“Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.” These are words by Theodore Roosevelt that have been spun by throngs of leaders, influencers, and motivational speakers worldwide. It rings true to this day, even in content marketing.
As Rand Fishkin, Moz co-founder, relates, “the content you share with the world needs to offer a distinct benefit; otherwise, no one will care.”
If your content is not solving problems and meeting the needs of your readers, then who is that content for?
You are making content for people, for successful conversions and authority in your market niche. To be able to do that successfully, you have to shift your focus to the needs of people that actually show up in search intent or queries on search engines.
7 ways you can make high-quality content that solves problems:
-
Provide answers to your audience’s search intent.
There were about 2.3 trillion Google searches in 2019. Search intent is the most essential SEO factor and is the driving force of your marketing campaigns. You want to rank organically in search engines, be found, and connect with your target market.
To be able to do so, you have to be answering the questions that people type on search engines. These are keywords and key phrases they type to look for answers and solutions that will add value to their lives. If you can discover what questions your target market is asking, you can start to deliver content that best responds to their search intent. It doesn’t matter if you have a wonderful website. If it’s not what people need or want, then it’s all a waste. So take time to know the pulse of your audience and find out what they care about.
When you produce good content, it causes a chain reaction and brings in more quality leads. You can create evergreen or whitepaper content, infographics, blogs, and even use multimedia to spice up your content. No matter what your content is, it should be giving solutions to your audience’s search intent. It has to be consistently valuable and relevant to your readers.
-
Include clear instructions.
When you are giving answers, do not just give generic answers for the sake of producing content and ranking for keywords. Genuinely give your audience answers that matter. For instance, if you are teaching about cybersecurity, guide them by the hand and point out different security software, how they compare to each other, and what best suits them.
Also, include details such as how to install the software and how to set it up. The more quality you add to the content, the more it helps your audience. Search engines will take notice of how long your readers are dwelling on your page, clicking links, bookmarking your page, sharing, and other engagements. The more useful an article is, the more readers would want to share them with others.
People don’t just want information, they want a presentation, demonstration, and quality solutions. Add pictures, infographics, and even how-to videos or commentaries if needed. I found a site with step-by-step tutorials, which showed me in less than an hour exactly how to use the program. I have since returned to that site to use some of their other tutorials. Likewise, you should spend some time figuring out what products or issues confuse your site visitors and figure out ways to clarify the product or issue for them.
-
Produce right and timely content
You need to get your content right. You need to be consistent in producing high-quality content to sustain the customer’s trust and authority as a brand.
Joanna Lord, Vice-President of Marketing at Porch and CMO at Skyscanner, said, “Content is a commitment, not a campaign.”
Quality content creation is not a one-time thing. Making a website of high value that solves people’s problems need careful planning and passionate commitment to your audience and excellence. It takes commitment to build an enduring content strategy that nurtures your relationship with your market well. This kind of commitment is what brings in that stable revenue your website needs.
Whenever you make content, think outside the campaign. Yes, you need to cater your content to what you are currently promoting, but you should also think of its long-term implication to your brand.
Your storyline needs to remain consistent through different campaigns you run to stay credible and believable to your audience. Sometimes, when you don’t plan well, you write something “out of character” that can bring confusion or doubt to your brand’s identity. Slowly but surely wins the race of building trust. Trust takes a while to build and a moment to destroy, thus, all the more we need to be strategic with the content we put out.
Use tools so you can measure how your content is doing. If something is not working, if the content is not right, no amount of boosting will make the content high-value. So better fix your content right away and adjust where needed.
-
Provide Internal Links and Reliable backlinks
91% of all pages never get any organic traffic from Google, mostly due to the fact they don’t have backlinks. Backlinks do matter. The more backlinks your page has, the more search traffic it can potentially get from Google. And as your traffic increases, so will the occurrences of referring domains.
Write long-form content with more than 2,000+ words. Also, be generous in facilitating your audience to other pages that relate to the content, or even to other blogs or websites that may further help your readers. Don’t be intimidated by keeping your audience just within the walls of your website. Lead them to other useful links, websites, forums, and the like.
-
Use High-quality videos, pictures, infographics, and the like
Utilise the different media and creative platforms available to make your content more dynamic.
You can try the following, as you see fit and relevant for your content:
-
- Infographics: a display of info in an ocular way. Infographics are a crowd favourite and usually get shared more. Infographics are perfect for getting information out in an engaging, visual format. Infographics get social likes and shares three times more often than other forms of content. Tools such as Canva.com helps you make infographics for free, and they have several templates to choose from.
If you have the funds, you can use Visual.ly. templates to choose from and to edit. Hire a professional if you can to create stunning and informative infographics to help your audience understand your content even more. People will share content they are confident will also help others. So, these readers become advertising channels for your webpage.
-
- Videos: good video communication makes your content more dynamically and memorably. A high-quality video can be very persuasive and engaging, good for your conversion rates and revenue. You can create live streams, tours, explainer videos, MTV’s, infomercials, and the like. You’ve got to get the script right. You can commission professional video editors or try video editing tools for beginners that help you produce professional-looking videos. Post your videos on YouTube or Vimeo, and even on Facebook stories or IGTV. Get your content out there, so your audience knows you produce exciting and varied content.
-
Explore other forms of content
You can try producing other forms of content once in a while to add some variety to your website.
-
- Guides: Guides are utility content and usually long-form, about 2,000 to 2,500 words and above. They contain text and other visual materials to add more in-depth information. They will also include statistical data and other research to back the information within the content. A guide needs to be researched extensively and requires good writing skills and excellent design merged together seamlessly to produce one high-value content. These types of materials even become evergreen content that gets referred to time and again.
Usually, a downloadable pdf is also provided for the sake of readers that deem your material canon for that particular topic or search intent. In this way, guides are excellent for clickthroughs and lead generation, harvesting email addresses easily in exchange for your valuable guidance.
-
- Book Reviews: A book review can be complicated or straightforward, based on what you want to produce. You can introduce the book, the author, and summarise the book’s major points. You can also share your opinions about the book, what you like about it, and how you think it can add value to the lives of your audience. This works like a backlink or reference link. You can provide a call to action so your readers can purchase the book for themselves.
You can choose to rant about books too. A fair warning, though, it can turn off some followers or subscribers who do not support and tolerate this kind of activity. It’s better to stick to providing content that can ADD value to your audience. If writing a negative book review will not do that, then do not produce such content at all.
-
- Opinion Posts: Opinion posts, on the other hand, works like a book review, but this time, you can address trending topics and search intent queries of your target market. Be mindful when producing such content, that you maintain the website and social media etiquette and preserve the integrity and credibility of your site. Just like with the book review, if what you will say will not help your audience and add value to their lives, edit those out. Keep a standard of excellence, even if you are producing content other than your conventional ones.
- Product Reviews: product reviews can help establish your credibility, authority, and leadership in your market niche. You can share your experience with the product, provide recommendations, and maybe a guide on how to use a product well.
You can introduce the product, the maker, provide detailed descriptions, how to use your overall experience, and your recommendations. Provide a call to action as well. Recommend the product or service to your audience if you think it can help them. It’s like going ahead of your readers and exploring these products for them to see if it’s a good buy or not. You do the legwork for them so they don’t have to.
-
- Memes: Memes are a refreshing break from conventional content you may usually put out. Do not overuse them, though, as you want to maintain a high-value website. It’s good to inject now and then, and if you use a good one, they might even go viral that directs huge traffic to your site.
People love humour, and that’s why memes are a hit. They don’t require professional design skills. There are tools like Meme Generator that lets you add your own text to popular meme images. Memes are an excellent come-on in your social media sites, where they can get viral and draw more traffic. The good thing about memes is that they can be adjusted for any niche.
Again, use memes with caution. Make sure that when memes do lead traffic to your site, they find high-value content that will want them to linger on your website. Beyond the meme, they need to see substance in your content for them to become subscribers, followers, and even valued customers.
-
Keep content updated
It is essential to check your content and keep them relevant. If you have used dates and facts in an article, update these details when necessary. Remove outdated content or maybe spin some articles to make them more relevant.
Your aim is to ensure that whenever your readers come to your website, there is something new, and your website remains fresh. That is a mark of a high-quality website that has its readers in mind all the time.
Accurate Google Tips To Produce High-quality Content
Looking for accurate Google tips for high-quality content? For a long time, Google has been laying emphasis on the need to create high-quality content in order to meet high-rank standards. Even so, the tech giant has not offered meaningful assistance to people striving to create high-quality SEO content, until recently.
Last month, the company’s Developer Relations Group released five different guides to the public that are targeted at helping its own creators to come up with “high-quality documentation.” When posted online, “documentation” means digital content.
One of the most effective ways to meet the standards required for content to deserve a high rank on Google is by following these guidelines, which are what the company has set for its own content creators. These guides are just but a few of the tools that are internally used by the tech giant.
They are as follows:
- Keyword research guide
- CSS/HTML style guide
- Java-style guide
- Anchor text structuring guide for readability and Google
- JavaScript style guide
- Developer documentation guide
-
Content creating tips based on Google developer documentation guide
- Use a familiar and friendly tone with a well-defined purpose — similar to the voice you use when chatting with friends and that you would use if you were a machine.
- Your content ought to use standard American capitalization, punctuation, spelling, and grammar.
- Try to understand what users are in need of by sounding knowledgeable.
- Create short, concise, clear sentences with simple-to-understand words for users.
- Use short sentences and accessible words that are easily translatable to other languages.
- Employ descriptive and effective text in your backlinks.
- For sequences of events, consider numbered lists.
- Make sure that the outbound links you use are to sites with reliable, respectable and high-quality content.
-
Keyword research tips for content creators
- Craft a list of relevant, important topics based on your business/service
- Identify some keywords that are relevant to those topics
- Research related keywords on Google if you are struggling to come up with more
- Check for a mix of long-tail keywords and head terms in each topic
- Make use of Google AdWords Keyword planner to cut down your search term list
-
Google developer documentation guide for technical creators/developers
- Use optimized .png files or SVG files containing ALT text.
- Place your lists and tables appropriately.
- Include or as appropriate — is for visual emphasis and is for high importance items.
- Use HTML5 in UTF8 for HTML templates without BOMs (byte order marks).
- Consider 3-character hexadecimal notation instead of 6 characters for colours, as they are more succinct and shorter.
- Use CSS for the visual style and HTML for structure Anchor text structuring guide for readability and Google
- The less exact anchor text you utilize, the more powerful your content becomes
- Avoid slang, technical jargon, exclamation marks and buzzwords
- Refrain from beginning your sentences in the same way
- Don’t use the word ‘please’ in the instructions
- Avoid CSS hacks and extreme metaphors
- Avoid redundant ancestor pickers that help enhance performance
- Don’t use placeholder phrases, such as “at this time” or “please note”
- Avoid null anchor text, such as “click here” on your content
-
Use a Conversational Tone
According to a recent report by MarketingProfs, more than 2 million articles are published online every day. This means that users are overwhelmed and can find articles on virtually any topic in the blink of an eye. To ensure that your article content resonates with the audience, is read, and shared, it is imperative that you use a conversational tone.
That is, write the content using a friendly tone and a writing style that will make it easy for the audience to read and relate to it. Most of the content that goes viral online is a conversation, that is, the creator uses a friendly voice similar to the one that you would use when offering advice or discussing a topic with a friend, colleague or family member.
The bottom line is that, make sure you use a conversational tone when creating content for your business website or blog to spur engagement with the target audience. Any other tone will result in little or no results as it will not resonate with the readers.
-
Understand the Needs of the Target Audience
Before you embark on creating content, understand the needs of each segment of your target audience. What do they want to know or learn from your website? The answers to this question will provide ideas on what you should write and how you should present the information.
Fine-tune the content in such a way that it shows them that you are an expert in your niche. Use plenty of references and research studies to support your recommendations. More importantly, be consistent in your writing style and tone to build a strong following.
-
Consider the Audience When Writing
As mentioned earlier, millions of articles are posted online, so you need to make sure that your content stands out from the crowd and communicates with the target audience effectively. One of the guaranteed ways of achieving this goal is by considering your audience when writing each piece of content that you intend to publish on your website.
You can achieve this by using short, concise, and clear sentences that contain words that are easy to understand. Extensive research about the audience will help you to know the type of words that you should use or not use. Jargon will make it difficult for the audience to understand the message you are trying to put across so avoid them.
Short sentences will make it easy for the audience to read the article and take the desired actions. Go the extra mile and use words that can be easily translated into other languages especially if you are targeting readers from different countries.
-
Be Careful With Outbound Links
Outbound links will add relevance to your content and enhance onsite SEO. Over the years, Google has become stricter; it will not hesitate to penalize you if outbound linking is not done correctly. Stay safe by making sure that every outbound link that you include in your content to support the facts direct the readers to other websites or platforms that are reliable and respectable. More importantly, the content published on the said website should be of high value and related to your niche for the SEO benefit to be achieved.
-
Use Numbered Lists
When writing guides or any other form of content that entails a sequence of events or processes, it is recommended to use numbered lists. The list will make it easy for the reader to understand the sequence and follow it later. Before publishing this kind of content on your website or blog, make sure that the sequence is correct to avoid misleading the audience and compromising your credibility online.
-
Keyword Usage
Keywords are phrases or individual words that the target audience uses to look for information related to your niche, products or services on search engines such as Google. Unlike in the past when it was difficult to identify these words and phrases, there is a plethora of software that you can use to carry out extensive keyword research.
Use them to know which keywords you should incorporate in your content to enhance its visibility on search engines as well as onsite SEO. If you are on a tight budget, you can use a free tool such as Google Keyword Planner for this purpose. It is equally effective, and thousands of businesses use it to optimize their content.
-
Use Visuals
Numerous studies have proved that audiences respond to visuals better than blocks of text. Visuals will help you pass the intended message to the target audience well. This does not mean that you should stop publishing articles on your blog.
Go against the grind and spice up the articles with high-quality images that are related to the content. You can also embed videos that the audience can watch to learn more about the topic. Infographics are also great at capturing the attention of the audience and conveying the intended message compared to conventional articles.
Nowadays, there are plenty of graphic design tools online that you can use to create stellar visuals for your content. Alternatively, you can hire a professional graphic designer to create them for you. Whichever option you opt for, rest assured that the visuals will spice up your website or blog content, spur engagement with the target audience, and help you relate better with your readers.
Bonus Tips
-
Meta Description Tag
Meta description tag helps to draw the readers in by giving them an idea of what the article is offering. The search engines also display this part of the content on the search engine results page (SERPs). Ideally, the meta description should be compelling, readable and include high-value keywords to enhance the click-through rate.
-
Call-to-Action (CTA)
Enhance your content ability to convert readers into customers by including a call-to-action. Add a link by hyperlinking certain words such as “contact us” or “click here” to the landing pages or any other page on your website.
These are Google’s general guidelines for text documentation that are meant for use by the tech giant’s internal content creators. Nonetheless, they provide an interface into the factors that the company considers as essential for the creation of high-quality content. As such, they would be of great assistance to content creators and marketers looking for highly valuable tips to boost their content creation efforts for high ranking on Google.
MediaOne can help you create SEO content for your website or blog and also give you more Google tips for high-quality content. . Get in touch with us for more details about our digital marketing services.
Conclusion: Think Like a Customer
Think like a customer, says Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Group. He adds, “You can never go far wrong by thinking like a new customer.” Walk in their shoes, get into their heads and get their pulse. What makes them tick? What do they look for? What can bring value to their lives?
Your market is going to keep changing. You need to be in tune with these changes, not just to keep up but to even be intuitive and prepare even before the changes do happen. This does not happen overnight. This comes out of the years you study your market, build networks and relationships.
When you have this mentality, you’ll genuinely be able to provide excellent customer service and experience that they will keep coming back for. Amid competition, you will not easily lose loyal customers when they feel secure with you and the way you nurture the trust that they gave you. Stay appealing and endearing to your customers, then, through high-quality content that solves problems and makes their lives much better.
 |
John Ocampos is an Opera Singer by profession and a member of the Philippine Tenors. Ever since Digital Marketing has always been his forte. He is the Founder of SEO-Guru and the Managing Director of Tech Hacker. John is also the Strategic SEO and Influencer Marketing Manager of Software Australia – the leading software eCommerce company in Australia and Software New Zealand. |
