Content is a critical factor for successful digital marketing these days. A couple of years back, all you needed to do was do some extensive research, shortlist a few effective search engine marketing techniques, and then just begin. However, search engine algorithms keep changing rendering many SEO techniques obsolete over time. Including keywords in titles, descriptions, and alt tags to get your website’s rank up is not that effective now. Some techniques do work though, but it’s simply harder to surpass competition now.
Many optimizers have started to believe that old school SEO is dead. Might be, but a bit of ‘Googling’ will reveal that it’s very much alive albeit in a different form. The difference is that new age SEO and content are deeply interconnected now.
A successful content marketer should be able to leverage the power of content, making it beneficial not just to the business but to customers as well.
Here are a few tricks that could make a successful content marketer.
1. Behavioral Factors
The key is to figure out the problems of your audience, and solve them with educative/informative content. Google has been trying to do the same for years, trying to teach crawlers to assess the relevance of content. They are not yet there but quite close.
Semantic analysis was replaced with an assessment of the interaction indicators like bounce rate and the time a visitor spends on a website. If a user spends more time on a page before going to other pages in a website, it could mean that they found useful content there. This is a behavioral pattern that establishes the informative value of content.
This also makes it evident that well-written content can indeed make Google happy unlike uninformative articles stuffed with keywords.
2. Video Content
With Youtube, Instagram, and the likes growing in popularity, it is quite clear that video content will play a bigger role in digital marketing soon. Social media networks like Facebook have added live streaming features now, giving more opportunities for businesses to engage their customers and present their services in a more appealing manner. Besides, a video can hold a viewer’s attention better than long-form text content.
3. Effectiveness of Content
Developing content strategies is no simple feat, which is why a content marketer can always use a content manager or auditor. Content managers will have to carefully monitor the content even by the geographical factor, and measure and analyze how each article, image etc. influence buyer’s actions from the first click. Behavioral factors along with the data above can give you great insight on how the content affects conversion.
4. Creativity
The only thing that’s more important than SEO strategies for a content marketer is creative ability. Back in the days, some SEO texts and a few SEO-based tweaks here and there on the website would get its rank up on search engine results. Now it all comes down to the time a user spends on the website as well as social media influence. So if a website is brimming with high quality materials created by creative content writers and designers, visitors will want to spend more time going through it all.
Interesting headlines, appealing subheadings, and a unique style of writing can catch readers’ attention.
5. LSI
Stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. It’s basically how search engine crawlers use mathematical methods to identify patterns and relationships between the components of text. The analysis determines whether the content is relevant to the search criteria and what the website is about. LSI has been around for a while, and is still effective.
6. Social Promotion
Social media is the next best thing for a content marketer. Leverage it wisely, and your content would grow in value. This is why a part of the marketing budget should be allocated for social promotion of content. The key is to find influencers – people having a large number of readers for their blogs and pages, and have them promote your content. This way, publications reach a lot more audience.
