Content is Critical to Inbound Marketing
Inbound Marketing and great SEO are not mutually exclusive. In fact, an effective Inbound Marketing greatly improves your rankings. Central to any Inbound Marketing campaign is producing great, meaningful content that your target audience is seeking.
Think of creating and producing great content as seeding search sites. Plant enough of the right seeds in the right places and it will root. When it does, it will be a source of lead-producing traffic to your site.
However, a word of caution, we know that all seeds are not the same. Old poor quality seed yields a much lower crop than top quality seeds. Content is the same way. Low quality content that your target audience is not interested in will not benefit you. In fact, it will project a very poor image about your company and its products or services and harm you with your search engine rankings.
So why is producing content that your target audience is seeking so critical to your Inbound Marketing campaign and your SEO?
Great Content Helps You Be Found
Hubspot has conducted extensive studies about the relationship between blogging frequency and a site’s traffic. In studies it found that companies
that blog 15 times or more per month will increase their site traffic by 500% more, than companies that are not blogging.
Every blog post you add to your site adds a new page. If your competitors is blogging two times per week, after two years their site will expand to a hundred plus pages.
If you sit on the sidelines with a twelve page web site and don’t post, what site is more likely to be found? Your competitor with a hundred plus page site or your twelve page website.
Every time you post a piece of engaging content focusing on a long tail keyword is another opportunity to engage your audience and for new visitors find you.
When new visitors do find you and you have a great offer available for them in exchange for their contact information, you’re golden. You’ve done the heavy lifting and made that initial connection. Now, they move into your automated marketing campaign and you continue building and nurturing the relationship.
It Starts with Delivering Engaging Content to Your Visitors
Your site traffic depends on you delivering the goods. Deliver interesting, creative, educational, meaningful, entertaining content that connects with your visitors. Once you have them craving more you’ll see immediate results. The average length of time your visitors spend on your site increases, the number of social shares of your content increases, your visitors view more pages and drill down deeper into you site. These are all signals to you that you are on the right path to delivering great relevant content.
Use and experiment with delivering content in different formats. It does not all have to be blog articles. In fact, we all learn and process information differently. Some of us are visual learners while others are auditory learners. Consider using infographics to tell a story, educational videos, useful how to guides or checklists.
The more meaningful the content and the better it connects with your target audience the more engaged your visitors will be. It is why it is so important to develop the buyer personas for your target audience. It provides you with ta clear picture of what information and content will appeal to them.
Engaging Content Improves your SEO
You have to feed the beast. Search engines love new content. As highlighted above, every post is a new page on your site and is another opportunity to be found. In addition, every visitor on your site tells Google and other search engines a story about your site.
We all know Google is our “Big Brother.” They track every available piece of data they can: Where we go, how long we’ve been there and what sites we go to after we exit a page.
As a site owner these stats are available to you. You can monitor and review them and learn what pages are of mots interest to your visitors. It is also available to Google and other search engines to help profile your site.
Search engines are all about delivering the best most relevant search results for its customers. If they send a visitor to your site and the visitor immediately exits (bounces out), it reflects poorly on your site and is a signal to the search engine your site is not delivering a quality visitor experience. It is a check mark against your site.
The statistics search engines use, when profiling user experience and site visitor engagement are:
- Bounce Rate – The percent of visitors that find your site and immediately exit after landing on it. You want a low bounce rate.
- Time on your site – This is pretty obvious, the more time your visitors spend on you site, the more engaging your site is, i.e., there’s some meat to your site.
- How many pages are viewed by your visitors – Another indication of how engaging your site is; the more pages viewed, the more interest shown by your visitors.
- The number of returning visitors verses new visitors – Returning visitors is a good indication to search engines that you’re delivering the good. There must be a good reason your audience is returning.
- Social Sharing – Make it easy for you visitors to share your content with social share buttons. Increasingly important to search engines is the number of social shares of content from your site. The more content shared socially the stronger the signal that you have some good stuff worth sharing.
Wrapping it Up and Putting a Bow on this Post
Content is king. No doubt, you have been hearing this expression for what seem like eons. However, it is not just any content. It is: Great, engaging content is king.
Hubspot, through its research, has unquestionably documented the correlation between producing new content and increasing site traffic. However, it is not just about driving traffic, it is about engaging visitors and establishing a relationship with your visitors. That requires great engaging content. Throw out a bunch of garbage content and it reflects poorly on you and harms you with the search engines.
Producing great content is central to both an effective inbound marketing campaign and your search engine rankings. Produce great content and seed the internet using your website and all your social media sites and you lay the ground work for producing some great growth.
Do you have a piece of content you produced that produced great results? We’d love to hear about your success.
