SEO Content
Having great content that engages your target audience.
Content is Where You Get the Long Term Growth of Organic Results.
The second not-so-secret piece to outstanding SEO results is all about how you continually grow, build, write, video record and dictate really valuable content that your target audience finds useful, and that they’re looking for online.
There’s a lot in all of that which we’ll break down into bite size chunks shortly.
Great content builds trust and attraction
Great content builds you into the authority and expert in your field (that you know you are on the inside). This great content, in turn, builds trust and naturally makes people like you. The more I like and trust you, the more I’m going to choose to use your services over competitors. Now, it doesn’t mean I’m going to buy from you today, I may not have a need for your services today, but I will most certainly some time in the future.
Business is all about relationships
This is all about how we start and nurture a great long term, value adding relationship. You need to start a relationship with your potential customers. And that comes down to how are you’re adding value to them. By adding value to your potential customer (and expecting nothing in return in the first instance), they will like you more and trust you more.
How to add value...
In digital marketing (and marketing generally today) you add value by helping people. And you help them by educating them, providing them information, resources, guides, how to guides etc.
What value do you want to add?
That really circles us right back around to your value proposition. You need to have crystal clarity on your target audience and the value proposition you defined, and then you can create great content that fulfils this value proposition to your target audience accordingly. The long term aim is how are you building the complete ‘wikipedia’ (for want of a better word) of your industry, your products or services and your business – both what you do and what you know.
Why your marketing strategy is so important
If you aren’t clear on who your target audience is, and what value you are going to provide them, you can’t be clear on what great content is for them. So you need to get this right to be able to create a great content strategy.
This builds a great asset
Great assets add money into your pocket every day, week, month and year. Content is this great asset that will continually drive leads and revenue for your business for years to come. And that’s actually worth a lot of money. Your ability to continually generate new clients and repeat clients is ultimately the value of your business. And that all boils down to how good your content is.
Great content starts with great foundational pillars
Knowing your target audience and the value you want to add allows us to produce what we call ‘content pillars.’ The whole point of content pillars is to define the framework and categories around how we add value, information, education, ideas to your target audience. This is that’s going to make them like you more and more. Here is one example of 4 content pillars:
- 1. Guide Me: Given the uneducated nature of the market, we need to be producing great content that guides the beginner through the minefield of how to choose and what’s best for them.
- 2. Techie: There is a real opportunity for you to own your space, so we want to show our thought/industry leadership with our, and others, technology advances.
- 3. Let’s Get Healthy: This is all about how we help the general public get healthier, so let’s share ideas, recipes and habits that are going to help them.
- 4. Inspire Me: It’s time to showcase how important healthy food is to life and how we are contributing to a better world.
They ask, you answer
This is a cracking book that I suggest you read by Marcus Sheridan. You want to overlay some of what this awesome book covers, which is for every single question you get from anybody about your products or services, you should be writing it down. From customers, staff, stakeholders, friends and family – write it down. Then you should be making a blog article out of it or a video out of it or a screen share out of it or a webinar out of it or whatever it may be.
Every single question you get asked, you should write down and answer because if they’re asking it, chances are somebody else is going to ask it, and chances are, somebody is going to type it into google, and google is going to show them your answer. Chances are half your customer base is going to ask it. So that illustrates the amazing power in the sort of content you want to create.
You’re great at what you do
Let’s not be shy now. You really are an expert at what you do. You’ve done it for a long time, you’re good at it, you’ve learned the hard way. Now it’s time to share that expertise with the world. There will be ideas in your head of what you do, how you do it, better ways of doing things that’s contradictory to what your competitors do – these are all the things you should be sharing. How do you bring in what you learned from the last trade show in Las Vegas that you went to? How do you get ideas out of your whole team’s head? Because they have a plethora of knowledge that needs to go onto your website, which is worth its weight in gold. And ultimately, they all form amazing assets and resources that can be shared throughout the business.
Great technical tools
There are some great technical tools you can use that gives you an indication and guide to what people are actually typing into the search box, this will help get your content ranking. You need to make sure that there’s some decent volumes coming through that you can write some good content about. This then drives the priorities of what content you’re producing and when you’re producing it.
Keyword research
You put in ten seed keywords and it spits out the 4,000 possible variations. Then you go through and start categorising them together and that starts giving you some good themes of the type of content that you should start producing. Next step, content design and plan. We need to then put that all together into a plan of attack so we know who’s doing what, when and how through the process.
The biggest challenge
Is to actually produce the content. Everybody has great intentions, and most will get the first piece or two under their belt, then it falls by the wayside. Customers get in the way, staff grab your time etc. Making content production a priority and building the working habits is one of the biggest challenges.
Point of note: We strongly recommend content gets produced internally. We’re not fans of content bring outsources, and haven’t seen it work well. There’s ways and means of doing it so it comes out of your head and you get help with finessing. But ultimately, the bones and the main points need to come from you, the business owner or the marketing manager or the people that eat, live and breathe the business.
Then it can be spiced up or made more attractive by external people to help make it sound better or smoother and simpler to read, etc. But the crux of all good content has to come from you. So it comes back to quality over quantity any day.
We want great content, not just content
You want to produce a good amount of great content, not just lots of average to good content. This is all about how you use great, unique, interesting, informative, educational, bits of content. Habit, cadence, rhythm. The most important thing over all, is how do you get in the right habits, the right cadence, the right rhythm of every day, of every week, of every month, of every quarter, every year. So that you’re doing the right things that are going to get you to where you want to go.
So how do you make sure that every week you’re producing one piece of content that looks good, that reads well, that goes up on the website, that looks great on the website? And then ensure it’s shared and promoted on all platforms, such as all your social channels and on your email campaigns to leads or customers.
Everybody learns differently
You want your content in all the different formats as everybody learns differently. For example:
- Standard blog articles
- Videos for quick and easy digestion
- Images and infographics
It’s leveraged
You’re not creating new bits of content for each, you’re re-purposing it. The more you can use the same bit of content, the easier and quicker and more useful it becomes long term. So a video presentation can be turned into a blog article, that then gets packaged up into an eBook. That eBook can then be packaged up into a master bible of instructions or encyclopedia or whatever it may be. Once again, it’s continually used in all different formats for different benefits. Ultimately, you continue producing amazing assets for your business.
It’s shared and promoted
Once you’ve created it, you need to share and promote it (it’s no good to sit there and do nothing). So you need to share it on your social channels (both the businesses and your personal account) and you want to pay to boost it. You want to email it out to your database, and you want to put it on blog sites, industry sites and discussion forums.
Note: you must pay to boost your posts, no point in putting it up if you’re not prepared for the world to see it and put money behind it.
It’s individual
Share it with individuals. People love you thinking about them, so share specific bits of content that are relevant to people at different times in their journey with you. One article is just as relevant to a lead as it is to a networking colleague or a friend.
It’s time to do great digital marketing!
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