Last week, we published our Google Ads Guide for Marketing Managers with two goals in mind:
- Create a resource that helps our clients confidently start and scale campaigns.
- Show up in the top results of Google.
Within less than 24 hours, we ranked #1 (see below screenshot from 22 hours after we published).
Here’s the process we followed:
1. Pick a relevant, under-served topic
We wanted to create something relevant to our services and valuable for marketing managers. We searched through existing “Google Ads Guide” content and noticed most guides were “for beginners,” so we wanted to create a guide one specifically for marketing managers.
A guide for marketing managers wasn’t covered yet, making this a strong fit for relevance and lower competition as this area was under-serviced.
2. Choose a title that keyword + audience title
We always try to start by keeping things simple. Be clear before you’re clever is a great copywriting and SEO mantra to live by that gets great results.
So we started with a simple keyword + audience combination
- Keyword: Google Ads Guide
- Target audience: Marketing Managers
- Keyword + target audience = “Google Ads Guide for Marketing Managers”
Now, I’m no genius, but combining things together seemed to make a lot of logical sense for me. It’s not going to win any award for creative genius, but relevance is key when it comes to SEO.
3. Go deep, not shallow
Looking at the competition, there was a lot of Google Ads guides out there within the 1,500 to 3,000 word mark. With this as a general guide, we set a target of 2,000+ words to make sure it’s going to be comprehensive enough to rank well.
Rather than pick a specific part of Google Ads to cover, we decided to go all in and cover all 7 phases of our Google Ads process.
The idea is that we will start with the large main article, then over the coming months we will produce smaller article that will all point back to this main article.
This is commonly called the hub and spoke method of content marketing and it works great to increase topic authority – which increases SEO performance significantly.
4. Optimise structure
The process I follow for article writing is the same every time: outline first, then expand into headings, bullet points, and a clear intro.
By looking at the Google Ads guides that already existing, I knew of a few of the sub headings that we would need to cover that would make sure this content was comprehensive enough in Google’s eyes and for our marketing manager audience.
With the outline in place and key points to cover within each section, it’s then a matter of expanding into clear and simple sentences. Writing for the web is beyond the scope of this article, but if you’re looking to create SEO content that ranks, then I recommend hiring a SEO profesional to create your content for you.
With our content written, we added images to make it easy to scan and FAQs with schema for voice search and AI visibility. Images also increase content engagement (time reading the content), which is an important ranking factor.
We also added a “key takeaways” section to summarise the key points. This is great for readers so they know what’s coming, and it’s great to help pick up citations within the AI results.
5. Publish and promote
The best results come from promotion as well as creation. We posted the content on our blog, included in our weekly Marketing Monday newsletter, shared on LinkedIn, and submitted to Google for indexing.
These external “backlinks” help to provide trust signals that this content is quality.
Why did it rank so quickly?
In addition to the above, this particular article ranked quickly because we regularly publish quality, helpful content.
Google rewards sites that create valuable content regularly.
That’s why consistent blogging is a key part of an effective SEO strategy. If you’re only posting sporadically, it’s unlikely you’ll see these results. But if you’re building your site into a long-term content asset, ranking opportunities open up.
If you’d like help improving your SEO and rankings in Google, get in touch with our team:
