“72% of marketers say content marketing increases engagement. In addition, 72% say it has increased the number of leads.” – Content Marketing Institute
Since becoming an SEO & Internet Marketing firm, I have worked with many business owners over the years, and when the topic of Content Marketing comes up, it is usually met with a bit of resistance and hesitance. Why? Writing is hard. And writing content people actually want to read is harder, and putting words on a page is an often insurmountable task for many busy entrepreneurs.
Knowing these challenges ahead of time, still I persist to tout the advantages and benefits of content marketing and how the effort invested can have a long-lasting impact on your internet marketing success. There is positive and usually measurable ROI with content marketing, as seen from many of the stats in this article, and from my own experience over the last 20 years in business.
So let’s discuss the most frequently asked questions pertaining to Content Marketing.
Why is Content Marketing a Challenge for Most Businesses?
“65% marketers find it a challenge to produce engaging content. 62% don’t know how to measure the ROI of their campaigns. And 60% say they can’t produce content consistently.” – Optinmonster.com
So, you’re not alone if you feel content marketing is an obstacle that you’re not sure you want to take on. My job is to motivate business owners to find the most effective way to increase traffic and resulting leads from their web presence, so let’s start with a brief lesson on the components of organic SEO.
When it comes SEO, there are three building blocks: (1) Age; (2) Authority; and (3) Content. Age takes time and patience. Authority is about building relevant and trusted backlinks. Content is about consistently adding quality, keyword-rich content to your website, which is the most important and easiest to influence of the other components. As they say, Content is King.
If you contract out your content creation, do your research as many of these large Digital Media firms offer an array of services, acting as a ‘jack of all trades, but master of none’. When it comes to content, writing readable, original, engaging and client-specific content is their weakness. Why? Content that is customized to the client’s brand, products, services and specific personality takes a lot of time.
“In 2018, bloggers spent an average of 3.5 hours writing a post. The only way for bloggers to differentiate themselves is by putting in more sheer effort, both through increasing the quality of their blogs and the length of their posts.” – Orbit Media
Content marketing is an investment of time and creativity, which many business owners are not willing to give. In those cases, it may be advisable to hire a content creator.
A content marketer or creator should have a good rapport with the brand owner or decision makers. First, they will need to get to know the client and their business intimately and regularly communicate with them, so the content is high quality, engaging and relates to the message the client wants to promote. Second, they need to possess quality writing skills, which are hard to find so look over their past articles or blog posts to verify their writing style meets your needs. Third, there should be a strategy in place to promote the blog posts, to increase readership and conversion.
Startup Production’s team of writers have been vetted, with a proven portfolio of articles, blog posts and website content in various industries. Our company’s mission is unique in that we aim to write high quality and accurate content that meets the needs and standards of our clients. None of our content is published without our client’s review and consent.
“Bad writing is costing American businesses close to $400 billion every year. Even a college degree doesn’t save businesses from the effects of poor writing skills as 26.2 percent of college students had deficient writing skills.” – ThinkGrowth.org
Why is Content Marketing an Essential Key to your Digital Marketing Plan?
“72% of marketers say the single most effective SEO tactic is creating relevant content.”
“Content is King” as they say in the SEO world, as content and the layout of that content offers the greatest impact in your ranking in search engines. Adding engaging and original content to your website is the single most important way to effectively drive more traffic to your website.
“Quality content is the key factor in any good SEO strategy. Improvements in content have been known to increase blog traffic by as much as 2,000%” – Search Engine People
For content to have an impact, it must be engaging, related to your industry, original and added to your website consistently each week, each month and throughout the year. Write on topics you know well, that your customers want to read and your leads will search for, and that is shareable. Tell your story, don’t imitate the writing styles of others and don’t be afraid be yourself, share your opinions and show your sense of humor.
“Adding a blog to your site will increase your chances of ranking on search engines by 434%.”
A great way to add content to your site consistently is to add a blog to your site, but many of my clients are very hesitant or resistant to the idea, because writing quality content is an investment of time and effort they and their staff do not have time or the writing confidence to do so. Often, they don’t know what topics to write about, they struggle to define a blogging strategy and they have no idea what their target audience is searching for and wants to read. That’s where I come in for my clients, with either training, continued consulting, analysis and/or writing the articles for them.
How many words should a quality blog or webpage be to attract traffic?
“Average length of top ranking pag es on Google is 1,890 words.” – Backlinko
“Long form blog posts generate 9x more leads than short form posts.” – Website Hosting Rating
- Write from your heart, from your experience, your knowledge base, your journey and your skillset.
- Write the full story by answering by defining the topic, the dilemmas surrounding the topic, how to resolve,
- List the benefits and illustrate the impact in resolving,
- Provide answers to frequently asked questions on that topic, case studies or statistic relating to your topic,
- Show how you and your business are involved with the solution.
If you outline your article beforehand and hit the above points, it will not be a challenge to reach an optimal 1200 to 1800 words.
What is the process of Quality Content Writing?
Each time I write a blog, website page content or article for a client there is a process of interviewing, research, writing, editing, approval and then visual formatting to increase engagement and scannable reading. The goal is to write original, unique, engaging and keyword-rich content that users will search for and actually want to read.
Length, keywords used, placement of keywords, subject matter, target audience and analytics of results are all important factors that I focus on when I’m writing for a client. It’s an ongoing partnership between the business owner and myself with regular meetings and communication throughout the writing, editing and publishing process.
Why have recent changes in Google algorithms made content marketing even more imperative?
“Quality content is the key factor in any good SEO strategy. Improvements in content have been known to increase blog traffic by as much as 2,000%” – Search Engine People
“72% of marketers say the single most effective SEO tactic is relevant content creation.”
Quality, original content is imperative to your website and blog, because Google is becoming increasingly intuitive in determining what is original content. In fact, in January 2019, the Newsgate update was rolled out to penalize those using duplicated, stolen, scraped or rewritten content from other websites. Find out more: https://startupproduction.com/google-updates-changes-whats-new-in-2019/
In October 2019, the BERT update was released which will continue to improve the quality and accuracy of search results by enabling Google to understand the natural language used in search and voice search. It will no longer ignore pronouns in search terms that add so much meaning, and use context to better identify words that could have double meanings.
“The BERT algorithm (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) is a deep learning algorithm related to natural language processing. It helps a machine to understand what words in a sentence mean, but with all the nuances of context.” – Search Engine Journal
*Here’s a great article to see BERT’s before and after on various search results.
Why you need to start producing content today?
The sooner you start blogging, the sooner your content will start building indexed pages and those indexed pages will start build page ranking on search engines.
“Websites that also have a blog are shown to have 434% more indexed pages.”
And when you consistently blog, you will begin to see an increase in website traffic.
“Once you write 52 or more blog posts, blog traffic generation increases by up to 77%.
And finally, more traffic will lead to a more engaged audience, who after reading your original, engaging and audience-specific content, they are more likely to convert to a lead.
“Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads.” – DemandMetric
As any business knows, an increase in traffic and leads, when handled effectively, results in an increase in conversions. A conversion is defined by some measurable action: an online sale, a form signup, a newsletter signup, an event registration, an estimate or quote request or an appointment scheduled.
“Conversion rates are nearly 6x higher for content marketing adopters than non-adopters.” – Aberdeen
Don’t wait to initiate a content marketing strategy for your business. Startup Production is here to help you with either training, consulting, content creations and content marketing management, depending on your time, budget and marketing goals. We are flexible because we understand that small business owners come in all shapes and sizes, thus we do not have a ‘cookie-cutter’ approach to marketing, but allow our clients decide how much assistance and collaboration they would like from our team.
Wow, such an informative blog I was really looking for something like this. thanks for sharing this amazing set of Q&As with us. I got the answers I was looking for.