Drastically Increase Your SEO Instantly (Really)

Search for 'increase your SEO instantly' and you'll find 'instant' tips that actually take months.  This insider tip delivers big results that literally begin overnight.

Many larger brands, even $100M companies, struggle with showing up in organic search for their most core keywords.  Scenario:  You’re pushing out great content, but because your domain rank is lower (25 – 60), your content rarely makes it to page1 search results for anything but long tail keywords.  Your blog limps along without growth.  New content gets a spike as soon as it’s released, but after a few days it’s never seen again.

Initially, the CEO and the VP of Sales are supportive.   “We know you’re doing your best.”   But you know the thought they’re not saying out loud is, “This is our core competency, and we do it better than anyone else. Why aren’t we ranking on p1 for these keywords?”

Here is the quandary –  if you have a lower domain score, people are going to have a hard time finding you – especially for competitive keywords.  The chart below is regularly published by Advanced Web Ranking and it shows how many people see p1 content compared to page 2+ content.  This is what it tells us:  If you rank on page 1 you’re competing with 9 other publishers for 71.33% of the available traffic.   If you rank on page 2, you’re competing with 9 other publishers for only 3.99% of the traffic.*

*Source = Advanced Web Ranking, 2014 Google Organic CTR Study.  More recent reports from June and July 2016 show that p1 results now account for over 78% of total keyword traffic.

Because user engagement signals (including bounce rate, linking, and sharing) influence your search rank, if p1 content gets 20x more visibility than p2+ content, then it’s also getting 20x more opportunities to earn user engagement – which in turn keeps it ranking in p1 results, month after month.  Just as an insurance salesman continues to earn residual income long after he’s sold you insurance coverage, high-ranking content continues to earn traffic dividends over a long term.
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To illustrate, below are two typical traffic patterns.  The green line represents a piece of high ranking content, and the orange line represents a piece of poorly ranking content.  Both pieces of content were published the same day.

Here’s the rub.   There may be no difference in quality between the two pieces of content.   The lower ranking content only dies because people have stopped talking about it.  Google and many of the content marketers of our time set us up to believe that all good content has Field of Dreams potential.  The fact is, though, that to rank highly – your content must first be seen by many people.
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So back to your CEO / VP of Sales.

Building a strong organic traffic engine is a slow and time-consuming process.  You’re not going to have any good news for her today, or any time soon.  There are no short cuts. 

Are there?

Actually, there are.  Through Written, you may license content that’s already ranking highly for keywords that are important to your business.  Written is a content provider with an edge – instead of buying new content, you license a proven performer.  “We help marketers find readers already engaged with content relevant to their brand, and bring them into a brand’s content efforts,” says Bill Fanning, Written co-founder and COO.  The process is simple:
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• Tell Written which keywords you want to rank for
• Review Written’s findings of top-ranking content for those terms, and select the best fitting content for your business
• Written negotiates licensing (or purchase) agreements with the writer on your behalf
• Install Written's plug-in (also used by content authors, to ensure appropriate management of links, redirects and canonical)
• Publish the content on your website
• Use the space around the content to engage visitors with your brand

There are multiple benefits to Written’s approach:

• Immediacy.   If you license a piece of content through Written that typically gets 4,000 monthly visitors, your website will immediately see 4k more visitors per month.  Further, because of the ripple effect of high-quality content across an entire domain, most companies will observe a 10 – 20% increase in organic traffic to their own content.   This positive benefit to your existing content is a key reason this strategy can make a difference in ROI this quarter.  You’ve already invested in all that content!  Using Written is like using premium gas in your car - driving better performance out of your existing content.  I’ve seen companies literally double their blog traffic overnight.
• Legitimacy.
  • For Publishers:  Written’s platform for transferring content adheres to Google’s recommended best practices.  The platform’s rules eliminate any risk of content looking like a guest blog or duplicate content. 
  • For Authors:  Written’s platform ensures that writers get paid for the use of their content.   Criminal plagiarism of web content is a growing in both prevalence and impact.  Using Written is a badge of authority that says a Publisher respects and honors the value of authors.
• Post-partnership benefits.  You get to keep all the added attention your own content gets by being more noticeable.  All links and shares earned by your owned content during your license with Written remain with your domain, even if you should stop using Written’s services.

Now it’s your turn.

Does your blog fail to thrive?  Have you used Written already?  What were your results? 

Please share your recommendations, frustrations, strategies and wisdom with all of us via comments below.

This article is third in a series of “5 Strategies to Improve Marketing ROI in 90 days.”  Also in this series:
Can Longer Lead Forms Actually Deliver More Revenue
Get a Quick ROI Lift from ABM Advertising

Trisha Merriam is VP of Demand Generation at SWOPtimize, focused on helping companies optimize their digital marketing strategy for higher volume and better quality leads.  We are Your Partner in Awesome.

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