Eco marketing

Creating high-value eco-friendly blog posts

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“If you build it, they will come”

That theory may have worked in the 1989 movie Field of Dreams, but when it comes to ranking a brand new website…it’s not gonna happen.

That’s not to say that if you build it, they won’t come (IT = your eco-biz USP (unique selling proposition | THEY = your future customers).

You just need to get VERY specific about what IT is, and who THEY are.

This is also called niching down, and here’s how the whole niching down thang works.

Buyer Personas – finding your WHO

Before you write the first word of a blog post you’ll get VERY specific about two things. WHO are you writing for (the they), and WHY would someone be interested in what you are offering (the it)?

These WHO and WHY’s, they make up your Buyer Persona…a general representation of the characteristics your ideal customer is going to have.

One of the main reasons bloggers fail is because they go with the “blog and pray” strategy.

Essentially writing whatever they want and praying that the Google Gods show it to a would-be reader.

Unfortunately, that’s not how it works, especially with Google’s newest PageRank updates.

Nowadays, it’s not only about which keywords you’re including in your posts, it’s about writing a piece of content that aligns with a searcher’s intent.

For example, if someone runs a search for “Eco-friendly websites”

Are they looking for a list of the best designed eco-friendly websites for inspiration
Are they trying to find out how to create an eco-friendly website
Or are they looking for a marketing agency that builds eco-friendly websites?

The only way you’ll know this is if you know WHO you are writing for and WHY they would visit your site.

Econus, for example, wants to help new eco-minded entrepreneurs grow their businesses, so we create step-by-step guides and tools that are proven to grow eco-startups.

You may have seen our post titled “How to create an eco-friendly website in 10 minutes” [LINK TO].

We created that article because we found in our research that a lot of our users know how to set up their social media accounts, but aren’t sure how to build a website that helps them connect too and monetize these accounts.

If you’re not sure how to find your WHO? Check out our post we made about finding your eco persona [LINK TO]. Hubspot also made a great cheat sheet for discovering buyer personas.

Planning posts with impact in mind

Even though you might have a ton of great ideas, sitting down and putting these ideas on paper can be rough.

Writing a piece of content that someone actually wants to read is even rougher.

Writing a great piece of content that someone actually wants to read and having it show up in the search results above competitors like Brightly.com, GoodOnYou.Eco, and the New York Times may seem like a laughable goal if it’s just you doing all the work.

Luckily, it’s not. All it requires is some planning ahead of time, and here’s how you do it.

Topic clusters

A topic cluster is the best way for eco-startups to show search engines that they are experts at something.

Once you know your WHO and WHY, you can zoom out and look at the bigger picture.

The WHO that is interested in your WHY, they all have something in common.

Are they all interested in ditching plastic toothbrushes because of the environmental impact? Are they all interested in affordable clothing alternatives so they don’t have to buy fast fashion?

Here’s an example for the latter:

You are selling ethically made clothing
Your WHO are consciously aware Gen Zs
Your WHY is that these Gen Zs want an affordable clothing alternatives so they can ditch fast fashion
The thing they all have in common is that they think SHEIN is an unethical company
SHEIN Alternatives is searched ~880 times/ month and is relatively easy to rank for. The perfect Topic cluster keyword!

Here’s how we ran our keyword research to find SHEIN Alternatives.

Keyword research

SHEIN is searched ~13,600,000 times per month

SHEIN dresses: 301,000/month

SHEIN clothing: 246,000/month

While these keywords get TONS of monthly searches, it’s highly unlikely that your new site would rank for any of them. If you’re not sure how to do keyword research, here’s a post we did on keyword research and drafting content outlines in Ubersuggest [LINK TO]

SHEIN itself will rank for the majority of those keywords, with other major players like WalMart and Amazon ranking for the rest.

But SHEIN isn’t the topic cluster we’re looking at. And the SHEIN keyword doesn’t really align with our WHO/WHY’s intent.

“SHEIN dresses” for example is a transactional keyword. This means that whoever makes this search is already interested in SHEIN dresses and they are simply looking for an online store to buy them on.

As mentioned above, SHEIN Alternatives, which is searched 880 times/month and has a SEO difficulty level of 44, aligns with our searcher’s intent and has a much more realistic probability of being ranked for.

Now, go to AnswerThePublic (another Neil Patel tool) and type in SHEIN Alternatives.

This will show you everything you’ll want to write about to become a topical authority! Though we do recommend taking these keywords back to UberSuggest and checking to see whether they have enough monthly search volume/are easy enough to rank for.

Whichever keywords are listed in your AnswerThePublic results, have the highest search volume, and are still relatively easy to rank for, those will be your priority pieces of content!

Here’s an article on drafting an eco-friendly blog post [LINK TO] and keyword research using UberSuggest.

So how does that tie into your content plan?

Content planning

If what you do is create clothes that are sustainable alternatives to SHEIN, within the content pieces discovered in the steps above, you’ll just throw in little CTAs (calls-to-action) that say things like “SHEINs [example shirt] created $X,XXX amount of waste in 2022 alone, that’s why we created [insert shirt name], then link to your new shirt!

At Econus, we offer free resources and tools for Eco-entrepreneurs.

As such, all of our content is about building successful eco businesses, and within all of our content pieces are CTAs with additional resources, including our main tool, Econus [LINK TO].

Creating your high-value blog post

Now you’ll want to do some research and really dial in the content. The key here is to use as little words as possible, people lose interest very quickly nowadays!

If possible, use images to tell the story. You can find free stock images on sites like Unsplash or Pexel [LINK TO] (where I get most of my photos). By using free stock images, you can be sure that you’re not infringing on anyone’s copyright.

Upload your images into WordPress with the “Add Media” button and they’ll appear in your media library, ready to be inserted into your post.

You’ll want to add an image optimization plugin, like Imagify. If you’re not sure how to create a website or add new plugins, check this article out [LINK TO].

Once it’s installed, a new tab on your WP menu will appear for the plugin. Click on it to set it up and compress your images!

Images are one important SEO ranking factor, so make sure you use the keywords your post is trying to rank for in the image metadata.

Here’s an example -> [ADD IMAGE AND MENTION OUR ALT-TAG]

Another option is creating your own images or graphics from scratch. Custom images (like infographics) can be shared on platforms like Pinterest or Instagram to drive traffic to your blog.

That idea brings us right into the next step: getting readers to your website.

Eco-friendly business tips

Now that you know which content pieces you should be writing, let’s show you how to draft eco-friendly blog posts using UberSuggest so that your WHO finds them interesting enough to share.

Or jump around to different articles in this topic cluster series ->