Search Engine Optimization is for many businesses the growth channel for the long term. That said, most businesses aren’t viewing SEO properly.
There is no definitive cookie cutter solution to ranking your site in Google, but in order to dominate the niche or market of the web that you play in – there is a very clear decision. Do you want to do it as David or as Goliath.
What I mean by that, is do you want to be David and create 10-30 pages that have tonnes of keywords that they target and have thousands of words of content on them? Or would you rather be Goliath and build a couple hundred or thousand pages that each target very few keywords with a smaller amount of content per page?
They might not be the only way you can do SEO, but in almost all cases – they are the most effective. In saying that though, you might be in a niche where there really is only 30 or forty topics that you can go after and so going Goliath and building thousands of pages might be worthless for you.
No matter what market you are in, you will have the opportunity to employ one of these strategies and should do so. So how should you structure it?
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Get Your Initial List
- Go to the Google Keyword Planner and select the “search for new keywords” option
- Start entering ANYTHING that your business is about, offers or just generally wants to rank for
- Download both the ad group ideas and the keyword ideas
- Put that list into a spreadsheet and base your ideas off of that
A tip with this tactic is that you always want to start with the highest search volume keywords and then go down from there.
Now you have at a minimum 700 different keywords that might work for an article. Not all will, and many overlap or aren’t truly worth it, so now we apply the David or Goliath strategy to turn this list of words into article topics.
Going Goliath
Going Goliath (ie. large number of articles/pages, low keyword density and smaller word counts) means that you take all those ideas we just found and every single one gets an article of 300-500 words that uses that keyword in the title, in the URL and in the article 3 to 5 times.
Going David
To go David (ie. small number of articles/pages, high keyword density and large word counts) you will spend slightly more time breaking down the list than you would with the Goliath strategy. Instead of taking all 700 and going after an article, we will try and put together a number of lists with keywords of similar nature.
Each one of these targeted lists will then become an article, where the minimum number of words will be 1000 words and every keyword will appear at least once, with those of more traffic appearing 3-5 times and being made into headers throughout the article.
How Should You Make This Content?
For most businesses, getting to the point in which they have things to write about – is easy. It is the execution of a strategy where these businesses fall flat.
Everyone has the option to create their own content for their blog, but very few have the hours to put into it. So here are three strategies that we have seen work for business after business:
Overseas Freelancers
Many companies shudder when they think about letting someone overseas write for them, yet these fears are largely ungrounded. Although there can be difficulties with some in terms of poor grammar or punctuation, the issues are so minor and easily corrected that this is an option any and everyone can give a crack at.
A freelancer site like Upwork can be leveraged to pay extremely low prices for consistent high quality content. Create a job request for a writer, and wait for applications to be placed.
Two tips for you though, NEVER put the pay rate in the job description and always get any reasonable candidates to do one test article for you (you will have to pay them for it), in order to vet for quality.
Australian Freelancers
Getting a freelancer to write for you from the country you are in always invokes the idea of high costs or employees for business owners, but that just isn’t the case. Getting an Australian writer helps in terms of knowing that English is a first language and that they hopefully have some cultural context.
That said, finding them is a little harder. On every job site in Australia you can find ads from them looking for work or you can post your own. ProBlogger can be a great site to find writers as well if you can post a job there.
Otherwise, if you would like to target a writer more specifically – search LinkedIn for freelance writers and try and reach out to them with the job description and ask for what their rates would be. Generally you will be paying per word or per 100 words although some writers do work on an hourly basis.
Interns
Now this is an option that can be challenging for many small businesses as they wouldn’t normally have interns. If that is the case for you, or you just aren’t ever interested in getting them – ignore this.
For companies that do have interns or would be willing to bring them on board, this is one of the BEST ways of getting content done. If you have interns, they will want to get work done and they will give you their best every single time.
Getting you intern or interns to produce content is the most cost effective way for you to get content done. As an incentive for them to produce great work, attach their name as the author to their articles. They will get the benefit of being able to link back to their content once they leave you, and you get the benefit of their full effort.
Final Thoughts
Whatever strategy you take, however your content gets made – just get started. Ideas and strategies and tools are worthless without execution. You could plan your strategy for months, but until you toss your cards on the table and start producing and posting content – you are adding ZERO value.
Something we here at 5Tales have learnt from experience, is that once you start producing regular content – you will likely change your initial plan. Get producing, analyse and re-evaluate is the motto in content marketing.
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