Episode Summary
You won’t see the benefits of content creation right away…it takes time. In this episode of Content Logistics, Alina Benny talks about her experience as a content lead at Nextiva and points out the most important steps every aspiring writer should take to succeed.
During Camille’s and Alina’s conversation, we get an inside look into what makes content fresh and how a team approaches content creation, organic search, and lead generation. Besides that, Alina shares her experience in leading a team of content creators and pinpoints the priorities involved when scaling out a content program.
Alina reflects on how difficult it is to create content that ranks and leads to revenue. According to Alina, you have to practice, try different approaches, and focus on quality to ensure your website visitors actually become interested in what you have to say.
Guest Profile
- Name: Alina Benny
- What she does: Alina is the senior SEO and content lead at Nextiva.
- Company: Nextiva
- Noteworthy: Alina is a specialist in revenue-generating landing pages, but she started her career with brand copywriting and then moved into product marketing.
Key Insights
- Everybody has the same tools at their disposal. Alina introduces us to her rich experience in content creation. She points out that practice and planning are very important in this lane of business, regardless of the tools you're using. "Everybody has the same tools at their disposal. You've got Clearscope, Market News, SEMrush, et cetera. I guess what's different is just knowing how to place content; how much social proof is too much social proof. I think in my three years at Nextiva, I've probably built over a hundred landing pages. To create that hundred first landing page is easy because I know what works and what doesn't."
- Practice makes perfect. Alina remembers her starting years and how it was difficult to rank some pieces of content. Luckily, if you try it enough times, you'll get a hold of it, and your content will start ranking faster and better. "Three years ago, when we were starting out without an organic SEO engine, we weren't able to rank for things overnight. It definitely took us a few months to start seeing results. But fast forward to today, if we publish a page on Friday, there's a very good chance it's going to be ranking on page one by Monday; that is because we've been able to show ourselves as an authority on voice over IP, over and over again. Incrementally, we've gotten better at producing content."
- You don't need to chase backlinks. Alina claims that high-quality content is crucial for success, and that claim is proven repeatedly. She points out that race for backlinks doesn't have to be a pain if your content is great. Backlinks will come by themselves. Just sit down and start creating high-quality pieces. "When you work out, one of the upsides that you don't necessarily focus on is just that you have more energy throughout the day, and you're able to focus better. Just like that, when you create high-quality content, organic backlinks are just a nice upside that you don't even have to chase. Whenever somebody asks me what our link-building strategy is, I say it's not as genuine as it used to be because our content already ranks. We've proven time and again that it is high-quality content, and since we've been investing more in visual content, which is video, and images that are original, it's just been easier to get backlinks."
“You don’t have to build this crazy, intricate thing to start. Just create an MVP at first.”
Alina Benny
Senior Content SEO Lead
Nextiva
Episode Highlights
There are four important pieces of content
“We’ve got organic landing pages, PPC pages, blog posts, and videos. […] And so, at Nextiva, we focus on creating these four broad categories of content. What’s cool about the processes that we’ve built so far that make producing these different pages or content pieces effective is that there are dedicated people to do it. […] Each one of us knows what works in our lane. We’re able to shed information that works for our specific type of content. Once you roll something out, all these four different pods work together in order to make that piece of content successful.
Organic landing pages are for the bottom of the funnel. PPC landing pages are, you could say, strip-down linear versions of these organic landing pages that are more- focused blog posts; 65 to 70% of it is for awareness type of content. Videos are something that we’re dipping our toes into. We just recently started doing it in the last six months, and we’ve seen some tremendous results from it.”
Landing pages should be created by an in-house writer
“In our context, landing pages are product-led. We don’t necessarily create a lot of evergreens, top-of-the-funnel landing pages, where you stumble upon a page about, ‘What is VoIP? ‘ Or something that’s fundamental and basic. That’s the final reason why it’s easy for you to create a blog outline or a brief and then give it to a writer who’s not a subject matter expert on something that’s product-related and tell them, ‘You know what? Just do three days’ worth of research. These are all the different white papers, PDFs, or whatever.’ They dig and go through. Asking them to create a massive, say 4,000-word guide, ironically, it is easier than asking someone to create 400 words.
Freelance writers who service multiple different companies at any point in time say they’re working with five or six companies because that’s what they do, and you’re just one of them. It’s so difficult for them to zoom in like that on something so specific about your product and create something world-class for you, which is why I strongly feel that in-house teams are the best equipped to create your targeted planning pages for you.”
Utilizing videos on landing pages
“I think the primary goal with organic landing pages for us is more time on the page. You’re getting any user to just spend time reading what that page was created for. If you don’t do a good job in the first 25% of the page, they’re gonna exit the page, and then the rest of it doesn’t even matter. That’s why we deliberately use more videos, especially pointed videos. For example, this is how brand XYZ does something. I think that’s what the agility of our team comes into play and goes back to having separate lanes for how these different pieces of content are created.
We’re able to have synergy in what we produce and how we produce them. If I have a page in the pipeline that is talking about something, then it’s very easy for my coworker to create a video that can match that intent as well. Video is a crucial element that we’ve been testing over the last six months, and it’s been showing some improvements. I think it might’ve been like a 300% increase in click-through rates because of videos, just because we’ve been able to grab rich snippets.”
Don’t look at content from an at-scale point of view
“You just need to create a few different templates and then run with that. If you are focused on producing high-quality content and that our end pages are going to help you align, not just for one specific keyword but a huge bucket of keywords, you need to stop thinking about it from the at-scale perspective. In my experience, and I could be wrong, it just hasn’t worked anytime. We’ve tried to build more than ten pages. The process is broken, the QA process, the design process, and the quality that has taken a backseat.
That’s not something I’m comfortable doing as a content marketer because I like to be fully accountable for something that goes out when I’m in charge. When you produce things at scale, that’s just not something that you can do practically, and looking through each one, every sentence of every page that you push out. Unless there’s just no other way, stop thinking about it at scale. Just acknowledge that content production costs are the highest it’s ever been.”
