Every site owner – whether it’s a blog or any other resource – should understand that you need to attract and retain visitors with interesting and thoughtful content. Surely, there are other ways to engage customers like by posting poor quality content and betting purely on organic search results.
This way you can achieve a certain number of visitors, but no site cannot hold high positions in this mode for a long time.
Focusing on interesting and useful content, you will be able to attract a huge audience and increase conversion to fantastic indicators.
Lots of businesses nowadays use social media unwillingly, because they feel they are rather forced to. Lots of people still do not consider it as a profitable way to get new customers and increase sales or brand awareness.
The reason for this is a vague concept of business development on social media: there is no leading idea, no comprehensive approach to the strategy of promotion in social networks, no shared view on current problems of clients. The concept is the seed of content marketing of the company and development on social platforms is essential.
Planning content is as important as creating it. The development of content strategy should be approached comprehensively to make it as effective as possible for your website. Let’s analyze it step by step.
Set the Right Goals.
Why did you create your website? What is the concept of your resource, what problem do you solve for the customer? You need to answer these questions first. It will lay the foundation for your future content strategy.
An example of a goal might be achieving a certain attendance rate over time. In this case, determine the main sources of traffic for your website. It can be social media ads, email marketing, posts on social media, blogs, and content, paid search (Google AdWords, organic search, or backlinks).
For example, you are creating an online college homework help website, then your goal may be to reach a certain number of orders every day/week/month.
This resource is socially-oriented, so it will be reasonable to promote it on social networks. In this case, you can set yourself a goal to achieve certain indicators of user activity in the community (number of followers, comments, reactions, impressions, shares, etc.). Statistics will help you measure your progress quantitatively, and adjust your strategy based on numbers.
Find Your Audience
Usually, websites created for everybody at once do not succeed. It is necessary to identify an audience to target the content on your website. You should imagine who your typical customer is. Think of age, education, gender, geography, level of income, career, lifestyle, values, hobbies, and how often they might need your product/service.
Customers are spoiled with a huge amount of content these days. So, if your content is irrelevant to your customer, you will get lost in the stream of the global web.
Analyze Your Competitors
Starting to explore your competitors, write 5-10 of the main competitors in your industry to begin with. Thoroughly research their sites, conduct content audits. Watch them for a while: what they publish, how they do it, how often, what content pieces are successful, and what is not.
Create a special file (it will be convenient to do it in xls format) and once a month record there the results of your observations. This way you will observe competitors under the magnifying glass, and you won’t have to repeat their strategic mistakes.
But the main point of all this is to be able to stand out from your competitors. You should focus on the same search queries as your competitors, but give them more interesting, more useful, more compelling content.
Identify the Most Relevant Keywords
Without quality SEO, nothing (even the most interesting content) will bring a large number of visitors to the site. After all, most users find websites from search engines. Analyze what exactly your customers are looking for in search results.
These words and phrases (keywords) should be natively included in any text content that you publish on your site. However, do not abuse keywords, since search engines consider it spam. The main thing to remember is the quality of content, it should be a priority.
Introduce Keywords cCrrectly
Keywords should be introduced at the beginning of the text. It is better if the keyword is not changed. That is, if the audience is looking for “how to learn martial arts”, then the text should involve this phrase several times with this order of words and number.
Changing the order of words, diluting the phrase with other words is also allowed. However, keep in mind that the search engine will define a page with the direct keywords as a more relevant query than the one where the keywords are synonyms or phrase variations.
Content can be introduced in different formats: text, video, audio, images, infographics.
Decide exactly what you will use, based on the specifics of your topic and the needs of the audience.
The combination of several formats is now almost necessary for maximum efficiency. Any content must be informative and have a certain utility for the audience.
At the same time, find people who will be responsible for content creation. This process may involve several specialists – copywriters, editors, marketers, and designers.
The modern saying goes, ‘Content is king’. Think about bringing value to your audience, and you will be truly surprised how loyal your audience can be and how much fruit you get out of it.
Invest in your content development regularly and you’ll get great returns in higher brand-awareness, a loyal customer base, and continuous growth.
