So, it’s likely that someone has recently leaned over the ‘digital’ table to you and whispered a sweet nothing in your ear…
‘Content Marketing, it’s the future of SEO, dontcha know?’
In fact, we’d go a little further than that – content marketing is SEO right now and, on top of that, it’s also a key driver for your future digital leads and new business generation. Or rather, it should be.
So, the challenge that most businesses face is now not all about whether it’s a good idea, it’s how to deliver a viable solution that works. This process starts with a joint content vision, which both delivers good rankings bring relevant natural traffic AND also engages visitors.
It sounds easy and yet most companies end up making a complete horlicks of it for a number of reasons:
Do any of these sound familiar to you? They should, we’ve heard all of these, every day!
The main issue is however, that the content is just awful. It’s all about you and your business, or just ‘reporting’ of facts that no-one is interested in, or seems to resemble a sequence of rambling press releases.
No one stops to think: “will anyone really be interested in any of this?”
They should, because if there is no interest in what is created then you may as well not have started in the first place. Digital has, for too long, been a dumping ground for pathetic attempts at writing – and that is now changing, for the better.
Google is working out, mainly through Social Media as well as analytics, what is good and what is bad content, and is prioritising the good stuff, because it knows that users will use Google the more they send them to the good stuff. Right?
So, how do you get your content sorted out? Our number one main recommendation we give you is to think like a journalist.
What do we mean by that? Well these four things:
Please do not put PR people in charge of your content, they just don’t have the full skills to make the content shine for you. There is a good reason why a journalist is sent a Press Release, because they know how to turn it into a story which is going to be read.
Which is exactly what you want from your content marketing…
And then, any good SEO, can tweak and optimise the content to get you the rankings you want. Whereas if you put an SEO in charge of your content, well, have you seen what they write?