I’ve been working as a SEO expert & consultant in San Francisco and Sacramento work for 5-6 years now, and recently I ran into something I’ve never had a problem with.

I wrote and published a 2900 word mega guide on our core product. It was the type of content Google normally loves – lots of images and video, plenty of secondary phrases and it was over 2000 words.

I even linked to the article directly in the middle of our home page, so it would get passed a ton of PageRank.

I figured in a week or so the article would be in the top 20, and probably on page 1 by the end of the month.

3 weeks after it was published, the article was nowhere to be seen on Google. So what they hell happened?

I did everything right, but I didn’t take the time and effort to promote the post. I don’t handle the social media marketing and our email marketing isn’t setup to send newsletter type content. Basically, Google didn’t get to use any quality or social metrics when evaluating where to rank this article, and it has hurt us.

As I begin the process to correct this mistake, I want to share 3 valuable lessons I’m reminded of when you create an amazing piece of SEO content, but fail to achieve the rankings you want.

Always Use Your Email Marketing

Your list of email subscribers is filled with hundreds or thousands of potentially interested readers. After all, if they’re on the list, chances are they are interested in your products, expertise, services or advice.

To successfully send them a general newsletter with your latest SEO content, keep things simple. Hyperlink the title of the article in bold font. Below it, put your introductory paragraph, but rewrite that paragraph if it wasn’t catchy or to the point enough. This needs be enticing to generate clicks.

Repeat this step for 2 more articles (3 total). This is a good amount of content that won’t overwhelm the people who open your newsletter.

As always a/b test your subject lines and employ split testing (breaking up a list into 2 small + 1 large segment and test the subject lines on the 2 small lists, saving your big list for the winner.)

Sponsor Your Post on FB and LinkedIn (Also Tweet Out Your Link, Then Pin It To Your Profile)

There’s a couple of ways to get your articles some traction on social media. The organic way is the obvious route – posting content directly to your followers, and I suggest you use this method since it’s low cost (employee time) and you’re once again hitting people who are likely interested in your thoughts.

But one strategy that gets overlooked is sponsoring SEO content. I highly suggest you do this with your top articles because the benefits are 2 fold: one is it will attract more following to your social media accounts, the other is that the shares and views can increase the content’s organic ranking. There is a correlation between social shares and rankings.

Another point to consider – you’re already spending a lot of money on SEO. Probably much more than your social media (depending on your product, target market and industry). Why not invest a little bit more using sponsored content to get the results you want?

In conclusion

Take the time to work various marketing channels with your SEO content. Share and distribute it to valuable readers who in turn are likely to share it on their own social network.

It’s important, from Google’s standpoint, that your website is popular, often visited and that your SEO content has a lots of reads. These popularity factors are being baked into the core algorithm more and more.

Thanks for reading.