Instead of always trying to figure out what to write your next blog post on or wonder why you aren't ranking for strategic keywords, take my advice and learn how to plan out and build one year's worth of blog content which will become your strategic library of content.
This content will not only help you rank higher for SEO but also give you a social "voice" and allow you to engage with both prospects and clients in social media as well as your email subscribers.
I will show you the exact steps I have taken to outrank formidable competitors in building my own Library of Content in this episode.
Key Highlights:
[02:07] Library of content
How can I strategically create a library of content in one year?
[7:22] How Am I Going to Get Discovered on Google?
[09:46] Targeting Relevant Keywords
The library of content starts with understanding what are the relevant keywords to target
[12:24] Importance of Curating the Right Keywords
[13:33] Creating a Content Schedule
[15:12] What is Search Intent?
[17:19] Planning Out Library Content in Terms of Keywords
I have planned out my library content, now, how do I implement it?
[18:01] Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to Rank
[22:08] Calculate Your Content Marketing
How do I calculate my ROI? How do I track my social engagement of the blog posts I published?
[23:07] Search Visibility
[25:42] E.A.T Methodology
How does EAT Methodology help get you a higher ranking on search engines?
Notable Quotes:
Related Tools:
Learn More:
Instead of always trying to figure out what to write your next blog post on or wonder why you aren't ranking for strategic keywords, take my advice and learn how to plan out and build one year's worth of blog content which will become your strategic library of content.
This content will not only help you rank higher for SEO but also give you a social "voice" and allow you to engage with both prospects and clients in social media as well as your email subscribers.
I will show you the exact steps I have taken to outrank formidable competitors in building my own Library of Content in this episode.
Key Highlights:
[02:07] Library of content
How can I strategically create a library of content in one year?
[7:22] How Am I Going to Get Discovered on Google?
[09:46] Targeting Relevant Keywords
The library of content starts with understanding what are the relevant keywords to target
[12:24] Importance of Curating the Right Keywords
[13:33] Creating a Content Schedule
[15:12] What is Search Intent?
[17:19] Planning Out Library Content in Terms of Keywords
I have planned out my library content, now, how do I implement it?
[18:01] Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to Rank
[22:08] Calculate Your Content Marketing
How do I calculate my ROI? How do I track my social engagement of the blog posts I published?
[23:07] Search Visibility
[25:42] E.A.T Methodology
How does EAT Methodology help get you a higher ranking on search engines?
Notable Quotes:
Related Tools:
Learn More:
instead of always trying to figure out what to write your next blog post on, or wonder why you aren't ranking for those strategic keywords, take my advice. And I am going to teach you in this episode how to plan out and build one year's worth of blog content, which will become your strategic library of content. This content will not only help you rank higher for SEO, but it's going to give you a social voice, and allow you to engage with both prospects and clients in social media, as well as your email subscribers. I'm going to show you the exact steps I have taken to outrank formidable competitors in building my own library of content on this episode of The maximize your social influence podcast. Welcome to the maximize your social influence podcast with Neal Schaffer, where I help marketers, entrepreneurs and business owners grow their businesses using innovative marketing techniques, leveraging the concept of digital influence throughout digital and social media. Hey, everybody, welcome to episode number 209 of the maximize your social influence podcast. So last week, we had Pam dinner, we talked about content in terms of supporting our sales team, today is going to be a another episode about content specifically, it's going to be related to not limited to but definitely related to blogging, and SEO. Now, if you turn the clock back around six months ago, episodes number 185 186 187. I had episodes like why you need to invest in content longevity, and discoverability. Going forward. One of the seven was what if I told you you already had enough content to be successful 181, how to optimize your content publishing on your blog and social media. Now from all that I've developed this concept called the library of content, it's going to be a concept that's going to be really central to my upcoming fifth book, which I'm still writing, but I can't wait to get this preview in your hands. And when it's out there, I'm going to do another pre roll advert. So you will know. But this episode is dedicated to really providing you the process as to how I did that. Now, this comes from content that I created to present on the content marketing conference, my presentation was entitled How to strategically build out your library of content in one year. But as I said, it goes through a lot of different things that introduces some various tools that you might be interested in as well. And really, as I say in digital first, your website is your gateway for digital discoverability. And your blog content is the gateway for your content to be discovered, by the biggest influencer of them all, Google, as well as other search engines, obviously, depending on what country you're in. So let us now take a deep dive into my presentation, I'm going to be representing it for you on this podcast. But I hope that you get a lot of value out of it. And I would really love your feedback as to what you think about this concept. Because I have leveraged it for my own blog, as you'll hear, I've leveraged it for clients. And every time, I know that we're getting better results for a variety of reasons. And I think by the end of this, you'll be able to figure out why. So how to strategically build out your content, your library of content in one year, I don't need to go through the about Neal Schaffer slides, I'm just gonna skip through this. I will say this is the first time that I created a presentation on Prezi. And I just went cold turkey. It's funny because the organizer of the content marketing conference, requested assaulter created on petzi wanted to have a more engaging atmosphere. And I actually use Prezi. For my, my kids, when they were in elementary school, I helped them create some presentations that they had to create on Prezi. So I was really familiar with it, but I just had never done it with my own professional content. So that was very interesting. Let's put it this way. But let's get onto the back to the content here. So it begins with SEO and blogging, and I want you to be the 9.37% and you're gonna know exactly what that means in just another few minutes. But we know that we need search engine optimization to be discovered. And we know that by blogging more it will help improve our SEO. Now in the presentation I showed the screenshot of this HubSpot you know, impact of monthly blog posts on inbound traffic for b2b versus b2c doesn't matter. They're both going to get more traffic but you need to serve search engines with the content that people are looking for. Otherwise your competitors are going to be getting those views obviously. And we need content for social media. idea to as I mentioned in that teaser, in fact, email marketing needs content to content becomes the currency of digital and social media marketing. The problem is that many companies are really out of sync, when they think about blog content, for some reason, they think blog is like press releases, or promotional content, or more information about the products. And they really miss out on the opportunities. There are places for everything I just talked about, like product pages, like press releases, right? But a blog is something that when leveraged, together with this library of content concept, can really provide some incredible benefits. And maybe this is why it is said, and this comes from an H ref study that's pretty famous in the SEO world, that 90.63% of content gets no traffic from Google. And therefore, if we subtract 90.63, from 100, we get to the magical 9.37%. Just much blog content is irrelevant to search engines. It's not the information that people are searching for. So I'm thinking that a lot there's a lot of marketers out, there are a lot of business owners who just have not done their homework, let's be the 9.37%. Who rank. So the case study behind this is going to come from my book, the age of influence, hopefully, you know, this is my latest book, a book about influencer marketing, that was published in March of 2020. Yes, the most ideal time to publish a book, right when the whole lockdown started. The funny thing is, at the time, Neal schaffer.com, had approximately 450 blog posts. But the number of blog posts about influencer marketing were around six. And I think an overwhelming majority of those were contributed by guest authors through the years. So I never really blogged about this, but I wrote a book on it. So I realized, and this is the same, I don't want you to think well, Neil, that's books that has nothing to do with my, my product or service. It's the same thing you want to get discovered on Google. So how the heck am I gonna get my book discovered on Google? When I don't have any content about influencer marketing? I just have like a page book, a page about my book, similar how a lot of companies without a blog, they just have singular pages about their products. How are we going to get discovered? So I realized that I had to create a lot of content revolving around influencer marketing. And that's where I developed this library of content concept. Now, you know, how much is enough? is probably a question that I was asking myself, that you may be asking as well. But really the library of content concept I created. Let's define it now so that you have a better understanding of what I'm thinking. So really, it starts with what are the keywords that you should be found for? I'm going to repeat that? What are the keywords that you should be found for? If you have the best product in the market, if you have the smartest service, the least expensive, sir, I don't care what it is, you're out there you have a business, because you provide something valuable, if there are keywords related to your business that you need to be found for you should be found for. And if you don't attack this strategically, you're never going to be found for it, or you're going to be paying a lot for advertising in order to be found for it. Let's start when we talk about keywords with the most popular 52. So my idea of a library content is like, Look, if I blog weekly for a year about influencer marketing, that's 52 pieces of content, that should be enough to get the word out there that I'm an expert on the subject. And you may want to consider buying my book now doesn't have to be 52. It can be for some categories of content on my blog, I have 26 thrive 13 because for some keywords, they're just not a lot of search volume for influencer marketing or influencer, there was enough to say, okay, there's 50 tier more that I probably should be targeting that have a pretty decent monthly search volume. And I'm going to go through it. It's not as easy as that. There's a few other steps. But that's sort of the thought process. So 52, obviously is once a week for a year. But the exact number isn't important. But at the end of the day, it takes time to build authority. It's not let's just pick a few keywords, you want to pick a number of keywords, and I like 52 because it allows you to blog weekly, and build that authority. Over time. As more people begin to discover you begin to link to you begin to consume more of your content. So let's begin right now, as you listen this podcast, stop the car stop the train. I'm just joking. But let's begin to build our library of content. It starts with understanding what are the relevant keywords to target? I said let's look at the most popular 52 Well, what happens is that not every popular keyword is going to be relevant. So let me give an example. Now, there are many tools for keyword research. Google Ads is free, the Google Ads Keyword Planner, you can go to the leading SEO tools of Moz, sem, rush or hrs. And then in the middle, we have Uber suggest, which Neil Patel put out. And it's sort of priced instead of the $99 a month by these other platforms, it's like$49 a month, I think at some point, it will be $99 a month. But you might be able to get some great information there as well just pick a tool, you know, I don't care what it is, my thing is, look, if you're trying to generate six figures, then paying $99 a month should not be a big deal to get access to the best data, and hopefully save you more time later. That's why I choose sem rush. And by the way, I'm gonna have links to the tools that I recommend in the show notes as well. So if you don't want to take notes, just go to the show notes and click on the links and you'll be able to go to those websites immediately. But you need to do keyword research, and I highly recommend you have a tool to do so. Now, since my book was about influencer marketing, I did influencer marketing as the keyword. And on sem rush, you get this whole window, and it gives you in terms of results. It gives you three different ideas for keywords. It gives you keyword variations, it gives you people asking questions, leveraging the keyword, and it gives you related keywords. I like to look at keyword variation now, in this instance, it gave me 10,000 different keyword variations 1100 questions 1300 related keywords. Well, I'm going to go for the 10,000 it should not be hard to find 52 relevant and popular keywords because there are 10,000 variations. So here's the thing, though not every keyword is relevant. So if we just do influencer marketing, the second most popular keyword is influencer marketing hub that is a branded keyword for influencer marketing hub.com it's irrelevant to me, right? Number three is influencer marketing agency. Well, I'm not an agency. I'm a fractional cmo, I have a membership group coaching membership community. So why the heck would I want to blog about influencer marketing agency. But then further down we have Instagram influencer marketing we have what is influencer marketing, we have influencer marketing strategy. These are all real solid keywords that I cover in my book. And that's it's relevant for me to repurpose some content and to blog about them as well. So curating the right keywords, that's what sets you apart from all the other marketers that you're competing with, they may not be doing as good of a job of finding not just the most popular keywords because they didn't use the right tool, but also the relevance. And this is also what's going to make or break not only you know you compared to your competitors, but it also carves out a path that's unique to you, you might have nine different competitors, but you're not all going to pick out the same keywords, they're not equally relevant to all of you. So don't feel like well, everybody's going to do the same thing. In reality, that's not what happens. Think of it this way, you only need to curate those keywords that will lead potential customers to you. So these aren't keywords for your product page. These are keywords, for blog posts, you can publish, that if people find that blog post, they will want to become a customer of you naturally through the topic. That's what you want to do. And you want to sort of whittle down your list, you started at the 52 most popular now you want to go through and get rid of your elements and keep on going down the list until you get 52 that would potentially lead customers to you. Now, you then want to create a schedule targeting the lowest volume and competition and work your way up. This is really important. If we want to go for the number one highest search volume word of influencer marketing, it's definitely going to be the most competitive, right. And we're trying to build authority in Google's eyes around a certain subject matter. So start with those topics that are easier to rank for. Now sem rush has a great Keyword Planner, you can add your keywords to it. And it'll tell you not just the volume, but also the Keyword Difficulty compared to the competition in terms of who's already ranking. How easy or hard is it going to be for you to rank I will basically week by week when I want to write a new post going here and start with the easiest post to rank for the posts that has the lowest Keyword Difficulty. And that's if you ever see this number on SEO reports. That is how you want to use that I suppose cost per click the lower the cost per click the better. I find that the Keyword Difficulty. This number put out by SEO platforms to me seems more relevant than just cost per click okay. All it takes is one company to overbid a keyword, whereas the Keyword Difficulty leverages a lot more data points I think and looks at a lot more competitors. But we continue to whittle down this list And now we have an order of sort of Keyword Difficulty. But there's one more step we need to do before we can finalize this. That is we need to confirm search intent. Search intent is something like this. Some keywords in your SEO tool seem relevant, but they really aren't. And you want to for every single keyword, you want to go to Google, and you want to type it in, and you want to see what comes out in the top 10 organic search results. I'll give you a great example as I did in the presentation, influential influencer marketing. Well, it sounds like a great topic to write about. But it turns out that there's a company called influential.co. And, and the first three rankings are for them influence without SEO, their LinkedIn page, and then their crunchbase profile. I am not going to be able to rank for that keyword. It is a branded keyword from a brand that I do not know. I'll give you another example. What is influencer marketing and influencer marketing definition? If you were to type in influencer marketing definition, most of the top results are what is influencer marketing, Google is smart enough to understand to do something called natural language processing. And to understand when someone is asking a they really mean B. From our perspective, we don't need to have two separate blog posts, we just create a blog post for a and even if people type in B, it will satisfy the need for a and get more impressions and therefore clicks. That's sort of how this works. This is the last sanity check, which is Google Search intent. So what's going to happen is, after confirming your search intent, you're going to need to add more keywords, you're going to need to go back in that list. And you're going to continue to look for lower search volume, you're going to add them you're going to you know check the Keyword Difficulty. And then you're going to do search intent. Again, at the end of the day, you want to have 52 keywords that have already been vetted by search intent, and then put an order from, you know, search volume and or Keyword Difficulty from low to high. And then you basically have your roadmap. So you have your 52 keywords, and you've confirmed search intent, you're ready to roll. Now there's more advice, though. This is how you plan out that library content in terms of keywords. How do we implement it and today, for each keyword, we want to leverage what we can to rank and that what we can in air quotes that I'm talking about is a AI. If you have a WordPress blog and you think Yoast SEO you get the green light, you're good to go. Yoast SEO is only the start. There's a new generation of tools out there that can help us significantly impact our rankings way above and beyond what Yoast SEO does. Yoast SEO is the infrastructure, making sure everything's in place. Great tool. Don't get me wrong. But there's a lot more we can do when we actually write the blog content. So what do I mean, when I talk about leveraging AI to rank? Well, there is a new generation of AI slash NLP tools. NLP is that natural language processing that I mentioned that Google knows when I type in influencer marketing definition, I really mean what is influencer marketing. So there are 10 or so tools out there that are gaining a lot of interest in the market. And they all basically analyze top search results. they analyze your content, and they give you recommendations based on the language that can help you rank higher. So there's surfer SEO, there's phrase.io similar content, market Muse copyright, Li clear scope topic, page optimizer pro content harmony dashboard, I'd say these are all solutions to look at. I have become a big fan of phrase.io for a few reasons. But one of them is they had a lifetime deal an app Sumo that I was able to snag. So that was good. But I introduced phrase.io to all of my clients. And they all love working with the two and they're starting to see results as well. If this was a video, I be able to show you what it looks like on the other end behind the curtains. But basically, what phrase.io is doing is and for this example, I typed in content marketing ROI. It's basically going out there grabbing the top 20 search results, and analyzing them using natural language processing, and artificial intelligence and machine learning. And it's basically saying, These are the topics that are mentioned the most. And it'll give your content which you can copy and paste or let phrase grab it for you. If you're like a WordPress website, it'll compare your content to that of the top 20 search results in Google. So basically, it's saying that, hey, Google already ranks content for a reason. Let's tap into that to make sure that these clusters of keywords that are used in Most of those top search results are also used on our platform. So I show here, I have this blog post content marketing ROI 10 essential metrics to track. And yet I never mentioned content marketing campaign. I don't mention experience video return on investment, ROI of content content strategy. There is a lot of, you know, when we write blog posts, we have these keywords, we put a lot of thought into it, we write the post, but sometimes we don't cover topics that the top search results are covering. So maybe you notice you go on these blog posts, like I see this all the time, like an influencer marketing all blog post, I go in there. And the first paragraph is like, what is influencer marketing? It's like, dude, I know what it is. I'm way beyond that. I want to look into influencer marketing ROI and better understand that. And the reason why people are putting this stuff in, is because this is what these analyses are telling us to do in order to rank because that's what the top rank content has. Okay, so it's giving me topic ideas. It's giving me header ideas, it's showing me you know, the the search results, the summaries for all these posts, what is the score of all of my competitors, on a score of zero 100. And I want to try to get to 100 for every post. And I've taught this to the writers that my clients work with, including my own writer. And it's not that hard to do to figure out how to go ahead and do that once you get used to this, you can better sort of semantically prepare your content and get published for higher rankings because you're basically at the end of the day, you're giving search engines what they want, right. So now another thing I do when I am doing searches on phrase dot O, I mentioned the topics the headers is another area. So the topics may hint that areas I might have missed in my article, but if they don't the headers definitely will. So for instance, these like h2 h3 headers that these competitive websites he is for instance, I see headers such as content marketing ROI, how to measure your success, ROI, sales leads and revenue measuring content marketing success in a multifaceted task is a multi faceted tasks gimme content marketing, ROI basics. Step four, calculate your content marketing, ROI tracking social engagement in Google Analytics. Ideally, I'd want to weigh weave these themes into what I am writing, if it is natural to do so. But you want to make sure that you check out the headers of all the top performing posts. And I think you're gonna get a lot of inspiration for content that YouTube can be including to align yourselves with top performing content, improving your chances that you get ranked next time. And like I said, it's really all about serving search engines what they want to see if this is what they think values the reader, they'll want to serve the same thing that you have, you do not want to republish though, it's got to be original content. But assuming it is, there are lots of opportunities for you to get your content seen by following the advice that I'm giving here. What are the results of everything that I talked about? So in sem rush, there is this data point called visibility, search visibility. And the idea is that you put in your keywords, and then it tells you every day what your ranking is in Google. Now, I have 52 keywords for influencer marketing, I sort of drink the same medicine I'm giving out. And if every one of these were to score or to rank number one, I'd get 100% score. I think if all 100 of them were to rank 100, I'd get like a 1% score. And then everything in between you either lose points or you gain points. So I was close to zero, all through 2019. And then since July 15, to April 21. The last day I saw this, I went from like a, you know 0.5% peaking at a 12%. So there's no doubt in my mind that doing everything I talked about will undoubtedly lead to higher rankings. And when you build authority, it raises all boats. influencer marketing is only part of what I offer. But I have found that categories for other content on my website is also going up as well. So before I started blogging about influencer marketing, my visibility index was about 1.2%. And now April 21. Again, that is for x at 4.5%. So that gives you a feel Yes, influencer marketing related topics have definitely helped. But it's not just that when you build authority in one subject, it really does raise all of your boats in other subjects. And I showed a screenshot of how of those 52 keywords I'm targeting 18 are currently being displayed on the first page of Google. I don't know how long they're gonna stay there. But needless to say, I think that this is a major major achievement coming out of nowhere and Only in the first page for so many keywords that are all related to influencer marketing. So I have a client who blogged and then stopped blogging and then blogged again. And what they found was, you know, six months after they closed down the blog for various reasons, now they're starting to back up, and they are getting that visibility index score up as well. They were also at like zero, close to 0%. And that has shot up recently to 6%. So another great case study example, why does the library content work? Why does it get you higher search engine rankings? I believe it comes from what Google says is an important factor. It they used to say, you know, most important or very important, they just say important now, is there eat methodology EA T, no, we're not talking about eating food, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. And this in Google's words, this is an important quality, characteristic quality of your content. When you are publishing 52 blog posts on one singular subject, you are building a library content that showcases your expertise, like nothing else. Now, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. If you want authority, well, that's going to be the subject for another podcast. In fact, I have recorded an episode all about that about building authority for your blog content. And that one, and I'm just going to scroll through here right now that one I talked about, once again, about six months ago, October 21, Episode Number 183, influencer marketing for search engine optimization, building backlinks for SEO. That is really what that authority I believe. And once you listen to a podcast episode, I think you'll agree as well, that is what Google is looking for. That was my presentation at content marketing conference. I hope you enjoyed it. The goal was to have a 20 minute presentation to make it fairly fast paced and action packed. And I hope that I was able to do so. So what do you think I would really, really love your feedback. Once again, be on the lookout for some announcements from me from that ebook. Maybe even by the time this is published, it'll be announced. And I also want to give a shout out to the digital first group coaching membership community. If you're looking to network have an accountability partner with leading marketers from a variety of sectors from around the world. I highly suggest you go over to Neal schaffer.com slash membership and consider becoming a member today. All right, well, that does it for a another episode of The maximize your social influence podcast, wherever you are in the world. Make it a great virtual social day. Bye Bye everybody. And sale nada