Content marketing is a powerful vehicle to generate highly-targeted inbound visitors to your website. The benefit of finding your target audience and getting them to your front page is that they convert at a much higher rate than any other audience.
How much higher?
Organic traffic converts an average of 70-300% higher than paid traffic, according to recent Hubspot data.
Your next question is likely going to be something along the lines of "how do I get more organic traffic to my website?"
Our answer is to take advantage of what we like to call the Virtuous Content Marketing Flywheel.
The true power of content marketing is when you can measure how it's working and then use that data to inform the next round of your content production efforts. But first, you need to understand the flywheel and then we can describe how to use it and reduce the length of time from start to finish. The faster your flywheel, the faster your results, and the more organic traffic and conversions you get from your data.
How do we do this? Let's examine each step of the flywheel quickly.
- Plan Content - This is the tried and true "what are we going to write about" starting point. Without any good data, you're going to take your best bet based on who your target audience is and what you sell. We all have to start somewhere and a solid understanding of your customers should allow you to generate 3-5 good article topics to begin your content marketing efforts.
- Research High Performing Keywords- Once you have your article topics, the next step is making sure you're targeting keywords that are both relevant to your business products or services as well as rankable based on your domain authority and website reputation with Google. If you've been around a long time with a good content track record, you can likely rank for more difficult keywords. If not, it's imperative to identify keywords that are easier to rank for so you can establish a track record of expertise, authority, and trust with Google (EAT).
- Create & Publish Content - Once you have your keywords, it's time to create your content, edit it, and most importantly, get it on your website. Having a Google Doc sitting in your drive folder with the most amazing article just isn't going to show any value at all. It needs to be online and indexed by Google. Which brings us to...
- Validate Google is Indexing Content - So many businesses create content, write blog posts, upload a brand new "amazing landing page", only to never receive any traffic from it. That's because Google either hasn't discovered the content, they've crawled it and decided it isn't worthy to add to their search index, or you potentially have some sort of technical SEO error. You need to fix those but you also need to know you have a problem. Use the Google URL Inspection tool to verify a URL is Indexed properly and showing up in search results. If it isn't, fix the problem.
- Measure Website Visitor Behavior - Now that you have your content written, optimized for keywords, and showing up in Google's search index, it's time to take a step back and let it ride for 1-2 months. After that, you'll start getting important critical data from Google Search Console (GSC) to understand how it's performing and what keywords it is now appearing for.
- Optimize for Conversion - In marketing industry parlance, this is often called Conversion Rate Optimization or CRO. This next and final step of the flywheel is to take the data from GSC and use this information to inform and inspire your next set of article topics. If you're a Sage SEO customer, you can watch our video to understand more about this data and how we help you optimize your next round of content. If you're not, head directly to Google Search Console, find the Performance Report, and mine the same data using GSC's built-in tools.
Now that you understand the flywheel and each step along the path, you can see how using the data from step 5 and 6 allows you to create a content strategy that gets increasingly more efficient at generating article topics for your next round of content. The better you are at identifying high-performing article topics, the shorter the lifecycle time of your content flywheel.
The first round might take you three months.
The second? 2.5 months. 1 month. 2 weeks. You get the picture.
Eventually, you'll instinctively know what article topics perform best for your business and begin churning out high-ranking content that hits the mark immediately rather than having to wait months for the data to tell you a story.
At Sage SEO, our goal is to get you onto the front page of Google Search results. We think we're pretty good at it and our customers would agree. Book some time with us and learn more about how we help with the entire virtuous content marketing flywheel!
