content ranking strategy - Express Writers

10 Key Ways To Stand Out From The Crowd & Be A Thought Leader

December 31, 2020December 7, 2015 by Sarah Shade

To be a “thought leader” is one of the most sought-after titles a marketer can hope for. Thought leaders are influential individuals who play a huge role in informing the public, leading the direction of the industry, presenting new information and breaking barriers. Theirs is the content that is loved; shared; read; and sought-after. You can’t just go to school to be a thought leader, though. It requires the careful cultivation of a set of particular skills, strengths and networks. It’s not enough to simply be intelligent, hard working or interested: you also need to be passionate, unique and unafraid of pushing the boundaries of possibility. What is a True Online Thought Leader? Thought leaders are many things but, to put it simply, they’re the people to whom everyone else goes for new ideas and key questions. They are informed individuals who offer valuable opinions and inspiration for the people who learn from them and they serve the amazingly important purpose of turning intangible ideas into solid realities. Thought leaders make things happen and, more often than not, they undertake the task of transforming industries and instigating great change across varieties of platforms. Thought leaders in the content marketing world include Brian Clark, the CEO of CopyBlogger; Brian Halligan, the Co-Founder of HubSpot and Joe Pulizzi, the Founder of Content Marketing Institute. How to Be a Thought Leader: 10 Solid Tips Becoming a thought leader is a little bit like becoming a unicorn: it takes a lot of effort and just a little bit of magic. Fortunately, you’re totally capable of both of those things. In the world of content marketing, the process of becoming a thought leader boils down to having unique ideas, expounding upon them in a unique way and offering people real, tangible value. Follow these 10 tips to become a thought leader in your industry. 1) Be Authentic Although it’s part of a thought leader’s job description to create high-level content that answers tough questions and provides real value for readers, it’s also important to know yourself and know your audience. This is especially difficult when you take into account the external pressure that is exerted on though leaders all the time. While it can be tough to avoid becoming distracted by things like the analytics attached to your blog, it’s important to remember that those things don’t provide a real window the to the big picture. Additionally, they make it hard to remember that there are actually people behind all those swoopy lines and numbers. Because of this, the first step to becoming a thought leader is to be authentic, both to yourself and your audience. You came to this business because some aspect of it was interesting to you. Therefore, there is very little that is more important than continuing to chase that interest. By writing what you know and are passionate about, your content will already have an edge over a great deal of content available on the Internet. Additionally, doing this will allow you to draw a series of followers who genuinely care about your topic. How We’re Being Authentic (On Social) One way we’re working on our authenticity is bringing a new level of transparency in our social media. In August 2015 we opened an Instagram account. We’ve started to feature a weekly #virtualworkforceculture post about our remote writers, with a picture of their faces, in their location: and our CEO has been traveling weekly to local businesses for a #localbusiness feature. among other things. Here’s a glimpse: Featured #virtualworkforceculture of the week – our full time creative #writer, Oana G, based in Milano, Italy: “As you can see, I’m fighting a lost battle with clutter. To be honest, I like to surround myself with eclectic, odd, one-of-a-kind things that offer me the highest dosage of inspiration and energy. I love to connect objects with places and experiences, and I adore my job, because it allows me to get creative in my own environment.” #workfromhome #homeoffice #copywriter #copywriting #writing #marketing #SEO #contentmarketing #blogging #SMM #content #inboundmarketing #growthhacking #marketing #webtraffic #success #sales #expresswriters #photooftheday #loveit #selfie #instadaily #picoftheday #igers #instacool A photo posted by Express Writers (@expwriters) on Nov 5, 2015 at 6:49pm PST This is the start to a very transparent social account that shows just what we’re up to in the office, and ties together faces in our work-at-home based team. 2) Seek to be a Hub of Information Nobody wants another loudmouth marketer who takes over a huge portion of the Internet by hawking products or hard-selling readers. For this reason, one of the most important steps in becoming a thought leader is to dedicate yourself to being a hub of information rather than a blaring siren. Business and personal blogs should act as platforms for reader engagement and should seek, primarily, to offer value to customers. Additionally, these platforms should offer a place for people to gather and engage in conversation via blog comments, tweets and re-tweets or social media shares. By doing that, you serve the most important purpose of a thought leader: inspiring ideas and facilitating cohesion. 3) Inspire Action One of the most important purposes your content can serve is to inspire action within your readers. Your content should be so irresistible that people want to share it on social media, read the book you mentioned, try their hand at something new or travel to the exotic locale outlined in your most recent post. The goal can vary but the outcome should be the same: in order to be a thought leader, your content needs to move people to action. 4) Cultivate Your “Breakthrough Idea” One of the traits of thought leaders everywhere is that they’re associated with a breakthrough idea. Depending upon your niche, your breakthrough idea could be an area of expertise or a particular approach to an old topic. Whatever your breakthrough idea is, it should inform the rest of your content. For example, if you’re going to run a blog … Read more

How Express Writers Gained Over 300 Keyword Positions In One Day in Google (Case Study)

December 31, 2020November 9, 2015 by Adam Oakley

The other day, I was poking around in my favorite SEO analytic software of choice, SEMrush, checking on our rankings. My team at Express Writers has a Guru subscription there that allows us to see detailed analytics of our site–and I mean detailed. We see a ton of keyword position data down to the most recent keyword ranking change of our site in Google, as of just an hour ago. (If you haven’t already, go check out SEMrush here.) Well, a couple days ago I was doing my biweekly SEO audit of all of our keyword positions and pulling keyword data for new content. I was shocked to see that the positions changes mapped a huge spike: as of October 28, 302 new keyword gains. In 24 hours. And our traffic had spiked up to the most I’d ever seen: 1,251 people on one day. What Exactly Are We Doing In Google? Let me give you a little look at exactly how we’re getting and maintaining our positions with Google before I delve into the recent major keyword growth. 1. Content We write and publish about 3-4 blogs on our site a week, ranging from 1,000-3,000 words each. So since 2011, we have 642 blogs published on our WordPress site (this one makes 643): This isn’t counting the hundreds of guest blogs I’ve placed on places like SiteProNews, Search Engine Journal, Social Media Examiner, and more. Also, we have about 50-80 website pages, maybe 400-800 words each. 2. Traffic So, with that insight into just how much we publish, now it’s time to see what the results are. We have some serious organic traffic. I’ve never placed a Google paid ad in all my four years of business; and never will. I believe in great content brainstorming, writing and publishing, and it is what is keeping us strong. And sometimes just this process can take me 40 hours a week. It isn’t easy, but it is thoroughly worth it. SEMrush puts our traffic at a value of $6,800 (what we would pay if we were paying for ad clicks). We have 3,000 keywords indexed in Google, with over 100 in the top 5 positions of Google. We’re outranking a large number of our competitors in the content creation niche. Let’s look at the graph on the right a little deeper: Whoa! This month we have the most site traffic we’ve ever had, with 1,251 people visiting in a single day the first week of November. 3. How We Gained 300+ Rankings In One Day Here’s what I saw that stopped me in my tracks the other day. I clicked on Position Changes under Organic Research, in SEMrush: See that? 302 new rankings in a single day! Clicking on what was “new,” some of these showed we were position 11 for “modern copywriter,” #3 for “copywriting companies”, and #19 for “website content”: The orange bar below showed we’d lost 200 keywords. But clicking on that, I saw they were mostly unrelated keywords—like “express for her,” “sprinkles icing,” and more. Except for a few pivotal ones we’d lost a few positions on (looks like I need to refresh some old SEO content), the “lost” weren’t too bad. How The Heck Did We Get 300+ Keywords In One Day? I have a couple theories. First, Google RankBrain is out. It came out two days before our rankings showed a major spike. Read my blog on RankBrain here. RankBrain is an AI system that basically could be replacing Google’s old way of doing its algorithm, and it exposed 15% of the web that Google hadn’t shed light on before. I’m sure RankBrain is showing a lot more website owners rankings they didn’t know they ever had. RankBrain means we’ll all be able to see a whopping 15% more in analytics and positions online that our sites and content are ranking for—all the more reason to start publishing great content! Secondly, Google has still been rolling out Panda, AND, topical trust flow has recently been making big waves (it’s replacing PageRank and focuses on reporting relevant content in higher rankings). Topical trust flow weight could be mostly likely why we lost our unrelated rankings, too. All this is probably tied into the quality of the RankBrain AI. Lastly, we’ve been working hard on our content. Over the past month, I’ve revamped and improved our blogging and content publishing quality. Here are just a few of the changes: SEO audit of our blogs (I just corrected 35 “bad SEO” blogs, rewrote their meta descriptions and edited the copy, over the last 3 weeks, and took them to green SEO on the Yoast plugin) More SEO research and keyword planning with SEMrush for each post Heavier research and analyzing of topics and what goes into each post Custom drawings and illustrations, like this one, for many of our posts At least one infographic written, designed and published per month Re-purposing of infographics into SlideShares, RSS content to pull guest traffic Email marketing bi-weekly that sends a blog roundup to our subscriber list We Know What It Takes To Help You To end this post, I’d like to emphasize that any one of our clients can see these results. We’re not only writers with pens over here. My team not only writes great SEO optimized content, but we plan it, too—and we use SEMrush! Our team includes strategists that map out monthly editorial calendars for our clients, audit websites to remove anything that could be hurting websites, and similar services. We’ve seen content success truly happen for us – this post proves that – and we know exactly what it takes to get even a brand new website client onboard with publishing great content that gets both the eye of a reader and Google (albeit if Google, a robotic eye). If you’re ready to get serious about content and thus, your rankings and readers, check out our Content Shop!

Less is Not More (Anymore): Secrets of New Year Web Content Ranking

January 1, 2021December 30, 2013 by Adam Oakley

In previous years, content marketers have held to the standard that “less is more.” As a result, we’ve kept web pages short, blog posts concise, and gotten a lot of practice condensing huge topics into 300 to 600 word shots. If you’ve struggled with this practice, you’re in for a treat as the trend to web content ranking makes a hard right turn. Google Hummingbird Sets the Standard for New Web Content In 2013, we weathered more changes in search engine optimization than any other year in the history of SEO. Since 2011, Google was dropping hints via Panda and Penguin updates; that search and ranking models and algorithms would change. Hummingbird marked the new SEO focus: quality web content containing substance. For those of us manning the SEO trenches, we’ve seen innumerable marketing hypes come and go. However, Google’s algorithm updates have resulted in more than just hype; an entirely new trend and best practice has emerged: content-driven search engine optimization for higher web content ranking. The Meaning of ‘Content-Driven’ What does ‘content-driven’ mean when it comes to SEO? It means your SERP (search engine results page) ranking will be directly related to your content quality. Google is listening to what consumers want, and they want to be educated buyers. As a result, it is imperative that your content contain well-written and relevant material in relation to your business, brand, product, or service. Content-driven optimization is happening as soon as a web page is created. As we create the web content, we inherently make our target audience the focus. As Eddie Choi says in his ClickZ article about content-driven SEO, “the semantic logic then follows naturally to hyperlink the texts, pictures, videos, and external and internal citations.” As a result, we connect ourselves with similar or associated social profiles. Google’s algorithms then “read” all of this information and increase your ranking accordingly. In essence, optimization is happening when the content is written. It’s not an afterthought or second process built in later. The New Secret Ingredient: Longer Content = Higher Rankings As we said at the outset of this article, the standard of “less is more” is dead. We used to cram keywords and keyword phrases into a short piece of web content to push search engine rankings. Those days are in the past, never to be repeated—at least as far as we can tell from Google’s rapid push to arrive at 100 percent of search keyword data returning with “(not provided).” What does this mean in terms of word count? Word count is about to go up. Google has indicated that content containing about 2,000 words versus 300 to 600 will rank higher. Skeptical? So were we. So, we tested the waters: At Express Writers, we took it upon ourselves to test whether or not long content really does matter. So, we switched over to 2000 word blogs approximately mid-November, 2013. These were posted daily with 1 to 2 stock images per blog, SEO optimized, and socially shared (as we did with all of our previous 300-600 word blogs). Mid-December, our rankings took a huge increase. We had about 7 keywords in the top 3 rankings on Google, and mid-December after we switched to 2000-word blogs, we achieved no less than 35 top keywords in the top 3 rankings. Folks, the cat’s out of the bag. IT WORKS! 2014 Web Content: What to Keep & Toss The new trend in web content is all about giving the audience what they want: a one-stop shopping experience. Your audience wants all the pertinent information from you, not 2 to 3 other websites that all drop breadcrumbs about the same topic. This means your readers want all the best info in ONE lengthy article. The best way to prepare such an article is to understand exactly what SEO is today: Analytics Content Marketing Social Notice, “keywords” is not included in this list. The surest way to kill your search engine optimization efforts in the New Year is to riddle your content with keywords and phrases over and over. Google’s algorithms are acutely attuned to synonyms. Flooding content with the same keyword or phrase is no longer necessary; variations are completely acceptable and absolutely encouraged! Keep in mind that your audience is composed of intelligent individuals. They might even understand more than you think, especially when it comes to technical information. Avoid talking down to them or reusing the same keywords over and over. Such methods are outdated and will quickly turn potential customers—and Google rankings—away, swiftly killing your New Year’s marketing. The Secret to Making a Difference The new frontier of search engine optimization focuses heavily on: Quality content Relevant content Longer content Social media presence Customer reviews Your web content plan should therefore focus on at least four primary areas: Product or service sales Company information Customer support Education, information, and resources Keep in mind that today’s content marketing is not a “one-size-fits-all” plan. You might have a fifth or even sixth, content area that fits your business and fleshes out your plan even further. However, you will need to include these four primary areas at minimum to ensure the building blocks for SEO are present. One of the most groundbreaking changes to the SEO frontier is Google’s move away from static. Neither Google nor your market is static. This means it’s time to rethink your strategy for ranking placement: You’ll need a local, national, and international plan so that searchers from any location will find you. Mobile searches are hot and heavy for the New Year, which is why marketing in each category equates to survival. Local search terms are vital. Anyone searching by mobile in your locale will find you, if you have local search terms built into your content. Customer reviews are about to be huge. This means what customers are saying about you means higher or lower search engine rankings. … Read more