Creating stellar content is your best chance for being ranked highly by Google, captivating your target audience and getting recognized as an industry influencer. You need to create top-notch, relevant content—blog posts as well as premium content—on a frequent and consistent basis. Publishing content overloaded with keywords and SEO trickery will no longer pay off; Google Hummingbird saw to that. The algorithm calls for a more holistic approach to content creation that does a lot more than revolve around keyword optimization. You must consider how you can deliver the best possible experience for your intended audience. Publish content, which answers important questions and solves vital industry issues—making it attractive and highly shareable to your target audience.
Hummingbird changed the game of content marketing in a positive way; quality matters more now than ever. Although SEO still plays a vital role, you cannot let keyword considerations hurt the relevancy or readability of your content. There is now an increased upside for creating high-quality and highly shareable content. So, how can you pack more of a punch with your content marketing?
Kick Your Content Creation and Marketing Up a Notch
Create Attention-Grabbing Titles and Headlines
You need to captivate your audience from the get-go. Failing to create attention-grabbing titles and headlines has dire consequences, including reduced website traffic and social reach. Your titles should loudly and clearly promote your must-read content. Resist the urge to jam-pack your titles with keywords, if it would leave them too long and unappealing.
Effective content titles are clear, concise, relevant, actionable, authoritative and intriguing, and they elicit strong emotions, such as happiness, shock or awe. The more clickable you can make your titles, the more your content will be read and shared on social media—greatly increasing your website traffic and lead generation though the power of sharing.
Be Original and Surprising
Conduct ample research in order to deliver useful but not widely known facts. Coupling hard-to-find information with unique and valuable insight is a winning combination. Too many websites publish content on the same tired topics over and over again—influencing many others, including career content writers, to do the same. Practicing content marketing in this way is unproductive and lacks any true inspiration or innovative thought.
Make Sure Your Content Has Character
Does your company content have a likeable personality, or is it bland and boring? Your content should not be indistinguishable from your competitors. Figure out what makes your brand tick, and then play up those attributes through your publishing efforts. Humor and shock can be valuable assets. People love to laugh, and they also liked being shocked from time to time.
When appropriate, go ahead, and be funny once in a while. Shaking things up with humor can refresh your content marketing, which your audience will appreciate. As far as shock goes, supplying surprising data is a good place to start. Such data is a great way to showcase your deep industry insight. Overall, always try to be helpful and provide useful information. Even if it is not shocking or funny, useful content will be appreciated and passed on via social media.
Create content that demands to be read and shared on social media, because it is top-notch, relevant, original and information-rich. Strategic content marketing can greatly advance your search rankings, boost website traffic and incite higher rates of lead generation. Without high-quality content, you will be unable to create social capital with your content, and your business will feel the pain. Do not get left behind. Create highly shareable content each week to get recognized as an industry thought leader, increase your social reach, generate and convert more leads, and attain more new business.