It goes without saying that content forms the basis of all marketing. The placeholder for your organisation, product, or service’s representation, the description or piece of information that you provide, everything is basically content. That is why we refer to the act of creating content for marketing purposes as content marketing.

This differs from other forms of content in the way that it is written for target audiences AND search engines. It can be in any form of media, although the guidelines for various search engines as well as what works in specific industries and niches can vary.

What Works in Content Marketing in 2021?

It’s important that you only trust the origin of the source when it comes to search engine ranking guidelines. That’s why in SEO, we refer to Googles’ EAT guidelines that direct us to make content that comprises 3 core characteristics:

• Expertise
• Authoritativeness
• Trustworthiness

While these terms can be open to interpretation, we can all agree on some common grounds.

• Firstly, we have seen how Google has always pushed webmasters to produce quality content that is useful to users.
• Secondly, backlinks are important and quality content that has unique information is linked to by all good blogs and industry-related websites.
• Thirdly, we know that to rank on top, you need substantial traffic of regular as well as unique visitors that engage with your content.

Incorporating all 3 characteristics is only possible if you provide enough engagement, value in the form of information and satisfy the user’s search intent. A clear example is of the recent Featured Snippets that instantly take a search query as a question. Consequently, search engine algorithms take the website with the most effective content and display it in a box.

How Can I Rank My Website Through Content Marketing?

Bringing in unique content can seem like a tough task, especially if you have to do it on a regular basis. Your existing and new competitors will always be trying to do something unique, which is something you should do yourself as well.

Now that we know how content is judged and how rankings work, we can get to improve our content marketing. To help you create fully optimised, unique and engaging content, we’ve compiled a list of steps you can follow:

Write for Audience First, Search Engines Later

Gone are the days when we stuffed keywords to fool search engines. With modernised innovations, it’s wrong to assume that you can find loopholes to rank on top. Black hat and grey hat can only get you so far for a limited amount of time. Eventually, bad content will not prove to be useful for you.

This is why we recommend writing for your audiences while keeping a variety of search intents in mind. Search intents are either informational or transactional. People are either looking for answers or something to buy. By focusing on what your particular target audience wants, you can structure your content accordingly.

Search engines always endorse content that users engage positively with. If you can retain their attention and keep them coming back for more, you’re sure to rise through the rankings.

Keep Good Content on Your Own Site

Don’t post quality content on other websites, even if they’re high DA ones like WordPress or HubSpot. You want all the backlinks your content will generate to bring traffic to your own website. With good internal linking, you can ensure that visitors find more valuable related information. This will inevitably lower your bounce rates and increase session times, thereby giving you good analytics to report.

Use Catchy and Specific Headings

It’s been found that people often skim through content without reading everything. Even in some Featured Snippet results, we see that all the H2s are presented before us. This is something webmasters complained about before. Their concern was regarding Google presenting summarized information to visitors on its own result page. This resulted in visitors getting the information without even clicking on any web link.

However, smart webmasters figured out that your headings have a huge impact. Like a thumbnail in a list of videos, your headings are key to attracting your audience to click on your post’s link. With the right words presented to the right audience, you can persuade them to click for more.

Incorporate Rich Keywords

We’re familiar with the types of keywords and related concepts such as incorporating LSI, alt texts, etc. However, using them in your content is where the distinction is made between good and bad quality content.

We recommend thoroughly researching a list of short-tail, long-tail, voice-search, and even full questions that relate to your content before you start writing it. Once you have an exhausting list of related keywords that don’t cannibalise your content, you can start using them generically. As long as your keywords are appearing in a formal, grammatically adequate and structurally important way, you should keep a 1-4% density.

Focus on the Structure

Bland introductions, no or too frequent call-to-actions, unstructured or non-hierarchical headings, etc., are common structural mistakes.

Your content doesn’t have to be very long to be considered exhaustive or effective. It only needs a good structure that retains your audience’s focus, interest and attention. Looking at some of the top-ranking blogs such as Moz, SEMRush, SERoundtable, Search Engine Land, etc., we can easily come across good examples of content structure.

Studies show that small chunks of information are easy and preferable to long texts. Regardless of the information you provide, unless your user digests it easily, they won’t be able to find it useful. That’s why breaking your content into small paragraphs, with the right infographic, video or image appearing at the right place, you can improve your content marketing.

Your Competition Is Your Mentor

In SEO, almost all good strategies begin with a simple trick: competition research.

There’s no better way to find out what works than to look at exactly what is working right now. Notice how your competitors are working and what they’re doing in their content marketing strategies. You’ll notice specific patterns, content structure, or if you’re researching enough, even their sources of information.

By being quicker and more efficient, you can cover the news or information that they’ve missed or improve upon the content structure where they performed well. This is the surest way to get yourself on the right track. Look at what’s happening, look at what people are trying to find, become the missing link, and voila!

By providing information that isn’t available on your competitor’s site, or providing it in a more efficient manner can make you better than your competition. Smart webmasters don’t limit themselves to just their industries. They look beyond at what the masses are engaging with. It could be that a medical blog has a very efficient structure and design that you can incorporate into your website for a law firm.

Conclusion

The above-mentioned tips are only effective if you have a good marketing strategy that comprises effective SEO, PPC and SMO practices. While content is integral to most of the work, it’s still not all that there is to digital marketing. To have teams of experts analyse your business and design a custom digital marketing strategy for you, contact Zoom Digital in Dubai. We guarantee quality marketing services on all fronts.