Tag: <span>Popular Blog</span>

26 Best Content Marketing Tips of 2024

Posted on July 13, 2021May 23, 2024 by Daniel E. Lofaso

You’d probably agree that content marketing can help build trust and credibility within your industry.

However, this only happens when your content strategy is aligned with what your target audience wants to hear.

To gain more insight into what other content marketers are doing to engage with their audience effectively, I’ve asked a slew of professionals from different industries what their best content marketing tips for 2022 are.

Check out the wealth of information below and see if you can incorporate some of these ideas into your next piece of content.

Promote user-generated content

Not all of the content in your content marketing strategy, in my opinion, has to come from you. For various reasons, user-generated content is an effective marketing strategy. For starters, it provides social proof to new learners who are discovering the topic, letting them know that they aren’t the only ones who are interested in what you’re teaching, and it allows them to evaluate the outcomes of previous classes. Second, it’s much easier to share. The person who developed their material is more likely to promote and share your article highlighting them with their online connections, who are also more likely to like, comment, and repost it, resulting in far higher organic results than if you had created it yourself.

Ryan Dalal
CEO & Founder
Word to PDF

Dan’s Take
To get user-generated content try an outlet like Help a Reporter Out (HARO) where you can create queries in which relevant parties can respond. You can then use this information to create meaningful content that comes from the perspective of other credible sources (hint: sort of like the piece you are reading now!)

Understand search intent

It is 2022 and Google is getting more sophisticated with every update so the demands on content increase. One of the most common mistakes I see is that writers and content marketers don’t understand the searcher intent. This may result in 2 issues – you focus on wrong KWs (that drive you traffic and not sales), or badly written content that cannot rank.

A lot of people are looking for a magical formula on how to write content that ranks. But they often forget that people are just looking for information for their queries. So before you start writing, ask yourself a few questions.

Who is my content for? What is the search intent?
What do I want to share?
How does it benefit the reader?
Is it helpful?
Is it well researched?
Do I engage the reader’s emotions?

Every word of your content should add value. People are not interested in fluffy sentences with little to no info. Add value = Answer questions, solve problems.

Ing. Petr Minarik
Cyclists Hub

Google wants the user to find the answer to the query right away, at the beginning of the introduction. The days of content marketers weaving a story into the introduction to hook readers are over. Google’s Core Update of June 2021 focuses on user experience. Marketers need also not worry about bounce rate. The focus today is on getting the user the answer to the

search query right away. This is in stark contrast to trying to keep users on the blog post longer in order to improve bounce rate. Marketers need to update their posts with fresh content and content that answers the user’s query at the beginning of the introduction.

Janice Wald
Blogger, Blogging Coach, Freelance Writer
Mostly Blogging

Rely on data

Many content creators ignore their own data because they don’t know how to quantify it or set a benchmark for what is good and what is terrible. It’s easier to understand the outcomes if your content approach is results-oriented. The first step is to get to know your audience and personalize your material to their preferences. The topic matter and the structure, the platform you choose to promote the content, and the relevancy of your final objective are all factors to consider.

The first step toward success is to get the basics right, and delving deep into who your learners are and how to effectively reach them can help your overall content marketing approach succeed.

Jake Smith
Managing Director
Absolute Reg

Keep track of your success against your goals as you implement these content marketing ideas and produce content on your site. Although it’s easy to feel accomplished by merely looking at the number of pages you’ve published, it’s critical to examine whether or not those pages are truly creating results. Make it a habit to check Google Analytics (or another analytics application) regularly, and keep track of the parameters that show overall performance. If things are going well, keep doing what you’re doing; if they aren’t, utilize the data to improve your plan.

Naomi Bishop
Chief Insurance Officer
Surfky

The biggest shift we’ve made is from a focus on quantitative data to qualitative data when it comes to content strategy. The truth about quantitative data is that (1) we’re all using the same tools (2) to pull suspect data (3) on micro-conversions like links and shares—not leads and revenue.

So we can’t expect quantitative data to rescue our strategies—to reveal the compelling angles on topics and help us stand out in a crowded landscape.

Qualitative data, however, has tons of insights. You can gather this by cataloging and coding comment threads on posts or—my favorite—comment streams on upvoting sites (e.g., Hacker News, Reddit). You can also run user surveys to get this same data.

Instead of staring at a laundry list of content that earned likes and shares, you’ll get real user commentary about *why* certain articles or opinions within them resonated. Those are the crucial insights you need in 2022, when everything has already been 10x’d and skyscraper’d to death.

Derek Gleason
Lead Analyst
Workshop Digital

Build tools

By far, one of our most effective content marketing strategies has been building calculators. With so many people’s problems online, sometimes there’s no better answer than by giving them solid numbers. There’s some fantastic plugins which make creating content like this easy (I recommend the Calculated Fields Form plugin on WordPress). You can create calculators on almost anything, like:

Finance calculators
Material calculators
Product recommendation calculators
Cost-to-run calculators

The real beauty is in the ease of marketing these content pieces. Simply find websites that discuss the issue that your calculator solves, and mention how you’ve got a purpose-built calculator to help their readers. More often than not, they’ll thank you for it.

Craig Anderson
Owner
Appliance Analysts

Dan’s Take
We love building tools for site visitors as well as our clients. In fact, we’ve built an SEO ROI Calculator and a PPC ROI Calculator that we use for internal purposes, but also as a means to naturally acquire links. You don’t need to be a developer to build calculator tools, either. Run on over to Code Canyon and type in a specific search for the type of calculator you want to build; you may find that it already exists and you can simply update it a little bit to match your branding.

Make your content more voice search-friendly

Voice search is becoming a more frequent way for individuals to access and consume web material as smart devices become more prevalent. Voice search is used by 41% of individuals on a daily basis to accomplish everything from checking the weather to making purchases.

When generating the content, keep voice search in mind to ensure that your site and products are available to the biggest possible audience. People omit extraneous words and focus only on the most crucial terms, making search engine queries shorter and shorter.

Amber Morland
CEO & Founder
WinCope

Establish your authority

Your goal with each item should be to improve your authority as an instructor in your industry, regardless of how you offer it. Select a strategy that allows you to demonstrate your expertise and teaching techniques.

When it comes to ranking websites, Google’s algorithm prioritizes Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness (EAT), so it’s critical to establish oneself as a credible figure before your site rises to the top of the SERPs. Start by making sure your credentials are visible on your website and social media pages. To show learners and search engines that you are a respectable figure in your industry, use your professional title, if you have one, or establish social proof.

Adam Fard
Founder & Head Of Design
Adam Fard UX Agency

Know your audience

You must first understand your target audience before you can develop any type of marketing strategy (online or otherwise). However, unlike most traditional tactics, content marketing necessitates a deeper understanding of your target group. You must write articles, blog posts, and visuals that engage your audience as part of content marketing. To accomplish so, you must first comprehend your potential clients’ desires, know about their passions, know areas they need your assistance in, know the words and phrases they use to search for answers on the internet.

Here’s an example of how to use this content marketing tip. Even though they both work in the healthcare area, a pharmaceutical digital marketing strategy and a dental digital marketing strategy may target two different audiences. While the pharmaceutical industry caters to doctors, the dental industry caters to patients, resulting in a wide range of materials. Your content marketing efforts will be considerably more successful if you have a thorough understanding of your audience. If you’ve never done any kind of research before, developing personas is a good place to start.

Daniel Foley
Founder
Daniel Foley SEO

To better understand the buyer’s journey for my customers and clientele, I like to browse online forums for industry-specific topics to note what kinds of questions they’re asking. With more people than ever on the internet in 2022, my company plans to work double-time in 2022 to ensure that our content goes further by utilizing the internet to identify information related to our buyer personas.

Leticia Romney
Owner and Editor
The Write Hand, LLC

Use an empathy map and take a comprehensive approach to gain a better understanding of your target audience’s point of view to allow you to take a step back and better tailor their experience based on what they think, feel, see, or hear. Empathy is the value that opens the door to have more meaningful interactions with our customers, which is extremely important during these changing times.

Matthew Paxton
Founder
Hypernia

Stay relevant with evergreen content

When it comes to content, the Internet is incredibly saturated with articles, videos, webpages, and media being produced on an unbelievable scale every second, and ensuring that your content remains visible and relevant is a daily challenge. One effective way to stand out is to skillfully edit videos, making them engaging and polished to capture and retain your audience’s attention.

As a result, evergreen content – content that remains relevant for an extended period of time – is crucial. Evergreen content will not go out of style in the near future, will always be timely and relevant, and will engage and attract users.

News stories, statistical trends, and seasonal topics are not allowed in evergreen content since they become associated with a specific date and lose their relevance. Evergreen content is regarded as a critical success factor for a business’s marketing strategy, particularly because it drives more traffic, has lower maintenance costs (because it doesn’t need to be updated or replaced on a regular basis), maintains high SEO rankings, and can be shared on social media for extended periods of time.

Tanner Arnold
President & CEO
Revelation Machinery

Prioritize quality over quantity

Don’t try to do everything at once.

Many edupreneurs will adopt broad content marketing plans in 2022, which will rapidly become unmanageable in practise. Be honest with yourself about what you can accomplish. It’s simply not possible to write a blog post every day, start a podcast, and eventually get around to forming a Facebook group, let alone teach two courses and write a book. Instead, concentrate on what you can do relatively well.

Frequency is less crucial than consistency. If you can only write one good blog post per month, adhere to that schedule and publish it on the same day each month. As a result, your fans will know when to expect your next post and will eagerly await it.

Dr. Pooneh Ramezani
CEO, Co-Founder
Dr. Brite

Dan’s Take
There is something of a debate in the SEO community about whether you should publish regularly or focus on quality and publish less frequently. My take is on the quality side of course, but I usually analyze other factors as well when it comes to content production frequency. When it comes to content, you want it to rank. Period. To get your content to rank you are likely to need a link building strategy to accompany it, so you have to budget accordingly. While you may be able to scale your content production to four blogs a month, not having a budget or resources to promote your content will likely not provide the same benefit of publishing one blog per month, building enough links so that it ranks, and driving traffic.

Create comparison content

One of our favorite content strategies this year has been creating comparison articles. We sell live bugs to reptile owners. And each bug has a variety of nutritional differences. Our articles on crickets vs worms, and worms vs roaches, and roaches vs crickets have been some of the most read articles on our site.

Those articles yield the greatest AdSense return and time on site compared to our other articles.

Jeff Neal
The Critter Depot

Dan’s Take
I really like comparison content as well, especially when comparing lesser-known or new brands as well as SaaS companies. For these types of clients, a comparison piece would want to look into the keyword volume around comparing well-known brands. For example, if you were in the CRM space, you would do Salesforce vs HubSpot vs [Your Brand]. The major competitors would drive the keyword volume necessary to make it meaningful and adding your business to the comparison list draws attention to the fact that you provide the same services. Ideally, you showcase why you are better here as objectively as possible.

Create unique content

My best content marketing tip for 2022 is to stop rehashing old content! Instead, if you want to grow your website or blog, you should be creating unique, original content that your audience won’t be able to find anywhere else.

You can do this by commissioning your own research on a subject, creating original infographics, and interviewing experts in your niche. Unique content is far more likely to attract high-quality backlinks, which in turn will help your blog rank and be found by a wider audience.

Emily Brookes
EmilyBrookes.com

Stay on top of trends

My top tips for content marketing in 2022 include staying on top of trends, looking at what other people are posting and consequently, what people are reacting most to. This then allows you to cater your content to something you know people will react most to. Another tip would be to make sure your content is straight to the point within the first couple of sentences. In this day and age, people don’t have the time to read a full article so they want to digest shorter pieces that get straight to the point.

Hannah Barden
Digital Marketing Apprentice
Bite Digital

Conduct competitor content audits

Given that content marketing is used by 48 percent of B2B marketers and 77 percent of B2C marketers, you’re probably not the only company in your field aiming to acquire clients with content. While this implies that you will face competition, it also implies that you will have the opportunity to see what others are working on.

Examine what your industry’s top competitors are doing with their content initiatives. Understand the formats they use. Understand the themes on which they will be debating. Find out what the general population thinks about it and what they have to say about it.

Kate Libby
Founder
Best Kids

Narrow your focus

You may find yourself coming up with broad, generic subjects when you choose the topics you wish to write about. However, unless you’re willing to devote the time to creating thorough long-form material, you should restrict each issue to the point where you can fully cover it. This will not only make article creation more manageable, but it will also assist you in developing more effective subjects. It’s preferable to have ten pages that completely answer a single question rather than one page that answers ten questions with minimal explanation—especially if each question is about a different subject.

Stephanie Young
CEO & Founder
Best Camping

Use internal links properly

If you want your content to rank highly in 2022, you need to use internal links correctly. One of the best ways to interlink your on-site content is by creating content clusters in a hub and spoke model. This is where you create a master page on a topic, which then links out to all relevant articles, which will naturally interlink with one another and of course, back up to the master page. This allows authority to flow around your content cluster, establishing credibility in Google’s eyes and serving users with all the information they need.

Ashton Hudson
Marketing Manager
Roofing Megastore

Use memes

Memes are undoubtedly the best performing content type in 2022 and every business must use them to their advantage. Laughter is an instant vacation and people love those who make them laugh.

Creating a fun image of your brand helps you increase the interaction with your content. People will like it, share it, and comment on their views that will naturally increase its reach.

All you need to do is to keep yourself updated with the latest trends and create content around that. But you must also be careful not to overdo the same and balance it with educational/informational content.

Madhav Goenka
Co-founder and CMO
Frazile

Leverage live streaming technology

A big trend in content marketing for 2022 will be the continued rise of live streaming. The pandemic introduced us to the idea of events online, with seminars being held on Zoom, and talks/community interactions being a popular feature with instagram live.

Even with things now getting back to normal, audiences have been introduced to a much more accessible access to events they never had before, and that demand to keep this type of accessibility is clear to see on social media. Whatever your business is, working out how to incorporate these digital live events is something you should definitely be discussing.

Alex Magnin
CEO & Founder
Alex Magnin

Repurpose your content across all mediums

As companies become used to new features online being used in order to engage wider audiences, the next big trend will be about taking this a step further and learning how to repurpose this content in order to again share further and wider.

For instance, live online events were extremely popular in 2020, so the next stage for that content will be saving, editing and sharing through other platforms in order to get your message further and to engage new audiences. Live will still have that excitement, especially with the idea of interaction, but having it available at a later date can still engage new people.

Alex Mastin
Founder & CEO
Homegrounds

Invest in long-form content

It may seem paradoxical, but despite the fact that our attention spans are shortening and we are hopping from page to page, website to website, people are still ready to put in the time to read a detailed and well-written piece.

Just keep in mind that we’re not discussing words for the sake of using them. Consumers are looking for quality. They want postings that are thorough, topical, and valuable. They are also not scared to spend time with them. More words equal more success, but only if they’re relevant words.

Alex Claro
VPN Analyst
Credit Donkey

Showcase your brand’s personality in your content

My best piece of advice in regards to content marketing is to be authentic.

Too often, businesses seem to think they need to put out professional-looking content all the time. The best pieces of content are ones that showcase your personality. I am a firm believer that people want to do business with people they actually like. If you can make your audience feel like they know the people behind the company logo you will see a tremendous response to your content marketing efforts.

You don’t need the best camera or the best video editing software. Sometimes, the best content happens when you spontaneously turn your phone around and do a quick video message speaking directly on something that will help your audience.

Alex Carter
Director of Product Development
MaxExposure Business Solutions

When starting a new small business, it’s ok to take on content marketing and strategizing yourself, but eventually you’re going to find it difficult to juggle everything, especially if you don’t know best practices.

Hire a content marketing manager

A professional content marketing manager will work with you to learn about and understand your audience, make sure your content has a clear goal, and maintain your brand voice across all platforms and promotional avenues. If you’re not doing it right, you could actually be hurting your business.

Jennifer Berube
Content Strategist
Jennifer Berube

Content Marketing Tips Takeaways

Thanks to all the content marketers out there that made this post possible. What is interesting about this roundup is that content marketers come in many shapes and sizes — CEOs, Founders, Analysts, and even Apprentices.

The takeaway here is that anyone can do content marketing with the proper plan, strategies, and execution. We look forward to checking out the best content marketing tips for 2022 next year.

SaaS PPC Tips for TOF, MOF, BOF (Sales Funnels)

Posted on October 1, 2021March 21, 2022 by Daniel E. Lofaso

https://youtu.be/9qfPsgNql1g

In our years of running custom PPC campaigns for SaaS companies, we’ve learned a trick or two about appropriate use of funds and targeting the right audience across the top (TOF), middle (MOF), and bottom (BOT) of the sales funnels

Where we see most companies (PPC agencies or self-managed PPC) get it wrong is by only targeting one part of the funnel instead of all three.

Below, we’ll look at the sales funnel and some tactics we consider when running PPC campaigns for our SaaS clients.

A Quick Review on the Top, Middle & Bottom of the Sales Funnel

Top of the Funnel: At the top of the funnel, you are driving awareness to your brand. These people may not know who you are, and your marketing efforts generally assume as much.
Middle of the Funnel: After awareness of your SaaS in the product mix, the middle of the funnel is where you help showcase why you should be considered amongst your competitors.
Bottom of the Funnel: The bottom of the funnel is where the key conversions happen and where you convince users to demo and purchase your SaaS over the others.

Here’s an example of Larry, our made-up persona, moving through the funnel. Larry is a product lead at a large fitness brand and is involved in video content creation and distribution.

SaaS Ads Example

A SaaS prospect is targeted at the top of the funnel:

Larry is on LinkedIn and sees a promotion for a free white paper on a recent guide to optimizing digital video infrastructure. Larry clicks the download button and is granted instant access to a well-made white paper from a brand he’s never heard of. Larry learns a lot from the white paper and keeps it on file with the plan to show to his team on the engineering side of the business.

The SaaS prospect moves to the middle of the funnel:

Six weeks later, Larry is at a meeting with his executive team and shares some of his insights on digital video infrastructure optimization that he thinks will work for the company. The C-suite tells Larry to find some potential vendors in the space that may help them with their goals. In addition to performing Google searches for video distribution software companies, Larry sees a retargeting ad from the initial company he downloaded the white paper from and requests a demo. He also schedules a few demos with other companies whose ads he clicked on.

The Saas prospect moves to the bottom of the funnel:

After meeting with four potential vendors, Larry makes the recommendation to the C-suite to use the services of the initial vendor he received the white paper from. Subconsciously, Larry felt that the educational experience he went through gave that company the most credibility to solve his companies challenges with video distribution.

This example plays out every day across the web, with additional layers trickled in that I’ve left out (such as email marketing to Larry, webinar invites, and Larry’s further research on the topic with blogs and other forms of organic content marketing).

Now that we know some PPC sales funnel use cases, let’s look at more specific examples for each stage of the funnel.

Top of the Funnel PPC Campaign Examples

Here are a few examples of top-of-the-funnel PPC campaigns we’ve run for select clients to help bring awareness to their business and begin to drive traffic.

White Paper / eBook Promotion Campaign

Channel: LinkedIn

Target audience: Interest & Position Based

Ad type: Leadgen forms

A white paper or eBook can be a powerful asset when building an inbound marketing strategy to your SaaS, but it needs to be in front of the right people to turn that investment into a success.

We recently ran a lead generation white paper PPC campaign for a SaaS healthcare client that boasted some good results. After a couple of months, we managed to get the CPL to around $40.

SaaS PPC Tips for TOF, MOF, BOF (Sales Funnels)

While this CPL may not be a good benchmark for every SaaS industry, for this client it was. For starters, their average client value was around $400,000 per year, with a lifetime value in the seven-figure range. Secondly, we were targeting a very niche market of a niche market (yes, a niche of a niche) so the net we could cast was rather narrow but made for a perfect LinkedIn campaign.

Pro Tip:

It is critical to direct people to a ‘gate’ rather than the actual content with white papers or eBooks. The point is to gain their contact information (which LinkedIn takes care of without much friction) and start them in the sales funnel. Therefore, it is recommended to build a landing page to download the asset on-site after the leads fill out the form on LinkedIn as opposed to directing these leads to your asset directly from LinkedIn (note that you can’t retarget from PDF links which is why we send them to a landing page).

With the recommended approach, you gain the following benefits that you wouldn’t if you’d just used LinkedIn’s form alone:

You direct people to your website giving the opportunity to learn more about your brand and engage with your content.
You provide yourself an opportunity to retarget these visitors based on the way they interact with your site. For example, if they landed on your gated page and made it to a software demo page, you’d want to retarget them with ads that encourage them to try a demo.
You provide an optional opportunity to move further down the conversion funnel, should they want, like in the example below.

Steps to take to emulate a top of the funnel SaaS white paper campaign like this:

Create a meaningful white paper your ideal customer would be interested in
Build a landing page to promote your white paper
Launch a LinkedIn PPC campaign using Lead Gen Forms (and connect your CRM)
Redirect your leads to your landing page

Social Video Demo Campaign

Channel: Facebook

Target audience: Interest & Position Based

Ad type: Video Ad / Video Carousel

Facebook offers very detailed targeting options, such as by job title, household income, business industry, etc. Therefore, it is usually an excellent way to increase the reach of important content from a content marketing perspective by boosting it and reaching targeted audiences in their streams.

Check out this top-of-the-funnel social video demo from WeTransfer as an example.

This video demo on Facebook sums up their software offering in 24 seconds with a clean CTA: Share files up to 2GB for free. No login is required.

Oddly, this desktop example has no clear call to action although the mobile example we saw from the Aaron Zakowski site does.

Middle of the Funnel PPC Campaign Examples

Branded Search-based Competitor Targeting

Channel: Google Ads

Target audience: Keyword based

Ad type: Search campaign

In a nutshell, AdWords competitor targeting is simply bidding on the branded search terms for the biggest competitors in your space.

Check out how YuJa bid on their competitors’ search term “kaltura pricing.”

This is a smart SaaS PPC technique for a number of reasons:

It allows you to bring brand awareness to searches who are already in the middle stages of the buying cycle.
It allows you to go after higher intent keywords such as “pricing” that clearly indicate a searcher is closer to a decision-making process.
It allows you to go after what are often high volume, low cost keywords.
It allows you to get creative with your unique selling proposition (USP) to encourage click-throughs.

There are two main hooks (used in your heading) you can use to steal branded clicks:

Offer better pricing
Create a value proposition that competitors don’t address

Note: YuJu’s use of “Platform Migration Toolkits” language in their ad is not super relevant from an intent perspective. A query for “Kaltura pricing” likely has the intent of someone searching for pricing and who is likely still shopping around. The language used seems to be geared towards someone who is wanting to migrate from existing software and would likely use a different search query.

However, YuJa’s landing page does live up to the promise of being a great comparison page to Kaltura and provides unique selling propositions in different ways.

For starters, YuJa goes right at Kaltura with their heading “Alternative and Replacement for Kaltura”. This also showcases that YuJa is matching their landing page content with the direct competitors that are used in the ads.

They could have used vague “Enterprise Video Platform” language but instead, mention Kaltura specifically and likely have several iterations of this landing page (and competitor search campaigns) for all of their competitors.

There isn’t any distinct USP as to why YuJa is better than Kaltura but they do provide some social proof to help with the consideration of this software in their mentions of companies that have made the switch:

Here’s another example.

A search for “Basecamp pricing” takes me to an ad on a Monday.com landing page with the below USP comparison table. Monday.com uses a grid to showcase their USPs which, in this case, are features.

Pro Tip:

We recommend segmenting competitors based on the above factors and creating landing pages and ads accordingly. In addition, we recommend creating a customized landing page for various competitors, such as a “vs.” page, emphasizing the benefit of your SaaS over competitors’ services to improve conversion rates.

Retargeting with Webinars

Webinars can be a really powerful SaaS tool when done correctly. And because “done correctly” is a very ambiguous statement, here’s a really good resource on evergreen SaaS webinars where you can learn the ropes.

Before going deeper, it should be noted that webinars can really serve the middle and top of the funnel well, but here, we will focus on a middle of the funnel example.

We recently created a good breakdown on how to run effective PPC marketing funnels on Facebook that utilize webinars in the middle of the funnel.

Here’s a breakdown of how that works:

ToF: First, create a blog that resonates with your target audience and send paid traffic to it to get brand awareness up and build trust with our free resource. This traffic will serve as the retargeting piece of the pie.
MoF: Next, retarget these blog viewers, this time with an invite to join a webinar.
BoF: Finally, with an additional retargeting layer, the website visitor and the website visitor who opted in and watched the webinar are targeted once more, this time for a more direct call to action to book an appointment.

While the blog initially drives interest and brand awareness, it’s the webinar that pushes people over the edge to move into that consideration mode.

Below is an example of a retargeting ad for a webinar from Neil Patel.

Honorable mentions for middle-of-the-funnel PPC strategies:

Non-branded search: The most obvious of all Google Ads campaigns, non-branded searches target specific high intent keywords related to your SaaS.
Branded search: The targeting of your company’s name in search results to take up real estate in the search results and to protect your brand from competitors who are trying to do the same.
Product and Pricing Page Based Retargeting: Retargeting users who visited specific product pages and the pricing page with ads. For example:
- Offer: Discount + show competitor comparison landing page to address buyer hesitation
Engagement Based Retargeting: Retargeting users who spent 4m+ on a high converting blog page.
- Offer: Free Trial or Demo

Bottom of the Funnel PPC Campaign Examples

Bottom of the funnel is the most fun aspect of paid marketing because you are targeting people who are the most likely to buy.

One of the best ways to know who is most likely to buy is based on their behavior. Assuming you have cookies setup on your site you can retarget specific users (by behavior) who you think are most likely to make a purchase.

Let’s go back to the hypothetical Larry example.

Larry visited Monday.com from the ad he clicked when he searched for “Basecamp pricing.” Larry thought Monday.com was pretty cool, and Monday.com thought Larry was pretty cool too, targeting him with display ads for their project management software because they knew, from Larry’s previous behavior on the project management software comparison page, there was a pretty good chance he might soon be in the market for some PM software.

Turns out Monday.com was right, and Larry quickly moved from the awareness stage into the decision stage. Larry indicated this by visiting Monday.com’s pricing page several times, four in fact. At that time, Monday.com triggered additional retargeting ads to actually make it difficult for Larry to pass up the opportunity to use their software via a special promotion.

Because Monday.com’s goal was to get Larry to make a purchase, and they’d seen that he’d visited their pricing page four times, they knew the time was right to send Larry a unique pricing incentive to finally get him to convert.

Behavior-based Retargeting SaaS Prospects

Channel: Google Ads

Target audience: Activity-based

Ad type: Display ads

As we saw in the example of retargeting ads to close Larry, we learned that creating an audience based on their behavior, and an offer unique to that behavior, will increase the likelihood you’ll get results. Of course, retargeting in and of itself is not inherently bottom-of-the-funnel, but it is arguably the best bottom-of-the-funnel PPC tactic for SaaS companies.

When designing your bottom-of-the-funnel offer, make sure it is aligned with the goals of your company and the list you are promoting, especially if you are targeting multiple areas of your software.

Here are some potential retargeting campaigns you can run with some conditional logic that would take the user into consideration:

Pricing Page Abandonment: Users who spent 1m+ on the pricing page but moved away / exited without conversion
- Offer: Discount
Checkout Abandonment: Users who visited your checkout page but never converted
- Offer: Offer a time-sensitive discount

If there are other paths users can take on your site that will logically make you say ‘hey, that guy is probably very interested in our service’ then you may want to create a retargeting list with them and hit them with ads.

Branded Search for High Buyer Intent Keywords

Above, we referenced using branded search for middle-of-the-funnel-type opportunities related to specific brands (ex. Basecamp pricing).

But you can also use branded search to go after bottom-of-the-funnel queries.

For example, check out this ad for a “Google sheets and QuickBooks” search:

And the corresponding Zapier landing page:

Zapier creates bottom-of-the-funnel pages (for search and ads) for people looking for integration software.

PPC for SaaS Takeaways

If you learn one thing today it should be that the most successful SaaS PPC campaigns involve targeting across all the sales stages. Meeting your prospects’ intent with ads, landing pages, and offers is the most effective way to reduce ineffective ad spending, and move those users down the sales funnel.

Holy Grail SEO: How to Find Low Competition, High Volume Keywords

Posted on September 27, 2019February 21, 2022 by Daniel E. Lofaso

Content Marketing Case Study: How to Find Low Competition, High Volume Keywords

If keywords are the core of SEO, why is it that so many people still go after the wrong ones?

In order to drive traffic to your website you have to utilize keyword research and content marketing strategies that actually give you a chance of ranking quickly.

In today’s post, I want to introduce a content marketing technique that allows you to rank your content with little to no links (links are still one of Google’s most highly aspects of ranking). I call this technique “Holy Grail SEO” and I covered it in-depth on a beautiful post featured on Search Engine Journal.

So what is Holy Grail SEO?

In Arthurian literature the Holy Grail is a cup that allows it’s owners to have infinite abundance. In SEO, using the Holy Grail technique will give you abundance in the form of boatloads of traffic.

The difference in the Holy Grail SEO technique and the actual Holy Grail is that you don’t need to embark on some mystical journey to find it; I’m going to show you how to rock it out right now.

Read on to learn more about how Holy Grail SEO can help you:

Understand how important low competition keywords are to your overall SEO and content marketing strategy
Identify low competition, high volume keyword resources
Utilize keyword competition data to create in-depth, high ranking blogs

The Importance of High Volume, Low Competition Keywords to Your SEO Strategy

Traffic from search engines is an obvious benefit to any website. However, generating that traffic with content that is related to your brand can often prove to be challenging, especially for sites that don’t have the luxury of being able to publish content and automatically begin to drive loads of search engine traffic to it (like some big brands can).

Don’t get caught up in the “publish and pray” approach so many content generators utilize to create content. Don’t just create content for the sake of creating content; be intentional about the content you create as it should provide a return on investment to your business based on the time and resources you put into it.

Whether you are an SEO yourself or doing SEO for your own website, your goal is the same: try to drive (relevant) as much traffic as possible as fast as possible. Because fast traffic is more of a luxury than a reality, we need to implement strategies that help us to satisfy the goals of our clients as well as our own websites. We also want to be able to pull off strategies that allow us to benefit from the search engine traffic that bigger, more established sites generate.

This is especially true for:

Startups
Brand new websites
Websites with little or no domain rating
Brands that are in super competitive industry’s
Any combination of the above

Who should go after low competition or high competition keywords?

As alluded earlier, some sites just can’t compete for certain keywords or topics and therefore may want to consider not exhausting the resources to go after them. These sites might be better off going after topics that are low competition — meaning easier to rank for — while still maintaining some degree of search volume.

So who should go after high competition keywords and why?

When it comes to search engine rankings and correlations, there tend to be a number of important factors that will dictate whether a page will rank or not. To oversimplify what these are (there are over 200 Google ranking factors), here are some of the main factors that may dictate a pages ability to rank:

Topical relevance to search query
Domain rating of the website
Links to the page

In terms of topical relevance, we can all go after any topic that we want and publish pages on them. This, of course, does not mean we will rank for them mostly based on the other two factors mentioned above.

Domain rating, a proprietary Ahrefs’ metric that shows the strength of a target website’s total backlink profile, can provide a major headstart for brands attempting to rank for certain topics. The metric is measured logarithmically from 0-100 to showcase, essentially, how popular a site is. Forbes.com for example, has a domain rating of 93.

This is why a site like Forbes can virtually publish an article on any topic and rank for it. However, smaller sites — or those with smaller domain ratings — may have to work harder at the next metric to get more attention from Google (i.e. rank better).

Links to a page is the other metric that influences how well a page can rank. Often, a page with more links will outrank a page with less links. Sometimes the page with a higher domain rating and less links will still outrank the page that is on a site with a lower domain rating. There is no exact rule for this, this is purely based on correlation.

Anyhow, you need to keep this in mind as a content creator because you should obviously be creating content with the intent of getting as many eyeballs on it as possible. The Holy Grail approach, however, accomplishes this goal by allowing you to be strategic in what topics you target, or put another way, topics you don’t.

Below I will detail how to use data to understand what topics you can potentially rank for easily and how to find them.

Using the Holy Grail SEO Technique to Find High Volume, Low Competition Keywords

Before diving into how to find high volume, low competition keywords we must first understand that the definition of “high volume” is subjective. For example, in some industries a high volume topic may be 500 searches a month, while in others a high volume topic may be 50,000. Either way, you must keep in mind long-tail traffic, which is why we will discuss how to create complete topics that rank for boatloads of keywords.

Method 1: Using Google SERPs to Reverse Engineer Results

When you want to cover a specific topic this is probably one of the best approaches to take. The second approach also allows you to target specific topics, while the third approach involves stealing topics from your competitors.

Starting with the Google search engine results pages (SERPs) to reverse engineer results is a good foray into one of the three options for finding high volume, low competition topics. Here is a case study from one of our financial planning clients, Castle Wealth Management, where we used this approach to great success.

Castle Wealth wanted to cover a blog post on trusts as many of their clients are high net worth. While we like to tackle topics that our clients want, our job as an SEO and content marketing agency is to have conversations with our clients about how to be intentional about the topics we cover. Plus, we knew a topic in the finance industry would put us up against sites like are likely to dominate the space such as Kiplinger (DR 84), Nerd Wallet (DR 86), and Forbes (DR 93).

Here’s how we, and you, can tackle this type of keyword research and determine if a topic is worth going after.

You’ll need some software to make this kind of advanced prospecting happen, and in this case, I use Ahrefs. More specifically, I use their Chrome extension for its data on Domain Rating, Referring Domains, and the Keywords a page ranks for. It’s cool because you can get data directly in the SERPs without having to visit a site or run it through the software.

Anyhow, with the software in place and the topic of trusts to evaluate, we start with some initial searches on generic queries such as “What is a trust.”

As you can see above (and as highlighted), the top result for the topic has a high Keyword Difficulty (29), has a bunch of links (Referring Domains (RD)), and is on a site with a massive Domain Rating (DR) of 89. As you may expect, a topic like this gets a lot of searches per month, 17,000 (indicated by “Volume”).

Because our goal is to be able to realistically rank within the top three search results, we decided to stay away from this topic.

Eventually, we found that the search for “Why would you put your house in a trust” was a really great candidate.

The number one ranking site had these factors that make the topic ideal for our client to go after:

The site has a DR of 31 (not much higher than what our client was at)
The post only had seven Referring Domains
The topic only had a Keyword Difficulty of 5 out of 100
The topic had a search volume of 200

While the search volume of 200 is not particularly high, something we picked up on was the total amount of keywords this post ranked for, over 1,600 (as indicated by the “KW” on the page level).

These signs all looked pretty good, but we wanted to look closer at all the potential long-tail traffic (in Ahrefs) before committing:

As the Darrow Wealth Management site ranked really well for loads of keywords that were related to trusts and many with really low Keyword Difficulty, we knew this was a win.

To summarize why this was a good topic to emulate:

It was related to our clients offerings — they provide financial advice on setting up trusts
The topic had a lot of long-tail traffic potential
The sub-topics and related keywords to the topic were all relatively low Keyword Difficulty
The top-ranking spot did not have a lot of links and was not a site with a really high Domain Rating

So, what are the next steps? Write a bigger, badder blog post!

Let’s teleport about 3-months after we published the blog for Castle Wealth Management and see how we started to compete:

As you can see, the page ranks really well for a large amount of long-tail keywords. What’s more, we only built one backlink to the page and have now benefited from high rankings for nearly 500 keywords.

Take a look at the Google Analytics traffic to see how this post for Castle Wealth continually grew:

And just to provide some silence to the negative Nancy’s out there who think this strategy only works because the target competitor (Darrow Wealth Management) had a modest Domain Rating, check out all the other sites we outrank that are way bigger in DR than Castle Wealth:

This is just one strategy to use when you have topics in mind. In addition to doing research from the Google SERPs, you can go straight to Ahrefs to do the work for you.

Method 2: Using Keyword Software to Target Specific Topics

Another excellent way to find that low hanging fruit content is to use the Ahrefs Content explorer tool. This too allows you to search by topic but offers some additional filters that make it a joy to use.

For this example, we decided to write about the topic “garment bag.”

Start by throwing your topic into the Content explorer:

For generic topics like this, you’ll likely see something like the below — a result with 1,000’s of pages in the index that you’ll want to filter down.

There are a lot of filters that can be utilized and it’s actually quite fun to play around with the tool to generate results, but there are some rules to live by to start finding topics with a lot of keyword traffic.

As you can see above, I set the organic filter to “From:500” to see pages that rank for 500 or more keywords. You can get more aggressive if you have a lot of results to shift through, and vice versa.

In this scenario, filtering out pages without at least 500 ranking keywords left us with 173 pages. Because that is still a lot of pages to review, I can apply more filters to determine if there are better options. Thus, I set an additional filter for a DR above 30. Filtering out sites with a higher DR shows results that apply to smaller sites I can likely compete with easily with good content alone.

This is not a hard and fast rule however; just because a page that lives on a site with high DR ranks well, does not mean it won’t have low competition, high volume topics. In this case, however, there are a lot of results so we have more play in what we can filter out.

Now, with filters set to organic traffic above 500 keywords and sites with a DR below 30, we now have 10 pages to review based on the “garment bag” topic:

The next thing to do is open up the Organic keywords tab on each site to see if there are low competition, high volume keywords that are Holy Grail material.

Boom! And just like that we have our first candidate meets our criteria for Holy Grail SEO:

First off, this page has about 1,200 keywords it ranks for
The page itself only has one referring domain
The volume behind a bunch of the searches compared to the KD is great. Lots of long-tail keywords to consider in our blog post that we’d likely rank for easily.

Now, I can repeat the same process with the other sites in the filtered list to document the keywords my writers should cover in the blog post.

I really like this approach, but my favorite way to find Holy Grail opportunities is analyzing competitors sites and stealing their high volume, low competition topics.

Method 3: Looking at Competitors to Find HV/LCK Keywords

So far we’ve looked at two ways to use topical analysis to find blogs. But what do you do if you don’t have a particular topic in mind or can’t seem to find anything that you like using the other approach?

You mine competitors’ sites, find their best content, and rewrite it.

Let’s check out another example in the financial industries space, an industry that is extremely competitive and full of great content everywhere you look.

To start, you’ll simply want to visit a popular site that is in the same niche as your site. For this example, I referenced NerdWallet because they are really popular in the space and rank well for a lot of topics.

Grab the NerdWallet domain and plug it into the Ahrefs Site explorer to begin the process.

Because this site is a behemoth, it is going to rank for a ton of different keywords so we want to filter down our results. First, I’m going to click on “Top pages” — pages Ahrefs is telling me ranks for a ton of keywords — and set the Keyword Difficulty filter down to 10 (although you can get more aggressive and go lower to see how many results you get).

With our Top pages and KD 10 or below filter in place, we immediately see some really good candidates such as “how to fill out a money order” and “best time to buy a tv” as potential options to cover. Of course, you want to make sure any option you choose to cover is relevant to the audience of your site.

To dive a little deeper, I can open an Organic keyword report for the pages I want to investigate and reference the Volume and Keyword Difficulty. Here’s the report for the “how to fill out a money order” post:

I can see this post ranks for a lot of high volume, low competition keywords making it a solid candidate for a similar post on my (or my clients’) site.

I can even take the main keyword a step further to see how many links I might need to build to rank for it on the first page. “How to fill out a money order’ gets 23,000 searches per month and is a KD 6! According to Ahrefs, I’ll need about seven links to rank on the first page.

Utilize Keyword Competition Data to Create In-depth, High Ranking Blogs

Now, if there is something that needs to be mentioned it’s the fact that you can’t simply publish any old blog and expect it to rank. In other words, you’ve only done some of the hard work required to give yourself the best chance of ranking. The next part is actually writing the blog you want to rank.

Great keyword research needs great writing!

While this is not a post on how to write a good blog, it is integral that you carry out good copywriting to give yourself the best chance of ranking. Here are a few resources that may help you with that:

In addition to good writing, I want to emphasize the importance of being truly exhaustive with the topics you cover. This means doing a competitive analysis of the other pages that rank for your target keyword and making something more in-depth and ultimately better.

A great way to do this is with the inclusion of keyword rich subtopics. The good news for you is that these should already be revealed when you did your initial topic research.

For example, let’s review the keyword data from the “garment bags” research to see if we can pull some sub-topics.

Ok, great.

We have a bunch of good data on volume and KD but is this alone going to make your blog rock? No, it needs a little logical thinking to ensure the post has good talking points while also being intentional about the keyword opportunities.

Let’s go with a topic for our post that is general but seems to cover the keyword opportunities we found. Something like “17 Best Garment Bags of 2019.”

Now, let’s take your keyword data and make something of an outline for the post that flows logically and still leverages the keyword data intelligently.

Best roll up garment bags
Best carry on garment bags
Best garment bags with wheels
Garment bag carry on rules
When to get a tri fold garment bag

As you can see, my keyword research has dictated my subtopics. If you think about it, it really should as volume has everything to do with interest in a topic. Thus, it makes sense to cover high volume subtopics.

Another great area to pull additional sub-topics (leaning more on the logical side) is within the Google SERPs. Check out the “People also ask” section as well as the “Searches related to” sections for inspiration:

Embark on Your Quest for Holy Grail SEO Today!

Holy Grail SEO is something that will work for every kind of site, big or small, high DR or low DR, and those with lots of human resources at their disposal and those without.

The research portion gets easier the more you do it and can actually become second nature once you get the hang of it. And while we never rule out content promotion or link building as additional was to drive traffic and exposure, it’s nice to know you can lean on Holy Grail SEO without having to dedicate a bunch of resources to social promotion or link building.

Try Holy Grail SEO yourself and enjoy the abundance it brings your website!