Dec 2 2025
Signal Vs. Noise: Predicting Future Impact Of Content Marketing

This edited excerpt is from “B2B Content Marketing Strategy” by Devin Bramhall ©2025, and is reproduced and adapted with permission from Kogan Page Ltd.

Marketing can contribute to company growth in many different ways: Net new sales, customer retention, reduces risk from competitors, sometimes creates new revenue streams (like events) that impact more than one company goal, bringing a product to market successfully, feature adoption/upsells, to name a few.

The challenge marketers have is convincing multiple stakeholders that their work did, in fact, contribute to any of these areas. Even if you have goals and agreed-upon metrics to measure success, reporting on marketing ends up being fraught with all kinds of complications, from the political and interpersonal to depth of knowledge about marketing and what shows up as “impact” and “value” to the business.

The opportunity for marketers in this situation is that the people who need to be convinced don’t know what “the answer” to marketing attribution is either. They argue with each other about it behind closed doors and change their minds a lot, but they honestly can’t really prove anything better than you can. They just bought into some corollary model or made one up and have spent a ton of time campaigning internally and out in the world to make other people believe their way is correct, and eventually some of them do.

Predicting Future Impact

Most reporting focuses on what’s already happened – last month’s lead generation, last quarter’s revenue, or last year’s customer acquisition costs.

While historical data is crucial to making future decisions, it also keeps marketing leaders in a reactive position. By the time you identify a problem, it’s already affected your results. Leading indicators give you time to adjust course when needed, rather than explaining missed targets after the fact.

That’s why monitoring the signals along the way is also useful, if executed thoughtfully.

A few caveats:

  • Monitor quietly. You don’t have to share what you observe with your executives 1) at all, or 2) until you’re ready. They’ll either get confused or too excited, and neither leads to a good place for you.
  • Work with your data team. Whatever job title they’ve been given at your company, find the people who have access to the raw data and ask them questions. Be specific about what you want to know. You don’t have to know the exact data types, time periods, or segments. They just need a detailed question to get you what you need.
  • Talk it through. Since data contains multiple realities depending on how you slice it, I’ve always found it helpful to run any conclusions or stories by my data team and, where possible, my boss (see first bullet!). Basically, I look for two different analytical perspectives:
    • Someone whose job it is to ensure our data is accurate.
    • Someone whose job it is to analyze data for reporting on the business.

Remember: Reporting isn’t a single use-case activity. Reflecting on the past to measure impact is just one way to leverage reporting. Use it to inspire new ideas, optimizations, and experiments, too.

Read more: How To Write SEO Reports That Get Attention From Your CMO

A Few Potentially Useful Signals You Can Monitor

Ultimately, it’s up to you to determine which signals provide valuable insights into the performance of your marketing initiatives. And regardless of your role, whether it’s producer, manager, or team lead, as your boss, I’d expect you to know how to determine what those are.

Also, the exact signals you monitor will continue to change as technology and the internet evolve. However, there are a few informative signals that have stood the test of time (thus far) for me.

Resonance

When it comes to resonance, unprompted action on even a semiregular basis is a huge signal that something you’re doing is working, so even if your data is statistically insignificant, I’d lean in and, at the very least, conduct further experiments.

One example of this is folks sharing and referencing a topic or idea you share publicly in their own content (and how their followers react to it) on a semi-consistent basis. This indicates you’re at least on the right track with content direction.

In my experience, search volume for a keyword or phrase is minimally helpful in determining resonance in the beginning. As in, just because no one is searching for a topic doesn’t mean it’s not a common problem. A more useful exercise in search monitoring to me is whether your campaign corresponds with an increase in search volume in that time period.

Activity

The same principle applies to other actions as well. Are folks commenting on posts asking for your opinion on specific problems they are experiencing? Are you receiving anecdotal feedback semi-consistently on specific marketing initiatives or topics you’re investing in?

Do folks engage with your content even when you’re inconsistent? One client I worked with saw 60-70% open rates even on major holidays or when the newsletter was sent off-schedule on a Saturday or Monday.

Are you seeing an increase in time-on-page or pages per session from certain topics or even specific pieces?

Copycats

While not a perfect signal, if your competitors start copying your content, it’s either a sign you could be onto something or an indication that their strategy isn’t working, they don’t have one, or they’re struggling. No matter the case, it’s a signal worth paying attention to and perhaps doing some recon to find out if there are any weaknesses you can exploit.

Ultimately, your goal is to explore these signals to establish whether there are correlations between these leading indicators and your ultimate business outcomes. This isn’t just theoretical – it requires analyzing your data to identify patterns that predict success for your business.

Turning Measurement Into Mastery

Effective reporting isn’t the end of your marketing journey – it’s the bridge to your next phase of growth. Measuring the impact of content marketing isn’t just about proving its value; it’s about creating the leverage you need to execute strategies that genuinely move your business forward.

Remember these essential principles as you develop your measurement approach:

  • Numbers don’t tell stories – people do. Your data provides ingredients, but you create the meal. The most powerful reports transform complex metrics into clear narratives that inspire action and build confidence in your strategy.
  • Measurement serves strategy, not the other way around. When you begin with clear objectives and understand what truly influences behavior, metrics become tools for insight rather than constraints on creativity.
  • Reporting is campaigning. The most successful marketers recognize that performance reporting is ultimately a persuasion exercise – one that requires understanding audience motivations, building relationships, and consistently communicating value.
  • Both measurable and unmeasurable impacts matter. While focusing on quantifiable metrics, never lose sight of the equally valuable but harder-to-measure effects of brand building, relationship development, and community growth.

By developing measurement systems that capture both immediate impacts and leading indicators, you transform reporting from a dreaded obligation into a strategic advantage.

Summary: Practice And Persistence

As you apply these principles to your own marketing, remember that mastery comes through practice and persistence. You’ll make mistakes, discover unexpected insights, and continuously refine your approach. That’s not just normal – it’s the path to excellence.

To read the full book, SEJ readers have an exclusive 25% discount code and free shipping to the US and UK. Use promo code “SEJ25” at koganpage.com here.

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Nov 27 2025
From Organic Search To AI Answers: How To Redesign SEO Content Workflows via @sejournal, @rio_seo

It’s officially the end of organic search as we know it. A recent survey reveals that 83% of consumers believe AI-powered search tools are more efficient than traditional search engines.

The days of simple search are long gone, and a profound transformation continues to sweep the search engine results pages (SERPs). The rise of AI-powered answer engines, from ChatGPT to Perplexity to Google’s AI Overviews, is rewriting the rules of online visibility.

Instead of returning traditional blue links or images, AI systems are returning immediate results. For marketing leaders, the question is no longer “How do we rank number one?” but rather “How do we become the top answer?”

This shift has eliminated the distance between the search and the solution. No longer do customers need to click through to find the information they’re seeking. And while zero-click searches are more prevalent and old metrics like keyword rankings are fading fast, it also creates a massive opportunity for chief marketing officers to redefine SEO as a strategic growth function.

Yes, content remains king, but it must be rooted in a foundation that fuels authority, brand trust, and authenticity to serve the systems that are shaping what appears when a search is conducted. This isn’t just a new channel; it’s a new way of creating, structuring, and validating content

In this post, we’ll dissect how to redesign content workflows for generative engines to ensure your content reigns supreme in an AI-first era.

What Generative Engines Changed And Why “Traditional SEO” Won’t Recover

When users ask generative search engines a question, they aren’t presented with a list of websites to click through to learn more; instead, they’re given a quick, synthesized answer. The source of the answer is cited, allowing users to click to learn more if they so choose to. These citations are the new “rankings” and most likely to be clicked on.

In fact, research shows 60% of consumers click through at least sometimes after seeing an AI-generated overview in Google Search. A separate study found that 91% of frequent AI users turn to popular large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT for their searching needs.

While keyword optimization still holds importance in content marketing, generative engines are favoring expertise, brand authority, and structured data. For CMOs, the old metrics no longer necessarily equate to success. Visibility and impressions are no longer tied to website traffic, and success is now contingent upon citations, mentions, and verifiable authority signals.

The AI era signals a serious identity shift, one in which traditional SEO collides with AI-driven search. SEO can no longer be a mechanical, straightforward checklist that sits under demand generation. It must integrate with a broader strategy to manage brand knowledge, ensuring that when AI pulls data to form an answer, your content is what they trust most out of all the options out there.

In this new search era, improving visibility can be measured in three diverse ways:

  • Appearing in results or answers.
  • Being seen as a thought leader in your space by being cited or trusted as a credible source.
  • Driving influence, affinity, or conversions from your digital presence.

Traditional SEO is now only one piece of the content visibility puzzle. Generative SEO demands fluency across all three.

The CMO’s New Dilemma: AI As Both Channel And Competitor

Consumers have questions. Generative engines have the answers. With over half (56%) of consumers trusting the use of Gen AI as an education resource, generative engines are now mediators between your brand and your customers. They can influence purchases or sway customers toward your competition, depending on whether your content earns their hard-earned trust.

For example, if a customer asks, “What’s the best CRM for enterprise brands?” and an AI engine suggests HubSpot’s content over your brand, the damage isn’t just a lost click but a missed opportunity to garner interest and trust with that motivated searcher. The hard truth is the Gen AI model didn’t see your content as relevant or reliable enough to deliver in its answer.

Generative engines are trained on content that already exists, meaning your competitors’ content, user reviews, forum discussions, and your own material are all fair game. That means AI is both a discovery channel and competitor for audience attention. This duality must be recognized by CMOs to invest in structuring, amplifying, and revamping content workflows to match Gen AI’s expectations. The goal isn’t to chase algorithms; it’s to shape the content in a meaningful way to ensure those algorithms trust and view your content as the single source of truth.

Think of it this way: Traditional SEO practices taught you to optimize content for crawlers. With Generative SEO, you’re optimizing for the model’s memory.

How To Redesign SEO Content Workflows For The Generative Era

To win citations and influence AI-generated answers, it’s time to throw out your old playbooks and overhaul previous workflows. It may be time to ditch how you used to plan content and how performance was measured. Out with the old and in with the new (and more successful).

From Keyword Targeting To Knowledge Modeling

Generative models go beyond understanding just keywords. They understand entities and relationships, too. To show up in coveted AI answers and to be the top choice, your content must reflect structured, interconnected knowledge.

Start by building a brand knowledge graph that maps people, products, and topics that define your expertise. Schema markup is also a must to show how these entities connect. Additionally, every piece of content you produce should reinforce your position within that network.

Long-tail keywords may be easier to target and rank for in traditional SEO; however, optimizing for AI search requires a shift in content workflows, one that targets “entity clusters” instead. Here’s what this might look like in practice: A software company wouldn’t only optimize content around the focus keyword phrase “best CRM integrations.” The writer should also define its relationship to the concept of “CRM,” “workflow automation,” “customer data,” and other related phrases.

From Content Volume To Verifiable Authority

It was once thought that the more content, the better. This is not the case with SEO today as AI systems prefer and prioritize content that’s well-sourced, attributable, and authoritative. Content velocity is no longer the end game, but rather producing stronger, more evidence-backed pieces.

Marketing leaders should create an AI-readiness checklist for their content marketing team to ensure every piece of content is optimized for generative engines. Every article should include author credentials (job title, advanced degrees, and certifications), clear citations (where the statistics or research came from), and verifiable claims.

Create an AI-readiness checklist for your team. Every article should include author credentials, clear citations, and verifiable claims. Reference independent studies and owned research where possible. AI models cross-validate multiple sources to determine what’s credible and reliable.

In short: Don’t publish faster. Publish smarter.

From Static Publishing To Dynamic Feedback

If one thing is certain, it’s that generative engines are continuing to evolve, similar to traditional search. What ranks well today may change entirely tomorrow. That’s why successful SEO teams are adopting an agile publishing cycle to continue to stay on top of what’s working best. SEO teams are actively and consistently:

  • Testing which questions their audience asks in generative engines.
  • Tracking whether their content appears in those answers.
  • Refreshing content based on what’s being cited, summarized, or ignored.

Several tools are emerging to help you track your brand’s presence across, ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, and more, including SE Ranking, Peec AI,  Profound, and Conductor. If you choose to forego tools, you can also run regular AI audits on your own to see how your brand is represented across engines by following the aforementioned framework. Treat that data like search console metrics and think of it as your new visibility report.

How To Measure SEO Success In An Answer-Driven World

Measuring SEO success across generative engines looks different than how we used to measure traditional SEO. Traffic will always matter, but it’s no longer the sole proof of impact. For CMOs, understanding how to measure marketing’s impact is essential to demonstrate the value your team delivers to the organization’s mission.

Here’s how progressive CMOs are redefining SEO success:

  • AI Citations: How often your content is referenced within AI-generated responses.
  • Answer Visibility Share: The percentage of relevant queries where your content appears in an AI answer.
  • Zero-Click Exposure: Instances where your brand is visible in AI responses, even if users don’t visit your site.
  • Answer Referral Traffic: The new “clicks”; visits that originate directly from AI-generated links.
  • Semantic Coverage: The breadth of related entities and subtopics your brand consistently appears for.

These metrics move SEO reporting from vanity numbers to visibility intelligence and are a more accurate representation of brand authority in the machine age.

Future-Proof Your SEO For Generative Search

Generative search is just as volatile as traditional search, but volatility is fertile ground for innovation. Instead of resisting it, CMOs should continue to treat SEO as an experimental function; a sandbox for continuously testing new ways to be discovered and trusted. SEO continues to remain a function that isn’t a set it and forget it, but one that must change with time and testing.

CMOs should encourage their team to A/B test content formats, schema implementations, and even phrasing to see what appears in AI generated responses. Cross-pollinate SEO insights with PR, product, and customer experience. When your organization learns how AI represents your brand, it becomes a feedback loop that strengthens everything from messaging to market positioning.

In the near future, the term “organic search” will become something broader to encompass the fast-growing ecosystem of machine-mediated discovery. The brands that succeed won’t just optimize for keywords. They’ll build long-lasting trust.

The Next Evolution Of Search

The notion that AI is killing SEO is false. AI isn’t eliminating SEO but rather redefining what it means today. What used to be a tactical discipline is shifting to become a more strategic approach that requires understanding how your brand exists within digital knowledge systems. It’s straying from what’s comfortable and moving into largely uncharted territory.

The opportunity for marketing leaders is clear: It’s time to move past the known and venture into the somewhat elusive realm of generative answer engines. After all, Forrester predicts AI-powered search will drive 20% of all organic traffic by the end of 2025. At the end of the day, many of the traditional SEO best practices still apply: create content that’s verifiable, well-structured, and context-rich. The main mindset shift lies in how to measure generative engine success, not by rankings but by relevance in conversation.

In the age of AI answers, your brand doesn’t need to just be searchable; it needs to be knowable.

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Nov 24 2025
The Founder-Led Growth Loop: How To Amplify And Measure Executive Voice For Real ROI via @sejournal, @purnavirji

In this series (here and here), I’ve covered why founder-led marketing works and the systems you need to stay consistent, based on the playbook I co-authored for LinkedIn (my employer).

You’ve built the content engine and the operational frameworks to avoid burnout. Now comes the final, most critical part: proving it works.

Your founder provides the authentic voice. Your job as the marketer is to amplify that voice to the entire market and build the measurement framework that proves to the board, “This is working.”

This is how you turn a content strategy into a scalable, predictable, full-funnel growth loop.

Part 1: Amplify What’s Already Working

Your founder’s organic content is resonating, but it’s only reaching their first-degree network. Why guess what might work when you can use data to amplify what’s already working?

This is the most efficient paid strategy you can run, because paid works better when it’s built on trust. Our playbook data shows that startups whose directors post actively already generate 33% more leads through their paid campaigns.

Your secret weapon is Thought Leader Ads (TLAs).

TLAs are a LinkedIn ad format that lets you promote posts from individuals – founders, employees, even customers – rather than just your company page. They look and feel like organic posts: authentic, human, and scroll-stopping.

In general, TLAs are a high-performing format resulting in 1.5x higher click-through-rates (CTRs), 30% more efficient cost-per-click (CPCs), and 2x follower growth.

Apply them to startups and the impact is even bigger:

  • 7.6x more engagement than any other paid ad format.
  • 5x higher video engagement with video TLAs than regular sponsored video ads.

This isn’t just a top-of-funnel awareness play. You can use TLAs to build a full-funnel machine:

  • Top-of-Funnel: Amplify your founder’s best “scar story” or “contrarian take” post to your entire Ideal Customer Profile.
  • Mid-Funnel: Retarget everyone who engaged with that TLA with a more direct offer, like a Conversation Ad or a Lead Gen Form for a webinar.
  • Bottom-of-Funnel: Add this engaged audience to your nurture sequences and track them as they become sales-qualified leads.

The foundation is your founder’s best organic posts. From there, you can plug them into a full-funnel paid strategy.

Part 2: Build The Measurement Framework

This strategy feels right, but you have to prove it.

The biggest challenge in founder-led marketing is that the most important metrics – trust, reputation, resonance – don’t show up on a simple dashboard. They show up in your deal velocity, your DMs, and the way people talk about you when you’re not in the room.

There are ways you can start to track these on LinkedIn. Let’s break it down.

First 90 Days: Track Leading Indicators

Validate whether your content is resonating before it drives pipeline:

  • Engagement quality: Comments from ideal customer profiles (ICPs), DMs received, reposts by peers.
  • Audience growth: Follower count, especially from target segments.
  • Conversation starters: Number of inbound messages or replies sparked by content.
  • Profile metrics: Track who’s viewing your profile after seeing your posts.

LinkedIn recently expanded its analytics for individual members, giving you more visibility into how your content performs. Under the “Analytics” tab, you can now track:

  • Profile views from a post.
  • Followers gained from a post.
  • Audience demographics (job title, industry, location).
  • Premium button clicks (if you have a custom CTA).

These metrics help you move beyond vanity metrics to start measuring resonance – what’s landing, with whom, and why.

What not to do: Obsess over engagement metrics, delete underperforming posts, or let your founder compare themself to established thought leaders. These habits will drain motivation before your systems are strong enough to carry them through the dip.

Next 90 Days: Track Momentum

Track how your content is influencing relationships and reputation:

  • Prospect mentions: Train your sales team to log every time a prospect mentions your founder’s content during calls.
  • Dark social mentions: Track when your content gets shared in private peer networks like Slack groups or email threads.
  • Content-influenced deals: Create a CRM field to tag every prospect who mentions your posts.

Scott Albro, TOPO founder, does this in Salesforce by creating a “content-influenced” deal stage and tagging every prospect who mentions posts, comments, or competitor reactions. Then he measures deal velocity and pipeline.

Irina Novoselsky, CEO of Hootsuite, shared her results in the playbook: “I just did the math on my daily LinkedIn commitment over the last 3 months—10M+ impressions generated. But most importantly, 37% of our monthly leads are influenced by my social presence.”

Her team saw measurable business impact:

  • Executive presence was mentioned more frequently in sales calls in Q1 2025 than in all of 2024.
  • Deals closed faster when buyers referenced her content.
  • Enterprise opportunities influenced by her social presence had higher ACV.

Kacie Jenkins, former SVP of Marketing at Sendoso, found that when a prospect followed one of their Director+ executives on LinkedIn, they saw 11% higher win rates and 120% larger closed-won deal sizes.

Peep Laja, CEO of Wynter, tracks self-reported attribution: “About 80% of people signing up for Wynter or scheduling a demo say they found me on LinkedIn.”

6 Months Onwards: Business Impact Metrics

Track your lagging indicators:

  • Increasing inbound pipeline: Gal Aga’s rule is “if 20%+ of your pipeline mentions your content, you’ve won”.
  • Increasing deal velocity: Deals with content-influenced leads close faster due to pre-established trust
  • Attracting talent: Job applicants cite your posts.
  • Owning your category: You’re increasingly referenced in industry conversations.

Connect The Paid Loop

This final step connects amplification and measurement. How do you prove your TLA spend is driving revenue?

Use LinkedIn’s Conversions API (CAPI) to connect your CRM and website data directly to LinkedIn. This gives you visibility into offline actions and helps you attribute pipeline.

LinkedIn’s revenue attribution tools let you measure impact at the business, campaign, and company level. One tech company using revenue attribution found 36% higher win rates and 37% shorter deal cycles.

Startup advisor Canberk Beker sums it up: “When founders connect their organic presence to paid strategy – and measure both direct and influenced pipeline – they see outsized ROI. We’ve proven that TLAs lift demo requests and drive cross-channel conversions.”

Your Role As The Growth Multiplier

A founder-led strategy is a game-changer for sales and marketing.

Your founder’s job is to be the authentic voice. Your job as the marketer is to build the machine around them.

By connecting an authentic organic strategy with a high-powered amplification lever and a sophisticated measurement framework, you create a complete growth loop.

This is the modern marketing engine, one that builds trust at scale and proves its impact on the bottom line.

All data, quotes, and examples cited above without a source link are taken from the “Founder-Led Sales and Marketing Never Ends” playbook.

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Nov 18 2025
B2B Content Marketing Has Changed: Principles Of Good Strategy

This edited excerpt is from B2B Content Marketing Strategy by Devin Bramhall, ©2025, and is reproduced and adapted with permission from Kogan Page Ltd.

Modern content strategy is no longer about being a brand megaphone, shouting messages across digital space.

Modern content strategy that works is a blended approach designed to create community around shared experiences, build lasting relationships, and establish genuine trust and influence. It’s about leaning into individuality within niche communities by creating content that resonates with individuals and small groups rather than trying to appeal to the masses.

And it’s definitely not a pursuit of ubiquity, in the ways brands used to do it by creating a dominant presence on every platform and community space.

Instead, it’s about taking fewer actions to accomplish more. Playing a supporting role in the community sometimes by elevating others. It’s about building relationships that motivate action rather than force it. Mostly, it’s about creating frameworks and principles to guide and evaluate your decisions so you can develop your own “playbook” that works for your company and community.

Principles Of Good Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing exists to serve business goals by solving customer pain points. It accomplishes this through education and relationship-building:

Education attracts potential buyers and influencers by providing immediate value in the form of short-term solutions (awareness and affinity).

Establishing trust allows your brand to become an ongoing part of your community’s lives by speaking their language, empathizing with their challenges, and solving their problems (nurture and engage).

Relationship formation creates alignment between external promises and internal experiences – the product delivers on the expectations set by content (convert, grow LTV, and upsell).

The goal is to help first and sell second – at which point customers often feel they reached decisions independently. They become eager to invest in both the product and the relationship. This is how content marketing works organically based on human behavior.

It’s also the stuff you already know.

Content marketing teams guided by the following principles consistently achieve superior results.

Create Unique Advantage

No other company exists with your exact combination of product, people, and resources. Your first job as a marketer is to identify what you already have that can be leveraged for growth.

This could be your founder’s network, your CMO’s substantial LinkedIn following that overlaps with your target buyers, or a product feature that solves a previously unaddressed problem. It might be an upcoming conference where your CEO is speaking to 300 decision-makers who gather only once per year.

Other advantages might include:

  • Budget, software, and technological resources.
  • Existing audiences, email lists, or content archives.
  • Market position (whether as an established leader or disruptive newcomer).
  • Opportunistic events like funding announcements or key hires.
  • Your own unique talents, experiences, and connections.

The goal is to create a content strategy that:

  1. Competitors can’t easily duplicate because they lack your specific advantages.
  2. Generates exponential impact by leveraging opportunistic events, efficient execution, and activities that serve multiple outcomes simultaneously.
  3. Is scalable with repeatable elements that compound over time and can expand with relative ease.

A prime example comes from Gong, the revenue intelligence platform. While competitors focused on standard SaaS marketing playbooks, Gong leveraged their unique advantage: Access to millions of sales conversations and the data patterns within them. By sharing insights from this proprietary data, they created content no competitor could replicate, establishing themselves as the definitive source of sales intelligence while simultaneously demonstrating their product’s value.

Serve Outcomes It Can Logically Impact (Better Than Other Approaches)

Strategy that serves business goals does need to be measured to ensure it’s serving those outcomes, and ideally, how well it achieves them. Yes, I’m talking about ROI.

The benefit of having clearly defined, quantifiable, time-based outcomes is twofold:

  • It helps you narrow down tactics.
  • It gives you a target to “bump up against” to extract learnings for continuous improvement.

This principle forces you to evaluate each potential marketing activity against a simple standard: Is this the best way to reach the business outcome we want, or are we doing it because it’s the way we’ve always done it?

Can Be Executed With Existing Resources

A strategy is only as good as your ability to execute it.

Your plan is only strategic if you factor in all constraints, including budget and resources. If you come up with a “brilliant” idea that you know is unlikely to be funded, then it’s not brilliant in the context in which you want to apply it.

So, if you come up with something that could really move the needle and you want to get funding for it, come up with an MVP and call it a test. Once you’ve shown impact and dazzled the purse-holders, then it’ll be easier to get budget to expand and do more. So start by getting buy-in on only those resources you need to execute a bare minimum version that demonstrates enough impact to justify additional investment. One approach that has worked for me (though it’s not a silver bullet) is to treat it like a sales activity. All I need is enough of the right kind of information that whoever I’m pitching to will:

  • Understand without a complex explanation.
  • See a type of business impact they recognize as valuable.
  • Not care too much about it (i.e., the investment is negligible to them).

Your best-case scenario at this stage is not enthusiasm; it’s disinterest. You want them to feel like saying yes is an errand, almost like it’s a waste of their time.

This requires keeping a ton of details to yourself – especially the ones your leadership will question. Also useful, make it feel familiar and demonstrate you listened to them by pointing out areas where you intentionally factored in something they wanted or advised. Think of it like landing page copy. Your “conversion” is a yes, so what details and messaging will get you that conversion?

This doesn’t mean your strategy can’t be ambitious. Rather, it means being realistic about what you can sustain long enough to see results.

Serves Outcomes It Can Logically Impact (Better Than Other Activities)

It doesn’t matter what size your marketing team is – at some point, you’ll be tasked with showing impact beyond what seems possible with your current resources. This is where strategic thinking becomes essential.

Content marketing strategy plays a crucial role in driving business results. What sets a strategy apart from a simple plan is its ability to serve as a unified and thoughtful response to a significant challenge, as emphasized by Richard Rumelt in his book “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy.”

A plan is simply a list of activities you know you can accomplish, like running errands in a particular order to minimize time. Strategy, by contrast, is using the resources you have to show enough impact that decision-makers will recognize, making sure you remind them over and over in different ways about that impact, then using that as leverage to get the budget to do what you wanted to in the first place.

This doesn’t mean your strategy can’t be ambitious. Rather, it means being realistic about what you can sustain long enough to see results that you can use to do more later.

Grounded In Facts, Not Best Practices

Choose channels, tactics, and messages based on YOUR customers, not on what others are doing or what industry best practices dictate.

At some point, nothing we currently do in marketing existed before. SEO, for example, was once considered a growth hack. It wasn’t in the content marketing lexicon, let alone on any list of best practices. Someone discovered it could provide unique advantage for their company to appear first when people searched for specific solutions.

This principle requires you to reason from your specific facts:

  • How do YOUR customers make purchase decisions?
  • What channels do THEY genuinely use for discovery and research?
  • What unique circumstances does YOUR company face?

What might appear as constraints – limited budget, market position, team size – can often become advantages if you approach them with curiosity and objectivity.

Designed To Have Exponential Impact

Most “strategies” content marketers present are just action plans that itemize tactics they will execute over a period of time to hit a goal.

Create content, distribute, convert people, measure results, repeat.

But think about how content marketing itself came to exist. It was all about leverage. Take SEO, for example. It was essentially a “free” way to get more people to visit your site without paying for ads. And for a while, it was an ROI multiplier, meaning that the amount of investment required to execute was minuscule compared to the long-term impact it would have over time. That’s a strategic ratio.

Now, SEO is a part of B2B marketing modus operandi. The ratio is more incremental; thus, it’s not really a strategic activity, it’s more of a table stakes tactic.

The opportunity for marketers now is to come up with a scalable way to transform bespoke interactions between people from the company and community across multiple mediums into ROI for the company that they can sustain. This means designing your strategy such that some activities serve more than one purpose or outcome, as well as having “self-sustaining” elements (i.e., automations, workflows, etc.) built in.

To read the full book, SEJ readers have an exclusive 25% discount code and free shipping to the US and UK. Use promo code “SEJ25” at koganpage.com here.

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Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Nov 11 2025
Ask An SEO: Do I Need To Rethink My Content Strategy For LLMs? via @sejournal, @MordyOberstein

For this week’s Ask An SEO, the question asked was:

“Do I need to rethink my content strategy for LLMs and how do I get started with that?”

To answer, I’m going to explain the non-linear journey down the customer journey funnel and where large language models (LLMs) show up.

From rethinking traffic expectations to conducting an audit on sentiment picked up by LLMs, I will talk about why brand identity matters in building the kind of reputation that both users and machines recognize as authoritative.

You can watch this week’s Ask An SEO video and read the full transcript below.

Editor’s note: The following transcript has been edited for clarity, brevity, and adherence to our editorial guidelines.

Don’t Rush Into Overhauling Your Strategy

Off the bat, I strongly advise not to rush into this. I know there’s an extreme amount of noise and buzz and advice out there on social media that you need to rethink your strategy because of LLMs, but this thing is very, very far from settled.

For example, or most notably, AI Mode is still not in traditional search results. When that happens, when Google moves the AI Mode tab from being a tab into the main search results, the whole ecosystem is set for another upheaval, whatever that looks like, because we don’t actually know what that will look like.

I personally think that Google’s Gemini demo (the one they did way, way back, where they showed customized results for certain types of queries with certain answer formats) might be what AI Mode ends up resembling more than what it does right now, which is purely a text-based output that sort of aligns with ChatGPT.

I think Google will differentiate those two products once it moves AI Mode over from the tab into the main search results. So, things are not settled yet. And if you think they’re not. They are not settled yet.

Rethinking Traffic Expectations From LLMs

The other thing I want you to rethink is the traffic expectations from LLMs.

There’s been a lot of talk about citations and traffic – citations and traffic, citations and traffic. I don’t think citations, and therefore traffic, are the main diamond within the LLM ecosystem. I believe mentions are. And I don’t think that’s anything really new, by the way.

Traditionally, the funnel has been messy, and Google’s been talking about that for a long time. Now, you have an LLM that may be a starting point or a step in that messy funnel, but I don’t believe it’s fundamentally different.

I’ll give you an example. If I’m looking for a pair of shoes, I might go to Google and search, [Are these Nike shoes any good?]. I might look at a website, then go to Amazon and look at the actual product.

Then I might go to YouTube, see a review of the product, maybe watch a different one, go back to Amazon, have a look, check Google Shopping to see if it’s cheaper there, and then head back to Amazon to buy it.

Now, you have an LLM thrown into the mix, and that’s really the main difference. Maybe now, the LLM gives me the answer. Or maybe Google gives me the answer. Then I go to Amazon, look at the product, go to Google Shopping to see if it’s cheaper, watch a YouTube review, maybe switch things up a bit, go back to ChatGPT, see if it recommends something different this time, go through the whole process, and eventually buy on Amazon. That’s just me, personally.

It’s important to realize that the paradigm has been around for a while. But if you’re thinking of LLMs as a source of traffic, I highly recommend you don’t. They are not necessarily built for that.

ChatGPT, specifically, is not built for citations or to offer traffic. It’s built to provide answers and to be interactive. You’ll notice you usually don’t get a citation in ChatGPT until the third, fourth, or fifth prompt, whatever it is.

Other LLMs, like AI Mode or Perplexity, are a little bit more citation or link-based, but still, their main commodity is the output, giving you the answer and the ability to explore further.

So, I’m a big believer that the brand mention is far more important than the actual citation, per se. Also, the citation might just be the source of information. If I’m asking, “Are Nike shoes good?” I might get a review from a third-party website, say, the CNET of shoes, and even if I click there, that’s not where I’m going to buy the actual shoe.

So, the traffic in that case isn’t even the desirable outcome for the brand. You want users to end up where they can buy the shoe, not just read a review of it.

The Importance Of Synergy And Context With Content

The next thing is the importance of synergy and context with your content. In order to be successful with LLMs, it’s not about (and I’ve heard this before from people) that the top citations are just the ones that already do well on Google. Not necessarily.

There might be a correlation, but not causation. LLMs are trying to do something different than search engines. They’re trying to synthesize the web to serve as a proxy for the entire web. So, what happens with your content across the web matters way more: How your content is talked about, where it’s talked about, who’s talking about it, and how often it’s mentioned.

That doesn’t mean what’s on your site doesn’t factor in, but it’s weighted differently than with traditional search engines. You need to give the LLM the brand context to realize that you have a digital presence in this area, that you’re someone worth mentioning or citing.

Again, I’d focus more on mentions. That’s not to say citations aren’t important (they are), but mentions tend to carry more weight in this context.

Conducting An Audit

The way to go about this, in my opinion, is to conduct an audit. You need to see how the LLM is talking about the topic.

LLMs are notoriously positive and tend to loop in tiny bits of negative sentiment within otherwise positive answers. I was looking at a recent dataset. I don’t have the formal numbers, but I can tell you they’re built to lean neutral or net positive.

For example, if I ask, “Are the Dodgers good?” LLMs, in this case, I was looking at AI Mode, which will say, “Yes, the Dodgers are good…” and go on about that. If I ask, “Are the Yankees good?” and let’s say two or three weeks ago they weren’t doing well, it won’t say, “Yes, the Yankees are good.” It’ll say, “Well, if you look at this and you look at that, overall you might say the Yankees are good.”

Those are two very different answers. They’re both trying to be positive, but you have to read between the lines to understand how the LLM is actually perceiving the brand and what possible user hesitancies or skepticism are bound up in that. Or where are the gaps?

For instance, if I ask, “Is Gatorade a great drink?” and it answers one way, and then I ask, “Is Powerade a good drink?” and it answers slightly differently, you have to notice why that’s happening. Why does it say, “Gatorade is great,” but “Powerade is loved by many”? You have to dig in and understand the difference.

Running an audit helps you see how the LLM is treating your brand and your market. Is it consistently bringing up the same user points of skepticism or hesitation? If I ask, “What’s a good alternative to Folgers coffee?” AI Mode might say, “If you’re looking for a low-cost coffee, Folgers is an option. But if you want something that tastes better at a similar price, consider Brand X.”

That tells you something: There’s a negative sentiment around Folgers and its taste. That’s something you should be picking up on for your content and brand strategy. The only way to know that is to conduct an audit, read between the lines, and understand what the LLM is saying.

Shaping What LLMs Say About Your Brand

The way to get LLMs to say what you want about your brand is to start with a conscious point of view: What do you want LLMs to say about your brand? Which really comes down to: what do you want people to say about your brand?

And the only way to do that is to have a very strong, focused, and conscious brand identity. Who are you? What are you trying to do? Why is that meaningful? Who are you doing it for? And who is interested in you because of it?

Your brand identity is what gives your brand focus. It gives your content marketing focus, your SEO strategy focus, your audience targeting focus, and your everything focus.

If this is who you are, and that is not who you are, then you’re not going to write content that’s misaligned with who you are and what you’re trying to do. You’re not going to dilute your brand identity by creating content that’s tangential or inconsistent.

If you want third-party sites and people around the web to pick up who you are and what you’re about, to build that presence, you need a very conscious and meaningful understanding of who you are and what you do.

That way, you know where to focus, where not to, what content to create, what not to, and how to reinforce the idea around the web that you are X and relevant for X.

It sounds simple, but developing all of that, making sure it’s aligned, and auditing all the way through to ensure it’s actually happening … that’s easier said than done.

Final Thoughts

LLMs may shift how your customers find information about your brands, but chasing citations and clicks isn’t a solid strategy.

Despite the chaos in AI and search in the age of LLMs, marketers need to stick to the fundamentals: brand identity, trust, and relevance still matter.

Focus on brand identity to build your reputation, ensuring that both users and search engines recognize your brand as an authority in your niche.

More Resources:

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Oct 21 2025
A Smarter SEO Content Audit: Aligning For Performance, Purpose & LLM Visibility via @sejournal, @coreydmorris

A major category, focus, or pillar (as I have defined it for decades) of SEO is content. Influencing a range of on-page factors, but more so to develop authentic context and authority status over the years, content has been an engine of so much SEO and is a focal point in the shift from keyword-focused to visibility in the era of LLMs, AI search results, and organic search results in integrated thinking.

With a focus on content needs of today, combined with those from the past few years, a popular way to understand content’s effectiveness is to conduct SEO content audits. As we look at content auditing in a more versatile way for broader visibility, I believe it is important to address the fact that audits often fall into one of two extremes:

  • Too shallow to be useful – using an automated tool and lacking data and a point of view.
  • Too deep and detailed to be usable – so much data, so much crawling, and so many topics that it’s difficult for search engines and LLMs to understand the actual focus.

With AI and LLMs changing how content is discovered and interacted with, we can’t afford to rest on the content we have created in the past and to assume past performance will provide future positive results. I believe a better model is a performance and purpose-driven audit that prioritizes actions based on business impact and newer visibility models.

SEO content audits, which evolve to stay relevant in today’s search and AI environment, need to account for the fact that search behavior is shifting. I’m not going to unpack the stats or talk about search market share in this article, but trust that you’re seeing the impact in your stats and dashboards. As we shift with the market, we do have to think more about answers and authority signals.

Even if we have a finely tuned content machine that has every possible AI-driven efficiency built into it, we can’t afford wasted efforts and content bloat. Flooding search engines and LLMs with bloat, whether human-generated or AI-generated (or some combo), is wasted if it isn’t working for us. This is especially true for B2B and lead-generation-focused companies that have longer customer journeys and sales cycles.

Marketing and corporate executives expect performance and find out too late that outdated or ineffective content didn’t translate from keyword rankings to AI visibility. Leveraging a content audit that balances having enough depth, but being actionable and focused on business value, is as important as ever.

How To Conduct A Performance-Driven, LLM-Aware Content Audit

I’m advocating a modern and repeatable framework that replaces traditional SEO content audits with one that is more useful and aligned to how things work today.

1. Define Purpose

We have to start off by getting on the same page with what spurred us to do an audit and what our ultimate goal for the effort is. Whether we’re trying to clean up legacy content overall, to shift focus to LLM visibility that we want to improve, seeking to get more conversions out of existing content, or other noble goals.

It is important to understand what “good” looks like. Whether it is visibility, traffic, authority, engagement, or some other measurable outcome.

2. Segment By Type And Funnel Stage

A challenge of content reviews and analysis is how specific content is prioritized. We want to avoid a one-size-fits-all approach.

That means we need to break down the categories of content for the audit by type. That can include blog posts vs. core landing pages vs. gated assets. However you look and classify the types of content on your site and that your team creates, you’ll want to use this as a filter.

Additionally, you want to look at your content in the same way that you consider your funnel. Whether it is top, middle, and bottom-of-funnel content, or if you look in a different way at customer journeys and classifications, use this as a second important filter and prioritize what you want to analyze and why (going back to the defined purpose of the content audit).

3. Score Content 3P’s (Purpose, Performance, Potential)

This is where our audits and processes start to take a more custom approach based on the steps we’ve completed so far. You’ll need your own custom scoring system. It could be as simple as a 1-3 scale for the categories of Purpose, Performance, and Potential.

Purpose:

  • What is this content meant to do?
  • Is it aligned with:
    • Brand?
    • Positioning?
    • Goals?

Performance:

  • How does it drive:
    • Traffic?
    • Conversions?
    • Citations?
    • Engagement?
  • Does it actually:
    • Bring people in?
    • Move them forward?

Potential:

  • Could it rank or be rendered in answers in AI with updates?
  • Could it be:
    • Repurposed?
    • Repositioned?

As third-party tools continue to add to their data sets and measurement capabilities, you could do your own checks, combining Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console, and ChatGPT to see what content feels useful for LLMs.

4. Determine What Stays

At this juncture, it is time to add a business-focused or aligned lens. Considering content for things like it helps us get found for the right reasons, if it would resonate with our primary audience, and if it would be prominently perceived as expert and authoritative by further stakeholders (current client, journalist, industry colleagues).

For each piece of content that is reviewed within the audit and analysis, arrive at a final decision:

  • Remove: With no performance, future, or purpose, this content can be removed.
  • Combine: This category is typically for topics that are competing or have cannibalization.
  • Update: Whether it is a topic that isn’t optimized, is misaligned in the current iteration, or needs some other type of identified improvement. LLMs prefer sources that are timely, so refreshing content on a regular basis to stay as up-to-date as possible can help improve the longevity of a piece being sourced by AI.
  • Keep: This category is for content that needs no change and that you’ll keep as-is currently.

5. Optimize For Search & LLM Visibility

For the content you have determined that stays or gets updated, you’ll want to consider both search and LLMs and what they reward for your content and brand to be found.

For search engines, starting with intent can often help to not get bogged down in old-school thinking about keywords and help with thinking of topics and the opportunity that exists for visibility in organic search results.

For AI, while this article isn’t a primer for what matters for being found in LLMs, there are things like content structure, clear and authoritative answers, brand signals, and external validation (PR, etc.) that are important here, too, in the edits and updates that you make.

6. Create Prioritized Action Plan

While it might feel like, at this point, the heavy lifting is done and that you’ve got a solid spreadsheet, list, or way that you’ve organized the work so far, this is where the follow-through and implementation can get derailed quickly.

You need to work at this juncture to score or plan out what is required for implementation based on effort vs. impact. Additionally, you need to layer in your team’s capacity, skill sets, and cost (or opportunity cost) of resources. Lastly, you need to organize the effort into sprints or milestones to do over time so it doesn’t become a never-ending project or one that is too big to accomplish.

7. Track Business (Not Search) Metrics

As the content audit work wraps up and turns to implementation of the action plan, you need to make sure you’re set up to look beyond rankings and traffic.

Deeper business-aligned metrics include conversions, form submissions, and demo requests as the bridge from online to sales processes. Quality metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) still apply as you weave in conversion rate optimization (CRO) efforts and mapping to expected aspects of the customer journey or funnel.

And, as you evolve from SEO metrics to visibility, third-party tools or your own qualification and quantification efforts in customizing GA4 or other data capture and analysis work will be important in understanding the impact of your content auditing and update efforts.

Final Thoughts

Content audits aren’t dead. However, the way we’ve done them in the past likely does need to change. There’s no such thing as a perfect process, tool, or spreadsheet, but we can leverage solid practices that integrate our own goals, potential, and value to our target audiences.

SEO this year and beyond is about visibility, usefulness, and what we can impact across search engines and LLMs.

Remembering that the right audit balances depth with being actionable, the steps I outlined and your team’s dedication and focus can help you see it through to measurable success.

More Resources:

Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Sep 3 2025
Make AI Writing Work for Your Content & SERP Visibility Strategy [Webinar] via @sejournal, @hethr_campbell

Are your AI writing tools helping or hurting your SEO performance?

Join Nadege Chaffaut and Crystie Bowe from Conductor on September 17, 2025, for a practical webinar on creating AI-informed content that ranks and builds trust.

You’ll Learn How To:

  • Engineer prompts that produce high-quality content
  • Keep your SEO visibility and credibility intact at scale
  • Build authorship and expertise into AI content workflows

Why You Can’t Miss This Session

AI can be a competitive advantage when used the right way. This webinar will give you the frameworks and tactics to scale content that actually performs.

Register Now

Sign up to get actionable strategies for AI content. Can’t make it live? Register anyway, and we’ll send you the full recording.

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Jun 13 2025
Social Media Planner: How To Plan Your Content (With Template) via @sejournal, @jasonhennessey

Marketers and business owners are spoiled for choice when it comes to the many social media platforms available for growing an online audience.

From BlueSky to TikTok, LinkedIn to Patreon, social media marketing has never been more robust, or, arguably, time-consuming.

But it doesn’t have to be. Fortunately, you don’t have to be everywhere at once.

Where you choose to show up online should be based on where your target customers spend most of their time. Choose these platforms purposefully.

Also, streamlining your social media marketing is made easier with the right planning tool in your arsenal – and no, it doesn’t require fancy software solutions.

In this guide, I’m sharing a free, easy-to-use social media planning template, plus helpful steps on how to make it work for you.

It’s as simple or as customizable as you need it to be. No unnecessary bells or whistles.

Free Social Media Planner Template For Google Sheets

Planning your social media content doesn’t have to be complicated – or require the use of expensive tools.

With the free Planner Template, you’ll find an easier way to plan, organize, and schedule your social media content.

Whether you are an individual, business owner, or marketer, this template is designed to help you publish content consistently, stay organized, and make better decisions about your social media strategy.

With this Google Sheets template, you can:

  • Plan your content calendar in advance, see what you’ve published, and know what’s coming up next.
  • Schedule posts for multiple social media accounts from one calendar.
  • Track the progress of your content and use the information to inform your future strategy.
  • Collaborate with others by sharing access with your team.

Note: Click on File > Make a Copy to edit your template. You do not need to request edit access.

Make a copy: Social Media Planner Template for Google Sheets

How To Plan Your Social Media Content

The Google Sheet template makes it easy to see your schedule well in advance and save all of your social media assets in one place.

Here’s how to plan your social media content this year.

Step 1: Create A Copy Of The “Social Media Planner Template”

Once you have access to the template, click “File” and then “Make a Copy.” This will create a new copy of the template that you can edit.

How to make a copy of social media planner templateScreenshot from Social Media Planner Template, May 2025

Next, give your copy a descriptive name, such as “[Business name] – Social Media Plan Q1-Q4 2025,” and save it to Google Drive.

Step 2: Identify Your Current Quarter/Month

Depending on when you’re reading this article, you will want to identify the quarter and/or month in which you plan to start your social media planning.

The bottom of the template includes tabs spanning from “Q1: January” to “Q4: December” of 2025.

Open the tab for the month in which you want to start planning your content:

Open the tab for the monthScreenshot from Social Media Planner Template, May 2025

For simplicity, we started with “Q1: January” and began filling out the first few topics as an example:

Fill out first few columns: Social Media Planner TemplateScreenshot from Social Media Planner Template, May 2025

You will also see in the left-hand columns that there is a calendar for each month. This is simply a reference to the correct days of the week/month for 2025 so you can plan accordingly.

You can, of course, update this for 2026, 2027, and so on.

Step 3: Choose Your Social Media Platforms (“Platform”)

Column K includes a dropdown of various social media platforms to which you may be publishing your content.

You can select from this list of options (Blog, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter/X, TikTok, YouTube, or Other), or you can add your own by clicking the pencil icon:

How to fill out social media planner templateScreenshot from Social Media Planner Template, May 2025

This dropdown allows you to easily identify which platform you plan on publishing to. Whether it be Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), or any other platform, this will help you keep your content organized.

Step 4: Plan Your Topics

Now, it’s time to fill in your topic ideas.

There are quite a few ways to think of engaging social media topics, which we covered in our guide on how to create authentic social media content.

However, the research process doesn’t have to stop there. Here are a few ways to come up with social media posts:

  • Conduct competitor research: Look at what your competitors are doing on social media and use that as inspiration for your future social media posts.
  • Look at industry trends: Stay up-to-date on industry trends and news, and use this information to create relevant and timely posts for your audience.
  • Utilize user-generated content: Encourage your followers to share their own experiences and use that content as inspiration for your posts.
  • Look at hashtags: Research and use relevant hashtags to increase the visibility of your posts and reach a wider audience. This can also be a way to find content ideas.
  • Schedule regular promotions: Share your promotions and discounts to drive engagement and increase sales.

Once you think up some ideas, you can start filling out your social media planner.

Just fill out Columns J through R with your “Title/Topic,” “Description,” and the like.

Step 5: Add Content And Publishing Notes

Start editing the template by adding relevant information, such as your descriptions, content document links, hashtags, publish dates, and tracking links (if needed).

Fill out columns: Social Media Planner TemplateScreenshot from Social Media Planner Template, May 2025

Feel free to add rows, columns, or fields to suit your needs.

In the “Images” and “Video/Media” columns, you can add links to the visual assets you plan to use in your social media post. You can do this by adding a link to a Google Drive folder with images or your chosen Digital Asset Manager (DAM).

Step 6: Add Publish Dates

Next, use the template to schedule your posts in advance by adding the date and platform for each post.

Don’t forget to update the “Status” column (I) as you work through your social media plan.

You can also use the template to track the success of your content by adding metrics such as likes, comments, and shares.

Step 7: Share With Your Team

If you are working with a team, share the template with your colleagues and give them access to edit the template.

This will allow you to collaborate and work together to maintain a consistent social media presence.

The “Notes” column is for any miscellaneous notes about your upcoming content, including details about your upcoming content, drafts, due dates, etc. and you can use this to work with your team async.

Step 8: Plan Ahead And Repeat

Planning your social media content in advance offers numerous benefits that can greatly enhance your social media presence.

By taking the time to plan your content, you can ensure that you are consistently publishing relevant posts that engage your audience and drive results.

With a clear content plan in place, you can focus on creating high-quality content that is aligned with your overall marketing strategy and avoid the pitfalls of impulsive, unplanned posting.

I recommend using the social media planner to plan at least one quarter’s worth of content, so you’re not scrambling to write the copy, collect the assets, schedule the posts, etc.

Plan And Publish Social Media Content Like A Pro

Social media marketing doesn’t have to be a headache. With the right process, you can streamline your social media content planning and publishing schedule.

In as little as a few hours per quarter, you can plan your content well in advance, taking the guesswork out of your social media posting.

Using a planning template allows you to be proactive in your topic planning, get organized, and stay on schedule. Over time, planning your content will feel like second nature rather than a chore.

With social media planning, marketers gain:

  • A no-nonsense system for tracking content topics and scheduling.
  • Time efficiency and a streamlined publishing cadence.
  • Consistency in publishing timely, relevant posts.
  • Improved visibility into performance and results.

Also, when you plan your social media posts in advance, you can better allocate budget and resources to your efforts, ensuring you’re using your time in the most effective way possible.

So, take advantage of the free social media planning template, make it yours, and save time in your social media marketing efforts.

More Resources:

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
May 13 2025
How To Increase Google Discover Visibility Naturally Using These Ranking Signals via @sejournal, @rollerads

This post was sponsored by RollerAds. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

Want more visibility in Google Discover?

Not sure how to get into Google’s personalized news feeds?

Discover isn’t like search. You don’t rank for keywords.

You get selected.

And that means the best way to get featured isn’t to optimize for keywords; it’s to optimize for specific algorithmic signals.

In this guide, we’ll cover the core ranking signals that help Google determine which content belongs in Discover feeds, and how you can naturally boost those signals using tools like push notifications.

Google Discover Optimization Tips: Which Signals Tell Google Your Content Belongs in Discover?

Google Discover uses a different algorithm from traditional search results.

While it still considers many of the same quality indicators, Discover visibility depends less on keywords and more on how your content performs in the real world.

Here are the most important content quality signals for Discover.

1. E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust

A good rule of thumb is to follow the “E-E-A-T” guideline:

  • Experience: Firsthand, real-world familiarity with the subject.
  • Expertise: Deep knowledge and skill in your content niche.
  • Authoritativeness: Recognition from other trusted sources.
  • Trustworthiness: Accurate, unbiased, and reliable information.

2. Engagement Metrics

These tell Google your content resonates with users and may be worth promoting more widely.

3. Strong Visuals & Headlines

Discover is highly visual, so if you don’t stand out immediately, the users are likely to scroll past your content.

Take your time to polish headlines to get attention, but make sure they accurately reflect the content of your article, post, or whatever you’re writing right now.

Engaging headlines, images, and videos perform better, especially when those assets are optimized for mobile.

4. Technical SEO & Mobile Optimization

While you don’t need to “rank” per se, you do need a well-optimized site, which includes:

  • Fast load times: Consider page speed and overall efficiency. Use PageSpeed Insights to ensure your web pages are optimized for user performance.
  • Mobile-friendly layouts: Google Discover is only available on mobile devices, as there is currently no desktop version.
  • Structured data: Google relies on structured data to categorize content and provide relevant suggestions for users. To attract more engaged and relevant users, you need to add tags and structure data so that Google can better recognize and categorize your content.
  • Internal linking & link building: It will help you create your own network of content. This concerns old articles, too, as they might serve as a gateway to newer pieces of content.
  • RSS or Atom Feed: Allow users to follow you to receive updates quickly. Google generates a feed for you automatically, but you can connect your own.
  • Google Web Stories: Similar to Instagram, these stories appear under the Visual Stories banner on mobiles and serve to expand your reach. Stories are easy to create, engaging, interactive, and fun.

    Track, test, improve. Use Google Search Console (GSC) to monitor your performance and statistics. Unlike Google Analytics, it has a dedicated tab for monitoring Google Discover traffic.

    5. Freshness & Topical Relevance

    Valuable content addresses and solves pain points.

    For content to have a better chance of showing up in Discover feeds, it should be:

    • Accurate.
    • Timely.
    • Trending.
    • Helpful.
    • Continuously updated.

    This is especially powerful if your content is tied to current events or spikes in interest, as shown in Google Trends.

    To discover what users search for, try:

    • Google Search: Enter a query and scroll down to view related and popular requests.
    • Google Search’s Autocomplete: Start typing a search and observe the suggested autocomplete queries; these are the queries that many others regularly search for.
    • Google Trends: Identify how popular a content direction is in any part of the world. This is also great for identifying seasonality.

    How Google Discover Works

    1. Google Discover suggests your content, which should include all the positive signals mentioned above.
    2. The Google app user engages with your content within Google Discover, adding to Google’s knowledge of how users interact with your website.
    3. These engagements (visitor volume, time on page, user experience, etc.) indicate to Google that your content is well-suited for similar readers.
    4. Google increases your reach and visibility on Google Discover.
    5. Those new viewers engage with your content in a similar pattern.
    6. The cycle repeats, spreading your optimized content to more Google Discover timelines.

    This is known as a positive loop because your content consistently passes positive ranking signals back to Google’s Discover algorithm, thereby continuing to increase in engagement.

    How Do I Create A Positive Loop & Show Up In Google Discover?

    Now that you know what Google is looking for, here’s how to naturally boost those signals.

    We know that Google Discover places your content based on:

    • High-clickthrough rates.
    • Long time-on-page.
    • Repeat visitors.

    So, how can you increase those metrics?

    By getting a dedicated reader base that is always ready to consume your new content.

    Push notifications are a great way to alert your dedicated readers that new content is out.

    And they will feed your Google Discover algorithm data.

    How To Use Push Notifications To Boost These Google Signals

    Many publishers avoid push notifications, believing they’re too promotional or might harm user experience (UX).

    However, modern push notification platforms allow you to take a more hybrid approach, combining editorial updates with monetization to boost visibility.

    Why Hybrid Push Notifications Help Boost Discover Visibility

    Done right, push notifications help your content get discovered organically by:

    • Increasing CTR with a second wave of distribution.
    • Driving fast engagement shortly after publication.
    • Bringing back repeat readers to increase session depth.
    • Boosting behavioral signals that Google uses to judge quality.

    In other words, push notifications support the very engagement metrics that can lead to more Discover visibility.

        When users receive a mix of informative and promotional pushes, each message feels fresh, encouraging clicks and boosting your CTR.

        Higher engagement signals to Google that your content is valuable, increasing the chances of it being featured on Discover.

        And since Discover traffic is largely made up of new visitors, each one becomes a fresh opportunity to grow your subscriber base.

        Once users opt in, you can keep re-engaging them, creating a cycle of rising visibility, CTR, and traffic.

        Image created by RollerAds April, 2025

        How to Implement Hybrid Push Format to Get on Discover Faster

        In a recent case study, one RollerAds publisher increased their revenue from $0 to $60,000 per month by pairing great content with hybrid push notifications and Discover-optimized distribution. The key was creating content that signals quality and leveraging distribution to show it.

        With a tool like RollerAds, you can gain a streamlined way to:

        • Send personalized push notifications for your latest content.
        • Mix promotional and editorial messaging without spamming your readers.
        • Increase engagement, retention, and revenue simultaneously.

        Simply register your site, get a custom strategy from your account manager, and start boosting content visibility, without compromising user experience.

        Even better? You can monetize this traffic directly with ad formats designed for Discover audiences, no intrusive pop-ups or poor user experience. Just clear, engaging content with a side of revenue.

        For SEJ readers, use the code SEJ30 to add +30% to your funds before July 1st, 2025.

        Just show the code to your account manager on RollerAds before your first payment.

        Getting featured on Google Discover isn’t just about luck; it’s about strategy.

        From creating high-quality, relevant content to optimizing visuals, headlines, and mobile performance, every step counts. However, to truly stand out and amplify your chances, pairing content strategy with smart tools, such as hybrid push notifications from RollerAds, can make all the difference.

        Engaging your audience through push updates not only drives more clicks but also signals content quality to Google, boosting your Discover reach. With the right monetization tools, you can convert that traffic into substantial revenue.

        Image Credits

        Featured Image: Image by RollerAds. Used with permission.

        In-Post Image: Images by RollerAds. Used with permission.

        Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
        Apr 3 2025
        Free Content Plan Template To Adapt To Your Needs This 2025 via @sejournal, @donutcaramel13

        Consistency is crucial when posting content to ensure your customers remain engaged with your business and its products.

        To maintain consistency, it’s essential to develop a structured posting schedule aligned with your company’s marketing objectives for optimal results.

        Our content plan is designed to support this process.

        But, what exactly does a content plan need? And what differentiates an effective one from an ineffective one?

        This article provides an overview of productive content planning, outlining essential components, and offers a customizable free template for your content team.

        What Is A Content Plan?

        A content plan is a strategic roadmap that defines the what, when, and where of your content, as well as its purpose in achieving specific objectives.

        It spans various content types, from snappy Instagram Reels to 2,000-word blog posts, across platforms that support your marketing funnel.

        Ideally, the content should align with one of the funnel stages: Awareness, Consideration, or Conversion.

        Why Do I Need A Content Plan?

        A content plan helps ensure alignment and consistency within your team while smoothing out the posting schedule to keep your audience engaged.

        It also supports SEO and marketing efforts by maintaining focus on key priorities. These include targeting the best keywords, creating high-quality content that satisfies search intent, and enforcing consistent publishing schedules.

        By creating and implementing a content plan, you make it easier for your team to collaborate and execute effectively.

        A well-structured plan ensures efficient resource allocation, minimizing delays and costs while maintaining organization and preventing redundancies.

        Content Strategy Vs. Content Plan: What’s The Difference?

        Although they sound interchangeable, they are not.

        Content strategy refers to your overall vision and goals for content – a content marketing masterplan, if you will.

        A content plan is a tactical tool that helps to implement your strategy.

        You’ll need both to succeed in content marketing.

        Your content strategy outlines the overarching goals and purpose of your content within the broader marketing plan.

        The content plan, on the other hand, focuses on the specifics, like detailing what content will be created, when it will be published, and where it will be distributed to support the strategy and achieve your objectives.

        Leverage your content plan to achieve specific goals outlined in your content strategy, such as driving organic traffic, boosting on-page engagement, and increasing conversions.

        Your content strategy needs to be crafted first, with the content plan serving as a tool and blueprint to execute.

        What Information Is Included In This Content Plan?

        The structure of a content plan is largely determined by your specific goals and the needs of your team and organization.

        For content managers, it’s essential to track who is responsible for what tasks and identify opportunities for high-quality content within the given timeframe, whether monthly or annually.

        For the team, an effective content plan should provide all relevant information in a clear and easily accessible format, enabling them to efficiently create or oversee the production of content.

        In our experience, every content plan includes core elements, though they may be labeled differently. These are the columns in our content plan:

        • Status: Simply put, the current stage of your content. Whether it has not yet started, is in progress, is under revision, has been completed, etc., you can keep track and provide updates to stakeholders or team members during meetings.
        • Title + Creator/Owner: A clear title crafted with the primary topic/keyword and reflecting the content is essential on every plan so you can reference it easily. The creator/owner is the point person for producing that specific title.
        • Primary Topic/Keyword: This is the focus of your content based on keyword research. These help ensure your content is relevant, searched for, and aligned with SEO goals.
        • Marketing Funnel Goals/Customer Journey Stage: Understanding the stages of awareness, consideration, and conversion (others have a fourth stage: loyalty/retention, depending on your company’s goals) allows you to tailor content to your target audience’s needs and craft the most effective messaging to engage them.
        • Prioritization: With 1 being the highest and 5 being the lowest, you can prioritize which content requires more attention and budget allocation from your team.
        • Content Formats And Types: Is it a blog post, white paper, infographic, or video? This is where you specify what your content will look like and what it’ll contain. The choice should be influenced by your target audience’s position in the funnel.
        • Distribution Platforms: Take your pick from social media platforms, company sites, etc.
        • Promotion Strategies: Whether a combination of social media push and email marketing, paid ads, or entirely organic, having a plan maximizes the visibility of your piece of content.
        • Publishing Schedule: A target schedule for when it’s created until when it goes live. For the latter, it may or may not be the deadline for the writer to submit the content.
        • Notes: Context for anything that doesn’t necessarily fit the above, like suggestions from stakeholders, insights from analytics, or other instructions important to creating that content.

        For additional details on tone, structure, layout, word count, categories, and URLs, we recommend utilizing a content brief to maintain clarity and avoid clutter in your content plan.

        Different Types Of Content To Include

        We mentioned this above, but we cannot emphasize enough how every piece of content should tie in with the marketing funnel and align with your customer’s needs.

        Now as a quick refresher, let’s look at each stage and discuss the types of content that work best for each stage of the customer journey.

        Awareness

        This type of content is going after the top of the marketing funnel (TOFU). The goal is to introduce your brand to customers and quickly capture interest.

        Ideally, TOFU content should be easily consumable and easy to share. For some companies, that could be visually desirable home decor ideas or top trends on TikTok.

        Common types of awareness content are:

        • Social media content.
        • High-volume keywords for SEO.
        • Short-form videos and live streams.
        • Non-branded blog posts and articles.

        Learn More: How To Use SEO To Target Your Audience Throughout The Funnel

        Consideration

        At this point in the funnel (a.k.a. the middle of the funnel or MOFU), the customer is evaluating your brand and factoring in other solutions to their problem.

        You’re already on the customer’s mind, but they need more convincing to choose you over your competition.

        They need more information, and this is your chance to present your product as the solution to their pain point. Given this, your content should be more in-depth and provide evidence of solutions.

        Content that works well for the consideration stage includes, but isn’t limited to:

        • Blogs establishing your authority.
        • How-to guides.
        • Comparison content.
        • Webinars.

        Learn More: How To Write Content For Each Stage Of Your Sales Funnel

        Conversion

        This is the last stage at the bottom of the funnel (BOFU), where your customer knows your brand and has already compared all the options. They’re now ready to take action.

        Aside from purchasing the products or service, this could look like a free download, subscribing to newsletters, or calling someone on your sales team.

        The goal is now to encourage customers to take action and remove any blockers for a smooth process. Content types that can help in this stage include:

        • Sales, promos, and coupons.
        • Case studies and white papers.
        • Customer feedback and user-generated content.
        • Consultation offers, product demos, free trials, comparison content.

        Learn More: What Is The Content Marketing Funnel

        Creating Your Own Content Plan: Template + Tips

        Download the content plan template here and edit it for your brand’s content team.

        You can also customize it to best fit your team’s requirements. Here are some suggestions:

        Tips On Tailoring Your Content Plan

        1. Refine Your Content Goals And Make Them SMART

        Each piece of content must serve a clear purpose from the moment it’s listed there – it should align with user intent, title formulation, format, target audience, and other elements of your strategy.

        As you look at each column, continuously assess and make sure that each piece is aligned with its intended objective.

        When trying to achieve more defined goals under the marketing funnel, keep SMART goals in mind (specific, measureable, actionable, relevant, and time-bound).

        2. Know Where The Target Audience Is

        Understanding your audience’s position in the marketing funnel and selecting an appropriate format is crucial, but it’s equally important to choose the right social media platform to engage them effectively.

        Identify your target audience, explore all available platforms (both social and non-social), and decide the optimized placement for each piece of content.

        Note that certain content types perform better on specific platforms: Short-form videos thrive on TikTok, Instagram Reels, and Facebook, while webinars are more sought after on LinkedIn.

        3. Factor In Your Budget

        When creating and publishing content, you can use the plan to carefully manage your budget.

        For instance, if you’re managing a travel blog and preparing resource-intensive Christmas content for a major event, you would want to reduce your budget in other months to ensure you can invest in your event.

        The plan can help you visualize where you can scale down and better allocate your budget where it’s best spent.

        The great benefit of a content plan is that it gives you information about ongoing and upcoming projects at a glance.

        4. Establish Your Publishing Schedule

        Add or subtract as many rows as you need to when you tweak this content plan.

        Your frequency of posting will depend on many factors relevant to you, so once a week might work for one brand, and five times a day is right for another news publisher.

        As for social media, you could post multiple TikTok videos every day or publish static assets on Instagram as few as three times a week on social media, depending on the platform and several other factors.

        Gaining credibility and growing your audience requires regularly releasing fresh content at the best times to post.

        Have a rough estimate of how long it takes to craft various content types, as well as the resources needed for planning, production, and publication.

        Then, try to gain insights from your customers as to how frequent they’d love to see your brand, perhaps via survey and feedback sessions.

        Finally, decide the frequency based on your primary content goal.

        For example, if you’re trying to grow your audience, you should probably post more frequently. But if you’re trying to gain authority, taking the time to produce higher quality content would be even better.

        5. Tailor To Incorporate Into Your Workflow

        You need to know who’s responsible for each piece of content.

        For a smoother workflow, you need to determine what content a team member is responsible for at each step. Then, establish a process for submission, approval, publishing, and social media crossposting.

        Try to structure your free content plan around your team to integrate it without much friction.

        You could rearrange the columns, add a color-coded system for each member of the production team, and include COUNTIF formulas, add/subtract types, etc., if you have target numbers for each type of content.

        You may also merge the top cells and leave instructions for people to tag, input URLs, etc.

        Make it as granular or as broad as you need to for seamless integration.

        Content Planning Reminders

        So, you’ve downloaded the template, edited it to your team’s requirements, and are ready to fill out the months.

        But, before you start outlining every piece of content you’ll produce this year, here are some other reminders and recommendations:

        Keep SEO In Mind

        It’s crucial to ensure your customers can find you, and organic search is a critical part of this.

        Every piece of digital content you create should be built around your SEO strategy and be optimized to maximize visibility and reach.

        Consider your keywords and strive to make helpful content that matches search intent.

        Also, always be looking at your competitors through competitive analysis and content gap analysis to see if you are missing any opportunities.

        Consider Crossposting And Repurposing

        Get the most out of your investment in content and repurpose where you can.

        For example, if you have a lengthy how-to video tutorial, you can cut that into shorts, or summarise the highlights into a post.

        You can also create templates for multiple trendjacking opportunities, like the Super Bowl and Valentine’s Day.

        Keep A Tab On Ideas

        Content ideas tend to strike while you’re planning other ideas in your spreadsheet, so make a note that you can return to.

        Consider adding another tab to your content plan spreadsheet called “Ideas” or “Idea File,” where you can list ideas for future content.

        Keywords can give you extra material for generating ideas. Marketing holidays and major U.S. events are great sources for inspiration, too.

        Conclusion: Make Your Content Plan Work For You

        Creating a good content plan doesn’t automatically mean your brand will go viral and achieve immense success.

        But, organization and workflows are essential in managing content production and implementing content strategies. It is all about planning.

        Using the template provided, you might adapt it over time to suit your needs.

        So, download the content plan template and start planning for the year to create your best content yet.

        Happy planning!

        More Resources:

        Featured Image: David Gyung/Shutterstock

        Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments