Create content that hits the spot
One of the statements you hear more than ever with SEO these days is ‘content is king’. This is something I feel can be overused and often implies that content alone will solve all your online worries and be the missing piece in your SEO jigsaw. Content can provide a huge boost to your online marketing armoury but as a marketing strategy on its own is not going to win you business. With large websites in particular more than content alone is needed to increase traffic and for satisfying keyword hungry marketeers. Content can be seen as a leading piece in your armoury that can be used to add value and quality to your offering and support your marketing strategy.
However producing great content and sharing it with your target market is only your key to ‘good marketing practice‘. To create ‘good SEO’ is more about understanding the technical ways of ensuring that crawlers can understand and correctly rank your website. As well as this understanding the impact of the work you do away from your site (offsite SEO) to drive backlinks to your site. In essence the SEO, content, marketing and backlink building should all work as one with the same marketing goals to achieve optimum results.
So when you are ready you need to know how to engage your audience, create a buzz about what it is you do and get people talking. And you know that ‘content marketing’ as part of your overall online marketing strategy can achieve fantastic results. But how do you know your content will hit the spot and get people paying attention to what you have to say?
5 tips for effective and engaging content:
Find your story
Content marketing is not about simply producing more sales blurb; instead, it’s about effective storytelling, placing your business and what you do at the centre of the narrative. The best way to do this is to ask yourself what excites and fascinates you about it – and following on from that, you can discover what information others might be looking for, in order to get to your product. By taking this approach, you can craft a compelling story that is all about discovering your brand that is fun, imaginative and relevant.
Build on what you already have
It might seem like you’ve got a mammoth task ahead of you to conquer, but you don’t need to start things from scratch every time. You may already have existing content that you can use, albeit in another form, that will provide a brilliant foundation to start from. Customer queries are a useful springboard to exploring what parts of your business they currently struggle to understand and need more information on, while testimonials and feedback are enormously valuable in showing your strengths.
Focus on strong headlines
A large number of people will seek your headline, but only a fraction of these, suggested to be as little as 20%, will go on to read beyond it! Which just shows how important it is to have a headline that draws people in instantly. A good headline should be short and snappy, evoke an emotional response and make it clear what the subject is.
Call to action
Effective content is about more than just getting hits on your visitor counter – it should lead them on to taking action, too. Provide useful details and tips that readers can digest and put into practice immediately, taking the information you’ve presented to the next step. By showing the way forward to a clearly identifiable strategy, readers will respect the fact that your content brings immediate value.
Always be accurate
Telling a captivating story is great – telling porky pies is certainly not. Always fact-check to ensure that any information, statistical data and references that have been used, are correct at the time of publishing. Incorrect information is not only an inconvenience to readers and yourself; it can seriously impact your long term reputation and credibility. When assessing the accuracy of any sources you may have used, consider where you have obtained the information from in the first place – is it really a reliable and authoritative source?
For further information on your content marketing as part of an SEO campaign contact RAD SEO today.
