Being connected more than ever means brands are battling with each other to get their content shared with the wider world. Whether it’s posting on your blog, or sharing competitions on social media, you’re determined to get the kind of audience engagement that matches the quality of your content. But staying relevant can be difficult when the average consumer is bombarded with new articles and videos every day.
A recent statistics report showed that the median time people spend on articles is 37 seconds. Consumers are after engaging content they can skim through. Over time, the engagement builds up and increases brand recognition. So, how can your business use content to reach its full potential and rank highly on search engines? Here are four tips that will help you stay relevant.
Understand your personas
Getting into the mindset of your customer is essential to creating content that will resonate with them. What do they care about? Where in the world are they living? What problem do they have and how can you solve it?
The structure of your content should be geared around answering these questions. By following this approach, you’ll be able to optimise content and make it more searchable.
Format content
There’s nothing worse for a consumer than clicking onto an article and being greeted by a wall of text. It’s a big turn off, so you’ll want to make use of header tags to break up the article. H1, H2 and H3 formatting are all important.
The H1 headline needs to explain the overall theme of the article, while H2 should be used as subsection headers of H1 content. H3 is used for subsections of H2 content.
When writing the headers, make sure they are similar to the questions your customer is asking.
Understand natural language
Last year, mobile overtook desktop as the channel people use for carrying out online searches. Combine that with voice-recognition software and it’s becoming more likely consumers will search using natural language rather than keywords.
This means full sentences will be used in search engines. It’s another reason why your content should address specific questions, as more users will find your brand.
Make use of online resources to find new content ideas
Stuck on what to write about? There’s a wealth of online resources to help you get over that pesky writer’s block such as Google Alerts and Quora. For Google Alerts, all you have to do is log into your Gmail account, access the alerts part of the browser and type in a keyword. From then on you’ll receive emails on the latest news that relates to your topic.
Quora is a knowledge sharing hub that people access from around the world. By signing up, you’ll be able to type in a list of interests and search a range of articles that others have posted. This will given you an indication of what consumers are thinking about within a specific field and you’ll be able to produce content around the subject.
Combining your passion with the right content strategy will help you reach the right audience. Never forget that as long as you’re writing with conviction then someone will believe in what you’re trying to say.
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