What a content-driven future looks like? About a year ago, it became obvious to most business leaders and SEO experts that the SEO industry’s days were numbered. Google, as well as a couple of other search engine providers, started getting really clever about the way in which they delivered results.
No longer was it enough to spam a load of backlinks from dodgy sites to boost your site ranking, and no longer was it acceptable to publish thousands of words of gibberish in the hope that Google’s algorithm would pick up on the fact that your website had a lot of keywords.
Things have moved on significantly since then, and now Google is dragging businesses kicking and screaming towards a world where they have to provide valuable content. There is no other way around it. You either market with amazing content or you give up.
That’s not to say that SEO from a website development agency is no longer important: it is. But effective SEO today is more about amplifying great content than it is about generating high page ranks from essentially nothing.
This means that businesses need to start thinking about their content seriously. How can they make it better?
Keep Up With Trends
On the internet, people get bored quickly. Sometimes trends last a couple of months, other times they can last a day or less. Keeping up with trends and finding out what your audience is interested in is key to the success of your business.
If you can get a handle on what is hot right now in social media, you can take advantage of this buzz and target your content accordingly.
In the aftermath of the US election, for instance, there was a lot of discussion about moving to Canada. Clever Canadian real estate businesses latched onto this story, boosting traffic to their web pages by talking about how great Canada was as a country. That trend soon died down, but it goes to illustrate just how powerful current trends and events can be if leveraged effectively.
Generate A Content Calendar
Most business leaders tell themselves that they’re going to create loads of content and provide tons of extra value to customers. But when it actually comes to following through, very few of them actually succeed. Other stuff just gets in the way, and producing great content falls down the list of priorities.
The solution to this is to create a content calendar. Content should be organized under headings like date, channel it’s going to go out though, the type of content (video, blog etc.), holiday and seasonal themes, the amount you want to spend and who will make it.
Once you’ve got a plan in place, it becomes a lot easier to see where you are in relation to where you want to get.
Analyse With Metrics
Once you’ve got your content strategy up and running, it’s important to make sure that it’s performing how you’d like.
There are currently dozens of analytics tools out there on the market to help firms keep track of the performance of their material.
You’ll find that some of your material is incredibly popular, serving a very specific niche, while other material gets passed by.
Knowing which material is successful is the key to remaining competitive.