SEO is Not a Sprint but a Marathon
April 12, 2016A Case Study on How Creating Content Really Does Increase Website Traffic
April 19, 2016Google rewards sites that have fresh, shareable content that people click into. The more clickable, shareable content you create, the more authority you have as an author. Let me explain.
Google’s main product is you and you need to continue to come back to Google so they can sell advertising to their customers, the advertisers. Youwill keep coming back to their website because you continue to receive the content you desire. You want it to be relevant and up-to-date. A page that is more than two years old (as some About Us pages are) is irrelevant in Google’s eyes. The content is old and may be outdated. This leaves you with no choice but to create new content regularly.
How Do I Create Content for My Site?
Let’s make the assumption for a moment that you are an expert in what you do. I am pretty sure that you answer customer questions regularly. What do they ask? Could you expand on those questions? This could be the start of a blog post. Are there new regulations in your industry that effect your customers? Can you explain it in simple terms? How about weighing the pros and cons?
Could you create a list (perhaps a top 10 list) of items that can help your customers? People LOVE lists! We all have lists: todo lists, wish lists, bucket lists, grocery lists and the list goes on. (Pun intended) Why not feed into that insatiable need to have a list of something?
How Do I Know If I Am Creating the Right Content for My Site?
There is a simple technique that you can use to find out if you are creating content people want… use Google. Here’s a trick I tell my clients who get stuck on the content creation front. Go to the Google home page? Start to ask a question or type in a topic. Don’t go too fast as you want to see what Google uses to pre-populate the search. I suggest type one word at a time. What comes up?
What this technique does is tells you what other people are searching for. For example, your company, a pet insurance company, may have “pet insurance” and classify it as such. Everyone else searches for insurance for dogs. You can do a blog post “How much insurance is needed for my dog?” Google will see the word pattern “insurance for dogs” and rank it higher in search. Add that with the fact that you are posting regularly, you will see more of your content rising to the top of the page.
See, it’s not that hard.
One last thing… Make Your Headlines Interesting
Say it in the headline because the reader may never get to the content. Remember this: we are scanners. We scan webpages, newspapers, magazines, TV channels and we don’t stop until we find something that catches our attention. For example, not many can pass by a headline of “10 Reasons to Lift Weights with Your Vagina” (I’m not making this up). I was curious and I don’t even have a vagina. As ironic as this sounds, we have very little time to engage in content. We are literally choosing in an instant whether or not to engage in something. You need a hook without it your content is sunk. Beyond the search results, we want people to click on our content. This helps our authorship authority. In the end, if your content is not interesting, you can post all you want, no one is going to read it.