From optimising local SEO to targeting voice searches, these 5 content marketing strategies will help you increase brand awareness, engagement, and conversions.
Content marketing plays a crucial role in digital marketing campaigns initiated by both business owners and marketers. Not only is it a vital tool for brand awareness, but it also helps nurture existing customers, ultimately improving consumer engagement and creating more sales. However, the strategies and techniques used in this marketing strategy are constantly evolving, making it essential that you continually stay up-to-date with new developments.
Here are 5 content marketing tips to improve your website for your small business to increase engagement, traffic and conversions.
Use Effective Titles
The headlines/titles you choose to use are instrumental in convincing potential visitors to click and visit your URL. When thinking of a title for your blog, be sure to consider its clickability, shareability, and SEO benefits.
The ideal title should be fully visible on Google’s search results page – your title should be between 50-60 characters long to ensure that potential visitors will be able to see it in its entirety. Your title should always consider user intent first and foremost and convey the value it provides succinctly to the reader. It should be immediately clear what your article is about and why a reader should click. In addition, it’s important to note that titles that quantify the points entailed in the content (e.g. ‘10 Tips to Start a Business’) tend to generate higher click-through rates.
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Optimise Your Text Length
Among many useful trends in content marketing, one of the simplest is to create blog posts of an appropriate length. Undoubtedly, creating quality blog post content can take a lot of time, especially when it comes to lengthier blogs – but do it right, and you can reap some serious rewards.
In general, lengthier content can help your content rank higher. Google algorithms rank content based on its perceived ‘quality,’ using engagement metrics such as time spent on a page to determine the content’s relevance, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. By producing longer – and useful – content, users are more likely to spend longer on your website, which will gradually help to boost your website’s SEO ranking.
In contrast, shorter content – blog posts with fewer than 300 words – is often categorised by Google as ‘thin content’, which is assumed to add little value to the reader by default. This is especially pertinent to e-commerce sites who might have product pages that have thin or duplicate content, both of which can hurt your SEO ranking.
Furthermore, you should always be creating unique and original content on your website. If you’re accepting contributor articles, you may want to consider using plagiarism checker tools, such as EduBirdie, that ensure your website’s content isn’t plagiarised from elsewhere.
Create Diverse Content
To improve your content marketing strategy, you should diversify the format of the material published on behalf of the business. Do not rely solely on blog posts to get the message across, but instead diversify and use some visual content to attract different types of visitors. You can use videos, images, infographics, and even podcasts to market to customers, depending on their preferences.
This also gives you a great opportunity to repurpose previously published content. For example, after determining a blog post’s success, you can convert it into a video that can be published on your business’s website, as well as various other platforms. Alternatively, you can convert that content into an infographic which can then be posted on your own website and shared across other business blogs.
Use Local SEO
Small businesses should also implement local SEO to target loyal customers within their communities or districts. Using local SEO can make your content marketing strategy more effective as it can deliver more targeted traffic, generating more conversions in the long run.
Local SEO keywords indicate positive search intent because individuals that use them might be more prone to visit the premises of the business and make a purchase. Remember to optimise for the neighbourhood your business is in, rather than the city, since Google divides its geographical areas into smaller sections to better match search results with user intent.
In addition, you should also ensure that the business name, address, and phone number (NAP) is consistent across Google My Business and all social media platforms – this is essential for establishing trustworthiness in Google search rankings.
Target Content at IoT Devices & Voice Searches
There has been a distinct rise in IoT-enabled devices that can do just about anything by the simple command of a user’s voice. A large number of these devices are enabled to conduct Internet searches, like the Amazon Echo speaker, which has a virtual assistant called Alexa.
Similarly, phones and tablets have virtual voice assistants such as Siri and Google Voice, which are changing the way people search on Google. In fact, it’s estimated that 20% of Google searches on mobile devices are voice searches.
In order to take full advantage of this new form of search queries, you should optimise your content differently for searches on these devices by using long-tail keywords – longer and more detailed keywords that add a level of intent, resulting in more targeted search results. Ensure that you mix these specialised keywords with regular ones to substantially increase your content’s visibility to potential customers.
Running a small business website can be a lot of work, especially when starting out. However, with these practical tips, you will be well on your way to successfully establishing and managing your site. On top of implementing these small, incremental changes, ensure that you consistently stay on top of content marketing trends as things change very quickly in this field. Do that, and you should start seeing the rewards in no time.
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