Seeking inspiration for improvement or new ideas is something we do in many areas of life and business. Are you looking for a new recipe? Check Pinterest. Want to redecorate? Give Modsy a try. Need home improvement advice? Home Depot is the place to go. Craving time management hacks? LinkedIn Learning can help. Need to future-proof your organization? Harvard Business Review has a good article on this. Pretty much everything you could want to learn through self-guided or paid services is available with a quick search.
When looking for inspiration on marketing advice or tips or trends, Google produces many results from trusted industry sources. One prevalent theme jumps out – content. Search results reveal topics on how to tie your content to your marketing strategy, educate with your content, promote your content, write better content, and ready your content for search engines. One could take from this that content is a pretty big deal.
Yes, content is a common thread in almost every aspect of marketing. Content is the voice of your brand. It helps educate, inform, entertain, and move people from knowing your brand to trusting your brand. It helps us get our audience’s attention, and when we have their attention, we can build a relationship with them, leave them with an impression, and guide them to action.
What Makes Good Content?
Good content is content that people want to read. Generally, that means that you know your topic, and you’re able to write about it in a unique voice. In addition to being timely, entertaining, and informative, content likes to solve the reader’s problems. Content that does this best has a single focus or purpose. It’s also possible to create a need from your content that the reader doesn’t know they have and solve it in the same passage. Genius!
Feeling conflicted about what you need to write and how to write it is natural. Sometimes you have to start in the middle to understand how you’re going to connect with the reader before you can work your way back to the top to give your content a title. A head-turning headline is essential for good-performing content. It may be your content’s most crucial feature. It will set the tone of your content and help your reader know what to expect. A great headline will make the reader feel like they will miss out on something if they don’t read.
Writing Content for Search Engines
The trick to writing content for search engines is to write it for people. Search engine algorithms react well to content that people read. Google has engagement metrics in place. The algorithm analyzes which content people click on, how quickly they leave or how long they stay, and whether there is further engagement through additional clicks to more pages.
Google wants to make content and websites visible that it deems relevant to the search. When you click on a page, Google’s algorithm goes to work. It looks for the date the content was indexed, which can indicate when it was created – and is meaningful because search engines favor ongoing content creation. Algorithms produce data on the length of time a visitor spends on a page, if the content is doing its job of asking and answering questions, promising knowledge or facts, and the keywords found in the passage match those of the page optimization.
The Reader’s Experience
Understanding your audience and their needs is a great place to start when deciding the type of content to write. Knowing the reader means you either know your topic well or you’ve done your due diligence through research. When you look at your content to educate your audience and provide informational value, it will stick and resonate with like-minded searchers. That’s good content! If the content doesn’t speak directly to your audience, fit their needs, and drive them to take further action, it’s not doing its job.
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