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Last Updated on September 27, 2022 by Arif Chowdhury
Keep this in mind when you try to market your product online – Content is King. It is considered content, whether an article, infographic, video presentation, images, etc. Website quality is good or bad, always determined by its content.
When you visit a website and find low-quality content filled with many advertisements that hinder your view when reading their article, it can be an example of a low-quality website. It is a crucial factor, and because of that, users don’t stay long as they can’t read comfortably and leave quickly. And this is called a wrong content marketing strategy.
If your visitors leave quickly, then Google will consider your website low-quality and rank you down. Therefore, you must keep your visitors busy on your website by writing SEO-optimized engaging content. And remember, the whole internet is filled with billions of contents; every day, 4.4 million blog posts are published. Hence, it is challenging, as you have to compete with other websites like yours.
In this article, I will walk you through 4 creative ways to improve content marketing performance.
Rule 1: High quality is the key & there is no way around it.
There is no replacing high-quality content; no tricks can replace that. So if your content is low quality, you will eventually be outlasted by high-quality content. And finally, Google will throw this low-quality content like garbage by either ranking it down or blacklisting it.
Golden rule: Stay out of article spinner.
Now, you may already hear about Article Spinner. If you didn’t, do a quick search on Google and learn about it. My advice is, don’t just ignore this software; run away as fast as possible. In their eye-catching advertisement, they promised that their software would produce a human-quality article that is highly engaging & unique.
However, behind the scene is – that software replaces words with synonyms & re-shuffles sentences to produce new content. So, maybe it can bypass Google verification for now. Yet, your audience won’t like it when they read it because article readability is low because of the spinning of original content.
Thus, your readers will start to leave. Finally, as your audience quickly leaves your site, Google will rank you down. Therefore, you will lose anyway.
Quick Note: You can launch a robust content marketing strategy on social media. Most large organizations use social media content strategy for their brand awareness. They use a content calendar to create the best content for their target audience consistently. Thus, as you can see, social media is an excellent platform for lead generation and can increase the conversion rate.
Don’t search for a shortcut.
Instead of trying to get a shortcut, forget about it. There is no shortcut. Don’t waste your time searching for it. To rank higher in search engines & content marketing, you must consider your audience. Before you write content, ask yourself what you would like to see & read. What benefit would you ask from this content?
Try to create value within your content so people will benefit from it. And your audience retention rate will increase. Thus, Google will rank you higher. Ultimately, you will get success and achieve your goals.
Recommended Reading: How Content Marketing Can Increase Sales for Free? (Definitive Guide)
Rule 2: Research in-depth before you start creating content.
Think your website content is an assignment from a University or a thesis paper from the Ph.D. subject. You cannot pass without researching thoroughly on that particular subject. Therefore the same goes for your website content. You need to do your homework & understand the topic and have enough knowledge to write it down.
Before you write anything, always think about your customers first. Your content marketing plan should be based on your audience. Publish case studies, white papers, research data, tutorials, etc., to solve your audience problem. And this is how your buyer’s journey will end with your content.
Focus on keyword analysis before creating content.
First, you should focus on keywords ideas by researching your audience’s behavior. Which type of keywords is relevant to your topic & people would search? Then, try to imagine what your audience would expect from your content. Be informative and helpful; otherwise, people will leave because millions of other websites like yours are waiting to serve them.
Quick Note: Use Google to get content creation ideas. It is by far the most effective & completely free technique. Forget about expensive keyword research tools; use Google & you will be surprised with the result.
When creating content, you have to show expertise. Be professional, and give real-life examples to prove your experience in a relevant field. Thus people will trust you. Do not write thousands of words based on speculation; people are not looking for it; instead, try to present your content with practical information with a few hundred words, which would be enough to keep your audience coming back to you.
In other cases, relevant keywords will help Google to find & index your content. Also, use a reliable hosting service for your blog or website. A slow server can easily drag your audience out from your site because of frustration.
Recommended Reading: Why Facebook Marketing is Best than All Other Platforms?
Rule 3: Focus on relevant keywords to increase rank in google.
Keyword is a vital part of content marketing. Major search engines like Google will index & rank your website content based on relevant keywords. On the other hand, irrelevant keywords disrupt your website growth, and sometimes your rank will go down significantly. Therefore, it is vital to inject relevant keywords into your content naturally. Here, “naturally” means do not intend to trick Google by stuffing keywords. It will harm your site rather than do any good.
Quick Note: Keep your focused keywords around 2-3% maximum. Better keep it under 2% for the safe side. One piece of advice, do not even bother with keyword counting. Just write naturally. Thus, your keywords will also appear naturally in the article.
Resource Box: Use WordCounter, it is a free web-based software. You can quickly check your article keyword density with it.
Utilize keyword planner tools.
For best practice, research keywords using keyword planner tools. For example, you can use the Google keyword planner tool, which is free and valuable. Search for low or medium-competition keywords with at least 1,000 monthly search volumes. However, it can be time-consuming and tricky. So you may use some paid tools; it’s your choice anyway.
However, a low competition keyword is easier to rank for your website in Google, while it should have a substantial monthly search volume. Just think this: if your website ranked number 1 for a keyword in Google, but only 200 people search for that keyword per month, it would be a waste of effort. Therefore, you need to find keywords that are in low competition and have enough search volume.
For that purpose, a long-tail keyword can be better than a short-tail. However, it may happen that when you try to find low, competitive long-tail keywords, you will find some unusual keywords like the example below.
I tried to find some long-tail keywords for “SEO”; however, Ahrefs suggested some “nonsense long-tail keywords” that have no meaning. Like, “park seo joon”, “park seo-joon”, “seo-ye ji”, etc. Though these keywords are low competitive & have high search volumes, around 70K, there is no way you can incorporate these into your SEO-related articles.
So, my suggestion is, if you do not find any meaningful, relevant long-tail keywords, then skip this part. Instead, write as naturally as you always do. Do not massacre your article’s readability for meaningless long-tail keywords. Always remember that you can quickly grow your business using content marketing.
Quick Note: Content marketers don’t just create content; they also monitor its progress by utilizing Google Analytics. Therefore, they know exactly how far they have reached to achieve their overall goals.
Resource Box: Here are some keyword analysis tools to test out. SEMrush and Ahrefs.
Incorporate keywords naturally & smartly.
Anyway, after your research, let’s say you find a set of keywords to rank for your website. Now, what to do? First, ensure you inject those keywords very smartly into your article title, slug, and H1-H6 tags & in the article body. Do not forget to inject keywords in the image description if you have images.
Again, do not overdo it, as it will harm your site more than do any good. Also, you may reduce your article quality by overdoing it as the same keyword appears repeatedly. It will minimize readability & people will start to leave & then Google will rank you down.
Honesty is the best policy. Just write content for your audience, and forget about all tips and tricks. Eventually, you will gain loyal customers and become number one on Google. It is an excellent strategy for your content marketing campaigns.
Recommended Reading: How to Utilize Content Marketing in Business? (Practical Guide)
Rule 4: Fresh & up-to-date content will boost SEO.
Google wants to keep its reputation intact, so they always try to present relevant & fresh content on its search engine result page (SERP). Look at yourself; what do you do when you are in a hurry and want to know about something? Search in Google, but if you don’t find it right away or find irrelevant content. Then you would feel disappointed. And dissatisfied customer is bad for business.
Therefore, Google wants to keep their customer happy by showing the most accurate and relevant website on the result page. For example, let’s say a recent earthquake happened 2 hours ago & you wanted to know more about it. When you search on Google, they show you recent earthquake news, articles, and stories from various websites and news channels.
But, the question is – how do they identify recent earthquake news & articles from old ones? Simple, they are smarter than you think; they use QDF (Query Deserves Freshness) to filter and rank recent content to show their users.
Conclusion.
If you want to get successful in content marketing, then you must have to keep your audience in mind because they are the key to your business. It would help if you had to make your audience happy and engaged in making more profit in the long run. The audience is a gold mine for you and Google.
Without the audience, Google cannot run its business. So both of you have to work to satisfy your audience. And for that purpose, be honest and write informative and relevant content to help your audience answer their questions. Only then will you become successful in content marketing.