Published on September 11th, 2020
Content is and always will be the alfa and omega, the king of all digital marketing strategies. Yet, over half of all online traffic is through mobile devices. The average human attention span has shrunk to less than that of a goldfish.
All of these factors and more are changing the landscape of content marketing and communications in general. So, what do you need to take into consideration, to make sure your content will stand out?
1. Quality
Content needs to be relevant and valuable in order to both rank high in search engines, and satisfy customers’ needs. It needs comprehensive but on-point information, something that people actually look after when entering queries.
That is why Google introduced in 2011 the Panda update, meant to discourage low quality and poor content from ranking high in search engine results, and actually give the good-guy pages their rightful spot.
2. Richness And Length
Research shows that short, thin content doesn’t by far perform as good as info-rich and in-depth content. Rumor has it that by delivering info no longer than 500-600 words will suit people’s attention span, thus ensuring reader retention.
The truth is that’s no longer applicable. Thin content cannot truly satisfy people’s needs, as usually, it’s not only short on length but also short on value.
Studies show that the longer your content is, the better it will rank in Google. Nevertheless, it has to be useful and original. After analyzing the top 10 results given when entering queries on Google, SerpIQ pointed out that they scored more than 2000 words each.
For ranking high in search engines pages, you need to deliver a wealth of information but without overstuffing, irrelevant, repetitive content, or keywords. Consider the example displayed below:
Are you looking for cheap running shoes? If you’re looking for cheap running shoes, look no further.
Our cheap running shoes website is the best place to order your new cheap running shoes. Feel free to check out our selection of cheap running shoes from our cheap running shoes selection below.
As Will Rogers said it, “You will never get a second chance to make a first impression” so make your content is as good as possible.
Visual and interactive content has always attracted readers and counting them in means making your page even more of a hit.
Many webmasters say you should primarily craft for the reader, but also check on meeting the search engines’ requirements.
3. Useful Tools To Find Content Ideas
If you’re a content writer, you have a blog or work for a company, you might have struggled with this question before: How do I find good blog topic ideas? There might have been situations when you didn’t have any ideas and you had to write something just to keep your users engaged. So let’s talk about two apps that will help you find topic ideas: Google Alerts & Brand Mentions.
Is not always easy to monitor brand mentions, and it might be difficult to measure your success across the Internet. That is why brand mention tracking apps are now available on the market and offer you plenty of easy ways to monitor your niche.
If you want to see what spot you occupy in terms of online mentions but also to figure out new topic ideas, there are a number of popular and qualitative social and web listening tools to help you with exactly just that.
You can use the Google Alerts tool to get an idea of the trending topics floating around or specific mentions of your brand or the industry your brand is in. Google Alerts is still one of the most popular brand monitoring tools out there.
Set-up a mention tracker on Google Alerts and keep up with your niche and industry doings, spy your competitors, monitor the web for new content ideas, or see who, where, and how often you were mentioned online.
It’s pretty simple to create a Google Alert; besides, it’s completely free. However, there’s still room for improvement for their email alerts, as they don’t always report all the new and fresh content on the web, thus making alerts quite outdated.
Moreover, the Google Alerts tool doesn’t cover social media platforms, therefore you can’t have a good perspective on what’s going there with your topic of choice.
You can take a step further and use BrandMentions, a full-stack web and social listening tool that will give you tons of good content topics ideas. It can analyze and monitor each type of mention, be it social media mention or web mention, from all across the web and comments on social media.
BrandMentions finds every relevant mention about your brand or name in a heartbeat. All you need is to type a keyword and leave an email address and they’ll track and notify you about all the relevant web mentions you’re interested in.
The tool can determine not only the current location the brands are mentioned in but also the sentiment around them.
Brand Mentions is quite useful not only for topic ideas but also for brand and media monitoring, competitor spying, for improving your reputation management, or for getting hands-on with business intelligence and publishing.
Find, follow, and manage mentions that are critical to your brand’s development process.
Consistent, high-quality content marketing is one of the most effective tools you have to reach your company’s goals and grow your business. Follow the pieces of advice above and make the most out of your content strategy.
