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Can Content Marketing Improve Your Organic Reach?
There is still some confusion about the relationship between content marketing and search engine optimization.
For instance, a lot of people still think of content marketing as something rather soft—something where the metrics are a little fuzzy and difficult to quantify. Content marketing, it’s often believed, is all about establishing consumer trust and brand loyalty, while search engine optimization (SEO) focuses on the harder metrics, like website traffic.Actually, the distinctions between these two disciplines are not nearly so well-defined, and content marketing is an increasingly vital tool for improving your website metrics. In fact, content marketing is a powerful way to augment your SEO endeavors, helping your website reach more people and snag higher rankings.
In other words, good content marketing can result in more website visitors, better brand loyalty, and a higher conversion rate—all of which are measurable, bottom-line goals.
The question is, how are we defining good content marketing? How can you ensure that your content helps improve your organic reach, supplementing and enhancing your SEO endeavors?
Creating Content to Improve Organic Reach
Here are a few tips.
Start with Compelling Headlines
Your content’s not going to have much of an impact at all if people don’t open it, read it, and share it. All of that starts with the headline. Your headline is where you entice people to tune into whatever you’re saying; make sure your headline is relevant to the actual content (no bait and switch), and that it conveys value. Readers should immediately have a sense of what they will learn from reading the article, and what actionable insights they’ll take away.
Use an Editorial Calendar
Content needs to be compelling, but it also needs to be consistent. A blog that’s updated once every nine months simply isn’t going to win you much favor from Google; regular, organized posts—each one addressing a new topic that is valuable and relevant to your target audience—are crucial. An editorial calendar can help you stay on top of things.
Write for Human Readers
There is always a temptation to overemphasize the role of Google search algorithms—to try to give the search bots what they want. Actually, what Google wants is for you to provide a relevant and useful search experience for the end user. In other words, the best way to win over Google is to write with humans in mind, and to offer them content you know will prove helpful.
Format Your Content Properly
Good content isn’t just about the words on the page. It’s also about how they are arranged. Make sure the content you produce is readable—and that means having plenty of white space, short paragraphs, bullet points/lists, section subheadings, images and video, and mobile optimization.
Stretch Your Content as Far as You Can
Finally, remember that the best way to maximize your content bang for buck is to reuse and recycle everything you create—sharing across social platforms and possibly even leveraging a good blog post for an e-book or a short video. When something clicks with your audience, then it becomes especially important to stretch it out.
Your Marketing Should Get Results
Remember: Your marketing should move the needle on your bottom-line sales—period. If it’s not doing that, you should rethink it—and we’d love to help you in doing so. Driven2020 is a marketing company that cuts the filler and the fluff and focuses solely on growth—and we’d love to apply that philosophy to your content creation. Learn more by reaching out to the digital marketing team at Driven2020 today.
