We strive for great content; it’s what we all should strive for on our own sites.
This past month, I had the chance to attend an Econsultancy course on Digital content strategy, something that is increasingly finding its way into the world of SEO. Gone are the days when an SEO can come along and spam the content to an inch of its readability with the targeted keywords, build a few site-wide links, wipe their hands clean of it, and move on to the next project.
No no, those days are long gone my friend – now we need to know how to make sure the content is readable for users and not search engines.
Now I’ll admit that this course did sometimes stray away from where I wanted it to go with its relevance to my day-to-day job of SEO’ing, but it did get me thinking and acknowledge even more that the importance of content can’t be stated enough. It’s where you can gain and lose your reputation; a poor link profile may grab all the headlines but the content is what will help you drive traffic and retention and provide customers with that reason to come back (that and a good user experience of course).
On page content writing
When writing content for your own site, it is essential to remember that you have brand guidelines to follow—but that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with your content, unless you’re possibly an HR company. Your content is there to serve a purpose, and that is more than likely to drive conversions. There is no point in undertaking an arduous link-building campaign and getting your landing page up the rankings if the content lets you down.
The U.K. social media advertising market is projected to reach £9.95 billion in revenue by 2025
Make your content readable and linkable. There is no simpler task than getting free links from great content. Imagine your work is so great that you don’t even have to do any link building because you have become the source! Your work is what people are linking to as the reference of that specific topic. There couldn’t be a simpler way of link building, but that doesn’t mean it is easy to come by.
Off page content writing
A content strategy can still serve a purpose when you create content in return for a link back to one of your landing pages. Keeping your content unique is imperative and what people want. They would have allowed you to contribute on their site in the first place because they were more than likely interested in your view and opinion on the said topic, and in return, we get a nice link out of it all.
Make your content interesting & engaging – now we have all had comments on an article we have written where we are having our ego fed and then you realise they were just trying to sneak a link on in the comments section. Well imagine your guest post didn’t go to waste and you have actually appealed to someone who has their own blog. Again, the hard work has been taken away from you (finding a site to host your content) through some great content and you have got another link out of it. Pretty awesome right? (Yes)
Summary
Whether we are writing for our own site or hoping to contribute content to another site, the content needs to be human-oriented and not geared towards the search engine. Make it human-friendly, and you will reap the benefits.