The New Age Of Content For Business

By now, you already know how important it is to develop valuable content for your customers. This is one of the only ways to raise your visibility in Google and other search engines, and as a result, your business will drive more qualified traffic.

Pretty simple, right?

Not so fast though, because the content in and of itself is not valuable. Your content needs to be found by search engines, and your customers need to engage with your clients if you want your content to be relevant to your business.

It’s time to cut through the noise and look at some proven methods that you could use to generate results from content development.

A Solid SEO Strategy For Your Business Content Marketing Strategy

I have helped business owners just like you for over ten years to define and amplify their SEO strategy. Throughout that time I have developed proven methods to get my clients more money.

I use a checklist to direct content marketers and capitalize on opportunities for business owners. Here are some of the top elements to help you build a profitable SEO strategy for your business!

1. Understand How Users Search

Your audience is the most important part of your marketing strategy because the truth is that you are looking for your customers to exchange their money for your product or services. Without paying customers your business does not exist.

Since this is true, I recommend you always start your SEO strategy by thinking about how your customers search. What terms do they use to search for your products and services? What questions do they have? What are their pain points and desired gains?

You should record these fundamental questions to build out user personas for your customers. This approach to marketing helps you segment different customers and personalize your SEO strategy around their unique needs.

By understanding your target audience’s online behaviors, interests, and expectations, marketers can develop stronger content that compels users to socialize with and talk about your brand.

2. Review Existing Data To Build An SEO Strategy

Developing an SEO strategy from scratch can be overwhelming. Depending on how large your business is, you might be the person in charge of your SEO efforts. Don’t get lost in the trees or overwhelmed!

Begin your strategy by looking at existing data. You can look at Google Analytics, social, and other assets to identify user trends. This can provide valuable insight and give you context to how your SEO strategy should look, based on how your audience interacts with your content.

Here are a few quick suggestions on how you can use existing data as you build an SEO strategy:

• See what content now appears in search and what opponent content users see when looking for related terms and keywords.
• Look for your competition to see what they are doing. Look at their messaging and other components to reverse engineer their strategies.
• Identify what users need and expect from your brand. You can do this by looking at different sources like Reddit, Quora, and other review sites.
• Create a story from your data that identifies trends, conducts, and interests to come up with personas for individual audience sections.

With users at heart, your articles should be formed around the interests of audience segments to offer more value.

Targeting your content to your focused audience will make your content more valuable and will help you produce more quality leads.

Just remember that your primary focus is only on traffic, but on qualified traffic. Keep your SEO strategy in context to what your customers need so you can deliver valuable content through a proven approach to SEO for your business.

3. SEO Is About Being A Thought-Leader & Authority In Your Industry

You have lots of competition, and your customers do a lot of research before they buy from you. This means that your SEO strategy needs to be based on delivering content that entertains, educates, and establishes your authority in your industry.

This is not easy, but if you build your SEO strategy around the goal to be trusted, then you will be successful. Here are some ideas to help you establish your credibility and establish yourself as a thought-leader in your market to maintain a competitive edge:

• Identify how your business offers value through education or entertainment and create content worth sharing.
• Support your ideas with references to validated, external sources to improve credibility and power. This will make you a thought leader and authority in your industry.
• Build your content around the subjects and keyword phrases your audience is seeking for to increase exposure.
• Keep content “individual” in delivery that’s easily digestible and suitable for your audience sections
• Establish your brand’s tone and voice in different channels to create unique content that contributes to your overall focus and strategy
• Research distinct content mediums and delivery channels to ascertain what methods create the largest participation. Exclusive content often gets found easier in search engines so your business can achieve higher rankings easier.

4. Optimize For Search Engines

Modern day SEO is a balance between producing valuable content for your customers and optimizing that content for search engines. This is because today’s search engines know that it is in their best interest to find and suggest relevant content to their users.

Think about it- Google doesn’t want you to go to Bing, Facebook, or any other service to find answers. The more time you spend on Google, and the more often to refer to Google, the more chances you will click on an ad and Google will make money.

This means you need to balance your SEO strategy around the business interests of search engines.

Optimize your content and how you distribute to different channels to help search engines make links between your content and the information your audience is hunting for. This creates deep associations that Google and other search engines use to determine the relevance of content.

• Keep a regular content calendar that identifies themes and keywords for every piece of content.
• Integrate keywords into content and back-end optimization. For example headlines, page titles, URLs, and meta descriptions should all be planned out and optimized before developing a piece of content.
• Influence tools to audit content for Search Engine Optimization such as Yoast for WordPress. This helps non-tech people improve elements of Onpage SEO, so you can achieve the best rankings without wasting time coding.
• Create quality links from bloggers and trustworthy publications to help search engines connect content with keywords. This is often time-consuming, but backlinks provide great SEO juice for any business.
• Perform periodic audits to discover and repair any broken links. After a while you will build a lot of content, so you want to perform inspections to ensure the quality of your holistic SEO strategy.
• Create an XML sitemap and submit to Google and Bing to assist in indexing pages.
• Amplify content with paid media to increase visibility over the internet.

5. Measure & Improve

A valuable SEO strategy is not a one-off action. Since search engines are constantly evolving and updating their algorithms your business needs to continuously measure and optimize your content and various SEO elements.

Your content tells a story, and your SEO strategy dictates how your distribute and promote that content. Continually examine how your content is performing by referring to different data points so you can find ways to build strong marketing campaigns for your customers.

• Pull reports from all channels and identify patterns of engagement and interest.
• Influence tools in analytics platforms to detect what content drives more traffic and activity from users.
• Define clear goals in Google Analytics to monitor how content determines your conversion funnel and sales cycle.
• Refer to Google Webmaster Tools to look for site errors than can inhibit exposure in search.
• See how users move across your website and content with click tracking and heat mapping tools, for example, Crazy Egg.
• Use data to comprehend what content mediums, focus, tone, and distribution channels result in the best participation.

Check out our next SEO Site Clinic Meetup if you want to learn more about how to create a valuable SEO strategy for your business. Our team of experts will provide you with real-time insight on how you can improve your website today!

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