Optimized Web Content That Serves Viewer Needs by Determining What Content Pleases Customers and Drives ROI
Updated 12.29.2022
You can improve business revenue as a result of your content marketing strategy and SEO ranking factors to optimize your content.
If you feel that your paid search efforts could offer your business more long-term value, the benefits may be enormous when taking a close look at how organic search may drive qualified leads, revenue (and ultimately prized profit) into your organization. Optimizing your web content for viewer needs in a power-packed step in on-page foundational SEO best practices.
Content Marketing is a fast-paced growing marketing focus needed to keep up viewership. More multifaceted than ever, both the skill and reach of quality, unique, and engaging web content is a must. Explosive new media and technologies mean more business marketing messages are produced each day. Every piece of content a marketer generates promotes a business goal, and to succeed it must ultimately serve your audience in the process and answer their queries.
So, you may be asking a few straight forward questions, especially around content that provides mobile users a great experience. We’ll provide answers.
What is Web Content Optimization?
Optimized web content is prepared web material that meets specific web searchers’ needs. It provides valuable, unique, and wanted curated content that is optimized so that search engines can better understand it, catalog it, and use it to match related search queries. Some call it persuasive sales writing techniques based on proven direct-response and predictive search studies. It makes it easy for site visitors to respond by taking a specific action that helps them move through a sales funnel.
What is SEO content writing?
SEO content writing is the ability to write fresh content with a solid understanding of search intent and how to make it easy for search engines to understand and trust it. It is writing that is focused on appealing to your target audience using specific search phrases and using them in specific ways. Every online retail business especially needs search engines to point people to their site to sell their products. Success getting in Google Product Carousels can mean money in the bank.
But today, it involves query entity mapping in addition to keyword research.
How can my Content Drive CTR and Conversions?
When someone is consuming your content, if there’s something engaging about it and they are excited by your offering, they may complete a Call to Action. Also, compelling content means that more consumers click through and then the engagement rate is higher. Good CTR has a ripple effect, creating a whole chain of positive results that support both your desktop and mobile advertising.
“Digital Content Marketing messages that engage readers, excite new social shares, and solve problems are hard work”, says Jeannie Hill, owner of Hill Web Creations. “Yet the content we create for clients becomes the heart and soul of successful social media strategies.”
It’s becoming increasingly clear what content marketers and journalists can learn from each other’s positions. Moz talks about what a smart content marketer must do. With the press for effective content that is produced efficiently, editorial calendars, style guide compliance, and integrated teams are turning into bonafide brand newsrooms.
What Web Content Best Promotes Brand Awareness and Affinity?
Our main objective in content marketing is to be customer-centric by offering value and affinity to the audience. Ideal content articulates the subject matter as “the expert” with a clear message that gives the audience what it is looking for. Then building analytics tracking to measure content engagement adds a significant contribution. From content tracking, business owners are empowered to make clear next-step plans for revenue enhancement. By engaging an experienced Digital Marketer, you benefit from advantages that reveal golden opportunities for your and stay up with Google ranking changes. There is much more to it than just using the customer’s name in your email marketing messages, or re-marketing plans; rather, learn how to incorporate answers to his or her needs upfront in your web content. These answers are showing up in more Google hosted features and may be included in Google Map Packs in the future.
To begin with, it helps to have a solid understanding of what SEO is. More in-depth insights have been added to your Google Search Console to find and fix weak areas.
Content Marketing Is Actually a New Business Model
In recent years, we’ve had the opportunity to interview and work on dozens of growing businesses led by savvy entrepreneurs who leverage an “optimized content-first” business model. The deeper we delve, the more similarities we found among business models that engage optimized web content. After analyzing the businesses, six steps clearly emerge to create quality content that services both viewer need and search engine’s ability to connect queries to related web content.
Regardless of the dollar amount you invest in creating content for your website, viewers will quickly leave if it doesn’t engage their attention. According to the Nielsen Norman Group, individuals who browse the web typically leave a newly found website within 10 to 20 seconds. Forget that second chance to make a good first impression; you need to do it right straight up – if possible. Using a few content optimization strategies, you can retain viewers’ attention longer, while gaining a presence in People Also Aks boxes, generating new prospects and higher revenue.
Website viewers find much demanding their attention; with so many things competing for their focus, they don’t have time to puzzle over your website’s purpose. If you use a cluster topic model, it is easy for people and search engines to recognize your topic expertise. It is best to speak to them – not at them. Offer free items that viewers want. Stage them with compelling headings; include digital material such as tip sheets, compelling images, videos, news articles, and downloadable e-books. Be giving. With solid planning, you can capture viewers’ attention and encourage them to stay longer. This should be your focus when optimizing, as well as adding the structured data that helps visitors find you in the the Knowledge Graph and Google featured snippets.
How Can Web Content Drive Online Sales?
Every evergreen sales funnel starts with producing unique and helpful content. Then add paid search for promoting it. Strategic content creation should be seen as the gold standard, but content must fit your KIPs and digital marketing as a whole. Marketing research that informs your content strategy is critical to creating SEO content that can match search intent.
When businesses solve problems and answer online queries with a structured approach to content, those who visit their web pages are more likely to become repeat buyers and followers. Your lead generation strategies will work better for you.
We start our web content plan by first uncovering the top topics/services around which the business model will be based. To achieve a better result, we identify a sweet spot that will attract an audience over time where is a high volume of queries or niche need and make it understandable with structured data markup for the intersection of a knowledge or skill set (where the client has a key competency) and a passion for offering this great value to users or an inherent value to the target audience.
Sales are the single most important factor in which a business can gain more revenue. This allows you to hire people, buy equipment, introduce products, or deliver services. Without sales, there is no future for a business. But your web content needs to drive those sales. If you are a Minneapolis local business, your need to add local content that has value for your audience.
Optimizing Your Web Content for Discovery by Search Engines
How to optimize your website content for SEO, discovery and improved lead conversion?
* Find a niche that is specific enough to your unique address, but broad enough to fill your marketing funnel around your business objectives.
* Locate where your ideal customer within your market niche hangs out. They probably favor certain blogs, correspond on favored social sites, attend particular events, and like a certain ambiance online.
* Create buyer personas that best reflect the average customer you are targeting. Try to gain an understanding of their demographic makeup as well as their psychology, what emotional messages they respond to, beliefs, etc.
* Use this focus on what buyers want as a guideline for building your content marketing efforts around “their” needs.
* Answer your audience’s top question to win visibility in People Also Ask Boxes.
* Seek to understand Google’s current manner of awarding websites that use semantic markup to assist semantic search engines.
* Use your Google Core Web Vitals Reports to improve key performance issues.
* Schedule regular audits and do multiple audit types to cover all angles of your online brand presence.
* Optimize the following on each page: title tags, optimize images, and the page’s meta description.
* Remember to understand what each browser needs in order to quickly render your content, including Internet Explorer.
* Understand and apply updates to Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines.
Enrich Your Web Content with Quotes and Source them Correctly
It’s about providing meaningful text on the web and data interoperability.
What makes this a powerful search marketing approach is that it makes discovering and appealing to your customer’s genuine interests a central focus. This aligns your content with the goals of Google and other search providers. So even though this is not “SEO” in the sense that the term has come to be understood, Creating digital content from a plan that meets viewers’ needs first and is secondly, optimized for search certainly goes a long way.
When adding a relevant quote to add value to your readers, always follow online etiquette. The Library of Congress states, “When citing a particular website include the archived website’s Citation ID ( e.g., /item/lcwa00010240 ). Researchers are advised to follow standard citation guidelines for websites, pages, and articles.” (www.loc.gov/item/lcwa00090760)
Build Content Curation into Your Optimized Web Content Plan
IMN Inc. carried out a survey on marketing practices, led by Joe Pulizzi, Content Marketing Institute, and founder. Key insights:
* 82% of all Marketers surveyed curate content.
* 16% of Marketers are daily curating to add value for their audience; 48% are curating from third party sources on a weekly basis.
* Over 30% of survey respondents admitted that their content marketing plan could largely be defined as “winging it”.
* At the same time, more than 76% of the same participants said that content curation should be a medium to a high priority for their business.
* 83.3% of Marketers find and share content from 3rd party sources (found on blogs, social media, industry publications or news sites) with their website viewers and/or in their social network. Integrate such content with your own comments and give full attribution.
* Slightly more than 50% of Marketers surveyed say that curated web content has increased their brand positioning, thought leadership, visibility, web traffic, and buyer engagement.
* 41% of Marketers indicate that curate content can be attributed to an increased in the number and/or quality of their lead generation efforts that are ready to make a purchase decision. When selling products online, it is easy to become to sales-driven in your text. We recommend to use the profucts feature in Google My Business profiles to support your sales volume.
SUMMARY: Hill Web Marketing can help your business with evergreen content curation for optimized web content; “It’s about defining with great specificity who you are, what you do well, and why anyone should care.”
6 Important Steps in Web Content Marketing
1. Create buyer personas for clarity who the message is meant to reach
2. Answer questions your viewers are asking and then refine messages with a great kick for amplification
3. Have a clear action so readers can obtain factual answers
4. Establish frequency and timing to best promote clear and compelling marketing messages
5. Test, tweak and try marketing messages over and over again to be the best response that viewers want
6. Avoid crossing marketing streams by keeping marketing messages fit to each channel
Overcoming the Challenges of Content Saturation
New immediate SERRPs on Google’s first page keep opening for Content Marketers which provide new opportunities. This competition also forces older channels to evolve and emerge with new opportunities for its users, like Facebook and its news-feed. Know where to add to the new content and keep a diverse presence with the right content for the right audiences can bring more value today than ever before.
If your Google Analytics data indicates that user’s “time spent on Facebook slightly declined” or “Google SERPs are referring 3.1% fewer clicks than in the previous year,” it is erroneous to assume that content consumption as a whole has lowered. It is not that people are turning less time to their phones and computers; rather it is an indication that where and people are consuming your content is changing.
So increasing your readership is more challenging. Here is why:
- More competition due to more overall content to choose from.
- Ongoing shifts in consumer consumption and privacy preferences; just how users consume, like, and share what they read online is always changing.
- Improved savviness of content consumers who now recognize low-quality content faster, from further away, and without even clicking on a blue link (due in part to featured snippets) .
Audit your schema markup at least monthly to avoid any depreciated structured code. This can protect your rankings and ability to reach your target audience.
”The web marketing world is buzzing about “content shock,” “content saturation,” and the declining value of content. I agree w/ statements like: “there’s more content than ever and standing out is more difficult.” But I disagree strongly w/: “the value of content is shrinking.” – Rand Fishkin
Web Content Must be Ready for Voice Activated Searches
Formerly most users reached a web site by typing words in a search box; today they are speaking their search query to gain information. “Voice is beginning to replace typing in online queries. Twenty percent of mobile queries were made via voice in 2016, while accuracy is now about 95 percent,” states recode.com.
Mary Meeker’s 2017 internet trends report* posted on recode on May 31, 2017 by Rani Molla lists the following web web content statistics:
• In 2014, 76% of customers reported they halted making purchases from a company after a bad experience when expectations failed. That figure has climbed to 82%. Content needs to be an accurate reflection of products and services.
• The percentage of real-time, online purchase conversations that rely on using Intercom is skyrocketing, and is now hovering near 400 million.
• Customers are also seeking to understand how businesses operate before they complete a purchase. A company’s “How We Work” or “About Us” page is frequently the most-viewed content after the home page. Therefore, it is key to provide web pages that disclose who you are and how to do business with you.
Adweek reports that the “total number of people using voice-enabled assistants like the Amazon Echo suite of products continues to grow. In the fourth quarter of 2016, Echo had even more than 8 million users. That total jumped to 11 million in the first quarter of 2017. Total Echo skills (the voice version of apps) is also rising sharply, from 7,000 in January to 10,000 in February to 12,000 in April”.**
Businesses Plan to Increase Their Content Marketing Budgets
LinkSmart says that “58% of businesses in North America planned to increase their content marketing budget for the 2020s. That increase comes on top of $118.4 billion that was shelled out in 2013 for content marketing across the globe, including strategic video marketing and social media management. Marketing spends are predicted to place internet advertising near 25% of the whole ad market industry by 2015. While that dollar figure may seem staggering, content marketing is a 62% cost savings over traditional marketing and generates 3x more leads.
Creating your own quality web content from the outset might seem to be a daunting task; however, it will best protect you like immunity from Google’s continual updates. It very well might be helped by them – because your content will be the type of web-worthy material that Google prefers to promote instead of the keyword-stuffed spam their engineers’ shutter at. Content marketing is the sum of your marketing techniques used to draw positive buyer behavior and stimulate action leading to positive business relationships. Optimally executed web content marketing produces useful, relevant information assets that prospective buyers consider a beneficial service rather than an irritating interruption or just another “pitch.”
Your businesses can boost website content with stronger calls to action. Conclude each web page with a priority call to action that is woven into that page’s unique content. Use Google Analytics to identify each page’s placement in your conversion funnel(s). Depending on where your prospect is in the sales funnel and the purpose of the page, craft a clear and compelling next step for the reader. Refined web content is highly useful for gaining better optimization; digital lead generation, audience targeting, and stronger distribution metrics.
Understandably, it is easy for small business owners to feel overwhelmed with tasks of continually creating fresh and valuable optimized web content. Be willing to dedicate time to it or hire help to implement your business plan with excellent follow-through. When accomplished professionally, it always pays off. Step over the threshold of being daunted and never starting. The key value of a content strategy is that it saves more in time and monetary costs with returns on investment in the form of new customers. The investment is worth every bit of it. When a machine and a VA may be well designed to handle certain aspects of it, you need to be fully aware of your content marketing challenges and wins.
Utilize Content Marketing Research and Data Reports
Delivering on business growth starts by alignment with what consumers want.
As a Marketer, I encourage my clients to draw their future web content structure from strategic insights and tactical activities with supportive data. You are fortunate to have content marketing related research and data available from your analytics and dedicated research professionals. Content Marketing involves strategic efforts to help brands create interest, relevance, and build relationships with consumers by producing, curating, and sharing web content that provides solutions and delivers visible value. Set up a system to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing program. Engage the services of an analytics expert who can read the data and knowledgeable enough to implement key insights that are gleaned for content building.
Strive to make your content marketing a savvy process for developing, executing, and delivering your web content and related assets so that they create, nurture, and boost your company’s customer base. Content marketing process steps may include a foundational strategy; content development; additional dataset schema and visual asset development; and channel leveraging across outbound marketing platforms, inbound marketing, and conversion development for sales. Google stated it clearly that it will always favor content that is relevant to the page, which is much deeper than just setting your primary keyword to match page content.
Users are the key drivers of change in what web content gets consumed the most. We see a growing hunt for high-value content among prospective B2B buyers. As this trend continues, strong growth in the quest for content during the buying journey is anticipated. The medium of product and service supplier websites and using the web to find providers is grown remarkably; changes are rapidly updating to provided better-optimized content on mobile. Having your structured data in place correctly for mobile content will move into the forefront in quarter 1 of 2016, with Google’s anticipated AMP platform rolling out.
Digital resources abound that demonstrate the significance of unique and optimized content within a great UX design. Consistent content curation and blogging typically reduce your cost per generated lead and why content marketing is a vital key in your marketing mix. AdWords conversion tracking is very useful for paid search, and Google Analytics is useful for demonstrating what buyers are most interested in on your website. While site optimization carries a necessary role in online media, the behavior of the B2B buyer shows they want more compelling details at every step in the buying process.
Buyers went to see your communications consistently available with solutions they need – and they are looking more often than ever on social channels and at images with Google Product Carousels. While your optimized web content for static pages evolves less frequently, set up a content calendar to point to them from your social networks to content that answers questions asked at each stage of the buyer journey.
Let Your Customers Drive Your Web Content
Users are the key drivers of change in what web content gets consumed the most. We see a growing hunt for high-value content among prospective B2B buyers. As this trend continues, rapid growth in the right content during the buying journey is anticipated. The medium of product and service supplier websites and using the web to find providers is grown remarkably; changes are rapidly updating to provided better-optimized content on mobile for voice search. Having your structured data in place correctly for mobile content will move into the forefront in quarter 1 of 2016, with Google’s anticipated AMP platform rolling out.
Digital resources abound that demonstrate the significance of unique and optimized content. Consistent content curation and blogging typically reduce your cost per generated lead and why content marketing is a vital key in your marketing mix. AdWords conversion tracking is very useful for paid search, and Google Analytics is useful for demonstrating what mobile-friendly content that buyers are most interested in on your website. While site optimization carries a necessary role in online media, the behavior of the B2B buyer shows they want more compelling details at every step in the buying process. Buyers went to see your communications consistently available with solutions they need – and they are looking more often than ever on Google+ and Google Search. While your optimized web content for static pages evolves less frequently, set up a content calendar to point to them from your social networks on a regular basis.
Website Optimization May Start with Page Speed and Link Repair
SEO copy-writing is best when it focused on creating useful, compelling, and valuable content, which targets niche keywords so that other individuals will gladly share it on social media platforms and build your site’s backlinks. This increases the authority of your content, validates it, and improves your ranking in Google for the corresponding keywords. Before you implement the principles of optimized web copy-writing, remember there are things that should come before on-page optimization. These include site speed and repairing any broken links first up, but there are many others.
Your content may be just what viewers are searching for, but if your headline is mediocre – poor, your click-through rate will be minimal. Because this makes a bold statement about the page content, spend adequate time being original, and meeting viewer interests. Also, I also check a business’s database regularly to see if there is clutter from old plugins and then recommend merging all databases into one. Additionally, be sure to monitor your social signals, consumer reactions, online reviews, tracking analytics, etc. But we have found that improving page speed alone may increase lead conversions by as much as seven percent.
Do People Using Mobile Devices Read Long-Form Content?
In order to provide complete and specific answers to questions asked online, long-form content has its place for both desktop and mobile users. Your developer should know how to take a mobile query directly to where it is answered on a page, so readers don’t need to scroll. This means it doesn’t matter how long the page’s content is; it is about being useful content. Longer Content While content length is clearly correlated with better search rankings, the factors that actually help Google rank pages are merely made possible by long-form content.
Measure and determine if you need more long-form web page content to meet user’s expectation and offer solutions.
No doubt, time and budget are a real hurdle when it comes to “getting mobile content done”. Much demand the attention of business owners and marketing teams. Updates in Google algorithms, platforms, search criteria, and tougher competition can overtake anyone. Then after producing the content, it is necessary to see what is happening with the page speed of the blog post. Was the image used condensed optimally? Do your supporting JavaScript and CSS files load without bogging your awesome content down? One can easily end up doing lots of tactical e-Commerce SEO work and running campaigns instead of stopping to identify goals and how to achieve them in a logical manner. And frequently the reason a business owner gives is along the lines of “we don’t have the time or the money for a web content audit”. The strategy may be regarded as expensive; tactics are cheap. In the end, the content you produce must resonate with your end-user whatever divide they are coming from!
Achieving Winning Content Requires Balance and a Team Approach
SEOs and web designers face the need to become hybrids that have blended expertise in areas of form and function as well as how a page can be found be search engines and useful for matching search intent. A concept popular within modernist design architecture and search engine optimization circles, team and consider all aspects so that the page first servers the users.
By beginning with a certainty that an SEO professional provides as to consumer interest in the page’s topic and the best URL, Title and the content frame for the ideal keywords used, then designers can better optimize the attractiveness (the “form”) of their web design and site attributes with usability and usefulness (the “function”).
Many content designers started out with a web or software background with a focus more akin to graphic designers, are tend to be primarily concerned with the presentation of text, images, colors, and other creative elements on-page. Today, a further developed expertise in user experience and human-computer interaction involved additional skills in ethnographic research and a study of conversion success that relies on a deep empathy with site users.
How to get your content noticed by Google Discover?
- Create quality, original, and engaging content
- Include uniqie and compelling visual content
- Become a trusted topic source
- Use reivew markup to help your product pages stand out for prospective buyers
By combining teams and disciplines, web content optimization includes beautiful interfaces, sites that are also intuitive, easy for users to navigate, fast-loading, and enjoyable. It is at the heart of lead generation best practices. The best world is when SEO’s, content writers, and designers share a passion for great content, and the desire to differentiate a business by creating content that really delivers. It starts with a true and current perception of the value of SEO and content pieces by authoritative authors.
Udemy** says that “While millions of online writers and companies are doing content marketing, very few are winning at it. To achieve the most positive outcomes, web content needs to be on-purpose and optimized.” Roles and hierarchies must bow to what the client site needs in order to gain and maintain consumer relationships by providing winning content. Use Artificial Intelligence and current search trends to best reach your audience.
Stats that Support Best Practices in Content Strategy
Hubspot compiled a list of what web content marketers find that users engage most in 2017.
* 8% of marketers plan to add Medium to their marketing efforts in the next 12 months. (HubSpot, 2016)
* On average, B2B marketers allocate 28% of their total marketing budget to content marketing. (Content Marketing Institute, 2015)
* Only 30% of B2B marketers say their organizations are effective at content marketing, down from 38% last year. (Content Marketing Institute, 2015)
* 55% of B2B marketers say they are unclear on what content marketing success or effectiveness looks like. (Content Marketing Institute, 2015)
* 32% of B2B marketers say they have a documented content marketing strategy. (Content Marketing Institute, 2015)
* 28% of B2B marketers say they have a documented editorial mission statement. (Content Marketing Institute, 2015)
* 47% of buyers viewed 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep. (Demand Gen Report, 2016)
* 96% of B2B buyers want content with more input from industry thought leaders. (Demand Gen Report, 2016) (Source: https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics)
“Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing web content to be easily discoverable by users searching for terms relevant to your website. The term SEO also describes the process of making web pages easier for search engine indexing software, known as Google Crawler to find, scan, and index.” wordstream.com
“87% of surveyed buyers look for advice before buying a product, service or solution. The first source when doing so: Web searches. With 71% of respondents who look for information, searches are by far the main source of information. Search and content are by definition very integrated.” – www.i-scoop.eu***
“Almost three-quarters (71 per cent) of B2B marketers say it’s a very important component of their marketing activity. But it’s worrying that 31% of the marketers who completed the survey have no formal strategy in place.” – www.baseone.co.uk
Jeannie Hill of Hill Web Creations offers marketing services, tools, and valuable information so you can glean better insights when analyzing your search performance. If you have major web content development project, we can work with you to create optimized web content that will serve your viewer’s needs.
You can download our Free SEO Page-by-Page Analysis Checklist. To advance on-line visibility through integrated content marketing strategies, you may reach Jeannie at 651-206-2410.
If your business can benefit from guidance to get your staff current and confident in all of the efforts, read how to Get your Web Content Crawled and Indexed: we’d love to help!
* Source: https://www.recode.net/platform/amp/2017/5/31/15693686/mary-meeker-kleiner-perkins-kpcb-slides-internet-trends-code-2017
** Source: https://www.udemy.com/web-content-optimization + http://www.adweek.com/digital/7-internet-trends-from-mary-meekers-2017-report-that-marketers-should-know-about/
*** https://www.i-scoop.eu/content-marketing-research-shows-b2b-buyers-want-content/