Content MArketing

Con-TENT Mar-ket-EENG

verb

creating engaging, relevant, and unique content that helps your organisation both connect with new customers and engage with existing ones, enhance discoverability and build brand awareness across multiple channels.

synonym

content creation, blogging, news, owned content, social content, newsjacking, podcasts, instagraphics, and much much more

In truth, great SEO is not about the number of pages that your website has, or the length and number of keywords on each page. It really is about answering the needs of your potential customers

So how much content is the right amount of content?

For some sites “that “the right amount” literally means five pages and a contact form – for others it may be many hundreds of articles. There is also no rule about how ling a page should be. Sometimes you will need a long page of complex text with images and steps to follow. Sometimes you just need a paragraph.

There is a myth that constant content makes Google crawl your site better and people come back to read your content on a regular basis. Both of these are half true – if you’re a news site then you do need constant content (more than three times a week but really multiple times a day) to ensure the news bots index your breaking news quickly. Everyone else, however, should be adequately and comprehensively crawled on all pages of the site because they have a good site structure and, if it can be trusted not to break, they have a sitemap. Search engines don’t need to be lured back with regular new content to crawl your site and they won’t crawl ‘static’ pages more often because you have a section called ‘Blog’ where you put new content out.

But – and this is important – all of your content should be current. Even if content is evergreen, examples must be up to date and the content should be regularly checked and updated when necessary.

Regular readers can be attracted by great content, but will not come back to read articles that are clearly written just to fulfil the brief of creating new articles. The length and content of new articles/pages should be driven by having something insightful to share. Ideally, that will be something that people are searching for.

So is Content Marketing a Fallacy?

Adding insight and information that will benefit your audience is a massive indication of your Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness (EEAT) – this in turn can deliver big benefits for your SEO and also help your sales team by demonstrating you really do know what you’re talking about.

And remember, content is not just words on your website, but video, audio, and images. More than that, earned content (other websites featuring your content on theirs) can also bring valuable exposure to new customers, and backlinks.

With Google’s recent focus on helpful content and user intent, it is more important than ever that content is created for people and not for search engines.

Amelia – Account Lead, and resident intent checker

With Google’s recent focus on helpful content and user intent, it is more important than ever that content is created for people and not for search engines.
Amelia – Account Lead, and resident intent checker

It is far easier, and works far better, to write content based on your visitors needs (intent) rather than a long list of keywords. With this benefit comes a negative though – Google is looking to understand the intent of the searcher and direct them to content that will answer that question. This is not something that the neat add-on to many keyword tools which ‘defines intent’ of each keyword can give you a magic answer to – Google measures intent by individuals behaviour, not by what category Sistrix allocates to a keyword (we do love you Sistrix).

Creating content that will work for your specific requirements isn’t always about taking the easy or obvious route. Contact us to talk about when and where content might help achieve your aims.