Incompetent bosses, management fads, and bewildering technological changes are a few of the quirky bits of mockings Scott Adams includes in his 1997 book, The Dilbert Principle.
via Remember Dilbert? Has Workplace Incompetency Changed? — From Behind the Pen
If your current content marketing simply isn’t getting the results you want, it may be time to rethink your strategy.
Great content can be the defining factor that sets your business apart from competitors, but it can certainly be hard to find and create. Even the best marketing teams seem to struggle with the creation process.
Most marketing experts will agree that creating unique and valuable content is one of the most challenging tasks on their to-do list. One of the reasons why this is often so difficult is due to the high demand for consistently high-performing content in terms of engagement and quality. Fifty-one percent of marketing teams publish content every single day, which puts a lot of pressure on their writers to constantly come up with fresh ideas.
Chances are, even if your team is extremely talented, they have struggled with coming up with great new content over and over again. If your current content marketing isn’t driving in the numbers you’d like to see, or your team’s stream of ideas seems to have run dry, it may be time to rethink things.
Creating content is more than just writing about something interesting or trending; it also needs to increase your brand’s online visibility and boost its searchability. Knowing the keywords and terms that your audience tends to include in search engine queries is essential for coming up with relevant content topics. But, if your writers are unaware of the optimal keywords to use, it could hurt the effectiveness of their work.
Conducting an SEO audit is a great starting point because it not only shows your team the current status of the keywords your website content is utilizing, but it can also identify new ranking opportunities. It’s a good idea to partner with an SEO agency to conduct this audit and analysis because they will be able to offer unbiased advice and recommendations based on thorough research and expertise.
Switching things up with your content can mean more than just writing about new subjects; it may be quite effective to totally revamp your content style by trying a totally different medium. Visual content like videos and infographics tend to receive higher engagement rates with audiences than traditional blog posts, but one of the latest content trends that many businesses can benefit from is vlogging and podcasting.
Vlogging (video blogging) is highly engaging because it gives your content a face and a personality through the people sharing it. This type of content is also fairly easy to produce, depending on the type of format you wish to use. It can be as simple as sitting a few of your marketing leaders down in front of a camera and filming them discuss a particular subject or reading off the highlights of a previously published piece. Podcasting has also been on the rise and is becoming quite a popular way to quickly consume content during commutes or downtime.
When it comes to targeting audiences, small can often be better. Honing in on the niche segments within your business’s audience is important for increasing engagement and building important connections with your customers.
If your team’s content has been falling flat or engagement rates are simply not where they need to be, it may be time to reassess your audience niches. Your customer’s preferences and interests can change and shift over time, and there may be new niche groups that have formed since your last analysis. Be sure to regularly reexamine audience data and observe shifts and changes in important demographic areas — such as age groups, locations or overall interests. Finding these new audiences can help your content team come up with new topic ideas that speak to these niche segments and strengthen the engagement rates with these small yet mighty groups.
Trying out something totally new and changing the traditional approach that you’ve always followed may be just what your team needs for inspiration. For instance, your marketing team may want to give employee advocacy a try and encourage the entire workplace to share their thoughts and experiences on the business’s content outlets and social media pages.
The important thing here is to actually give things a shot and give them enough time to determine whether or not it actually works. Just because your first video content piece doesn’t receive a lot of views doesn’t mean that it was a total bust. It takes time to figure out what works and what doesn’t, and your team will find ways to adjust and improve their efforts overtime. However, it is still important to constantly track important metrics, such as engagement rates, audience reach, and conversion percentages to see if there is an upward trend.
While you obviously want to be extremely careful not to copy your competition, there is no harm in using their content strategies as inspiration. If there is a competing brand that really resonates well with an audience that is similar to your own, encourage your content marketing team to identify patterns in their strategies that seem to be working. On the flip side, your team may also benefit from checking out struggling brands and seeing what content approaches they should avoid.
A stagnant content strategy simply cannot support a growing business. Keeping things fresh and exciting is certainly a challenge, but staying inspired and finding ways to switch things up can help your marketing team create better and more engaging content on a consistent basis.
By Scott Bay
Viral content is a dream goal for all marketers. When your content explodes, your business gains visitors and leads in very little time. However, there are many misconceptions about what it takes to get your content to go viral. Why? Because viral posts are outliers—they aren’t the norm. Most content typically receives a small amount of views and a few shares, but then dwindles. However, successful content doesn’t depend on virality. Utilizing professional methods and specific strategies can generate more interest in your content and drive more traffic to your site. By using strong social media tactics, you’ll definitely increase the chances of your content going viral.
Providing your readers with new information increases the chance of your material going viral. Prior to posting your content, it’s crucial to complete a thorough content audit of both your site and your competitors. A content audit ensures that you avoid reposting content similar to that of your competitors. Additionally, youwill also have a better understanding of what keywords will increase your ranking on Google.
It’s also critical to create an engaging voice. Carefully analyze your audience and determine how to best communicate with them. Take Coca-Cola for example. Despite being around for an entire century, the brand has always spoken to its audience in a way that evokes happiness. Whether it’s the joy of family, friends or a holiday, Coke has been fantastic at creating the same thirst-quenching emotions in its audience.
Studies have shown that content that includes images receives 94% more views than those without. The reason is simple. Visual content is more effective than text. Many users who click on an article, and see a long body of text, do not bother reading the information. They either do not have the time to read through a lengthy article or don’t care to read it.
Splitting up a large body of text with images creates more engaging content. Many studies show that the human brain processes images much faster than text. This information tells us that readers get the information they need much faster when it’s visual. Additionally, individuals are 65% more likely to retain information through images than through text.
The bottom line: your content becomes more compelling and interesting to readers when it is strategically interspersed with images.
Creating content that resonates with your readers is a difficult, yet critical task to master. Engaging, relatable content is more likely to be socially shared, forwarded and linked to from other sites. Individuals who relate to the information you’re providing are more likely to continue reading until the end. Moreover, relatable content is what sparks conversations and elevates your marketing.
Buzzfeed is one company that excels at this tactic. According to Quantcast, the company succeeds in catching the imagination and attention of their audience through engaging, entertaining and unpredictable content that resonates deeply with their readers. Discussing common, relatable issues with their readers increases the chances of users resonating with the content and sharing it.
One of the most effective ways to communicate a point is through stories. They capture your audience’s attention for a short journey. When content can take a reader/viewer from point A to point B, then you have a robust content marketing tool.
Without a compelling, interesting story, your content is just another piece of content. Additionally, stories have the ability to create an emotional response within your readers. Once this happens, your audience is more likely to take action and/or share the content.
Humor is infectious. When individuals read or see something funny, they’re inspired to share it with others. In fact, a recent survey showed that 43% of participants said that sharing funny content was important to them. Why? Because when people read or watch something funny, they share it others who might find the content hilarious. Humor creates and strengthens relationships with people.
Using humor in your content can also…Continue Reading
Article source: http://smartbrief.com/original/2018/08/want-viral-content-follow-these-steps
Tessa Lieber | Go Local Interactive
You’ve probably heard that “Content is king.” After all, what would a website be without it? But simply throwing words or quirky quips on a page isn’t a strategy; and content without a purpose doesn’t really contribute to business revenue.
Keep in mind that online content has a job to do, even your blog and social media posts. In self-storage, its function is to build relationships with customers and sell your services. However, there are many forms of content and many things it can accomplish. Is yours positively contributing to your bottom line?
When creating online content, your word choice impacts your self-storage brand: the personality, relatability and expertise you convey. The right words not only promote and describe your facility features and amenities, they establish and affect your digital presence.
Keywords are all the rage in search marketing, and for good reason. Still determining a good part of search engine rankings, they’re important, but not in the same way they used to be. Before Google made some major algorithm changes, the more abundant a specific keyword, the better. Now, an overuse of keyword mentions can be viewed negatively. That doesn’t mean you should eliminate them altogether, but rather, incorporate keywords naturally. You want to comprehensively cover a topic so your content shows better in the search engine results page (referred to as “semantic search”).
Your online content does more than just capture Web traffic. It must funnel users through your website. Ultimately, your website should be one of your best salespeople. As such, its content should drive users through each stage of the sales cycle to eventually rent or reserve a unit. This means it must not only address facility features, but the benefits of renting at your property.
Your website pages need a strong call to action (CTA). By providing clear, relevant and actionable inbound-linking options on each page, you can drive users through your site like IKEA herds customers through its stores. It’s proven that users are more likely to click when a CTA is present.
A self-storage website should contain at least three types of content: static pages, facility pages and blogs. Once these are satisfied, you can diversify by incorporating more visually appealing, shareable types of content. These more creative pieces help capture audience interest and develop top-of-mind awareness.
Static pages. These are the educational or informative pages that are always on your site. They should answer users’ questions about self-storage in general and your company specifically. They’re typically more “evergreen” in nature, meaning the content doesn’t need to be constantly updated to stay accurate. Be wary of including things like nearby businesses or how many years your company has been in business, as these things will constantly change.
Facility pages. These market-level pages are integral to your website. This is typically where users can reserve or rent units, and where many sales conversions take place. But facility pages aren’t meant to include just a list of available units. Your content should build up the value of each type. In their heads, your customers are doing their own form of a cost-benefit analysis, and the content of these pages should account for that.
Specific markets (cities, states, ZIP codes, etc.) are also commonly part of search terms when users are looking for self-storage near them. By incorporating proper keywords into your facility pages, you can stay optimized for search engines.
Blogs. While the days of RSS feeds are past, blogs are still an important marketing tool. They should provide fresh, relevant and keyword-focused content to stay on top of search engine needs. The key metrics of a top-performing blog are increased entrances and page views, and a low exit rate. This means that not only does a blog need to be optimized for search engine optimization (SEO) to generate traffic, it should be timely and relevant to capture user interest and—with a strong CTA—funnel users through your website.
While it can be hard to measure your blogs’ return on investment, they’re still vital in the overall strength of your sales funnel. After all, could a funnel do its job without the wide mouth at the top?
Visual content. Once the essentials are covered, you can delve into more engaging content. These might include gated, lead-generating content and appealing social media graphics. While it’s important that your brand tone comes through in all forms of content, this is where your personality can really shine. Visual content can help with brand recall and loyalty.
Creativity doesn’t necessarily involve…Continue reading
Article source: https://www.insideselfstorage.com/marketing/driving-self-storage-success-through-online-content-marketing
When it comes to growing your organic visibility and position, your company as an industry, or topic thought, quality content is a must. While blogging and page optimization is very beneficial, there is one popular strategy, when executed correctly, that can take your game to a whole new level. They are called “Pillar Pages.”
The idea of a pillar page, or what I’ve always called a core page, is to increase your topic authority by creating an in-depth piece of content that covers as many aspects of that specific topic as possible. Brian Dean has been using the strategy with great success for years. To see an example of one of his pages click here.
As you see on this page, there is a ton of content, broken into multiple sections (chapters). But the idea is to give as much information as you can around a topic to show your authority to your users and the search engines.
Pieces of content like this don’t just happen. They take a lot of time and careful planning and execution. Check out the video below to learn more.
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Over the last couple of years, or maybe a year and a half or so, HubSpot has been pushing something known as pillar page. HubSpot is an inbound marketing software used to get everything that you need to do to achieve high-level inbound marketing under one roof. Now, they’ve been pushing pillar pages for one main reason. Google is focused on topic authority. This is nothing new. This is something that we’ve known about for quite some time. They’ve been really gearing towards this in order to better understand user intent and to deliver the content that a user is expecting, that’s actually going to answer their questions.
Topics you can think of as the meta-category. The top category. The big thought. We can have a topic like SEO. Let’s say we have this topic. Now, this is our big idea. This is something that we want to be known for, something that we want to do. Underneath this, we are going to have things like local SEO, or things like search marketing. We’re going to have things like Google. These are all keywords and terms that are now related to this meta topic, this main topic.
In Google, when they’re looking for authority figures on ideas, they want to know that you’re a topic expert. Yes, you want to be a niche expert as well and maybe this is going to be your focus over here. Then, there’s going to be subcategories under there. What they’re looking for, is do you know what you’re talking about. One of the ways that they do that, is they look at the content. They look to see whether or not that your keywords and the content that you’re writing about matches the topic authority of what you’re talking about.
Where does a pillar page fit into all of this?
Since Hummingbird was released and Google began to focus more on topics and more on relational search or search that’s more contextual, we have been focusing our SEO strategies on our services pages, on what we would call our core page, which is the exact same thing as a pillar page. These are pages that prove your topic authority and help the user better understand. A pillar page is not really a high-level piece of content. It’s more in that consideration, more in that middle of the buyer’s page. It’s going to add a lot more context. It’s also going to help that user take the next step into building that relationship with you.
What you want to do is have these pages on your site that display topic authority and then you want to build relationships between those pages and other related pieces of content. Again, let’s take a look at how this strategy works.
If you’ve got a website, you’ve got a number of pages. Right? You’ve got your home page, about, services, and content. Underneath your services pages, you’re going to have probably what you’re known for. I’m just going to use what we do as an example because it’s going to be easier for me and I hope it still makes sense to you. We’ve got SEO, we’ve got inbound, and we’ll also say analytics.
Now, we can treat either our services pages as core pages, or we can build a separate pillar page. What a pillar page would be, would be something like you’ve probably seen like the Ultimate Guide to SEO. What this guide is going to be is a really in-depth piece of content that covers everything about SEO from on page, off page, maybe some backlinks, maybe we’ll talk about the technical side, maybe we’ll talk about schema, maybe we’ll talk about local, Google, ranking factors. We’re really going to just create this really comprehensive piece of content that’s going to be this guide that lets our users know everything that they need to know about SEO. In that, we’re going to have these different sections that really show our authority. Each under these sections is going to have very targeted terms in them, like on page SEO, link building, Google algorithm, Google analytics, local SEO, ranking factor. All these other terms that are related to SEO, which we’ll want this page to rank for, is terms related to what is SEO. How does SEO work? You know, a guide to SEO. Those are the things we want searchers to find us for. So, we start creating all this content.
It doesn’t just stop there. We don’t just create this one page. Now, we’ve got to take this page and build relationships between our site, because we’re going to be doing this with each one of our core pages here. Then, Google now wants to see relationship. Just because you have this big giant piece of content and some links in it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to rank. I think that’s a lot of disconnection sometimes. We assume that, hey, as long as I build a lot of content, people are going to naturally rank to it, put links to it, and they’re going to like it. If you don’t put the work behind your content, and you don’t build the right linking, internally linking structure as well as building backlinks, you’re not going to get the visibility you want, which is why a lot of people get frustrated with pillar page campaigns or any other link building and content marketing campaigns. It is because they haven’t taken the extra effort to make sure one; they’ve added the context within their website and two; they’ve gotten outside sites to link to them as well.
Let’s talk a little bit about how that all flows together. So, you’ve created this pillar page and you’ve created this really in-depth piece of content that you want to ultimately drive your users to. A pillar page’s goal isn’t to move people to a blog, it’s to move people deeper into that page and hopefully take some action. This can be your pillar page.
Now, what you want to do is start driving traffic or start to show relationships to it. Again, let’s say this one is about SEO again. Now, I might have a blog article that is an SEO how to. I want to add an internal link from this SEO how to into the pillar page. Maybe I’ve got one on local SEO. Again, I want to add an internal link to that. I also maybe have one on backlinks. I want to add an internal link back to that. What this is doing is starting to create a web. Go figure, right? Where Google is able to crawl our sites and begin to see the relationship. Not just the content on this page, but that we also have other authoritative pieces of content on our website. Now, what we also need to do is take these pages and, if appropriate, interlink them where it makes sense. Again, we’re showing that relationship. We also want to find high-quality third-party sites that we can build relationships with that can also build backlinks to these pages. That’s HQ for high-quality.
That is going to raise the visibility of these blog pages. The authority of these blog pages, which then is going to pass that authority to the pillar page as well. Alone, this pillar page should be attracting tons of links as well. If it is a really good piece of content and it’s being marketed well and distributed well, it’s going to increase in value which in return has the potential to increase the value of all your other content.
This really starts to work in a very cyclical way and it needs to all be integrated to each other. You can’t just put one page up and spend a lot of time creating this content and hope that people are going to find it and link to it. You may have people on social. Great. Push it out to social. Use it in your newsletter, but make sure you’re doing the other things. Make sure that the technical side of it is done right, that the content is well written, that it’s easy to read, that it’s digestible, that it’s contextual, and then make sure that you have the links in place.
This is a critical piece of this strategy to make it work. A lot of people don’t do it because it’s hard and it does take time. It takes a lot of organization and understanding what are these types of sites that you should be linking to. Not all links are created equal. You can spend a lot of time and a lot of money buying or going after bad links that are actually going to do the opposite of what you want the strategy to do for you. Make sure that you take the time to not just identify what you want to create that core pillar page about, but what are the other assets you have that you can interlink and begin to build this web. What resources can you build outside of that? Maybe you can do some guest posting, get some resource pages, maybe you find some high-quality niche communities in LinkedIn, or some other places, where you can begin to build in some of these links and these other assets and traffic that are going to build the…
By Nate Vickery, Editor at Bizzmark Blog
Content marketing is subjective and can’t be measured by tangible metrics, right? Not true, says Nate Vickery. Content marketing is as much about creativity as it is about knowing your audience, so marketers need to know how to measure what’s working.
One of the major problems content marketers face is not knowing how to track the effectiveness of their content. Many believe that content marketing is subjective and that it depends on some intangible metrics, but it’s not true. There is a wide range of specific metrics that can tell you which strategies really drive more traffic to your site, boost conversions or increase your revenue. All you have to do is learn how to separate the right KPIs from those that may distract you.
With this in mind, here are eight awesome metrics every content marketer should monitor:
The bounce rate shows how many visitors leave your site after viewing just one page. This metric provides you with an invaluable insight, helping you understand your target audience. It gives you an opportunity to find out why someone lands on your site and then kicks it before completing the desired action. It could be a poor page load speed? Maybe your content is not relevant to them or the overall appeal of the site is not that positive. What about your menu and navigation? How clear and user-friendly are they?
The only problem with this metric is that it’s usually misunderstood, as it can sometimes be quite murky. For instance, if someone clicks on your link from Facebook and leaves your site after reading your article from beginning to end, this still counts as a bounce – this is why you shouldn’t rely on this metric solely when determining the success of your content.
The name says it all – retention metrics show how many people return to your site. These metrics include stuff like return visitors and the frequency of returns – they are insanely important to content marketers as they actually show how well your content resonates with your readers. If it’s relevant, informative and engaging enough, they will come back. Most importantly, they will see you as a reliable and trusted source of information. Remember, attracting new visitors to your site is important, but retaining them and boosting their loyalty to your brand is the foundation of your content marketing strategy.
It’s good to know the average amount of time your readers spend on your site since it shows how engaged they are with your content. So if you’ve published a comprehensive 2000-word guide and you see that people leave it after two minutes, this means that they’re not reading it. The same goes for your videos, infographics and podcasts. If your visitors aren’t interested in reading, watching or listening to your content from beginning to end, this means that you’re either targeting the wrong people or that you’re failing to bring value to them.
The major problem with this metric is that it doesn’t really tell you if your readers are actively engaged. For example, if someone opens your article, but then gets distracted by a phone call and spends 15 minutes on that page without reading…Continue reading
Article source: https://www.marketingmag.com.au/hubs-c/opinoin-nate-vickery-eight-awesome-content-marketing-metrics/
WOW! What a wonderful surprise. We are so honored to find out that our blog was recently nominated by blogger Rafi Nandi, the administrator from LONEART1ST, for the Blogger Recognition Award. Thanks so much LONEART1ST for your kind consideration and we are humbled by your thoughtfulness. Be sure to stop by and visit Rafi’s blog site.
InKnowvative Concepts dedicates this blog to encourage our audience to “Take what you know and turn it into something extraordinary!”
We began our blog in January 2017. Although to date we only published approximately 130 organic and curated blogs, we are pleased by the wide range of audiences we attract. We are a creative disruption think-tank pursuing new ways of helping our readers step outside your comfort zone and position your company as a trusted leader in your industry. We also encourage individuals to do the same. This platform, along with our Facebook and Twitter channels, gives us the opportunity to share, educate, engage, collaborate and communicate with an international audience. We divulge resources from a wide range of industries and offer inspirational and motivational good reads outside the business realm.
Here are 4 easy tips to apply to your blog content creation:
1. Ideas drive interest and social engagement. Whatever your blog’s unique angle is write down ideas that connect or contrast to your theme, no matter how farfetched they may seem. This gives you a premise to work from and a unique topic to write about.
2. Research- In order to break out with new, informative and exciting things to write about, you must first disrupt yourself by doing your research. You can find out information about practically any subject matter anywhere. Research will help you to either innovate or disintegrate in the construction of your words and ideas.
3. Use images whether they are your personal credits or those from public domain to give a well rounded more engaging introduction to your blog piece. Be sure to avoid using images from stock photography, stock footage, and stock music providers, unless you purchase them. Give credit to images you may add to your post from sources like Google Search images if they are not copywritten. Some are.
4. Share your blog posts on your social media channels for greater exposure. Oftentimes your social channels attract an audience different from your blog. Consistency and frequency is the key.
Our nominees for the Blogger Recognition Award are:
Irish Life
From Behind the Pen
My World Standing Still
Adoption From Foster Care
I Am Starstruck
Just Love
Daily His
Catchlightsb
Charlene Woodlee
Gender Creative Life
To participate in the Blogger Recognition Award, here are a few simple rules:
1. Show your gratitude to the person who nominated you and provide a link back to the person’s blog.
2. Explain a brief story about your blog.
3. Share two or more pieces of advice for beginner bloggers.
4. Choose 10 other bloggers to nominate.
5. Comment on each blog, by letting them know they’ve been nominated, and provide a link to your award post.
In closing, we want to again thank LONEART1ST for nominating InKnowvative Concepts for the Blogger Recognition Award!
By Katy Katz for Search Engine Journal
When is the last time that you read something from beginning to end?
Be honest with yourself.
Marketers are notorious for skimming or – even worse – blindly sharing things that we haven’t read.
I remember Rand Fishkin talking about this phenomenon once during a keynote. He shared Moz’s killer Twitter stats along with his disappointment that they didn’t directly correlate to their blog traffic.
The reason? People were sharing Moz’s posts without ever reading them.
Other studies have confirmed this depressing fact, including one that found 59 percent of the content shared on Twitter never gets clicked.
Imagine, the nerve (*cough, cough*)!
This isn’t the fate that good-intentioned marketers want for our work.
We spend a lot of time creating good content in the hopes that someone (or ideally lots of someones) will find value and take action. For the record, I feel the same way so please feel free to tweet at me if you’ve made it this far.
There are a lot of tips out there for what makes good content. But what types of content turn people off? What’s causing them to skim, ignore, click away, or even bounce?
Truthfully, there are a ton of ways that you can turn off your audience with your content, and many of them are easy mistakes to make.
Here are some of the glaring culprits that you should work to avoid in your content.
You don’t have to write an Oscar-worthy saga every time you take to the keyboard. But you do need to think about your reader and whether they are going to be interested in what you have to say.
If you dump some text into a document with no point, or angle, or hook — you’re going to lose them.
If creativity doesn’t come naturally to you, but you have a lot of subject-matter expertise to provide, jot your thoughts down and go back over what you wrote at the end.
The headline and introduction are critical to pulling in the reader. Ask yourself:
If your content needs some work, try spicing up your introduction and key points with some of these writing best practices:
Being insulting is worse than being boring.
Lately, it seems that every couple of weeks, some company is making headlines for making a blatantly insulting remark on email, a blog post, and especially social media.
One of the most well-known examples is DiGiorno’s Twitter incident. They misused the hashtag #whyistayed, which was an open forum for Tweeters to chat about domestic violence, to make a joke about pizza.
If it feels icky to promote during a sensitive time or issue, it probably is.
Another fast track way to get a bounce or have your readers turn up their noses is to make all of your content about yourself.
No one enjoys listening to someone else talk about him or herself for 15 minutes. The same goes for brand content.
The way around it? A customer-centric content strategy.
Build content that focuses on the benefits for your customers as opposed to the features of your product or service.
By focusing on “the why” and the value of your business, you can help customers more easily visualize their positive outcomes and experiences.
This is an addendum to number three. While one of the “wrong persons” is definitely the result of focusing too much on yourself, you could also easily make the mistake of writing content that’s specific to an individual who is nothing like your target market.
For example, if Search Engine Journal only targeted its content toward new marketers, their audience would quickly be overwhelmed if there was too much jargon and any advanced content. On the flip side, if SEJ’s target audience was only very experienced readers, too much SEO 101 and basic marketing content would quickly lose them.
Avoid both of these scenarios by doing some customer research and building out detailed buyer personas. Hubspot found that personas make websites 2-5 times more effective — because the content is more relevant and interesting to your reader.
It can also be helpful to map out the buyer’s journey for each of your personas, so you understand the important goals, questions, and concerns your potential buyers have along the way. That way, you can address all of this information with your content.
I get it. As a marketer, you’re pulled in a lot of directions. One piece of content has to accomplish a lot:
There are also a lot of requirements to technical SEO and, in the past, some of them seemed at odds with writing for humans.
SEO 101: A Beginner’s Guide
Read Search Engine Journal’s guide, SEO 101: Learn the Basics of Search Engine Optimization.
Those days are now gone.
Search engines are getting smarter by the second. Their number one goal is user experience. So, as marketers, that should be our number one goal, too.
If you’re still stuffing keywords or writing dry gobbledygook (technical term) for the sole purpose of ranking, you will turn off your audience. It’s a waste of your time and theirs.
Do your readers and yourself a favor. Write for people first, then optimize your content.
False, incorrect, or unsubstantiated information is going to quickly frustrate your readers.
Be sure to back your claims up by citing an authoritative source.
A few quick statistics and facts from a trusted resource can go a long way in helping to illustrate your point and convince your reader.
Bonus points for making this information more visually appealing with charts, graphs, or other visual aids (like the one above). These will help break up big blocks of text and keep your reader interested in what you have to say (more on this in number eight).
We all want more leads and revenue. And anyone who has been trained in inbound marketing knows that you should have a relevant call to action at the end of your content that helps move your audience to the next step.
That does not mean, however, that your entire blog needs to be pushy and salesy. In fact, if you do that, you will annoy your readers and they’ll see right through you.
Instead, make helping your readers your number one focus.
Genuine support and a focus on the truth will go so much farther than an aggressive, old-school sales push. And you’ll certainly turn off a lot fewer readers.
It’s best to format website content with short, digestible pieces of information with headlines and bullet points whenever possible.
This is partly because it makes it easier for the reader to skim the content and follow along.
In fact, one study found that users only read about 20 percent of the text on your page.
But digestible formatting is also helpful because a wall of text can be overwhelming. Your readers don’t want to have flashbacks to thesis statements and 1,000-page history books.
Don’t make your audience work for information.
Provide value in a way that easy to absorb. Your audience will be much more likely to stick around and keep reading.
Writing in an easy-to-follow format doesn’t necessarily mean that the overall amount of content needs to be a specific length.
In the last few years, we’ve heard a lot about how longer content was better for search engines. However, it’s a big mistake to make long content for long content’s sake. Your audience will see right through it and their eyes will gloss over.
At the same time, if you cut your content off and don’t actually answer the question, you will frustrate your readers and they will seek a solution elsewhere.
The secret is to let the needs of the audience dictate the length of your content.
This goes back to the same point that has been made several times here:
That’s it!
Utility is the magic recipe for preventing your audience from turning up their collective noses.
Sometimes, the idea of being useful is easier said than done.
Start by ensuring you have a deep understanding of your audience. Do your persona research and map out the question and answer process that they are likely to follow along their journey.
Once you know what’s important to your audience — their goals and pain points — you will be able to write content that excites and motivates action.
If you skip steps, or try to take shortcuts, you’re way more likely to lose or even offend your audience. From long-form website content, to tweets and social posts, putting in the work at the beginning is sure to help you have a quality product in the end.
Article source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/weak-content/217809/
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