Optimize Your Content To Be Found
Bill Gates wrote an article titled “Content is King” in 1996, and I am sure content still rules today. Content marketing is all about developing a strategy to deliver valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience. Without content, our jobs as marketers would not exist. Therefore in 2020, content marketing should be at the forefront of all digital marketing strategies. An article by Pradeep Kumaar, states that “the ultimate goal of content marketing is to rank high on the Search Engine Results Pages.” I couldn’t agree more. Great content can help to reach the ultimate goal but content marketers need to understand the competitiveness of the content marketing space. It doesn’t help to put high-quality content in the world if nobody sees it. Pradeep Kumaar proposes five aspects to ensure that your content is optimized to be found.
1. The user is always first.
Marketers are too focused on adding keywords and aberrant phrases to ensure a higher ranking on Google, but that can sometimes limit us in providing high-quality content. Pradeep Kumaar suggests that instead of trying to fix the system, we should focus on delivering remarkable value to our target audience. It doesn’t help if we put out content that ticks all the boxes of Search engine optimization (SEO) but our target audience cannot relate to it. After all, content marketing is not a one-size-fits-all deal. The key is to provide content that is of high-quality and utterly authentic to the well-defined audience. If your audience appreciates the value of your content, it will instantly be worth sharing. Therefore your brand would rank higher on the Search Engine Results Pages.
2. Optimize for mobile.
The trend that will keep skyrocketing as technology advances is that people prefer mobile devices over desktops. Companies need to realize that they should evolve with the revolution. Pradeep Kumaar advises that companies need to make use of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to optimize their web site. Not only will AMP help to capitalize on the changes in device trends but enhance the overall User Experience (UX) by allowing faster loading pages for mobile users, reduced load time, low bounce rates, adjustments on any browser, and enhanced SEO. As mentioned before, we should always think about the user first and content marketing should be efficient on the devices that we carry by our sides 24/7. Even though content marketing is distributed across multiple channels (for example, social networks), they all lead to the same point, which is the website. Content marketing is a brilliant way to drive traffic to a website and keep consumers on the site for longer, but if your site is not mobile-friendly, you lose a lot of potential consumers. This will lead to a higher bounce rate which will send Google wrong user signals that can cost your ranking on the Search Engine Results Pages.
3. Optimize for Voice Search.
Even though my personal opinion is that voice-activated devices make me feel like I am being spied on, I cannot ignore that 40% of today's adults use mobile voice search at least once daily. This is a fact that marketers cannot overlook. Pradeep Kumaar advice that we should make use of the Google Schema markup, to ensure that our content is found via voice search and to get content into rich snippets, consequently, increasing voice search traffic. The gist of the Schema markup is that it allows search engines and other applications to identify content to read aloud on Google Assistant-enabled devices. By optimizing our content for voice search, we can seize a new opportunity in the world of digital and gather more consumers from the well-defined audience.
4. Technical SEO Optimization.
We know that publishing organic content alone is not good enough in such a competitive environment. We need to apply different tactics within our content and platforms to ensure that the people we target receive our high-quality content we spend so much time creating. Ultimately, all that any company wants and marketer strives for is to have a high return on marketing investment (ROMI). Otherwise, our content marketing strategy was not worth the time and effort. Pradeep Kumaar provides the tip that we need to ensure that we do regular site audits and fix all the technical factors that hamper our site ranking. A higher ranking ultimately exposes our brands to more digital consumers searching for content and that is why SEO is such an essential factor.
5. Use Google Analytics.
Last but not least we need to talk about metrics. Metrics and content marketing are like peanut butter and jelly. We cannot provide high-quality content without feedback. Pradeep Kumaar says, “it is always wise to monitor performance metrics such as bounce rates, time spent on the web site, what content themes and topics work better to give the right actionable feedback to your content team.” The data from these metrics can help our content to improve and evolve into better strategies for long term benefits. The more data we have, the better equipped we are to make decisions about the overall content marketing strategy as well as the next campaign.
