There is an underlying element that gives our content massive opportunities for success. We spend so much time writing our blog post, recording and editing our video and podcast, creating and editing images, emailing our subscribers, servicing our clients, and sometimes we overlook the fundamentals that shape the success of our content.
The opportunity of driving more traffic to your site, getting more email subscribers, getting more YouTube subscribers, generating more leads primarily lies within the Second Layer of Your Content.
Let’s dive into why the Second Layer of your content is the most important aspect of digital marketing and content creation.
Understanding Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is the method of building brand awareness, trust, and community in order to sell your products or services to people through digital mediums.
Smart Insights shows how digital marketing plays a huge part in the Life Cycle of customers for your business.
Digital marketing is a critical component in business and branding. It’s expected of you to at least have the basics, and why wouldn’t you. You are able to strategically reach people when they’re looking or currently in need of a particular solution to their issue. The ultimate goal is to figure out the best way to package up your product or your services and deliver it to people where they are searching for it.
But you have to create your content in a discoverable way, and that can be achieved by optimizing the Second Layer of your Content.
What is the Second Layer of Content in Digital Marketing?
The Second Layer of Content is the layer of text-based content, that is attached to the Primary Visual Layer of any piece of digital content.
For example, what you see in a YouTube video is considered the Primary or First Layer of Content. It’s the main thing people consume when watching, reading or listening to your content.
The Second Layer would be the video tags added to help with discoverability in search.
With the many articles being created discussed digital marketing trends for 2020, The Second Layer of you Content is a crucial element that is being overshadowed by the shiny new objects.
As marketing technology advances and the need for fresh content arises, the fundamentals get blurred.
Here’s how, regardless of the medium, the Second Layer of your Content is still a critical element to your strategy.
Voice Search
Yes, you are using your voice to search for a particular term and getting a voice response to your query.
The way this works is similar to your talk to text function on your smartphone.
Your speech is being translated to text for the algorithms to understand what you are searching for.
Then the algorithm searches and pulls the Second Layer of Content (text-based content) from, let’s say, the schema markup of a reputable site.
Then your device reads that content to you.
Without this website doing their proper due diligence and having optimized Second Layer or text-based content on their site, the voice search would have picked another piece of content that is deemed more relevant to the search query.
Video
I’m sure you’ve probably heard how video is dominating right now in the digital marketing space.
We will spend hours over a couple of days recording and editing a video in order to get that quality content that is expected now of days.
But, a best practice for all video-based content is to include a transcript of the video with each upload.
This is because algorithms still need text-based content in order to fully understand what is being said in your video.
Imagine after spending all that hard work on your video that YouTube only really understands 20% of the context of your hard work.
The same is true for Youtube tags.
Your video’s tags are not seen but are a critical element in your video’s searchability.
This is what Hubspot contributor Clifford Chi had to say about Youtube Tags.
“YouTube tags are important because they help YouTube grasp your video’s content and context. This way, YouTube can understand your video’s topic and category, and associate it with similar content, which can amplify your video’s reach.”
Images
Another example is the images that you add to your Website. A best practice is to have your keywords in the Image Name and Alt tag.
Algorithms still cannot fully understand images without having this text-based content added. Without them, the relevance of these images on your site is zero.
As you can see from the examples mentioned earlier that regardless of the medium, the second layer of content (text-based content) is what helps get your content discovered. Making it easy for algorithms to understand your content will increase the odds of your content doing better in search and recommended videos.
How To Optimize the Second Layer To Your Content
Here we will discuss the key fundamentals that will help with the discoverability of your content.
Schema Markup
Schema markup is a quick to implement solution that will help search engines better understand your content and deliver more informative results to searchers.
According to Neil Patel, at least one-third of all Google’s search results include rich Snippets, which includes schema markup.
How to add schema markup to your content:
- Go to Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper
- Select the type of data you want to mark up
- Paste the URL of the page you want to Mark up
- Highlight the content you want to mark up
- Categorize the highlighted content from the My Data Items choices.
- Mark up as much of your content as possible. More information the better
- Click Create HTML
- Test your Markup
- Add it to your webpage
The process is relatively quick once you have gone through the steps a few times.
If you are not familiar with schema markup and using Google’s structured data tool, Buisness2Community has an excellent tutorial walking you through the process.
Keyword Research
I’m sure if you have had a website for just about any period of time, you have come across the importance of keyword research.
This is not an exciting topic, to say the least (although I enjoy it. Don’t Judge Me!), but it is vital to the overall discovery of your content.
According to Moz, Keyword research is a core SEO task that involves identifying popular words and phrases people enter into search engines -make in an attempt to figure out what to rank for. Researching keywords gives marketers a better understanding of how high the demand is for certain keywords and how hard it would be to compete for those terms in the organic search results, offering some direction to optimization efforts.
Understanding the 5 Most Common Keyword Types
Short-Tailed Keywords
These are highly competitive keywords that are 3 words or less. ‘Digital Marketing’ is an example of a Short-Tailed Keyword. Short-tailed keywords are usually the first step when someone is searching for an answer and should be used, but the primary focus should remain on less competitive long-tail keywords.
Long Tailed Keywords
Long Tailed keywords are longer and very specific. “Digital Marketing Tips For a Landscaping Business” would be an example of a Long-Tailed Keyword.
These will generally provide you with the best results, along with using Evergreen Keywords.
Evergreen Keywords
These keywords are generally something that will be relevant for the long term without the need for fresh content. This varies wildly depending on your industry, but anything like Digital Marketing Trends For 2021 will obviously only be relevant for that year. It will require updated content on the trends for the following year. Try to create pieces of content that you rarely or minimally have to update regularly.
Ahrefs uses evergreen content to help them generate over 200,000+ visitors a month.
Geo-Targeting Keywords
These keywords include a specific location. These are great for local businesses who are creating content for your particular area. An example of this would be “Your Guide to Lowering Your Electricity Bill in Nashville.” If you are creating content and service, a 50-mile radius of your location. Using Geo-based keywords may result in less overall traffic but more relevant local traffic that can actually turn into leads for your business.
LSI Keywords
LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) Keywords are alternative Keywords that Closely relate to the main keyword you are targeting. An example would be you targeting the keyword “Digital Marketing.” An LSI Keyword you could add to your content is “Digital Marketing Hacks for Small Businesses” or Digital Marketing for Lead Generation.”
Strategically use Exact Match Keywords
Now, I know Google has been releasing updates to better understand user intent making exact match keywords less important.
But, after tons of content created and studies, I found that Exact Match Still has tons of potential for increasing your search results.
Using SEO Quake and Moz Bar to get a quick snapshot of the data when doing my keyword research within the search results.
This allows me to analyze my potential competition quickly. If I’m researching a keyword and all the results on page 1 have high Doman Authority and ranked as some of the most popular websites on the web- then I know I should find longer tailed alternatives or move on.
I have come across many results of small no named websites that appear ahead of massive sites like Content Marketing Institute, Wordstream, and Copyblogger to name a few.
Yes, the Exact match still matters in 2020!
Now, I wouldn’t build my strategy around it completely. Looking back at all the Google updates up until today, the goal is to better understand the searcher’s intent, and one day Google will crack the code where exact match may not mean much of anything.
If you are not familiar with Google’s long list of updates over the years Search Engine Journal has a complete list of all updates and changes.
But in the foreseeable future, I recommend “strategically” using exact match when it makes sense.
Titles
This is one of the most essential places to optimize your Second Layer. Merely adjusting the Titles on your content can result in an increase in your CTR on search.
According to Backlinko, Title tags that contain a question have a 14.1% higher CTR.
Do not brush over this piece of the content. Be very strategic and methodical about your Titles. Of all the people who will see your Title across search, social media, and email. Less than 8% will click on your links, while only about 2% will completely consume your content. Don’t miss the opportunity to bring them to your content by not focusing on your most seen piece of your content.
H1, H2, H3 and H4 tags
These tags help break up your content, and better help search engines understand who deep you went into a particular topic. Optimizing this for your Second Layer will be huge for your content searchability as well as user experience.
Meta Descriptions
This is another critical element in your optimization. If you were to search for a particular keyword, the results would have the query bolded in the description.
In the above example for BloggingWizard.com, Google pulled two separate pieces of content from the article in order to make sure that the Meta description for the search phrase, ‘Keyword Research Examples’ is also relevant to the query.
Create a detailed summary of your content, including your main keyword of no more than 160 characters.
Finishing Up
I have worked with clients that did a great job with creativity. They took professional photos, created high-quality videos, wrote interesting blog posts that are helpful and unique. Yet, they get little to no benefits from their efforts.
The issue with much of the content these days is not creativity. It’s that all the emphasis is focused on the First Layer of Content with little to no regard to the most important Second Layer of your Content.
The fundamentals of digital marketing are still necessary. I enjoy trying, learning and implementing new strategies and technologies as much as the next guy, but we can’t let these shiny new objects distract us from what has been and remains important.
What are your thoughts on your second layer content?
