What is the “holy grail” for Content Marketing? The answer is:  The ability to predictably say that if you target a keyword with a specific criteria, and produce an article that meets certain specifications, you will be “guaranteed” to rank in the top 10 of Google.  

Today we look at how CognitiveSEO can help in this quest!

The “Holy Grail” of Content Marketing might be a long shot, but we are always using our unique position of publishing A LOT of quality articles on great sites with Content Refined to try and come closer to understanding the variables that will rank your content with certainty on search engines. With the sheer number of articles published, along with access to data science talent, we were able to perform a multivariable regression analysis that we think it is worth pursuing.

In this article, we are going to talk about the results from one specific tool that can provide more metrics about both the keyword and content quality compared to almost any other tool on the market. 

CognitiveSEO provides an amazing array of metrics for data driven content marketers to dig into and analyze against the performance of their content. Where you would need data from several different tools such a SEMRush, MarketMuse and Ahrefs etc., CognitiveSEO consolidates a lot of that functionality into one super awesome tool. A great solution for those who have too many ongoing SAAS subscriptions already (I’ve been so guilty of this). 

So by using just CognitiveSEO, what are the metrics that would “guarantee” a ranking in the top 10? Come on a stats adventure with us.

Stats Disclaimer – Before we get dig too deeply into these numbers, it’s important that we share what some of the statistical performance was for these. 

The Keyword Monthly Volume, Content Performance, Article Word Count and URL Character length are the most valuable variables to analyze. Analyzing  50+ regression scenarios,12.42% r square is the best regression result available using a majority of only CognitiveSEO’s Variables. The best single regression variable, content performance, achieved an r squared value of 4.4%. In most successful multi regression analysis, a variable ” anchor” is needed to drive line of best fit. This seems to be missing as the most successful single regression variable only has 4.4% correlation to google rankings, making it hard to fit the rest of the data to variable with little fit. Actionable insights are still achieved and are explained below. 

Actionable Insights: 

If you are trying to create content that will predictably rank on google, according to CognitiveSEO, you want to follow these guidelines. 

Metrics: 

Minimum Conditions:

• Keyword difficulty should be at least 17
• Content performance score should be at least  51
• The readability score should be at least 47
• Minimum article length should be 250 words

Ideal Conditions: 

• Keyword difficulty should be at least 17
• Content performance score should be at least 85
• The readability score should be at least 65
• Minimum article length should be 1400 words

I checked to see if one of my best ranking pages met this criteria, and check out my findings below! 

My article “How to Build a PBN” is a great example of this. This article does really well–it has 10 keywords ranking in the top 3 spots on Google and it has been picked up for Google’s featured snippet for this article. 

In this case all of the “Ideal” Criteria were met!

• Keyword difficulty should be at least 17
  • For my Keyword it was 37
• Content performance score should be at least 85
  • Our content performance score was 97
• The readability score should be at least 65
  • Ours was 75
• Minimum article length should be 1400 words
  • We went big with this one and it was 14,743 words long! 

Conclusion: 

So what does this mean? Have we “cracked the code” of content marketing? According to this data analysis (which has pulled on hundreds of articles written by Content Refined) we are able to predict that if the ideal conditions of an article are met, you should be able to rank in the top 10 of Google. We’ve given you the Holy Grail–so give CognitiveSEO a try for yourself and really step up your game in the world of content marketing.

This post is to serve a couple purposes… 

• First: I hope to show that if you have a valuable service this is a way to get people on board to help promote it. 
• Second: This is where I am going to send people who reach out with messages like, “Hey you don’t know me, but promote my course/app/service so I can make lots of money”. It can be mildly frustrating when we receive these messages. 

At the bottom of this post we will share some resources on how you can achieve similar results in terms of impressive traffic increase that Doug Cunnington achieved to his sites.

End Result:

The end result of this effort was…

1. 12.83% increase in page views to the upgraded articles (in 4 weeks)
2. Doug’s niche site’s organic traffic is now at an all time high (see image below)
3. A great article explaining the strategy that resulted in that traffic increase
4. $8,388.00 in sales from 7 new customers for Content Refined

Strategy Overview:

At ContentRefined Maddie and her team developed a process called the Pareto Upgrade where they identify the content to upgrade that will have the biggest impact and be able to predictably show an increase in traffic quickly.

Doug Cunnington is a contact in the space who runs a site called NicheSiteProject. 

During a conversation with him we were comparing notes on what was working now with his sites and what we were learning from all the data analysis ContentRefined does. From that discussion an idea was born to take one of his sites, identify and complete several upgrades and share the results.

Based on those results, we completed an interview and case study post at Doug’s site you can see here.

The results of a value first approach was a win for Doug’s site, win for his audience and a win for ContentRefined. This is an example of the type of affiliate relationship of ‘value first’ that we prefer to do.

The business benefit to ContentRefined was significant with over $8k in sales and 7 well-qualified new customers we will be able to help! 

Results:

Doug Cunnington’s Case Study

Results for Content Refined: $8,388.00 and 7 new customers

Doug Cunnington made $838.80 in Affiliate Earnings

5 Key Lessons Re-Learned:

1. Always seek to add value first. 
2. Give away all the information of a strategy so anyone can execute it themselves.
3. Reaching a new audience is most efficiently done working with someone who already has an audience.
4. The people who see the largest benefit of Content Refined’s offering are profitable niche site owners.
5. Content Upgrades continue to blow me away with how fast they work, how well they work and how consistently they drive an increase in traffic.

Want Similar Increase in Traffic As Doug Achieved?

1. Do it yourself – Here is a detailed step by step guide – Pareto Upgrade Strategy
2. Have the experts at Content Refined do it for you – contact ContentRefined

My content’s predictable summer crash and how I’m overcoming it this year.

Takeaways from some research on content audits. Looking at your website and your competition’s content to assess what articles you need to be building out for your niche.

Today Content Refined turns 2.5 years old and Maddie has recently shared a BIG post about the journey!

Read about the entire journey here – Content Marketing Company or my Content Refined business review.

Plus they just had a video produced to help people learn more about Content Refined…

In this post I want to share 3 lessons I have learned from my position (idea identification, initial system architecture and assembling/stewarding the team).

Background:

In the summer of 2016 Maddie joined my team with the mandate of systematizing the content creation process for my portfolio of sites. She killed it!

From that effort we decided to launch Content Refined as a content marketing company.

I documented that launch when I announced it in this post – https://websiteincome.com/content-marketing-strategy-launch-business/

It grew incredibly well, achieving 10% week over week growth for the first few months.

There have certainly been a fair number of challenges/opportunities and in this post I hope to share from my perspective what the 3 most significant lessons were.

Lesson 1: Systems Can’t Replace People!

For everyone that reads this site they know I LOVE systems. Systematized business processes and systematic solutions to problems are core values for the business.

However, despite the engineers desire in me to build a system that doesn’t require great people to run it never happens. Great systems allow great people to execute better.

As I significantly shifted my focus in 2017 to adbank my core businesses needed to be managed and any business where there was a manager responsible for running the business did well. However any business that was solely dependent on a system went off the rails.

Maddie grew the business, Laura managed it while Maddie was on mat leave and I have had limited ongoing involvement. No system could have been built to adapt to the changed and achieved what the team has achieved!

Lesson 2: Churn is a Moral Sapingl!

Content Refined has been a great business with significant initial success and very solid longer term performance. But as with any recurring revenue business that is non-essential, churn is the enemy!

Trying to keep growth moving while fighting churn is a never ending battle and can be very unmotivating.

Sometimes even solid months feel like this…

For anyone who ever wants to dig more into recurring revenue business models this is the best article on any subject ever and it focuses on metrics – https://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics-2/

Lesson 3: Focus on your Strengths in a Congruent way!

Congruent has been my favourite business word for awhile. Ensuring the people, value proposition and systems are all aligned congruently is critically important.

Building that congruence around the set of strengths that makes you unique and focusing on it has been where our biggest successes have come from and also, when we drifted, where our biggest failures occurred.

For Content Refined, the effort around data analysis (to determine what tools/metrics give our content the best predictive ability to perform well in Google) has been very rewarding. Trying to broaden and sell other services where our set of strengths didn’t align didn’t get off the ground in a significant way (for example, an email marketing service to existing clients).

Being accountable for results and not just words, as a content marketing company that uses data (and the thousands of articles we’ve already published) to continually refine what is working now, is what has Content Refined clients loving the service.

Summary

I hope my view on the 3 key lessons while stewarding the growth of Content Refined has been useful.

If you have any content marketing needs be sure to book a free call with Maddie or Laura… they often share some pretty incredible and specific to your site insights on those calls! You can book here if there is availability.