Creating Strategic Content That Gets Results
In the digital world, content is king. Whether your goal is to boost search engine rankings, gain traffic and leads, or simply to become a thought leader in your industry, the first step is to have great website content. In this week’s episode, Morgan and Jailyn discuss tips and strategies behind creating valuable website content for businesses.
5 Simple Ways to Create Valuable Website Content
At its core, great content should be goal-driven, original, and engaging. Below, we’ll outline 5 basic steps to take when creating content for a website, blog, or other digital media.
1. Define your Goals
When creating anything for a business, it’s imperative to have a goal in mind for what you would like to achieve. Whether it’s to gain more leads, increase sales, boost traffic, to position yourself as a thought leader, or simply to improve your overall SEO, it’s important to have a clearly defined goal when creating new content. This will allow you to better-craft your content to see real world results.
2. Understand your Audience
Another necessary element of content creation is understanding who you are creating it for. Is it for potential customers? Current customers? For search engines? Defining what kind of people you want to reach with your content will help you to stay on track with your chosen topic and ensure that all of the information you are providing is relevant to achieving your goals.
Every person thinks, acts, and makes decisions in different ways. To better understand your target audience, their pain points, their behavior, and more, consider creating buyer personas. Buyer personas help companies better understand the personalities of their customers and helps to give a face to a name when creating content. For more information on creating effective buyer personas, check out our previous podcast on the topic.
3. Be Original
When it comes to optimizing your content for search engines, having original content is key. Google’s algorithm (along with other search engine algorithms) reward original, relevant content, and react negatively to content that is copy and pasted from another source. Not only is taking content from another source morally frowned upon, you’re basically telling search engines that you have no real value to offer to the internet.
Obviously, quoting snippets of content from external sources and linking to them will not hurt your SERP results. Linking to related content from upstanding websites will actually help search engines understand the context of your content, meaning better visibility on related keywords.
For help finding original topics to create content on, conduct keyword research. Tools like Answer The Public, Keywords Everywhere, and SEMrush are great for finding “low-hanging fruit” topics that people are already searching for. For a better understanding of the importance of keyword research and how to start it, listen to our Enhancing Your Keyword Research podcast from a few months back.
4. Supplement Written Content with Media
It’s 2019, nobody wants to read a 5,000-word blog while they’re casually surfing the internet. Incorporating multimedia elements into your content will not only help readers stay engaged, they also make your content more “shareable.” Making use of helpful infographics, relevant photos, informational or entertaining videos, and more can help to make your content more whole. Not to mention, alt tags and metadata can be added to certain media types to further aid search engines in understanding what your content is about.
5. Update Content Frequently
Not everything is written in stone – especially on the internet. Things change, links get broken, and information gets outdated. If your goal is to maintain a search-optimized website, it’s important to make sure that your content stays up-to-date. Blogs and articles posted years ago can still be searched for, so you want to make sure that your focus isn’t only going towards creating new content.
If you are maintaining a blog, it is also crucial to regularly upload new content to show search engines that the blog is still active. Because of the speed that the internet changes, search engines want to ensure that they’re not delivering outdated, forgotten-about websites to their users. By posting blogs at a minimum of every 2-4 weeks, search engines will see that your website isn’t filled with stagnant content.
Professional Content Creation Services
No matter what your business goals are, having a website regularly updated with original, relevant content will benefit you in the long run. Customers will see that you are passionate about providing free information, search engines will see that you are creating value for users, and potential customers will see that you are a reliable source that can be trusted.
Interested in creating original content, but not sure you have the time or resources available to keep up with it? Hiring an agency to write, publish, and maintain your content may be the right choice for you! For more information about our copywriting services, social media maintenance, and SEO maintenance, contact PA online or call us at (248) 206-3559 to get started.
