These days it’s important for businesses to accept their role as publishers. In the era of news where almost anything can be considered news, we have a responsibility to put our voices into the ether of online in a respectable and responsible way, but also one that drives traffic to our websites to meet our SEO goals and that balance can be tough. Here are my favorite tips for strong content, right after I answer a quick question:
What makes content good?
In this article, we’re talking about good, strong content. So what makes content ‘good’ anyway? Like most things, it starts with your goals. As a newly minted content marketer in the world of digital business, you should be asking yourself—what do you want the content to do and what tools do you have in place to understand if it’s working?
For a lot of business owners, the answer is to raise their SEO profile. Domain authority is a number that is attached to every site on the internet that tells you how your site performs from an SEO standpoint. There are a lot of elements both on-page and off-page that can help you lift that number, but it’s not easy and it takes a combination of implementing both on-page and off-page SEO strategies.
From a content marketing perspective, an on-page strategy would be having a blog that’s regularly updated with content that targets certain keywords, phrases, and ideas. Similarly, an off-page content strategy is link-building, or the process by which other pages link back to yours. This might come in the form of a free or paid backlink plugged into someone else’s content, or creating guest posts for other websites with a byline that points back to you. It’s a whole process.
Maybe it’s needless to say that content that raises is your SEO is good, but when you fall into the trap of only writing for SEO purposes, and not anticipating the interests and needs of your clients, it may come off-dry, boring, mechanical, or in the worst cases, like a string of words that don’t make a ton of sense or isn’t very meaningful. We’ve all been online and stumbled on SEO content that could have been written by a robot with a limited understanding of human context. And that’s bad for your brand, building trust, and for keeping clients on your website long enough to reap the full benefits of your SEO.
So what do you do?
Here are some of my favorite tips for exceptional content
Use these ideas to ensure your content reads exactly how you want it to:
- Capture your brand voice: What’s even the point of publishing content if it isn’t going to meet your brand standards? On the one hand, it attracts people to your site, but on the other, when they get there what they meet is disappointment! Is that what you want to be known for? Heck no! Don’t be afraid to have a little fun with it. It lets people know there’s what to expect on the other end of it.
- Be informative: Content for the sake of publishing content is not good content. Each piece needs to have a goal and it needs to deliver on that goal, ideally capturing as many search terms as possible while sounding natural.
- Use spelling and grammar tools: Spell check is your friend. Microsoft Office and Google Apps offer spelling and grammar tools built in. If you’d like to take your writing to the next level, free apps like Hemingway Editor and Grammarly can help you write for wider audiences.
- Consider your readership: Your readership is your lifeline. Consider who they are and what they want out of the content they receive from you. For example, my clients are business owners. While it’s good for my SEO to have a piece of long form content every now and then, if every piece was 8 miles long, I’d lose their interest in second, because who has the time?
- Use brand photos to tell a story: Don’t forget to use your brand photos. Your brand photos offer breaks from walls of text, offer a place where the eye will naturally follow on a page, they make the content special. And, they offer opportunities for captions that capture on keywords so that you don’t need so many in your written content.
- Create metadata: Metadata is another way to sneak in keywords and keyphrases without writing robotic content. Using keyword laden meta descriptions and meta tags can help your site get discovered.
- Focus on ideas not keywords: This may be a little controversial because keywords are still important to every piece, but when you get carried away with keywords it impacts the quality of the content. So, in addition to the tips mentioned above, content is always better when you focus on the ideas behind the piece, ask and answer questions in a natural way, and allow the keyphrases to come up naturally.
For more information like this, follow me at kristinamaness on IG.