When it comes to digital marketing, content still is the ruling king. You need to stay ahead in your content strategy to bring in more traffic, better visibility, and better brand following.
Content is not just limited to your blog posts and has evolved beyond traditional channels. You have to account for SEO, the various lead generation techniques and be on top of the latest trends and developments in the content management space.
A Smart Insights report says that companies with a solid documented content strategy were the most successful, with around 69% of companies directly benefiting from their content plans. More learnings have shown that organic traffic is considered to be the best indicator of success and that quality content is the one that drives it.
It takes approximately 65% more time to write content than it was a few years ago in 2014. The focus on quality has also pushed companies into outsourcing their content creation to expert SEO analysts and content management providers to ensure continued success.
If there is one inevitable fact in the online world, it is that the importance of quality content has become even more important.
You need valuable, authentic, and original content that is SEO optimized to keep your search rankings and brand loyalty higher. Here are some strategies that can help fill any gaps within your content plan.
Perform Content Audit
Try to create content that is tailored to the preferences of your target audience. Conduct a gap analysis that reviews all your current content and their performance levels. Use Google analytics to know about the latest buzzwords and trends and compare them against your content.
As part of your content audit, you should also analyze your competitors’ content and uncover their strong points and weaknesses. Understanding what they’re doing better than you will give you better insights into how you can improve.
The next step is to check whether your content is shareable across different social media channels. As mentioned earlier, the content has moved from just blogging platforms to a multitude of media formats and platforms. Analyze the performance of all your content platforms and social media channels and assess their performance. See how much content interaction and engagement they are generating.
For instance, looking at the number of retweets and comments your marketing tweets carry will be a good sign of how much reach it has had. These interactions help you understand your customer and target audiences’ needs and see if your content can satisfy those needs.
Establish your key metrics and try to get a better understanding of how they translate to real-world success.
Work With Pillar Content
A typical pillar content piece consists of pillar content, a cluster of topics, and relevant content that you link to from your pillar piece and the hyperlinks.
Pillar content lets you create a connected blog post that will act as a comprehensive guide on a particular topic as well as provide a bridge to your other relevant connected topics.
Thus, visibility to your pillar piece will automatically boost visibility to the connected clustered content as well.
Make sure to optimize your pillar piece as well as connected content with the proper keywords.
Here is how you can formulate writing a pillar piece:
· Plan your overall content, the keywords to be used, the content structure and flow, supporting topics well before you start writing.
· Try to incorporate old blog links and your most successful content pieces into the wider content strategy
· Start writing your content and review it well before publishing. Provide the necessary crosslinks and sub-topic tags wherever required.
Google Snippets
Google Snippets are short pieces of information that appear just below the search query. Having your content display in this area would be an excellent boost for your incoming traffic.
Some words that have a higher probability of being displayed under Google Snippets include:
· Recipe
· Best
· Definition
· Vs
· Make
· Meaning
· Review
Try to incorporate these words into your titles, subheadings, or body text so that Google sniffs up your content when a relevant search query is made.
Lists, tabular information, and short paragraphs are also easier to get featured in Google snippets.
Wrapping it Up
Identifying your content gaps is important to steer your content marketing strategy in the right direction. That said, it is recommended to perform a content audit to identify the problematic areas and fix them. You may also like to take the help of expert content curators and creators who will address all the content gaps in your strategy professionally.
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