Content Marketing
I get a lot of questions regarding the topic of content marketing and how you can incorporate it into your SEO or SEM plan. First of all for those of you who don’t know what content marketing is, it is a form of marketing that stems from the idea, “if you write it, they will come”. Content marketing is specifically creating content for search engines and social networks to pick up and in turn drive more traffic to your site. Content can be produced on your website or syndicated through other content sites. The two main goals of content marketing are to create content that search engines find worthy of ranking and content that people will want to spread through their social networks. Of course as a content writer myself I believe that the best content is content that serves a higher purpose than simply writing to get ranked or shared. I believe that the best content offers the reader a satisfying experience, of feeling like they learned something new or found an answer to a question, or even got them to ask more questions. Good content is extremely hard to find especially online with millions of articles being published every hour on the internet. Many of these articles may get ranked on search engines because of external factors such as the site they are posted on, but it doesn’t mean that the content is great or even provides any benefit to the reader. I’m sure we have all searched for something before using search engines and the results were just not what we were looking for. Writing good content takes time, thoughtful energy and sometimes even some good old fashioned research. Content marketing is exponentially becoming the new form of search engine marketing for many companies and rightly so with the increasing challenge of getting your website ranked in search engine results. The following are some tips that actually work to drive traffic to your website through content marketing.
Produce Engaging Content
When choosing a topic to write about make sure it is something that is either provocative or educational. Most people are either searching online for entertainment or education. When you get online you either search for content or content catches your eye and drives you towards it. The later is usually because of the topic of the content in question. It gets your attention either through a great title or a great image. Think about it, how many times have you landed on MSN or Yahoo home pages perhaps just to check your email and you end up reading through the featured articles there instead of checking your mail. That’s because they get you with engaging titles and images. The article itself may not even be well written or even what you were looking for, but they get you with the title and sometimes images that have nothing to do with the article itself.
Share and Have Others Share Your Content
Most business owners especially those who run a brick and mortar business and have a company website don’t know the power of social media, and therefore don’t utilize it to their fullest. Social media indicators not only help with organic rankings on Google but also spread the word about your brand and company through trusted sources, your customers! The best way to increase social traffic is to ask people to vote for your content. How many times in the last year did you post content on your blog? How many times did you ask people to vote for your content using those small social media icons? Let’s face it most of us don’t do that. Either we are to embarrassed or just don’t thing anyone will vote. You will be shocked at how wrong you are. I recently wrote an article for a client of mine and syndicated it only through Facebook using two accounts. Each account had only 200 friends linked to it. The article was liked over 100 times within 36 hours simply because I sent a small message asking people to like it. In fact I even received responses from people who didn’t agree with the article in the slightest, yet clicked the like button because they were asked to. Sharing content can not only help with social engagement in your business but also produce better search engine rankings for your site.
Using Keywords in Your Content Marketing
Using the right keywords or semantically correlated keywords in your content marketing is very important, after all you want the search engines to pick up your content and display it to people who are searching for it. Select keywords that are related to your main topic or keyword and disperse them across your content. Using images or videos with your keywords within the content is a great way to spread the message to search engines about your topic. Find keywords which have less competition but still get a decent amount of searches per month. Write engaging content for your target audience and have them share and like it. This way you have a better chance of getting it ranked on search engines as well.
Content marketing seems to be the new SEO p0st Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird. Yes it’s a lot of work! Yes you do need to do it! Yes it can bring in traffic and conversions when done correctly! So sit down, clear your mind and start producing great content for your site, and while you are here click the like button on your way out!