97% of marketers in a survey claimed that content formed an important part of their overall digital marketing strategy in 2021. The topmost goal of content marketing was to promote brand awareness and attract more website traffic.
Customer experiences are powered by content, however, most businesses struggle to effectively create, manage and distribute personalized content. Often a lack of strategy, outdated processes and inefficient systems slow down content velocity.
If your brand’s content velocity is slow, your teams may be doing more, but creating less relevant content that attracts the right kind of traffic to your website. After all when it comes to content marketing, quality matters most than quantity.
Achieving high content velocity means creating quality content that delivers desired outcomes and achieves the company’s goals. When done well, it gets the right assets to the right audiences as quickly as possible, capitalizing on conversion opportunities and personalizing experience at scale.
To that end, here are effective content marketing strategies you can try to improve website traffic and accelerate content velocity:
1. Create Content that Satisfies the Search Intent
Uncovering the user intent or search intent is paramount to delivering relevant content that aligns with what the audiences want. If users search for a specific keyword only to land on a page that is irrelevant to what they were looking for in the first place, they are likely to navigate away from your site.
For each of your products or services, make a comprehensive list of your target audiences’ expectations from your portal and classify them into the following intents:
- Know – Create content such as informational guides, features, terms, and specifications to educate audiences about your brand or products and services.
- Go – Create content for consideration and interest stage of the purchase journey such as comparison, calculator usage, quote generation, wish list addition, etc.
- Do – Align content that further promotes audience engagement such as video tutorials, how-to guides, product demos, case studies, reviews, and more.
- Buy – Align transactional content that enables audiences to make a decision and add products to a cart, subscribe for a service or submit a form.
2. Perform Periodic Content Audits
A content audit is a process by which companies can track and organize all the content they have produced. Start by reviewing all the existing content on your site to identify what’s working and what’s not. Here are some checks you can undertake in your content audit to improve website performance:
- Identify web pages with high SEO potential to rank at the top of SERPs
- Check and optimize internal linking
- Understand what content you need to update, redirect or remove from your portal
- Conduct thorough topical research to find low-competition and high-opportunity keywords to optimize your website content
- Repurpose popular content that generates the most engagement
- Identify technical issues on your website that may prevent search engine crawlers to rank your pages such as 301 redirects, 404 deletions and insertion of metadata, H2 and H3 tags, etc.
3. Keep Updating your Website with Fresh Content
Content freshness has a direct correlation with search engine ranking and in turn, can increase organic site traffic. This doesn’t mean you have to do a major revamp of your site content to make it appear fresh and contemporary. Making periodic changes to your creative units or copy such as banners, high-visibility locations on your home page or inner pages, headlines, CTAs, adding blogs and more can go a long way in improving your online presence.
4. Build Natural Links
It’s no myth that building a strong link profile is one of the best ways to improve domain authority and gain traffic. Most companies fail when building links because they follow shortcuts in trying to get quick links. It’s more important to gain one naturally obtained backlink than several spammy no-follow links from random places unrelated to your content. Conducting research studies, creating charts or infographics and other unique content that people can download or share on their own website are some effective ways to build a natural backlink profile.
5. Create and Use a Content Calendar
A content calendar helps make your content marketing strategy stress-free and rewarding. Unfortunately, most people never take the time to craft a plan for creating content, marketing it, and tracking its effectiveness. Creating and following content calendars helps you stay on track, save time, and post relevant content regularly.
6. Diversify your Content Distribution Approach
Audiences today are consuming content through different channels and media formats. Therefore you cannot rely on a single channel or format to distribute your content. After putting in a lot of hard work to create content, you need a solid strategy to distribute it through the right platforms. Utilize the right mix of channels including social, public relations, online forums or communities, and email to maximize reach and meet consumers where they are. Regardless of which content distribution channels you choose, ensure they align with your audience’s preferences and behaviors.
7. Conduct Competitor Analysis and Work with the Data
Competitor analysis is no longer optional. Industry experts agree that competitor analysis is an integral part of search marketing success and generating website traffic. Spy on your competitor’s portals to know what they are doing right and also find content gaps you can leverage to outsmart them. Create a list of direct or indirect competitors and use automated tools to assess the key SEO metrics that help them rank higher. As you analyze the SEO metrics, try to pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of your competitor’s content strategy. This will help you come up with innovative ideas to improve your content strategy.
The key to an effective content marketing strategy that drives traffic is honing in on customer focus and creating high-quality content. Publishing hundreds of posts is not essential for this approach to work. What’s more important is what goes inside those articles, the consistency in publishing, and its distribution through the right channels.