound like a futile exercise. Website designs vary from the very bad to the very good, but this doesn’t explain why some sites manage to get 99% of clicks and traffic. At the same time others, even with excellent content, fall way behind.
If you’re thinking there must be more to it than fast, well-designed and optimized websites, you would be correct.
The secret is often within the content. It can be based on blog posts, webpages and social outreach working together to offer the user a great experience, but that isn’t everything. Let’s take a look at three content marketing secrets, recommended by experts, which can give your traffic a boost and help you stay one step ahead of the competition.
1. Formulate Content Strategy
This method, coined by Shane Barker, is about identifying your objectives before creating a content strategy which will attract clicks and then engage your customers.
Great content is critical, but so is getting the traffic to your site in the first place. Instead of simply creating and adding content, there is a step-by-step process to follow.
First, identify your goals.
Think about what you want to achieve.
This could be:
- Driving more traffic to your site
- Improving search result rankings
- Brand positioning as an industry leader
Figuring out what your goals are will help you keep track and achieve them.
Second, come up with a buyer persona.
This is to define your target audience and allow you to create content which is meaningful for them.
What is your target audience? Some parameters to consider include:
- Gender
- Age
- Interests
- Income
- Job
- Education
- Lifestyle
This will allow you to understand their priorities and needs, and then address their concerns by providing content they will want to read and engage with, and then convert.
Next, perform a gap analysis.
This will show you the gap between where you are now and where you want to be. Consider the steps you could take to close the gap and achieve your goals.
Conduct keyword research.
This will help you find keywords which will generate a good flow of traffic to your website.
Decide which content to create.
There are many options to choose from, such as infographics, blog posts, photos and videos, guest posts, and more. What would work best on your website?
2. The Middleman Approach
During the 4 -day Affiliate Summit hosted by Travelpayouts, the largest affiliate marketing network focused on travel, Farzad Rashidi, co-founder of Respona, shared his approach on ranking ‘link building software’ for his business.
Implementing his content marketing strategy allowed him to reach a position in top ten Google results for the same keyword. The DR of his site also increased dramatically from 2 to 66 including 67 DA.
Here are the three types of content essential to businesses who want to achieve high rankings:
Link building content.
The goal here is to make content that makes others want to link back to your site. If a relevant authoritative site is linking back to you, this lets Google know your content is also authoritative. As you get more high quality links, your content ranks higher up on Google.
SEO-driven content.
This is content you create based on keywords, to drive traffic to your website.
Bottom of the funnel content.
This might be case studies, a user community or product updates, for example. Bottom of the funnel content is anything data-driven and used to convince customers to buy from you.
Rashidi explains how to use these three types of content simultaneously. Take ‘presentation infographics’ as a parent keyword for this example.
- First create a landing page for the parent keyword.
- Then create a silo structure.
- Include internal links to the money page or landing page.
- Build plenty of links around blog posts.
- Pass link equity to help your landing pages do better.
In this way, you can cover all three types of content and hopefully attract customers. Farzad coined the name ‘middleman approach’ for this strategy.
3. The Reverse Funnel Approach
Larry Kim shared his ‘reverse funnel approach’ in his 2014 Pubcon presentation. His content promotion generated more than 10 million unique visitors and 10,000 press pickups. This strategy begins with the end in mind.
Here are some of his best tips:
Decide where you want media coverage.
Kim’s WordStream team likes to begin with goals. Rather than try to encourage reporters to cover what they want to discuss, create content publications which appeal to news organizations. This is automatically more promotable content. One thing the press loves is breaking large-scale stories.
Decide on your main idea.
The WordStream team noticed the Facebook IPO was a month away, so they created a head-to-head analysis comparing ads on Google and Facebook.
The ‘So What’ Factor.
Think to yourself: so what? Why would someone want to cover this? The key here is to make your content really stand out by finding a new angle. Larry’s team created their content and then published the story just a few days before the Facebook IPO. In this way, they managed to leverage the buzz and attract visitors.
Conclusion
Your website could boast the most amazing content out there, but unless you know how to get traffic nobody is going to find it!
Build your brand by creating valuable content and then promoting it. Right from your first idea, you can build content into the link-building process. Use these clever tips from the experts and take your website from strength to strength.
from Business 2 Community https://ift.tt/38ut4uv
Comments
Post a Comment