Merged Marketing Podcast

174 – Avoiding the “Content Graveyard” with Alan Silvestri

In today’s episode, we discuss Avoiding the “Content Graveyard.” My guest expert today is Alan Silvestri, the founder, and CEO of Growth Gorilla. They help B2B SaaS companies promote their content to get high-quality publishers to link to it, increase traffic and sign-ups, and win at the SEO game. Alan is also a Back to the Future fanatic and daily drives a Delorean.

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Alan’s affiliate marketing building sites in the early days – He built a site debunking health myths using thoroughly researched content. He also created content on hair loss for women. He enjoys working with clients to create content in areas they are passionate about and spreading content on their products.

What is The content graveyard – Alan defines content graveyard as unpromoted content sitting idle on Google pages, not adding any value to the business. To avoid this, Alan employs strategic link promotion where they promote specific pages with more potential to rank higher in the short term (90 days).

Accessing content with more potential – They get conversion data from the client and use google analytics and their link-building SEO analytics to create a short list of pages with the most business potential.

Alan’s link-building process: He looks at the pages linked to the client’s competition to get a feel of the type of content on topics and subtopics and uses them to find similar pages not linked to any competitor. It provides room for a unique pitch to the competitor to link back.

Role of social media in the strategy against content graveyard – They use social media for brand awareness but not for SEO benefits. He recommends that a company or business should seek where people are, such as on Reddit, instead of randomly publishing on all its social media sites.

Some issues SaaS Companies have with creating content – Alan observes that SaaS companies have excellent content creation but need to improve on the promotion side. As such, there is a lot of similar content across many SaaS businesses, meaning that differentiation is a major challenge. To go around this, Alan advises that a business should utilize its product within its published content to help and demonstrate to the target audience how to solve a problem with the product.

Helping a SaaS company create content – They assess existing content on pages with the most links from a few competitors and establish those ranking well. After that, they develop something similar but with a better spin to resonate better with the audience.

How are you using Chatgbt in your business? Alan says that they use it as an assistant for tasks like link prospecting and generating extra sentences or anchor text in articles. However, he laments that ChatGbt is only an assistant, not the real writer, because human input is still crucial in content creation. (The biggest misconception is that content creators solely rely on Chatgbt for creation while it is only part of the human brain extension)

Trends in SEO in the year 2023 – Alan predicts that links will have less impact on content promotion. This explains the ongoing shift to actual distribution by seeking communities where people hang out. He believes that artificial intelligence interventions will run most of the tasks, rendering organic search a bit irrelevant (It is a good idea to go where your audience is instead of waiting for it to come to you).