Top Content Marketing Strategies For MSPs
Looking for ways to stand out from your competition?
Content marketing is where we spend a great deal of our time and effort at Ulistic, as we find just the right keywords that will drive traffic to our clients' websites. Taking the keywords that you are interested in and translating them into a comprehensive content marketing strategy takes a fair bit of time and effort -- and that doesn't include the time for actually creating the new content! Here are a few of the tools and techniques that we leverage to create the compelling content that drives website visitors to deepen their engagement with your brand.
Research Top Pages with Ahrefs.com
Wouldn't it be great if you could tell exactly which keywords your competitors are using to drive traffic, so you could dip into the well of their followers? A tool that we use on a regular basis is called Ahrefs.com. Ahrefs is used to analyze competitor's websites and their traffic patterns, to see where they're getting their content from as it can help you build a content strategy around specific keywords. You can filter traffic by countries -- what you're looking for are pages on the website with high traffic and low referring demand from competitors. Another key metric that you want to be as low as possible is "referring domains". Once you've found a keyword that meets these criteria, you should be able to create a keyword set that is ideal for fairly easy optimization on your site.
Stalk Your MSP Website Competitors
Okay, this is a little less scientific than working through Ahrefs, but the results can be every bit as valid. The last thing you want to do is to recreate something that your MSP website competitors have already done, but you might find inspiration and a way to improve on a particular topic through deeper research, deep links and more. See something that's getting a lot of social traffic or comments? That topic may be one that's engaging audiences, and would be worth consideration as a future topic on your blog or even as a content upgrade for people to download.
Are You Listening to Your Audience?
You're probably not going to call each of your clients and ask what they are concerned about, but there are other ways of listening that don't have to be so passive. It's a good possibility that your customers are clearly communicating their interests, simply based on their search terms and the pattern of activity on your MSP website. Are there particular sections that seem to be getting the most traffic (cybersecurity, perhaps?!?) -- if so, these are great topics around which to generate content.
Update Top-Performing Posts
Is there a particular post that you wrote several years ago that still brings people to your website in droves? These top-performing posts aren't hard to find -- simply check your website analytics to see which topics are most engaging for your readers. Recreating an older post or refreshing the content with recent developments allows you to revisit the engaging topic and provide your audience with added value, too. You might find that posts that perform well on social media could be completely different than the topics that are working well through other channels, so be sure to review all of your relevant content distribution channels for ideas.
Create Commentary on Hot News Topics or Industry Trends
Are there new tools hitting the market that you think your audience would be interested in? Perhaps you just read about a malicious malware that is targeting organizations similar to your customers. These are all topics of interest to a broader audience, and may be just what you need to jump to page one of Google's search results. Organizations are always looking for ways to be more competitive -- or to improve their security posture. There is a lot of conversation around data security requirements in Europe and the U.S., and it's not unusual to see a report about yet another organization being hit with a data breach. If you're able to add useful commentary to help translate these concerns for your audience, you may have a winner!
While you can always use the tools that we recommend, you may not have the time to invest to implement a knock-your-socks-off SEO strategy. If you need help creating content for your MSP or are seeing your website traffic drop off over the years, contact the digital marketing professionals at Ulistic today. We only work with MSPs, and have a deep and broad understanding of marketing strategies that will get your business noticed on a search engine results page and beyond. Contact us today to claim a complimentary review of your current MSP website with our CEO, Stuart Crawford or check out our services offerings tailored for MSPs.
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