What's your primary objective, creating content for search engines or creating more engagement among your audience? They’re both super important and you need to find a strategic way to balance both and make them work together in your favor.
Let’s start by understanding the value and purpose of using Foleon Docs as part of your broader content strategy.
Foleon Docs are web-based formats created to engage your audience and scale your content strategy by offering readers a better way to consume your content.
Ranking vs. Engaging
Sadly, in the current digital content landscape, it’s typical for content marketers to fixate on "writing for SEO," mistakenly prioritizing search engines over actual readers.
Instead of considering the user experience or finding ways to move readers through the funnel with content, we’re focused on content length, keyword density, and adding various keyword variations and local modifiers solely for potential SEO benefits.
This leaves you with a host of content that may rank well on Google, but does it convert? Does it engage? And does it provide any additional insights into your target audience?
We’re not saying that SEO isn’t necessary; it is. However, the best way to increase the success of your content strategy is to ensure you create high-quality, engaging content for people, not just search engines. And that’s where Foleon Docs come in.
But unlike paper or PDFs, they’re infused with web technology, meaning they are responsive, interactive, measurable, and trackable.
Foleon Docs scale your content strategy
You’ve undoubtedly already got a great website with an array of content and a solid SEO strategy.
Foleon Docs don’t replace your website or your blog; that’s not their purpose. Think of them instead as an additional communication medium like email or social media. They expand and enrich your online presence.
Much like going to an event is a great way to gain exposure for your brand and generate new leads, Foleon Docs do the same. They add to your overall communications mix and your content strategy.
Foleon Docs are, well, documents. They’re used for content you’d typically put in a PDF or on paper and wouldn’t necessarily add to your website in the first place. Think of sales proposals, business reports, and brochures.
But unlike paper or PDFs, they’re infused with web technology, meaning they are responsive, interactive, measurable, and trackable.
The Foleon Doc format provides a visually engaging experience with rich media, videos, animations, and data visualization, making the more complex and lengthy content more digestible for your readers.
This, in tandem with your website and blog content, contributes to a healthy content strategy that ranks with Google and engages actual people. With Foleon, you scale your content strategy as a whole.
Foleon Docs expand and enrich your online presence.
Strategic ways to incorporate Foleon in your broader SEO content strategy
Foleon Docs can be used to advance your overall content strategy, but they won’t boost the SEO rankings of your primary domain, in most cases. They will, however, engage your audience and give you untapped insights into your readers. Both your website and Foleon Docs have their places in your strategy if done the right way.
Here are our tips for incorporating Foleon into your SEO content strategy.
Enhance parent domain ranking with compelling content
Generally, search engines prioritize company domains over subdomains, e.g., foleon.com vs. docs.foleon.com, especially with branded search. This is because search engines will favor a website with a history of established site traffic and engagement. That being said, highly engaging content on subdomains can enhance the overall visibility of the parent website, as it sends positive signals to search engines.
It’s best to leverage Foleon Docs to present visually engaging content that supports, not replicates, your website content. So your blog would live on your website, and your other commercial documents like white papers and reports could live in immersive Foleon Docs that link to your parent domain, enhance your strategy, and support your overall rankings.
Self-hosting Foleon Docs
If you really want Foleon Docs to live on your primary domain, it is possible via our self-hosting feature. This allows you to create a Foleon Doc and park it on your website rather than on a sub-domain (e.g., www.acme.com/foleon-doc).
Putting Foleon Docs on your primary domain means that they will contribute to the domain authority of your main website, potentially increasing your rankings. This can be a great option if your primary goal is to use Foleon Docs to boost your SEO strategy.
You can read our guide to self-hosting here.
Search engine visibility
Since Foleon Docs are used for many different kinds of content, they're optimized for security. By default, search engine visibility is switched off to avoid making any sensitive information public. But you can change this setting if you want to and let search engines crawl your content. Foleon Docs have all the SEO-related features you'd expect. You can set meta titles and descriptions, alt tags, language headers, and even canonical links to prevent competing with other content you're prioritizing.
Read more here.
Ultimately, Foleon Docs help scale your content strategy as a whole
Leaning too heavily on your website creates bottlenecks regarding access and skills for content creation, management, and performance analysis. That said, the majority of CMS systems aren’t designed for non-specialists to publish content, leaving website owners and specialists overloaded with design and publishing work.
Website CMS, for example, is not set up to easily create the kind of structure and navigation in long-form content that you can easily design in a Foleon Doc (with very little specific skills or experience).
It comes down to the fact that well-rounded content strategies know how to balance SEO goals with user experience, and know how best to leverage different communication channels for different purposes.
