Regulars to this blog will probably have heard me speak about Inbound Marketing, and if there are any newbies in the room who haven’t yet heard that term this is what it means, in a nutshell;
“ Inbound marketing refers to marketing activities that bring visitors in, rather than marketers having to go out to get prospects’ attention. Inbound marketing earns the attention of customers, makes the company easy to be found, and draws customers to the website by producing interesting content.” Source, Wikipedia
So in relation to that, providing valuable content means the “stuff” you fill your pages with must have a purpose…
… There are two main purposes for people searching on the internet;
1. Educational reasons i.e. to find out how to do something
2. To accomplish something i.e. to buy, stream, download or watch something
So from here we can look at the type of results each type of search may hope to find.
There are many ways to provide someone with educational material and put your wares on the metaphorical shelf;
- ebooks
- downloadable catalogues
- webinars
- how-to videos
… and so on and so forth, but that still hasn’t really answered the question of how you make a lasting impression, or one that will make them continue on their buying purchase journey.
To make an impression for searchers, or prospects, you will need to consider a few things including the tone of your content, a path of progression and shareability.
When writing your content it should all be linkable to your main business aim, and potential search terms used by prospects. So if you cover a lot of nothing or a little of everything then you may want to reign it in and put a clearer focus on it. Concise headlines are a good place to start because you can relate the content to them.
You need to think about the layout too. Nowadays it is not enough to get people to your website and hope they will stay because it looks beautiful and reads well with short, concise sentences and paragraphs. You need to direct your visitors by using a series of call to actions and desirable content (preferably free) to your end goal; a purchase. Along the way you should think about strategically placing visual aids and social share options so that your useful content can be easily consumed and shared amongst their friends, family and colleagues and the cycle begins all over again.
By using all these tips you will not only be valuable to the searcher but the search engines will find your content easier to process also. Did you know that Google considers over 200 factors when determining how relative a page is to a search term?
There’s a point to ponder on and one that we will cover more closely in the next blog post, how to make your content valuable to search engines.