Every marketer knows that content is king, but in order for your content to deliver the most powerful results, it has to drive organic traffic. Setting up an effective content strategy will help you drive more organic traffic to your business and boost your overall success. How do you develop a content strategy that will deliver organic traffic? Read on to find out.
It’s no secret that content is one of the most crucial pieces in a marketing strategy. It helps to get your business noticed by your targeted audience, highlights important information about your products and services, offers valuable insight, and gets people to engage with your brand. However, in order for content marketing to deliver these results, it has to deliver organic traffic.
What’s Organic Traffic and Why Is It important?
Organic traffic is the natural, unpaid traffic that is driven to your website from search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. It’s real human traffic. In other words, it isn’t directed to your website via a paid source, but rather it is traffic that arrives at your site via actual clicks that people make when they are searching the Internet.
Organic traffic plays a vital role in the overall success of your business. Why? Because it has a huge effect on your conversion rates. People are far more inclined to make a purchase when they arrive at a website on their own then when they are directed toward one by a paid source. Organic traffic also boosts your rankings because it’s the type of traffic that search engines care the most about. Search engines, like Google, want to know that your site offers real value to its users, and sites that have a lot of organic traffic are seen as the most valuable. The higher your rankings, the more visible your website will be, and the more success you stand to achieve.
Developing a Content Strategy that Delivers Organic Traffic
In order for your content to deliver the organic traffic that you want and need, you have to develop and employ a strategic content marketing strategy.
How do you go about developing a strategic content marketing strategy? Here’s a look at some valuable tips that will help you build the most effect plan so that you can attain organic traffic.
Understand Your Targeted Audience
In order to create an effective content marketing strategy that will deliver organic traffic, the first and most important thing you have to do is understand your targeted audience. Your content has to be based on things your prospective customers is interested in and wants to know more about. Therefore, before you begin creating content, you have to determine who your targeted audience is and what they are interested in.
What type of demographic do you want to reach? Who would be the most interested and benefit the most from the products and/or services your business offers? What kind of content do they want to read?
To develop a deep understanding of your audience, create a buyer’s persona.
What’s a buyer’s persona? – It’s a fictional and generalized representation of the perfect customer. It will help you better understand your customers, making it easier for you to customize your content to the particular interests, needs and behaviors of your targeted audience. How do you develop a buyer’s persona? By gathering market research and insights from the demographic you are trying to engage with. It should include gender, age range, income range, personalities and interests.
Develop a List of Keywords
Once you have a better understanding of your targeted audience, the next thing you have to do is develop a list of keywords. Keywords are the words and phrases that people use to search for and find products and/or services on the Internet. A good content curation is a important part in a good content strategy.
You want to figure out what keywords your targeted audience uses to search for whatever it is your business offers. How do you figure out what keywords your audience is using? It’s actually easier than you might think:
- Become familiar with your niche. The more you understand your audience, the better you’ll understand the keywords the use to search.
- Choose long tail keywords, or specific topics your audience searches the most. For example, “Android” isn’t the best keyword, as it’s too general. Things like “Android photos” or “Android photo tools” are more specific and are more likely to be used by your audience when they are searching.
Find Out What Content Your Audience Likes the Most
The entire reason you are creating content is to appeal to your buyers. Use your buyer’s persona to determine what type of content your audience is looking for and will engage with the most. For example, do they like blog posts and social media updates? Do they enjoy email newsletters? Are press releases and PR articles more their thing?
Develop Killer Content
Write content that really appeals to your audience. Choose interesting topics and create captivating headlines that will make your buyers want to click and read more. Incorporate keywords, but do so naturally. Never, ever stuff your content with keywords. Incorporate photos, videos and other graphic images that will add even more value to the content. Break up long and boring blocks of texts by using bullets, numbers and headings. And the content integration should be great too. Use graphics and a table of content.
Develop a Frequency Pattern
Lastly, you have to determine how frequently you should be posting new content. How often are your readers looking for new material to read? What days of the week or time of the day is the best to reach them? Will posting new content a few times a week be enough, or should you be posting new content every day and several times a day?
Once you figure out the best content strategy for your specific business, put it into practice and remain diligent. You’ll soon see organic traffic coming in by the clickload!