Incorporating Content Marketing into Your Online Strategy

Content, content, content. If you’re up to date on the latest trends in SEO and online marketing right now, you’ve heard that content is king and that “content marketing” is what it takes to grab search engine traffic. But what does that mean?

Content has become one of the vaguest terms in the business world, but when people talk about it in an SEO context it means high-quality, valuable content. In other words, “content” is the stuff that visitors to your site will find useful, funny and/or thought-provoking. That can come in many forms, but it has to be easy for them to find and consume, ideally without strings attached. Content can contain a plug for your products or services, but it really isn’t a sales pitch – its purpose is to increase the value of your site as a resource for web surfers.

For many companies, this is a big departure from earlier SEO strategies. SEO used to be much more an act of calculus: more links from more websites meant better search rank, period. But that meant that the top search results were not necessarily the most useful, and Google decided to change that with its infamous “Panda” update.

Example: Infographics

As an example of the change, let’s look at an increasingly popular type of share-worthy content: the infographic. An infographic is great because it delivers real, meaningful information but it uses a visual format to grab eyes. A well-made infographic can easily go viral.

Before Panda, in the age of calculus, you could make a compelling infographic, set it up to be embeddable on other websites, and encode links to your own site – with your keywords – so that everyone who used it “linked” to you. The more links the better, so even though you were tricking users, this boosted your search rank.

Today, if you try the same thing you’ll get penalized. (As Google anti-spam guru Matt Cutts advises, include a “nofollow” tag on widgets and infographics so Google knows you’re not trying to game the system.) Instead, an infographic could be one in a long series of high-quality content that draws search engines organically by proving you’re a valuable source of information.

A Steady Supply of Content

At EverSpark we’ve always preferred the content-based approach to SEO. There’s something about making your site more valuable, and serving potential customers better, that just seems right. That’s why we create a variety of content for our clients, including:

• Blog posts, which can influence customer decisions as well as search traffic when readers share the link via social media
• Guest blog-posting: essentially ghostwriting a highly relevant blog post to appear on another site with an SEO-boosting link back to your site
• Social media content, which can help move the needle and garner free publicity when your posts are “trending”
• Press releases: tying your company to relevant hot news stories
• Multimedia content such as video or infographics

Need to keep fresh, valuable content coming for your own web strategy? Talk to EverSpark Interactive today.