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Letter #10: The secret to creating high-ranking content
Expert interview on what makes SEO content rank.
Hiya homies! 👋
I'm excited (and refreshed) to share that I started this week with a do-nothing-but-basics weekend.
That is: I was able to pull together an extremely restful weekend to recharge my batteries by doing absolutely nothing. Except, of course, sipping coffee, reading (saved pieces from my Pocket app and Netflix CEO’s No Rules Rules), and getting basic home chores out of the way.
You could say such weekends are my much-needed fuel.
As with us needing fuel to recharge though, content needs fuel to rank better too.
So what's fuel for high-ranking content? Good quality? Authority and expertise? Readability? Yes, yes, and yes.
But the high octane fuel? Backlinks 🙌
Meaning: Every time you create content, you need to have a plan to attract and build links to it.
Without it, your content would likely never rank. After all, backlinks are among Google’s top 3 ranking factors.
So step 1 is to create content that’s a link-attracting magnet.
According to Digital Marketing and PR Strategist, Joanne Camarce, currently the Director of Outreach at uSERP, three link-attracting content types are:
Stat round-ups (69 SEO statistics, for example)
How-to guides (How to live stream like a pro, for example)
Infographics (doesn’t need an example, does it? 😄)
The common theme among all three? They’re all highly useful resources.
With that, I asked Joanne our three regular questions:
A mistake Joanne made as she learned about link-building content.
An actionable tip to get you one step closer to snagging a spot in the SERPs.
And, a secret tip to creating high-ranking content.
On we go:
👉 Learn from Joanne’s mistake: Not having a distribution strategy.
“This was something I didn't really pay much attention to in the beginning, but the more proactive we distributed (step 2), the better the results were,” shares Joanne.
“You may have written the best content with the perfect keywords, but if you simply publish it and don't proactively distribute your content, nobody will see it.”
👉 Do this today: Reverse engineer top-performing content.
“I can never stress this enough. You can’t beat your competition if you don't know what they have (or don't have),” Joanne admits.
Side note: I’ll walk you through how to reverse engineer ranking content in next week’s issue.
👉 The secret tip you need for creating high-ranking content: Writing highly-valuable content is one of the most important steps to creating ranking content — not the only step.
Remember: Most content out there has almost no backlinks. So the best way to get ahead is to:
“Create amazing link-attracting content that matches your searcher’s intent. Then, proactively build backlinks so it ranks on SERPs and more people will see it.”
That’s all for today.
Here’s me saying goodbye for the week!
Cheers,
Masooma
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