If you’re not investing in content marketing, you’re missing a trick.

Boosting your website and business in search engines can have a great effect on reaching a new audience and bringing new customers to your site. Optimising your content is a massive part of achieving successful SEO. For customers to get drawn to your site and engage with your brand, your content needs to stand out.

Good content will appeal to a wide audience, often with a range of storytelling techniques, using meta titles and meta descriptions to pique your customers’ interest. Successfully curated, it should spark conversation and drive your company to the forefront of peoples’ minds.

In this article, we’ll look at content marketing and how you can optimise it to maximise your site visibility.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing focuses on the creation of authoritative content related to a brand’s industry without selling a brand or its services. This approach, if done effectively, stimulates interest in your products or industry.

If you’re considering adding content marketing to your strategy but don’t have the resources to do it in-house, consider a content marketing agency. Our review of the 10 best content marketing agencies of 2020 can help you decide.

Why you should care about content marketing

Content marketing can take time and effort to get the best out of it, so here are four reasons why you should care about it.

1. It shows authority

If you are sharing articles with business advice on particular issues, or videos that discuss interesting topics related to your area of expertise, you are presenting yourself as an authority figure in the industry that you work in.

Anyone engaging with this content will come to think of you in this way, and if your content goes on to be shared by others, your authoritative voice will only grow.

In a conversation between Demian Farnsworth of Copyblogger and Brian Clark, this is what Clark had to say about authority in content marketing:

“It really boils down to the demonstration of expertise through delivery of valuable content as opposed to claiming expertise or saying, “We’re number one.”

It’s the difference between marketing messages and content that actually creates the experience of authority. This is an important distinction that can be summed up with the short phrase: ‘Show, don’t tell.'”

2. It improves brand reputation 

Alongside showing your authority, content marketing improves the reputation of your brand. If you are giving good advice and creating good content, potential customers will trust you as a source of information, and therefore feel more comfortable using your products or services.

There’s also the trust factor. A study by the 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer said 58% of consumers didn’t trust businesses the way they once did. That’s a challenge many content marketers accept and strive to overcome with expertise, authority and trustworthiness (better known as E-A-T).

3. It increases site visibility

The internet is home to over 4 billion websites. It’s easy to get lost way down in the algorithms, making it hard for new customers to find your business. Content creation and sharing are like spreading tendrils out into the internet, increasing the chance that you will catch customers’ attention and lead them back to the central source—your website.

Newer sites won’t have the pulling power of older sites as they haven’t established enough authority but you can’t do that without showing up for relevant terms.

At the very least, you need relevant content to get the necessary impressions which will turn into clicks with practical content marketing and search engine optimisation, both on-page and off-page.

4. It can impact conversions

Content marketing isn’t just great for leading people to your site. It can also have an impact on engagement once they arrive. By increasing your reputation, authority and trustworthiness, content marketing can help turn site visitors into new customers better than any traditional ad campaign.

Ways to optimise your content marketing

Now you’re on board with the importance of content marketing, you’ll need to consider how to optimise it for yourself and your business. This can be a complex process, but the rewards of a successful campaign are definitely worth the effort.

Think about the target audience

Firstly, you’ll need to identify who it is that you want to reach. It’s no good spreading the net too wide, as many of your intended targets will slip through the cracks. Your target audience could be built of many different factors. Do you have a geographical focus, either on a particular country or city?

Is the product aimed at a specific age range? In terms of content creation, different generations will react better to different types of content, so this will be an important consideration.

Talk about your niche, not your business

Remember, unlike traditional direct marketing, your content should not be visibly promoting your company. Rather than talking about your business itself, talk about the niche your business fills, offer information about the service area you work in, use your knowledge to provide advice and opinions.

This content will be shared more widely and effectively than simple promotions.

Do keyword research

Keyword research is still crucial to content creation, even if the practice has changed over the years. There’s more of a focus on topical research as Google’s search algorithms grow in sophistication. But topics are, in essence, the grouping of keywords.

Diverse keywords tied together under a particular topic provide users with the most useful content, and keyword research optimises the process.

Try to research what words people tend to use when they search for issues related to your business and use these as much as you can to draw people to your content.

Find knowledge gaps

Some of the most successful content marketing comes from offering your audience advice on particular issues they might be struggling with. Now, the internet is overloaded with articles like this.

Still, if you can find a particular gap where a question has not been answered clearly or satisfactorily, you are in a brilliant position to capitalise on this. Fill knowledge gaps with your content, beat the competition, and watch your outreach grow.

Leverage the power of social media

Social media is a great way to promote your content. The trick to a successful content marketing campaign is to find ways to get your audience to do the work for you, by sharing and commenting on your content.

Tailoring your approaches to different social media platforms to achieve the best results is an excellent way to leverage their power to your advantage.

Use content marketing tools

There is a wide range of content marketing tools that you can use. There are tools that will write content for you such as FatJoe and StoryChief or tools that review spelling, grammar, punctuation, and a ton of other things such as Grammarly.

Leverage the power of PPC

PPC, or pay-per-click advertising, can be a vital tool if used correctly. The key to PPC is that you only pay if a customer clicks on your ad, so it’s a great way to spread your net with minimal up-front costs.

Try using PPC advertising alongside good quality content, and find the right balance to draw more people to your site, and convert them from an interested audience to your new customers.