Content is still king

“Content is king!” It’s a phrase that’s been used for years, yet it still rings true today.

When marketers are asked for the single most important aspect of what they do, of course, many will say creating content. Unique, targeted, high-quality content is so important to marketers globally, but do you know why? And do you know how to set your business apart from the rest?

First, you must understand what “quality content” actually is. Many businesses follow the same content strategy, write as many words and push as many pages onto their website as possible, week after week. While this does hold merit, it will only scratch the surface on what you could be achieving.

An excellent content marketing strategy with unique, focused, targeted content can help you increase your visibility on the right platforms though the publication and distribution of relevant content.

A good basis for quality content is relevant text. This content should fulfill a number of criteria:

• It should be unique
• It should be targeted to your specific audience
• It should be informative and solve a problem
• It should be easy to read, well structured, and error free
• Most importantly, it must be Search Engine friendly

So why is content still king in 2020?

There are several reasons why content will always remain relevant and useful to your business:

• It will improve your SEO
• It can increase website traffic
• It can generate more leads and potentially more sales
• It will encourage engagement
• It adds value to your product or service

Here’s a more detailed breakdown of why content is still so important for businesses:

Improve SEO

SEO (search engine optimisation) is a term that most business owners have heard, buy may not necessarily know about. Almost 70% of trackable web traffic comes from search engines like Google, therefore you need to be placing yourself close to the top of the search.

Whenever you post anything online, search engines analyse and categorise every word you write. So, when you search for “best coffee in Melbourne,” the results will come from how relevant and unique the content is on each page. Posting high quality, authentic content with naturally placed keywords boosts your SEO. The more consistently you do this, the more Google will believe your page is relevant and will place it higher up the rankings.

Increase website traffic

After you’ve consistently posted high quality and relevant content to your website, not only will Google increase your search ranking, but your customers will tell others about your brand, whether this be through social media or recommendations.

While this may take some time, eventually your business will see an increase in website traffic from search engines, providing you with more exposure to new potential customers. Alongside this, your customers are promoting your brand through recommendations and shares, which will also increase exposure to new customers.

Generate leads and sales

The overall aim of any marketing activity is to achieve your businesses goals, and for most of us the end goal is to generate quality leads and sales. If your content isn’t helping to achieve your goal, then what’s the point?

Although we believe increasing web traffic is a good metric, you could see a huge spike in traffic with no conversions. In this case your content is either not relevant, or not reaching the right audience. Your content should be encouraging Google to increase your ranking, pushing your relevant and unique content towards the right audience, who then will be linked back to your business ready to make a purchase.

Encourage engagement

We have already mentioned that Google will rank your pages higher when you create high-quality, relevant content. But what about your customers? Yes, we said they would be promoting your business, but why?

Customers don’t just buy into products or services; customers buy into brands. Customers will use your content to judge your brand, and if your content mirrors their beliefs and solves their problems, they are more likely to engage with your content and share it with new people.

Add value to your brand

Consider a time that you landed on a website. Did you immediately make a purchase? Or did you read through the description of what it is, what it does, why you would want it and why it is better than its competition?

Your content should educate, entertain, engage and inspire your customers. These four pillars should be the basis to any content that you write. If your content is engaging and informative enough, mixed with your business’s unique voice and authority, your clients will trust bringing their business with you.

How do I make my business stand out?

We’ve already mentioned why engaging, high-quality content is so important, but how do we write it? The key requirement is a content strategy.

To run a successful website, you need to know how to write SEO optimised content that engages your target audience. To do this you need to put yourself in their shoes. What do your customers want to know? What problems do they have? How can you solve those problems? This will be the foundation of your content. Adding content just to rank for key phrases is not enough anymore. Adding content that your target audience will truly benefit from is the strategy that will drive your goals.

You then need to spend time doing research. Your content needs to be unique, focused and targeted to your audience. Your audience needs to read your content and believe that you are experts, they need to be willing to share this content with like-minded people because it will benefit them in some way. If you don’t spend time or put in effort to make it engaging, then it won’t be.

Ok, so you’ve researched into your audience, and your audience’s problems, now what? You need to create Search Engine friendly content. By this we mean content that Google will rank highly.

Whenever you add content to your website you need to make sure you are targeting key phrases that you want to rank for on Google. These key words and phrases you’re trying to target are the phrases that will bring your target audience to the site. In order to target these key phrases, all you must do is include them in certain places within your content. For example, if you’re writing a blog post, your key words should be included in the title of the post, the H1 tag, and should be mentioned in different variations throughout the post.

There is a method to this, you don’t want to include it too many times throughout your content, but you also don’t want to include it too little. For example, it’s not as simple as placing as many H1 titles full of your keywords, as Google will only choose to recognise the first one. Your overall strategy should be to make sure your content contains key phrases that your customer would search, as well as solving the problem for your target audience that you researched earlier.