Content Marketing in 2015
More than anything else, look for quality content. If you’re selling a service, do you go the extra mile? How many times do you go beyond being a simple brochure website with the same information as competing sites? Do you provide a reason for people to spend more time reading your pages than other sites or social networks?
Do you offer value, something meaningful to your visitors, something unique, different, useful and that they won’t find anywhere else? These are just a few of the questions to ask yourself to assess whether you’re delivering quality in your content marketing.
Perhaps the most important factor in creating good content marketing pages and posts is good keyword research. There are a variety of online tools available that allow you to see how people are searching for content.
You want to create content using those keywords, phrases, or questions. Knowing the actual recent search terms that people are using and knowing how to use them to produce content is the cornerstone of a successful digital marketing strategy.
Your content must be written in the correct “language”, that is, the language that your future client or user uses when searching. Optimizing your content writing in this way can lead to increased search engine impressions and you are more likely to better convert your target audience when they land on your site.
Having done your research, you now have to use these words in your content. If you’ve already created some quality content before researching, revisit it and do some editing to include it. Simply put, if you want your pages to be found for specific words, it’s a good idea to use those words in your copy, title, H1, Meta, etc.
How often? a density between 2.5% and 3% for best results, but there are no guarantees. Keyword density sounds scientific, but even if you hit an ideal percentage, that doesn’t guarantee anything, it’s just good practice.
Search engines try to measure engagement in a number of ways. They will never publish exact statistics on this, but with analytics so easy for them to implement, engagement metrics are sure to influence search results.
For example: How long do visitors stay on your page? Did they search, then click on your listing but then immediately “bounce” back to the results to try something else that caught their eye? That behavior is measured by search engines and could be a sign that your content isn’t engaging.
Secondly:
Are people spending a lot of time reviewing your content, relative to other sites in the same batch of results?
Social comments, shares, and likes represent another way that engagement can influence search results. If nothing else, it shows new visitors that others who have been there like what they see, read, or watch. That has to have a positive effect on the user experience.
Search engines love new content. That’s what we mean when we say ‘freshness’. A freshness boost can happen when you have the right content at the right time. Google has something they call “Query Deserved Freshness (QDF)”. If there is a search term that is suddenly very popular, Google will apply a QDF to that term and search its search results database for new content on that topic. If there is and you have it on your site, new content is considered likely to get a boost in search results.
Sites with pages and posts can take advantage of this freshness boost by producing relevant content that matches real-life experience.
So you can’t just update your pages every day thinking that will make them “fresh” and more likely to rank. You also can’t just add new pages constantly, just for the sake of having new pages, and think that gives you a freshness boost.
