How to Create Content for SEO

Hi, I'm Asia from HubSpot's SEO team. In this course we're going to talk about holistic content strategies, the topic cluster methodology, what a search insights report is. And not to give too much away, but the last part is definitely my favorite how to create your very own search insights report. So, first things first, what do I mean by holistic content strategy anyways? The way I think about it, content can generally be categorized into three buckets. The first category, content that generates traffic, is probably the one you're most familiar with because this is the bread and butter of SEO. Basically, you're creating a piece of content that's intended to drive traffic from search. Why create this type of content? Well, not only are you helping a lot of people, which is going to introduce them to your brand, but you're also making your site more competitive in search across the board. And that authority will extend to your product pages, your landing pages, etc. To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, let's look at an example of a blog post in this bucket. Doing pretty well, right? The second category that we create is usually called thought leadership or link bait. Unlike the first bucket of content, the goal is not to rank for keywords, although it might do that anyways. The target is usually generating buzz and backlinks. Here's Another example from HubSpot. This page has gotten more than 2000 backlinks and was covered by some pretty cool sites like Forbes Entrepreneur Moz. It's not actually getting that much organic traffic, however, because people don't search for future of content marketing very often. That query only has a monthly search volume, aka MSV of 50, meaning that it gets 50 searches every single month. The last category is lead gen, which tends to bring in less traffic. The upside is that traffic is higher qualified. These are the people that are going to download your content offers. They're typically known as bottom of the funnel and it's a lot closer to revenue than the other two buckets of content. The last example, nearly 2,000 people download this social media content calendar template every month. After visiting our blog post, it's really tough to prioritize all three buckets of content equally. I actually see a lot of teams creating one type of content and kind of forgetting about the other two. To be completely honest, that's exactly the trap that HubSpot fell into. So I'm going to tell you a short story. Go back to February 2018. Our blog was getting several million organic visitors per month, which is definitely enough traffic to make most marketers super happy. But when you take a step back and look at organic traffic over time, you see that it's actually steadily going down. We needed to do something, change something. So in March of that year, I created a new strategy around what we at HubSpot call the search Insights Report. That's what we're going to learn how to create today. In the months following the release of a new Search Insights report, which our blogging team uses to create content, the blog starts ranking for tens of thousands of new keywords. Traffic has completely reversed that downward trajectory, and our backlink profile has gone up to 5 million plus links from 84,000 referring domains. We've also set new records for the number of leads and software users coming to us from the blog. I I think this shows that when you use a holistic content strategy, you're going to get more bang for your buck from every type of content. In other words, one plus one equals three. So that's the why. Now let's talk about the how.