20 steps to drive content marketing success with seo
TRANSCRIPT
20STEPS
to drive content marketing success
with SEO
K E V I N G I B B O N S
LET MEtell you the story behind this…
CONTENT MARKETING can be a fantastic way to take your SEO to the next level...
In competitive sectors especially, you need engaging content and authority link reputation
in order to compete at the top...
BUTMake sure you do it for the right reasons...
All organisations start with WHY, but only the great ones keep their WHY clear year after year.”
S I M O N S I N E K
Your content marketing strategy, should start here
A content marketing strategy isn’t about one-off campaigns
It’s about moving the needle where it really matters.
Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
A B R A H A M L I N C O L N
Strategy - we’re not ready to jump into the exciting ideas just yet, take time to build your plan of attack...
01S T E P
What does success look like?
TRAFFIC
£
DIGITAL PR & SOCIAL MEDIA COVERAGE
RANKINGS
SOLID ON-SITE SEO & CONTENT STRATEGY
Don’t fall into the trap of getting excited about coverage...
without having a clear plan of how you can make £!
Clearly define how you will measure success from the very start.
Business Goals
SEO & content marketing strategy
02S T E P
Get the right team in place
CONTENT MARKETING IS
BROKEN DOWN INTO
3 MAIN CATEGORIES
01Strategy
02Creativity
03Promotion
Being aligned in all 3 of these areas is vital in order to hit the sweet spot of content marketing results.
Make sure you create an action plan based on these 3 key pillars of content marketing:
1
2
3
Strategy - SEO & content strategy
Creativity -Outstanding content creation
Promotion -Digital PR & social media coverage
03S T E P
SEO short-term wins - Almost every site I’ve seen has technical or on-site issues, that can be improved to make an impact to organic performance
following technical SEO recommendations to improve how Google was crawling and indexing the site.
305%increase in organic visibility
04S T E P
Competitor marketplace analysis -who’s winning, where and why?
Use tools like SearchMetrics for competitive analysis on organic visibility and market share, and then dig deeper - are they winning because they have better content?
05S T E P
Audit your existing content before you create anything new
§ What content do you have already?
§ Can you improve it?
§ What worked best / what didn’t?
§ What has generated the most traffic in the past?
§ Where is the social engagement or links coming from?
§ Your internal site search could be a gold mine!
§ Give feedback to editors on content performance; social, traffic, links, pageviewsetc…
§ Have you got an offline magazine? Newsletters?
06S T E P
Persona analysis - who are you targeting at each step of the journey?
Classic Purchase Funnel
AWA R E N E S SSomething sparks an interest – it
meets a need or creates one.
C O N S I D E R AT I O NPeople think about it and
ask around
A C T I O NPeople buy, join,
share etc.
§ Awareness: Interesting, engaging, fun, entertaining, thought leading content
§ Consideration: targeted content around research based keywords
§ Action: to help people to buy, subscribe or navigate back to what they liked before
07S T E P
Build your content strategy - think short-term impact, long-term success...
1. Improve top converting content from your PPC data, Google Search Console and analytics.
2. Perform a content gap analysis vs key competitors - what are you missing out on? Create it!
3. Focus on narrow topics - putting into keyword groups that drive the highest revenue and engagement.
4. Build a seasonalised editorial calendar, prioritised by value - focusing on topical subjects.
5. Measure and improve - building your key learnings back into how you can create future content.
Creativity –stand out from the crowd
08S T E P
Solve real problems that your customers and target audience face
Leverage tools to build insights on what keywords people are searching for.
This can also be a great way to secure Google Answer boxes!
09S T E P
Research top performing content and build data-driven insights to give a newsworthy and credible hook
10S T E P
Run content brainstorm sessions to spark creative ideas
Brainstorms should also be prepared - start individually, and then each share ideas as a group to discuss and refine.
Keep a digital bank of ideas -not everything is content that should be created today, but it’s worth keeping in mind for future campaigns.
11S T E P
Create the best on-site content on the internet for a given topic
If you want to rank number one in Google, you need to deserve to be there.
12S T E P
Leverage creative campaigns for big content ideas & PR coverage
UK Search Awards 2016 Winner: Best Use of Search in Travel
§ Strategy: We identified three clear themes to generate content campaigns to different target influencer groups: fashion, movies and food.
§ What we did: We developed a series of creative data-driven guides and ran a blogger event to involve influencers and engage with Expedia’s target audience.
§ Results: Across our campaigns, we generated coverage from over 125 authority publishers, with a significant impact on organic-search-converting keywords and traffic to key target landing pages.
Promotion –Become an Authority Within Your Industry
13S T E P
Get publishers excited about your content with digital PR coverage
Agreeing an exclusive with a publisher in advance can help to get their buy-in.
e.g. “did you see this article on
the dailymail.co.uk? I saw you
did something similar last year,
perhaps you’d like to cover this?”
But make it 100% clear who the original source is!
14S T E P
Work with influencers to maximise outreach success
For a street food campaign, we invited top London food bloggers to our Leather Lane office and gave them a lunch to remember...
§ Identify who the top publishers and influencers are within your niche - then you can learn from:
§ What they’re doing
§ What type of content they like
§ What they don’t like
§ Who their original sources are (who influences the influencers)
15S T E P
Build influencer profiles to build credibility & attract publisher writing slots
§ We built a content strategy focused around key topics, hiring nutritionists & building up their writing profiles to provide authority content.
§ We secured coverage from 93+ authority health and fitness publishers, with regular writing slots on HuffPost, Men’s Fitness and Cosmo (also featured in magazine).
§ This generated a 144% YoY increase in organic search traffic!
16S T E P
Build an engaged audience of potential customers
01 Identify – who is your target audience and where can you find them?
02 Acquire – acquiring traffic to your content, across marketing channels.
03 Nurture –provide content your readers love, in a content hub environment you control.
04 Engage – by providing consistently great content, the goal to continually create outstanding & engaging content.
05 Capture – provide useful content to build your audience of email subscribers, social followers and re-targeting lists.
06 Grow – build real loyalty and advocacy with your readers. Increasing sales down the customer journey.
17S T E P
Push content further with paid amplification to get the ball rolling
Paid social can build credibility and get you get in front of publishers - the popularity of this post we ran for Bloom & Wild helped us to open doors to secure digital PR coverage for an Easter campaign.
Measure –prove your work has been a big success
18S T E P
Report on success to show real impact and business value
TRAFFIC
£
DIGITAL PR & SOCIAL MEDIA COVERAGE
RANKINGS
SOLID ON-SITE SEO & CONTENT STRATEGY
Visualise the revenue impact to organic traffic by building key insight reports in Tableau
Demonstrate monthly and year-on-year organic search growth.
Measure and report on organic keywords and groupings.
Showcase your digital PR coverage and metrics.
Reduce SEO errors and improve indexing.
19S T E P
Build upon your successes and learn from the failures to recycle content into fresh new ideas
NOWyou’re ready to get started…
20S T E P
Your blueprint to SEO & content marketing success
A N A L Y S I S R E S U L T S
Persona analysis
Technical SEO audit & implementation
Competitor marketplace analysis
Editorial calendar roadmap
Ideation
(Research/insights & brainstorming)
Promotion
(Digital PR, influencer outreach, audience
building & paid amplification)
Creativity
(On-site content & creative
campaigns)
C O N T E N T M A R K E T I N G
S T R A T E G Y C R E A T I V I T Y & P R O M O T I O N
Insight Implementation Performance
Benchmarking goals & KPIs
Organic traffic & new
customeracquisition
Content audit and gap analysis
