Every website owner knows that content is king. It is the key to attract, engage, and build a loyal audience. Aside from that, it makes marketing efforts much easier.
If you are struggling with increasing your website traffic, the best solution is to create effective and quality content. But, how do you create content that will drive traffic to your website?
Well, you will need to design a content strategy. And for you to do it, you have to take into consideration the following:
Know Your Audience
You have to think of your audience before you create your content. What are their problems? Where do they usually hang out? What do they do for a living? What are the other publications or websites they read? Those are just some of the questions you can ask yourself to know more about your audience.
Generate Lists of Ideas
Now that you know your audience, you can proceed with generating lists of ideas. You have to take note that not all content pieces you come up with will be a big hit. To generate more ideas, look at influential industry blogs and industry forums. You should also check for the articles with the most engagement. You can also list ideas that include recent news or trends in your niche or industry. It can be anything related to your business or service you are offering.
Just ensure that your content engages with the audience and tells a story. You must also use your expertise and be willing in injecting industry knowledge and do extensive research to make more advanced content.
Do Keyword Research
Forget about long-tail keyword stuffing, keyword optimization, and other keyword weirdness that used to be effective in the past. It is because these can hurt your ranking on search engines. However, it doesn’t mean that you must stop doing keyword research. Remember that keywords reveal what people talk about, share, and respond to.
Create a Long-Tail Keyword
The golden rule in creating content that will increase your website traffic is to focus on creating a long-tail keyword strategy and use it for every blog post. Long-tail keywords are targeted search phrases that contain 3 or more words. Oftentimes, these keywords contain a head term. This is a more generic search term that includes 1 or 2 words.
Your chosen head terms must align with the topics that you like your business or site to be known for as well as build authority around. For instance, if you like your business to be known for SEO like “search engine ranking”, you can write content about “How to optimize your website for improved search engine ranking”. It can be a good example of a long-tail keyword for your topic.
There is a reason why you must focus on using long-tail keywords for the titles of your content. These keywords keep the posts focused on your audience’s particular goals. Site visitors looking for long-tail terms are more likely to read the entire posts and get more information from you. In short, you will attract the right kind of website traffic.
Focus on Making Strong Headlines
Good headlines spark more interest to readers and invite them in. According to statistics, 80 percent of people will read the post’s headlines, but only 20 percent of them will read your entire content. This is the reason why headlines are as crucial as the post or article itself.
Determine the Type of Content You Want to Create
You have to choose your content format properly if you want to increase your website traffic. The methods for creating content that attracts traffic and leads largely depend on your products, audience, and business. However, it may involve a combination of the following:
If you want to display a huge set of statistics or summarize a big content piece in a visually appealing manner, you can do it through infographics. It’s an easy and quick way of somebody displaying your content. The only thing you should do is to embed the image as well as credit you with the link below.
It can be an interview post or a Q&A post. This kind of content is more suitable for forum threads.
Perfect for B2B marketing, slideshows can be embedded within some content and shareable on social media channels like LinkedIn.
These are in-depth authority pieces and round up posts. This content is the best way to delve deep into complex subjects within your industry.
This is ideal for a personal brand, especially if you want your brand personality and stand out in a highly competitive market. Although it will require more effort, it can be the key for you to set apart from your competitors.
Make a Compelling Meta Description
Basically, the meta description is meant to provide readers and search engines information about the content of your post. The maximum length of the meta description is 150 to 160 characters. Anything that is longer than the recommended will not be seen on search engine result pages.
Even if meta descriptions might not impact your SEO directly, you have to bear in mind that copy matters a good deal for CTR or click-through rates for the reason that it satisfies the intent of readers.
The more context and more engaging your content are, the better. Other than being compelling, relevant, and reader-friendly, meta descriptions must include a variety of long-tail keywords for which you are optimizing the posts around. However, remember that search engines might not choose to use meta descriptions as the descriptive texts in the search results.
Don’t Forget to Optimize Your Content
If you are done creating killer content with the best headline, there is still one thing you should do before you post it. You have to optimize your content before publishing it.
The process includes placing links to some internal pages so your visitors will be on your website longer. You may also include outbound links to different authoritative websites.
If possible, add images with descriptive ALT text. Although adding some visual media like slideshows and videos is not a must, it can boost your visitor’s interest and increase the chances of your content being shared on various websites or social media platforms.
Closing Tips
When it comes to content creation, never write content for the sake of writing it. Never write content out of necessity. Write things out of passion and sheer enthusiasm. Once you do that, your customer base will keep coming back to your website check out regular updates on your posts. However, it is important to take note that there is no way to predict how much attention all your content will get. But, nothing beats a knowledge-based approach for content creation.
If you churn out personable and well-written posts consistently loaded with insight and information, your website traffic will grow in the long run. It requires a lot of patience at first, but once you have done it right, you can achieve success.
In essence, content is your brand. The content you post drives consumer interest in your company and inspires the audience to be brand advocates. The only trick is to build a careful library of informative and knowledgeable content based on the industry topics your audience searches for and present it in a more understandable way. Then, add it with some images to make your content more appealing. Great content includes knowledge, good presentation, and a bit of promotion.
Lorenzo Kallenberger has been working as a content strategist for more than ten years now. Lorenzo helps his clients by creating different types of content suitable for their short and long-term goals. He is also responsible for overseeing his client’s content requirements, creating content deliverables, and conducting content audits.
Lorenzo shares his online by writing articles about content strategies.
Lorenzo Kallenberger
Lorenzo Kallenberger has been working as a content strategist for more than ten years now. Lorenzo helps his clients by creating different types of content suitable for their short and long-term goals. He is also responsible for overseeing his client’s content requirements, creating content deliverables, and conducting content audits.
Lorenzo shares his expertise online by writing articles about content strategies.
