Content Marketing Done Right: Where Do I Start?

1. We all do content marketing
2. SEO companies bring numbers
3. Your content should meet the user’s demands
4. Not every business needs content marketing
5. SEO is only one tool
6. Review your target audience
7. Final thoughts

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All You Need to Know About Content Marketing

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We all do content marketing

Even if you produce the content for your website without keeping marketing strategy in mind, you still do the content marketing. That’s because content marketing is not only about numbers and SEO rankings.

Have you ever asked yourself who sees your content on your website?

The answer is simple:

1. Search engines
2. People who enter your website

It means that working for the audience that visits your website is a part of the content marketing.

Unfortunately, it also means that if your content is SEO optimized and ranks on the first spots of the Google results, it still can screw up your business.

You may look surprised now, cause you’ve invested so much money into the SEO-optimization, hired the best professionals in SEO business, your content shows great results in Google rankings and your traffic shows constant and stable growth… How can it hurt your business, right?

The answer is simple: your content should control your website audience’s actions and convert this traffic successfully into the leads and sales or subscriptions.

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SEO companies bring numbers

Right after the first section, you could start being mad at SEO companies, cause you’ve understood that their work is not as good for your business as you thought before. But there is no need to rush your anger, drink some camomile tea and relax.

SEO agencies do what you ask them to do - they bring you traffic and work on making your search engines rankings better. They do what you pay them for, they don’t actually lie to you, they do their job good (well, if they actually bring numbers, lol).

These guys try to catch the fish that is laying somewhere on the surface, they bring you the audience that asked search engines to guide them to you.

Their main task is bringing the numbers that you agreed to when you signed the contract. However, these numbers not always show you the actual amount of profit that your business should get from the new traffic.

Your SEO guys are not responsible for your content and not responsible for your marketing. They take you to the top of the world (search engines world) and how you deal with this furthermore is your headache, buddy.

Unfortunately, those SEO specialists that still work on hacking the search engines algorithms with their “brilliant minds” are doomed nowadays, especially considering the Rank Brain by Google (read my detailed article about it in my Ultimate SEO Guide for 2018).

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Your content should meet the user’s demands

Search engines are smart as f nowadays and you need not only to include the needed keywords in your text, but also make sure that your article meets the user’s demands. Basically, it means that you have to give straight answers in your article, just stop “pouring water” and give your potential customer what he wants to get.

That’s where you need to understand how Google, for example, works with websites and analyze if they meet those demands.

Back in 2015 Google released the Rankbrain feature for the search optimization. This is the algorithm learning AI system that learns how you interact with the search results and rank the results for the others based on the information that it gathers.

When they released the Rankbrain it was used only for 15% of all the search results, but now this feature is one of the most important things that affect the search results.

RankBrain takes into the consideration two things:

1. The time you spend on the page
2. The number of people who selected your page out of all the search results by this keyword

The logic behind that is pretty simple, cause if you stay on the page for so long, it’s obvious that you love it or simply consider it useful and dig into this information as deep as needed.

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Not every business needs content marketing

Sometimes content marketing is not an option for you. Let’s say you are a rental company that gives its customers a possibility to rent a car.

All you need to care about is your SEO rankings, covering all the needed keywords, gaining the highest SEO positions and giving your potential clients the clearest contact channel. Make it easy for them to get in touch with you and make the whole renting process easy and convenient.

However, if we could all give out rental contracts for cars, the whole marketing world would be too easy. Sometimes, you need to tell more about your services, so your customer could know what he’s up to when he’s about to work with your company.

Some people need media materials to consider your company as fitting his business demands, some of them want you to give him big longreads describing your services and some of them want you to give them a brief explanation of what you can do for them in the shortest possible form.

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SEO is only one tool

That’s where we need to admit that SEO is a great tool and it’s absolutely crucial for any business. However, we all need to remember that SEO is only one tool and you still have to use all the other screwdrivers and hammers from your toolbox in order to bring your business higher to the stars.

SEO agencies solve one of your problems and they do that greatly. Let these professionals do their job and bring you the numbers you need, the traffic and search engines ranking positions.

The only thing you should always keep in mind is the fact that you cannot agree with everything your SEO templates offer. Make sure you work with them closely, cause otherwise you will get pretty screwed up pieces of content that include lots of needed keywords, yet the content quality will suck.

You may need an article with the same keywords as your competitor. But it doesn’t mean that your article shouldn’t be more useful for the client that your competitor’s one.

Golden rule: SEO optimization should not screw up your content’s quality.

You will be told that your beautiful top-notch content will not get viewers without SEO optimization, but if you optimize your article simply for higher traffic rates, the users brought to your website will not find a decent content to read.

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Review your target audience

So how do you create the content that will actually meet the client’s demands? That’s not easy, but I can tell you for sure where to start this amazing journey: start by highlighting your target audience.

You should understand all audience groups that read your blog or website. You need to create a scheme and write down the following info:

• Who are they?
• What are they looking for?
• What are they afraid of?
• What do they want to achieve?
• What do they like?
• How can you help them?

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Final thoughts

My final guideline for your content marketing adventure is simple: your content marketing should start from your own blog or website. You should take it from the square one and move forward step-by-step like a SEO-optimized baby (sounds pretty damn horrible, but you get what I’m talking about).

Work on your content closely with your copywriters, SEO department and targeting managers and you’ll find that golden ratio for the perfect articles that will give you a chance to control your audience properly and market your services among them easily.

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