One thing that is vital for any business owner to remember when they start thinking about generating interest and leads online is that Google’s search engine is the number one referrer of traffic on the Internet. The SEO industry has been built atop this fact, and has operated largely from a position of trying to “trick” Google into ranking sites highly for keywords.
Over time, though, Google has improved its ranking algorithms and has come down very hard on people trying to game their search results. The “old school” SEO tactics of building tons of backlinks and keyword-stuff pages on your site not only no longer works, but they can actually damage your site in the eyes of Google. As a result, much of the older style SEO no longer works at all.
But there’s something more important than just the changes Google are making. The way that people interact with the web is shifting radically. There is a critical mass of users around the world that now use the Internet on their mobile device for the majority of their time. Mobile users are more likely to do natural language search – for example, “how do I get to the nearest petrol station” – which is changing the nature of search significantly.
These changes are presenting website owners with a significant opportunity, not only to improve their search engine rankings, but also to become more relevant and helpful to their site visitors through a content marketing approach. Creating content that helps solve the problem that a person is having when they arrive at your site is now the best way to engage to attract and keep an audience.
Specialist Content Marketing
The main focus of content marketing is to take concepts and ideas that you specialise in within your business and create valuable information that you can post on your website. This information can take many different shapes, including blog posts, videos, infographics, free downloadable reports or a combination of all of those things. Content marketing is a great tool to help you establish your own credibility and authority in your market, with your target audience by helping solve people’s problems.
Google loves this type of content and rewards people who create it by sending them more traffic. It’s really a virtuous circle: you create high quality content to help solve problems, Google sends their search clients to your site, you help people solve their problems, you build your own authority and Google sends you more and more traffic and so on.
Good quality content marketing does take time and it requires commitment, and for busy practice owners time is often something that is in low supply. One way of overcoming this is to work with an online marketing agency that can help you pull together your ideas, work on creating excellent content with you and oversee the publication and integration into your website. Content Marketing is not just the future of SEO, it is important now and the best part is that it closely aligns with the business objectives of all practice owners: establishing credibility, creating trust and leveraging your expertise to build your business.
