12 tips for content marketing from an SEO perspective
How are you able to create content material marketing which works for search, proper from the beginning?
Many of us in all probability consider search engine optimization as one thing which is completed after the very fact: you create your copy, then you consider find out how to optimise it. But on the Content Marketing Association’s Digital Breakfast final week, Kevin Gibbons from BlueGlass proposed a radically totally different strategy.
To make your content material work for search engine optimisation, Gibbons’ recommendation is to “begin with the top in thoughts”. You must be fascinated by promotion from the phrase go, he stated; in order that on the subject of publishing your content material, you have already got a distribution and promotion technique in thoughts, and have crafted your content material in the direction of that objective.
So how are you going to carry this out in follow? Here are twelve ideas from Kevin Gibbons’ presentation that may guarantee your content material works for search from starting to finish.
Break down ‘silos’ when creating your group
I’m not the most important fan of the phrase ‘silos’; in truth, in seven months of writing about digital marketing and search, I’ve grow to be heartily sick of it. But primarily what it means on this context is bringing individuals collectively throughout totally different departments – web optimization, content material technique, creativity, PR and social media – to work on content material.
Content marketing is a workforce effort, and your staff ought to mix quite a lot of skills; in Gibbons’ phrases, “Get the appropriate individuals on the bus!”
He warned towards doing too many various issues, and making an attempt to unfold your self too skinny. Ideally, you need to put collectively a group of people that specialise of their totally different areas, relatively than making an attempt to have one or two individuals be good at every little thing.
Know your objectives
Once you’ve obtained your superior staff assembled, it’s time to set some objectives. First off, perceive your model: what’s your function and the story you need to inform? What are your core values, and how are you going to talk them?
As an instance of this, Gibbons cited Apple’s 1997 ‘Think Different’ slogan and the adverts that Apple put collectively to speak this message:
Second, know your viewers and perceive who you’re concentrating on. As John Romero, online game entrepreneur, as soon as stated: “Market to your greatest clients first, your greatest prospects second and the remainder of the world final.”
Thirdly, what’s the purpose of your content material marketing, and how are you going to measure and show it? Success seems to be totally different relying on what you’re making an attempt to realize, and totally different metrics could be necessary to measuring totally different sorts of success.
Are you monitoring conversions, visitors, social engagement, equal media spend? Are you on the lookout for an enchancment in buyer help or gross sales?
Finally, Gibbons recommends creating clear content material tips to work out what you need to and shouldn’t be publishing. “Don’t be afraid to say no – being selective is sweet to maintain targeted on what’s actually essential.”
Image: BlueGlass
Do a content material audit
Before you strike out and create new content material, take inventory of what you have already got with an audit. Can you enhance on it? What labored, and what didn’t go over so nicely? What has generated probably the most visitors, or social engagement and hyperlinks?
Knowing what content material you’ve can also be massively helpful in creating a very good inner linking technique, which is vital for search engine optimization. And if clients are going to be discovering your model via this content material, even simply sometimes, it’s necessary to ensure it’s updated and related!
Don’t create content material for content material’s sake
They say that each minute on the web, there are four hundred hours of video uploaded to YouTube, O.A million Facebook posts, over four hundred,000 Tweets, and over B,200 WordPress weblog posts revealed. So how are you going to differentiate your content material amongst a lot noise?
Make your content material is high quality, mandatory and worthwhile – don’t simply create content material for the sake of publishing content material. Google’s algorithms prioritise high quality content material, so publishing much less and publishing properly, fairly than churning out generic content material, will assist the content material that you simply do have rank higher. In the phrases of copyblogger:
“search engine optimisation can’t, by itself, make a well-liked weblog. First, you want exceptional content material, after which you optimize it for serps. Skip the exceptional half, and all of the optimization on the earth gained’t assist you to.”
Create knowledge-pushed content material – and make it newsworthy
When placing collectively your high quality, properly-crafted content material, one factor that Gibbons recommends doing is incorporating knowledge. Find out what knowledge your shopper has, and take a look at how you should use that in your content material. More knowledge will increase your credibility, and knowledge can be a terrific hook when pitching to journalists, particularly if you will discover a excellent news angle.
Get exclusives on your content material (however be sure to’re the supply)
This is a tactic that works nicely when you’ve got knowledge-pushed content material and/or content material with a excellent news angle. Agreeing an unique with a writer prematurely will help to get their purchase-in on overlaying it, plus it helps with further outreach to different publishers afterwards.
The protection helps each to amplify your model and to spice up your web optimization with backlinks; simply just remember to’re credited because the supply!
Create content material that solutions questions
Creating content material which solutions your viewers’s questions is a sound precept on a number of ranges, each when it comes to content material worth and when it comes to search engine optimization. First of all, by researching your viewers and understanding their ache factors, you higher perceive the individuals who your content material is focused at.
Secondly (if achieved properly), it permits you to create evergreen, high quality content material that your viewers can come again to repeatedly as a invaluable useful resource.
How-to guides and ‘tutorial’ fashion content material are all the time a superb guess for each viewers worth and web optimization, as individuals typically search with a selected query in thoughts.
This is especially true for voice search, the place individuals are likely to phrase their searches within the type of a complete query – so V&A fashion content material is particularly nicely-suited to rating for voice searches.
A helpful tip that Gibbons gave is to start out by answering individuals’s questions on websites like Quora and group boards, which offers you an perception into what they need to know. Then flip your hottest solutions into extra in-depth content material!
Understand what triggers Quick Answers, and play to it
Also often known as ‘wealthy solutions’ and ‘featured snippets’, Quick Answers are these informative boxouts on the prime of Google search outcomes which shortly provide the knowledge you’re looking for.
Rather than being drawn from the highest rating end result on the SERP, they’re drawn from the content material that Google thinks greatest solutions the question.
So in the event you gear your content material in the direction of these packing containers, they could be a unbelievable solution to ‘leapfrog’ to the highest of search outcomes and get your branding – and content material – up there on the prime.
Happily, ‘how one can’ type content material, which we talked about within the final level, is right for this, together with V&A type content material and bullet level lists.
For extra on how you can hack Google’s Quick Answers, learn Jim Yu’s information to the ABC of Google Quick Answers.
Make the client the hero
Involve your viewers! If you assume your content material is about you, says Gibbons, you’re lacking the purpose – when individuals share content material, they share it about themselves, not you. And by involving your viewers, you could have an in-constructed cause for individuals to share and speak about your content material.
Another speaker at CMA’s Digital Breakfast, Scott Davies, CEO of social TV and promoting firm by no means.no, gave some nice concepts as to how this can be utilized to jazz up a marketing marketing campaign.
For instance, when tasked with selling a reasonably boring family merchandise – a mop – by no means.no requested individuals to submit their very own movies on Vine and Instagram of doing various things with the mop. The end result was a plethora of hilarious brief movies that made for an ideal advert.
Another piece of recommendation that Gibbons gave was to play on individuals’s egos. Your viewers loves to speak about themselves and the place they’re from. Play on rivalries between cities, between nations, between areas.
Buzzfeed is a professional at this type of content material, as a result of it’s so shareable – simply take a look at forty five Reasons The North Of England Is Better Than The South, or 31 Reasons To Avoid South London.
Remember that you simply’re constructing an viewers – not simply visitors or hyperlinks
People wish to eat content material in several methods, so take into consideration how one can recycle the identical content material into a number of codecs. You might flip an in-depth research right into a collection of brief-type articles, or construct up an extended article right into a downloadable information or whitepaper. You might create interactive content material, infographics or knowledge visualisations, e-mail newsletters, video.
You can use these further items to create “content material upgrades” – providing a useful resource that’s distinctive to every weblog publish, or different piece of content material, that readers have to submit an e mail handle or share on social media so as to obtain.
The result’s extra worth in your viewers, extra mileage in your content material, and an enormous increase to your e-mail subscribers or social backlinks. Backlinko has a extra detailed information on easy methods to make and use content material upgrades.
Explore related syndication companions
Think about the place you’ll be able to cross-submit your content material each to amplify its sign and to create backlinks. Outlets like LinkedIn and Medium may be nice for attracting an viewers that your website won’t get in any other case.
Just keep in mind two issues: one, don’t unfold your self too skinny by making an attempt to cowl each platform – work out the place your viewers is, and focus on these retailers.
And two, keep in mind that you’re nonetheless publishing to another person’s platform, with their model and their guidelines. And regardless that the visitors goes to your content material, it’s nonetheless going to their website.
Walled gardens make up a lot of the web that it’s all however unimaginable to keep away from them, however you may be savvy about publishing to them.
For instance, submit the primary half of a weblog submit on LinkedIn, after which when you’ve received your reader hooked, invite them to learn the remainder of the content material in your website.
Hopefully they’ll take the bait and comply with the hyperlink to the place you need them. (This tip comes courtesy of my colleague Ben Rabinovich, editor of PaymentEye – thanks, Ben!)
Just do it!
Don’t second-guess your self with questions like, “What if everybody is aware of this already?” or “Why would I share all of this info if individuals can simply copy it?” What individuals don’t get, says Gibbons, is the most important danger isn’t doing it in any respect. Take a bet on that adventurous content material concept, and it’d simply repay – nevertheless it gained’t in the event you don’t!
