Introduction to Content Marketing
Small Business Content Marketing – A Short Introduction and Some Ideas
Do you want to increase your website’s visibility and promote your products online effectively? The key to achieving this is to find a professional website designer who has extensive experience in effective content marketing. Holistic Web Presence (HWP) builds eye-catching websites and creates interesting content to help strengthen our client’s online presence and boost their business profit. Tim Barrie, the founder, and CEO of HWP provides ideas about this marketing approach.
What You Must Consider in Content Marketing
Attracting a clearly defined audience and driving more sales can be achieved with an effective marketing approach, called content marketing. It should become a part of your online marketing tactics because it helps attract customers and builds long-lasting relationships.
There are factors that you must consider in order to ensure that you focus on the creation and distribution of interesting and relevant content. You must know how much content is enough and how many pages you need to add to your website.
The Basics of a Well-Designed Website
If you are planning to have a website for your business, you will hire someone to build the website for you. You are going to describe your company, choose an eye-catching design, and write some stuff on there. You believe that these are enough to create a brochure of your company on the web.
Keep in mind that this can work quite well if your goal is to be able to send people to your website who already know who you are, who already contacted you, or to whom you gave your business card. You can easily tell them to go to your website and view the products and services that you offer.
However, if your priority is to be visible on the web, and to rank in the competitive environment of the online world, you are going to be competing with a number of other companies in your location, in your city, or suburb.
What you want to do is to be at the top of Google’s page one. What Google does is it rewards the website that has the most interaction or engagement with clients. This means that the website has the “stickiest” content among other websites with the same target audience.
How to Stay on the First Page of Google
In digital marketing, SEO has a big impact on local search ranking. When doing a local search, websites that are on the first page tell the users that those websites are relevant for a particular key phrase. Keep in mind that the relevance of your website is based on your content.
Assuming a client or a searcher finds your website because he typed in, not the company name, but the key phrase of the service they are looking for. If they then go on that website and they are staying on it and don’t go back to the search engine looking for more, that’s a signal to Google that your website has fulfilled the requirement of the individual searchers.
This can be achieved by having some content on there that causes people to scroll down the page, click on a link, or engage with that user in some way. Now, the most commonly asked question on that point is: “What if I just want people to call me?”
That’s okay because if somebody does a search, finds your website, sees the phone number, picks up the phone, and calls you, they haven’t “bounced” or they haven’t left the website immediately. They haven’t gone back to searching, so that’s okay. The problem is, when you get a website that is very light in content, the users click on it, and it doesn’t really do what they want, so they go back, and they continue to search until they find a website that fulfills their requirements.
If that happens, that’s a negative indicator to the search engine. It’s true for Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines. If there is that negative signal, then you’re going to get negative points, which is going to push you down in the rankings compared to another site that has engaged with the visitor.
Create “Stickier” Content with Key Phrases
There are two reasons why you need content on your website. One is that Google’s algorithm can analyze your site and learn what it’s about. Is it about the key phrases somebody is searching on?
For any given market, there are about two hundred different key phrases. You can create lots of content that cover all those key phrases if you want to be visible for all those different key phrases.
Your content must be highly engaging to make the visitors call immediately, or click on something and learn something. Typically, the best technique for doing that is to add useful information to the website.
How much useful information you need to add is proportional to the number of keywords that you want to be visible for, and it is proportional to your competitors. You can outrank your competitors if you have more useful or stickier content on your site.
Techniques to Encourage Clients to Call You
You will not succeed in content marketing if you have many pages within your site that are not engaging or are not relevant to your target audience. Your content should be interesting enough to make the user read it, click on it, learn something from it, or call you.
Add Content that Answers the Questions of Your Customers
There are lots of techniques for doing that. But the best way to think about how you can add more content to your website is to think about the things clients typically ask you. So, when somebody calls you on the phone, every time you have a conversation with a client and explain something to them, that’s your content. So, the best thing you can possibly do is record your phone conversations so that you can turn that into a “here’s the question, here’s the answer.” You can use that for your page, or blog post.
Add Content that Features Your Happy Clients
Depending on whether you are writing a blog post or a page on your website, one of the best techniques that work very well for a local business creating content is to do features on your clients.
For example, if you are a wine cellar specialist or a builder, and you’re building something for a client, you can tell a story that contains information about why they want that sunroom or wine cellar, what motivated them, what was interesting about the project, what was the site like before, what was the room like before, and how did they go about designing it. You can add pictures of the original room, sketches, ongoing construction, and the finished product.
You can say: “These are the different things we had to do to this area and look how beautiful it is and what the customer thinks of it.”
One of the most compelling things you can possibly do is to add pictures. Photos are akin to a testimonial. If you build something physical for a client, then have some pictures of them proudly standing beside it and add captions that tell what the client thinks about his or her newly built or renovated room. You can put: “I love my wine cellar”, or “I love my sunroom,” or “I love my kitchen”.
That picture is much better than a picture that just shows a picture of a house with the changes on it because it’s like a testimonial. You’re showing a happy client. You’re going to write up that story of what you did, how you did it, what materials you used, why you use those materials, what features you built in it, and so on.
Now, these are great examples of when you’re delivering a service that’s physical. Not all services that people provide are physical. So for example, if you are an attorney and you’re doing some kind of legal work for a client, you can do the same thing. You don’t have to give away key issues, legal issues, but you’ve got to get permission from the client.
But, you can still talk about the business and what the client wants to incorporate. Were they going to incorporate from day one, or were they thinking about an LLC? What was in their mind? What is it they are trying to achieve with their business?
You can do a write-up on the whole thing, and now that they’re incorporated this is what their business looks like. Isn’t it cool? You have just done your client a favor when you do that type of client write-up because you’re promoting them. You can send links to the client’s website within that. It doesn’t hurt you in any way to send them links but helps them, so you can provide a service to help your clients.
Optimize Keywords for a Specific Location: a Very Effective Content Marketing Strategy
Every single time you get a client to buy something from you or work with you, you’ve got a story of what they were are thinking, how you arrived at the solution, or what the solution looked like? Each one of those stories can be optimized for that service, which is your keyword, and it can be optimized for a specific location.
If you have 50 clients that are in different locations in different parts of the city, or in different cities around you, perfect! That will increase your visibility hugely.
It’s the same thing if you’ve got a physical product. Users usually search for products or services locally. For example, people who are looking for an attorney are not going to do a national search.
If I’m from California, then I’m not going to look for an attorney in New York. They’re going to look for an attorney in California or in the city that they’re in. If someone is looking for a local builder, that’s what they’re going to do. There’s almost an endless amount because every client that you get, I’m sure you will agree, when you have a conversation with them, is unique.
Keeping Track of Your Conversations with Your Clients
They are going to ask similar questions. But, you can redo the questions and phrase them slightly differently. You have to track the answers in the conversation you had with the client.
The trick is to have some kind of mechanism that becomes part of your regular business process for interacting with clients so that you keep track of all of those different conversations.
But, I guarantee you, if you do a page for each client, you’ll have hundreds of pages over time, and you’ll have huge deep content that will be very interesting to somebody else. Because whatever the question is, whatever the solution is, that’s what a particular client wanted.
It is going to resonate with somebody out there, so you have a list of all these types of services that you provide, but they’re from the client’s point of view. You can add that information to the core pages that you create, describing at a high level what your service is.
So, not only is it adding more content, but it’s making it real because you’re talking about different clients and different solutions. That’s by far one of the best techniques I’ve seen and we’ve implemented for increasing the amount of content, highly interesting content, content that engages with the clients, and content that enables us to optimize and help the clients be much more visible in the search engines for tons of key phrases in their local market.
Let us Help Level-Up Your Business’ Visibility Online with Content Marketing
At Holistic Web Presence, we will help boost your business’s online visibility through a strategic marketing approach called content marketing. We build websites with valuable and relevant content that will reach your targeted audience and encourage them to purchase your products and avail of your services. Call us today at +1 (801) 349-8226.
