“Content marketing applies to every business. There’s no reason not to test it”
– Julian Shapiro (Growth Marketing Expert).
Hey👋, Rafiqul here. Welcome to Content Marketing VIP that delivers actionable insights, the latest updates, & free resources every Monday, for free.
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Table of Contents
🎯 Actionable Insights
💡 1. Four Factors That Leads To Quality Content
There is no shortcut for creating extremely high-quality content.
But how do you ensure that your content passes the quality test in readers’ minds?
Here are four factors that will help you to do so:
👉 Read The Must-Read Guide On Content Marketing [Insights from Julian Shapiro]
💡 2. An SEO Experiment That Leads To A Monetization Opportunity [Case Study]
I recently talked with Taleb (SEO professional), who started a blog in Aug 2021 and is now ranking for 100+ keywords.
The blog is pretty new with almost zero relevant backlinks (no link-building is done) and has already started getting traffic.
A little background of the site:
- Site: catiomedia.com
- Niche: A blog for cat lovers
- Launch time: August 2021
Here’s how Taleb approached this:
Featuring Products On The Site
The first step was to find relevant products relevant to the niche. He has featured around 2500 products on the site.
Instead of writing review articles for these products, he has turned the blog into a woocommerce store.
The product pages are yet to be SEO optimized for the right products.
So you may expect a traffic boom after improving the basic on-page optimization and link-building.
What’s in it for you?
You’ll fail to rank no matter how good content you create if you don’t match the search intent.
Study the top pages ranking for the target keyword.
Because writing a long-form article isn’t the best idea when the top pages are product listings. In that case, product pages could be a better solution to rank higher.
The same thing is happening with this site.
👉 Read The Full Case Study Here
💡 3. Six Important Points For eCommerce SEO
Optimizing eCommerce stores for SEO could be harder than optimizing a content-heavy blog.
You should be looking at the many aspects such as on-page content, technical SEO health, and many more.
Here’s a simple SEO checklist for an eCommerce site:
1/ Check For Duplicate And Thin Content →
This is one of the most common issues you’ll encounter while working with eCommerce websites.
Lack of content (especially on the product pages) can be an issue that will limit the SEO potential.
You may use tools like screaming frog or Ahrefs webmaster tool to find duplicate or thin content issues.
Also, you should be looking at using canonical URLs or disallowing the search engine to crawl automatically created duplicate pages such as:
- Product filters
- Faceted navigation
- Product variants, etc.
An example of using canonical URL for product variation to avoid duplicate content issues:
2/ Flat Site Structure →
It’s common for online stores to have hundreds of categories, sub-categories, and product pages.
Therefore, it is important to have a flat site architecture that is simple, scannable, and not too deep.
This not only helps the search engine to crawl new pages but also improves the user experience.
Here’s an example of flat site architecture.
Image credit: Backlinko
3/ Well-Optimized Category Pages →
For an eCommerce site, category pages play an important role in driving high-intent traffic.
A few ways to optimize your category pages:
- Find relevant keywords (based on search demand, business value) to optimize your category pages
- Add unique category description at the bottom of the page
- Optimize title and meta description for CTR (e.g. Free delivery, exclusive offers, 10% Offer, etc. can improve the CTR)
4/ Internal linking structure →
Make sure that your site uses breadcrumbs because this is the easiest way to help users navigate any page on the site.
It also makes it easy for Google to understand the relation between pages.
Other internal linking best practices:
- Add relevant products from the same category
- Pass the Pagerank from high authority sites to product and category pages.
5/ Implement Structured Data →
Using structured data to markup products, customer reviews, & breadcrumbs may make your page stand out from the rest of the search results.
Here’s an example:
> Read further on implementing structured data on eCommerce sites
6/ Add Unique & High-quality product images →
Search results are becoming more and more visual.
Here’s an example where Google is showing the product images on the SERP.
That is why you need to invest in unique and high-quality images for products to stand out from the competition.
Also, consider using proper alt text and descriptive file names so Google can understand the context of the image.
👉 Read This Actionable Guide On Ecommerce SEO
🗓️ Free Resources & Upcoming Events
💡1. How to Leverage Keyword Intent to Get More Traffic and Boost Conversions [Webinar]
You cannot substitute search intent with quality content of a strong backlink profile to rank specific keywords.
Fulfilling searcher Intent in SEO is that important.
In this 1-hour SEO Bootcamp, you’ll learn:
- Different types of search intent
- How to find the search intent and use it in your SEO strategy
- Finding content gaps
- Search intent best practices for optimizing content
From: Semrush
Date of the webinar: December 2, 2021
(Can’t make it live? Register to get the recording of the webinar)
💡 2. Compare Your Content With Top Ranking Pages To Find Content Gaps & Opportunities [Free Tool]
One way to find content gaps and identify missing entities is by comparing your page with top-ranking pages.
MissingTopics is a free SEO tool that lets you:
- Find topics that you’ve missed or haven’t mentioned enough in your content.
Here’s an example of extracting entities and topics from URLs.
👉 Start Finding Content Gaps & Opportunities
💡 3. How Google’s E-A-T Can Guide Your SEO Strategy? [Webinar]
E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness) is now an important part to futureproof your SEO strategy.
Especially for any YMYL site, you need to make the content trustworthy and credible enough for Google and the users.
Join this EAT webinar and learn about:
- Google’s recent update on the quality raters guideline
- How EAT can influence the organic results
- A rundown of Google Algo updates in 2021 and more.
From: Duda
Date of the webinar: December 1, 2021
🆕 What’s New
💡1. Google Is Now Promoting Content From Regional Languages [Opportunity For SEOs]
Praveen Sharma shared a screenshot on Twitter about Google showing content from regional language (Hindi) even when the search query is in the English language.
When checked about the SERP result, it shows that “It looks like this search is coming from Haryana, where Hindi is commonly spoken.”
Here’s what Praveen has to say on this:
“In a country like India where there are many languages spoken & not everyone is fluent in English, having results in the language they speak/understand is great.
It will encourage ppl to search in non-Eng queries, which means more demand for non-Eng content.”
So, identify the commonly used languages in your region and look for content gaps for your niche.
This could be a great time to invest more in regional content, not just English.
💬 SEO & Content Marketing Wisdom
💡 1. Practice Copywriting With Observation
“How to practice copywriting without writing a single word. Find successful ads.
Then answer those:
1. Who’s the target audience?
2. What is their awareness level?
3. What’s the big idea of the ad?
And then answer this:
– What’s a different big idea I could come up with?“
– George Ten (Copywriting specialist)
💡 2. Start Measuring The Quality Of Your Content
“People often say that content quality is subjective.
Yes, but when people write positive comments below your articles, something must be right.
That’s why I recommend having the comment section open + a rating plugin installed.
It will give you a sense of what people enjoy or not”
– Paul P (Founder of LowFruits)