As digital marketing becomes crucial in running a successful business, more and more people are experimenting with content marketing. It seems easy enough. Please write a few blog posts to update your website and share them on social media. Get a few likes and shares. What else have you got to worry about?
As digital marketing becomes a crucial element in running a successful business, more and more people are experimenting with content marketing. It seems easy enough. Write a few blog posts to update your website and share them on social media. Get a few likes and shares. What else have you got to worry about?
That’s the main problem that most businesses have when it comes to content marketing. They don’t understand what they are doing or why they are doing it. As a content writer, I’m used to the confused expressions on people’s faces when I explain what I do.
It’s not just writing blogs. It’s about writing SEO-optimised content. It’s about providing people with content that is relevant and useful to their life. And it’s about ranking on the first page of the search engine results pages. I don’t care whether one person or ten thousand people read my content if I’ve achieved those objectives.
Content marketing is far more technical than you might have first thought. You won’t achieve these results by asking different members of your team. Without understanding why you are writing content, you will never produce great content. But it’s easy to learn. In this article, you’ll discover the basics of content writing so that you and your team can take your content marketing strategy to the next level.
By now we are all well aware of SEO and its benefits to our business. Ranking in the top spot of Google drives organic traffic to your website. Every single one of these organic hits is a potential customer. But how do you get those lucrative spots?
Search engines scan every website, looking for obvious signs that that page is the best suited to answer the searcher’s question. All you have to do is design a website that answers the question. Simple enough, right?
I won’t get into technicalities in this post, because you want to know how to write content that ranks. But a basic understanding of on-page and off-page SEO will help you write better blog posts and drive more organic traffic to your site.
Of course, there are other elements that are out of your control. The age of your domain has a role to play. As well as the loading speed and image optimisation. Some of these things you’ll be able to improve yourself. There are loads of tips and tutorials online to help you. Other elements may require SEO experts or just take time to see results. But there are still a lot of ways that you can optimise content for SEO.
The main goal of a content marketing expert is to increase web traffic and brand awareness. To do this they create content that is useful and relevant to their target audience.
This content can come in many forms. Graphic designers and copywriters are in their element when it comes to creating infographics and blogs to be shared on websites and social media. But videographers, academics and chefs have all been called upon to create meaningful content for brands.
Creating content brings together a host of skills. These are easily transferred from other disciplines and can be self-taught. There is no need to study or spend years at university. There are online courses and tutorials that can help you develop the specific skills that you’ll need to excel in content creation.
Content marketing serves two purposes:
Both of these factors can help you generate leads and achieve your sales targets. If customers are coming to you and actively seeking you out, your workload has halved.
Optimising your content marketing strategy gives you more opportunities to climb the search rankings. It is common knowledge that most people click on the first organic google result. By reaching that spot you are driving more genuine leads to your website and increasing brand awareness.
The truth is it doesn’t matter if 10,000 people read your blog post or just 1. Readers don’t help you just the search engine rankings. Answering a searcher's question does, and that’s exactly what you should aim to do.
Let’s say, like us at Quadrant2Design, you would be in the events industry. Do people search for ‘exhibition stand’ or ‘how much does an exhibition stand cost’? Okay, people search for both. But Google knows that.
If you have content on your website that is relevant to your target audience, you are probably answering these questions. We have a number of exhibiting guides that answer the most searched-for questions about exhibitions. As Google picks up on all of this additional information it pushes us up the search engine rankings because it has decided that we are a relevant site.
So you see, content marketing really isn’t about people reading your blog posts at all. Instead, it is about answering your customer's questions and doing it well enough that the search engines recognise you as a valuable and relevant source of information.
This is why I don’t care that nobody reads my blog posts.
