Our blog turns 1 tomorrow! To celebrate our little baby growing one year older, we thought we’d review the most popular RMG blogs of the entire year. From explaining why we think they were so popular in the first place to providing some insight into the strategy behind the posts, here’s a recap of our most popular blogs from the last 364 days. Stay tuned for even more great content in the year to come!
DBM vs. DCM: What’s the Difference?
This post drives the most traffic to our site. Why? It’s a Quick Answer! Whether you’re one of our clients or have been tasked with writing SEO-optimized content yourself, there’s a reason so many SEOs talk about Quick Answers. Also called Featured Snippets, Quick Answers are the very first result on Google. (The ones that are a complete answer, and don’t require you to click through to the site.) Plus, smart home devices and virtual assistants read the Quick Answer when they give you an answer, proving that the Quick Answer position is where you want to be. Here’s an entire blog on how to optimize content for Featured Snippets, but if it seems too complicated, we can totally help. 😉
TLDR: Quick Answers work.
SEO Horror Story: Five Real-Life Creepy Tales of Digital Marketing Gone Wrong
This was our first post that “went viral.” It was written on a whim (literally on Halloween, in an hour) after we discussed how cool it’d be to have a post written for Halloween. Stephanie rushed home, whipped this out, and Mauricio took the photo. We slapped it up on the site and we weren’t prepared for what happened next. We woke up the next morning and realized that Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch had linked to our posts. (If you’re unfamiliar with the sites, they’re like the Wikipedia for SEOs and both have great authority, so getting a link from them was awesome, especially for a baby blog like ours.)
Needless to say, sometimes really fun content that’s written and published at the right time and gets seen by the right person is all it takes to go “viral”.
TLDR: Write content that’s fun and relevant, and the links will come.
Weighing the Pros and Cons of User-Generated Content
In addition to Quick Answers, another core content strategy we focus on at RMG is the Striking Distance method. The popularity of this blog is the direct result of that. After noticing this post was ranking on Page 2 for “the pros and cons of user-generated content”, we went back into the post and optimized it for that phrase (which literally took five minutes). We hit “publish” and waited for the results. And here’s what happened: The post went from the #18 position to the #1 position, where it stayed for a little bit before moving down to the #3 position, which is where it lives now. The only thing that would have been cooler is if it were actually written by one of our readers, but that might have been just a little too perfect.
TLDR: Practice what you preach.
Local SEO Trends on Our Minds in 2019
We think this article was successful for a few different reasons. 1) It was timely and relevant. It was published in early April, so it wasn’t too late in the year to post an “in 2019” post, but it was published late enough to break through a lot of the other “in 2019” posts that were being published in January and February. 2) We used the Striking Distance method on this post; by optimizing for the phrase “local seo trends” a few months after the post was published. We moved the ranking for that phrase from #14 to #2. 3) This blog has a few backlinks pointing to it. Good content naturally attracts links, but our link builder Jason also did a good job seeking out links for this blog.
This blog goes to show that taking a multi-faceted approach to content marketing is key. Some content marketers focus too much on keywords but don’t think about linkability, or they write a piece of content and forget about it, never going back to re-optimize. Don’t be those marketers.
TLDR: Don’t forget about content once it’s written.
Quick Wins: The Striking Distance Strategy
If we told you our Striking Distance post was so popular because of the Striking Distance method, would you believe us? Well, you should, because that’s at least part of why it’s successful. We think the other part is that this post provides information that’s hard to find. (Google “striking distance method” and see how many posts go as in-depth as this one does into the process.) We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again– the Striking Distance method works, and it’s much easier and less time-intensive than a lot of other content strategies out there. Just read the blog to learn more about our love for it! We promise you’ll be a believer when you try it.
TLDR: Give the people what they can’t find elsewhere.
Five Digital Marketing Lessons We Learned from the Fyre Festival Fiasco
Similar to the Halloween blog, this one was published one week after the Hulu and Netflix documentaries aired about the Fyre Festival, so everyone was searching phrases like “Fyre marketing” and “Fyre marketing disaster.” Plus, this post was written from the perspective of a marketer, talking to other marketers. This is another example of how simply joining the conversation around us with a timely, relevant piece helped us connect with our readers.
TLDR: Don’t do what the Fyre people did (or you’ll be stuck eating cheese sandwiches, too.)
So there you have it! Our six most popular posts of the last year. Check back next Thursday (and the Thursday after that….and the Thursday after that….) for even more great content from your friends at RMG.
