Most small businesses have a website, yet if you talk to most small business owners and marketers, they always talk about the woes of not ranking higher in the search results for relevant queries. Most marketers know how important it is to rank on the first page of search results. 91% of all search engine traffic goes to a website listed on page one of the results and then drops to 4.8% on the second page (source).
Traffic essentially falls off a cliff from page 1 to page 2 of the search results.
Our mission is to help these small businesses climb their way up the search results by first helping them find and target high-opportunity keywords: Those that have the lowest amount of competition online but were also searched for thousands of times a month. After uncovering these keywords, we help users add them to their relevant pages to optimize them for relevancy. These two items are crucial to any content marketing campaign, but there were two key fundamentals missing from the equation – content creation and inbound links.
Those two items working together is called building “authority” within the search results. The more relevant content and links you have, the higher authority level you’ll achieve. With Google’s Penguin and Hummingbird updates, it’s apparent that these two items are even more crucial, because the search engines are rewarding precise content that matches conversational queries even better, as well as counting the number of natural, inbound links from relevant sources and tallying them as votes of confidence. Links are nothing new to most SEO professionals and content marketers, but now these links need to have higher relevancy and come from higher quality sources if you expect to rank higher.
That’s why we built an awesome Authority Building tool in BoostSuite.
Here’s how it works.
You increase the popularity and ranking of your content in social media and the search engines by trading content for incoming links and social validation from other BoostSuite users in your industry or local community. BoostSuite delivers your content to marketers who are already writing about similar topics and who already need your content for their content marketing strategy. You can even include your Google+ profile URL to increase your Google Author Rank too.
Remember I told you about how BoostSuite identifies your best keywords? Now you have suggestions in your account under the “Increase Traffic” tab on the Suggestions Stream notifying you that BoostSuite has found you need to increase your website’s authority by publishing new articles about said keywords.
After you click “Do This Task Now”, you’ll see you have everything you need to add an article to the marketplace; article title, article summary, main body content, author name, Google+, and author bio. The last three of those are saved into your account after the first time you add an article so you don’t have to add them next time.
At the bottom of these authority suggestions, you’ll actually see how many BoostSuite users will see this article when you save and verify the suggestion. These users have the highest potential of selecting and adding your article to their website because they’re not random people, they’re targeted by relevant keywords you have in common. That’s powerful stuff. There’s no tool out there today where you get this level of relevancy for content exchanging.
You may see that there aren’t any other users who have a need for your content on specific high-opportunity keywords in your account. That’s ok. You can still add the article to the marketplace so if someone comes in later down the road who need the content, they can get it. Or if you already have a page on your website about this topic, click the checkbox and assign the keyword to the existing page. You’ll then receive optimization suggestions to boost the authority of that page for that keyword.
Once you put your author hat on, go ahead and write a 300 – 500 word article including a title and a short summary/description. Feel free to be very creative with your article titles. If your keywords are pretty general you can make them more specific as long as the title and article body still contain the targeted keyword, i.e.: “presentation” becomes “Five Effective Tradeshow Presentation Strategies”.
I suggest writing the article in a Google doc, Word, or in a text file, giving it a good proofread for quality/typos/value, and then copying and pasting it over to BoostSuite. Try to provide some valuable information in the article. Make it contain some useful information that people can’t get anywhere else.
Be sure to be as professional as possible with your article writing. Your name and reputation will be associated with your articles, so put some thought behind them. Don’t just stuff keywords in there. People won’t pick up articles that don’t provide value or are spammy.
Save and verify the suggestion once you’ve added your article to the marketplace. BoostSuite will then notify every user who needs website content on that topic via email, letting them know who you are and what you wrote about. Then it’s first come first serve. Your content can only be used once so the first person to claim it and publish it, gets it.
To capture any article in the marketplace for your own website you must log in to your BoostSuite account then click “Plan Improvements” then “Increase Traffic” and then click the “Do this task now” button beside the suggestion that says “You need to increase your authority for the keyword x.”
Select the option to “Use an existing article about keyword x that was written by another BoostSuite user” then select the article from the list. Then click the “Save and Verify” button. The article will then be added to a task within the Implement Improvements section in your BoostSuite account. Add the article as a new page on your website then complete the implementation task in BoostSuite by providing the URL of the new page and clicking the Verify checkbox for the task.
This Authority Builder makes it easier for small businesses to rank higher in the search engines, faster than ever before.
Content creation and link building efforts are two of the most time consuming processes that you can do as a marketer, so why wouldn’t you want to be able to immediately find the right content partners to exchange with and then automate the correspondence? Contribute to the BoostSuite content marketplace today. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t. You’re either publishing quality content on your site, or your letting relevant websites publish your articles, generating natural inbound links.
That’s something that both marketers and the search engines can be happy about!
