We’re living in the AI era. From software and healthcare to data and other industries, AI is fueling technological disruption on a level unseen since the arrival of the personal computer. But beyond the business applications of AI, another revolution is unfolding in the realm of consumer behavior—specifically, search behavior. 

In late 2024, Google’s share of the search industry market fell below 90% for the first time in nearly a decade. AI is the culprit. Now, for the first time, users have free access to AI answer engines that not only crawl the open web, but provide custom responses to their queries in real time. Suddenly, the company that invented the modern search engine is now locked in a battle to win eyeballs from LLM tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, X’s Grok, and many others. 

SEO isn’t dead. But search itself — the way we find, vet, and interact with digital information — is being turned on its head. And in the middle of it all? Your brand, which still needs to reach, educate, and persuade potential customers and users in organic-ish ways.

That’s where Generative Engine Optimization comes in — a discipline both similar and unlike SEO in fundamental ways. In this guide, we’ll unpack GEO, explain how it differs from Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and traditional SEO, and share what smart brands are doing to future-proof their visibility in a post-keyword world.

What is GEO?

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of improving your brand’s visibility in AI engines. 

Unlike traditional SEO, where the goal is to rank a website highly on search engine results pages, GEO is about ensuring your brand and its content is referenced in the responses generated by tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Bing Copilot, Google’s AI Overviews, and others.

These tools don’t just fetch and display a link to your website. They synthesize and construct responses in real time based on a blend of training data, live web content, and contextual interpretation of your query.

For brand leaders and marketing teams responsible for converting unaware audiences into qualified prospects, the question is no longer just, “Are we ranking?” It’s “Are we a part of the answer?”

An example of GEO (missing) in action

Now, I personally think it’s defensible — albeit misguided — to read all of the above and think, “so what?” After all, marketing is a field dominated by cycles of hype and decompression. We’re obsessive about the latest thing. And Google’s been around for 20+ years, so maybe all that staying power means users will just stick with it.

So to illustrate the point, let’s define GEO by its opposite and share what a lack of LLM visibility actually means for your brand: 

• A user asks ChatGPT, “What’s the best B2B CRM for startups?” The answer includes two competitors and a product roundup, but your brand isn’t mentioned.
• A prospective customer types a question into Perplexity instead of Google. The AI cites three articles — none of which are yours — as the foundation of its recommendation.
• A decision-maker using Google SGE gets an AI-generated answer at the top of the page summarizing key takeaways from five sites. Yours isn’t one of them.
  

In each case the user gets what they need, but your brand is nowhere in sight.

That’s the challenge GEO is designed to solve. It’s not about optimizing for search results but about optimizing for inclusion in AI-generated narratives.

GEO vs. AEO vs. SEO — What’s the Difference?

To understand where GEO fits into the broader picture, it helps to zoom out.

Over the past two decades, SEO has evolved from keyword-stuffing and backlink chases to a more nuanced, intent-driven discipline. But now, AI is accelerating that evolution, splintering search into multiple surfaces: Ranked results, featured answers, and full-blown generated responses.

Let’s break down the distinctions:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Traditional SEO is about ranking web pages in search engine results to drive organic traffic.

• Goal: Earn clicks from high-ranking links on Google or Bing
• Tactics: Keyword targeting, backlinks, technical site health, content quality
• Success Metric: Organic traffic and page rankings
  

Many brands should still do SEO — but SERPs are increasingly crowded and click-starved as search engines add AIOs, paid results, and more dynamic content. 

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)

AEO is about structuring your content to be surfaced as the direct answer to a query — whether in a featured snippet, knowledge panel, or voice assistant response.

• Goal: Be the answer, not just a result
• Tactics: Clear formatting (Q&A, bullets, tables), schema markup, concise definitions
• Success Metric: Featured snippet placement, voice response inclusion, zero-click visibility
  

AEO emerged alongside voice search and smart assistants. It’s about incorporating tiny bits of information that engines can extract instantly.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

GEO focuses on getting your brand included in AI-generated answers; i.e., the synthesized, conversational outputs produced by tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google SGE.

• Goal: Be referenced, cited, or paraphrased in AI-generated responses
• Tactics: Authoritative content, semantic depth, entity, schema markup, presence in trustworthy sources, systematic content freshness
• Success Metric: LLM visibility, brand citations in AI tools, brand sentiment in AI tools
  

Similar to AEO, GEO is about formatting for extraction. But it’s also about building enough context and credibility that AI tools pull you into the conversation even if the user never visits your site.

We should note that some brands and search thought leaders still use different terminology for the practice of optimizing content for AI visibility; e.g., it’s not unheard of to read “LLM SEO” out in the wild. At Tuff, we prefer GEO. 

Rethinking SEO Strategy in the Age of LLMs

Until recently, SEOs have followed a tried-and-true formula: Publish high-quality content, earn links, rank well, and capture clicks. The idea that every business is a publisher was huge for its time.

But in 2025, that playbook is fraying.

According to SparkToro’s 2024 zero-click search study, nearly 60% of all Google searches now end without a single click — a number that’s been steadily rising year over year. 

Why? Because Google has long invested in keeping searchers on its platform rather than referring them to sites directly. Before the AI boom, they did this by answering more queries directly — through featured snippets, maps, and carousels — often satisfying the user’s intent without requiring them to visit a site. 

Now, that dynamic is expanding both in Google Search and beyond. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Bing Copilot are starting to function as end destinations themselves by delivering synthesized, citation-lite answers to complex questions. Users don’t need to click through to get the gist. And thanks to LLMs’ ability to summarize, contextualize, and personalize, the barrier to finding information is trending toward zero — and so is the barrier to creating content.

Generative content tools are flooding the internet with basic, surface-level explainers. As a result, top-of-funnel, Wikipedia-style content is rapidly becoming commoditized, and brands that keep churning it out are seeing diminishing returns. 

So, where does that leave marketers?

It doesn’t mean you should stop publishing content. But it does mean your content strategy needs to shift from “publish more” to “publish smarter.”

What brands should do instead:

• Double down on differentiation. Move away from generic explainers and lean into content only you can produce: Product deep-dives, original data, founder insights, customer stories, and technical how-tos.
• Refresh content consistently. According to data from AirOps, 95% of all pages cited by ChatGPT were either published or refreshed in the past 10 months.
• Shift down the funnel. Instead of chasing top-of-funnel traffic, use content to nurture evaluation-stage prospects, educate on key pain points, and reinforce product value. SEO is no longer just an awareness channel. It’s a trust-building tool.
• Structure content for AI surfaces. Write content in a way that’s easily extractable and reference-worthy for GEO. That means structuring answers clearly, using schema, and building semantic authority around your niche.

The bottom line? Brands still need to publish. But they need to be strategic about what, where, and why. In an environment where AI answers dominate and clicks are harder to earn, content must do more than fill space. It must anchor your presence across a fragmented, answer-first internet.

Your Next Move: How to Future-Proof Your SEO Strategy

The rules of search are changing, but the goal remains the same — show up where your audience is looking for answers.

In the era of LLMs, that means expanding your SEO strategy beyond ranking pages to earning presence across traditional search, answer engines, and AI-driven interfaces. Here’s how to get started:

1. Conduct a GEO audit and test your visibility  

You can’t be the answer if you’re not formatting for answers.

• Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Bing Copilot industry-specific questions. Is your brand, product, or POV mentioned?
• Check which sources are being cited, and reverse-engineer what they’re doing right.
• Use platforms like Profound to monitor and benchmark your presence across generative engines — even when you’re not getting the click.
• Add schema markup, internal linking, and modular Q&A formatting to make your content snippet- and voice-ready.

2. Build an Answer-First Content Library

Think beyond blog posts. Create layered content assets built for human and machine consumption.

• Modular formats (e.g. quick definitions, comparisons, data tables) make it easier for AI crawlers to pull and summarize information.
• Product marketing content — e.g., feature breakdowns, use case pages, competitor comparisons — is more defensible and harder to replicate.
• Integrate content with your brand voice, narrative, and hard-to-replicate trust signals. 

3. Redefine Your KPIs

Rankings and organic traffic still matter. But they’re no longer the whole story.

• Track AI citation mentions and content visibility across AI platforms.
• Monitor your “answer share” across key question categories in your space.
• Consider SEO performance alongside downstream metrics like demo requests, sales velocity, and pipeline quality.
• Think about visibility as the new ranking. 

Build a GEO Strategy in 2025

Search is changing. We’re here to help. Whether you’re looking to expand your content efforts this year, future-proof your existing content library, or figure out a strategy that does a little bit of both, we can help. 

Reach out today to kickoff your free GEO strategy call with one of our content strategy experts.

The post GEO, AEO, and LLM SEO: How AI Is Reshaping Search (And What Brands Should Do About It) appeared first on Tuff.

Have you seen how folks are skimming past those long ebooks and hefty guides lately? You pour your heart and soul into crafting these valuable resources, but still, it’s tough to generate leads and MQLs on the platforms you’re promoting them on.

We’re starting to notice this because search engines are dishing out answers directly on the search results page (SERP), resulting in fewer visits to your website from Google. Plus, more people are tuning in to short video clips, newsletters, and LinkedIn posts instead. In 2022, video accounted for 82% of all internet traffic, up over 10% compared to the time period before the pandemic – likely due to how our consumption behaviors have changed since then.

At Tuff, we’ve found that engaging and authentic videos, not just slickly produced ones, are your golden ticket to standing out and building stronger connections with your audience, especially in the B2B realm. It’s not just about being visible; it’s about forging genuine bonds. Nowadays, people are turning to video content for more of their information, evident in YouTube’s longstanding position as the second most popular search engine globally and the rising use of TikTok for searches. Your audience is already consuming plenty of videos in their personal time—why wouldn’t they want to watch them when it comes to business decisions?

In this post, I’ll break down why short form video should take the spotlight in your B2B content and creative strategy. Plus, I’ll dish out some examples of the video marketing that have been hitting it out of the park with our clients. Ready to dive in?

The Case for Short Form Video in B2B Content 

When it comes to grabbing attention, videos take the cake over static images. They’re dynamic and include movement and sound, making them harder to scroll past. Plus, viewers tend to stick around longer, getting more engaged as they watch. Starting with a hook ensures viewers are drawn in from the get-go.

Also, in one video, you can convey multiple messages or clips, saving you from creating separate ads for each. With video, creative testing becomes a breeze—it’s way more efficient and scalable compared to static assets. This versatility is especially handy for products or services that need a bit of explaining to pique interest. And with a whopping 88% of people persuaded to buy after watching a brand’s video, it’s clear videos are more than just informative—they drive conversions.

Insights into High-Performing Videos and Categories: Current Success Factors

In our client portfolio, we’ve got a diverse mix of B2B brands, and nearly all of them have jumped on the video marketing for bandwagon for both their paid and organic inbound efforts campaigns.

Now, a common question we get is: what types of videos should you be creating? Well, based on recent successes, here are some categories we suggest diving into or at least considering, along with examples of each:

Explainer Videos: 

One awesome aspect of explainer videos, especially for intricate products or services, is that they’re easily crafted using stock images or videos. This makes them super useful for brands that don’t have a load of their own footage lying around.

Check out these two recent explainer videos we whipped up for clients. They’ve been successful in various paid campaigns, boosting both awareness and conversions:

Testimonial or Case Study Videos: 

Social proof is absolutely crucial for B2B. With decisions often hinging on referrals or thorough research, it’s key to have that backing. When we’re targeting specific audiences further down the funnel in our campaigns, we lean heavily on social proof and case study videos to encourage action. Our goal is usually to get them primed for engagement with the sales team. 

Check out this recent example of a short-form social proof video we used in B2B campaigns on LinkedIn:

We’re big believers in short-form video testimonials, so much so that we use this strategy for our own growth efforts too! Take a peek at this collection of testimonials from our clients sharing their experiences working with our team.

Animated Videos:  

When it comes to animated videos, nailing that attention-grabbing hook in the first few seconds is crucial. Plus, don’t forget to add some text overlay for an extra boost of engagement. These short-form videos, like explainers and testimonials, can really shine on your website and in LinkedIn and YouTube campaigns. Check out this recent animated video we did for a B2B brand—it nails all the key creative elements and has been a real winner for us in campaigns

User-Generated Videos: 

While you might think of UGC content as more fitting for DTC brands, it’s gaining traction and significance in B2B efforts too. One major perk? You can repurpose, tweak, and leverage UGC in various ways to maximize your budget. People connect with faces, so showcasing them in your content builds a deeper connection. That’s why UGC is such a hit—it works wonders in B2B, just like it does in D2C setups.

Check out one of our recent favorite examples that we crafted for a client to use in their paid campaigns:

Measuring Success with Short Form Video Campaigns

Wondering how to gauge the performance of your short form videos? Here are some key metrics to focus on when leveraging them in campaigns:

1. CTR (Click-Through Rate): This percentage shows how many people clicked on your ad out of those who saw it. It’s a good indicator of how engaging your ad is.
2. VTR (View-Through Rate): Similar to CTR, but calculated based on the number of people who viewed your ad. Depending on the platform, a view may be counted as 2 seconds to half of the video.
3. Ad Hook Rate: This measures how effective the beginning of your video was at capturing attention and keeping viewers engaged.
4. Completion Rate: This percentage tells you how many viewers watched your ad all the way through. It gives insight into overall engagement with your video content.

Ready to jump into video marketing? Now that you’ve seen what works and how to check if it works for you, it’s time to get going! You don’t need fancy gear or editing software to start—just dive in. But if you need a hand, reach out to our team! We’ve got a skilled bunch who can craft your performance creative strategy and handle everything from start to finish for your first video ad. 

The post Video Marketing for B2B: The Key to Elevating Your Content Strategy with Short Form Video appeared first on Tuff.

From ancient myths passed down through generations to the latest viral TikTok trend, quality storytelling is what captures the attention of…everyone. But beyond entertainment value, stories hold a special place in marketing–they’re catalysts for action. They are the key to building trust, achieving better ROI, and fostering unwavering brand loyalty. When working in tandem with great campaigns, storytelling is an important lever in driving substantial growth.

Importance of Storytelling in Marketing

Before getting into the impact of storytelling specifically, we have to acknowledge the significance of messaging in marketing. Messages are what brands use to communicate their value, products, and ethos to their audiences. The effectiveness of these messages often determines the success of a marketing campaign. You can have an optimized campaign with an unlimited budget, but if your messaging doesn’t stick with the audience, your efforts will be stifled. No trust built = no action taken.

The Psychology Behind Storytelling

Why do stories resonate so deeply with us? It all boils down to psychology. Our brains are wired to seek out and remember stories. We can more easily recall and relate to the beginning, middle, and end of a story. We easily understand that problems need solutions. From childhood bedtime tales to best-selling novels, stories activate areas of the brain responsible for processing emotions and creating connections. 

Marketers are missing out if they’re not making use of juicy storytelling. By weaving narratives into messaging, brands can tap into emotional triggers, fostering a deeper connection with their audience.

Influence of Storytelling on Trust, Loyalty, and ROI

The reason storytelling is powerful is because it’s based on trust. Brand trust is the foundation of customer loyalty and business growth. Storytelling goes beyond conventional marketing by humanizing brands, making them relatable, and establishing a personal connection with customers. When people interact with real stories, they tend to see the brand as truthful, dependable, and deserving of their loyalty.

Building Connections, Nurturing Loyalty, and Driving Growth

Through storytelling, brands can actually create narratives that mean something to their audience. And guess what? This emotional link doesn’t just stop there–it’s what keeps customers coming back and spreading the word, driving and multiplying growth. Here’s how:

1. Copywriting vs. Storytelling in Marketing

We start by understanding the distinction between “storytelling” and “copy”. Sales copy is an important type of messaging that uses persuasive tactics to drive action (namely, purchases). It’s concise and direct, highlights the benefits of a product or service, and asks the viewer to take the next step. While copy certainly has its place in marketing, it’s missing some key characteristics of effective storytelling.

A compelling story gives the audience something to care about from the start. Think of the last great movie you watched. Chances are, you were introduced to a likable character, you saw their problem, and you understood the implications if they failed to address it.

Marketing works in a similar way. If you aren’t able to establish a reason why customers should care about your product or service, why should they care about all the amazing features? 

Storytelling in Marketing Example

Think about promoting a project management software, almost like telling an interesting story. Imagine meeting a character in this “story”—a stressed-out project manager juggling dozens of tasks and struggling to keep everything on track. The obstacles they face, like missed deadlines and communication hiccups, might remind you of your own work experiences. You can clearly see what could go wrong if these issues aren’t resolved—projects slipping through the cracks, missed deadlines, and a burnt-out team.

Now, consider marketing the software. If you can make potential customers feel a connection with the real challenges of managing projects, they’ll be much more interested in the software’s impressive features. By sharing relatable stories that highlight the struggles of modern project management, you give them a reason to care. This emotional link not only grabs their attention, but it also creates a sense of understanding and appreciation. Suddenly, the software isn’t just a bunch of tools—it’s a solution to their problems and a key component to their success.

Through character development, relatability, and emotional connection, we earn the right to speak to our audience in a persuasive manner. While copy conveys information directly, authentic narratives resonate deeply with audiences, fostering a sense of shared values and experiences. This emotional connection transcends transactional relationships, nurturing lasting brand loyalty.

2. Fostering Brand Loyalty and Advocacy

Loyalty isn’t built overnight; it’s a result of consistent positive experiences and a genuine bond. Storytelling helps brands cultivate loyalty by weaving a narrative thread that customers can relate to and become emotionally invested in. They can see themselves using a product or service before they even hit “Add to Cart”.

Starbucks, for instance, doesn’t just sell coffee–it sells a consistent experience. Through their storytelling, they’ve created a global community of coffee enthusiasts who see Starbucks storefronts as more than just places to grab a drink; they’re spaces that provide comfort, community, and connection (even when they spell your name wrong). This brand loyalty leads to repeat business and enthusiastic brand advocacy as loyal customers willingly share their Starbucks experiences with others.

3. Improving ROI through Storytelling

Let’s address the elephant in the room: “How does storytelling affect my bottom line?” The beauty of storytelling lies in its ability to convert engagement into tangible results. When customers feel emotionally connected to a brand, they’re more likely to become repeat buyers and brand advocates. All because their connection goes beyond the product itself.

Consider the case of Apple. They’ve mastered the art of storytelling to create a brand that elicits a sense of wonder, innovation, and elegance. Their product launches aren’t just presentations, they’re stories that captivate the world’s attention. This storytelling prowess has directly translated into impressive ROI figures, with Apple consistently breaking sales records and commanding a premium price for their products, regardless of how their technology stacks up to worthy competitors.

The influence of storytelling on ROI is undeniable. By eliciting emotional connections, brands can create loyalty, advocacy, and ultimately, increased business success. Now let’s explore how to craft your own narrative and use strategic storytelling to your advantage.

Crafting Your Authentic Narrative

So, how can brands effectively harness the power of storytelling to build trust, achieve better ROI, and foster loyalty? Here are some steps to get you started:

1. Know Your Audience: Understanding your audience’s needs, aspirations, and pain points is necessary. Your story should resonate with them on a personal level.
2. Embrace Authenticity: Be genuine in your storytelling. Highlight your brand’s values, mission, and the people behind it. Authenticity is magnetic.
3. Evoke Emotion: Create narratives that trigger emotions. Whether it’s joy, pain, or inspiration, emotions create connections that lead to action.
4. Consistency is Key: Your story should be consistent across all touchpoints. From your website to your social media, the narrative should remain cohesive.
5. Test and Analyze: By constantly testing and analyzing how messages are received and how your audience engages, new insights can help shape and reshape your narrative.
6. Evolve and Adapt: Your story can evolve as your brand grows. Embrace changes and let your audience be a part of the journey.

Storytelling at the Center of Marketing

As we’re inundated with new information every day, storytelling has become a useful tool to help people organize complex thoughts and connect with brands in meaningful ways. By seamlessly blending narrative with design and consistently delivering authentic messages, brands can actually create deep connections that withstand the test of time.

As marketing continues to change and evolve, one thing remains clear: the power of storytelling is here to stay. It’s not just about selling products; it’s about building relationships, shaping perceptions, and driving growth. So, if you’re looking to elevate your marketing strategy, remember that behind every successful brand, there’s a captivating story waiting to be told.

Need help crafting your narrative? Talk to our growth experts today.

The post The Role of Storytelling in Marketing: Connecting with Your Target Audience appeared first on Tuff.

Long story short: Look at the numbers. A data-driven content marketing strategy has emerged as a necessity for businesses aiming to attract qualified leads from organic search. By dissecting customer data and conducting meticulous research, marketers have the capacity to curate compelling and valuable content that profoundly resonates with the target audience. 

This thoughtful approach not only encourages meaningful engagement but is also designed to convert leads into devoted customers. The process of turning data into dineros unfolds through four key steps: 

1. Research
2. Strategy
3. Activation
4. Optimization

With a glimpse of how content marketing fuels organic lead generation, let’s turn our attention to the specific insights that will form the foundation for engaging, data-driven content (and remarkable results).

1️⃣ Research

What’s the best (and only) way to get the data that will serve as the foundation for your content strategy? Research, research, and more research. Qualitative and quantitative, hard and soft–now’s the time to follow your curiosity and find out everything you can about your audience, what makes them tick, where to find them, and what they need. 

Audience Research: Identifying Your Target Audience

Before starting the content creation process, you must clearly define your ideal customer profile(s) (ICP). By developing a detailed understanding of your target audiences, you can tailor your content to their preferences, pain points, and aspirations.

Creating Customer Personas

Craft detailed profiles that include demographic information, interests, behaviors, and goals of your target audience segments. This will help you empathize with your audience and create content that answers their questions, addresses their needs, and starts to connect the dots between their pain points and your solutions. The more your audience feels you understand them, the easier it will be to build trust.

Conducting Customer Research

Utilize as much first-person and third-party data as you can to gather insights into your audience’s needs, challenges, and motivations. By delving deeper into their preferences, you can better understand what type of content will resonate with them. Try these tactics to jumpstart your research process:

1. Surveys: Utilize surveys to gather valuable first-hand anecdotes and preferences. 
2. Customer Interviews: If possible, meet with customers or prospects to get a better understanding of their goals, pain points, and what they want from a product or service like yours, so you can tailor your content accordingly. 
3. Collab with Customer Support and Sales Teams: Engage closely with your client-facing teams to gather valuable feedback from customer conversations, allowing you to identify opportunities for improvement, where customers need the most help, and what trending topics come up frequently.
4. Case Studies and Testimonials: Research is a great catalyst for collecting case studies and testimonials from satisfied customers. You’ll be able to build trust with potential customers by getting specific about their needs and how your company addresses them. ABTSA: Always be 2 steps ahead!
5. Competitor Intel: Conduct thorough competitor analyses to understand the competitive landscape, identify your unique selling points, and differentiate your offerings, enabling you to position your company strategically in the market and in front of your audience.

Conducting thoughtful customer research sets the foundation for a strong content strategy aimed at generating quality leads. By leveraging what you know about your audience, you have the fuel to make informed decisions when planning content that speaks directly to what they care about. An audience-centric approach is the KEY🔑 to a successful content strategy that brings in the right leads at the right time. But there are more ways to get to know your audience and the information they seek, which is why we turn to keyword research to learn more. 

GA4 and Keyword Research: Identifying Organic Search Opportunities

At Tuff, we know that creating content that truly captures the attention of your target audience requires a deep understanding of not only their preferences, but also their behavior. By leveraging search and keyword data, we can craft content that will live a long, happy life online. Meaning – search engines can find it, your audience can use it, and it remains relevant and useful for weeks, months, years (?!) after publish. By combining metrics from GA4 and keyword research, you can uncover what you need to build an SEO-friendly content strategy. Here’s a good place to start:

• GA4 Analysis
  • GA4, the latest version of Google Analytics, offers advanced features/measurement that provide a comprehensive view of your website and marketing performance.
  • Use GA4’s enhanced measurement to track user interactions and behaviors across multiple devices and platforms.  providing a holistic understanding of your audience’s journey. Through that holistic view, you can identify patterns and trends that can guide your content strategy.
  • Leverage audience insights from GA4 to understand user demographics, interests, and engagement patterns. Then, segment your audience and tailor your content to their specific needs and preferences.
  • Content Performance: Analyze the effectiveness of your keywords by tracking key metrics such as page views, bounce rates, and time on page to see how your audience (or audience segments) interact with your content. 
  • Conversion Tracking: Multi-touchpoint conversion tracking can help you better understand which keywords and content contribute to conversions at each point in your audience’s journey. 

• Keyword Research

1. • Conduct keyword research using tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to discover “hot” topics aligned with your audience’s search behavior. Check out search volume, keyword difficulty, and related terms and find the right balance of high demand and low competition to fill your keyword gaps.
   • Pay special attention to the intent behind popular search queries. Rather than focusing only on the words they search, try to understand their motivations, pain points, and desired outcomes when searching to get to the root of their needs.
   • Monitor your website’s SEO performance, tracking keyword rankings, organic traffic, and click-through rates. Use that data to refine your plan and continue to optimize for your audience, their needs, and the actions you want them to take. 

By integrating these data points, you can develop content ideas that both engage your audience and are also rooted in real behavior metrics. This data-driven approach will enable you to create highly engaging content that resonates with your target audience. This level of planning, when done right, will attract relevant traffic, increase visibility, and build long-term site authority. As we move onto the next section, we’ll discuss turning these data points and trends into a practical, usable, data-drenched content strategy. Let’s do this.

2️⃣ Building a Content Strategy

Building Content Pillars

After conducting your initial research, you’ll have uncovered and collected relevant topics and themes that align with your audiences’ search behavior. You’ll have enough data to identify your top target keywords, which will form the basis for developing content pillars that address your audience’s interests and challenges. 

Content pillars are a fundamental aspect of any successful content strategy. They serve as the backbone of your plan, guiding your content production and ensuring consistency and relevance across everything you produce. By organizing your content around central pillars (think: themes), you establish your website as a reliable and authoritative source for specific information, boosting your credibility for search engines and in the eyes of your audience. 

Creating content pillars based on search and audience data lets you organize and optimize your content for search engines while providing valuable info to your audience. It’s a strategic approach that not only improves your SEO performance but also establishes your expertise and builds trust with your readers. 

Identifying the Right Promotion Channels 

Choosing the right distribution channels is a critical aspect of developing a successful content strategy. Here’s how you can determine which channels will drive quality leads: 

• Historical Performance: Revisit the performance of previous content you’ve published. Tap into key metrics such as engagement, conversion rates, and of course lead volume and quality. Identify the channels that are driving the highest quality leads and focus your efforts on developing content tailored to them.
• Audience Data: Use your audience research to select channels where they are most likely to be present and engaged. Assess the relevance of each distribution channel to your content and target audience. Are they Tiktok users vs. newsletter subscribers? Do they attend industry conferences or consume mostly digital content? Are they more likely to Google something or search Instagram for info?
• Industry Best Practices: Stay up-to-date on the latest industry trends and best practices for content distribution. Look for successful case studies and examples of companies that share a similar target audience and see what their publishing patterns look like. What do their ads look like? Which blogs do they continue to promote month after month? That may give you an idea of their top-performing content.
• Start with Key Channels: Begin by focusing on a few key channels that have proven to be effective for your industry and/or target audience. Allocate your resources and efforts accordingly to maximize your impact on those channels. As you gain more insights and resources, you can scale to more channels and begin testing. 

Scheduling and Logistics

This one’s for all the planners and organizers out there–logistics 🤓 A consistent content publishing schedule is key to maintaining audience engagement and building trust, two important factors in attracting and converting quality leads. Plan your content creation and publishing process in advance, allowing enough time for research, writing, editing, publishing, and optimization. To streamline the workflow, develop a comprehensive content calendar as your single source of truth. Include essential details like content pillars, topics, keywords, formats, distribution channels, and publication dates. This structured approach speeds up resource allocation, provides transparency, and sets the stage for a smooth and consistent development process.

When planning your timeline, make sure to incorporate repurposed content into your plan to extend its reach and lifespan. Transform existing content into various formats like videos, infographics, blogs, or social media posts. Reach new audiences and reinforce your message across channels without extra production time.

Here’s a snapshot example of a content calendar for a project management software company:

By implementing a comprehensive schedule, you can ensure that your content reaches the right audience at the right time through planned keywords, rich content, and optimized publishing channels. This naturally leads us to the next component of a strategic marketing plan: the funnel. Let’s talk about how we plan for content that guides prospects through each stage of the funnel, ultimately converting engagement into valuable leads. 

Full-Funnel Content Marketing

At a glance, the marketing funnel consists of three sections: 

• Top of the funnel (TOFU): Grab their attention
• Middle of the funnel (MOFU): Collect their contact info
• Bottom of the funnel (BOFU): Make the sale!

For your content to make sense to the audience, it must not only align with keywords and address pain points, but it must also match where your audience is in “user journey”. By mapping out the touchpoints your audience has with your brand (from TOFU to BOFU) you can tailor your content to address their needs along the way. It’s the data that tells us what they need when! 

We lean on UX (User Experience) to guide the audience naturally to the next step of their journey. By offering opportunities for capturing contact information from interested visitors, you can nurture and convert them into paying customers over time. Strong calls-to-action (CTAs) play a key role in driving conversions. Place persuasive CTAs throughout your content, encouraging readers to take action and provide their contact details in exchange for information or resources.

By strategically incorporating these lead gen tactics into your content, you can optimize your content strategy to convert engagement into valuable leads. 

Setting Goals

To prove the success of your content marketing efforts, establish benchmarks and goals from the start. All goals should be specific to your brand and ladder up to business objectives, whether they’re increasing brand awareness, driving website traffic, generating leads, or a combination of all three. Whatever you choose, it’s crucial to proactively define your objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) to track and evaluate your progress. Setting specific, attainable, and time-bound goals will help you stay focused and measure the success of your content efforts. Here are three examples of tangible goals, broken down into two phases (think: crawling and walking) to get you started: 

Example Goal 1: Increase monthly website traffic

Drive more potential leads to the website by increasing the number of unique visitors. Expanding brand visibility and attracting a larger audience to the website increases the potential for lead generation and future conversion opportunities.

• Phase 1: Increase unique visitors by 20% (compared to the previous month).
  • This will be our initial benchmark to gauge progress and assess the effectiveness of the content strategy in attracting a larger audience.
• Phase 2: Increase organic traffic by 30% (compared to the previous quarter). 
  • The emphasis shifts to increasing organic traffic to the website within a quarterly time frame. This will tell us about the content’s ability to rank higher in search engine results and attract more qualified leads.

Example Goal 2: Improve lead quality through content

Attract high-quality leads by creating content that addresses their pain points, offers valuable insights, and positions the company as an industry thought leader. 

• Phase 1: Increase average time spent on site by 15% (compared to the previous month).
  • The focus is on engaging visitors through better site UX and content. A longer time on the site signals a higher level of interest and better lead quality.
• Phase 2: Increase conversion rate by 10% (compared to the previous quarter).
  • A higher conversion rate signifies that the content effectively convinces and motivates visitors to take the desired actions, indicating better lead quality.

Example Goal 3: Expand email subscriber base

Grow the email subscriber list to nurture into a loyal audience. A larger subscriber base provides a direct communication channel for further qualifying leads and driving conversions.

• Phase 1: Increase email subscribers by 25% (compared to the previous month).
  • Attract more sign-ups through successful lead generation content and improved UX.
• Phase 2: Improve email open rate by 10% (compared to the previous quarter).
  • The objective is to optimize email content and subject lines to increase open rates. A higher open rate indicates greater engagement and interest among email subscribers, resulting in better lead quality and potential conversions.

By focusing on increasing website traffic, improving lead quality, and expanding the subscriber base, your content strategy can achieve clear, measurable, and attributable results that directly impact the bottom line. With that data, you’re able to provide a better roadmap for attracting more potential leads, nurturing them through engaging content, and ultimately converting them into customers. 

As we’ve discussed in this section, you have the opportunity to address your audience’s pain points throughout their journey. By utilizing keyword and audience data to create content pillars, you can spark your audience’s interests and acknowledge their challenges. Choosing the right promotion channels and establishing a consistent publishing schedule allow you to systematically fill in the content gaps on your website while giving your audience exactly the information you KNOW they need. Setting specific goals and KPIs sets you up to prove the impact your content has before you even hit the launch button. That’s up next ➡️

3️⃣ Activating Your Data-Driven Content Strategy

Writing Content for SEO

Simply put, the best content empathizes with the audience’s pain points and provides practical solutions that just so happen to be related to your product or service. Show up where they’re searching, educate and inform, offer solutions, and collect leads. It’s as easy as that 😉

To make sure your blogs and videos and infographics and whatnot reach the right audience, they all must be optimized for search engines. By employing basic SEO best practices, you can increase your content’s visibility and attract people (re: qualified leads) actively searching for solutions related to you.

SEO Writing 101

Start by including your target keyword in the post title, preferably at the beginning, and mention the target keyword early in the article (ideally in the first sentence). Reinforce it naturally throughout the content, aiming for at least five mentions while maintaining a healthy keyword density of 1-3% (so if your article is 1,000 words, 10-30 of those words should be keywords). Don’t forget to incorporate related keywords to expand the scope of your content and cover various aspects of the topic that users might be interested in.

To add links to your blog, prioritize a methodical internal and external linking strategy. Avoid too many consecutive paragraphs without links, as it can negatively impact user experience and SEO. Include at about five internal links in each piece of content with keyword-optimized anchor text. Be mindful not to link to another page with the primary keyword you want to rank for, even internally. Distribute the links naturally and ensure they are all working properly.

Don’t forget readability! Use subheadings to break up the text, keep paragraphs concise (3-5 lines), and optimize images with keyword-optimized alt tags. Maintain a natural flow without keyword stuffing, and remember that online readers prefer shorter sentences and dislike large blocks of text. Include an enticing call to action or clear next steps to inspire action.

When writing, focus on providing value, solving problems, and delivering a seamless user experience to attract the right leads and improve quality overall. 

Publishing 

A well-executed publishing process is absolutely crucial in activating and maintaining a strong content strategy. It ensures that your content gets to your audience consistently, maximizing its impact and driving the greatest possible engagement. With the content calendar as your guide, you have a clear plan of action already in place. There are quite a few considerations to make before launch:

Start by establishing clear workflows and responsibilities. By defining roles upfront, everyone knows their tasks and deadlines, preventing bottlenecks and reducing errors or delays. Streamlining the workflow promotes collaboration and accountability across content creation, editing, proofreading, and publishing. The less time you spend on logistics, the more you can spend on the content and strategy itself.

Maintaining editorial standards ensures that your content reflects your brand’s voice, style, and mission, building trust and reinforcing your brand identity. Implementing a review and approval process guarantees quality control and accuracy, ultimately upholding the quality of content you produce. Leaning on automation tools, such as content management systems like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, HubSpot CMS, or Adobe Experience Manager. These tools provide a range of features to support content creation, distribution, and scheduling, enabling you to efficiently manage and automate your content strategy. By implementing some or all of these tactics, you can enhance efficiency, maintain quality, and deliver excellent content to your audience!

Now, let’s move on to the best (okay I’m biased) part of the process: reporting and optimization, where we analyze our results and make data-driven adjustments to further improve our content. It’s coming full circle now!

4️⃣ Reporting and Optimization

Reporting

Like most aspects of growth marketing, your reporting process simply must be structured and consistent in order to demonstrate success. First things first, you should always revisit your goals and KPIs. Take the time to reassess what you set out to achieve with your content. For example, if your goal was to increase website traffic and conversions, your KPIs may include metrics such as page views, click-through rates, and conversion rates. 

Quality ≠ Quantity

Next, pay attention to lead quality. To assess the quality of your leads, track their movement through (or out of) the funnel and collaborate with your sales team for additional context. They have valuable insights into the leads generated from your content and can provide first-hand feedback on the quality and conversion potential of leads your content has delivered. By working together, you can identify which content pieces are attracting high-quality leads that are more likely to convert into customers. This collaboration also helps ensure that your content aligns with the sales team’s objectives and that they have the necessary information to effectively nurture leads through the funnel. It’s a win-win 🤝

At the same time, make sure to assess the quality of your content itself. Look at metrics like engaged sessions in GA4, time spent on page, click-through rates, referrals, and bounce rates. These metrics provide insight into how well your content resonates with your target audience, captures their attention, and encourages further interaction. Further down the funnel, conversion metrics such as form submissions, newsletter sign-ups, and downloads, point directly to whether your content is generating those high-quality leads we’re after.  

Once you have all that juicy data, it’s time to uncover patterns, trends, and highly specific audience preferences. This deeper understanding will help you plan and optimize for even more data-driven, targeted, and engaging content that resonates with your ideal audience even better than before. 

Optimizing Your Content Strategy

To attract more qualified leads, refining and optimizing is the name of the game. Here’s how to jumpstart that process: 

Double Down on Success 📈

When you discover content that performs exceptionally well in terms of lead generation and engagement, you’ll want to sprinkle that magic into more content. Identify the key elements that contribute to its success and replicate them in your next content plan. The more data you collect, the stronger your plans become (and the better your results!)

Make it an Ongoing Process ♻️

Optimization should be an integral part of your content strategy cycle. Continuously monitor and analyze your content’s performance, making data-driven adjustments along the way (can we rework this content that’s not gaining traction, can we repurpose this winner for another audience?) Iterating on your content marketing strategy lets you supercharge its effectiveness in generating qualified leads while the gettin’s good. 

Our advice? Follow the numbers. Let your data be the heart of your marketing planning and content strategy. Marketers have access to so much information–and it’s up to us to use it wisely! Don’t let all your hard work go to waste. Report, analyze, optimize, and repeat. 

Embracing Data-Driven Content Marketing

Content lets us connect with people on a more personal level. By taking the time to understand their needs, interests, and preferences, we can build content that truly resonates with them, sparks genuine interest, and solves a pain point or two. When we tap into the insights we pull from (so, so much) data, we get to know our audience better than we did before, allowing us to create content that speaks directly to them, in the way that they want us to.

To effectively share our content, we rely on channels that help us connect with individuals in more useful ways. Our content and websites should guide the audience through a logical journey that actually addresses their real-life, in real-time, needs. 

By embracing data as our compass, we continuously adapt and refine our strategies, staying attuned to what truly matters to our audience, positioning us as a trusted resource. Ultimately, data-driven content allows us to infuse our online presence with humanistic elements, forging connections with a lasting impact.

Ready to rank higher and close the deal with your audience? The pros can take it from here 💪

Hannah Burks

Hey! I’m HB, the Head of Operations at Tuff. With a decade of experience across marketing and web, I specialize in complex problem-solving, strategic planning, and organic acquisition. My focus is on facilitating client growth, supporting our creative teams, and consistently improving efficiency across our org. Let’s chat!

The post Optimizing Your Content Marketing Strategy for High-Quality Lead Generation appeared first on Tuff.

There’s been a lot of talk about an economic downturn—and what that means for marketing budgets. In a recent survey, 75% of global brands said signals of a recession influenced their media budgets for 2023. 

Some have already seen their budgets shrink. While others are keeping or increasing their marketing budgets, but taking a much closer look at the return on investment (ROI). 

The challenge many marketers face now is how to do more with less money.

Regardless of the state of the economy, there are two main priorities you can focus on to make the most of your marketing dollars: 

• Spend smarter on paid media channels – Analyze data on your audience targeting, media channels, creative, and landing page performance to reveal where to put your money and what you need to improve. 
• Invest in owned media channels – A strong content strategy drives inbound traffic, leads, conversions, and revenue.  

As a growth marketing and content strategy agency, Tuff helps brand partners with paid and owned channels. However, in this article, we’ll focus on owned channels—in particular, your website, content, and search engine optimization (SEO). 

We’ll show you how to build a content strategy that helps reduce your paid marketing spend and contributes to customer acquisition, sales, and revenue. 

Table of contents 

• Why brands need a strong content strategy in 2023
• How to build an acquisition-centered content strategy
• Types of content that drive traffic and conversions

Why brands need a strong content strategy in 2023

When marketing budgets are tight, organic marketing shines. The main reason for this seems obvious—money. Here are the main reasons that investing in content marketing can save you money (and help you make more) in the long run. 

1. Get nearly free traffic

SEO is one of the few remaining ways to raise brand awareness and reach potential customers without paying for every click.

Unlike paid channels, you don’t pay for every click and sale that you get. You may pay upfront for the cost to create content. But, once you publish it, you don’t pay anything. If you’re on the first page of Google search results, you could drive hundreds to thousands of visitors from it every month for free. 

2. Attract higher-quality inbound leads

Instead of going to leads (outbound marketing), you get them to come to you (inbound marketing). Content is a core component to build an inbound marketing strategy. It helps you attract and convert new visitors and leads. Around 76% of marketers use content to generate leads.

According to Hubspot’s 2022 report, SEO is the second most effective channel for acquiring new customers, behind social media. 

When prospects and potential customers find your content organically and reach out to you, you’re more likely to make a sale. For over 60% of marketers, inbound marketing—SEO, blogs, and so on—is their highest quality lead source. 

3. Build brand awareness and educate customers

Content Marketing Institute’s (CMIs) 2022 report found that the top five goals marketers achieve through content marketing are:

• Raising brand awareness
• Building trust 
• Educating their audience   
• Building loyalty with clients and customers
• Generating leads and demand

If you only focus on ads, your brand can feel too transactional. Organic content tends to be more educational. 

For example, you might create content that answers a common question or pain point for customers. This type of content provides value without outright asking for anything in return, which builds trust and affinity. 

When customers are ready to buy, they might click on an ad or go directly to your website. However, there’s a significant chance they entered the funnel by consuming your content first.

How to build an acquisition-centered content strategy

All the benefits above might sound great, but they also rely on having a strong content strategy. Here’s how to build one like a pro. 

1. Outline clear, measurable goals

Every marketing strategy starts with goal-setting, but it’s even more important for content. Goals vary widely and tracking is challenging, so be as clear as possible. To set goals for content marketing, begin by answering these questions: 

• How does your marketing goal contribute to your bottom line? 
• To be successful, what milestones do you need to reach?
• How will you measure success? 
• When do you need to reach your goal? 

Some examples of content marketing goals could be to:

• Grow organic website traffic by at least 30% month-over-month (MoM)
• Attract at least 250 organic leads monthly 
• Increase organic revenue by 25% in six months

Once you’ve set a clear direction, then you can begin planning your content strategy. 

2. Choose content topics based on data

The biggest mistake that I see some brands make when planning content is choosing topics without data. 

Instead, they brainstorm themes and generate ideas that are based on assumptions. For example, let’s say a brand sells products and services to women business owners. The brand creates a week’s worth of content around Mother’s Day, including a listicle of Mother’s Day gift ideas. 

But, is that really what the audience wants? Simply because your audience is made up of women, it doesn’t mean they’re mothers. Plus, how does that topic relate to the service or solution you provide? 

When you base your content strategy on assumptions, at best, you’ll have little to no results. At worst, you could end up offending and losing your audience. 

When money is tight, the last thing you want to do is invest in creating content based on assumptions. So, what do you do instead? Use data to inform your content decisions. Here are two types of data you’ll need: 

• Audience data – this is where you uncover customer pain points, motivations, hesitations, and more factors that influence buying decisions. 
• Keyword data – this is the traditional SEO approach to building a content strategy, by looking at monthly keyword search volume and difficulty to rank. 

The best content strategies include both types of research. In the next two steps, we’ll walk you through how to do both—audience and keyword research—to create content strategies that consistently deliver results. 

3. Conduct audience research and create personas

Most audience research starts with basic demographic information—age, location, income, education, and so on. You can pull this information from: 

• Your current marketing channels (email, social media)
• Google Analytics and other attribution software
• Customer relationship management (CRM) tools 

However, this is only a start. True audience research goes beyond demographics and digs into qualitative data including: 

• Pain points
• Aspirations (desired outcomes)
• Motivations
• Hesitations
• Perceived value
• Other influences on buying decisions

There are many ways to collect qualitative audience data, but we recommend starting with two—message-mining and customer interviews or surveys. 

Message-mining example

Message-mining, also called review-mining, is when you pull feedback from your customer reviews on your website, Google, and sites like Trustpilot or G2. You can compile the reviews into a simple spreadsheet like this one. 

The process often reveals:

• Features and benefits your customers love
• Products and services you need to improve 
• Your unique value proposition

You can also message-mine competitor reviews. Positive reviews will show you where competitors are winning. Mixed and negative reviews reveal opportunities—they show you where you can beat competitors. 

The key is to look for patterns and de-prioritize outliers. What benefits or drawbacks appear the most? 

Example customer interview questions 

If you’re conducting interviews or surveys, here are sample questions to ask and which data point they reveal:

• Pain points – What problems does this product/service solve for you? 
• Aspirations – What do you hope to achieve by using this product/service? 
• Motivations – When did you realize you needed this product/service? 
• Hesitations – Was there anything about this product/service that you had questions or hesitations about? 
• Perceived value – What made you choose this product/service over other competitors?

We could devote an entire blog to audience research, and it still wouldn’t cover everything. If you have limited resources though, this will help you get the most important audience data. 

With all this data, you should have a better understanding of your audience to create personas. Audience personas should include demographics as well as qualitative research like pain points.

4. Perform keyword research 

How will you get your content in front of your audience? Most people won’t navigate directly to your website and go to your blog, so you need a way to distribute your content. 

For most businesses, that means SEO. First, you need to identify which searches your audience is putting in Google, and which you want to show up for—these are your keywords. 

To find them, you’ll conduct keyword research with a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush. 

At the start of keyword research, it’s okay to have a lot of ideas. Later on, you’ll trim your list and prioritize keywords that will have the most impact on your bottom line. Now that you’ve done audience research, it’s easier to put yourself in your audience’s shoes too.

How to identify keywords

To identify keywords, begin by looking at your: 

• Paid keywords – Are there keywords in paid campaigns that you could rank for organically?
• Current rankings – What is your site ranking for currently? Which pieces of content could rank in a higher position if you refresh the content? 
• Competitors – What keywords and pieces of content drive organic traffic to your competitors’ sites?
• Audience and intent – Does the person searching this keyword align with your audience? How likely are they to convert to a lead or customer?

Paid keywords you can find in your Google Ads and Analytics account. 

Current rankings you can find in Google Search Console. You can also use keyword research tools like Ahrefs and Semrush. If you’re using Ahrefs, you’ll go to Site Explorer and drop in your website URL. Then, click on organic keywords from the left menu. 

If you’re using Semrush, you’ll go to Domain Overview, add your website URL, and hit Search.

Then, scroll down to Top Organic Keywords and click View details. For SEO research, you’ll want to exclude branded keywords. This is usually your company name, so it wouldn’t be a keyword that you target with content. 

For example, this is what it looks like if you put REI’s website into Semrush and filter out branded terms. Three of the top keywords that drive non-branded traffic to the site are: hiking shoes, paddle board, and sleeping bag. 

To find what keywords your competitors are ranking for, follow the same process or do a keyword gap analysis. 

For audience and intent, refer back to your audience research. You can also bring in data from sales and customer service teams to identify questions and pain points that arise after your initial research. 

Keyword research is only one part of SEO. To rank in search results, you’ll need to structure your content and website intentionally with best practices. You may need technical SEO experts to optimize your website too. 

Also, you may create content without SEO. But, that means you’ll need a budget for paid content distribution to get content in front of your target audience. 

5. Prioritize topics that relate to your products and services 

To make the most of your marketing dollars, you’ll narrow down your content strategy to focus on the most impactful topics.  

To do this, start with a map of your customer journey and ask:  

• What questions do potential customers have as they learn about your business? 
• How can you help answer those questions with content? 

Then, narrow down your choices further by asking: 

• What pain points does this content address and do I actually have a product or service that helps solve them? 

Every topic you choose should originate from data—either keyword or audience data. Now, that doesn’t mean that you can’t leave a small percentage open for experimentation. However, when marketing budgets are small, it’s harder to take those risks. 

You’ll also want to select topics that map back to a core product or service and include an internal link to those landing pages.  

6. Measure results and adjust 

How you measure success will ultimately depend on the goals you set at the start. For SEO content, the typical metrics for success focus on the quantity and quality of organic traffic. 

Here’s some examples of ways to measure results for content and SEO.  

SEO tends to take longer to see results than paid because you aren’t paying for a spot at the top of search results. Typically, we start to see results after three to six months. 

Now you have a solid plan, here’s how to execute it with high-quality content. 

Types of content that drive traffic and conversions

Part of the challenge of building a content strategy is deciding what types of content to create. There are so many options that it can lead to decision paralysis. 

We’ve created many types of content for B2C and B2B brands. Here are some types of content we recommend to drive inbound marketing efforts and focus on more traffic and conversions. 

1. Comparison content

For this, you create in-depth comparisons of you vs. your competitors. There are two main reasons to create comparison content. First, if you don’t have a lot of brand recognition, you could possibly steal some from your competitors that do. 

Second, it’s ideal content that sits at the consideration stage of the marketing funnel. Your prospects and customers are already researching your brand. They can either get the information from a third-party or even your competitors or hear it straight from you. 

Many companies from project management tools to bookkeeping software create comparison content. Gusto, for example, has an entire pillar page of comparison content. 

Each page features a comparison chart and an overview of the most important differences. ClickUp is another company that leans into comparison content. Comparison pages have easy to understand charts with key features. 

2. Articles about pricing  

If your company is being mindful of spending, your customers may be too. Be upfront about pricing, because it’s one of the first and most important factors that buyers look for on your website. 

You could also drive organic traffic and qualified leads to your website with content around pricing. There may be keywords that follow one of these formats: 

• How much does (your product or service) cost? 
• (Your product or service) pricing 
• (Your product or service) cost

For example, let’s say you search “how much does a mattress cost”. According to Semrush, there are over 6,600 monthly searches, and it’s possible to rank for the term. 

It could be a great keyword for a mattress company like Casper or Nectar to rank for organically. (Even though they are paying for paid shopping spots.)

On the other hand, Enterprise ranks in the number one spot for a pricing question: how much does it cost to rent a car? With over 6,600 monthly searches, it likely drives a large chunk of qualified traffic every month for free.

By the time someone searches for pricing, they’re close to buying. As a company, you want to show up when they are ready to buy. Prioritizing pricing content is one way to do that. 

3. Video content

Video is the top content type for marketers, followed by blogs and images, according to HubSpot’s latest marketing report. 

You can use all those types of content together and repurpose them on channels outside of your website like YouTube. 

Combining and repurposing content has two benefits. You save money by stretching how you use your creative assets, and you increase your content effectiveness. 

For example, on average, blogs with videos get 70% more organic traffic. 

Here are some examples of videos to include in your content strategy:

• Product demos 
• Short-form videos
• Tutorials

4. Templates and interactive content

Interactive content gets almost 53% more engagement than traditional static content. Examples of interactive content include: 

• Quizzes
• Calculators
• Webinars
• Video 
• Templates 
• Forms

Another perk that comes with creating interactive content is that you can use it for lead generation. For example, when potential customers take a quiz, they may provide their email along with information about themselves that helps you get to know them. 

These are only a few examples of content to get started. Along the way, you may add other types of content that are inspired by customer and audience research. 

Investing in a strong content strategy will help you spend smarter. But, remember to base your content decisions on data, like you would with any other marketing campaign.

Interested in working with Tuff on a content strategy for your business? Let’s talk!

The post Building an Inbound Content Strategy to Acquire Customers appeared first on Tuff.

As we watch companies scale back both their workforce and spend, it becomes clear (again) that unpaid channels are vital to a healthy marketing and sales strategy. Businesses are trying to be cognizant of spending without canceling all long-term investments, so in terms of priority, unpaid channels have moved to the top of the growth list.

If you haven’t invested in organic channels or if you’ve taken a hiatus from that investment, it’s time to get back in the game. Unpaid channels are a sustainable and helpful fallback during economic downturns.

Organic is a long-term play. Strategies within SEO, for instance, take time to build up and take frequent maintenance. So the longer you neglect your organic visibility, the longer it will take to catch up to your competitors.  Prioritizing  a solid foundation now means that you start reaping the benefits sooner. 

Aside from SEO, there are endless unpaid opportunities you can leverage while pinching pennies. From branding to experimentation all the way to that website refresh you’ve been holding off for far too long. 

Let’s walk through a step-by-step guide on how companies should be spending their time and marketing budgets in 2023.

Step 1: Self-care, but make it branding

At Tuff, we see a lot of well-established companies come through without having performed any brand or audience exercises to establish voice, tone, and persona targeting strategies for their website and campaigns. Putting in the work here is important both on and off your site. A strong, established brand is the secret sauce to campaign success and customer loyalty. 

When you’re looking to save money but spend your time productively, it’s a great time to tighten up brand messaging, produce value-driven content, and build relationships with new and existing customers.

Here’s a branding checklist you can use to get started:

• Establish your brand’s mission and purpose
• Understand your competitors (how do you stand out)
• Determine your target audience and create personas
• Shape your brand’s voice and tone
• Modify how your organization discusses your products or services
• Ensure all digital property emulates your brand identity

Once you’ve made these branding decisions, it’s important to audit your website and ensure it represents your brand well. The areas that will get you the most bang for your branding buck are updating high-intent pages and creating a fresh content strategy that’s brand mindful while delivering the information your audience needs. 

Step 2: Content with a twist

“People still crave information and solutions to their unique challenges, especially during a downturn.Tap into the emotions and needs of your audience, now and into the future. Create evergreen content that connects and builds trust in your brand.  You’ll reap long-term returns from your content and keep your base engaged while others pull back.” – Bridget Doherty, UX Copywriter

Content will always be an important part of your branding and marketing strategy. It’s also the easiest to upkeep while cutting budgets. 

Take advantage of this time and create a solid plan for content production and promotion. Leverage your internal experts to write pieces that grab and hold your audience.

When we think of content marketing, we usually think of fresh content to bring in new customers. However, content is a valuable way to stay connected to existing customers and provides a direct line of communication for brand loyalty and upsells. 

The probability of selling to an existing customer is between 60% and 70% while that number is only between 5% to 20% for new customers, so give your current customers plenty of attention during this time and beyond. 

Step 3: Designing your strategy 

High-quality design has become an expectation of customers. In today’s digital world, well-designed websites, social feeds, emails, videos, and blogs is the norm. Meaning, your customers hold you to a higher standard than you think. 

When potential customers come to your site, they’re bringing the experiences they’ve had on every other site (especially those of your competitors). They’re always looking for speed, ease of use, and, whether they realize it or not, something that’s easy on the eyes. 

Investing in design can help to:

• Ensure that your product or service is easy to use and understand
• Connect with customers on an emotional level
• Make your brand stand out and your company more memorable
• Build a positive brand image
• Gain customer trust and loyalty

If you don’t have a resource internally now, it’s a worthwhile investment to bring on a partner who can support your brand’s design needs.Generally speaking, it’s often cheaper to outsource design work to an agency, as they have lower rates and can provide a wider range of services. Hiring a full-time designer can be more expensive when you’re trying to save, as it involves additional costs such as benefits and other overhead expenses.

Don’t let your campaigns be wasted on lack of design and branding. 

Step 4a: Your Website & SEO

Think of your website like it’s your home. A strong foundation is important and when something breaks, it’s best to take your time and fix it correctly. Shortcuts risk the problem becoming out of control. 

Enter SEO. 

“When consumers begin spending at normal levels again, companies that have pulled back on SEO efforts will have to make up for lost performance. Companies that keep SEO rolling won’t have to backtrack and deal with drops in visibility and lost rankings as other companies overtook them on the SERP.”- Claire Routh, SEO Strategist

SEO is a secret weapon that’s important to keep in your arsenal, whether it’s keeping up with content optimization and creation to sustain organic visibility or monthly maintenance on your website to ensure it provides a good user experience.. 

Poor site performance and lack of keyword support can be detrimental to your visibility in search. Sites that give users a bad experience are penalized for this and the same goes for poor keyword targeting. Not using the right language to find the right audience can mean useless traffic and irrelevance within search engines.

As you face uncertainty during financial hardship, shift your strategy to long-term, unpaid investments. Take the time to finesse on-site content to target keywords that will bring in high-intent audiences. Focus on maintaining a healthy site experience for your users so they’re more willing to come back again as they continue on the buyer journey. 

Start now and keep up with it even once you’re back at full force with your paid investments. A consistent organic strategy is an ironclad way to guard against tumultuous times.

Step 4b: Your Website & Experimentation

So, you finally figured out your branding, content, design, and you’re maintaining SEO support on your site… Now what? 

Even though you’ve refined your brand’s online presence, the best way to see what truly resonates with and converts your audience is to start testing. From headlines to CTAs, websites present endless testing opportunities. This is the perfect way to improve conversion rates and sustainably grow the leads flowing through your pipeline without having to toy with money in paid platforms.

Forming the habit of testing before solidifying decisions about your brand ensures you’ll always have a pulse on the market and the needs of your customers. 

It’s surprising how often we see clients making major site changes because they like it internally. Just because we like something doesn’t mean it will actually be successful at speaking to customers. When in doubt, test it out. It’s not just the experience your customers need, it’s the one they deserve. 

Step 5: Organic social and partnerships

With paid social as successful as it is for a lot of companies, the upkeep of social media platforms organically is often forgotten. Staying active  and organically engaged on social media is a great way to keep visibility with your audience and keep customers engaging with your brand. 

The same is true for partnerships. During a downturn when budgets are cut, focusing your energy toward building and strengthening partnerships is time well-invested. The exchanging of content or more logo visibility off-site is the perfect, low-budget strategy to get eyes from untapped audiences. 

Don’t you… forget about paid 

During an economic downturn, it can be easy to make a rash decision like completely cutting budget to certain channels but it can actually be a great time to get strategic with your ad spend. 

Nielsen Marketing Mix Models found that when companies go cold turkey and cut channels out of their media mix, they can expect to lose 2% of their long-term revenue each quarter and found that it will take up to 3-5 years to recover. 

Nielsen data also shows that marketing accounts for 10%-35% of a brand’s equity, proving if budget cuts are done incorrectly, it can have major impacts across your organization.

You’ll find your competitors will also be dealing with budget cuts, meaning campaigns that were once highly competitive in the market can now be  high-opportunity. Campaigns that historically haven’t had much return can have a greater impact now.

The solution isn’t making hard budget cuts but rather allocating your budget towards the channels or campaigns that will have the most return at this time. Knowing how to watch the trends and keep your strategy agile is an important factor to sustaining paid media, and having a partner who brings that expertise can be the best tool for being  cautious yet effective with your budget.

It’s all about balance

Ultimately, whether you’re just getting started with unpaid investments or picking things back up, create a sustainable plan to upkeep your organic channels even as you ramp back up with paid media.

Whether it’s leveraging high-value content on and off the site or sharing keyword and audience insights to support and improve campaigns, there are endless opportunities for cross-collaboration. Add CRO into the mix by testing everything from ad copy to elements on your landing pages, and have a media mix that’s a recipe for digital success.

It seems more complicated than it is, though we are the experts. Reach out if you need an assist ramping up and maintaining your organic efforts. 

The post Prioritizing Unpaid Channels During an Economic Downturn appeared first on Tuff.

This post is #2 of a 2-part series on how to conduct a content analysis. In the first post, we focused on using quartiles to find the top-performing content. Today, we’ll focus on analyzing content by its publish date and SEO performance over time.

Conducting a time-based content analysis can be an invaluable tool for content marketers. It allows you to audit your existing website content and determine which content is performing the best at a particular time.

It can also help you identify content gaps and ensure that your website is up-to-date with the latest industry trends. In this blog post, we’ll explore how to conduct a time-based content analysis and the benefits it provides.

What is a time-based content analysis?

A time-based content audit and analysis is an in-depth review of a website’s content efforts across a specific timeframe. It involves reviewing website content from the standpoint of accuracy, relevance, consistency, and performance.

The audit and analysis involve looking at the content on the website, analyzing performance metrics such as page views and referring domains, and making changes to the content strategy based on the findings.

The goal of a time-based content audit and analysis is to find the top-performing piece of content at a certain point in time.

Similar to our previous content audit, we won’t concern ourselves with SEO title, meta description, focus keyword, keyword density, or any of the other SEO metrics that we typically focus on.

What are the benefits of a time-based content analysis

As you build up your brand and create more content over time you will hopefully start to get more and more traffic and engagement to each blog post. So, eventually, all of your blog posts will naturally get more traffic and engagement than they did–say a year ago.

At a quick glance, you may think that content is performing great, but maybe it’s just “a sign of the times”. Let’s see how it stacks up against other content that was published around that time.

How to conduct a time-based content analysis?

Export and organize data

First, you’ll need to export all of your URLs along with their published date and the main KPI or KPIs that you’re looking to track. 

If you’re analyzing content on your own site then you can typically export blog post URLs and publish dates from your CMS. If you’re analyzing a competitor’s website it might be tougher to get the actual publish date of the blog post or landing page. XML sitemaps will contain the last modified date and this is typically what SEO crawlers will pull as well, such as ScreamingFrog. 

And nowadays, you know, everyone’s constantly updating their content, so it’s tough to get a competitor’s actual publication date. 

I used the WP all export plugin to do this. And then I pulled in the all-time organic traffic from Google Analytics.

I chose to analyze all-time organic traffic because for this particular exercise it’s the most accurate growth metric for calculating a proper SEO score. This will differ for every business.

Calculate the median of your KPI

Once we’ve got all our data organized in chronological order, we can begin to calculate the time-based index and measure performance. We’ll begin with the following formula–assuming that your data is in column C:

=C2/MEDIAN(C$2)

What this formula is doing is dividing the number in cell C2 by the median. Since C2 is the first cell and there is no previous data, the time-based index for the first piece of content will always be 1. We use the median rather than the average because it factors out any outliers that might skew the average.

So the first piece of content is compared only against itself, and all proceeding content is compared against all historical content. So this is how the formula looks at cell 10:

=C10/MEDIAN(C$2:C9)

With conditional formatting added to the template, it should be easy to quickly spot your top-performing content.

You can copy the time-based index column and paste the values only so that you can sort by the highest score.

Template

The template linked below is slightly different than the one I walked through in the video because it’s tracking referring domains rather than organic traffic. I also left the formula out of the spreadsheet so that you’ll get a bit more familiar with it when you manually input it.

Time-based content analysis template

Conclusion

A time-based content audit is an incredibly effective way to review and optimize your content. Not only does it help you identify the topics you should focus on, but it also gives you the ability to track the performance of your content over time. With this free template, it’s easy to get started and make sure your content is performing at its best.

You can combine this template with the template from the previous post to get a more comprehensive understanding of your content.

Derek Coleman

Derek is a digital marketer based in Boston, Massachusetts with almost a decade of hands-on SEO experience. He finds it meaningful, challenging, and exciting to develop, test, and implement new SEO strategies. When he’s not auditing websites and optimizing content he’s usually backpacking and exploring new cultures.

The post How To Conduct A Time-Based Content Analysis [Free Template] appeared first on Tuff.

As a content marketer, it’s essential to know the ins and outs of your website content in order to create a successful content strategy.

Content audits are a great way to take stock of what content does and doesn’t exist, so you can better understand your site’s strengths and weaknesses. Using quartiles and a composite score, you can identify the content that is most powerful and worth building upon. 

In this blog post, we’ll walk through how to conduct a content inventory audit using quartiles to uncover the most powerful content on your website.

What is a content inventory audit?

A content inventory audit is an analysis of your content marketing strategy. It involves taking an inventory of all of your content assets, such as blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, and other forms of content.

It is helpful for content marketing because it allows you to identify what content is working, what isn’t working, and what content needs to be improved or removed. It also helps you identify any gaps in your content and plan a strategy for filling those gaps.

Additionally, it allows you to track the SEO performance of each piece of content, so you can better understand what content is driving the most engagement and conversions.

What is the goal of a content inventory audit?

The goal of a content audit is to be able to identify the best-performing content on your website or a competitor’s website so that you can figure out how to improve on it. This will make it easier to find content gaps between you and your competitors.

How to conduct a content inventory audit

The first step in building a content audit spreadsheet is gathering data on your existing content—KPIs of blog posts and landing pages—and organizing it in Google Sheets.

The KPIs will differ for everyone but I’ve listed a few common ones below. Keep in mind that you may have to pull this data from multiple analytics tools and use a Vlookup to merge it together in a spreadsheet depending on what KPIs you’re pulling. I pulled my data from SEMrush, Google Search Console, ahrefs, and Google Analytics. If you’re using a content management system like WordPress with the appropriate plugins then it may be possible to export all the data from there. If you’re crawling a competitor’s website then ScreamingFrog is a great options as well. 

• Webpage URLs
• Shares
• Referring domains
• Organic traffic
• Keyword rankings

Be sure to track KPIs that you’re actively optimizing for. This doesn’t work well if you have a lot of cells with a value of 0 in the spreadsheet and it will skew your data. So if the majority of your blog posts get 0 shares, don’t include it as a KPI. 

Unlike most SEO exercises, we’re not too concerned with the SEO page title or meta description in this auditing process.

Once you have all your data, the next step is to build quartiles. 

Building Quartiles

If you’re familiar with statistics and the five-number summary then you’re familiar with quartiles. If not, here’s a quick explainer. 

Quartiles are the three points that divide a data set into four equal parts. The first quartile (Q1) is the middle number between the smallest number and the median of the data set. The second quartile (Q2) is the median of the data set. The third quartile (Q3) is the middle number between the median and the highest value of the data set.

• Quartile 1 starts with the bare minimum—0 and creates an upper bound of X, based on historical KPI data. Anything in quartile 1 is your lowest-performing data—unless you haven’t done a time-based analysis on it yet, which I’ll get into later.
• The upper bound of quartile 2 will be your median. 
• Quartile three is above average and quartile 4 is your best-performing content. 
• This gives you more perspective and allows you to quickly compare and benchmark your KPIs at the page level.

Building quartiles is essentially calculating, benchmarking, and grouping your content into four different buckets based on key performance metrics. These performance metrics will vary depending on which KPIs you’re tracking. 

Benefits of quartiles

Quartiles give us a better way of tracking content performance without obsessing over the numbers. For instance, whether a post gets 120 clicks or 130 clicks is not what is most important but being able to consistently produce content that ranks in quartiles 3 and 4 is what your goal is and what is most important.

Having quartiles for different metrics helps you filter out the outliers. A page might look like a top performer because it has hundreds of backlinks, but if the traffic doesn’t match then most likely those are low-quality backlinks. 

What can you see in the data

So now that we have quartiles, what can we derive from the data? Let’s take a look. 

By analyzing the referring domains quartile and traffic, we can calculate how many referring domains we have per visit. The higher the number, the lower the quality of referring domains. This can be really helpful when looking at competitor content and deciding which content generates the most healthy backlinks.

How to find the most successful content?

All of this still doesn’t tell us what the most successful content is yet. So, how do we find that? 

The template includes a composite score and allows you to change the weight of each KPI so that you can weigh your backlinks as more important than your social shares, and vice versa.

The composite score is based on the four different quartiles and the referring domains per visit. The template also gives you the ability to weigh each metric to get a more accurate rating of what is most important to you. 

Content audit template

Since I couldn’t find a content audit tool that handles this work for me, I found the next best thing—a template. And I’m sharing it with you! Click the link below and make a copy.

Content audit template

Takeaway

A website content audit using quartiles and composite scores can be a powerful tool for discovering the most impactful content on your website. By tracking the performance of each piece of content over time, you can identify the content that is driving the most traffic, engagement, and conversions. By leveraging this data, you can focus your content strategy on the content that is working and create more of the kind of content that will have the greatest impact on your website.

Next Steps

What to know how you can take your content audit to the next level? You might notice that something is missing. Something that can improve the accuracy of this template. What is it? Time!

Stick around for part 2 of this blog post where we walk through how to conduct a time-based content analysis. 

Derek Coleman

Derek is a digital marketer based in Boston, Massachusetts with almost a decade of hands-on SEO experience. He finds it meaningful, challenging, and exciting to develop, test, and implement new SEO strategies. When he’s not auditing websites and optimizing content he’s usually backpacking and exploring new cultures.

The post Conducting A Content Inventory Audit With Quartiles [Free Template] appeared first on Tuff.

Author’s Note: This post was updated on March 20, 2023 with new links, data, insights, and resources. 

You can use various methods to conduct keyword research. However, a keyword gap analysis—also sometimes called a content gap or keyword competitor analysis—is a must. 

When it comes to SEO, there are no ties. Only one company can be in the number one spot, and to get the most organic traffic, you want that to be your site.

We know the top result in Google gets over 31% of clicks, with some variation depending on the industry, keyword, and device. However, no matter the industry, the number of clicks (and consequently traffic) that goes to your website drops consistently as you drop from one to two and so on. 

If competitors are outranking you, then they’re getting more organic traffic, leads, and likely sales.

However, you can beat them with a strong SEO strategy, and a keyword gap analysis helps you create one. We’ll show you how to conduct a keyword gap analysis using tools like Semrush, and how you can use it to build a content strategy.

What is a keyword gap analysis?

A keyword gap analysis is an SEO strategy that compares your site to your competitors to find keywords that rank the highest and drive the most traffic.

Your keyword “gaps” are areas in which you could overtake your competitors and outrank them. In short, it’s a way to reveal keyword opportunities you’re missing out on. 

It’s also an essential part of an SEO competitive analysis. First, you’ll identify keywords that your competitors rank for, but you don’t. You’ll also identify keywords that you have a low ranking for, for example, positions 5 to 15. From there, you can create a strategy to “boost” low rankings and steal keywords from your competitors.

Why is keyword gap analysis important?

The ultimate goal of any holistic SEO content strategy is to drive traffic to your site. But you don’t want just any traffic. You want high-value, high-intent website visitors whose problems you can solve. 

A keyword gap analysis helps you discover those keywords. It reveals areas of opportunity where you can create new content or improve existing content to increase rankings and traffic. 

A keyword gap analysis isn’t only important for SEO, but for paid search campaigns. You can use it to identify your competitor’s paid search terms as well. It’s even more useful when you combine your learnings from paid and organic to inform your strategy. 

At Tuff, PPC and SEO teams collaborate. We share insights on keyword volume, performance, and conversions, so paid and organic search strategies work together. When doing keyword research, we look at: 

• Which paid keywords convert the most? 
• How much money do they cost for paid search? 
• Can you rank for them organically and save money?  

Ranking for top keywords on paid and organic channels translates into more traffic – and more revenue.

How to do a keyword gap analysis

You don’t need to be an SEO master to do a keyword gap analysis. However, having a professional on your side is always helpful to interpret results and create a list of target keywords. Here’s how we do it at Tuff.

1. Identify competitors

If you haven’t already, you’ll need to create a list of at least two to three competitors that have a strong organic traffic strategy. If you’re not sure where to start, you can use our two-step guide to identify competitors. Now, that you have your list, you can use it to figure out why those sites are outranking you.

2. Pick your tools

You’ll need at least one SEO tool in order to perform a keyword gap analysis. We use Semrush, which has a free version available with a limited amount of queries allowed. (That’s another benefit of hiring an agency – we have the tools and the expertise to use them!)

You can also try Ahrefs’ Content Gap tool, but it is not as powerful or intuitive as Semrush when it comes to filtering. 

For example, it’s easier to use if you’re looking for keywords that you’re not ranking for at all (new content opportunities). It’s possible to filter search queries to look at your competitor’s position compared to yours but it takes some finesse. 

In general, its keyword gap tool is not as user-friendly as Semrush. For comparison, this is what doing a keyword gap analysis in Ahrefs looks like after filtering out branded terms.

3. Get your keyword list

Open up your tool and enter your website domain. Then enter your main competitors and click “Compare.” The keyword gap tool will show you a list of keywords your competitors rank for and where you appear in the SERPs for those same words. 

If you are using Semrush, you’ll go to the left menu and use the keyword gap tool. 

As an example, let’s compare two popular investment companies—Ellevest and Betterment. We’re not affiliated with either, but you can easily compare their organic strategy using

You can sort by organic, paid, or PLA (this stands for Product Listing Ads and you need a business account in Semrush to use it). 

Semrush will also show you keyword volume, difficulty, competitive density, and CPC among other metrics. For in-depth analysis, download the file as a CSV report so you can sort and search more easily.

4. Interpret your results

Now you need to determine where you can get the most value from your keywords. Your keyword tool will do some of the work for you. 

Semrush, for example, has a section showing “Top Opportunities” for keywords that your site is missing as well as weak keywords—where you have a ranking but it is lower than all of your competitors’ rankings. 

To discover opportunities yourself, look for keywords that are:

• Highly relevant to your business and your website
• Regularly searched for by your target audience
• Not overly competitive, but still high-value
• Easily filled using existing content or easy to create new content for

We export each keyword gap analysis into a spreadsheet to better sort, analyze, and filter the data. It looks something like this with four core tabs: Shared, Missing, Weak, and Strong.

5. Identify opportunities 

When you’re just starting your research, you’ll want to focus on weak and missing keywords first. Here’s why: 

• Weak – these are words that your competitors rank higher than you for, and there are prime candidates for content remediation
• Missing – these are words that your competitors are ranking for, and you are not ranking for at all

When planning SEO content, this will help you decide if you need to update a page or create a new one. Generally, you can follow this rule:  

• Weak = refresh old content
• Missing = create new content

Your keyword export (example here) will look something like the image below once you upload it to Google Sheets.

You can also prioritize which opportunities you should focus on by filtering the keyword gap results. Go to the Positions filter, Competitors, and choose to view only the terms that they are ranking for in the top 10 or 20. 

Using our investment app example, let’s look at gaps in the top 10 results. You can see that Betterment is outranking Ellevest for some relevant keywords like “what does vesting mean” and “roth ira vs sep ira”.

Of course, this is the initial research, you’ll want to refine your results further to narrow terms down based on keyword difficulty and intent. 

6. Try a page-level analysis

You already know a few areas where you and a competitor have similar articles. You want to determine what they’re doing right and replicate it. 

To figure this out, do a page-level analysis. You can enter an exact URL of a competitor’s page and compare it to your own to see what you may be missing. You’ll either add those keywords to your page—or create an entirely new page—and start stealing competitors’ traffic.

This can also help you determine the best keywords to go after. For example, if we look closer at the terms that Betterment outranked Ellevest for, you can see exactly which pages rank. 

In Semrush, you can see that Betterment is ranking for a lot of 401k keywords, but which ones are driving the most traffic? Luckily, Semrush will list URLs for each keyword when you export a CSV file. All you need to do is go to Domain Overview, add the URL, and search by Exact URL. 

Most of those 401K terms are coming from a blog on retirement. According to Semrush’s data, a little over 600 people are visiting that page alone. 

You can see exactly which terms are driving traffic to the URL and decide if it’s worth adding to your content calendar. Scroll down and go to the section marked “Top Organic Keywords”. It will give you a list of every search query that page ranks for and the percent of traffic it contributes.

7. Put it into action

How do you know whether to refresh an existing page or create a new one? What types of content will most effectively attract customers from your competitors? This is where SEO becomes not a science, but an art. 

To determine your plan of action, analyze the top content that is already ranking for that keyword and look for things like:

• Type of content (video, blog, gallery, etc.)
• Content length and organization
• Headers and keywords used

Do you have content that already fulfills these criteria? You can update it to use the new keywords. If you don’t, you’ll want to create something new. 

Organic growth is crucial to the overall growth of your business, but it isn’t always straightforward. Tuff can help you with every step of the process, from performing a keyword gap analysis and determining the best course of action to creating content that outranks the competition. Contact us today to get started.

The post How to Do a Keyword Gap Analysis appeared first on Tuff.

If you do a quick Google search for SEO forecasting, you’ll find some confusing, and often unhelpful tools and articles. As it turns out, predicting the future is hard to do. 

That’s why we developed our own method and SEO forecasting template to help. As a growth marketing agency, we’ve used this Google Sheet to forecast organic traffic growth for several SEO partners at Tuff, and it’s been eerily spot on with its predictions—as little as 10 or 20 visits off some months. 

What is SEO forecasting? 

SEO forecasting is the process of using data—like keyword volume, click-through rates, and monthly organic traffic—to predict the impact of your SEO efforts. 

In general, all kinds of industries analyze trends and patterns in past data to predict what will happen in the future. We’re applying similar methods but focusing on search engine optimization. 

Since no one can truly predict the future (that I know of), there is some margin or error to be expected. However, forecasting for SEO can help you set realistic expectations and measurable goals that are grounded in data. 

If you invest in SEO content, you want to know how much it will increase your organic traffic growth. SEO forecasting can help you with that and more. 

Want to learn more about how we forecast SEO at Tuff? Check out this video! 👇

SEO forecasting models

There are two basic ways to forecast SEO or predict organic traffic growth. 

1. Keyword forecasting

Keyword forecasting models use keyword search volume and average click-through rate (CTR) to determine website traffic. 

To use this method, you need to know the estimated search volume a target keyword gets each month and the average CTR for each ranking position. 

For example, people are most likely to click the top search result, so that CTR is higher. The CTR drops significantly as you go from position one to two to three and so on. You can pull the average CTR by position from a tool like Advanced Web Ranking’s Organic CTR history. 

Generally, in keyword forecasting, you take the search volume and multiply it by the CTR. 

For instance, let’s say you have a travel blog, and you are ranking number one for the keyword “what to bring on a road trip”. According to Semrush, the average monthly search volume is 880. 

Then, if you want to pull the CTR in the US for only the travel industry, you can do that by going to Advanced Web Ranking. According to their data, the average CTR for the top position is 33.1%. 

• 880 (search volume) × 33.1% (CTR) = 291 monthly organic traffic

2. Statistical forecasting 

The statistical forecasting method uses historical data and mathematical formulas to predict what your traffic will be in the future, based on your growth trend in the past. Specifically, it uses linear regression and exponential smoothing. 

You don’t really need to worry about the exact mathematical terms. The purpose is the same for each function—to predict the future by using data from the past. 

It is typically more accurate than keywords alone because it is custom to your website. It looks at how your site has performed in the last two to three years and uses that information to estimate your organic traffic. 

How to Forecast SEO in a Google Sheet

The method that we use combines both keyword and statistical models. You can make a copy of this SEO forecasting template and use it for your website. The step-by-step how-to guide is below, but first, you’ll want a few tools and data handy. 

What tools you’ll need:

• Google Analytics – to pull your monthly organic traffic numbers
• Google Search Console – if you are using it for your keyword positions and CTR
• Semrush or Ahrefs – to conduct keyword research and get search volume

Data that you’ll need: 

• Your organic website traffic for the last two to three years
• CTR for each ranking position (or you can use the one in the template)
• Keyword research – a list of your target keywords, current position, and monthly search volume

1. Pull your historical data 

Once you have all this, open up the forecasting template. Go to the “historical data” tab and update the dates as well as the organic traffic for each month. 

You’ll pull this from your Google Analytics account under Organic Search. Make sure to adjust it for each month, and remove bot traffic. 

Ideally, you’ll have two to three years of data. This will help you create an accurate forecast. 

If it’s a newer site, you may not have this much data to pull. In that case, pull for however many months you have. It won’t be as accurate, but it’s a starting point.

2. Identify outliers and seasonality

To make your forecast as accurate as possible, you need to look at your historical data numbers for seasonality and outliers. 

Seasonality 

Does the website have defined busy and slow months? For example, a tax business sees a spike in traffic around the beginning of the year through tax time in April. This is seasonality because it happens during the same period of time every year, and it’s predictable.

Outliers 

Are there any months when the website traffic is unusually high? Outliers are data points that are much higher or lower than the rest of the data set. For example, many online businesses saw spikes in traffic during the COVID pandemic.

You might have outliers in your data if: 

• You ran a one-off campaign that inflated your traffic
• Your website was hit with bot traffic
• Your site went through a redesign or overhaul

You’ll want to remove outlier data because it is a one-off event and not representative of your overall performance. It will also skew your forecasting and make it inaccurate.

You can use forecasting to replace it with a number that it would be if there wasn’t a random spike.

3. Get a no-change forecast 

Once you’re happy with your historical data set, go to the “Forecast” tab. Here, you’re going to get a no-change forecast. This tells you what your future organic traffic might look like without any SEO marketing or other changes.  

First, copy over your dates and traffic from the “historical data” tab into the “Forecast” tab for reference. 

Then, go to the “No change forecast” column, and adjust the forecast function so that A29 matches up with the first month you are forecasting. 

For example, it is currently (=FORECAST(A29,’historical data’!B:B,’historical data’!A:A), but the A29 will change based on your date and row. Everything else will stay the same. Drag down to get a forecast for the following months. 

4. Add the average CTR and keyword volume

The no-change forecast uses statistical forecasting. Now we are going to add keyword forecasting. 

You can either use the click-through rates that are listed in the “CTR” tab of the forecasting template or update them with your own. You can estimate your click-through rate with your website’s data or you can use Advanced Web Ranking’s organic CTR data year-over-year or by category.

Either way, you want an average CTR for positions one to twenty. 

5. Add your keyword research

Next, you’ll update the “CTR” tab with your list of target keywords. You’ll also include the monthly search volume and your current position in those columns. 

6. Forecast your traffic for different ranking positions 

Now, you’ll forecast what your organic traffic will be if you start ranking for target keywords. You’ll do this by multiplying the volume for each keyword by the CTR for each position.

I used top twenty, ten, and three but you can use any that you want. More positions can smooth out the growth trend when you add in your keyword movement. If you are currently ranking in the top twenty for one of your keywords, you may want to also add that into the forecast so it’s a little bit more accurate.

This will give you the estimated traffic numbers for each keyword, depending on the SERP. You’ll add those together and get the total estimated traffic for each position.

7. Add the total potential traffic from keywords to the no-change forecast.

Jump back to the “Forecast” tab and go to the column labeled “Keyword movement”. Add the total keyword movement to the no-change forecast number. You decide what this is—if you think most of your keywords will be in the top twenty in the first one to two months, then add that. 

If you think you’ll move to the top ten after three to six months, then use that. You’ll noticed that the chart in the template will update automatically as you add your forecast and keyword movement. 

You’ll adjust this based on how quickly keywords appear in the search results and in what position.

Note, as you add more keywords, you’ll need to update your forecast for keyword movement. You may also want to make adjustments as you get a better sense of your organic click-through-rate. 

A Growth Marketing Spreadsheet to Help Predict the Future

This SEO forecasting Google Sheet focuses on predicting your future organic traffic growth. However, you can go a step further and predict how increasing your organic traffic will affect conversions and revenue. If you want to do this, you’ll need to know your organic conversion rate and average order value. 

Predicting organic traffic can be tricky. After all, you are trying to predict the future. However, by using historical data and keyword movement, you can set benchmarks and expectations for your SEO marketing. Hopefully, this forecasting sheet will help you get started. 

The post SEO Forecasting—A How-to Guide and Free Template appeared first on Tuff.