SEO
10 Reasons You Need A Long-Term Content Strategy
It’s no secret that content is time-consuming.
However, some marketers are so focused on whittling down that time, on cutting corners just to “get something out,” that they ultimately end up losing out.
What do they lose?
The power inherent in high-quality content helps you:
- Rank in Google.
- Build trust with consumers.
- Earn leads.
- Convert leads.
Rushing content, meanwhile, gets you the opposite.
Marketers who view content marketing as a sprint rather than a marathon think they can write 20 short, low-quality blog posts, slap them online, and call it done.
Unfortunately, this is a recipe for major content failure.
For content to succeed – truly succeed, with the rankings, engaged readers, and conversions to prove it – you need to play the long game with your content marketing.
You need to come to terms with the realization that it may take anywhere from six months to a year (or even longer, according to one study) to get your content ranking well.
You need to understand that your target audience is comprised of humans who need to be nurtured and respected continually over time if you want their trust and, ultimately, their buy-in.
You need to fully own that good content cannot be created in a rush. Great content takes even longer, but great content gets results.
Let’s get deeper into why you should be playing the long game with content.
Why Focusing On A Content Marathon, Not A Sprint, Is A Good Thing For Your Marketing
Think about a footrace for a moment: It’s pretty brutal, right?
To win a footrace, you don’t necessarily need technique or style; you just need speed (at least until you become a professional track athlete, at which point style and form are critically important).
Because of this, the winner of a footrace isn’t necessarily the best runner in the group. Put that same winner into a 10 km and he’d likely burn out at the beginning, right? I bet you see where I’m going with this.
The same thing applies to content.
While anyone can sprint in a general direction towards the finish line with crappy content and poorly thought-out content strategies, not every marketer can devise an effective, long-term strategy for actually consistently ranking well with content.
This is the main reason that the long-term content strategy is so much better than a short-term content strategy.
In addition to being more sustainable, the long-term approach is also wiser and more fully thought out.
In the words of Tim Ferriss, “There will always be a need for high-quality, and there will always be a need for long-form.”
While short-term content strategies seek to produce instant and short-lived results, long-term content strategies allow marketers to bond with their audiences, build their voice, provide real value, and rank in an authentic and sustainable way.
Because of this, marketers who create long-term content strategies often publish more effective content, build bigger audiences, and garner more shares across the board.
10 Reasons Long-Term Content Strategy Is Better
1. It’s A Better Use Of Your Money And Resources
Imagine going on a diet to lose weight. For two weeks, you eat only whole, clean foods and you exercise for two hours a day.
You feel great and – hey! — you lose weight. At the end of that two weeks, however, you stop exercising and go right back to your old diet habits.
What happens?
Of course, you gain all of the weight back, and your guise of physical fitness takes a nosedive.
Not surprisingly, the same thing happens with content. Regardless of what you’re doing, content marketing takes money and resources.
If you’re paying someone to flood your accounts with content for two weeks and then laying off your strategy entirely, you can bet not only will your strategy be ineffective, but it will also be a waste of your money and resources.
Instead, you’re much better off allocating your resources to a long-term content strategy that will build readers over time and help you maintain steady levels of traffic and clicks over months or years.
Instead of wasting your resources, this funnels them right back into your company and ensures that you’re building value while also establishing a solid foundation of lasting, relevant content.
2. Long-Term Content Engages Readers
To keep readers interested and engaged for an extended period, you need to offer them comprehensive, in-depth content that helps them address their concerns and solve problems.
And that means long content, in terms of word count per article.
Don’t think just because we live in an age where attention spans are short that long-form content won’t do well. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
An Orbit Media survey found that bloggers who write longer posts (anything over 1,500 words) get better results.
Why does long-form content perform so well as part of a long-term content strategy?
In addition to providing outstanding value for readers, long-form content also allows your company to build authority and establish dominance by showcasing your knowledge on relevant topics in your industry.
3. Content Changes All The Time
As search engines and readers progress, the demand for quality, informed, relevant content increases all the time. Because of this, a long-term content strategy is the best possible weapon.
Designed to insulate marketers against change and help them maintain their traffic and readership despite changing SEO, content, and marketing requirements, long-term content marketing allows space for the strategy to absorb and adapt to changing trends. This ensures more effective content and a more adaptive strategy that doesn’t have to scramble to keep up.
4. Long-Term Content Is Synonymous With Cornerstone Content
Every good house needs a solid foundation, and every good marketing strategy needs cornerstone content to provide long-lasting value and relevance to readers.
Cornerstone content is long-term content that might not draw a huge number of clicks right off the bat but remains valuable for months or years after the publishing date.
Think of it as a down payment toward your own business.
In fact, if you look at the aforementioned Tim Ferriss’s blog, you’ll notice most of his most popular blog posts were written up to two years ago. How’s that for an effective long-term strategy?
In contrast, short-term content strategies are largely aimed at ranking well for a specific keyword or phrase, so they all but neglect cornerstone content entirely.
Unfortunately, this leads to a less valuable and less relevant website for users of all types.
For attracting long-term clicks and ensuring that a website’s readers are engaged, entertained, and consuming value at all times, cornerstone content becomes more of an essential than a luxury.
5. Long-Term Content Doesn’t Turn Off With A Hard Sell
In today’s marketing environment, there is virtually nothing customers hate more than being hard-sold.
Nobody wants to know why they can’t live without your product or why it’s critical for them to “buy now!”
More often than not, these approaches simply alienate customers and make it harder for your company to sell products naturally.
Unfortunately, the hard-sell is often a tone taken by short-term content.
Because short-term content is insistent by nature, it’s tough to engineer it so it doesn’t push on your customers.
As a result, short-term content strategies run a high risk of alienating customers and making it more difficult to sell your products.
Long-term content strategies, on the other hand, do no such thing. Because they’re not designed to elicit an immediate response from readers, they seek to provide value and relevance rather than insistence and immediacy.
In other words, they succeed in explaining a problem, helping the audience handle the problem, and then inviting them to engage in a discussion about the problem.
This, in turn, is a fantastic way to nurture long-term customer relationships and ensure that your company continues to meet the needs of your clients.
6. Long-Term Content Strategy Is An Effective Way To Approach Current Events
Do you think writing about trending news and industry events makes you a short-term content strategist? Think again.
Trending content-focused blogs are extremely important, and it’s a mistake to think of this as only a short-term strategy.
In fact, trending news can be critical to your long-term strategy, and can help you establish your website as the source for up-to-date and relevant industry news.
When you focus on using trending, to-the-minute news pieces as a way to enhance and strengthen your long-term content strategy, it’s easy to see how you can improve your brand presence and boost your business overall.
7. Long-Term Content Promotes Itself
Failing to promote your content is one of the most dangerous mistakes in the entire content marketing industry and, unfortunately, it’s one many marketers make.
While short-term content needs aggressive promotion to succeed, long-term content essentially promotes itself.
When you create high-quality, in-depth, well-researched, long-term content and push it out to your followers, it’s easy to rank well for your chosen keyword.
Because long-term content is meant to garner clicks and shares over time, it’s a great way to build steady, long-term rankings that can boost your SERP placement and improve your standing over time.
8. Long-Term Content Is Good Content
One of the differences between long-term content and short-term content comes down to priority and intention.
As a general rule, people who commit to the pursuit and development of content for the long term are much more in love with content.
While all types of content are important, creating good long-term content requires a different mindset and series of priorities than creating short-term content.
Because of this, long-term content strategies often boast better content that caters more effectively to readers.
9. Long-Term Content Effectively Builds An Audience
When it comes to building an audience, you don’t want to aim for the largest audience possible. This will result in a massive but unengaged group of followers.
Instead, you want to build an audience of people who are genuinely interested in your concept and your content and will engage with it actively when it comes out.
This is one of the areas in which long-term content strategy is so powerful.
Fewer people have the attention span for long-term (or long-form) content today, and by making it a large part of your content strategy, you can build a better audience and earn more qualified leads.
10. Long-Term Content Is Best For SEO
SEO is a complex mix of strategies that companies need to succeed online.
In addition to optimizing content correctly, companies that want to use good SEO also need to ensure their content is high-quality, relevant, and useful to their readers.
While this can be difficult with a short-term content strategy, a long-term content strategy suits the goal quite nicely.
In addition to the fact that long-term content is written with the reader in mind, it’s easier to target a group of keywords with a long-term content strategy than it is a short-term content strategy.
Finally, every piece of content written in a long-term content strategy goes to boost and improve SEO, contributing to more online visibility and more clicks to your website.
The Case For Long-Form Content Strategy
Treating content as a sprint rather than a marathon may seem easier at the outset, but it’s really just a quick way to stall out with content that doesn’t move the needle.
Good, results-driving content takes thought, time, and effort. It takes commitment to a long-term strategy because, by nature, content doesn’t work in the short term.
Ultimately, the time and commitment you invest in your long-term goals and strategy will pay off with higher dividends and a higher ROI. And that adds up to time well spent.
Featured Image: alphaspirit.it/Shutterstock
SEO
Content Pruning: Why It Works, and How to Do It
Content pruning sounds pretty appealing: delete a ton of content and see your organic traffic improve. But pruning has risks (like deleting useful pages and useful backlinks), and benefits are not guaranteed: So how does pruning actually work? And when…
SEO
8 Free SEO Reporting Tools
There’s no shortage of SEO reporting tools to choose from—but what are the core tools you need to put together an SEO report?
In this article, I’ll share eight of my favorite SEO reporting tools to help you create a comprehensive SEO report for free.
Price: Free
Google Search Console, often called GSC, is one of the most widely used tools to track important SEO metrics from Google Search.
Most common reporting use case
GSC has a ton of data to dive into, but the main performance indicator SEOs look at first in GSC is Clicks on the main Overview dashboard.
As the data is from Google, SEOs consider it to be a good barometer for tracking organic search performance. As well as clicks data, you can also track the following from the Performance report:
- Total Impressions
- Average CTR
- Average Position
Tip
But for most SEO reporting, GSC clicks data is exported into a spreadsheet and turned into a chart to visualize year-over-year performance.
Favorite feature
One of my favorite reports in GSC is the Indexing report. It’s useful for SEO reporting because you can share the indexed to non-indexed pages ratio in your SEO report.
If the website has a lot of non-indexed pages, then it’s worth reviewing the pages to understand why they haven’t been indexed.
Price: Free
Google Looker Studio (GLS), previously known as Google Data Studio (GDS), is a free tool that helps visualize data in shareable dashboards.
Most common reporting use case
Dashboards are an important part of SEO reporting, and GLS allows you to get a total view of search performance from multiple sources through its integrations.
Out of the box, GLS allows you to connect to many different data sources.
Such as:
- Marketing products – Google Ads, Google Analytics, Display & Video 360, Search Ads 360
- Consumer products – Google Sheets, YouTube, and Google Search Console
- Databases – BigQuery, MySQL, and PostgreSQL
- Social media platforms – Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter
- Files – CSV file upload and Google Cloud Storage
Sidenote.
If you don’t have the time to create your own report manually, Ahrefs has three Google Looker Studio connectors that can help you create automated SEO reporting for any website in a few clicks
Here’s what a dashboard in GLS looks like:
With this type of dashboard, you share reports that are easy to understand with clients or other stakeholders.
Favorite feature
The ability to blend and filter data from different sources, like GA and GSC, means you can get a customized overview of your total search performance, tailored to your website.
Price: Free for 500 URLs
Screaming Frog is a website crawler that helps you audit your website.
Screaming Frog’s free version of its crawler is perfect if you want to run a quick audit on a bunch of URLs. The free version is limited to 500 URLs—making it ideal for crawling smaller websites.
Most common reporting use case
When it comes to reporting, the Reports menu in Screaming Frog SEO Spider has a wealth of information you can look over that covers all the technical aspects of your website, such as analyzing, redirects, canonicals, pagination, hreflang, structured data, and more.
Once you’ve crawled your site, it’s just a matter of downloading the reports you need and working out the main issues to summarize in your SEO report.
Favorite feature
Screaming Frog can pull in data from other tools, including Ahrefs, using APIs.
If you already had access to a few SEO tools’ APIs, you could pull data from all of them directly into Screaming Frog. This is useful if you want to combine crawl data with performance data or other 3rd party tools.
Even if you’ve never configured an API, connecting other tools to Screaming Frog is straightforward.
Price: Free
Ahrefs has a large selection of free SEO tools to help you at every stage of your SEO campaign, and many of these can be used to provide insights for your SEO reporting.
For example, you could use our:
Most common reporting use case
One of our most popular free SEO tools is Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT), which you can use for your SEO reporting.
With AWT, you can:
- Monitor your SEO health over time by setting up scheduled SEO audits
- See the performance of your website
- Check all known backlinks for your website
Favorite feature
Of all the Ahrefs free tools, my favorite is AWT. Within it, site auditing is my favorite feature—once you’ve set it up, it’s a completely hands-free way to keep track of your website’s technical performance and monitor its health.
If you already have access to Google Search Console, it’s a no-brainer to set up a free AWT account and schedule a technical crawl of your website(s).
Price: Free
Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar is a free Chrome and Firefox extension useful for diagnosing on-page technical issues and performing quick spot checks on your website’s pages.
Most common reporting use case
For SEO reporting, it’s useful to run an on-page check on your website’s top pages to ensure there aren’t any serious on-page issues.
With the free version, you get the following features:
- On-page SEO report
- Redirect tracer with HTTP Headers
- Outgoing links report with link highlighter and broken link checker
- SERP positions
- Country changer for SERP
The SEO toolbar is excellent for spot-checking issues with pages on your website. If you are not confident with inspecting the code, it can also give you valuable pointers on what elements you need to include on your pages to make them search-friendly.
If anything is wrong with the page, the toolbar highlights it, with red indicating a critical issue.
Favorite feature
The section I use the most frequently in the SEO toolbar is the Indexability tab. In this section, you can see whether the page can be crawled and indexed by Google.
Although you can do this by inspecting the code manually, using the toolbar is much faster.
Price: Free
Like GSC, Google Analytics is another tool you can use to track the performance of your website, tracking sessions and conversions and much more on your website.
Most common reporting use case
GA gives you a total view of website traffic from several different sources, such as direct, social, organic, paid traffic, and more.
Favorite feature
You can create and track up to 300 events and 30 conversions with GA4. Previously, with universal analytics, you could only track 20 conversions. This makes conversion and event tracking easier within GA4.
Price: Free
Google Slides is Google’s version of Microsoft PowerPoint. If you don’t have a dashboard set up to report on your SEO performance, the next best thing is to assemble a slide deck.
Many SEO agencies present their report through dashboard insights and PowerPoint presentations. However, if you don’t have access to PowerPoint, then Google Slides is an excellent (free) alternative.
Most common reporting use cases
The most common use of Google Slides is to create a monthly SEO report. If you don’t know what to include in a monthly report, use our SEO report template.
Favorite feature
One of my favorite features is the ability to share your presentation on a video chat directly from Google Slides. You can do this by clicking the camera icon in the top right.
This is useful if you are working with remote clients and makes sharing your reports easy.
Price: Free
Google Trends allows you to view a keyword’s popularity over time in any country. The data shown is the relative popularity ratio scaled from 0-100, not the direct volume of search queries.
Most common reporting use cases
Google Trends is useful for showing how the popularity of certain searches can increase or decrease over time. If you work with a website that often has trending products, services, or news, it can be useful to illustrate this visually in your SEO report.
Google Trends makes it easy to spot seasonal trends for product categories. For example, people want to buy BBQs when the weather is sunny.
Using Google Trends, we can see that peak demand for BBQs usually happens in June-July every year.
Using this data across the last five years, we could be fairly sure when the BBQ season would start and end.
Favorite feature
Comparing two or more search terms against each other over time is one of my favorite uses of Google Trends, as it can be used to tell its own story.
Embellishing your report with trends data allows you to gain further insights into market trends.
You can even dig into trends at a regional level if you need to.
Final thoughts
These free tools will help you put together the foundations for a well-rounded SEO report.
The tools you use for SEO reporting don’t always have to be expensive—even large companies use many of the free tools mentioned to create insights for their client’s SEO reports.
Got more questions? Ping me on X 🙂
SEO
Study Reveals Potential Disruption For Brands & SEO
A new study by Authoritas suggests that Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE), currently being tested with a limited group of users, could adversely impact brand visibility and organic search traffic.
These findings include:
- When an SGE box is expanded, the top organic result drops by over 1,200 pixels on average, significantly reducing visibility.
- 62% of SGE links come from domains outside the top 10 organic results.
- Ecommerce, electronics, and fashion-related searches saw the greatest disruption, though all verticals were somewhat impacted.
Adapting to generative search may require a shift in SEO strategies, focusing more on long-form content, expert insights, and multimedia formats.
As Google continues to invest in AI-powered search, the Authoritas study provides an early look at the potential challenges and opportunities ahead.
High Penetration Rate & Industry-Wide Effects
The study analyzed 2,900 brand and product-related keywords across 15 industry verticals and found that Google displays SGE results for 91.4% of all search queries.
The prevalence of SGE results indicates they impact a majority of websites across various industries.
The research analyzed the typical composition of SGE results. On average, each SGE element contained between 10-11 links sourced from an average of four different domains.
This indicates brands may need to earn multiple links and listings within these AI-curated results to maintain visibility and traffic.
The research also suggests that larger, well-established websites like Quora and Reddit will likely perform better in SGE results than smaller websites and lesser-known brands.
Shifting Dynamics In Organic Search Results
With SGE results occupying the entire first page, websites that currently hold the top positions may experience a significant decrease in traffic and click-through rates.
When a user clicks to expand the SGE element, the study found that, on average, the #1 ranked organic result drops a sizeable 1,255 pixels down the page.
Even if a website ranks number one in organic search, it may effectively be pushed down to the second page due to the prominence of SGE results.
New Competition From Unexpected Sources
The study revealed that SGE frequently surfaces links and content from websites that didn’t appear in the top organic rankings.
On average, only 20.1% of SGE links exactly matched a URL from the first page of Google search results.
An additional 17.9% of SGE links were from the same domains as page one results but linked to different pages. The remaining 62% of SGE links came from sources outside the top organic results.
Challenges For Brand Term Optimization & Local Search
The study reveals that SGE results for branded terms may include competitors’ websites alongside the brand’s own site, potentially leading to increased competition for brand visibility.
Laurence O’Toole, CEO and founder of Authoritas, states:
“Brands are not immune. These new types of generative results introduce more opportunities for third-party sites and even competitors to rank for your brand terms and related brand and product terms that you care about.”
Additionally, local businesses may face similar challenges, as SGE results could feature competing local brands even when users search for a specific brand in a regional context.
Methodology & Limitations
To arrive at these insights, Authoritas analyzed a robust dataset of 2,900 search keywords across a spectrum of query types, including specific brand names, brand + generic terms, brand + product names, generic terms, and specific product names. The keywords were distributed across 15 industry verticals.
The study utilized a consistent desktop browser viewport to quantify pixel-based changes in the search results. Authoritas also developed proprietary “alignment scores” to measure the degree of overlap between traditional organic search results and the new SGE links.
While acknowledging some limitations, such as the keyword set needing to be fully representative of each vertical and the still-evolving nature of SGE, Authoritas maintains that the insights hold value in preparing brands for the new realities of an AI-powered search ecosystem.
Why We Care
The findings of the Authoritas study have implications for businesses, marketers, and SEO professionals. As Google’s SGE becomes more prevalent, it could disrupt traditional organic search rankings and traffic patterns.
Brands that have invested heavily in SEO and have achieved top rankings for key terms may find their visibility and click-through rates diminished by the prominence of SGE results.
SGE introduces new competition from unexpected sources, as most SGE links come from domains outside the top 10 organic results. This means businesses may need to compete not only with their traditional rivals but also with a broader range of websites that gain visibility through SGE.
As Google is a primary source of traffic and leads for many businesses, any changes to its search results can impact visibility, brand awareness, and revenue.
How This Could Help You
While the rise of SGE presents challenges, it also offers opportunities.
Taking into account what we’ve learned from the Authoritas study, here are some actionable takeaways:
- As SGE favors in-depth, informative content, businesses may benefit from investing in comprehensive, well-researched articles and guides that provide value to users.
- Incorporating expert quotes, interviews, and authoritative sources within your content could increase the likelihood of being featured in SGE results.
- Enriching your content with images, videos, and other multimedia elements may help capture the attention of both users and the SGE algorithm.
- Building a strong brand presence across multiple channels, including social media, industry forums, and relevant websites, can increase your chances of appearing in SGE.
- Creating a trustworthy brand and managing your online reputation will be crucial, as SGE may feature competitors alongside your website.
Looking Ahead
While the long-term impact of SGE will depend on user adoption and the perceived usefulness of results, this study’s findings serve as a valuable starting point for businesses and SEO professionals.
By proactively addressing the challenges and opportunities SGE presents, you can increase your chances of success in the new search environment.
Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock
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