10 Steps To A High ROI Content Strategy

Your website is a bridge between Google and your offer. When someone searches keywords in your niche, you want them to land on your landing page, and not your competition. Search traffic is the #1 marketing channel out there.

When you Google something, you have "intent." You're looking for something specific. Social media is the opposite. Users have no "intent," they're just bored and browsing to get dopamine hits, instead of being on a mission to find information. This means far greater conversions through search than social.

This means search should be your priority as a marketer. It's the biggest channel, and if you're not showing up on Google when users type in keywords in your niche, you're not doing your job properly.

1. Improve Your Landing Page Experience

Without a high-conversion, optimized landing page, the traffic you get will be wasted. If your site doesn't convert, getting more traffic is like pumping water into a leaky bucket.

Your landing page should fundamentally be focused on a clear conversion goal, like converting users to a free consultation call. You can have secondary goals, but be careful not to lose focus from your primary goal. Good landing pages do the following:

• Shorten the journey from a user's click to their conversion.
• Remove friction from every interaction with the page.
• Simplify and remove jargon.
• Don't put text in images (these don't get crawled).
• Don't use generic headers (like "Home" or "Services"), as these are bad for SEO.
• Include relevant keywords for your niche.
• Include clear, unambiguous calls-to-action.
• Don't make the user use logical thinking, everything should be able to be understood while on "auto-pilot."
• Answer user's questions (objections), reinforce their motivation for visiting your site, and address barriers.

The above are just a few of many steps to take to improve your LP, but they all center around empathizing with your users and their needs. How can you show that you're genuinely the best solution for them?

2. Audit Your Domain Authority (DA)

Google used to tell you your domain authority, essentially your ranking on Google. They don't anymore, but you can use the MOZ Link Explorer to estimate your Domain Authority on a scale of 1 (low) to 100 (high). Domain Authority is on a logarithmic scale, which means that it gets harder and harder to increase it as you rank higher.

For example, it's a lot harder to get from 21 to 30 than it is to get from 1 to 10. This graphic by Orbits Media shows this:

The "Competitiveness" axis relates to the level of keywords you can rank for. If you have low domain authority, you can only rank for keywords that don't get much search volume. These are niches within niches. With an extremely high domain authority, you can rank for keywords with extremely high search volume.

High DA = High Competitiveness

3. Get High-Authority Back-Links

The Internet, or the World Wide Web, is fundamentally a network of links. The more links you get to your site, the higher you'll rank. Especially if those links come from sites with high Domain Authority. You get these back-links by building real-world relationships to contributors and editors at leading publications in your niche.

The key here is to focus on quality, not quantity. If you try to take shortcuts and pump out back-links in less-than-ethical ways, Google's algorithm will take note and punish your domain authority, potentially going so far as to blacklist your domain.

4. Create High-Quality Content ("Blog")

There's a huge difference between a blog and a content strategy. One is a hobby, and the other is potentially the biggest source of leads for your company.

By creating a strategy-driven blog that makes you a thought leader in your niche (through consistent, high-quality content), your domain authority will rise above your competition, and you'll gain more leads through the #1 marketing channel out there.

By not consistently pumping out content, you're missing out on massive amounts of real estate. It's just common sense.

5. Create Guest Posts

As you know from Step 3, you need high-quality backlinks to boost your authority. A great way to do this is with guest posting. As you can see on my profile, I've put out over 100 guest posts in the last year, building thought leadership for tech companies.

Most publications in the world accept guest posts, either directly through "contributor" forms on their site, or indirectly by emailing editors at the publication with your pitch.

6. Re-purpose Top Performing Content

By now, you've pushed out tons of content, and if you're analyzing metrics on your blog (which you should be with Google Analytics), you can see what resonates with your target audience. You can easily select top-performing content and re-purpose it to capture changes in your industry, or simply upgrade the content and re-release it.

Don't let great content wither in the face of time, simply give it a polish and re-publish to bring it back into the limelight. Of course, it's crucial that you don't get lazy in this step, as your readers will notice if you push out too-similar content and look for others with more originality.

7. Write What People Want to Know About (Keyword Analysis)

Creating content that gets read is not about luck - it's about listening to your audience and answering their questions. To get clicks to your content, you have to target associated keywords, so here are a few tools I use that I can recommend:

• Keyword Tool
• Answer The Public
• Google Trends

The first one, Keyword Tool, basically scrapes together all the keywords associated with any word you type in, giving you tons of potential topics to cover. Answer The Public scrapes together a bunch of questions your audience is asking about a keyword you type in. Finally, Google Trends obviously shows trends in the volume of keywords over time. These tools give you virtually infinite content ideas.

8. Create Original Research

Perhaps the best type of content to create is original research. No matter what industry your in, people undoubtedly share platitudes and stereotypes about the industry, but often without data to back it up. If you can provide that data and industry-grade research for a popular topic in your industry, you'll win the Internet.

For example, here's a lengthy original research report I created for the Security Token Alliance on "Investing in Blockchain."

9. Update Old Content and Link to Newer Content

From Step 6, you already know to re-purpose old, high-performing content into newer content, but another strategy you should implement is maintaining old content by going back and adding links to new content.

Your old content (if you're following the tips in this article), is still getting traffic, so you should provide internal links to new content for those users to stay in your ecosystem and on your pages for longer, boosting your SEO with higher on-page times.

10. Properly Format Content

The truth is, the design and formatting of your content are just as important as the content itself. Here are a few simple steps to better formatting: Create a custom cover photo and put the headline in the cover photo (check this article as an example). Use multiple images throughout the article. Bold and italicize words with impact. Use a lot of whitespace.

Formatting is pretty simple, but also easily forgotten. Nobody reads walls of text, so if you're putting out ugly, poorly formatted content, don't expect to get any ROI.

11. (BONUS) Collaborate in Creation

"An ally in creation is an ally in promotion."

What Andy Crestodina meant by this quote is that people whom you collaborate with will automatically want the content to succeed, and therefore help promote it. If you have quotes and mentions from others, they'll want to make sure other people see your content as well!

Here are a few ways to collaborate on content:

• Quote and mention influencers in your content.
• Ask influencers for expert quotes.
• Include others in "expert roundups."
• Invite others to guest post.
• Create deep-dive interviews with industry leaders.

As you can see, there are a lot of ways to collaborate in content creation, and this can have a great impact on your content ROI.