How to Create Search-Relevant Content to Boost Marketing Performance

Intro

Without a doubt, content creation is one of the fastest-rising and most effective marketing strategies nowadays. The rise in technology paved the way for content creation to become famous, whether written or visual. A lot of businesses are heavily investing in content marketing.

One of the challenges that businesses face in creating content is their search relevance and audience impact. After all, content is only as good as its popularity, views, and, of course, sales conversion. Content creation should always target boosting marketing performance.

What is search-relevant content?

In the simplest definition, search-relevant content is systematically optimized to rank well in search engine results, i.e., top Google results. There are a lot of means and techniques to ensure that your content becomes search-relevant. In the following sections, we will discuss the methods; some do's and don'ts, and how you can implement them in your business to achieve high-performing marketing strategies.

Keyword research is the key

(Image from Ranktracker)

A top priority is performing keyword research to identify relevant terms and phrases your target audience is looking for. You can start by determining your target audience and deeply understanding their needs and interests.

One of the more popular ways to do this is using the best keyword research tools. There are several ones in the market which will suit your needs. Keyword tools aim to identify the keywords and phrases your target audience is interested in.

You can also create a list of seed keywords related to your business or brand. Seed keywords usually are simple words or phrases directly related to your products or services. As an example, if your business is a clothing boutique, seed keywords can be "dress," "blouse," "coordinates," etc.

You can also use keywords with a high search volume by your target audience but have low competition. You should use these keywords systematically throughout your content with just the right amount of density.

At the same time, you can also define another set of keywords related to your niche but not highly searched by your target audience. This is an opportunity for you to create relevant content out of them and make them trending until they become highly searched.

There are also what is called latent semantic indexing or LSI keywords that can help your content avoid keyword stuffing. LSI is a background method that search engines use to better categorize websites according to their contents. When you utilize these keywords, your contents have a higher chance of reaching your target market.

Of course, you need to be systematic and not just use any identified keywords randomly. The best way to maintain your keywords is to categorize them according to relevance to your product or services, such as buy Instagram likes. You should also regularly monitor how your keywords are faring, e.g., ranking in the search tools, and make adjustments based on results.

Optimization is also vital

Optimized content is one way to ensure that you are on the right track to boosting your marketing performance. There are several techniques on how you can optimize your content.

• Use meta tags in your title and description that provide clear and structured details about your content to the search engines.
• Use a sitemap to submit to search engines. Sitemaps contain information about your website's contents - pages, audio, videos, etc. - and how they relate.
• Use backlinks to your website on other reputable sites. This technique is an excellent way to increase your search engine ranking and drive traffic to your website.

(Image from Ranktracker)

• Ensures that your website has a friendly user interface and provides a good user experience, i.e., fast-loading.
• Create informative content and provide solutions to the problems of your target audience. You should avoid creating fluffy content.
• Create content with various interesting topics to keep your target audience loyal.
• Research meticulously on your topics and ensure that you gather reliable information from reputable sources such as industry experts and verified statistics and studies.
• Make your content understandable and relatable by using simple definitions and concise paragraphs.
• Ensure that your contents are free of errors, red flags, or other sensitive topics by having a proofreader or editor review your final output.
• Always stay up to date with the latest trends and relevance by keeping your content updated and reviewing them regularly.
• Use internal and external links to support your content.
• Be reachable by having audience engagement all the time. This can be a call-to-action, surveys, or positively engaging in the comments section.
• Run a web audit tool on your website to automate your optimization check.

Use of multimedia like images and videos

Visual content marketing or the use of multimedia such as images and videos helps improve your content in a lot of ways. Aside from making them visually appealing, the target audience tends to understand more when watching or viewing. This also helps them understand your content better. It also serves as a "break" from reading, especially for long-form content.

Captioning images and videos, putting alt tags, adding subtitles or transcriptions, and naming them descriptively also help your contents rank high in search engines. This is because these help search engines reach you better and understand your content more deeply.

Aside from those mentioned, images and videos are an excellent approach for products or services that need demos or tutorials as they support and validate the written form through visuals. You can also use images or videos for customer testimonials which add trustworthiness and authority to your brand.

Another tip to utilize images and videos in your search engine ranking is hosting them on popular platforms and embedding them on your websites. Platforms such as YouTube or Vimeo are the highly-suggested ones. To further widen your reach and increase your brand's visibility, you can also use these images and videos on social media platforms such as Tiktok.

As a caution, though, since multimedia sometimes have large file sizes, it will be wise to reduce or compress them to ensure timely response time and load on your website. Even with the images and videos, you should ensure that your site has an exemplary user interface and your audience has a good user experience.

Promotion of your content through various platforms

One of the key ingredients in boosting your marketing performance is to increase your visibility across different channels. This is important because you may have an untapped potential target audience, which you could find through these other channels. Social media is the biggest chunk of platforms businesses use to promote themselves. There are several means to achieve this promotion from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok, LinkedIn, etc..

• Create a community. If you build a community dedicated to your brand, you are building trust in your group. This increases your customers' loyalty. You may even offer extra perks like discounts to your community.
• Be proactive in forums. Your brand's visibility will significantly increase if people see you engaged in forums and other online discussions.
• Partner up with influencers. This is a chance to widen your audience, especially with influencers with many followers.
• Do guest postings. You can create backlinks to your website by doing guest posts, increasing traffic and potential conversion. It will also increase your search engine rankings.
• Submit press releases to media outlets and other industry experts' media channels. This can significantly increase your brand popularity as well as authority.
• Regularly send out newsletters containing links to your new content to your subscribers. Let them know that you are visible and always in touch with them.
• Run ads or paid promotions on various platforms. Such examples are Google AdWords, PPC, Facebook, etc.
• Prepare a content distribution strategy. While there are several platforms that you can promote yourself in, you have to strategically plan how, when, and where to share your content. That way, your promotion is optimized, and at the same time, you can avoid wasting money on non-effective strategies. While there are several platforms that you can promote yourself in, you have to strategically plan how, when, and where to share your content. That way, your promotion is optimized, and at the same time, you can avoid wasting money on non-effective strategies.

Monitoring of your contents' performance metrics

Monitoring the metrics of your content is very important so you can make adjustments when needed, improve your content, or shift to entirely different content when your existing ones become irrelevant. Fortunately, there are several specific tools that you can use to monitor these metrics.

One of the more popular monitoring tools is the traffic tracker. This tracks your website's traffic, e.g., how many visitors and which of your pages are the most visited ones. Then there is also the engagement tracker, which tells you the engagement levels on your pages, how long visitors stay on that page, and even the bounce rate or those who viewed only one page on your site and then navigated away from it. Other tools include backlinks monitoring, which counts the number of backlinks to your website and identifies which websites are linked to your content.

In social media, you can monitor the number of shares, likes, and comments. Tools like Hootsuite and Social Champ can do all those mentioned. Meanwhile, tools such as Google Analytics can provide you with conversion metrics. An example would be how much e-commerce sales you have accumulated, etc.

You can also analyze your site visitors' behavior. The metrics may include how they interact with your website, such as where they most clicked, scrolled, stayed longer, etc.

Aside from these content analysis tools, there are also tools meant to analyze your competitors' performance. One example is Ranktracker's SERP Checker, which helps you find your competitors' weak spots.

(Image from Ranktracker)

There are tons more content performance metrics tools that you can find in the market. Some, like Google Optimize, even offer A/B testing on your website. What is important is you find which tools can suit your business needs and provide you with data that you can use to optimize your content.

Content creation revolutionizes the marketing strategy

Content creation has revolutionized the marketing strategies of businesses. Thanks to technology, it is now easier and faster to market your business and, at the same time, reach out to a wider audience. That is why optimized and search-relevant content is very important.