With so much emphasis being made on quality content for search engine placement, there has been a rise in the interest of content marketing. But a lot of questions still remain as to how to create an effective content marketing strategy. Here is a strategy that focuses on the three main concerns of content marketing – findability, shareability, and convertability.
FINDABILITY
Previous SEO strategies included keyword stuffing and keyword density, but those strategies do not work anymore, in fact, will even get your site penalized in the search engines. The best way to create search engine friendly content is with a combination of the following methods.
Create High Quality Content
There are several factors to be taken into consideration in order to create quality content. The content must be directed toward a specific audience and address a concern they may have. The information included in the article must be detailed and perhaps even present a new or unique solution to the problem. It is also recommended that you have mapped a visitor’s journey toward a specific goal (a purchase) and know where on the map the content you are creating will be.
Use Relevant Keywords
Is the content you are creating informational or transactional? Know what kind of keywords searchers use when looking for these types of information and use them in your content. The content should provide an answer to the search phrase.
Create Meaningful Interactions
Once a user has clicked through to your site from the search engine, what they do or how they interact with the page is the engagement metric that the search engines will use to determine your content’s relevance to the search term. Content that answers the search query will grab the visitor’s attention and keep them on the site for a while. If the visitor doesn’t immediately see what they are looking for, they are likely to hit the back button, which is called a “bounce.”
Stay Fresh
It’s not just important to have high quality content on your site. It’s important to be consistently adding new high quality content on your site. Search engines love to see new content on a site and new content will bring viewers back to consume your new content.
Consistently providing new quality content on your site will also help brand you and your site as an authority on the subject.
SHAREABILITY
Visitors that find your content useful, insightful, unique, or funny are going to be more likely to share your content with others. When others share your content, it not only helps generate traffic and increase your search placements, it builds other’s trust in you.
But just what makes content share-worthy? According to the NY Times study, “The Psychology of Sharing,” key factors that influence sharing include:
- People need to trust you and the accuracy of your content in order to want to share your content.
- Content that is simple is more likely to be shared.
- Things that are funny, convey urgency, or connect people to a cause are thought to be share-worthy.
The study also revealed a few motivations that people have for sharing:
- To bring valuable or entertaining content to others
- To define themselves to others (by sharing things that reinforce an image they would like to present)
- To connect to other people that share their interests
- To get feedback and interact with others
- To get the word out about a cause or brand
Keep these key factors and motivations in mind when creating content. Spark people’s interests by providing a different take on the subject or an opposing point of view. Bring new issues to the forefront and share new tools and resources.
The most important part of shareability is to make it easy to share! Don’t forget to include share buttons for all the major social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, etc.
CONVERTABILITY
You can create great content that gets shared or even goes viral, but all the views in the world will not do you much good if the content doesn’t convert. Whether you want to make a sale or gain another subscriber for your list, if your content isn’t compelling readers to take some kind of action, your content isn’t working.
The first step in creating content that converts is to know your audience. Create profiles of kinds of people to visit your site and consume your content. What are their needs and desires? Know what step of the buying process are they on and provide information geared for that step and provide a path to drive them forward to the next step until they reach a purchase.
Quality content that no one sees doesn’t do you any good. Quality content that gets lots of views but doesn’t generate any sales is equally as useless. You have to strive to create quality content that people want to share and will convert visitors into customers.