CONTENT AND COPY WRITING ON THE CASSOWARY COAST
There are over 7 million articles published online every day
Out of those two million posted, how many do you think are being published by your competitors, related areas or by bloggers who are not selling a product?
Not only do people expect content for free, they expect it to be useful, educational and/or entertaining. The days of the five-hundred word re-written blog post being of any use to a website are a thing of the past.
It’s not just people that are looking to see if your content is actually any good, it’s the search engines themselves.
To an extent, good SEO and marketing revolves around content. Aside from the technical aspects of optimisation (of which there are many), getting ranked on any search engine worth its salt comes down to how many people actually like your website.
You have to remember that a search engine’s main priority is customers, not website owners, bloggers or even businesses. If, for example, Google started to rank websites that did not engage, entertain or educate the people using their services, they would cease to be the world’s most used search engine.
What Is Content Marketing?
Chances are you’ve read your fair share of online content – but if you stop to think about it for one second, how much of what you’ve read online can you actually recall? Getting your reader’s attention with big bold text, and eye-catching headlines is one thing, but keeping your reader’s attention is a COMPLETELY different story (see what I did there?).
The amount of content that is written, posted, published and read each and every day is enough to shatter even the most spirited of writers looking to break into the world of online publishing. When money is on the line it can become an even more daunting prospect. What should you write? Who needs to see to it? Where should it be published? When should it be posted? How often do you need to repeat this process?
Great quality content is a thing of true beauty. Yet sadly, in this day and age it is a rare thing to come by. Fierce competition, automated software, cheap services, and growing time constraints have resulted in marketers trumping excess quantity over genuine quality. It’s my job to endeavour to bring your audience the most epic content they’ve ever read.
Developing amazing content is where great SEO leads
So how does a search engine work out which websites have the best content and over all user experience?
Well, for obvious reasons, the ranking factors used in algorithms for each of the big search engines is a closely guarded secret, but most industry professionals believe that Google uses over 2 hundred different signal factors to work out where your site should go on their list.
Although we don’t know all of the factors, we do know some of them, your back-link profile, or the amount of related quality links pointing at your website from other sites (and social media to a growing extent) is a big one….a very big one.
So the question then becomes how do I get people to like, share and link to my website? The answer, you guessed it, is by creating truly amazing content. And just like that, your site’s content has instantly transformed into a massive chunk of its SEO!
How Do I Do It?
“Okay, that’s cool and all…” I hear you say. But how do I know what content my customers want to read?
Good question, I’m glad you asked. The truth is, you probably already have at least some idea since no one knows your business quite like you do.
So ask yourself:
What questions are my customers frequently asking?
What are my most popular products or services?
What are my competitors doing?
What are the most popular articles in my industry about?
These are great starting points. From there it’s time to look at the data (I have serious big love for data) to understand which of the answers to these questions…
Have the highest search volume
Are possibly not yet exploited by your competition
Have been shared the most across multiple social media platforms
Are genuinely helpful to your customers
The last point is very important. Everything on your website is for your customers. You always have to be thinking of what your customers want and give it to them before you even start to consider asking for something in return.
Then we level up and move to the next stage: What’s the format?
Video, guest post, article, infographic, podcast, social media, slide show or listicle? The best answer is all of them, but that’s not always possible or time/cost effective. The realistic answer is whatever format and platform is most popular with your clients. To find this out, we digital marketers make our offering to the Google gods and dive back in to the data. We then make that decision on an article by article basis.