If you have ever researched search engine optimization (SEO) before, then you’ve probably heard the phrase “content is king.” What does this mean exactly?
Well, Google is always looking for the best, most unique, and most helpful content for its users. Gone are the days when you could create a new page on your website, copy a body of text from a Wikipedia page, and expect it to rank on Google. As the internet becomes more competitive, Google continues to develop and evolve its algorithm to show the best web pages possible.
What Is Content?
First, we need to answer a simple question. What is content? Content is anything digitally digestible for the users who land on your website or are interested in your products and services. Some examples of website content include text, images, video, audio, downloadable files, guides, blog posts, articles, etc.
Let’s talk about creating a content strategy with the two most common types of content pages. We will show you how you can use different content types to grow your audience and make sales with SEO.
Blog Articles
Blog posts may be the most common type of content written on the internet. Blog articles can easily be optimized for SEO with most content management systems. Writing consistent blog posts that are created based around a certain keyword/keyphrase can eventually bring you hundreds of thousands of views. The idea here is to research keyword phrases in your space/industry and allow the keyword phrases to be the ideas for the articles.
I understand this may feel restricting or like you are not able to be creative with your blog, but let me ask you this. Do you want a blog that has a few readers or a potentially endless amount of viewers? If you want to grow your organic website traffic, you will need to create SEO-centric blog posts.
One thing I like to do to not feel creative restriction is the one-to-three approach. I will make three posts with keyword research and SEO, and then write one blog post for me. This seems to be a good formula to avoid content burnout and keep my mood and creativity high.
Here are some of the most common types of blog posts:
- List posts
- News posts
- Video blogs
- Industry-specific
- How-to guides
- Free checklists/cheat sheets
- Guest posts
- Interviews with industry experts
Blogs are a great choice if your goals are to get as many eyes on your website as possible while growing your authority and building an audience around your brand.
I would not use your blog post as a means of trying to push your products on people or make sales. If your users begin to realize that every blog post you make is really a sales page in disguise with no value, they will soon stop visiting your blog. Your blog post strategy should be to give away free, valuable content and grow your website traffic and audience.
There is a specific type of page/content that is designed for sales pitches called a landing page. More on that later.
How Many Times Should I Post?
There is no secret formula here, even though some gurus may say there is. Really, the correct amount of posts is as much as you can write within the time constraints of your normal life. If the question is quantity or quality, then my answer would be quality. Two hand-written blog posts that are unique in content, long in word count, and revolve around a keyword or set of keywords will always beat 12 blog posts created with AI just for the sake of posting content.
Landing Pages
Landing pages are where things get exciting because they can lead to sales and calls. As your website authority begins to increase because of your blog efforts, other pages on your website will become easier to rank. This is when you will want to go back and revisit the landing pages you created for your services and service areas. Landing pages differ from blog posts because you are not offering free educational information on these pages.
The purpose of a landing page for any business is to try to convert a user into a buyer. Think of your website as a funnel that you’re squeezing your users through. When they’re new to your brand or company, they want free value, but they still need to recognize you as the authority in your space. The blog posts will help them realize this, and when they are further along the funnel, you can send them to a landing page.
Google also loves landing pages! These pages can hold all of your business information like prices, phone numbers, emails, free quotes, and more. You can also optimize them for SEO and feature them on the first page of Google search results if you work hard enough.
Pretend you have a page that’s all about dental implants in Chicago and is ranking number one on Google. When someone types in “Dental Implants in Chicago,” it is very likely they will click on your link. If you set this page up with a phone number, an email, a map, and directions, then this is a landing page! You want the user to land there and have access to enough information to make a purchasing decision.
Product Pages — How They Differ From Landing Pages
Product pages are similar to landing pages but are optimized to revolve around a single product that you’re trying to sell instead of a service. The same concepts of SEO apply here, and you still want to do your keyword research before writing the copy for these product pages. You can optimize product pages with the right SEO techniques to be able to show your products in the shopping tab in Google search, which is a highly used search feature.
Start Creating Your Own Strategy
Now that you have some basic knowledge of the types of content pages that work well with SEO, it’s time to create a content strategy.
If this was a brand new website and I were in charge of creating a content strategy plan, I would begin with creating a blog post once a week or at least two times per month. Before starting the articles, I would do some keyword research and look for long-tail keyword phrases that are low competition. I would try to shoot for a monthly search volume of 100+ and increase the competitiveness of the keywords and volume as my website’s domain authority increases.
Along with this, I would do similar keyword research for the products or services you sell and begin making landing pages for each keyword you are targeting. These landing pages do not need to be linked into your navigation menu because you’re setting these pages up specifically for people who land on this page via Google search.
About Service Rankers
At Service Rankers, we help local businesses become more visible on Google searches to get more calls and make more sales. We are experts in GMB, web design, Google Ads, and SEO. If your website is not visible to the people who are looking for your services, then what’s the point in having a website? Trust us for your online marketing today.