A lot of business owners I speak to have a huge passion for the business they are building, their product or service, and usually the industry they are in. Where they often fall short is how to generate demand for it and get engagement across potential customers. They sit and wait and hope.
I always say “Hope is not a plan.” And the sooner you get started on demand generation programs the sooner you’ll see the results.
You may have heard you need to produce some blog and get those live on your site. You may have never really considered the finer details of what to write about about where to place that on your site for maximum results.
After all you’re not just engaging readers but you’re expanding your reach by using the right words and posting it in the right place.
This article will help you identify what to write about and what words you might use to see the most potential buyers clicking through to your content.
The great thing about it is it’s a science not an art. You can reasonable predict the best places to promote your content and it all works through a simple plan that is totally reproducible.
If you’re interested in understanding what kind of results you can get from this you can download the case study for free.
Step 1: Find Related Low Competition Keywords That You Can Write About
The words you use in your content is absolutely essential. If you want to begin ranking for terms that are likely to generate traffic but also not too competitive you need to start with some research before you begin writing.
The best place to start is using a regular Google search as well as the Google Keyword Planner tool. The tool itself will help you uncover the best phrases for you to write about. Google search will help you understand your competition and what searchers are expecting to get as a result.
The Keyword Planner Tool requires a Google Ads account but rest assured you don’t need to actively advertise on Google to have access to it.
In this case I knew I wanted to write an article about how to get your content ranked higher in Google and I also wanted it to be a “how to”. In other words I wanted to target it to people actively searching for ways to make get more people to their site. I jotted down a few ideas:
- how to get ranked first in google
- how to rank higher in google
- how to get on page one of google
- how to create content that will get ranked high
- how to generate more traffic
- how to create content that will get more traffic
I purposefully steered away from SEO because I know it’s an extremely competitive term and I just want to avoid it. What we’re doing here isn’t strictly SEO anyhow…here are the results of just those search phrases:
What I’m looking for is terms with the highest “Avg. monthly searches” I can find with Low competition. This is our sweet spot. 90 for Avg. monthly searches is fairly low, but I am really looking to generate traffic on a site that barely gets any at all – it may be worth it to target this one.
The suggested terms aren’t really helping…
I could spend some more time really pruning this list by popping a lot of other options into the Planner tool but I’m going to settle on this for now. I am pretty sure within a month or two the post will be on page one, and I know that the 90 will generate quality traffic in the long run.
Our new article will be called “How to Rank Higher in Google”
Step 2: Find a Great Place to Put The Article On Your Site
The next thing you’ll need to decide is whether this piece makes more sense as a blog post or as a pillar page.
Pillar pages are much longer than normal blog posts and similar to an e-book. They often contain hyperlinked chapters at the top of the text. They are in-depth enough to provide real value to your audience but general enough to allow for “cluster content” to do more of the specific explaining. Obviously blog posts are much shorter and generally unrelated to each other.
There are SEO-related benefits to a pillar page as well, since they are neat and cleanly organized together which is something Google likes.
If the term “pillar page” is brand new to you it’s either time to start one, or it’s best to place your new piece of content on a blog.
Here is an example of how a pillar page content might be thought of:
- Pillar: Digital Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Lead Generation
- Website Creation
- Conversion Optimization
- Reporting
Using your new piece of content in the right format will help users consume the material and will help ensure your rankings in Google improve. For my piece (the one you’re reading now) I’ve decided to create it as a Blog.
Step 3: Write With The Intent to Add Value
I’ve heard many times “That content is valuable why would I give that away for free?”. I think that old thinking is going away, replaced with the realization you need to offer or add value to prospects up front in order to begin building loyalty and trust.
Think of this article here as an example – NorthIQ can do this work for you and would gladly receive payment for the services. Giving away a view into my methodology seems counterintuitive.
I’ve done this for two reasons:
- I want to bring visitors to the site who are looking for this information
- Many of those may be interested in DIY but some may be interested in talking about an engagement.
I honestly also have a side interest in helping small businesses who are really trying to grow their vision out. I understand their passion but also their struggles. If I can help some of these business owners along the way that is a good feeling.
Oh, and remember to work your keywords into the body of your post.
Step 4: Track Your Progress
I consider very few things a “set it and forget it” in the digital marketing world. You need to know how well this is doing for a few very important reasons.
You need to understand if your methodology/process even works!
If it is working you’ll want to reproduce it constantly. If it’s not you’ll need to review what went wrong and fix it.
You want to understand how much traffic you’re generating, where they are going and whether they are converting
Pure raw traffic is not the most wonderful thing ever…let me put it that way. Part of the math here is conversions on your website. If that’s not happening you’ll need to re-evaluate the content you’ve been writing about.
There are a few important ways you can track how things are doing.
Google Things Manually
You can easily perform a Google search manually to find out what your rank is, but keep in mind there are a couple of significant downsides. First, rank does not indicate traffic. Second, you’re only performing a search from your own localized geography and it won’t indicate your broader rankings.
Here you can see NorthIQ has a high ranking for this term, which is important to us. Our ranking for “lead generation” as a broad term is not so positive.
Use Google Analytics
Using Google Analytics you can somewhat fine tune your reporting to get a ballpark view into overall how your new article is performing. This report doesn’t take rankings into account – but so what you’re seeing the important information here which is Traffic.
Navigate to Google Analytics and select the Acquisition > Channels > All Channels report. Click on “Organic” from within that report. Next you’ll notice the Primary Dimension at the top of the report – you’ll want to select Landing Page. Here you’ll see all organic traffic by landing page. If you scroll and sort through this report you’ll see the content pieces you’ve created and how much traffic you’re driving. I recommend this report as a free way to monitor how your content is performing.
Paid Reporting Tool
NorthIQ uses SEMRush to track our results, and the results of our customers. We get a lot of information in order to understand results, as well as daily gains and losses. I would only recommend this route for when you’ve really hit your stride with content deployment and it’s become a business driver for you. Until then take it easy and use the tools listed above.
With that said the paid tools give you a complete view into performance and (in my opinion) is worth the spend if scaling traffic is a business driver for you.
Conclusion
This methodology is designed to help you rank higher in google for the terms that are meaningful to your business. If you follow it closely over time it will really begin to pay off for you!
Be patient! Generating organic traffic takes time but will ultimately lead to growing the right traffic to enable your business to grow. This is not a quick solution, but it does work.
If you’re interested in understanding what kind of results you can get from this you can download the case study for free.
