Content holds huge importance when it comes to marketing your business. Content helps your audience or your clients understand what you know and what you’re talking about when it comes to your business. Without high-quality content that is created for your audience and not just search engines, it’s almost impossible to rank your site.
Content holds huge importance when it comes to marketing your business. Content helps your audience or your clients understand what you know and what you’re talking about when it comes to your business. Without high-quality content that is created for your audience and not just search engines, it’s almost impossible to rank your site.
Keyword research
This could be a whole article on its own, and I will eventually write one, so for the moment, I’ll write something brief about this topic. Keyword research is the minimal amount of market research you should be doing for your business.
When deciding what keywords to target, this can be seen as an investigation. You can’t go into keyword research thinking that you know the keywords that you need to rank for. When using a free tool like Google’s Keyword Planner, you’re able to generate hundreds, if not thousands, of keywords. Google’s Keyword Planner, like most tools like this, will give you search volume.
So now that you have a list of keywords that you want to start targeting, you can take these keywords and put them into another tool such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, Majestic SEO, etc. These will give you competition scores on each keyword. You don’t want to start targeting keywords that are hard to rank for, so you find keywords that have a low competition score, meaning these are easier to rank for.
When doing your keyword research, you need to make sure that the keywords you are targeting have buying intent behind them.
Keyword research
This could be a whole article on its own, and I will eventually write one, so for the moment, I’ll write something brief about this topic. Keyword research is the minimal amount of market research you should be doing for your business.
When deciding what keywords to target, this can be seen as an investigation. You can’t go into keyword research thinking that you know the keywords that you need to rank for. When using a free tool like Google’s Keyword Planner, you’re able to generate hundreds, if not thousands, of keywords. Google’s Keyword Planner, like most tools like this, will give you search volume.
So now that you have a list of keywords that you want to start targeting, you can take these keywords and put them into another tool such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, Majestic SEO, etc. These will give you competition scores on each keyword. You don’t want to start targeting keywords that are hard to rank for, so you find keywords that have a low competition score, meaning these are easier to rank for.
When doing your keyword research, you need to make sure that the keywords you are targeting have buying intent behind them.
Non-buying intent keywords:
Free courses on SEO
Free SEO
Easy ways to do SEO
Buying intent keywords:
SEO companies London
Cheap SEO
SEO for marketing companies
One place to start your keyword research is www.answerthepublic.com. This site gives you a list of questions that people are asking about your niche. You can see the search volume for each question and use this information to create a content strategy that will have a real impact. If you don’t use websites like Answer the Public, you’ll be guessing about what content to create, so make sure you start with the basics in your niche. For example:
What is SEO?
Why is SEO important?
SEO for dummies
SEO news
This list is just a starting point and doesn’t include any keyword research.
On page SEO
While I won’t be going into Meta descriptions, title tags, page descriptions, alt tags, etc., I want to focus more on how you speak to your audience.
Target your audience and their needs
So you have to think about what it is that your buying audience wants to know. How can you help your customer understand more about your niche without telling them how to do everything for free? For example, here at Bell Clarke, we try to educate you on what you should be doing for your marketing efforts.
Relevant, valuable, and unique content
While we could write articles about the latest plugin for WordPress, most of our customers are not in a place where they need to know. Many of our customers are coming to us to find a company that does SEO for the first time, so we try and cater to this type of customer. We of course also write content for customers who have been using SEO and marketing companies for years.
Writing about the latest WordPress plugin will only apply to a certain number of customers, so this kind of content will have low value to these customers because they don’t have an interest in this.
Writing unique content is important because you don’t want to seem like you are just copying and pasting what other websites are producing. You need to offer your own unique ideas that will separate you from the competition. Offering your own unique take on a topic will help teach your customer new ways they can do business.
Keyword phrase
If your customer is coming to your site looking for information on SEO for roofers, then you want to focus on that particular subject in your content. If you have a page on your site titled SEO for roofers, everything you need to know, you should make sure to stick to that topic and not go off on tangents about email marketing. This can be seen as clickbait and may annoy your customers when they don’t get the information they’re looking for.
Length of content
The length of your content depends on the value you’re offering. For example, if you want to give away a free course on SEO, it will likely be lengthy and include video explainers. On the other hand, if you just want to give an update on the latest AI tech, it might not exceed 1200 words. Tests have shown that articles over 1200 words in length don’t rank any higher than those written at 2000 or 3000 words. So, articles at the 3000-word length don’t offer much more value in terms of ranking than 1200-word articles would. It all comes down to how much value you want to offer in your content piece.
Use of images and graphics
People like to look at images, and in studies, it’s been found that people will remember concepts much more if they see a photo, image, or graphics in the article. Photos can create a small amount of emotion in the viewer, while the amount of emotion felt is small, it can be enough to help the reader retain the article’s knowledge more. If you can create emotion in people when reading your content, you’re much more likely to be remembered by the reader. Memorability = profitability
Depending on the situation, people can often remember more from a video if the video engages the audience more. Video can trigger emotion more than the written word with the use of emotive music, humour, creative cinematography, etc. Think back through all the books you have read; do you remember films or the books you’ve read more? You most likely remember the film much more than the written content.