Category Archives: Content Strategy

How to combine organic content writing and PPC campaigns to boost your rankings

Leave a reply
Combining pay-per-click advertising and organic content writing

Combining pay-per-click advertising and organic content writing.

Here is a nice Forbes article that describes in detail 13 smart ways you can integrate paid search results with organic content to improve your SEO.

As a content writer I primarily focus on providing organic content to my clients. Most of my clients don’t want to spend a ton of money on Google AdWords and other PPC campaigns because they understand that once they are able to organically improve their search engine rankings through optimized content, they won’t need to pay for every click they get from Google. Though, I do provide Google AdWords copywriting services.

What are organic search engine rankings?

Your content appears naturally in search results. You don’t need to pay for it. You’re not paying for every click. You appear in search results due to the quality and relevance of your content and not because you are paying Google.

But the benefit of using PPC advertising is that – provided you can afford – you can immediately start getting traffic to your relevant landing pages, for the conversion-friendly keywords. The key is, you need to know what you’re doing. Since you are paying for every click, you need to make the maximum number of sales or optimally tweak your conversion prospects.

This can be tricky. You may need to spend a lot of money before you can figure out how to optimize your campaigns and bring your costs down.

Organically improving your search engine rankings on the other hand is a safer bet. Although you may feel that you are randomly publishing content and hoping that your search engine rankings may improve for your desired keywords, if you use the right tools such as Ahrefs or SEMRush to find the right target keywords and topics for you to focus on, you can get tangible results with optimized content writing within a foreseeable future.

Should you use a mix of PPC advertising and organic content writing?

If you can, yes. Through PPC advertising, as I have written above, you can instantly start getting targeted traffic, and with better conversion rate, you can also start generating some good business.

There is a side benefit though, that I noticed a few years ago. When you start advertising on Google for certain keywords, your organic rankings for some keywords begin to improve on their own. This was quite surprising. I don’t even know whether it was a fluke or it really happened.

For example, I created a couple of AdWords campaigns for a range of around 10 keywords and I selected 2 Indian cities to be targeted because I didn’t want to spend lots of money. I was just experimenting.

To my great surprise, the organic rankings of those keywords that I hadn’t bid for, suddenly improved manifold. The links that were appearing on the fourth or the fifth page, began to appear on the first page. Again, I’m not claiming that it was related. Maybe it was coincidental. Maybe the ranking of those links was bound to improve and then they jumped to the first page just as I was advertising using Google AdWords. Who knows?

It may also be because when Google crawls your website for the paid links, it also ends up crawling and indexing the other links it finds, and then ends up ranking them around the paid links.

So, if you have some money, you can try that out. Use a combination of PPC advertising and organic content writing, and for a while, observe what happens.

Other than this, you can use PPC advertising to increase your visibility. Your website gets indexed faster. It becomes easier for people to find your content. This in turn has a positive effect on your organic search engine rankings.

 

Is SEO all about writing optimized content?

Leave a reply
Choosing between a content writing service or an SEO company
Choosing between a content writing service or an SEO company

Many SEO experts claim that there are 200+ factors that influence your search engine rankings. Optimized content is one of them. But most of these factors are influenced by the quality of your content.

Often, I advise my clients that if they need to make a choice between hiring an SEO company and hiring a proficient content writer, at least for the time being, make the choice in favor of a content writer. Not because I provide content writing services and if they hire me, they are going to pay me, it is the most obvious choice to make.

Now, when I say writing optimized content is one of the biggest influencing factors for your search engine rankings, I assume that I’m talking about, and your understanding, high-quality, relevant content.

Content is the foundation of the structure of rankings you are going to build upon. This foundation can be solid. This foundation can be weak. But foundation it is. If the foundation is weak, you are either not going to be able to build your structure of rankings, or your structure is going to collapse sooner or later.

SEO experts are important. I’m not saying they are not important. They give your content writing the right direction.

In fact, if you can hire a good SEO expert and a content writer, this can be a win-win situation.

A year before Covid-19 hit, I was working with a UK-based market research company. They had hired a good SEO company to strategize content writing. I could have done that for them, but they preferred to work with an expensive SEO your company. Which was a good decision.

One thing I liked about the SEO company is that they knew exactly what titles I needed to write content for, how tough or weak competition our individual titles faced, and how long must the pages be in terms of the number of words. They had access to some great SEO tools that I don’t have. This saved us a lot of time.

For example, when I am in a flow, I don’t mind writing 1000 words even if the client has asked me to write 600 words (I don’t charge extra for those 400 words). But the people from that SEO company insisted that if they had asked for 600 words, I stuck to 600 words. The logic was, writing those extra 400 words was a waste of time, and they didn’t have much time. To beat the competition, they needed just about more than 550 words. Made sense.

By the end of the day, I won’t hesitate to say that for better SEO, all you need is high quality content that is well written and written in a manner that is easily understood by search engine algorithms.

An SEO company can help you get back links – you need back links to boost your rankings.

An SEO company can audit your website structure to make sure that the content organization is search engine friendly and all the elements needed to make your search rankings better are present.

An SEO company also monitors your current rankings and raises the red flags in case some of the rankings are going down.

So, in that sense, an SEO company provides you the needed vigilance. As a business serious about improving and maintaining its search engine rankings, you need such vigilance. The rest is taken care of by regularly publishing high quality content.

Should you write content based on keywords or customer needs?

Leave a reply
Should you write content for visitors or keywords?
Should you write content for visitors or keywords?

We don’t live in an ideal world. In an ideal world, one would solely write content for the visitors. In the non-ideal world that we live in, aside from writing content for the visitors and customers, one also needs to write content to generate search engine traffic.

In fact, most of the clients who approach me, want to prioritize getting traffic from search engines over writing content that would help their own customers and clients. Somehow, they believe that if they get people to their websites, they will magically convert.

The problem with this approach is two-pronged: by the time you realize there’s a problem it’s often too late, and it’s a self-defeating exercise.

You are achieving nothing when you are completely focusing on the keywords. The keywords are not some magical enchantments that will open the floodgates of riches and affluence. They are simply queries that people use to find information they are looking for.

Am I saying that you should completely ignore keywords? I’m not saying that you should completely ignore them but let them be an integral part of your content. For example, if you select the right topic and then you focus on the topic and you focus on delivering the value, you are automatically going to cover the main keyword associated with the topic.

The problem arises when in order to cover as many keywords as possible in a single blog post or web page, we end up cramming too much content and needless actions.

Content publishing on an ongoing basis is simply unavoidable. Whether you realize it or not, or you realize it when it’s too late, or maybe you never realize it, there is no escape from regular content publishing.

The simple logic behind this is, just like you want to increase your visibility and draw people to your website, there are hundreds of other businesses having the same objective, or nearly about the same objective (if they don’t provide exactly the same business as yours, but more or less the same).

This means they are constantly pumping new content into the web. Whether your prospective customers and clients are trying to find you on Google or on social media, your content is going to have to compete with thousands of other web pages and blog posts. Thousands of pieces of content are constantly being added on a daily basis. Hence, if you don’t update your website or blog with new content, with fresh content, your website is going to get buried under a ton of new content.

Therefore, don’t worry much about creating and writing content around keywords. Let keywords be covered automatically when you write lots of content to help your visitors. Write and publish lots of valuable content. Your keywords are taken care of automatically.

13 ways you can build better content than your competitors

Leave a reply

Publish better content than your competitors

Publish better content than your competitors.

Publishing regular content is always about beating your competitors. This may not be your direct aim, but by the end of the day, it matters how much business you can wean away from your competitors, towards your own website or blog.

How can you build better content than your competitors? Here are a few things you can do

1. Understand your audience better

The more you understand your audience, the better your content will be. But what does understanding your audience mean?

It means writing and publishing exactly the content your visitors are looking for.

It means understanding the search intent and then writing content around that search intent.

You may like to read: Why search intent is most important when writing content for your website.

2. Use conversational writing

  • Write in a manner that it is easy to read.
  • Use small sentences.
  • Use smaller paragraphs.
  • Use bulleted lists whenever possible because they are easier to read.
  • Organize your text under headings and subheadings for easier reading.

3. Publish lots of long form content

Although I’m not a big fan of needless long form content, not many publishers can come up with quality long form content.

Long form content means publishing well researched blog posts and articles. These can be anywhere between 2000-3000 words, and sometimes even more.

The thing is, everyone can write 400–800-word blog posts but it is very difficult to come up with lengthy and comprehensive blog posts. This is where you can gain an edge.

4. Offer more value than your competitors

Most of your competitors might be publishing purposeless content just to improve your search engine rankings.

This may be a good thing for you because you understand that the purpose of publishing content regularly isn’t about improving your search engine rankings but providing value to your visitors.

  • Publish meaningful content.
  • Provide information that is valuable to your visitors.
  • Educate your visitors better than your competitors.

5. Maintain a schedule and be persistent

A big problem with most of the business blogs is that they are not regular. They post whenever it is convenient for whenever their budget allows.

Content publishing is a commitment. You can’t just offer content to your visitors whenever you feel like.

  • You need to be persistent.
  • You need to be regular.
  • Have a clearly defined content publishing calendar.

Publishing content with a schedule makes search engine crawlers visit your website regularly and also encourages your human visitors to keep a tab on your website.

6. Work with a professional content writer

I’m not saying this because I provide professional content writing services; it actually helps to work with a professional content writer because well-written content always outperforms content that is written in a lousy manner.

Most of the websites don’t have professionally written content. Luckily for you, you understand the importance of high-quality content (that’s why you are reading this, right?). The advanced AI being used in search engines can differentiate between good content and bad content.

Badly written content also increases your bounce rate. Remember that the writing on your website represents your approach to your customers and clients. If you don’t have properly written content on your website, it means that you don’t respect your customers and clients.

7. Publish case studies on your website

Case studies explain to your visitors how you solve their problems once they decide to hire you or buy your product or service. The format of a typical case study by itself is quite helpful. Here is how:

  • The title of the case study.
  • A small profile of the company or the individual for whom you had offered your product or service.
  • The problem the company or the individual was facing prior to using your product or service.
  • The highlights and features of the product or service you are describing in this case study.
  • How your product or service solved the problem of the company or the individual.
  • How the company or the individual is doing right now after having implemented the solution that you offered.

You can see that there is a natural flow –

  • There is a narrative that the reader can follow.
  • You introduce the characters.
  • You introduce the problem or the conflict.
  • Then you offer the solution.
  • In the end, you offer the “happily ever after” condition created by your solution.

8. Use storytelling through content writing

Just like case studies, stories can also help you weave a narrative around your product or service. People easily relate to a story. They feel emotionally connected with the problem and the solution being offered. They are more receptive towards your messaging.

9. Use concrete numbers when stating facts

Avoid using expressions like “hundreds of”, “many”, “a wide range of”, and so on.

Use numbers as much as possible. Instead of saying that “we have served hundreds of clients” say, “we have so far served 300+ clients”.

Instead of saying “our product offers many ways to solve your problem” say, “our product offers 18 ways to solve your problem”.

10. Master SEO content writing

SEO content writing can boost your search engine rankings. Writers who can get higher search engine rankings for their clients are highly coveted.

You may like to read this for more information on the topic: 10 SEO content writing rules you cannot ignore.

11. Publish content on multiple platforms

Content publishing these days isn’t just about publishing content on your website or on your business blog. You need to cover many platforms such as third-party blogs and social media websites.

  • Share your content on LinkedIn.
  • Post answers on Quora.
  • Write on Medium.
  • Offer guest blog posts on authoritative websites and blogs.

12. Re-purpose your existing content

You can re-purpose your existing content in many forms.

  • You can recycle small portions and post them on social media websites.
  • You can create dedicated blog posts on subtopics that you may have mentioned in other blog posts.
  • You can create infographics.
  • You can create animation and videos explaining the same concepts that you may have explained in a blog post.

13. Build a mailing list

This has got nothing to do with content writing or content publishing, but you can beat your competition by building a mailing list from scratch.

Of course, publishing a mailing list or a newsletter also involves content writing. Whenever you publish a new blog post you can broadcast the link to your newsletter. You can distribute important updates about your product or service using your mailing list. You can increase traffic to your website.

Ultimately it boils down to delivering value.

Fortunately for you, very few of your competitors publish content to serve their visitors well. In most of the cases, they want to generate search engine traffic and then they hope that this traffic would lead to business.

Unless they are publishing advertisements and that is the main source of revenue, random traffic does not help. You need to generate targeted traffic and targeted traffic can only be generated by publishing high-value targeted content.

 

Difference between content aggregation, content curation and content writing

Leave a reply

This is an interesting question I came across while surfing the web.  Content writing means writing original content. You may like to read What does a content writer do?

But what do content aggregation and content creation main?

According to this article, this is how you explain the two:

  • Content aggregation: You extract content from different sources and then publish it without giving credit to the original sources.
  • Content curation: You manually go through various links and decide which piece of content you would like to showcase on your blog, and then publish the link to it, with your own comments, attributing completely to the original source.

Interesting. By the way, I must have come this link via a content aggregator, Flipboard.

Though, to read the full article on the link mentioned above, you need to register.

I have written about content curation multiple times. You may like to read 5 benefits of content curation.

These days I do lots of content curation. Even right now in this blog post, I have linked to another article and then I’m quickly adding my own take.

Content curation normally involves gathering multiple links on the same topic. For example, I can publish something like “13 content writing tips shared by content writing experts”, and then I can find 13 different links, publish the links with individual excerpts, giving full credit to the original authors.

But even if you don’t publish multiple links, you’re curating content. If you link to another article or blog post and then add your thoughts, it is also content curation.

What about content aggregation? Many websites use content aggregation but it is mostly automated and content writing doesn’t play much role in that. You probably use a script that crawls the web looking for certain keywords or phrases and when it finds those keywords and phrases, it extracts the content and publishes it on your blog.

Lots of my content is aggregated in this way by other publishers. Sometimes a link back to my website is automatically added, but most of the time, it is not.

I don’t find the concept of content aggregation appealing because one, if you cannot spend enough time to create original and unique content for your business, how can you work hard for your customers and clients, and two, you can never be sure if the content is going to be of good quality.

Content aggregation is mostly used by people who want to make money through advertisements. For them, as long as they enjoy good search engine rankings and as long as people are clicking on ads, it doesn’t really matter how good or bad the content they are aggregating is.

As mentioned above, content aggregation is also used by known aggregators such as Flipboard and Feedly.