Things are changing in the online world faster now than ever before. What was once gospel in terms of online marketing is now old hat and even potentially damaging. What has become clear over the last six months is that quality, unique, lengthy content is one of the key elements you need to really drive your online marketing strategy.
Recently Google made one of the largest changes ever to the way it fundamentally looks at sites in terms of ranking. The latest update called "hummingbird" is aimed at providing the most relevant and quality sites to a person searching on Google. It makes sense and is just the latest installment in Google's goal of making search relevant and really useful. They are trying to weed out all the low quality sites that were "gaming" the system by having computer generated content and lots of crappy links to other crappy sites.
So, what does this mean for you and your business?
One of the corner stone's of your online marketing strategy should now be looking at generating quality, unique content that provides real value to the user.
You should be making sure that you generate as much relevant and useful content you can around your products and services, this can include:
- Making sure you have quality, in-depth and unique descriptions for category and product pages on your ecommerce site. Do not just rely on the manufacturer description or just a one line overview. Think about augmenting product listings with reviews and ratings.
- Ensuring your service pages are crafted to accurately explain the service and how it is unique, think about including case studies or how to guides as value additions.
- Think about adding a blog or latest news section, if you already have one look at leveraging your unique knowledge of your product / service / industry to create insightful or informative content.
- Make sure you are cross publishing this content to Google+, Facebook and Twitter for maximum exposure.
These practices work in the following ways:
- Every time Google comes back to your site it should be changing and growing, they like that and it will increase your quality score.
- Creating quality content, especially if it is unique, contentious or humorous has the potential to generate natural "back links" (links back from other websites) which is the key to the Google hummingbird update. Natural links will vary in terms of "anchor text" (the text used for the link back to your site) and location which contribute to a very natural looking back link profile.
- Help position you and your business as a thought leader and quality provider. If you visit a site and it provides useful content or advice that others do not who are you more likely to contact?
- Help build your brand and profile online. By leveraging your content onto social media such as Facebook and Google+ it allows you to potentially reach a much wider audience that could generate more business. Google have also made it fairly clear that users of Google+ that link their profiles to their websites will potentially gain a competitive advantage.
That's great but how do I find the time to generate all this content?
This is the question we get asked most often. It's easy for the big companies with lots of cash and resources to do this but how about everyone else?
There are a number of approaches to this issue:
- Make a list of the things you are knowledgeable about, you will be surprised how much there is and you should find it fairly easy to write 300 - 500 words on some of those topics.
- Think about the conversations you have with clients. What questions do you get asked? What things most often come up? Can you create content around those themes that would add value to potential clients?
- Think about creating how to guides or frequently asked questions content.
- You can source good quality content writers for very effective rates. This way you can provide a list of topics and they will go and research and write content for you. Make sure you use a native English speaker and always review and edit the work to put it in your own style.
- Think about content you can easily obtain and repurpose. Do your manufacturers provide technical information or how to guides you can use? Can you easily create photos or video which you could post to your blog or social media?
Don't get your knickers in a twist
It's easy to get obsessive about your content and struggling to create great content regularly. Take your time to explore different options to see what works for you. Don't obsess about having to get loads of content out as soon as possible, focus on how to create quality content with the minimum of effort.
If you would like help with your content strategy we are here to help. We have lots of ideas and access to a great pool of resources that can help you out. Give Ivan a call today on 1300 77 3569 to have a chat about your requirements.
