In last week’s article we established what the purpose of content is and how you should not go about writing or acquiring it. Let’s now look at what you should be doing.
It is not sufficient to simply have one page for each product and service your company provides. That is the bare minimum and is not enough for SEO purposes or ‘content marketing’ purposes. In addition to your site’s base content you need to expand out and create additional valuable content which creates interest and pulls in traffic.
What should I write about?
The answer is simple: you should write what will be read. In other words write content which people want to read, because they find it either helpful or interesting.
How do I determine what content people view as helpful or interesting?
This is a key step in content creation. Investing your time and energy in content that no one is interested in is not what you want. You have must research using Google, Youtube and other web platforms to find out what type of content being read, shared, linked to and popular.
For instance if your company is a florist you would want to check on Google to see what kinds of flower-related pages rank well, and then inspect those pages to see if there is anything unique about its content which you could emulate. On Youtube see what types of videos have the most views and isolate what makes the videos more popular than others. Scour the web for articles on florist related topics and find the ones which had the most social media shares (the articles usually have social media buttons at the top which will tell you this). By doing these actions you’ll have a general idea of what content is succeeding.
Additionally in order to find what is popular, you should use Google’s Keyword Tool to find out what are the most searched phrases related to your business. This will give ideas for what type of content is in demand.
https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner
Another simple and direct way of determining what content to write about is to personally survey your customers, using survey questions geared to find what kind of information would be very valuable to them with regards to the products and services you provide. For example a business that deals in landscape maintenance could survey its customers on: 1) what are the biggest problems you face in maintaining your landscaping? This would then give one good ideas for content.
Different types of content
Once you have gathered what the topic of your content will be, it is then time to determine which form of content your topic should take. For instance if you determined that you should write some content about ‘easy and affordable ways to maintain lawns”, then that topic could then be turned into any of the following content types:
- Original Research
- DIY / How-to guides
- Reviews of industry products
- Descriptive articles (written to inform one about the topic)
- Entertainment
Conclusion
After writing your content, be sure to follow closely its performance so you can keep a record of what type of content is performing and not performing (by using analytics). In this way you can gain certainty in what you should or should not be writing about.
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