Grow and Convert

Outsourcing Content Creation: A 5-Step Vetting Process

Cameron Brown — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 22:10:45 +0000

When people talk about outsourcing content creation, we’ve noticed they typically fall into one of two buckets:

Bucket #1: They want to use content as a marketing channel that drives increased traffic, leads, and sales (i.e. what our agency would traditionally refer to as content marketing).

Bucket #2: They want to use content as more of a thought leadership and brand-building effort, and they’re not as concerned about measuring specific metrics related to business growth. Think: ghostwriting for the CEO, producing interesting story articles to share on social media, etc.

If you’re in bucket #2, what you need is simply a good writer. Specifically, someone who can communicate your perspective and unique ideas in a writing style that matches your brand’s voice. You don’t need to worry about SEO strategy or the various other things that put the “marketing” in “content marketing”.

Now, don’t get us wrong, finding a good writer isn’t easy. We’ve learned this the hard way after filtering through 1000+ writer applicants and testing hundreds of writers over the last seven years running our agency. But we have learned that the key to writer hiring is having a good filtering process.

We’ve written extensively about this in our article on hiring freelance writers. If you’re in bucket #2, read that in addition to our posts on creating a Content Brand and producing thought leadership content. Those pieces will give you a good idea of mistakes to avoid, how to find writers to meet your content needs, and how to do this type of content well.

In this post, we’re going to focus on how to outsource content creation when you’re in bucket #1 and you want to use content as a marketing channel that drives measurable business results.

We’ll cover:

Common misconceptions about outsourcing content

A step-by-step process for vetting content marketers and agencies

How much does it cost to outsource content creation?

Common Misconceptions About Outsourcing Content Creation

Misconception #1: Hiring a content writer is equivalent to hiring a content marketer

When companies decide they want to invest in content marketing, they often mistakenly think that they just need to hire a writer. But there’s a lot more that goes into content marketing than just the writing.

Specifically, most content marketers make the mistake of producing exclusively top-of-funnel content — the common introductory guide-type posts you’re used to seeing. The problem with this, as we’ve argued in many articles over the years, is that these top-of-funnel articles don’t typically generate conversions and qualified leads.

As a result, we strongly believe the key to good content marketing is content ideation and strategy (often with some focus on search engine optimization). In addition, content marketing also includes understanding content promotion, analytics and attribution, and more. This combination of skill sets is not common in most “writers”, and typically even a “content marketer” is only going to have some portion of these skills.

So, if you’re going to invest in content marketing, it’s essential to understand that hiring a writer alone is not enough. One way or another you need to figure out how to get those other aspects of content marketing into your process.

It could be building that expertise in-house, or finding an agency that has that expertise and puts emphasis on these non-writing aspects of the content marketing process. Specifically, at our agency, there are often 3 to 5 people with different areas of expertise working together on your account. We have SEO strategists, content writers, a PPC specialist, a project manager, and a designer ready to deploy for each client. We could not produce the results that we do for our clients without these teams in place.

Misconception #2: Overemphasis on whether to hire in-house vs. outsource content

Companies often put a lot of emphasis on whether they should outsource or make a full-time hire such as an in-house writer or content marketing manager. But in our opinion, the most important thing to be concerned about is: Does the person or agency you’re considering have a good strategy? Are they a good fit for the type of content you want to do? And do they have a proven track record of driving the type of results you’re looking for?

We can tell you from experience that finding great writers, content strategists, and agencies is hard. So, if you find a good person to run your content marketing in-house, take it. If you find a good agency to do it, take it. It doesn’t actually matter that much whether they’re outsourced or in-house.

Are there some differences between the two? Sure. The main difference from our perspective is that outside agencies will typically have workflows in place to get content production up and running faster. But for a long-term investment like content marketing, this is trivial in comparison to whether or not who you hire is actually good.

Misconception #3: Outsourcing content means you won’t need to be a part of the process

Some companies think that outsourcing content implies you can fully outsource content and not be a part of the process at all. However, while there are agencies and writers out there that will do content for you in this way, this is one of the biggest reasons why companies are regularly dissatisfied with the content they receive from third parties.

If you want to produce high quality content that your brand is actually proud of, that necessitates participating in the content creation process — even just a little bit to give your perspective on the content. Otherwise, how could the writer or agency accurately portray the nuances of your brand’s perspectives on each content topic (not to mention your product or service differentiators, positioning, value props, etc.)?

This is why it’s best to work with writers or agencies that include you in the process. At our agency, we use an interview-based process in which we interview subject matter experts from within our client’s company for each new content topic we write about (more on this below).

Now, with all of this in mind, in the rest of this post, we’re going to walk you through a 5 step process that you can follow to vet content marketers and agencies. This process is equally useful for outsourcing content marketing as it is for hiring someone to join your in-house team.

5 Steps for Vetting Content Marketers and Agencies

Step 1: Decide whether you want content to generate leads, traffic, or something else

Companies have different goals they hope to achieve from content marketing. In our experience, most want leads or sales — whether that be eCommerce purchases, sales call signups, or trials and demos in SaaS. They want measurable ROI out of all their marketing channels, including content. This makes sense.

But there are some, for example, later-stage companies with existing large lead generation numbers, that may want to use content for traffic and email marketing growth. Others just have a vague idea that they want to do content, and may not even realize that this is a choice they can make (i.e. they assume content is solely for getting traffic and brand awareness).

It’s important to understand that this is a choice. You can optimize content around metrics like traffic and email signups (what most digital marketing agencies do), or you can optimize content for generating leads and sales (what our agency does).

If you just want traffic to grow your online presence, it will be much easier to find a content marketer or agency whose strategy aligns with your goal. However, most businesses ultimately want to see ROI from content, which means seeing leads or purchases attributable to content and meaningful increases in revenue over time.

In our experience, this requires a very different content marketing strategy (like the one that we use and have explained at length in previous articles like this and this).

Whatever you decide, the first step is to be explicit with potential candidates about this goal and base the rest of your questions and vetting process around how they’d help you achieve this.

Step 2: Ask them to come up with content ideas and walk you through how the ideas would work to achieve that goal

Once you’ve explained your goal, ask the candidate to come up with content ideas (the #1 most important aspect of content marketing strategy) and explain how those ideas would work to achieve your goal.

If your goal is to drive leads and sales, have them walk you through each content idea and tell you the story of how that piece of content would bring in a new lead or customer.

In our opinion, this story should not be a long multi-step narrative that’s hard to explain. When prospects ask us this on sales calls, we have a very simple explanation: we prioritize content topics that indicate people searching that topic have buying intent for the product or service our client sells.

For example, if our client sells remote executive assistant services, we’re likely going to write about topics such as “best executive assistant services,” “how to hire an executive assistant,” “executive assistant vs. virtual assistant,” and other topics that indicate people are on the market for an executive assistant.

The story of how these topics would bring in new leads or customers is simple. People are either searching on Google for the exact service they offer, or indicating that they’re close to being on the market for that type of service, and we show up with a piece of content that explains:

The pain points that prospects are likely experiencing

How our client’s product or service solves those pain points

How their product or service is different or better than other solutions on the market

This is the type of clear and concise story you should be looking for. This is in contrast to a typical explanation of how top-of-funnel content helps bring in customers that involve multiple conditional steps like a visitor landing, reading, remembering the brand, coming back, maybe downloading an ebook or whitepaper, opening nurture emails, and eventually when they need that product, reaching out.

Remember: The longer the explanation, and the more steps required for the content to achieve your goal, the less likely it is that the content topics the candidate is presenting will get you results.

Step 3: Ask them to explain their content creation process (and how they go about expressing product and domain expertise through content)

Regardless of what your content marketing goal is, it’s important for whoever is producing your content to be able to express domain expertise in a way that feels native to your brand.

This is especially true for B2B businesses whose target audiences are often advanced industry experts who need to be communicated with at an expert level. If you don’t speak to them at their level, you risk reputational damage and turning off potential customers.

Particularly if you choose to optimize your strategy for leads or sales, the topics you’ll write on will be very product or service-centric. As explained in our article on Pain Point Copywriting, this means the person doing your content writing will need in-depth knowledge of your product or service, the nuanced pain points that they solve for customers, and how your product is differentiated from competitors.

Most outside writing services or freelancers will not have this product and domain expertise and therefore need to have a process for getting this information out of the minds of the experts at your company and expressing it through your content.

With that said, what we’ve seen in the market is that many agencies and freelancers end up doing what we call “Google research papers.” Like a high school student doing a research paper, they Google around the topic they were given and regurgitate what everyone else is saying on a given topic.

This results in undifferentiated and generic content. So, particularly if you want to produce conversion-focused content, make sure you ask them:

What is their process for being able to write and convey your value props, benefits, messaging, and differentiators in a way that feels native to your brand?

Do they even have one? And if so, how does it work?

Is it a one-off interview at the beginning of the engagement? Is it a few one-hour calls? Do they regularly interview experts at your company on a piece-by-piece basis?

We have found the latter approach — doing interviews on a piece-by-piece basis — to be extremely rare when working with outside agencies, yet the most effective approach for expressing product and domain expertise through content. This is the approach we take at our agency, as we’ve demonstrated in this in-depth case study.

Step 4: Ask them how they would drive traffic to your content (i.e. What’s their process for content promotion?)

For content marketing to work, someone needs to drive traffic to your articles. So, another key thing to understand is what the candidate offers with regard to content promotion. Is it included in their service? Sold separately? And what exactly do they do?

For example, do they just share the content they write via your own brand’s social media marketing channels (tweet it out for you, share it on your LinkedIn page, etc.)? Because that’s something you could easily do yourself.

Or, if they rely strictly on SEO, is there anything they do in the short term to help drive traffic to articles during the time it takes for them to rank? Or do they help build links to speed up rankings?

This is a key issue to address because what an agency offers for promotion will determine how much you’ll need to do on your end to drive traffic to your articles.

At Grow and Convert, we use a two-pronged promotion strategy to drive both short and long-term traffic to your articles as we wait for them to rank in Google. Specifically, we use paid ads to drive short-term traffic and conversions to content, and manual link building to support SEO rankings which drive long-term organic traffic that grows over time.

We do all of the above from our budget, with no extra spend for our clients, making us a truly full-service agency. This is markedly different from other content marketing agencies and something we’re very proud of offering our clients.

**Step 5: Ask them to explain how they measure and report on results**

Finally, it’s important to ensure that whoever you hire has a way to track and report on metrics that align with the goal of your content initiatives.

Most commonly, companies and agencies track and report on traffic, keyword rankings, and email marketing signups. Fewer track and report on conversions from content, despite conversions being the key metric that most companies actually want to drive from their content efforts.

At Grow and Convert, we track and report on the following for our clients:

Conversions: We track and report on conversions using the Model Comparison Tool in Google Analytics.

Keyword rankings: We use Ahrefs rank tracker to monitor rankings progress for each article’s target keyword.

Overall pageviews and organic traffic: We set up traffic dashboards in Looker Studio that measure overall pageviews and organic traffic to our articles.

In tracking multiple metrics, particularly keyword rankings and conversions, we’re able to double down on the topics that produce the best results for our clients.

Check out our article on tracking conversions in GA4 to learn more about how to measure conversions from SEO content.

How Much Does It Cost to Outsource Content Creation?

A natural question that companies have when considering outsourcing content is: how much does this cost? And how would the cost compare to hiring someone in-house?

The answer to these questions will vary depending on your business context. For example, do you have some resources to manage parts of the content marketing process in-house, and just need a writer to write the content? Or do you need someone to do your entire content marketing strategy, keyword research, content interviews, writing, etc.? Obviously, the latter is going to cost significantly more.

In terms of ballpark numbers, if you’re hiring just a content writer, our stance is you shouldn’t pay less than $200 per piece of content. In our experience, we thought professional writers charging high rates would be really good, but that hasn’t been the case. We’ve paid more than $1,000 for a piece that we weren’t able to publish. Grow and Convert writers get paid $500 per article, and we have pretty high standards for content quality.

If you’re looking to hire someone to run content marketing for you more broadly, including strategy, writing, promotion, and measuring results, this cost would be more akin to hiring a full-time team member that also hires contractors such as writers, designers, and developers to execute your content marketing.

In terms of how much you should expect to spend, it’s not going to cost you $50k per month, nor is it going to cost you $200 per month. Depending on what the makeup of your team looks like, you should expect to spend somewhere in the mid to high thousands per month. The most popular plan for our SEO content marketing agency, for example, is $10,000 per month.

How We Hold Ourselves Accountable

For every one of our clients, we create an ROI graph like this one (a live graph from a B2B SaaS client we’ve been working with for over 2 years):

Each month, we plot the number of leads from our articles on this graph (green being a particular product signup metric and blue being another one further down the funnel). The red and orange horizontal lines represent the number of leads this client needs per month to break even on their monthly spend with us. This lets us and the client see progress in relation to that break-even number, so clients can see when they begin to have positive ROI.

We’ve written extensively about how we do this here and here, including more case studies and client data. Before we started our agency, this is the type of thing we were looking for but could never find. And we feel this is the number one differentiator of our agency.

Learn More About Our SEO and Content Marketing Agency

Our Agency: If you want to hire us to execute a content marketing strategy built around driving lead generation and sales, not just traffic, you can learn more about our service and pricing here. We also offer a PPC service for paid search, which you can learn about here.
Join Our Content Team: If you’re a content marketer or writer and would love to do content marketing in this way, we’d love to have you apply to join our team.
Our Content Marketing Course: Individuals looking to learn our agency’s content strategy and become better marketers, consultants, or business owners can join our private course and community, taught via case studies, and presented in both written and video content formats. We include several details and examples not found on this blog. Our course is also built into a community, so people ask questions, start discussions, and share their work in the lesson pages themselves, and we, along with other members, give feedback. Learn more here.

Announcing Our Next Public Challenge: Doubling Our Agency

Benji Hyam — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 20:42:27 +0000

Many of you may not know this, but we started Grow and Convert with a public challenge:

Can we grow our site to 40,000 users/month in six months? (You can read that piece here.)

There were two main reasons behind launching this challenge and setting this goal:

We were unknown entities in the content marketing world. We thought that instead of sharing content marketing strategies, the best way to build trust and show people that we knew what we were doing would be to publicly pursue the challenge of growing a site from scratch.
In addition, this would force us to work hard from day one to grow the site. Mind you, we both had other jobs then, and it’s easy to let new side projects fall by the wayside. This forced us not to.

While we didn’t hit the 40,000 number, we hit 16,000 users (24k sessions) in 4.5 months (mostly without SEO traffic, too). We felt like we did achieve Part 1 of our goal: building an audience and building trust. We had tons of people following along our journey, rooting us on and sharing their thoughts and best wishes with us. People kept saying they loved the transparency of the challenge and were hooked on our journey. They wanted us to keep going, and they wanted to keep following our journey.

However, candidly, I needed money. A few months into the challenge, I quit my job and moved abroad. But by the end, I was running out of the little savings I had, so with an audience built, we felt like we now needed to figure out how to turn the site into a business.

We went through multiple iterations of our business publicly. We tried a phone course, an in-person training program, and an online course. None of them worked, meaning none of them got enough interest or customers to turn into a business. But after extremely poor course sales, a glimmer of hope emerged. Several newsletter subscribers emailed us and asked if, instead of buying our course, they could just hire us to do their content marketing for them.

(Note: All posts chronicling this early journey can be found here.)

After some initial resistance (Devesh had an agency already and I had no desire to start one), we realized we sort of had no choice but to say yes. What other business model did we have? So, we began taking on content marketing clients.

Fast forward seven years, and now we run a seven-figure content marketing agency that employs over 15 people and has built some brand recognition in our space.

Why Share Our Journey Publicly Again?

Towards the end of 2023, for the reasons we outline below, we felt like this business was ready to be scaled, and we were ready, as founders, to do it. So naturally, the next question is how? As Devesh and I thought about how to double our business, we felt like we needed to add a marketing channel on top of what we’ve been doing so far to help accelerate our growth.

Let’s look at why.

To date, our main driver of leads has, of course, been our content. This content can be bucketed into two categories:

SEO content
Non-SEO content (or content that is not targeting a keyword, but rather that makes an interesting point and that we distribute through Twitter ads and organic social media, such as LinkedIn and Twitter).

To be clear, we’re going to continue doing both of these things. They worked, and they’ll continue to work. But since we have a team helping with a lot of this now, we asked ourselves what else we personally could do to help accelerate growth.

Our minds definitely gravitated to how we could utilize our content brand framework, in other words, content that could really get our brand more notoriety and get the G&C name out there, beyond just showing up when someone Googles “SaaS content strategy” or “best content agency.” This is because a lot of buying decisions for hiring an agency don’t happen via Google search.

Hiring an agency isn’t the same as buying sneakers (eCommerce SEO) or searching for a new CRM or accounting software (SaaS SEO). Most people hire agencies based on word of mouth. They ask their colleagues, friends, and followers on Twitter. So even if you theoretically dominated all possible SEO keywords as an agency, you still can never get this word-of-mouth business unless you’ve built the brand recognition that leads to word-of-mouth referrals.

We talked about doing YouTube SEO, a podcast, a marketing meme account, and a few other options, but none of those seemed on-brand or interesting to us.

What about ads? We do do some Twitter and Google ads now, but even then, we just use those to get extra traffic to our high converting articles. We never seriously talked about scaling with lots of ads or “media buying.” That sounds costly, the lead quality is poorer than those that read your content because they know nothing about you, and frankly, it just isn’t us. Our whole goal is to be remembered as the premier content agency to hire. Content helps do that; ads don’t really do that.

So we asked ourselves: How can we do something like this again?

Then, we thought: What if this time, instead of focusing on how to start a business from scratch, we shared how to scale a business that is already at seven-figures and already has a team of employees? We liked that idea. We feel like there’s already been a ton of content produced about how someone is starting a business or a site (including many self-case studies about growing “from 0 to X”). But we haven’t seen a lot of these transparent growth journeys chronicled about businesses that are already established and trying to scale.

And the problems aren’t the same between starting and scaling. In the early stages, it’s all about getting product market fit and hustling to just get your first few customers. But when you’re scaling a business that already has product market fit, already has inbound channels, and already has a team and processes to execute, what do you do then? What are the challenges then?

For us, they include things like:

How do we continue to scale hiring and training? This is one of our biggest challenges, and many times we’ve had to turn away clients because we didn’t have the people to execute on it. We’ve made progress and plan to create videos.

What do we delegate versus what do we do ourselves? When is it okay to step in and fight a fire versus letting the team handle it and possibly fail or upset a client?

How do we scale lead generation?

How do we evolve our organizational structure? Do we need managers? When?

How do we handle various tricky client situations?

How do we deal with burnout and the emotional rollercoaster of entrepreneurship?

You can watch our first episode here:

Where Our Business Is Right Now — And Why We Feel It’s Time to Scale

We’ve always been hesitant to grow our agency too quickly. We’ve seen the mistakes that other agencies make: They sacrificed quality of work for revenue, hired a bunch of junior people that aren’t trained well, and then their quality of service declined. It’s our belief that as an agency, all you have is the quality of your service and reputation, so we’ve purposely taken the slow growth route, making sure that we could execute well and get results across all of our clients. This may be to our detriment; who knows?

Now, we feel like we have a solid foundation from which to scale. Specifically, we feel really good about a few key aspects of the business:

Our product: We can reliably grow leads from content for our clients using our Pain Point SEO process. This is our product, we’ve proven to ourselves it can work over and over again across a number of different clients, and we’re proud of it. We didn’t start G&C with this process in hand. It took years of iteration and tweaking to get this to where it is now.
Our target client: We know who this works for. We’ve gotten really good at sniffing out what kinds of companies are a good fit for our process and which are not. We learned it the hard way by taking on all kinds of clients that weren’t a good fit, something we’ll likely outline in future content, as per what we’ll explain below.
Our operations: We’ve made a lot of mistakes in hiring, managing, assigning roles, and general team architecture. And when I say a lot of mistakes, I mean a lot, including some really boneheaded moves. But we’ve learned from them and ironed out operations:
- We know the team structure that works for servicing clients.
- We have supporting roles hired.
Our recruiting: This was a tough challenge for a long time. In many ways, it still is our biggest challenge. We have frustratingly high writing standards, and finding writers that meet them has been really hard. But thanks to an amazing employee on our team who took on recruiting, we have a process for testing, filtering, and training new writers now. There were many times in the past where we lost clients because we didn’t have the people to take them on. Now that’s a lot less likely.
Our marketing: After some hiccups in trying to position ourselves as an SEO agency, we know our positioning as a content agency, and our content continues to bring in qualified leads, so we have a way of reliably getting new customers in the door.

Those are all the components of a good business: a good product, the right customer, a team and a process to reliably reproduce the product, and a channel for getting customers. So why not scale at that point?

That’s what we want to do.

Our Public Goal and What We Plan on Sharing

Currently, we’re at 17 clients. We want to get to 40 clients by January 2026 (two years from writing this).

On a monthly basis, we’ll share an update covering:

Our monthly client count
How many leads we got in a given month
What percentage closed
Patterns in what they told us they wanted
How many clients we lost that month and why

Every week, we’ll share new videos on our YouTube channel on a unique challenge or issue we’re having and/or a new strategy we’re trying to help solve some current problem. We’d love to have you join us on this journey. We’ll be sending updates whenever a new video drops to our email list, which you can join here.

Any comments or requests? Let us know in the comments.

Best Content Marketing Agencies in 2024: 5 Options to Consider and How to Choose the Right One for Your Business

Devesh Khanal — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 21:47:34 +0000

We’ve been running our content marketing agency, Grow and Convert, for 5+ years now. In that time, we’ve worked on content writing and SEO strategy for dozens of clients, including SaaS businesses, B2B service businesses, and B2C companies.

From several years of experience, as well as countless conversations with other businesses doing content marketing (both in-house and with agencies), we’ve developed a good sense of what businesses are looking for when they hire content marketing agencies, what they’re disappointed by in the ones that don’t work out, and what true growth looks like in a successful content marketing engagement.

So, to help businesses choose the best content marketing agency, we’re going to share our most important learnings and the key factors that you should consider when evaluating different content marketing services.

We’ll also share how we’ve addressed these factors at our agency and discuss the pros and cons of hiring a content marketing agency versus building a team in-house.

And lastly, since most companies like to evaluate multiple agencies, we’ll share the best content marketing agencies we’ve heard come up over the years (including ours).

Below, we cover:

4 factors to consider when evaluating content marketing agencies
Our agency’s process: How we’ve addressed each of these factors
Should you hire a content marketing agency or build a team in-house?
Best content marketing agencies to consider

If you’re interested in hiring our agency to do content marketing for your business, visit our work with us page.

If you’re interested in working for our agency as a content writer or strategist, check out our careers page (we’re hiring).

And if you’re interested in learning the strategy and processes we use to do content marketing, check out our course and community.

4 Factors to Consider When Evaluating Content Marketing Agencies

To begin, we’ll cover the 4 biggest factors you need to consider when evaluating agencies:

Factor #1: What’s your content marketing goal?

For example: website traffic growth, email newsletter growth, leads and sales — e.g., calls to discuss your service, trials/demos for SaaS companies, product purchases in eCommerce.

And is the agency’s content strategy optimized to achieve that business goal?

This is the #1 factor you need to be clear on. In our experience, most companies want leads and sales — i.e. real customers and measurable ROI! — while most content agencies are built to grow traffic and email marketing lists. This mismatch causes problems.

Factor #2: Do they have a process for gaining product and domain expertise, and expressing that through content?

Factor #3: Do they have processes to actively promote the content they produce?

Factor #4: Do they have detailed case studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of their strategy?

Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

1. What’s Your Goal From Content (Traffic, Emails, or Leads and Purchases)? And Is Their Content Strategy Optimized to Achieve That Goal?

Companies have different mindsets regarding the goal they hope to achieve from content marketing. In our experience, most want leads or sales — whether that be eCommerce purchases, sales call signups, or trials and demos in SaaS — because they want measurable ROI out of all their marketing channels, including content. This makes sense.

But there are some, for example, later stage companies with existing large lead generation numbers, that may want to use content for traffic and email signup growth. Others just have a vague idea that they want to do inbound marketing, and may not even realize that this is a choice they can make (i.e. they assume content is solely for getting traffic and brand awareness).

The first thing to understand is that this is a choice. You can optimize content around metrics like website traffic and email signups (what most digital marketing agencies do), or you can optimize content for generating leads and sales (what our agency does).

If you just want website traffic to grow your online presence, it will be much easier to find an agency whose strategy aligns with your goal.

However, most businesses ultimately want to see ROI from content, which means seeing leads or purchases attributable to content and meaningful increases in revenue over time.

In our experience, this requires a very different content marketing strategy (like the one that we use and have explained at length in previous articles like this and this).

That’s why we think this is the first and most important consideration when evaluating content agencies: Know your goal and figure out if the agency’s strategy and process is built to satisfy it.

If your goal is customer acquisition, then ask the agencies you evaluate if that’s what their strategy is optimized for. Ask them to be very explicit about this:

Is their process designed to produce content that gets leads and sales?
How does it work to actually achieve that goal?
Are they data-driven and can they prove that their process works?

If an agency is asked if their process produces leads and sales, they’re obviously going to say yes, so you have to be very specific in your questioning. Focus on the second and third questions above, see if they can explain exactly how their process generates service signups or product purchases (not email signups, those are very different). Use your gut instinct — if you can’t figure out how their process will get leads or sales to increase, it probably won’t.

The biggest complaint we hear from companies who’ve had bad experiences with agencies — and frankly, the biggest complaint we had in our past experiences working with agencies — comes down to misalignment between what the agency optimizes content for, and what the company actually wants. So don’t skip this factor.

2. Do They Have a Process for Expressing Product and Domain Expertise Through Content?

Second, regardless of what your content marketing goal is, it’s important for whoever is producing your content to be able to express domain expertise in a way that feels native to your brand.

However, expressing product and domain expertise is important in B2C, too. Particularly if you choose to optimize your strategy for leads and/or sales, the topics you’ll write on will be very product or service-centric. This means whoever is writing your content will need in-depth knowledge of your product or service, the nuanced pain points that they solve for customers, and the ways in which your product is differentiated from competitors.

Most outside agencies or freelance writers will not have this product and domain expertise, and therefore need to have a process for getting this information out of the minds of the experts at your company, and expressing it through your content.

Instead of producing engaging content, this is undifferentiated and generic. So, when evaluating agencies, make sure you ask them:

What is their process for being able to write and convey your value props, benefits, messaging, and differentiators in a way that feels native to your brand?
Do they even have one? And if so, how does it work?

Is it a one-off interview at the beginning of the engagement? Is it a few one hour calls? Do they regularly interview experts at your company on a piece-by-piece basis?

We have found the latter approach — doing interviews on a piece-by-piece basis — to be both extremely rare when working with outside agencies, yet the most effective approach for expressing product and domain expertise through content. This is the approach we take at our agency and what we think differentiates good and great content, which we’ll discuss more below.

3. Do They Actively Promote the Content They Produce?

Content writing is just one facet of the content marketing process. For content marketing to work, it’s also necessary to do content promotion. This is what drives actual traffic to your articles.

So, another key thing to understand is what the agency offers with regards to content promotion. Is it included in their service? Sold separately? And what exactly do they do?

Or, if they rely strictly on search engine optimization (SEO), is there anything they do in the short term to help drive traffic to articles during the time it takes for them to rank?

This is a key issue to address because what an agency offers for promotion will determine how much you’ll need to do on your end to drive traffic to your articles.

Ensure They Don’t Use a “Keyword Sprinkling” Strategy and Call That SEO

We’ve spoken with several clients who’ve had bad past experiences with SEO agencies. And after digging into the content those agencies were producing, we’ve learned that they often use a “keyword sprinkling” strategy.

Essentially, they’ll create “SEO” articles by simply “sprinkling” a bunch of keywords throughout their articles. But as we’ve explained in our article on SEO content writing, ranking highly for valuable keywords takes a significantly more strategic approach than this. Specifically, for the most valuable and competitive keywords, you need to have one single article or landing page completely optimized for a single keyword.

If an agency says that they primarily rely on SEO to drive traffic, be sure to have them explain to you how they go about ranking content for specific keywords. Ask them:

What’s your process for doing keyword research?
How do you choose keywords to target?
What’s your process for analyzing search engine results pages (SERPs)?
How do you reflect those analyses in your writing to get articles to rank?
Can you show us examples of articles you’ve written that are ranking highly in Google?
Are you doing digital PR or building high-authority backlinks to the articles?

Content or SEO services worth hiring will be able to answer these questions in detail and show you results they’ve gotten for other clients.

Note: We’ve published a detailed article on our SEO writing process, which you can read here. We’ve also published a detailed case study on SEO rankings data from 20 active and former clients, which you can read here.

4. Do They Have Detailed Case Studies That Demonstrate the Effectiveness of Their Strategy?

It’s very common for content marketing companies to share a lot of theoretical advice and information, but show little to no data or case studies that back up what they say and prove that their strategies work. It’s also common for them to put up badges about having “award winning” digital marketing services, quotes from past clients, or random stats like “we grew X company’s organic traffic by 200%.”

These types of testimonials and unsupported claims are not reliable proof that an agency can do what they say. So, an essential thing to look for is whether or not an agency has published the results they’ve achieved for clients, and specifically explained the details behind how they achieved those results.

Otherwise, you just have to blindly trust their level of competency, which leads to very inconsistent experiences with agencies.

When reviewing agency case studies, look for details about the work behind the results. For example, if they’re claiming they increased traffic by some percentage for a past client, figure out:

How many articles did it take?
Did one article produce most of that or was it spread out?
What keywords did they rank for?
How and why did they choose those keywords?
How long did it take to rank?
What was the domain authority of that client at the start and end? Did they do link building?
What didn’t work?

The more transparent agencies are with the results they’ve achieved and the ways in which they got those results, the more you can trust them to be able to replicate those types of results for your business.

Now, let’s walk through how our agency has addressed each of these factors, including the details of our content marketing strategy, our writing and promotion processes, and 6 long-form case studies we’ve published to demonstrate the effectiveness of our strategy.

Grow and Convert’s Process: How We’ve Addressed Each of These Factors

1. Our Content Strategy Is Optimized to Drive Leads and Sales

We’ve optimized our content marketing strategy to drive leads and sales (versus traffic and email signups) for two key reasons:

Most Companies Want to See ROI from Content: Sooner or later, most brands that invest in a content agency want to see some form of measurable ROI. We learned early on that if we can show ROI to clients (in particular management and executive teams), the engagements last longer, allowing results to compound while making everyone happy.
There’s Likely a Significant Volume of People Actively Looking to Buy the Product or Service You Sell: For almost every business, outside of rare category-creating products, there is some significant volume of people who are actively looking to buy that type of product or service — or solve pain points that product or service solves. These people are Googling terms that indicate they are ready to buy. Our perspective is that it makes way more sense from a business standpoint that a content strategy goes after these ready-to-buy-now people first (where conversion rates are much higher), before trying to reach the people higher in the funnel.

We’ve written at length about how we drive leads and sales through content for different business types. Check out these articles for detailed walkthroughs on our philosophy and our process:

Our Philosophy on Content Marketing Strategy

How We Hold Ourselves Accountable

For every one of our clients, we create an ROI graph like this one (a live graph from a B2B SaaS client we’ve been working with for over 2 years):

The horizontal lines represent the number of leads this client needs per month to break even on their monthly spend with us. Each month, we plot the number of leads from our articles on this graph. Then we report on our progress in relation to that break even number, so clients can see when they begin to have positive ROI.

2. We Use an Interview-Based Writing Process to Express Product and Domain Expertise Through Content

We don’t produce articles in the “Google research paper” style we described above (self-researching a topic and writing what you find).

Instead, our writers start by interviewing people inside your organization who have the know-how and expertise to speak on that topic and convey how your product and your company has innovated or differentiated itself in the topic area of the article.

Thus, the writer is not asked to pretend to be an expert themselves. This is a massive shift from traditional content services and is essential to producing genuinely high-quality content.

We’re not talking about grabbing a few quotes from experts to throw into an article. We’re talking about hour-long recorded interviews where we shape an entire article around the viewpoint and knowledge of an expert inside your company, who can not only speak to the topic area but also tie-in your product.

This changes everything. It creates true thought leadership content, and adds genuine product expertise into our articles because we’re able to include copywriting on all the detail and nuance of how your product or service is differentiated, what it replaces, why features were designed in certain ways, and more that only experts inside your company would know.

3. We Use a Two Pronged Content Promotion Process

We use a two pronged promotion strategy to drive both short- and long-term traffic to your articles as we wait for them to rank in Google. Specifically:

Paid Ads / PPC Marketing Campaigns (Short Term Traffic): We use paid ads to promote content using two targeting methods: Cold audiences (using interest and demographic based targeting) and lookalike audiences (based on the client’s existing customer list or website visitors). We test paid channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Google Ads — based on each client and where we’re most likely to reach their audience.
Manual Link Building (Long Term Traffic): When certain pieces start ranking for their keyword, we strategically deploy link building to boost them to page 1 — or the top of page 1 — in Google.

The combination of these two steps gives our pieces a short term boost in traffic followed by long term sustainable organic traffic that adds up from different articles and grows over time.

We do all of the above from our own budget, with no extra spend for our clients, making us a truly full-service agency. This is markedly different from other top content marketing agencies and something we’re very proud of offering our clients.

4. We Publish Detailed Case Studies to Demonstrate and Prove the Effectiveness of Our Content Strategy

Here are 6 in-depth case studies we’ve written to demonstrate how we’ve executed our content strategy for real businesses:

Finally, if you’re interested, you can learn more about our agency, pricing, and reach out about working with us here.

Below, we’re going to share 4 other content marketing agencies we’ve seen or heard come up over the years, so you can weigh other options. But before we get to that, let’s briefly cover a question looming in the minds of businesses and decision makers that are considering hiring an agency: Should you even hire one or would you be better off hiring in-house?

Should You Hire a Content Marketing Agency or Build a Team In-House?

Over the years, we’ve spoken to many companies who are considering hiring us and at the same time considering bringing someone in-house. And very often, companies lean toward making an in-house hire.

We think the biggest reason for this is that by hiring someone in-house, they feel the content marketer will more deeply understand the details of their product and their company — and therefore be more trusted and capable of acquiring the product and domain expertise we discussed above. This is in contrast to agencies, where most of them assign articles to writers without domain knowledge or any process to acquire and express expertise through their content.

However, because of the interview-based content writing process we use at Grow and Convert, this isn’t a problem when you work with our agency. And in fact, if this problem is solved, there are actually many additional benefits of hiring an agency compared to an in-house employee.

Specifically:

Speed to Get Up and Running: If you hire an in-house content marketer, it may take 3 to 6 months for them to create a content marketing plan and get content production up and running, let alone the time it will take for that content to begin producing results. Whereas, an agency has processes in place to get up and running immediately, speeding up the time it takes to get results from content. As shown in our post on how long it takes to rank in Google, we typically have 25-35 articles ranking on page 1 of their intended keywords in the first 12 months.

A Team vs. an Individual: Effective content marketing takes a variety of digital marketing skills and areas of expertise, and often one person won’t have all of the skills to execute the strategy, the writing, and the promotion, etc. Companies often think they can hire just a writer, or just a strategist, and later realize that they actually need more than one individual to carry out their content marketing efforts. In contrast, when working with our agency, there are often 3 to 5 people with different areas of expertise working together on your account — which has distinct advantages over relying on a single person. For example, we have content strategists, writers, a paid ads specialist, project manager, and designer ready to deploy for each client.

Strategy & Deep Expertise: Particularly for companies that want to optimize their strategy for driving product signups, it’s difficult to find and hire an in-house content marketer with experience developing that type of content strategy and writing pieces that both rank for valuable keywords and sell products. This is in part due to a culture in content marketing — most content marketers subscribe to the belief that content is just for driving traffic and brand awareness, and so that’s how they operate and what they know. In contrast, when working with our agency, we have established hiring and training processes that ensure our strategists and writers have the expertise to execute signup-driven content strategies.

It’s perfectly understandable to want to hire an in-house content marketer instead of an agency, but it is worth considering the advantages that agencies can offer.

Most Profitable Companies: U.S. vs. Rest of the World, 2023

Benji Hyam — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 19:31:50 +0000

Our following research takes a deep dive into the financial landscapes of the Fortune 500 global companies list, unraveling the intricacies of their profitability and disparities between U.S. and international counterparts.

In the fiscal year ending March 31, 2023, the top 500 companies amassed a staggering $41 trillion in revenue, yielding a profound $2.9 trillion in profits. The U.S. emerged as a profit behemoth, with its 136 Fortune 500 companies contributing a massive 38% to the global profit pool.

This study meticulously examines sector-wise profitability, country comparisons, and the highs and lows within the Fortune 500, offering a panoramic view of the world’s economic powerhouses.

Key Findings

Global Giants: Fortune 500 companies amassed a colossal $41 trillion in revenue, with $2.9 trillion in profit.

Top Global Profit Makers: The top 10 companies globally amassed $689.8B (24%) in profit, with Saudi Aramco leading at $159.1B.

Global Losses: The bottom 10 companies worldwide incurred a collective loss of nearly $126B.

U.S. Dominance: U.S. companies (136) secured a remarkable $1.1T profit, overshadowing China’s $528B, despite similar company numbers.

The U.S. and China jointly generate 56% of the global 500 companies’ profit.

Sector Powerhouses: Technology, Finance, and Energy sectors claimed 63% of the $2.9 trillion global profit.

U.S. Sector Standouts: The Technology sector in the U.S. emerged as the most profitable, generating $306B, constituting 28% of the country’s total profit.

Top U.S. Performers: The top 10 U.S. companies contributed 46% of the $1.1 trillion total profit, led by Apple.

Sectoral Disparities: Media, Wholesaler, and Retail sectors in the U.S. lagged behind with profit margins of 0.76%, 1.53%, and 2.60%, respectively.

Top 500 Most Profitable Companies: U.S. vs. the World [Infographic]

10 Most Profitable of the Largest Companies in the World, 2023

The elite league of the world’s 10 most profitable companies in 2023 showcases a powerhouse of financial success. These industry giants, representing the Energy, Technology, Transportation, and Financial sectors, collectively amassed a jaw-dropping $689.8 billion in profits, constituting 24% of the total profit from the analyzed Fortune 500 companies.

The average profit per company within this elite group is an impressive $69 billion.

Notably, half of the top 10 are U.S.-based corporations, underlining the economic dominance of American businesses on the global stage.

Each of these companies showcases the diverse financial prowess across sectors in 2023. Saudi Aramco steals the spotlight with an unparalleled profit of $159.1 billion, accounting for a remarkable 5.49% of the global 500 total profit — emphasizing the dominant role the energy sector plays in generating substantial financial gains.

The U.S. Postal Service surprises as the only representative in the transportation sector, boasting a remarkable profit of $56 billion (71.29%) with a revenue of $78.6 billion, outshining all of its peers with ease.

In the technology realm, Apple, Microsoft, and Alphabet secure top positions, collectively contributing $232.5 billion in profit. Microsoft stands out with an impressive profit margin of 36.69%, underscoring the profitability potential in software and technological solutions.

In the financial realm, Industrial & Commercial Bank of China and China Construction Bank secured their spots by contributing a combined profit of $107.7 billion.

The energy sector, represented by Exxon Mobil and Shell, contributes significantly too, with both companies together accounting for $98 billion in profit.

Overall, this top 10 ensemble underscores the global impact of varied industries, from energy giants to technology titans, that shape the financial landscape with substantial profits.

10 Least Profitable of the Largest Companies in the World, 2023

The bottom 10 companies in 2023, however, collectively faced significant financial challenges, accumulating a staggering combined loss of almost $126 billion during the analyzed fiscal year.

Notably, industry giants Berkshire Hathaway and Uniper, ranked 14th and 16th in Fortune’s official ranking with huge revenues of $302.1 billion and $288.3 billion, respectively, found themselves among the least profitable.

The average loss per company within this group amounted to -$12.6 billion, reflecting the significant financial challenges these companies encountered.

The energy sector, represented by Uniper, Korea Electric Power, Electricité de France, and CPC, dominates the list, collectively contributing to a substantial $53.2 billion in losses.

Meanwhile, technology and telecommunications companies, such as Uber Technologies, AT&T, Warner Bros. Discovery, and SoftBank Group, have also had to grapple with substantial losses, emphasizing the many challenges faced across diverse sectors.

The inclusion of well-known names like AT&T and Uber in the least profitable list helps to highlight the wild unpredictability and volatility inherent in today’s global business landscape.

Most Profitable Sectors for the World’s Largest Companies, 2023

The top 3 sectors — energy, finance, and technology — emerge as the most profitable among the world’s largest companies in 2023, collectively contributing to a massive 63% of the total global profit, amounting to $1.8 trillion.

With a profit share of 24.56%, the energy sector takes the lead, bolstering $711.6 billion in profit by 88 companies within the Fortune 500.

Finance follows closely, with 101 companies and a 23.07% profit share, showcasing it still holds considerable financial dominance.

Technology, represented by 35 companies, secures a notable 15.54% profit share, underlining its continued significance in the profit landscape.

Healthcare, represented by 30 companies, holds a 7.51% profit share with $217.6 billion in profit and significantly contributes to the profitability of the world’s largest companies.

Transportation, with 22 companies, secures a notable 5.54% of total profit, amounting to $160.5 billion in profit. The sector’s role in facilitating global movement is evident in its substantial profit share.

Motor Vehicle and Parts, encompassing 34 companies, contribute a noteworthy 5.36% to the global profit, generating $155.4 billion. The automotive industry’s impact is still substantial, albeit with a slightly lower profit margin compared to other leading sectors.

The remaining sectors, including Food, Beverages and Tobacco, Telecommunications, Retail, Materials, Wholesaler, Industrial, Engineering and Construction, Household Products, Aerospace and Defence, Chemicals, Food and Drug Stores, Apparel, and Hotels, Restaurants, Leisure, collectively make valuable contributions to the global profit landscape, showcasing the diverse strengths and importance of each individual sector.

This analysis helps to highlight the diverse strengths and contributions of various sectors across the globe, with energy, finance, and technology leading the charge in shaping the financial landscape of the largest global enterprises.

Ranking Countries by Total Corporate Profit, 2023

In the dynamic landscape of global corporate giants, the United States and China emerge as titans, each housing a near-equal number of companies on the Fortune 500 list with revenues totaling $13 trillion and $11.2 trillion, respectively.

Despite this similarity, the U.S. outshines all nations, with its 136 companies generating a staggering $1.1 trillion in profit, representing 37.56% of the total global profit. China follows closely, with 135 companies contributing $528 billion, comprising just under half of the U.S.’s global profit pool with 18.22%.

The combined force of the U.S. and China stands out, jointly accounting for $1.6 trillion (56%) of the total profit, surpassing all other countries combined, which contribute $1.3 trillion (44%) in total.

Saudi Arabia secures the third position with a single company generating $159.1 billion in profit, making it 5.49% of the total global profit.

Continental Analysis

In the global landscape of corporate profitability, North America takes the top spot as the foremost economic powerhouse, contributing an impressive $1.18 trillion in profit and commanding a substantial 40.75% share of the global profit. The United States emerges as the major player within the continent, underscoring its unparalleled economic influence.

Venturing across the pond into Europe, the continent collectively generates $629.9 billion in profit, claiming a notable 21.74% share of the global profit. The UK and Germany take the lead among European nations, showcasing their economic strength and significant corporate contributions.

Across the expansive and diverse Asian continent, encompassing China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, the combined profit amounts to $974 billion, representing a formidable 33.62% share of the global profit. China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia emerge as major contributors, collectively illustrating Asia’s substantial economic influence.

Brazil is the only South American country. Their corporate entities contribute significantly to the global profit pool, generating $76.2 billion and holding a 2.63% share.

Australia, positioned in the Asia-Pacific region, makes a notable impact with $36.7 billion in profit, constituting a modest 1.26% share of the global profit.

This continental analysis provides a comprehensive and clear overview of corporate profitability, showcasing the major players and their contributions within each region.

Top 10 U.S. Companies with the Highest Profit, 2023

In the dynamic landscape of corporate profitability within the United States, the top 10 companies among the Fortune 500 elite emerge as extremely formidable contributors.

These 10 corporations, out of a total of 136 U.S. companies, collectively generate a staggering $499.5 billion in profit, comprising an impressive 46% of the total profits amassed by all 136 U.S. entities.

Apple leads the pack, commanding a lion’s share with $99.8 billion in profit, constituting 9.17% of the overall profits among U.S. companies.

The composition of the top 10 reflects a diverse range of sectors, with technology taking the lead. Following Apple, Microsoft and Alphabet secured the second and third positions, contributing $72.7 billion and $60 billion in profit, respectively.

The U.S. Postal Service, representing the transportation sector, stands out with a remarkable profit of $56 billion.

Continuing down the list, energy giants Exxon Mobil and Chevron contribute significantly, with profits of $55.7 billion and $35.5 billion, respectively.

Financial institutions JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America showcase their dominance, with profits amounting to $37.7 billion and $27.5 billion, respectively.

Meta Platforms, a technology giant, rounds out the top 10, contributing an impressive $23.2 billion in profit.

This collective dominance underscores the significant role played by these select few in steering the economic trajectory of the nation.

Top 10 U.S. Companies with the Highest Loss, 2023

In the realm of corporate challenges, the top 10 U.S. companies with the highest losses faced a combined setback of $66.9 billion.

Notable among the highest losers are Amazon and Berkshire Hathaway, ranking as the 4th and 14th largest global companies, with massive revenues of $514 billion and $302.1 billion, respectively. Despite their prominent positions, both companies incurred significant losses during the analyzed period, with Amazon reporting a surprising loss of $2.7 billion, and Berkshire Hathaway facing a substantial loss of $22.8 billion.

Uber Technologies and Warner Bros. Discovery experienced the most significant percentage losses, with 28.68% and 21.80%, respectively.

Intriguingly, four out of the top 10 least profitable companies in the U.S. belong to the Financials sector—Berkshire Hathaway, State Farm Insurance, Prudential Financial, and Allstate.

These challenges illuminate the diverse landscape of corporate performance, emphasizing the sectoral variations within the top companies experiencing losses.

Most Profitable Sectors for the Top U.S. Companies, 2023

The technology sector emerges as the powerhouse for the top U.S. companies, contributing significantly to the country’s total profit of $1.3 trillion.

With a remarkable $306 billion in profit, the technology sector commands a substantial 28% share of the overall profit generated by all sectors. Impressively, the Technology sector also showcases a robust profit margin of 19.76%, underscoring the efficiency and profitability of tech companies within the U.S. corporate landscape.

The top four sectors—Technology, Energy, Healthcare, and Financials—stand out as major contributors, collectively accounting for 75 companies and generating a substantial $779 billion in profit, representing 72% of the total profit across all sectors in the United States.

Healthcare, with the highest total revenue of $2.5 trillion, further solidifies its prominence.

On the other end of the spectrum, the Media, Wholesaler, and Retail sectors exhibit the least profitability, with profit margins of only 0.76%, 1.53%, and 2.60%, respectively, highlighting the modern-day challenges faced by these sectors in the specified fiscal year.

Methodology

Our comprehensive analysis delved into the profitability of companies listed in the Fortune 500, a globally recognized list comprising companies with the highest revenue. Our objective was to shed light on the most profitable companies and sectors worldwide, with a particular emphasis on how U.S. companies fare in comparison to their international counterparts.

Approach to Analysis

Data Source: We sourced our data from the Fortune 500 list, ensuring that we based our insights on a reliable and respected global business ranking.

Profitability Focus: The primary focus of our analysis was profitability. We evaluated not just the revenues but more importantly, the profits of these companies to gauge their financial health and performance.

Sector-Wise Analysis: We categorized companies based on their operational sectors, allowing us to identify which industries are leading in terms of profitability and which are facing challenges.

U.S. vs. Global Comparison: A significant part of our analysis involved comparing the performance of U.S.-based companies against those from other parts of the world. This comparison provided a broader understanding of the global business landscape.

Interpretation of Data: By reorganizing and scrutinizing the data from multiple perspectives, we aimed to extract valuable insights into the financial health and market positioning of these leading entities.

The methodology employed in this analysis enabled us to gain a nuanced understanding of the financial dynamics at play within the Fortune 500 companies. It highlighted the sectors and regions that are leading in profitability, providing a clear picture of the current state of global business and economic trends.

Content Creation Process: How to Produce Unique Content

Cameron Brown — Mon, 13 Nov 2023 21:10:02 +0000

In our experience, the content creation process used by most brands, agencies, and freelance writers is flawed, which is why many companies struggle to produce high quality content that they’re actually proud of and feel is a good representation of their brand.

The flaws of the typical process, which we’ll discuss below, stem from issues related to who is tasked with writing, what information they’re given, feedback coming too late in the process, and an overreliance on SEO tools to drive the direction of content. As a result, brands end up with poor quality, beginner level content that lacks original ideas from the brand’s perspective.

So, in this post we’re going to explain why we think this is so common and share our process, which we feel produces better results.

Table of Contents

Flaws of the typical content creation process
- Writers are expected to come up with ideas and arguments on their own
- Strategists and writers let SEO tools dictate the direction of their content
Our step-by-step content creation process for producing unique or advanced content
- Content Ideation: Generate topic ideas through in-depth interviews and keyword research
- Content Interviews: Interview subject matter experts from within our client’s organization for each new content topic
- Content Writing: Get feedback and align on content at multiple stages of the process
- Measurement: Track content performance to see how it contributes towards your marketing goals (and make adjustments accordingly)

Note: While content creation can apply to many different content formats and channels ranging from podcasts and webinars, to infographics and templates, to social media content and video content, this post will focus on our agency’s process for creating long-form written content for blogs and SEO.

Flaws of the Typical Content Creation Process

Whether they’ve tried to hire writers in-house or worked with outside freelancers and agencies, very often companies are disappointed by the quality of content they receive.

This can take a number of forms, such as:

The content is too beginner level for their target audience or industry (e.g., a brand selling to IT directors producing content with basic tips on IT that any long-time professional would certainly already know).
The content fails to communicate the nuances of the brand’s actual perspective on the topic.
The content lacks substance and is full of “fluff”.

Through working with dozens of brands, hearing about their experiences, and seeing direct work products of other content writers and agencies, there are two key reasons for why we think this is:

Writers are expected to come up with ideas and arguments on their own.
Strategists and writers let SEO tools dictate the direction of their content.

Let’s begin with digging deeper into each of these issues to help you understand what not to do when creating content.

1. Writers Are Expected to Come Up with Ideas and Arguments on Their Own

Particularly when companies outsource content to freelance writers or content marketing agencies, a common process involves writers being given a topic, and then tasked with coming up with all the arguments and ideas themselves for the piece of content. We call this “the Google Research Paper,” because it resembles a student writing a school paper by Googling a topic and summarizing or regurgitating what others say on that topic.

By definition, content produced this way lacks originality and fails to communicate any unique ideas or stances that a brand has on that subject, which is fundamentally misaligned with the goal that many brands have to be a thought leader in their space, impress readers, or generate leads and prospects from their content.

Furthermore, there is often a lack of communication and feedback throughout the writing process, so by the time key topic experts from within the company see the content, they’re thoroughly dissatisfied because it fails to say anything unique, interesting, or representative of their thinking on that topic.

As we’ll discuss below, at Grow & Convert we solve this by interviewing the experts at our clients’ companies for each content piece we create, and getting feedback at different stages throughout the process to ensure alignment. This allows us to express the company’s expertise on each topic to create unique and engaging content.

2. Strategists and Writers Let SEO Tools Dictate the Direction of Their Content

With the rise of on-page SEO tools, it has become common practice for writers and agencies to use these on-page optimization tools or even AI-based tools to dictate the outline structure and subtopics (i.e., content briefs) that are discussed in their content.

The problem with this is similar and related to the problem of writers self-researching for their articles on Google. On-page SEO tools simply pull the topics and keywords that are being discussed in the content that’s already ranking for a keyword. Again, by definition this leads to discussing the same ideas (and in this case even the same subheading structure!) that everyone else is on that topic.

Now, if you’re specifically doing SEO content — content that you optimize to rank for keywords in organic search — addressing these topics on some level is a necessary part of the process. But it shouldn’t dictate the entire direction of the piece.

Instead, content creators should prioritize the unique ideas and perspectives of the brand on that topic first, and use on-page SEO or keyword research tools later in their workflow to support ranking performance. This is what we do at Grow & Convert to ensure the content we create for clients does not fall into the trap of saying what everyone else is saying on a topic.

In the rest of this post we’ll walk through the content production process we use that avoids each of these flaws, and link out to in-depth articles that dive deeper on each step.

Our Content Creation Process for Producing Unique or Advanced Content

1. Content Ideation: Generate Topic Ideas Through In-Depth Interviews and Keyword Research

When we start working with a new client, we begin the engagement with a series of calls where we chat with team members from different departments, some of whom have direct interaction with customers (e.g., sales team, customer success).

The goal of these calls is to gain a holistic understanding of:

The details, features, and use cases of their product or service.
Their top competitors, competitive advantages, and unique differentiators.
Their ideal customer personas (specific verticals, company sizes, decision makers, etc.) and the specific pain points that their product or service solves for those customers.

Outside of speaking directly with customers, which often isn’t an easy option, this is the best way to quickly identify topics that will (a) resonate with and be searched by potential customers and (b) have a tie-in that actually allows us to sell our client’s product or service through the content.

Note: The type of content we do for our clients is lead generation and conversion-focused, so this goal guides the questions we ask in our initial interviews. If the goal of your content marketing efforts is more focused on brand awareness, for example, the questions you ask could be more tailored to informing ideation for that. But regardless of the type of content you plan to create, interviews with people inside the company are the best way to get great content ideas.

Once we’ve completed these calls, we plug the most common use cases, questions, and problems that customers are trying to solve into keyword research tools to identify keywords that we’ll target with unique pieces of content. These keywords make up our SEO content strategy and, once agreed upon with our client, are added to an editorial calendar.

For further reading on this step, check out the following articles:

Content Ideation: How to Identify Content Ideas That Convert — This post shares examples of questions that we ask different departments during our series of kickoff interviews. It also shares additional tactics that will help you brainstorm ideas and aid in content planning.
How to Create a Successful SEO Content Strategy: 2 Factors That Are Often Overlooked — This post discusses common (and critical) issues we see with the SEO content strategy used by most businesses, and summarizes our agency’s approach to SEO content for various business types (SaaS, B2B, B2C).

2. Content Interviews: Interview Subject Matter Experts from within Our Client’s Organization for Each New Content Topic

For each new content topic that we write about, we interview one or more subject matter experts from within our client’s organization. This is the key part of our process that solves the “Google Research Paper” problem discussed above, allowing us to:

Include arguments and ideas that are above the knowledge level of the customer, not below.
Get unique insights to include and guide the direction of the content.
Communicate our client’s brand’s actual perspective on the topic.
Cover the necessary SEO subtopics thoroughly in order to outrank competitors in search engines.

To prepare for content interviews, our strategists will perform a “SERP analysis” (a review of existing search results for the target keyword), so they know what others are already saying on the topic and they can draft a list of questions to guide the conversation to get information on what our client’s brand thinks about the relevant issues, how the client’s product or service approaches solving the problems at hand in a unique way, and more. Interviews are then recorded (Zoom) and transcribed (Otter.ai) for use during outlining and drafting of the piece.

3. Content Writing: Get Feedback and Align on the Content at Multiple Stages of the Process

The next step is to have the writer digest or organize the information from the interview into ideas that can form the piece. The first step in our process for doing that is an outline. Despite resistance from some of our writers (lots of writers, including myself, like to jump right into drafting), we’re adamant about having a multi-stage writing process that includes an outline phase prior to drafting.

At this step, the writer will summarize:

The intent for the keyword and any relevant findings from their SERP analysis.
Title ideas and the angle they plan to take for the article to differentiate it from existing top results.
Any unique insights from the interview that they plan to include.

Then, they’ll outline the article in varying levels of detail, depending on the piece, at which point the account strategist or editor will review this document and provide feedback to ensure there aren’t any crucial gaps in topics getting covered, issues with the angle, etc. We find that this significantly reduces the need for lots of rewriting once drafts have been completed.

Because of this pre-work, editing the draft typically focuses on ensuring we:

Get the introduction right (i.e., avoiding generic statements, including compelling details that entice readers to keep reading, etc.).
Back up points made throughout the piece with appropriate depth and examples.
Fix any grammatical errors.
Maintain clarity, conciseness, and the appropriate tone and style.

Note: Two additional aspects of our writing process are that we write unique pieces of content for each target keyword (one piece for one keyword), a strategy which you can learn more about here. And we use on-page SEO software to optimize our articles as a final step in the writing process, not as an initial step to determine the outline.

4. Measurement: Track Content Performance to See How It Contributes towards Your Marketing Goals (and Make Adjustments Accordingly)

It isn’t necessarily intuitive to think of measurement as a part of the content creation process. But content creation without measurement is like cooking food that never gets tasted — you don’t know if it’s actually good or not.

From our perspective, tracking content performance is in fact essential to the creation process because:

It’s what tells you whether or not what you’re doing in the previous steps is actually contributing towards your goals.
It allows you to adjust your process, such as the kind of content topics you’re focusing on, to do more of what’s working and less of what’s not.

The metrics that you choose to track will depend on the exact goals of your content efforts. Most commonly, companies and agencies track and report on metrics such as traffic, keyword rankings, and email marketing signups. Fewer track and report on conversions from content, although in our experience, conversions are something that many companies actually would like to see from their content efforts.

At Grow & Convert, we track and report on the following for our clients:

Conversions: We track and report on conversions using the Model Comparison Tool in Google Analytics.
Keyword Rankings: We use Ahrefs rank tracker to monitor rankings progress for each article’s target keyword.
Overall Pageviews and Organic Traffic: We set up traffic dashboards in Looker Studio that measure overall pageviews and organic traffic to our articles.

In tracking multiple metrics, and particularly keyword rankings and conversions, we’re able to double down on the topics that produce the best results for our clients.

Check out our article on tracking conversions in Google Analytics 4 to learn more about how to measure conversions from SEO content.

Learn More about Our SEO and Content Marketing Agency

Our Agency: If you want to hire us to execute a content marketing strategy built around driving lead generation and sales, not just traffic, you can learn more about our service and pricing here. We also offer a PPC service for paid search, which you can learn about here.
Join Our Content Team: If you’re a content marketer or writer and would love to do content marketing in this way, we’d love to have you apply to join our team.
Our Content Marketing Course: Individuals looking to learn our agency’s content strategy and become better marketers, consultants, or business owners can join our private course and community, taught via case studies, and presented in both written and video content formats. We include several details and examples not found on this blog. Our course is also built into a community, so people ask questions, start discussions, and share their work in the lesson pages themselves, and we, along with other members, give feedback. Learn more here.

The Content Brand Framework: How to Differentiate Your Company with Content

Benji Hyam — Fri, 10 Nov 2023 00:16:21 +0000

The holy grail for every content team is to have their company be known for the content that they produce. More specifically, brands want to be able to create a narrative that separates them from their competition.

Some brands have been able to do this successfully, for example:

Drift was able to separate itself from all of the other “chatbots” by creating the concept of conversational marketing and evangelizing it through content.

Clearscope was able to set itself apart from other SEO tools by sharing long-form webinars and videos, where their founder analyzed detailed examples and case studies around search intent, which search queries had overlapping results, and what that meant for on-page optimization and content optimization (what their tool does).

These are two examples of companies that have managed to create a “content brand,” or in other words, a brand that differentiates itself through the content that they produce.

At Grow and Convert, we differentiated ourselves from the commoditized content marketing and SEO world when we coined the term Pain Point SEO. The term is now synonymous with a bottom-of-the-funnel first content strategy and has gained popularity over the past five years.

When companies are able to create a content brand, they benefit from prospects viewing their product or service as differentiated (even if their product or service from a feature perspective isn’t that differentiated). The quality of their content can differentiate their brand and build trust.

The reasoning: Prospects know the brand, like the brand, and trust the brand because of the content, and therefore assume that the product or service must be good, too.

In other words, even if you think all chatbots are the same, you might buy into Drift’s narrative on conversational marketing, and that might make you want to buy their product over the rest of the companies in that category. Or, if you’ve watched a Clearscope webinar with smart insights on SERP analysis, a part of you assumes that those strategies are baked into their product and will also help you to rank well.

Obviously, this is a massive advantage to a brand trying to differentiate itself in a commoditized space.

Additional benefits of creating a content brand:

Prospects come in educated and have already bought into what you do
Sales cycles are shortened
You reduce the number of competitors that prospects are considering

In this article, we’re going to share what a content brand is and how we think about creating one.

What Is a Content Brand?

A content brand is a company that has been able to differentiate itself, grow awareness, and change the perception of its business through content. Oftentimes content brands are in categories that are heavily commoditized, but a big reason they stand out is because of the content that they produce.

Examples of B2C content brands are Redbull, Yeti, Nike, Liquid Death, and Patagonia.

Examples of B2B content brands are HubSpot, Drift, Gong, Moz (via Rand Fishkin), and Basecamp.

Notably, most of the examples we listed are larger brands. We’ve noticed that smaller brands either don’t try or struggle to execute in building a content brand.

Why?

We think it’s because there’s an important precursor to successfully building a content brand: a crystal clear understanding of your positioning.

The Foundation of Building a Content Brand: What Makes Your Company Unique?

Step one in creating a content brand is understanding the reasoning behind what makes your company unique, or in other words, your positioning.

This isn’t just about what features your product has that others don’t have. It’s bigger than that. It includes elements of why you exist, what hole in the market you fill, and how you make your customers’ lives better.

To figure out what makes you unique, these are the sorts of questions you need to ask yourself (or your customers):

Why was your company created?
What’s different about the strategic approach you take vs. the way that everyone else in the industry does things?
Does your product or service have any unique features that other businesses don’t have?
Do you approach solving any problems in your business in a unique way?
Does much of your industry believe in something you think is wrong or false?

We ask every single client questions like these in our sales conversations and in extensive interviews at the start of the engagement because we also need to deeply understand their positioning in order to pitch their brand at a high level in their content. And we’ve found that these questions do a great job in developing concepts that differentiate a brand from its competition. They often lead to lively discussions that reveal that different folks at the company even have disagreements on these answers, and they’re forced to do the hard but rewarding work of resolving those differences.

The answers to these questions will be the foundation or the seedlings of the core concepts that we discuss below. They’re the original seedlings of how your brand is different or what you’re disrupting or changing that’s broken in your space. These ideas will lead to the foundational content pieces that will differentiate your brand.

Case Study: Figuring Out What Makes Grow and Convert Unique

Here’s an example of what answering these questions can lead to from our own positioning case study. This is a summary of the problems we set out to solve that were rampant in the content and SEO marketing agency world.

In short, agencies weren’t good at measuring or holding themselves accountable to leads generated, they often didn’t promote the content they produced (and if they did, they just shared from social accounts without any real strategy), and content production was farmed out to freelance writers that had no experience on the topic they were writing about. All of these things led to subpar results.

Our solution to the above three problems was to create an agency that (1) held itself accountable to leads generated, (2) actually promoted the content it produced, and (3) could write on very advanced topics in wide-ranging fields (such as concussion and cancer treatment and software development) because we interview subject matter experts inside of the business rather than farm out writing to people that don’t have expertise on a topic.

Having a clear understanding of what separates your business from its competitors is what allows you to create core concepts for your brand that all of your content ties back to.

Coming Up with Core Concepts for Your Brand

We think that every business has around 3–5 core concepts that are unique to them. (At the start, it may be just one or two, which you can build on over time.)

These core concepts are your “thought leadership” — concepts that push the thinking in your industry forward. These are opinions, stories, data, and/or strategies that share how you approach solving a problem core to your industry that’s different from the way that everyone else does things.

You formulate these core concepts over time as you start to come up with ideas that truly set yourself apart from the way others are doing things. These concepts should map to the problems you solve in the section above. Almost every business should have some sort of differentiation. It doesn’t necessarily have to be from a feature perspective, but it can be a philosophical difference in the way that you approach things, a strategic difference, a process difference, or a cultural difference.

We’ll use Grow and Convert as a running example throughout this post because we feel that most people reading this are familiar with our company, so it should make it easy to understand.

Grow and Convert’s Core Concepts

Pain Point SEO (Strategic Difference)

We came up with Pain Point SEO when we were trying to figure out how to drive more leads from the content we produced for our clients. If we hadn’t initially set out to solve the problem of lead attribution of content marketing, we might not have come up with this strategic difference.

After measuring and figuring out what the highest converting articles we published on behalf of clients were, we noticed that posts that ranked for search queries that had high buying-intent had the highest conversion rates. Contrary to industry norms that prioritized top-of-funnel content, keywords with high volume, and an idea of not selling too much in content, we realized that producing more articles around these bottom-of-the-funnel, high buying-intent keywords (that pitched the client’s product) produced results much faster than the typical top-of-funnel approach. This core concept differentiated us strategically from the way most businesses did content marketing.

Pain Point Copywriting (Process Difference)

Pain point copywriting came from us trying to solve the problem of how to write advanced content that converts for our clients’ businesses. The industry norm for agencies is to hire a bunch of freelance writers, send them a topic and/or content brief, have them self-research the topic, and then write the article. This leads to content that doesn’t sell the value props of your product or service and a lot of surface level content that’s the same as what everyone else writes. The difference in our ability to write advanced content has to do with our process. We interview subject matter experts inside of businesses and use their expertise to write product-focused sales copy.

Content Distribution Strategy (Strategic and Process Difference)

We came up with this differentiator when trying to figure out the best way to drive targeted traffic for our clients. Many agencies just published content and then waited for content to rank. Or, they’d schedule some tweets or LinkedIn posts in Buffer. We figured out an approach to content promotion that was different from how most agencies or in-house brands were doing it, and we shared the strategy in this blog post.

Content Brand (Philosophical and Strategic Difference)

This post is meant to be a core concept for Grow and Convert going forward. There are many companies looking to distinguish themselves with content, but few know how to produce thought leadership content. We created this article to guide people through a framework to produce content that differentiates themselves from their competition.

You can see that all of our core concept examples map to our positioning differences. These articles share how we approach things differently than the status quo and back our core thesis up with evidence, data, stories, and examples that prove the concept to be true.

The next part of building a content brand is to produce supporting content that maps back to these core concepts.

Produce Content That Maps to Core Concepts

Once you’ve come up with a core concept, you need content that explains and supports that core thesis.

You should produce case studies, data posts, strategy guides, and more that help prove the validity of your core concept.

For example, if you look through a bunch of our case studies or strategy articles, you’ll see that they all serve to show how Pain Point SEO was implemented in different types of businesses.

Even large data pieces like this recent analysis of SEO conversion rates adds a ton of original data backing our Pain Point SEO approach. We could’ve just analyzed SEO conversion rates broadly, but instead we chose to tie the conversion rates to the content frameworks we share in our post on Pain Point SEO.

A piece like this not only supports our Pain Point SEO core concept, but it’s unique. (Most other sites in the content marketing space aren’t publishing data on conversion rates across 90+ posts; it’s hard to find data like this.) It’s also extremely hard to replicate since you can’t just hire a freelance writer to go publish a post like this one.

What we’re trying to do here is to provide further proof that our core concepts are a better way to approach things than the status quo or industry norms and that we best understand (or are leading the way on) this core concept in our industry.

Also, original, hard-to-replicate content that maps to your core concepts like this is what starts to get your brand known for its content. In this case, people will start to know that if you want detailed analysis content and SEO conversion rates, you go to Grow and Convert.

Examples of Drift Content That Supports Conversational Marketing

Let’s also look at some of Drift’s content that backed their conversational marketing core concept.

First off, Drift wrote a book on conversational marketing which outlines their core concept. This is the equivalent of our post on Pain Point SEO; it just goes way more in depth.

Drift started a State of the Conversational Marketing Report that surveyed 503 B2B companies to find data and trends on how people benefitted from conversational marketing.

You can find some of those here:

When you create a state of the industry report and use your own branded term to share the data, it’s hard for other companies to argue that they do the same thing.

Not only did they do that, but they also developed a conversational marketing certification program. Again, if you’re certifying people on conversational marketing, it’s going to be hard for someone who has gone through that program to want to buy another tool because they won’t think that the other tool does “conversational marketing,” even if the tool is the same from a feature perspective.

Lastly, Drift has created a number of case studies and JTBD pieces that share how companies have successfully implemented conversational marketing into their sales process.

All of these supporting pieces build on the case for why companies should sell with conversational marketing and follow the Drift process rather than use another tool that has a similar feature set.

Examples of Clearscope Content That Supports Conversational Marketing

I want to include Clearscope examples because they’re different in two ways from us and Drift.

They’ve developed a content brand without creating a branded concept like “pain point SEO” or “conversational marketing.”
Their content goes beyond written content and includes a heavy dose of webinars and video.

Clearscope founder Bernard Huang has really compelling beliefs that he shares in webinars about how Google’s algorithm figures out search intent and what content to rank. Then, he supports it with data, analysis, and examples. These beliefs are the basis for how the Clearscope tool was built and why it gets rankings better than other tools that help with on-page SEO.

Essentially, if you buy into what he’s saying in his videos about how search works and why you should create content in specific ways, then you’ll also buy into his tool being able to help you get results from SEO.

Here are some examples of webinars he’s done:

They also have written content that supports the idea of ranking on the first page of Google:

How to get on the first page of Google

While Clearscope uses a different approach than the two examples above (both Grow and Convert and Drift), if you’ve read or watched any of their content, you probably immediately bought into their strategic difference and the value of using Clearscope over many of the other tools that do similar things.

How to Integrate the Content Brand Framework with Your Existing Content Strategy

The content brand framework and your existing content strategy should go hand in hand. The idea is to create a number of pieces around core concepts that are not SEO focused but that can be promoted via paid social (Twitter, LinkedIn), shared through newsletters, and shared through organic social.

Then, you can create supporting pieces that help build on that core thesis. The content type doesn’t matter. You can create YouTube videos that are focused around SEO keywords, webinars, a podcast, eBooks, or pain point SEO focused articles like we do.

The key to differentiating yourself as a content brand is having something unique to say. Hopefully, the content brand framework will help you discover your company’s uniqueness.

How We’re Helping Clients Build Content Brands

We help clients build content brands in two of our services.

First, in our core content service, when it makes sense, we often start the engagement off by publishing a disruption story that is not SEO based (it doesn’t target any SEO keyword) but rather explains what the company and product or service is disrupting. It’s the equivalent of our Pain Point SEO piece or a blog post version of Drift’s Conversational Marketing book. Then, the majority of the SEO-focused pieces we publish after that in our standard engagement harken back to the disruption story and its core concepts. That way, our SEO pieces build this foundation of organic traffic that helps lead prospects that are Googling various high buying-intent phrases to a core concept of the brand.

Here are some examples of disruption stories that we’ve produced:

Rainforest QA

Rainforest QA is a client who has a really innovative product in the software quality assurance (QA) space. Most QA is done using code-based software, so it has to be managed and run by developers. Their product is visual, so other departments can own the QA process as well. This piece talks about how that concept can transform product development processes for the better.

Asking Developers to Own QA Is Broken. Here’s a Better Way.

Vocal Video

Vocal Video has built a really easy-to-use software for collecting video testimonials. Instead of hiring a video production crew and meeting on-site somewhere, marketing teams can send happy customers a single link that allows customers to walk through a simple guided process to record their thoughts using their own phone or computer camera. This piece goes into what that ease of producing testimonial videos enables for marketing teams.

Producing Video Testimonials Used to Be a Huge Pain. Here’s How We’re Fixing It.

Lawclerk

Lawclerk is a marketplace of lawyers available for other law firms to hire when they need extra legal help. That sounds simple, but behind the idea is some really provocative thinking around how the business model of large law firms is broken. Here, we helped Greg German, a co-founder of Lawclerk, get those ideas across via their founding story. Note how the piece also sells Lawclerk in addition to the commentary on large law firm business models and their issues.

Why the Large Law Firm Business Model Is Dying and What We’re Doing Instead

Second, we also offer a one-time project based engagement where we help brands figure out their foundational core concept(s) and positioning via interviews. We expand upon the questions above to uncover what the brand is disrupting, what differentiates them in their space, what core customer pain points they are solving, and more. Then, we publish one or two disruption story pieces that convey that core concept in an engaging and educational way. You can learn more about this service here.

How to Outrank Your Competition on Google: A 3-Step Process

Cameron Brown — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 21:43:14 +0000

It’s very common for companies to do search engine optimization (SEO) for months or years, and still not rank for any of the keywords they want to target.

In some cases, they’re not sure why they’re not ranking. In others, they attribute the issue to factors such as having a lower domain rating than their competitors, or not having enough budget to build sufficient backlinks to their content.

In our experience, while domain rating and backlinks are important (i.e. you can’t have a DR of zero to rank and you usually need to do some link building), it is still possible to compete and outrank your competitors in Google even if you have a “low” DR (it’s relative) or minimal link building — even for high value, buying-intent keywords.

In this post, we’re going to discuss the main reasons why companies often have difficulty outranking their competition (or even getting to the first page of search results). Then, we’ll share the 3-step process we use to help our clients outrank their competitors in organic search, even when they have less domain authority than their competitors.

Table of Contents

Why companies often have difficulty outranking their competition on Google

Reason #1: They don’t create content that thoroughly satisfies search intent for their target keywords
Reason #2: They just “sprinkle” keywords into their content, thinking that will get them to rank
Reason #3: They try to rank for many different target keywords with individual posts
Reason #4: They aren’t strategic enough when choosing target keywords

Our 3-step process for outranking competitors in organic search

Base every piece of content on an in-depth SERP analysis for a specific target keyword
Create dedicated blog posts or web pages that deeply satisfy search intent for each target keyword
Target a strategic mix of keywords with varying levels of competition

Note: If you’d like help outranking your competitors on Google using the process below, you can learn more about our agency here and reach out about working with us here.

Why Companies Often Have Difficulty Outranking Their Competition on Google

Reason #1: They Don’t Create Content That Thoroughly Satisfies Search Intent for Their Target Keywords

One of the most important ranking factors of Google’s algorithm is fulfilling the search intent of the specific query someone has typed in. In other words, in order to rank highly for a keyword, you need to provide searchers with the most relevant answer or information to the question or topic they’ve searched for.

In our experience, doing this successfully requires two equally important parts:

Doing an in-depth “SERP analysis.” This is the process of analyzing the search engine results page for your target keyword to see what topics are being discussed and what page types (e.g. list articles, how to posts, landing pages, etc.) are showing up in the existing top results. This information indicates the topics and page types that Google has determined are the best match for the intent of that search query.

Creating content that is informed by that SERP analysis. Once you’ve determined the topics you need to cover and the type of page you need to use in order to match search intent for your target keyword, you need to create content that follows that framework and covers those topics (and ideally do so in a way that’s better or more thorough than existing results).

Many companies lack the know-how or process to do one or both of these steps. As a result, they end up creating content that doesn’t sufficiently meet the search intent of their target keywords, and they fail to rank.

Reason #2: They Just “Sprinkle” Keywords into Their Content, Thinking That Will Get Them to Rank

A common practice in SEO is to hand writers a list of keywords that they want to rank for and have them “sprinkle” those keywords throughout the articles they write, thinking this will get their site organic rankings for these keywords.

This doesn’t work.

As we explained above, ranking for target keywords requires a much more strategic process of creating content that deeply meets search intent. If others are creating tailored content to rank for specific keywords, and you’re just sprinkling keywords in here or there, you have a slim shot at ranking.

Reason #3: They Try to Rank for Many Different Target Keywords with Individual Posts

Another common mistake that companies make is trying to rank for a number of competitive keywords with a single web page or blog post. (There was a time when this strategy worked, but for the most part, it doesn’t anymore.)

In doing so, their content gets outranked by competitors that are creating dedicated pages to go after each search term, allowing them to more deeply meet the search intent of each keyword.

Reason #4: They Aren’t Strategic Enough When Choosing Target Keywords

A final mistake that we commonly see, discussed at length in our post on Underdog SEO, is companies investing heavily in ranking for a few of their highest buying-intent (but highest competition) category keywords, while ignoring their less competitive (but still high buying-intent) long-tail keywords.

For example:

A hosting company spends all of their effort trying to rank for “web hosting,” while ignoring slightly lower competition opportunities such as “web hosting services for ecommerce” or “web hosting services with email.”

A content marketing agency focuses all of their effort trying to rank for “content marketing agency,” while ignoring opportunities such as “outsource content creation.”

A CRM tool trying to rank for the term “CRM software,” but ignoring opportunities such as “CRM that integrates with QuickBooks.”

Don’t get us wrong. We support businesses going after their main product and service category terms. But companies ranking for these sorts of category-definition keywords usually have extremely strong domains, are well-known brands in their category, have spent tens of thousands of dollars to own and protect those keywords (mostly through building a ton of links to the ranking page), have more money to spend on content and SEO, and have spent years trying to rank for these terms.

So, one way to outrank your competitors is to go after less competitive, long-tail keywords that they may not even be thinking of targeting. These variations will generally have lower search volume, but they can still drive significant conversions. And furthermore, ranking for them builds up your domain authority over time which can help you target and rank for those higher competition, category-definition keywords later.

It is some combination of these mistakes that often cause companies to get outcompeted in organic search. By following the framework laid out below, you can give yourself a much better chance at outranking competitors, even when you have a less authoritative domain.

Our 3-Step Process for Outranking Competitors in Organic Search

1. Base Every Piece of Content on an In-Depth SERP Analysis for a Specific Target Keyword

For each individual keyword that we decide to target for a client, our process begins with doing an in-depth analysis of the existing Google search results for that term, including:

Reviewing the titles, page types, and sources of existing page one results. SEO titles and page types reveal the types of content ranking for a given keyword (e.g. list posts, “how to” articles, guides, product landing pages, etc.).

In general, what is ranking tells you what Google’s algorithm already thinks is best for this keyword, so typically we will use one of those content types for our piece of content. But that’s not a hard and fast rule. If we feel we can better meet search intent with another type of content, we may try it.

We will also note the sources of the top results to understand who we’re competing against (e.g. Direct competitors? News sites? Adjacent products and services?, etc.). Our goal is to understand exactly what the existing results are doing and be intentional about what content type we’ll use.

Reviewing the topics discussed inside of those posts or pages — identifying themes or topics that come up repeatedly.

Next, we’ll scan or read each of the results on the first page and pay attention to topics that are discussed (especially those listed in subheadings) throughout the page. As we go through the results, we’ll take note of topics that come up frequently. This indicates that they likely need to be covered in our post in order for it to rank.

Identifying what individual pages or articles do well — and what they do poorly.

Identifying the strengths and weaknesses of existing top results allows us to incorporate elements that we think work well, and gives us insight into the ways in which we can differentiate our post to create a better piece of content.

Determine the intent of searchers typing in this term.

Once we’ve gone through the results, we’ll summarize the core intent(s) of the users searching this keyword.

You can check out our interview with Bernard Huang of Clearscope for an in-depth video tutorial on doing SERP analysis.

For more detail on how we approach this, check out our article on SEO content writing which walks through an in-depth example of a SERP analysis we did for our previous client, TapClicks.

2. Create Dedicated Blog Posts or Pages That Deeply Satisfy Search Intent for Each Target Keyword

We use a one-page-per-keyword strategy, targeting individual keywords with unique, dedicated pages. This enables us to meet search intent more thoroughly than competing content, and achieve more page one rankings (specifically position 1–3 rankings where the majority of search traffic comes from) for our clients.

Based on our SERP analysis, we’ll choose a post framework (e.g. “how to,” product list, comparison, etc.) that others are using to get top results for that keyword — unless we think we can beat existing results with a different format.

Once that’s decided, we use an interview-based writing process, whereby we interview experts at our client’s company on the topic, ensuring that we get their perspective on all of the necessary subtopics (again, based on our SERP analysis) that we need to address in the article in order to rank, as well as any unique or original ideas that they have on the topic which can help us differentiate the article.

We then leverage any insights gleaned from the interview to come up with a unique angle for the post and write the piece, covering each of the necessary topics to satisfy search intent, while incorporating originality and differentiation wherever possible. This combination is what makes truly high-quality content.

Finally, once we have a completed draft, we use the SEO tool Clearscope to ensure we’re using enough related keywords in our post for on-page SEO, add internal links, and write our SEO title and meta description.

3. Target a Strategic Mix of Keywords with Varying Levels of Competition

We have written extensively about how and why our SEO strategy focuses on ranking for bottom of the funnel, high buying-intent keywords.

Specifically, keywords that fall into three broad categories:

Category Keywords: Terms that describe the exact category of the product or service our client sells (e.g. social media management software, digital marketing agency, user experience designer, etc.).

Comparison and Alternatives Keywords: Terms where potential customers are comparing products or services and looking at options on the market (e.g. Google Analytics alternatives, Ahrefs vs. Semrush, etc.).

Jobs to Be Done Keywords: Keywords that indicate someone has a problem that your product helps solve (e.g. how to measure organic traffic, improve search engine rankings, etc.).

Within each of these categories, there is a wide array of keywords with varying levels of search volume, intent, and competition. So, when we’re doing keyword research and developing a keyword strategy for a client, especially if they have lower domain authority compared to their competitors, we don’t just focus solely on their highest competition, category-defining keywords.

We likely will target some of those, but we’ll look for longer tail opportunities like we discussed above. In particular, we’ll look for keywords that map to a competitive advantage that our client’s product/service has over their competition, per our specificity strategy.

For example, when working with a QA testing platform, we didn’t immediately target “qa testing.” We targeted keywords such as “automated web application testing” and “codeless test automation” which directly mapped to their core differentiator of being a codeless tool.

These are examples of lower competition, but still high buying-intent category keywords. But these opportunities can be found in the other keyword categories as well.

For example, we were working with a remote executive assistant service that had a domain rating of 28 (quite a low DR). And while many of the posts we produced for them were taking months to progress towards the first page of search results, the comparison keywords we targeted were getting onto the first page within weeks of publishing.

In looking in Ahrefs at their rankings today, we see that all 5 of the comparison keywords we went after are ranking in the top 3 positions of search results.

There are different factors that we think contributed to this. For one, we created in-depth dedicated pages targeting each of these keywords and optimized them very precisely in order to rank. But we also found that the competitors in their space hadn’t caught onto this strategy yet, leaving the door open for us to rank for these terms.

This strategy works and is the foundational principle behind Underdog SEO, as we’ve demonstrated in numerous case studies.

Here are a few to check out:

Scaling content: Expanding from bottom of funnel content to top of funnel (Geekbot case study)

Scaling SEO traffic from 920 to 14,577 sessions in 6 months (Circuit case study)

How to do B2B content marketing without domain expertise (Rainforest QA case study)

How to create a keyword strategy for a new, innovative product (case study of a video editing software client)

Learn More about Our SEO and Content Marketing Agency

Our Agency: If you want to hire us to execute a content marketing strategy built around driving lead generation and sales, not just traffic, you can learn more about our service and pricing here. We also offer a PPC service for paid search, which you can learn about here.

Join Our Content Marketing Team: If you’re a content marketer or writer and would love to do content marketing in this way, we’d love to have you apply to join our team.

Our Content Marketing Course: Individuals looking to learn our agency’s content strategy and become better marketers, consultants, or business owners can join our private course and community, taught via case studies, and presented in both written and video content formats. We include several details and examples not found on this blog. Our course is also built into a community, so people ask questions, start discussions, and share their work in the lesson pages themselves, and we, along with other members, give feedback. Learn more here.

How to Rank for Long-Tail Keywords: Why Dedicated Content Is a Must

Meg Riley — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 16:58:53 +0000

Long-tail keywords are extremely valuable because they often indicate a lot of buying intent, show specificity in that buying intent, and usually have less competition. If you can rank for these keywords, you can get in front of Googlers who are a) looking for your exact products or services, and b) intend to make a purchase.

But in our experience working with many dozens of companies over the years, most try to rank for them with product pages (eCommerce) or a few “Solutions” or “Use Case” pages (SaaS).

What we’ve learned after publishing and tracking hundreds of pieces of content is that the most effective way to rank for (all) the long-tail keywords that relate to your brand’s products or services is by creating dedicated long-form content — ideally, one piece of content for every long-tail keyword you’re going after.

Your Homepage Can’t Magically Rank for All of These Long-Tail Keywords

Ranking for use-case-specific keywords doesn’t happen by accident. You can’t just plug these keywords on your site pages and hope you will automatically rank for them. You have to create dedicated content to rank for super-specific, long-tail keywords. Why? Because:

Homepages and product pages rarely have sufficient detail. They contain high-level copy about the brand and product that isn’t specific to any industry or reader.

Industry or Use Case pages aren’t usually competitive enough to hit page one because, even though they have more focused information, they rarely satisfy search intent for long-tail keywords.

For example, look at the SERP for the keyword “accounting software for small business:” the first three results are all list posts comparing accounting software (in fact, 8/10 results on page one are all comparison posts).

Google clearly favors list posts because that’s what best appeals to search intent — the searcher is shopping for accounting software and wants to find the best solution for their small business, it’s obvious that they will want to compare a few options before making a decision. So there’s just no way a homepage or landing page that talks about only one brand will rank for this specific search query.

To capitalize on these audience-specific keywords, you need to do the hard work of creating blog content that systematically ranks for each one.

Not only is this the most effective way to hit page one for these search terms, but by creating this content, you create opportunities to speak directly to all the different target audiences that are searching different long-tail keywords — their pains, what they hope to accomplish from their search — and describe in clear detail and with specific examples how your product can be tailored to their requirements. This specificity in your content is important for conversion rate.

We’ve done this work for dozens and dozens of clients and have seen time and time again that dedicated blog content outranks and outperforms landing pages sprinkled with industry-specific, long-tail keywords for the reasons above.

Below, we explain our process to rank for long-tail keywords. We’ll also run through a few case studies so you can see how we find these keywords for clients and the results from our work.

How to Rank for Long-Tail Keywords

1. Find Keywords That Are Closely Related to Your Brand, Products, and Services

The first thing to do is find the long-tail keywords that are most relevant to your offerings. These are typically variations of what we refer to as your main “category keywords” in our Pain Point SEO framework, that is, keywords that indicate the searcher is looking for your exact type of product.

The first group of long-tail keywords you should look at just add one layer of specificity to your most relevant category keywords.

In the example above, it was: accounting software (the primary product category) for small businesses (the layer of specificity). There are tons of examples that could fit this framework.

Accounting software for nonprofits
Professional accounting software
Enterprise accounting software
Accounting software for HVAC businesses
Accounting software for eCommerce
Accounting software for property management
Accounting software for personal use
Accounting software for beginners

This list goes on.

Choosing which of these layers of specificity makes the most sense for you comes down to considering your ideal customers and unique selling points — which audiences do you want to attract, which strengths or differentiators position you above competitors?

You can also think about long-tail queries that indicate searchers have a question, pain, or job to be done that your products or services satisfy. We call these “Jobs-to-be-Done keywords.” Look for queries that closely align with your brand offerings —the problems or jobs that you offer the absolute best solutions for. These are typically action statements or “how to” type searches.

Some keyword suggestions here are: how to organize purchase orders, track invoices and payments, or track mileage for taxes.

Choosing keywords that most closely align with your product or service is important for obvious reasons — the whole point of this SEO strategy is to get your name in front of the right audiences — but it’s also important for rankings because these are the queries where you have the most topical authority and the best chance of hitting page one.

Bonus: Using SEO Tools to Find More Long-Tail Keywords

There are plenty of keyword research tools to find long-tail keyword ideas, popular options include Semrush, Ahrefs, and Answer the Public.

Semrush is free to use (up to 10 searches per day) and a fairly popular keyword tool, so we’ll show you how this works with their features.

Start in the Keyword Overview tool and type the keyword phrase you want to search — one trick to find industry or user-specific long-tail keywords is to type “[software category] for” and see all of the results. For example, “accounting software for”.

On the next page, you can see metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty, and CPC, then Semrush displays a list of keyword ideas below.

There are often an enormous number of these industry- or use-case-specific keywords with extremely high buying intent available — we see over 7K options related to accounting software — so you have to filter and use your best judgment.

Semrush displays categories on the right side (in the screenshot we see: best, business, small, free, mac, etc.) so you can easily filter keywords by topic. There are a number of additional filtering options. We suggest searching by term to find keywords related to your layers of specificity.

Ahrefs also has a free keyword research tool, where you can do similar searches. Note that they allow an unlimited number of searches, but only show the first 100 keyword ideas with limited metrics on the free plan (you can always upgrade to see the full list and all metrics).

Start by opening Ahrefs Keyword Generator and typing the keyword phrase. We’ll stick to our “accounting software for” example from above.

From there, Ahrefs displays a list of ideas. You can see keyword difficulty and search volume, and when those metrics were last updated.

(Keep in mind, both Semrush and Ahrefs offer paid subscriptions with full access to these tools.)

Note: As per our Mini Volume Keywords article,we strongly caution against dismissing keyword opportunities solely because they have low search volume. Many of the super specific long-tail keywords will have lower search volumes, and this is to be expected because they are so specific; but as per that article, the actual traffic you get is almost always much higher than the stated search volume, and as per Pain Point SEO, the conversion rates can be so much higher than top of funnel, higher volume keywords.

2. Create a Dedicated Blog Post for Each Target Keyword

As we already warned, you can’t create a few landing pages or one massive “ultimate guide” that’s going to hit on every long-tail search that relates to your brand and offerings.

Think about it: the search results for best accounting software for small business will (and should) be different from results for enterprise accounting software or accounting software for eCommerce. These are three different audiences; they have different problems and require different types of solutions. You can’t possibly hit every vertical with general website pages.

The only way to effectively rank for each opportunity is to create a unique piece of content for each query.

Comb through your list of keywords to prioritize topics and plan an individual blog post for each one.

3. Perform SERP Analysis to See What Your Post Requires to Compete with Top Search Results

Before you start writing, it’s critical to analyze the search engine results page to figure out the search intent of your target keyword.

Remember, Google’s entire goal is to deliver the most helpful results to satisfy search queries, so the page one results offer a strong indication of what its algorithm favors or wants to show its users for your target keyword.

Consider again our example above — accounting software for small business:

One look at the SERP (screenshot above) tells us we need to create a software comparison guide. We can take research a step further, actually scanning through each content piece, to see what competitors they mention and any other topics they cover. Then we know what our post requires and can determine ways to improve upon what’s already ranking.

You can read more about SERP analysis in our SEO Content Writing guide.

4. Write Content to Appeal to Search Intent and Audiences

Tailor each content piece to the target audience — you need to touch on relevant topics and solutions to rank, but content also needs thoughtful examples, advice, opinions, recommendations, etc. to engage readers and satisfy search intent.

All of the “fine details” should be catered to the person reading the content.

In each piece, think about the target audience: their current processes and pain points, how your solution appeals to them, and the specific benefits your solution offers. This lets you speak to each audience more head on; you can drop in relatable quips about what audiences are doing now and how your solution solves their challenges. This gives you a much higher chance of converting the readers who land on your content.

We also wrote a guide on creating reader-centric and conversion-oriented content, which you can find here: Pain Point Copywriting: How to Write Compelling Sales Copy Inside Blog Posts

Here are a few examples of our work ranking clients for these industry-specific long-tail keywords:

Case Study #1: Ranking Digital Asset Management Software for Industry, Business Size, and Location-Specific Keywords

A client we recently worked with offers digital asset management (DAM) software. If you’ve never heard of DAM before, it’s essentially Google Drive on steroids, for companies that have tons of digital assets and several employees who need to find them, and thus for whom Google Drive or Dropbox aren’t enough.

Their primary audience is marketers and creative teams since these folks often store and share the most digital files. But, as you can guess, all kinds of businesses can benefit from DAM software, and our client offers features so they can work with small businesses, enterprises, and global teams. So our task was to find allthe long-tail keywords that would get our client in front of the right target audiences.

During our extensive onboarding interviews with their sales and marketing teams, we talked about:

The DAM’s customizability — they can tailor their product to virtually any requirement, offering a “universal DAM.”

All industries they could realistically cater to, and who to avoid.

The DAM’s scalability and support for enterprise companies — these are the big ticket sales.

Their onboarding services and custom pricing for small teams. Our client works primarily with enterprise brands, but one of their USPs was support for small, expanding businesses, so targeting small business keywords was a priority for them.

The DAM’s global capabilities and expanding their reach beyond the US, into the UK, Australia, and APAC countries.

We found over a dozen highly specific, long-tail terms to create dedicated content. These were keywords around DAMs for different departments, different use cases, different company sizes, and more. After publishing, we saw 75% of blog posts for all “category + layer of specificity” keywords hit the first page of search results.

Case Study #2: Finding & Ranking a Unique Help Desk Software for the Right Layer of Specificity Keywords

Another client of ours who sold help desk software had a slightly different dilemma: they have a solution they can theoretically market across industries, however, their software is strictly an email management system with a few straightforward features, it does not have other help desk tools like live chat, voice, or social media messengers.

So we had two layers of specificity to determine during keyword research: the “help desk software” keyword variations specific to email management plus the additional layers of specificity determined by target audiences and unique selling points.

Here are some of the important findings from our strategy calls:

The help desk is easy to use and offers affordable pricing, so they are a known choice for small businesses.

On the flip side, they also have multi-brand features and global scalability, so they can support enterprise and international brands.

They are one of the only help desk brands to offer a self-hosted solution, which can be essential for federal institutions or meeting GDPR compliance.

While we assume that anyone searching general help desk keywords could be interested in software with all the bells and whistles, our client is a good option for anyone needing an email-based, multi-brand, or self-hosted help desk. So we found specific category keywords related to ticket and email management, ease of use, cost, industry, business size, location, device, and hosting options.

Here’s a look at their ranking positions:

At first, rankings moved slowly; posts were indexing at positions 30+ and crawling to page one. So we:

Performed quick SERP research for each piece of content to ensure blog posts still satisfied search intent and were competitive with what was already ranking.

Built backlinks to promote content.

Performed a technical audit to see if anything on the site’s backend affected the poor rankings.

After identifying and addressing subdomain issues, we saw these posts achieve top rankings — and they’ve sat on page one for 6+ months. They consistently drive traffic from search engines and convert website visitors, without us needing to update or “maintain” content.

Case Study #3: Covering Every Base for Time Tracking Software That Caters to All Industries & Business Sizes

The last client to talk about here sells an employee time clock software — a software solution that can obviously be used across any business with hourly employees.

In addition to time tracking, they also offered scheduling and payroll, support for field service teams via mobile apps, and flexibility to customize the software via integrations. They could work with virtually any organization interested in time clock software.

Since they sold a common software type and worked with businesses big and small, we had a lot of directions to go in during keyword research — some of the boxes we wanted to check were:

All feature specific category keywords and their combinations. For example, keywords that suggest the searcher is looking for time tracking and payroll or payroll and scheduling. As an example from another industry (ours, SEO) it would be something like “keyword research and rank tracking tool.”

All layers of specificity that apply to the product’s unique benefits. For example, many field service teams want GPS-enabled time tracking software so they can see where workers are clocking in from and their routes; since our client’s product has GPS, we could target GPS related keywords.
Industry-specific keywords. This client wanted to capitalize on keywords related to contractors and construction teams since they had luck with these types of businesses in the past. However, they also wanted to hit on all industries they could (realistically) sell to — restaurants, hair salons, healthcare organizations, accounting firms, banks, insurance companies, and more are all good candidates for our client’s product.

Small-business-related keywords. Our client’s product gets good feedback from reviewers for its ease of use, and they have packages for all team sizes, so they wanted to attract more small business users who were moving away from manual processes.

Enterprise keywords. This client usually attracts mid-size and enterprise companies, so we wanted to double down on what was already working for them and pinpoint more of those same leads.

Over our years working together, we’ve written over 100 pieces of content targeting these highly specific, long-tail category keywords. And at the time of publishing, those articles rank for more than 100 BOTF keywords on the first page of Google search. (Many articles rank for more than one keyword.)

Note: In addition to ranking this client in top search positions for these keywords, our content brought in over 2,000+ conversions in 2022.

When we look at conversions by page, we see most top performers are blog posts written to target specific variations of main category keywords. For example, a category keyword related to construction drove 130+ conversions alone. Another category keyword related to a specific feature benefit generated 100 conversions.

And this is why we say you need dedicated content to capitalize on these keyword opportunities fully: there’s no way a homepage or landing page is going to rank for these specific keyword phrases, and even if they do, they won’t convert readers nearly as well as tailored content will.

Want to Work with Us or Learn More About Our Approach to Content Marketing?

Our Agency: If you want to hire us to develop, manage, and execute your content marketing strategy, you can learn more about our service and pricing here.

Write For Us: If you’re a content marketer or writer and would love to do content marketing this way, we’d love to have you apply to join our team.

Our Content Marketing Course: Individuals looking to learn our agency’s content strategy and become better digital marketers, consultants, or business owners can join our private course, taught via case studies, and presented in both written and video content formats. We include several details and examples not found on this blog. Our course is also built into a community, so people ask questions, start discussions, and share their work in the lesson pages themselves, and we, along with other members, give feedback.

Competitor Comparison Landing Pages: 3 Unique Strategies

Cameron Brown — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 19:52:20 +0000

Many companies are interested in either (a) how to create competitor comparison pages or (b) how to improve rankings or conversion rates from the ones they already have.

And for good reason. As we’ll show below, competitor comparison landing pages are some of the highest converting page types we have seen from the thousands of articles we’ve published for clients over the years.

So, in this post, we’re going to define what these pages are, discuss the main reasons why they’re worth creating for many businesses, and share three unique comparison page strategies that we’ve learned and used to drive significant conversions for our clients.

Below, we cover:

What is a competitor comparison landing page?
Why should you create competitor comparison landing pages?
3 unique strategies for creating competitor comparison landing pages

Note: If you’d like help creating pages to rank for your competitor comparison keywords, you can learn more about our agency here and reach out about working with us here.

What Is a Competitor Comparison Landing Page?

Competitor comparison landing pages are website pages in which you compare your product or service to a direct or peripheral competitor. Typically these pages include a feature comparison table, messaging about your service’s unique differentiators, social proof, and a call-to-action (CTA).

Originally, comparison pages were primarily used by SaaS businesses for PPC advertising, such as Google Ads. However, many SaaS companies (as well as eCommerce businesses) now incorporate comparison pages into their SEO strategies, creating them to rank for brand comparison keywords in organic search.

Why? Because if you can optimize your comparison pages to get organic search rankings for the same keywords you’d be bidding on through ads, you can generate conversions from that page over the long-term — without paying for every click.

Why Should You Create Competitor Comparison Landing Pages?

1. Competitor Comparison Pages Have Some of the Highest Conversion Rates of Any Type of Content

Competitor comparison keywords, including “versus” keywords (e.g. QuickBooks vs. FreshBooks) and “alternatives” keywords (e.g. QuickBooks alternatives), is one of the three bottom of the funnel keyword categories that we focus on in our client work.

In a recent analysis of 95 articles we’ve written for our clients — What SEO keywords convert the highest? — we found that comparison and alternative keywords had the highest average conversion rate of the posts that were measured.

Comparison and alternative keywords had a conversion rate over 7.5% and versus keywords had the second highest conversion rate at over 5%.

To our surprise, both of these comparison keyword categories converted higher, on average, than even main product category keywords (e.g. best accounting software), which are some of the most common-sense, must-have keywords in a bottom of funnel SEO strategy.

Furthermore, despite SEO tools often reporting these keywords as having a very low number of monthly searches, which might cause you to question whether these pages are worth creating, we have found that:

These keywords almost always get more traffic than their monthly search volume estimates would suggest (often a lot more).

With such high conversion rates, they can deliver significant conversion volume, even while generating less traffic than other pages.

For example, in our post on Mini-Volume Keywords, we show how 6 comparison articles (all with less than 20 searches per month) collectively drove 149 organic signups for a past client, with an average conversion rate of 2% and one post converting at 4.5%.

This is why competitor comparison pages are a high priority in our SEO content strategy, and, in our opinion, should be considered a valuable SEO asset for many businesses.

2. Competitor Comparison Keywords Can (at Times) Be Surprisingly Easy to Rank For

There are a number of accounts that we have worked on in which we’ve found comparison keywords to be some of the easiest and fastest keywords to rank for. We’ve seen this even in cases where a client’s domain rating was very low, and ranking for other buying-intent keywords was difficult and took a lot of time.

In looking in Ahrefs at their rankings today, we see that 5 out of 5 comparison keywords we went after are ranking in the top 3 positions of search results.

This obviously will not be the case for every business. Depending on your space, it may be more competitive and challenging to rank for these keywords. But anecdotally, we’ve had experiences where it was relatively easy to rank for comparison keywords with clients who were in competitive spaces as well as clients who were not.

Coupled with the high conversion rates discussed above, the potential for comparison keywords to be low hanging fruit from a rankings perspective is another reason they’re worth prioritizing.

3. Competitor Comparison Landing Pages Can Aid in the Sales Process

Lastly, the content and format of competitor comparison landing pages is well suited to inform potential customers about how a product or service differs from competitors’ products, and therefore can help prime prospects for sales conversations.

We’ve also had clients remark that they like the ability to direct prospects to comparison pages to help them better understand their unique selling propositions (USP) and the concrete differences between their products and relevant competitors that prospects may also be considering.

3 Unique Strategies for Creating Competitor Comparison Landing Pages

There are 3 unique comparison page strategies that we’ve found to work well but haven’t commonly seen discussed by other brands and agencies.

The first two strategies use long-form content to target comparison keywords instead of the usual short-form landing page format. The third strategy is to target different variations of competitor comparison keywords beyond just “brand vs. competitor.”

Let’s look at each.

1. Use Blog Posts Instead of the Usual Landing Page Format

The prevailing method for creating competitor comparison pages (as you have likely seen if you have ever looked at one) is to use a short-form landing page format.

In other words, a concise, conversion-focused page with the elements we discussed above: a feature comparison table, bullet points or short paragraphs about the service’s differentiators, customer testimonials, pricing comparison, and CTAs.

Here’s a SaaS comparison page example of Pipedrive vs. Salesforce that follows this usual format:

At first glance, there’s nothing overtly wrong with this page. But in our experience, there are a number of weaknesses with using this type of landing page format that blog posts or longer-form content can solve:

These comparison landing pages are often too basic to be compelling to advanced prospects. We have looked at tons of comparison pages and too often they offer very little detail that is useful for helping (particularly advanced B2B SaaS) target audiences understand the true differences between competing products. This is especially true for prospects that have experience using products in your category, and are looking for an alternative that can solve their pain points better than their current solution.

Landing page formats tend to be harder to get ranking. It’s often much more difficult to get a landing page to rank highly in search engines, especially for brands with lower domain ratings and authority in their space. A blog post format gives you more room to include relevant SEO keywords and answer the intent of the searcher, so blog posts often allow you to compete better with established competitors in the SERPs.

Landing page formats are at times a mismatch for meeting search intent. There are cases in which top results for a comparison keyword are blog posts (not landing pages). This is Google signaling that searchers are looking for more in-depth content. In these scenarios, landing pages are unlikely to satisfy search intent and therefore unlikely to rank. And if a page doesn’t rank highly, it doesn’t matter how high its conversion rate is.

Furthermore, conversion rates of landing pages are not always higher than conversion rates of blog posts, as we discussed and presented data to support in a previous post. So using a blog post doesn’t necessarily mean you need to sacrifice conversion rate, and in some cases, blog posts can actually convert better than a landing page.

For all of these reasons, we typically use blog posts instead of landing pages when creating competitor comparisons, which can convert at an extremely high rate (as shown above) while solving all of these potential issues.

Check out our article on SEO content writing for an in-depth look at the writing process we use to create these pages.

2. Use a Hybrid Landing Page + Blog Post Format

We have also had success with using a hybrid comparison page format that adds long-form blog-style copywriting at the bottom of a comparison landing page to help with SEO ranking and provide greater detail for prospects that want it.

This can be approached in a number of ways. If you have pre-existing comparison landing pages and are having trouble getting them to rank, you can write longer form editorial content and add that to the bottom of those pages to help with SEO.

Alternatively, you could create the blog post first to have the highest likelihood of ranking. And then once you’ve achieved that ranking, build a landing page-style template around it later to optimize the page for conversions.

Lastly, you could create a hybrid page from the get-go. Either way, based on what we’re seeing, it’s absolutely worth testing a hybrid strategy.

You can find an example of us describing how we used this with a client in this post.

3. Target ‘Competitor vs. Competitor’ or ‘Competitor Alternatives’ Keywords to Get Discovered by Prospects Looking at Other Brands

A final strategy we use that’s less common is to look for “competitor vs. competitor” and “competitor alternatives” keywords. By targeting these variations, you can reach prospects that are showing clear buying-intent but may not have heard about your solution yet.

‘Competitor vs. Competitor’ Keywords

“Competitor vs. competitor” keywords are search queries in which prospects want to understand the differences between two of your competitors, not including you! This can be especially useful for startups or lesser known brands that have less search demand.

We’ll often use this approach when we search for our client’s brand versus competitor keywords in SEO tools and find there to be no registered search volume. For example, here’s a screenshot showing no registered search volume for “Circuit vs Onfleet” (Circuit being a past client of ours, Onfleet being one of their competitors).

Meanwhile, we found that there was some registered search volume for “Postmates vs. Onfleet” (both solutions in which Circuit could be a viable alternative), as shown here:

So, we created a three-way SaaS product comparison — “Postmates vs. Onfleet vs. Circuit” — to piggyback off of that search demand, and insert our client into that conversation and consideration among prospects.

At the time of this writing, that page ranks in position one for the query ‘postmates vs onfleet’ in Google:

There are a lot of instances in which these opportunities exist and are worth taking advantage of, especially for small businesses with lesser known brands.

‘Competitor Alternatives’ Keywords

While most people associate competitor comparison landing pages with only “versus” keywords, “competitor alternatives” keywords are a close cousin that many marketers ignore but that actually convert the highest out of all the buying-intent keyword categories we’ve measured.

People often search these terms when they’re either (a) a competitor’s customer that’s unsatisfied with their current solution, or (b) wanting to compare the solution they’re considering to other options before making a purchase decision. In both cases, their buying-intent is high and these are valuable prospects to show up for in search results.

So, in addition to targeting “brand vs. competitor” and “competitor vs. competitor” keywords for our clients, we also look for opportunities where there is some search demand for their “competitor alternatives” keywords.

As a hypothetical example, if we were working with Podia, a platform for building websites and digital products (online courses, webinars, etc.), and their sales team said that their top SaaS competitors were Wix, Squarespace, ClickFunnels, and WordPress — we’d plug “wix alternatives,” “squarespace alternatives,” etc. into our SEO tools, assess search volumes, analyze the search results for each term, and prioritize which ones to go after.

We’ll typically target these pieces with list-style blog posts because that is what search intent generally calls for. We put our client at the top of the list and walk through their unique differentiators in detail to clearly communicate the advantages they can offer over other solutions. Then, we include a call-to-action to reach out and learn more about their service before carrying on with the list of competitors.

Learn More about Our SEO and Content Marketing Agency

Our Agency: If you want to hire us to execute a content marketing strategy built around driving lead generation and sales, not just traffic, you can learn more about our service and pricing here. We also offer a paid search service, which you can learn about here.

Join Our Content Marketing Team: If you’re a content marketer or writer and would love to do content marketing in this way, we’d love to have you apply to join our team.

Our Content Marketing Course: Individuals looking to learn our agency’s content strategy and become better marketers, consultants, or business owners can join our private course and community, taught via case studies, and presented in both written and video content formats. We include several details and examples not found on this blog. Our course is also built into a community, so people ask questions, start discussions, and share their work in the lesson pages themselves, and we, along with other members, give feedback. Learn more here.

How to Find & Rank for Bottom of Funnel Keywords

Cameron Brown — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 16:27:07 +0000

In our experience working with dozens of brands and tracking conversion rates for hundreds of blog posts, we have learned that ranking for bottom of the funnel keywords is the most efficient and effective way to generate conversions through SEO. The inverse — focusing on top of the funnel keywords — is, ironically, the more popular approach to keyword strategy but in our experience it leads to very low conversion rates and ultimately poor ROI from SEO.

In this post, we share data from our client work that demonstrates this, and cover everything you need to know about what bottom of funnel keywords are and what it takes to rank for them.

Table of Contents

What are bottom of the funnel keywords?
- Top of the funnel vs. bottom of the funnel keywords
The main types of bottom of funnel keywords
Ways to find bottom of the funnel keywords
How to rank for bottom of the funnel keywords

Note: If you’d like help identifying and ranking for your bottom of funnel keywords, you can learn more about our agency here and reach out about working with us here.

What Are Bottom of the Funnel Keywords?

Bottom of the funnel keywords are search queries in which people indicate that they have intent to buy a product or service. They are also referred to as “buying-intent keywords.”

Top of the Funnel vs. Bottom of the Funnel Keywords

In contrast, top of funnel keywords are keywords that could still be searched by a brand’s target audience, but do not directly indicate that searchers are in the market for their product or service.

In our analyses across dozens of clients, we have found that bottom of the funnel, high buying-intent keywords don’t just convert a little bit better than top of funnel, low buying-intent keywords, they often convert hundreds (and in some cases thousands) of percent better. Yes, it’s that dramatic.

This is summarized in this analytics screenshot from our article on Pain Point SEO (our agency’s foundational SEO strategy):

The right most column shows new user signups from each page. The three boxed posts rank for bottom of funnel keywords (via our Pain Point SEO approach). The rest rank for top of funnel keywords, that is, something the target audience could search for, but not a high buying-intent keyword.

The new user signups from the three Pain Point SEO posts are hundreds of percent higher.

We also showed this at a larger scale in an analysis of 60+ posts for our client Geekbot:

The posts targeting bottom of the funnel, high buying-intent keywords converted 2400% better. In that case study, you can read about how the higher conversion rates more than made up for any differences in search volume or traffic between the two buckets.

This is why we very strongly feel businesses should spend far more effort and time creating bottom of funnel content to rank for their buying-intent keywords before moving up the funnel. But most don’t.

There’s a culture in SEO and content marketing where marketers think their company needs to be the one to educate all potential customers at every stage of the funnel, starting at the top. This is not true, and it results in a huge waste of resources on content marketing that does little to help get conversions. For almost every business, there are plenty of people in later stages of the buyer’s journey that are already searching for bottom of funnel search terms.

Therefore, we think a more effective SEO content strategy should prioritize bottom of the funnel topics to capture people who are ready (or getting close) to make a purchase decision.

The Main Types of Bottom of Funnel Keywords

We view bottom of the funnel keywords as any that indicate the searcher has purchase intent (in that respect we don’t care too much about distinguishing between bottom and middle of funnel, anything with buying-intent can be thought of as bottom of funnel). And, as we define in our Pain Point SEO framework, these basically all fall into one of three categories:

Category Keywords
Comparison and Alternative Keywords
Jobs to Be Done Keywords

Let’s define and look at examples of each.

#1. Category Keywords

Category keywords are search queries that describe exactly what you offer — i.e., the person searching is shopping for the specific products or services you offer. They’re the top terms that most businesses are bidding on through Google Ads, and the most obvious keywords that any business would want their website to rank for.

This includes keywords like “best accounting software” or “men’s running shoes.” If you sell accounting software or men’s running shoes, these are keywords you absolutely want to be ranking for. In our case study on What Blog Keywords Convert the Highest?, we found category keywords to have an average conversion rate of 4.85% (to be clear, this is very good — the majority of SEO content that brands publish converts to product related CTAs at less than half a percent). This is why we have long advised that brands prioritize these keywords, and our data presented in that case study further supports that assertion.

A key thing to keep in mind about category keywords is that there are often more category keywords that closely describe your business than many companies realize. For example, if you sell accounting software, you may have distinct category keywords pertaining to different features (e.g. invoicing, time tracking, etc.), industry verticals (e.g. small business, freelancer, etc.), or product category variations (e.g. software, app, tools).

We find that many (if not most) of the clients we work with are in a similar situation where there are many different ways that people search for what they sell. As you begin your keyword research, it’s useful to find as many of these variations as possible.

#2. Comparison and Alternative Keywords

Comparison and alternative keywords are queries that indicate the search intent is to learn about how different solutions compare, and which product or service would best suit their needs.

This includes alternative keywords like “Salesforce alternative” and versus keywords like “Salesforce vs. Pipedrive.” And one of the most interesting takeaways from the case study cited above is that comparison and alternatives keywords convert at a higher rate than any other keyword type. We found them to have an average conversion rate of 8.43%! This is not surprising. Anyone searching these terms knows what they want, even knows the options in this space, and is just comparing before trying or buying one — their buying-intent is very high.

Tactic worth trying: When working with new or smaller brands where there aren’t many searchers looking for their brand versus a competitor, we’ve had success creating content targeting “[competitor] vs. [other competitor]” keywords. We’ll create content for “[competitor] vs. [other competitor] vs. [our client’s brand]” to piggyback off the search volume of people comparing our clients’ competitors, and insert them into the list of options being weighed by prospects. We have found these terms to be relatively easy to rank for, even for clients with low domain authority.

3. Jobs to Be Done Keywords

The final category in our Pain Point SEO framework is “Jobs To Be Done” keywords — queries that describe a job to be done (or pain, challenge) that is best solved with your product or service.

These are slightly more middle of the funnel because they don’t explicitly say “software” or “service” (like category keywords) or mention competitors (like alternatives keywords) — these are mostly “how to” queries: how to organize design files, how to do a poll in Slack, how to get video testimonials from customers.

Although these users may not be aware of your brand, or competitors, or precisely what they need for their problem, they still have the potential to buy because they have a job or problem that you solve.

We insert our clients’ names in these conversations by creating content to specifically solve what the reader is searching for in the context of the client’s solution, and we’ve seen these convert at a ridiculously high rate.

Ways to Find Bottom of the Funnel Keywords

1. Start With Brainstorming Your Category, Comparison, and Jobs to Be Done Keywords

Before you begin using search engines and keyword research tools, it’s worth listing out all of the search queries you can think of in the three bottom of funnel keyword frameworks discussed above:

Category keywords: List all of the different ways that people might phrase your product or service.

Comparison keywords: List out all of your top competitors in [Competitor brand vs. Your brand] and [Competitor brand + alternatives] formats.

Jobs to be done keywords: List out all of the phrases that indicate someone has a problem that your product helps solve. Read our JTBD post for guidance on how to do this.

This brainstorming session will establish a foundation for the rest of your keyword research. You may not end up targeting all of these, but they’ll lead you to discovering your highest buying-intent target keywords.

Note: Check out our post on content ideation for additional guidance on this step.

2. Begin Googling Your BOFU Keyword Ideas

Once you have a running list of bottom of funnel (BOFU) keyword ideas, you can begin analyzing the search engine results page (SERP) for each keyword. This will give you insight into the exact phrasing people are using when they search for that topic, as well as provide you with related searches and other valuable keyword ideas.

As you analyze the SERP for each keyword, here are some aspects to pay attention to.

SEO Titles

The exact phrasing that is used in the search result titles, known as SEO titles (i.e., the blue links), is a good indicator of the specific target keywords and phrasing people are using when they search that term.

In some cases, the SEO titles throughout the page will use the exact phrase you typed in. For example, if you Google “accounting software,” all of the results use that exact phrase in the title. You can therefore feel confident that is the correct phrasing to use as your target keyword.

In other cases, you might find that the SEO titles use a different variation of the phrase you typed in. For example, if we look at the SERP for the keyword “executive assistant service,” we see phrases such as “Remote executive assistants,” “Virtual executive assistants,” and “Virtual administrative assistants.”

With that in mind, you might decide that a better keyword to target might be (or include) one of those variations.

Google Suggested Search

Finally, as you type in your keyword ideas, you can find great opportunities by paying attention to Google Suggested Search. For example, if you type in “accounting software,” you’ll find that people search for “accounting software for small business,” “accounting software for nonprofits,” and “accounting software with payroll.” These could all be potential keywords to target with dedicated pages.

3. Using Keyword Research Tools

By following the two steps above, you can make significant progress on finding bottom of the funnel keyword opportunities to go after. But, once you get this initial brainstorming done, it’s useful to plug them into keyword research tools to:

See their search volumes
Find other similar ideas and long-tail keyword variations you didn’t think of

We use Clearscope and Ahrefs, but you can use SEMrush, Google Search Console, Moz Keyword Explorer, or any other keyword research tool.

Here are some examples of how we use keyword research tools to find additional BOFU keyword opportunities:

Keywords Explorer: Most SEO tools offer a keyword explorer feature that allows you to type in specific queries and find related keywords to that topic. You can use this much like you used Google in the above example: type in the BOFU keywords you brainstormed and find all the similar variations of that keyword. The key advantage of doing this in a keyword research tool, however, is that you get data on search volume and difficulty that can help you be strategic in how you prioritize keywords to go after.

Content Gap: Tools such as Ahrefs offer a “Content Gap” feature that allows you to review organic keywords for competitor domains compared to your own to see where your keyword gaps are. It’s important to note, however, that most companies are doing a terrible job of ranking for BOFU keywords, so you likely will see tons of top of funnel keywords in your competitors’ rankings. Don’t be scared or deterred from your BOFU strategy when you see this. We assure you, we have seen under the hood of so many brands’ analytics — they are not getting many conversions from these top of funnel rankings. So, it can be useful to filter for specific keyword modifiers, such as “software” or “service,” to find keywords in the various BOFU frameworks discussed above. Check out our post on researching competitor keywords for a deep dive on how to use this tool.

Organic Keywords: As you publish content to rank for your BOFU keywords, you can periodically plug that URL into your keyword research tool to see all the organic keywords it’s ranking for. Often you’ll find variations of your target keyword in which you’re ranking on some page below page one that also have high buying-intent, but that you could target with a separate, dedicated page to get a top ranking position for that variation of the query.

How to Rank for Bottom of the Funnel Keywords

Understanding the various bottom of funnel keyword frameworks and how to find them for your business is necessary, but the difficult part is creating blog posts or landing pages that actually rank for these buying-intent keywords.

We have written extensively about the in-depth process we use, and that we feel is needed, in order to create content that ranks for these highly competitive BOFU keywords.

To understand what it takes, check out our post on SEO content writing, which covers the following 5 step process:

1. Topic: Come up with content ideas and identify target keywords that have business value.

2. SERP Analysis: Analyze the search engine results page for each of those keywords to understand which topics need to be covered in your article for it to rank.

3. Structure: Choose the angle and structure of your article based on that SERP analysis.

4. Writing: Write the content in a way that fills in that structure with compelling information to sell your product or service.

5. On-Page SEO: Optimize your content with on-page SEO.

We see content marketers make mistakes at every stage of this process. So, as we cover each step throughout that post, we discuss those and their implications so you can avoid them in your business.

Learn More About Our SEO and Content Marketing Agency

Our Agency: If you want to hire us to execute a content marketing strategy built around driving lead generation and sales, not just traffic, you can learn more about our service and pricing here. We also offer a paid search service which you can learn about here.

Join Our Content Marketing Team: If you’re a content marketer or writer and would love to do content marketing in this way, we’d love to have you apply to join our team.

Our Content Marketing Course: Individuals looking to learn our agency’s content strategy and become better marketers, consultants, or business owners can join our private course and community, taught via case studies, and presented in both written and video content formats. We include several details and examples not found on this blog. Our course is also built into a community, so people ask questions, start discussions, and share their work in the lesson pages themselves, and we, along with other members, give feedback. Learn more here.

Grow and Convert

Outsourcing Content Creation: A 5-Step Vetting Process

Common Misconceptions About Outsourcing Content Creation

Misconception #1: Hiring a content writer is equivalent to hiring a content marketer

Misconception #2: Overemphasis on whether to hire in-house vs. outsource content

Misconception #3: Outsourcing content means you won’t need to be a part of the process

5 Steps for Vetting Content Marketers and Agencies

Step 1: Decide whether you want content to generate leads, traffic, or something else

Step 2: Ask them to come up with content ideas and walk you through how the ideas would work to achieve that goal

Step 3: Ask them to explain their content creation process (and how they go about expressing product and domain expertise through content)

Step 4: Ask them how they would drive traffic to your content (i.e. What’s their process for content promotion?)

Step 5: Ask them to explain how they measure and report on results

How Much Does It Cost to Outsource Content Creation?

How We Hold Ourselves Accountable

Learn More About Our SEO and Content Marketing Agency

Announcing Our Next Public Challenge: Doubling Our Agency

Why Share Our Journey Publicly Again?

Where Our Business Is Right Now — And Why We Feel It’s Time to Scale

Our Public Goal and What We Plan on Sharing

Best Content Marketing Agencies in 2024: 5 Options to Consider and How to Choose the Right One for Your Business

4 Factors to Consider When Evaluating Content Marketing Agencies

1. What’s Your Goal From Content (Traffic, Emails, or Leads and Purchases)? And Is Their Content Strategy Optimized to Achieve That Goal?

2. Do They Have a Process for Expressing Product and Domain Expertise Through Content?

3. Do They Actively Promote the Content They Produce?

Ensure They Don’t Use a “Keyword Sprinkling” Strategy and Call That SEO

4. Do They Have Detailed Case Studies That Demonstrate the Effectiveness of Their Strategy?

Grow and Convert’s Process: How We’ve Addressed Each of These Factors

1. Our Content Strategy Is Optimized to Drive Leads and Sales

Our Philosophy on Content Marketing Strategy

B2B Content Marketing Strategy

SaaS Content Marketing Strategy

B2C Content Marketing Strategy

How We Hold Ourselves Accountable

2. We Use an Interview-Based Writing Process to Express Product and Domain Expertise Through Content

3. We Use a Two Pronged Content Promotion Process

4. We Publish Detailed Case Studies to Demonstrate and Prove the Effectiveness of Our Content Strategy

Should You Hire a Content Marketing Agency or Build a Team In-House?

Other Content Marketing Agencies to Consider

1. Animalz

2. Siege Media

3. Optimist

4. Codeless

Want to Work with Us or Learn How to Implement Our Content Marketing Strategy?

Most Profitable Companies: U.S. vs. Rest of the World, 2023

Key Findings

Top 500 Most Profitable Companies: U.S. vs. the World [Infographic]

10 Most Profitable of the Largest Companies in the World, 2023

The average profit per company within this elite group is an impressive $69 billion.

10 Least Profitable of the Largest Companies in the World, 2023

Most Profitable Sectors for the World’s Largest Companies, 2023

Ranking Countries by Total Corporate Profit, 2023

Continental Analysis

Top 10 U.S. Companies with the Highest Profit, 2023

Top 10 U.S. Companies with the Highest Loss, 2023

Most Profitable Sectors for the Top U.S. Companies, 2023

Methodology

Approach to Analysis

Content Creation Process: How to Produce Unique Content

Flaws of the Typical Content Creation Process

1. Writers Are Expected to Come Up with Ideas and Arguments on Their Own

2. Strategists and Writers Let SEO Tools Dictate the Direction of Their Content

Our Content Creation Process for Producing Unique or Advanced Content

1. Content Ideation: Generate Topic Ideas Through In-Depth Interviews and Keyword Research

2. Content Interviews: Interview Subject Matter Experts from within Our Client’s Organization for Each New Content Topic

3. Content Writing: Get Feedback and Align on the Content at Multiple Stages of the Process

4. Measurement: Track Content Performance to See How It Contributes towards Your Marketing Goals (and Make Adjustments Accordingly)

Learn More about Our SEO and Content Marketing Agency

The Content Brand Framework: How to Differentiate Your Company with Content

What Is a Content Brand?

The Foundation of Building a Content Brand: What Makes Your Company Unique?

Case Study: Figuring Out What Makes Grow and Convert Unique

Coming Up with Core Concepts for Your Brand

Grow and Convert’s Core Concepts

Pain Point SEO (Strategic Difference)

Pain Point Copywriting (Process Difference)

Content Distribution Strategy (Strategic and Process Difference)

Content Brand (Philosophical and Strategic Difference)

Produce Content That Maps to Core Concepts

Examples of Drift Content That Supports Conversational Marketing

Examples of Clearscope Content That Supports Conversational Marketing

**Step 5: Ask them to explain how they measure and report on results**