The saying “content is king” has been around for a while, but it still very much applies to search marketing.
Content marketing (which is the essence of SEO) is still a mystery to most companies and many internal marketing specialists, and it remains incredibly under-valued.
Almost all of our marketing efforts are centered around content marketing strategies and we’ve seen huge dividends in terms of quality leads driven to our website.
We’ve come to realize that the vast majority of our clients are only scratching the surface when it comes to content marketing and the potential that it offers to their businesses.
6 Tips on Content Marketing & Your Website
1. Onsite versus Off-site Articles
Content marketing refers to the strategy of creating and distributing valuable content to your target audience.
The term “content” can refer to numerous formats from video blogs and articles to press releases and off-site articles.
Depending on your overall marketing goals, you’ll typically want to consistently produce quality content for your own website. The search engines like to see sites with consistently new content, and producing in-depth resources will also help build credibility & trust with web visitors.
Content marketing often includes doing off-site articles where you can contribute to a large content site or serve as a guest blogger. This content is also valuable because it can build up your brand awareness and get quality links back to your site, which is key for SEO.
2. Conducting Keyword Research
Understanding your audience will help you determine the best topics to write about and what kind of resources would be most helpful to your customers.
Keyword research is also a critical step in determining your content topics, especially if you want to improve your SEO and target some long-tail keywords. There are free and paid tools online for keyword research, such as Google Trends, Ahrefs or SEMrush. It can be helpful to get support from an expert, if you’ve never done keyword research before.
When searching for keywords for content marketing, look for “sweet spot keywords” that are high in volume, relevant to your business, and not extremely competitive. Once you’ve selected those ideal keywords, you’ll typically create what’s called long-form content for each one.
3. Creating Long-Form Articles
It’s great to have a consistent blogging strategy and regularly post new content on your site.
However, you’ll need to create a long-form article for each of your top content keywords if you want to compete in the search rankings and with other competitors.
A long-form article is typically anywhere between 2,000 and 5,000 words and the article length requirement can depend on the keyword and topic.
Even though the article is long, you don’t want to scare away readers with dense paragraphs. You can add in a table of contents with anchor links and break up the text with relevant imagery and calls to action.
4. Upgrading Your Article Layouts
Similar to the long-form articles, you can make all of your content more engaging by focusing on the design layout and the overall experience.
For a long-form article, you may want to consider creating a custom design layout rather than using a normal blog post layout. Here is an example of our long-form article layout: https://tinyfrog.com/website-redesign
If you are creating an e-book or white paper, make sure all of these assets match the style guide of your website and branding. Consistency will help visitors recognize your brand identity, even if the content is shared elsewhere.
5. Quality and Quantity
Content marketing is about both quantity and quality. For instance, we typically produce about 1 long-form article each quarter, 5-8 blog posts for each long-form article, weekly video blogs, and 2-3 off-site articles each month.
Most businesses will use a similar spoke and wheel model where they’ll produce 5-8 blog posts and link those back to their main long-form article for on-page optimization. You’ll typically do off-site articles as well to build up your brand awareness and quality links to your content. You may also have blog posts and articles for your email marketing campaigns.
All of this content though has to be high-quality if you want to stand out from competitors. It can be challenging to produce such a high volume of quality content in-house, so you may want to consider hiring a content writer to support you in those efforts.
6. Tracking Your Goals
Your goals for your content marketing will determine what kind of data you’ll use to track success. If you are creating a long-form article and hoping to rank that article for a specific keyword, success may be measured by traffic to the page and ranking reports.
Domain authority is a search engine ranking that predicts how successful the site will be in search rankings based on several factors. Creating more quality content for your website and posting articles off-site will also help with the domain authority of your site.
If you are using a new e-book to drive email marketing sign-ups, then you’ll want to evaluate the form sign-ups and engagement from email marketing. Creating high-quality content can also support numerous marketing efforts from SEO to social media to email marketing.