As all business owners are reminded, content is king!
Content is what drives people to your site and helps you appear in numerous searches. It also helps establish your business as an authoritative source within your domain and can act as a way of demonstrating your expertise and talents.
The right content will assist in building your brand image and help you gain lots of new customers. It all sounds so simple, yet plenty of businesses fail in the content creation department. You may have an existing content strategy, but how do you ensure it’s as successful as possible? To start, you need your content to do two main things:
- Rank well
- Drive traffic to your website
This puts you in the favourable position of having lots of targeted web traffic that’s just waiting to be converted. As a result, the focus should be on creating content that does both of the above – but how is this possible?
What goes into making high-ranking content that encourages people to click on it? Scroll down and you’ll see a few ideas to help you improve your content creation strategy for better search engine performance:
Focus on problem-solving content
We begin with the intent of your content – what should it do? Businesses typically focus on making content that incorporates high search volume keywords. In other words, keywords your target audience is likely to use in lots of searches.
However, this approach can be a bit outdated and won’t necessarily help you drive traffic to your site. A more innovative strategy is to address customer’s pain points in your content. You’re targeting “high-intent” keywords, which are more like phrases or questions users will type into Google when they need help. In essence, your content offers a solution to the problems they’re having.
Problem-solving content ranks a lot better and is more likely to drive traffic because people will want to click on it to get free help. You still need to focus on optimising the content for the right keywords and searches, but the goal is to create articles or guides that improve your customer’s lives. They find the answers they’re looking for – and this also makes it more likely that they’ll pick your business over others when they want to spend money. Your content proves you’re good at what you do, so this can generate more conversions.
Generate backlinks from other websites
Backlinks are links from different websites/sources directing users to your website. You’ll see them in this guide and virtually every piece of good content on the internet. When you’re writing content, linking to other websites helps back up your points and gives readers additional information. It makes your content much better – but you want lots of sites to link back to you.
Generating backlinks means lots of other websites trust your content as a valuable source. Google notices this and thinks your content deserves a bump up the rankings. After all, if hundreds of sites are linking to this page, then it must be valuable information – and Google is all about giving its users the best information possible.
To get backlinks, you’ll need a link-building strategy that helps place links to your content on sites around the web. You can find agencies who’ll do this for you, or you could try guest-posting on numerous blogs and incorporating links to your content that way. Regardless, the more backlinks a blog post has, the higher it tends to ascend the search rankings.
Moreover, problem-solving content is more likely to get organic backlinks. If people are writing about a similar topic and find your content online, they’ll link to it as it helps solve their readers’ problems too!
Make the content as engaging as possible
This point was likely met with a few eye-rolls.
You hate it when you look for tips on how to make good content and all that comes back is “make it engaging”. Isn’t that an obvious thing to do? Who’d want to read content that wasn’t engaging?!
Your frustrations might be well-placed, but this point centres around what you can do to make your content as engaging as possible. It’s more about the structure of your content and how a few changes make it easier to engage with your audience.
For instance:
- Avoid massive paragraphs of text – breaking it up makes the content easier to read and more visually engaging.
- Use bullet points (like these) so readers can quickly see key pieces of information while skimming the text for answers.
- Utilise images, infographics or videos whenever possible. This also breaks up the text but the visuals can provide more context to your content without adding additional words.
- Always ensure there are headings and sub-headings so readers know what each section focuses on. This is key for long-form content where some readers may only be interested in a specific part of the guide and don’t want to read anything else. Headings help them skip ahead with ease!
- Optimise your content for mobile devices – this is where shorter paragraphs are useful as big ones are harder to read on smaller screens. Also, be sure all images and videos are optimised for mobile so they load quickly and don’t create slower page loading speeds.
Keep it updated with the latest information
You can make content that ranks well and drives traffic to your website, but how do you ensure this continues for the longest time possible?
A big mistake involves publishing a blog post and then leaving it. You see an influx of traffic and leads for a couple of months or a year, but then the post stops being beneficial. Why? Because the information might be outdated!
You must keep your content updated with the latest info so it stays relevant, but also to help it rank better over time. Every little update is noticed by Google and it can re-crawl your site and index it again, which often leads to a little rankings boost.
All in all, these are the secrets to making content that ranks incredibly well and drives a steady stream of targeted traffic to your website. This sets the foundations for greater success with your small business. You’ve got the right people visiting your site, you’re building an authoritative brand with your content and you’re ready to convert all of these leads into paying customers!
