Making sure your website content is successful isn’t only helpful for your business, it’s also helpful for your audience. The world of digital marketing is changing in that helpful content is becoming a huge focus. High-performing content can increase the authority of your site, but to do that, you need to first work out if your content is ‘working’.
What Do We Mean By ‘Is Your Content Working’?
We simply mean: is your content strategy helping you reach your goals?
Although many will say it’s all down to sales, different focuses like lead generation, brand awareness, engagement, customer retention and more can all be measurable when it comes to your content. To figure out whether you’re reaching your goals, it’s important you track your performance; and there are many variables that you need to consider when determining if your content marketing is working for you.
Questions You Should Ask Yourself
Successful content is unique, comprehensive, specific, and targeted at the right audience. Without these, your content can fall under the radar. Ask these questions to yourself about your website and the content you deliver to work out if your content works.
Is Your Mission Statement Clear?
Before you determine if your content is working, you need to first define what ‘working’ means for your business. You can do this through a mission statement. A mission statement is a short statement of why your business exists. It identifies the goal of operation, what services or products it provides and where it is located. It should be aligned with your core objectives and marketing goals which will therefore help you create successful content.
Is Your Content Unique?
Unique content is content that exists on your site and nowhere else. If you have content that is duplicated, Google will see this and penalise your site causing it to rank low. Make sure all content on your site is completely unique.
Does Your Content Target a Specific Audience?
When writing content, you should have a specific audience in mind – ideally one with a specific problem or set of problems. By having a deeper understanding of your audience, you can create valuable content that will solve their problems.
Do You Have Calls to Action?
A call to action is a prominent statement that compels your reader to convert into a lead or a sale. Depending where in the sales funnel your content lies may determine which call to action you choose. For example, readers at the top of the sales funnel may not be ready to convert to a lead just yet, so a call to action for following you on social media or signing up for your newspaper is a good follow-up for your content. For bottom of the sales funnel content, you can target more towards sales.
Is Your Content Readable?
If your content isn’t readable for whatever reason, your readers will likely click straight off your site. Unreadable content could look like unresponsive pages, heavy, clunky content on smartphones, dark backgrounds with dark text etc. Clear and responsive content is how you will keep your readers on the page.
Tips for Creating Better Content
Creating better content is more important than ever before. Following the release of Google's new Helpful Content Update, sites will rank better the more helpful their content is to their readers. Here are some tips following Google’s update that can help you produce better content.
Create Content for People, Not Search Engines
Google’s new update focuses on helping people-first content climb the rankings. This means you should focus on writing content that targets a specific need for your audience, rather than writing what you think Google wants to see. Google’s new algorithm update can determine which content is genuinely helpful to readers and answers questions they promise to answer.
Become an Expert
Becoming an expert on the topic you’re writing about can help you achieve better content. Instead of simply summarising what others have to say, you can create content that includes different views, insights and opinions following your extensive research and expertise.
Share Relevant Content
Keep an eye on trends by looking at forums, Google Trends, your common customer queries and more to make sure you’re sharing content that’s relevant. Understand what your audience is looking for and answer questions that you see come up frequently during your research.
Keep Tracking
No matter what, you should always track the success of your content. This can help you continue creating content that works. For example, you can see if certain topics, page types or titles drive more traffic, and you can use that to your advantage. You may also want to try A/B testing to get an idea of certain elements that get the most engagement/click-through rates.
Hire a Digital Marketing Agency
Hiring a digital marketing agency can take the weight off your shoulder when it comes to content and figuring out what works for your business. 427 Marketing has a huge range of experience in different niches and we are an ideal solution for those who feel their content isn’t working for them. With our knowledge and expertise in SEO and content writing, we can offer a full content marketing strategy tailored specifically to your business.