PPC - Pay Per Click Management

2020 has been quite a strange and unprecedented year, to say the least. Actually, I think I never heard of the word ‘unprecedented’ more this year than my whole entire life. Coronavirus/Covid-19 has caused the world, to some extent, turn upside down, and has left many people having to adapt.

One such area comes with the content marketing strategy of websites, especially those that are evergreen and have been hit hard by the pandemic.

From owning a few evergreen sites, here are a few tips I found that kept things flowing during the hardest points of lockdown – if a website/business can survive through such tough times, then the only way is up.

Understand PESTEL

Understand the risks and rewards that you cannot have an influence over is extremely important for evergreen content. I make sure, on a 6 monthly basis, to do a PESTEL analysis and change the content marketing strategy to suit:

• Political
• Economic
• Social
• Technological
• Environmental
• Legal

To give you an idea as to how I used this, briefly, for one of my websites, Poem Analysis:

• Political – UK decided to drop poetry as non-compulsory learning from 2021 exams – will influence UK traffic considerably
• Economic – Recession coming caused by Covid-19 – won’t influence poetry
• Social – more people working from home/social distance – won’t influence poetry
• Technological – ways to access the internet always improving. More emphasis on digital content – could work to help poetry online
• Environmental – won’t influence poetry
• Legal – won’t influence poetry

From this super brief analysis, you can see there was a political decision, regarding how to teach English literature, that could influence the website (since if poetry is not compulsory, people won’t Google how to understand the poems).

In this situation of bad news, what do you do? Find new opportunities. Focus the evergreen content on other areas and diversify the portfolio. For example, would you invest all your savings in one company or other a portfolio?

Although the news is quite recent, the content marketing strategy of the website has diversified. I targeted other country’s poetry anthologies students require learning about. I expanded into other evergreen content such as a Glossary page – all of these were done on the analysis caused by looking into PESTEL.

Improve old content

Sometimes, the best thing to do is not necessary for investing in new content but improving old content. For example, you might find a lot of articles ranking in the top 10 of Google, and gain a good amount of traffic for that. With this, there is huge opportunity to improve the content to improve ranking:

• Reduce your website load time
• Compare what the results above do that your content does not?
  • Images?
  • Videos?
  • Better headings?
  • Better website design?
• Add to the content too

For example, take the top traffic articles, according to SEMRush, for the above website example of mine:

There are a few that gain the top spot. But a lot don’t! With this, even +1 or +2 changes to ranking can make a significant difference in improving traffic to a site.