I’ve dug out a few gems from my LinkedIn inbox lately, triggered by a question an operator asked: “We are just starting to do SEO work and I saw that you were the one doing it for [former client] so I was just analyzing some data and thought to reach out. What has worked the best for you to drive more traffic to service pages and not just blog posts?”
This operator had noticed: “I was just looking at some Ahrefs data and looks like you finished the project and their organic traffic disappeared as well….I see that [when it was] the posts from [former client] with you as the author their traffic was growing, but then when you stopped being the author the website visits dropped dramatically as well.”
The plain answer is it wasn’t anything special. We just figured out what our audience was interested in and kept at it. That was the pattern I followed for all of my clients for years, and there’s nothing glamorous or particularly interesting–it was just keeping at it. Then I started to wonder if maybe I don’t know what I know — similar to a welder saying “you just weld it, simple” to someone who doesn’t even know what welding means.
I scrolled a little further to find other questions and comments about my work with other clients, and found these nice things that I’m sharing just because.
- “Miss working with you too! I still tell people about the amazing content you wrote as an example of good content strategy.”
- “One comment saved me from publishing into a void. Appreciate you taking the time.”
- “I would say its full time but maybe someone with your skill set could do it in less than 20 hours per week.” (This was before I discovered AI btw.)
So if those kind words convinced you reading on is worth your time, here’s the advice I’d give (and am giving) anyone who asks about best practices for content and getting ranking/spotted on search.
Tl;dr you need:
- Industry knowledge
- Customer knowledge
- Internal bandwidth
- Interesting information/perspective
- Consistency
- Repurposing/Distribution
Those go in order of priority by the way. For example, adjust what consistent looks like based on how often you can share something interesting.
Longer version below.
Content considerations for a worthwhile website
In order for content to work well for your business, it needs to be backed by a few things. Let’s go over them in what I would argue is their order of priority.
1) Industry knowledge
The baseline of all content is industry knowledge. Sometimes it’s easy to forget this, because experts don’t always know what they know. eCommerce industry knowledge to a brand founder is like swimming technique to a fish. They just know it.
Really great content is always built from this foundation. I’ve been able to clock it, and am calling it out here, because I’ve hired amazing writers from other industries and the writing is always amazing, but the foundational knowledge can break a piece.
A good example of an easy mistake for writers to make; mixing up Amazon Seller Central and Walmart Seller Center. Whereas someone who lives and breathes the industry will see “Amazon Seller Center” and immediately think “there’s something wrong with that.”
2) Customer insights
I’m a big believer in customer-led content, even before I took a customer-led growth course and finally learned the term for it. Essentially, you need to know the words and phrases your customers (and audience) use, how they use them, and how they understand them.
A good practice for this is to review all of your customer-facing communications and compare their commonly-used phrases with what appears on your website.
Here’s an example of how to do this with AI. Download all your customer call transcripts, support tickets, customer emails, and any customer feedback surveys you may have run and upload them all into a folder. Prompt option:
Review all of our customer-facing communications in this folder [add path to folder] and pay special attention to any patterns in words or phrases they use. Look at how they talk about their problems and issues, particularly the ones that we solve. Look at how they speak of us (positive vs negative) and how they phrase the benefits of working with us. Then look at our website and identify any gaps between what we should be saying to get more conversions and what we say today. Also, check whether there is anything on our website that is misleading or confusing, such as instances where we refer to something in a different way than our customers/audience understands.
I’m sure there’s a more token-efficient prompt you can use, but that should give you an idea of what you want.
Then if you have time, you can go on to have AI analyze the wording of the leads who then become customers, and apply more of their language to your website. Monitor if that affects the conversion rates you’re seeing at all.
If you want to do this all manually, run some surveys and interviews that will let you ask the exact questions you want to know.
Audience intelligence: Power up your marketing by understanding your customers
3) Bandwidth
If you have the first two things, next you need the actual bandwidth to plan, create, and distribute that content. I’ve heard a lot of complaints about consultants who come in, hand off a packet of instructions, then leave. Those instructions don’t become anything because there’s no bandwidth for execution.
Outsource what you need to, hire if you need to, but if you don’t have the right people who can own the content process it’ll be a waste of time and effort to put a plan in place and then leave it at that.
You can check out my content templates to get a starting point for building out your content operations.
4) Interest
Now, once you have the right baseline knowledge of your industry and audience (remember, I am assuming you already know everything you need to know about your company and offerings), and you have enough manpower to create and distribute content, you need to actually be interesting.
You need to have interesting information, an interesting perspective, or a unique point-of-view.
Most content planning thinking starts here. They wonder what they can say that’s worth reading, listening to, and talking about. Find your unique angle for each piece and execute well.
For service pages and your main pages, you’ll want to think about how easily someone can get to those pages from your homepage (how many clicks does it take) and how strong are your internal link maps. Your key service pages should be linked to from the homepage, other service pages, relevant industry pages, and so on.
The angle you want to laser in on for service pages is what to say so that people who land there think; that’s exactly me and exactly what I need right now. When you understand your customer, you’ll be able to build a service page that, when your ideal customer lands on, will feel like it was written just for them. The most interesting thing you can provide is a solution they want.
Tip: Consider UX design and smart content design to keep them scrolling. Key information above the fold in the hero area, then build it out with more and more detailed info as they scroll down.
5) Consistency
So you have something worthwhile to say, the resources to do it, the customer understanding to frame it so it lands, and the knowledge to make it credible.
Now it’s time to be consistent. Make sure your website is consistent with your brand and your service pages cover everything you need to cover, in the language that will resonate with your audience. Be consistent with your webpage updates (that doesn’t mean go overboard and create 100s of service pages), and consistent with your blog publishing.
It sounds really boring because it usually is, but this part makes a big difference in your results. And be patient, because sometimes it takes years before you look back and realize it’s been working.
6) Repurposing
When you put in a bunch of effort to make something amazing and useful, you want to repurpose it for multiple channels and distribute it everywhere. Turn a blog into an infographic for social media, publish your webinar recording with a transcript to your blog, create a PDF of a case study for your sales team to share out.
There are a bunch of ways to repurpose your content based on what it is and what channels your audience lives on. If you have a strong newsletter, leverage that and share your content out there. If you have a wide partnership network, tap into them to see who is willing to share to their LinkedIn audiences.
Content repurposing guide: How to extend the lifetime value of your content
Wrapping up: Making sure your content works for you
That checklist may look like common sense to readers, but without any of those content requirements you end up wasting your time and shouting into a void. I would even argue it’s better to have a lean website that narrows into your offerings rather than a bloated one filled with AI garble.