Over the last decade, the convenience of ecommerce has continued to rise, radically changing how shoppers view brands. Now that almost any given product can be procured in any one of numerous ways, they get to pick and choose the brands they support. This is one of the main reasons why content marketing is now immensely important for companies of all varieties: it’s one of the best ways to show humanity, personality, commitment, and expertise.
But content marketing goes beyond just straightforwardly distributing press packs and infographics. It also encompasses your on-site content. Yes, that’s right: what visitors find on your site actually does affect how they view you, so you need to make it as impressive as possible. In this post, we’re going to offer some tips for doing just that. Here we go:
Have all your employees contribute
It’s pretty common for a company to have just one person produce all the on-site content, which wouldn’t be so bad if they were an experienced copywriter but it’s usually the busy owner or some kind of intern instead (neither is ideal). This is a mistake since it leads to bland copy and a lack of interesting perspectives, so avoid it by having your employees collaborate.
When you identify a content brief, allocate it to several people and get them to discuss how they’re going to fulfil it. One can do the first draft, the next can revise it, and so on until they’ve agreed upon a polished piece. This will produce high-quality work much more reliably and reduce the pressure on any given writer, helping to avoid burnout.
Additionally, be sure to make this approach visible through clear content authorship. Not only is attribution good for meeting Google’s EAT expectations (Expertise, Authority, and Trust), but it’s also great for bringing consistency and continuity to your overall content strategy. You may prefer to focus on your brand name — particularly if employees come and go — but there are two things worth nothing: firstly, you can always remove authorship down the line, and secondly, any employees that do stick around can develop personal brands that are valuable to you.
Show meaningful industry expertise
If you want those who consume your content to return value to you in some form (and you do, since you’re not creating content to be charitable), then you first need to deliver your end of the bargain. There are various ways to achieve this — you could seek to entertain them, for example — but it’s generally easier to offer up valuable insight into your industry.
Try the classic question-and-answer format, since it’s a great way to rank naturally: pick out the most common questions people ask about your business (and your field) and answer them in detail on your website. Be mindful of existing answers, of course: your goal must be to make your answers better, whether they’re more detailed, more accurate, more keyword-optimized, or simply more succinct (Google prefers bite-size chunks of information).
Additionally, try to gauge what larger topics your followers want to see addressed. There might be an appetite for a comprehensive guide on a particular matter, in which case you could plug that gap and corner the market for a significant amount of traffic. If there’s already a guide but you’re sure you could do better, then create one specifically to outperform it (this is known as the skyscraper technique because you can get somewhere by narrowly surpassing it).
Conduct outreach to pick up backlinks
Now that you have some great content, you need to do what you can to get it some attention, and one of the best ways to do this is through outreach. It’s as simple as it sounds: you reach out to sites that might be interested in your content and see if that’s the case. You don’t need to explicitly ask for links though: instead, just mention that you thought they might like to read your content, and leave things there.
This can work for a simple reason: while they’ll likely know that you’re trying to earn links to your content, that won’t really matter to them if your content is good. If it is good then they’ll consider it something worth telling their followers about and want to share it. Do enough outreach and you’ll surely pick up some links, and just one from a reputable site can make a big difference.
Think about using outreach tools to identify relevant opportunities. One audience that’s always worth targeting consists of all the sites that have linked to pages similar to yours (largely your competitors). Those links confirm their openness to mentioning such things, allowing you to conduct outreach with confidence that your pitches aren’t going to be dismissed out of hand.
Rework elements for social media
Let’s say you’ve done what we just looked at: you’ve used employee collaboration to produce some high-value pieces of content that cover matters significant to your followers, and you’ve done what you can to pick up some relevant backlinks to help build up your rankings. What do you do now? Well, you can use that content for social media in two useful ways.
Firstly, you can simply link to it in your posts, recommending that people check it out. Those links most likely won’t directly do anything for your rankings, but they will bring you traffic — and through improving your on-page metrics, that traffic will directly affect your rankings. By sharing links at different times of day and in different situations, you can accrue useful analytics data that will help you improve your overall strategy.
Secondly, you can take small parts of it and rework them for social media: for instance, you could take one point from a long post and turn it into a visual quote to pin on your Twitter page, or create an infographic from some stats you researched. This is superb for efficiency: if you start with substantial pieces of content, you can make your strategy extremely economical.
Automate:
These tactics should help you do more with your on-site content, turning it into a real asset for your brand. Put some time and effort into it and you’re sure to see results.
