In our 9 Practical Business Marketing Tips You Can Apply Today series, we’re giving you one quality marketing tip every day for two weeks and showing you how to apply it step-by-step. Today, we’ll talk about tip #3, featuring quality content on your website.
What makes up quality content?
A quality article by itself doesn’t immediately make it a good piece of content for your website. Quality content combines two aspects: excellent pieces and solid SEO performance.
Quality content writing should focus on topics that are of interest to your customers and related to your services. A good article or blog post should be informative, easy to read, and interesting. Well-written content flows conversationally and keeps the reader wanting more. Usually, it will be broken down into several sections or categories with headings, use small paragraphs, and be written in the vernacular (people shouldn’t have to search a dictionary to understand what you’re saying).
However, a well-written article won’t be of any use if no one can find it! Because of this, the article needs to have SEO value for you to get the most value out of it. This means that you should choose your keywords wisely and make sure that you are maximizing your SEO impact by using best practices around your content.
Why is featuring quality content a great marketing strategy?
Quality content – that essential combination of great pieces and SEO value – is what draws people to your website. New visitors come to your website initially because you ranked highly on Google for their keywords; they stay around for more because you gave them a thorough and interesting answer to their question.
Skillfully selected content will also direct readers to your services without being overly pushy. You want to make sure that you provide something of value even to the visitor who will not end up purchasing your products. This builds credibility and trust with future customers. It shows that you are trying to help other people and showcases your expertise in a particular domain.
How can you apply today’s tip right now?
1. Analyze your content strategy.
Think about the big picture. How does your blog complement the information on other pages of your website? How do your social media accounts work with your blog? Do you have a newsletter to draw people to your page? Content has a lot of moving parts, and each one can work together to maximize the other’s impact.
If you don’t have a content strategy, start by thinking about the different elements – social media, blogs, product pages – and how they can play off of each other to build your credibility by showcasing your expertise.
2. Utilize a copywriting service.
It’s the truth: quality writing takes time and energy – sometimes more than we have. Once you have a good idea of your content strategy (for example, how often you want to have a new blog post and the types of topics you’re after), other writers can take care of the nitty-gritty wordsmithing that comes afterward.
There are services that will let you hire freelance writers who are experts in your field. Verblio, for example, lets you put out a call for a resource, and then writers submit their content to you. If you’re happy with how it turned out, you can buy the copyright and use it however you want!
3. Start publishing.
We know the feeling: there’s so much going on and you offer such an array of services that you aren’t sure of where to start or what to highlight in the blog.
Here’s the good news: a blog is, by its nature, continually a work in progress. This means that you don’t have to have 100% confidence in your content strategy that you’ve sketched out. Because things are always changing, your strategies will also evolve over time. This is okay – but it also means that you have no excuse to get started now!
If you aren’t sure where to begin, just think about a service that you provide that is valuable. Write about (or hire someone to write about) the importance of that service without overemphasizing your brand. Then do it for another service or product. You can also find keywords to see what customers in your industry are searching for and write pieces to answer those questions.
As long as you keep in mind that your goal is to help a customer find a solution to a problem, you will be able to come up with blog topics and posts that are informative and interesting. This becomes a great marketing strategy because eventually, customers will learn that your information can be trusted and turn to you when they need the services you provide.
© Joshua Brown 2019, all rights reserved
