Transparency is essential to see great growth in your business, so when you’re selecting and working with a white label SEO reseller, make sure to do your homework! A strong emphasis on data, tracking and measuring your campaigns can truly help you see improvement and perhaps even a significant amount of growth in your business. Watch this Daily Brown Bag to learn some helpful statistics about content marketing that can help your marketing strategy and we’ll also share our six steps to creating excellent content with a white label SEO company.
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Hello and welcome to the Daily Brown Bag. Today we're going to be talking about the six steps to creating excellent content with a white label SEO company. I'm Chad Hill, and I'm joined by Adam Stetzer.
Good morning, Chad. It's a really interesting topic. People are out shopping for white label SEO partners. They know content marketing is really important, but this gets really confusing really fast, Chad. Here's a few steps to start us off. A third of the marketers last year said that content marketing was the most commercially important trend in digital marketing. And I predicted that number was going to be up as we head into 2016. Content marketing has become center stage when we think about digital marketing.
It's a big conversation in SEO, it draws customers to your site and helps you work on your brand. It helps build relationships, it gets you shared. It's a big, big thing in social media. It helps build your follower base, a lot of people are really focused on that and their reach and their engagement. It's all been very helpful with cross-pollination with PPC. But this is not old school advertising. Content marketing is a very confusing term and small businesses are really struggling here. They're struggling with what to create. What are the best channels? What are the tools they should use? How do they measure ROI?
We hear this, Chad, all the time. "I'm doing all this content. Is it working?" We ask that question of ourselves. Some statistics here to set the stage, this is an Ad Age study that said 80% of companies have content that is focused on their brand rather than addressing what customers really want and need. Eighty percent, so they're talking about their brand, the seller should work on their brand has been pounded in, but they may be missing the mark. Eighty-three percent of marketers say they can't tie the value of their content marketing even if they do shift off pure branding work, they can't tie the value of their content marketing to their business.
Another study from LinkedIn said that only 8% of marketers consider themselves very successful or extremely successful at measuring and tracking the ROI of content marketing. Only 8% and this is a staff from LinkedIn. Another great staff from B2B content marketing report, almost half, 48% of B2B marketers said they don't document their content marketing strategy at all. If we know content marketing is this huge thing in SEO, therefore as you're shopping for a white label SEO partner, it has to be a discussion you're having. But these stats show that the state of the industry is not good and people, marketers are really struggling. So Chad, how do we help these folks out?
6 Steps to Creating Excellent Content with a White Label SEO Company:
1. Communication
Communication is so critical especially if you're of the mindset from a couple of years ago where SEO was just throw up content, you didn't really care too much about audience, let the search engines consume it. If you've shifted that mindset and your mindset really now is on content marketing and how to get more audience involvement, then you really need to focus on communication.
Communication with your white label SEO company is important as well. The Content Marketing Institute actually did a study where they looked at how often companies met to talk about their content that was rolling out and 36% of marketers said they get together once a week to discuss content, 11% said once every two weeks, 16% said monthly and 8% said daily. And interestingly enough here, 61% of marketers who said that their content marketing strategy is effective met daily or weekly.
This all comes down to the budget because if you're a larger client and you're doing 10 or 15 pieces a month, clearly, there's a lot more to discuss, so you need to meet more frequently. If you're a smaller client, maybe you don't need to meet so frequently. But the most important thing here is that you do need to think about what content should be created, making sure that you understand who the target audience is and you're communicating that to your white label SEO partner. Otherwise, you're really just setting yourself up and your client and, ultimately, your partner up for failure.
2. Work together to build a foundation of solid research
Number two, research. I think this is a great lead-in from what Chad covered in number one. Once you have a direction, you need to work with your team and make sure that they have research. They have statistics. This gets you into what is your audience looking for. What are they searching for? Why do people come to your site? And how are you going to feed them what they want?
Look at your competitors. You need to have better content than them. We believe that you achieve that quality in part based on research. So your white label SEO team better have a very good research process, must be able to find good statistics that can be used in your content. It should flow very effortlessly through your videos, your blog posts, your infographics, the things you're doing on social media and tie to your overall strategy of what you're putting out.
3. Invest in quality writers & staff
Number three, invest in quality writers and staff. The old adage is "You get what you pay for," and that is certainly true when you're talking about content marketing and writing. You want to search for a team that has certainly writers that are familiar with the local customs and sayings. You want to make sure that usually that's going to be U.S.-based if you are in the U.S. And you want to make sure that they have experience understanding what gets engagement, what gets clicks because that's a really critical thing.
4. Use onsite and offsite SEO
Number four on how to create excellent content marketing, balance onsite and offsite SEO. We hear this conversation all the time. People coming to us, "Tell me about your white label SEO program. I really just need links." But then when we start to peel back the onion and look at what they're doing onsite, their onsite SEO isn't as together as they want you to believe it is.
And we talk to folks and they say, "I've got my inbound marketing all tuned up with HubSpot," but when you look at it, the editorial calendar maybe isn't as tight as it needs to be. Maybe there isn't a target keyword for every piece of content that's being put out. Maybe the stuff they're writing isn't appropriate for their audience.
We all know links are very, very important and we've seen it go the other way. We've seen people coming to us and say, "I want you to write one blog post today and it better be awesome and I don't believe in doing any link building." That's not going to work either. You need to have a balanced approach based on research, based on industry accepted ratios of how much content to create and how much to spend and how much a budget to put behind promotion. You get this onsite offsite balance right, and you'll be working really well.
5. Be Open to Promotion in Various Ways
Exactly as Adam said, you don't want to just focus on only writing the content. You really need to build the promotion into it, into the program and we recently talked about this in our webinar. You almost need to be thinking that it's 30% of effort into content and 70% into promotion. And that promotion may include things that are paid. So you may want to run some paid searches or some paid social media promotion against that. The organic reach of things like Facebook has gone way down as they have moved to more of a pay to play platform. Think about promotion when you're building and thinking about your hunter market program.
6. Monitor, Track & Measure
Obviously, we're big proponents of this. We've been talking about this since the very early days when we released our dashboard. We believe in transparency and you should be able to see these numbers. You should know where your rankings are. You should be talking to your white label SEO firm about this and having regular meetings with your account manager who should be consulting with you.
And also we've been big into very recently helping, across our hundreds of resellers, helping them benchmark themselves against other resellers and see how their programs are working compared to hundreds of other resellers across thousands of keywords. This helps put it in perspective. Maybe there's decisions that are being made about these campaigns that aren't optimized. Maybe the balance of offsite to onsite isn't correct.
Again, this kind of transparency and belief in data and tracking and measure and continuous improvement can really help you become a reseller who sees great growth in their business and move out from some of those resellers who are really stuck in the mud. Well, those are our six keys to creating excellent content with your white label reseller. We appreciate you coming today, and as always, we'll ask that you subscribe if you found this helpful. We'll see you back here real soon for another video.
