Creating vs. capturing demand

Hey,

We are going live next week with an exiting new case study:

???WEBINAR: Decoding the SEO Success Secrets of Drift

Drift is known for “conversational marketing”. And yet, they rank for all things “chatbot”.

How did they manage to create demand for their new category whilst capturing people where they are at?

Decoding SEO Success” is where we break down the SEO strategy of popular software companies, so you can deploy them yourself.

The webinar will run on Wednesday, 22nd of June, at 5pm CET, 11am ET and 8am PT.

Safe the date and sign up on LinkedIn here.

???GUIDE: Should You Accept Guest Posts on Your Startup Blog?

You all get them… the outreach emails from SEOs asking for a guest post on your website.

Our new guide by Sofie Couwenbergh is for you.

As usual, the answer is… It depends.

??SEO DONE RIGHT: Personio’s Glossary for SEO Content At Scale

My LinkedIn post on glossaries got 6.700 views. More than 2x the size of my following. So it is clearly the talk of the SEO town.

Who would have thought that glossaries are the hot thing to do in SEO these days? ?? ??

Revenue.io has one, Active Campaign and Personio.

But let me get one thing straight: When I say “glossary”, I don’t mean short-form dictionary style content.

What these companies are doing is rolling out long-form, strategic SEO content - at scale.

Instead of flooding their blogs with SEO articles, they leverage the glossary as the place to launch hyper-optimized SEO content.

Because of the big interest in the topic, I decided to follow up with a how-to here.

Step 1: Keyword research

Glossaries will mostly house your educational, informational content for middle and top of funnel. Personio ranks for “attrition rate”, “workforce planning” or “employee lifecycle”.

???To find all the keywords, start with a brainstorming in your team. Put together each and every concept that your customers are interested in or need to understand to use your software.

???Then go to your SEO tool and enter these ideas as seed keywords to get even more suggestions. Also you use the function “also ranks for” to find keywords that other websites rank for.

???A review of your closest competitors should serve even more opportunities.

At this point, you are trying to find as many keywords as possible to understand the competitive landscape.

Step 2: Prioritization

???Firstly, you will want to cluster all of your keywords into topics. You can have a tool like Keyword Cupid or KeywordInsights.AI (I prefer the later) help you but you will need to manually sense check and refine the results.

For example, the topic “attrition rate” will include supporting keywords like “attrition rate meaning”, “what is attrition rate”, “attrition rate definition” or “high attrition”.

???Secondly, you want to check if your website is already ranking for a topic - in this case, you will want to optimize the existing article, not launch a second competing article in the glossary.

This is most easily done by pulling a complete ranking report from your SEO tool and using VLOOKUP to marry the ranking position with your keyword ideas.

???Thirdly, you will want to categorize your topics (clusters of keywords) by priority. This includes search volume, difficulty and customer alignment.

What are crucial concepts that your customers need to understand? You will want to include them even if the difficulty is high.

The goal is to create a final list of topics that you actually want to publish.

For reference: Personio has 215 ranking pages. Active Campaign has 143 ranking in the glossary. The goal of the glossary is to launch SEO content at scale.

Step 3: Content plan

You will want to create a content plan. (You can use our editorial calendar template).

???Start with topics with medium to high search volume but low difficulty.

???Then slowly work your way into the more difficult topics.

???Lastly, fill the gaps with the topics that are low in search volume but important to your customers.

A good content plan includes the topic/title and description, the associated campaign (glossary), the due date, the publish date, the target audience, the main and supporting keywords, the call-to-action or offer, the author and a link to the brief, final version and live URL

Step 4: Page layout and URL structure

???Start by creating a hub page. This could be /glossary/ or /lexicon/.

The goal of the page is to structure your content and provide internal links. It does not need to have lots of content. Essentially, you will want to make sure that every single article will be linked from here. The most easy way to do this is in alphabetical order.

Active Campaign added a search function on the top of the page which is a nice touch.

???Create a page template for your glossary entries.

Each glossary entry is a topic from your prioritized content plan. Each entry will live on /glossary/main-keyword/.

Your page template should include at minimum: One H1 at the top of the page, a table of content, space for CTAs in the text and in the the sidebar, links to related articles in the sidebar and at the bottom.

Step 5: Content publishing and optimizing

Now is time to start writing and optimizing at scale. Here is a helpful checklist for every entry of your glossary:

???Include the main keyword in URL.

???Add main keyword to page title.

???Add the main keyword in the meta description if possible.

???Add main keyword in H1.

???Include only one H1 per page.

???Add main keyword in first paragraph.

???Add main keyword at the end of the page if possible in a natural way.

???Subheadings (H2,H3, H4) should use the right order and hierarchy.

???Add supporting keywords in the subheadings.

???Add supporting keywords in the body of text.

???No thin content -- aim for at least 800+ words for most content. Word count can be reviewed in SEO content briefings.

???Include 1-2 internal links to related glossary entries within the content.

???You can include external links if necessary (links to other pages outside yours) but try to make a maximum of 2.

???Include a CTA (call to action). Make it visible.

Personio launched more than 200 English glossary pages in a year. Can you beat them? ??

And with that, we wish you a great week and happy ranking.

Cheers, Viola