Ever since the world went technological, digital marketing became a vital part of online businesses. Since there is so much competition in the online world, brands and businesses have to make sure that they take the right marketing steps to properly promote themselves and gain an edge in the market.
One of the most commonly used and effective types of digital marketing is content marketing. According to a source, 79% of companies use it for generating quality leads.
Understanding The Ins and Outs of Content Marketing
However, despite being a popular approach that is opted for by most companies, it is not something in which you can get successful easily. We don’t mean to discourage you by saying this. Rather, we just want to point out the importance of properly knowing the necessary tricks and techniques of content marketing.
If you have the right know-how and expertise of content marketing, you can easily gain distinction in the market. And in this post, that is pretty much what we are going to be helping you with. We’re going to be looking at nine important SEO tips that you can incorporate in your content marketing strategy to make it more effective.
8 Top Content Marketing Tips To Get the Most of Content Marketing
Let’s begin with the tips.
Focus on Keyword Research
One of the main and popular techniques in content marketing is to create blogs and regularly publish blog posts. By uploading optimized blog posts on your website, you can get a boost in its SERP rank and make it stand out in the search results.
Related: SEO Keyword Research Guide
However, for that to happen, you have to properly focus on keyword usage. You have to find the right keywords related to your business and then use them properly in your posts.
Related: SEO Keyword Research Tips For Beginners
The keywords essentially describe to the search engine what your website is about. When the search engine determines the relevancy of your website, it understands where it has to show it.
Related: Best SEO Keyword Research Tools
For doing keyword research, there are a lot of different tools that you can use. Some of the popular names nowadays include Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Ubersuggest.
Keep Your Content Readable
As we mentioned earlier, there are different ways in which you can utilize content in content marketing. You can either create blog posts, write emails, create newsletters, etc.
Related: Ultimate Content Marketing Plan For Startups
Now, regardless of the type of content that you create, you have to make sure that it is readable. The reason why we are mentioning this tip so far up on this list is that this is something that you have to keep in mind before you embark on any sort of content marketing endeavor.
Related: B2B SaaS Content Marketing Strategy Guide
By keeping your content readable, you will be able to make it easier for your readers to digest. You will be able to attract a larger audience and you won’t be as likely to scare away your readers with your utterly sophisticated and confusing style of writing.
Add Internal Links
This tip applies if you are using blogging as a part of your content marketing strategy.
When writing blog posts, adding internal links in the content can be a great way to make it user-friendly. When your readers will see the internal links, they will be prompted to click on them, which will get them to explore your website.
This will help you lower the bounce rate on your website, and increase the dwell time.
Add External Links
This also applies if you are using blogging as a content marketing technique.
There are essentially two main benefits of adding external links. The first benefits of adding external links is that it lends authority and credibility to your content.
Related: What Is Website Analysis and Why Should You Do It?
For example, if you are mentioning some sort of fact or figure in your content, you can link it to its source so that your readers can understand that the information is reliable.
The other benefit of adding external links is that it helps the search engine to realize the relevancy of your website.
Use Optimized Graphics
Regardless of the technique that you are utilizing with regards to content marketing, using graphics is a very important factor that you should never neglect.
For example, if you are writing blogs, then you should add some useful graphics in the post for informational purposes such as demonstrating a step in a guide or a tutorial.
Related: Online Image Editing Tools
In the same way, you should utilize useful and relevant graphics when sending emails as well.
However, when it comes to uploading images on blogs and websites, you should also optimize them by properly describing the ‘alt-text’.
Related: Ways To Edit Images To Increase Your Business Credibility
Optimize Your Content
When you want to use content for any purpose in content marketing, you have to make sure that you take the necessary steps to optimize it first.
Optimizing your content basically means to polish it in order to make it more appealing to your readers and more conducive to achieving the goals that it has been written for.
Related: Best SEO Content Optimization Tools
There are different types of steps that you can take to optimize your content. Some of them are as follows:
- Finding and removing spelling mistakes
- Finding and removing grammatical and punctuation errors
- Adding headings, sub-headings and bullets to structure the content
- Highlighting important parts in the content for better visibility
- Make Sure There Is No Plagiarism in Your Content
Plagiarism can be very harmful for your reputation as well as for the efficacy of your content marketing approach.
Related: Best Plagiarism Checkers
Basically, if you upload plagiarized content to your website, it can get penalized by the search engines. That can either result in a reduced rank in the SERP or it can result in your website getting removed from the listing altogether. Although the latter is more severe, both these situations are not good for your brand’s popularity.
Related: Plagiarism Free Content: Importance In SEO
To make sure that there is no plagiarism in your content, you should run it before a plagiarism checker before finalizing it. If there is any plagiarism in it, it will get detected by this tool.
Remove Plagiarized Content Using a Paraphraser
Assuming that there is some plagiarism in your content, you should always remove it before publishing or using it anywhere.
There are a couple of different methods of removing plagiarism from your content. You can either remove the plagiarized part completely, or rephrase it to make it look unique.
Removing the part can be difficult if it is something important and vital to the overall meaning of the content. In that case, you can rephrase it instead.
Related: How Source Citation Prevents SEO Plagiarism
There are two ways in which you can rephrase or paraphrase your content. You can either do it yourself or you can do it using a paraphrasing tool. The latter can be more suitable provided that you manage to find a tool that can efficiently and intelligently do the job.
Updating Old Content
In content marketing, if you happen to write a blog post on a certain topic, you should not just let it sit and get all moldy. Rather, you should keep updating it with newer information.
Related: How To Improve Your Omnichannel Content Marketing Strategy
The benefit in updating old content is that you can get the benefits of a new post…without having to write a new post. For example, when you update some old content, it will start appearing at the top of your blog listing and it will be read by your audience again.
Similarly, you can incorporate different keywords in the updated version and increase the SEO-friendliness of the content as well.
Conclusion
Although there are a lot of other pointers and tips that you have to keep in mind other than the ones listed above, these ones can be a good place for you to start.
When using any sort of content for content marketing, your priority should be to make sure that the quality of the content is absolutely top-notch.
The quality of the content is determined by its grammatical perfection, uniqueness, and readability etc.