Content is any piece of information or media that users engage with on the internet. Your business’s online presence hinges on the content which you produce, and the value it provides to your audience. Therein lies the crux of content creation.
Learn why digital content creation is vital to growing and maintaining your online presence. Find out what separates those who sink from those who swim, when it comes to generating engaging content. And, discover where an opportunity lies for your business to find a strong foothold in the content marketing world.
Content Creation and Content Development: Why it Matters to You
Imagine, an internet void of content. An internet that exists without video, audio, images, or text. Well – that wouldn’t be much of the internet at all.
It is fair to say that content creation is to the internet, as the food is to a restaurant. Why go to a restaurant where the kitchen is empty and the food is cold when there are dozens of better options available? Likewise, why consume outdated online content, when there are innumerable sources of fresh, relevant content?
The internet is a great library of content. Content is that which you seek when engaging with the internet – in any and every capacity. Content creation, therefore, is the base-line foundation for every website’s vitality and your business’s online presence.
Why is Content Important?
Content creation is the most important aspect of your digital marketing strategy. The overall goal of your business website is to achieve conversions. Content is vital to achieving conversions, for two main reasons.
A conversion is when you gain a new lead, customer, or client through the user completing the desired action. But how a user is drawn to such an action is the purpose of the content. To that end, content exists to provide users a ‘call to action.’
Whether it is to get a user to buy a product, become a subscriber, get a free quote, contact your business – etc – the doorway to conversions is your ‘call to action. The type of ‘call to action’ will vary, depending on your business and marketing strategy. In this way, content creation is like fishing, and each piece of content is another chance to catch a fish – so, the more, the better.
But, content also serves a broader purpose of increasing your business’s prominence and visibility – in the eyes of search engines. Search engines are the great highway by which internet users travel to a destination. Search engines, like Google, are the gatekeepers to your audience.
What are Keywords?
The easiest way to understand the relevance of keywords is to use the example of a blog post – like this one. A ‘keyword’ is the exact word or phrase that a user types into a search engine. To return relevant results to the user, Google scans your content to see if it matches up with the users’ keyword.
Content development begins with identifying the keywords for which you want to rank, so when a user searches for that keyword, your webpage shows up on the search engine result page (SERP). In essence, keywords are one piece of information Google looks at to determine whether or not your content is relevant to a search query.
Keyword optimization is the process of specifying and targeting the most valuable and highly-searched keywords that are relevant to your business and services. For example, a gardening business might target keywords, like ‘tomato varieties,’ or keyword phrases, like ‘how to grow a garden’. Content is the vehicle to inform search engines of the keywords that are relevant to your business.
Keyword optimized content is one of the most useful tools to strengthen your search engine optimization (SEO). The more optimized content you produce, the more prominent your content is to search engines, and the more site traffic you receive from organic search.
Each time you create and publish new content on your website or social media, internet crawlers are informed to pay more attention. Sites that are crawled more frequently receive higher ranking for content on SERPs. Search engines, like Google, see frequent site crawls as a sign that you are a reliable content source.
How to Create Great Content and Increase Engagement
Content creation includes video, audio, photo, and text – all of which contribute to your SEO and the overall ranking of your content on SERPs. So, no matter the form of content, search engines judge its relevance based on scanning for keyword optimization. Search engine algorithms, however, are complex and ever-changing.
In the early 2000s, all you had to do was stuff keywords into every orifice of your content, and it was sure to rank. It wasn’t too hard to trick Google’s algorithm into thinking your content was on-point, so many content producers flooded the internet with low-quality, highly optimized content. Fast forward to today, Google’s SEO algorithm has become infinitely more sophisticated.
How to Build Your Kingdom of Content
Being listed prominently on Google is equivalent to owning a stock that is being traded on Wall Street. Today, if you want to rank well on SERPs, it is essential to produce high-quality content. Google only wants to show users results that provide value, so that’s what content creation works to produce.
Content is only valuable to your audience if it is of substance. The length of your content serves as an indication of your content’s value. Google wants to provide results that go in-depth to the subject of a user’s search quarry.
The frequency with which content is published acts as an indication of the content’s relevance. Google looks for publishers that update old content, and produce relevant content regularly.
Search engines scan the breadcrumb trail of content to see if it is plagiarized. If you copy/paste text into your content it is flagged. So, be sure that your content is always 100% unique, or it is deemed irrelevant.
Finally, Google wants to show users content that other users verify as high-quality. Search engines track the metrics of user engagement with your content to determine how useful it is to others. The more engagement your content receives, the more relevant and useful it is in the eyes of Google and other search engines. If you want to engage a larger digital audience to grow your brand awareness, you have to provide search engines and users with valuable content. Contact a content development specialist to take the next steps into content creation that drives traffic to your website.