SEO and PPC: Creating an Integrated Content Strategy

Interesting Insights

• Content rigor can help drive a cohesive strategy between paid and organic traffic.
• It’s important to have a clear plan and roadmap for content creation, with logical ties to the intended customer profile (ICP), intent, and product.
• Content decay, where content loses relevance or effectiveness over time, is a significant challenge that needs to be addressed through regular updates and refreshes.
• Paid and organic strategies can support each other, with paid strategies helping to determine the right page for a query or set of queries.
• For early-stage companies, it’s beneficial to start with high-intent content close to the product, and then build out topic clusters and awareness-building concepts.
• Companies should consider the business relevance and impact when deciding which content to update or prioritize.
• Companies can cut inefficient spend from their paid campaigns and invest it into digital marketing to build a more sustainable organic growth channel.

Takeaways

A strong and consistent content strategy is crucial for SaaS businesses’ growth

Content strategy plays a key role in driving organic revenue for SaaS businesses. In their conversation, Jeff and Nate emphasize the importance of having a consistent content marketing plan tied to the company’s ideal customer profile (ICP) and strategic goals. Nate Turner from Ten Speed stresses the value of content optimization and the need for proper systems to identify content decay and maintain consistent publishing schedules.

“Early stage companies tend to need to be doing more thought leadership and kind of putting their stake in the ground on why they’re different or what problem they’re solving,” says Turner. He also highlights the importance of maintaining consistency in publishing and having a clear plan and roadmap for content creation.

Turner further explains that creating high-intent content—content that’s closely tied to the product and logically designed to attract the ICP—should be prioritized. “We love to start close to product and whether that’s blog content or any other format with really logical ties to ICP and the intent and the product,” he says.

Content Decay and its impact on businesses

Content decay is a phenomenon that can significantly impact a business’s search engine traffic and overall performance. Here, Jeff and Nate discuss the importance of regularly updating content and staying on top of decay to ensure the content continues to perform effectively in driving traffic and conversions.

“There’s a lot of opportunity to really still a lot of opportunity to help companies in this area which led us to start Ten Speed,” says Turner. He further points out that if a company’s traffic is decaying at 10% every month, it’s a significant amount of work that needs to be done to offset that before even getting into growth.

“Even if you are to tie it back staying on top of decay that it does continue to perform month after month. And so I think there’s some of that,” he adds.

The intersection of paid and organic channels

During the conversation, Jeff and Nate deliberate about the interplay between paid and organic channels in driving traffic and revenue. They touch upon the necessity of balancing the investment in both channels and the potential of reallocating inefficient spends from paid campaigns to organic content marketing.

“By turning off brand terms in paid search and different things like that. There’s definitely a halo that kind of works bi-directionally between the two. And so certainly Paid can help in that area where there’s people kind of coming back through branded organic search after they had found an ad, vice versa,” highlights Turner.

He also addresses the issue of channel cannibalization and emphasized the importance of understanding search intent to balance the content shown on both paid and organic channels. “So I would say that’s typically where we like to start is higher intent as much as possible and then build from there,” he concludes.

Key Quotes

Here are some interesting quotes pulled from the conversation between Jeff and Nate.

• “One of the things that I saw pretty consistently in the consulting side and felt very contradictory to my experience at Sprout was there often wasn’t a clear plan, longer-term plan, and sort of roadmap of the content being that’s going to be created, whether that’s Blog Content or any other format with really logical ties to ICP and the intent and the product.” — Nate Turner
• “You know, external competition, like you had something, someone just did a better job and created something better. There’s internal competition where you’re creating too much content that overlaps a bit and sends some confusing signals.” — Nate Turner on content decay
• “I think that for a while, sort of within the content marketing sphere, the idea of updating content became very popular and a lot of folks sort of understood, okay, I need to update my content.” — Nate Turner
• “There’s proven studies on how much CPCs go up every year. Like 10%, 18% of kind of like varies by industry and stuff like that. So you naturally have like your budget is becoming dollar for dollar, your spend is becoming less effective every year as CPCs are going up.” — Nate Turner
• “There’s content that’s created with the intention of it helping to drive growth and pipeline and revenue and there is content that is generated to build the brand and build awareness and there’s content that’s created to get PR and some of those types of things. It works so much better when you let each have their own focus.” — Nate Turner

Featured Guest

Nate Turner is a SaaS marketing leader. He was the first marketer at Sprout Social, where he built and scaled the inbound engine from $100k to $100m in ARR. He is now the co-founder and CEO of tenspeed.io, a content optimization agency helping SaaS companies create revenue-generating content, and an advisor for SaaS companies.

Resources

• tenspeed.io
• What Is Content Decay? How To Identify & Fix To Unlock Organic Growth