Why leverage is the most important part of your content-SEO strategy
In one of my previous jobs, I ran the SEO operation for SongLyrics.com, a huge lyrics site. The lyrics space was as pure an SEO game as it gets — dozens of sites offering the same product, competing for users that mostly flow through the search engines. It was the greatest SEO opportunity since cereal.
I led SongLyrics to 350,000 visitors per day and a large share of a lucrative market. In that time, here’s the most important thing I learned about SEO: get leverage. Your resources are limited, and your primary job is to figure out how to get the most out of them. That’s leverage.
In this post, I’ll show you why leverage is the most important part of your strategy. In the next post, I’ll show you how to get it.
Why leverage matters
At SongLyrics, we had a database of 600,000 lyrics and 40,000 artists, each on a unique landing page optimized to the teeth. How much of our 350k daily traffic do you think went to our top 100 most popular songs? The answer is about 10%. The vast majority of our traffic was spread out along the long tail of that 600k catalog.
But because we had so much content, plus world-class SEO, we were able to match for hundreds of thousands of search terms each day, and turn that long tail into upwards of a million dollars per year in ad revenue.
We were able to do that because we had massive content leverage. Here’s what I mean by leverage:
Leverage = # of monthly visitors per SEO hour worked.
Strategy 1: So for example, let’s say it takes you 2 hours to produce an article that will hit for a handful of long tail keywords and get you 100 visitors per month. Your leverage coefficient there is 100/2 = 50.
Strategy 2: Imagine another strategy in which you invest 200 hours scraping and formatting a database of technical manuals, and turning them into a set of 1,000 properly-SEO’d landing pages that will each hit a handful of long tail keywords and generate 100 visitors per month. Your leverage coefficient here is (1,000*100)/200 = 500. Ten times more efficient.
Now look at how those strategies compare over time. Using the first strategy, after 200 hours you’ll have 100 articles, each generating 100 visitors per month. That’s 10,000 visitors per month — not bad. Using the second strategy, your 1,000 landing pages are generating a total of 100,000 new visitors per month. Let’s say you convert 2% of those visitors for $10 each. Strategy 1 will net you $2,000 per month (after all your content is up to full speed). Nice side money, but hardly lucrative. Strategy 2 will net you $20,000 per month. That’s a real business.
The leverage concept applies to link building as well. Links are the life-blood of any SEO operation. What’s the return rate on an hour’s link building work? If the only links your team builds are manual placements by a staff member, you’ll have a thin stream of new backlinks. If you can instead use your resources to set up a leveraged strategy, you can turn on a shower of links. If you want to win big, that’s your goal.
Marketing organizations need to think about leverage early in the strategy planning process. If you’re already implementing a traditional content creation strategy with a team of writers and an editorial calendar, it’s too late. This is a decision that exists higher up on the hierarchy. In evaluating any strategy, ask: how much leverage does this have? Quantify it, crudely if necessary. And then factor this metric into your calculations of the expected utility of various strategies.
That’s why leverage matters. In the next post, I’ll show you how to get it.
