Category Archives: Content Strategy

What is thought leadership content and how it helps you grow your business?

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Writing thought leadership content

Writing thought leadership content

Thought leadership enables you to demonstrate your expertise in a particular field, profession, or topic.

Many professionals and marketers these days strive to promote thought leadership through strategic content.

They write the content to show their command over their subject area and demonstrate to their audience how passionate and deeply involved they are in the subject matter.

Thought leadership content can include

  • Infographics
  • E-books
  • White papers
  • Blog posts
  • Newspaper and magazine articles
  • Podcasts
  • Webinars
  • Original research-based articles and blog posts
  • Social media updates

The main stress through thought leadership is original thinking, research, independent opinions, and an ability to predict future.

Thought leaders can evaluate industry trends.

They participate in ongoing debates.

They keep a tab on the current events and have something valuable to add to them.

When it pays to publish thought leadership content?

Thought leadership takes time to nurture.

You cannot suddenly start publishing authoritative content without making a name for yourself for being there in the hub of activities.

This Search Engine Journal article suggests that before starting on publishing your thought leadership content, increase your visibility.

Building thought leadership through content takes prolonged reputation management.

You need to manage public relations and social media.

You need to remain active and interact with your followers.

Participate in ongoing conversations.

Begin to be recognized as an expert in your field, or at least someone who always has something valuable to say.

Once people begin to recognize you, you can start publishing smaller pieces of leadership content, gradually moving towards comprehensive work that people will trust and pay attention to.

Why should you publish thought leadership content?

It earns you respect among the peers.

It makes people trust you.

People pay more attention to what you have to say.

They take your words seriously.

When it comes to doing business, people prefer to work with leaders rather than someone they don’t know.

Thought leadership content is good for your SEO.

In most of the cases, thought leadership content is written in long form – that is, you may write anywhere between 3000-5000 words.

Google prefers long form content because it provides comprehensive information at a single spot, to its visitors.

More people link to thought leadership content than average content.

This further improves your search engine rankings.

Thought leadership content improves your domain authority and your overall ranking potential.

It gets shared more on social media, further improving your visibility.

It can be repurposed into smaller content pieces.

How to develop a thought leadership content strategy?

Developing your thought leadership content requires planning and strategy.

You need to clearly identify your area of expertise.

What original research have you done?

How is your solution different from the solutions being provided by other businesses or thought leaders?

Why is your take different?

How have you overtaken challenges and tackled problems within your business?

What have you learned from your mistakes?

How will you publish your thought leadership content?

You may like to read the entire blog post in the above-mentioned link.

 

What stops your content from improving your search engine rankings?

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What stops your content from improving your search engine rankings

What stops your content from improving your search engine rankings

Have you been posting content without much success with search engine rankings?

This can be frustrating.

Especially when you are putting in lots of effort and money into publishing high quality content on a regular basis.

How well your content ranks on search engines depends on multiple factors.

High-quality, relevant and engaging content is fundamental.

Without good content there can be no rankings.

Your search engine rankings depend on

  • How much content you have already published.
  • Your content publishing frequency.
  • Your content publishing consistency.
  • The niche of your content.
  • The topics you have been covering.
  • The relevance of your topics.
  • Your click-through-rate on search engine listings.
  • Your bounce rate.
  • Search engine optimization level of your content.
  • Social proof your website and individual links attract.
  • The quality of incoming links from external websites.
  • Internal linking of the content within your website or blog.
  • How easy or difficult it is for the search engine crawlers to access your content.
  • The age of your domain.

There are 200 odd factors that decide the search engine rankings of your content.

The factors that I have listed above are under your control.

There are many factors that are not under your control and they occur over a period of time, provided you keep publishing and promoting your content.

Nonetheless, how you write your content, how you choose your topics, and how you format your content, can have a significant bearing on your search engine rankings.

Over the years I have observed two types of problems that clients face:

  • Less search engine traffic.
  • Decent traffic but no business.

Less search engine traffic happens when content is not published regularly.

Decent traffic but no business happens when incorrect topics are chosen – topics that are not relevant to the target customers and clients.

Below I am listing a few reasons why your content may not be ranking well on search engines.

You are not choosing the topics your readers want

There is no direct connection between what you are publishing and what your readers are looking for.

This may result in your website attracting good traffic but not generating much business, or not generating traffic at all.

You need to have a clear idea of what people are searching for in relation with your business.

For my Credible Content blog I want to attract search engine traffic for the following topics

  • Content writing
  • Copywriting
  • SEO copywriting
  • SEO content writing
  • Email marketing copywriting
  • Social media marketing content writing

And such.

All my topics involved one of these expressions.

When you are writing content to improve your search engine rankings it is very important that in the topics you use the language and the expressions that are normally used by your target audience.

You are choosing topics that are too competitive

Are you writing on topics 25 other websites already rank on top?

It is normal tendency to want to write on topics that you are easily finding in search results thinking that they are in high demand.

Yes, they are in high demand, but many top-ranking websites have already occupied the top space for those topics.

SEO copywriting tips Google screenshot

SEO copywriting tips Google screenshot

Instead of going for very popular topics, use longtail keywords to come up with topics that are highly useful, but not very competitive.

For example, for me, it would be better to not write on “SEO copywriting tips”, but write on something like “10 SEO copywriting tips for beginners”.

I may attract fewer visitors, but at least, there is a chance I will get higher rankings for a less competitive title and there will be an audience for it.

You are not publishing content with greater frequency

This is important in the beginning when the Google search engine crawler hasn’t yet started crawling your website.

The crawling frequency depends on the frequency of content publishing.

The more often you publish, the greater is the frequency of the Google crawler.

If there is no routine, if you don’t publish content regularly, the crawler does not visit your website or blog regularly and hence your content is not included in the search engine index.

Even when it is included, it may take months before it can appear in search results.

So, what should be your content publishing frequency?

In the beginning, I would suggest, if your budget allows, two blog posts or web pages everyday.

I know, you may think it is too much, but if you want to improve your search engine rankings fast, then this is a good way to go.

Publishing twice and then submitting your URL to Google will get your content indexed faster.

You let Google know that your website is being updated with great frequency and hence, it should be crawled accordingly.

Once your content has begun to show up in search results, you can gradually reduce your frequency from two publications to one in a day.

It is recommended that you update your website at least 16 times every month even if you have good search engine traffic.

You are not using your keywords properly

How you use your keywords is very critical to the success of your search engine optimization campaign.

You need to use your keywords as exact phrase and as different parts.

Your main phrase must appear in the title of your web page or blog post.

For example, if I want to optimize my blog post for “SEO copywriting tips”, then this phrase must appear at least once in the title.

It can be a part of a bigger sentence or a bigger phrase, but it must be there.

Your main keyword must also appear within the first 100 words of your blog post, article, or web page.

There is a reason for that.

When search engine crawlers crawl your content, they may not get enough time to crawl the entire piece of content.

Midway they may leave for other sections of your website, or may even leave your website altogether.

Hence, use your main keyword in the beginning itself – this is because your main keyword represents the fundamental idea of what you are writing.

Without overusing, use different combinations of your main keyword (in my case, it would be “SEO”, “copywriting”, and “tips”) all over your text.

Use the exact phrase in some of the headings and subheadings.

If possible, also use the exact phrase at least once in bulleted points.

Also make sure you don’t over use your keyword.

In my case, instead of constantly using “SEO copywriting tips” I can use “writing tips”, “SEO writing”, “SEO tips” and “tips on SEO copywriting”.

With practice you learn to strike a balance.

You are publishing thin content

Most of the SEO experts recommend that your individual web pages and blog posts must be a 1000 words or more.

My blog posts average around 1000-1300 words.

Although Google considers less than 400 words as thin content, how many words you need depends on your competition.

If you run your longtail keyword through a tool like SEMRush it will tell you, based on your competitors, how many words your present blog post or web page must have to get a decent chance of ranking well.

Most of my clients ask for 800-1000 words, which is fine.

Personally, I believe, as long as you are publishing relevant content, there is no such thing as thin content.

Nonetheless, research has shown that the top 10 pieces of content that rank on Google, are more than 1000 words.

If, despite publishing regularly, your content is not ranking well, this could be one of the reasons.

For a couple of months, try publishing blog posts and web pages that are more than 1300 words.

Your Google click-through-ratio is low

Your search click-through-ratio is the number of times people click your link divided by the number of times your content appears in search results.

If, despite appearing in search results, fewer people are clicking your links, it tells the Google algorithm that the current rankings of your links are not solving their purpose, and as a result, your current rankings are lowered.

Therefore, despite the fact that sometimes your content is appearing in search results, just because people are not clicking your links, your rankings are lowered until they are way down the listings to be found.

Your bounce rate is high

I’m talking about the bounce rate in terms of traffic coming from search engines like Google.

Bounce rate means the number of people immediately leaving your website after finding your link on Google divided by the total number of people finding your link on Google, clicking it, and then coming to your website.

Google knows how much time people spend on your link once they find the link in search results.

If, after finding your link on search results and then clicking it, people hardly spend a few seconds on your web page or blog post, the Google algorithm assumes that your link doesn’t deserve its current rankings for the keyword it is showing up right now.

It assumes that the link does not have the information people are looking for, for the associated search term, and hence, your rankings are lowered.

These are a few factors that stop your content from ranking well on search engines.

There may be more factors that are directly in your control, or not in your control, but as far as your content goes, if you can take care of the above, you can significantly improve your search engine rankings.

What is topical authority in content writing? How to write topical authority content?

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Building your topical authority

Building your topical authority

Google is constantly looking for authoritative content. When people search for information, Google wants to provide them with best possible search results. This is achieved by topical authority. What is topical authority?

There may be two definitions, one by Google and one by your readers or users.

If you want to improve your search engine rankings, then topical authority means your authority and expertise in a particular niche or topic. For example, I would like to have a topical authority in the field of content writing and online copywriting. What do I do to achieve that? I try to cover as many topics as possible pertaining to content writing and online copywriting.

As you may know, content writing and copywriting for SEO isn’t just about writing content. There are many factors involved such as

  • Quality of content
  • Search engine optimization of content
  • Writing keyword-centric content
  • Writing content based on search intent
  • Frequency of content writing and content publishing
  • Writing topical, relevant content
  • Writing style
  • The authority you have already garnered
  • Pillar pages and topic clusters
  • Topical authority

Even these may have subtopics: search intent can be of different varieties such as informational intent, transactional intent, commercial intent, or navigational intent. It goes on and on, and you can keep writing on these topics and subtopics to increase your topical authority.

Why topical authority is important for SEO?

To rank you higher, Google wants to know if you have authority in your chosen field. It wants to know your content density for the topic you have chosen to write about.

Suppose you are an SEO company, and you know that content writing is important for search engine optimization. Therefore, you write a web page describing the benefits of high-quality content.

I have a similar page: benefits of high-quality content. Now, your web page may be excellent, but it is just a single web page dedicated to content writing on a website that is dedicated to SEO.

On the other hand, my page on content writing resides under a website that is dedicated to content writing. Who is supposed to have more authority on the topic?

Of course, if your SEO website already enjoys massive authority then this authority may also trickle down to the page on content writing and consequently, your page may rank higher than mine, but when it comes to topical authority, my page will have a higher authority over yours.

Is topical authority an SEO jargon? As per Google, topical authority is the perceived authority over a niche or a broad idea set, as opposed to authority over a singular idea or term.

What does that mean? Coming to the above content writing blogging example, if you are a digital marketing company and you also provide content writing services and you have published lots of content on content writing, you have authority over a broader niche. On the other hand, being a content writing website (a subset of digital marketing), when I publish content on content writing, I have authority over a single idea or term. In this regard, the digital marketing company has an edge over my website.

As you may already know Google uses artificial intelligence to rank links. Your topical authority signals to Google that your website has a deep understanding and a vast knowledge of the topic. If Google already considers your website a topical authority, then it is more likely to crawl quickly and rank your links higher.

Why should you focus on improving your topical authority?

Not many people are aware that in 2018 Google changed its algorithm, putting more emphasis on the topical authority of a website. Before this, news publishers had an advantage over smaller publishers due to the vast amount of content they have. Now, it is more about a narrow niche.

This way, a national newspaper publishing a gadget review isn’t going to hog search engine rankings if there is another website solely focusing on Gadget reviews publishes a gadget review.

The advantage is that you can focus on your niche instead of worrying about bigger publications inundating search results simply because they have swathes of content.

There are multiple benefits of improving your topical authority. Some of them are listed below:

  • You will have scores of topics to write about.
  • Your visitors will find every possible information they need on your website or blog itself.
  • There will be more content for you to share on social media.
  • You will have more content to re-purpose.
  • You will generate a library of information which will be favored by Google.
  • If people want to link to your website or share your links, they will have plenty of opportunities.
  • You will be covering and capturing more keywords.
  • Google will index more content from your website, increasing your presence in the process.
  • When Google is looking for answers, it will find them on your website.
  • When Google wants to display additional information, it will find it on your website.

How to build the topical authority of your website?

You can begin by preparing a long list of primary, secondary and long-term keywords that are relevant to your website. These will give you plenty of topics to cover.

You can ask your customers and clients what questions they would like to put in front of you before deciding to do business with you.

You can write case studies and white papers.

When you write blog posts and web pages there are many subtopics that you lightly touch upon. You can extract these subtopics and write complete blog posts and web pages on them, with further details. Later, you can link to these blog posts and web pages to increase the value of your existing blog posts and web pages.

You can either use external tools to track your keywords and what content other websites are publishing on those keywords, or you can do it manually. You can maintain an Excel sheet of the top blogs in your field. Then, once a day, you can quickly visit these blogs and see what new content they have published. You can either aggregate the content or get new blog post ideas from them.

To build your topical authority you need to

  • Write quality content over a long period of time on your chosen subject.
  • Primarily focus on creating E.A.T. content – Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness.
  • Cover as many topics and subtopics as are available.
  • Strategically link to different topics.
  • Put in effort towards improving your search engine rankings by paying attention to SEO content writing conventions.
  • Maintain buzz on social media networks.
  • Increase your visibility.
  • Seek feedback and input from the peers.

Regularly coming up with topics to increase your topical authority may be difficult in the beginning, but once you get into the groove the topics will come to you naturally. Otherwise, you can always hire a professional content writer to write and publish content for you.

LinkedIn content strategy to generate more traffic to your website

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LinkedIn content strategy

LinkedIn content strategy

LinkedIn can be a great source of traffic. This ReadWrite update claims that 79% of B2B marketers value LinkedIn as an abundant source of leads. For many B2B websites and blogs, almost 50% of social traffic comes from LinkedIn.

I mostly use LinkedIn to post blog links that I publish on my own website. A few times a year I become active on LinkedIn, but I haven’t been regular.

According to experts, content strategy for your LinkedIn profile may include a mix of native documents, videos, images, and text only posts. It depends on your market.

Native documents are the PDF slides that you upload – these are then converted into carousals like Instagram.

Here are some insights you can use to leverage LinkedIn’s social reach, especially for B2B market.

Native documents attract maximum clicks on LinkedIn

The average conversion rate on LinkedIn is 3X the other networks. The average CTR for native documents is 2.20%. In fact, some posts containing native documents attract a CTR of 3.5%-8.6% on an average. Native documents, as mentioned above, are the PDF files that you upload. The slides of these PDF files are turned into carousals automatically by LinkedIn.

Video content fares well on LinkedIn

This is the case for almost every platform – Video content outperforms text content. 15-20% posts on social media are video content these days. Average CTR for videos on LinkedIn is 3.16%. The data is slightly different if the following on LinkedIn is 50,000-100,000 – then native documents and single images get a higher CTR.

Should you delete or re-purpose your existing content?

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Should you delete old content or re-purpose it?

Should you delete old content or re-purpose it?

You have been publishing content for years, right? By now you must have a couple of thousand blog posts and web pages. Some of the web pages and blog posts on my blog are from 2008-2010. Some of the information is evergreen. For example, some writing tips that I have shared can be used even now. I have little time sensitive content.

Read: The difference between content repurposing and content spinning

Should you delete or re-purpose your old content, is the question asked by this CMSWire blog post.

If you are not a professional content writer yourself and you also don’t write by yourself, you must have spent money on your content. Your existing content is the asset you have invested in.

Right now, the five-year-old content may look outdated and stale but when you published it you paid good money for it and it was quite up-to-date. You were proud of it.

Of course, if your business direction has changed than the old content solves no purpose if it was written for your old direction. It is irrelevant content. Its time has passed. Even if it is drawing traffic, it isn’t benefiting you. If you want, you can remove the content from your website. You can even request Google to remove it.

Other than that, I always advise my clients to re-purpose content. You can rewrite it. If the old information is relevant, you can update it. From a subsection you can write a completely new blog post. If you think the language of the blog post or the web page doesn’t truly represent your brand correctly now, you can update that.

Being a content writer, I am possessive about what I create. Since for the past 15 years more or less I have been providing the same services, nothing much has changed. Maybe a few sentences here and there, but other than that, with little revisions, I can easily update my old content. You should do the same if your content is not completely irrelevant.