You are likely to have heard the phrase “Cash is King” and if you are in the digital marketing world, you will also highly likely have heard the phrase “Content is King”. As content marketeers, perhaps we are biased. However, there are some really good reasons why content is considered of top importance when it comes to your marketing communications.
In the current climate, business owners are needing to do things differently. Many have used time in lockdown to work on building their organic web presence, which can help with future business exposure. “Organic” simply means the web presence that isn’t paid for through advertising. Building an organic web presence is often related to creating content, as content can help with organic rankings in the search engines, as well as communicating to your customers about your website and services.
Give this article a read if you are thinking how to utilise your time now, to benefit your business in the future.
Search engine algorithms
Whilst the exact algorithms that search engines like Google use are undisclosed, one thing we do know is that they place a big emphasis on high quality, unique content that is relevant to the searched-for term.
It is one of the reasons why content marketing has an important place in marketing strategy these days.
Search engine “spiders” that crawl a website deciding how to rank a webpage or blog, need sufficient content to know what is on offer. A lack of content means a lack of information when making their ranking choice.
Even with the power of video these days as an excellent medium of communication for reaching out to the time-poor, the video needs to be published on the website in a specific way for the search engine to get the information it needs when deciding the page ranking. It takes knowledge and expertise. It also typically still requires supporting written content to make the SEO effective.
Building trust and understanding
Adding new and unique content to your website on a regular basis, gives more pages for the search engine spiders to understand your website. This is why blogs can be so useful in content marketing and for improving SEO, as they widen the story of what your business is all about and also show the search engine you are committed to providing useful information to the public.
Targeting keywords
Online content can also be written with specific keywords in mind, which increases the chance of the site or article being ranked highly when someone searches for it.
This typically needs an element of expertise in professional copywriting, as poorly written content can have a negative effective on the ranking too.
A few tips if you are attempting this yourself:
- Content must always be 100 percent unique and original – plagiarised content can be spotted by the search engines, so your work must always be your own.
- Content must be high quality and relevant to the search term.
- Don’t over-use keywords, as this reflects as poor quality.
However, properly crafted content, rich with keywords, can earn you an increase in your organic web traffic.
Quality backlinks
A library of quality blogs and articles means you can create high quality backlinks. A backlink is where you take a keyword in an article and link it to another URL (perhaps another blog or a webpage), which helps the search engine to index them together and understand connected content. Again, it gives the search engine a better picture of what you are offering.
It is again a fine line – too many backlinks can be seen as negative.
Aside from SEO…
We talked about SEO, but content is also invaluable for getting your message across to people that visit your site. If delivered in the right way, it gives the reader:
- insight into your service or product offering
- understanding of your brand values and ethos
- information on how you help your customers.
Even though video is now seen to be a more concise way to get your message across – for the camera-shy amongst us, the written word is still a great way to communicate. Even if your audience are time-poor, words can be structured in a way where bite-size messages can be absorbed by scan reading an article, particularly if you put a summary of key points, or use bullet point lists.
Also, it’s important to note that content isn’t just on your website – it can relate to your social media marketing, your email marketing and all communications. Put it all together and this is why a content marketing strategy is so important and content is considered “king”, to ensure consistency and correct messaging in line with your brand.
Next steps
Content isn’t always easy to compile if you don’t have experience in copywriting, or time to dedicate to creating the content. This is where we help businesses fill in the blanks.
