Content marketing is a powerful strategy for digital marketers in order to achieve higher rankings on Google.
A majority of 88 percent marketers use content marketing in their strategy as it helps the brands and the customers to remain connected with each other.
Here are five primary ways to supercharge your content marketing strategy:
1. Prepare Valuable Content That Readers Will Love to Share
Here are some steps to prepare high quality content:
- Ensure that your content is between 2,000 and 2,500 words. The longer the content, the higher are the chances of ranking. The below graph from SerpIQ reveals this:
- It should be useful and informative. Moreover, your content should be better than that of your competitors.
- Use the main keyword in the title and the H1 tag.
- Start your content with the main keyword.
- Help the user solve a problem. Content should be actionable.
- Do not use fluff and stay away from duplication.
- Make use of LSI keywords and TF-IDF score.
- Use high quality images with relevant alt tags.
- Do not make spelling, stylistic or factual errors.
- Do not degrade the user experience by displaying a high number of ads.
- Ensure your content is not having too much comment spam.
- Include relevant and high authority citation and links to improve the content credibility.
- Make the content easily shareable.
2. Prepare Your Content Like a Story
People love stories. It helps to engage your audience in a new and interesting manner.
Ninety-two percent of consumers prefer a story compared to boring text. Here are some of the ingredients of effective storytelling that you can use to boost your existing content marketing efforts:
- Adopt a three-act structure that starts with set up, moves on to some conflict within the story and finally ends up with a solution to the problem. Every piece of information is narrated before the audience in the form of a story. It is usually based on the Freytag’s Pyramid as shown in the image below.
- Align your story with customer values.
- Try narrating local stories because audiences are more interested in listening to them as opposed to non-relevant stories.
- Adopt the McKinsey S-C-R (situation, complication, resolution) framework that will help you to bring out the UVP (Unique Value Proposition) of your business.
- Include proper call to action in between the content so as to improve the scope of generating user actions.
3. Create Product or Service Adjacent Articles
Do not promote your product or services directly. Instead, prepare content that provides information to the intended audiences who might use your product or services.
For example, if you are selling sports shoes then you can blog about the latest sporting events or tricks to improve skills related to a particular sport. You need to prepare content for your sports centric audience that easily adapts into their lifestyle. It is obvious that for anyone related to sports, a good sporting shoe is a must so creating articles linked to your main product will give you more traction without hampering the customer experience.
4. Share the Content on High Authority Sites
Once you have your content ready, the next step is to share the piece on popular and relevant sites.
Here are some sites that you should use:
- Medium
- Slideshare
- LinkedIn Pulse
- Scribd
- Visual.ly
- YouTube
- Quora
- Triberr
- Stumbleupon
- Scoop.it
- BizSugar
You can find even more places to share your content using the Internet. The sharing should be done on relevant sites and communities so as to generate the maximum engagement.
5. Earn Backlinks to Your Main Content By Using Strategies Like Influencer Marketing
Your work isn’t over yet. You need to earn or earn some high authority backlinks to your main content by way of influencer marketing.
Backlinks remain one of the most important ranking factors for Google. If you desire your thoroughly written content pieces to rank on Google, then you need to acquire as many trustworthy backlinks as you can. This will ensure your content jumps in the ranking faster and starts generating highly awaited clicks.
Here are some strategies to follow:
- Use LSI variants of main anchor text in place of exact match anchor to keep your content safe from any Penguin penalties.
- Make use of influencers having a good number of loyal followers who can share or link back to your main content piece.
- Do not hesitate to feature main influencers in your own blog by way of roundups and then ask them to promote your content.
- Share published guest posts on social media sites and try to boost the amount of engagement.
Content marketing is not dying. Step away from a “salesy” approach to your content marketing and indulge in creating content that actually helps the readers to solve a problem.
Are you currently using any content marketing strategy that has given you a good ROI? Please share with me in the comments below.
