Best Practices for Leveraging Long Tail Content & Gated Content

[Allie_Williams]

Our B2B site has a lot of of long form content (e.g., transcriptions from presentations and webinars). We'd like to leverage the long tail SEO traffic driven to these pages and convert those visitors to leads.

Essentially, we'd like Google to index all this lengthy, keyword-rich content AND we'd like to put up a read gate that requires users to register before viewing the full article. This is a B2B site, and the goal is to generate leads.

Some considerations and questions:

• How much of the content to share before requiring registration? Ask too soon and it's a terrible user experience, give too much away and our business objectives are not met.
• Design-wise, what are good ways to do this? I notice Moz uses a "teaser" to block Mozinar content, and I've seen modals and blur bars on other sites. Any gotchas that Google doesn't like that we should be aware of? Trying to avoid anything that might seem like cloaking.
• Is it better to split the content across several pages (split a 10K word doc across 10 URLs and include a read gate on each) or keep to one page?

Thank you!

[Allie_Williams]

Hi Ronnell,

Thanks for your considered response, I appreciate it!

Re: #3, I was thinking an advantage to splitting the content amongst multiple pages could be that it gives the search engines more URLs to index, and thus gives more opportunity for users to find it via long-tail keywords.

For example, if we split a webinar transcript across five pages, and optimize the title tags, header tags, other on-page elements, etc. uniquely for each page, then it increases the chances a user will find one of those pages (via long tail searches) vs. loading all the content on the first page.

We could add a sidebar paragraph that gives an overview of the webinar content, and users would see that when they land on the page (or perhaps a modal would be more effective?). Once a user signs up to view the entire transcript, we redirect them to an unlocked experience of the first page of the webinar.

I'm not sure if the effort to separate the content and optimize all the unique pages is worthwhile, and I do think the user experience will have more friction if we go this route. We plan to experiment and see how it goes!

Thanks again -

[ronell-smith]

Hi Allie,

Great to see that you're proactively working to use this content in a way that best benefits the brand while reaping the rewards of organic search. One thing I'd add, however, is it's more important that you create as positive a user experience as possible as well, and that means ensuring that the benefits of the information are commensurate with the effort prospects will go through to access it.

To answer your questions...

1. You'll have to do some experimenting here, but you want them to invest enough time that they feel compelled to keep going. You also need to make the case that what they've read only scratches the surface of what they'll learn. To that end, I'd say one or two paragraphs should suffice. However, that means (a) that the headlines are catchy and descriptive and (b) the graphs of text pique their interest to a significant degree.
2. From experiments I've done with gated content, headlines/titles and compelling nuggets of text work exceedingly well. Also, use A/B testing on the CTA.
3. From a user experience perspective, I'd keep it to a single page. No practical advantage to splitting the content.

Be sure to let us know what you decide. We'd very much enjoy hearing the results of the effort.