Content is a key factor in driving website traffic and attracting new customers.
Good content is the lifeblood of any successful company, big or small. Nowadays, customers expect informative, high quality content from their favourite brands. In this blog, we’ll cover a few essential best practices in content marketing to ensure you deliver the best content to your customers.
Let’s go:
In the Beginning, Focus on Blogs
The blog is perhaps the single most effective form of content when it comes to boosting organic ranking online. In fact, blogging quadruples your likelihood of being found in an organic search. In addition to increasing visibility in search engines, blogs help develop new relationships with prospects and strengthen existing relationships with customers. They help establish the business as an industry leader, and create numerous opportunities for sharing and inter-linking.
Here are a few tips for blog writing:
• Use bullet points and short paragraphs to make for more digestible content
• Add images and graphics to break up the text and keep readers engaged
• Understand your audience and write to them
• Vary sentence length and structure to create diverse content
• Avoid clichés
Think of On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is the process of optimizing pages on a website to rank higher in search engines. On-page SEO involves optimizing individual components like title tags, URLs, body text, and image alt text. By improving each of these components, you ensure a search engine friendly and user friendly webpage.
Here are a few tips to help improve on-page SEO:
• Ensure the category hierarchy is reflected in short, descriptive URLs
• Use the target keyword in the first and last 100 words of content
• Place the target keyword in the title, meta description, and H1 tags
• Ensure the title tag, URL, and image alt text refer to the specific topic of the page
• Use outbound links to help your site gain authority
• Ensure a quick page load time. Use Google’s free PageSpeed Insights Tool to test individual page load times.
Check out our article on What is SEO? your Go-To guide for more information.
Create High-Quality Content
When it comes to content marketing, quality is everything. A 3,000-word blog put together by the best web designer in the world is nothing without accurate, engaging, and relevant content. It starts with a topic – always keep in mind that you are writing to an audience, not a computer. Choose a topic that is relevant and timely. When crafting the article, always reference reliable and trustworthy sources (say no to Wikipedia!), and ensure all links to external sites or other pages work. Not only does this help rank higher in search engines, it shows the audience that the brand is trustworthy and professional.
Here are a few tips for creating high-quality content:
• Perform preliminary research on the chosen topic before you start to write
• Where appropriate, consider adding personal experiences to the story, this will add value and authenticity for the reader
• Use different forms of content, like infographics, whitepapers, case studies, videos, or illustrations to engage the reader
• Don’t forget to spell-check…typos can turn people off in an instant
• Always credit the author(s)
Come up With a Distribution Strategy
Where you post content is just as important as what you post. A blog posted on LinkedIn will have a much different impact on readers than a blog posted to Twitter. An omnichannel content distribution strategy is essential to any marketer’s success in 2020. In the past, people interacted with content in much the same way as with magazines or books – one page at a time. In today’s technological era, content is published across multiple channels in many formats, and is consumed at a much faster rate.
Here are a few tips and tricks to help you develop a stellar omnichannel content distribution strategy:
• Do your research on each social media channel, and the type of audiences that they attract. People using LinkedIn, for example, are expecting to find longer-form pieces of content from reputable sources. On Twitter, users are looking for constant, short pieces of information they can digest in an instant.
• Consider re-purposing old content as a viable distribution option. This is a great way to maximize the value of an asset by publishing it in more than one format.
• Find and market to ultra-niche communities. It may seem counter-intuitive, as it involves advertising to a smaller group of people, but it allows you to target the right people. This leads to more conversions in the long run.
There are countless things marketers can do to improve their content strategy. Even the most knowledgeable marketers are always looking for ways to enhance their skillset and optimize content. To learn more best practices in content marketing, check out our other blogs.
