Last Updated on February 14, 2021 by Arif Chowdhury
When you try to market your product online, always keep this in mind – Content is the King. Whether it is an article, infographic, video presentation, images, etc. It is considered as content. Website quality is good or bad, always determined by its content marketing strategy.
When you visit a website and find low-quality content filled with lots of advertisements, that hinder your view when reading their article, it can be an example of a low-quality website. This is a key factor and because of that, users don’t stay long as they can’t read comfortably and leave quickly.
If your visitors leave quickly then Google will consider your website as low quality and rank you down. Therefore, you have to keep your visitors busy on your website by writing engaging content. And remember the whole internet is filled with billions of contents, every day there are 4.4 million blog posts published. Hence, it is a challenging task, as you have to compete with other websites like yours.
In this article, I will walk you through 4 creative ways that you can utilize to improve your content marketing performance.
Rule 1: High Quality is the Key for Content Marketing Strategy
There is no replacing of high-quality content, no tricks can replace that. If your content is low quality, then eventually you will outlast by high-quality content in the future. And eventually, Google will throw these low-quality contents 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, then 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 will produce you a human quality article that is highly engaging & unique.
However, behind the scene is – that software just replaces words with synonyms & re-shuffle sentences to produce new content. Maybe it can bypass Google verification for now. Yet, your audience definitely 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.
Don’t Search for a Shortcut
Instead of trying to get a shortcut, just forget about it. There is no shortcut. Don’t waste your time searching for it. To rank higher in search engines & content marketing you have to think of your audience. Before you write content just 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 get benefit from it. And your audience retention rate will increase, thus, Google will rank you higher. Ultimately, you win the game.
Recommended Reading: Best Marketing Strategies for Online Business in 2021
Rule 2: Research In-depth Before You Start Creating Content
Think your website content is an assignment from a University or 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.
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? Try to imagine what your audience would expect from your content. Be informative and helpful otherwise people will leave. Because there are millions of other websites like yours waiting to serve them.
Quick Note: Use Google to get content creation ideas. This is by far the most effective & completely free technique. Forget about expensive keyword research tools, just use Google & you will surprise with the result.
When creating content, you have to show expertise. Be professional, 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, rather try to present your content with practical information with a few hundred words and that would be enough to keep your audience coming back to you.
In other cases, relevant keywords will help Google to find & index your content.
Rule 3: Focus on Relevant Keywords to Increase Rank in Google
The keyword is a vital part of content marketing. Major search engines like Google will index & rank your website content based on relevant keywords. Irrelevant keywords not only disrupt your website growth, 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 doing any good.
Quick Note: Try to 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 keywords 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 easily check your article keyword density with it.
Utilize Keyword Planner Tools
For best practice, research keywords using keywords planner tools. For example, you can use the Google keyword planner tool, which is free and useful. Search for keywords that have low or medium competition and have at least 1,000 monthly search volume. It can be time-consuming and tricky. You may use some paid tools out there, it’s your choice anyway.
However, a low competition keyword is easier to rank for your website in Google while it should have a huge monthly search volume. Just think this way, if your website ranked number 1 for a keyword in Google, but only 200 people search for that keyword per month, then it would be a waste of effort. You need to find keywords that are in low competition as well as have enough search volume.
For that purpose, a long tail keyword can be a better choice 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 to me some “nonsense long-tail keywords” that have no meaning at all. Like, “park seo joon”, “park seo-joon”, “seo-ye ji”, etc. Though these keywords are low competitive & have high search volumes around 70K, yet 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. Write as naturally as you always do. Do not massacre your article readability for the sake of meaningless long-tail keywords.
Resource Box: For keyword analysis, use Ahrefs & SEMrush for best result & performance.
Incorporate Keywords Naturally & Smartly
Anyway, after you have done your research let’s say you find a set of keywords to rank for your website. Now, what to do? Make sure you inject those keywords very smartly into your article title, slug, H1-H6 tags & in the article body. If you have images, then do not forget to inject keywords in the image description as well.
Again, do not overdo it, as it will do more harm than good to your site. Also by overdoing it, you may reduce your article quality as the same keyword appearing repeatedly. This will reduce readability & people will start to leave & then Google will rank you down.
Honesty is the best policy. Just write content for your audience, forget about all tips and tricks. Eventually, you will gain loyal customers and become number one in Google.
Rule 4: Fresh & Up to Date Content Will Boost SEO
Google wants to keep its reputation intact and that’s why they always try to present relevant & fresh content on their search engine result page (SERP). Look at yourself, when you are in a hurry and want to know about something, what do you do? Search in Google, but if you don’t find it right away or find irrelevant content. Then you would feel disappointed. And the disappointed 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 just happened 2 hours ago & you wanted to know more about it. When you search in Google, they show you recent earthquake news, articles, 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 success in content marketing, then you must have to keep your audience in mind. Because they are the key to your business. You must have to make them happy and engaged to make more profit in the long-run. The audience is not only a gold mine for you but also Google.
Without the audience, Google cannot run their business. Both of you have to work to satisfy your audience. And for that purpose be honest and write informative and relevant content that will help your audience and answer their question. Only then, you will become successful in content marketing.