9 Reasons You Should Invest in Content Marketing

Content marketing has become an indispensable tool for smaller businesses to promote their products and services in the online world.

Although it requires special skills and ability to use words in a way to convince customers to turn their attention to and become loyal customers of your services, it's cheaper than any other means of marketing persuasion.

Good and clever content writing can make you stand out from the crowd and become noticeable.

Therefore, if you are still thinking whether your writing imagination is not enough to enhance the traffic on your website, you should give it a try and see what happens.

Here are 9 reasons you should invest in web content marketing that we have identified and want to share them with you.

Your business is at its inception

Small businesses need much more than just traditional advertising marketing campaigns to raise awareness to their products and services. Today, consumers are looking for fresh and engaging ideas, and what can be better than a well-written, information-trustworthy piece of content? You should make your presence noticeable by sharing information on platforms that your costumers are spending time.

You need to become trustworthy

Businesses that are not afraid to share fresh, innovative information with their consumers are those who have only to gain. Digital marketing allows you building a trustworthy relationship with customers and potential customers with fewer costs. This will not happen over the night, but if you are willing to educate and give away valuable piece of content, you will increase your credibility.

SEO

Although marketers are obsessed with social media marketing, you should not forget about search engine optimization. This internet marketing drive will push your content on top of Google search results, as long as it is fresh and custom-made.

Boosting traffic to your website

Nowadays every business has a website. But how to attract new customers and boost traffic, when there are so many options to choose from? Your website is your marketing tool. Hire a website content writer to create content that is intuitive and helps drive traffic to your website.

Lead generation

There is no other better-proven means of generating leads than intelligent writing. No more cold-calling to promote your services and products. You can control your leads by simply creating intuitive content.

Engaged customer base

Engaged customers mean buzzing business. Great piece of content will make this easier to achieve.

Cover global market

Creating high-quality content makes your online presence noticeable and set you as an authority in your domain. You can interact, discuss with everyone who is online, and nowadays their number is outstanding.

Great ROI

Valuable content enables you to measure the ROI, which, often, is much higher than the ROI yielded by traditional marketing means. Thus, you can get long-term effects from good content with little investment.

Minimize crisis

It is no secret that, at some point or another, businesses might face crisis of trust deficit. However, a strong writing strategy can minimize this crisis and you can play the card in such a way as to turn the discussion into the direction you want.

Do check you website content from time to time to observe whether it's still relevant for your business. Your services are evolving, so that make sure update your business information according to you actual situation. This procedure is called "content audit". Click the link to find out why and how you should do it.

Related post:How to Unlock your Creativity and Wake up from a Creative Slumber?

Conclusion

Content marketing is exploited by many businesses in the net environment. You should know that an intelligent, engaging way of acquiring costumers through your content can drive profitable action to your business. Readers are more likely to respond to fresh ideas and pieces of content. Therefore, with great content be sure you will be alive on the net for a long time.

What are other reasons, according to you, that address the need to develop a strong content marketing? Let us know your opinions in the comments below.

Why and How to Do a Content Audit?

Perhaps you’ve already heard and read on several resources that Content matters and that from time to time you have to do a content audit.

You’ve also must have heard that content must be qualitative. Due to the recently appeared Google Panda and Penguin, black hat and grey hat SEO practices are obsolete now and will yield only penalties for you.

Another topic that is currently hot is the responsiveness of your website. Earlier it was only a trend, but now it’s a must– how else will you reach your audience that uses mobile devices to browse your website?

Making your website responsive is much easier than making a separate mobile version. You won’t have to pay as much for responsiveness and the content of your website will have only one URL, which facilitates sharing and discussing the content.

While all of it is true, no word was mentioned on what to do with the heaps of content that already is on the websites, especially if we are talking about websites of well-established businesses. You may redesign your website for it to be squeaky clean and new, but old and obsolete content may show its ugly head through incompatibility with the new design or in any other way.

That’s the main reason why it’s essential to do a content audit before uploading it to the redesigned website. Thus, you’ll get the chance to get rid of the outdated and unnecessary content, leaving more place for a new one. This problem may appear unexpectedly while designing a mobile version of your website. If you don’t get rid of the old and obsolete content, it may appear on the pages that were never meant for it.

Thus, it may clog the access to your multi-layered content, leaving only 2 out of 4 or 5 layers accessible. Due to this, other layers of content will be accessible only through search and you definitely don’t need that.

Conducting a Website Content Audit is a MUST

There is no way around it – it has to be done, despite the fact that no one is willing to do it because raking through piles of obsolete content is no fun. However, content is the what people interact with on your website, which is why it must correspond to modern trends and be absolutely relevant.

Every company can conduct this content audit for different reason. Some browse through it to find outdated information and remove it. Others want to restructure it and present in a way that is better for understanding.

In any case, managing the content you already have can set realistic expectations of the new website design, as well as help you choose the right direction for it.

How to do a content audit?

The best way to conduct a website content audit is to take every single page separately and review all the elements that it includes. Start with the text, see if it's relevant, contains useful, concise and up-to-date information.

Define its purpose – is it a story, a guide, a featured article or simply a block of information with instructions on using certain sections of your website. Delete and modify it to correspond to the recent changes if such changes took place.

Further on you might want to look on the banners, promotions and button inscriptions. Perhaps you’ll have a great idea for updating it – go ahead, because any new element is more exciting than the one your visitors saw a thousand times already.

Besides, you’ll have a better structure of your page in general if you take time to learn how the type of text that you defined information on your page to be, must look like professionally.

What content audit tools to use?

The very process of reviewing your website’s content has been around for a long time. However, recently there has appeared a wide row of tools that you can use to help you analyze the content. One of the best this Content Analysis Tool (CAT).

This content audit software costs just a couple of dollars, but will provide you with detailed reviews of each page of your website. This is extremely useful, considering that in such way you’ll be able to notice and weed out bad content.

Tough Decisions

Remember that there is no way around it and there is no right way to conduct the content audit. Your purpose is to find what is called a “golden mean” – a structure and meaning of the content that will be convenient and appealing both to users as well as for designers, who’ll be working on updating your website to make it a responsive one with positive UX.

Try to make the content on your website brief and concise – straight to the point. People don’t like to work hard to obtain something and they will definitely won’t be doing any additional reading.

If your website has many pages, overloaded with info – it just won’t be supported in the responsive version. Make it short, interesting and scalable.

Have you recently done a content audit on your website or you are planning one? What you think is the toughest part in the whole content audit process?

5 Obsolete SEO Techniques that Harm Your Business

Which of these Obsolete SEO Techniques are you still using? Find below the ones you have to get rid of and as soon as possible.

Let's start!

Perhaps every businessman understands the importance of having a commercially successful website in terms of increasing the digital reachability of his business.

However website cannot become commercially successful by itself (such cases are extremely rare and usually imply crowdsourcing).

Therefore, you need the help of the experienced SEO professional, who will be able to boost the reach of your website and increase its overall turnout.

It's worth to remember that your SEO must be well aware of the current trends in the SEO world. Sometimes websites get fined for so-called “grey” practices, in other cases, practices that are considered legal and popular this year, may be penalized the next year and if your SEO is unaware of the changes – your business will definitely take a hit, no matter its size or nature. Google spares no one in this regard.

Below you will find some tips on how to improve your SEO practices by simply pulling the plug on the obsolete ones that can get you in trouble.

1. Backlinking:

There is a fair chance that you’ve heard of this term, whether from your SEO or somewhere in the

net. It’s one of the practices that can influence your business negatively.

It implies the creation of unbelievable amount of links to the website you’re promoting, without accomplishing any audit or research on the domains that you’re linking.

When Google Penguin appearedin 2013 such practice immediately became not only obsolete, but also harmful for your business. Nowadays it’s all about the qualitative links.

Why not backlinking? 

Simply because your website’s rating will drop if you create links back from websites that are absolutely unrelated to your nature of business or from websites or blogs with bad reputation.

If you want to avoid it, simply stop including your links in various directories, exchanging links with websites that have absolutely no relation to your business or writing posts chock full of your links on any open blogs.

Now Google ranks high only those websites that have a few links, but from very qualitative websites with excellent reputation. The focus is on quality, not quantity.

2. “Fake” Content:

A lot of misinformed SEO and business bloggers consider that long pages of words will be ranked high, as they waste tons of time to create them. However, to their great disappointment, they couldn’t

be further from the truth. Google Panda will not let any poor quality content to be ranked high.

The so-called “fake” content, that is full of links, is no longer perceived and ranked high. Just like with back links – quality means high rank, even if your article does not reach 2000-words. You can simply make sure that it’s above the 300-words minimum and you’re set.

Of course, that is given that you will provide interesting and engaging content with helpful tips or insights for the users to read.

Duplicate descriptions, that can be found on various pages of the same website will also be ignored by Panda, who’ll drop your ranking like it’s hot. Your visitors and users of your website must want to read the content you’re providing, otherwise Google Panda will penalize your website and you hardly need that.

3. Excessive Keyword Usage:

There is no denying that keywords have been one of the main ways to promote your website. However the excessive usage of keywords can never lead to anything even remotely productive.

Cramming lots of coarse sounding, out of place key words in a text makes your content unreadable to users, considerably decreasing overall website or blog quality.If you are an experienced online business owner, you understand the importance and benefits of using keywords the right way.

Moreover, it’s worth to mention that such practice of keywords cramming is currently strictly against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Nowadays, content writers can finally take a deep breath, because there appeared Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). What does it mean? It means that it uses the most widespread phrases of your page as the keywords.

Even more surprising is the fact that it can find synonymous phrases in your text, so you don’t have to annoy your readers with constant repeating of the same words over and over again.

For example, if your article is about “website design”, Latent Semantic Indexing will also determine that your keyword phrase is “web design” or “responsive web design” and so on. All the focus is now on quality and user experience.

Bots are being taught to analyze texts from the point of its simplicity and usefulness for users.

4. Keyword Rankings:

This obsession with keywords ranking is so obsolete. You need to simply understand that nothing will change financially speaking even if your website is on top, but no one clicks it and there is no

traffic.

No traffic means no sales and revenue.

Therefore, before you invest a good chunk of your funds and time into reaching higher rankings, you need to think it over and determine whether these resources will be better spent on something that actually maters.

For example, creation of new products/services or improving the UX of your website.

You will be much better off targeting a few keywords instead of a multitude of hardly related ones. Long tail keywords bring most of the traffic to the website.

Another good strategy is to write exciting meta descriptions to your pages. Thus, visitors will be more inclined to click them.

5. Ignoring images:

It’s not a secret that a while ago images weren’t considered a useful tool in your website’s promotion.

Well, guess what? Now they are!

People are attracted to visual materials, such as images, video, gifs, animations and so on. What you probably did not know is that search engines like them as well.

They just need some help seeing them. In order for search engines to see your images and index them better you need to write alt texts for them.

Suitable and well defined description will help Google determine to what category your images and your text is related. Such relevant images can sufficiently increase your overall website quality and Google ranking.

For instance, if you’re selling washing machines you can rename your boring 1.jpg file to the name of the washing machine model. Thus, users will know for sure that such model is available on your website and will visit your website to see if they will be able to purchase it.

Make sure you omit these obsolete SEO techniques from your promotion strategy. Instead, focus on recent tactics that proved to be efficient and are Google-friendly. Don't know what they are? Keep checking our blog to find out.