Content Marketing – 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.

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.

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 Often Should You Update Website Content to Maintain Rankings? (Best Practices & Past Results)

Meg Riley — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 17:47:30 +0000

There are three main buckets when it comes to updating website content:

1. Updates to ensure accuracy when talking about your brand, products, or services — we’ll call these “brand-accuracy” updates. If you update or add new products or services, or go through a significant rebrand, you’ll have to update your website content to reflect those changes. But obviously, there is no “how often to do this?” question here because it’s self-explanatory. If you update a product feature, you should immediately update that product page (and any other content about that particular functionality).

2. Updates to general marketing site copy (e.g., your home page, About Us page, resource pages, product or feature pages). Our rule of thumb here is: if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. These don’t require updates if they’re accurate and accomplish the goals you set for them. Which leads us to our next point…

3. Key SEO-based pages (i.e., the vast majority of this is long-form blog content, though many brands optimize and track conversions from their home page, too) — and this is what most digital marketers are curious about during our conversations about updating website content. But there is no magic number here.

The intention behind creating SEO content is to rank highly in search engines and drive organic traffic (and, in most cases, see conversions from content). So, considering the goals of SEO content — updates should not revolve around some arbitrary schedule — the trigger should be slipping/stalled rankings.

The best way to stay on top of content updates is to monitor search engine rankings. If you notice rankings decline or stagnate, then an update is warranted. If not, you don’t have to update for the sake of updating.

We do this for a living (publish new content to get SEO rankings and keep old content updated to maintain rankings). So, we put together this guide to share our process for updating SEO-driven content. In it, we explain:

The best ways to monitor content and schedule updates (including the tools we use)

Best practices for updating website content

Setting the right expectations for updates — the importance of updates and what to expect after making changes

Results from our experience

How to Monitor Content & Schedule Strategic Updates

To monitor rankings, we recommend a tool like Ahrefs or Google Search Console (this is not as ideal, but it’s free, and if you don’t have a high volume of keywords to track, it can work for a period).

Ahrefs has a tool called Rank Tracker, where you can plug in the keywords on your content plan and see the pages that rank for them, with the most current rank position. Ahrefs will even show you how rankings improve or decline and provide a dropdown where you can review the entire rank history.

Google Search Console shows a list of all your ranking pages, the keywords they rank for, and the average position. You can add all of the keywords to a spreadsheet, with the page URL, and update the sheet every week or so to catch when the average position changes. Again, this is a more time-consuming process, but it can work for smaller teams or teams that don’t want to shell out on SEO software just yet.

Here are the best practices to keep in mind during content monitoring:

As we said above, you don’t need to update content until you notice rankings slip or stagnate.

If you were seeing steady movement up page one, but rankings start to stall (e.g., isn’t pushing past position #5), then updating content could be one method to keep climbing the rankings, or you may need to employ other tactics like link building to achieve higher rankings. We’ll explain what to look for to determine if updating could build some momentum.

If you notice rankings or traffic start to decline (not just in one week, but over the course of many weeks or months), it’s a clear indicator that content does not match search intent and needs an update. Backlink strength may also be a factor here, but if there’s a steady decline in rankings, our experience would tell us an update is required to align with search intent.

So, we’ll stress again: there is no magical timing for updating website content. The most efficient approach is to monitor its performance and take action when you notice a problem.

Mini Case Study: Auditing Website Rankings Helps You Identify Which Pages Are Due for Updates

During a rankings audit for a particular SaaS client, we noticed our post for an industry-specific keyword related to “estimating software” started to decline in rankings. It had been moving up to page one, plateaued around the bottom (positions #9 and #10), then began to dip. So we see here a combination of stalled and slipping rankings.

We performed SERP analysis to see if the content still matched the search intent of the target keyword (explained below) and found the results on page one had actually changed since we first wrote the post.

Google was now primarily ranking list posts comparing different software options. But our post didn’t have a list. It didn’t compare multiple options. It only talked about the client’s product. At the time we wrote it, that was fine — a single landing page for one product was part of the search intent. But that changed over time. So, the drop in rankings was understandable.

We reworked the piece to include a list of competing software so readers could review and compare top options (while also learning about our client’s solution). Then, we changed the title to reflect the updates and show readers we cover all the most popular solutions.

After the updates, we saw the post not only recover, but steadily move up page one to position #1 (image above, blue line is the ranking position, higher on the page). Since hitting the top of page one, we’ve seen some fluctuation, but the post never dips past position #3 and remains, most of the time, at #1. So we do not need to update it again until rankings fall.

Bonus: Use Content Optimization Software to Monitor SEO Scores

Another note for our more advanced readers: content optimization software (like Clearscope) is a category of SEO software that can be really useful to create, monitor, and update content.

These tools analyze and grade content based on how well it aligns with search intent and existing rankings for a keyword. Some of these tools have a “content tracker” that monitors SEO scores; you can see if grades fall and use that as a trigger to update your content.

Tracking SEO scores can be extremely helpful because they may start to decline before rankings; by monitoring these scores, theoretically, you can “get ahead” of updates and make changes before you see a dip in performance.

Best Practices for Updating Website Content

Now that you’ve identified what content to update, the next question is how to actually update them.

1. Use Content Optimization Software to Check SEO Scores

The first thing we do is check the content’s SEO score in Clearscope. We like to aim for an A score or better on Clearscope, but if you’re using other on-page optimization software, adjust accordingly. At this step, we’ll adjust the keywords in the piece to achieve an A score.

2. Check That Content Matches the Target Audience’s Search Intent

The next thing we do is run a search for the target keyword to see if there are larger misalignments between our content vs. what Google is favoring and ranking. This is a critical step (arguably the most critical) and totally separate from checking the Clearscope score.

We wrote more about our SERP and search intent analysis process here, but in short we check to see if our content matches what Google is already ranking in terms of:

Format — Is Google favoring blog posts, landing pages, lists, narratives, etc.

Topics — What topics and subtopics do most of the highest ranking pieces tend to cover? That’s an indication that Google feels those topics are important to this keyword.

In this step we look at the content with fresh eyes and see if it still matches search intent (presumably, it did when we first wrote it, but if you’re evaluating content that was written without this kind of search intent matching in mind, it may never have matched search intent — it could be way off).

Also, some common sense and critical thinking is important here. Beyond finding patterns in what is already ranking you can also think back to your original strategy and consider how SERP results have changed since you initially wrote content. What’s relevant now that wasn’t before?

For example, new products, competitors, or technologies can pop up within your realm, and if your content isn’t up-to-date with the most current solutions, it could be noticeably out of date or not fulfilling search intent. For example, if you have posts ranking for tech trends from pre-2023, there’s a good chance they don’t mention the rise of AI and ChatGPT, which probably makes them incomplete now. That’s a major example but minor examples like this exist in any space.

Mini Case Study: Updating Content Relevancy Improves Rankings

In addition, societal changes can impact SERP results and search intent. For example, take the keyword “time tracking software” — this is an opportunity we looked at for a client a while back.

At the time (pre-COVID and remote work), the SERP was specific to time clock software for businesses to track employee hours.

If you look at the SERP for this keyword today, the results now talk about two types of software solutions: time clock software for businesses and time tracking software for individuals to monitor remote work.

Since more people are working from home, there is an increased interest in solutions to track working hours.

So the search intent isn’t entirely different — there are still Googlers doing that search with the intent of finding traditional time clock software — but there is another audience to consider now. Another fraction of these Googlers are looking for apps to track remote work.

So we have to update content so it’s helpful for both audiences: instead of keeping the post specific to one type of solution, it’s more competitive to create a review guide explaining the two types of time tracking apps.

Then, you can review software in both categories, sell your product to the right portion of Googlers, and help each reader find their best solution.

Performing SERP analysis helps you determine the high-level ideas for content and where to start making changes.

3. Double-Check That the Details in Content Are Up-to-Date and Accurate

As a final step, make sure these details are polished:

Stats, examples, and quotes are up to date.
There are no broken links.
Update SEO titles and meta descriptions for accuracy and relevance (e.g., update the year to the current year if it’s in your title).

Bonus: Display “Last Updated Date” on Article Pages

A final tip: you can also try adding the “Last Updated” date alongside the original publishing date in the article schema. Including both dates can help Google “catch” updates more easily, and it shows readers your content is current. You can make these changes within your content management system.

In our experience, we’ve seen that displaying the “Last Updated” date can encourage an immediate boost in keyword rankings for older pages you’ve recently updated.

What to Expect from Updates

It could take a few weeks or a month for updates to make a significant impact (i.e., you see rankings recover or even improve), and you’ll likely see volatility in rankings for a period; this just means your post may jump around a bit as Google finds a new home for it. The movement will eventually settle down, and you’ll see the content’s new rank.

You should also know that not all updates make a difference. It’s not guaranteed that just because you update a page, rankings will move up at all. In those cases, content may require more comprehensive detail, better-quality links, or more relevant media to reclaim its position; or perhaps you’re just targeting a really hard keyword and not pushing hard enough on the promotional side.

Our Results from Client Content

Before wrapping up, let’s talk about how updating content proved beneficial for another one of our clients.

This particular client of ours was seeing 200+ trial sign-ups per month from our content, but around the end of 2022, we noticed conversions started dropping off. Since conversions are our primary metric of success, this is what we noticed first, then we dug into rankings and website traffic to identify the cause of the dip.

During our research, we realized some of our posts had lost rankings for primary (and secondary) keywords — so content wasn’t being found or viewed as often, and fewer visitors meant fewer conversions.

We performed SERP analysis for the primary (and valuable secondary) keywords we’d lost rankings for and we saw that many SERPs had changed. So, we brainstormed ways to re-angle content to better align with search intent.

Some content only needed light changes (e.g., adding new product features or competitor information) while other posts required heavier remixes (e.g., turning a product feature article into a list post mentioning several products, as described in examples above)

After we completed updates to all posts on our queue, rankings recovered and trial sign-ups ended up at an all-time high.

Prior to updates, content was averaging 171 conversions per month. After updates, our content averages 258 conversions per month.

You can read more about this project and using secondary keywords to your advantage here: How to Find and Use Secondary Keywords to Increase Conversions: A Case Study

The Sparknotes

There is no golden rule when it comes to updating website content — you can’t say “content requires regular updates every month or year” because it’s just not that simple. Despite what other blog posts on this topic may suggest.

Timing website updates and choosing which posts to prioritize is highly dependent on your content marketing strategy, the piece of content, the keyword(s) you’re targeting, site performance and domain authority, promotional efforts, business goals — the whole gamut.

The best way to maintain content is to monitor rankings and troubleshoot when you notice numbers stall or slip. If content is performing well for you, there’s no obligation to update it because X amount of time has passed. If it’s not broken, don’t touch it.

Once you identify what needs attention, you can begin slotting updates and determining your strategies to revamp content.

Want to Work with Us or Learn More about How We Approach Content Marketing?

Our Agency: If you want to hire us to execute content marketing in this way, 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 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.

3 Key Challenges of Healthcare Content Marketing & How to Solve Them

Cameron Brown — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 22:28:41 +0000

Over the last 5 years running our agency and working with a number of different healthcare providers and product businesses, we’ve come to understand that content marketing in the healthcare industry has some unique challenges compared to other industries. Specifically:

Difficult and technical writing: It’s difficult to find writers that can write clearly and accurately about the technical aspects of healthcare topics (describing concepts correctly, using the right terminology in the right contexts, etc.). At the same time, the consequences of putting out inaccurate information are especially high in the healthcare sector because doing so can severely diminish credibility or even have legal ramifications. So extremely precise yet nuanced writing is essential in healthcare but hard to come by.
Compassionate selling: The selling of products and services in healthcare content needs to be done thoughtfully and with consideration for readers that are often under duress when searching for solutions to their medical problems. There needs to be a careful balance of educating versus selling that requires finesse to execute well.
Nuanced SEO keyword strategy: The most effective form of content marketing is that which ranks for search terms that (a) your target audience would actually Google and (b) shows some buying intent for your offering. Executing this well for healthcare is tricky. You need a really deep understanding of customer or patient questions, what those questions indicate about the stage of the process the patient is in, when it’s appropriate to sell your product or service, and more.

Our healthcare clients have often remarked on how difficult it has been to solve these challenges both internally as well as with outside writers and agencies they’ve worked with.

So, in this post, we’re going to discuss how we’ve approached solving these challenges in our work with healthcare organizations and product companies. As usual, we will share examples and case studies from our work to demonstrate and support the methods we discuss.

If you’re in the healthcare or med tech space and looking to build a content marketing or SEO operation, feel free to reach out to us here.

What Is Healthcare Content Marketing?

Before we get into the key challenges below, let’s first define how we think about healthcare content marketing at our agency.

From our perspective, healthcare content marketing is the process of creating content that’s designed to a) reach potential patients or customers, b) help them better understand their health-related problems and answer their health-related questions, and c) share with them how our clients’ products and services can help them solve those problems.

Broadly speaking, healthcare content can include many different content formats: blog posts, infographics, webinars with healthcare professionals, podcast interviews with industry experts, quizzes, video content, white papers, etc.

However, for the purposes of this article, we will focus on search engine optimization (SEO) focused blog content, because that’s what we do at our agency, and that’s fundamentally what many marketers and businesses have in mind when they think about content marketing.

Now, let’s dive into the key challenges of healthcare content marketing we shared above, and discuss how we’ve approached solving them.

Challenge #1: Finding Content Writers That Can Accurately Express Subject Matter Expertise

The ability to express subject matter expertise through content is a critical, but often under-emphasized, aspect of effective content marketing (especially in the B2B space where content is aimed at advanced target audiences). However, this need is taken to the extreme in healthcare content marketing which often involves discussing medical conditions or providing medical advice to consumers, and therefore requires the utmost accuracy from both an ethical and a brand credibility standpoint.

Now, like other industries, finding agencies or writers that have processes to gain and express subject matter expertise through content turns out to be quite hard because it’s common practice in content marketing for writers to self-research topics to produce their articles. This is problematic in most industries, but for healthcare products and services that need to discuss and portray medical-related topics clearly and accurately, it’s simply unacceptable.

Healthcare content must be informed and vetted by subject matter experts within your organization (often doctors, licensed care providers, or scientific researchers).

Furthermore, for most healthcare organizations or companies, it’s important that the views of their care providers, founders, or leadership are expressed, not that of any expert on the topic.

Why?

Because their organization and brand often has a unique process or product to solve a common healthcare problem. That unique twist is almost always extremely important to their brand. It’s why customers should choose them, what they innovated, and how they’re differentiated.

So, the writer or agency can’t just interview some random expert or doctor (for example using a tool like HARO) on a topic. They need to understand the importance of interviewing your company’s employees. Then, they need to be able to deftly craft narratives that accurately express the company’s brand positioning. It’s not trivial to find people who can do this (trust us, hiring writers is one of our biggest challenges).

As an example, our client Cognitive FX (discussed below) built their entire brand and business on a new, cutting edge way of treating concussions. Specifically, they developed a process to identify where in your brain you’re experiencing changes from a concussion, and a multidisciplinary team of doctors and therapists that tailor treatment based on each patient’s individual case. Paired together, what they offer is unlike what anyone else in the world can provide. And content for them will never be right unless the team producing it has a process to get their viewpoint on every piece they write.

The bottom line: If you’re going to do healthcare content marketing, you need to ensure that whoever you hire has a process for gaining and expressing subject matter expertise from inside your own organization for every piece of content they produce.

At Grow and Convert, we solve this by doing in-depth interviews with experts at our clients’ organizations for the articles we write.

To demonstrate what this looks like, let’s walk through an example of our process of writing an article for the healthcare client mentioned above, Cognitive FX (a world-renowned concussion treatment center based in Provo, Utah).

Expressing Subject Matter Expertise in an Article for Cognitive FX

The Target Keyword: “post-concussion headaches”

Each article we produce for our clients begins with a specific keyword that we’re targeting. Below, we’ll share more about how we select and prioritize keywords. But, for the purposes of this example, we’re going to focus on our writing process for a keyword that we’d already selected for Cognitive FX. Specifically, “post-concussion headaches.”

The Interview Preparation Process

Per our SEO content writing process, our content strategist for Cognitive FX, Olivia Seitz, began her interview preparation by reviewing the existing search results for the target keyword “post-concussion headaches” in order to figure out what topics she would need to cover in the article (and therefore ask about during her interview) in order for it to rank.

She read the top articles to see what they were saying and which subtopics they were covering. And she sought to understand the specific questions that patients have around this topic by reviewing queries from “People also ask”:

That was one part of her interview preparation. The other part was doing a simple but important thought exercise — putting herself in the mindset of a person that has this problem, and considering their concerns. For example:

What’s causing this problem?

What are the different ways that I might experience this condition?

Do my symptoms line up with the symptom profile for this condition?

How is this treated?

What are the treatment options?

How long does it take to recover?

Etc. etc. etc.

So, these were the sorts of questions she used to guide the conversation during her interview, discussed next.

Technical Topics Covered in the Interview and Discussed in the Article

For this post (and many others), Olivia interviewed Dr. Jaycie Loewen, a Clinical Neuroscientist whose deep expertise informed many treatment improvements at Cognitive FX. Dr. Loewen explained a number of complex topics during the interview, which Olivia later translated into the article. For example:

How autonomic nervous system dysfunction leads to post-concussion headaches

How neurovascular coupling dysfunction contributes to post-concussion headaches

Vestibular issues that can lead to headaches

Had Olivia tried to self-research concussion headaches, or interview some random neurologist about this topic, she almost certainly would not have even come across these topics or this terminology.

Other top ranking posts she likely would have read, such as posts by Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, or WebMD, say nothing of these specific types of headaches. It was only by interviewing Dr. Loewen that these subtopics came up.

This is what gave the article more depth, and led it to ranking in position #1 for the target keyword (as well as many other keywords) for several years.

Data from Ahrefs showing this post ranking for a cool 8.4K organic keywords with 165 in the top 3 positions. This type of reach, compounded over many articles, has led Cognitive FX to become a true thought leader in their space (as they deserve to be, given their unique approach to treating concussions).

Unique Insights Gleaned From the Interview That Differentiated the Article and Made an Impact on Readers

Because Dr. Loewen had extensive, direct experiences talking to patients on a daily basis about their concussion symptoms, she had a much more nuanced and detailed understanding of how post-concussion patients experience (and importantly, describe) headaches than what any existing articles on this topic were discussing.

For example, one unique concept that came out during the interview was the common ways in which headaches feel different to different patients. Dr. Loewen was able to break down and categorize post-concussion headaches into six different types of headaches which, remarkably, can sometimes be linked to what might actually be causing the headache. This gave us a whole new layer of information that none of the existing articles on this topic at the time were acknowledging or discussing.

Furthermore, she was also able to share the exact words and phrases that her patients use to describe their headaches, which can make an article really resonate with the searcher.

“I feel like there’s a tight band around my head.”
“My head feels like it’s blowing up like a balloon.”
“I have a constant pressure headache.”
“I feel like my head is being pulled apart between the eyes.”

In the first paragraph of the piece, we opened with these phrases about how Cognitive FX patients describe their concussion symptoms:

This ended up having a profound effect on the article’s ability to resonate with readers (and, downstream from that, produce many leads for CFX as we’ll show below). Just look at this comment left by one reader:

“I almost cried when I started to read this article.”

Again, had Olivia tried to self-research this topic, there’s no way that she would have been able to understand and share the nuanced ways in which post-concussion patients describe their headaches.

These details matter a lot in healthcare content writing, and the interview-based process we use at Grow and Convert is what allows us to translate these insights into content.

Now, let’s move onto a second key aspect of content writing: selling through your content in a considerate, compassionate way.

Challenge #2: Striking the Right Balance of Educating vs. Selling Compassionately Through Content

A key mistake that most businesses make when doing content marketing is that they don’t actually sell their products or services directly through their content. This is due to a misguided, long standing view that content is a top of funnel, strictly-educational marketing channel — not a channel for selling to readers for risk of turning them off. So blog content often only glancingly mentions their product or service (if it says anything about it at all). We disagree with this “don’t sell” approach, and we’ve long argued that it’s one of the key reasons why content fails to convert readers into customers for most businesses.

With that said, selling healthcare products and services through content requires finesse because people searching for information about health or medical issues are commonly in a vulnerable or worried state. They’re often looking to learn about or diagnose some problem they’re experiencing, and understandably healthcare businesses want to be respectful and careful about not coming off too salesy.

You can’t just push your product in the pieces as directly as you may with a less emotionally charged topic like business operations software or IT services.

This concern often leads healthcare companies to stay even further away from discussing their product or services through their content which is counterproductive to marketing goals. Content marketing is only effective insomuch as it reaches potential patients, drives lead generation, or acquires new patients or customers.

So, the ability to strike an appropriate balance with this is a second key challenge of doing content marketing for healthcare products and services.

At Grow and Convert, we navigate this first and foremost by focusing on topics (discussed more below) where it actually makes sense and would be appropriate to share about our client’s product or service. The basis of our approach still involves creating long-form, quality content pieces that thoroughly answer the queries of the reader on that particular topic. But in addition to that, the pain point and jobs to be done topics we focus on tend to offer natural, appropriate opportunities to include details of our client’s product or service.

Continuing with the example from above, let’s look at how we approach this.

Selling Cognitive FX Services Appropriately Through Content

The Article Introduction

In the introduction to the article, we share that the information discussed in the piece is based on Cognitive FX’s first-hand experiences treating concussion patients. This has a dual purpose.

On the one hand, it helps establish credibility in the eyes of readers. “Oh, these people treat concussions including concussion headaches. They’re speaking from first-hand experiences.”

On the other hand, it explicitly states that Cognitive FX has a service to treat these symptoms, which, because of the intent of the keyword (i.e., “I have this problem”) is a perfectly reasonable thing to share, even right at the beginning of the article.

If we were targeting a broader keyword that didn’t signal that searchers had this pain point that Cognitive FX’s service solves, it probably wouldn’t have made sense or been appropriate to discuss their service in the introduction. But, by focusing on a pain point topic, it made a lot of sense.

Discussion of Treatment Options

After the introduction, the majority of the piece is educational, covering in detail the key topics and queries that searchers want to understand about their concussion headaches. Throughout, the level of unique detail continues working to build trust with readers. And, because treatment options are one of the subtopics that readers are interested in and wanting to understand, again the topic presents a natural opportunity and bridge into sharing about Cognitive FX’s service.

In the post, Olivia sets this up by first discussing some of the key misconceptions about treating concussions and headache symptoms, which directly relates to the core differentiation and positioning of Cognitive FX’s service. Then, she concludes the article with an explanation about Cognitive FX’s approach of treating the root causes of concussion symptoms, versus the symptoms themselves.

This is an approach that we’ve applied across all of the content we’ve produced for Cognitive FX. We don’t shy away from sharing about their service, and just cross our fingers that readers will appreciate the information provided and feel compelled to go digging into what their service offers. We share about their service in the post itself, including what makes it different and better than other treatment options, which is crucial for producing actual leads and new patients from our content.

Challenge #3: Identifying and Ranking for SEO Keywords That Will Result in New Patients or Customers

A final key challenge is understanding which SEO keywords to target that will drive high-quality leads and sustainable conversions from your content.

When it comes to keyword strategy, a key mistake that many healthcare brands make (as well as the marketing agencies and consultants that work with them) is that they focus their content creation around keywords that have the highest search volume. But as we’ve demonstrated many times before, this often isn’t the most effective approach if your objective is conversions or lead generation. Why?

Because high search volume keywords are, inevitably, broad, introductory level topics. For example, here is the broadest, most high volume keywords you can get in Cognitive FX’s space:

135,000 monthly searches is really tempting. But who is Googling “concussion”? Anyone!

Students writing a paper on concussions

Reporters getting background info on concussions

Anyone having any conversation about concussions and stopping to learn more

Could some of the people Googling “concussion” be a potential customer of Cognitive FX? Sure, but in our experience measuring conversion rates, it’s likely a tiny, tiny fraction.

Do you want to go through the massive content marketing effort needed to rank in the top 5 of that keyword only to risk potentially never ranking and even if you do, converting only a tiny percent of those visitors into leads or sales? We don’t.

If you want to build a healthcare content marketing strategy that is focused on business results (i.e., conversions), then you need to prioritize your blog post topics and SEO keywords by conversion intent instead of search volume. That requires knowing the real pain points of a company’s ideal customer.

Of course, if a particular keyword is pain point based, has conversion or buying intent, and has high search volume, by all means go after it. But it’s a matter of prioritizing content ideas based on conversion intent first, then search volume second.

For the full discussion on this, you can read our original Pain Point SEO article here, or our accompanying article on content ideation.

Now, let’s look at some examples of specific types of keywords we targeted for Cognitive FX.

Conversion-Focused Keywords We Targeted and Types of Content We Prioritized for Cognitive FX

As per our Pain Point SEO framework, the solution for solving the keyword problems mentioned above is to target high buying intent keywords which usually come in three buckets:

The content strategy that we’ve executed for CFX has consisted of 2 of those 3 keyword categories as well as patient stories:

Pain point related posts (targeting pain point or Jobs to Be Done keywords)
Direct service-related keywords
Patient stories

Let’s look at an example of each.

Pain Point Keyword: Post-Concussion Headaches (Cont. From Above)

On why we chose “post-concussion headaches” as a topic to begin with: From our discussions with the doctors at Cognitive FX, we learned that headaches were one of the most common recurring, long lasting symptoms of a concussion. Many patients that Cognitive FX treats have had these for years and as we state in the intro of this post, they feel different than normal headaches.

Curiously enough, the search term “what does a concussion headache feel like” gets 1600 monthly searches (according to Ahrefs) so it felt like a great fit with their ideal patient profile.

As of this writing (2023) we rank #2 for that term, ahead of the Mayo Clinic and the CDC.

Furthermore, just in the first year of being published, that single post brought in 32 leads — defined for Cognitive FX as a consultation request form fill for their service, which costs $13,000 for a week of in-person treatment at their center in Utah.

To put that in perspective, that’s equal to 4% of the leads they got from their homepage in that same time span, from a single blog post. That’s a lot from a single blog post! Many companies’ entire blogs don’t generate that percentage of attributable leads.

Direct Service-Related Buying Keyword: Best Concussion Clinics

For almost every business we’ve worked with, there are a handful of even higher intent keywords than the pain point based ones: direct product or service related keywords.

People interested in these topics have the highest possible intent in that they are literally Googling for the best option for the known solution.

For Cognitive FX, this includes terms like “best concussion clinic”, which we targeted with a blog post: How to Find the Best Concussion Clinics Near You.

At the time of this writing (2023), we rank #1 for that term.

Patient Stories: Figure Skating Concussions

Cognitive FX’s customer stories are amazing and a content strategy that didn’t incorporate them would have been a shame. And we knew it would have some value in their social media marketing.

The most amazing story we wrote for them was that of our own Grow and Convert content strategist, Olivia Seitz, who during the course of being the content strategist for Cognitive FX thought “Hmm, maybe some of the symptoms I’ve been dealing with for years could be related to a concussion or TBI (traumatic brain injury)”, talked to the Cognitive FX team, decided to give it a shot, got treatment for a week in Utah, and had an amazing transformation herself:

How 14 Years of Unexplained Chronic Illness Turned Out to Be Concussion-Related: A Former Figure Skater’s Story

These stories are not SEO motivated, so it’s not essential that they rank, but some still do. The story above, for example, sits in position #2 for “figure skating concussion”:

So, if you do customer stories like this, it can be helpful to pair them with some SEO keywords, even if they are lower in search volume. We typically do this after the story is conceptualized. Telling a great story takes precedence over what search engines want.

Results of Our Work With Cognitive FX

Ultimately, our work for Cognitive FX has resulted in 200,000+ page views per month, 180+ page one search engine rankings, and has grown to produce over 50% of all leads on their site.

Read an in-depth case study that dives deeper into our work with Cognitive FX here.

Closing Thoughts: A Key Lesson & Challenge of Healthcare Content Marketing in 2023

One key takeaway from our work with multiple healthcare providers and product companies is that, compared to other industries where ranking in search results is a relatively even playing field, Google and other search engines tend to heavily favor certain web domains when it comes to ranking for keywords in the healthcare space.

This presents a unique challenge for companies that want to do healthcare content marketing — one that has only gotten more difficult with recent search engine algorithm updates.

In our experience, even when we’ve produced a far better and more in depth article than, say, Mayo Clinic has on a particular topic, it can sometimes be difficult to outrank them simply because Google has evolved to heavily favor their domain.

With that said, there are still many cases in which, using the strategy and approach we laid out throughout this post, we’ve been able to beat those heavily favored domains for high intent keywords that are highly valuable to our clients. And, when we haven’t, we’ve often been able to rank just beneath those favored domains, giving our clients a leg up on their competitors which are also trying to rank for those keywords.

Learn More About Our SEO and Content Marketing Agency

Our Agency: If you want to hire us to execute a content-focused SEO strategy built around driving lead generation and sales, not just traffic, you can learn more about working with us 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.

SaaS SEO Case Study: Attracting Advanced Users with In-Depth Blog Posts

Olivia Barrow — Tue, 01 Aug 2023 16:33:41 +0000

Smartlook is a product analytics and visual user insights platform based in the Czech Republic that was recently acquired by Cisco.

When they hired us for our SEO and content marketing services in the fall of 2021, they had limited brand recognition in the US, especially as compared to top competitors Hotjar and FullStory. One of Smartlook’s key marketing objectives was expanding their U.S. customer base by ranking for valuable keywords in the web and product analytics space.

In addition, Smartlook also wanted to bring more exposure to their product analytics features in order to attract more advanced users. While they were best known for their heatmap and session recording tools, their customer retention data indicated that customers who used their more advanced product analytics features — event tracking, funnel analysis, retention tables, crash reports, cross-platform analytics, etc. — got more value out of the tool and stuck around longer. So they wanted to build their authority as a product analytics tool, and not just a web analytics tool, to attract users who were more likely to need these additional features.

Here’s how we used SEO, specifically our Pain Point SEO process, to help with these challenges.

SEO Is Ideally Suited to Attract Specific Customer Personas

Unlike paid display, paid social, or even most paid search campaigns, long form SEO content is an ideal channel for B2B SaaS companies looking to attract users looking for very specific features, because it allows you to target people who are searching for extremely specific things exactly when they’re interested.

In contrast, while social and display ads offer some ability to target the right people, they have almost no ability to capture their interest at the right time — when they’re looking for a solution to the problem. Instead, they just show up when people are browsing the web or social media for any reason. High-quality content that targets long tail buying keywords, on the other hand, lets you show up for the exact search queries that indicate the user has pain points that map to your features and rank for those features.

Paid search (or PPC) can also be difficult to apply to specific, long tail queries. In particular, we’ve noticed that many of these queries don’t have enough search volume for Google to decide to show ads for (we’ve tested this), but if you rank for these terms organically you can get enough search traffic and leads to make a real difference (as our results below show).

Finally, long form content gives you the right medium — specifically, enough space — to explain advanced features and demonstrate how they help your target audience solve specific pain points. This space also lets you include the amount of copy necessary to adequately fulfill search intent and rank for competitive keywords.

For these reasons, we were excited to help Smartlook via our content process.

Applying Our SaaS SEO Strategy to Find and Rank for High Intent Keywords

When we started working with Smartlook, we immediately noticed a pattern in their existing content. Their blog had a lot of well-written educational articles about high-level topics related to website analytics and product analytics, but their only content aimed at high intent keywords were landing pages and feature pages.

For example, they had several landing pages that targeted competitor-type keywords like “Hotjar Alternative” and “FullStory Alternative.” The landing pages were well designed from a conversion-rate optimization (CRO) standpoint and included compelling copy about Smartlook’s features. Similarly, their standard feature pages had a sharp design, strong visuals, and interactive features.

But almost none of these landing pages and feature pages were ranking on the first page of Google. Most weren’t even ranking in the top 100 results. Why not? In both types of pages, the total word count per page was less than 500. It’s a common problem with landing pages: the content was too thin compared to the content existing on the search engine results page (SERP), and it lacked both key elements searchers were looking for and the crucial on-page SEO elements search engines look for.

The competitor alternative landing pages didn’t include a thorough analysis of how those features compared to the competitor, nor any insight into what the shortcomings of the competitor products might be. And the feature pages didn’t have enough space to really dig into the use cases of each feature with examples that would resonate with readers.

These two factors — too little content and not meeting search intent — were the key reasons these pages weren’t ranking (and are very common reasons most SEO agencies struggle to generate rankings and conversions).

Content for High Buying-Intent Keywords

To address this, we applied our SaaS content marketing strategy and found dozens of long tail competitor and category keywords with high buying-intent that Smartlook didn’t rank for.

When we analyzed the SERP for each keyword, we determined that searchers would be best served by an in-depth blog post, instead of a landing page, because it would give us the space to dig into the nuances of the differences between Smartlook’s features and their competitors, while showcasing Smartlook’s deep knowledge and expertise in the product analytics space.

We combined our SEO strategy with our intelligent, thoughtful writing that demonstrates how a product or service solves the customer’s problem (we call it Pain Point Copywriting) to produce new content that offered the in-depth analysis searchers were looking for and presented a compelling pitch for Smartlook’s solutions.

Compare the user experience of their landing page, Hotjar Alternative, with our blog post, 12 Hotjar alternatives for website and mobile app analytics:

The reader can immediately see that the blog post will help them make an informed decision — especially if they have a very specific use case in mind and want to make sure the tool they choose is appropriate.

While the landing page includes social proof in the form of testimonials and G2 ratings as well as screenshots of their key features with the value proposition of each one in clear, compelling copy, there’s no analysis of how these features compare to Hotjar, which is likely to be a high priority for the person searching “Hotjar alternatives.”

Content for Mid-Funnel Keywords

Our keyword research also turned up several jobs-to-be-done keywords (JTBD), which are descriptions of the use case for a feature that don’t include the name of the feature or the product category. This area of keyword research can often be a gold mine for SaaS companies.

Searchers who choose to describe the problem they’re trying to solve are often advanced users looking for validation that a product can solve that exact problem. In many cases, they’ve already tried a product in the category that didn’t meet their needs, so they’re refining their Google search to turn up new products that can meet their exact use case. In this way, even though JTBD keywords are higher up in the funnel than the keywords discussed above, they still have product buying-intent. But unlike some of the more obvious buying-related keywords, JTBD keywords often require very few backlinks to rank.

For example, the phrase “tracking user activity on website” is a long tail keyword we targeted early on in the engagement. It’s a more precise search query than phrases like “session recording tool” or “website analytics.” After evaluating the SERP, we determined that searchers were looking for tools that could help them track specific user interactions like button clicks and text inputs and provide insights into why users behaved the way they did. This keyword was a great fit for Smartlook because it allowed us to highlight their advanced features for an audience that was clearly looking for those features.

Many SEO agencies won’t go after these keywords because they have low monthly traffic on Ahrefs. But we know that Ahrefs and other tools grossly underestimate the volume of long tail keywords, and this keyword was no exception. While Ahrefs estimated the traffic for the phrase “tracking user activity on website” at 40 searches per month, it accumulated nearly 7,000 organic sessions in the final nine months of our engagement (20 times more than Ahrefs’ volume estimate would have predicted). Across all of our content, that piece was one of our top 10 performers by conversion volume.

Lastly, in keeping with our proven SEO tactic of creating separate blog posts for each target keyword, we also did a lot of “vs” pieces and “alternatives” pieces, offering head-to-head comparisons between Smartlook and a wide variety of competitors, including products that were more familiar to the advanced users Smartlook wanted to attract, such as Amplitude and Mixpanel.

These three types of keywords (category, competitors and alternatives, and jobs to be done) accounted for every piece within our top 15 converting pieces.

Results: 600+ Monthly Conversions, 37 Top 10 Rankings, and Traffic Growth

This engagement produced some of the most impressive results we’ve seen.

As we do with all of our clients, we created a custom dashboard in Google Analytics to track conversion metrics from our content. In this case, we tracked free account sign-ups and demo requests.

We grew conversions to our content to more than 600 per month in 16 months.

By creating dedicated high-quality blog posts for each high intent keyword we identified, we helped Smartlook gain dozens of top three organic search rankings in Google in the U.S., growing their brand awareness and customer base.

Of the 50 keywords we targeted during the engagement, we had the following wins:

11 no. 1 rankings
20 top 3 rankings
37 top 10 rankings
Average position of 7

We also helped them meet aggressive goals for organic traffic growth during the engagement. Organic traffic to our posts alone grew to 18,000+ per month.

It was a pleasure to work with Smartlook’s marketing team as well as nearly a dozen subject matter experts generously lent their time to thoroughly explain the ins and outs of their product and the problems it solves for their customers.

And, while we don’t take credit for Cisco noticing the good work the Smartlook team has been doing, we were pleased to see that one of the key reasons Cisco highlighted for the acquisition was how Smartlook helps users “troubleshoot hard-to-replicate digital behavior anomalies and analyze user interaction trends across web and mobile application platforms.” Those are some of the key benefits we focused on in our content, and it’s nice to see that message resonating with a worldwide technology leader.

More Grow and Convert Case Studies

Here are five other case studies, each with unique insights, that you can read to see how we’ve executed our SEO strategy for other B2B and SaaS businesses:

Applying Pain Point SEO to All-In-One SaaS Products: A Case Study

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)

How to Work with Us or Learn More

Our Agency: If you want to hire us to execute a content-focused SEO strategy, complete with content creation, link building, and technical SEO, learn more about working with us here.

Join Our 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.

Pain Point Copywriting: How to Write Compelling Sales Copy Inside Blog Posts

Devesh Khanal — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 21:34:37 +0000

We’ve talked a lot at Grow and Convert about which keywords you should target and also to some extent about how to rank for those keywords. But there’s a third step to our process that we haven’t talked about as often, but which is just as important as the other two:

Target high-buying-intent search terms (Pain Point SEO).
Rank for them by fulfilling search intent (SEO content writing).
Write compelling product or sales copy to convert visitors into customers (this post).

Converting readers into customers requires intelligent, thoughtful writing that demonstrates how your product or service solves the customer’s problem. You need to be able to sell your product or service inside blog posts, which is a very different style of blog writing than typical top of funnel how-to or intro-guide style posts.

What does it take to be able to write this kind of product-focused content? We’ve been asking ourselves this question for years, in particular while trying to hire writers. We’ve evaluated portfolio samples from thousands of applicants and waded through tons of test projects, and we’ve noticed one major pattern that separates the bad writing from the good. The bad writing gets the value propositions wrong.

Specifically, we’ve noticed 4 patterns in messing up value props:

Selling the wrong value props
Selling non-existant value props (aka “fluff”)
Missing important value props
Selling a good value prop the wrong way

Where do these mistakes come from? Why does blog post after blog post make these same mistakes? It’s because the writers don’t deeply understand customer pain points. As a result, they just guess on which value props are important, which ones should be emphasized, or how they should be positioned. Or, they often just fill space with fluff to mask this lack of true understanding.

The solution is to understand the customer’s pain points deeply and write about them deliberately. Getting this right leads to good writing that makes the customer feel like the brand understands their pain and has a solution to their problem.

As such, just as our foundational content strategy framework is called Pain Point SEO, we’re calling this product copywriting approach Pain Point Copywriting.

Below, we discuss this approach to content writing and dissect the 4 mistakes mentioned above, using a case study (a post we wrote for a past client that’s currently ranking #2 for the term “website translation plugin”) to illustrate our points.

Case Study: “Website Translation Plugin”

The keyword we’ll be analyzing is “website translation plugin”, which is a moderately high difficulty keyword according to Ahrefs:

At the time of writing, the post we wrote for our client ranks #2 for this keyword:

Note that “website translation plugin” is a prototypical bottom of funnel keyword (in the “category keyword” bucket of Pain Point SEO) which means searchers are actively looking for products.

This seems obvious, but it actually has a big impact on what you should write.

Specifically, Google is favoring ranking lists of plugins, not how-to posts or guides. That’s because the searchers don’t want some belabored background discussion on why translation is important, they just want a list of plugins, and importantly, they want to figure out which plugin best solves their translation problems (aka “pain points”). This is what it means for a keyword to have high buying intent. Keep this mind when we discuss more details of the writing below.

Mistake #1: Selling the Wrong Value Props

When writers don’t deeply understand the pain points of customers, they don’t know what value props of the product are most important. So, they end up guessing. And when they guess, they often riddle articles with totally irrelevant or unimportant value props. This kills the writing.

Let’s look at some examples.

“More than 100 Translation Languages”

Here are two excerpts from the first-ranked article in the SERP, from HubSpot.

The descriptions of both products mention the number of languages each plugin can translate to. In fact, the first one (coincidentally, our client’s product) mentioned the number of languages as the very first thing.

On the surface, this doesn’t seem so bad. In fact, even our post (ranking #2) mentions the number of languages our client’s product can translate to. Certainly the more languages, the better, right?

Sure, but here’s a key fact: Most companies only care to translate their site to a handful of languages. Everyone just assumes any translation plugin can translate to the languages they care about.

Think about when you’ve been to a site with multiple language options on the top right, are there 100 language options? Never. There are usually just three to five. And it’s the usual suspects every time: English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, etc. That’s because the majority of companies only do business in a few countries.

Even the United Nations website only has 6 languages listed.

So, sure, the number of languages is a value prop, but by no means should it be the first thing you mention. So why do writers keep overemphasizing it? Because to a writer just getting familiar with this space, it seems like this number matters. It’s easy to find. Bigger seems to be better. But, alas, it’s not a real pain point.

“Assign Tasks and Chat with Your Team”

In the description of the tool Lokalise in HubSpot’s post, we see this interesting value prop mentioned:

Chat with your team? In a translation tool? Is anybody looking for this? Are web teams really looking to chat inside the translation tool instead of on Slack or Teams or wherever they normally chat? Are they using translation plugins to assign tasks instead of whatever project management system they already use?

Even if assigning tasks inside the tool is useful (it could be), is this really such an important value prop to where it should be the first feature mentioned about the tool? No, not at all. Again, the writer is just looking at the tools’ website and guessing at what’s important.

“Cloud-Based”

In the #3 result for this keyword, by WPBeginner, it states that our client’s product is cloud-based. This is true. But why does it matter? Isn’t almost all software cloud-based now? Are any of the other options built to run on-premise or on your local computer? I doubt it. You could argue “cloud-based” is a value prop, but it certainly isn’t an important one.

Complete Mis-Characterization of Loco Translate

Finally, I discovered this mistake was most exemplified in a total mis-characterization of obscure translation plugin Loco Translate in HubSpot’s post.

Here’s the full description:

To appreciate why this copy is so bad, you need to understand what in the world Loco Translate actually does.

I actually had to look it up and it turns out Loco Translate is not a tool for translating any of the public facing content of a WordPress site! That means it won’t translate your homepage headline, your on page copy, your blog posts, nothing. In fact, it doesn’t actually translate anything!

It only helps people edit translations of WordPress theme files.

That’s literally the only thing it does. It says so very clearly in its help docs:

If the writer had just dug into the most basic documentation of this tool, they would have figured this out. Then, they would have realized it actually doesn’t belong on their list at all (or if it is included, it should be clearly stated as a very specific tool for editing translation files of WordPress themes). But they didn’t do this work. They just more or less regurgitated what was on the WP plugin listing for Loco Translate.

This is an extreme example, but it illustrates the point that in order to get the value props in your writing spot on, you need to deeply understand what pain points the product or service solves. But most writers and content marketers don’t do this. They just look at the company’s website and guess what the most important value props are. That leads to egregious and embarrassing errors like this.

In fact, many of our clients have actually told us not to use the copy on their website because it’s bad, outdated, poorly written, or improperly positioned. Marketing site copy is a hard thing to change because it requires agreement from executives and a bunch of key stakeholders, so it often sits with outdated or poor copy for months (or years).

This is why interviews with customer-facing employees, like what we do in our agency’s process, are so important to getting value propositions correct.

Mistake #2: Selling Fluff

Next on our list is maybe the most common complaint about bad writing: fluff. By fluff, we mean unnecessary words or phrases that don’t add anything to the writing and often don’t even really mean anything.

Many clients have told us fluffy writing was one of their biggest annoyances with their previous content teams and writers. They complain that they spent hours turning fluffy writing into something concrete and specific.

Even for us, fluff is our number one challenge with new writer applicants and something we are extremely critical of in our own work. It’s a big problem.

But where does fluff come from?

I believe it also comes from not understanding the customer’s real pain points at a deep and detailed level. Writers need to write something. So when they don’t really, truly, know what the reader cares about, they fill that space with fluff.

To eliminate fluff, you have to ask yourself: Does every word in this sentence earn its way onto the page? This is not a question I invented. It’s a common rule in non-fiction writing, and it works in our marketing content writing as well.

Examples of Fluff

I’ve noticed that one of the most common places where fluff makes its appearance is in the very first sentence describing a product, which is, ironically, where you least need fluff. You’re on the first sentence! You haven’t even gotten to the details yet. Just describe the product plainly.

But here’s what some writers do instead:

“Full-fledged”

The first sentence of the first product mentioned in the WPBeginner article is:

On the surface, this looks like a clean sentence. But look closely. Does every word earn its place?

What immediately jumps out to me is “full-fledged”. What is “full-fledged” accomplishing in this sentence? What does it even mean? This article is a giant list of a bunch of website translation plugins that all…drumroll…translate websites. So if this tool also translates your website, that doesn’t make it “full-fledged”. That just makes it normal.

For “full-fledged” to not be fluff, it needs to be defended with evidence of what features make a tool full-fledged versus what are baseline features. In this case, we see no such defense. “Full-fledged” is just thrown out there with no explanation or backup. It’s fluff.

Here’s the full section. Note how the concept of full-fledged is never defended or explained:

And this brings us to a key definition of fluff words, phrases, and sentences: words by themselves aren’t fluff, it’s the context that makes them fluff.

In other words, “full-fledged” could have been good, non-fluff writing if there was an argument for why TranslatePress was full-fledged. For example, something like:

“While most translation plugins are limited to just [this thing], TranslatePress is a full-fledged WordPress multilingual plugin that also….[list of other features that make it full-fledged]”

That sentence would have defended and even defined full-fledged, turning it from fluff to an actual, useful, value proposition. But, it didn’t.

“Every aspect”

The second half of that first TranslatePress sentence above has additional fluff: “to translate every aspect of your website”. If you have a translation plugin, it, by definition, can translate every word on that site. That’s literally what all of these plugins do. So what does mentioning that this plugin can translate “every aspect” of your website accomplish? Nothing. It’s fluff. It sounds like good sales copy, but it isn’t.

(Note: In this way, fluff is similar to the concept of Mirage Content we introduced back in 2017. The difference is Mirage Content is talking about larger arguments in blog posts. Here, I’m talking about specific words or phrases in the writing that are unnecessary or unclear. They’re related but not the same. Every sentence of a piece could be fluff-free, but if the arguments are all beginner level or cliche, it’s still Mirage Content.)

“Multilingual or bilingual”

Later in the WPBeginner post, there is a discussion of the plugin Polylang that says it’s good for creating a “multilingual or bilingual WordPress site”:

This is redundant for two reasons. A bilingual website is by definition multilingual. If you just say it can help you create multilingual websites, that’s enough.

Second — and this is the more important reason that is at the heart of fluff — this is just not a notable characteristic of a particular translation plugin because all translation plugins help you create multilingual websites. That’s literally what they all do. It’s the equivalent of listing a bunch of different tennis racquets in a blog post and for one of them saying “This racquet can help you hit tennis balls.”

Fluff Makes Your Brand Look Bad

Fluff muddies the writing. While most readers won’t recognize it or call it out as such, they will have a sense of unease at reading bad or shallow writing.

Fluff doesn’t mean it’s incorrect. It’s true that a tennis racquet helps you hit tennis balls. It’s true that a translation plugin can help you create bilingual or multilingual websites. It’s just unnecessary to say these things — often to the point of being weird.

That’s why fluff makes your brand look bad.

To anyone who actually knows the topic (like a high end, savvy B2B customer), fluff immediately stands out as weird or amateurish. How can you expect to attract, impress, or convert the best customers if your content is full of fluff?

Expertise Eliminates Fluff

Although I can’t get inside these writers’ minds and tell you exactly what they were thinking, I’m convinced that fluffy phrases like this enter pieces because the writer doesn’t know what is actually important to say about a given product. They’re just spending a few minutes checking out the website of each tool and regurgitating what it says back into their post, filling in the blanks with fluff.

They haven’t stopped to really figure out which features of each product are the most important and which problems of the customer are most important. If they did, they wouldn’t need fluff.

As evidence of this, think about if you asked any writer to talk about something they know extremely well, say, a specific aspect of their favorite hobby, a political issue they care a lot about, or a family event that was important to them. The writing would be dramatically less fluffy. They’d probably be discussing all kinds of very specific arguments and details that they’ve thought about and been passionate about for a long time. The writer is the same, but in this case, they know all the nuances of that topic — so there is no reason for fluff.

Mistake #3: Missing Important Value Props

The lack of understanding the true pain points of customers and guessing at value props or filling space with fluff results in perhaps the biggest travesty of bad copywriting: missing the most important value props.

For website translation, while writers waste time emphasizing the number of languages you can translate or filling space with fluff like “full-fledged” or “multilingual and bilingual”, we noticed almost none of the other posts on page one of the SERP emphasize (or, sometimes, even mention) these two critical value props of website translation:

Automation
Accuracy

We figured this out from actually talking to employees who work with customers every day. We do this with all of our clients. We talk to sales reps. We talk to account managers. We talk to customer support. We talk to anyone who interfaces directly with customers and learn the real reasons people buy, the real pain points they have, the value propositions that are really important. That way we don’t have to guess.

How Our Article Is Different: The Work Required to Deeply Understand Pain Points

In the article for our client ranking #2 for this keyword, we have an entire section at the beginning that outlines what to look for in a translation plugin:

First of all, the very existence of a section like this indicates a well-written article. Of course, the actual “features to look for” listed in this section need to be correct, but writers who don’t know what pain points are most important don’t even think to create sections like this.

Why did we list Automation and Accuracy as #1 and #2? Why are they so important for a website translation tool?

To answer that, you need to understand the customer in detail:

Who are they?
Why are they translating their website?
How were they doing it before?
What is annoying or a pain for them about translating their website?
And more.

First, through extensive interviews with our client, we learned that one of the biggest annoyances with website translation is keeping up with all the new content that people add to their website.

A common customer type of site translation tools are eCommerce brands that sell in multiple countries. And eCommerce sites are constantly adding new products. Every time that happens, they need to have all copy related to that product translated to all the languages that site is in (typically most European languages: Spanish, French, German, etc.). This is usually managed by humans and is a huge pain. They don’t want to have to go into a tool and even click “translate” over and over every time a new product is added. They want it done automatically.

Without talking to customers, you would have no idea that this was a critical pain point (arguably the biggest pain point) of website translation.

Second, customers want to pair this automation with accuracy.

Automatic translation means computer translation, which everyone knows can create unnatural sounding language. That’s fine as a start, but most brands want to make sure a human can edit and tweak the translations. They want both the computer translation to be as cutting edge in accuracy as possible and the ability to easily let human translators check the site’s work.

Third, they want the SEO meta info (meta tags, etc.) to be translated to each language as well, so each language version of their site is automatically optimized for SEO.

And, these three are just a start. There are many more pain points (as you can see in the five things to look for section) that we uncovered in our interviews for this piece.

Then, when we introduce our client’s product, we emphasize the three critical features that address these three major customer pain points right at the beginning:

This is what it looks like for an article to talk about the correct and most important value props. Yes, it’s hard work to figure all this out before writing a blog post. Yes, it takes time. But if you want good copy and good blog posts, this is what it takes.

Now, let’s look at the opposite.

How HubSpot Gets Our Client’s Product Wrong

In contrast, look at how the HubSpot post mangles these value props and fills space with useless value props and fluff:

Specifically:

“100 languages” — Again, the vast majority of brands only care about translating to 5–10 languages, maybe even less. That said, our post also mentions this, but it’s as a side note in a bullet about automation that is one of the most important value props: “Automatic machine translation (you can translate any website in minutes, not days) that works with over 100 different languages.”
“A lightweight plugin” — Who cares? No one is choosing a translation plugin based on how many megabytes it takes up on your server.
“Manage from a single dashboard” — This is fine but not as important as automation, accuracy, and SEO, which aren’t mentioned anywhere here.
“The best part? It can even handle your WooCommerce product pages” — The best part?! This is not the best part! It’s expected that it can translate all pages. This is fluff.

But to be fair, there is a single line in this HubSpot blurb about our client’s product that starts to get at the right value props:

“…offers automatic translations and access to professional translators if needed.”

This is great. These are the important value props of automation and accuracy (via professional translators). The only problem is that this is not emphasized enough and not positioned quite correctly.

The phrase “if needed” is really, really close. While it’s technically accurate, in our opinion, it positions professional translation a little too casually. The better positioning of professional translations are that they can help you keep your translations extremely accurate. In addition, this line misses a critical related value prop of our client’s product: you can order professional translations right from the platform, which solves a massive pain point of having to find your own translators.

This difference in positioning is subtle, but it’s important — and it takes us to the last common mistake.

Mistake #4: Selling a Good Value Proposition the Wrong Way

This is the last mistake because it’s the most subtle. It requires that you talk about the correct value props in the first place, which, as we saw above, isn’t a guarantee.

But when you are talking about the most important value props, the way you position them matters.

“If You’re Short on Time”

The second tool discussed in the HubSpot post has this line that talks about automatic translations — a feature we know is important to these customers:

That last line is so close to being good. It does talk about automatic translations, which as we said is one of the customers’ biggest pain points.

But the problem is it’s positioned as “if you’re short on time.” This isn’t quite right because it underemphasizes the importance of this feature. It makes it sounds like automatic translation is a optional perk, like a heated cupholder in a luxury car: “If you happen to have a hot coffee you need to keep warm, you can!” You don’t buy the car for the heated cupholder, it’s just a nice perk. But good automatic translation is a reason you’d choose a specific plugin. It’s that important. This emphasis matters if you want your copy to convert the best customers at the highest rate possible.

“Grow into More Complex Language Implementations”

Another tool in the HubSpot post, Lingotek, has its human translation feature positioned like this:

This is also almost there. As we learned, pairing machine with human translation is a feature that solves important pain points. But it’s not about “starting simple and growing into more complex language implementations.”

First of all, that line includes fluff. What is a “more complex language implementation?” That sounds like a smart phrase but what does it mean? Do they mean more complex languages? What exactly is a language “implementation?” Language is language. You have a website in language X, you want to translate it into language Y. You do that every time. Why would one time be more complex than another? Maybe they mean length? If so, why not just say length? It’s unclear.

Second, it’s not about “growing into” anything. These plugins aren’t like when your parents bought you oversized clothes that you had to “grow into.” It’s not that small companies only need machine translation and big ones need human translations. The real value prop of human translation is accuracy.

Even a small site with only a few pages may need extremely accurate copy (say, for legal reasons). If customers are looking for accuracy, but you’re positioning these features as being about “growing into” complexity, you’re going to lose some of those potential customers due to lack of clarity.

A simple sentence like this would have been much better:

“These three tiers let brands pair the speed and automation of machine translation with the accuracy of human translation — depending on the accuracy levels they need.”

Why This Matters: Good Copy Converts Better

These subtle differences matter. This is the difference between copy that makes a prospect think “Yes, this solves my exact problem!” and “Hmm, let me see what other options there are.”

It’s the difference between copy that converts and copy that doesn’t.

To really understand how to position the automatic translation feature, you can’t guess.

A typical freelance writer just given minimal info isn’t going to stumble upon the fact that automatic translation is really important, or that it should be paired with the ability to edit translations for accuracy, or that finding your own professional translators is a pain, or that translating SEO meta info is a pain, or that being able to translate everything without developers is a huge need. You need interviews — like the ones we do with all of our clients for our pieces — to figure that out.

Here are resources from our site to help you fix these mistakes:

Interviews to Understand Pain Points

Content Ideation — An old article that details how to interview customers to figure out their real pain points

Case Study — An example of how we learned a lot about a complex space where we had no domain expertise, via interviews

Pain Points for Content Topics

Jobs to be done keywords — How to use pain point understanding to find niche keywords that convert

Our Course

Our content marketing course and community is case study based and the first module has recordings of us actually interviewing members of the founding teams of 3–4 companies so you can see how we do these for clients.

Our Content Agency

Finally, if you’re looking to work with a content or SEO agency that does not make the writing mistakes outlined above and writes in a very intentional, careful way about your products, you can learn more about working with us here.

AI Content And Why Originality Will Be More Important Than Ever

Benji Hyam — Wed, 17 May 2023 21:40:02 +0000

There have been a lot of predictions around how AI is going to change the world of SEO and content marketing, such as:

“AI is going to remove the need for writers”
“You’re going to be able to produce 10X the content with AI”
“Search is going to become so much more competitive because companies will be able to churn out 100s of blog posts in the amount of time it takes a human to produce 1 blog post”
“Keyword strategy won’t be important because you can produce so much content that you’ll be able to rank for any keyword you want to target”
“Writers will become prompt engineers – all you need to be good at is telling AI what to write for you”

All of the arguments center around the theme of companies being able to do way more with less resources, but none of the conversation has focused around the quality of AI written content and if your customers will actually want to read anything produced with AI.

To me, that’s where the center of the conversation should be.

Here are some of the questions that I’ve been asking myself:

Can AI produce the content that we produce better than a human on our team can?
Can it educate customers on a product or industry better than a human can?
Does it have unique and compelling arguments that are different from what everyone else writes on the subject?

The answer to all of those questions at this point is no. This is why we haven’t been as bullish on AI as other content agencies and vendors pushing the AI narrative.

It’s not to say that AI can’t get there, but I think people are focusing too much on the speed of work instead of the quality of work and that’s a dangerous game to play if you’re wanting results from your content investment.

Let me explain why I think this.

ChatGPT Content is Mirage Content 2.0

In 2016, I wrote an article called Mirage Content, it argued that most of the long form content produced by marketing departments looked, on the surface, like it was well-written, but if you actually read the details it was just high-level fluff. Specifically, when you do a Google search on a topic, many of the articles on the first page have interesting titles, but when you click into them, they all just regurgitate versions of the same few talking points.

I argued in that piece that this problem stemmed from two flaws in the content production process:

Most companies would hire freelance writers to write on a subject they had no expertise in. That writer would “research” the topic by Googling it and reading the top 10 results and then rehashing what those articles already said. We coined this The Google Research Paper approach, as it mimics a high school student producing a research paper where you can clearly tell the person doesn’t have expertise on the topic they’re writing about.
The second flaw was that most articles weren’t specific enough. They would cover broad concepts, which forces them to cover them at a high level. They never got deep enough into the details that people actually care about. This specificity problem is also a function of the writer not having expertise on the topic they were writing about.

Now if we think about what AI does, it basically mimics the flawed approach outlined above. AI is trained from a large portion of the web, books, and articles written on a topic, so when you ask it about anything, it simply rehashes what’s been written on a topic (in grammatically pristine English, to be fair).

But what is the “correct” answer? How does AI decide what to say? What does it say on topics where there is no right answer? Does it ever take a strong stance on a topic?

The answer is that AI writers are biased towards saying the most average thing because that’s how they’re built. They’re programmed to produce a response that is as similar to the information they were trained on. All AI-writing tools know is what they’ve been trained on, which is by definition, things that people have already said. They are literally programmed to find the most likely word that goes after the word it just wrote, over and over again.

This is why AI content feels so much like what I defined as Mirage Content 7 years ago: when you first read it, it sounds really articulate and well-written, but when you stop to really dissect the arguments, you realize it’s just stating the same generic arguments in different ways.

So as a content marketing tool, AI is effectively just making it easier to produce mirage content at scale. Many companies and agencies are taking the same flawed approach they used before to produce content and are now doing it faster with technology. Instead of hiring freelancers to Google a topic for an hour and regurgitate what the top 5 results are saying into their own blog post, they can now just use AI to do the exact same thing, but faster.

So if this is the type of “content marketing” you do (largely surface-level coverage of introductory topics), I absolutely agree that AI could be a good replacement for this type of writing. This is writing where you don’t care about selling your personal or company’s expertise to someone else, and where you don’t care about having your company or CEO’s opinion on the topic woven into the pieces. There’s a large number of writers and agencies who produce mirage content that will get replaced because their approach and strategy was flawed to begin with.

But most companies don’t want to produce content that says the same thing as everyone else. They want to share unique, original, or provocative opinions. They want to explain why the approach their competitors are taking to solve the industry problems are wrong, and why their approach is better. They want to be known for their thoughts and their opinions and be considered “thought leaders” in their industry (easier said than done).

This kind of high-quality content is effective. It helps convince customers about your product over competitors and it helps your brand and ideas stand out from the rest. But if your process to produce great content starts with getting the argumentation on a topic from AI, you’ve already lost. You’re just going to end up with the same unoriginal content as everyone else.

Going forward, I think that AI written content will be a race to the bottom. Companies are going to experiment with it, the web is going to get flooded with more bad content, and I think in a year or two the content that will be most valued will be the ones produced by humans. People have always wanted to read something that challenges their thinking, educates them on something new, or has a differing opinion. The way to produce content like that going forward isn’t with AI, it’s with humans.

There are many people that might disagree with this opinion, but I have yet to see anyone show me an example of a good piece of content produced with AI. So if you have one, feel free to share a link to it below.

How to Create Conversion Content (That Actually Converts)

Devesh Khanal — Mon, 15 May 2023 17:39:10 +0000

We recently noticed that there is a term people are using called “conversion content”. From what we can gather, this refers to content aimed at generating conversions (free trials, demo signups, sales form fills, actual sales), as opposed to how many marketers view content: as a top of funnel, non-converting marketing tactic.

We have, for those familiar with Grow and Convert, built our entire business on using content to generate conversions. So, we have lots of opinions and ideas on this topic, which this article will review.

To start, we noticed that most discussions about creating conversion content place too much emphasis on what we think of as the “window dressing” of content. For example, writing great headlines, having easy-to-read formatting, using compelling visuals, etc.

All of these tips are fine, don’t get us wrong, but they’re, (a) kind of obvious (of course you should have good formatting), and (b) not that important. We’ve had plenty of clients come to us with all of these bases covered — good headlines, clean blog design, good user experience — and yet, their content barely converts.

Why? Because in our experience, these UX details aren’t nearly as important as, (1) the topic and SEO keywords that your content ranks for, and (2) how well you sell your product or service in the content.

You can think of the important aspects of getting conversions from content in three tiers:

Tier #1 — Topics: Choosing high-converting SEO keywords

Tier #2 — Writing: Selling your product or service inside the content

Tier #3 — CTAs and Everything Else: CTAs, headlines, blog design, etc.

Crucially, these tiers are in order of importance. If you don’t take care of tiers 1 and 2 first, then no amount of tier 3 tactics (well crafted headlines, banner CTAs, or CRO “hacks”) will make your content convert.

Below, we’re going to walk through the framework we use to create high-converting content for our clients, including what to know about each tier, why the order is so important, and links to articles that will help you with executing this conversion-focused content marketing strategy.

Note: This post focuses specifically on creating conversion content for SEO because this is what we do at Grow and Convert. We’re not talking about content for social media, video, or other channels, because SEO content is more evergreen and can drive traffic and conversions more sustainably over the long term, making it one of the most valuable forms of conversion content for many businesses. You can learn more about our approach here.

Tier #1 — Topics: Choosing High-Converting SEO Keywords

As we’ve discussed at length many times before, most businesses, content marketing and SEO agencies, and in-house marketers use traffic-focused content strategies. These strategies are based on the assumption that with enough traffic, conversions will inevitably follow.

In practice, this means they prioritize keywords that have high search volume, but low to zero buying intent. For example, if you sell project management software, this might mean targeting keywords such as “project management tips” or “top trends in project management.”

While these keywords are loosely related to your product and likely have high search volumes that could drive substantial organic traffic, people searching these terms show no indication that they have intent to buy project management software. (If they did, they’d be more likely to Google a term with clear buying intent such as “best project management software” or “project management apps for contractors.”)

As a result, from our measurements, these keywords tend to have very low conversion rates — a point that is neatly 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 for each of the URLs listed. The three boxed posts follow the Pain Point SEO approach and rank for keywords with high buying intent. The rest rank for 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 high buying intent keywords (which we’ve traditionally referred to as “bottom of funnel”) didn’t just convert a bit better than the higher-volume-lower-intent posts, they converted 2400% better. In that case study, you can read about how that difference in conversion rate more than made up for any differences in search volume or traffic between the two buckets.

If you choose and rank for the high buying intent keywords, you could get everything else we discuss below wrong and still convert more readers than if you were to get all of what we discuss below right, but focus on keywords that lack buying intent.

This is why choosing the right keywords is the #1 most important thing to get right if you want to increase conversions from content. For an in-depth look at our process for developing a conversion-focused keyword strategy, check out these articles:

Tier #2 — Writing: Selling Your Product or Service inside the Content

Many content marketers barely discuss the company’s product or service inside of the content they write. They’ll sometimes glancingly mention and link to a product or service page in their blog content, but they often just rely on design elements of the page to “take care of conversions” (e.g. pop-ups, email list opt-in forms, CTA graphics, etc.).

We think this mistake is related to the problem discussed in Tier #1 above: that the culture of content marketing has been to keep everything top of funnel (whitepapers, infographics, ultimate guides, etc.). The advice that’s typically paired with that practice is to “not be too salesy” in your content: “just give the customer advice and value and they’ll like your brand and (fingers crossed) remember you later when they need to buy” (not likely).

In our experience, even if you’re writing about top of funnel topics that aren’t product-focused, you need to weave in a compelling discussion of your product or service if you want your content to convert.

Furthermore, if you focus on high buying intent keywords as we discussed above, this necessitates discussing your product or service in order to meet search intent (a key ranking factor in search engine optimization that determines whether or not your content will rank for its intended keyword).

If someone is searching for “best project management software”, their intent is to learn about the details of various options. They want to know what’s better about this software option versus that one, how they compare, which is better for whom, and more. Discussing those product related ideas isn’t “being salesy” for this search query, it’s just fulfilling search intent! So, whether you go after that keyword with a landing page or a blog post, the content of the page needs to discuss your product or service in-depth.

Now, with all of this in mind, there are two key things to consider:

Writing about product and service details and differentiators requires that writers are able to gain product and domain expertise, and express that through content.
Expressing originality through content (a key aspect of driving conversions) requires a slightly different approach when selling a service versus a product.

Let’s look at each.

(1) Conversion Content Requires a Process to Gain and Express Product and Domain Expertise

Writing conversion-focused content requires writers to be able to deeply understand your value propositions, key features and unique differentiators, and express these in a clear and compelling way through content.

We can say from experience that this is a unique skill set that isn’t easy to find or teach. Even great writers often lack these key abilities that are more akin to product copywriting. And from what we’ve learned, most content marketing and SEO agencies (many of whom outsource content writing to freelancers) also lack good processes for gaining and expressing product and domain expertise.

At Grow and Convert, because our focus is on ranking for high buying intent keywords (“best accounting software” or “recruiter for executive assistant” for example), we sell our client’s products and services in every piece of content we produce. We get into the details of features, explain how they solve customer pain points, weave in testimonials and case studies, and differentiate our client’s products from those of their competitors.

We do this by basing our articles on extensive interviews with people at our clients’ companies — product teams, sales teams, customer support teams, etc. We have been doing this for years and have an extensive writer training process that has helped us build a tight-knit team of product copywriters.

If you want to write truly high-quality content that is capable of converting readers (particularly advanced B2B readers), involving the experts at your company in your content creation process is absolutely essential.

To learn more about the details of how we approach this, check out these past articles:

(2) Expressing Originality Through Content Is Different When Selling a Service versus a Product

What we’ve discussed above — the need to gain product and domain expertise, discuss your unique differentiators, and the way you solve customer pain points — applies to both product and service businesses.

However, another key aspect of conversion content is expressing originality, and in our experience this is done slightly differently depending on whether you sell a product or a service.

If you sell a product, originality comes from discussing your product’s features and the way they solve customer pain points differently or better than your competitors. But if you sell a service, typically the way you express originality comes from discussing what’s different about your strategy or process compared to competitors, and how that allows you to get better results for your clients. We do this in every piece of content we produce for our agency as well as for the service businesses we work with.

For example, we previously worked with a remote executive assistant service, and their unique differentiator was their hiring process. Specifically, they used their backgrounds in behavioral science to design a rigorous hiring methodology that allowed them to more thoroughly vet executive assistant candidates. So, this was the main point of differentiation that we would focus on expressing in each one of their articles.

To learn more about leveraging originality in content, check out this post: Why Your Content Needs “Originality Nuggets” to Be Effective.

Tier #3 — CTAs and Everything Else (Headlines, Blog Design, etc.)

If you’ve done the first two tiers right, the rest of the tactics that marketers talk about prioritizing for conversion are, to be honest, pretty trivial and inconsequential. Why?

Because if someone is googling some super high buying intent term, like “plumbing management app” for example, and they go to a page that explains in detail the ways in which your plumbing management app works, and how it’s better or different than competitors, most modern blog layouts have plenty of call to action buttons for them to to click on should they decide they want to learn more.

For example here is a collage of blog layouts of our actual bottom of funnel blog posts for our real clients:

Note how all of them, across different industries and verticals, have unmissable CTAs in the navbar. Plus the logos going to the homepage and other navigation links are also totally reasonable routes for a customer reading a good BOTF article to use to explore more about the company and its products or services.

These customers have come to your site with clear intent to see if your product or service might be a good fit for them, you’ve either convinced and compelled them with your content, or you haven’t. If you have, the CTA buttons and links in your navigation are generally right there for them to take the next step.

Sure, you can make conversion optimization tweaks like making your navigation bar sticky (a good idea), or use UX improvements like increasing font contrast to improve readability, but the bottom line is that if these potential customers want to sign up for a demo or call to learn more, most websites make this very easy.

This is why we don’t prioritize the typical window dressing elements of blogs. When you’re using a high buying intent SEO content strategy, they’re nowhere near as important as they might be otherwise.

Learn More about Our SEO and Content Marketing Agency

Our Agency: If you want to hire us to execute a content-focused SEO strategy built around driving lead generation and sales, not just traffic, you can learn more about working with us 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.

Content Marketing – 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

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?

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

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

How We’re Helping Clients Build Content Brands

Rainforest QA

Vocal Video

Lawclerk

How Often Should You Update Website Content to Maintain Rankings? (Best Practices & Past Results)

How to Monitor Content & Schedule Strategic Updates

Mini Case Study: Auditing Website Rankings Helps You Identify Which Pages Are Due for Updates

Bonus: Use Content Optimization Software to Monitor SEO Scores

Best Practices for Updating Website Content

1. Use Content Optimization Software to Check SEO Scores

2. Check That Content Matches the Target Audience’s Search Intent

Mini Case Study: Updating Content Relevancy Improves Rankings

3. Double-Check That the Details in Content Are Up-to-Date and Accurate

Bonus: Display “Last Updated Date” on Article Pages

What to Expect from Updates

Our Results from Client Content

The Sparknotes

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

Want to Work with Us or Learn More about How We Approach Content Marketing?