Content marketing is a serious pain in the burro. It feels frivolous. It’s time consuming. The cherry on top of this sundae is the realization that, at first, most content will hardly generate direct leads or revenue.
Digital marketers driven by ROI (like the one currently feeling like he’s wasting his time writing this content marketing piece) have a tough time connecting the dots between marketing budget, lead generation, and creating blog content for the company website.
However, the connection between content and revenue is absolutely possible.
It only takes a little fox-like thinking, according to one of my favorite philosophers, Isaiah Berlin. That is to say, a bit of abstract thinking can yield some incredible results from executing a strategy for blog content.
There are 3 essential keys to publishing high-converting content:
1. A Blog Is The Gym Membership Of A Website. It Helps Keep The Site Fresh & Bulks It Up.
I love the gym membership analogy for a company blog. More than bulking up the site, a company blog also has another similarity to a gym membership.
We often write a blog when we’re “inspired”, much like purchasing a gym membership. However, it often falls in the background as we get busy with other pieces of life, like actually using a gym membership.
Anyone wishing to be the best or rank first, whatever side of the analogy you’re following, has to be consistent with going to the gym (or publishing blog content).
Search engines take in account how often a website is updated with new content when determining who should rank first. In addition, the number of pages within a website is also taken into account.
Content marketing takes care of both. It just takes a consistently executed plan to start gaining traction and turned into a revenue tool for your company.
2. Be The Answer To The Google Search Questions
The Hall-of-Fame basketball player, Allen Iverson, was known as The Answer. No one claimed ownership of The Question, so that portion of the puzzle remains a mystery. Although, I do sense a missed opportunity for an Iverson cameo when Batman took on The Riddler.
This basketball nickname conundrum brings us an interesting content marketing point (trust me).
One of the most popular forms of searches within Google are question-based searches. We’ve all done it. I’ve done it three times just writing this blog post (admittedly, one was to see the year Jerry Maguire was released (it was 1996)).
However, in order to be successful content marketers, we need to provide the answer before the questions are being asked. See? The Allen Iverson metaphor comes full circle.
A vast majority of these question-based searches are going to long-tail keywords. Meaning, they are a long string of keywords in a sentence structure, rather than other searches like “furniture store chicago.”
Typically, these long-tail keywords have significantly lower competition and are therefore easier to rank in the first spot on the Google Search Results Page (SERP).
By being predictive of these long-tail, question-based searches, you can position your company website in a prime position to not only answer customer questions (thereby building brand trust), but also capture those precious, precious clicks.
In addition, Google often features additional questions in the People Also Ask drop down listing for most question searches. So, not only are you directly answering customer questions, you’re also getting extra visibility by being ranked within an addition string of relevant questions.
This is why numbered content (like the one you’re currently reading) works so well. We are actually answering a question. For this one, it’s “why write a blog for a company”. Now, I didn’t just match that search query – I’m not a robot.
The trick is to creatively approach the question. Add some personality. Approach the topic by mixing around the keywords. Because creatively approaching the search data is the absolute key to the next benefit.
3. “Show Me The Links!” – Jerry Maguire, I Think
Haven’t seen the movie in a few years, but I’m pretty sure that’s the quote.
Terrible jokes aside, consistent blog content has a hidden gem at the center: backlinks.
Now, I’m thinking A Temple Of Doom reference would’ve worked better. Too late to go back now, I’m already onto the next paragraph.
The foundation of ranking higher for keywords within Google is the number of external and internal links pointing to and from each individual page on your website. The more links, Google determines that you’re a good reference for people searching, so you rank higher in the search engine results.
For example, the homepage of a website is often the highest trafficked page because of all the web directories linking the company listing to the homepage. More links equals higher rankings which equals more traffic.
With compelling blog content, you can generate links from other websites that are looking to do the same – build links to their own website. Moreover, more blogs creates more opportunities to gain links.
Even if you develop links to your blog pages, the overall number of links will help your site rank higher as a whole. So, other, more sales-based pages, become more authoritative and gain more traffic in higher-converting keywords.
Written by Zach Phillips, the CMO at McMillan & Phillips Digital Creative Agency.
