One of the most important success factors for advertorials and sponsored posts is long-term visibility in search engines such as Google, Bing and others. Here you will learn why this is the case and how you can achieve long-term and sustainable rankings for your topics with a one-off investment.
Unlike other forms of advertising, advertorials remain online permanently for many magazines (including our online magazine BASIC thinking, which is visited millions of times) and thus bring new visitors and potential customers to your company over a long period of time.
While with a Google Ads or Facebook Ads campaign you only reach potential customers if you pay for the campaign, an advertorial is the more sustainable form of advertising here: once paid for and implemented, you benefit from it for months or even years.
Example 1: Dominance of search results
IONOS, for example, has understood this concept. They have created a mix of their own content marketing with their corporate blogs, which contain high-quality articles about the IONOS product world, and external content marketing with suitable advertorials in relevant media (including ours).
This has enabled them to rank in the top three, five or eight search results for many search terms. Some of these go directly to their own channels, while the rest go to advertorials placed in other media, which in turn redirect visitors to IONOS.
It is important not to simply spend a lot of money and publish a whole series of advertorials without a strategy. It’s about thinking from the customer’s perspective and producing suitable content with added value that appears in media relevant to the target group. Google and other search engines want to see helpful content.
If you would like to present your content to our readers in the form of an advertorial or sponsored post, please contact us here or send us your contact details using the form below. We will get back to you promptly and will be happy to advise you.
Example 2: Creating authority with press articles
In our second example, we can see how to create authority with well-placed advertorials in high-quality media and online magazines. The advertorial ranks in position 1 on Google for the search term – funnily enough, even before our client’s website.
This creates authority because there are already articles, guides, test reports, etc. about the product that a potential customer is looking for. If you were looking for a platform for your new website, what would you prefer to be on page 1 of Google?
A: 10 hits from the relevant platform
B: A good mix of the platform’s website, review portals (ideally with good reviews) and articles in specialist media
Admittedly: Rhetorical question, the answer is of course B. Achieving such a mix is not complicated. All you need is very good content (we are happy to advise you on this with our in-house service editorial team) and pages with a high authority that actually manage to rank with this content for competitive keywords on Google and other search engines.
Example 3: Placing topics and trends (agenda setting)
In this example, our task was to place a newly published study in the best possible way. In consultation between our client and our service editorial team, we analyzed the study in detail and created an article with the results.
As you can see from the screenshot below, this article not only achieved the first hit for the study’s main keyword, but also the featured snippet – i.e. a display of the first hit that is particularly emphasized by Google. Google always does this when they find a result particularly suitable and helpful for a search query.
For our customers, this means maximum visibility in the search results. Of course, we cannot guarantee these results. But with high-quality content full of added value and an online magazine with high authority, you can at least influence them.
Example 4: Placing products with added value
We were able to achieve a similarly great result for the following customer, who was also able to achieve the featured snippet with our advertorial. Especially nice: Google even emphasizes the core message of the advertorial (without our influence). This ensures maximum visibility and a great placement – and for us the sign from Google: “Everything done right with this content!”
In this case, we achieved this by not simply presenting the product, but by thinking from the customer’s perspective: What problem does the customer have? He wants to reduce his electricity costs. And it is precisely for this problem that he finds the right article on our site.
Example 5: Supporting campaigns with our deal format
In this example, we have used our deal format, which is popular with customers. When creating the text, we focus on getting to the heart of the most important aspects of an offer and generating as many measurable sales as possible for our customers.
In this case, a customer may see the name of the current campaign somewhere in an accompanying TV, radio or banner advertisement from our client and enter it into Google to find the offer. They then find our article, which directs them to the offer.
In this way, we not only create direct sales, we also support the current campaign indirectly via the search results.
Conclusion: The strength of advertorials lies in the search engines
You can see from these diverse examples: The true strength of advertorials, sponsored posts and content marketing lies not only in the short-term reach, but above all in the sustainable and long-term placement of your content on Google, Bing and Co.
If you would like to present your content to our readers in the form of an advertorial or sponsored post, please contact us here or send us your contact details using the form below. We will then get back to you promptly and will be happy to advise you.