Content marketing is great, and an integral part of inbound marketing. However, content marketing alone doesn’t prove to be effective. Strategic content marketing, on the other hand, is very effective and increases and improves organic search traffic.
Organic traffic is traffic to your website from a search engine, meaning somebody typed in a keyword and your website was relevant to that keyword.
In this blog post, we highlight how strategic content marketing can increase and improve your organic search traffic to your website.
Writing to your buyers personas
As we mentioned above, it takes strategic content marketing in order to increase your ogranic search. This means that you have to develop buyers personas and cater your content to them. Your content should be about topics that your target audience cares about. Your personas are typically in one of three different stages when they are searching for content. Those stages are:
- Awareness – They are experiencing symptoms of a problem or opportunity
- Consideration – They have defined or given a name to their problem or opportunity
- Decision – They have decided on their solution strategy, method, or approach
Don’t just writer your content to your buyers personas, but also cater your content to what stage in the buyer’s journey that the persona is in.
While writing to your buyers personas doesn’t magically increase your organic search traffic, it is more likely that your content will be shared on other websites and social media. thus, increasing the amount of value, references, and inbound links that your content receives. All of those are key to being ranked higher in search engines, which gives a higher likelihood of increasing your ogranic search traffic.
Keywords
Keywords should be the backbone of your content marketing strategy. Again, this is why we emphasized that you have to be strategic with the content your create, otherwise it doesn’t carry much value and won’t help our organic search traffic.
Your personas should help mold everything about your content marketing strategy, and keywords are no different. Use a keyword tool to find terms that your buyers personas are searching for. You want to find longtail keywords that have high search volume and are not virtually impossible to rank for.
For example, using the keyword ‘marketing’ is not a good idea. Yes, it has a high search volume, but it is almost impossible to rank in search engines for it. Instead, using a long tail keyword like ‘inbound marketing case studies’ may be more effective. It still has a relatively high search volume, and it is not nearly as difficult to rank well in the search engines.
After you have found longtail keywords that you can rank for and that your personas are searching for, creating compelling content titles with those keywords. Using the example above, we could create the blog title, ‘Why Inbound Marketing Case Studies are Great MOFU Content.’ Make sure that the content titles compel your audience to read the actual blog.
Types of content you can create are:
- Blogs
- Ebooks/Whitepapers
- Infographics
- Webinars
- Social Media
- Podcast
- Video
The opportunities are endless. Do note that your keyword strategy should never be static. Be sure to check on it at least monthly to find other areas of opportunity.
As it was mentioned, keywords are the backbone to increasing your organic traffic. The process on paper is very simple.
It looks like this:
- Your personas are searching for certain keywords/topics
- You create content based upon what they are searching for
- Your organic traffic increases
Obviously it is the strategy part that is difficult, but by having a stronger strategy than your competitors, you can see drastic increases in your organic traffic, and hopefully in turn, drastic increases in business.
What content marketing strategies have you seen as the most effective?
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: How Content Marketing Increases & Improves Organic Search Traffic
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