An effective content marketing strategy makes use of a variety of tools, including social media, blogging, and downloadable content offers, to enhance awareness of your brand, attract visitors to your website, and encourage them to interact with your business. The best strategies synchronize these efforts to continuously attract and engage new customers by providing what they need through every step of the buying process.
Why blog?
Blogging is perhaps the most broadly effective form of content marketing available. While the practice began as a kind of online journaling (maintaining a “weblog”), it has grown into a common way for many different types of websites to continuously incorporate fresh, new content. Keeping your website up to date with a steady stream of relevant content that your audience values is an essential element of search engine optimization (SEO)—the practice of fine-tuning your website so that it appears as prominently as possible in results from search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Because the job of a search engine is to provide answers to users’ search queries, the more your site is able to answer the questions your potential customers are asking, the more it’s likely to show up in their search results.
Selecting Topics
Consequently, when thinking of topics to cover on your blog, it’s important to consider what kinds of questions your audience is likely to ask. For example, if your business is a veterinarian’s office, your potential clients will likely be searching for information about various pet care and pet health questions. If your blog answers common questions like, “How can I help my dog stay calm on the 4th of July?” or “How can I control fleas naturally?” your potential customers are more likely to find your site in the course of their own online research. In addition to attracting more visitors to your site, by providing helpful answers, you also begin to establish your business as an authority and build trust in your brand.
Incorporating Keywords
To write an effective marketing blog, research keywords that your potential customers are using, and include them in your articles to cue search engines that your pages contain material that is relevant to those searches. Including keywords in article titles and subheadings provides even stronger cues.
Be careful, however, to use keywords only in ways that flow naturally in your writing. In the early days of SEO, lots of website owners began packing their content with keywords they hoped would bring in traffic—with the result of creating headache-inducing text that no one wants to read. While the hypothetical vet’s office in the example above may find that potential clients are searching for “vet clinic Des Moines,” that phrase is not likely to seem natural in any real context. A better way to drive traffic for a keyword phrase like this is to alter it slightly so it fits neatly into your text. For example, at the end of the article about natural flea control, the author might include a line like, “[Business name] vet clinic in Des Moines can help you find the best way to control your pet’s fleas.” The site could benefit even further by using those keywords as anchor text linking to the page that is most relevant—the one page that is most important for people to find when they search for those keywords (in this case, probably the clinic’s home page).
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