Content is king, but in 2014 content marketing has received the attention it deserves from professional marketing organizations with budgets allocated to creating traffic building content. In the past two years, we have witnessed several new software platforms in the market, which are designed to help companies create dynamic content.
Many students have told me that it’s very easy to go out and spend money on creating content or marketing campaigns with a goal of driving traffic to a website. Alternatively, I’ve observed that many companies have access to lots of content, which is generated in-house, but for a number of reasons they are not publishing or using their internal resources efficiently to create new content that will help them with their web traffic marketing efforts.
Content creation is a significant undertaking. We will focus on 10 strategies to create good content for your site or company.
1. Keyword Volume
This is a popular method of creating content where you can use your favorite keyword tool and type in the key phrase you want to target. For our example, we will use the free key word discovery free keyword tool and use “Google Panda” as our sample keyword:
Most content creators are tempted to optimize for the first keyword since that phrase has the most query volume. This is not a recommended strategy as competition will be high on this keyword and it may take time for your site to rank well. Instead, start with keywords that have low traffic volume and are more long-tail like in this example we see “What is Google Panda” and “Google Panda Updates” as two excellent keyword choices.
When using a key word tool select narrow matches so you get the phrase you want to target.
2. Search As You Type Tools
This can be quick hit way to conduct keyword research on the fly.
Google Auto complete can be a gold mine for looking up keywords – and when combined with detailed keyword research, it can really help shore up your content creation process.
Soovle is another engine that can be really helpful for doing keyword research on the fly. Simply type in the keyword and it will show suggested keywords from across many engines. This can be really helpful as your starting step in creating keyword based content from scratch.
3. Social Media Listening Platforms
Mining social media conversations can be a great source to find new ideas for creating content. Each day you will find users conversing on Twitter, sharing links on Facebook, complaining on blogs and forums, and so on. These conversations can be a perfect starting point for creating your content. After all, this is what people are talking about so you can be sure they'll be querying it on search engines too.
If you don’t have access to social media monitoring platforms then Socialmention.com can be a great place to get started. Simply enter any keyword and it will show you the conversations across the web, along with sentiment analysis, and related keywords.
4. Internal Site Search & Web Analytics
Mining your web analytics referral keyword report to see what keywords people are using to visit your site, and then what keywords visitors are using once on your site (through your site search) can be a gold mine. These keywords would end up as the most targeted keywords and can help a great deal in improving your site bounce rates as well.
Mining your internal site search keyword reports can also help close content gaps on your site. Bringing visitors into your site through SEO and then those visitors not finding what they are looking for can be a huge loss for any business. Look at internal site search keyword reports and create content to convert those site visitors. Every SEO should have access to these reports at least weekly.
5. Live Blogging at Events
Live blogging at an event can be an excellent way to generate new content. SES conferences are a great place for this and we regularly see live bloggers from companies including to prank Marketing, aim Clear, Bruce Clay and many others across the country. Find out where relevant live events are for your industry and start live blogging at some sessions try a few to get started.
6. Expert Interviews
Every industry has its own thought leaders and experts. Interviewing those experts can be another great way to generate content. There are many ways to do this, for example more companies are using Google+ Hangouts and Skype to conduct expert interviews. When conducting an interview be sure to write up a text version of your discussion. It will optimize well with search engines.
7. Twitter
On Twitter, there are so many conversations happening daily in any industry. Focus on your industry and create content out of those tweets on the fly. For example, recently a big brand was called out for buying links in this post by Josh Davis which then had a follow-up by Danny Sullivan. In between, quite a few tweets were exchanged by Matt Cutts and others. Pulling these recent tweets and creating your own analysis on this topic could be a great way to generate content.
I have also seen content being created and then using tweets to further back your content or assertion on a given topic. You can find documentation on Twitter Developer site on how to embed a tweet on your site.
8. Customer Testimonials
Testimonials, if done creatively, can be used to generate good content on your site. Testimonials can be used, for example, to support a specific topic like showing exemplary customer service your company provides.
In many organizations, customers write glowing testimonials for companies but they hardly get published, except in internal newsletters. Find a way to publish these testimonials on your site or on your blog.
A few years back Discover Financial Services found a creative way to publish their card member stories testimonials on a blog and was named Cashback Connection which is a collection of card member testimonials. So instead of letting your customer stories be stored in some email folder, why not go ahead and publish them!
9. Customer Questions
Your customers have questions. There are many ways to convert customer questions into meaningful content for your site. You can take customer questions and make it into a video series or create a question and answers site like Yahoo Answers.
This content can be of high value and can also aid in new product development or enhancing your products. All in all customer questions can be highly targeted content and can be a great source of SEO referral traffic.
10. Industry Trends
No matter what industry you’re in, chances are there must be some hot new topics and new trends. Looking for new trends in your industry and creating content on them can be a great way to capitalize on existing search demand.
Going with this approach fulfills an existing demand based on industry hot trends. The content you create based on these trends can be temporal in nature, but again can be a good source of traffic if created at the right time. Some of the most popular places to look at current trends are: Google Trends, technorati, Twitter trends, and icerocket.
Summary
Creating content can be resource intensive but more than that it also involves lots of creative thinking to come up with new content day in and day out. The above ideas are just a small sampling of how to come up with great content. Have any other ideas worked well for you? Please leave a comment below.
For more information on Search Engine Optimization courses to help you write search engine friendly content, contact us @ abcotechnology.com
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