Back then, it was enough to spam your keyword in the content, and you would rank on the first page.

10 years later, the SEO game changed a lot. Now everyone is talking about backlinks and quality content.

It’s time to put this myth on a test and see if you really need backlinks to rank or quality content is enough?

And that’s what I did with a fresh domain for 10 months straight.

In this content marketing study case, I will share everything I learned from this experiment and some interesting results.

So stay till the end!
Let’s start!

Content Marketing study case

The idea behind this experiment is simple: produce 100.000 words of content in 10 months and see what happens

It’s been 10 months since I started this journey, and today I completed 100.000 words for this website. Which is an equivalent of 6 hours and 51 minutes of reading time.

I believe this is something that anyone can achieve! It’s not something extreme, I’ve seen people who write 100k in a month.

The website

This experiment was done on a fresh domain with 0 history, 0 DA, 0 PA to see conclusive results and data. I had 0 authority and no backlinks.

The CMS I used was WordPress and a paid theme that my team and I customized a bit to fit my needs.

The plugins I used are:

• Akismet anti-spam,
• Asset CleanUp Pro: Page Speed Booster,
• WPBakery, Read Meter,
• MC4WP: Mailchimp for WordPress,
• Contact Form 7,
• Updraft,
• WP Fastest Cache,
• WP Word Count,
• Yoast SEO Premium.

The content

The average length for an article is 1081 words. I wrote articles with 4100 words and articles with 700 words.

If I can’t produce at least 500 words on a topic I don’t do it.

The overall subject I choose is easy to write about. Because it is my expertise, and that’s what I recommend, don’t write about something you have no idea about.
The research part will take a lot of time, plus it won’t be fun.

Process and tools

Before writing any words you have to research the keywords you plan to rank for. If no one is searching for that topic, you write for ghosts, no one will read your stories. (trust me, the blog era is dead)

To research keywords and ranking difficulty I used: Ahrefs and whatsmyserp (free version extension on chrome).

If you don’t have 99$ per month you can use the free trial, 7 days is more than enough to create a content list for an entire year.

My criteria to find long tail keywords that I can rank was:

• Minimum search volume 50
• Maximum 10 backlinks (position 1-3)
• An irrelevant subject for the keyword intent
• old/outdated article ranking in 1-3 position

If one or better all the conditions are met I add that keyword to the list. Then, I added titles/subjects to my content planner.

This is an example of how my content planner looked like:

The most productive period of the year for me was during the lockdown when I wrote like a monster

You can see in 4 months I wrote 49.915 words.

50k in 4 months, and keep in mind that I have 6 more websites to manage, but for those, I have writers to take care of my content :D.

To collect emails I used MailChimp, but I am thinking to switch to ActiveCampaign because I heard so many good things about it.

Now let’s talk about On Page SEO.

On Page Optimization

On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing content for search engines and users. Common on-page SEO practices include optimizing title tags, content, internal links and URLs.

All the content is optimized for:

• User experience
• Bounce Rate and Dwell Time
• Search Intent
• Page loading speed

The content structure is very well optimized (H1, H2, and H3). Every blog post has a good keyword frequency and external links to help Google figure out the page’s topic.

I optimized URL structure (something I neglected in the past). It’s very easy to do it:

1. Make your URLs short.
2. Include a keyword in every URL.

Seriously. That’s it.

I used unique, keyword-rich meta descriptions.

Last but not least, optimize your images. You want to give every image on your site a descriptive filename and alt text.

To rank you want to make sure that the content :

• Satisfies Search Intent
• Is Valuable
• and easy to read (use lists, images, and supporting material as much as possible)

In terms of speed I managed to hit these marks:

• Page Size < 800KB
• Fully loaded time < 2.4 Seconds
• 40 total requests or less
• 400 ms response time from the server or less

You can test your page for free using Google PageSpeed Inshights.

Last but not least, Author Biography. This section helps your website to build trust and authority in your content and brand.

Make sure you have one on your website! Include achievements that build credibility or are interesting to the reader.

Results

Here is the interesting part After all that hard work, we want to see the results, right?

Well here you have it.

Organic Traffic

Here is a screenshot from Google Analytics:

Organic traffic grew from 0 (December) per month to 472 (September) per month.

That’s 35.75% of the total traffic.

We are only in the tenth month, and I know from Ahrefs that it takes 1-3 years for an article to rank in the top 10 results on average.

And that means we will see the real results of this experiment in 24 months. I will make sure to update this study case every 2 months.

Bear in mind that this growth was made with 0 manually created backlinks!!!

What’s even crazier, some of the pages ranked on positions 2 and 3, and we got some natural backlinks.

The domain rating raised from 0 to 21 according to Ahrefs.

Google Search Console

Let’s take a look at Google Search Console now.

Ohhh yeah, that’s what I am talking about, 2500+ highly targeted people ready to consume, inform and buy. Over 320.000 impressions with an average position of 45.2.

Yes, you can achieve higher numbers in a general niche like Lifestyle, Fashion, Pet, etc., but then the message would be harder to communicate on such diverse traffic.

Google indexed 113 and excluded 276 pages.

The index rate is not that great, I am looking to improve it in the future.

Ohh, and after the announcement of Google releasing the Page experience update, make sure you have this in your GSC:

All URLs are good for mobile and desktop. You will find this option under the Core Web Vitals menu.

Email Marketing and Revenue

What interests us at the end of the day are conversions.
How many people actually care about us? Did they interact with our content? How many bought from us?

Here is a screenshot of my audience from Mailchimp:

Out of 2500 people who visited my website from search engines, 120 subscribed to my newsletter, which is a 4.8 % conversion rate. (keep in mind that I didn’t collect emails from the start )

Sure, this conversion rate can be a lot higher if I offered them something in return for their email. (and that’s what I plan to do next

And I am not talking about the generic “here, give me your email I will send you a newsletter every week”.

No.

I am talking about really offering something valuable, it could be:

• a 10.000 words free ebook full of informations,
• a video tutorial on how to ...

Things like this make your visitor to interact with your content and ultimately buy from you.

Moving on, here are the interaction after my first email campaign.

That’s 10 people who clicked on my link, 3 people who bought a product and one instant call

What could be done better

My first and biggest mistake was: I didn’t count all the leads coming from this website.

Their is an old saying “you can’t improve what you don’t measure”.

This means I don’t know my conversion rate, didn’t had any KPIS.

When you do things randomly you just float around hoping to catch something.

More than that I wasn’t collecting emails from the start, and I didn’t had a funnel.

Make sure you set up all these things before you starting your journey

What’s next

Here is how I plan to scale the website and make more money.

I am working on understanding better what’s my customer journey. This will lead to creating an effective sales funnel.

The only way to improve your online revenue without hiring 100 sales guys is by setting up a sales funnel.

Once I have that in place, I will unify my traffic sources into the sales funnel and scale.

If you manage to customize the visitor experience as much as possible you will have success, and that leads me to another thing I am looking to implement : chat bots.

Live Chat bots with logical jumps that creates your experience based on your choices. It’s a sales funnel, but instant

After implementing these I will check Google Search Console, get a list of top 5 article that brings the most traffic and put a custom banner on each page.

My conclusion from the content marketing study case

What I learned from this content marketing study case is that you can rank and have success with less than 100$ to invest. (ahrefs free trial, hosting and domain)

Of course, this takes time and effort, but eventually, good content will always win. Content created for humans, not search engine bots.

I am not saying you shouldn’t use backlinks (you will need them eventually), they are very good if you want to scale or you want to achieve results faster. But just so you know, you can start without them. Just be patient and produce epic content.

Another important thing is to measure everything. If you have metrics, you will know your next step and where to improve.

I am planning to update this study case with new results once we hit 12 months, 18 and 36

If you want to check more interesting content from me, I am doing a 1 million dollar journey, the page where I am documenting my online income.

Now, it’s your turn.
Tell me what did you find interesting from this content marketing study case? What would you like to know more about?

Write me in the comments or give me a personal email

The post Content marketing study case – 10 months of content production appeared first on Vladislav Ray.

And this can be stressful, worrying about what you will produce today, or tomorrow—constantly brainstorming for new ideas.

Plus, Benjamin Franklin once said, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”

But there is a solution to relieve all that stress: content plan.

A content plan is such a time saver. It gives you a clear goal for the week and a sense of direction.

What I will do today with you guys is:

• research new ways to create a content plan
• create a content calendar template that I will share it with you guys

Let’s start.

How can I create a content plan?

The first thing I wanted to do was to see if theirs a new way, a better way to plan content.

After reading at least 10 articles from top-ranked websites, the answer is no; the principles are still the same.

1. Set your goals and measure them.
2. Decide the type of content you will produce.
3. Create a content calendar. 

Basically : plan, create, share, measure and repeat.

And that’s your content marketing strategy, right there :))

Let’s define togheter all this points.

1. Set your goals and measure them.

A good starting point is to define your mission.

To define your mission for your own business, try this:

I provide [target audience] with [type of content] to help them [business goals]

For example in my case:

I provide internet marketers with videos to help them grow their online revenue.

Once we know our mission it’s time to define goals and measure them.

The best way to achieve goals is to make them specific and measurable.

For example a goal can be:

Get 500 subscribers to my newsletter with 20 pieces of content.

or even

Write 20.000 words in a month.

2. Decide the type of content you will produce

There are a lot of options out there and you have to make a choice.

Now, you don’t have to pick one and create only that type of content; you can mix them. But, usually, you should have one primary type of content and 2 secondary’s.

Don’t try all types, first because you will get burnout pretty fast and second, you want people to know you for something and associate you with that thing.

Here is a list with the best Types of Content Marketing you can use:

1. Videos
2. Blog posts
3. Social media
4. Podcasts
5. Ebooks

Bonus: Case studies, Infographics.

Videos

Videos, in my opinion, should be a priority. Especially in 2021, take a look at the estimated ad spending for videos in the next years.

Videos are highly engaging content, and with the raise of Tiktok, it’s very clear you should start producing videos.

Blog posts

If you already do videos, you can transform that video into a blog post. Learn how to optimize your articles, and that can give free organic traffic in a few months.

Articles should provide valuable content for your audience. I recommend to have between 1000 to 1500 words in length, but you should always test to see what works best for your audience.

Social media

With social media, you need to create and post constantly. I know that from raising an Instagram page to 46.000 followers.

As you can see from graphs, once I stopped posting my followers went down a lot.

One tactic that I learned from Gary V is to repurpose my content.

So, if you created a video for YouTube, you take that video and repurpose it for IGTV. Take the audio from the video and transform it into a Podcast.

And then you can take that video and transform it into a blog post. You can take that blog post and post it to Facebook and so on.

Take the audio from the Video and transform it to a Podcast.

Adapt every piece of the content to the platform.

If you are still reading this, go and subscribe to my mail list to receive posts like this weekly.

Another form of content you can create is Infographics, Study Case, and Ebooks. I recommend creating an ebook once you have an audience.

Let’s get to the last part, which is:

3. Create a content plan calendar. 

As I said in the beginning, a content calendar gives you a clear goal for the week and a sense of direction.

It’s one of the primary element in a content marketing strategy.

There are several ways to do this.

For example, you can use Google Calendar and simply put the due dates for each piece of content there. That works pretty well, especially if you’re not publishing a lot of content.

Another tool you can use is Trello. Here is a template for content planner.

What I use is Google Spreadsheets.

And here I have the template that I use. You can download it for free.

Conclusion

As you’ve seen, there’s a lot of preparation work in your content marketing strategy before you actually create a piece of content.

Now when everything is set, it’s time to create the content.

With the research you’ve already done, you’ll have an idea of what type of content to create.

After you publish all the content you create leave it for at least 3 months and then measure the results.

How many subscribers you gained after posting that content? What about revenue?

I personally like to measure the impact of my content after 6 months. Especially if it’s a blog post, they tend to rank after 6 months depending on your authority.

Check my 1 million dollar journey and make money online methods.

I wish you good luck!

The post How to create a content plan and what to do with it appeared first on Vladislav Ray.

So for the next 30 days, I will create at least 3 new backlinks every day for this website.

The backlinks will be mostly web 2.0 since they are easy to create. All of them will be manual, and I will post original articles where the websites allow me to do that.

The objective is to grow external links and divesify.

Here’s a screenshot of GSC:

Let’s see after 60 days how many backlinks GSC will count.

I will keep the logs here:

Day 1

• Created 4 Social Bookmarking Links
• 1 Forum post link
• 1 Article Backlink

Day 2

• 1 article submissions
• 3 profile backlink
• 1 Slide Presentation backlink
• 1 Social media share

Day 3

• 1 Quora article created
• 1 Linkedin article
• 1 Medium article
• Registered on affiliate fix forum

Day 4

We are on day 4 and we already have +10 external links.

Here is a screenshot from Google Search Console:

• Created 1 edu link
• Imugur image backlink
• 1 image backlink
• 1 profile backlink

Day 5

• Created a Youtube channel description and added a backlink to this website.

I can’t wait to see how many backlinks we have in the end.

Day 6

• Added 2 paid guest post links
• Created 1 profile backlink with 51 PA

Day 7

• Posted 1 medium article
• I send 10 emails to different webmasters, asking them for a guest post.

The post 30 days backlink challenge appeared first on Vladislav Ray.

Hi guys! I created a new category on the blog called “How to”. Well, it’s gonna be tutorials about SEO, Marketing and web development. Since that’s my expertise

Let’s start by answering to What is structured data?

According to Yoast (the seo plugin for wordpress as we know it :), Structured data is code in a specific format — in this case Schema.org –, written in such a way that search engines understand it. Search engines read the code and use it to display search results in a specific and much richer way. You can easily put this piece of code on your website.

How does structured data/ rich snippets looks like?

Let see some examples. In this way, you will visualize and understand better what structured data is.

<html>
  <head>
    <title>Grandma's Holiday Pie</title>
    <script type="application/ld+json">
    {
      "@context": "https://schema.org/",
      "@type": "Recipe",
      "name": "Grandma's Holiday Apple Pie",
      "author": "Elaine Smith",
      "image": "https://images.edge-generalmills.com/56459281-6fe6-4d9d-984f-385c9488d824.jpg",
      "description": "A classic apple pie.",
      "aggregateRating": {
        "@type": "AggregateRating",
        "ratingValue": "4",
        "reviewCount": "276",
        "bestRating": "5",
        "worstRating": "1"
      },
      "prepTime": "PT30M",
      "totalTime": "PT1H",
      "recipeYield": "8",
      "nutrition": {
        "@type": "NutritionInformation",
        "servingSize": "1 medium slice",
        "calories": "230 calories",
        "fatContent": "1 g",
        "carbohydrateContent": "43 g"
      },
      "recipeIngredient": [
        "1 box refrigerated pie crusts, softened as directed on box",
        "6 cups thinly sliced, peeled apples (6 medium)",
        "..."
      ],
      "recipeInstructions": [
        "1...",
        "2..."
       ]
    }
    </script>
  </head>
  <body>
  </body>
</html>

Well, this is how it looks in the back. It’s a piece of code for search engine to understand better what your content is about. And this is how it looks on the search engine.

Okay, okay. I am not gonna get into the code part. There are plenty of tutorials out there that teach you how to do it anyway. Hmm but let’s find one and maybe embed one video just for the sake of it.

Ok, so this guy Rhys Davies ( at the moment he has 91 subscribers) teach you how to  Add FAQ Schema Using Google Tag Manager . So yeah man, free promo just like that

Now let me show you how I did it.

The easy way.

Add FAQ Schema markup in your WordPress website

Step 1 – Install plugin called WP FAQ Schema Markup for SEO.

Step 2- Enter to your dashboard. Then go to your blog post or page that you want to add the FAQ Schema markup.

Step 3- Scroll down till you get this.

You should see this at the bottom of the page int the dashboard.

Step 4 – Include Schema by pressing the button and then just write your question and answer.

Simple as that. That’s how you add FAQ Schema markup in your WordPress site.

Now after that. What you want to do is go to search console.

Copy the link that you just updated and hit the re-index button. That way you will tell Google that you added rich snippets and he should update the page.

This is how it should look like if everything is okay.

Sorry for the language. It’s the Romanian website for my agency UNO SOFT.

If it doesn’t work, you may want to check if there is an error in your code.

Here you can do that: Structured data testing tool by Google

I hope this was helpful to you. And if it was, share it for the world to see it.

Wish you a great day!

The post How To Add FAQ Schema markup in your WordPress website appeared first on Vladislav Ray.