Recently, I heard the phrase ‘content is king’. I’d never come across this before but it couldn’t be closer to the truth. Your website, blog or social media pages all serve one common purpose and this is to share some form of content with your customers/followers.
Evidently, they may do this in different ways and require varying approaches, but the fundamental goal of audience participation is uniform. The following article will try to guide you through content creation by providing five SEO tips to think about.
- Engage – try to create content that readers can get involved with. Whether it is collecting views via comment boxes or re-Tweeting a follower’s update, this encourages more interaction and helps deepen content. In addition to this, you avoid preaching to your audience by incorporating an informal approach that many companies benefit from.
- Vary content delivery – albeit simple, varying content can really help enrich the principal site or media. Some readers may have a preference towards podcasts, or written articles, so mixing things up increases the chances of entertaining the majority. Besides, some content may be more suited to different forms of delivery. For example, anything orientated around the visually impressive may sit better in a YouTube video or slideshow.
- ‘Clean’ content – it’s important to avoid grammatical mistakes. Errors can be a big turn-off for some readers and may prevent them from engaging with your content altogether (or for the wrong reasons!). Clean content looks professional and can establish you as a credible source for information.
- Have a strategy – consider the audience and develop a strategy. Identify how often content will persuade, inform, entertain and/or encourage communication. For example, light-hearted articles may appear monthly but more sophisticated material could be uploaded on a weekly basis. Next, decide where different types of content should be located, shared or displayed. This strategy can be seen in traditional print-based media as well; newspapers commonly distribute content via recognised sections so the audience know where to find desired content. By employing a tactical balance, you enforce routine which regular readers become accustomed to.
- Current and relevant – lastly, keep everything up-to-date. If content is related to current affairs, it competes with ‘switched on’ brands. Also, acknowledging trends in the corresponding sector keeps content relevant and provides an opportunity for you to add industry expertise, alongside your own judgement.
Due to recent changes to search engine algorithms, many SEO professionals consider high quality content as the key to SEO success. Whilst this list of tips is not exhaustive, some may agree these 5 components are the building blocks of quality content and will help to develop robust material.
I can fully acknowledge the irony of this article because I haven’t employed these tactics entirely myself (although, I’d like to think number 3 has been adhered to!). As a result, feel free to leave comments regarding suggestions for future content or tips about content creation I have overlooked.
By Jack Powell
