Did you know traditional marketing will cost you 40% more than what you’d invest in content marketing? Besides, content marketing will get you 3x more leads, as well! It is no wonder that close to 90% of businesses now focus more on content marketing.

Readers look for good content and come back for more if they find you an authority on what interests them. There is a lot of content to be found on the internet. In order to stand out of the content noise, there is an urgent need for you to strengthen your content marketing efforts.

You not only have to produce more high quality content, but you need to market it frequently to get it noticed by more people. Well, all these efforts are fruitful only if your content gets you some revenue. Before we deep dive into the 5 tricks that help you strengthen your content marketing, let’s bring back your awareness on why content is king!

Benefits of Content Marketing

If content marketing is one of your top priorities in your marketing efforts, then you will strive to create more content for your readers. When you have more content for your readers, they come back for more, winning your trust and being loyal to you, in return.

Higher frequency of content i.e. posting content daily or multiple times in the week will make Google index your content regularly. This ups your chances for better ranking on search engines. The more content you produce, the better are our chances!

The regularity of your updates will again reflect on your Domain Authority (DA). Your DA score is indicative to how often you update your website and the content production. Therefore, when you produce more high quality content, internet will trust your website and recognise you as authority.

In content marketing, creating content and distributing it goes hand in hand. When you frequently produce good content, you need to distribute your content just as frequently as well. This gets you more followers on social media. More followers may translate to more traffic to your website, and of course, increased brand awareness.

With improved brand awareness, the quality content will help you improve customer relationship as well. This relationship with your readers is important as it brings more traffic back to your website.

5 Tricks to Strengthen Your Content Marketing

#1. Improve Your On-Page SEO

On-page SEO must not be confused with on-site SEO. On-page SEO strictly points to the action points to improve your post and it’s not limited to just keyword research.

  • Add keyword in your blog title. Keep the title less than 65 characters while you are at it.
  • Update URL so that it resembles the title. When your post title shows up on search engines, the URL shows up as well. Readers trust your site when both the title and URL match.
  • Divide your text into H1, H2, H3 headings so your readers can easily scan through your content.
  • Keep keyword density between 1-2%.
  • Optimize Images: Add your keyword in the alt text. Use images with small sizes.
  • Write blog posts that are 700 words minimum. You can go as high as you like, but make sure it is only unique and relevant data that increases your word count.
  • Use internal links to link to your other relevant blog posts. This will help readers maneuver your website further and stay on your site longer.
  • Use external links to make your content more credible.

There are many other SEO trends that can help you strengthen your content marketing, but let’s not get carried away with just this. You can take a quick look at this infographic from MidasMedia for more information.

2016-seo-trends-1

#2. Consider Content Remarketing

Content remarketing gives you more chances to make that first impression to your audience and make them take the action you want them to take. This is a process by which you try to bring back engaged readers – those that know you, but that haven’t registered yet. You try to re-engage them so they return as potential leads. Use your content remarketing efforts through Google Display Network (GDN) to increase reach.

  • Define your audience. Make different lists based on interests.
  • Modify your content message to suit each list.
  • Test audience membership duration to fit the type of your audience.
  • Diversify the format of your ads.

#3. Minimize Your Website Loading Time

The longer your website takes to load on devices, the higher are the bounce rates. Users are becoming increasingly impatient and they are not going to wait for your website to load.

Use Google Pagespeed to check your website’s loading time and get feedback. It will tell exactly what needs to be fixed – be it on mobile or desktop, and improve your loading time.

You need to minify your HTML and CSS files to start with. Website loading time can be minimized by optimizing images and videos. Then continue by periodically removing unattached images, plugins, revisions, themes and other elements that take up unnecessary space.

#4. Design User-Friendly Website

Publishing great content that is unique and high quality is simply not enough. You need to distribute it frequently to get readers to your website.

Ok so you did this and that and now readers are on your website, now what? Your website needs to be designed with your reader’s usability in mind.

Make yours a mobile-friendly website. As mentioned earlier, readers are impatient and will not hesitate to bounce off your website if your page loading time takes very long. This is true especially for mobiles, since users can easily click the back button and get out of your website and go to a competitor.

#5. Engage More Intimately On Social Media

Sharing your blogs on social media will get you traffic back to your website. Choosing the right platform is key. For some brands, using Google+ and LinkedIn gets them the highest traffic. For others it may be Facebook or even Pinterest. Make sure you reply to comments and take suggestions.

Quora is now an up and coming platform where you can choose to answer questions relevant to your business and industry. You can say that Quora is a more dignified version of Yahoo Answers. All you need to do is create a free profile and start answering.

The trick here is to include relevant links in your answers that take readers to your blog posts so you drive traffic from here. Make sure your answers are informative and remember that witty answers have better chances of getting an “upvote”. The more authoritative your answer, the more views your are likely to get.

Action steps:

  • Invest in SEO
  • Improve On-page SEO
  • Invest on Google Display Network (GDN)
  • Use Google Pagespeed insights to improve your website’s loading time.
  • Create a company profile on Quora and answer questions related to your industry.

The 5 tricks to strengthen your content marketing may seem comprehensive, but following these techniques have proved to improve ranking for many authority websites. Therefore, use these tricks to get a better audience reach, improving their user-experience and converting them into potential leads.

Do you have any other tricks up your sleeve for content marketing? Comment here.

About the Author: Alicia Honeycutt is a passionate writer, blogger and marketing expert.