There is no doubt that in today’s marketing climate, content is king. A high-quality piece of content can deliver tremendous value for potential clients and drive traffic to your products or services. But, it can be hard to reach your target audience without an effective SEO strategy to distinguish you from the crowd.
In this blog, learn how to improve your content marketing game through a two-pronged approach: publishing high-quality content with a strategy for keyword ranking.
Writing Quality Content for Your Content Marketing Campaign
The first step to building a content marketing system is creating the content itself. Your potential customers have nothing to read, nothing to engage with, and no reason to explore your products or services without content.
When beginning your content library, cater to your target market. For example, if you are a healthcare business, don’t write content about the newest developments in computer processors. Even if you attract people interested in technology, they are unlikely to care about your products or services.
When we think of what makes compelling content, it boils down to maximizing the creative aspects of copywriting. Readers want powerful, expressive, inspiring writing that addresses a potential client’s pain points and solves a unique problem. Therefore, a great copywriter is someone who understands people, knows what their audience likes, and chooses the appropriate words that will appeal to them.
However, writing content that connects with readers is only the start. If your business invests in amazing content that readers enjoy but does not make you money, the investments are failures. Content needs to funnel people towards giving you their information, visiting a product page, or some other part of your website designed to sell.
At the end of the day, you are writing content to add value to readers’ lives so that they add value to your business. Content marketing is not a charity–it is an exchange of information and value between a company and a potential customer.
Best Practices For Ranking Your Content
However, no matter how good your content is, nobody will ever see it unless you pair it with SEO. Understanding how Google uses keywords and phrases to separate your content is vital to getting it in front of the people who want to read it most. Therefore, the better you are at creating engaging content that is properly SEO optimized, the more likely you are to attract valuable readers.
According to marketing guru Neil Patel, the six elements of SEO copywriting that matter most are as follows:
- Site Speed. Website speed is everything. If your readers are waiting for slow pages to load, they might just go somewhere else. A study by Akamai revealed these stats:
- 40% of people will abandon a web page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load fully.
- 47% of end-users expect a web page to load in two seconds or less.
- Headline. Headlines are what readers see first and often act as the determining factor in whether they read the content. They should not be a last-minute addition to a blog but instead a central focus.
- Content. From an SEO perspective, the content that ranks well on Google avoids keyword stuffing. In other words, place keywords throughout your content but never sacrifice readability for keyword density.
- Meta Description. The meta description on your content is a snippet for when people search for keywords relevant to your page. This snippet will often determine whether or not you get clicks, no matter how highly you rank in the search results.
- Keyword Frequency. Like we mentioned above, stuffing content with keywords can be a negative thing. You need balance in content marketing, and keywords are one area where striking the right balance matters. Aim for a keyword density no greater than 5.5% in your content. In addition, incorporate long-tail keywords in your content.
- Page Links. Appropriately linking to other thought-leaders’ sites and authority pages will lead Google to reward you for being in sync with their mission: organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible.
A Conversation from the Digital Marketing Masterclass Podcast W/ Brad Smith
We sat down recently with thought-leader Brad Smith to discuss Advanced SEO and Content Marketing Tactics. How does great content meet a fluid, adaptive, and data-responsive SEO strategy to optimize and maximize reach and targeting?
Brad is the founder and CEO of Codeless, a content production company whose content has been highlighted by The New York Times, Business Insider, The Next Web, and thousands more.
You can check out the podcast here, hosted by Farotech CEO Chris Carr.
Improving Your Content Marketing for the Future
To guide you in your journey toward an effective content strategy, a team-based approach with professionals dedicated to the science of SEO and the art of copywriting can take your reach to the next level.
A growth-driven methodology recognizes your website as so much more than a glorified online business card. Your site is (or should be) your greatest digital marketing asset. Because of that, it should also be an ever-improving work in progress.
With this approach, you get all the benefits of a full-time team of professional marketers without any of the downsides. At Farotech, we have dozens of experienced marketers who are ready to take your leads and conversion rates to new highs.
To learn more about making your content more measurable, scalable, and adaptive to changing algorithms and industry trends, click here for a copy of our comprehensive guide.
