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Have you heard of the phrase ‘Content is king?’
I’m sure you might have heard or seen something similar in your life, especially if you’re into content marketing. Okay, let’s discuss an example to make you understand better. Suppose that you’re planning to get a house built. Your house’s foundation is the most crucial part. Isn’t it?
Similar is the case with content. Whether you’re planning to engage in search engine optimisation, customer service, email marketing or any other activity, the content you produce is the most essential element to get started with.
Content and Search Engine Optimisation go hand in hand. The ability to produce content that resonates with SEO can help you to increase your engagements as well as play a huge role in getting your brand recognition on Google.
Content that is designed with the needs of SEO ranks well when searched and if you don’t believe this – Neil Patel is one such example, soaring high in the skies of content marketing due to his competent SEO optimised content.
In today’s world, almost every business is effectively making use of SEO optimised content to sell their products and services as well as to create a respectable place for themselves in this competitive market. The industries include news & journalism, media & entertainment, tourism & hospitality, retail & e-commerce, etc.
Do you want to get into the world of content marketing and discover more about search engine optimisation (SEO)? You’re at the right place. Scroll down and learn everything you need to know about content and how it can help you with SEO.
Don’t forget to thank us later!
1. What is the content?
Content is anything that you consume in the form of audio, video, text or infographics. For different people, content holds a different meaning, and it triggers different emotions altogether. Content is a piece of information brought together in any chosen form with a purpose to educate the audience through a proper channel. Now, let’s highlight the most critical words through this definition and dig deeper.
Information
Your content highlights the most important key point that you want to address your audience. It contains the message that you wish to speak about. On the other hand, your content offers explanations and supports the main idea of your work. For example; this article is produced to enhance your knowledge and inform you regarding the importance of content in SEO.
Form
The form is the format that you’re going to choose for sharing your content. It is the way opted by you to communicate with your audience. It’s up to you whether you want to use text, audio, videos or infographics for fulfilling your purpose.
The form will include your media type, number of words, size, length and style etc. For example, the chosen form for this content is mainly text.
Purpose
What is the reason for producing this content, and what do you want to achieve with this? It describes your motto, aim and the goal you want to accomplish by delivering it to the public.
A successful piece of content is always the one that is designed with a specific goal in mind. It prospers when created creatively, keeping in mind the importance of SEO. For example, the purpose of this article is to let you know more about SEO and content.
Audience
When you decide to create content, remember to keep in mind the people you want to interact with. Keep their concerns in mind. Take notes about their likes and dislikes.
Make a list of questions they might ask and make sure to answer them in detail while producing your content. When you can identify your target audience, it gets easier to identify the tone of your content too.
For example, this article is targeted towards anyone who is interested in content marketing and is curious to know how content is vital in SEO.
Channel
Channel is the medium you decide on while posting your content. If you’ve created a video, you can choose YouTube as your channel. You can select WordPress as a channel to post your blogs, and so on.
Pro tip: Whenever you decide to create content next time, make a checklist and tick these boxes while getting prepared.
2. What are the types of content?
A widespread myth while observing the word content is that it comes in ‘textual form’ whereas, content can be in the form of audio, visuals, text and even infographics. Let’s explore the various types of content and look into different options for creating it.
Audio Content
Any type of content that is possible to consume while listening falls under this category. It makes use of targeted keywords and makes sure to address a specific target audience to leave a substantial impact on the listeners.
Audio content is used to enhance user experience and makes communication with the audience easier whether they’re there to attain information or to purchase a product or a service. It is easy to consume while multi-tasking and includes a recording of actual human voices. Following are some examples of audio content:
Google search and Amazon Echo are two of the most successful examples that are playing a successful role in quick and easy interaction with the customers. They are making the content marketing game smarter.
They are easily accessible for anyone unable to read. Audiobooks can engage readers with captivating content and smart techniques.
During Covid-19, podcasts have gained popularity, and they are being used to discuss important topics with a specific type of audience.
Podcast listeners listen carefully to 80% of the total content, which means there’s a lot of learning. Content marketing is experiencing a boost with this type of content too. According to research, 45% of citizens of the US have listened to podcasts at least once.
Visual Content
Videos are not just pictures that we see moving on the screen. They create impact through words. The right words chosen for a video can help to improve social signals for search engine optimisation and play a huge role in content marketing too. One of the most common types of visual content is videos on YouTube.
Webinars have gained a lot of popularity during Covid-19. Students and professionals from various fields who used to attend seminars are now taking the help of webinars to gain information. Webinars revolve around a particular topic and are arranged for a specific target audience, and the content is designed accordingly, too.
Interviews can be in audio and visual forms. This type of content is useful in highlighting the industry’s leaders and target a specific group of people to disseminate information. Interviews generate curiosity and excitement. By the end, they provide a call to action for the audience.
Have you noticed the increase in admiration of online courses during pandemic times? I’m sure you must have seen people around you, taking up new routes to upgrade their skills and feel productive. These courses are specially designed in a way to talk about a particular subject, just like a keyword in SEO highlights the topic that we are talking about.
Textual content
Textual content is one of the most important forms of content since most of the people still read to learn and gain insights into their area of interest. Long researches, emails, newsletters and quotes are some types of textual content. Let’s explore some critical textual content below:
Blogs are written in both short and long forms. Longer blogs are likely to attain better results in terms of content marketing. They are beneficial in optimising for search results.
Case studies are mostly success stories in the field of content marketing. They’re appealing and insightful at the same time.
White papers offer a solution to dense problems. They are sophisticated, technical and take a lot of time to be written. Case studies and white papers both focus on one particular subject and offer solutions to it.
Infographics
Infographics include valuable data and the unique fact about them is that they deliver a lot in fewer words and pictures combined. They are an incredible way of building links in content marketing. Animated gifs, memes, illustrations, posters, comics and diagrams all come under the umbrella of infographics.
3. Content Mapping
Studies confirm that businesses with blogs get 126% higher lead growth than companies which don’t happen to have blogs. These statistics are emphasising on the importance of content mapping. Content mapping gives a clear structure and idea for blogs and helps businesses to understand the likes and dislikes of the audience.
It is an accurately built plan to provide the right content at the right time to right people.
Goals Of Content mapping
It helps to create content according to the person who is consuming it. It helps to identify the needs, goals and reservations of the target audience and assists in developing a content marketing strategy accordingly.
It enables the person to make purchases by getting inspired through the content that is being consumed.
Content mapping is done in six steps, including:
Let’s scroll down to understand what a buyer’s persona is and how it helps in content mapping
4. Developing buyer personas & learning about the target audience.
A buyer persona helps to provide an insight into the preferences of your targeted customer. These personas help in the creation of content, the building of the product and packaging of the service. They explain what a potential buyer would like to see, read and buy. It helps to create highly targeted content.
A case study by NetProspex revealed that developing buyer personas resulted in a 100% increase in the number of visits on their website pages by visitors.
A buyer persona consists of:
All of these traits help to develop an ideal buyer – how this buyer turns into a customer.
5. Understanding the basics of content marketing principles.
Now, that you’re well aware of the tricks of developing a buyer persona, let’s address some of the essential principles to keep your content marketing game up
Keep Your Content Original
Do you know that Google is a pro at detecting plagiarised content?
If you’re repeating content that has already been covered, then there are high chances that you might not get ranked on Google. So it is essential to stay unique while producing SEO optimised content.
Produce Valuable Content
Give tips to your users, offer tutorials and add ‘how to’ guides that add value to their existing knowledge.
Be Consistent
Publish your content in regular intervals that are synchronised with your brand identity and matches with its personality. This will help to keep your customers intact, intrigued, and loyal otherwise, there are fair chances that they might forget you.
Speak More About User & Less About Yourself
Research from Content Marketing Institute astonishingly reveals that a post about their website could only gather 25% views and shares as compared to educational posts. Hence, they concluded that it’s important to address people’s issues rather than speaking about themselves.
Find Methods For Engagement
Years ago, Wikipedia was enough to provide content, and it was a one-way means of communication. Right now, content marketing requires engagement and interaction to stay visible among the competitors.
Pro tip: Users crave for debatable topics, so keep in mind to indulge them in activities.
Equip Yourself With In-depth research
Today’s content market is hyperactive, and you can’t stay on top if you come out unprepared. Equip yourselves with facts and figures. Provide logical reasoning to anyone who is reading your content. Explore your topic through multiple angles and try to persuade your readers through different techniques.
Stay Prepared For New Technologies
Since the world is ever-changing, so accept modern technologies to enhance your content marketing strategies, keep experimenting and finding out more ways to get success. You can let your main strategy rest but keep adding new ways to make it useful than before.
6. Writing Skills
Now that you’ve mastered the basic content marketing principles, it’s time to talk about your writing skills. We’ve got you covered with some simple yet important techniques to polish your content writing skills.
Identify the flaws in your writing so that you can determine how to get started. Read other writers and observe how they apply different techniques in their writing.
Assign yourself a task of practising one writing technique daily and most importantly, don’t underestimate yourself. Keep notes of your practice and compare it with older versions to see the magic.
Think & brainstorm before start writing
Begin with a clear purpose in your head. A right type of content is always directed towards a specific audience and is goal-oriented. Choose appropriate keywords and address issues and problems of your readers. Build a roadmap for your readers and fill them in on what they’re going to achieve
Make A Writing Habit
Take out time to write and read the content of competitors as well as the latest techniques to cope up in the world of content marketing. Wake your inner critic up and analyse your writing. Pick one writing technique, master it and then move forward. To improve your writing skills, emphasise on your content’s structure too.
Let’s learn about content structure in the next section.
7. Content Structure: How to create catchy content that boosts website traffic?
How to develop content is an important question that needs to be addressed so that you don’t tend to lose organic search visibility. You can follow the following steps and create perfect content that benefits in content marketing.
Construct A Catchy Headline
Do you know that a study by Columbia University and the French National Institute indicated that viewers don’t even click almost 59% of the links shared on social media? Wondering why?
It’s because of unattractive headlines.
So, it is crucial to construct a powerful headline that acts as a pathway of knowledge for the readers. Show the readers a clear picture about what they are going to learn from the content, use keywords, add numbers to make it more catchy and make sure to target an idea specifically.
Formulate a captivating opening
Begin your post with a question, try adding a quote, use anecdotes or add statistics to hook the readers in the beginning. This is how you can engage the readers right from the first step. But, stay cautious to keep up with the readers’ expectations. Use keywords and keep a word limit in your head.
Strong Main Body
Your content should have a strong main body. Divide your text into sub-headings, add examples and use facts and figures to keep your audience engaged. Use simple language and ask questions to engage the readers. Hit the chords by adding trending information, so that content reaches a large amount of audience.
Clear & Informational, Inspirational Ending
Your ending needs to address your queries. It needs to provide a proper solution to the issue and by the end, engage readers in a call to action so that they are pumped up to use their acquired knowledge. Ask for feedback. Provide links to read more, request them to subscribe to your newsletters or simply motivate them to get started. Now since this, the main content structure is here, let’s add more details to nurture your content by following instructions in the section below.
8. How to nurture your content?
Scattering words here and there without a proper technique doesn’t define content writing. Hence, you need to an appropriate direction to develop content and nurture it like a gardener, sows his seeds and looks after his baby plants. According to research in the US, 20% of the audience has hearing, learning, vision or cognitive disabilities. Hence, it is essential to deal with content while using an effective content marketing strategy so that everyone can access a website and interact with content without any hindrance.
Here are a few tricks that you can turn into your checklist to nurture your content correctly:
Add Sub-Headings
Add headings in the form of HTML tags to avoid adding too much content in one place. Maintaining hierarchy helps the crawlers to study content as well as allows readers to save time.
Use Short Sentence
Shorter sentences are easy to understand and comprehend.
Pro tip: Make use of TextOptimizer tool to help you follow this technique.
Add Videos Multimedia With Text
Add videos, podcasts and tweets etc. to expand your audience. This will play a key role in improving your content’s ratings.
Image size in accordance with social media plarforms
A study by Buffer revealed that tweets with images received 150% retweets. If you want your content to be shared, nurture it correctly by adding pictures that fit perfectly with the sizes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and Instagram.
Social Media Buttons
Make your content easy to share by adding social media buttons like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin. You can use these to increase your engagements on different platforms. Encourage people through a call to action to share content after reading. Remember to use the points mentioned above while creating meaningful content.
Once you’re done, get ready to know the tricks to discover how content receives engagement and what makes it worth sharing.
9. How to write engaging shareable posts?
Every one aims to get maximum exposure to the content they produce. Do you want to be your content a talk of the town too? If yes, then follow some simple tips explained below, and you won’t ever have to feel disappointed or neglected.
Create Emotional Content
If you want your content to be noticed, this is an important technique to follow. Try to understand your readers’ emotions and make your words reach their hearts. In this way, more and more people will connect with your content and share it with their circle.
Valuable Content
Add value to your content by addressing your readers’ issues. Answer their queries, provide them solutions and offer advice that helps them to trust you and come back for more valuable content that you’ve got to offer.
Relatable Content
One of the primary reasons that people share content is that they can relate to them. The most significant success of any content is that it can strike the right chords of the reader. Keep your content easy, relevant and relatable. Original and simple words can do wonders.
10. Trending Content & Marketing Research
If you’re looking for instant results to get your content recognised, find a trending topic and produce content on it. It is going to spread like fire, 100 per cent guaranteed.
Tools For Finding Trending Topics
A handy website for searching trending topics to improve your content marketing is Exploding Topics. An exciting feature is that it predicts topics that are going to emerge and stand out of the crowd.
You can use websites like BuzzSumo to find out what is trending and popular among the people.
Another excellent tool for finding trending topics is Google analytics that highlights the most popular webpages, the number of visitors and the number of times these webpages are being viewed. You can dig deeper into Google trends to know the terms that are trending among the viewers.
By now, you have a clear idea of how critical trending topics are and how pivotal they are to grow in terms of content marketing.
Since you’re aware of the art of creating engaging and shareable posts now let’s move to the next level of content marketing.
11. Understanding The Importance Of Keyword In Content Marketing
Before you start writing, you need to select a keyword that is a base for the content you’re about to create. Without a keyword, there is no way of moving forward since content marketing and Search engine optimisation is solely based on keyword research.
The words entered as search queries in the search engines are mainly the keywords that content marketers target while producing content. Keywords determine the kind of traffic that you want onboard. They are a bridge between what visitors want and how they receive it.
Type Of Keywords
There are three types of keywords.
Pro tip: Long-tail keywords used in titles give a ranking boost to the content so avoid using vague words like ‘content’ and start focusing on words that are specific as well as clear like ‘content strategies of 2020’.
Being aware of the types of keywords can help you determine how to use them for marketing purposes.
Identify The Keywords You Want To Rank
There are three types of keywords.
Pro tip: Look for high traffic and low competition keywords. Use these keywords in your on-page SEO and keep reading to know how you can do it.
12. Everything You Need To Know About On Page SEO
If you want to get your content shared, let that be found in the first place. Let that sink in and get ready to discover the most essential ingredient of content marketing. Your content should be optimised in a way that it’s recognised as well as fetched by the crawlers. Your goal is to make your audience reach your content instantly when they search any term relating to the subject.
For this purpose, you have to master the skills of On-page SEO. It helps to:
Here are some essential factors to consider in on-page SEO:
Headlines
Headlines need to creative to beat all the SERPs so that the users can leave all the remaining options and read what you’ve got to offer. Add your main keyword in the headline to make it optimised
URLs
URLs should reflect the information that you’re trying to explain on your page and inside your content. It is essential to add a relevant keyword in the URL so that it can be easily fetched from the search engine.
Title Tags
It leaves an impact on the ranking factors; hence it needs to be adequately optimised within a word limit of 60 characters
Meta Description
It is present below the meta title and describes what the content has to offer in almost 165 characters. It plays a massive role in optimisation and can improve the click per rate.
Content Optimisation
It is important to optimise content by adding:
Sitemaps
Sitemaps provide all necessary information to the crawlers by Google who visits the website and store cache on a routine basis. They play a massive role in improving the ranking of a website and enhancing SEO. If a website is ranked high, it will resultantly receive a fair amount of traffic and also good revenue for the website.
Site Speed
Improve your website speed by adding wp rocket plugin if you’re working on WordPress and try analysing the rate of your site through Google analytics and search console. A good site speed helps in improving user experience as well as helps in reaching more audience.
Content Audit
As the name indicates, content auditing means collecting and analysing content on websites that includes landing pages and blogs. This process helps to detect which content needs to be deleted, renewed or edited. It provides a clear insight into what type of content to produce for high conversion rates in future and also helps to understand the impact of this content on consumers.
Several content audit templates are available over the internet, and you can create one according to your choice too, after running the audit, which has the following steps:
One of your most important goals can be to make your pages SEO optimised and boost traffic. Identifying your goals will help to strengthen your content marketing strategy too.
Audits are usually conducted for blogs, product descriptions and multimedia etc. It is crucial to collect URLs of all such content and use tools like SEMRush and Screaming frog to provide all information according to your sitemap. Now make categories in the spreadsheet while mentioning the date, publication type, publication name and author name.
It’s showtime. Analyse missing content, point out old content and also the one that needs improvement. Fill your spreadsheet with answers accordingly
Finalise audit after analysis. Make necessary changes by adding a final section in your spreadsheet that allows creating action items. Decide whether to remove, update or keep content. This will help you to identify which blog requires what action. Finally, you’re ready to take action and see results.
Audit Tools
There are some excellent audit tools to help you improve your content marketing strategies. Let’s look at the best ones:
Screaming frog is one of the best website crawlers that collect URLs from the sitemap of your website and performs content audit for you. It gives you perfect suggestions for improving SEO and charges 500$ subscription fee per year with first 500 links free of cost to audit and sees if it works well with you.
It is another brilliant tool that involves site crawling and SEO monitoring. It informs you if your website needs to improve their SEO and if your website is not up to mark. Now you are equipped with an ample amount of knowledge about content creation, SEO and how to analyse it after getting done.
Take charge, evaluate and see the magic.
Final Thoughts
Finally, you know content is the king. It’s your turn to use it for generating traffic and boosting the number of visitors on your website.
Decide the type of content you want to generate. Create a perfect content map and develop a desirable buyer persona. Remember to find out the characteristics of your customers and plan your content accordingly.
Don’t forget to apply the essential marketing skills shared above. Keep your content original, informative and catchy. Make sure to follow the content structure that helps to create shareable and engaging posts for you. Add action buttons and pictures to make your content look attractive.
Engage yourself in marketing research of the trending topics. These trending topics can help you flourish in uncountable ways. Search for strong keywords, check their competition as well as volume and use all of them while doing on-page SEO of your content.
When you’re done, perform the final step of auditing your content and analyse where you stand. Make necessary changes if needed, and you’re ready to excel. If you have any more queries or need our expertise in developing a robust content strategy for your business, please reach out to us at or call us today for a free consultation at +44-774-785-3337
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