Content marketing for SEO - Conceptualisation And Implementation - Sam Jones & Lukasz Zelezny

1. Content Marketing for SEO –
Conceptualisation and
Implementation
Lukasz Zelezny and Sam Jones
Sam@delvermedia.com
Twitter @sameljones
Lukasz@Zelezny.co.uk
Twitter @lukaszzelezny

2. Where to Start?
Why do content marketing?
- It’s the best tool we have for brand and community building
- It’s a Google proof form of SEO
- Search engines want it
- Customers want it
- It’s the best source of traffic generation!

3. How to start the creative process
1. Identify the audience – your customers
2. Identify where the audience are
3. Mind map content topics!
It’s really as easy as 123

4. Identify the audience
What is your customer persona?
- Create profiles of what you think your customer is like
- For each type of customer you identify try to work out what
motivates them – e.g. streamlining processes, satisfying personal or
business need, feeding desires etc!
- For each type of customer work out the content they would engage
with the most.

5. Exercise – Developing Personas
Develop 3 Personas that represent core customers/markets for your
company.
Think about
1. Who they are?
2. Why they need your products or services?
3. What information would help or encourage them to buy your
products or services?
4. What type of content would appeal to them – short/long,
video/ebook, fact centred/emotion centred.
5. Where do each persona spend the most time – blogs, news,
industry sites, social media, email.

6. Reaching your personas
Armed with our customer personas we can now start planning our
content marketing strategy.
We start with research aimed at finding out the best places to
externally place our content for greatest exposure. Place this into an
excel spreadsheet so you can refer back to it.
This can be done in 2 stages
Stage 1: Identify the thought leading sites in your industry; news
sources, journals, magazines, blogs.
Stage 2: Identify the people behind these sites.

7. Stage 1 - Research
Google searches
(Industry)
(industry) news
(industry) blogs
(industry) magazine
(industry) books – also done on Amazon!
Site searches
Alltop.com – find social media influencers
Technorati – Blogs
Linked In – People
Helpareporter.com – this is for news sources and to add yourself too!

8. Stage 2 – Finding the people
Rip contact details from websites
Connect on twitter, facebook linked in
Who is domain checks etc.
Add these details to your spreadsheet.

9. Laying some groundwork
Before we start planning a content marketing campaign it’s a good idea
to touch base with your high value targets and influencers. This can be
simple as sending them a question, posting a thoughtful comment on
their articles.
At this stage we wouldn’t ask for anything we are just getting our
company on their radar.

10. Content Topics Exercise
Types of content – Can you name them all?
Obvious content types
1. Blog posts 7. Surveys
2. News Articles 8. Competitions
3. Infographics 9. Podcasts
4. Guides 10. Video
5. eBooks 11. Courses
6. Brochures 12. Tutorials

11. Traffic and Competition Analysis
1. Google Adwords
2. SEM Rush
3. Search Metrics
4. SEOQuake
Then we look at the actual content………..
1. Gaps in the market – Look for knowledge gaps, information gaps and
ways you can improve existing content.

12. Exercise – Plan Content
1. Plan an in-depth landing page that targets 1 or more of your
personas.
- Identify the problem or topic to be addressed
- Information to cover – i.e contents
- Tools and resources – videos, tools, widgets, slideshows
- Structure
- Knowledge level
2. Plan how you would turn this into an ebook or eCourse

13. Creating Content - Guidelines
Creating compelling, engaging and useful content can be tricky.
What we’ll look at here are some key structures and pointers to make
your content come together more effectively.

14. Outline
- Write an answer to the following questions
A: Who is the content for?
B: What are the main points we need to cover?
B: Where will the content be placed? E.g. This will be placed on-site
C: What value are we giving readers? E.g. This page will teach users
unfamiliar with our software how to use it.
D: What additional (non-text) content would be useful for readers? E.g.
Diagrams, video tutorial, worksheet, infographics.
- Bullet Point Contents
- Write a 3 sentence summary. This needs to tell the user exactly what
they will get from reading your content.

15. Structure
1. Introduction – 2-3 sentences.
2. Contents listing – All the major points people may want to jump to
3. Additional Resource – Video, courses, other relevant landing pages for more in-depth information.
4-n. Content sections
Break up with
- Bullet points
- Images
- Tables
- Diagrams
- Instructions
- Video
- Call out boxes
5. Conclusion – 200 words tops. 2-3 sentences. Starting with a call to action.

16. Writing
Write the first draft content!
Now go through every section and do the following
1. Remove Unnecessary Adjectives
2. Break up any sentence longer than 15 words into 2 or more sentences
3. Break up any blocks of text (8 or more lines)
4. Clarify the language, remove jargon (Or use call outs to explain jargon)
5. Insert soft calls to action where they would be useful to the reader
6. Insert internal links where they are useful (set to open in new window)
7. Insert named anchors (<a href="#Mark_1">Mark 1</a> <a name="Mark_1">)
8. Make sure each section makes sense in isolation from its counterparts and
provides significant value

17. Repurposing Content
Once we’ve created these epic landing pages we have a golden
opportunity to repurpose the content.
This means – turning into presentations, turning into video, podcasts,
using as the basis for articles, creating webinars, ebooks, ecourses etc.
We then use this content to enhance our landing page and gain traffic
and links from other sources.

18. eBooks
Turning big content projects into eBooks is a great way to get extra
mileage out of your content.
1. Design a branded front cover
2. Add a table of contents
3. Include extra links to internal pages and to the original landing page
4. Add a company bio page and detail your expertise

19. Publishing eBooks
Publish everywhere
- Amazon
- Kobo
- Scribd
- Smashwords
- Lulu
- Project Gutenburg

20. Link Baiting Your eBooks
To get more leverage for your landing page and eBook we can use it as
link bait.
So we contact our identified partners from earlier.
- We offer them the opportunity to share the book on their site or to
their email lists.
- We offer them the opportunity to publish a section
- We offer them the opportunity to contribute an additional section
- We ask for a link to the original (but don’t demand it – as the book is
already branded and linked to our landing pages)

21. With all our content projects we need to think about where they can
actually be delivered, repackaged and repurposed.
1. Industry Sites and Blogs
2. Newsletters, giveaways, embedables
3. Video – YouTube, Vimeo, dailymotion
4. Audio – iTunes, Soundcloud, ipodder.org, podcastalley, odeo.com,
Yahoo
5. Infographics – Visual.ly, coolinfographics.com,
infographcisbin.tumblr.com, infographepedia.com,
infographics.alltop.com

22. Building Authority
The more authority you are perceived to have the easier it is to get
exposure, backlinks and to make connections.
So how can we get more authority quickly?

23. Google News
News general guidelines
- News content.
- Journalistic standards.
- Authority.
- Accountability.
- Readability.
News technical guidelines
- Article URLs.
- Article Links.
- Article formatting.
- Robots.txt or metatags.
- Multimedia content.
News quality guidelines
- Stick to the news--we mean it!
- User-friendly.
- Proper use of our meta tags.
Share your site with us

25. http://www.uswitch.com/broadband/news/2007/10/tech_wizard_of_oz_breaks_broa
dband_speed_limit/

27. - Who needs to be involved in creative process?
- Who is best placed to create content?
- Who is best to implement content?
Creating Content

28. - Who needs to be involved in creative process?
Initialstage
Senior
management
Research
In-House
SEO Team
Contentcreation
In-House
Copywriters
Optimization
In-House
SEO Team

29. Initialstage
Senior
management
Research
In-House
SEO Team
Contentcreation
In-House
Copywriters
Optimization
In-House
SEO Team
- Who is best placed to create content?

30. Initialstage
Senior
management
Research
In-House
SEO Team
Contentcreation
In-House
Copywriters
Optimization
In-House
SEO Team
- Who is best to implement content?