Everyone speaks about the importance of content for SEO. The internet has been run down by articles which articulate the importance of useful and unique content for drawing visitors to your website.
Hubspot (https://clutch.co/agencies/content-marketing/resources/why-hubspot-stands-out-in-digital-marketing-software-space) stands out as one of the success stories for this, as to how it has used the theme of content marketing for building its business and also marketing the same to the outside world.
We at adultseomaven have keenly observed how web marketing has evolved in the past decade, and there’s been a renewed focus on content and that too good quality content since the past few years. We had always advocated for online businesses to incorporate useful and unique content on their websites and are glad that this is the way the wind is blowing!
We will look at in this post as to how you as a business can incorporate content marketing in your online strategy. We will also look at whether it is better to source content online from various providers or to do it in-house.
As a business, the fundamental principles of marketing dictated that you had to fetch customers from the outside through various measures such as advertisements, cold calling, and outdoor promotions. All this cost a lot of money but it was what everyone did, so you did it too!
Content marketing is a kind of in-bound marketing, the term popularized online by Hubspot (https://www.hubspot.com/inbound-marketing). It seeks to attract users by making them come to you, and not the other way round. It does turn the fundamentals of marketing on its head and it is the in-thing for businesses now. The Content Marketing Institute in its ‘B2B Content Marketing Report’ (http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2017_B2B_Research_FINAL.pdf ) found that ~90% of businesses have started using content marketing for promoting their business.
So, everyone has jumped on to the content bandwagon, but how do you as a business ensure that your content efforts pay off? Two or three years ago, irrelevant content filled with keywords could and did work and enabled web marketers to increase traffic to the targeted websites.
But it is 2020, and Google has gotten smarter (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66358?hl=en ); it is now penalizing keyword stuffing to a great extent, and rewarding relevant content which is found useful by your users. Digital Marketing provider SEMRush in its study, ‘Ranking Factors 2020’ (https://www.semrush.com/ranking-factors/) found that 18% of domains which ranked high in what it classifies as ‘high-traffic keywords’ (between 1000 to 10,000 keyword searches per month) did not have the target keyword in the body of the link!
Thus, this means that the somewhat easy practice of just rolling out content like a factory is not of that much use anymore. But the fact remains that constantly updating your site with fresh content is also of great value. However, generating quality content regularly also has a price which might be out of reach for your business.
So how do you find a solution to this quandary?
The first thing to do is get hands-on. If you are a small business, your knowledge of your segment and its issues will be more than any other. Even if you have outsourced content to a third party provider, get your hands dirty too. Enrich your content using your experience and start devoting some time to it. If your business gets a substantial flow of customers from the online sphere, then this is a policy that you should implement right away.
Ideas for content are available on the internet. Two of the more useful resources out there are SEO specialist Neil Patel’s ‘Content Marketing Made Simple: A Step by Step Guide’ (https://neilpatel.com/what-is-content-marketing/)
Content marketing also involves a great bit of keyword research for which Brian Dean’s Keyword Research for SEO: The Definitive Guide’ {https://backlinko.com/keyword-research} will be a good place to start. If you have outsourced your SEO to a third party, then there is a good chance that they have already done this research. It will be excellent to keep in touch with them to see if they are on the right track. You being in the business would have a better idea of how the consumer thinks than any outside agency. So, giving your inputs on keyword research will make it more effective and will give more value to your web marketing efforts, in addition to the research that your web marketing agency puts in for you.
Content marketing also involves and aims to create a brand for your business. By putting out useful content that your customers care about portrays a positive picture of your business in the minds of your customers, thus creating a brand value.
An essential part of marketing your content is your social strategy. It’s not just enough to create the content and hope that it will be found by the users needing it. What you need to go is to use social media and promote your content. Also, regular interaction with your users and customers on social media will again create a brand value of your business. Try and find out the most popular business forums or even join sites such as Quora, Reddit and Pininterest and promote your content in between the people who are interested in your segment. We would advise you to give more time and a personal touch to your social media efforts; as it is very easy to gauge an actual business owner giving time to customers and a third-party agency in charge of a social media handle.
Posting your content in business journals and forums and directories which are specifically targeted at your segment is also a valuable tool to get targeted traffic to your website which can actually be converted into sales.
Landing pages or what is called in web marketing parlance as a ‘call to action’ is also a very useful tool to convert your traffic into paying customers. It is important to incorporate these landing pages into every bit of content that you produce, so that you can take actual advantage of producing the content. Check out what SEO masters Moz have to say on this (https://moz.com/blog/most-entertaining-guide-to-landing-page-optimization)
In the above paragraphs, we have delineated many important techniques in content marketing. Now the question is that should you handle content marketing yourself or should you outsource it?
SEO is a specialized task and you can view the top SEO companies who can give the best bang for your buck on adultseomaven’s website itself. Content is an essential part of SEO so they will handle a part of your content strategy but this is where you have to a bit hand on.
Let them handle the technical aspects of SEO and you should sit down with and flesh out your content strategy with them. Let routine postings of content be handled by the firm, monitor it regularly, but social media should have your personal touch.
Then one comes to the bit which matters the most when you look at third party content and that is the cost. Many reputed firms charge a lot for content and they will charge for every bit of content they produce. This might prove to be quite expensive for you. A better way to reduce cost is to sit down with your SEO firm and find a strategy to source content from freelancers from sites such as Upwork.
Another topic of debate regarding content is regularity. The flow of content should be regular but as mentioned earlier, quality has started playing a very important role in the content marketing space so this is a decision that you have to make. Our advice is one good quality post with around 1200-1500 words of text, infographics and videos per week is something that you should aim at.
Then we come to the length of your content. It is now common knowledge that the longer the post, the better it ranks on Google! This has been stated by the most influential content marketers around. They also incorporate the same in their web pages and you will hardly find a post that is less than 1000 words long. This must be your policy too as lots of regular post of sort length will not add much value to your business.
So, folks, we hope that you learnt a bit from this post on Content Marketing and how to handle your content marketing efforts in 2020. We would love to hear from you in the comments section below.
And if you like it, do not feel shy to share it to the world out there!