Content for Digital Marketing: Crush SEO with Great Content

Great content is vital if you want to crush SEO (search engine optimization). Creating great content for digital marketing means you need a steady flow of high-quality content that’s engaging. At the same time, it must still be optimized to meet the requirements imposed by the algorithm search engines use to rank every piece of content available on the public web. Here’s everything you need to know about creating great content for digital marketing in 2024.

SEO and why it matters

SEO generates a higher Google rank, thus sending more traffic to your website. Search engine traffic is so critical for the success of your website because organic search traffic stimulated by user queries represents more than 50% of the traffic visiting your website (more if you attract B2B visitors). You can’t replace organic traffic with any other single digital marketing tactic. Only social media advertising comes close to organic traffic, representing 15% of the traffic on the average website. Moreover, organic traffic signals an interest in purchasing a product, as that’s the most common user intent reflected in the query.

So, how does SEO work?

You generate content on your website, which search engines categorize and rank based on a complex algorithm using a spider (a small snippet of code that constantly scours the internet for fresh content). When a user enters a query, the search engine first accesses its database to find content matching user intent and then displays results in a rank order.

Rank matters. In fact, 75% of users never scroll past the first page of SERPs (search engine results pages), and most clicks occur to one of the first three organic links users find at the top of their SERPs.

Hence, a Google ranking in the top three positions generates a ton more traffic to your website, providing increased opportunities to convert and increase sales.

Among the key factors to improve your Google rank are:

• sitemaps preferrable submitted through Google Webmaster Tools
• valuable content created on a consistent basis
• fast load speed
• mobile-ready
• links and backlinks to and from high-authority sites
• wordcount above 2000
• social media engagement
• meta descriptions reflecting keywords
• keywords used effectively in headings, image alt tags, and scattered naturally throughout the content
• mentions

Understand how Google ranks work

Let’s start with a bit of background on how Google rankings work.

The Google algorithm used to determine your link’s position in search results is a complex, constantly changing group of factors with unknown weighting across factors that determines your ultimate position.

However, each time Google releases a significant update (something they do once or twice a year, on average), experts spend a lot of time experimenting to see how the algorithm impacts content (and other on-page and off-page factors) to guess at the changes made by Google. Detecting changes, especially when those changes primarily involve weighting factors, isn’t straightforward since Google doesn’t publish its algorithm. So, if you want to know a bit more about how Google rankings work, all you need to do is have a quick look online at websites maintained by leading SEO experts such as MOZ and Wordstream. Do your research, and you’ll understand the whole concept a bit more.

Content for digital marketing drives SEO

Content is the single most significant factor impacting your rank on search engines. Not only is it an essential factor alone (with a high weight associated), but it drives your performance on other highly weighted factors such as:

• engagement on social media
• organic backlinks
• time on site
• repeat visits

By generating fresh content for digital marketing that provides value to your visitors, you can crack the SEO code, bringing more traffic to your website.

Content for digital marketing and conversion

Think of the content on your website as a salesperson in your retail store or service location. Below, you can see conversion rates by channel. The graph shows that SEO (including content marketing) is a significant driver of conversion, second only to email marketing, and represents the highest conversion rate in B2B marketing.

To optimize conversion, the content should motivate visitors to make a purchase or to visit a local office by making sound arguments that demonstrate the superiority of your products by sharing your competitive advantage and unique selling proposition. Your content for digital marketing must also make the conversion process clear and easy to complete.

Optimize your content for digital marketing

Understand your target market

Your first step in optimizing your content for digital marketing is to develop a deep understanding of your target market, including their pain points, phrases used to reflect a user intent for what your website offers, and the type of user intent desired when entering a query. Different types of user intent are informational, navigational, and transactional intent. Each of these requires an alteration in the content you develop.

Use tools such as Google Analytics, customer and prospect surveys, and scouring social media to develop personas like the ones below to help you not only with content creation but other marketing efforts, including new product development, that are outside the scope of this post.

Conduct keyword research

Tools like Google Keyword Planner (a free tool accessed through the Google Ads platform), Ahrefs, and SEMrush can help you refine a list of 25 to 50 keywords to use in crafting content. Look for keywords related to your company’s offerings, specifically those with high search volume and lower levels of competition, when making your choices.

Since you can only use each keyword once in crafting content, you need long-tail keywords, which are actually phrases you can build content around. Not only are long-tail keywords necessary for SEO, but the increased use of voice search means queries become longer and look more like natural language. Focus on specific keywords, such as women’s black running shoes, rather than shoes when crafting content, as your specificity will drive more of the visitors you want and fewer folks who visit, thinking they can find something you don’t offer. When visitors leave immediately, it lowers your rank.

Create high-quality, valuable content consistently

Content on your website isn’t a teaser to entice visitors to scroll aimlessly through your website, looking for something they need. Instead, provide solutions, address their pain points, demonstrate your products’ value, and answer visitors’ questions. Long posts not only improve your SEO, but they can also cover topics in-depth to prove your value, trustworthiness, and expertise.

• Avoid duplication by crafting each post with unique content (that means using AI to craft content for digital marketing is a bad idea, although using it to create a first draft saves time and effort).
• Keep your content interesting by writing like a human being rather than like you’re writing a report.
• Share your experiences and populate your content with concrete examples.
• Use graphics and videos that support your written content.
• Write using short paragraphs, heading (H2 and H3, as H1 is reserved for your content title), bullet points. and white space to make your content more readable. Include keywords in some of your headings and within your content at regular intervals, but ensure you don’t use them too frequently or when they don’t fit naturally, or you can be penalized for keyword stuffing.
• Optimize images and embed video to improve load time. Add alt tags that include your keywords to improve SEO.
• Aim for longer posts as they are deemed higher quality.
• Gain backlinks through your expertise and authority, as well as by crafting unique images other website writers might deem worthy of inclusion in their posts.
• Keep your content fresh by posting at least once a week (see below) and either deleting or revising older content.

  

Promote your content

Don’t stop with creating great content for digital marketing. Share that content across your social media platforms and engage with your community by responding to their comments. If you don’t already have an email marketing program, start one. If you have one, use your content as a springboard to gain more subscribers. Send your content out to a segment of your list that might find your content interesting and valuable.

You should also include internal links to other content contained on your website. This invites visitors to explore other content on your website. You can also include a plugin to end each post with a list of posts on your website related to the one the visitor is currently reading. Categorizing your content into segments also encourages visitors to explore related content.

Reach out to other website writers to bring your content to their attention in the hopes of gaining a backlink when they reference your content in their own content.

You can also build relationships with influencers and share your content with them. When they refer to your products and use the arguments you made to encourage their community to convert, you gain a higher conversion rate. Influencers have a greater impact on conversion than your content does without them, and they help spread your content more widely.

Measure key metrics to refine your strategy

There are many paid and free tools you can use to monitor the performance of your content in attracting visitors and driving conversion. Tools like Google Analytics can track a visit from the specific content piece that drew the visitor through the totality of the visitor’s time on your website, including whether they converted or not. You can even use Google Analytics to learn more about your visitors, including demographics and interests.

Google Search Console provides insights into your content that help you avoid pitfalls such as content that doesn’t show up in a crawl. It can also help you determine your keyword rankings. Of course, there are paid tools that also do this and provide more comprehensive evaluations of your content, such as SEMrush.

Ensure you gather key metrics (termed Key Performance Indicators or KPIs) rather than wasting your time and energy on vanity metrics. Examples of KPIs include:

• percentage of organic traffic, especially trends related to this metric
• bounce rate, which refers to visitors who leave after viewing a single page (this is a negative metric)
• time on site
• percentage of repeat visitors
• maps of the funnel represented by visitors
• load speed (from the Google Search Console)

Content marketing exists across three channels: owned channels, including blogs and social media platforms; earned channels reflecting engagement that amplifies your content, such as Retweets, Shares, and Comments; and paid channels, like PPC advertising. So, let’s add these to our list of content marketing metrics that matter:

• consumption metrics reflecting people reading your content
• sharing metrics showing how much amplification a post received
• lead metrics that encompass how effectively you generate leads from your content
• sales metrics representing bottom-of-the-funnel actions
• retention metrics that show how effectively you retain customers over time
• engagement metrics — for me, these should fit into sharing metrics with the exception of advocacy and user-generated content metrics
• production metrics showing how effective you are in creating content on a consistent basis
• cost metrics, allowing you to calculate the ROI of your content marketing campaigns

Create a dashboard using KPIs offered through the reports function provided by Google Analytics in GA4. Use this dashboard to build insights that help you optimize the performance of your content. By taking advantage of the interactive tools available, you can compare the performance over a time period with any other period or break down conversion by gender, age, or geography.

I use a Cognos dashboard from IBM to bring these metrics into a single place to enhance usability. Google Analytics (for blog metrics), Facebook Insights, and Twitter and Pinterest Analytics can all export data into CSV files that you import into Cognos — or other dashboard software.

In addition, you’ll need to add cost and production data — and your content marketing calendar helps with this task if you set it up to capture metrics such as producing content in a timely fashion, time spent on crafting content (which should translate into costs), content backlog (Curate includes a great formula for tracking backlog), and any distribution costs to share the content, such as using Facebook or Twitter sponsored posts or creating PR related to the post.

The downside of content creation

Crafting great content isn’t easy, and SEO isn’t cheap.

Drafting a post

One of the most significant problems is the time it takes to create unique content on a regular basis. You can make the task easier by constantly updating your keywords and then using those keywords as a starting point for crafting content. As mentioned earlier, AI is a great tool for crafting the FIRST DRAFT, but don’t use it to write content for you, as it represents duplicate content, doesn’t sound human, and might contain inaccuracies.

If you’ve ever stared at a blank screen trying to come up with a great idea for content, you know how hard it is to create content on a consistent basis. Lucky for you, I recently posted an infographic containing the perfect post for every different social network, including your blog.

Writing great content: Knowing what the perfect post looks like is only half the battle; you still need to know what to write about. That’s where tools like BuzzSumo, Google Trends, and Feedly come in handy.

Feedly (which is also great for content curation) brings recent content created by others to your inbox so you can see what others are talking about. BuzzSumo and Google Trends identify which topics are trending and, in the case of BuzzSumo, show how successful these posts are in getting shared.

Use these tools to identify trending topics and even help identify headlines that work well.

A killer headline: Headlines are the most important part of your content marketing success, so spend some time crafting a really good one.mPortent is an excellent tool for crafting the perfect headline (notice in the infographic the importance of a great headline in getting your content shared). Other tips? Include a number (doubles your shares), strong words (like killer), and don’t be afraid to go negative or create some controversy.

Add a compelling image: Posts with images get shared much more than posts without an image. Luckily, a number of tools exist to help create or find compelling images for your posts, including Canva. Optimize your images for various social networks and include Twitter cards (a way of sharing images) to increase sharing. And don’t forget to optimize images for Pinterest.

Organization means consistency: Using a content marketing calendar will help you become a content marketing rock star. Create your own using Excel or use this template.

Get help: Use your community to help create content. A contest is a great way to generate user-generated content, for example. Or invite guest bloggers to contribute high-quality content. (If you’re interested, I do accept guest posts. Please read my guidelines here).

Sharing content

Using a marketing automation tool such as Buffer, helps you stay on top of your efforts to share content on social media. You can connect your website directly with these tools as well as your email marketing provider using a couple of plugins and linking your RSS feed.

Add sharing buttons to all your posts. This allows visitors to share your content with their social communities.

Allow comments and respond quickly when a visitor adds a comment to your content. This keeps the conversion going and encourages others to post comments.

Conclusion

Crafting great content for digital marketing is a key element supporting your success because great content improves your rank in search engines and helps convince visitors to convert.

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Hausman and Associates, the publisher of MKT Maven, is a full-service marketing agency operating at the intersection of marketing and digital media. Check out our full range of services.