1) Assess 2) Build 3) Amplify
Phase 1: See what’s working and what’s not
Maybe you’ve invested in content already, or a podcast, or LinkedIn, or any number of marketing tests. In this first month or two, we look at every activity you spend time, energy, and money on, and evaluate it against your goals.
We ask tough questions, like:
Is the website doing what you want it to do?
What is your best-performing activity and worst-performing marketing activity right now?
Which activities align with your vision?
If you could wake up and never have to do X again, what is it?
Then, we look deep into the data to verify the numbers. The data will tell us what’s working, what’s an opportunity, and what’s a risk.
Data helps us prioritize where to start.
We look at marketing activities, and we look at the website.
If you already have some pages on the website, we’ll start with the most promising, highest performing, and most visible. We’ll also tackle the broken pages and irrelevant pages.
Is a full site audit really necessary? Usually, we will come pretty close to it. Your users rely on a good website experience to find what they need, and sometimes that means completing SEO audits to fix what seem like minor issues, but add up to big improvements.
Then let’s cut your lowest-performing marketing activity. Are you on Instagram but hate it? Are you asking your CEO to post to LinkedIn every Friday but you’re not sure if it’s even helping? Together we’ll assess your least influential activity, and make a data-driven decision about its role in your marketing plan.
Phase 2: Build Content
After tightening up the site, we aim to increase the authority of key pages by improving the overall usefulness of the page. This includes editing the copy, images, calls-to-action, and more.
We focus on enhancing these elements throughout the site:
Accessibility: Are you making efforts for someone with impairments to have a good experience on your site?
E: Experience: Do you highlight your case studies in places where they will help conversion?
E: Expertise: These are your staff’s credentials, your writers’ credentials, and the overall contribution to thought leadership your site is making. Are you showing this effectively in the right places?
A: Authority: Do you have the data, certifications, licenses, and associations that make you an authority in your space?
T: Trust: Is the site secure?
S: Speed: Does the site load on a typical mobile phone in less than 3 seconds?
As you can see, it’s a lot more than just adding Alt text to images (but yes we will do that too).
We prioritize improvements based on what’s the lowest-hanging fruit, plus what will get us the best results. On any given day we might improve the copy on a product page, smooth out the signup flow, apply for Google News, murder a blog post, or improve your main navigation. There are over 200 direct and indirect ranking factors, and we’ll focus on the ones that generate the most trust in the highest-impact places on your site.
Phase 3: Outreach & PR
Once the site is clean, content is up to date and you have some juicy assets that are relevant and timely, it’s time to start showing ourselves off.
The long-term levers to pull are building content, improving old content, and distributing content.
Scale content: A long-term content roadmap tells us what users need, and what we can build next.
Earned media outreach: Proprietary data can be a competitive advantage that enables you to create sexy, eye-catching headlines and pitch those to reporters for authentic shareable coverage in today’s top publications. Let’s get you on some podcasts, quoted in articles as an expert, and amplify our reports through our organic partners.
Then it’s up to you
Now it’s up to you to execute the long-term content plan and continue doing outreach on your journey to a high-traffic, high-engagement website. I leave you with the keywords, SOPs, templates, and more to make this process straightforward for a junior content creator.