What is Content Marketing and How Does It Grow Organic Traffic?

Today, consumers are more conscious about what they purchase and how they purchase. It has been estimated that about 59% of shoppers use Google to research their purchases while buying something online or in-store. Many turn to social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter. 

A business can easily reach a greater number of customers with the help of content marketing, which involves creating as well as distributing content to attract the target audience.

A strong strategy of content marketing can help in driving traffic to the website and generate better sales for the business. This article will discuss in-depth content marketing and how good quality content writing can help you in growing your organic traffic.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing can be understood as a marketing process that works on the fact that most of the customers may disregard the “noise” of different marketing efforts that they are exposed to regularly. This technique involves creating unique and relevant content for the business that the customers would find valuable and useful.  It can even be considered as an art of communicating with potential customers without selling your products or services to them directly.

In content marketing, instead of selling your products or services, you give out relevant information to the prospective customers about your business.  When done correctly, one can easily promote their business without interrupting the lives of the customers while being rewarded with support and loyalty. The purpose of content marketing is to attract and develop a particular target audience to create customer engagement.  By consistently delivering valuable information to the customers, you can gain their trust and support.

How does Content Marketing help in Growing Organic Traffic?

Content marketing is particularly helpful if you want to grow the organic traffic to your website or blog. Below are some content marketing tips that would help you in growing your organic traffic:

1. Define the Target Audience

Defining the target audience is the key to creating and implementing an effective content marketing strategy. Find out who is your ideal customer, what are their interests, which method of communication they prefer, etc. You can also make use of data from the existing customers to help with the research. One should then compile this research into a buyer persona. To understand your target audience, you need to understand their pain points and provide products or services which provide a solution to it.

2. Establish Marketing Goals

Defining your goals and objectives would help you and your team to have clear and defined objectives and stay focused on the bigger picture. To create your content marketing goals, you can follow the SMART methodology (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely) to create a roadmap for the business. This will help you plan the strategy accordingly. One should also define the metrics that are important for the business before investing in content marketing.

3. Research about Your Competitors 

Today, many companies are starting to see the value of content marketing. More than 56% of B2B content marketers spend more on content creation in today’s world. This means that most of the competitors in the industry are likely to be using content marketing for attracting customers. However, it also represents a huge learning opportunity for the business. 

You should compile a list of the top competitors in the industry and find out details about their content and the strategy that they are following. This way, you would get a sense of what the competitors are doing. One should never copy their competitors directly. You should instead look for ways to distinguish the content and provide more valuable content to the customers.

4. Build In-Depth Content

The ranking algorithm of Google has grown over the last few years. Initially, one could easily produce a short article of 500 words and get it ranked on the first page itself with a few backlinks. However, today Google has got better at delivering authoritative and relevant content. 

In case you want to increase your organic search traffic, you should focus on building in-depth content for your website or blog.

Also, by creating lengthy and factual content, one can gradually improve the search engine rankings while establishing the business as an authority. Consider the target audience and find out the topics that they are searching for. This is a great starting point to create engaging content.

5. Create Topic Clusters

One can take their content marketing efforts further with the help of topic clusters. Such clusters consist of different groups of interrelated content that links to another specific piece of content. These are beneficial from the point of both the search engine as well as the user. Users can also learn about a topic by clicking through the internal links.

6. Incorporate SEO

It is also a good idea to incorporate SEO into the content marketing strategy as it would help in increasing the search engine rankings. One can also use tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner to identify relevant keywords, including long-tail keywords that the audience is searching for. You can then optimize the web pages around them. Optimize the page titles, headers, URLs, meta descriptions, and Image ALT tags on-page SEO factors as this will help in increasing the relevance of the content.

Ensure that you include the keywords throughout the content. However, don’t go overboard as spamming the content with keywords can lead to a ranking penalty. Focus on providing value to the users and use a grammar checker to ensure that your content flows properly.

7. Make a Content Calendar

A content calendar can be understood as an editorial calendar that helps in streamlining your efforts in content creation and helps in staying more organized. It also provides an overview of what content is to be created and where it is to be published. By creating a content calendar, one can also factor in any holidays or special events throughout the year.

8. Multiply Your Content Marketing Efforts

Blogs are an effective way of increasing organic traffic. It allows one to not only share your expertise but also helps in reaching your target audience online. Every blog post is a marketing asset that can generate better and more leads for the business. Keeping a blog post in a single format is a wasted opportunity. One can easily turn a blog post into social media posts, white papers, webinars, infographics, videos, guest posts, and so on.

9. Ensure Consistent Marketing

One needs to put in consistent efforts for content marketing to be successful. One cannot publish just one blog post and expect immediate and good traffic to the website. Regular publishing the content is the key to growing organic traffic to a website. As you scale up your content marketing efforts, it’s important to maintain a consistent voice through different media platforms. You can also create a brand style guide for your team to cross-check before publishing any content.

10. Track the Results

Building and implementing a content marketing strategy needs a lot of effort. Therefore, it is important to track the results and check whether your content is generating enough revenue or not. By doing this, you can also determine the type of content that resonates with your target audience and whether one should continue to invest in a channel or not.

Conclusion

Today, more and more customers are turning to digital platforms to research their purchases. Content marketing is thus a great way to position your services or products in front of a greater number of prospects and generate more sales for the business. You can implement these tips on your own or just hire professionals such as Stan Ventures to help you grow your organic traffic with the help of content marketing.