As search engines have evolved, so has the practice of optimizing for them. Especially with the release of Google’s Hummingbird algorithm, ranking highly in the results pages involves much more than plugging keywords into your content. More and more, the quality of your content is key both to ranking highly in search results and to driving traffic to your website.
Inbound marketing has been growing in popularity among businesses in recent years. It is estimated that around 60% of businesses now employ an inbound marketing strategy, and inbound marketing has been shown to be a more effective means of attracting customers than traditional outbound methods. Unlike traditional advertising, which interrupts consumers with a sales pitch, the inbound strategy focuses on attracting potential customers by providing value and developing relationships.
Content marketing, which aims at attracting customers by building relationships through delivery of remarkable online content, is central to any inbound marketing strategy. Providing the valuable content that your potential customers seek helps your company to increase its visibility, build trust, and establish itself as an authority.
Due to the increasing importance of content marketing, Forbes has predicted that “Director of Content” will be the most recruited job title in 2014. As CEOs realize the value that quality content delivers in terms of customer acquisition, they will be more inclined to make specific budget allocations to professional content writing, rather than assigning the task of content creation haphazardly among staff. The publication further predicts that attempts to cut corners in content creation will backfire. Low quality content creates negative branding and poor relationships with site visitors, which tends to repel, rather than attract, customers.
Your content marketing strategy should begin with optimizing the user experience your company’s website. Make sure that it is easy for visitors to find and navigate to the information they are looking for. In order to know what that information might be, you will need to think about what intent brings them to your site in the first place. Keyword research is a fine place to begin; it gives you information about what kinds of searches bring users to your site. As mentioned earlier, however, keywording cannot be the entire strategy. Once you know what queries are leading users to your site, then you can go on to consider what kinds of information would be useful and valued to people who conduct those searches. The crux of content marketing is delivering value in order to build relationships. Your site could shoehorn in large numbers of long-tail keywords that echo frequent searches, but in the absence of quality content, any users who find you will likely be repelled by your obvious attempt at directing traffic to an essentially valueless site.
Longer, in-depth content is generally more effective for SEO and relationship building than shorter content. Google looks favorably upon smart, high-quality, insightful articles, so they get an edge in the results pages. Visitors love finding just the information they need, explained clearly and intelligently. If you provide this, you will gain credibility, authority, trust, and respect for your company. Avoid the hard sell. Consumers are weary (and wary) of being sold and generally tune out anything that feels like a sales pitch. If you help your visitors by providing value, they will naturally want to purchase from you over your competition.
Intelligent content can come in many forms. Some common elements of content marketing include
A company blog, including guest posts
E-books
Email newsletters
Whitepapers
Social media posts
Videos
Slideshow presentations
Blue Frog Marketing offers professional content writing services tailored to the needs of your business. Tell us what you would like to communicate to your customers, and we can do it elegantly and intelligently, leaving them with a positive impression of your company.