source:: Why the winner takes all in Content Marketing - Saxifrage Blog

Why winner takes all

Or, why you need to aim high in SEO

SERPs

1. The top results are ads:
   • The top 10-30% of SERP traffic goes to paid ads placements
2. Most clicks are on page-1
   • 95% of SERP traffic goes to results above the fold (top-5 results)
3. Most keywords are long-tail
   • Below the top 20% of keywords ranking - there's 80% of lower traffic longer tail keywords that make for a long term strategy

Myths

Myth #1: Best practices exist

In SEO, as soon as a tactic works and is shared, it ceases working.
Following 'best practices' makes you an average copy at best.
You need to take small bets, and keep experimenting.
Find what works for you over time!

Myth #2: Write for your target customer

Content marketing is a longer sell than paid.
People clicking on organic results, skipping all the ads at the top of the SERP probably aren't in the market to buy yet.
Think of content as a brand channel. A much longer-term horizon.

If you think about content marketing as a brand channel, the economics make more sense. Unlike normal brand campaigns that aim to get a potential customer to remember you when it’s time to buy, content marketing is trying to win space in the mind of whoever is going to influence that decision. So don’t take the common advice to write to “decision-makers” — your content will be boring and you’ll have to dumb it down. Write for the people who really know what they’re doing, and convince them you’re competent too.

Myth #3: Only focus on evergreen content

You must think long term growth! Most SEO novices aren't thinking this way, so you can beat them in the long game.
You must balance between short-term spikes and long-term growth.

==Think of other formats and tools that are really useful for your audience. ==

Content Roadmap Structure:

Content can be: spreadsheet templates, calculators, guides, trend reports, data studies, tactical guides on specific topics, Q&As, webinars, video series, podcasts, examples, twitter threads, polls and results, combinations of the above, etc.

List of content types and formats for SEO

At the end of the day - one of the biggest levers you can pull is backlink acquisition.
The more people are linking and referencing your articles, the higher you'll rank.
(much like LYT and mind-maps)

When we published the hiring freeze database at Candor we attracted over 4,000 backlinks, and hundreds of unrelated pages on our blog suddenly started ranking.

Keyword Universe

You need to understand what people are searching for and where the intent is.
Use Ahrefs, SEMrush and Spyfu daily. Make them your best friends.

Owned Keywords

• Identify one or two keywords to own
• Make sure every piece of content contains them and has some relevancy.
• Make sure your content internally links to anchor pieces for this keyword so people naturally navigate to them next.

Coin a search term

eg.
Bryan Dean’s “skyscraper technique”
Or, for Vexpower it’s “simulator-based courses”

Identify keywords and a search term you're going to aim on owning
(eg. for Cardano it might be 'native tokens')

There will be low search volume, but that's okay - you're going to grow that with recognition.

You want the term to be unique enough that you can own it for a long time before it becomes more common in the industry and your competitors start ranking for it (this is a sign of success)

Trending Keywords

These are the top, most competitive keywords for your niche.
Trends can blow up unexpectedly, but you can also predict some.

eg.
the upgrade of iOS 13 to iOS 14 is a predictable trend, you can prepare content for and be ready to lead the charge.

In some cases you can find a keyword that will reliably trend at predictable intervals: news organizations take full advantage of these types of keywords: for example they have pre-written obituaries for all major celebrities ready to publish in the event of their death.

Testing keywords

You can test blog post ideas and keywords with social posts.
Identify what will start trending based on engagement on a social post with a high-level pitch of the content.
Then write about what starts to pick up speed.

Remember the goal of creating content for these keywords is to quickly ride the wave so you get shares and hopefully backlinks. 
You don’t have to create the trend but these things grow up unexpectedly, and by being the first serious source on the trend you’ll get all the references. The content you write here should start off as social posts: most trends flop, so only graduate the keyword to a blog post if it starts to take off.

Target keywords

Most people in your industry don’t regularly look at SERP rankings, so there are usually keywords with a low difficulty / competition and high enough traffic.

Create atomic essays:

an atomic essay: 500 words on the topic, with a single shareable asset: a template, image or insight.

Keywords

Head Keywords

These are the 10% most popular keywords you're trying to target.
These are hard to rank for and require constant attention to maintain once you find some success.

Long Tail Keywords

This should be the final bucket you optimize for, because it’s hard to do it right. Of course you will be ranking for some long tail keywords at this point, because every page ranks for multiple keywords, not just the ones you targeted. But to really hit long tail keywords at scale, you’re going to need to build products. This is very difficult to do as an SEO team, because usually you don’t get developer resource. That means when you pull it off, it can be a great moat that’s hard for competitors to replicate.

SEO Auditing

‍Minimum Viable Technical SEO Audit - Saxifrage Blog

1. Visibility
   1. Sitemap
   2. Robotx.txt
   3. HTML readable
2. Archetecture
   1. Rank for one keyword per page
   2. Make that keyword as close to the URL as possible
3. Metadata

The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors

Content Ideation and Road Mapping

Link building for SEO

Link building for SEO

Content Repurposing

Content Repurposing for Social Promotion - Saxifrage Blog

1. Export text transcript from video
2. Run through GPT-3 to clean up
3. Format for socials