If you have a blog, you already have the means to reach a giant audience. You can connect with them, get to know them, and sell your content to them.
The next step is to figure out how to monitor your organic growth in the most effective way.
However the main principle we always adhere to is: Spend your time wisely.
This means that although having A+ content on your website and being the main method of converting organic traffic is wonderful… perhaps the best use of your time isn’t to use the next 3-6 months to write 600 amazing blog posts (even if they are SEO optimized).
Be sure to put up interesting content and promote that content through social media.
AI Content generation is the process of creating content, such as articles or posts, with an artificially generated NLP (natural language processor). Most people have heard of GPT-3 and know the power that this model has brought to the content generation landscape.
However what does not get headlines is the amount of open source generators there are out there. These are essentially just as good and even better once you realize that GPT-3 is censoring certain content.
There are a number of software tools that can help you create content, including our own product Juice. The beauty of Juice is that we’ve distilled all the essential ingredients of an article (text, headings, images, meta tags, optimized word count) and automatically generated those for you.
This way you can clean up the text as needed and publish away knowing that the SEO optimization of your content is great.
Most SEOs know that keyword research is the fundamental building block of what type of content you want to create. Just because you write it, doesn’t mean people will come.
Keywords indicate to search engines that your content is relevant to a certain topic. And good keywords are keywords that have been less widely used, and thus there is more digital space for your content to shine.
Keywords are usually composed of three to four words, but they can also be five words. Five or more keywords are usually called Long Tail Keywords.
In order to pick the right keywords, you need to determine what people looking for content will type into a search engine.
They also help you rank higher in search results. There are several ways to use keywords to help you get found and rank higher.
The first is to use keywords in your content. If you do not use keywords, your content will seem unorganized and read like it was written by a robot.
Keywords can be used in several ways. You can look at the keyword list of a page and see what people are searching for, or you can look at the top keywords in a page view.
There are some tools that can help you find keywords. There are some free ones, like Google’s Keyword Tool as well as some paid ones like SEM rush. But the simplest way to get a phrase is to begin typing on google and see the autosuggestions.
This gives you a great amount of keywords that you can type into one of those platforms I mentioned above to analyze.
The fact that these keywords are in Google’s autocomplete list means that they are somewhat trafficked (which means there is competition). But if you analyze the keywords even further you can see whether or not they are worth organizing your content around.
Once you’ve got your keywords, how many do you need to get started? Hundreds? Thousands?
Though the more the better, it still doesn’t mean you need to rank for hundreds of keywords to get any traffic.
You can still get a lot of value from a few carefully chosen keywords. With long tail keywords, you have more room to rank for something broader than just a single keyword.
For example, you can rank for “best cat food” as well as “top cat food”, or you can rank for “how to reduce cat stress”. These are much more broad topics, but you can still get some traffic and sales from them.
It can be difficult to rank for short tail keywords, but it’s not impossible. It all depends on the competition for the keyword.
If you do find yourself ranked for a long tail keyword, you can use keywords like “best”, “top”, or “popular” to get more traffic from the same keyword.
SEO is an imperfect science.
You can do all the keyword research in the world and still some of your articles will gather dust while others will flourish. So what is the secret?
One secret is to think of articles as planting seeds for the future. You never know when your article will pop off, it may be weeks from now, it may be months from now.
So there are two good methods to follow, and this is a reality that you may not want to face:
Fortunately or unfortunately there is no secret other than this. However let’s dive into this a bit more.
If you write 150 OKAY articles and put them on your blog today, you will start moving the needle way quicker than if you write one AMAZING article a week.
You will also be in a position to improve the articles that end up being more successful and not spend time on the ones that are not.
This means that although you should think of your articles as seeds that will eventually blossom, it does not mean you need to put your heart and soul into EVERY single blog post.
Instead, don’t worry about turning your articles that are not ranking into A+ articles, and instead spend time making the articles that are ranking some of your best work.
Don’t get me wrong, I want to emphasize that article quality will win over quantity in the end.
Users will bounce (leave your site!) if they aren’t interested in the content.
But the first step to getting these users is to create content quickly, even if it is not your best work.
This is why we’ve created our tool, to give you a perfectly SEO optimized first draft of content that you can use to help your site rank in the eyes of Google.
We then will want to measure the articles that are ‘winning’ in the search engines and improve those ones accordingly.
We all have a million things on our ‘to-do’ list, so we want to make sure we prioritize the things that are most important.
The same goes with SEO.
Why spend so much time improving articles that no one is seeing when you may be neglecting the ones that are beginning to get traffic?
One ‘hack’ that we’ve found is to get Google analytics to send us weekly updates of the top ranking articles in the search.
We have a full post on how to treat your winning articles here.
For more information on this see our article: Best Ways to Identify Blog Growth using Google Analytics.