Surefire Ways to Supercharge Your Content
Content is still King in digital marketing.
Semrush’s State of Content Marketing 2022 confirms this fact. 55% of the 1,500 marketers Semrush surveyed for their report felt that “improving the quality of their content” was top priority. Only 35% felt that “website optimization” held the key to their success.
Improving page load speeds, ensuring mobile compatibility, etc. are essential to the success of your website and digital marketing efforts. For instance, using structured data will not only improve your rank but also increase your CTR.
Website optimization is important to your digital marketing efforts like sunshine and water is important to your garden. Fixing duplicate URLs nourishes your articles. Validating your XML sitemap is sunshine on your content roses.
However, we’re not focusing on sunshine and water here. Let’s put that to the side for the moment. Since digital marketing folks believe that improving the quality of their content is the most important consideration, let’s take this at face value.
So how do you improve the quality of your content?
#1. Let’s Get Visual
Articles with images or embedded videos perform better than those without them. According to Semrush’s 2022 report, articles with 7+ images generate 116% more organic traffic than those with none. Articles with videos had 83% more traffic than those without.
Why are visuals successful in content marketing? Well, they are appealing to readers, help you break up the text of your article, show up in Google image searches, and can be leveraged to provide SEO value from keywords in the alt text.
If you have a graphic designer and/or videographer, lean on them to make compelling customized images and videos for your articles.
But what if you don’t have a designer or videographer? You can go the paid stock photo route, or you can try your hand at DIY graphic design on Canva.
I “designed” the above graphic in about 5 minutes. It’s not a great design because I’m not a graphic designer. Still, it breaks up the text and does what images are supposed to do: it tells your story to readers in yet another, enticing format.
The point is to use images and videos in your articles. Whether you use stock photos or custom graphics is up to you. Custom graphics are best, and you might be surprised how easy it is to create compelling designs that improve article performance.
I might take 15 minutes next time to see if I can do better. If I can embarrass myself, you can, too, if only for the good of your articles.
#2. Create a Content Marketing Plan
Only 19% of marketers say that they have a fully mature content system in place. Remember that content is still not dethroned, so a robust content plan would seem essential to your digital marketing efforts. Both businesses and marketers want quality digital content, but they sometimes fail because they don’t have a plan in place beforehand.
Ideally, your digital content strategy should include your business goals (if you’re an agency, these would be the goals of your clients), your target audience, your brand voice, distribution channels, and content types.
KPIs will differ by organization, but you don’t want to take a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants approach. One noteworthy thing is that “leads” and “conversions” rank 3rd and 4th when you ask content marketers about their most important KPIs.
“Organic traffic” and “search ranking” are #1 and #2. Obviously, if you have a lot of organic traffic headed to your articles, you would expect that these will generate leads and conversions, although this might be a false assumption.
From experience, I know that you can triple organic traffic and 4x the keywords you rank for and still not generate sales-qualified leads. Maybe your CTAs aren’t working; maybe you need better form submissions — UX writing and design anyone? — but whatever the case, more eyeballs don’t always translate into an improved ROI.
So while you’re building user personas for your annual digital marketing plan, you should ask your manager or boss what matters most to them. Happy boss, happy life, right? Understanding their goals goes a long way toward your success.
Your KPIs might be:
- Organic Traffic
- Search Rank
- Leads
- Social shares
- Email Engagement
- Sessions/Pageviews
- Bounce Rate
- Time on Page
It is probably all of these, but figuring out what matters most to the person in charge will help you devise the best strategy for content to meet your organization’s goals.
#3. Use Headlines and Tags Geared Toward the Reader
Semrush and other SEO tools often flag multiple H1s as a problem. Although, according to Google Search Advocate John Mueller, Google’s algorithm really doesn’t care if you have 1 H1 or 15. What seems to matter most about H1s is their length.
Because H1s tell Google bots what your article is about, you want to be as clear and concise as possible. You’ll hear different recommendations (>70 characters or less than 7 words) but as writers and content strategists, clarity and precision likely matter more than some arbitrary word or character count.
“The Top 7 Foundations for All Skin Types.” We’re at 40 characters and 8 words here. This seems perfectly fine to me. If you’re using multiple H1s, you want to ask yourself if it is necessary. Do you need “The Best Foundations for Dark Complexions” as another H1 for this article? Maybe.
Does the reader benefit from having two or three titles in a single article? This is the question you need to be asking. The key thing about title tags comes down to helping the reader navigate your article with the greatest ease.
If we’re focusing on topics instead of keywords, or treating topics and keywords as the same thing, that’s the goal. We know that Google no longer cares about keywords per se or backlinks, so we as content marketers and writers need to start listening.
Successful title tags with keywords depend on giving the reader what they need, not what we think we need to rank.
#4. Learn to Love Lists
Online readers love lists. But there’s an art in deploying lists. If your article is all lists then you’ve probably missed the mark. It would be like adding an image of an adorable red panda to your article just to fulfill some image quota.
While adorable and precious, this panda doesn’t really help the reader understand how to “supercharge” their content.
Some content strategists recommend 1 list for every 500 words in your article, and since we’re past the 1,000-word mark, let’s add another list to this article to demonstrate how fun, informative, and helpful lists can be.
Here are the best James Bond movies according to IMDB ranking.
- Casino Royale (2006) – 8.0
- Skyfall (2012) – 7.8
- Goldfinger (1964) – 7.7
- From Russia With Love (1963) – 7.4
- No Time to Die (2021) – 7.3
- Golden Eye (1995) – 7.2
- Dr. No (1962) – 7.2
- The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) – 7.0
- Thunderball (1965) – 6.9
- Spectre (2015) – 6.8
I find all kinds of helpful insights here as a film buff. Who would have thought that Daniel Craig’s Bond held the top two spots? There’s a psychological aspect to lists that attracts users. They remind me a little of online quizzes because they scratch an itch for readers.
Think about it. How many Best of Year lists pop up in online magazines, blog posts, and elsewhere during the holiday season? They’re everywhere because much like Buzzfeed quizzes, users want them.
So give the people what they want in your content: scannable lists that are informative, entertaining, or preferably, both.
#5. Write for Other Human Beings
The internet is drowning in content. If you search for how much content is created online every day, you will see the figure of 2.5 quintillion bytes of data floating around. I don’t know what this figure means without context, but the point is that it’s a lot.
Most of this content is not worth the WordPress site it was published on. But with artificial intelligence, content will only increase in volume. Are we as content marketers the apocryphal horse-and-buggy makers when the first automobile rolled through our small village? We will be if we use words like “apocryphal” in our articles.
The content writers who will be successful in our current landscape will need to be original and develop a strong sense of voice. They will need to take some risks. They will need to remember that they are humans writing for humans, which gives your content something that robots can’t replicate — at least not yet.
We’re all good at writing scannable, readable copy that attracts at least a few clicks. So what sets the best content writers apart?
Their writing is clear and concise.
You don’t need to always dumb things down for your readers. But, in most cases, you do want to steer clear of writing that is too dense. Think about your reader, your audience. Are they reading your article on mobile? Some studies suggest that users don’t do a lot of actual reading on their phones, but you should make it easy for them to glide from paragraph to paragraph, sentence to sentence nonetheless.
They are good storytellers.
Every article you write is a story. I know this sounds phony. It sounds like the advice your high school English teacher would give. How can you tell a story about the 7 Best Coffee Bars in Seattle? My question would be: how can you not? You are never just providing information to readers. Content marketers do not typically write technical manuals. And even the most technical writing tells a story.
Let me give you an example. I write for a client that builds Internet networks for other businesses. It’s a little more complicated than that, but we really, really don’t want to go into the weeds on this one. Recently, they asked me to write a blog post about fiber optics for airports. How do I turn this into a story?
I first think about the problem that airports need to solve when it comes to internet service. They need coverage for both employees and passengers. Once I’ve identified the problem and the solution (airports have spotty Internet coverage, which is why they need “my” company’s services), I can easily think about it in terms of a story.
Here it goes:
- Passenger X can’t get coverage to communicate with his family about a flight delay.
- They are so fed up with the airport that they decide to fly out of another one next time.
- If only they had “my” company’s networking solutions, Passenger X would be a loyal customer for all their future business travel.
This has all the elements of a story. It has characters, a setting, a conflict, and a resolution. I would probably never write a blog post entirely about one person’s trouble with internet coverage at an airport, but this exercise in storytelling helps me make the writing more relatable.
They write vividly.
We can take it for granted your article solves a problem for readers. It could also entertain or make them laugh, but most content marketing is about addressing user pain points. This doesn’t mean you can’t make your writing vivid and compelling.
Don’t be afraid to use descriptors. The Internet networking equipment you’re selling to an airport is not “the best-in-class equipment,” but a “networking solution purpose-built to deliver coverage to passengers striding through your airport.”
You don’t need to shy away from figurative language, unexpected comparisons, and metaphors simply because you’re writing about a “boring” subject. Remember: there are no boring subjects, only boring writing. My favorite writers could be writing about the life of a fusebox, and I would still read them.
The Content Marketer’s Burden
Content marketers like us don’t have the luxury of extensive market testing. We’re asked to guess what topics, types of content, and channels will work best based on our own insights, experience, and speculation.
The advice in this article is simply that — advice. It’s based on 20 years of writing and training other writers professionally. But my ideas about content marketing are mostly a result of listening to other content marketers, SEOs, and digital strategists, taking their advice to slowly, but surely, move the needle for my clients.