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By David Rome, Head of Content Strategy at BikeExchange
It’s commonly said that ‘creating content’ helps to bring people to site through online search, but such a vague statement is likely to overwhelm many and rarely leads to success, let alone action.
Traditional SEO (search engine optimisation) of picking keywords and placing them on the page has been replaced with search engines providing the ‘best’ and most helpful responses to the query.
Building an online presence takes time and resources, if you do things right along the way you’ll build credibility and trust, leading to stronger rankings in search results.
Here are a few tips to get you started on the road to creating content that will connect with your tribe:
- Before creating content, you need to define exactly who your customer is. The more broad you try to be, the more competition you’ll have in trying to reach them. Really delve in, find your niche and target them.
- What are your goals for the content? Do you just want people to check out your site? Do you want people at the point of research or are you just seeking customers ready for purchase? Knowing what you want from your traffic will further define what content you should be creating. Here you can decide on whether you want your content to build trust, educate or perhaps just convert. Keep in mind that successfully reaching your potential customers at various points of the purchase cycle means multiple pieces of content.
- Knowing your customer and when you want to reach them will let you discover what they may be typing into a search engine. It’s these questions and requests (known as ‘keywords’) that you want to target and answer. Google’s AdWords ‘KeyWord Finder’ is a popular (and free) tool to discover the demand on specific keywords (or actual products), it can also help reveal related keywords. ‘Google Trends’ is another tool that’s great to see if the topic is seasonal and whether it offers growth.
- Now with these keywords at hand, speak to your potential customers with authenticity and seek to offer them value. Creating content isn’t always easy in this sense, it needs to be unique and useful. And unique and useful may not be enough, be sure to check what competition exists on your chosen keyword, if competition is high, go back to the first point and delve deeper in your niche.
- Content comes in many forms. Blogs are a popular and proven method for gaining new site users, but they’re by far and away from being the only option. Video, white papers, quizzes, infographics and podcasts are other popular digital content approaches. For example, if you’re seeking customers at the point of purchase, then perhaps put your content focus on your product pages, here a helpful guide to the product, perhaps with a unique and original video or infographic is likely to earn you more valuable traffic than a simple product description.
