The Science of Content Development with Gabriella Sannino @SEOcopy #vcbuzz

Digital content marketing has been changing a lot over the years.

It started as a way to trick search engines into thinking a page is relevant to a search query.

Content marketing has slowly evolved into a way to position a brand as a knowledge hub, grow your business’s authority and attract organic leads.

How to create useful and SEO-friendly content these days?

Let’s discuss!

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About Gabriella

Gabriella Sannino @SEOcopy is an International marketing & SEO consultant as well as co- founder and the senior project manager at Level343

Level343 LLC @level343 is a search marketing and SEO company specializing in geo-targeting for local, national and international markets.

Connect to Gabriella on Linkedin

Questions we discussed

Q1 How did you become a digital marketer? Please share your career story!

It started out of Uni. I sold ad space in various local publishing space…worked with a local marketing/advertising/radio space. Wrote a few short ads for radio spots. Sold ad space fell in love with dot.com when I moved to SF.

Back in my day in the early 90’s I noticed people were gun shy about making things appealing online since it was nothing but porno, gay space and pharmaceuticals. But as a salesperson/merchant at heart, I knew about closing.

If you want to get someone’s attention…You were either the loudest, flashiest or you guided the buyer to convince you of why they needed your product.

How do you convince a buyer without doing the hard sell? How do you close unless you CLOSE and ask the client to do something? People need to be guided to an action, most people in your website are there for a reason

Q2 Content creation: What does it take? Let’s talk about how much content brands need to be creating and what would it cost them?

Where marketing is concerned with the four P’s of price, place, product, and promotion, consumer psychology adds the why, where, when, and how to the mix.

A2 There's no magic amount: You need as much content as it takes to answer your audience's questions! #vcbuzz
— Anna Fox (@manifestcon) January 4, 2022

If your competition is ranking for every one of your keywords, you need to take your content development very seriously. Some would argue good links would take care of that challenge; however, it doesn’t address your commitment to your brand users or buyers.

It's a huge mistake trying to create new terms describing something that people are already searching for, just because competitors rank there. Let the competitors do some audience education for you. Take that term and build long-tail content around it for your position. #vcbuzz
— Don Dingee (@don_dingee) January 4, 2022

I don’t disagree @don_dingee theres always room for long tail or short tail strategy

How much it would cost ultimately depends on your budget. In a perfect world you would already know where your buyers are, and budget accordingly. Blog posts to videos, infographics, IG, now TickTock for a minimum of 3-6 months. measure, tweak, rinse repeat

A2
As I see it, content creation is wrapped around a content strategy – which is hyper focused on the business goal.

The content created supports the goal.#VCBuzz
— Debi Norton (@BRAVOMedia1) January 4, 2022

Audiences are smart to know they’re being sold. Reminds me of what Scott Cook said, “A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is – It is what consumers tell each other it is” Basically, listen to the audience to understand what the story is!

A2: When it comes to content creation, it should always be quality over quantity. Focus on the 20% that produces 80% of the result. #vcbuzz
— VirtuDesk (@virtudeskcom) January 4, 2022

What's the best way to answer clients' question: "How often do I need to publish content on my blog?" #vcbuzz
— Jessy Troy (@jessytroy) January 4, 2022

How many blogs: beyond once a week, think about how many you can reasonably put out on a regular basis. You can always do extra, but first define what you can do every week.

Q3 Content SEO Now vs 10 years ago: How is content different these days?

Content has/will always be important as long as people search on the web. -Google got better at figuring things out. BERT, E.A.T., Conversational, User Interfaces to mobile searches near me, they’re constantly making things easier for the user.

A3
Content over the last 10 yrs has evolved greatly, now we're working with content in video, social media, podcasting, and still blogging.#VCBuzz
— Debi Norton (@BRAVOMedia1) January 4, 2022

The competition wasn’t near as fierce as it is today. ranking nowadays takes more than just a few articles. It takes commitment to a strategy that has to be continuously monitored, tweaked, updated along with all of Google’s capricious updates.

A3: Drastic difference in terms of relevance. Different form of content, like feature snippets etc, which are game changers for users. More content patterns in results based on search intent which is major change. #vcbuzz
— Hiren vaghela (@hirendream) January 4, 2022

Q4 What should content marketing goals be and how to evaluate content performance?

Content marketing goals encompass a stronger brand & better leads. It’s either informational or promotional. Prequalify your audience as “target market” doesn’t mean “the people coming to my website.” It means “the people I WANT to come to my website.

A4
Ultimately content marketing is to support the biz goals, as said before. Evaluating the performance is based on engagement, conversions & ROI (KPI's)

Gotta love the jargon.?#VCBuzz
— Debi Norton (@BRAVOMedia1) January 4, 2022

Content performance evaluations can be as simple or as easy as you want to make them. Content audits, for example, can be excellent tools, but how much information do you want to incorporate? How granular do you want to go?

Really important concept for B2C and local SEO. Pulling traffic from outside your local market might feel good, but if there's no way (or more accurately, place) to convert them it's wasted effort. #vcbuzz https://t.co/8i9NPDil74
— Don Dingee (@don_dingee) January 4, 2022

What’s the engagement on each piece? What kind of traffic do your pages get: organic, social/referral? How long do they stay? How often do they choose the CTA? How many backlinks have they received? In my mind, the more data, the better insights.

You want to encompass the basics of SEO then you can always read through this SEO guide checklist

Q5 What are your favorite content development tools?

I wish I could sound all techie and spew out a bunch of cool tools… but really my #1 My brain, when I look at a site, I’m taking an inventory with my eyes, my understanding, does this page speak to what they offer.

A5 – Exactly. "Eyes on the site" is equivalent to "boots on the ground". It puts you in the thick of it, so we get real first impressions of the content before we ever get into the tools. #vcbuzz
— Jahnelle Seaman (@jrpittman) January 4, 2022

All kidding aside… Lately, we’ve really been looking at SEMRush’s content tools, as well as BuzzSumo and even ahref’s Content Exploration tool.

A5 @Buzzsumo, @textoptimizer and @Ahrefs are great platforms I use every day for content development! #vcbuzz
— Ann Smarty (@seosmarty) January 4, 2022

We also like to dig into Yoast’s SEO tool for WordPress; many would be surprised at all the possible ways to dig up content development opportunities. Most recently we picked up jetoctopus