 We see it a lot. Younger people enter the creative-services workforce, and are invariably disappointed when they don’t get to express their full genius on every assignment. Look at their killer portfolio! Look at the awards they won in school! What gives with the real world?
In this article, we’re going to focus in on some of the (seemingly) most creative-crushing assignments, with an eye toward helping your client succeed. And our parenthetical comment above is spot-on, because if you believe there’s no room for creativity in that assignment, you’ve already painted yourself into a corner. SEO... as creative? We worked on an assignment recently, featuring a slew of social ads aimed at executives in a particular vertical; let’s say it’s “logistics.” And we were told—it was a mandatory—that we had to feature the word “logistics” in the headline. Mind you, these are social ads. As we’ve written before, they’re a lot like freeway billboards. In that there’s hardly any room for copy. You get a few words, max. And now you’re telling me that I have to use the word “logistics” in the headline? It’s enough to frustrate any creative pro. But there’s a sound method to this madness. And there is most certainly a creative solution to this challenge. First things first. If this ad, on a cluttered web page, is targeting logistics executives, it needs to cut the clutter of all the other ads that don't. Yes, you can show a picture of a long-haul tractor-trailer (and likely should), but nothing says "logistics” like, well, “logistics.” It gets worse. Or, depending on your perspective, better. We were also told—another mandatory—to get the word “exec” in there. We’re targeting logistics executives, right? Execs are a special, elite group. Again, think about it. You’ve got a genuine logistics exec, looking at some cluttered web page. He or she sees the word “Logistics” and takes notice. But there are tons of offerings in the world of logistics; it’s like manufacturing or insurance or any other huge vertical. But then you add the word “exec” to the ad, and it’s undeniably focused. This is what we might call “the SEO approach to creative.” It’s using the kinds of words that the audience would search on, to populate creative elements such as the headline. Which might read something like this: Logistic Execs: Boost LTL Throughput Now! Exciting, huh? Well, maybe not to you. And therein lies the rub. This is what so many of the new-to-the-workforce creatives fail to grasp. You’re not trying to score points for cleverness. You’re trying to help your client make money. Simple as that. Deeper geekery Notice the mention of “LTL” in that made-up headline above? It stands for “less-than-truckload,” which is an acronym that’s very specific to logistics. So while you would never use an obscure, and undefined, acronym in a headline to the general public, here, in this case, it slices through the clutter even more sharply. It tells that logistics exec, “We know what you’re up against.” It tells them that you speak their language, both literally and figuratively. Sounds crazy, but little ads like this work. We’ve jammed in some intense, industry-specific jargon, and whereas it would be death at, say a cocktail party, it works quite well when you need to cut through the clutter toward a very focused and time-constrained audience. So where on earth is the room for creativity here? If you’re in the tightly-constrained realm of a social ad, think of your remaining elements, besides the headline:
Not much, but it’s there. What if you did something like this: Logistic Execs: Boost LTL Throughput Now! ABC Enterprises Helps You Keep On Trucking [Button:] Accelerate Your Performance And what if there’s a totally outrageous, grabber image, such as a tractor-trailer... with a rocket engine and wings? The heat from the engine could even be scorching the call-to-action button. Well whaddya know. All of your college portfolio work paid off after all. The important thing—the discipline—is to know when and where to add the creative “spice” to an assignment, vs. letting the “untouched ingredient” stand on its own merit. The qualifier here, as always, is what the end-client/prospect/customer will respond to. Viewed through that lens, the decisions get much clearer. Need help with these kinds of assignments? Contact us. We’d love to answer the call.
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 It’s that time of year again: time for our annual year-in-review wrap-up of our top articles from Copel Communications. We do two of these each December: one for our “Creatives” audience, and another for our consultants audience.
This one (although it's posting first) is the latter. Here are the top articles we’ve published for consultants, chock full of counterintuitive tips and business-building tricks. In case you missed any of these, here’s your chance to get some fast, free pointers. Enjoy!
Have suggestions for topics you’d like us to cover next year? Contact us. We’ve love to hear from you.  Here at Copel Communications, we create a lot of content for our clients. Videos. Blogs. Case studies. You name it.
Most of this ends up on their websites (as well as other places). So while this may seem like “the water’s edge” in the content-creation biz, we do often get insights from our clients' website and email traffic reports. It helps us raise our game, and continually improve, as we see what works, and what doesn’t work as well. In this article, we’ll share some info we’ve seen from some of our clients, in order to help you profit from it. Naturally, we’re going to anonymize everything we discuss, but you’ll easily detect the patterns in the noise. An SEO caveat Before we dive into these weeds, we’d like to be nice and clear: Here at Copel Communications, we are not SEO experts. We doff our hats to those who are; indeed, we often work shoulder-to-shoulder with our clients’ SEO teams. That said, we specialize in the human side of the equation. We can’t tell you if Google will rank a certain paragraph higher than another, but we can easily discern whether or not it engages the reader, and compels them to, oh, make a purchase decision. So. We were screen-sharing with a client of ours recently, and they dove into their website analytics dashboards for us. What we saw was very interesting. All you need to know about this client of ours is that they toil in the high-tech B2B space. And they blast out a lot of content (which we help create), extolling their virtues and showcasing their ongoing successes. In any good website dashboard, you’ll be able to sort visitors by the platform they use to visit your site. In other words, “mobile vs. desktop.” Now, in this day and age, everyone’s gone mobile, right? If you judged only by the volume of Verizon and AT&T ads on TV, you’d assume that cords, and big computer screens, have all gone the way of the buggy whip. Well guess what we saw when this client clicked the tab? Turns out that 90 percent of their visitors were on desktop machines. It wasn’t even close. Ninety percent. Think about that. It tells you a couple of very important things:
This one data-point alone dictates a ton of strategic and tactical considerations for our client:
If you haven’t checked this one little point of info in your own website dashboard recently, it’s time you should. Globe hopping Here’s something else we discovered with this client: The majority of visitors, not surprisingly, came from the U.S. But quite surprisingly, these Americans accounted for only 44 percent of all visitors! Granted, our client does provide global offerings, but they are definitely U.S.-centric. Fortunately, the number-two country for visitors, clocking in at an impressive 27 percent, was the UK. It wasn’t enough for us to change all the spelling on the site to the Queen’s English, but still. Incidentally, drilling down to the top cities of visitors yielded London as number one, and New York as number four. Very interesting. Dwell time Here was another interesting insight. One particular blog article which we created for this client was consistently at the top of the hits. That’s fine; perhaps it simply has some good keywords in it. But no. It was more than that. Much more. Whereas most pages would be visited for one minute, this blog entry held readers for seven minutes. That means they read every single word of it. That’s huge. This helps to dictate other good (read: “similar”) topics for future blogs. It also provides indisputable data on how much time an interested reader will spend on valuable content. Nights and weekends Last bit of data porn from this deep dive: Traffic on the site would spike early in the week… and then again on Saturday nights. WTF? Turns out that this company (our client) sends out weekly emails (yep, we help with those, too), which go out early in the week. So, many recipients click on those emails’ links when they get them; thus the early-week traffic spike. But the website dashboard revealed a subtler, more interesting pattern. Many of the targeted email recipients are busy executives. Know what this means? It means that they get the emails from this company, early in the week. They don’t open them. They don’t delete them. They don’t mark them as spam. Rather, they save them for later reading, you guessed it, on the weekends. That’s how time-constrained these targets are. Knowing that helps us to craft focused content. It’s also reassuring to know that these people consider our materials “worth the wait,” too. Good content works The takeaway here is that diving into your dashboard data will provide actionable insights and feedback. This is clearly a link-in-the-chain scenario: If, for example, the materials we provided this client sucked, then all the numbers would tank, too. That’s clearly not the case here. We’ve helped this client. And we can help you, too. Simply contact us today to get started.  Here’s a dilemma: Your business serves two different audiences. They each have different needs. They each are aware of the other audience—and may well be wary of them.
Yet you need to serve them both. What do you do? Do you create two different websites? That is, one for each? You could. But we think there’s a simpler, more elegant way. A twofold dilemma The situation we described above is common:
So this is a common situation. Think about your client base, and the prospects you’d like to serve. Are they really all in one homogenous “bucket”? The self-selecting gate The simplest way to shepherd these crowds through your site is to give them a simple selection, right up front. Imagine a home page that is truly minimal. We’ll use the recruiting firm as an example:
Below it, you’ll see two buttons:
There. Done. Simple as that. When you arrive at this site, you can’t get confused. You’re either an employer or a candidate, and there’s nothing for you to do but click one of those two big buttons. Thus you self-select your “side” of the site and enter it. As you might guess, each “side” of the site is similar looking, but different enough to avoid confusion. Imagine, for example, the exact same layout, but with different color palettes. Once the visitor is on their “side” of the site, it’s basically a self-contained experience. They land at “their” home page, where they get more-focused messaging and navigation. And they get the full panoply of options they’d expect: “Services.” “About.” “Recent Posts.” "Contact us." And so on. Some devilish details As we’d mentioned above, the two different sides of the website are similar yet different. So just in case the visitor of one side accidentally stumbles onto the other side, they’ll know immediately that they’re on the wrong side of the fence, because it will look different. They’ll thus need to click their browser’s “Back” button to return to familiar territory. This leads to an opportunity, and a caveat: The opportunity: The “About” page content that you offer to one audience is likely 95 percent the same as the “About” page content you’ll be offering to your other audience. And aside from the color change, the layout is the same, too. This translates to a big bang-for-the-buck cost saving, in terms of content creation and site-development time. You can effectively copy-and-paste Version 1 to create the bulk of Version 2. So do this as much as possible. Start with the bigger/more difficult “side” of the site, and build it out. Then leverage its parts for Side 2. The caveat: You need to assume that members of Audience 1 will occasionally stumble onto pages designed for Audience 2, and vice versa. And since you want both of them as your clients, you’ll need to offend neither. This is a messaging/copywriting challenge. You don’t want those HNWIs to think that you’re helping the professional-service providers to profit off of them. Similarly, you don’t want those professional-service providers to see anything that suggests you might interfere with their relationships—or revenue streams—with those HNWIs. So you need to craft the messaging carefully. And then you need to read each “side” through the eyes of each audience, and see if anything looks amiss. Making it happen We recently worked with a web-design firm that was a vendor to one of our “two-audience” clients. The lead person at that firm was totally confused by our proposal of a “two-button home page.” They hadn’t seen a site like that before. They were scared it wouldn’t work. Now that that site is up and running, that person is totally sold on the idea. And so are our client’s prospects: The site traffic statistics confirm it. Here at Copel Communications, we also serve two broad swaths of clients: 1) consultancies, and 2) ad agencies and internal departments we call “Creatives,” since they hire us for creative services. And guess what? Our home page has two big buttons, too. Need help with that bifurcated website challenge? Contact us. We’d be happy to help.  Where should you host your company’s videos?
This is not a no-brainer. If you say, “It’s YouTube, end of discussion,” then you’re missing a lot of important points. We know, because this question comes up frequently in our discussions with clients. Let’s review some of those here. Where does it hurt? We have a client that put a lot of work into creating a series of B2B videos, aimed at a certain target audience. But they had a legitimate concern: What does YouTube suggest, at the conclusion of the video? Aha. A valid contention. Think about it. Whenever you watch a video on YouTube, it ends with a little matrix of tiles promoting other videos, which YouTube thinks you’ll like, and thus serves up to you as “suggestions.” If you click on any of these, you presumably get to view content that you find valuable, and of course YouTube is rewarded; clicks are their currency. Let’s get back to our (rightfully) concerned client. Think about this: Who is serving up those “suggestions” at the end of your video? Is it you? No. It’s YouTube. Uh-oh. This can have serious repercussions. If your company is ABC Widgets, you want to promote and sell those to the widget-buying public. So as soon as your whiz-bang widget video ends, your viewer may well be served up a suggestion to watch a slick new video from—you guessed it—XYZ Widgets. Your direct competitor! See why we said that this is not a no-brainer? Different sized gorillas YouTube is a behemoth. And they’re owned by Google, in case that wasn’t big enough for you. If you want the world to see your video, you certainly want it on YouTube. But what about our aforementioned client’s legitimate concern? Do you want your prospects to possibly be served up “suggestions” to explore your competitors? Of course not. Thus we enter the murky realm of trade-off’s. There is, for example, Vimeo. It’s a video-hosting platform. It’s a small fraction the size of YouTube, but it functions flawlessly, in terms of serving up videos so that they play easily on any device. And Vimeo’s business model is structured a little differently. When a Vimeo video ends, it just ends. None of these YouTube-like “suggestions.” But, again, Vimeo is smaller. Reaches a smaller audience through, say, SEO. And you need to get a subscription (read: “pay for it”), with different tiers of membership available, to really make use of it. Creating a YouTube channel, as you know, is free. So you need to weigh the relative merits of each. For example, if you really want to feed those search-bots and get your video all over the world, then it’s probably worth going to YouTube, despite its sometimes unhelpful suggestions. If you really want your audience to stay focused and are willing to pay for it, then it’s Vimeo. What? Shun publicity? Sometimes, you don’t want the whole world to see your videos. What it it’s internal training? What if it’s client-specific/competition-sensitive? What if it’s gated webinar content that you don’t want to give away without collecting viewer contact information (as their “ticket fare”) first? There are lots of ways to skin this proverbial cat. You can create a private link on YouTube, so that it’s not searchable. You can create a Vimeo video that’s password-protected. You can even host the video on a private link on Dropbox or Google Drive, although they’re not really optimized for playback, and thus might force your viewer to download the actual video before they can watch it. But that might be a trade-off that you, and they, are willing to make. And of course, there are hybrid solutions. Remember our YouTube-wary client? They ended up doing both: YouTube solely for the SEO benefit (the “shotgun”), and Vimeo for the specific client views (the “rifle”). Need help answering seemingly-simple questions like “Where should we host our company’s videos?” Contact us. We help with these all the time.  We were recently tasked with a blog ghost-writing assignment in which we interviewed a subject-matter expert (SME) about a detailed technical solution that his company provided. It was kind of a case study, but was purposely genericized for a wider audience.
Boy did we get into the weeds with this SME. The jargon and acronyms were flying. By the time we were done, we could’ve pitched this story to yet another in-the-weeds SME and impressed the heck out of him or her. But that wasn’t the assignment. The SME in this case—and pay attention, because you’ll immediately see the parallels to your own business’ situation—was merely serving as a gateway. A translator. A guide. Importantly, he was not an avatar for the target audience. Aim high, avoid distractions Know that we went into this SME interview with our eyes wide open. Indeed, before we even booked the interview, we asked our client the crucial questions:
Turns out that the target audience is effectively the manager of teams of technical specialists like the SME we’d interviewed. This manager must ensure that the entire shop runs smoothly; our client had a unique solution to achieve it. But its initial interface was at the desks of these tech toilers, solving their daily problems in a novel and creative way. See where this is going? When those tech specialists are happy, then the manager is happy. This, then, was a way into telling the story, and crafting the article. It also involved a healthy dose of simplification. Yes, after getting all that in-the-weeds info from our SME, we needed to translate it into terms that the manager would not only understand, but drool over. That’s not “dumbing it down.” That’s “writing the executive summary.” See the difference? Push all the right buttons Of course our SME, in his daily life, reports directly to a manager who is similar to the person targeted by the article. So we asked the SME: “What keeps your manager up at night? What ‘buttons’ of FUD—that is, fear, uncertainty, and doubt—can we push?” The answers may have been hard for us to guess at, but for the SME, these were softballs. That’s why SME interviews, done right, are a goldmine. In fact, this SME interview was more than a goldmine. It was an embarrassment of riches. We got enough, from one phone call, to write two articles for this client. One was the setup: “How many times has this happened to you? Wouldn’t it be nice if...?” The other was the payoff: “Imagine a solution that could deliver...” The “payoff” article, incidentally included what we likened to a “drool-worthy Christmas list” of real-life examples to get those managers thinking, outside the box, about just what was possible in this exciting to-be world. Importantly—and make sure you take this lesson to heart—these two articles were not presented as “Part 1” and “Part 2.” Each was, necessarily, a standalone. Never flatter yourself into thinking that your target audience is reading every single one of your articles, let alone in order, hungering for the next installment like it’s “Breaking Bad.” Go for the CTA A thought-leadership blog, like the one we ghost-penned for this client, or that you would create for your business, is not merely fodder for the sake of feeding SEO bots or edifying your audience. Done right, it’s a well-crafted buildup toward a rewarding call-to-action, or CTA, for the reader.
While the CTA is the last thing you’ll mention in your article, it’s actually the first thing you should think about before you write it. Tease The way that websites and social-media platforms are structured today, a blog article rarely stands alone. More often than not, there’s a brief teaser at the top of it/the link to it. You need to write this one, too—and take the assignment seriously. It’s been said that “you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover,” but people do this all the time. So wrap it with a great tease. Go for shock-and-awe. Tantalize with the impossible or improbable: “Everyone assumes that cost-cutting and improved customer experience are mutually exclusive goals. What if you could do both, at the same time, using an ingeniously simple and counterintuitive solution? Get the details that will change the way you think, in this essential new two-minute read from ABC Associates." You get the idea. Note that we mentioned "two minutes.” Sadly, it’s an increasingly important element to include. Our collective attention spans have atrophied down to nothing. Of course, you can use all the tips above to craft that killer message. Or you could save time and turn to us. We tackle these kinds of assignments all the time—and they really pay off, because our clients keep coming back to us for more. Contact us today to get started!  Here at Copel Communications, we’re often asked, “What’s the best way to reach prospective clients?” More specifically, “What medium—such as LinkedIn ads, or direct mail, or whatever—should we use?”
These are great questions. This article will answer them. If things like your website, social ads, and eblasts are different media, then the way you combine them is called the “media mix.” It’s an advertising term. Don’t let it intimidate you. Every business that promotes itself in any way has a media mix. Of course, that’s not saying it’s a good one! We’ll start here with a basic assumption: You’re not Jeff Bezos. You don’t have unlimited funds. You need the biggest possible bang for your buck. How, then, do you proceed? First things first If you’ve read any of our articles, you’ll know that we’re downright passionate about taking a customer-first approach to marketing, and that applies to the media mix, too. If you start with your prospective customer, and really understand them, the elements of the media mix will actually fall right into place for you. What might at first seem daunting will quickly become straightforward. Let’s say you’re targeting logistics executives. You need to know everything you possibly can about them—the more, the better:
If you don’t have ready, and detailed, answers to each one of these questions, get them. Because you certainly can’t get into the tactical weeds of the media mix without them. But if you do have these answers, the next steps become progressively simpler. Know thy message If you know what’s keeping these people up at night, you also need to know how to flange your offering with it. We’ll assume, for the purposes of this article, that your offering brilliantly and uniquely solves these prospects’ problems. Then it’s simply (!) a matter of telling that prospect, in your messaging, how their life will be better with your company in it. So. You know their needs. You have a way to address them. You know how to communicate that solution, compellingly. Can’t you see how “the media mix” is now a really, really straightforward exercise? Carving up your options In today’s world, you have lots of choices when it comes to the media you employ. These include—and this is just a scratch-the-surface sampling, to get you thinking in the right direction—things such as:
As we said, the list goes on forever. And this is why it strikes people—people who approach it, list-first—as intimidating. There are so many choices! Which is the best one? First off, you should have caught the inherent error in that last question. It’s not “which one,” singular. It’s “which ones,” plural. You can’t have a “mix” with just one ingredient. Second, use your customer-first exercise, above, to begin your prioritizing. Are you into B2C (business-to-consumer) ecommerce? Then it’s hard to not consider Facebook. Is your business B2B (business-to-business)? Well then LinkedIn is hard to ignore. By the way, “Your website” is kind of an essential anchor to all of the above. It needs to be awesome, and quickly tell your story/motivate visitors to take action. (Far too many sites are hopelessly bloated. That’s the topic of a popular article of ours: “Your Website Is Too Big.”) Diving into details Once you know which troughs these prospects are feeding from, that’s where you go. It’s where you prioritize your efforts, and your spending. “Knowing what they’re searching for” will also inform your SEO (search-engine optimization) efforts, so that your site climbs the ranks in their search results. Some media cost more than others. It’s still expensive to buy a full-page ad in the print edition of The New York Times, even if that print edition isn’t long for this world. So make your best, educated decisions about how to allocate. A couple helpful pointers:
Get help There are businesses that are solely devoted to media buying and placement. We’re not one of them. If you’ve got the budget to use one, by all means, partake. Our sweet spot, for our direct clients, is for businesses who have the hunger and the wherewithal to do it themselves, with a combination of internal and external resources. If that’s you, let us help. We can help you answer the fundamental customer-discovery questions which underpin the media mix; we can also help you create killer materials that motivate those prospects to choose your business over others. Contact us now and let’s talk.  In this article, we’re going to show you how to create a pillar page. Isn’t that great?!
There’s only one question. What the @#$% is a pillar page? We’re so glad you asked. The answer, incidentally, can have a big impact on your business’ presence on the web. Okay, what is a pillar page? To answer this question, you need to back up a little and consider the world from Google’s point of view. That’s what search engine optimization, or SEO, is all about anyway. The “SE” in “SEO” is basically code for “Google.” Spoiler alert: Pillar pages are all about SEO, kind of a newfangled skeleton key for improving your search rankings. Back to Google. In the old days—not very long ago, actually—Google would scour the web for information it could organize (the company’s foundational mission) by searching for keywords: phrases that would indicate the contents of a given page. This, incidentally, is what transformed Google from a dot-com also-ran into a global behemoth: They figured out that they could monetize the search for keywords. Today, Google AdWords is basically still that: A reverse auction whereby advertisers bid on the keywords they want to own. So keywords still exist. But over the years, Google has gotten much, much smarter than just looking for keywords. It’s also searching for metatags, depth of content, appropriate images, video, and so on. The overarching goal, now as before, is to serve up useful content. Google has gotten much better at this. We’re sure you remember, not too long ago, when you might search Google for a certain term, and the top hit would appear to be exactly what you were looking for. ...But then you’d click that link and discover that it was essentially junk: Just a landfill of “aggregated content” and slapped-together keywords, created solely for the purpose of tricking Google into ranking it highly. You’d see a page like that, get frustrated, and go back to your search results. Only this time, you’d be wary: Would the second item on the list yield the same junk? There was a good chance of it. Today, you rarely encounter such situations. Credit Google: They’ve gotten smarter. Not only do they update their search algorithms, they update them continually, and in secret, so that junk advertisers like the one we just described can’t easily reverse-engineer Google’s search parameters and thus game the system. In an article about “pillar pages,” you might think that we’ve gotten significantly off-topic. In fact, we haven’t. The bigger picture Google, as we said, wants to serve you the best information it can. (It also wants to make the most possible money doing so, but that is actually off-topic here.) Now. Think. What is one particular website that’s known, better than every other site on the internet, for the information it serves up for free? Here’s a hint: Imagine a student trying to write an essay about “The Roman Empire.” What’s the first site they’d visit? It sure wouldn’t be “RomanEmpire.com,” (We just made that up.) It would be—no suspense—Wikipedia. Here’s where things get interesting. Wikipedia is, inarguably, a great source of information. But it’s not always the best source. Still, the way it presents its info is clear, logical, and authoritative. So if you’re Google, wouldn’t you want to find other websites that are equally clear, logical, and authoritative? Of course you would. And those—ta dah!—are pillar pages. Here’s a quick and dirty definition of a pillar page: A pillar page is single, long-form, informative page that’s structured very similarly to Wikipedia, but doesn’t reside on Wikipedia. A counterintuitive approach Wikipedia gets tons of traffic. It’s one of the most-visited sites on the entire internet. Wouldn’t you love to have even a sliver of that kind of traffic for your business? This is where the pillar page comes in. If you can craft a good pillar page, then Google will recognize it, and reward you with strong placement for your efforts. But if you’re new to this, prepare to go in unfamiliar directions. Again, think of Wikipedia. Does it have advertising? No. Does it self-promote? No. Does it feature a call-to-action? No. These are all things that you naturally assume would be on any website page you create! But in the land of pillar pages, they’re verboten. Incidentally, we keep saying “Wikipedia.” But it’s not the only example. Wikipedia is, after all, infamously dry and boring. So you’re free to do a better job. You can make your pillar page fairly conversational. You can make the layout pretty. Think of, for example, a good introductory college textbook. So you’ll want to craft a pillar page about a topic you absolutely own. Something you’re a world-class expert on. You’ll create it just like a Wikipedia page—replete with a table of contents at the top, hyper-linked to all of the chapter subheadings—and devoid of hype that promotes your business, or even a call-to-action. You’ll want the thing to be deep. Aim for 4,000 to 5,000 words. (You can always update it and lengthen it, going forward. In fact, Google likes it when you do.) Include Google-friendly elements, such as diagrams, illustrations with metadata and captions, bullet lists, embedded video clips, and so on. So how does this build your business? Well, the answer is subtle. First off, this big, huge, authoritative page does not reside on Wikipedia.com; rather, it lives on your website. So Google is driving all the traffic there. That’s the second benefit: the obvious SEO boost, if you do this right. And once those visitors arrive at your site, they automatically associate this authoritative information with your business. And they’ll be able to learn more about you: Your pillar page can still include things like top nav-bar links to the rest of your site, and ads for your services here and there, which can link to landing pages on other parts of your site. Admittedly, this is an unusual exercise. If you’re used to creating strong, promotional web content, prepare to downshift to a stranger gear. But it’s worth the effort: A good pillar page can really dominate its intended search results. We know: We’ve helped clients attain this exact goal. Need help creating a pillar page of your own? You don’t have to go it alone. Contact us today. We’ll help to ease the journey, and improve the destination. |