How to Get Your Content to Rank for Specific Search Queries

Sep 30, 2020 | Events

Over the course of four days, experts from top cybersecurity companies gathered to deliver talks, panels, and sessions at CyberMarketing Con 2020. The Cybersecurity Marketing Society organized this event in order to give professionals knowledge and advice on a range of topics.

In this session on Day 2 of Cybersecurity Marketing Con, Phoebe Fasulo delivered a tactical session revealing the secrets on how to rank on SERPs (search engine results pages). This tactic can be helpful to both new and seasoned marketers.

Content Marketing Statistics 

Fasulo starts out by describing the current state of content marketing with statistics from a survey by SEMrush. 91% say that their company uses content marketing as an approach, and 77% say that their company has a content marketing strategy. However, only 9% are fully satisfied with their strategy, and 38% consider their strategy to be average. Of the livestream viewers on Fasulo’s session, 81%  are currently using content marketing as an approach at their company.

  • Blog posts constitute the majority of content produced at 86%, followed by emails and then infographics. 
  • 37% of people said that videos and other visual content seems to be the most efficient marketing tactics. 
  • 75% of respondents stated one of their priority goals as wanting to generate more quality leads.
  • 62% said that they would increase their content marketing budget in 2020.
  • The most efficient content marketing tactics include search engine optimization (67%), updating and repurposing existing content (51%), creating more video/visual content (37%), and publishing more “How to” guides/educational content, among others. 
  • Content and SEO (search engine optimization) gives long-term results compared to PPC, social media, and PR. SEO marketing typically takes 1-3 months to show results depending on traffic and the content. 
  • Blog articles containing images receive 94% more views. 
  • There are over 5,600,000,000 searches a day.

Step 1: Identifying Keyword Opportunities

Fasulo defines keywords as the foundation of any good SEO or content marketing strategy. Keywords are ideas or topics that define what your content is about. They should be relevant and specific. Utilizing keywords is a great way to engage the user from right off the back. 

Types of keywords: 

  • Broad (short, vague, high competition, high volume and traffic)
  • Middle
  • Long-tail (less competition, helps build authority, more user specific, can be extremely beneficial)

For example, ‘cybersecurity’ (broad) is searched for around 110,000 times a month while ‘cybersecurity solutions’ (middle) is searched for 560 times a month and ‘enterprise cybersecurity solutions’ (long) comes up about 20 times a month. With that information, cybersecurity companies should focus on creating more specific keywords rather than ‘cybersecurity’ because most of these searchers are just trying to gather more information on the topic, and they are not interested in industry-specific solutions. 

Tools

  • Google SearchConsole
    • Allows you to check how your site is showing up in Google (errors, speed issues, technical aspects, etc)
    • Provides you queries that lead to your site
    • First, download your queries. Delete the 1-6 most popular, and focus on the rest that you can improve your ranking in and that you may already have content in. Sort by click-through rate, and eliminate anything less than 1%. 
  • SEMrush
    • Position tracking over time
    • Keyword gap with competitors
  • Google Suggest 
    • Type in a broad keyword and examine what is suggested
  • Keywords Everywhere (Chrome extension)
  • Answer the Public 

Step 2: Analyze existing SERPS

  • Notice: content, ads, related search box, people also ask box
  • Domains, URLS, HTML titles
    • Highlight where target keyword is used in an URLs, domains, and HTML titles and how they’re using it in variations
  • Meta-descriptions
    • Don’t directly impact rankings 
    • Is the keyword in the description of the site on the search page?
  • Content Types
    • Who are ranking in the top 5 search results and what type of content are they?
    • Ex: blog, article, list/review page
    • If the top posts are all videos, and you don’t have videos then you may want to reconsider a different keyword. 
  • Company Types
    • What types of companies produce the top search results’ content? Does your company align with them?
    • Ex: vendors, review sites, etc
  • Authority
    • For the top 5 results, analyze a couple of metrics to get an idea of the company’s authority. 
    • SEMrush domain rank, Backlinks, Referring Domains 

Step 3: Review Existing Content

By analyzing your current content, you can see what opportunities you have to tweak and where you have room for improvement in your keywords. Does this content still drive traffic and will it be able to in the future?

Step 4: Execute

After analyzing content that has room for growth, you can update your existing content by changing the title,  graphics, formatting, and links, as well as adding images/other media to align with your new keyword. 

If your content is outdated, consider writing a new post or creating new content related to your keyword.

To rival your competitors you can add images and videos to your content, make longer lists, add a schema markup, include a CTA (call to action).

Step 5: Promotion and Link Building 

It is important to promote your content via social media and emails. 

Step 6: Analyze & Iterate

Review your traffic, rankings, and referring keywords. 

Takeaways

“The best part of SEO is that it really comes down to common sense.”

Fasulo says that it simply comes down to writing a blog formatted in a list, and including the target keyword in the URL, HTML title, title, and meta-description. Using SEO as marketing strategy is highly beneficial and will become easier the more you go through these steps. 

More about Phoebe Fasulo

Phoebe Fasulo is the Director of Acquisition Marketing at SecurityScorecard, a cybersecurity ratings company based in NYC. She has over 8 years of experience in digital marketing, specializing in SEO, content marketing, paid search, and social media. Prior to joining SecurityScorecard Fasulo worked at a variety of marketing agencies including Genuine and KoMarketing, as well as at The Boston Globe. Phoebe holds her B.A. in Spanish and Hispanic studies from Union College in Schenectady, NY.