Publishing great website content requires a well-thought strategy. At its core, good content should resonate with your target audience, and, more importantly, drive the traffic you need to move your brand forward. This article takes you through 5 of the most important tips to keep in mind when publishing the next piece of content for your website or blog.
1. Generate Content Ideas
Your goal is to publish attractive content. However, it takes more than good content to funnel in traffic to your website. Before hitting the publish button, it’s important to ensure your content aligns with the search intent of your target audience. Why? Because your content may be the most valuable on the web, but if no one is actively searching for your solution, you aren’t going to see any results in traffic and engagements. Before anything else, finding the right search term(s) is key, and here’s where keyword research comes in.
If you’re bidding to outrank competitors on Google, Google Keyword Tool and Google Trends are your ideal tools. For more insights on what competitors are posting, and what’s likely to generate the most buzz and traffic to your website, BuzzSumo is another valuable resource.
Your choice keyword shouldn’t be overly competitive or it will be difficult to outrank competitors, and it’s search volume shouldn’t be too low or you’ll have only a few visitors coming your way. With keyword research out of the way, the next step is the content creation process itself.
2. Text or Visual?
Text-based contents remain a powerful tool for organic growth. However, if trends are anything to go by, visual is the new forward you want to face. The stats are out there. According to Forbes, 91% of consumers would prefer visual content over plain text. Also, Marketer Jeff Bullas notes that image-containing articles get 94% more views than articles without images.
So you really want to tap into the potentials of visual. infographics, descriptions and relevant images are some ways to spice up the visual appeal of contents you publish on your website. For text content, value doesn’t necessarily have to be long. Visitors rarely like those, thanks to decreasing attention spans.
Still, long-form contents tend to perform better on Google, so striking the balance between content length and quality is key.
3. Incorporate Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
To hit a home run in the SEO department, you need to play by Google’s rules. You ideally want to produce high quality, valuable content while leveraging insights from keyword research. The years of keyword stuffing are long gone.
A more practical, reliable strategy is what you want. Ticking the tens of SEO ranking factors to consider would make your content creation process more demanding than it should. Thankfully, there are plenty of tools to help you streamline this task. To test that your content meets the most important SEO metrics, consider running your article or web page on Yoast SEO Plugin.
Whatever tool you decide to use, at the most basic level, you want titles and headlines to be highly magnetic, while carefully putting keyword suggestions and variations to good use throughout the article. Don’t forget to optimize meta tags and image texts too. Done effectively, and consistently, your organic reach and website traffic are sure to skyrocket in the long run.
4. Promote and Share Your Content
Publishing high-quality contents is just as important as sharing them across major platforms where your target audience are likely to see them. Since results from organic growth take time, complementing reach by sharing content on relevant social media marketing platforms only sounds ideal. Your ideal platform(s) bring the most traffic to your website. However, you also don’t want to spread too thin posting on every platform out there.
While it can be a little puzzling knowing where to look when starting out, monitoring your website traffic would let you know what platforms deserve more time and resources. Facebook is always a great place for most brands.
Depending on your type of content and target audience, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter are other platforms to spread the word about your freshest piece of content. You may also consider running ads on your chosen platforms to maximize outreach potential.
5. Track, Reiterate, Repeat
To get the most value from your content strategy, tweaks and modifications are important, difficult things to do if you have no monitoring tool of some sort to fall back on. Only when things are trackable can they be improved.
So setting up an analytics tool is a good first step. Google Analytics tool works just fine. You ideally want to keep track of key performance indicators such as brand awareness and engagement. If organic traffic is soaring up north and visitors regularly leave comments and feedback on your contents, chances are you’re ticking the right boxes.
And if traffic and engagement keep stalling month after month, it’s time to tweak your content strategy. The comments section would allow you to make the most of visitor feedback when publishing future content.
To Wrap Up
Although not exhaustive, there you have it, 5 tips to consider when publishing the next piece of content for your website. It all starts with zeroing in on your target audience, finding their search intent, and creating a tailored content to match.
From Google Keyword Planner to Google Trends and BuzzSumo, there are plenty of tools out there to leverage when creating web content. With the growing trend of visual over text-based content, tapping into more graphics and videos is what you want. You also want to monitor performance and make the most of feedback and comments.
By keeping tabs on content performance and making informed tweaks over time, you stay on course to publishing content that not only resonate with your target audience, but also deliver the value-add and traffic you need to power your brand to the top of organic search, and double down on your bottom line!
Want to learn more? Contact Design Point for more information and how we can optimise your website content for user intent.