Creating ten times the content(marketing campaign )
Cornerstone content must properly address the demand of your audience for the pain point they are experiencing in order to rank highly and attract traffic in the long run. This entails going above and beyond the standard stuff users can get when searching for that keyword.(marketing campaign )
The phrase 10x Material was coined by Rand Fishkin, CEO of Sparktoro and former CEO of Moz, to describe content that is “10 times better than anything I can discover in the search results today.”
This information must be exceptional enough to act as a pillar (or cornerstone) for your industry in the future. It takes a lot of work to develop 10x content, which is why you performed all of the legwork in steps 1 through 4 earlier — to make sure that creating this piece of 10x content is worth the time and effort.
The main goal of your 10x content should be to provide genuine value to your audience. You must present them with genuine answers to their queries, rather than leaving them with unanswered questions that they must seek answers to elsewhere.
This material does not always have to be in the form of a long blog post or an ebook. It can also be a very well-thought-out tool.
Vanguard’s College Cost Projector, for example, will be one of the top results if you search for “cost of college estimate.” On this page, there isn’t much to look at. At first glance, the calculator appears to be similar to any other college cost calculator.
However, if you click “Look up cost” under “Current annual college cost,” you’ll see that they offer tuition costs for almost every school in the US. That’s a lot of data, and it gives the user a clear picture of how much it will cost them to attend that institution.
This tool, and the manner it’s presented, provides the user with the information they require without requiring them to visit another cost calculator.
This provides a lot of exposure for Vanguard, with thousands of new visitors to that page per month. And they’re well-versed in the interests of their target demographic. This allows Vanguard to target those users with further information via retargeting in the future, including more in-depth pieces of content and calls to action. However, they are missing out on a tremendous chance to include a call to action on this page to take consumers into the engagement and contemplation phase, such as requesting that they sign up for a newsletter or download a college savings guide.
Content of the bricks
Your cornerstone content is supported by content bricks. Blog entries, movies, infographics, and just about any other medium to long-form content can be used. You can make them on your own website, but they’re usually more effective if they exist on other people’s websites and tap into their audience.
These shorter pieces of content will focus on the other keywords in your keyword cluster, which are usually ones with a lower difficulty score.
Because those keywords have a lower difficulty score, they’re more likely to rank well in search, thus the content doesn’t have to be as detailed as the cornerstone piece of material.
Brick content’s purpose is to bring in new audiences and inbound links to your cornerstone content.
One of the most important signals used by search engines to rank content has always been inbound links. The more inbound connections your content receives from reputable websites, the better it will rank in search results. Successful brick content has a link to your cornerstone content that includes the cornerstone content’s keyword. Anchor text is the term for the linked text. It informs search engines about what other websites believe your content to be about.
Here’s an example of cornerstone and brick content functioning together in the real world:
In March of 2018, we released our 2018 Healthcare Content Marketing Report. It was our flagship piece of content, a 20-page study that could be downloaded for free. “Healthcare content marketing” was our target term, which has a modest search volume and difficulty.
Despite being focused and informative, moderate search competition meant that the report itself was unlikely to make a big splash unless we backed it up with other material that ranked well.
We needed bricks to construct our structure.
On our own site and on numerous partner sites, we developed brick content that connected back to the study.
Convince & Convert’s Jay Baer chose to write the essay himself, resulting in the 26 Best Topics in Healthcare Content Marketing. We also included keywords like “medical content marketing” and “healthcare market research” in the titles of our own material on other partner sites.
We attempted to link back to the report using the anchor text “healthcare content marketing” on each of those sites in some way. This anchor text told search engines that our report on healthcare content marketing was about “healthcare content marketing.” And the fact that it was now linked to by other reliable websites demonstrated that it was a reliable source of information.
What’s the end result? In just a few weeks, our cornerstone material rocketed to the top of Google’s search results for “hospital content marketing.”
Our brick content, which aided the rise of our cornerstone material, also rocketed to the top of the search results. As of this writing, two of the top four search results for “healthcare content marketing” are pieces of material we authored or collaborated on for that campaign.
