You know the deal: For a business website to rank high in Google and convert visitors into customers, you need top-notch content and backlinks. And after you’ve spent tons of time, money, and effort on content creation, you expect it to generate traffic and customer engagement, don’t you?
The problem is that your work doesn’t stop just after you hit “Publish.”
According to Ahrefs, 90% of content that lives online gets no traffic from Google at all! So if you want to join the rest 10%, it’s time to think of stellar content promotion methods.
You already know about the strategy of distributing content assets via as many paid and organic channels as possible. Therefore, you make content more visible and (hopefully!) attractive to a broader audience. But there’s a catch:
Everyone does the same.
To engage customers and drive more traffic to your website, you need to think ahead and go the extra mile with content promotion methods. Below are the top five to try right away.
1) Organize Your Content into Topic Clusters
A “topic cluster” is for a group of interlinked pages on your website. You take a broad topic and divide it into more narrowly-focused subtopics, interlinking them so that both users and search engines could navigate to your content easier.
That’s what it looks like:
- You create a pillar content piece targeting a high search volume keyword.
- You create a few related content pieces, with each targeting a smaller search volume keyword.
- You interlink pillar content and related assets, organizing all of them into a topic cluster that way.
With clusters, you’ll be able to target entire topics and gain traffic for a group of keywords at once, boosting interlinked pages all in one. Google’s bots will find all the related articles faster, see a semantic relationship between them, and push the entire cluster up in rankings.
Example: a personal essay writing guide from Bid4Papers. It consists of a pillar content piece and five related articles, each mentioned and linked from that pillar one. Like this:
Such topic clusters can skyrocket search rankings, organic traffic, and conversion. And the better rankings you have, the more credibility you get in the eyes of users.
How to organize content into topic clusters?
- Choose a topic: Think of those relevant to your niche and potentially meeting the user intent.
- Do keyword research to decide which ones to target with every article in your topic cluster.
- Come up with subtopics, and organize the cluster accordingly.
- Remember about your content quality: Don’t publish similar subtopics, ensure that every page brings the unique info, and use the best practices of content creation so that your pages would look appealing.
2) Optimize Content for Featured Snippets
A featured snippet or, as we knew it before, “Position 0” in SERPs allows your content to stand out and engage the audience by providing a quick answer to their search query.
It looks like this:
(There are three main formats of featured snippets — a paragraph, a list, and a table.)
Back in 2019, your content could get both featured snippets and top organic search results in SERPs. But now, according to Google’s update in January 2020 (described in details by SEO Smarty), if your page is in snippets, it’s removed from organic search results.
In plain English, featured snippets aren’t Position 0 anymore. While we had 11 search results per page before (10 + a featured snippet), it’s now counted as the #1 position in SERPs. Plus, thanks to its design’s nature, a featured snippet is more visible and engaging for users to click.
What does it mean for content promoters?
If you have no content featured in snippets, your competitors will be there, “stealing” all the organic traffic from you. But aside from traffic, content in featured snippets is your opportunity to build brand awareness and authority.
With that in mind, optimize your content assets for featured snippets to increase their chances of getting there. And since there are no official recommendations from Google on how to do that, experienced web publishers have figured out a few tricks:
- Create long-form content that covers all the related concepts and answers multiple questions.
- Structure content assets with question subheadings and short, clear answers to those questions.
- Use lists, step-by-step instructions, optimized images.
- Add how-to sections.
- Use “What is” headings.
3) Go Extra Mile with Sharing
You already know that you need to share content as much as possible so that more people would see it. The list of resources seems endless:
Post content to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Quora, Pinterest, Reddit, etc.; outreach bloggers and ask them to share your content; send content to your email list; write guest posts backlinking to your content; monitor and analyze media with your content; syndicate content, and so on and so forth.
Easier say than do, huh?
Such lists make it seem like every promotional channel is equally significant, but it’s not so. You need just a couple of places to focus your sharing endeavors, those where your target audience is active and can bring you traffic and conversion.
So, instead of promoting your content everywhere, you can choose 1-2 traffic sources that make the most sense for your marketing strategy:
Post to community groups
Their members are interested in particular topics, so your chances to engage them with relevant content are high. Not only are they your potential followers and customers, but they can also help you network with others and build your authority in the niche.
Submit to your niche-specific hubs
As well as community groups, such hubs deal with particular topics. And if your content is relevant and worth sharing, republishing it at such hubs will attract the target audience to your brand, give rise to further shares, and help you build a reputation of a leader in your industry.
Optimize visuals for sharing
You know about tactics such as “Add social share buttons” and “Add a click to tweet option” to boost shares and influence promotion that way. Why not go further and optimize your visual content so that visitors could easily share it, too, bringing more backlinks and traffic to you?
Ensure all your images are appropriately sized. Also, please do your best to create branded images of high quality so that readers would like to share them.
Another piece of advice:
When publishing infographics or any other interactive visual elements, share their embed codes to make it easier for the audience to republish.
4) Update and Repurpose Your Old Content
Repurposing content, you’ll boost your promotion endeavors because it allows you to reach different audience segments.
For instance, vertical videos are more engaging on social media than text posts with links. So why not use short clips to promote your other content types that way?
Or, say you have a stellar white paper with industry updates and insights? Why not take some points from it and write a shorter blog post or create a podcast?
You can turn blog posts into videos, slides, PDF, infographics, etc. You can repurpose your product page into a blog post or a case study. (Since people consume content differently, repurposing it will allow you to engage a broader audience to your marketing messages.
One more thing:
Remember to update and expand your old content regularly. As experts from Digital Ducats confirm, it can drive much more traffic to your website and influence your brand’s authority by far. Otherwise, both Google and users will consider your information outdated and, therefore, unworthy ranking high.
5) Involve Influences in Content Promotion
Build a network with influencers in your niche. It will allow you to get valuable knowledge and help each other with content promotion. Their experience is a surefire way to shape content assets so they would reach max results.
When writing a blog post, a case study, or any other content type, think of influencers that would be suitable for its promotion once it’s ready.
- Contact them, ask for a quote (comments, examples) to improve your content.
- Invite them to check the final draft before publishing.
- And finally, share the live link with everyone mentioned in your content, asking them to share and link to it if they can.
Some content makers go even further and focus their whole content strategy on publishing or taking part in expert roundups. This tactic helps them gain exposure to a new audience, get backlinks from the roundup participants, and promote their content as more reputable.
All this makes content promotion endeavors more efficient.
Final Note
For your content to succeed, please do your best to increase yet optimize your promotion efforts. The above five methods work for those who aren’t lazy to try and test different tactics. Now it’s your turn to join them and build a loyal audience.
About the Author
Lesley Vos is a seasoned web writer specializing in sales copywriting and storytelling. Currently blogging at Bid4Papers, she also contributes to publications on business, content marketing, and self-growth. Follow @LesleyVos on Twitter to see more works of hers.
