#063 Content Marketing Newsletter
Link building strategies, optimizing for quick SEO wins, free SEO tool, and much more.
🎯 Actionable Insights
💡 1. How To Build Links To Your E-commerce Site?
Convincing bloggers and journalists to link to your product or category pages is hard.
But there are some proven methods that any eCommerce brand can implement immediately to acquire links in 2022.
1/ Get listed on “best [product type]” pages
Start with the following google search: best [product type] -[your brand name]
This will show you a list of articles (best product types) linking to your competitors but not to you.
Next, pitch them a free trial of your product and ask them to share feedback.
Instead of exchanging product offers for links and mentions (which is against Google guidelines), ask whether they’d like to add your product to the list.
2/ Turn brand mentions into links
Brand mentions could be an easier way of acquiring backlinks to your eCommerce site as the third-party website is already aware of your product.
Use Semrush’s free brand monitoring tool (or any other brand monitoring tool) to track and analyze brand mentions.
Next, pitch them if they can also add a link to your website.
Here’s a real example of trying to turn brand mentions into links:
3/ Pitch guest post updates
You may have already heard of guest article publishing as a link-building method.
But in case of writing a new article for third-party websites, you’ll update the content of one of their existing articles.
Tip: Consider choosing outdated articles or articles that show a decline in organic traffic. This way, it will be easier for you to show the ROI of updating the content.
📌 Read the full article here and learn other link-building methods that work
👉 Insight from Joshua Hardwick (Head of content at Ahrefs)
💡 1. How To Optimizing For Quick SEO Wins
When you start an SEO project, you should always look for opportunities where small effort will lead to a significant improvement.
This is from a client's site after optimizing for quick wins (yet to create a single new page).
In this case, we haven't done (so far) any keyword research, content creation, or link-building.
All we did was assess and fix the common SEO issues on the site:
Here's what we did 👇
SEO quick wins Started with assessing:
GSC Coverage report
Checking metadata across the site
Crawl depth (how far a page is from the home page)
Avg position
Thin & duplicate content
Redirection issues (+Technical issues)
Page structure (H1, H2s, etc.)
Internal linking
This whole process didn't take more than a few weeks (normally depending on the number of pages) to execute.
But this can help improve the performance without even creating a new page and backlink.
This is a must-have process for eCommerce sites that may drive huge results.
Example:
Fixing metadata and adding related content to product and category pages can do wonders for many eCom sites.
The bottom line:
Before/ while doing a content audit, keyword research, etc., look for quick win opportunities.
In addition, this helps you build a solid base by making the site technically sound.
Here’s what Aleyda Solis suggests:
“…Establish a quick parallel low hanging fruit assessment along your usual SEO research/audit workflow to avoid waiting for so long to start implementing on high impact/low effort actions.”
👉 Access to content marketing VIP Club and unlock the library of case studies, SEO strategy breakdown, and more (Get lifetime access now - few days left).
💬 Bite-sized Insights
💡 1. Find Ranking Opportunity With This Trick
If the target keyword is not an evergreen topic and the 'last updated' time for some top ranking pages is over 1+ years,
Then you might have an opportunity to outrank them by creating content with fresh data, studies, the latest updates, news, etc.
Here’s an example where the top ranking pages were updated years ago:
👉 You can use a tool like Thruuu for SERP analysis (free to use).
💡 2. Realistic SEO KPIs for a new website
SEO results should be tied with end business goals.
BUT for a brand new website, you need to have a more realistic approach (as it may take at least 6 months to start showing results for your content efforts).
In this period, more realistic KPIs could be the month-of-month growth of:
Impressions
Clicks
Keyword positions in the SERP
Indexed pages (ensure that new pages are getting indexed), etc.
👉 Insight from Sk Rafiqul Islam (Creator of Content Marketing VIP)
🗓️ Learning Resources and Tools
💡 1. Free Content Brief Template [Download For Free]
Having an in-depth and clear content brief helps your writer to understand:
Purpose of the content
Who’s the audience
Which keywords/topics to include
How to structure an article, and more.
Most of all, you can scale your process of creating briefs for writers by preparing a template.
But not sure what to include in a content brief?
Then you’ll love this Notion template (downloadable) that you can copy for your own content requirement.
👉 Download the content brief template (by Content Harmony)
💡 2. Link-Building Prospecting Scorecard [Free Outreach Prospecting Tool]
If you're doing link-building outreaching, you will find this chrome extension useful.
Generally, it is hard to predict whether a site will accept your pitch for guest articles, broken links, etc.
But this free tool will help you increase the success rate of your outreach.
This tool quickly evaluates signals that correlate strongly with success or failure in outreach. Examples include:
Stop words (example: advertising)
No followed, org, .gov or .edu links
Number of external links on the page (willing to link out)
Words with intent to collaborate (example: tips, guest post)
Contact words that improve the likelihood of info being available
Use this free prospecting tool to increase the number of qualified outreach emails sent and links built.
👉 Download this free link-building tool (by SiegeMedia)
🆕 What’s New
💡 1. Google Released July 2022 Product Reviews Update [Important For Affiliate Websites]
Covering product review guides on your website?
If so, then Google's product review update can affect your search performance over the next few weeks.
What to do if you notice a significant traffic drop due to this update?
First, give this update some time to roll out completely before making any major changes on the site.
Next, if you don't see any improvements after the update rolls out, you may check out Google's guidelines for writing high-quality product reviews.
Here are some of the product review best practices shared by Google:
👉 Learn how to write high-quality product reviews (by Google)