Creating a robust content marketing strategy can be a challenge but is extremely important for SEO. Search engines crawl content for information that helps them index your pages correctly and help you rank in search results. Having a good SEO content strategy improves your website's visibility on search engines, helping to drive traffic. Furthermore, well thought out content will increase conversions by encouraging people to purchase your products/services.
The Top 3 Challenges of Content Marketing in 2021
1. Creating content that drives traffic
Solution 1: Create a content strategy based on the buyer journey
Truly understanding your customers is the first step in content marketing. If you understand customers' needs and expectations throughout the different stages of the buyer journey, then you can build a strategy that drives traffic through each stage of the funnel. Your content decisions should be based on user behaviour data that you continuously collect and analyse.
Solution 2: Research and understand search intent
Search intent is the reason why someone conducts a specific search, and forms part of the buyer journey. For example, are they looking for information, are they searching for a specific website, or are they looking to buy something? Keyword research will play an important role in planning content for search intent. Read more about the different types of searcher intent on SEMRush's blog.
Solution 3: Make use of long-tail keywords
Long-tail keywords are usually more specific search phrases, and are particularly beneficial when there’s a lot of competition in your market. Although long-tail keywords get less search traffic, they usually have a higher conversion value because competition is lower and they're targeted. Spend some time researching long-tail keywords before writing each content piece.
2. Keeping the target audience engaged in your content
Solution 1: Get creative with content formats
Diversify your content and get creative with different formats. Blogs will always play a major role in content marketing but by getting creative and focusing on user experience you can really engage with consumers and stand out from the competition. Research and test new formats of interactive and immersive content across all digital channels.
Solution 2: Regularly review performance and update your content strategy
Content marketing works best as an ongoing process. By auditing your content on a regular basis, you can test and learn what works best and is most favoured by your audience. Consumer behaviour is always changing online which is why regular analysis and an agile strategy is important for continued success.
3. Creating content that converts
Solution 1: Have a specific goal for each piece of content
Content should never be created for the sake of it, instead, you should have a clear, measurable goal in mind for each piece of content. This brings us back to the importance of understanding your audience and creating content for different stages of the user journey. Some examples of content goals include boosting blog traffic, growing an email list or increasing landing page conversions.
Solution 2: Create content for each stage of your funnel to create paths to conversion
A content strategy should look at each funnel stage. Plan an equal amount of content for each stage in order to create conversion paths that assist your customers through the buyer journey.
From your regular content audits, choose the content that already converts well and ensure there’s stable traffic flow to this content. Make sure other teams in your company know about this content, especially your sales team who can hopefully use the content in their own efforts.
By investing in an SEO Content strategy, you can help ensure long-term success by building stronger relationships with your customers and improving brand recall. We are here to help you with the many challenges of content marketing.
Our Content Team at Bell can help you create an SEO content strategy by helping you understand your audience and the different content formats. We use analytics to make optimisations and improve your long-term strategy.
Want to know what other SEO trends will be important in 2021 and beyond? Check out our 5 SEO trends to include in your 2021 strategy article.
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