MGWM

Our Proven Content Strategies to Increase Traffic and Conversions 

Table of Contents

It takes time, energy, and patience to build a successful SEO content program. Over time, we’ve learned through trial and error what works for our clients and what doesn’t. Out of that experience, we’ve established an effective set of strategies and methodologies for a range of different clients.

This article provides ideas to ideate, scale, and improve your content. Whether you’re just starting out or already have a mature content program, you can deploy these strategies effectively and reliably to reach your goals.

These methods aren’t original to us and not all of them will be appropriate for every site. That said, we hope you’ll find some value in our list and in seeing how they can be applied in a real-world setting.

Read on and we’ll walk you through each strategy, how it works, and why it’s effective. Let’s get started.

Prerequisite: Adopting an Owner’s Mindset

Adopting an owner’s mindset means going beyond the usual surface-level onboarding. It entails having empathy with the people leading the company you’re marketing and seeing things from their point of view. What are their pain points? What are they ultimately trying to accomplish?

If you work at an agency, learn everything you can about your client: 

  • Their story
  • How their business works 
  • Who their customers are 
  • What makes them better than competitors, and 
  • How SEO can ultimately serve their business goals. 

If you work in-house, it means knowing your company top to bottom and having precise knowledge of the leadership team’s highest priorities.

For us, adopting an owner’s mindset has become a prerequisite for creating effective content strategies. One reason for this is that SEO content can only be successful if it’s aimed at achieving a particular goal or set of goals, and we need to be clear on those goals heading into an engagement. And we need to be intimately familiar with the company’s products or services - how they help customers, how they compare to competitors, what problems they solve, etc. 

How We Approach Developing an Owner’s Mindset

First, we have a fairly in-depth introductory meeting during which we learn everything we can about the company and the people who work there. We need to know their goals, their timeline, their expectations, what it would look like to be successful, who their competitors are, and more.

Next, we lay the groundwork for the engagement by conducting a thorough yet focused audit of their website and using the insights gleaned to create an SEO strategy for the coming year. 

Typically, as we’re preparing to begin publishing content, we’ll have one more conversation with the client to surface any new information we might’ve missed in the first conversation and ensure we’re aligned on near-term content priorities.

With that out of the way, let’s move on to the specific content strategies we’ve used to get wins for our clients.

Strategy: Gap Coverage 

“Gap coverage” is what we call the strategy of finding information gaps within a client’s vertical and creating content to fill those voids. This content can be in the form of templated landing pages or blog posts, depending on the situation. It goes without saying that these topics need to be relevant to the business; we don’t want to be creating content for content’s sake.

This strategy is particularly effective for industries that aren’t yet saturated with content. For highly competitive industries, this method may be harder to pull off, since there likely won’t be many lucrative gaps left. 

To better illustrate how gap coverage works, let’s look at a real example in the wild.

Case Study: Raw Bistro

One of our clients, Raw Bistro, is in the raw dog food industry. Dog food is a relatively competitive vertical, but raw dog food is still an emerging trend. Because of that, there are plenty of opportunities to fill content gaps.

Raw Bistro started out with almost no organic traffic and had a goal of pulling customers away from larger, more established dog food brands. Our SEO strategy focused on educating customers at key decision-making points that Raw Bistro’s competitors were overlooking.

The Approach

We discovered competitive gaps in “raw” and general canine health topics. Competing content was low-quality and some topics simply weren’t targeted.

Within these gaps, we targeted high-volume topic clusters – such as which vegetables dogs can eat – to target users who may eventually be interested in raw dog food.

We then created high-quality, research-driven content incorporating our target keywords to drive traffic from search.

For each blog post, we went through an extensive review process with our client – an authority on the topic – to assure the quality and accuracy of the content.

The Results

We helped Raw Bistro double revenue with +1,238% organic traffic growth.

Since 2019, organic search has seen “hockey stick” growth from 1,200 visitors/month to 70,000+. In 2020, our SEO strategy contributed to:

  • 1,238% YOY increase in organic users
  • 165% YOY increase in revenue
  • 850+ newsletter sign-ups

 

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See the full case study

Case Study: Cohley

Another one of our clients, Cohley, helps content creators (many of whom are influencers) test their content so they know which content resonates most with their audience. Not having previously invested in SEO, Cohley wanted to build out its brand presence through strategic content. Our SEO strategy focused on educating clients – from executives in board rooms to the tacticians on the keyboards in marketing departments – how content engineering and testing can benefit their business.

The Approach

We discovered competitive gaps in “content engineering” and UGC (user-generated content) content. Competitors’ content was low-quality and less focused.

We targeted topic clusters like “how to work with influencers” to build a foundation of organic traffic.

Once we had a strong base of traffic generating content to get top-of-funnel users in the sales pipeline, we worked together to define what a good customer for Cohley looked like.

With that knowledge, we rebuilt our content strategy using keyword research into topics that would drive more bottom-of-funnel growth.

The Results

Traffic increased by 76% in 6 months with +267% organic search opportunities.

In just one year, organic search saw significant growth from 8 opportunities/quarter to 22 opportunities/quarter. Since August 2020, our SEO strategy has contributed to:

  • 76% POP increase in organic users (Aug 2020 – Mar 2020)
  • 152% POP increase in organic blog pageviews (Aug 2020 – Mar 2020)

 

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See the full case study

Strategy: FAQ SEO

Often times we overcomplicate SEO. Of course, there are plenty of complex situations you’ll come across in SEO that require specific knowledge, experience, and wits to solve. But much of the time, it’s the simple solutions that really impact performance. FAQ SEO is a great example of that principle in action. 

FAQ SEO simply involves answering questions that users have about a company’s products or services. The key with FAQ SEO is to answer questions that are being asked by people who have started their buyer’s journey and are looking for more information before buying/signing up/sending a contact form. By answering these questions, a business can quickly establish itself as a trusted resource that can solve the user’s problem.

Let’s take a look at a couple of examples in action.

Vistabule

One of our clients, Vistabule, makes beautiful teardrop trailers with iconic style. They have a loyal and engaged customer base but when they first approached us they had very limited organic traffic. 

The Approach

We searched high and low for any and all questions related to teardrop trailers. As it turns out, there are quite a few of them. As a fairly expensive and complex product, there are a lot of things people want to know before they commit to buying one or even contacting a manufacturer. 

We also sought information from Vistabule’s leadership team, who provided common customer questions and insight into what matters most to people in the teardrop trailer sales cycle. 

By combining these two information sources, we compiled a list of questions about topics like pricing, climate control, parts, water systems, and other FAQs. 

The Results

Since we started working with Vistabule, they’ve seen an increase of over 200% in monthly organic traffic. 

More importantly, they’ve massively increased the number of monthly organic conversions as a direct result of being the first ones to show up when potential customers have questions.

Strategy: User-Generated Content

Sticking with the simplicity theme for a moment, the next strategy in our lineup is user-generated content, aka UGC. User-generated content can mean different things in different contexts but in the context of SEO, we mean leveraging your audience to create and optimize authoritative content that your competitors cannot replicate

UGC gets to the heart of what your audience really wants to know. This is important for a few reasons. One is that it surfaces keyword opportunities that you might not find in SEO tools or competitive research. While everyone else is creating copycat content around the same set of topics and keywords, you’re using real human insights and experiences to publish content that gets right to your audience’s pain points. This is a big advantage.

Another reason why UGC works so well is the importance of social proof. When people see the comments/reviews/insights of others included in a piece of content, it helps to instill trust in that content and, by extension, your brand.

Let’s walk through how we implemented UGC to grow traffic for one of our clients.

Case Study: CaringBridge

CaringBridge is a well-known nonprofit that helps people share updates about their health with friends and family. Our goal with CaringBridge was to build authority around the emotional, spiritual, and familial topics that arise during a medical event. In order to do this, we developed a content strategy to guide people with advice and inspiration through what CaringBridge refers to as the “health journey.”

The Approach

First, we researched the topics their audience was interested in across a health journey. We then facilitated brainstorming with CaringBridge’s internal team to understand their audience’s questions and concerns around these health journeys.

Next, we sent out prompts to CaringBridge's 300,000+ Facebook followers to gather ideas for each article. We created questions around each topic and posted the question on Facebook to engage CaringBridge’s audience and gather ideas for each article.

After sourcing content ideas from CardingBridge’s audience, we created high-quality content that included real comments from users.

To make our content unique, we incorporated actual quotes from the comments into the content itself, further establishing CaringBridge’s brand as people-focused.

The Results

12,000 new keyword rankings and +356% organic traffic growth. Organic search grew from 5,000 visitors/month at the start of 2019 to 80,000 visitors/month.

Since January 2020, our SEO strategy has contributed to:

  • Search impressions growing from 1.2 million to 2.8 million
  • +356% YoY increase in organic users
  • Keyword rankings growing from 9,900 to 22,000+
  • The 2020 Search Engine Land Award for Best Overall SEO Initiative for Small Business

 

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Strategy: Feedback Optimization

With how much time and effort we collectively invest in creating and publishing exceptional content, it’s unfortunate we spend so little time updating and improving that content after it’s published.

One thing we’ve learned over the years is that the work isn’t done when you hit “publish.” Once a piece of content is live, it’s important to measure its performance over time. In many situations, the content doesn’t perform as well as we’d like or traffic deteriorates as the months go by. 

Instead of accepting this outcome and moving on, we try to look closer in order to see how we may be able to improve this content and thereby improve rankings and traffic. One of the most effective ways to do this is through what we call feedback optimization

Feedback optimization refers to the practice of sourcing direct feedback from your audience in order to improve the quality of your existing content. Like UGC, it’s a user-first approach that not only helps you serve your audience better but also helps your content score more keyword rankings and more traffic. 

This method isn’t ideal for every website. If a brand doesn’t have an engaged audience, it’ll make gathering feedback significantly more challenging. But if you are able to interact directly with your audience and they’re willing to offer their honest thoughts, we recommend giving it a try. When combined with competitive research, it’s a powerful tool. 

Strategy: Pseudo Category Pages

One of the challenges e-commerce websites commonly face is trying to rank for non-brand product keywords. Oftentimes, product category pages alone aren’t enough to rank for these types of keywords, especially in more competitive verticals. If it’s your category page vs. Amazon’s, you’re going to lose. Here’s where what we call “pseudo category pages” come in handy. 

The term “pseudo category pages” simply means product-led blog posts that target middle and bottom-of-funnel keywords. These blog posts usually come in the form of product roundups, since most users want to be presented with a set of options. Because of this, they’ll often target keywords that present the “best” of a certain type of product or brand. 

Pseudo-category pages are a useful strategy because changing your category pages can be resource-intensive and because, in reality, there’s really only so much you can tweak about the pages themselves to squeeze more performance out of them. 

Blog posts, on the other hand, are more scalable and easier to update. With pseud-category pages, we can create blog content to target a much wider array of keywords, thereby increasing organic market share rather than solely trying to protect and improve the rankings we already have. 

It’s worth noting that this is by no means a new or original tactic but it’s one we see being underutilized on many small to mid-sized e-commerce sites.

Strategy: Wildcard Content (aka Scalable SEO)

Anyone with experience doing SEO content marketing will tell you that one of the most time-intensive parts of the job is doing keyword research and creating a content calendar. While it’s an essential part of the process, finding and planning topics to write about can be a major time suck. Worse yet, it takes away from time better spent actually creating content. To solve for this, we present wildcard content.

Wildcard content allows us to create a large volume of content stemming from a single idea. You start with a seed question or topic and change a single variable or modifier at a time, creating a natural topic cluster. To help illustrate the concept, we’ll look at a simple example from our client, Raw Bistro. 

While doing keyword research for Raw Bistro, we surfaced content ideas around what dogs can eat. A quick look at Google’s autosuggest tool showed that people were asking this question about a wide range of different foods. This presented us with an obvious opportunity to scale content planning with minimal effort by using the keyword template “can dogs eat {food}” and simply swapping out one food for another. 

This strategy pairs extremely well with FAQ SEO and pseudo category pages. “Best of” and “vs.” keywords, in particular, can be combined effortlessly at scale and you can use the same templated blog post outline for most of the content, simply making tweaks where necessary.

Strategy: The Hub and Spoke Framework

By now, most people in the SEO and content space will be familiar with the idea of a hub and spoke framework, also referred to as “topic clusters.” At its simplest, a hub and spoke framework is a means of organizing and interlinking blog content. Rather than publishing one-off blog posts about a specific topic and simply moving on to the next one, a hub and spoke framework encourages covering a topic and its relevant subtopics in separate blog posts that link to one another.

 

A hub and spoke framework helps build topical authority and distribute link equity from high-performing pages to weaker ones. It provides what Jimmy Daly of Animalz refers to as “vertical integration.” With a hub and spoke framework, you’re able to publish content addressing users at the top, middle, and bottom of the marketing funnel within a given topic. 

Perhaps most importantly, using a hub and spoke framework forces you to focus your content strategy around a core group of topics rather than having a scattershot approach. 

Here’s an example of a vertically integrated topic hub we created for one of our clients, ThreadLogic

Conclusion

Over the years, the methods we included in this article have proven to be effective for our clients. They’ve provided creative constraints and helped us separate the wheat from the chaff. But don’t take our word for it - try them out for yourself. Every business is unique and a key part of any content strategy is measuring performance and reallocating efforts as needed. 

What are your favorite content strategies or methods? If there’s one we didn’t cover, hit us up. We’re always learning and evolving and would love to hear from you.

Dave Sewich

Dave Sewich

Dave’s a Minnesota-based SEO who's worked in digital marketing since 2013. In his time at Uproer, he's had the opportunity to lead client engagements with a wide range of ecommerce and software companies. The experience he’s gained along the way has made him a trusted advisor to both clients and colleagues. In addition to SEO work, Dave’s actively involved in company operations.

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MGWM

Sr. Manager, SEO & Operations

Dave Sewich

Dave made an accidental foray into digital marketing after graduating from the University of Minnesota Duluth and hasn’t looked back. Having spent the first part of his marketing journey brand-side, he now works with the Uproer team to help clients realize their goals through the lens of search.

When not at work, you’ll find Dave staying active and living a healthy lifestyle, listening to podcasts, and enjoying live music. A Minnesotan born and raised, his favorite sport is hockey and he still finds time to skate once in a while.

Dave’s DiSC style is C. He enjoys getting things done deliberately and systematically without sacrificing speed and efficiency. When it comes to evaluating new ideas and plans, he prefers to take a logical approach, always sprinkling on a bit of healthy skepticism for good measure. At work, Dave’s happiest when he has a chance to dive deep into a single project for hours at a time. He loves contributing to Uproer and being a part of a supportive team but is most productive when working solo.

Founder & CEO

Griffin Roer

Griffin discovered SEO in 2012 during a self-taught web development course and hasn’t looked back. After years of working as an SEO consultant to some of the country’s largest retail and tech brands, Griffin pursued his entrepreneurial calling of starting an agency in May of 2017.

Outside of work, Griffin enjoys going to concerts and spending time with his wife, two kids, and four pets.

Griffin’s DiSC style is D. He’s driven to set and achieve goals quickly, which helps explain why he’s built his career in the fast-paced agency business. Griffin’s most valuable contributions to the workplace include his motivation to make progress, his tendency towards bold action, and his willingness to challenge assumptions.