Published at 9:00 AM PHT,
by
Dennis Cabrera
Ads in digital marketing strategies are getting costlier
Paid ads can bring immediate results; however, the downside is they offer only short-term visibility. And if ad-spends cost a lot due to inflation, competition, and market uncertainty, MSME funds can be better redirected to more effective and long-term visibility. This long-term visibility makes your MSME online more authentic and authoritative. Paid ads are less authentic and authoritative; searchers online often trust organic search results because they see them as already part of the mainstream source links online [1].
If PH MSMEs want to produce long-term solutions for their marketing funds and prioritize "the bottom line", an effective alternative is to pivot and shift to an AI-powered organic content strategy that ensures growth and survival. The Philippine digital economy reached PhP 2.25 trillion last year, , and contributed 8.5 percent to the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Pivoting your saved marketing funds from paid ads to organic search optimization can expand an MSME's target market and zero in on its target audience better [2].
The Philippines is becoming highly digitalized:
- Filipinos spend an average of 4 hours and 17 minutes daily on social platforms, fueling the growth of the "creator economy".
- The Konektadong Pinoy Act recently lapsed into law and is taking effect with more telecom players entering the country's economy soon.
- The influencer marketing market is also expanding and projected to grow $93.4 million between 2024 and 2030 [3][4].
These statistics support a marketing strategy that involves balancing the use of hard-earned MSME funds by redirecting them also to organic content optimization, such as SEO, GEO, or AEO. These are highly effective optimization strategies that bring in more profit in the long run compared to your paid ad spend. With AI-powered geotargeting in SEO, you reach a more engaged visitor market. Organic geotargeting ensures you target the right audience, one of higher quality compared to lower-quality visitor traffic, which some ads in social media often generate. Social media visitor traffic is basic and can bring immediate results. Like SEO, it is well-founded, and still relevant. But to engage with a target market that is of higher quality, GEO and AEO are the new and very effective optimization strategies to apply. GEO and AEO bring visibility and ranking to your content, because the content's success is ascribed to how the strategy follows the new algorithms set by AI-enabled search engines [5].
This post will provide 10 content optimization strategies to make your marketing strategy highly effective, have greater long-term visibility and rankings, and re-root your MSME in sound fundamentals.
How to apply content strategies through repurposing
Strategy 1:
To repurpose existing content from other media channels like Facebook or LinkedIn (social posts, articles, reports) and to produce new AI-optimized web copy for your MSME's own domain, is a process made easy with AI. This process is important for MSMEs to "own" their visibility rather than "rent" their visibility through ads. An example process of repurposing from a social media post into an optimized and comprehensive content:
- Select a topic suitable for expansion into 300 words.
- Copy and paste the content and remove emojis.
- Expand the post draft by adding extra details, examples, and points limited by social media constraints.
- Edit the content to maintain page load speed and re-do the formatting (fonts, lists, bold/italics).
- Add visuals (feature image, infographics, embed videos).
- Include internal links (at least two or more links to other pages on the site) and set external links to open in new tabs.
- Add relevant labels or tags [6].
Strategy 2:
It is important to win Google's trust and the trust of other AI-powered search engines such as Perplexity and Claude. This is the ultimate goal of any Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy. The Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) standard is vital because it helps content to be marked up as highly valued organic content. To repurpose content with Google's standard for E-E-A-T:
- Take more time to include well-researched information, proprietary data, and firsthand insights.
- Include other relevant and highly valued organic content elements that AI cannot generate independently, such as brand storytelling.
- Add schema markup to ensure the algorithm of search engines understands that the content is valuable for readers (even as Google implements periodic changes to its algorithms)
- Make E-E-A-T content very reader-useful [7].
Strategy 3:
Repurpose content with comprehensive information through AI-editing to create high-quality pages that attract and engage organic traffic from your target audience. Comprehensive content gives users all that they need, answers all of their questions, and can go beyond their expectations. The latter elements create the impact and add a higher value. High-value content not only engages the reader but also attracts backlinks from high-value domains that are related to your niche expertise. With more backlinks to your content, you rise higher in the rankings of AI search results pages.
So what types of high-quality content are valuable?
- comprehensive and encyclopedic content
- well-researched and well-cited,
- original data from current research studies (from your own online surveys),
- insights and in-depth analysis,
- infographics, and
- statistics from reputable sources that support your niche expertise and domain [8][9].
Strategy 4:
Apply schema markup (or structured data) to your copy. The Schema.org website helps to create, maintain, and promote schemas for structured data on the Internet, on web pages, and in email messages. Schema markups can be applied in different formats: RDFa, Microdata, and JSON-LD. The microdata format is easy for those who are familiar with HTML. Google, however, has a preference for the JSON-LD format. Ensure all structured data is implemented using JSON-LD for optimal recognition and application by all AI-powered search engines. It is easy to implement schema markup when using AI-powered search. ChatGPT is highly recommended by reputable marketing professionals at LinkedIn.com for code and correct schema markup [10].
Strategy 5:
In schema markup, you can use specific schema types. The best for basic text content is the Article, BlogPosting, FAQPage, and HowTo schemas. As of this writing, the FAQPage schema is the most effective markup since it is structured in a question-and-answer format. This format is highly prioritized by the algorithms of the search engines to serve direct answers to many user queries.
This FAQPage markup has a direct question-answer mapping that clearly tells AI-powered search engines:
"This is the question, and here is its answer."
It is the best markup to apply for the new AEO (Answer Engine Optimization). Since AEO's goal is to provide direct answers to user queries, the FAQPage is a right fit for that goal. If the FAQPage is applied correctly, MSMEs can boost their visibility in SERPs, achieve rich snippets, and be optimized even for voice search (audio now, and not just text, video, or image, is an element being integrated well in AI search technology) [11].
Strategy 6:
For professional SEO marketers, schema markup can be used to help Google and other AI-powered search engines display rich snippets in search results. These snippets (usually 40-60 words) are more visually appealing and informative than standard listings. It can include ratings, reviews, carousels (a type of structured data), or recipe/job/event information. All these lead directly to a higher click-through rate (CTR). Another important schema is the Author schema for professional writers. This is vital because it helps AI-search understand the author's credibility based on previous posts, instantly leading to the author's higher trust, authority (E-E-A-T), and higher rankings. A good Author schema markup can detail:
- the author's Name,
- URL to a professional profile page,
- SameAs links (social media profiles), and
- JobTitle.
With schema markup applied to content marked up for optimization, the search engine's algorithm understands well the context of the content and how that content is valuable for specific types of search queries.
Schema markup is easy to learn. It is just a set of tags added to HTML to help search engines connect the content and its context to avoid ambiguity and create clarity [12][13].
Strategy 7:
Use well-structured internal linking strategies not only for SEO, but also to guide users through the buyer journey (awareness, consideration, decision, retention). Internal linking is a content strategy where the web developer maps out a funnel for site visitors. They follow linked pages that lead to a gradual understanding of a product or professional service, and finally, a page where the buyer's interest converts to a purchase.
As an example, a well-structured internal linking strategy can:
- begin with a blog post on "Starting a Small Food Business in the Philippines (awareness)."
- Within that content, there is a link to another article on "Affordable Supplier Options" (consideration stage).
- In that article, there is another link to the "5 Best Franchises to Choose From" page (decision stage).
- As the buyer purchases, there is a link for a free download of discount coupons (retention or delight).
- By weaving these links naturally, the buyers are assisted to progress from curiosity to action.
- The last piece of content must have a strong call-to-action (CTA) message at the end of a page.
Filipino buyers often value trust, word-of-mouth, and practical guidance. When the internal links contain the keywords that express "Filipino values" like word-of-mouth trust and practical guidance, then there is no buyer friction. This strategy establishes your blog as both a knowledge hub and a business funnel - one that makes your target audience read your content and decide to outsource your services [14].
Strategy 8:
A specific type of internal linking strategy is to include clear paths for conversion that include squeeze pages or sales pages. These pages specifically direct visitor traffic toward the offered products or services. Internal linking should actively link to squeeze pages or sales pages to drive the prospective buyer to conversions. The primary goal of a squeeze page is to capture leads (gather contact information like email addresses) in exchange for a valuable resource (like a free download) from your site. The objective of a sales page is to directly sell a product or service and persuade the visitor to make the purchase. When a list of emails is gathered from a squeeze page, it can be used as a marketing tool for the sales page. MSMEs need to remember that searchers online consult an average of 10 sources of products or services before making a final buying decision. Ensure better sales potential by making a squeeze page and a sales page that is easy for potential buyers to decide and convert easily [15].
Strategy 9:
Use Google Analytics (GA4) and Google Search Console (GSC) to measure the success of your repurposed content. These analytics tools provide specific metrics to track statistics and provide regular reports, which you can download and analyze with the use of AI tools.
- You can monitor organic traffic and search rankings related to new keywords in your repurposed content for your target audience.
- You can monitor and track average engagement time and bounce rate on the new repurposed content; longer dwell time and lower bounce rates suggest content that is "sticky" and valuable.
- You can track key events and monitor contact form submissions, calls, or visits to the pricing/customer service page as conversion key events
Strategy 10:
Regularly improve the repurposed social media content by updating the new copy, revisiting keyword research, and refining the content strategy used based on performance data. This is a routine procedure for evaluating the performance of the content based on comparing data between two selected periods of time (such as the present week compared to the previous week in Google Analytics 4 or Google Search Console reports). Analyzing statistics between two periods of time:
- One can spot an old page that needs updating and study well what SEO keywords to apply for better internal linking
- Check for broken links and outdated references to contribute to the overall user experience (UX)
- Remove or replace outdated statistics or information with the most recent ones
- Study and update on new content strategies to discover better leads that convert into sales
