Bestsellers. Photo by Christopher S. Penn
Google ranks content, not companies.
For this reason, content creation is perhaps the most crucial element of SEO as it exists today.
Search engines are engaged in a relevancy arms race, meaning that they are trying to provide the most relevant, useful results to their users. People conduct searches to find answers to questions, and the more detailed that answer is, the more useful it is to searchers. Thus, high-quality, relevant content will rank better in search results, plain and simple.
The end goal for content creation, then, is to publish relevant, remarkable and useful content. It can do wonders for rankings, position you as a thought leader in your industry, and majorly contribute to a long-term SEO strategy that will produce more sustainable results. Here are three content creation tips that will help you get traffic to your website and boost your overall SEO efforts.
1. Be Helpful
When you try and tackle content creation, it's important that you know what your target audience wants. If you don't, chances are you'll end up pouring time and resources into content that is unwanted by or irrelevant to your readers.
Once you have a good idea of the topics you should cover, make your content helpful. Provide a solution to a problem or an answer to a commonly asked question. Doing this can help you become the go-to, authoritative source for information in your industry.
Though your competition may focus on self-promotion, your content should focus on being helpful.
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2. Be Unique
There is a plethora of information available on every subject imaginable - the key to breaking through the noise is to provide something that is different.
It's very likely that any of the topics you are going to cover have already been covered a million times, but there is still ample opportunity to carve out your own niche or give your audience something that is completely unique.
Focus on adding value to similar content that others have done. Reimagine information and put it into different formats. Add images, videos, infographics and more to your content creation strategy. Make your content unique!
3. Don't Be Boring
Your industry may seem dry or vapid, but there is always room for you to be stimulating and creative, regardless of the subject matter.
Branding is hugely important to this end, as is diversifying your content strategy to incorporate a number of different content formats: webpages, blog posts, videos, images, infographics, whitepapers, social snippets and more.
Not only will this encourage engagement with your brand, it will also allow you to fill content gaps and get the most out of every piece of content you create.
Conclusion
The above content creation tips will help you publish content that will not only get traffic to your website, but also escalate lead generation and strengthen your overall SEO strategy. High-quality, relevant content will perform better on SERPs, gain better traction over social media, and position your brand as an industry authority, meaning that when prospects are ready to purchase, you will already be on their shortlist as a potential vendor.
Unique, quality, useful well written content is a must today. However, you need to keep it simple and easy to understand. Sometimes I come across blogs where the content is very difficult to understand. Visitors don’t want to have to use a dictionary in order to understand an article. People are visual and as you mentioned using images, videos and infographics can be a good way to be informative but not complicated.