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Author: Alise Zaiceva 10 minute read
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9 Content Marketing Tips to Rank Higher in 2023

Content marketing is an effective SEO strategy for digital publishers. Unless you’re a news publisher, you might be struggling to attract traffic to your website or convert your readers into customers. So, how do you do it? 

By utilizing content marketing! This technique aims to deliver high-quality content to help your site rank higher, upsell your additional services, and increase your expertise. 

In today’s round-up, you’ll learn 9 effective content marketing tips from content planning to creation and distribution to rank higher in 2023. 

1. Optimize Content for Search Intent

Optimizing your content for search intent is arguably one of the most important things in content marketing. If the content doesn’t speak to your target audience and doesn’t provide relevant information, it won’t rank. 

Search intent aims to discover what the user truly wants to find. To craft your content with search intent in mind, you need to analyze the top-ranking pages for your target keyword based on the 3 Cs of search intent.

The 3 Cs of search intent are: 

  • Content type (blog posts, video, product pages, category pages, landing pages)
  • Content format (how-to guides, step-by-step tutorials, list posts)
  • Content angle (content freshness, product comparison)

Content type

Content type helps to understand what content will perform best for a specific topic. For example, if the user searches for a term “how to set up instagram shop,” we can see that the top results are primarily videos.

content format

So, you will likely need to create a video to rank for this keyword.

Content format

Identifying the content format allows you to create content users are most likely to read. 

For example, the top-ranking results page for “best adsense alternatives” are listicles that include comparisons of multiple Google AdSense alternatives

content angle

Content angle

The content angle refers to the benefit the reader will get from reading your content. For example, people searching for “winter fashion trends” will likely expect to find information relevant to this season’s fashion. So, it makes sense that most top-ranking pages include the year.

content format

Google Trends is a free feature that shows how popular a search term is on Google in a given time. It allows you to see the search frequency of a given term based on countries, search volume, and even its relative popularity compared to other terms. 

What’s great about it is that it gives you a relative understanding of trending topics and helps avoid topics that are losing popularity. 

For example, in early 2020, Google announced that it would phase out all third-party cookies from its Chrome browser by 2022 (later postponed to 2023). 

As seen from the graph, it sparked a huge interest in the topic compared to just a few months before the announcement. 

google trends

3. Update Existing Content 

You can extend the life of your content and improve your rankings by updating and resurfacing some of your older but well-performing content. 

This content marketing technique is highly effective. Firstly, Google prefers fresh content. Secondly, it allows you to rank for more keywords than you originally have, which will attract more users to your page. 

A screenshot below demonstrates the increase in pageviews after we updated our article about how to monetize a website in 2022.

article update

There are 2 great ways to perform an effective content update:

  • Add original data to your content
  • Run a content gap analysis on a page level

Add original data to your content

Supporting your content with original data doesn’t only provide a unique angle to your content but also tends to generate social shares, likes, and inbound links. Infographics, charts, and tables are all great examples of original data. And are easy enough to create using various infographic template tools or data processing and visualization tools.

original data

Source: Admonsters

Run a content gap analysis on a page level

How do I decide what information to add to my content? Well, there are tools to help you out.

Most SEO tools offer content gap analysis features. Usually, you’d compare your page with your competitors and find content gaps at the domain level.

However, you can also run content gap analysis on a page level to make existing content more in-depth by adding missing subtopics. 

Just analyze a few top-performing pages for your target keyword and identify keywords they’re ranking for, but your page doesn’t. If you’re not ranking for these keywords, usually that’s an indicator that you’re not covering this subtopic in your content. 

content gap

4. Diversify Your Content 

Not all content types are made equal. Therefore, it’s important to determine which type of content would benefit your business goals. 

Your content portfolio should reflect the goals of your business. For example, if your goal is to build brand authority, consider gathering data for reports and whitepapers relevant to your industry.

If you wish to upsell your service, you can create YouTube videos and showcase your product in a video format. Don’t forget to include the videos in your blog posts.

Another fantastic way to generate more traffic to your website is to create a free tool that will keep visitors come back. 

The content marketing matrix is a great place to gather ideas for content diversification. 

content marketing matrix

Source: SmartInsights

5. Create the Right Social Media Content

Defining your social media target audience is just as important as defining your business’s target audience. Having a presence on social media can hugely help with your discoverability and brand awareness

There is a plethora of social media management tools available for marketers, but more important for you as a marketer is to understand your audience’s needs.

However, to craft content that will speak to your social media audience, you need to ask yourself: “What content performs best in this environment?” 

For example, Instagram is a platform centered around short, snappy, and highly visual content. Now, having this in mind, you can start defining the goals for your content. A helpful framework to decide on the type of content that will work best is the 5 E’s of content: 

  • Educate
  • Entertain
  • Engage
  • Enrich
  • Evolve

For example, creating content to entertain should be built around forming a relationship. The goal should be to trigger an emotion. If you have a team, it’s a good idea to show who they are and what they do. It builds trust between your brand and your users.  

setupad instagram

Similarly, content to engage can be used to give your users a taster of how your product or tool can help them.

Ultimately, your content must be visually appealing to your audience, or you won’t get a lot of traction. To make attractive content, you can use one of the many photo editor applications out there.

For example, Picsart’s photo editor is AI-powered and built for your content needs. With its intuitive interface and drag-and-drop features, you can crop, resize, and adjust colors on your photos with a single click. You can also use its AI image generator to make unique images.

wheelgenerator

6.  Promote Your Content on Public Forums

Reddit is the 6th most popular website in the US, surpassing Instagram and Wikipedia. Quora is often among the first pages in SERP with a DR of 91.

reddit quora

Both Reddit and Quora are community-based platforms with highly engaged audiences and strict content guidelines, which means they don’t allow self-promotion activities. 

However, if you meaningfully engage in discussion and provide users with relevant information, you’re welcome to drop a link to your website. As simple as that!

This technique is great for attracting new audiences and building your brand’s authority. It’s also highly beneficial for your Google’s E-A-T score.

Although links from these domains are usually no-follow links, they’re still highly beneficial to your backlink portfolio. 

Inbound links, or backlinks, are among the top Google ranking factors. There is a clear correlation between the number of referring domains that are linking to your site and the website’s organic traffic.

referring domains vs search traffic

Source: Ahrefs

When creating content, you should try to understand why people are linking to the pages you want to outperform. 

By looking at the anchor text from referring domains, you can get insight into why this content generates inbound links. 

For example, if we look at the keyword “unified ID,” we’d see that The Trade Desk page has backlinks from 879 referring domains. Why are so many websites linking to this webpage in the first place?

ahrefs backlinks report

Let’s open the “Anchors” report under the Site Explorer tab in Ahrefs. We’d see that the overwhelming majority of referring domains link to this page because of one concept: “Unified ID 2.0”. This concept relates to the solution developed by The Trade Desk, which is now used interchangeably with the term “unified ID.”

ahrefs anchors report

By looking at this report, you can gain insight into what your own content needs. If you find that people are linking to a page because of a stat, then you might also consider running a survey or creating a data report. 

8. Optimize Meta Description 

A meta description is a companion to the title tag. In other words, it offers the reader a summary of what will be covered in the post. 

Having a catchy meta description entices more people to click on your webpage in the search results. While meta description isn’t a ranking factor, Google pays attention to the click-through rate (CTR), which a good meta description can influence. 

Using a clear call-to-action (CTA) allows you to attract more people to your site while also letting your readers know what they should expect when they click. Depending on your content, you can use CTAs like “Sign up now” or “Learn more.” 

If you want your meta description to display fully on all devices, don’t exceed 160 characters. 

Pro Tip!

To generate meta descriptions ideas, use a free Google Chrome extension SEO Meta in 1 Click to quickly access meta data for any page.

meta description example

9. Optimize Table of Contents

A table of contents can be a great help when it comes to readability. In addition, it allows the readers to understand if the topics covered in the post are worth their while. 

However, another benefit of having a table of contents is that it often generates anchors on the page, which can appear in SERP or featured snippets. 

Pro Tip! 

It often makes sense to write your table of contents in a bulleted or numbered list, which can boost your chances to appear in featured snippets. The bulleted list captures 37% of the snippet results. 

table of contents

And there you have it, better user experience and readability! 

Wrapping Up

Remember that your content must serve value to your users but also engage them. And for that, you have to think outside of the box. 

Before creating any type of content, ask yourself: “Is there a tip or a strategy I can use to make my content even better?”. Then follow these tips and start seeing tangible results.

About Alise Zaiceva
Alise is a content marketing manager at Setupad. She’s passionate about content and helping publishers scale their businesses through powerful digital marketing strategies. In her free time, she expands her knowledge of tech.

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