You’ve probably heard the phrase “content is king”—meaning that in the modern SEO-driven era that we’re now living in, creating high quality, relevant, and inherently valuable content is one of the best ways to reach your target audience. But what you might not realize is that it’s far more than just a catchy phrase—a number of recent studies go a long way towards revealing just how true it really is.
According to the experts at Aberdeen, year-over-year growth in terms of unique site traffic tends to be a significant 7.8 times higher for those brands who are content marketing leaders, versus those who are followers. Not only that, but content marketing, in general, tends to cost about 62% less than traditional marketing—despite the fact that it can generate about three times the number of quality leads.
Content marketing opportunities abound, and if you really want to take advantage of them, you need to know exactly where to look moving forward.
By far, one of the best things you can do in terms of content and search engine optimization involves not necessarily creating new content but finding new opportunities that already exist within your current pages.
Use tools like Ahrefs and Moz to analyze organic clicks and impressions for your individual pages, and look for insight that may have otherwise gone undiscovered. Compare all of the specific searches that people in your audience are conducting to the actual pages you’ve created—is your current content a good match for all of the top queries? Are your current pages earning the types of organic clicks and impressions you hoped they would? If not, why? What small-yet-strategic adjustments can you make to help them perform better from an organic SEO standpoint?
Don’t be afraid to update this existing content and restructure it to create a more evident hierarchy of information. Fix any broken links, add links to related pages, and add fresh, high-quality images—all of this will help a great deal. Start with what you already have and make sure you have THAT accounted for before moving onto something totally new.
Even in a vacuum, any one of these opportunities would be well worth taking advantage of. By using them together, you can boost your brand’s search rankings and improve overall organic SEO efforts.
When it comes to creating new content, start by conducting a niche analysis. In other words, don’t just look at what people are searching for—look at HOW they’re searching for it. Keyword analysis plays a huge role in this, as even small changes in word usage can generate a massive difference with regards to search volume. Optimize your content not just for general keywords but also for very precise ones, too. Conduct competitive research to see what phrases or topics are driving organic traffic to multiple competitor websites and make sure that you have pages that directly address those larger ideas in a helpful, relevant way. Ultimately, Google wants to provide its users with answers to their search queries. If your content answers queries in-depth and with a breadth of coverage, your organic SEO key performance indicators (KPIs) will improve.
If you’d like to find out more about finding the types of content marketing opportunities that can empower your search engine optimization and improve your search performance, or if you have any additional questions you’d like to see answered in a bit more detail, the Zero Gravity Marketing team is here to help. Contact us today to get started!