#076 Content Marketing VIP Newsletter
Knowing what type of content and which content platforms are giving you the most and least ROI is important in content marketing.
💡 This newsletter is sponsored by Marketing Examined, a newsletter guaranteed to optimize your marketing performance.
5-minute reads that make you a better marketer, scale your startup, and are straight to the point.
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🎯 Actionable Insights
💡 1. Growing a site from 0 to 108k impressions in the first 6 months (case study)
Almost 6 months ago, I launched a blog as a side project.
Here are some stats:
2420 clicks
108k impressions
Traffic value is $503 (according to Ahrefs)
Let's break down some of the strategies that I think helped to grow the site:
1/ Topical authority
Since the website is in a broad category, it was important to first build topical authority on one topic instead of writing about every possible topic.
For example, I tried covering at least 5-10 articles on a single topic before moving on to the next one.
(Google sheet for categorizing every blog article by parent topic)
This helped in many ways, such as:
You can strategically use internal linking for only related posts
User experience: a reader interested only in Topic X will find multiple helpful articles on the same topic.
Action items:
If your blog has multiple parent categories, then you should consider improving the content depth, not breadth.
Cover a topic well before moving toward a different topic.
2/ Collaborating with industry experts
I collaborated with industry experts to gain expertise and make the blog more credible to the readers.
Here's what I did:
I started with a list of industry experts and reached out to them via LinkedIn, asking for contributor quotes (a few lines on a blog topic where they have expertise).
In favor, I have created a separate contributor page for each of these experts and given credit for their quotes.
Reasons for creating a separate page:
I wanted to associate my new blog with industry experts to make it more credible to Google and readers
Having a separate page will help me to target their branded searches.
Example:
Consider a well-known expert with 50 monthly search volumes on their name.
This contributor page may rank on the first page and drive branded traffic to the site.
Contributors share the article/contributor page URL on their social media platforms – increasing overall site traffic.
3/ Strategic internal linking
Internal linking contributes a major part to this SEO growth. I have built a glossary terms directory to build a more logical internal linking structure and topical authority.
For example, the glossary term directory will target keywords like:
What is [term X]
Definition of [term X], etc.
Also, each of these glossary definitions has an individual page (generally 800-1200 words of content) instead of listing all definitions on a single page.
The goal was not to rank them (as these keywords are highly competitive) but to create better internal linking.
Here's the visualization of the overall internal linking structure of the site:
Note: Avoid adding internal linking to highly authoritative pages to new pages if both of these pages have no relevance.
Where the site is going from here:
Currently, I am working on building a directory of free and paid resources for the readers – this will open a new level of opportunities in terms of traffic and branding
Scaling the expert outreaching process and creating dozens of contributor pages of industry experts
Planning to start monetizing the site once I hit 2,000 organic visits/per month
Have any questions regarding the SEO strategy of this side project? Feel free to reply below.
👉 Unlock the archive of posts on content marketing and SEO secrets of successful brands like Product Hunt, Shopify, Healthline, and many more.
💬 Bite-sized Insights
💡 1. ‘Content freshness’ for higher ranking in the SERP
“Freshness is a confirmed Google ranking factor.
And it's query-dependent.
E.g., The top results for "Netflix new shows" are new, whereas the results for "how to solve a rubik's cube" are old.
If freshness matters to your keyword, update your page often + publish new articles.”
Key takeaways:
Periodically audit your content inventory to check if any page needs a content update, freshness, etc.
When doing keyword research, if you identified a SERP (for your target keyword) with pages last updated years ago, then this could be an opportunity to outrank them with updated and fresh content.
👉 Insights from Ahrefs
💡 2. Use this SEO tip while embedding videos on your page (by Alex Cooper)
Using video content for your blog articles?
Then consider the following tip to help Google better understand the page content.
“Embed videos after a large chunk of text, so Google knows what the article is about before it has to process the video code.”
👉 Insights from Alex Cooper (founder of WP Eagle)
🗓️ Learning Resources and Tools
💡 1. SEO tool to track your ranking positions of up to 500 keywords (For free)
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.
The data is available in GSC, but this tool makes it easier to track the ranking and use the results in reporting.
Here’s a screenshot:
Key features:
Track ranking position of up to 500 keywords based
Daily email report to see changes in position
Filter rankings by country and device
Compare 7, 30, 90 day and yearly averages
👉 Track your website ranking for free (up to 500 keywords)
💡 2. Visualize your structured data with this free SEO tool
Using structured data helps Google understand the content and important information about your website page.
So if you play with structured data to improve the site's visibility, you will love this tool.
The tool JSON Crack helps you visualize your entire JSON code in graphs.
Here’s an example:
👉 Thanks to Aykut Saraç for making this awesome tool (JSON Crack)
💡 3. Visualize your structured data with this free SEO tool
In this article, Sistrix dives into the top sites in retail and finds out what they're doing in order to achieve outstanding organic performance.
This includes strategy breakdown of top performers in SEO such as:
The Perfume Shop (leader in commercial content)
Healthline - (leader in informational content)
Hitched - (leader in informational content)
Here’s a screenshot:
This case study helps analyze the elements of top-performing sites – content formats, SEO strategies, site structure, and more.
👉 Read the full case study: Leading Content Analysis - Retail 2022 - SISTRIX
📹 On my mind
I use Notion sheet to organize SEO resources or sites to study their SEO growth strategy. If you'd like to take a sneak peek at the sheet, I am sharing the access with you.
👉 Access my Notion sheet of SEO and content marketing resources