When SEO strategy comes up, people’s minds immediately go to on-site content. But optimization is an opportunity to align every element of your content marketing strategy around a collection of phrases that define your company, educate your audience at every turn, and advance your content marketing and overall business goals.
For LaunchCode, a client of ours since 2017, the hope was to amplify the organization’s brand awareness within the technical skills space. With a guest-posting strategy and PR placements, we worked to take LaunchCode’s keyword rankings to the next stratosphere.
Here’s a brief look at the content marketing results from our work with LaunchCode:
- Keyword rankings: LaunchCode ranked for 3,560 overall keywords in September 2020 before we implemented an SEO guest-posting strategy. That number jumped to 6,370 by September 2021. In February 2023, that number sat at 14,328, including 127 keywords in the top three positions in search results.
- On-site traffic referrals: From 2022 to 2023, SEO keyword referral traffic for on-site visitors has stayed between 9,000 and 10,000.
Preparing LaunchCode’s SEO Guest-Posting Strategy for Liftoff
LaunchCode is a nonprofit dedicated to narrowing the technical skills gap by providing free, accessible training and job placement to individuals from all backgrounds. LaunchCode students learn both technical and career readiness skills, and upon completion, job-ready graduates have the opportunity to connect with local companies in need of talent for paid apprenticeships.
From the start, LaunchCode has sought to create insightful thought leadership content that engages its target audience, establishes the organization’s expertise, and broadens its brand awareness. To work toward those goals, we built a package that includes search-optimized guest-contributed articles, a monthly PR retainer, and quarterly strategy calls to check in on our progress.
For LaunchCode, a successful content marketing strategy would yield:
- Effective placements that illustrate LaunchCode’s knowledge and value proposition for its target audience.
- Notable upticks in social share and reach numbers.
- Backlinks to the LaunchCode website.
- An increase in the overall number of ranking keywords.
The content marketing package we executed on used those success metrics as a guiding light, allowing us to strategically work toward LaunchCode’s overall content marketing and business goals.
Content Marketing ROI That Keeps Going Sky-High
Our intent with LaunchCode was to build a strong SEO foundation and watch the results materialize from there.
To do that, it wasn’t just about placing keyword-rich content in notable publications. We also worked to align the SEO strategy with consistent PR placements, regular backlinks, engaging topics, and timely social media posting that never left LaunchCode too far from the technical skills conversation. By allowing these elements to work in tandem, we were able to build a full-circle experience that educates and engages LaunchCode’s target audience.
From September 2020 to September 2021 (its first full year of SEO guest-posting), LaunchCode saw its ranking keywords jump 56% to 6,370. And as of February 2023, that total had jumped to 14,328 ranking keywords, including 127 within the top three positions. Plus, those rankings have kept site traffic steady, with organic referral traffic firmly in the 9,000-10,000 range.
These numbers paint a picture of where we’ve been, but we also use them to chart a course for where LaunchCode’s work can go. We use these numbers in our quarterly reporting calls to build a content marketing strategy that maintains its upward trajectory.
We continue to work with LaunchCode to cover interesting topics and create content that is optimized and aligned with the organization’s business objectives. And our media relations team works tirelessly to make sure that content finds its place in front of qualified eyes that will see LaunchCode’s expertise and visit the organization’s site to learn more.
The benefits of guest-posting can shine brighter when integrated with an SEO approach. As a result, LaunchCode now has a road map for content marketing ROI that can continue to generate results well into the future.
