Content marketing plays a crucial role in digital marketing campaigns initiated by both business owners and marketers. Not only is it a vital tool for brand awareness, but it also helps nurture existing customers, ultimately improving consumer engagement and creating more sales. However, the strategies and techniques used in this marketing strategy are constantly evolving, making it essential that you continually stay up-to-date with new developments.
Here are some content marketing tips to help improve the website for your small business to increase engagement, traffic, and conversions.
- Define the Purpose of the Page.
Before you write content for a page on your website, decide what purpose the page will serve. Different pages will have different goals. When thinking through how to write your website content, make sure the copy on each page serves its intended purpose.
For example, your home page serves as the main entrance to your site and helps people understand who you are and what you do at a glance. That means your home page content needs to give people a little bit of information about the most important concepts and help people find where to go next. Blog posts are website content, too, but their purpose is usually to educate and build brand awareness. They are time-stamped pages often related to something topical, timely, seasonal, or newsworthy. Some of your pages may be designed to bring in traffic from people who are searching online. If the purpose of your content is to bring in searchers, choose a good keyword to target in your writing.
- Optimize Your Text Length
Among many useful trends in content marketing, one of the simplest is to create blog posts of an appropriate length. Generally, lengthier content can help your content rank higher. Google algorithms rank content based on its perceived ‘quality,’ using engagement metrics such as time spent on a page to determine the content’s relevance, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Undoubtedly, creating quality blog post content can take a lot of time, especially when it comes to lengthier blogs but do it right, and you can reap some serious rewards. By producing longer and more useful content, users are more likely to spend longer on your website, which will gradually help to boost your website’s SEO ranking.
In contrast, shorter content blog posts with fewer than 300 words are often categorized by Google as ‘thin content’, which is assumed to add little value to the reader by default. This is especially pertinent to e-commerce sites that might have product pages that have thin or duplicate content, both of which can hurt your SEO ranking. Furthermore, you should always be creating unique and original content on your website.
- Use Effective Titles
The titles you choose to use are instrumental in convincing potential visitors to click and visit your URL. When thinking of a title for your blog, be sure to consider its clickability, shareability, and SEO benefits.
The ideal title should be fully visible on Google’s search results page – your title should be between 50-60 characters long to ensure that potential visitors will be able to see it in its entirety. Your title should always consider user intent first and convey the value it provides to the reader. It should be immediately clear what your article is about and why a reader should click. In addition, it’s important to note that titles that quantify the points entailed in the content tend to generate higher click-through rates.
- Use Local SEO
Small businesses should also implement local SEO to target loyal customers within their communities or districts. Using local SEO can make your content marketing strategy more effective as it can deliver more targeted traffic, generating more conversions in the long run. Local SEO keywords indicate positive search intent because individuals that use them might be more prone to visit the premises of the business and make a purchase. Remember to optimize for the neighborhood your business is in, rather than the city, since Google divides its geographical areas into smaller sections to better match search results with user intent.
In addition, you should also ensure that the business name, address, and phone number is consistent across Google My Business and all social media platforms – this is essential for establishing trustworthiness in Google search rankings.
- Create Diverse Content
To improve your content marketing strategy, you should diversify the format of the material published on behalf of the business. Do not rely solely on blog posts to get the message across, but instead diversify and use some visual content to attract different types of visitors. You can use videos, images, infographics, and even podcasts to market to customers, depending on their preferences.
This also gives you a great opportunity to repurpose previously published content. For example, after determining a blog post’s success, you can convert it into a video that can be published on your business’s website, as well as various other platforms. Alternatively, you can convert that content into an infographic which can then be posted on your own website and shared across other business blogs.
- Prioritize the user experience.
User experience is king. You can have the most well-written, well-researched piece of content, but if your website’s user experience is buggy, you’ll lose readers and have them bounce off the page which is a highly negative ranking factor. Most importantly, those are leads that you won’t convert. Also make sure your site loads quickly, is mobile-optimized and has navigability features such as a table of contents and back-to-top button.
Your content should be easy to read on all devices, with a series of clear, consistent headings and a sans-serif typeface. Be sure to also optimize for accessibility website standards. You should provide alt text for all images, include captions in videos, offer a high-contrast setting for the website, and ensure that your content can be read out loud by software.
Finally, content marketing evolves every day, its essence never changes: content marketing is all about the reader, not about the brand. In your content marketing campaigns, seek to know your target audience, serve their needs, and solve their problems, and you will soon convert them to customers.
