Site content alone is the biggest influence to draw visitors to your site. They want to read, watch or listen to whatever is on the page they’ve chosen. Because of this, content marketing has become something of a staple when it comes to digital marketing and SEO.
When looking at the SEO benefits of content marketing, there are three key features:
On-page SEO: Content is a hugely important tool for on-page SEO. The use of keywords within URL, alt-text, HTML headers and all body content is key for your site rankings. Additionally, Google has recently rolled out the indexing of passages to improve search results and make them more specific, making the written content of your site all the more important in terms of SEO strategy.
Links: When done well, your site content can work as natural linkbait. Users will naturally want to share high quality, valuable content and by boosting external links, you consequently boost your site authority score and SEO ranking.
Relevant content: This evergreen form of content is continually relevant to readers, no matter how long ago it was written. Common evergreen formats is content such as lists or top tips, how-to tutorials or encyclopedia-esque entries. To keep your evergreen content sustainable, avoid including statistics or numerical data, information on a specific holiday or season or even a current trend that is likely to fade. If you manage to achieve quality evergreen content, you’ll continue to attract links and stay at the top of SERPs for a longer time.
So now we have the basic SEO benefits of site content down, take a look at our content marketing top tips below, to help you and your brand increase visibility and promote your services.
1) Audience research
One of the most important processes to kickstart your content marketing strategy is by getting to know your target audience and what they’re looking for. Of course, everyone wants their content to rank for the biggest, most searched terms, but if you start your content journey by conducting keyword research into the smaller, more targeted topics, you will have an instantly higher chance of conversion.
By starting with audience keyword research, you’ll be able to get to know your ideal customer on a deeper level, and even create buyer persons that can help you map each piece of content.
There are many tools you can use online for keyword research, including Answer the Public, SEMrush, or even just typing in topics to Google and seeing what suggested topics and terms come up.
Part of this keyword research should be product cost, industry jargon, products vs other products, competitor alternatives and commonly asked questions.
2) ROI value
When planning your content calendar, you’ll first need to understand how much it’ll cost you to create content, get links and what are higher ROI methods that you should invest in more than others. Return on investment questions you need to be asking yourself are:
What are your competitors doing?
Check out what your competitors are doing. How much content are they creating each month and do they need a high-content ratio to bring in traffic? If you see competitors doing well with a low ratio of content, you can follow a similar strategy.
What are your costs per link?
A way to determine how much external linking is worth in your industry is by dividing the traffic value of competitors by their total number of links. You can then compare that rate to how much it costs to create link-worthy content.
This ratio will help you to understand if links have enough return on investment to be worth investing in.
3) Know your brand voice and focus on consistency
Make your brand recognisable across the various marketing channels by ensuring you consistently maintain your brand voice. To help with this, you can develop brand guidelines and editorial standards and share these with your entire team, to ensure your brand’s messaging is kept throughout.
4) Vary content marketing forms
Content doesn’t have to be text-only formats. Today’s consumers like variety and video content is proven to be just as, if not even more effective, than written content. Popular formats include:
- Videos
- Infographics
- Webinars
- Case studies
- Podcasts
- Interactive content, such as eBooks, polls and quizzes
Determine which of these content types will be most beneficial to your target audiences and what will engage them the most.
5) Utilise analytics
Almost as important as the content itself, tracking your website and content platform analytics is essential in ensuring your content is reaching the right audiences. While you may think your content is conveying your brand and service, if viewers are not converting or choose to move swiftly away from your webpage content once viewing, it’s time to let analytics inform and guide you.
Without utilising analytics, your content may be sitting there with little traffic or effect, and not reaching it’s full potential. Social media is an excellent way to spread your content. Whether it is image-based posts such as Instagram, Facebook pages where content is shared, or even B2B platforms like LinkedIn, social media often allows you to use their own analytics to track how your shared posts are doing and which posts achieve the highest engagement.
Equally, on a broader spectrum, Google Analytics is an excellent tool for tracking the success and engagement of visitors on your website. This free tool includes features that can help users identify trends and patterns in how visits engage with their websites. Including data collection, analysis, monitoring, visualisation, reporting and integration with other applications.
If you need any help understanding you content marketing and how to make use of it, see our content marketing services or get in touch with the team at Xanthos who will be happy to help.
