So, the holiday season is coming and this means that all businesses are
looking for more sales, so they can end the year with a bang, but the holiday
season also brings out the inner Italian that is in me, that is not so inner,
which means we will be whipping up some amazing recipes for your success.
So allow me to introduce you to... Mamma Chiara.
Chef Marketing Officer for SEMrush.
Today's recipe: how to cook up some great content marketing.
Let's face it.
One of the hardest recipes for marketers to make is delicious content that keeps
people coming back for more.
Too often, in fact, content marketers approach it the way some people test if spaghetti
is done cooking, which means throwing it on the wall and see if something sticks.
That's not how Mamma Chiara does it.
And you shouldn't do it as well.
Content marketing is most effective when you follow a very simple recipe with only
five ingredients that you probably already have.
Well, I shouldn't give away my secret recipe, but,
I mean, we're friends. First, start off with a full cup of goals and metrics.
Like any great recipe,
we'll need to understand what we want to accomplish, our final result,
Our perfect ready-made dish.
Well, start with a content audit, because that will help you align your
content strategies with your business objectives.
SEMrush can help you set goals and metrics to improve your SEO results.
Our Content Audit tool helps with the first goal of identifying existing content
that has great potential to rank high.
You'll also get insight to know what contents should be updated,
or even that old stale stuff that should just be tossed out.
And don't forget about internal links
Our Site Audit tool will help you really dig into internal linking to
help you bake your SEO from within.
And next off,
We want to boost our engagement.
Here's what you see in SEMrush: a much clearer picture of the types of content
that actually matter to your audience.
This information helps you refine the topics of actual interest and how
those topics can simmer in social media.
As of metrics, if you're a little lost and don't know what to look for, I'll give
you a small example with this Excel file.
First of all, we start with all the URLs that we have collected from our content
audit, a small description, the H1, the word count, which is not exactly
important, but still nice to have.
The publication date that is really important to understand
in the future, what content might need an update or not. The tag, that
makes us understand more or less
what's the topic of the content, the author,
and then this columns here are the target of our content, like freelancers,
agencies, and stuff like that.
The type of content, SEO in this case.
The groups we can create in fact, different clusters to help us
create more or less, a more organized distinctions between
all the content that we have.
And here are the most important metrics, the keyword volume,
which is our main target keyword,
what type of volume does it have,
And then data from Google search console and Google analytics.
And of course the registrations, because we always hope that those clients
will then become converting leads.
You also want to check the user behavior on the page, the engagement,
and don't forget the key metric of all which is actual sales!
Next off, we add a few generous tablespoons of
content inventory into the mix.
All great chefs know what's in their cupboards and the same
holds for marketers, know what you're offering right now:
blog posts, videos, PDFs, interactive tools, landing pages, all of them.
Create the list of all the URLs for content that you want to track
and analyze. Launching the audit of your inventory is really easy.
Check a few boxes and you're starting to cook.
It can line up easily with your existing site.
And if you don't have a site map, no problem.
We can substitute our site map generator. And remember how important
the metadata is for great SEO?
Our content audit tool can help you highlight gaps that you might've missed
so that you can quickly fix them.
Our next ingredient is data, lots and lots of data.
Don't be stingy here.
Like any great recipe, details really matter, but you know what?
Collecting SEO data can be a real pain unless you use also
here, the content audit tool, we just talked about. With a few clicks,
you can automatically gather all kinds of great data, including social shares
by channel, backlinks and other details.
Rather than gathering for hours manually
this information, was serve it up to you so easily so that you don't
have to run back to the store,
I mean, figuratively the store, for all the little ingredients you
forgot, but the data goes even deeper.
Hookup your Google analytics and search console accounts for even more
flavor about sessions and page views.
We even have our post tracking tool to help you zoom in on hidden
details about guest posts you've contributed to third-party sites and
more. All of this detail lets you make smart decisions about what content
you need to keep update or delete.
Now we're going to add our fourth ingredient: mix in a dash of action plan.
Here's where our earlier ingredient, goals, comes into play.
We want to prioritize them and determine how achievable a goal may be
along with the effort required to drive real results. Let's take
this to the individual URL level, make a simple spreadsheet of the
content pages you want to address.
You'll likely find ways to repurpose existing content or
craft it in a different format.
You may find underperforming blog posts that need to be rewritten or expanded.
Maybe even just with a little refresh to make it more current.
And remember our latest video about SEO mistakes?
If you don't hear it, well, it's very important to structure
your H2 and H3 tags because that can make a huge difference.
And it doesn't take a lot of time.
And now fifth and maybe even most important: flexibility.
We'll always need to adjust our content marketing strategy.
That's why doing audits periodically can really help us identify successes
and assess all those projects that didn't come out of the oven as we hoped for.
I suggest you do that at least once a year, whatch your competitors, and keep an
eye on your industry trends and topics.
In fact, if your industry changes really fast, you may need to do the audit
more than once a year.
Some brands may even need to do this on a monthly basis.
Just look what is best for you and for the industry you work in.
So that's the end of our cooking show with Mamma Chiara,
SEMrush Chef Marketing Officer.
And please, if you liked this video, subscribe to this channel, hit
the like button and activate the notification bell so that you never miss
all the content we'll be posting.
Oh, and if I forgot any secret ingredient that you put into your
content marketing recipes, please write them in the comments below.
I'm waiting to read them.
Buon appetito!