15 Nov 12 Tips for Your Content Strategy
Content is now a commodity, according to SEOs. But it still has to be creative, compelling and data-driven to get any attention. Here are some tactics.
- Make your content short, sweet and focused on photos and images. And make your content in-depth and wordy. Yes, it’s a contradiction only Hegel could love. Search engines reward the 2400-word white paper and those long, meaty, keyword-rich ebooks that provide really useful content. Social communities are loving infographics, motion graphics, video shorts and pictures that tell a story with no words. Ideally, your online properties are providing both. Be aware: Image Search in Google is becoming less productive for getting your content noticed, because Google wants to keep you on its own pages, as in this example at right.
Documenting the trend, Define Media Group showed that when Google Image Searchwas updated in January 2013, weekly image search traffic plummeted from over 1.2 million to around 400,000 in the course of a month, below:
2. Find and connect with Influencers. Always be helping them. Marshall Simmonds @mdsimmonds suggests Followerwonk, Friend or Follow, and Topsy for intel on finding them and looking at their behavior.
3. Optimize with keywords every time. Good resources for researching keywords: UberSuggest; Google Trends; SocialMention.com; the “Suggested Searches” that pop up when you begin typing into Google’s search bar, the keyword tool in YouTube; Soovle; your competitors’ top-ranked pages’ keywords.
4. Develop a content calendar, organized by type (infographic, meme, motion graphic, ebook, blog post, video), platform (website, Facebook, Twitter) and release schedule.
5. Get video testimonials from customers and put them on your website.
6. Provide a 30- to 60-second video overview of your company on the home page. This is especially useful for B to B, when you need to quickly establish “here’s what we do and why you should care” for products or services that require a bit of explaining.
7. On your website, don’t create competition for attention with your own content. Create a page visual hierarchy with three top priorities and push that content.
8. In B to B marketing, push your in-house experts. Put them front and center sharing their expertise, insights and news.
9. Create and manage a Wikipedia page, another great avenue for B to B companies with wonkier stories to tell.
10. Don’t make important content look like an ad by putting in the right hand column on your website, a space traditionally reserved as paid space, which many people avoid.
11. Make your content conversational in tone.
12. If your content fails to get traction, try a different medium or platform.
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