Content marketing and SEO are both giants in modern marketing. As forward-looking marketers, we must take both into account and perfectly integrate the two methods.
Determine the user’s focus and hot topics.
Q: What kind of content is good and what we are looking for?
A: Good content is the right content, and the right content is what the customer group needs.
So, how do you understand the hot topics that your target customers are concerned about and discussing? The author introduces several tools that can quickly find topics.
1. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo (buzzsumo.com) can provide data support for social sharing volume. It is a powerful tool for mining topics and verifying whether a topic is popular. Enter relevant keywords and you can see related hot articles that have been shared more times on social platforms. These hot articles are usually some hot topics. In addition to the total number of shares of each article, you can also see the number of shares of the article on Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter. Everyone knows the importance of social media. Many successful marketing campaigns started from social media. Therefore, social sharing data largely determines the success of content marketing under a certain topic. 2. Content Explorer Ahrefso’s Content Explorer is also a good tool for researching content topics. Enter a keyword or URL to get a list of the most popular articles related to it. Most importantly, the tool will also give indicators for each article in terms of social sharing, organic search traffic, and the number of external link domains. Social shares: means “social sharing”, which refers to the number of times the corresponding article is shared on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Organic taffe: means “organic search traffic”, which refers to the monthly organic search traffic of the corresponding article. Referring domains: means “number of external link domains”, which refers to how many external links the corresponding article has received, that is, the number of external link domains. The higher these three indicators are, the better the corresponding article is, the more popular the related topic is, and the more worth choosing it is.
3. SEMrush’s Topic Research
SEMrush provides a tool called Topie Research to help users better create and organize content topics. Discover new topics and related questions that can help create content and answer audience questions; use competitors’ existing content to get content ideas and see how they organize titles and articles.
Link: https://www.semrush.com/topic-research.
In addition, Google Trends, BuzFeed, Twitter Trending, NewsWhip, etc. are also some tools to help sellers get good inspiration. I won’t explain them one by one here.
Finally, don’t forget to study your competitors to see what content they have published recently. Content with good feedback is usually popular and user-interested topics.
Keyword research.
After determining the popular topics (more social sharing + large search volume), we basically understand what content needs to be created, but how to ensure that the content can appear in front of the target audience in a timely manner? This is inseparable from keyword research and SEO.
In content marketing, keywords can be divided into the following three categories according to the marketing funnel.
1. Information category
Users who search for information words may just want to learn about the business out of curiosity, but they may not necessarily have a purchase demand. However, sellers can use this to leave an impression on users through the content they create, so that users can know the business content. When the searched content appears frequently and users click frequently, their impression of the product will gradually deepen.
Information words are usually difficult to rank on Google, but content marketing has this SEO advantage. If we do a good job of content marketing and SEO around these words and appear more in front of users, users may buy our products or services.
2. Consideration category
These words are usually long-tail words. Users who search for these words are aware of the product demand, but they need to look for suggestions everywhere, compare prices and functions, and then decide whether to buy.
If we promote authentic and reliable content around these words to guide users and establish users’ trust in us, the possibility of users buying will increase.
3. Decision-making keywords
These keywords are usually very specific long-tail keywords. Users who search for these keywords are those who actually want to make a purchase. They already trust the seller’s brand and are familiar with the seller’s products or services.
People who search for these keywords either become paying customers or are difficult to convert. Therefore, for users of these search keywords, we must pay attention to our words and focus on providing services such as free trials or special offers to promote conversion.
Write original high-quality articles + optimize articles.
1. Create original high-quality articles
(1) Keep the title as short and attractive as possible.
(2) Avoid grammatical and spelling errors. I recommend a checking tool, Small SEO Tools, at http://alslolooco.org/graomaorchecker/.
(3) Use both pictures and texts. Use appropriate pictures. Visually is recommended. It lists a large number of infographics. URL: hpt:isual./vi/wvoe
(4) Layout keywords reasonably and naturally. Try to cover all of them. Do not miss decision-making keywords.
(5) Layout brand names and company names reasonably.
(6) Be long (more than 2,000 words are recommended) and not redundant.
(7) Continuously update and optimize content to keep up with the times.
(8) If your writing skills are not up to par, you can pay someone to write on outsourcing platforms such as Fiverr.
2. Page optimization
(1) Keep the URL short and put three or four main keywords.
(2) Do not use stop words in the URL and title.
(3) Optimize TDK.
(4) Optimize images, name them with keywords, compress them and upload them, and improve the ALT tag, which is the text prompt of the image on the website.
(5) Keywords should appear in the first 100 words.
(6) Important keywords should be placed in the Heading tag0, or in bold, italicized font.
(7) Avoid lengthy sentences and use more spaces and line breaks.
(8) Reasonably arrange internal links and export links.
(9) Improve the loading speed of web pages.
(IV) Implement strategies and monitor results
After creating high-quality content, we also need to promote and market the content and monitor the results.
For the content published on our own website, we can share it on social networking sites, such as Facebook’s homepage and Group, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, etc. We can also share it on relevant forums and related Q&A platforms. After the article is included, we can contribute to guest blogs, and appropriately do some high-quality external links and email promotion and marketing.
For content posted on other websites, we need to filter out low-quality websites before submitting, and submit to high-quality news websites and guest blogs.
As for the effect, we can use tools such as Google Analystic, SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc. to monitor the traffic and external links brought by the content, the number of shares on social networking sites, the impact on keyword rankings, the impact on online inquiries or sales, etc. In this way, we can determine which topics have better content effects and are more valuable, so as to adopt a data-driven approach to select new topics.