In this article, we’re going to focus on the most popular topics in SEO, content, and content marketing. It’s common knowledge that even if you write the most engaging content in the world if you’re not going to promote it, nobody is going to see it. In fact, the easiest way to explain the content and content marketing with one sentence is with the following quote:
“Content Is King, But Distribution Is Queen.”
That’s why we’re going to talk about the top 10 content optimization tips every business owner needs to know.
1) The Science Behind Viral Content Marketing
Drafting a great piece of content can be a challenging task, thus creating a viral article is even harder. But hard is not equal to impossible, and the rewards for your business and brand with viral content marketing are huge. That’s why we’re going to share the basic rules for creating viral content with you.
The two main pillars of creating viral content are:
Emotional Response
An article filled with emotional triggers, which evokes strong emotional responses, has a good chance of going viral. People share content on social media when that content makes them feel outraged, happy, sad or shocked.
Usefulness
The other factor you need to consider is the usefulness and practicality of your blog posts. In fact, researchers found that content that is useful and practical will likely go viral. That’s why lists, how-to articles, or social commentaries perform so well on the web.
If you want to go deeper into the subject, you can take a look at Milkman and Berger’s study of 7000 viral articles published by the New Your Times. The name of the study is “The Secret to Online Success: What Makes Content Go Viral.”
2) Content Strategy Planning
Content strategy planning is the most crucial phase of your whole content marketing outline. This is the stage where you as a business owner, need to answer all the essential questions
- Why are you creating content?
- What type of content do you need to create for your customers?
- Will this content help you generate more leads or sales?
- Will this content be useful for your customers?
- Will it be promotional or informative?
- Does it align with your brand?
- What’s the end goal? Increase in revenue? Broader customer base? Or something else?
The best advice we can give you is to answer the questions carefully, taking your business data into consideration and document every step of the way. Align your goals with the information from your market research and adapt the content to that vision. Once you get a full picture of the market, your ideal customer profile, and your business targets, you can start drafting a content strategy.
Moreover, it would be best if you also considered using measuring tools as a part of your content strategy. The best way for you to understand the impact of your content is to measure shareability levels, traffic, and social media popularity. Plus, it will give you a chance to interact directly with your customers.
3) Content Audit
The content audit is a “necessary evil” in the world of SEO. Even though most marketers and business owners try to avoid it as much as possible, the insights you gain about your website from content audits are a game-changer. Hence, we’re going to provide you with a short step by step guide on how to conduct a content audit for your most important digital asset – your website.
4) Popular Viral Marketing Techniques
Viral marketing is a vast subject, which is why we want to elaborate on some effective methods further.
Think Outside the Box
Traditional marketing methods are not working anymore. That’s why you need to find new and creative ways to stand out from the crowd, especially if you want your content to go viral. Create art from your products, like Samsung, combine videos, gifs, and text to deliver your brand message or simply be bold to try fresh ideas.
Create Content in the Real World
We touched on this topic above, but you need to evoke emotions if you want your content to go viral. And is there anything more emotional than the real world? No. Thus, you can take your idea in the streets and create awesome videos from the interaction customers have with your products.
Viral marketing is all about creativity, and the same rule of thumb goes for content. If you want your article to go viral, you’ll have to find a way to make it new and exciting for your readers.
5) Optimize Your Content for the User’s Experience
This might not be a piece of new advice, but it’s still an applicable one, even more, today when we’re “drowning” in a sea of content. You have to create and optimize your content in an engaging way that will make it easy for the readers to understand your point. In fact, that’s why lists and how-to articles are ranking so good on Google; they’re optimized for quick browsing with clear headings.
You can use images, videos, gifs, and charts as other visual tools that can help you optimize your article better. According to researchers, content with featured images gets more shares on social media and more views by readers.
If you genuinely want to enhance the user experience, you can even create instructional videos for your products and promote them as a part of your content campaign. Giving your customers the option to read about the functionality of your product or view its features in a video, will draw more attention.
Furthermore, you should consider interactive page design as well, because people visually process information.
6) Optimize your Content for Mobile
This should go without saying in 2020, but we’re going to write it anyway because the mobile is taking over. Let’s go over the statistics:
- More searches are done on mobile devices than desktop computers every day, and this percentage will continue rising in 2020. In 2019, 52 percent of all searches were done on a mobile device.
- 87 percent of smartphone users use their devices for online searching.
- The average time a person in the U.S. spends on the phone is 3 hours and 35 minutes, and in that time, people search for the topics that interest them.
- 61 percent of mobile users will contact a local business if their website is mobile-friendly.
- 51 percent of users discover a new company or product through mobile search.
And there is even more data that backs this up! Hence, the only logical conclusion would be to make sure that when you’re optimizing your content, you’re also considering mobile. Test the mobile version of your site before you publish new content and see if the article is fully displayed and there aren’t any “glitches” or errors.
In 2020, mobile and voice searches are taking over the landscape, and your business should be ready for it.
7) Keyword Research & Consumer Intent
SEOs have been talking about keyword research since the very beginning, and as with any foundation, it’s impossible to get results without it. In the old days of SEO, keywords were stripped down to simple Google bots understanding levels, but today that’s far from true. In fact, keyword research methods have been changing and developing together with Google. Hence, if you want to publish a successful blog post, you need to do your due diligence first.
Thankfully, we did that for you! Here are some of the most important tips when it comes to keyword research in 2020 and beyond:
- Consider (steal) the main keywords of your competitors.
- Always consider consumer intent. Sometimes, even if a keyword has a lower volume search, it will have a higher percentage of conversion because of the intention behind it.
- Don’t ignore keyword difficulty.
- Start using long-tail keywords and optimizing your content for voice search.
8) Word Count
Many myths and legends surround the topic of word count, which is why when Backlinko published their data, the need for speculation toned down … a bit. They found out that “the average word count of a Google first page result is 1,890 words.” For most SEO’s that’s not surprising at all, but for business, it might be an ideal chance for better rankings.
The world of 800- or 1000-word posts has been dying for a few years, and now it’s officially dead. It’s a fact that lengthy content ranks better on Google. Plus, it gets more social shares, which brings even more traffic to your website. Thus, on the start, you’re getting benefits both in ranking and through social media.
Product descriptions and feature reviews are perfect candidates for lengthy content. You can provide your users with a detailed step by step guide on how to use your product and get a boost in traffic. Furthermore, this gives you a chance to try out some new SEO content methods like the skyscraper, which is the easiest way to acquire backlinks.
According to the Columbia Journalism Review, “long-form has gone digital and is thriving.” We couldn’t agree more!
9) Content & Brand
Storytelling! The section where content marketing and brand strategy intertwine the most, but according to the latest data, that’s not the only one. In fact, every single interaction you have on social media, every blog post you publish on your website, is a representation of your brand.
If you strip down the definitions to basics, the brand would be the broader concept and content is the heart of it. Hence, you can’t tell the story about your brand (business) without content.
However, content shouldn’t be influenced only by brand, but aligned with it. For example, you can use content to create a full customer journey on your website. The brand can control the tone and the voice of the content, but SEO should be in the driving seat when it comes to optimization.
Furthermore, content and brand should share the same pool of information like customer personas or market research. If you understand the needs of your customers, it will be easy for you to create useful content that answers their questions.
10) Content & Social Media
Social media is the perfect tool for businesses to connect with their customers. Through Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, you can interact with your clients, and get their honest opinion on your products and services. In fact, more than 50 million small businesses are using Facebook to connect with their base. Social media drives sales and conversions, and in terms of content is the perfect platform for content promotion.
That’s why we’re going to end this article by giving you a few tips about promoting your blog articles on social media:
- Create two titles, one for social media and one that’s SEO friendly. You need to make sure that your title is catchy if you want the article to go viral and get a lot of shares. If you’re savvy, you can even perform AB testing to determine which version works best.
- Optimize your images for social media as well. As we said above, more than once, people experience content visually, and that’s more than enough for you to spend an extra five minutes to find the perfect picture.
- Optimize the description per the social media tool that you’re using. Facebook and Instagram users have different preferences; hence, they should get different descriptions as well.
Content marketing is an art backed by data-driven solutions. As a business owner, you should make sure you’re on the same page with the new content trends in 2020! We hope you can use some of our advice to further your business and get more exposure.
