The Golden State Warriors basketball team has already broken several NBA records in its quest to snap the longest winning streak in NBA history. However, even if you’re not a fan of the NBA or the Warriors, there are lessons to be learned from the team’s tremendous feat. Our team got together this week to discuss content marketing, a popular marketing strategy, and how website owners can take a lesson from the Warriors to improve their content marketing…and SEO score.
SEO is a strategy that takes some effort, and contrary to some people’s beliefs, just because you’re ranking for a keyword today (especially a keyword or keyword phrase that’s competitive) doesn’t mean your competitors won’t. They will set their own strategy. instead to “steal” your relevance through a more consistent and persistent SEO effort. Like the Golden State Warriors, if your team (or you, if you’re the owner or sole proprietor) don’t show up every day and produce quality work, you’ll eventually have a hard time competing with those “teams” that are running day after day But what do you do when you’re just starting out and/or operating on a tighter budget, and don’t have a lot of money to spend on a professional to handle SEO for you? We suggest you start by posting relevant content. And often.
This may seem pretty obvious, but when we talk to a lot of our clients, we almost always recommend that they do it, even if we’re writing some of the content for them. Why?
• Your content will be unique and Google LOVES unique.
• It allows you to showcase a bit of your expertise to prospects and partners, and can keep people coming back to your website for future ideas.
• If your targeted keywords are part of the content, it will help increase your page rank over time.
• You control the quality of the content. No third party may care as much about your business and industry as you do, so your own content will help that enthusiasm shine through.
• You can be timely and relevant to the topics you’re talking about, which is an easy way to catch trends and increase the chances of your content ranking.
So how does your company become the Golden State Warriors of content marketing and SEO? Here is a process we suggest:
1. Explore Google Trends and get ideas that have been popular in the last few weeks. People always ask us why we advocate this, and it usually stems from this question: “None of the hot topics are about my industry, so why should I use this?” First of all, trending topics don’t have to be about your industry. Take the article you are currently reading, for example. As we write this, the Golden State Warriors are trending as a result of their (currently) undefeated season in the NBA. So what if the title of our article was “How to improve content marketing by analyzing the Golden State Warrior’s winning streak”? What would we write about? Perhaps we’d draw parallels between a team-written blog with consistently well-written, in-depth articles and why not relying on a single player to win a game is the reason Golden State continues to beat opponents. The reality is that it doesn’t matter. You just want to attract readers and tap into what people are already searching for on the internet.
2. Once you’ve come up with an idea for your latest post, just start writing. Write about what, you ask? Anything! Not all articles need to be researched and obtained, and not all articles need to be 3000 characters long. Just look at Twitter. Twitter gives you 140 characters to get a message across, yet how many people see these tweets and act on them in any way? Million! The point is don’t worry about the length. Care about the quality and integrity of a thought, and whether it will move your readers to action.
3. Now that you’ve written your article, it’s time to maximize your profits for your website through internal and external links. Internal links have a huge SEO benefit because they allow readers to easily jump from one page to another based on what they’re reading and the actions you want them to take. They also prevent people from “bounce” or coming to your website and leaving immediately, and increase the amount of time they spend reviewing the rest of the content on your website. So read your article and find words or phrases that can be used to link to other parts of your website. External links, on the other hand, are links that take readers to another website. For example, above I linked to Google Trends. Why? Google views it favorably when you’re not constantly building links to just your site, and it also gives you the opportunity to exchange links with another website. Let’s say there is a complementary (but not directly competing) product that you reference in your article. You can contact that other company to let them know and ask if they would mind placing your link somewhere within their website. What is the benefit for you? It’s free advertising for your readers, and if your page rank is higher than yours, it will give your website an SEO boost if visitors come to it via the link on that higher page rank site.
4. With your article written and links embedded, you’re probably wondering where to post your content. Before Google’s Panda update, where we saw a bigger penalty for duplicate content, people who spent time creating quality articles thought it best to post them to as many websites and social media accounts as possible. We no longer believe this is optimal. While we know you spent all that time writing a great article and want to make sure you maximize the number of eyes on it, it can actually do you more harm than good by republishing your content in multiple locations. That’s why we suggest that you put your content in a single location or make sure that any of the publishing websites you use (for example, Search Engine Journal) allow you to use a rel=canonical reference to ensure that Google don’t penalize yourself for duplicate content!
5. Lastly, if you want to go further with your content marketing, forum discussions and the like can be a great way to increase the number of backlinks to your article. Reddit, for example, has become a really powerful social medium for expertise in certain areas. If you join groups relevant to your industry, you’ll probably find tons of user-generated questions that you can answer (and reference your article) that will give future Reddit users with the same question a static link to your article. . For the record, it doesn’t have to be Reddit. You can do this same strategy on all social networking websites.
So if you’re looking to improve your content marketing strategy and also want to save some of your SEO budget, we suggest starting with the process outlined above. The Warriors didn’t become the team they are today overnight, so keep doing the right thing week after week and you’ll eventually dominate your competition! And if you don’t know where your website currently ranks, or just want a second opinion, we suggest you check out our free SEO Report.
Good luck and good writing!