The Golden State Warriors basketball team has already broken several NBA records in its quest to break the longest winning streak in NBA history. However, even if you’re not a fan of the NBA or the Warriors, there are lessons to be learned from the team’s tremendous feat. Our team came together this week to discuss content marketing, a popular marketing strategy, and how website owners can learn a lesson from the Warriors to improve their content marketing … and SEO score.
SEO is a strategy that requires some effort, and contrary to some people’s beliefs, just because you’re ranking for a keyword today (especially a keyword or keyword phrase that’s competitive) doesn’t mean your competitors won’t. they will put their own strategy. instead to “steal” its relevance through a more consistent and persistent SEO effort. Like the Golden State Warriors, if your team (or you, if you are the owner or sole proprietor) doesn’t show up every day and produce quality work, you will eventually have a hard time competing with those “teams” that are running day. after day. But what do you do when you’re just starting out and / or operating on a tighter budget, and you don’t have a lot of money to spend on a professional to do the SEO for you? We suggest that you start with posting relevant content. And often.
This may seem obvious enough, but when we speak to many of our clients, we almost always recommend that they do so, even if we are writing some of the content for them. Why?
• Your content will be unique and Google LOVES unique.
• It allows you to show a bit of your experience to prospects and partners, and it can keep people coming back to your website for future ideas.
• If your specific keywords are part of the content, it will help increase your page rank over time.
• You control the quality of the content. No third party may care as much about your business and industry as you do, so your own content will help that enthusiasm shine.
• You can be timely and relevant to the topics you’re talking about, which is an easy way to stay on top of trends and increase the chances that your content will rank.
So how does your company become the Golden State Warriors of content marketing and SEO? Here is a process we suggest:
1. Explore Google Trends and get ideas that have been popular in recent weeks. People always ask us why we stand for this, and it usually comes up with this question: “None of the fashion topics is about my industry, so why should I use this?” First of all, trending topics don’t have to be about your industry. Take the article you are currently reading, for example. As we write this, the Golden State Warriors are trending as a result of their (currently) undefeated NBA season. So what if our article title was “How Content Marketing Can Be Improved By Analyzing Golden State Warrior’s Winning Streak”? What would we write about? Perhaps we would draw parallels between a team-written blog with consistently well-written, detailed articles and why not relying on a single player to win a game is why Golden State continues to beat its opponents. The reality is that it doesn’t matter. You just want to attract readers and take advantage of what people are already searching for on the internet.
2. Once you’ve found an idea for your latest post, just start writing. Write about what, you ask? Anything! Not all articles need to be researched and sourced, and not all articles need to be 3,000 characters. Just look at Twitter. Twitter gives you 140 characters to convey a message, yet how many people see these tweets and act on them in some way? Millions! The point is, don’t worry about the length. Be concerned about the quality and integrity of a thought, and whether it will make your readers act.
3. Now that you have written your article, it is time to maximize your profits for your website through internal and external links. Internal linking has a great SEO benefit because it allows readers to easily jump from page to page based on what they are reading and what actions you want them to take. They also prevent people from “bouncing” or entering your website and leaving immediately, and they increase the amount of time they spend reviewing the rest of the content on your website. So, read your article and find words or phrases that can be used to link to other parts of your website. External links, on the other hand, are links that take readers to another website. For example, above I linked to Google Trends. Why? Google views you favorably when you are not constantly linking to your site only, and it also gives you the opportunity to exchange links with another website. Let’s say there is a complementary (but not direct competition) product that you reference in your article. You can reach out to that other company to let them know and ask if they’d mind putting your link somewhere within their website. What is the benefit for you? It’s free advertising to your readers, and if your page rank is higher than yours, it will give your website an SEO boost if visitors come to it via the link on that higher page rank site.
4. With your article written and embedded links, you are probably wondering where to post your content. Before Google’s Panda update, where we saw a higher penalty for duplicate content, people who spent time creating quality articles thought it best to post them on as many websites and social media accounts as possible. We no longer believe this is optimal. While we know you spent all that time writing a great article and you want to make sure you maximize the number of eyes on it, it can actually do you more harm than good to republish your content in multiple locations. This is why we suggest that you put the content in a single location or make sure that any of the publishing websites you use (e.g. Search Engine Journal) allow you to use a rel = canonical reference to make sure Google don’t penalize yourself for duplicate content!
5. Lastly, if you want to go the extra mile with your content marketing, forum discussions and the like can be a great way to increase the number of backlinks to your article. Reddit, for example, has become a really powerful social medium for experience in certain areas. If you join groups relevant to your industry, you will probably find tons of user-generated questions that you can answer (and reference your article) that will give you a static link to your article for future Reddit users with the same question. . For the record, it doesn’t have to be Reddit. You can do this same strategy on all social media websites.
So if you are looking to improve your content marketing strategy and also want to save some of your SEO budget, we suggest that you start with the process outlined above. The Warriors did not become the team they are today overnight, so keep doing the right thing week after week and you will eventually dominate your competition! And if you don’t know what your website’s current ranking is, or you just want a second opinion, we suggest you check out our Free SEO Report.
Good luck and good writing!