The Power of Content Marketing

Content marketing is one of the most powerful and important parts of SEO.

This usually involves something like a blog, and can also include specific landing pages, guest posting, and more.

Google is still very much rewarding companies who produce high quality and helpful content. The key here is that your content must have actual quality – you can’t fake it or “trick” the search engines these days.

Let’s talk today about how you can create, implement, and sustain a content marketing strategy, taking your business from good to great.

Create

Let’s first talk about creating a content marketing strategy. Before you even create the strategy, we recommend getting other people at your company excited about it. Call a meeting to explain the importance of?content marketing, as well as the benefits. Get others involved and give them some kind of?stake in the project.

Part of the creation process involves brainstorming sessions for coming up with all sorts of different ideas. Potential topics are endless, and there’s a lot for you to talk about in your content.

Another important part of the creation process is setting up a schedule. This includes both frequency of publishing content, as well as the actual days and times you will publish on. This is up to you and depends on your industry, your needs, and your goals.

It makes sense to assign the responsibility of the content creation to a specific individual, a team, or both. Content is so important that there are people who do their careers in content creation these days.

There’s more involved in the creation process and a lot of details here, including creating content for various stages of the customer journey, but for now our goal is to give you the skeleton framework and get your creative juices flowing.

Implement

The whole point of creating the strategy is to put it into practice, so implementation and execution is essential here. As you publish posts, have a dedicated “blog” section of your website where you store all your blogs and publications, allowing users to sort by various topics and sub-topics.

When you publish your posts, don’t be afraid to share on social media! This doesn’t mean everyone will read your posts right away, but sharing on social media is a good idea regardless. That’s because of something called “Barnacle SEO”.

Through the power of Barnacle SEO, you create genuine links back to your site’s blog posts from social media and other types of legitimate sources. These links “signal” to Google that it’s important content and helps it to rank better.

So, if you share your new blog post for example on Twitter, using some trendy hashtags, and find that no one is engaging, don’t be discouraged. There’s still value there in the eyes of Google.

Google rewards long-form content. As mentioned above, it needs to be high quality, well researched, and genuinely helpful to the reader. At the same time, feel free to also publish medium and even short-form posts, as long as they are credible.

The point here is to start taking action.

Sustain

Sustaining your efforts is incredibly important. It’s not about being a one-hit wonder. Consistency and persistence are going to keep you going.

Think long-term. Even when you’re doing everything right, things aren’t going to take off right away. Don’t give up. Establishing authority in the eyes of Google takes time.

Be patient! It can take many months for a given post to rank in Google. And when it does, your efforts will be well worth it.

Another part of sustainability is sharing the workload. With all of the planning, scheduling, creation, and implementation, it makes sense to have multiple people involved in the process. This helps things to flow smoothly and cohesively. As your company grows, considering creating a content team.

As you look to the months and years ahead, one of the best ways to emerge as a top player in your industry is through content marketing.

Content marketing is one piece of the overall SEO and digital marketing puzzle. Learn more about digital marketing strategy in our recent article.

Do you need help with creating and implementing your content and digital marketing strategy? Our team of SEA, SEO, content, social media, and growth hacking experts can help you. Feel free to contact us today for a consultation.