#082 Content Marketing VIP Newsletter
Less traffic with high conversions is better than high traffic with no business value and conversions.
🎯 Actionable Insights
1. Find Underperforming Content Using Search Console In Just 5 Steps
You don’t always need to create new content to drive SEO results. Sometimes, content updates can bring significant results in ranking and traffic.
Here’s how to find SEO opportunities with Google search console (GSC):
Step 1. Open performance report in GSC
Open the performance report in GSC and select at least the last three months of data.
Step 2. Export the data
If the last three months don't have much data (clicks, impressions), then consider selecting a longer date range, such as six months.
Step 3. Filter the data
You'll now have a list of page URLs, impressions, clicks, and CTR.
First, remove the page URLs with low impressions. In my case, I've removed all the URLs with less than 1k impressions in the last three months.
Second, sort the CTR column from smallest to largest.
Third, I’d also recommend you tag each URL with a page type. For eCommerce sites, page types will be product pages, category pages, etc.
Now, the sheet will look like this →
Step 4. Study the low CTR pages
Now, it’s time to analyze individual pages with high impressions and low clicks.
There could be other possible reasons for pages with low CTR:
Not matching the search intent
Poor backlink profile and internal links – as it may impact the ranking position.
Meta title and meta description
Content information gap – headings structure, lack of content depth, etc.
Therefore, you need to analyze the list of pages you got from the last step. And check for possible solutions as well.
Step 5. Organize the action items
While researching, I recommend tagging each URL with the possible solution/ action item.
Here’s an example →
This way, you can easily forward the entire data to your content team or prioritize the SEO tasks.
👉 Insights from Content Marketing VIP
2. Information gain (ways to prevent your content from being copy-cat content)
So far, we have researched based on the competitors (top running pages). But the common issue with this approach is that the content will look similar to other pages (if not the same).
Why is this a problem?
First, a Lack of content differentiation can lead to poor organic ranking. Imagine why Google would want to rank just another page in the SERP with the same information.
Second, this makes it difficult for brands to differentiate (your clients may not want to invest in content that just copy-pastes competitors' pages).
Better approach?
Information gain, as described by Ryan Law of Animalz.
Information gain means your content will have more content depth as compared to other pages in the SERP.
This makes your content more comprehensive and unique and adds an additional layer of information that others are not doing.
Note: Teaching your writers about the information gained is a must. Forget about the ‘word count’ as a metric to understand the comprehensiveness of an article.
Instead, use 'content depth' to measure the information gain from your article as compared to top-ranking pages.
Here are ways to improve information gain/ content depth:
Going into more content depth
Consider covering all the important sub-topics and making the content more in-depth. Think of this like a user should get all the related information for the topic.
One way of adding content depth is by answering all related questions regarding your topic.
Problem driven approach is one of the easiest ways to increase the content depth in a meaningful way. For this, you need to identify the real questions and challenges people have regarding your topic.
You can get ideas from:
Google PAA
Frase
MarketMuse
Ahrefs/Semrush
Sistrix
Quora
Reddit
An example from the Sistrix keyword tool:
Tip: Turn questions into H2s in your content if it suits the context of the page.
First, make a list of all important questions gathered from various platforms. Next, answer these questions to make the content really useful for the users.
💬 Bite-sized Insights
💡 1. Use templates to optimize thousand of eCommerce pages
It may sound simple, but optimizing the title tag and meta description of product and category pages can make a significant impact on organic performance.
But…
eCommerce stores have thousands of products, and sometimes optimizing the title and description according to the target keyword is difficult.
This is why you may create templates to scale the process of writing metadata for product pages.
Here’s an example from Wakefit (an online furniture store):
Most of the product pages of Wakefit are using the same pattern as this:
Similarly, the meta description is also templatized for faster implementation.
This scales the product and category page optimization process (writing metadata)
Add unique metadata (optimized for CTR and SEO) to each eCommerce page
🗓️ Learning Resources and Tools (compilation)
Here, I am compiling some of the best free/freemium SEO tools that you should try:
The SERP Similarity tool will quickly show you the overlap between two keywords on the SERPs and will tell you whether you should create a new page or not.
Advertools help you visualize a website's content and publishing pattern.
Quickly evaluate a domain’s link-building power by exploring the referral domains’ backlink networks.
Rank Tracker is a newly launched free SEO tool that helps you track the ranking position of keywords by collecting data from the Google search console.
SeoPoz is a free tool that simplifies all of your Google Search Console data into one place. You can see what keywords are ranking, where they rank for, and more! It’s the perfect way to keep track of your SEO progress.
‘Answer Socrates’ is a free research tool that helps you find all the possible questions on a specific topic.
A keyword research tool (freemium), helps you find trending topics, keywords, and industries.
Find branded search queries, real user questions, related keywords/ subtopics, and search demand of related keywords using the Sistrix keyword tool.
Great article, well done.