Anyone who has been involved in online marketing for any amount of time knows the Internet is a constantly evolving environment. In order to use it to maximum benefit, marketing strategies need to keep up with that evolution. That’s why optimized content marketing is so crucial today.
A webmaster or SEO provider not practicing optimized content marketing is not giving clients the best chance of succeeding. Those that are remain at the cutting edge of the online world while keeping customers there as well. How is your webmaster or SEO company doing?
Optimized Content Marketing Explained
Though some SEO companies try to offer a very complex definition of optimized content marketing to make themselves appear more important than they are, it is not very complicated all. In simple terms, it is the practice of purposely creating content targeted at specific groups of people for specific purposes, then linking that content together effectively.
Generating optimized content begins with knowing what people are talking about and what they are interested in. This information comes from a number of sources including the news media, social media, and the content being generated by competitors already enjoying success.
The idea is to take those topics and use them to generate traffic to your own website. To a certain extent, there is some art involved here but for the most part, it just requires good analytics and some old-fashioned common sense. Webmasters able to correctly gauge the heartbeat of their target audience find optimized content marketing fairly easy to implement.
Defining Content
The other important component of optimized content marketing is to properly define “content.” On the surface that may seem like a no-brainer until you realize what you are currently generating is not helping increase traffic or page ranking. The types of content you are looking for need to take advantage of current Internet metrics. You want to generate things like:
- relevant blog posts
- newsworthy press releases
- white papers and case studies (where appropriate)
- how-to guides
- news and events articles
With all of these pieces of content, you do not need to worry so much about keywords and their placement as you do about relevance. Keywords are good; keyword portfolios are better. But more important than both of them is to create content that can provide users with something they will not find anywhere else.
When your content offers real, useful information, you will be rewarded by both Google and your readers. Yes, the last two rounds of Google updates have introduced relevancy and useful content to their algorithms. They are now paying attention to what you say as well as how you say it.
A good example of relevant content comes by way of press releases. When the press release became a viable marketing tool for SEO a couple of years ago, marketers were selling them as just another means of targeted advertising. However, Google and the other search engines quickly and began punishing companies using press releases for things other than what they were designed for: news.
An effective press released today informs readers of new products and services, industry news, or some important company development. A press release that does not fulfill these guidelines will be very difficult to include in an optimized strategy because it is likely to not be looked on favorably by Google.
Under the new Internet paradigm, optimized content strategies are the best way to make sure you do not fall behind the competition. If you are not already employing an optimized strategy, you cannot afford to wait until next month. Get started today and get back in the game.
