Are you struggling to write great content lately?
Do you find yourself struggling to write articles that are not only creative in their way but also have a content marketing strategy? Then you are at the right place as this article will tell you unique hacks to stay creative with an SEO driven content strategy.
So, how can you build an Effective SEO content strategy for greater gains?
First, let’s go through our basics: ‘What is SEO?’ and ‘Why is SEO important?’
What is SEO
Search Engine Optimization, which is popularly known as SEO, is the process of growing the quantity and quality of website traffic by expanding the visibility of a website or a web page to users of various web search engines. SEO helps in getting more exposure, and not only that, SEO helps in increasing the improvement of unpaid results (known as “natural” or “organic”) and does not include the purchase of paid placement in search results. It also includes image search, video search, academic search, etc.
Why is SEO important?
Paid advertising, social media marketing, and other online platforms can generate traffic to your website, yes, but search engines drive most online traffic. Natural search results cover the more digital area, appear more credible or genuine to tech-savvy searchers, and receive way more clicks than paid advertisements. Here are a few reasons why you need SEO to strive and thrive in today’s digital world:
Most pages are invisible
Most search engine users are more likely to click on one of the top 5 suggestions in the search engine result pages(SERPs).
According to the facts and figures, people do not generally go through the second page of search results because of a lack of patience and time, and thus to make a website visible, it should be on the first page of search results. To make it more visible, websites should make sure their content has enough SEO related keywords.
SEO is not only about visibility in top search results
Good SEO practices improve user experience, and users generally tend to trust websites more, which occupy the top position in SERPs for the keyword they are searching for.
Your competitors are already using SEO to steal your business and revenue
SEO can help you leave your competitors behind. If two websites sell the same or similar products, the SEO friendly website is likely to attract more customers and thus make more sales.
If you are just trying to attract customers through social media marketing, you can also guarantee that your competitors are overshadowing you where it matters the most. SEO is a lot more useful than social media.
SEO is responsible for 51% of website traffic and generates 40 % of revenue
Unique hacks to stay creative with an SEO driven content strategy
Over the past year, we have examined various ways to remain creative, even within a primarily SEO-driven strategy. Here let’s dive into a few tips and tricks to ensure you don’t have to sacrifice your very own creative freedom for organic growth.
Communicate with experts to spark creativity while ensuring posts are still SEO-driven
If you feel uncomfortable by a topic you know nothing about, do not hesitate to reach out to experts – even within your own company or from a different industry/organization to understand the given topic better and thus, write a fantastic piece about it. Their passion for the given subject will motivate you enough to write about it creatively and uniquely. Keyword-driven or SEO-driven content still leaves ample room to angle the piece in several interesting directions, as long as the insights you are providing aligns with the given keyword’s intent.
Content should be unique
Content plays a major role in attracting traffic to your website and staying unique and creative. If your content is not unique and creative, your content strategy, however smart, will not work out. The more unique and creative your content is, the more your website will be credible and rank well in search engine algorithms. Keep your content juicy, fresh, and make sure you write things that go viral. This will help you increase your rank in various SERPs and make your website stay at the top.
Interview leaders in different industries and tell their stories
Your industry undoubtedly has leaders that not only interest you but also influence you in a way. If you are a marketer for an e-commerce website, we suggest you try reaching out to e-commerce consultants to get quotes about the industry’s future.
It is not impossible to align your interests with your content. As someone who is personally interested in accountancy and economics, for instance, I was able to find the intersection between these two disciplines and workplace performance. Finally, it is of utmost importance to consider who you are interested in speaking with and how that expert’s experience might align with your audience’s interests, problems, questions, and brainstorm ideas from there.
Find the human angle
The easiest way to find a human connection is to consider the reader’s perspective when searching for a Google topic. Start by asking yourself the right set of questions, ask yourself, “Why would I ever search for this topic? Why did I use these specific sets of keywords?”
Nowadays, Google is increasingly trying to continue a “searcher’s journey” through People Also Ask boxes, People Also Search For, and Related Search links at the bottom of almost all Search Engine Results Page (SERPs).
These features allow them to rethink, reshape their search, and find similar, relevant answers to other related questions. Anyone searching for one keyword is ultimately searching for that keyword as a part of a larger marketing and business strategy. As a content writer or creator, you need to find the bigger picture element and use these new SERP features to tell more creative and unique stories around the topic at hand.
Use multimedia to add freshness to relatively old content
If you are struggling with an incredibly boring and dry topic, you might evoke creativity by adding multimedia elements like podcasts, YouTube videos, images, or graphs, all of which open up new traffic engaging opportunities since you can generate image traffic through the SERPs as well. These things help you stay engaged when writing the piece, and can also help your post rank on SERPs since search engines prefer multimedia elements such as images or videos.
Frame your content well
You should frame your content from a unique angle that differentiates it from other search results. You should consider provocative arguments you can make, as the uniqueness and sometimes controversy of your content will help you to increase ranks on the SERPs while providing a relatively fresh and exciting write-up to your audience.
Interact with your readers whenever possible
If you engage with your audience from time to time, you will understand their point of view, problems better, find new traffic engaging content ideas, and, last but not least, create quality content. The good news is that there are various ways to communicate with your audience. You can start by reading comments on your social media or blog.
Mostly, users online have no problem to leave complaints or positive reviews.
This way, you get constructive criticism or feedback about your content and your niche. If your audience has unanswered questions in your articles, you can create new content that answers them. For real-life communication types, you can connect with people from your niche using chats and live videos on the internet.
You must use all the available ways and get the best of your audience. One of the positive sides of your engagement with your target audience is that you can figure out trends and keywords before there is any data about them. You should keep in mind that online tools have data that is gathered in the past. Your readers will mention the problems that they have right now.
Generate ideas from your existing content
A niche that describes a specific topic has a lot of content. It will mention things that have been not analyzed before, but turn out to help your target audience. You can add internal links from your older articles to the new ones. This process includes a lot of value for SEO.
Even when the new topics are not relevant to any keyword, the new content adds value to your website and the articles linked. Many readers will read both the new and older content and remain longer on your website. An example of this is Wikipedia, which has many internal links on almost every page, and search engines love it.
Conclusion
It is not impossible to stay creative with an SEO-driven content strategy if you follow the tips above. Your problems will become ideas for your content when you are focused on helping your audience.
Read More: How can content marketing improve your seo
