WHY CONTENT WRITING IS THE NEW GOLD CURRENCY

The old proverb that “the pen is mightier than the sword” has never been more apt in this fast-paced digital era where “content is king”. Of course, we’re not talking about actually going to war unless you view fighting for your spot in cyberspace a veritable battle. And few of us still use a pen to write but you get the gist of what we’re saying.

The return on investment for content marketing is undisputed. In fact, it’s astonishingly valuable when you weigh up the cost of good content against the impact it has on the profitability of a business. Content marketing contributes significantly to SEO by generating natural inbound links, boosting awareness and providing valuable information for the customer’s buying decision.

Today, the bulk of SEO effort is focused on content marketing. If you have not already adopted an aggressive content marketing strategy, you need to act fast. If you don’t have immediate access to content writers, speak to SEOPros.

SEOPros provides a content marketing service backed by a team of business writers with expertise to deliver outstanding SEO content that dramatically improves rankings and helps generate much-needed sales leads.

 

What is content marketing?

Content marketing provides information that is informative, engaging and authoritative; and ultimately helps a reader make better decisions about just about anything in their life. Content marketing doesn’t sell products and services; it builds trust and relationships which is a solid platform off which a business can sell its products or services.

Content marketing is entirely different to copywriting. This is because content marketing is not a sales pitch. It’s information without the hard sell. Content marketing doesn’t focus entirely on the product and service; rather it provides insightful commentary on a topic based on thorough research with the aim being to help a reader make a more informed decision about a product or service.

Therefore, the focus of content writing is not to sell something but instead to create and distribute information that is valuable, relevant and honest. When a reader experiences this refreshing approach to information dissemination; you gain their trust, become an ambassador for the topic and cement a more meaningful relationship with the reader.

Off this solid platform of trust and engagement; a reader reaches out to your business, a solid lead is generated and that’s when the sales pitch can start.

The Content Marketing Institute more formally describes the task as follows:

“Content marketing’s purpose is to attract and retain customers by consistently creating and curating relevant and valuable content with the intention of changing and enhancing customer behaviour. It is an ongoing process that is best integrated into your overall marketing strategy; and focuses on owning media, not renting it.”

 

Why content marketing is so important for your business

You’ll hear the gurus of digital marketing say, “content is King”. In today’s digital space where consumers run the show, nothing comes close to the impact of content marketing on SEO. Simply put, without quality content, you’re unlikely to benefit from increased quantify and quality of traffic that SEO delivers.

Search engines reward businesses that consistently publish quality, authoritative and engaging content by improving their rankings; and on the flipside, punish those that don’t.

More about SEO later. All you need to know is search engines like Google match the highest quality and most relevant information with a search query. Basically, Google wants the reader to have the best user experience and it won’t feed rubbish to its users.

If you aren’t creating and curating quality information on a consistent basis; Google will ignore you. Your website won’t be ranked well, if at all; and potential customers (leads) have to really sweat it to find your webpages.

The sage of digital marketing, Neil Patel, says it’s simple; “SEO demands content. Content marketing is information. There is no such thing as SEO without content. You need words, articles, substance, keywords and verbiage (for SEO).” Patel confirms, “It’s so cliché but content is King.”

 

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. The SE of SEO is focused on the demands of search engines. The O part of SEO is focused on making sure the search engines know you have all this valuable, insightful and engaging information on your webpages.

Let’s start with understanding what search engines want from websites.

You can think of your website as a book in a library; one of hundreds on the same topic. Google is the librarian who will search for the best ‘books’ (websites) on a topic from the rows and rows of books based on what information a reader requests.

Google finds and delivers to the reader a selection of the best ‘books’ in the cyber library that it rates highly as being the most informative, interesting and engaging. If Google doesn’t rate your webpages, it won’t select them. In some cases, it may even remove your ‘book’ from the library for wasting space.

On Google itself, the best websites that the search engine rates highly appear on the first page that comes up when a user searches on a topic. These best websites don’t magically appear; they’ve been found by a ‘crawler’ using a complex algorithm to match the best information (search result) to a query. It’s what they call ‘first page ranking’ in SEO.

In summary, Google demands quality, engaging and authoritative content to deliver the best search/user experience.

Now let’s talk about optimisation.

Optimisation is any formal and honest means of alerting Google to the fact that a webpage has high quality, useful information for user requests (customer searches). The goal of optimisation is to be found by Google and delivered to the right customer; which in turn not only boosts the quantify of traffic to a webpage but improves the quality of traffic.

The right customer making a genuine inquiry is known as a “lead”; once Google has effectively put a genuine buyer together with a reliable and honest seller or service provider (lead generation), the magic can begin where leads are converted to sales and a business becomes more profitable.

A well-optimised website is not a ‘paid-for’ site that automatically appears on the top of the first page because a company has paid for it to be there. It’s a website or webpage that has risen to the top of search engine rankings organically; in other words, naturally without throwing money at the problem.

When talking about optimisation with SEOPros, you’ll hear terms like on-site and off-site optimisation, keywords and phrases, backlinks and of course, authoritative content. Search engines like Google are highly evolved and put much in the path to trip up and penalise what they call “black hat SEO” practices. Quality content coupled with honest optimisation is the recipe for success in the world of SEO.

In summary, you need to create and distribute quality content that is naturally embedded with relevant search words and phrases (keywords); and adopt tried-and-trusted optimisation techniques so Google can find your ‘book’ among the rows and rows of books in the digital ‘library’. Without high quality content, your website will do nothing more than gather dust in a lonely corner of the cyber library.

 

Need help for content marketing? Speak to SEOPros

If you are intrigued, baffled or worried about content marking and what it can do for the profitability of your business; speak to SEOPros.

SEOPros can help if you are new to content marketing and need a step-by-step guide to getting started on developing a strategic content marketing plan and producing quality content marketing; and can help if you understand and appreciate how important content marketing is for your business but you don’t have access to experienced SEO content writers.

Bear in mind; content marketing requires specialised writing skills which are honed to producing the type of natural quality content that Google demands for the best user experience.