I’ve talked at length about content marketing—about how it can accomplish both your SEO and your marketing goals. This is why Neil Patel calls content marketing “the new SEO.” (It’s not really “new,” but you get the point—it is the strategy for long-term success in the search engines.)
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| Content Marketing Versus “Pure” SEO |
Content marketing is one tool for SEO, but it’s not what people think of as “mainstream” SEO—the mainstream is things like link building, title and heading optimization, and keyword density checking. This leads to the question…
I run a small business… Where do I start?!
When you’re starting to get serious about Internet marketing, the last thing you want to do is waste your limited resources.
Get the basics first…
We’ve established that, in the long-term, content marketing is the only viable strategy for SEO.
However, there are a few one-time, site-wide optimizations that I consider essential to getting the most out of your content marketing campaign. I covered most of these in my article “SEO for People Who Don’t Have Time for SEO.”
They include:
- Choosing good URLs for your pages,
- Making a list of your most important content and linking to it (both now and in the future) from other places across your site,
- Setting your blog to display your photo in the search results, and
- Prominently encouraging users to share your content on social media.
One more of these one-time optimizations that (depending on your business) may be essential is getting listed in local search.
…But don’t sacrifice your long term plans
The optimizations above should take all of 2 or 3 hours for someone reasonably competent with managing your Web site, so it isn’t unreasonable to think you can make these changes without sacrificing your content marketing strategy.
Even if it costs you a bit more in the first month, don’t put your content marketing on hold. Just as your business thrives by delighting its customers, the search engines recognize that serving up great content keeps their users coming back as well. A good content marketing campaign naturally provides the topics for people who search for topics within your domain. Success with this, though, can take months to get going—you want to get started as soon as possible in order to reap the benefits more quickly.
Get your small business started
So here’s what I suggest.
Run through the list above of essential SEO tactics and implement them on your site. Then, get a blog started on your Web site. Your goal should be to write the articles your potential customers want to read—don’t write about things you are interested in, write about what they want to know.
One way of doing this is to make a note of the questions your customers have about what you do. (If you’re short on customers to talk to, browse forums related to your industry and see what kinds of questions people are talking about.) Write a post using their same language that answers that question.
Let me explain why using your customer’s language is important. I recently consulted with a dentist who wanted to perform more treatments for Invisalign. As a dentist, it was really obvious to her that if someone was looking for no-show braces, they would search for Invisalign providers in their area—and that was true for some prospects. But, a lot more searches are for things like “adult braces,”
“invisible braces,” “alternatives to braces,” and so on. If she had just targeted queries related to Invisalign in her content marketing, she would have missed out on those customers who weren’t yet sure that a solution existed!
As you start to gain momentum, you may want to move away from writing blog posts targeted at specific customer questions. By creating content that targets the long tail of search, you can build up “evergreen” content that will keep attracting visitors to you year after year. I suggest not including news in your content marketing strategy (though you might still occasionally publish it on your blog), since this is not content that will remain fresh and “green.”
By adhering to an editorial calendar and posting on a consistent basis, you can demonstrate to your visitors that they should be checking back with you all the time (or, better yet, subscribing to your email list to ensure they never miss a post). I suggest posting once a week at the minimum, and avoid at all costs the intermittent, maybe-once-a-month posting “plan.”
(As an aside, you might consider using DivvyHQ to manage your editorial calendar. It’s lightyears ahead of using Excel or your calendar when it comes to working out the timing of your content strategy.)
I’ve written previously about outsourcing your content creation if you’re short on time, ideas, or manpower. One post per week isn’t a hard schedule to maintain if you have four people on your team involved, each of you writing one post each month, but for many small businesses, this is overly optimistic. Some of my past clients have outsourced their content with great success, either to a blog writing service or a marketing intern—you can always look the posts over and expand on (or correct!) them as necessary before publishing.
As you cultivate a content “library,” you’ll be growing both your brand and your traffic, and the sooner you get started, the better off you’ll be at year’s end. If you’d like help formulating your content strategy, drop me a line in the comments, or shoot me an email at tyler@conversioninsights.net.
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