Samuel Edwards

Chief Marketing Officer at SEO Company

In his 9+ years as a digital marketer, Sam has worked with countless small businesses and enterprise Fortune 500 companies and organizations including NASDAQ OMX, eBay, Duncan Hines, Drew Barrymore, Washington, DC based law firm Price Benowitz LLP and human rights organization Amnesty International.

As a technical SEO strategist, Sam leads all paid and organic operations teams for client SEO serviceslink building services and white label SEO partnerships.

He is a recurring speaker at the Search Marketing Expo conference series and a TEDx Talker. Today he works directly with high-end clients across all verticals to maximize on and off-site SEO ROI through content marketing and link building. Connect with Sam on Linkedin.

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What is NAP? How Does it Help Local SEO?
Samuel Edwards

What is NAP? 5 NAP Strategies to Help Local SEO

Whether you are selling online or on television, using the same tagline, colors, and logo will make the audience trust your brand. But advertising online adds an additional wrinkle – it’s also critical to have NAP consistency, which stands for Name, Address, and Phone Number. Ensuring your NAP data is accurate everywhere on the Web is vital for your local SEO ranking. Google and other search engines crawl this information when finding out about your company. This vital data is stored and part of Google’s decision about your local search rankings. How important is accurate NAP data? A recent study found that NAP consistency could change your online performance by 16%! Learn more about NAP, local SEO, and more below. NAP And The Importance Of Backlinking Your online business listing must be a critical part of your overall marketing strategy on the Internet. These business listings are highly effective backlinks that will boost your site’s authority with Google and others. When we say backlink, we mean a link from a related website to yours. When a website with high authority links to your website, Google sees that as a good thing and will probably raise your ranking over time. However, if your Name, Address, and Phone Number are inconsistent from listing to listing, this will damage your credibility in the public’s and Google’s eyes. For example, if you are doing SEO as a personal injury attorney, you work in what is often a life-or-death profession. People go to your site or your Google Business Profile (GBP) to find information about personal injury topics and to locate a good attorney. If your NAP is inconsistent from one site to another in your law firm, that can be a serious problem. If NAP on one of your sites says one thing and NAP on the other says another, people will be confused. And, critically, search engines won’t trust your company. It’s especially important for NAP to be consistent if you operate in the health, financial, or professional services industries. How To Get The Most Out Of NAP It’s vital to ensure that your company’s NAP information is leaning into your SEO strategy to maximum effect. You can do that by following these steps: Make updates to your NAP information whenever anything changes. This step is critical if your company is new, moved, or has new storefronts. Keep your NAP as consistent as possible between online business listings. Put your company on major business indexes, such as Yelp and the BBB. How to Set Up Your NAP We’ve covered how important NAP is to local SEO results. However, there are several finer points to review before moving ahead. The following details might seem excessive but they matter a lot to your Google ranking. How Will You Display Your Company Name? For official local businesses online, you should always use your firm’s full name as it exists officially. For instance, if your law firm is John Smith Personal Injury Attorney, you shouldn’t list it in your NAP as John Smith Personal Injury Lawyer. It is the same thing but consistency is essential for the best use of NAP for local SEO. How Will You List Your Company Address? Everyone uses various abbreviations and notations when they write down physical addresses. For example, you may write ‘street’ but your husband writes ‘St.’ These small differences are a big deal with your NAP. The physical address should be the same on every website. Below are a few ways to write a business address. All of them work; they just need to be consistent across the Internet: 700 Orlando Avenue 700 Orlando Ave. 700 Orlando Ave It also helps to keep NAP consistency when you print marketing materials, including business cards,  brochures, and flyers. This NAP data is one of the key components for showing up in Google’s local pack. How Will You List Your Phone Number? As with your physical address, there are many ways to list your phone number online. Just make it consistent for the best NAP data: (877)-886-9615 877-886-9615 (877) 886-9615 Your phone number should be listed the same in print, too. Don’t forget letters, invoices, checks, pamphlets, etc. Whenever possible, use a local phone number with the area code of your location. This helps search engines understand your local relevance. Unsure how to list your NAP? Look at the business paperwork you got when you first registered the company. Whatever your filing paperwork says, make that your NAP data. Use Structured Data Markup with Your Phone Number As an example for the code: { “@context”: “https://schema.org”, “@type”: “LocalBusiness”, “name”: “Your Business Name”, “address”: { “@type”: “PostalAddress”, “streetAddress”: “123 Main St”, “addressLocality”: “Your City”, “addressRegion”: “Your State”, “postalCode”: “12345” }, “telephone”: “+11234567890” } Add Your Phone Number to Your Website At the risk of sounding too obvious, I’ll still give specific advice about making your information available to both users and search engines. Include your phone number prominently on your website, ideally in the header, footer, and contact page. Use the same format everywhere to maintain consistency. Submit to Local Citations Services Submit your business information to local directories and local link citation sites. Use services like Moz Local, Yext, or BrightLocal to manage your listings and ensure your NAP information is consistent across all platforms. Regularly audit your existing citation listings to ensure your phone number and other NAP information are accurate and up-to-date. Ensure there are no duplicate listings of your business with different phone numbers, as this can confuse search engines and customers. Creating A NAP Record Online Creating your NAP online isn’t difficult. It only takes a few steps and a sprinkling of common sense: Make your NAP information as simple to find as possible on your website. Google will crawl this information to check how authoritative and credible you are. Don’t forget to put the NAP in the text on every page and not in a picture. Otherwise, Google can’t grab it, unless your programmer puts it

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Money Pages: How to Find, Improve & Optimize Your Site's Money Pages
Samuel Edwards

Money Pages: Optimizing Your Money Pages for Sales, Leads & Conversions

Companies build money pages with the goal of making sales and otherwise monetizing their website. Money pages: Are the most important pages on your website (often they are your services pages that call-to-action forms or “buy now” buttons) Must be clean and easy to navigate Should be optimized for exposure in search (i.e. rank for very competitive keywords), where possible Should be optimized on-page for conversions Simply put, a money page must have two factors to be successful: a strong sales presentation and traffic. Here we’ll go through what it takes to optimize your money pages for leads and sales. Let’s dive in. What Is A Money Page? The main objective of a money page is to monetize your website’s content. And this content contributes to your online revenue in more ways than just providing a ‘buy now’ button. It is either via enormous advertising or by pushing services and goods as an associate, resulting in third-party sales. Meanwhile, the accompanying pages should have high-quality content that motivates visitors to click on your backlinks. And this is where it’s crucial to include well-designed CTAs in the content of your money pages to increase sales. How To Get More Visitors To Your Money Page Remember, knowing how to locate high-ranking sites with relevant traffic is the most effective approach to reach more extensive traffic to your website’s money pages. So, the good news is that you simply need to create a Google Analytics account if you don’t already have one. Also, the top landing site reports can assist you in identifying the primary pages that bring substantial traffic to the site. Instead of generating extra pages, you now can instantly identify your best landing pages. As a result,  you can reroute people from these sites to the money pages to boost conversion rates. How To Find Your Money Pages? Do not worry if you’re confused about how people will find your money pages, as it is one of the easiest things to see. As mentioned above, all you need is a Google Analytics account, which we are sure you already have by now! However, within your Google Analytics account, you need to focus on two reports, which are: Source/Medium Top Landing Pages Read on as we discuss how you can find your money pages by thoroughly looking into these reports: Money Page Source/Medium Report Keeping an eye on the source/medium report is always a brilliant idea. Why? It will detail the nature of the traffic your website is receiving, where it comes from, and how much money you are spending on it. Moreover, a source is the basis of your traffic in Google lingo. For instance, a web page, such as Google, or a particular web domain. The overall genre of the source is referred to as media. Organic search, for instance, or sponsored search. So, when you see google/organic next to a page, you will know that most visits originate from Google organic searches. Here is how you access them: Log into Analytics Click Acquisition All traffic Source/Medium from the menu on the left to get the report Top Landing Page Report The next step is to see the Top Landing Page report. To locate it: Navigate to Google Analytics’ left-hand menu Pick Behavior Site Content Landing Pages This report will illustrate all the pages on the site, and you can then filter it by income or the lead target you are aiming for. Here is what you are likely to find: even if you have numerous pages on your site, just 10% to 30% of such pages will contribute to all of the revenue and leads. Indeed, for a normal lead generation, service-based organization, it could be as little as 5 or 10 pages from out hundreds. 7 Ways To Increase Conversion On Your Money Pages Since you may have already guessed, it is critical to determine which pages convert the best. Because, after all, aren’t they the pages where you’ll be investing the most significant effort? Rather than generating hundreds of new pages that will most likely receive just average traffic, part of your work should go into your current web pages that genuinely improve your business. Your aim here should be for visitors to regularly return to such top sites – perhaps as much as a few times per month – and modify them to enhance the content, particularly for local businesses. This persuades Google that your page is still alive and highly relevant. With that said, here are a few tips to enhance your content on money pages: 1. Update And Refresh Your Money Pages Your objective should always be to fill the money page with the most delectable material available online for the topic at hand. That implies that as time passes, you will not only ensure that everything is available on the page is correct and accurate, but you will also want to include any new advancements or pieces of information. For instance, this may include revising a product/service handbook to cover all of the new features that have been launched over the last year. On the other hand, it may require you to add case studies, FAQs or new reviews to products or service websites. Alternatively, a content update may result from examining one of your competitors’ comparable pages to analyze what they are up to and how you may finally improve it. 2. Optimize Your Money Pages One of the most significant things you can do to increase the number of people who visit your money page is to optimize it completely. That means going back through your descriptions and title tags and optimizing them for the correct phrase. Furthermore, it also entails going over your material to determine where you can include a (keyword optimized) header to improve engagement and reading. Ensure that subheadings and headings serve as a guide for your audience, keeping them from sifting through overly long sections of text. Therefore, local business owners shouldn’t be hesitant about using these every several hundred words. 3. Add Videos And Images To Your Money Pages Images have been a consistent source of consumer

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Samuel Edwards

Top SEO Strategies for Estate Planning & Probate Lawyers

Estate planning is a profitable service, but you need a steady flow of leads to generate meaningful revenue long-term.  Like most businesses today, attorneys rely heavily on lawyer SEO to generate and convert leads into paying clients. While it’s still worth advertising in physical spaces, like magazines and journals, internet traffic will be responsible for the majority of your revenue. If you’re an estate planning attorney, you need a strong search engine optimization (SEO) game that employs strategies designed to increase targeted traffic, boost your website’s ranking in the search engines, and get more clicks. This article will explain how SEO can help you establish yourself as an authority in legal niche, garnering you more leads and ultimately more revenue.  What is SEO for estate planning attorneys? Source Optimizing an estate planning attorney’s website for search involves the fundamental aspects of SEO: Keyword research Content optimization Technical SEO Backlink building Local SEO Tracking, monitoring, and adjusting All of these elements are the foundation of SEO in every niche, but get customized to catch the attention of people who are searching for estate planning services. Some elements – like technical SEO – don’t require constant work. However, building a backlink profile is an ongoing process. Here’s a more in-depth look at how each of these SEO elements apply to your business. Keyword research for estate planning attorneys Keyword research involves finding relevant keywords and phrases that your leads might type into a search engine while looking for estate planning services. For example, someone might search for “estate planning services in Denver.” However, there are a variety of phrases that get included in the final list of keywords to target. Most keywords reveal the user’s intent, which means you can target the phrases most likely to be searched for by your hottest leads. People who are looking for estate planning services immediately will be searching for different phrases than leads who are just trying to learn more about the process. You want to target both groups of people, but with different content. Content optimization for estate planning attorneys Optimizing the content on your website plays a critical role in optimizing your site for search. On a general level, you want your content to include keywords and phrases your leads are searching for, but it’s equally important for that content to contain valuable information that provides answers or solutions for readers. This can be educational content, answers to frequently asked questions, or pages that sell your services. For example, you might publish one article titled, What is Estate Planning and Why Do I Need it? Another article might be titled, How an Attorney Can Help You With Estate Planning. You can rank both of these articles in the search engines, but each one is likely to bring you a different type of lead. The former will bring you people who are curious about your estate planning practice, and the second will generate leads who are specifically searching for an estate planning firm. In addition to speaking to specific segments of your market, your content should be easy to read, unique, and authoritative. It should contain some kind of call to action (CTA) that asks the reader to contact you right away. Technical SEO for estate planning law firms The content published on your website will speak to your potential clients, while the technical aspect will speak to search engines. Technical SEO is all about optimizing the back end of your website to make it easy for search engine spiders to crawl and index properly. This includes optimizing the following elements: Page titles Meta descriptions (these are seen in search engine results and can influence people to click) Image alt tags Heading tags URL structure Link building for estate planning law firms Most websites need a strong backlink profile to get decent visibility in the search engines, but it’s important to be intentional about where you get your links. Backlinks have always been a ranking factor for Google, but your links need to come from good sources or they can hurt you. Estate planning lawyers benefit from link building on sites with content related to estate planning law firms, like probate, power of attorney, wills, death taxes, asset protection, trusts, life insurance, and beneficiary designations. However, good backlinks can also come from other types of websites that publish quality content, are in good standing with Google, and have a positive reputation and/or authority status. There are several main ways to get quality backlinks, including guest posting, manual outreach, broken link building, and other tried-and-true methods. It’s also beneficial to clean up your backlink profile if you have spammy links that can hurt your rankings. Local SEO for estate planning attorneys If you offer your services nationwide, there are an overwhelming number of estate planning lawyers who will be competing for the same leads. However, when you target local leads, the competition thins out and you have a better chance. Local SEO involves optimizing your content to reach people in the specific areas you serve. At a basic level, you might include your address, phone number, and all the cities and counties you serve in the footer of your website. The same information should be included in your Google business listing. If you don’t already have a Google Business Profile, that should be at the top of your list to create. Anytime people search for services, optimized business listings that rank get displayed at the top of all organic search results, and you want your business to be visible in that section. Tracking SEO performance Once all the initial work is done, you’ll need to monitor your website’s performance and rankings to find out which strategies are working and where there’s room for improvement. By tracking important metrics, you’ll have the data necessary to make better decisions about where to go with your SEO strategy. Now that we’ve covered the basics of SEO for estate planning attorneys, let’s explore some implementation strategies that will

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White Label Link Building
Samuel Edwards

White Label Link Building: Pros & Cons of of White Label Backlink Services

Joining a white label SEO reseller program could be the best decision your digital marketing firm has ever made—but building links as a reseller isn’t a guarantee. Not every white label link building or SEO program is created equal. If you’re the owner of one or more digital marketing agencies, you have a few options when it comes to servicing link building requests for your clients’ SEO: Establish your own in-house outreach team for link building, hire writers and build links through a streamlined process OR You can outsource your link building to a white label SEO agency And, even the best search engine optimization (SEO) agencies have their proverbial warts. A marketing agency might naturally wonder: Why do private label link building companies get such a bad wrap? Doesn’t white-labeling your backlink development services cut heavily into your own margins? If I can do it myself, why would I outsource my direct client link building work to some white label agency? What if the quality of the outsourced, white label agency is shoddy and the links they build are sub par? What factors should you consider when hiring a white label SEO reseller services provider, so you can maximize your clients’ SEO ROI without risk? Ultimately, What are the pros and cons of hiring a white label link building agency to fulfill your client orders? Dig in while we discuss! How White Label Link Building Works In case you’re not familiar, most white label backlink programs work in a similar fashion. A marketing firm (the reseller/client) will sell link building services or SEO services to an end client for a specified price. The reseller then works with a white label link building provider, who provides link building services and related back-office support for a price (typically) less than what the reseller is charging, resulting in a profit for the reseller. These services are rendered such that the link building reseller can choose to brand these services as their own with most of the heavy lifting going to the reselling agency. There are many advantages to this setup, including: higher efficiency, greater link building scale, higher profitability, and access to more resources and expertise. However, these all depend on your ability to enroll in link building projects that gets results. Key Factors for the Perfect SEO White Label Link Building Agency Program There are many potential white label link building providers to choose from, but these factors should lead you to a better decision—both for you and your clients. Content-focused white label digital marketing services “Link building” refers to any process designed to help you get more niche relevant links pointing to your site, which opens the door to some questionable practitioners claiming to be legitimate link builders. Thanks to near-continuous Google algorithm udpates, the days of spamming links on forums across the internet are over. These days, there are only two legitimate avenues to building links, and both of them rely on content as a basis for development. One requires you to develop and promote more onsite content so you attract links from other sites naturally (which is often unreliable), and the other relies on producing high quality backlinks to the client’s site from published guest blogs. If a white label link building provider doesn’t mention content at all, it may be a bad sign. High-quality content writing It doesn’t matter how many articles you write if the content is poorly researched, obviously written by a non-native speaker, or is negligent about the nature of your industry. This is where most white label link building service providers diverge; some put the highest emphasis on content quality, employing good writers, taking extra time to research, and always proofreading every detail. Backlink development services identify your site’s best content for building links. Others are more focused on output. High-quality writing can work wonders for your clients’ campaigns, helping them get into bigger and better publishers, earning them a better online reputation, and even generating more referral traffic from the links built in the process. It’s a non-negotiable feature of your future link building partner. Dofollow white label backlinks Nofollow links aren’t necessarily a bad thing, but you don’t want them to be the consistent backbone of your link building efforts. In case you aren’t familiar, by default, links are “dofollow” links, which pass authority to the site they point to. This is what’s necessary to improve a client’s domain authority and eventually increase their search rankings. Nofollow links do pass traffic, but don’t pass authority, making them valuable, but considerably less so than dofollow, high quality links—especially for SEO. Make sure you know which of these your provider is offering. A focus on campaigns rather than one-time orders SEO involves hundreds of closely interwoven factors, working in tandem over a period of months. When executed properly, consistent link acquisition … Will lead to consistent keyword growth…   A single order of high quality links for your client isn’t going to give them a boost in rankings, and it certainly isn’t going to improve their rankings permanently. Instead of working with link building agencies that only focuses on one-off orders, focus on one that works on long-term improvements in a campaign format. It’s also important to find a link building provider with flexibility, accommodating multiple budgets, directives, and goals—especially if you have a diverse assortment of clients with different needs. A wide selection of available publishers Multiple white label backlinks built on the same publisher will have diminishing returns. The more authoritative the publisher, the more valuable the white label hyperlinks will be. Publishers related to your industry are better for link building than others. These tenets of white label services require you to seek out a link building provider capable of offering high quality links on a wide variety of different publishers. This is a sign not only of a reputable white label link building agency, but one capable of serving the widest range of possible end clients. The Right

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How to Use Location Landing Pages for Enhanced SEO
Samuel Edwards

How to Use Local Landing Pages for Improved Local SEO

Running an effective search engine optimization (SEO) campaign requires creating content and then ranking that content in the search engines. Ideally, all of your webpages would show up in search results, but that’s unlikely. While some of your content probably won’t make it into the search engine results pages (SERPs) for every search term, you can get some powerful SEO leverage by creating a local landing page for multiple locations applicable to your local business. Using location landing pages will boost your SEO power exponentially and will help you rank higher in mobile searches. Since the majority of internet users browse the web on a mobile device, location landing pages just might be the “SEO secret weapon” you’ve been looking for. What are location landing pages? A location landing page is a single page on your website with content specifically tailored to represent one of your physical locations. For example, if a retail giant has 2,000 nationwide locations, they’d have 2,000 individual location landing pages – one for each local store. The purpose of having location landing pages is to capitalize on local search. Optimizing for local search is essentially SEO service that targets local markets. Targeting local markets lowers the competition for keywords, it’s easier to rank for popular keywords and phrases, and it makes content more relevant to visitors. Local landing pages allow you to publish additional web pages with unique content When you use location landing pages, you can instantly multiply the number of webpages you have without it being duplicate content. Publishing more content will help you rank better in the search engines. However, the real opportunity is to reach people performing local searches. With location landing pages, each page will contain the same basic information about your business, but will also have unique content tailored to the location the page represents. For example, say you run a business selling inflatable rafts and have two locations – one in Baton Rouge and one in Miami. On each location landing page, you’ll publish general information about your inflatable rafts along with ideas for where people can use their rafts. These ideas will be based on local attractions like rivers, lakes, and water parks. This way, no two local landing pages will be the same. Location landing pages give you more opportunity to be seen in search results Location landing pages aren’t just more pages for you to figure out how to rank. They’re actually favored by Google, and as a result, they’re easier to rank. Since a user’s physical location is accounted for in Google’s algorithm, search terms involving types of local businesses, specific products, and in-person services are more likely to return location landing pages than other web pages. If you don’t have location landing pages, when users perform these kinds of searches, your competitors who do have location landing pages will be favored in the SERPs and will get all the traffic. Google favors local landing pages Another thing to consider is that you can’t just depend on your main web content to rank for related searches. Your main web content is unlikely to be served to people in the SERPs for location-related searches. Google actually favors location landing pages in local searches. Here’s how local searches work. A user who is logged into their Google account searches for “night club.” Google serves results to that user based on the zip code set in the user’s account, including what you might have listed in your NAP (name, address, phone) in your Google Business Profile. Location landing pages belonging to night clubs in that user’s area are returned in the results. Google knows when a night club’s location landing page is relevant to the user because the page contains the night club’s address, zip code, and phone number (including area code). Google also uses latent semantic indexing (LSI) to determine whether a night club’s location landing page is relevant to the user. This is why you always want to talk about major attractions in the area, because Google’s LSI algorithm will use that information to determine relevance for the user. The more related content you write about, the more Google will know your content is relevant to a given search. When you create location landing pages, the content will be unique to each page. Each page will be served to local users based on their physical location and your LSI-optimized content. Location pages help you bypass high competition general search terms Location landing pages will help you capture traffic from users logged into Google looking for nearby businesses in your industry. The fact that a user is logged in will automatically narrow down the possible search results they’ll generate. This is how you can bypass high competition general search terms that you don’t stand a chance trying to rank for in the SERPs. For example, say you run a nail salon business with five locations in New York: Buffalo, Albany, Montgomery, New York City, and Brooklyn. If you try to rank your website for general nail salon keywords, you’re not going to rank high without a multi-million-dollar budget. On the other hand, when you create a location landing page for each nail salon location using the city as a keyword, you can target people in each city almost effortlessly. For example, when a user in Brooklyn searches for “nail salon” or “nail salon near me,” and your webpage includes information about Brooklyn, they’re more likely to see your Brooklyn landing page in the search engine results. Local landing pages without location-specific information are not prioritized for these types of searches. 11 tips for creating local landing pages Are you ready to start building out your location landing pages so you can generate more traffic, leads, and sales? Here are 11 tips to get started. 1. Plan out your localized content Make a list of the content you want to put on each location landing page. Start with the basics: Your company’s name Your locations’ name,

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Content Marketing for SaaS Companies: Creating a Competitive Advantage
Samuel Edwards

Content Marketing for SaaS Companies: Scale SaaS MRR with Content

You’re a SaaS company, and you’re interested in how content marketing can help you get more sales, earn a higher customer retention rate, and possible improve your overall brand reputation in the process. In this guide for SaaS marketers, we explain both the basic tenets and advanced strategies that you need to take your SaaS compay’s content marketing efforts to a dominant, competitive level. I’ll include examples, weigh the advantages and disadvantages of each tactic I introduce, and generally guide you to create a content strategy that your competitors simply can’t touch. I’ll do this in four main sections: An introduction, to follow, discussing the general advantages and goals of a SaaS-originated content strategy. A guide on SaaS content marketing for non-branded topics and an audience specific to your niche. A guide on help documents and troubleshooting for your current and prospective users. A section on growth and ongoing development to keep your strategy thriving for the long term. With that covered, let’s take a look at two major considerations for your content strategy. I’ll dig a little deeper into the benefits and specific tactics to use in each respective section to follow, but to start, it’s important to grasp these principles. The Competitive Advantage of Content Marketing for SaaS Businesses  First, there are tons of benefits to a quality content marketing cstrategy, but most important (arguably) and the focus of the article are on the competitive advantage. Your close competitors are all itching to poach your users, whether that’s converting new prospects before you do or stealing them away with special offers. If you don’t already have a straight competitor, you will soon. SaaS is a fast-paced, high growth industry, and it’s only getting faster with time: (Image Source: Tom Tunguz) Staying ahead of your competition means being more visible, being more trusted, being more valuable, and encouraging greater loyalty. If your SaaS content marketing strategy is, on the whole, better than your competitors’, you’ll have no trouble achieving all of these. Content Markting is a Long-Term Investment The second important consideration is that content marketing is a long-term strategy. As you’ll see when I describe the benefits of each pillar of SaaS content marketing, the benefits of valuable content marketing compound over time, growing exponentially especially during the early months of implementation. By comparison, a paid advertising or traditional SaaS marketing campaign will get you a positive, yet consistent return: (Image Source: Stevenson Financial Marketing) Accordingly, it takes time to develop, but once you’ve established some early momentum, you’ll see a rising rate return for as long as you continue managing your campaign. Two Main Pillars of SaaS Content Marketing  With those considerations out of the way, I’d like to present you with the two main pillars you’ll use to establish your SaaS content marketing strategy: Ongoing content, or SaaS content marketing, will refer to blog posts, articles, whitepapers, eBooks, infographics, and other forms of content that you’ll be publishing onsite and offsite for your users. This will be targeted to both unfamiliar prospective users and current subscribers, and its main purpose will be to provide practical information. FAQ and troubleshooting content marketing will focus on addressing the needs of your current user base in a number of different forms. Its main purpose will be to improve customer understanding of your app and increase customer retention and loyalty. Let’s explore each of these in turn. Ongoing Content (Content Marketing) There are many types of content you can use as part of an ongoing SaaS content marketing campaign, so I won’t go to the trouble of listing them. There also aren’t many rules for where you host this content; an onsite blog is a good spot, but don’t neglect offsite opportunities. Remember, your goal here is to outcompete your fellow service offerers, so it’s all about offering something your competitors can’t or won’t. In this section, I’ll go over the principal benefits of ongoing SaaS content marketing, keys to success, angles to direct your strategy, and how to get started. Benefits of Content Marketing for SaaS Companies These are just some of the benefits you’ll receive—many of which are amplified if you’re able to create content and syndicate content better than the competition. Visibility opportunities and brand awareness. Have you ever heard of Hubspot? Of course, you have. Do you know why? Because they have an awesome ongoing SaaS content marketing strategy. (Image Source: Hubspot) When you create and distribute great content that people want to read, they’ll naturally happen upon it (by browsing their favorite sites, searching with a relevant query, getting it from a friend, or finding it on social media). Soon, they’ll start noticing your name attached to the work, and your brand visibility will begin to grow. Inbound traffic. Ongoing content is a channel to increase inbound traffic, and from multiple directions. Writing good content targeted toward search user interests, consistently, helps you rise in search engine rankings, which increases your organic traffic. Syndicating on social media will increase your social traffic. Plus, posting on external sites will boost your referral traffic. Best of all, these effects tend to amplify over time. Track your traffic trends in Google Analytics. Brand reputation value. This is especially important in a competitive environment. When you write good content—better content than a user’s ever seen before—you’ll be perceived as the thought leader in the industry. Your reputation as an expert authority will increase, and you’ll earn better conversions and higher customer loyalty as a result. Competitive differentiation. It’s hard to stand out in the SaaS world, especially if your model is similar to another company’s. Content gives you the opportunity to differentiate yourself. Take a look at Kroll’s unique content marketing offerings, which include events and webinars to attend in addition to basic content marketing—you can even submit your own. (Image Source: Kroll) Conversions and new subscriptions. Content marketing also gives you a platform to pitch the value of your product (though your primary focus should be on

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