Surprising But Proven Content Marketing Strategies & Tips to Skyrocket Rankings, Traffic, Sales & Revenue

Thanks for having me, and I’m excited to be here.

So I think the goals will be conversions. If you can measure what you want someone to do on your website, you will be in great shape. So that could be phone calls. It could be form submissions. If you do E-commerce, it could be people buying products and revenue. And then beyond that, if you’ve got a business, maybe you don’t have all of that E-commerce stuff set up if you can track things like form submissions or, even simpler, just clicks and impressions. So if you’re getting the eyeballs and getting relevant clicks to your business, it’s pretty easy to say, Okay, this content is doing well. It’s performing.

Yeah. If you’re selling shoes and want people to buy them online, you want them to take the final action to check out at the bottom of the sales funnel to buy the shoes. But there are different ways you can get people in the door and drive more traffic. And blogging is one that we and a lot of SEOs will focus on. There are so many different ways and different searches that people are putting into Google that the audience and the scope of the people you can get are wide. So you could get somebody ready to buy or look for different styles. Someone higher up in the sales funnel. So their goals are going to be entirely different. So if you can break that out and analyze the sales funnel and your conversions, you can say, all right, even if they didn’t make a purchase, we got extra value from this. So even if it’s just an estimate, then you’re going to be much more prepared to estimate the value of a page and how all the research that you did in creating the content, you can connect the dots from point A to point B, and measure value. So that was kind of a long-winded answer to that.

If we’re talking about search, you’ll see a lot of lists out there. People love lists, for better or worse. You see a lot of lists and a lot of guides depending on the keyword. So when doing keyword research, you want to make sure you’re Googling the keyword and looking at the search engine results page. And see what kind of content is ranking for this? Okay, is it a list? Is it a guy? Is it just a question? And then, from there, you can use one of the methods already done or custom combine and create a hybrid version of the different types of content already out there to increase the quality. And that’s what you need to succeed as you need that quality content.

Yeah. When we’re doing keyword research, to be honest, the sales funnel is in the back of our minds. It’s not at the forefront. The most important thing for me is to find a keyword that is frequently searched but is not too competitive and is highly relevant to the business. And those are the three factors we use whenever we’re doing keyword research. And we use a very simple formula to prioritize mathematically which keywords we think are the best to target. And it turns out the ones at the bottom of the sales funnel would go into our keyword relevance score when we’re analyzing it. So if we’re looking at those three factors and we’ve got a keyword that’s searched a lot, maybe it’s not very competitive if you’re lucky, and we look at their intent. So if they’re ready to buy and, say, they’re searching for Nikes and Nikes are your bread and butter, it’s what you sell a lot of, and that might be a bad example because Nike shoes are going to be hard to rank for. But with that example, we would weigh the bottom of the sales funnel as higher in relevance. And it’s a balance of those three things we’re looking for to prioritize which targets to go after first. And that’s incredibly important because if you go after the wrong keyword, you could be wasting all that time. And as you said, it does take a lot of time.

I don’t see any data based on what I’ve read. And then the nice thing about longtail keywords is that it’s so much more specific that you could find a keyword that will convert better. I imagine you could also find longtail keywords that don’t convert well. So I think it will depend on the keyword and their search intent.

Yeah. If you’ve got Google Ads set up and you’re ready to go, I see no reason; if you want to test out conversion rates, that’s a great way to do it. Because instead of waiting months or years for content to rank, you can figure it out in a day or a week.

And that brings up another interesting point. I think every company is going to have its process. They’re all going to have their customers. And for some companies, maybe they’re already running tons of ads. And maybe they’re dialed in and know exactly how to test something. So that may be a great strategy for them. If it’s a small business, other companies may not even run Google Ads yet. And maybe they need to start blogging and start testing out different keywords. But to your point, like it does take a lot of time, and if you’re investing a lot of resources, whether it’s financial or your time, by all means, that’s a great way to test, and you can get it done very quickly.

I think two things. First one is just analyzing the search engine results page. Let’s start there because there’s a lot you could unpack there. There’s so much information you could collect on the results page about what people are looking for? How are people asking questions? What types of content are ranking well and why? If you have a little bit of an understanding of what Google is trying to do with their algorithm, just rank things correctly and get people information concisely and quickly. If you know that that’s their goal, you can do all sorts of research by looking at one keyword. Looking at related searches at the bottom of the results page. That can give you some better longtail keywords if say, the one that you’re looking at initially that you searched is too competitive. You can enable Moz bar and look at keyword difficulty to see; how strong are all the domains showing up for this keyword? And if they’re all in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and your domain authority is a 20 or a ten, then that’s not a good keyword to target.

Yeah. So for keyword competition, Moz bar is my favorite because you can see it right there. I like using Mangle’s keyword finder. I think the way they built that tool is helpful because you get keyword difficulty, and you get Domain Authority, which is the Moz ranking we discussed. You can create lists, and that’s a good tool. But then one that’s free and under-utilized is Google Search Console. That’s data that you’re getting right from the source. It’s not estimated what you’ll get from all the different SEO tools. And there’s just so much data you can find just from looking through the keywords that you’re already ranking for. And a great example of that is looking at your keywords and clicks and sorting by impressions, and you can see; all right, if we sort by impressions, this is where we’re showing up the most. But maybe we’re on the fifth page. And just by manipulating that data, you can get all sorts of insights as to other keywords you might want to target, as well as how difficult a keyword might be.

I’ve never been a huge fan of those tools, and that’s because they’re automated. I want to create the best content I can and help people searching for whatever it is that they’re searching for. Now, that’s not to say that they’re useless. One essential thing is getting that Title tag. Title Tags are very important. If you have a bomb Title Tag, if you don’t have keywords in there, the chances of your ranking will just plummet. So the Title Tag is really important. There are a lot of things you can get feedback in an automated way using one of those tools that are going to be helpful. I don’t use them, but that’s not to rag on those tools. So if you’re not using headers, if you’re not using title tags, you could have all sorts of issues. And so those tools are going to help point out those things. And once you do enough SEO, blogging enough, and analyze keywords all the time, you get a much better sense of okay, this type of structure for this content, or we want to have more headers here, or this should be a list. So you’ll get a better feel for it.

So, that’s a really interesting topic. With AI writing content, it’s very easy to think that content marketing and SEO landscape could just drastically change. I don’t look at this on a day-to-day or even necessarily a monthly basis. I haven’t seen any AI that creates content that is better than what a human could write, or if you can write an article that AI generates, that you could say is maybe an eight out of 10 in terms of content quality and writing, then I’m going to say that that’s probably good enough to use if it’s affordable. In the content I’ve seen, there have been errors, and you can tell it’s AI-generated, and I’d put it at maybe a five out of 10 or below. But if it’s getting better, and it will get better, that will drastically change how people doing SEO create their content for obvious reasons.

Yeah. If you can minimize the amount of giving someone has to do to get their foot in the door, that’s going to be better. And that’s why it’s great to have several different offerings. Now, you don’t want to splash them all at one time. You don’t want to have links all over the place. But know, if you can figure out the best way to capture users at different entry points, that’s huge. And you can measure that stuff. So I think testing; if you have the web development to run effective tests to determine what’s going to be the most compelling and the best way to optimize your conversions and conversion rates and by all means, you will want to implement that and test everything.

Yeah. Are you referring to their first initial session, like, get their foot in the door and say, Hey, here’s…

I think as long as you’re not sacrificing quality. I don’t think you necessarily need a high volume of content. But sometimes, if you’re doing SEO, your first blog probably isn’t the one that brings in the big bucks. You’ll probably need to test the waters and try out different keywords. But to your point, if you are creating lots of content, the more you’re creating, the more times you’re throwing that line out and saying; Alright, let’s see what this does. So as long as you’re not sacrificing quality. I hate to say just churning out content, but the more volume you have, the more opportunities you have.

I think the more you can do, the better. If you are a small business, you don’t have the budget, and you need to get a website up, get it up, and you can come back to it. If you are starting a new business, I will also say most people starting their business probably don’t know much about SEO yet. Kudos if you do and know you have to hit the ground running. If you know that and have the resources to do it, by all means, do it all. Get it all out there and start producing content because when you are creating a new website and operating on a new domain with new content that Google hasn’t seen, you want to get in there and produce a lot of content. So that you can start seeing what people are searching for and getting leads and traffic. And if you just create a website without blogs or any strategy to bring in that traffic. It is going to be hard. Unless you are only doing social and you just need a website for people to see. It may have a form and other information. But if you are doing SEO, get it out early, as soon as possible.

Sure. So, we worked with a medical billing company. At the time, they were headquartered in Chicago. So we started doing content for them in 2018, and the things people search for, their target audience is interesting and very niche. And getting into that industry and audience is interesting for somebody who knows nothing about medical billing and is baffled by health insurance and whatever else. But, once you start finding those keywords, I found that there are not a lot of keywords out or less than you would think. Because the audience you are looking at is so small. Maybe somebody who is operating a Clinic or is a Manager at a Hospital. Figuring out the keywords they are searching for is tricky because it is very niche. But with that niche, there is a lot less competition. So once you find those keywords and start writing those blogs, give it some time; if the keyword is good and the content is good, you will see results over time. So it took maybe a year, but after that content is published, you generate ongoing traffic. It doesn’t stop. It might decline over a three to five or ten-year period. So if you write a successful blog that drives thirty or hundreds of clicks per day, you don’t have to do that work again. It just drives traffic. They did very well with content, and I think a lot came down to finding the right keywords and having a less competitive niche. Because it is a very specific industry, you will increase your chances if you target those longer tail keywords or keywords that companies aren’t going after left and right.

Yes. I can’t tell you how many clients I have dealt with that have one keyword in mind or maybe two, and that’s all they want. That’s great if we can rank for that keyword, and we will try. You have to go after those big winners, but some of the best keywords I have targeted do not look like they are searched that much. But you start getting into the woods of all the different things that people search, and you realize, especially for a company, if they get one conversion, they can generate thousands of dollars from a long-term customer. Maybe a B2B relationship. By all means, do the keyword that isn’t searched that often; nobody has targeted it before. Because your chances of ranking just skyrocketed.

I think it’s that last piece of information we discussed. The keyword’s difficulty is essential if you are doing search engine optimization. Unless you are at the top of your field and have that very strong domain authority that competes with the other companies at the top, it will be hard to rank up there. That doesn’t mean you don’t try. Instead, keep all your options open. Cast a wide net and look at those keywords that aren’t as competitive because many are out there.

They can go to our website, logicalseo.net. If they want to email me, that’s fine; it’s toshy@logicalseo.net.

I am on Twitter and LinkedIn, but I am not big on social media; certainly, reach out to me.

I hate to say it, but yes, I am there, but I will get back to you faster with an email.

Yes, thank you, and I appreciate you having me here.

You too.