Content Decay can derail your content strategy. And regular Content Updates are the only way to address it. This is what we found out at Userpiolt. By June 2021, I thought we nailed it. We’ve been able to publish around 40 blog posts per month consistently. We’ve hit our content velocity target! To my dismay though – the traffic not only didn’t follow our publishing velocity. It actually…declined. I felt equally terrified and embarrassed. What happened?! We looked at Google Analytics, Search Console, and run to our mentor. He came back with grim news: some of your old, best-performing content has decayed. This meant it actually lost its former position in SERPs, in one particular case dropping from #3 on […]
Continue readingYour content strategy is not working? Maybe your expectations are completely unrealistic
“We want to get to 50,000 monthly visitors by the end of the year!” “We want to 10 x our traffic in 6 months!” I hear such emphatic exclamations all the time. Problem is – they are rarely followed by a rational investment of resources, outputs, effort, and a content plan with a potential proportional to the ambitious goals. Setting such goals and not creating any actionable plans that would give you a chance to accomplish them is setting yourself up for failure. Worse still – if you’re the boss, you can set unrealistic expectations of your employees or team members, scare them, make them feel like failures and lead them to burn out and quitting. And that’s the last […]
Continue readingScaling Content Operations – The Most Difficult Piece of The Puzzle
How to scale content operations? I’ve heard this question over and over, asked both by agency owners and in-house content managers. Scaling content ops is notoriously difficult because there are so many moving parts, and it’s so hard to create standardized operating procedures for such a creative task as writing. I had the same problem when we decided to up our ante with content creation and publish 32 blog posts per month. Initially, I thought hiring 2-3 full-time content writers would solve the problem – as we were publishing really niche content that required specialized knowledge and hours of training – but it didn’t. The content writers were burning out double time and we were nowhere near hitting the target […]
Continue readingHow to measure content marketing ROI – metrics + Google Data Studio Dashboards
Most SaaS companies I know use content marketing as part of their acquisition strategy. But few really consistently measure their content marketing ROI. Be honest with yourself and think if you know the answer to the following questions: Is your content plan is working? Is the organic traffic generated by your blog content really resulting in any conversions? Are some types of posts performing better than others? Do you have clear “winner” posts that are doing most of the “heavy lifting” in terms of driving conversions? Which of your content clusters is driving most traffic, engagement and conversions? Which of your content writers are performing best in terms of: a) how long people stay on their pages Are people really […]
Continue readingContent Update ROI – How to Measure it with Google Data Studio?
Updating old content is all the rage in content marketing. But do you track and measure your content update ROI? I know a lot of SaaS businesses are not measuring the ROI from their content updates because it’s too tedious to dig the data up for each post. But there’s an easier way to do it. And it’s completely free. I’ve created some pivot tables with GA and GSC in Google Data Studio. Ever since my mentor John Leo Weber showed me the cool things one can do in Google Data Studio, I’ve been obsessed with it. 😅 But first, let’s see what content ROI metrics you should measure at all. Content update ROI metrics What should you measure when it […]
Continue readingExact Match Subfolders vs. Exact Match Domains – a Small SEO Hack that Can help you Rank Faster?
Exact match domains (EMDs – e.g. www.bestplumberisleofdogs.com, www.dogsittingshoreditch.co.uk) used to be a popular SEO hack that was abused by SEOs to the point it was contained by Google update from 2012. But “exact matches” still have a place in the SEO/content game – but not as exact match domains or achors. Meet Exact Match Subfolders – a method of organizing your content hierarchy in a way that helps Google understand your content-topic relevance and helps you rank faster, without exact match domains. What are Exact Match Subfolders? Exact match subfolders are subfolders on your domain that match the keyword you want to rank for. They are a perfect “home” for your topical pillar pages – which can live on their […]
Continue readingWhat is the ‘language of benefits’ and why does it matter for your website?
All ends are beginnings – as they say – and it proved to be true for me too. Exactly 2 weeks ago I changed my relationship status, and as a result moved countries again. But there were hidden perks – I ended up moving into a kickass coworking space with amazing people and opportunities, one of which was to give a live webinar on content marketing in front of 21,000 people last Monday 😊 After the training (and also before 😉) a lot of people reached out to me with questions about how to embrace content marketing in their business. I tried to answer all the questions, I looked through quite a few different websites and … something caught my […]
Continue readingContent Hierarchy for SaaS – The Winning Formula for SEO Content Marketing in 2021
“What’s your content hierarchy? What’s your inner linking strategy? It seems like you don’t have any.” – our mentor said to me in our call and it slapped me in the face. Then, as he (he who scaled his SaaS from $ 2 million to $12 million ARR in two years!) went on to explain it, I felted stumped. It was so simple, and yet so powerful. How come we haven’t come up with it before?! Now, if you’re starting a new SaaS business, you’re probably thinking of using content marketing and SEO as your acquisition channel. OK, everyone’s “doing” content these days and every company has a blog. But now, where do you start? You should start from keyword […]
Continue readingNiche content – the best SEO Hack for Low DR Websites in Competitive Industries
Niche content is your 1-minute SEO hack if you’re a small fish in a red ocean: Take a high-KD keyword you’d have no chance ranking for like “email marketing”, “newsletter templates” “social media marketing strategy” etc. and add “for {niche}”. …For churches …For dentists …For language schools Drives traffic & converts like a dream. I’ve run this playbook several times. When to use the niche content SEO strategy? Towards the end of 2019, I created a content strategy for a small Swedish email marketing tool. It didn’t involve just *blogs*, but also creating actual whole drip campaign templates for some *very* specific niches, they could just plug and play if they signed up. And blogs to promote these templates. My […]
Continue readingThis is why your content marketing strategy is not working!
Do you know why your content marketing strategy is not working? I do. Most likely – you don’t have any. Your blog story – why your content marketing strategy doesn’t work You know the story. You have a business, so you decide to start a company blog to promote it. You write a new blog post every week. You don’t really have the time to do proper research. You come up with topics as you go. Promotion? Yes, you use a social media scheduler to share your blog post on your Facebook business page and on your Twitter account. You do this for a few weeks and…nothing happens. Silence. Crickets. Yiiiyks! You feel like giving up. You announce to yourself (and […]
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