Content is King. This phrase is used every day and ingrained in every content marketer’s brain so deeply they hear it in their dreams. The thing is, not all content is valuable to you. The phrase should really be “quality content is king.” Slapping together something you’ve stuffed with keywords to the point of being unreadable and throwing it on your website is not only a waste of time and resources, but can land you with penalties from search engines. Good content strategy goes hand-in-hand with SEO but remember, in the end it’s about improving your audience’s experience.
From a more practical, perspective, consider the advantage of great content. According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing gets three times more leads than paid search advertising. That’s not to say your paid search efforts are wasteful. No one arm of marketing your business will magically push you past your goals.
Where to begin, then? How do I know what makes good content? There are a number of tools out there that help with keyword research, topic development, etc. A good marketing professional will know how to use them and help develop a strategy to make the most of your content going forward. What worked yesterday won’t always work today or tomorrow. Here are a few items to consider when looking at your content:
Continued Rise of Voice Search
With Google announcing that 20% of their mobile queries are voice searches, it’s foolish to take it lightly. Consider what goes into a voice search and adapt your content accordingly. When people speak, they ask questions in long form. Instead of optimizing content solely for head terms, consider long-tail keyword phrases you can zero in on. In short, look to answer questions the way a human would.
Live Video
Video content is still a great addition to written content, but live video is exploding in popularity. Livestream reports that live video is more appealing to brand audiences with video on social media generating 1200% more shares than text and images combined. Reported, too, is that companies using video had 41% more web traffic from search than those not using video. Planned live video streams are great ways to directly interact with your audience in real time.
Content Length
What’s the ideal content length? This has been thrown around and analyzed forever. Why does there need to be one answer? If all of your content is identical in length, there’s no variety. Your readers won’t want to read a novel every time the come to your site yet sometimes they’ll want more info on a subject. Vary your content length. Put up those longer posts but sprinkle in some shorter ones for easier digestion. As with all your posts, don’t neglect visuals! How likely are you to be drawn in by loads of content that are all text? We didn’t think so. We’re visual creatures and your audience will respond better to content providing that. We’ve discussed video content but don’t forget other visuals like infographics!
Content without strategy won’t yield optimal results. It’s important to know how trends have changed and where things are headed then act accordingly. That’s not to say older content can’t be revamped and made useful again. In fact, revitalizing older high-performing content is one of the most overlooked options in content marketing. You don’t have to always reinvent the wheel.
No matter how you create new content or rejuvenate older posts make sure your content is optimized for SEO. There are endless SEO tools to help with this, but a top favorite is Yoast SEO. This plug-in monitors header tags, keyword density, and loads of other metrics for optimizing your content. With free and paid options available, it should be a go-to for everyone.
Realizing you need to create a content strategy or update the one you had? We can help you there! We can work with you to develop and implement a content strategy to benefit your business. Give us a shout!