Let's say that your company provides either a service or software solution for employee onboarding.
Doing a simple Google search for "onboarding challenges" gets us these results:
Copy and paste the link of any of these top pages into @Ahrefs or @semrush
Great - low KD - relatively small traffic - but it speaks to the audience I want to help.
This becomes my pillar target. The connective hub of my initial content-building strategy.
Now jump into the top pages and see what the listed "challenges" are in each piece.
One of the top URLs:
Another of the top URLs:
And another of the top URLs:
Keep going, grabbing more challenges, issues, and hurdles.
Now sort out duplicates and do your best to get to the challenges that you know directly can be solved by your product. Great.
Next...
Take each item on your list and do a Google search.
Example: "lack of role clarity" - this came up on several of the lists so lets look at what people are talking about in relationship to that.
Google "create role clarity" (solution)
Grab a top link and throw it in Ahrefs.
The results give us some great role clarity solution ideas:
Since all of these keywords are ranked in the top 10 for a single page - You can assume that most of them belong to a single piece of content (have the same intent).
And I'll go look at that main/highest ranking keyword for this post "role clarity"
As you can see, you've got an easy target at about 4 KD, speaking directly to a solution for our persona's "challenges."
This will give you your first piece of cluster content.
How this will start to pillar and cluster or wheel and spoke:
In your "challenges" list (pillar post), you'll likely have an H2 or H3 section about "lack of role clarity" being a problem.
From that section, you'll link to your new "role clarity" piece...
You can do this via an inline prompt (soft CTA) inviting them to learn more about creating role clarity in your more detailed article.
In your piece on creating role clarity - you'll hopefully be able to allude to how a product like yours solves the problem - add a CTA invite
For the rest of the strategy - simply repeat the above process for each of the challenges that we gathered at the beginning, link from your pillar post, then link into product.
You're targeting an ICP, providing helpful solutions, and making your product a part of that solution.
For more transparent SEO threads like this feel free to give me a follow @I___DEREKflint
And I'll be building more content similar to this in my newsletter π
How to identify content consolidation opportunities to boost your organic traffic quickly π§΅
Content consolidation is a game-changing #SEO practice.
When you create new content, Google needs time to crawl, index, and rank your content.
Consolidation, on the other hand...
...is essentially a type of content update.
Because the URL youβll be using likely has existed for quite some time and is already associated with your target keyword(s), the results often come quickly.
So how do we find these opportunities?
1οΈβ£ Noticing when high-performing content decays exactly as a newer piece of content begins to grow
If a new piece of content is starting to perform β aka impressions shot up for that URL and yet growth on the website or the blog canβt be seen - check for losses elsewhere
Here are 17 #SEO tactics I've come to love for improving rankings + conversions on content π
Aka tactics that represent comprehensive #contentmarketing best practices rather than spammy, traffic-desiring ad spammers.
1) Effectively improving organic traffic starts with understanding the pain points of your ICP
Not a direct SEO ranking factor, BUT...
Any SEO can rank content.
What most struggle with is generating conversions with that content.
Knowing your ICP = Conversions
2) Build topic clusters
In recent years, the world of SEO has been shifting away from strategies that involve individual keywords and their search volume and more into topic clusters.
Aka many keywords that play a part in rounding out a topic both narratively and semantically.
An easy way to find great #contentmarketing topics from your own first-party dataπ
Google data can help you make smarter #SEO choices, removing the guessing game of choosing topics that are relevant/related to one another semantically.
Let's take a quick look at GSC.
Google Search Console is a goldmine for finding queries that are related to your business and the most successful pieces of content you've already built.
How to identify these topics:
1) Open GSC and navigate to the tab on the left side that says "performance." Select that.
2) Navigate to the navigation tabs that sit below the main graph and above the table. Make sure you select the "pages" tab.
Why "retention" topics make for great #SEO targets - Esp. for young #SaaS brands that might not have much data about their audience π
1οΈβ£ Retention topics NOT ONLY speak directly to your current customers but to the people who have the same problems as your customers.
It's a surefire way to ensure you're speaking to a relevant target audience.
2οΈβ£ Retention topics are often very specific. A customer has a problem, frustration, or a goal that your support team keeps encountering.
That specific problem might not have huge, 10k per month organic traffic volumes associated with it, but it likely has a high rate of conversion (plus generates loyalty!).