Yep, the impact of social links is pretty low on their own. You do, however, get these 2 benefits:
- If your content gets a ton of views, people will start Googling for it and clicking your result, specifically. This will increase your CTR, which is a known ranking factor.
- People who LOVE your content on Reddit or wherever will link to your website from their blog (hence, more backlinks).
I'll never forget the SEO consultant who, when I told him I wanted to focus on CTR, told me it was not a factor in ranking. This was many years ago, but it was obvious Google would use it, and it should have been obvious to him too.
Most of the organic traffic is content SEO, yes. Around ~2k of monthly searches is branded search (people looking for the company). And, well, it IS pretty reasonable - the company IS ranking for most BPM / workflow keywords.
I do get why you'd think SEO is snake oil. Yeah, useful website, service + good content is the way to go. You can't just "SEO" a mediocre website and expect anything to happen.
That's not the case, actually. Your content should be based on the intent of the search. For example, if someone's Googling "how to improve a process," they're looking for practical advice on improving processes. They're NOT looking for "benefits of process improvement," "why you should improve your processes," etc.
Sure, you can write the BEST article on one of these topics, but it's not going to rank because that's not actually what the user is looking for. Hope that makes sense :)
Edit: and the above is a very common writer mistake. They write interesting content, but it's just not that relevant as a search result.
Some of the best content isn't searched for by anyone at all before it was written, though. In the extreme case, consider the Harry Potter series—fantastic content, but it would have been horrible SEO content when it was written.
True, but in most cases, you won't write Harry Potter - you just want to drive leads from people searching for process management solutions, haha.
What you did mention IS an actual strategy though. The idea is, you coin a new term or strategy, and if you PR the content enough, the term will have a ton of searches (and you'll rank #1). More often than not, though, you have to be a big fish to really pull this off
Fiction sites typically use additional descriptions (story categories, genre, etc.), words that don’t appear in the story, to help it rank. This happens independently of the creative writing process.
What a terrible analogy. SEO content is written to market the site the best you can on search engines, obviously you want to write what people are looking to meet their needs for and its easy to do this with Google. It's very different purpose from writing a good book or writing good journalism.
If you were at the mall and picked up a pamphlet about say, philosophy from someone handing them out at the food court, would you complain that it didn't have the same depth as something you'd find at a bookstore?
We've accustomed ourselves to believing that collections of words should be free if they're on the Internet, when that has almost never been true in the real world.
SEO used to be about how to better use html tags on your sht to rank higher.
Now is about the human factor, which is good ;-).
So this is what works now:
- What your customers want? customer not sure?: Market positioning (sale will follow later)
-> Explain it and introduce your product in the explanation.
-> Write content to _educate_ your customers and add a call to action later.
- What your customers are looking for right now?
-> Write content to make your customers fix* their problem using your product.
-> Write content to make your customers fix their problem using any product, then show how easy is to use yours.
That's super situational and really depends on the keyword you rank on. Can't give you the numbers, but yeah, the high CPC keywords are usually the bread-winners.
We actually wanted to do a budget range, but it gets real complicated real fast. A micro-site, for example, can cost you anything from (technically) zero because you have an internal team, to 6-figs because you're using an overpriced dev agency. The same applies to most things. You can build links for nearly free with an outsourced link-building team, or you can hire freelancers that charge 1k / outreach
I asked you about content strategy vs tactics in another comment and you responded with “tomato tomat-o”. Not the most engaging of replies. It’s apparent this was click bait to begin with.
I don't think it's click bait. There is a lot of practical advice in the article and real examples of implementation. His "tomato" answer is a refusal to engage and be helpful, but the article itself is a very good roundup of marketing tactics. I am not affiliated with Apollo, but I do help startups with lead generation and can recognize quality content in an area I have expertise in.
I agree there is some useful content in the article however there is nothing original. The article is a compilation of marketing tactics that can be found when you search for "marketing tactics". It just feels like a lazy and thrown together attempt to push site traffic for them. Maybe I am being overly critical, if the HN community as a whole likes the post and content then great!
When you say something costs "(technically) zero because you have an internal team" I can assure you we are not on the same page. Based on this and your other replies I can only assume you made this post in hopes of generating more traffic to your site since you seem to have no interest in discussing the content.
Most of them are tactics. Your "tomato/tomat-o" comment makes it seem like you actually don't care that much about the distinction or can't be bothered thinking it through. And that's a shame because this is a great list of tactics, but presenting them as strategies diminishes their credibility.
Noel: your cofounder has written an excellent roundup article on marketing tactics that has gotten good engagement with your target audience. Why demolish a substantial fraction of the goodwill you were accruing with a remark like this?
In point of fact tactics are more generally useful and can be employed in a number of different situations. They need to be in service of your objective and strategy but are where the rubber meets the road.
To me the distinction between strategy and tactic is exactly the opposite of a tomato/tomato-o distinction. They exist at different levels of abstraction.
On it's own, that's not important. What is important is that many companies, especially young ones, waste a bunch of time and/or do ineffective things precisely because they haven't made this distinction, and are thinking at the wrong level of abstraction for the problem they have (if they have even managed to frame it properly).
You can do an impressive amount of diagramming with the free yED. It also has some automatic layout tools and so on. It's also cross-platform so everybody can use it. The gallery has some impressive examples in it.
- If your content gets a ton of views, people will start Googling for it and clicking your result, specifically. This will increase your CTR, which is a known ranking factor. - People who LOVE your content on Reddit or wherever will link to your website from their blog (hence, more backlinks).