📂 How to get the fastest ROI from your content promotion and link building

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Today's newsletter is by my friend and SaaS link building expert Alan Silvestri.

Alan is my go-to on link building and an absolute SEO expert.

And for the Swipe Files audience only, he's sharing some behind the scenes content on his process for content promotion and link building.

A lot of people want to promote their content. But most people focus on the wrong pages.

They may publish 4 new articles per month and just because they have published those pages, they either:

1. Do nothing. This is the most common choice.
2. Build links to all the new pages, one at a time just because they’re there.

What about all of that great content you’ve spent days planning and writing? Most of it is just gonna sit there and do nothing for you.

This kinda feels like you’re punching yourself in the face, am I right?

What you need is a roadmap. A document that tells you what to promote, why and in which order.

But first, let me tell you why this is important.

There are a few issues with promoting random content without a direction or knowing why you are promoting it.

1. Content promotion takes time, and it takes even more time for pages to rank especially for more competitive keywords.
2. A lot of your content might be ranking for keywords that are not relevant to your business or even worth promoting and ranking for.
3. The more time you spend on the wrong content, the longer it’s going to take you to actually get an ROI from your content.

At the end of the day, your content doesn’t only cost you money to plan and create. Every single day a piece of content sits on your site without doing anything (ranking for keywords, bringing in sign ups etc), can be considered sunk cost.

How do you actually make your content work for you then?

Here’s our process to prioritize pages for content promotion and link building by creating what I call a Content Promotion Roadmap.

1. Work out what kind of keywords you could “more easily” rank for

Start by setting what we call a “Keyword Difficulty baseline” and organizing keywords into buckets (shoutout to Robbie Richards for this tactic).

I use Ahrefs KD metric for this.

Here's how you determine the KD baseline:

• A) Export your top-ranking KWs (position 1 to 3)

With a simple spreadsheet and graph you can visualize how many keywords you have in each KD level:

• B) Define your KD buckets based on your distribution and what you see from the graph. The more keywords are in a KD level, the easier it will be to rank for that level.

Here are the buckets for that specific graph:

In this example:

• Most of our keywords are below KD 15.
• We're also doing a pretty good job with KWs below KD 40.
• We have some potential for keywords up to KD 70 as well.

Let’s keep these numbers here for now, we’ll need to come back to them in a bit.

2. Get your “quick-win” pages

Use Ahrefs again to find what keywords you’re ranking for on pages 1-2.

These are your quick wins i.e the pages that have the most potential of ranking higher in the next 60/90 days.

Typically pos. 4-20, but can be 4-30 or even 4-50 for newer websites that have fewer pages ranking.

I like to use the Top Pages report from Ahrefs for this step because it shows only one page and its top-ranking keyword.

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The drawback here is that the Top Pages report doesn't provide us with the KD for each keyword.

So, we need to get that separately by copy/pasting all of our keywords into the Keywords Explorer > Export the .csv and add the KD data to our KW file.

Now that we’ve got a complete list, let’s prioritize:

3. Build your keyword shortlist

For each keyword, ask yourself:

• a) Does your page match search intent?
• b) Is the keyword relevant to your goals?

Reminder: Not all of your top-ranking keywords are going to be relevant to your business and content promotion goals.

• A) Does your page match the keyword's search intent?

Here’s a common mistake:

You might be ranking for "pricing books" but your page is actually about "how to price a book" while the other pages that are ranking are about "the best books on pricing"

• B) Is the keyword relevant to our goals?

You might be ranking for "author name" with an author page if that person is well known, but that doesn't mean you actually need that for your content marketing goals (i.e. the page doesn't convert).

To make sure you’re not doing this, add a "Relevant?" column to your spreadsheet where you can type YES/NO for each page.

4. Add sales data to the list (number of leads/sign-ups + conversion rate)

If you have Analytics set up you can grab that data there.

For newer sites, you can skip this step because you’re going to go after the low hanging fruits anyway.

At this point your spreadsheet will look like this:

Now that you have your KW shortlist complete with conversion, traffic, and backlink data, it's time to use that data to identify your best opportunities.

I love using conditional formatting to highlight the best opportunities.

The closer to green a cell is, the better the opportunity.

I'm using it on the following columns:

• Ref. Domains: green = fewer RDs
• Position: green = ranking higher
• Volume: green = high volume
• Traffic value: green = higher value
• KD: green = lower KD
• Total Leads: green = more leads
• Conversion rate: green = higher CR

Look for keywords/pages that:

• don't have a lot of links already
• are ranking well
• have good search volume and traffic value
• have low KD (or within our KD baseline number)
• are bringing in leads
• are converting well

These are your final roadmap pages.

5. Prioritize the list

Here's how I do it:

• A) Filter to only see one KD bucket at a time starting with the "easy" bucket.
• B) Sort the position column from higher to lower and only 1-10.
• C) Assign your priority order to these pages
• D) Move on to the next KD bucket

6. Perform a “Deep-Dive” analysis

At this point, you have a prioritized shortlist of your top pages based on QUANTITATIVE data.

Now, you want to look at QUALITATIVE data.

Here's how I do this:

Add 3 extra columns to your spreadsheet (Search intent, Content-Type, Content Quality, and Compete):

A) Search intent/Content-Type:

• YES = MATCHES SERP
• NO = NO MATCH TO SERP

How to check:

1. Look at the target keyword and your target page in Ahrefs Keyword Explorer SERP overview.

2. Ask yourself: - Does my page match the other pages ranking above it in terms of topic/intent and type (blog page, home page, landing page etc)?

Caveat:

If not, does it at least have a unique or interesting angle to the topic? (Thanks Andrea Bosoni for this)

B) Content Quality:

• YES = QUALITY OK
• IMPROVE = Surfer SEO Content Score < X = see recommendations

How to check:

1. Manually check the pages ranking above you.

2. Ask yourself:

• Does my page look better?
• Is my content more in-depth/useful?

You might say this is all a bit subjective, this is why we also have a 3rd step.

3. Do a content audit using a tool like Surfer to get a data-driven and actionable analysis.

C) Compete?

• YES = SCHEDULE THE PAGE IN YOUR ROADMAP
• NO = DISCARD THE PAGE

How to check:

• Simply put, if at least 2 out of the 3 checks you do are positive, then the page has the potential to compete.
• If not, then I would discard it (or schedule to completely rework the content).

To recap:

1. Work out what kind of keywords you could rank for
2. Look for quick wins
3. Build your keyword shortlist.
4. Add sales data to the list (number of leads + conversion rate)
5. Prioritize the list
6. Perform a deep-dive analysis

This process allows you to:

1. Focus on the easiest KWs/pages first
2. Optimize them if needed
3. Push them up the rankings
4. Get more leads/conversions
5. Move to the more difficult KWs/pages
6. Repeat over and over as you publish more content

Now you can directly tie your content promotion/link-building efforts to increase revenue/ROI

This is so valuable. Now you can make a solid argument for that link building or promo budget

—Alan

Thanks again to Alan for sharing on link building and content promotion.

What did you think?

—Corey

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