Content marketing is becoming increasingly important as an inbound customer acquisition tool for any company. As it turns out, not only is writing content important, but writing content at the right time, with the “write” title is becoming increasingly important. At the Content Marketing World in Columbus, I heard a lot about understanding your consumers and producing content that’s relevant to them. There are a number of methods (surveys, social media, ratings) and tools to listen to your clients (Radian6, Survey Monkey, Internal Search), but you can optimize your content by understanding search behavior.
#1: Write relevant content as search demand spikes.
Google Insights for Search is a great tool to organize your editorial calendar. You can discover when certain topics are trending throughout the year, as well as discovering if your subject is getting more popular or less popular.
With this tool, you now know when newly engaged couples search for wedding venues – and possibly when you should increase your content output on wedding venue topics and tips (January and July):
If you’re a healthcare company, you know when best to discuss flu symptoms and remedies (December and January):
#2: Improve search results with optimized titles.
After you understand search trends for your industry and topics, you’ll need to focus on how to best title your blog posts and incorporate primary keyword phrases. With the keyword tool, make sure you use ‘exact match’ to measure search volume:
The above (“San Francisco Apartments” vs. “Apartments in San Francisco”) is a common example in the search world. Consumer search language can often be different than normal English phrases. Try to match search phrases without sounding spammy in your headlines or body.
This example — wedding locations vs. wedding venues vs. wedding sites – can help you with organizing your site structure or blog post categories. Understanding the top phrase for similar keywords can make a difference on showing up on page 1 vs. page 3. For a wedding site, the category page for places to have your wedding should be labeled: Wedding Venues.
#3: Original, high quality content always wins.
It’s great if you understand some of the concepts above, but at the end of the day, none of it makes a difference if you do not write high quality original content. We learned from Google Panda, and subsequently Penguin, that low-quality content simply does not work anymore (see chart below by Sistrix for post-Panda traffic stats). If you are going to run a content marketing campaign, there is no longer a shortcut to content creation – Google and other search engines will penalize you for duplicate content.
Writing great content is just a piece of the content marketing puzzle. Get the most of your content by publishing and promoting relevant topics at the right time. If you title your posts correctly, and understand what your customers are searching for, you will run an even more effective content marketing campaign.
Eric MacColl contributed to this article.
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