SEO
5 Tips To Improve Your Content Strategy
Every digital marketing strategy relies on a number of elements to ensure its success.
For a holistic campaign, you’ll need to consider how you’ll approach email marketing, paid search, social media posts, and reputation management, just to name a few.
And while these are all important, there’s one thing that takes precedence over everything else: content.
Regularly posting new, insightful content is a proven way to improve brand awareness, build trust, engage with your audience, and drive action – but just any old content isn’t going to do the trick.
You need high-quality content that serves a purpose. And to do that, you need a strategy.
A content strategy, also known as a content plan, is a collection of tactics used to create, implement, and manage marketing information, materials, and collateral. You can think of it as your marketing battle plan.
And like any good plan, it needs to be detailed and comprehensive, down to what type of content you’ll be posting, when and where you’ll be posting it, and who is responsible for each element.
Here are five things you can use to take your content strategy to the next level.
1. Think Like A Publisher
You know your brand inside and out, which is a good thing, but it also comes with some issues.
For one thing, because you’re so familiar with it, it becomes easy to take certain knowledge for granted, often without even realizing it. Unfortunately, this can easily lead to frustration for your audience.
The simplest way to eliminate that is to think like a publisher. In other words, identify what your audience is looking for and find content to address it. Here are some tips for doing just that:
- Build your content team. You have a lot of expertise in your organization already. Use it. Your team could include marketers, product team members, PR specialists, customer support reps, and IT.
- Establish roles and responsibilities. Everyone on the editorial team should have a specific role in creating the strategy and delivering content. Make sure everyone knows what is expected of them at each step of the creation and management processes.
- Build workflows. Write out exactly how your process works to ensure everything goes through the correct channels for approval. This may include looping in brand specialists, executives, or the legal team.
- Gather feedback. Too many businesses neglect social listening, which is a mistake. You should be actively taking part in the conversations customers are having about your brand. It’s also a good idea to keep track of trending topics, which can provide opportunities for your brand.
- Unify your digital efforts. General marketing and paid media should work to mutually reinforce one another. Partner with your paid media team to ensure your message is consistent and identify places to amplify effectiveness.
- Invest in the right CMS technology. Using a quality content management system (CMS) lets you put the latest technology to work for you. Platforms like WordPress, Shopify, and Squarespace can greatly simplify your workflow and help you manage the entire process from conceptualizing to publication. With the right CMS, you can manage your content across channels without needing to write a single line of code.
2. Make Sure Everything Fits Into Your Sales Funnel
Conversions are the name of the game. In most cases, this means sales, but it can also be clicks, newsletter signups, or any other marketing-specific goal you can think of.
There’s a lot more to content marketing than just sharing a viral video from your office, a blog post on the state of your industry, or linking to an infographic you’ve created.
Yes, it is those things, but it’s also about telling a story. It needs to have an emotional hook that helps change a target’s actions, thoughts, or feelings about your brand. And search is just one small piece of that.
All your online and offline marketing needs to align with your brand narrative and correspond to a step in your sales funnel.
That means that all your content – whether it’s a social post, a photo, a new blog, or even a press release – is important. And it all needs to work together to move your targets further along the sales journey.
And successfully accomplishing this means having a rock-solid strategy before you get started.
3. Refine And Document Your Editorial Process
Whether you’re creating all your content yourself, using a team of people, or outsourcing it to freelancers, it’s important that every piece of content goes through the same editorial process.
The first step to this is evaluating your process. Is everything being looked at by multiple sets of eyes for mistakes, typos, and the like? Sometimes it’s difficult for writers to spot their own mistakes.
Refine your process and then document it with detailed step-by-step instructions. There should be absolutely no confusion as to where a piece of content is in the creation process, what’s performed at that step, and what will happen next.
Be sure to always keep your brand in mind. When deciding on content, don’t neglect the fonts, images, and tone your audience has come to expect from you.
If your tone switches from business professional in one piece to casually familiar in the next, it will leave your audience confused.
Additionally, you want to make sure all your content adheres to your narrative. Make sure every content creator is familiar with things like:
- Positioning – your brand narrative should include the pillars your content is built upon.
- Your values – what issues are important to your brand? (civil rights, ecology, etc.)
- Perception – what does the media say about your brand? What about the community?
- Audience Interests – what are your customers talking about when they’re not interacting with your brand?
- Historical Performance – what type of content has traditionally worked for you? What hasn’t?
- Search Behavior – what are your targets searching for? What phrases are they using?
- Customer Support – what are the recurring support issues you keep hearing from your customers?
Once you’ve identified your brand narrative, it will be a lot easier to craft an effective content strategy and change customer behavior, whether that means closing more sales, repositioning your company, or changing the way customers think about your brand.
Make sure you invest in properly training your team on this new process.
And because there’s always room for improvement, you’ll want to have regular refreshers and continuing education programs built around the latest best practices.
4. Review, Refresh, Replace
Nothing lasts forever, but if you can create the type of content that will have a long shelf life, you’ll be able to generate traffic, clicks, and interaction for months or even years. Other pieces will burn brightly for a short period of time.
It’s up to you to identify what needs to be removed, what should be replaced, and what needs just a minor refresh.
Review your existing content to see what’s still relevant and what needs to go away. If you use stats or link out to other content, make sure you’re verifying these on a regular basis.
Some content, known as evergreen content, will continue to be relevant for a very long time. It’s not something you can set and forget, but it does require considerably less upkeep than trending topics.
How do you figure out what type of videos, blog posts, and how-to guides will stay relevant? With research, of course.
Go through your existing traffic, analyze your competition, and check out industry resources.
What type of topics keeps popping up again and again, regardless of how long ago they were published? Use your keyword research tools to find words and phrases with high search volume over a long period of time.
Either completely avoid news, trends, or technology that could be vulnerable to replacement (that piece on PlayStation 5 might be hot right now, but it’s not going to generate much traffic once PlayStation 6 hits the market) or create it with the understanding that it will have a shorter shelf life.
Choose visuals that are appropriate and less apt to look outdated.
Most of all, make sure it’s useful. If you have a blog post offering a step-by-step guide to riding a unicycle, people searching for information on getting started with a one-wheeler will find it just as relevant in 10 years as they do today (barring some massive change in unicycle technology, that is). Many types of educational content can stay relevant for a long time.
And once you have a good piece of evergreen content posted, keep promoting it. As long as it’s still relevant, it will still generate clicks.
5. Use Your Network
Your content strategy should include more than just your own domain.
Guest blogging is a great way to increase brand awareness and generate backlinks, which will help both your traffic and SEO ranking.
Additionally, if your guest post is on a site your audience trust, it will automatically lend you authority and credibility in their eyes.
Use your connections to find opportunities to cross-promote your brand. Reach out to industry sites and influencers to build a mutually beneficial relationship.
You can use platforms like social media to capitalize on and enhance this, so include this in your content strategy.
Share not just your own content and blog posts, but those from other people in your sphere. You probably don’t want to link to direct competitors, but anyone on the periphery is fine.
Be sure to tag publications, authors, and people mentioned in the article.
Does your industry have popular events, conferences, or trade shows? This is a great place to generate exposure and promote your content.
Run a booth, give a speech, or just have someone on hand to pass out business cards and literature. Not only does this give you a chance to increase exposure, but it also provides opportunities to link back (and therefore generate traffic) to your digital content.
And speaking of digital content, make sure you’re including other relevant and link-worthy sources in your own content. This opens the door for creating reciprocal links.
And if you can get a direct, unique quote from an expert, that’s even better.
Good Content Starts With A Good Strategy
Developing a good content strategy requires a bit of work. It’s not something you’re going to be able to jot down on a scrap of paper in 15 minutes, but instead requires you to do some research.
Generally speaking, the more work you put in upfront, the easier it will be when it’s time to create and implement content.
Remember your targets and consider what they’re looking for. How can you provide them with the most value while simultaneously maximizing your exposure?
Make sure your strategy is built around unique content that you can leverage cross-platforms to promote your social media presence, improve SEO rankings, and build relationships.
Featured Image: ZoFot/Shutterstock
SEO
Google On Hyphens In Domain Names
Google’s John Mueller answered a question on Reddit about why people don’t use hyphens with domains and if there was something to be concerned about that they were missing.
Domain Names With Hyphens For SEO
I’ve been working online for 25 years and I remember when using hyphens in domains was something that affiliates did for SEO when Google was still influenced by keywords in the domain, URL, and basically keywords anywhere on the webpage. It wasn’t something that everyone did, it was mainly something that was popular with some affiliate marketers.
Another reason for choosing domain names with keywords in them was that site visitors tended to convert at a higher rate because the keywords essentially prequalified the site visitor. I know from experience how useful two-keyword domains (and one word domain names) are for conversions, as long as they didn’t have hyphens in them.
A consideration that caused hyphenated domain names to fall out of favor is that they have an untrustworthy appearance and that can work against conversion rates because trustworthiness is an important factor for conversions.
Lastly, hyphenated domain names look tacky. Why go with tacky when a brandable domain is easier for building trust and conversions?
Domain Name Question Asked On Reddit
This is the question asked on Reddit:
“Why don’t people use a lot of domains with hyphens? Is there something concerning about it? I understand when you tell it out loud people make miss hyphen in search.”
And this is Mueller’s response:
“It used to be that domain names with a lot of hyphens were considered (by users? or by SEOs assuming users would? it’s been a while) to be less serious – since they could imply that you weren’t able to get the domain name with fewer hyphens. Nowadays there are a lot of top-level-domains so it’s less of a thing.
My main recommendation is to pick something for the long run (assuming that’s what you’re aiming for), and not to be overly keyword focused (because life is too short to box yourself into a corner – make good things, course-correct over time, don’t let a domain-name limit what you do online). The web is full of awkward, keyword-focused short-lived low-effort takes made for SEO — make something truly awesome that people will ask for by name. If that takes a hyphen in the name – go for it.”
Pick A Domain Name That Can Grow
Mueller is right about picking a domain name that won’t lock your site into one topic. When a site grows in popularity the natural growth path is to expand the range of topics the site coves. But that’s hard to do when the domain is locked into one rigid keyword phrase. That’s one of the downsides of picking a “Best + keyword + reviews” domain, too. Those domains can’t grow bigger and look tacky, too.
That’s why I’ve always recommended brandable domains that are memorable and encourage trust in some way.
Read the post on Reddit:
Read Mueller’s response here.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Benny Marty
SEO
Reddit Post Ranks On Google In 5 Minutes
Google’s Danny Sullivan disputed the assertions made in a Reddit discussion that Google is showing a preference for Reddit in the search results. But a Redditor’s example proves that it’s possible for a Reddit post to rank in the top ten of the search results within minutes and to actually improve rankings to position #2 a week later.
Discussion About Google Showing Preference To Reddit
A Redditor (gronetwork) complained that Google is sending so many visitors to Reddit that the server is struggling with the load and shared an example that proved that it can only take minutes for a Reddit post to rank in the top ten.
That post was part of a 79 post Reddit thread where many in the r/SEO subreddit were complaining about Google allegedly giving too much preference to Reddit over legit sites.
The person who did the test (gronetwork) wrote:
“…The website is already cracking (server down, double posts, comments not showing) because there are too many visitors.
…It only takes few minutes (you can test it) for a post on Reddit to appear in the top ten results of Google with keywords related to the post’s title… (while I have to wait months for an article on my site to be referenced). Do the math, the whole world is going to spam here. The loop is completed.”
Reddit Post Ranked Within Minutes
Another Redditor asked if they had tested if it takes “a few minutes” to rank in the top ten and gronetwork answered that they had tested it with a post titled, Google SGE Review.
gronetwork posted:
“Yes, I have created for example a post named “Google SGE Review” previously. After less than 5 minutes it was ranked 8th for Google SGE Review (no quotes). Just after Washingtonpost.com, 6 authoritative SEO websites and Google.com’s overview page for SGE (Search Generative Experience). It is ranked third for SGE Review.”
It’s true, not only does that specific post (Google SGE Review) rank in the top 10, the post started out in position 8 and it actually improved ranking, currently listed beneath the number one result for the search query “SGE Review”.
Screenshot Of Reddit Post That Ranked Within Minutes
Anecdotes Versus Anecdotes
Okay, the above is just one anecdote. But it’s a heck of an anecdote because it proves that it’s possible for a Reddit post to rank within minutes and get stuck in the top of the search results over other possibly more authoritative websites.
hankschrader79 shared that Reddit posts outrank Toyota Tacoma forums for a phrase related to mods for that truck.
Google’s Danny Sullivan responded to that post and the entire discussion to dispute that Reddit is not always prioritized over other forums.
Danny wrote:
“Reddit is not always prioritized over other forums. [super vhs to mac adapter] I did this week, it goes Apple Support Community, MacRumors Forum and further down, there’s Reddit. I also did [kumo cloud not working setup 5ghz] recently (it’s a nightmare) and it was the Netgear community, the SmartThings Community, GreenBuildingAdvisor before Reddit. Related to that was [disable 5g airport] which has Apple Support Community above Reddit. [how to open an 8 track tape] — really, it was the YouTube videos that helped me most, but it’s the Tapeheads community that comes before Reddit.
In your example for [toyota tacoma], I don’t even get Reddit in the top results. I get Toyota, Car & Driver, Wikipedia, Toyota again, three YouTube videos from different creators (not Toyota), Edmunds, a Top Stories unit. No Reddit, which doesn’t really support the notion of always wanting to drive traffic just to Reddit.
If I guess at the more specific query you might have done, maybe [overland mods for toyota tacoma], I get a YouTube video first, then Reddit, then Tacoma World at third — not near the bottom. So yes, Reddit is higher for that query — but it’s not first. It’s also not always first. And sometimes, it’s not even showing at all.”
hankschrader79 conceded that they were generalizing when they wrote that Google always prioritized Reddit. But they also insisted that that didn’t diminish what they said is a fact that Google’s “prioritization” forum content has benefitted Reddit more than actual forums.
Why Is The Reddit Post Ranked So High?
It’s possible that Google “tested” that Reddit post in position 8 within minutes and that user interaction signals indicated to Google’s algorithms that users prefer to see that Reddit post. If that’s the case then it’s not a matter of Google showing preference to Reddit post but rather it’s users that are showing the preference and the algorithm is responding to those preferences.
Nevertheless, an argument can be made that user preferences for Reddit can be a manifestation of Familiarity Bias. Familiarity Bias is when people show a preference for things that are familiar to them. If a person is familiar with a brand because of all the advertising they were exposed to then they may show a bias for the brand products over unfamiliar brands.
Users who are familiar with Reddit may choose Reddit because they don’t know the other sites in the search results or because they have a bias that Google ranks spammy and optimized websites and feel safer reading Reddit.
Google may be picking up on those user interaction signals that indicate a preference and satisfaction with the Reddit results but those results may simply be biases and not an indication that Reddit is trustworthy and authoritative.
Is Reddit Benefiting From A Self-Reinforcing Feedback Loop?
It may very well be that Google’s decision to prioritize user generated content may have started a self-reinforcing pattern that draws users in to Reddit through the search results and because the answers seem plausible those users start to prefer Reddit results. When they’re exposed to more Reddit posts their familiarity bias kicks in and they start to show a preference for Reddit. So what could be happening is that the users and Google’s algorithm are creating a self-reinforcing feedback loop.
Is it possible that Google’s decision to show more user generated content has kicked off a cycle where more users are exposed to Reddit which then feeds back into Google’s algorithm which in turn increases Reddit visibility, regardless of lack of expertise and authoritativeness?
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Kues
SEO
WordPress Releases A Performance Plugin For “Near-Instant Load Times”
WordPress released an official plugin that adds support for a cutting edge technology called speculative loading that can help boost site performance and improve the user experience for site visitors.
Speculative Loading
Rendering means constructing the entire webpage so that it instantly displays (rendering). When your browser downloads the HTML, images, and other resources and puts it together into a webpage, that’s rendering. Prerendering is putting that webpage together (rendering it) in the background.
What this plugin does is to enable the browser to prerender the entire webpage that a user might navigate to next. The plugin does that by anticipating which webpage the user might navigate to based on where they are hovering.
Chrome lists a preference for only prerendering when there is an at least 80% probability of a user navigating to another webpage. The official Chrome support page for prerendering explains:
“Pages should only be prerendered when there is a high probability the page will be loaded by the user. This is why the Chrome address bar prerendering options only happen when there is such a high probability (greater than 80% of the time).
There is also a caveat in that same developer page that prerendering may not happen based on user settings, memory usage and other scenarios (more details below about how analytics handles prerendering).
The Speculative Loading API solves a problem that previous solutions could not because in the past they were simply prefetching resources like JavaScript and CSS but not actually prerendering the entire webpage.
The official WordPress announcement explains it like this:
Introducing the Speculation Rules API
The Speculation Rules API is a new web API that solves the above problems. It allows defining rules to dynamically prefetch and/or prerender URLs of certain structure based on user interaction, in JSON syntax—or in other words, speculatively preload those URLs before the navigation. This API can be used, for example, to prerender any links on a page whenever the user hovers over them.”
The official WordPress page about this new functionality describes it:
“The Speculation Rules API is a new web API… It allows defining rules to dynamically prefetch and/or prerender URLs of certain structure based on user interaction, in JSON syntax—or in other words, speculatively preload those URLs before the navigation.
This API can be used, for example, to prerender any links on a page whenever the user hovers over them. Also, with the Speculation Rules API, “prerender” actually means to prerender the entire page, including running JavaScript. This can lead to near-instant load times once the user clicks on the link as the page would have most likely already been loaded in its entirety. However that is only one of the possible configurations.”
The new WordPress plugin adds support for the Speculation Rules API. The Mozilla developer pages, a great resource for HTML technical understanding describes it like this:
“The Speculation Rules API is designed to improve performance for future navigations. It targets document URLs rather than specific resource files, and so makes sense for multi-page applications (MPAs) rather than single-page applications (SPAs).
The Speculation Rules API provides an alternative to the widely-available <link rel=”prefetch”> feature and is designed to supersede the Chrome-only deprecated <link rel=”prerender”> feature. It provides many improvements over these technologies, along with a more expressive, configurable syntax for specifying which documents should be prefetched or prerendered.”
See also: Are Websites Getting Faster? New Data Reveals Mixed Results
Performance Lab Plugin
The new plugin was developed by the official WordPress performance team which occasionally rolls out new plugins for users to test ahead of possible inclusion into the actual WordPress core. So it’s a good opportunity to be first to try out new performance technologies.
The new WordPress plugin is by default set to prerender “WordPress frontend URLs” which are pages, posts, and archive pages. How it works can be fine-tuned under the settings:
Settings > Reading > Speculative Loading
Browser Compatibility
The Speculative API is supported by Chrome 108 however the specific rules used by the new plugin require Chrome 121 or higher. Chrome 121 was released in early 2024.
Browsers that do not support will simply ignore the plugin and will have no effect on the user experience.
Check out the new Speculative Loading WordPress plugin developed by the official core WordPress performance team.
How Analytics Handles Prerendering
A WordPress developer commented with a question asking how Analytics would handle prerendering and someone else answered that it’s up to the Analytics provider to detect a prerender and not count it as a page load or site visit.
Fortunately both Google Analytics and Google Publisher Tags (GPT) both are able to handle prerenders. The Chrome developers support page has a note about how analytics handles prerendering:
“Google Analytics handles prerender by delaying until activation by default as of September 2023, and Google Publisher Tag (GPT) made a similar change to delay triggering advertisements until activation as of November 2023.”
Possible Conflict With Ad Blocker Extensions
There are a couple things to be aware of about this plugin, aside from the fact that it’s an experimental feature that requires Chrome 121 or higher.
A comment by a WordPress plugin developer that this feature may not work with browsers that are using the uBlock Origin ad blocking browser extension.
Download the plugin:
Speculative Loading Plugin by the WordPress Performance Team
Read the announcement at WordPress
Speculative Loading in WordPress
See also: WordPress, Wix & Squarespace Show Best CWV Rate Of Improvement
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