A solid content marketing strategy will help your small business increase brand awareness, generate valuable leads, demonstrate thought leadership, and build trust. But if you’re not sure where to start, creating an effective strategy that suits your company, goals, budget, and resources can be difficult.
In this post, our Orange County SEO specialists share four do’s and four don’ts to help you get your content marketing strategy right.
Do Create Content for the Right Audience
Whether you’re working on a blog post, press release, whitepaper, or anything else, understand who you want to read it before you put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard).
Otherwise, you risk publishing content that has no clear purpose and fails to make an impact.
Don’t Put SEO Above Value
Optimizing content for search engines is essential to ensure it’s indexed and ranked properly. A key part of this process is peppering keywords throughout your content, but don’t take it too far.
Why? If you’re too eager with your keywords, you could affect the quality of the reader experience and be penalized by search engines.
Do Explore New Formats to Reach More Customers
If your content marketing strategy mainly focuses on blog posts and articles, a little experimentation could bring you to a bigger audience.
You can choose from plenty of content types, including:
- Podcasts
- Videos
- Guides
- Infographics
- Social content
- Case studies
- Ebooks
Some types are more popular than others — for example, 42% of people surveyed in the U.S. had listened to a podcast in the previous month. But creating a podcast is one of the more complicated, time-consuming options, so it may be best to experiment on a smaller scale initially.
Don’t Focus on Your Own Products and Services Too Much
It’s fine to mention your own work, but don’t let your content become a thinly veiled promotion. If you push your business too much, people may leave your site without converting to look for content that offers more value.
Do Invite Feedback
Encourage readers, listeners, and viewers to share their thoughts on your content. Feedback could reveal flaws and oversights that help you continually improve your output.
Don’t Post New Content Sporadically
Publishing new content regularly helps maintain audience engagement, gives search engine crawlers fresh pages to index, and demonstrates your dedication to producing quality material.
Stick to a content calendar and prepare each piece in advance. This will make it easier to publish new material frequently and check its quality before publication.
Do Monitor Performance
Track performance to identify your strongest and weakest content. You can learn from your best posts, understand where you went wrong in others, and continually hone your work.
Don’t Forget to Promote Your New Uploads
How is your audience going to consume your new content if they don’t know it exists? Take to social media to promote your latest posts and encourage followers to check them out.
Conclusion
Building a great content marketing strategy can improve your visibility and help you reach the right prospects.
Along with high-quality content, a comprehensive SEO strategy will help you achieve a stronger position on results pages, too. Our Orange County SEO agency will create a tailored SEO strategy for your small business that aligns with your goals.
To find out more, contact our SEO experts today.