Marketing teams and business owners understand that their written articles can increase traffic and drive sales, and what’s more, it’s a marketing strategy that can be used by any industry or business from nail salons to industrial engineers.
Quality content that ranks high in search will attract clicks from users and send visitors to your site who are looking for information or answers to questions. If you can create attractive content that aligns with search intent, your pages can attract hundreds, and in some cases, thousands of visitors a day.
This is great news for businesses who need to keep a healthy stream of leads coming in and written content is effective at generating business and capturing information.
Align with search intent
It has been mentioned already, but creating content that aligns with user search intent is one of the best methods to rank high on Google or other search engines. Think about keywords or phrases associated with your business that users are likely to search for and then create content using that information.
Content can be written as a series of articles to answer different questions around a topic or to provide helpful advice in the form of how-to guides or instructional content. Write enough of these article types and you can build a knowledge base that could become a go-to resource for people who are looking for answers.
Create clusters of content
Content can be created in clusters or around pillars of one main topic to increase ranking ability. One single page has the power to rank on the first page of a search, but clusters of content have a better chance. As you write each piece of content you should be linking it to related topics or articles.
This gives your website a structure that is easier for search engines to read and adds more strength and authority to your site giving it a better chance of a higher rank position.
Content clusters, sometimes called content pillars can be used to build a substantial amount of content around a single topic.
Use popular keywords
With the recent release of Google’s helpful content update, some people are wondering if keywords still hold the same importance when crafting website content. Keywords are still important, but equally important are things like content quality and page load speed.
Google is concerned with enhancing the user experience and providing the best response to queries possible, so churned-out, low-quality content will not work as effectively as high-quality pieces. Even so, it is still necessary to snake it clear what content is about so keywords and keyword search tools that identify content gaps and opportunities are still valuable.
Answer questions
One of the best ways to provide the kind of helpful content that Google is seeking is to answer questions. These can be questions from your customers about your company or how to use your products, or you can write pieces that answer general questions about your industry. You could create factual pieces containing the latest news, or generate insider guides that show expert tips on how to use your business products. Concentrate on quality, informative content that provides real value to your users.
Include a call to action
Now you know the kind of content you need to create you will want to focus on the lead-generating aspect of your work. With most people gravitating to your blog pages in response to a web search it provides an excellent opportunity for capturing information. A call to action can be as simple as an end-of-page link to take users to your main site where they can browse, or it may be more complex.
A call to action could lead page visitors to a whole new landing page or it may open up a form that requests their information. Make your call to action compelling and you will increase the chance of capturing lead information. You could also offer a lead magnet in exchange for information.
For example: if your website and articles are in the property investing industry, then your call to action may be something like ‘Click here to get your free property investors ebook; packed with 20 inside investing tips’. In exchange for their information, site users will be able to download your ebook, and as they are receiving something for free, they are more likely to part with their contact information.
Use a popup window
A great way to gain lead information from your blog pages is to add a popup to collect client information or add to an email marketing list. There are plenty of tools available which can be used to customize your popups and create targeted messages to show to website users. In addition, popups can be quite versatile and can be made more effective by changing things like when the popup will display and different trigger events.
For example, visitors to your site may see your popup when they scroll to a certain position of your page, or your popup window may display after a set number of seconds on site. Some popups can detect user activity and identify when a user is about to leave your site, with the right settings your popup can appear and collect user information before they exit.
Popups work effectively because they appear on the screen in front of your webpage, sometimes dimming the background to highlight the popup window even more. This concentrates the website visitors focus on one single message and removes all possible distractions until they close the window, making popups a super effective lead capture tool. If you have a site containing 250 blog posts that’s 250 lead-generation opportunities that will be accessed every time someone lands on your page.
Add to your website content today with affordable blog posts from Smarcomms.