Content Strategy

These words don’t write themselves.

Here you’ll learn about the tactics we use to develop and write content for our enterprise-level clients.

Infographic: Quick Start Guide for Purchase Decision Support Using ChatGPT

This is a quick start companion guide for Garrett’s comprehensive ‘applying E-E-A-T in money page link building’ process. You can also download the full infographic as a PDF:   Download Now     You can download the full infographic as a PDF here:   Download Now  

Read Post »

AI-Assisted Link Campaign Design for Inventory Management Software

Here’s a guide to applying ChatGPT in the development of a link campaign for this inventory management software page from Xero. In this guide we’ll use ChatGPT to brainstorm: We then use the ChatGPT outputs to determine: We use these roles, key concerns and our reachability metrics to guide our creation of Citable Elements – ... Read more

Read Post »

Scalable Link Building Ideas for Location Service Pages

Scalable Link Building Ideas for Location Service Pages: Cleaning Services Edition Local sales pages present one of link building’s greatest challenges. Here’s our approach – as always we begin with a deep dive on a URL to understand the target customer, as well as the “decision space” within which purchases occur. Always Start With The ... Read more

Read Post »

Link Building Brainstorm: Panelboards, Switchboards and Switchgear

Building links to a category page about… Panelboards? Switchboards? Switchgear?  Where do you even start with a page like this on se.com? Here’s the above the scroll view on desktop (doubtful there’s much mobile traffic): OOF. Visit the page then come back as we unpack our approach to building links into seemingly inscrutable, obscure or ... Read more

Read Post »

Link Building Services
in an AI World

Google’s scared of OpenAI’s significant release of ChatGPT (as are Facebook and Microsoft, but let’s stay focused on search for this article).  From what I’ve gathered, Google’s fears AI primarily because its answer context doesn’t provide clickable advertising opportunities. This lack of advertising opportunity (and a troubling, persistent bias problem) is what led to Google ... Read more

Read Post »

Links to Sales Pages: Total Overhaul for 2021-2022

Earlier this week, Garrett and I presented a 90-minute webinar that showcased a start-to-finish approach to building links to sales pages. Hosted by SEMrush, about 500 people registered and nearly 400 watched the broadcast live on YouTube and Periscope. Thank you to all who took time out of your day to join us, and a ... Read more

Read Post »

What are your team’s stories? Case study: ClifBar.com [video]

How to uncover great stories among your staff - and use them in your content marketing.

  https://vimeo.com/217999052 Duration: 5:52 minutes – full transcript below. ClifBar.com is a different kind of company… “the kind of place we want to work, that makes the kind of food we’d like to eat, and it strives for a healthier, more sustainable world”. The Idaho company recognizes the value that the team members bring, not only ... Read more

Read Post »

Video Review: The Sleep Matters Club

So who are the influencers in your market? Dreams.co.uk shows you can go very wide in your choice!

The Sleep Matters Club from a UK-based bed and mattress company, Dreams.co.uk takes a highly creative approach to content marketing. In creating content for their blog, you might expect they’d concentrate on sleep psychologists and sleep experts. That’s what many of us would do – but that’s not good enough Dreams! So how about a ... Read more

Read Post »

7 Elements of a Successful Guest Post Campaign

How to Brand Your Expertise in the Blogosphere

In our blog posts and webinars, we often hat-tip our content creation team. Lindsay Miller is this content curator. She, along with our other copywriters, develop the product behind our outreach campaigns.  Perhaps you’ve been avoiding guest posting because it seems like such a pain. You have your own blog, and you write for it regularly. ... Read more

Read Post »

PR Planning for Newbs Webinar

Scheduling Surprisies

This fall at Citation Labs: We just launched our first website refresh in 4 years, and it seems that you all are liking the new look. We recently wrote a case study on our first PR client. Today, we completed our first Citation Labs team webinar. Garrett was missed, and he’ll certainly continue to share his ... Read more

Read Post »

Meeting Customers Where They Live

Building Brand And Authority Links Via Qualitative Research

What do our customer groups call themselves? Our customers are more than buyer personas; they’re members of communities and online audiences. Most content marketing and link building efforts lack audience-centric design. Focus on the person behind the persona, and you’ll reap the rewards.

Read Post »

Linkable Content Brainstorming

From SEO Keywords to Proven Content Topics

Linkers go for evergreen, informative, educational content. The process outlined in this post is part of our content generation routine here at Citation Labs. It helps us determine topic areas for that content from a starting list of SEO keywords.

A video discussion with Garrett French, and new resource: the Linkable Content Brainstormer Spreadsheet.

Read Post »

The 1 Question To Ask Before Determining Content Strategy

Until we answer this question, we don't start writing.

Whether we’re prospecting for links pages, bloggers or even broken links to rebuild, it’s important to keep the needs of our intended audience in mind. This article, the first in our series on content strategy for link builders, explains the difference among content audiences and the type of content each seeks.

Read Post »

6 More Archetypal Stories You Can Use Right Now in Your Online PR

6 More Stories to Add To Our November List

Media stories have recognizable patterns that appear time and again in all sorts of outlets. Learn what they are, use them to tell your own PR stories and you’ll create pitches that resonate with journalists - and that increases your chances of coverage.

Read Post »

PR & Link Building Webinar

A Webinar with Garrett French and Ken McGaffin

In this webinar, Ken McGaffin and Garrett French take on PR for Link Builders, discussing the types of stories that capture journalists' and readers' attention. Ken lists ways that any company, even a business in an over-saturated industry, can stand out and place unique press pieces.

Read Post »

Agency Hacks for the In-House Link Builder

Our 10/17 Webinar

We held our first Webinar - "Agency Hacks for the In-House Link Building Team" on Friday, October 17. If you missed it, or would like to watch again, the video and Webinar notes are below. Or, to skip to a hack or audience question of the video, check out the minute-by-minute here.

Read Post »

Mission-Based Marketing for Brand Visibility

(oh yes, and those link things)

Creating something to be excited and passionate about has become our first and foremost task at Citation Labs. We make sure we're "on a mission" with every new project. That's because over the past four years we've learned that exciting, passionate outreach brings us brand mentions and new audiences like nothing we've done before.

Read Post »

4 Prospecting Approaches for Broken Link Builders

Broken Link Building Tips

Prospecting for broken link building opportunities typically begins with a "seed set" either of competitor/relevant sites to check for 404s, relevant pages with lists of links and old/niche directory pages.

You can also use the new Broken Link Finder tool for industrial-strength broken link prospecting.

Read Post »

5 Key Units of Expertise

On the Classification of Expertise Structures for Content Marketers

Through marketing with tips and tip inventory creation I came to think of tips as the smallest expressible unit of expertise. From a research query perspective, tips are quite easy to extract from a market's community of practice.

But what about larger and more complex units of expertise?

Read Post »

48 Query Stems for Creating a Tip Inventory

For Content Marketing Research

Combine these tip-stems with your subject matter phrase roots to create an initial body of research queries for use in your favorite search engine or search scraper tool. These queries are meant to be used in conjunction with your tip inventory spreadsheet.

Read Post »

11 Suggested Columns for Your Tip Inventory Spreadsheet

The How-To for "How-To"s

Tips are the distilled, actionable wisdom of subject matter experts. Tips become apparent to the subject matter expert as his general principles encounter reality. For the content marketer, creating a tip inventory of a market's knowledge provides a deeper understanding of a market's pains and opens up the opportunities outlined in this post.

Read Post »