• There is no shortage of interesting insights to find
• It’s tough to copy – nobody cares about the second person to come up with an insight
• Writing a 2,000 word article and begging for links ain’t what it used to be
• New data-driven insights are typically newsworthy

Data-driven content, along with the images, stats, graphs, and charts that come with it, is a great way to bake content promotion right into your article. It becomes much easier to build links when you have this differentiator.

Here are 8 examples of companies using data in one form or another to earn links and drive SEO traffic.  

1. Thumbtack’s Annual Small Business Friendliness Survey

Thumbtack, founded in 2008, came to be an SEO giant in nearly every home services vertical by two tactics. Incentivising badges with anchor text and their annual small business friendliness survey. The latter is what we’ll focus on here.  

Every year, Thumbtack incentivizes millions of small businesses on the platform to take a survey related to small business friendliness in their region. Thumbtack aggregates this data into results at state and city levels and assembles it onto a study on each of their state pages, and some of their city pages.  

They then pitch the study to local newspapers and organizations, earning them thousands of links. Since the links point to state and city pages, the link equity and relevance passes onto Thumbtack’s local service pages, allowing them to rank in the top results for almost every service in every metro.  

This link bait tactic economic study is so legitimate that the Governor of Utah went to Thumbtack’s office to receive an award.

Part of the brilliance of this tactic is that it can be reused every single year (Note how Thumbtack uses hashtags to trigger past year’s studies on their state-level pages.)

2. “Is Amazon actually giving you the best price” by Wikibuy

Wikibuy is a chrome extension that helps you find the lowest price on any item while shopping online. Around Black Friday of 2017, the company released a study that while customers did save on Black Friday, they could have saved more by shopping elsewhere.

The company created its own index of prices on Amazon compared to other prices that shoppers paid, showing a stark difference. In addition to backlinks, the company received widespread press coverage for this study, which couldn’t have come at a more opportune time than the holiday shopping season.

3. “Do Americans Know Basic Car Warning Symbols?” by the Zebra

The Zebra is asearch engine for car insurance that gets nearly 10 million visitors per year, mostly from organic search, according to Similar Web.

That’s no small feat in a niche as competitive as insurance, especially since the company was founded in 2012 – long past the ‘glory days’ of aggregator style SEO.  

How did they achieve this?  Data-driven content plays a big role.  

One of their most successful pieces, The State of Auto Insurance 2018, earned hundreds of links from sites ranging from personal finance blogs to local news stations.  

It’s a pretty beautifully done piece, with a great UX and lots of interesting tidbits such as how much a speeding ticket will increase your insurance and how much it costs to insure different vehicles. According to the site, all data came from “[the Zebra’s] quote engine, comprising data from insurance rating platforms and public rate filings”.

Typically the challenge with presenting data is balancing digestibility with the quantity of data, and the Zebra clearly invested a great deal of time striking this balance.

One particular instance of this is the state view, which allows a user to check out their specific state. This makes the piece appealing to the thousands of local journalists in the US.

It’s really tough to do this visualization justice with screenshots, so I’d highly recommend checking it out.

4. “Is Fortnite becoming a relationship wrecker?” by Divorce Online

UK-based divorce service Divorce Online recently released a study of their own data indicating that 5% of divorce cases mentioned the word Fortnite. In case you aren’t aware, Fornite is a highly addicting computer game taking the world by storm.

By combining newsjacking and proprietary data, Divorce Online earned links and press from the likes of CNBC.  

In contrast to the previous example from the Zebra, this piece of content is dead simple. The article is only 214 words and includes no data visualization or imagery other than a stock photo.  

That’s because the statistic they cited is the entire story – no need to overdo it if you don’t have to.

5. “Where are the new residents of Denver, CO moving from?” by LawnStarter

On August 2017, the US Census released a data-set showing metro-to-migration population flows in the United States. Not even a month later, LawnStarter turned this dataset into an interactive visualization showing exactly where new residents of Denver are moving from. The visualization shows several other tidbits such as where Denver lost population to, and what the demographics of the new population look like.

The result? Several mentions from reputable local news sources in Denver – exactly the types of local links an on-demand lawn care company is looking for.   

This is an example of how even companies in extremely boring industries can earn links from good content.

6. “This is the No. 1 reason Americans are losing sleep” by Bankrate

Bankrate built an SEO empire in the personal finance space.  

This is one of many surveys the company has done via a research firm, in this case GfK Custom Research. The piece begins by answering the question of what keeps Americans up (spoiler: it’s relationships), then breaks the data down by generation.

The beauty of surveys is that once performed, they are typically fairly easy to assemble into a piece of content. Use tools like HubSpot’s online form builder or a survey tool to gather results, and then simply put the results in a clean chart, cut the data in a few interesting ways, and add some color commentary to make the piece readable and interesting.

The downside? Surveys cost money, and sometimes they don’t yield anything surprising, controversial or otherwise newsworthy.  

If you don’t have much proprietary data but money isn’t an issue, hiring a research firm to do surveys can be a great way come up with brand new insights that earn links. On a bit of a budget? You can do surveys via Survey Monkey or Google for a lot less, but more established media outlets probably won’t bite.  

7. “Finding the best burrito in San Diego” by The Data School

I don’t think The Data School – a UK-based company – had SEO in mind when one of their members created this visualization of the best burritos in San Diego. Talk about out of the box thinking here.  

Here’s the explanation according to the author:

“The viz is split into 3 main parts. On the left there are a couple of filters that allow you to select what you want the burritos to be rated by. There is an overall score as well as specific variables such as meat to filling ratio, flavour synergy and uniformity. These are all rated out of 5 so an average can be taken and accredited to the burrito vendor. There is also a neighbourhood selector so you can drill down to find the best burrito shop in the neighbourhood you might be in.”

Will Griffiths describes the project as the week’s “viz at home”, and says that it was inspired by some of his classmates’ trip to San Diego.

Just goes to show how anybody can come up with cool insights from publically available data.

8. Plain Text vs. HTML Emails: Which is better?” by Hubspot

Hubspot revealed some of its own marketing test results in a 2015 piece titled on plain text vs HTML emails.  

The post contains around 1,200 words and a handful of visualizations delving into the results of an A/B test the company ran with regard to email.  

The post contains one surprising finding: plain text emails tend to outperform HTML emails, despite consumers’ alleged preference for the latter. This piece is useful, surprising and perfect as a source for others to cite, which is probably why it earned 300+ linking domains.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this post has shown you the power of data-driven content as it pertains to SEO.  In case you’re looking for more inspiration or datasets to play with, here are some of my favorite resources:

• Web Scraping
• Data.gov
• Google Trends
• Google Dataset Search
• Data is Beautiful (Reddit)
• Tableau Public
• Data.world
• World Bank
• FiveThirtyEight.com (datasets on Github)

Have a cool data-driven piece of content to share? Drop me a note!

The post 8 Examples of Data Driven Content Marketing appeared first on Raven Blog.

Read on as we tear into a few of them and show you what to look for….and what to do about it.
Photo courtesy Ralf Steinberger on Flicker.

What is negative SEO?

Google has been assessing ranking penalties, both manual and algorithmic, for some time now. Most of the penalties I’ve seen have been link-related: either anchor text keyword over-optimization (usually algorithmic these days), or just plain too-many-toxic-links types of penalties (both algorithmic and manual).

Building good, authentic, strong links is hard…just like real marketing and PR is hard. But instead of doing all that pesky real company stuff, Wil Reynolds always talks about strengthening your own backlink profile, why not just get a bunch of crappy links pointed at your competition and knock them off page 1 with a penalty?

Heck, you can get over half a million crappy links for your competitor on Fiverr for FIVE BUCKS.

This is the sort of technique that requires very little effort, very little money, and little respect for the ethical.

But does it actually work?

As of Penguin 4.0, Google says they ignore those sorts of links. I suspect that’s mostly true; the kinds of links you’d get for your $5 are probably going to be pretty easy to detect. And so hold on to your $5…it’s probably not going to affect that competitor’s site.

But think about it…if Google was now just ignoring ALL bad links, then there wouldn’t be any more penalties at all, right? Not so…

About 3 years ago, I saw two cases of negative SEO happening in the same month. Two different clients: one with fitness centers in Singapore, and another in the insurance industry in the western USA. Both were getting links from the exact same set of domains, the same week…dozens and dozens each day. The domains linking to them were penalized. This was pretty easy to spot, and I suspect Google would find and ignore those links today. Back then, their rankings tanked till we disavowed those links.

Today, the negative SEO attackers are much more sophisticated and are trying a wide range of tactics, which we’ll go into shortly.

Does it actually work today? To be honest, most of the time, Google seems to be ignoring at least enough of the nasty toxic links that the victim’s site does not suffer a penalty. However, one of my clients whose attack started in November 2017 definitely saw a massive drop in rankings. Their rankings didn’t recover until we had found and disavowed a ton of links–including a huge number of non-active links (either the page was 404ing, or the domain was not found or returning a 502).

Paul Madden, from Kerboo (makers of the backlinks analysis tool, LinkRisk) has this to say:

“At Kerboo we have seen an increase in customers suspecting Negative SEO attacks as our system helps flag up the new links and their risk. In general most of these have an innocent explanation but we have seen quite a number of genuine attempts aiming to impact a site’s rankings and in some cases, these appear to have worked.

I tend to agree that nowadays because Google aims to ignore the types of links typically used in a negative SEO attack, it’s harder to successfully damage a sites ranking through bad links. It is true however that Google are not nearly as good at ignoring everything as they believe and so the only sensible route for a site owner is to put in place a system where they can check newly appearing links and disavow anything that appears to be malicious at the time that it appears.”

It appears that someone is actually trying negative SEO on my consulting site right now, but so far all it’s managed to do is make me rank #1 for “seo consultant”! But it’s a giant pile of crap links, which will eventually hurt me, so I’m going to disavow them.

How do you know it’s negative SEO?

Well, often you don’t. There are a ton of people “experimenting” out there all the time, scraping other sites, manufacturing content, building little link farms, etc. Oftentimes they’ll build pages by either scraping search results, scraping news sites, etc. and you’ll get links that were originally in legitimate places copied and placed on their crappy pages. You’re just collateral damage in their attempts to mess with Google and make AdSense money, sell replica watches, generate affiliate sales, or whatever their little scam is.

Regardless of their intent, they’re creating nasty spammy links to YOUR website, and there’s a good chance that some of those links are NOT being ignored by Google. If there’s enough of them, you could very well draw a penalty.

As well, there are some SEOs (me, for instance) who believe that a backlink profile that’s really heavily weighted towards the near-zero value end of the page authority/domain authority spectrum is a pretty negative signal to Google in terms of the trustworthiness of your site.

How to Respond to Link Spam

I’m seeing a big shift in how they attack. It used to be more long-term: the attacker would find (or build) penalized sites, place links on those sites, and just let it cook forever.

Problem is, if the victim is proactive, and knows they’re under attack, they’ll use tools like Kerboo LinkRisk, Moz Pro’s Spam Score, Link Detox, etc. to analyze their profiles and disavow the craptastic stuff.

If you got YOURSELF into a penalty, you’d use these sorts of tools to find your naughty links, get toxic ones removed, disavow the ones you couldn’t, and get any paid links you wanted to keep nofollowed.

Once a link is gone, it can’t hurt you, right?

It probably can. Here’s what seems to happen:

• Google crawls a page with a link on it on some other site
• The page starts to 404, or maybe the site starts returning a 500 or 502 error
• In general, when this happens, Google (rightly, I say) thinks that the problem is probably temporary, and eventually, the page will be fixed…and until then, it can think about the page as if it has the same content on it that it saw last time it successfully fetched the page.

This is a really great way for Google to handle the everyday little problems, site downtime, etc. that we webmasters all suffer through. Unless it’s a REALLY long-lasting problem, that’s a reasonable way to handle it, and doesn’t cause all sorts of oscillations in rankings etc., both for the page that’s down and for the pages it links to. And in the case where…let’s say, a newspaper has a great story about your company (with a nice link to your site), and eventually archives the story or hides it behind a paywall, you still get the benefit of that link juice for many months. I’m not being facetious when I say that’s a good approach (ok, deleting old stories on a newspaper site, that’s another GRRRRR story).

Here’s what I’m seeing the negative SEO folks do to take advantage of this:

• They build a super-toxic page that Google will want to penalize.
• They leave the page up long enough for Google to crawl it and count (badly) the link from it to the victim’s site.
• They shut the page down, so that the link analysis tools all ignore it (link’s gone…all good now, right?).

I’m seeing them try a bunch of different tactics for shutting the page down:

• Switch the link to a nofollow (that seemed to be tried briefly, then stopped…probably because Google recrawls the page then ignores the bad link)
• Delete the page so it 404s
• Make the entire domain return a 502 Bad Gateway error

The last one is what I’m seeing the most of these days, probably because with the entire site being down, it’s tougher for any backlink tool to score the domain for spam, so they’re hoping you’re going to ignore it. If the page just 404s, it’s easy to see the domain’s spam scores in the Moz Pro Toolbar. A dead page from a site that’s getting 11/17 spam score? I’m gonna disavow the domain.

I’ve heard of spammers cloaking for Googlebot, so that ONLY Googlebot sees the live page, and all other user agents (regular browsers, link analysis tools, etc.) see a 500 error or a 404, but I haven’t seen this in any of the links I’ve looked at. At John Mueller’s suggestion, I’ve used the external mobile usability test tool to see if Googlebot could fetch these URLs, but so far all that I’ve looked at have returned 502s for both Googlebot and my other tools.

To make it even tougher to spot with tools, I’m seeing the attackers turn on and turn off domains really, really quickly…they’re hoping (I think) before the link analysis tools get any data on the domain, so it just looks like a weak domain. No nasty spam score in the toolbar.

How do the attackers try and get Google to hate their links?

I’m seeing a bunch of tactics here. They range from building obvious giant link farms on the same IP address to building porn or blog comment spam links to their own domains, to stuffing their pages full of porn or illegal drug terms. If Google says they don’t like something, the spammers fill their site with everything google hates both onpage and offpage to make their site as toxic as possible.

How to Read Patterns for Potential Toxicity

There’s a bunch of patterns I’ve been looking for. I’ll dive into some examples. One thing I’ve noticed is a heavy use of the following TLDs. If you’re seeing links from sites with these TLDs in your backlink profile, take a look at the site itself and see if it looks legit:

• .club
• .press
• .site
• .stream
• .ga
• .gq
• .tk
• .info
• .xyz

Does having one of the above domains automatically indicate it’s spam or a negative SEO attack? No…but I can count the number of legit sites using those TLDs that I’ve seen in the past year on one hand.

Wiring diagrams

I’ve seen a ton of sites, with all sorts of crazy domain names, with the folder part of the URL being wiring-diagram or something similar. The layout is identical, with a lot of content, and an interstitial popup. They appear to be scraping images from the victim’s sites. Here’s one example.

Crack injection

I’ve seen this with the word “crack” and also with various porn terms used. They seem to scrape a news site, and inject the nasty word in a few dozen places in the page. They scrape the logo of the legit news site as well…to avoid tainting a perfectly good, non-fake-news publication, I scrolled the logo out of view before taking this screen shot:

Fake business directories

Looks legit, right? Check out the domain name. Every instance I’ve seen of this technique had a different domain name. One huge series all looked exactly like this; another has an American flag image at top left, and has a heading with “US” or a state name on each page.

G-crap

This is a series of sites that look like directories or maybe search engines. All using the same awful green background, all with a domain name starting with a G, all with a very similar logo. And all with links to their Facebook and Twitter profiles. All of which are suspended.

Alphabet soup SEO directories

These all look like your typical spammy SEO directory, all with the same font, all with the same menu. The domain names are alphabet soup. This one’s a nice plain grey, but these ones tend to have a single bold color that’s a cross between OMG what did you feed the baby and gee, the eggplant’s way past its expiration date.

Water Damage Psychic Hotline

This is my favorite. There’s a series of logos, mostly related to water damage or renovation, with a super simple black and white theme. And the Contact us page (shown) tells you how to connected to gifted psychic advisors. Yeah…

Who’s behind the attack?

Good question. I stopped checking domain registrations after the first few dozen all came back with hidden registration info, registered in Panama.

But I’d expect that the attacker that the competitors hired would be offshore. If somehow they got busted by the victim, it’s going to be nearly impossible to take any meaningful legal action, and nearly impossible to force the attacker to give up the identity of the slimebags who hired them.

How to Respond to an SEO Attack

Apart from satisfying your own paranoid suspicions, it really doesn’t matter if you’re deliberately being attacked. You’re unlikely to be able to take any meaningful action against the other company, since finding evidence as to who it is is going to be really difficult.

I have a client who’s getting a handful of these kinds of links recently, but not enough that I think it’s an attack on them at the moment. I think this particular client is just collateral damage in an attack on someone else, and pages with their info are getting scraped up along with whatever else the attacker is using to build out their spammy pages.

I have another client who’s a local business, and they have 4 major competitors. Analyzing the backlinks to those competitors, there’s a TON of overlap in the bad links to 3 out of the 5 competitors. The other two: one has just a half-dozen really bad links, and the other has about 20 really nasty Russian porn sites linking to them. Here, most likely what’s happened is that the bad dog in the bunch has built (and immediately disavowed, of course) a handful of links to their own site as well, so they don’t look super-guilty.

So what do you do? Most of those spammy links are going to be ignored by Google, but which ones? The simple solution is just to disavow all the ones that are clearly crap, REGARDLESS OF THE LINK STATUS.

So:

• Disavow the toxic domains that are still active (of course!)
• Disavow the dead domains (either DNS lookup fails, or site returns a 500/502 error)
• Disavow the domains where the links have “dropped off” the page
• Disavow the domains where the links are nofollowed

Why disavow domains where the links are nofollowed? Shouldn’t those be ignored by Google anyways? Probably…but I believe I’ve seen a case where a client’s site had a keyword-specific algorithmic penalty caused by a ton of blog comment spam links with that anchor text. If the links were ignored anyways, then disavowing won’t hurt anything.

Then, review your new backlinks again each week, until the nastiness seems to stop. Just keep adding those links to the disavow file.

As a Raven Tools editorial note, we’ve seen webmasters identify competitors attacking their site with toxic links. The webmaster attempted to start a dialogue to get it to stop. When that failed, we’ve seen webmasters live by the eye-for-an-eye approach. We don’t recommend attacking others, but just know that you have a variety of options when facing negative SEO spam attacks. Negative SEO is literally attempting to harm the livelihood of innocent marketers and business owners. Its unacceptable and hopefully Google will learn how to ignore more and more valueless links so negative SEO can be a thing of the past.

The post Anatomy of a Negative SEO Attack 💣 appeared first on Raven Blog.

But have you established a strategy for your content marketing? Search engine optimized content is one of the main drivers of organic growth for websites and its the key to generating tens of thousands of dollars in site traffic through the expert use of content.

But, you’re not going to generate this kind of traffic unless you have a strategy. Content is good, thin content is bad. Google has already told us that thin content is negative for your site, so YES you should be creating content, but you shouldn’t be creating without strategizing.

This article will be dedicated to defining what content marketing is and how to make your content into something that actually accomplishes something.

What is a Content Marketing Strategy?

Content Marketing Strategy is the formulation of goals and the creation of internal guidelines that dictate the way your team creates content while providing a calendar for the team to follow in the creation of that content. To give an example, its a lot like fishing.  You need to find the right location, the right target, and the right approach based on your desired results.  For example, you aren’t going to fish for swordfish the same way you’d fish for catfish, and you definitely wouldn’t be sitting in a muddy lake hoping to spot that prized swordfish. Fishing is about knowing where the fish are, knowing what fish eat, and knowing what fish don’t want. Similarly, if your content is not designed to appeal to a target audience, is published on the wrong channel, and/or doesn’t provide the right kind of information it will fail.

The difficulty in content marketing is that, unlike fishing, it’s a little harder to get a definitive understanding of your target audience. Each person is unique in some way, while sharing similarities. Surprisingly, a large majority of companies don’t really understand who their audience is, or what their audience really wants.

According to Moz, “A content marketing strategy is the culmination of two very important aspects of content creation; Content Strategy & Content Marketing.”

Moz

“Vision without execution is hallucination.” Thomas Edison

So what can Agencies learn from this Venn diagram?

1. Understand your audience (or your client’s audience).
2. Establish internal rules and guidelines to regulate content creation.
3. Establish a release schedule for your content and build on a firm foundation.

All of these are essential as they assure that the resulting content succeeds in carving out space for you or your clients as “Thought Leaders” in the chosen industry.  Maintaining the client’s voice ensures that their content is unique and their own.  Keeping the content creation on schedule provides constant opportunities for growth. Finally, a solid foundation i.e. social media, branding, and research gives the content the best chance to succeed.

You don’t want to waste time or money on a strategy that will fall flat and turn into thin content.

How to Begin your Content Strategy

The Basics

Now that we have defined what a content marketing strategy is, it’s time to go over how to set up a winning strategy.  As with other strategies, a few of the core components are very similar. Such as:

• Create a Goal
• Identify an Audience

The goal of a content marketing strategy should be to grow both organic traffic and ranking keywords.  These two metrics have been shown to have a correlation. More ranking keywords equates to increased visibility which in turn leads to increased traffic.

Keywords

Organic Sessions

As you can see from the images above, both organic sessions and organic keywords rose hand in hand.  As keywords increased the number of sessions triggered on the site rose substantially over a 5 month period.  

Results like this can be obtained if the content is geared towards an audience that will be receptive to its message.  Hubspot speaks to the importance of identifying an audience by saying, “[with] knowing your target audience, you can produce more relevant and valuable content that they’ll want to read and convert on.  You can set your target audience by identifying your top verticals according to sales numbers, examining who the competition is trying to connect with, and/or by expanding to a new audience that had previously not been considered.

The Details

Now that we have the basics covered, it is time to get to the nitty-gritty details of creating a content marketing strategy (for details into our persona research-based content marketing strategy).  Let’s get right to it, there are three additional components to creating a successful strategy that ensures it goes off without a hitch.  

1. Determine the keywords that will be targetted by conducting thorough keyword research.
2. Identifying the ‘Type’ of Content
3. Assembling a Content Calendar
   

If you’re wondering what it looks like to create a calendar, this screenshot is from a company-wide google sheet. It targets everything we need for keeping our content on track to target something specific, to use a specific author, contain a post data, and we’ve even included a section for a downloadable offer.

Keyword Research

The backbone of content, keyword research is what makes or breaks a content piece.  Without a focus keyword in mind, the content serves no purpose other than just to exist.  As such, research needs to be conducted in order to find out which keywords have volume and how difficult it would be to rank for said keyword.  

Tons of tools exist for keyword research, but for this post, I’ll show Raven Tools and Moz. Both of these tools have shown to have accurate monthly traffic numbers and they are great tools for finding keywords that will, (going back to the fishing analogy) “cast the widest net.”

Raven Tools

This screenshot taken on Raven’s Keyword Research Central shows the available metrics that can help you decide if a keyword is worth pursuing.  From here you can then go on to identify keyword search volume, identify relevant keywords and then add them to Keyword Manager to organize your SEO campaign by adding tags & discover ranking & traffic via Search Console.  But, while Raven Tools is great for finding keyword volume, it doesn’t have a keyword’s ranking difficulty rating.  If you’re wanting to see some insights into difficulty, we can open up Moz.

Moz

When looking at a keyword in Moz, it is best practice to make sure it’s difficulty is lower or within 5 of your Domain Authority (DA).  Domain Authority is a metric created by Moz that measure the credibility of your site in the eyes of Google. DA grows with more links pointing to your site.  To read up on the importance of backlinks check out this article from webconfs.com.

The final thing you should look at for keyword research purposes is the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) itself.  When it comes down to it, this is just one of the many research elements for SEO.

This is known as a Share of SERP Analysis and this can truly determine if your content will rank or not.  Essentially, if the top ranking pages/sites have far higher DAs then your own, you need to either find a long-tail keyword variant or choose a new one entirely.  You don’t want to be caught up in a losing battle. Or if the currently existing content on the SERP is just better (videos, better design, highly informative, original images, etc) then you either need to upgrade your content or start improving drastically. We recommend reading over the Raven SEO Campaign Guide and combining your content marketing strategy with proper implementation of your overall SEO Campaign.

Important note: Domain authority is a metric created by Moz and it does its best at guessing Google’s Page Rank. It is not 100% accurate but it is meant to give a ballpark figure. You don’t always need the highest DA to rank for a keyword. Many factors exist for determining whether you will rank. I’ve seen low DA sites with a singular focus (such as business consulting) outrank high DA sites because Google sees the lower DA site as having a favorible E-A-T score within the keyword niche. If you’re wondering what E-A-T is (or if you want additional information on what Google uses to determine what will rank, then I recommend you read Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines.

One last thing on this topic, the most recent “medic” update has further implemented these guidelines as ranking factors. Authority is established in a myriad of ways. Relevant backlinks, social mentions, and a body of work that testifies to your expertise on a subject (one of the reasons the Hub and Spoke strategy or Pillar Strategy is frequently used in establishing more authority).

Choosing the Content ‘Type’

A fully fleshed out content marketing strategy won’t just include blog posts.  On top of blogs, your strategy should include: infographics, e-books, case studies, and guest posts just to name a few.  Having various forms of content makes your messaging more diverse and potentially more appealing to audiences who favor a visual approach.  Here are some examples!

Directive Consulting

On top of being visually appealing, different forms of content can be utilized for demand generation by making them ‘Gated Content.’  By placing “gates” in the shape of form fills, you can increase the number of warm leads generated by your content.  

Content can also be used to acquire backlinks! This is where Guest Posting comes in.  Guest Posting is done by identifying other websites in your industry and finding contacts that you can outreach to with the goal of writing content for them.  The point of this tactic is to write content in exchange for a backlink which diversifies your link portfolio while providing a free piece of content to whoever receives the content.

Assemble a Content Calendar

Your content marketing strategy is now almost ready to go.  You’ve done the keyword research and have various forms of content being designed, but you still need a concise way to check in and make sure everything stays on schedule.  A content calendar makes all of this easy.

A good content calendar, like the one pictured above, provides keyword researched topics and a working title along with a rough date for release.  Having the keyword research included adds additional insight as to why the topics are being added. This is helpful when pitching new topics to a client/content manager as it shows that they are backed by data.  It is also a ‘living’ document which then leaves room for new pieces of non-blog content to be added as necessary.

It is also smart to include a ‘Progress’ & ‘Link’ column which ensures that anyone viewing the calendar can understand what is being created, drafted, and published.

With these best practices in mind, your content calendar will be fully fleshed out and able to track the progress of your content marketing strategy.

Closing Thoughts

There may be a lot that goes into creating and executing a content marketing strategy, but if you are serious about increasing organic traffic it is a necessary process.  If you take anything away from this piece let it be this, keep your eye on the goal and remember to always follow the keyword research. If the keyword research part is optimized and you are still getting nowhere, you may want to evaluate whether your SEO content writing is up to snuff.

The post How to Make a Content Marketing Strategy 📝 appeared first on Raven Blog.

How do you choose your SEO Campaign strategy? Where do you begin? Which keywords should you choose? What happens if you choose the wrong keywords and your campaign gains 0 traction? Every search engine optimizer is flooded with a range of some doubt to a LOT of doubt as they begin each campaign. Its part of the job.

From personal experience, the most doubt occurs when you’re fresh in SEO, when you’re just beginning to work for an agency in-house, or when you’ve picked up a big client as a freelancer. Add to the list the fact that you don’t quite feel completely comfortable with your SEO campaign tools and you’re definitely beginning to toss and turn as keywords and SEO nightmares swirl (or maybe that’s just me).

In this guide, I’ll be addressing those with SEO nightmares, the slightly unsure optimizers, and those that just want to check their methodology versus Raven. I’ll dig into how I use my knowledge of SEO mixed with the toolset of Raven (with some other tool suggestions sprinkled in). Feel free to jump to any particular section that interests you.

Table of Contents

1. Establish your Marketing Campaign Goals
2. Keyword Research
3. Reverse Engineer the Top 10 SERP Pages
4. Audit your Website
5. Link Research: It’s Time to Get Backlinks
6. Track Progress with Rank Tracking

Establish your Marketing Campaign Goals

Webinars, conversions, demos, phone calls, trials, payments, traffic, rankings — What exactly are you trying to accomplish and what do you need to track? Marketing campaigns aren’t always cut and dry. Search engine optimization is definitely focused on generating organic traffic by ranking for search queries, but most businesses (especially local) don’t care about traffic unless traffic is connected with conversions. Most businesses just want to know about their rank and their conversion count. Raven Tools data echoes this fact. For simplicity sake, we’ll say that the goal is for keyword rankings and conversions (contact form filled). Strictly speaking, SEO isn’t focused on optimizing the sales process, but digital marketing strategists will definitely be focused on this as they are more trained in the overall marketing campaign process.

One you identify conversion and rankings as your goal, you’ll need to know your target audience. Raven Tools users range from SMBs to Agencies so our audience would be anywhere in-between.

Google Analytics will be the main tool you’ll use for measuring your conversions and traffic. If you’re new to Google Analytics or just rusty, I suggest you read up on a GA guide for beginners. Raven Tools offers an integration for this so you’ll be able to view these important data points right next to the rest of your SEO tools.

Once you’ve set up your Google Analytics tracking for your goals, you’re good to move to the next step. Keep in mind that if you choose to integrate GA with Raven Tools then you’ll just log in and open up your marketing dashboard to view your report, or you’ll just get your report emailed to you at an interval that’s convenient for you.

Keyword Research: Make Note of Your Core Keywords

What are the words and queries that are core to your business? An SEO company like Raven would include things like –> Site Audits, Keyword Research Tool, Rank Tracking, etc. Core keywords should describe exactly what you do. A non-Raven keyword that we rank for is “Ghostwriting” and “404 error”. Ghostwriting is tangential to marketing, so we’ve written on the topic, but by no means should ghostwriting or 404 error be included in our list of core words.

If you need help identifying some of your core keywords, I use Raven’s Google connection, so feel free to stay on the platform to research your keyword for variations. I’ve also found that ‘ubersuggest’ and ‘answer the public’ are handy tools that supplement your keyword ideation.

Just type in a keyword you’ve identified into the search volume section of Raven’s  Keyword Research (or use keyword planner) and you’ll get a list of some PPC information on top of the search volume. If you click that little gear to the right, you can even send over the researched keyword right on over to Raven’s Rank Tracker.

If you want another method for conducting your keyword research then my personal favorite is to reverse engineer a known competitor’s keyword strategy by identifying what they rank for. In Raven, we have a tool called “Domain Research Central” that allows you to peek under the hood of your competitor’s website. This is an incredibly helpful way to get keyword insights.

Just type in your target URL and watch keywords ideas generate for your keyword campaign. As an SEO consultant myself, I tend to use multiple SEO tools to get data from more than one source. The good thing about Raven is that it aggregates data from two well-trusted sources: Moz, and Majestic. If you’re not deeply entrenched in SEO you may not get as excited as me by that, but nonetheless, take my word for it, more data sources =  better data.

When you’ve had your fill researching competitors and brainstorming keywords, its time to move into the next phase of your SEO strategy.

Reverse Engineer the Top 10 SERP Pages

If you’re really trying to understand why a page is ranking for a keyword then you should hop on over to your competitor sites to start making note of what they’ve done with their onpage setup.  You can do this manually (I always do this as I’m reading their content) or you can use a tool like Page Optimizer Pro to get some deep insights into things like word count, keyword variation, header types, video usage, and image usage.

This particular method of optimization was recently argued against by Moz, but I humbly disagree. Once you see a page with Latin text outrank every other competitor in under 30 days by using this type of optimization, you’re not quite convinced by articles claiming that this type of thinking is for “SEO Dinosaurs“. No offense to Rand Fishkin.

If you’re really trying to understand how to up your content game beyond competitor research, our guest post content writing guru recently wrote a wonderful post that details the key to great SEO content writing, that should elevate your content writing game.

If you’re confident that you’re content writing is good to go then use Site Finder to identify the top sites for a keyword. This screenshot is from the “view competitors” tab, but you can also choose to view based on some Moz or Majestic rankings for page authority (this doesn’t necessarily mean the highest PA will be on the top of the SERP).

So here is what you’re looking for:

• Do competitor pages have images or videos? How many? If they don’t have any then this shows that you have an opportunity to improve an article. Original images work best with proper alt. text, but any image will benefit as long as it works contextually.
• How many header tags do competitors use?
• How many words do your competitors have on their article?
• What are the types of links they use? What are the anchors for those links?

Regarding video, way too many people are slow to adopt video in their SEO efforts. Impact has a great infographic that should convince you of the importance of investing in video (something I myself need to start implementing more).

If at all possible, include video. It adds value to your post and it can be used as a separate organic ranking effort in video searches results and video snippets.
When you’ve evaluated a competitors page, you should move to the next step after you’ve written down the average number of H2s-H6s and after you get an understanding of what the page is ranking for on the SERP. I’ve recentthat scrapes keyword data so I can get a list of semantically relevant terms along with a content score of competing pages. Once you’ve listed the competitors and have all relevant information from their pages, its time to move on and look at yourself.

Audit your Website

 
All of this research is great, but if you try to conduct your SEO campaign without diagnosing the health of your site, you’ll wind up sabotaging all of your hard work. If you want to rank in Google, start by fixing your own site. Some people might do this step first, but the important thing is to conduct your audit before you start competing for keywords. Raven’s Site Auditor tool was my favorite audit tool even before I worked for them, so I can’t recommend it enough. Raven crawls your site quickly, generates an overall score, and provides you with a checklist that begins with most urgent to least urgent. The real importance in an SEO audit is in its ability to identify the negative signals that work against your positive google ranking signals. Raven has also conducted a massive on-page SEO study that identified the typical things to look for when analyzing common opportunities for improvement on a website.
 

 
If at all possible, SEOs should always make every effort to remove any potential negative signal from their site that may harm their ability to rank a page. Page speed is a prime example of a signal that can terrorize your page’s rank if you bloat it too much with images and videos. We’ve covered this topic extensively in our post on preparing for link building, and I highly recommend you read that for additional information on how website audits affect a rank or link building campaign.
 

Link Research: It’s Time to Get Backlinks

 
After you’ve fixed your site and after you’ve written your content through some good ole fashion research and some reverse engineered SERP magic, its time to move to the final stage of an SEO campaign, and its by far the least developed skill for most people in SEO; backlinking. SEO used to be about quantity over quality, but now you can rank a page with a few quality links and beat competing pages with 10x the amount of backlinks as long as your quality is higher. In 2018 it’s even more important to understand how to conduct quality link research. If you’re feeling a little confused on this step, we’ve written a very simple 5 step outreach guide for link building that may give you some food for thought. Otherwise, we’ll cover some tactics within this post as well.

Where to begin? First, I definitely recommend reviewing this video from Siege Media for a quick 8-minute video that details some simple backlink strategies that will be useful to implement as you use Raven Tools to conduct your link research and link monitoring.

 
Step 1: Open Raven’s Site Finder and enter your keyword
 

 
A detailed list of sites with your target keyword will generate. Click “Competitors” and the list filters to the top 10 on the SERP.
 

 
From this page you’re going to be able to see the sites that have the most backlinks and you’ll be able to create your link outreach plan from this data.  Click the page you want to research and you’ll then get some important information on the anchor text used in the external link and you’ll see the website that links to the competitor. In our case, we’ll look at the backlinko page.
 

 
If you think that your resource helps more then the one sites are linking to, then try and steal the link or get them to add you in addition to the current link by providing high-quality assets or by providing a better version of the current content. If someone is linking to a guide and your guide is more in-depth, then reach out to various sites and get creative. A host of link building strategy posts exist so give any of those methods a try. Just remember, if you’re pitching to SEOs then your pitch needs to be perfect. SEOs pitch things all the time and have a higher standard when receiving a pitch. If you come in weak with your value proposition then you’ll get a rejection or the silent treatment.

One of my personal favorites (shhh, don’t tell Google) is to do a link swap. A site is much more likely to use your link if you offer to link to them.
 

SEO is all about relationships. SEO is the grownup version of a playground. Play nice with the other kids and you’ll have fun. Refuse to build relationships and you’ll be watching from the sidelines as the other kids have fun.

 
For some reason, a massive number of people seem to have some sort of anxiety about talking to other humans. SEO isn’t rocket science. If you want backlinks, then you need to start talking to people and finding creative ways to provide them with something valuable. We’re all very busy and unless you run into an SEO unicorn moment, you’re going to need to do something that makes a webmaster take notice of you.

Is your guide equal with all the other guides? Create an infographic? Does a target site have something that you could improve? Offer to help. Unless your company is a massively recognizable brand, you’ll need to grind for the links. If you’re having a hard time identifying what exactly you should be looking for, you can get some good link building insights from Siege Media.

 

 
I digress with link building information. This brings us to the last step of an SEO campaign.
 

Track Progress with Rank Tracking 

 
Once you’ve set everything up, its time to monitor the progress and evaluate whether you should be changing your strategy by watching where you’re ranking for keywords. Raven’s Rank Tracker tool uses Authority Labs data and allows you to bulk upload or to just type in one at a time.
 

 

In the previous step, you’ve already identified your core keywords you want to target, so upload that list into SERP tracker and monitor your position side by side your competitors. I won’t go into the details of rank tracking in this post, but feel free to read up on our Rank Tracking in 2018 post that gives you some ideas for how to efficiently conduct your keyword monitoring by identifying the right words to monitor in your SEO campaign. Keyword tracking is an important final step that allows you to continually read the pulse of your page. If you see something dip, you know to fix it. If something goes up, then pat yourself on the back. As an SEO freelancer, I’ve noticed that clients love to see that glorious green bar, so give them some eye candy and send a visual report praising your work.

That’s it for our Raven Guide. If you want a full guide on Raven Tools, I’ve written an Ultimate Guide that may better illustrate all of Raven’s features.

Good Luck!

May the keywords be ever in your favor.

The post SEO Campaign: A Visual Guide appeared first on Raven Blog.

This article aims to help people optimize their current content and improve the quality of their content. Too often companies shell out money to create more and more content while failing to use what they already have.

After decades of the “content is king” hype most businesses by now have some kind of content.

I don’t mean only self-promotional material. I mean real assets that provide value by themselves.

By now most legacy content is buried somewhere in the archives and is often not even findable anymore though.

People rarely visit such content and when they do they bounce quickly because it’s often

1. Unreadable
2. Boring
3. Visually bland

So how do you improve your content? What exactly can you do to clean up your existing material so you can dust off the cobwebs and bring in some real visitors to your web pages?

Table of Contents

• Improve readability
• Add images
• Support the blind
• Make content timeless
• Update links and sources
• Add expert opinions
• Provide content upgrades

Improve readability

First and foremost, you have to allow people to read your content. Sounds self-explanatory? Captain Obvious is needed though! No kidding.

Most sites have legacy content formatted for desktop users or worse for book readers. Huge paragraphs meet tiny fonts sizes.

Endless sentences meet formal language with scores of acronyms (SEO ROI WTF?), Marketese or simply pseudo-intellectual gibberish.

Do not try to sound smart! Make people of all ages and skill-levels understand what you are trying to say! That’s the key objective.

What exactly can you do? Add a new paragraph after each sentence or two. Make sure to keep sentences short.

Write in a “conversational” tone.

What the heck does that mean? Write like you talk! You may even sound funny. Say things like: hey, readers! How are you?

In case you only published press release in corporate lingo translate it into language people an relate to. Trying to sound objective does not work. Only God is.

Ideally, you add personal stories of people who work with you or who you have helped. Don’t just claim things. Make your actions talk on your behalf.

Let people scan body text by adding subheadings and text-formatting like bold, italics or textmarker effects.

Use quotes like magazines and newspapers do.

See the one above? You just need to paraphrase the most intriguing or important messages of your article. No need to quote someone in particular.

Add images

Lack of imagery or repetitive one is making people bounce right away. Why? People are looking for visual clues! When they can’t find them they skip the body text altogether.

By images, I do not only mean logos, graphs or screen shots. These are rarely a way to catch attention.

You need actual photos first and foremost to illustrate what the post is about. Where to get those? Unsplash is your best friend for free images you can use anywhere.

Of course, you can use real hand crafted illustrations as well. These – as long as there is a creative idea behind them are often even better.

Yet many illustrations for blog posts look the same and only offer stereotypical metaphors. That can happen with images too.

What I often see are badly formatted posts that have a photo of a computer or smartphone on top. Sounds familiar?

Wow. How intriguing! You need to view this on a computer or phone! Who would have imagined?

Usually seeing real people doing something related to your post can be the actual trigger your brain needs.

Another often made mistake is that of using a logo of the company you describe as the main image. Worse – many sites use an outdated logo!

Google is the best example here. They have updated their logo years ago but bloggers and even journalists still use the obsolete logo to “illustrate” the articles.

This way you only reach those who are already interested in Google – think their share holder for example. Why should anybody else care?

Ideally, you show an image everybody can relate to or at least your preferred audience. That, of course, depends on the topic that is covered.

Google many privacy breaches can be illustrated in manifold ways. Think of a voyeur or a spy. Just showing the Google logo is more like an ad.

Support the visually impaired

When adding images most content creators do not even consider blind or visually impaired people.

There are many ways how people have a faulty vision. They can be

• blind
• color blind
• short-sighted
• have strained eyes

There is a whole discipline called accessibility that deals with user experience for all of us not just the perfectly healthy ones.

There are many ways to help people with poor eyesight. For example, using visualization or graphs that rely solely on color is a bad idea.

Use both colors and patterns to make it clear for everybody where one item starts and the other one ends especially when implementing pie charts.

Graphs accessible by the color blind. Image courtesy of Adam Silver

One of the most well-known ways of making images make sense for the blind or those don’t see images for other reasons (think slow connections in rural areas) is so called alternative text.

For many years I made the mistake of leaving them empty or just adding a meaningless keyword inside the alt-attributes (not alt-tags [sic!]).

When writing proper alternative text you have to both describe what the image shows and explain the effect it has.

While showing an apple, for instance, do not just say alt=”apple” but describe the apple as red, fresh, hanging on a tree branch and looking very tasty.

Sadly WordPress is not really helpful with alternative text as they only show tiny text inputs for a few words. I’d rather edit alternative text in the code view itself.

There is an easy solution for shirt-sighted people. Enlarge your fonts by default and make them resizable so that your whole design does not break when people do it.

What to do for people like myself who only scan body text quickly or have strained eyes and sometimes suffer from lack of focus due to a migraine?

• Keep the paragraphs short.
• Make every sentence have a complete message.
• Use simple words.
• One sentence contains one message ideally.
• Don’t over-complicate sentence structure.

Do not rely on sentences above or other paragraphs to provide context. A sentence like “He loves that” does not tell me anything without reading the rest.

Make content timeless

Many articles are still written news. Especially bloggers tend to write as if a piece of content would be just written for a day or week and could be disposed of after that.

Unlike daily newspapers that get thrown away on the next day your remains available and visible – at least theoretically.

Book authors in contrast ideally write for eternity. Some of them are read even hundreds of years later.

Most of us aren’t working for CNN or the BBC though. We write for websites. No matter how we call them,

• blogs
• online stores
• portals.

They are all websites and as such the content remains online forever as long as you pay your hosting bills.

First of all, do not make the date the second thing to be seen after the headline. Anything that is older than a few days might get ignored then.

In case the date has to be on top at least display the “Last updated” date there not the “originally published” one.

You can show the date below the content as well when you are not writing for a daily newspaper.

Remove all redundant time-frames like “yesterday”, “recently”, “in 2011”. All of these things seldom provide context and often devalue the content.

When the information is still valid you don’t need to tell people it’s from 2011 unless you want them to ignore it. If you’re looking for an easy way to leverage content and make it timeless, then work on your content writing skills. Jessica Foster has written a handy dandy 6 step guide that’ll do you wonders for generating some great seo content.

Update links and sources

This one should be obvious you may think yet most blogs do not fix broken links. Even when you write the blogger and suggest a replacement you will in most cases get no response.

Some bloggers even get offended when you tell them that their blog is broken. They assume its criticism and are annoyed to say the least.

When approaching bloggers during so-called “broken link building” I often had bloggers respond negatively. They not just ignored me or said “no” but some would even delete the whole article.

Most bloggers are still focusing on flooding their readers with new content while they neglect existing assets.

This is even worse with a company or corporate blogs. The authors are often long gone and nobody cares about the articles they have written.

In some cases, links only get removed but not replaced with new ones. This way posts often lose their context.

Posts based on facts become lower value opinion pieces without external links because the statements are not backed up with references to actual sources anymore.

Long story short it’s important not only to fix dead links but also to replace them with links that are still up.

Ideally, you check all links from a post when updating it and even replace those that are still up but have been rotting themselves.

In the worst case, links that look OK are just redirects that lead to the homepage at best but often just to parking or spam pages.

Some outgoing links even may lead to malware sites or get redirected there after a few steps. Thus redirects are often worse than a dead link. They are zombies!

The process of fixing broken links is pretty straightforward. On WordPress there is a plugin that automatically identifies them. It’s called Broken Link Checker quite appropriately.

All you need to do is to look at the results of the ongoing link check in your WordPress backend. I do it just like checking the comments.

In case you don’t use WordPress or do not have the option to install a plugin there are external tools that can check your internal links for issues.

You’re reading the Raven blog so you most likely know of Raven’s Site Auditor, but if you’re an SEO practitioner with a focus entirely on site crawls, you probably know the likes of Screaming Frog – a high-end tool for crawling your website. It’s also great for finding links to fix.

Add expert opinions

Even though I blog about search, social media and blogging itself for more than a decade I’m never a big enough expert not to ask others for help.

You are never the God-like know-it-all entity. Asking peers and influencers to contribute to your existing post is as easy as sending a tweet.

Many people are glad to showcase their expertise – other are too busy – that’s why it’s important not to address only the top 3 influencers of your trade.

Seek out the actual experts who not only spend their day on social media and talking on conferences but also doing hands on work themselves.

Often the real experts are not that prominent because they have enough to do with client work instead of flaunting their expertise on a daily basis.

You can do this even without stealing their time. Just look up who is an expert and can prove it by existing published work. Then quote their content!

Do whatever fits you but don’t make your content solely self-centered. Make sure there are other – ideally independent – voices that either confirm what you say or add new angles.

Provide content upgrades

One way to use existing content is to improve the actual experience of it is by converting it to another format and either adding something or making things easier to digest.

You could simply provide a PDF version of your articles so that people can print and share them easily. There are other formats even better suited for ebook-readers to consider.

Consider summarizing your long-form-content by providing the 10 key takeaways in a printable form or as video. Most people do not have the time and energy to read a whole tutorial.

Brian Dean of Backlinko even was able to get a conversion boost of 785% by adding a simple checklist! Sometimes less is more!

The PDF format also usually leads to less clutter by itself. Many older sites have annoying sidebars and redundant or distracting elements that annoy people.

Making an audio or video version is also a good idea to tap into new audiences. Some people prefer media types they can listen to on the go while others rather prefer to watch than read.

Ideally, you do not just transfer the existing content to a new format without adding or changing anything but adapt it to the new medium you use.

The PDF is widely associated with ebooks. You can take your article and enrich it with actual real-life success stories and

• imagery
• data
• visualizations

Instead of just taking a static image and reading the content aloud you can show your face and talk to your audience about the message it contains.

In case you are afraid you don’t look good enough just watch Brian Dean and another hugely popular Internet marketer – Neil Patel. Both are (almost) bald and look fine that way.

Thus other formats are not just a means of duplicating your content to get traction on other platforms but also a way to reach those who were to busy to read your content.

The post How to Improve Your Content Experience 👍🏼 with Existing Assets appeared first on Raven Blog.

How do you explain your job to your grandmother, your dentist, or to a class of 8th graders on career day? That was the basic idea behind this past week’s #SEOChat a weekly tweetchat hosted by Alicia K. Anderson. Here’s the list of the SEOs from all over the world who gathered on Twitter to discuss how we address our jobs and our work to people who don’t know all the details but want the results we can provide. 

• @A_K_Anderson
• @BRAVOMedia1
• @RebekahLMeyer
• @gyitsakalakis
• @Carolyn_Lyden
• @LauraLeeSEO
• @Howdy_Doughty
• @simoncox
• @rebeccagofish
• @marccxmedia

Executive education and relationship building are crucial to any marketer’s success (for agency, freelance, and in-house). While the person funding your budget doesn’t necessarily care about every detail of your work, he or she needs to know you’re getting the job done (once that person realizes what your job actually is). Here are the best ways to communicate your value to executive-level  

1. Don’t Get Mired Down in Details

When asked how most SEOs describe their jobs to people who really have no idea, many people kept it basic and neutral saying that most people don’t understand or sometimes don’t care about the details:

If the person asking understands the basics, some people continue on to show how it’s important to work on SEO factors to get to potential conversions:

The basic idea is to find a way to describe what you do that’s easy to understand, doesn’t make people feel dumb (because that automatically puts some people on the defensive), and describes your value to their company and bottom line.

2. Use Easy Analogies

One of the best ways to help people understand what you do for their marketing and revenue is to use analogies that are easily relatable. Some people likened it to a delivery service–of answers:

Some wanted to ensure that the hard work behind the good rankings and conversions was recognized for what it was–not just a quick magic trick.

Find something that strikes a chord with your executive audience and use that as a bridge to the gap between what they need from you and what you can do for them. By speaking their language, they’ll be on your side faster and willing to work with you as challenges arise.

3. Know Your Audience

There’s nothing more annoying than feeling like you’re being condescended to. Ensure that you know your audience’s knowledge level so you’re speaking to that. If your pitch or reporting insights are too technical, your executive audience may feel frustrated or even tune you out. However, it can go the other way too. If you’re talking points are too low-level, your crowd might find you condescending. Know their level and speak to it.

4. Engage Your Client/Executive Continually

As with any business relationship, constant communication is often key to ensuring all parties remain satisfied and happy. For SEOs this means keeping on top of the latest news in tech and marketing and passing that info on to people you know who might be stakeholders.

Is there a big change in Google My Business? Your franchise owner client will definitely want to know about that. Has Facebook changed its algorithm again? A company that relies on social for customer feedback and engagement will need to know about that shift.

Being the expert who cares about your client’s business is an invaluable relationship builder. Here are some of the ways #SEOChatters said they keep the conversations going with the executives they serve:

5. Set Expectations

Part of a good communication plan and education plan is setting expectations. Not only does this give the exec a notion of what’s worth freaking out about and what’s not, but it can also avoid the “You provided X, but I expected Y scenario.”

When your executive is confident that you’ve got it covered, there hopefully won’t be a freak-out email at 2 am. Just a calm, “Did you see this?” at a reasonable hour.

Participants in #SEOChat span all levels of marketing, multiple divisions, varied backgrounds, and more, but their knowledge and tips ring true. As with any relationship, it’s crucial to work with your executive team toward mutually beneficial targets–whether you’re an agency working with a client, a freelancer helping a business reach it’s goals, or in-house on a company’s marketing team.

These tips can help you get started on the right foot.

—

Carolyn is the resident Search Engine Optimus Prime at CallRail, a call tracking software company.

Previous to joining CallRail, Carolyn specialized in franchise, local, small business SEO. In her free time, she loves to participate in marketing- and SEO-related Twitter chats.

The post 5 Tips to Ensure You and Your Executives Are on the Same Page: #SEOChat 🐦 Edition appeared first on Raven Blog.

Your Revenue Model
Distributors and Vendors
Service Differentiation
Cloud Skills
Acquisition of Decision Makers
Lead Magnets
Content Strategy
Content Topics
Outreach

As infrastructure migrates to the cloud, the modern cloud startup needs to differentiate itself from the pack with a clear unique selling proposition and a solid inbound marketing strategy. Use the following checklist to build a strategy that fits your business model like a glove.

1. Your Revenue Model

In developing your inbound marketing strategy, you will need to clearly identify what you expect your revenue model to look like.

While it is obvious that your cloud startup will be based on a subscription revenue model, this is only one of many questions you will need to clarify about how you plan to bring in revenue.

Here are a few important questions to ask and clarify before moving further:

• Will your primary source of revenue be a small number of clients with a large subscription fee for each, or will it be a large number of customers with a relatively small fee for each. This plays a major part in both the tone and the strategy you will need, to deploy in your inbound marketing strategy.
• Will clients or customers have access to a free trial before they start paying a subscription? A free trial is a very different type of conversion than signing up for a monthly payment and will have dramatic impacts on how you approach your strategy.
• Will there be a “freemium” component to your business? If so, considering the rate of adoption of the paid product after use of the freemium product will have a dramatic impact on your approach, and your lead funnel will look very different.
• How much of a role will product tiers and additional services play in scaling your business? To what extent do you intend to focus on adding customers, and to what extent do you intend to add value for existing customers?

While you can certainly revisit your revenue model both in the process of completing this checklist and in the trial and error that inevitably comes with launching a business, it’s important to have some idea of how you expect it to look before continuing.

2. Distributors and Vendors

What role will you play in the cloud distribution supply chain? Will you focus primarily on building and supplying infrastructure? Are you more on the SaaS side of things? Are you a back-end developer and will help marry the two disciplines? Are you a vendor selling to the final consumer or a distributor selling in the B2B marketplace?

The answers to these questions will change your marketing strategy in fundamental ways, and it is absolutely necessary to have a clear handle on this aspect of your business.

Once you have identified where you are in the supply chain, you will need to determine who your primary and secondary audiences are.

• Are distributors and vendors your primary customers, or are they partners who will help you sell to the end consumer?
• Will you be selling infrastructure to SaaS companies or SaaS to consumers?
• Will partnerships with infrastructure help you on the back end while you sell to the end user, or will distributors be the ones selling to the end user?

Clearly, the variety of the types of cloud providers leads to a wide variety of customers and partnerships. You will need to identify clearly, which parties look more like customers and which look more like partners.

3. Service Differentiation

Most startups in the cloud industry will be, in large part, reselling a great deal of the services that they provide. This makes differentiation incredibly important since competing on price alone is essentially impossible without owning the core infrastructure.

The most powerful ways to differentiate your cloud services will come down to the following:

• Specific industries that you target and custom solutions that you can offer to that industry

• Experience with a specific type of technology or set of tools that is relatively uncommon in the cloud industry

• Often, the best cloud startups are launched based on an in-house solution that was developed for a previous company, which can be generalized to a broader industry

Use this information to develop a concise mission statement and unique selling proposition. Your USP should be the fundamental guiding force of the marketing strategy you develop. Everything else has to be built around it.

4. Cloud Skills

In addition to your USP, you should define a clear list of skills that separate your software engineers and network administrators from the vanilla. What specifically do they excel in? How do those skills contribute to your USP? What add-ons do they offer, and how do these skill sets expand and alter who your target audience is?

5. Acquisition of Decision Makers

Aside from your target industries and use cases, who are the people who will ultimately be making the decision to purchase your services? Will you be dealing with somebody in procurement? Will you be talking to IT professionals? Do the companies you target have CTOs, and will they be the primary buyers? Will you be selling to business owners and CEOs? Do these people work for small businesses or massive conglomerates? Will you aim to be popular with employees and gain traction from the ground up, or will you be winning over management?

All of these factors have a tremendous influence on the psychology of your target audience, and you may need to define multiple target audiences if multiple types of people will influence purchasing decisions.

This is where it is very useful to build target personas laying out what types of people you are targeting, what roles they play at the company, what problems they are struggling with, how your services will alleviate those problems, other interests they may have, and who they may need to persuade to obtain the funds.

6. Lead Magnets

Priority number one for your inbound marketing strategy is to obtain the contact information of the decision makers discussed in section 5.

Factoring in all of the information you have clarified in steps 1 through 5, you will need to develop an appropriate lead magnet. A lead magnet is simply a resource valuable enough to a potential lead that they would be willing to share their contact information with you in order to obtain it.

A good lead magnet must:

• Offer a direct and concrete solution to a real problem that your potential leads, the decision makers discussed above, often struggle with and are hungry for a solution to.
• It should not serve as a full replacement for the cloud services you are selling.
• The lead magnet should have a natural connection to the cloud services you ultimately hope to sell. It is not enough for it to target the appropriate decision makers if it does not demonstrate an expertise related to your primary product.

Examples of good lead magnets include:

• A freemium version of the full product
• A free software tool solving a problem tangential to that of your primary product
• A whitepaper, eBook, calendar, or guide that helps them solve or approach a problem tangential to that of your primary product

The important feature of a lead magnet is that it should offer more utility than a blog post or other piece of content than one would expect to or be able to find on the open web.

7. Content Strategy

A successful content strategy in the cloud industry aims to do the following:

• Capture the attention of your decision makers
• Draw them to sign up for your lead magnet
• Use their contact information to build trust and rapport through relevant content
• Educate them about the problem that your product solves
• Persuade them to sign up for your product
• Onboard them with the product so that they understand its full potential before leaving
• Maintain loyalty by continuing to offer relevant content and advice on how to make the most of your product

Every piece of content should be designed to accomplish one or more of these tasks, in roughly this order.

Develop a broad outline of this strategy and use it to guide your decisions in the aforementioned steps.

8. Content Topics

You will need to identify content topics that best serve each of the purposes discussed above. Each content topic should be large enough to sustain itself for the foreseeable future without stretching. Identify the following:

• Topics suitable for publication on third-party sites such as industry magazines and blogs that your leads are likely to be reading. These topics should address problems closely related to your lead magnet enough that a call to action in an author bio would make sense and be attractive. Similar content can be placed on your own site to draw attention to the lead magnet as well.
• Topics that appeal to your lead which are tangentially connected to your primary product. These can be posted to your site and sent to leads who have provided their email address.
• Onboarding content, based on user testing, that addresses the most common obstacles new users face and makes it very clear how to make the most of the product in the shortest amount of time. This should be publicly available on your site and sent to new sign-ups.
• Use cases for your product. This is separate from instruction manual material, with a focus on various ways in which users are taking advantage of the product and explaining in detail how to replicate the results.

9. Outreach

You will need an outreach strategy in order to earn publication on third-party sites, as well as to promote content on your own site.

Recognize that for any outreach strategy to be successful, it must focus on how best to benefit the influencers you are reaching out to, not just how they can benefit your platform.

Begin outreach with any vendors or distributors you are currently partnered with, to look for collaborative opportunities.

Determine where your decision makers are spending their time and come to a conclusion about who they are following on social media and where they are spending their time, online. These are the people you want to talk to and the places you need to be.

Develop a strategy for collaboration with influencers who have audiences like yours. Do not limit yourself solely to influencers within your own industry. Put the focus on who your leads are following, not whether they are within the same industry.

Conclusion

Separating yourself from other cloud providers is more important now than ever. Use this checklist to build a solid marketing foundation.

The post 9 Step Guide: Inbound 📝 Marketing Checklist 📝 For Cloud Startups appeared first on Raven Blog.

Any piece of content you produce should help readers accomplish a specific goal. Imagine if your client was an employee recruiting firm. If you surveyed HR managers, like Market Research Today did, you would have found out that 58% of HR managers spend less than one minute looking at a resume!

This type of data can be the base for an entire article.

You could create a how to guide on resume formats, with the focusing on readability and length, to ensure that the “less than one minute” is spent effectively. A guide like this could include multiple infographics and links to authoritative sources, further strengthening your content.

Your Readers are Looking for Specific Data

When you do an online search, wouldn’t it be nice to find the answer in one article? Of course! Get the information you need without having to click a million things or Google a ton of phrases.

Content with hard data is more likely to answer multiple questions readers may have. Sticking with the example on HR managers, an article about resume length with data, would provide users a reason on why they need a short resume, how to create the perfect resume, and if you took your survey a step further, give examples of resumes HR managers find most appealing.

Content like this would cover every base possible for creating a resume.

The more specific your article is, the more likely is it to contain long tail keywords. Profitworks, ran a studying showing long tail keywords convert 2.5x more than head keywords.

Now we’re getting somewhere! Content with survey data can answer multiple questions, help produce long tail keywords, and in turn conversion (and dollars) for your client.

Sound good so far!

Surveys Produce Catchy Headlines

Anyone can write a blog post. But if no one reads it, will it accomplish any goal? Nope!

What if you saw an article labeled “90% of businesses feel like they can’t’ trust their SEO firm”. Would you click on that? I know I would. Might find out what customers in the marketing and SEO game really want and how to improve.

Clicks are so import (duh) in generating traffic. The more catchy your titles are, the more likely users are to click, and in-turn promote your content.

Tips on Capturing Great Data From Your Surveys

If you create an online survey, you’ll want to make sure you can grab a really cool statistic to get attention. But how can you do this?

You can look at a standard summary report, question by question, and you might find some useful data. But does it tell the whole story? Is it really an earth shattering find?

Maybe, but digging deeper into your data might be even better!

Cross tabulation is a great way to take data the next level. Let’s say you took a survey of 100 people asking them what type of degree they hold along with their state of residence. You might find that an unexpected state has high level of master’s degrees than others.

Any type of unexpected relationship would make for a great title to generate clicks, and of course great content for people to read.

Creating a Successful Survey

1. Keep it brief – no one wants to answer 20 questions. Only include the questions you need, and keep the question itself short
2. Add an incentive – motivation is important in getting people to act. Give people a discount or a promo code for a purchase upon survey completion
3. Share, share, share! Post the survey on Facebook, email it to past clients, and place it in articles you’re currently writing. The bigger the sample size, the better
4. Use images and logos: add spice to your survey to better engage the audience. The more engaged they are, the more likely they are to complete the survey

The post Using Online Surveys 📋 to Generate Killer Content appeared first on Raven Blog.

Perhaps this is because they are a bit tricky to understand, especially the first time you want to participate in one. However, it doesn’t take long to become a pro!

Whether you want to host your own or interact with someone else’s, Twitter chats are an easy way to engage with your peers and target audience by asking targeted questions or providing answers to the community. In this article, you’ll learn the best ways to use Twitter chats to network and learn.

But first, you may be wondering: What Exactly Is A Twitter chat?

In short a Tweetchat or Twitter chat is a scheduled, organized topical conversation on Twitter centralized around a specific hashtag.

It’s best to think of a MeetUp or panel discussion around a specific topic. Now bring that conversation into the digital world of Twitter, a platform designed for high engagement through bite-sized content in the form of tweetings containing 280 characters or less.

Put them together and presto — you have a Twitter chat!

What Are The Requirements For A Twitter chat?

• A specific hashtag designed for the chat
• A specific time — this is often a regularly occurring time, such as Mondays at 2 p.m.
• A topic for each chat
• A moderator posting questions, using the format Q1, Q2, Q3, etc.
• Participants answering the questions, using the format A1, A2, A3, etc.
  

Twitter chats usually last for an hour and have six-to-12 questions. While that may not seem like many questions for 60 minutes, the time goes quickly — especially when you have a large number of participants!

The Benefits of Twitter Chats

One of the biggest advantages of Twitter chats is perhaps the most obvious — you can grow your social media following. The best way to reap this benefit is by interacting with the moderator and others involved in the chat, as we’ll discuss below.

In addition to the number of followers you have, Twitter chats increase your brand awareness as a whole. Hosting a chat brings your target audience to you. You can listen to members of your audience, learn how to engage them, and get ideas for your content marketing strategy.

Chats provide an opportunity for professionals around the world to meet and share their expertise. When you participate in a chat, you display your thought leadership — especially if the moderator retweets your answer!

Twitter chats also give the ability to learn from your peers. A marketer on the other side of the country could have a tip or tool that solves that challenge you’ve been struggling with for the past month. Alternatively, you can also find inspiration from others and get the creative juices flowing.

How to Participate in Twitter Chats

Even seasoned content marketers may be a little foggy when it comes to participating in a Twitter chat. They’re not all contained in the same thread, making them more difficult to follow.

Find a Twitter chat you would like to participate in. (You’ll find several for marketers throughout this article or Huffington Post shares its 10 best chats for entrepreneurs.) Then, at the designated time, log onto Twitter and type the hashtag into the Twitter search bar. You can also go to the moderator’s profile page.

When you see a question you want to answer, start your tweet with the number that correlates with the question. Here you can see how Timara Nichols did so on a LinkedIn chat, tweeting her answer to the first question beginning with “A1.”

Many Twitter users create a new tweet when answering a question, be sure to use the Twitter chat’s hashtag, of course!

You can also directly reply to the tweet asking the question. This is similar to commenting on Facebook and Instagram posts, and it’s what I, along with 30 others, did in a recent #CMWorld chat:

Now that you know the basics, let’s look at some tips to make the most of your time on Twitter.

Tips For Participating in Twitter Chats:

• Know when to share.

Don’t feel the need to answer every question. You will still benefit from watching the conversation, learning from your peers and industry experts. On the other hand, don’t hesitate to jump in and make the most of the answers that show off your expertise. Doing this will make people notice and appreciate your participation. This is especially beneficial when you have a unique point of view.

• Put the conversation first (Not yourself).

Just like all good content marketing, the focus should be on educating and helping others. While self-promotion is a benefit, people will see right through you if you include a link to your product in every answer. When your intentions are to promote yourself, instead of engaging with a community, it shows. (And it’s not a good look!)

• Interact with others.

Speaking of engaging with your community, don’t just reply to the moderator’s questions. Like and respond to the answers of other participants. This is how true conversations get started in the digital world. In addition, it’s how other Twitter users will get to know you, increasing the likelihood they will engage with your other activities on Twitter.

• Follow other participants.

If you want to increase your followers on Twitter, the best way to do it is by following those who also participate in the conversation. Given you are interested in the same topic and they’ve just interacted with you, there’s a good chance they will follow you back.

• Go GIF crazy!

Okay, so maybe you don’t have to go crazy, but GIFs are a huge part of Twitter chats. They give an emotional response to your comments. You can also comment quickly, without needing to craft the perfect 280 character response. Plus, they’re fun! People love them, and a clever GIF is a positive reflection on your social media skills.

Gifs are regularly used by both the moderator and participants. For example, AdWeek regularly includes GIFs with each question it asks:

In case you couldn’t tell, Twitter chats are meant to be fun!

Hosting a Twitter Chat

To host a Twitter chat, the first thing you will need is your chat hashtag.

It can be related to your brand or the content topic, but it should be short, memorable, and unique.

• Short: The longer your hashtag, the fewer characters participants have to include with their reply.
• Memorable: Choose a hashtag that is easy to remember. This ensures that Twitter users can find you, and it makes it easy to participate in the conversation.
• Unique: Hashtags that are easy to remember are also common. You also need a hashtag that is unique to you. Otherwise, those wanting to find your chat may get confused by the other results that appear with your hashtag.

Next, consider the time of your chat. Twitter chats get the best long-term results when they are held on a regular basis, such as weekly. Examine your audience and their location. In America, you will want a time that works for those on Eastern and Pacific time.

Some choose to hold their chats during business hours, others prefer at night. Think about your audience when choosing your time. Aside from their locations, are they more or less likely to participate during business hours?

Once you have decided to on your Twitter chat’s time and hashtag, just like all types of event marketing, you need to promote the event.

Any event is meaningless without attendees, and that applies to the digital ones too. Without participants, you don’t have a Twitter chat — you simply have a series of tweets.

Announce your Twitter chat across all channels, including other social media platforms, your website or blog, and within email newsletters. Knowing that Twitter is where the event takes place, pin a tweet to your profile that promotes your Twitter chat. If chats are a big part of your Twitter strategy, you could also make a Twitter header image that includes the chat date, time, topic, and hashtag. 

Here, you can see how #BrandChat, held weekly on Wednesdays at 11 a.m. EST, has pinned a tweet with basic information about the chat:

When conducting your Twitter chat, keep a few tips in mind:

• Have all of your questions written and scheduled before the chat begins.
• Wait five-to-10 minutes between questions, giving participants time to respond.
• Interact with your participants — comment, like, and retweet the top answers.
• Stay focused! An hour-long Twitter chat will have you racing among questions and participants. Take your bathroom break and have coffee ready before it begins!

Don’t forget to promote any prominent guests participating in or moderating your chat. Doing this before your chat will increase participation. Plus, you are making it easy for influencers to retweet posts that mention them!

After the Twitter chat, it’s time to maximize on that benefit of creating content. Build a blog post that highlights key tweets and lessons from the chat.

Here, you can see how Content Marketing Institute summarizes its weekly #CMWorld chat:

The search function and categories Content Marketing Institute uses enable readers to stay on its site and continue engaging with its brand.

Blog posts ensure your Twitter chat has a lasting impact, even when it has fallen to the bottom of your Twitter feed.

Time to Twitter Chat

Twitter chats provide a valuable opportunity for both companies and individuals.

Share your expertise and get to know the other chat participants. Like, comment, and retweet posts from the moderator and other attendees to maximize your exposure and engagement. Then, be sure to follow those engaged with that chat.

Those participating in Twitter chats have a sincere interest in the topics being discussed. And best of all, when you are the host of a Twitter chat, your name is associated with the source of that knowledge exchange.

The post Understanding Twitter Chats 🧐 A Guide to Join (and Start!) the Conversation appeared first on Raven Blog.

It’s a question most serious content creators and SEO strategists ask themselves.

While we know, directionally, that better content usually gets more links, the concept is nebulous. What the hell is 10x content? And actually, do we even know that 10x content is what garners links, or do we only call it 10x content after the fact because it has required so many links (post hoc ergo propter hoc).

Instead of vague advice on “10x content,” I’ll break down some tactical things I’ve done to help out with link building, both natural and outreach-based link building.

A Behavioral Heuristic (Make Things Easy and Appeal to Self-Interest)

At a high level, humans make decisions using two main factors: motivation and ease. This is the underpinning of the BJ Fogg Behavior Model:

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When a prompt arises – let’s say in this case it’s your morning alarm that says you should go to the gym – the level of motivation and the level of ease determine how successful that prompt will be. If you slept in your gym clothes and your gym is right next door, it’s fairly easy to do. If you’re naturally highly motivated, either by the desire to improve or by the shame of not improving, you may have the will to fight through traffic or greater difficulty to get to the gym.

Either way, there is an association between the two variables, and the higher the motivation and the higher the ease, the better the chances of success.

In link building, we can consider our prompt the cold outreach email to try to get a backlink. We can trigger higher motivation by answering the question, “what’s in it for me?” This does require a solid understanding of your prospect’s motivations.

Sometimes this is easy, particularly if you work at a big brand that has a lot of offer.

When I was doing link building for our customer feedback software, we were simultaneously looking for guest writers for our new blog. I could essentially kill two birds with one stone, asking for a link and offering the chance to write for HubSpot:

This isn’t a lesson in email outreach, though, so we’ll focus more on the second part of the equation: making it easier to give you a link.

This part, by and large, is accomplished through the content itself. If you email someone and ask them to link to your crappy article that is simply rehashed and adds nothing new to the conversation, you’re not likely to get a good response (unless the “what’s in it for me?” is extremely tempting!).

Prerequisite: Your Content Can’t Be Awful

The number one variable in terms of creating content that is easy to link to is that it’s good and that it adds something new to the conversation.
What’s good? Well, when I was at CXL, our editorial strategy was simple: every piece of content should be comprehensive. It should be the only thing the reader ever needs to read on that topic.

This editorial lighthouse helped bring the ship to shore, in that it gave us a simple strategic heuristic where we could flex various tactical muscles to accomplish it. It didn’t translate specifically to “write long content,” though it often took that form, and there was no requirement to make content interactive, though sometimes we did that as well.

Granted, I don’t think that’s the editorial strategy everyone needs to take. It’s an expensive and difficult strategy to execute.

The Raven Blog recently featured a content writing guru to detail what makes content less awful, if you’re interested in that sort of thing. I think the marks of great content are easy to notice, but hard to replicate, so I definitely advise that you invest some time into upping your content game.

3 Elements All Great Articles Have

I think if you keep these three factors, your content will pass the bar in terms of linkability:

1. It’s well-written, stylistically and grammatically.
2. It’s written on a topic that people care about (as Paddy Moogan writes, “there is a big difference between a good idea and a good idea that gets links.”)
3. In the piece, you say something different or unique, and add something to the conversation.

Your content doesn’t need to be 10x, but it simply can’t be embarrassing for someone to link to. The better the content is (I acknowledge the fuzziness of this scale), the easier it is to build links.

So, try to create excellent content, if not for the benefit to the world and to readers of content, but for your link building efforts.

Past that, once you’ve got a solid base for your content, there are several “hooks” or “boosts” that you can add to your content to make it even more linkable.

Content Hooks: 7 Tactics to Make Content More Linkable

Step one: write awesome shit. Step two: make sure your awesome content includes some of the following “content hooks”:

• Original data
• Original images
• Graphics and charts
• Quotes from top experts
• Pros and cons tables
• Videos
• Statistics
• The good old infographic

This list isn’t extensive – I’m sure you have your own great tactics – but these have helped me get links. I’ll walk through examples of each below.

1. Original Data

One of the most compelling ways to build links to your content is by using original data, stuff no one else has because you conducted the study yourself.

If you have a full team dedicated to this, that’s a huge asset. At HubSpot, we’re lucky enough to have a research team, so we have the chance to see first hand how great original research is as a link building tool.

We also did this at CXL in a few different ways. First, we conducted several industry surveys which did really well with link building:

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Second, we built out a UX research facility and published our own original studies. Expensive? More than regular content production, yes. Hard to replicated? You betcha.

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2. Original Images

Original images are a pretty easy one to add in. They result in mostly passive, naturally occurring inbound links. The fact is, many writers and editors want to beef up their content with visuals, so they’ll do an image search for a certain keyword, say “a/b/n testing.” One can only hope that your images shows up…

Basically, if you’re going to add an explanatory image, ask yourself if you can create your own bespoke version of it. Writing about Customer Satisfaction Score surveys allowed me to create our own HubSpot branded version of it:

Clearly, if you’re doing a how-to article or a complicated walk-through, you’ll naturally end up with a bunch of original images. There’s no real way to do “technical” content marketing without doing so, and it certainly helps link building, because other content creators are going to be searching for these types of tutorial images. Igloo Analytics has a great example on their post on doing path analysis in BigQuery:

3. Graphics and Charts

Graphics and charts are similar to original images, though I look at them as a sort of synthesis between 1) original research and 2) original images. You’re creating data visualizations, essentially.

If you want some awesome inspiration for what you can do with data visualization, just check out reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful.

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Another great resource now is Data Studio. They actually offer an interesting gallery for your inspiration. One of my favorite examples if a report on “What Happened to M Night Shyamalan,” shown here:

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4. Quotes from Top Experts

Quotes from top experts can take many forms, from the lazy roundup post to the most astute and groundbreaking journalism. It’s all a matter of curation.

My vote: stop trying to rack up a huge number of contributors just so you can ask these “influencers” to tweet your article later. That’s the lazy way. It’s ineffective and contributes to noise pollution in our fine industry.

Wordable did an excellent parody of these silly roundups a while back:

A better way? Think like a journalist, and use experts – people who have built their careers learning what you’re writing about – to make your content better.

That’s the end goal, after all. You should go deep with a few people who really know their topic. Don’t opt for the “100+ experts share their #1 SEO tip” garbage.

5. Pros and Cons Tables

Pros and cons tables are yet another method by which we can make our content more readable for visitors, creating a better user experience, and a true resource that is naturally linkable.

They’re especially useful when comparing complicated methodologies. Though they can lack nuance, they help readers understand concepts at a high level. Oracle did this well when they created pros and cons tables to deal with one-tail vs. two-tail hypothesis tests:

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We do this for several of our products at HubSpot. Here’s an example of a comparison page for our online form builder:

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As Peep Laja wrote, “people comparison shop, stupid.” If you work at a software company, people are going to compare solutions. You may as well help them out. Effective Experiments is another great example of making this easy with comparison charts:

6. Videos

Videos are pretty underrated when it comes to search and link building as well. Often, we look at them as pure branding plays, but people love videos, and it offers you a chance to differentiate your content. This is particularly true if you have an articular speaker, or especially if you’re speaking on a topic that is quite dense and needs proper elocution.

For instance, in this post on one-tail vs. two-tail hypothesis testing, I needed a bit of clarification, for it’s a pretty dense topic for the uninitiated. Here’s a video I embedded to help explain:

I’ve tried to start implementing video for walkthroughs in my own content, such as this video I added to my post on capturing email leads:

7. The Good Old Infographic

I’ll admit, I’m somewhat of a hater when it comes to infographics. They seem to have fallen into the same trap that roundup posts did. They’re a good concept (roundup posts, after all, are a distillation of expert wisdom, at least in theory), but the barrier to entry is so low that the market was flooded with garbage and cheap production.

Paddy Moogan, too, comes to this conclusion in a recent Search Engine Land piece:

“Too many infographics were created, with many with poor designs and bad messages. The effect they had as link magnets wore off, and the concept suffered overall.

Bad infographics are a bad idea. But overall, a good infographic that has been well executed can be a link goldmine.”

I know this to be true from firsthand experience, having built a link garnering infographic for LawnStarter back in the day.

But as Paddy implied in the quote above, the more competition and crappy execution there is on a tactic, the harder it is to stand out.

As HubSpot CMO, Kipp Bodnar, put it, marketers tend to follow a “scorched earth” methodology once a tactic works. They beat it down and overuse it until it no longer works.

Infographics definitely suffered this fate, though it may be an opportune time to revive them (in a better form, at least). As such, you really have to cut through the noise with a great infographic – from great concept to beautiful design – for it to work.

Better Content, Not Silver Bullet “Hacks”

There’s no silver bullet when it comes to link building or content creation, and nothing on this list will give you a guaranteed victory. Can you imagine if it did? How easy SEO would be, and how lowly we’d be paid.

Part of the fun is in the puzzle, in creating a holistically great piece of content and executing on link building properly. Sometimes, you do everything seemingly correctly, and there’s still something missing. Learn to love that puzzle, and you’ll be a fine link builder and you’ll get results of the long term.

In any case, adding in “content hooks” should help you break down the barriers to building links in your already great content. These 7 tactics should give you a wonderful starting point.

The post 7 Step Guide to Creating Linkable Content appeared first on Raven Blog.