What is Content Marketing: Guide to Successful Content Strategy

Learn everything about content marketing, web content and how you can use it to make your website successful, get more visitors and increase conversion.

What Is Web Content

Web content is basically the stuff on your website. It may include:

• text;
• images;
• audio;
• video;
• other types of files with various extensions.

From a user’s perspective, content can be available for:

• viewing;
• downloading;
• listening;
• signing up.

Types of Content:

Static content is a piece text, which is usually placed on a web page (for example, services or brand description). It is very important for text materials to be not only unique, but also intuitively meaningful and engaging for your visitors. Well-written standout description can make a difference to the point where the people would call your office or and sign up for your stuff, based on the description alone.

Dynamic content or the so-called user-generated content: forums, comments, and reviews. The main advantage of this content marketing strategy is that you don’t need to add anything yourself. People are usually easily engaged in conversations and produce large volumes of content. However, user-generated content requires moderation.

Informational content is typically represented by news, articles, or company blog. This type of content marketing strategy is equally beneficial and rewarding for the site visitors and site owners. The former may read interesting stuff, while the latter can utilize its SEO potential.

Multimedia content is comprised of videos, pictures, or 3D-images, all of which are considered content. You view, enlarge, or even rotate the images in order to discover the product in details. There are also audio and video files, which you can also add to your website.

News aggregation is a process of collecting news pieces from various news sources. You can easily find information about pretty much anything, and that’s why it’s so great. Another cool thing about news aggregation is that you don’t have to edit the news. All you have to do is find the source and set up a module, which will parse the news onto your website.

So, let’s talk a little bit more about content marketing and how the aforementioned types of content work together.

Why Is It so Important for All Types of Content to Be Relevant to the Target Audience?

An interesting and helpful article will drive users to your site long after you posted it. This is what they call “evergreen content.”

A good-looking image indexed by search engines can also lead users to your website, when they’re looking for some important information. If this image contains a relevant text, chances are you’ll get even more visitors.

Video content is just as important so don’t forget to add keywords to the title and description of the video. You can also provide an intriguing description and the length of the video content.

And what about the audio content? It’s still out there and you can use it too, e.g. make short audio bits (descriptions or instructions) to make your site feel more appealing. What you definitely want to do is give the audio files proper titles, preferably featuring some keywords, which can lead the visitors to your website.

How to Create Web Content

There are a few ways of creating web content marketing strategy:

1. Produce your own content (write articles, create images, make videos or audio tracks)
2. Order content from freelancers on specialized copywriting services or freelance platforms.
3. Order content from companies, which specialize in professional copywriting. Many such companies offer content marketing services as well. This includes:

• Placing the information on the client’s website using the admin tools;
• Creating the content (this is usually done by copywriters or other employees). This is equally important to both the site launch and day-to-day maintenance.

Often site owners would have their content created and managed by professional companies, because they possess the right tools, expertise, and staff required for job. We’ll look into this process a bit deeper in just a few paragraphs.

Why Content Marketing Is Important for Website Promotion

It’s simple: if you update the current content and add new content regularly, your website is alive and well. Otherwise, it’s not, unfortunately. Wrong and outdated information gives visitors a negative impression and provokes strong dislike of your website. Search engines don’t favor bad content too – their algorithms can define how fresh and relevant content is. That is why you should always keep your “News”, “Contact Us”, “About Us” or “Portfolio” sections relevant and up-to-date.

Content audit is quite an effective procedure, during which we analyze how the content meets the website goals. It is especially helpful for the companies that have generated a lot of content already and would like to sort it out.

Content audit may help you rectify some major content problems, duplicates, errors and complete the missing information. Editor can check if your texts meet the actual requirements, copywriter will see if the grammar and style are alright, SEO specialist will improve your texts to achieve better search ranking:

• add the necessary keywords;
• delete excessive keywords and spam;
• increase uniqueness.

All this is used for building successful content marketing strategy.

All the texts should be original and unique. You can always check your piece of copy for uniqueness using one of the specialized services out there. If a text duplicates some other piece of copy, the whole page or even site containing the text may be a subject to penalties by the search engines. This rule ensures the originality of the content on the web.

The only way you can host third-party content is to provide the source link. It’s a common practice to ask for the owner’s permission to use the content.

SEO specialists often study the competition when suggesting content improvements. This way you can come up with the most effective set of keywords, avoid spam and keep your page relevant at the same time!

The Importance of Regularly Updated Content

If you update/add relevant content regularly according to your content marketing strategy, you’re bound to get higher search ranking without investing additional money in advertising and promotion. However, it’s only possible if the content is SEO-friendly, correctly posted and, of course, unique and interesting.

Unique content creates steady increase in the number of visitors and target audience. Your website is promoted the most natural way possible – via news and articles, graphic and video content.

From a search engine perspective, it’s all about the value of the website page. And that’s when various user behavioral factors come into place: relevant content gets you more page views which means visitors will spend more time on site.

As a result, you will be able to reach out for more potential visitors and increase the loyalty of the current ones.

What Is Content Marketing and Why It’s Important to Diversify Your Content

Content marketing is an approach focused on creating relevant and valuable content. Content marketing starts from creating the initial content for your website. This leads to the increased number of fresh articles, news and sections on the website, which in turn increases the number of pages indexed by the search engines.

This is true for graphic and video content as well. In addition, these types of content allow for a smoother user experience since most people prefer watching to reading. So, whenever you’re about to present some information, try to use as much visuals as possible – add infographics, video presentations and other graphic content.

A successful content marketing strategy is only possible if you’re constantly improving the quality of your content and the ways you’re presenting it. Organic content marketing leads directly to the increase of the number of site visitors as more people start to discover your content in search results.

All your potential clients care about is information, and that’s why they’re here. Relevant and useful – that’s how they want it, and they wouldn’t settle for anything less than that. These days the reputation of the company, the number of potential clients, and the conversion rate heavily depend on the quality of the information you provide about:

• Products and services;
• Terms of shipment;
• Prices and discounts;
• Your testimony and reputation;
• What makes you different;
• How relevant and unique the information is on your website.

Updating Your Site Regularly with High-Quality Content Will Drive It Closer to the Top.

You can never guess how the next search algorithm will work. Use long-term strategy instead, providing your visitors with fresh and relevant content. And if you don’t want any hassle, hire some professionals for the job. They can:

• Perform content audit;
• Check you stats;
• Come up with the list of suggested improvements for the semantic core;
• Create high-quality SEO-friendly texts for you website.

How Often Should I Add New Content? How Much New Content Should I Add?

The most popular section is News. You can post pretty much anything there, but usually it’s industry news, company news, and corporate events.

Suggested frequency of content updates for News – once every two or three days
Suggested volume per news piece – 1,000 to 2,500.

Articles and Announcements. This is where your product and service descriptions are. Whether it’s translated articles, copy or rewrites, you need to ensure the consistent quality of it. Hard-to-read texts and articles stuffed with keywords are a no-no. Informational materials should be useful and interesting for your clients.

Suggested frequency of content updates for Articles and Announcements – once a week.
Suggested volume per article – 4,500 to 12,000.

Recommendations. As the name suggests, this section is all about guiding users through the product lineup pointing out the highlights. Here you can also place professional reviews to substantiate the product quality.

Suggested frequency of content updates for Recommendations – once a week.
Suggested volume per article – 5,000 to 20,000.

Image and video gallery. This section typically features graphic and video content. Once you uploaded the files, don’t forget to add the descriptions and comments to them. This is a very important aspect of promotion, so make sure you provide <alt> and <title> tags for all images, pictures, and videos, adding some keywords as well.  You should read this article “On-page SEO Checklist: How to Build a Perfectly Optimized Website Page“

Who Is Responsible for Creating High-Quality Content?

1. Content manager comes up with the general content strategy and oversees the website content.

2. SEO specialist is responsible for creating keywords for every piece of copy and optimizing the content to match popular searches.

3. Copywriter is essentially a writer, who writes articles based on the subjects assigned to him by the editor.

4. Graphic designer is a graphic designer 😉 it can’t get any simpler than that. The main task of designer is to create appealing visuals to supplement and enhance the text.

5. Editor is responsible for the quality of the content. He comes up with the initial content idea and ensures the appropriate style and relevance of the content.

Conclusion:

One can go on for hours about web content, but unfortunately, I don’t have the luxury to do so. Here in this article I covered the basics of what makes quality web content and how to manage such content. Still, there’s one more thing to keep in mind…

Every piece of content on your website should serve its own purpose. Whatever content you may come up with, just remember that it’s there for a reason. The purpose of content is to appeal to visitors, make them interested in your products/services/information and realize that this is exactly what they were looking for.

The right thing to do would be share this article with your friends on the social networks – just click on one of the icons of social media, it’s that easy.

If you have further questions on the subject, please write them in comments – I’ll be glad to answer.