“Content Marketing” has recently become a major focus for companies working to most effectively use online marketing for their business. The first question is the most obvious: what is meant by the phrase ‘content marketing’? Basically, this means that you use your online content not simply to convey information to your reader, but you also shape and mold this content to make it a major factor in the marketing of your goods or services – and a major part of what content marketers are after are more prominent rankings in Google.
There are some simple rules and suggestions that we can follow to help our content work most effectively for our businesses.
The Content Marketing Quality Factor
Quality content is needed for several related reasons. High quality content is helpful to your reader, which means that they will spend the time it takes to actually read and understand what you’ve written. Having readers stay on your site to read your content also reduces your bounce rate, which is good for page rank in Google.
Quality content is not something that you can just throw together at a moment’s notice. The quality comes from deep research, wide expertise, and is presented in a way which is both authoritative and instructional. If any of the pieces are missing, the quality value of the content, even if very high, begins to be reduced.
The Quantity Factor
New content is regularly needed to continue helping search rankings. Google has a “freshness bias” within their search algorithm, which simply means that new content tends to rank well. If you are constantly putting out new, quality content for your business, then you’ll be doing a great deal of content marketing correctly just in that.
User Experience
We all want our readers to have positive experiences when interacting with our material. This serves both to help develop continuing relationships with consumers of our materials, and Google also positively weights sites and pages that seem to provide users a good experience.
Making Content Work for You
Once you have quality content ready to share with the world, now it’s time to make sure that content works to its maximum potential. Do good keyword research, know the keywords that people are searching for, and make sure to pepper your content with these specific keywords. Try not to only mention important keywords, but make sure that your content gives people answers and information about those topics; if you fail to do this, people will begin ignoring your material as essentially useless.
Time
Making content marketing work for you and your business requires determination and dedication. Throwing out a bit of sloppy material a few times a year will do nothing positive for your marketing efforts. Rather, you need to be consistent in putting out quality material, and following the guidelines above to make sure your content works for you. An editorial calendar can help you stay on target, and spreading out the writing among several good writers can also help keep you on goal.
Content writing is work; there are many people out there who do nothing other than write this type of content marketing material. But you know your business and your industry – so who better to put together content than the experts!
As we’ve seen, all of the pieces come together in content marketing. If you create quality content then that is good for your reader; what is good for the reader then becomes good for you again; and all of this interaction is good for marketing, especially rankings in the dominate search of our day, Google.
Go – create good content!