Welcome to our multiple part series on inbound marketing for small business. In this series we will go over the different parts of inbound marketing and how it fits into your current marketing strategy. This week we will go over how to create intentionally crafted content and how to make sure it’s working.
What is Intentionally Crafted Content?
In inbound and internet marketing, content is king. If you have done any research on the topic, you’ll know that content is what drives people to your website. Both Google and your audience use your content to tell what your page and company are about. The type of content you create must be pretty important!
Learning Marketing from Niche Websites
I may do an entire article on this in the future, but a niche website is a recent marketing phenomenon that involves creating a small website to promote a single type of product and create revenue using affiliate advertising. These websites base their entire business on inbound marketing strategies to rank high on Google and attract visitors. The steps that they use to find success are: use online tools such as google keywords to find a niche for which they can rank, create lots of SEO optimized intentionally crafted content, and use analytics software to check their results.
Finding Keywords to Rank
The big question, “What do I write about?” Well that is a good question, and there are plenty of ways to answer it. A good answer is to write content that your customers would want to read. You can write content about what you do so that search engines can better understand your website. The best answer is to combine the two and to write content that is both about your business in some way AND that your customers would want to read.
If you want some ideas, Google Keyword Planner is a great free tool that shows you what kind of content may be able to rank higher up on Google and build a content plan from there. What you are looking for is what are called “long tail keywords”. What this entails are search strings like “best pasta in Carlsbad” or “red camping backpacks for sale” which are things that are specific enough that large companies haven’t written content to dominate the search results, but are broad enough that enough people still search for it to be worth your time.
The keyword planner tells you related keywords to what you searched for and approximate search traffic for each one. You can then search for them yourself and see what shows up on the first page. If it is dominated by big box stores with millions of dollars of marketing budgets, you probably don’t stand much of a chance in beating them out. If it is other small blogs or businesses, you can look them up on MOZ Open Site Explorer to see what their Authority Scores are. Authority is a whole other topic and has its own in depth strategies, and I will go over that at another time.
After finding keywords for which you can rank, it’s time for…
Creating Content with a Purpose
Now its time to do the biggest part: writing the content. Writing is easier for some than for others, it’s something you get used to. But how does one write to rank on google? I recommend using a tool that I mentioned in an earlier post, the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress. In Yoast you enter the keyword for which you are trying to rank and it lets you know how you are doing SEO wise. It tells gives you hints on how many times you’ve used it in the writing, headers, links, etc. and how you can improve. You want the keyword to show up in the important places but not too often. Important places include the page title, meta, headings, and slug. This is a good guide to on-page SEO.
Using Analytics to Fine Tune Results
You created an SEO optimized piece of content; you are finished right? Wrong. When it comes to marketing, you always need to analyze the results. This allows you to fix any issues that may have unintentionally made and learn more about what your customers really want. The best free tool I have found for this is Google Analytics. First you attach it to your google accounts and create a “new property”. Then you find the tracking code for that you will use on your webpage. It will look something like UA-xxxxxxxx-x (x’s replaced by numbers). I use a plugin called Google Analytics by WebKinder. This allows you to just type the tracking code into your settings once and have it applied throughout the page. It also gives you the option not to track yourself.
Google Analytics is great for seeing which pages get the most traffic, how long people stay on each page, which page they leave from, and lots of other great information. Using this information, you can try to optimize your results by emulating your most successful pages. You can see what pages are performing the worst and how you can change them.
Conclusion
Hopefully this has been a useful guide to creating intentionally crafted content. This information can help bring you more traffic and convert more leads into sales. As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to send us a message or comment. We would be happy to help you achieve your marketing goals and grow your business.
