The Importance of Content in 2014: What You Need to Know to Do It Right
In the world of online marketing, there is a certain adage that has remained so important that many marketers have gone through the effort to engrave it on their desks, clipboards and foreheads so that they remember it: content is king.
Up until now, that philosophy has earned a mixed reaction from both advertisers and search engines. It’s in 2014 that this adage will become important to SEO, general marketing strategies, social integration and other countless fields that are a necessity for businesses to have a strong grasp on if they hope to succeed.
Without further delay, let’s take a look at the things you need to know about content in 2014 in order to do it right.
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1. All Content Has a Purpose
The first thing you need to know is one of the basic tenants of content creation: it must always have a purpose.
There are different categories that you can divvy content into, which includes advertisement, sales letters, lead-in pages and simple information pages.
Each piece of content, regardless of what it is, shares the same goal. You want to reel the reader in and force them to follow one of the many tantalizing bread crumbs that you’ve left there for them. While you might lead some to purchasing products or services, others to social media interaction and others to just increase their brand recognition, your content will fall flat unless you keep what the purpose of your content is while you’re creating it.
2. Your Content Needs to Satisfy
When you’re creating new content for your business’s website, your blog or even the web properties that might work to support your online ventures, it’s important to realize that you’re not just writing to entertain search engine spiders. You want to give the kind of information and details that real people will not only feel satisfied reading, but they’ll ask for more.
One way to satisfy your visitors with your content is to use the time-tested and proven philosophy of answering the questions your readers want to hear answered.
3. Make Content Interesting
Interesting and unique content will always shine miles above rehashed content with the usual perspective that your audience expects. This leads your audience members to not only stay on the pages that play host to your content, but also to give them incentive to share it with their like-minded friends, relatives and co-workers.
Unique content reduces negative SEO factors like bounce rates and increases positive factors like social media buzz, which are both factors that have become increasingly important with major search engines as of 2013 and will likely continue to increase in value in 2014.
Furthermore, social media buzz tends to bring in additional links that you otherwise would be hard-pressed to find. This can make the actual process of link building easier and cheaper due to the fact that it can require less work from a firm or your in-house staff.
4. Content Needs To Be Related
The most important thing you need to know about creating excellent content in 2014 is right here: you need to focus on branching topics rather than specific subjects and related key phrases rather than long-tail keywords.
Google has made how related the content is to other pieces important with the Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) introduced in the Google Penguin update and the interpretation features implemented from the Google Hummingbird update. Both updates directly affect search queries in such a way that web pages no longer need to use the exact keyword in order to be shown as a result.
Furthermore, a website with related content that fits under a certain theme will perform better for both visitors and search engines. This is one reason why the most successful content makes use of smart contextual linking within text, as users and search engines can find closely related topics without being forced to skim through hundreds or thousands of unrelated pages.
