Fresh content is important for a successful website.
It’s not only a valuable part of your SEO strategy but also keeps your dream clients happy with new content relevant to them and their pain points.
The problem for many business owners is finding inspiration and time to get fresh and effective content out there regularly.
In this blog, I’ll run through some of the key points to remember when creating your content marketing strategy and coming up with new ideas, I’ll also guide you through some of the considerations when it comes to actually creating the relevant content that’ll get found online.
Getting to page one is less about the way Google search views the content on your website but how it understands the way your dream your dream clients will perceive it.
Confused?
The longer a visitor spends on your website engaging with your content, the more signals sent to Google that your content is helpful to that visitor. Google will then remember that for the next time someone else uses the same search query and eventually, you’ll rank higher than your competitors offering information on the same subject.
Remember that Google is a search engine. Its job is to match websites with the people that are looking for them. If your dream client is searching for “ SEO myths ” and you have content on that subject, you’re more likely to end up higher in their relevant search results list than if you just write about SEO in general.
Some other factors come into play with your Google rankings like link strategy and technical aspects of your SEO so, just putting out helpful content isn’t enough by itself but it certainly helps.
Know what your target audience want to see
So, the obvious step is to figure out the kind of content that your dream clients are interested in, i.e. what they are actually searching for online. This is what we call ‘search intent’ – the intended content Google search users are looking for.
There are a few ways you can unearth the topics and questions your target audience are searching for right now, and I suggest you try as many as you can.
One thing you can be sure of, is that your dream clients are looking to solve their pain points The search terms they’re using are about helping them in some way. That might to help them conquer insomnia, take care of their business administration, save money on their household budget or simply for a new flavour of chocolate to try.
Take some time to jot down the pain points your dream clients are experiencing and how you can help them, i.e., what services/products do you offer and what problems do they resolve? This will help you know what to look out for when you try the following content inspiration ideas.
Check out your comments and social media responses
One of the simplest ways to discover the kind of content your dream clients are interested in is by checking out what they’re already telling you.
If you get a lot of positive comments on a certain blog – that’s a big indication that more content on the same topic is welcome. That doesn’t mean rehashing the same thing over and over again, but finding new angles to talk about, other methods and tools, even alternative viewpoints.
If you’ve helped someone on social media with a problem, that’s a pain point you can generate helpful content for. You can even create a case study kind of blog where you talk about the question asked, the answer you gave and then go into depth about that answer and how to resolve the problem discussed.
Check out the kinds of comments, articles and questions your target audience are sharing on social media in general. This can give you some big clues about what they’re looking for.
Scope out Quora and Reddit
These websites are particularly for people to ask questions and gain the answers they’re looking for.
Which means that any questions asked here are likely to be asked in Google search too. It’s actually not uncommon when these questions are searched for on Google for answers from Quora and Reddit to appear in the results, this is particuarly the case where there are few websites with content answering the problem. If you see this, there’s a great opportunity for you to fill that gap.
You don’t have to answer any questions on these websites yourself (although I suggest that you give Quora a try as it can really boost your SEO efforts ) but have a look every so often to see the questions that are coming up. If a question is routinely asked, perhaps there isn’t enough information available and you can fill the gap?
Social media groups are another good place to see the kind of questions being asked around your industry.
Build on existing content that has worked well for you
If you’ve written one blog on a topic and it’s performing well for you, have a think about spin off articles you can write.
Or repurpose the content into another form – like a video, social media live video stream, an infographic, lead magnet, etc.
Video marketing is a growing trend year on year and can be achieved through a variety of ways . You could talk through your content as a Live Q & A session, or you could summarise your key points in a quick Explainer video. One of the reasons video works so well is because you’re talking directly to your target market and so it’s easier for that rapport to be established.
In fact, keeping to the same topic shows that you have the expertise your dream clients are looking for, but also helps Google in understanding what you do and how you can help. Important factors when it comes to your ranking in those search results.
Scope out the competition
Don’t plagiarise any content I’m not talking about being unethical, but simply taking a look at the kind of content your competitors are putting out there and how it’s being responded to. Is there a gap you can fill? Can you provide an alternative viewpoint?
Also check out the comments and interactions from their audience – are they asking further questions?
Try to establish why you think a piece of content worked well (or didn’t!) and how you could create something of a similar theme but with your unique selling point and expertise at the heart of it.
Trust me, it’s always obvious when something has been copied from another website, so don’t go there.
Audit your existing content to see what’s worked, and what hasn’t
One mistake I see a lot of business owners make is uploading a blog and then leaving it alone.
They might promote it a few times on social media but in general, people tend to upload and run believing that’s all they have to do for their content to work its SEO magic.
Unfortunately, you have to do a little more than that.
You need to check how well the content is performing. Use Google Analytics and social media analytics to gauge things. If a blog performed well, can you figure out why? Was it from social media shares because it resonated with your target market or did it seem to come just from organic search traffic?
The key here is to figure out why a piece of content hasn’t worked, so focus on the content with low visitor counts and ask yourself these questions:
- Did the headline resonate with your dream clients enough?
- Was the topic aligned with a pain point your target audience is searching for?
- Do your competitors have better content on the topic?
- Did you make any mistakes with the information or with spelling and grammar?
- Was it poorly formatted and hard to read?
If you can figure out why content hasn’t worked, it’ll be easier for you create content that does work in the future.
Make your web content easier to digest
As I’ve just alluded to, difficult to read content is one of the biggest issues I see business owners make when blogging. Other forms of content are naturally easier to digest, like videos and graphics, but many people have a tendency to be too formal with their blogs and approach them like an essay rather than a conversation with their dream clients.
Decide on the right format for your content topic and your audience.
Web content doesn’t have to be a blog.
Although blogging is, I believe, crucial for SEO and your audience looking for information; other forms of content are naturally suited to certain topics. A how to guide might be better as a video, for example.
you want to be creating multiple forms of content around an idea to reach as many of your ideal clients as possible and in the right format for them, some of us are more visual than literary, for example.
If you’re not a fan of getting in front of a camera, consider creating audio clips instead. Thanks to Clubhouse audio based content is rapidly gaining popularity and might be a good compromise for getting yourself out there with reliable content without the camera fear.
Formatting your content for the web is essential
If you have decided on a blog, remember to format it so it’s easy for your audience to read. Remember that you’re creating content for users, not bots.
Lots of white space, images to break up text and varying sentence/paragraph lengths are essential. We don’t actually “read” websites but scan them for information, so we naturally look out for certain words and phrases to jump out to us. It’s a lot easier for that to happen if your text isn’t in huge blocks that are difficult to process.
Headings are your friend here too.
Header tags aren’t there to make your text look different (and if you’ve been using them for that, please stop. You’re probably confusing search engines by doing that!). Heading tags are best thought of as section markers, i.e. in this section I will be talking abou x, y and z. You can see how that works with this blog.
Google uses headings to understand your content and what it’s about. So this is where you should be putting those keywords that you’ve taken time to research. Keep it to one focused keyword per section wherever possible.
You need to be using the same tone and words they’d be using to describe their pain point or the topic you’re talking about.
Doctors are used to medical terminology and expect it to be there, but your average Jane Doe looking for a small business accountant isn’t going to understand industry jargon, she just wants someone who can take care of her books!
This is where doing your target audience research is essential. Get to know your dream client inside out and write your content as if you’re having a direct conversation with them. If you wouldn’t say it, you probably shouldn’t write it.
Focus on one theme per blog rather than lumping everything together
Long form web content has proven to work better at getting you ranked higher on Google than shorter blogs , that doesn’t mean you should try to cover everything under the sun about a topic in one piece of content.
Think of each blog or video as a chapter of a book, if that helps. The overall theme of your blog might be virtual assistant services, but each blog will cover a different area – why you need a virtual assistant, what a virtual assistant does, things a virtual assistant can do (one service per blog), etc.
The aim is to focus on one keyword per blog to get the best results in terms of SEO. Often it’ll be a question that you’re answering in some way.
Create an editorial calendar
To help you see how your different pieces of content will work together, you should create an editorial calendar.
Not only can you jot down all the ideas you have for content and assemble them into some kind of order, you can plan how and when you’re going to write/film and publish it. You can then plan your marketing around the content to make sure it gets seen!
Many business owners decide to pick a theme a month and create content around that theme, others prefer to have a different topic each week. However you choose to do things is up to you, but having a plan makes it so much easier.
I hope you’ve found this blog useful for improving your content ratings and having your website appear in more google search results as a result. If you do have any questions, get in touch!
