Let’s face it, content is the lifeblood of successful B2B marketing. Let us dive into the ‘7 Proven Hacks to Boost Your Content’s Performance & Visibility’.
“If you are not writing, posting, promoting, or sharing valuable content, you are actively putting your business at a disadvantage against competition.” Neil Patel, Digital Marketing Expert, and Thought Leader
I dedicated the longest chapter of my book “The Ultimate B2B Marketing List: 200+ Innovative Tactics You Need to Try” to Crafting Killer Content, with over 40 tactics & tips to help readers succeed.
But I understand that we’re all busy, which is why in this article I’m going to focus on the 7 easy hacks you can use today to optimize your existing content. With these hacks, you’ll be able to quickly and easily transform your content performance from “meh” to “WOW” in no time.
Let’s dive in and explore these 7 hacks!
Hack 1: Add Current Year to Your Blog Posts (or Website Content)
To increase the click-through rate (CTR) from the search results page, you can add the current year to the title or subtitle of your blog posts. This will make the content appear more relevant and up-to-date. For example, you could use titles like “How much does it cost to organize a conference in 2023?” or “Google Ads benchmarks [updated for 2023].” This tactic can help you to attract more clicks and drive more traffic to your website.
Hack 2: Update Old Blogs by 10%
By updating and republishing your old blog content, you can not only improve its relevance and accuracy but also increase your organic click-through rate (CTR) on search engine results pages (SERPs). This is because Google displays the updated publication date if the content has been changed by at least 10%. Additionally, Google tends to favor fresh content, so updating your old content will also give it an SEO boost.
Hack 3: Optimize your Headlines with Headline Analysers
Headlines are critical in all your content. They are the first thing that readers see and can significantly impact their decision to continue reading or to move on.
As David Ogilvy, the Father of Advertising said : “On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”
A good headline should be attention-grabbing, relevant, and informative, and should accurately reflect the content that follows. Headlines should also always be search engine optimized.
Update your headlines by using powerful headline analysis tools. One of my favorites is the free headline analyzer from coschedule.com, but there are others such as Sharethrough, AMI, and TweakYourBiz.
Hack 4: Incorporate Numbers in Your Headline
You can easily boost the impact of your headlines with this simple yet effective tip. As I learned from Sabry Suby’s book “Sell like Crazy”, incorporating numbers in headlines is a powerful way to grab people’s attention.
Whether it’s a blog post, whitepaper, or webinar, adding a numerical value will spark interest and signal to the reader that the content is organized and easy to consume. It can also be used to provide clear step-by-step instructions, such as “5 Simple Ways to Increase Staff Engagement” or even “7 Proven Strategies to Boost your Sales” or to share a list like the title of my book illustrates. Make this a regular practice and see the difference it makes in your readership and engagement.
Hack 5: Merge Two Pieces of Content
One way to improve the performance of your content and increase organic traffic is to merge two (or more) average-performing pieces of content into one.
This works because Google prefers content that is more than 1000 words. Additionally, the resulting article is often more comprehensive, as it contains information from multiple sources. To do this, you can use a 301 redirect to point users from the lower-authority page to the higher-authority page.
This will help ensure that the combined page receives all the traffic and benefits from the improved page authority.
Hack 6: Conduct Content Upgrades
Content upgrades can include resources such as eBooks, checklists, cheat sheets, and swipe files, basically anything that offers additional value to readers by providing more information or resources related to a specific blog post.
By offering valuable content upgrades, you can help to increase the conversion rate of your blog readers and provide them with more value in return for their engagement.
Hack 7: Repurpose Your Content
To reach more people, you really should be repurposing the content you already have. Try breaking it down and distributing it on different channels. For example, you could turn your best-performing text content into videos, audio recordings, slides, or infographics.
Alternatively, you could take your video or audio content and turn it into written or visual formats. If you have a whitepaper that covers 15 customer insights, for example, you could create 15 separate posts each covering one insight or partial paper excerpts, and post them on LinkedIn or Twitter. This will allow you to share your content with a wider audience and get more engagement. Best of all, it also saves you plenty of time.
Repurpose.io can help you repurpose content easily, by allowing you to reuse your existing content across different channels and platforms.
Here is a great idea for repurposing content: Turn your top-performing blog into an eBook. Ebooks are considered high value and will enhance engagement.