Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
By: Savo Nikić
In the circles of digital marketers, or at least those who offer themselves as prominent narrators of marketing contemporaneity, you will often hear the now famous phrase: Content is king!
Always exceptional Seth Godin went even further, and points out that the only thing left of marketing today is actually just content. Today, when we’re all fighting for a client, a new visitor to our site, our landing page or portal, our app, our integrated campaign, reach on social networks, or, most simply, our place online, it’s crystal clear to us – regardless whether digital marketing has already tired us with its constant changes – that content is the only thing that makes the decisive difference and which has taken on the role of the divinity in digital marketing.
Though we could cite a bunch of examples of good content marketing – for example, from what Pornhub is doing, to examples from regional forces – the question is how to get functional and good content? And how much can we benefit from simple tips and other company teams that, although not directly related to content and marketing, have valuable information!
Google loves you
I mean, above all, teams that daily communicate online and offline and meet the real needs of our potential or existing clients. And all in the spirit of the basic rule that good content is the one created for people, not for Google. Let’s recall, the strategic future of Google Search is to favor content, not only as a desirable culture of our digital work, but also the crucial thing that can quickly set as apart from the competition. Not only in our competitive niche, but also in wider terms. The tectonic shifts in Google’s algorithms happen so often and so inconspicuous that Google practically every week (or every day) makes minor or major changes. Although Google is trying to offer optimization instructions and democratize them, many of these changes are covered with a veil of secrets. So recently, more precisely just over a week ago, the online world experienced a real small earthquake, because organic ranking results of even the finest SEO players suddenly got jumbled. So much so that the Google’s team on Twitter started getting frantic questions about what happened. The Gods fell on their heads – more precisely, some even fell to the second page of the search results, where, we would say jokingly, the living rarely exist.
Responding to a question whether a fresh update to the algorithm was made, John Mueller, one of Google’s spokespersons, gave a mystic and short answer on his Twitter account that “such changes occur every day”. Generally, Google is working every day to make it easier for users and to streamline related organic searches, so they could get the answer to their question, or the “search query”, as soon as possible, and find not only what they were searching for, but to spend some time there (the website) and consume certain content. It all seems very simple, but how do we do it?
It’s not advertising, but it sells
So first and foremost, before you go on an adventure of creating content, you first have to realize what it is that the visitors of your website are actually looking for, what interests them, and then answer their problems. All of them come from the real world, with needs, desires for knowledge or with the purpose of spending. One of the most important things is to try and be a client before you go into the adventure of creating a certain continual online content. In such a preparation, you can rely on your company’s external teams. Listen to what your clients want to know, what problems they have, through direct email, POS or offline contacts and call center communication, and keep track of them to offer content that will respond to their needs at the same time. You have to go through the whole circle to find these things efficiently. Only such content, as well as the one that is unique enough and interesting, will bring you the true content marketing that will work for your benefit! Above all, there’s a whole lot of digital tools in front of you, from basic Google Analytics onwards, which can help you test which keywords, inquiries and searches bring users to you, and it is up to you to use this information in a timely and systematic manner with a smart and continuous strategy.
Moreover, Google will reward you if you offer content that, so to say, contextually matches your site, but it will reward you the most if you are original and – very important – regular. Okay, you’ll have to take care of keywords, indexed pages, not having misleading tittles, and so on, but that’s all the stuff that one technical SEO can do very efficiently, leaving the content team the opportunity for creativity, uniqueness and being “tricky”. This leaves you the necessary space for compulsory mutual cooperation. Even if you make the effort to do it yourself, you will understand that your links must be “semantically accurate”, as they must be easily readable both for users and the crawlers, with keywords preferably at the very beginning. Be vary of the so called duplicates, make a good tittle tag and meta description. This last one will affect your mythical click through rate (CTR). In one word, all that is meant when we talk about SEO. However, creating new content and keeping it up to date can do wonders. It always takes time. Experience has even shown that if you refresh some old content, it will get a whole new organic search rank, which is beneficial to you, and this very insisting on fresh content, it turns out, was one of the causes of recent tectonic disorders in Google’s algorithm updates. True, despite many speculation, the latter is still in the dark side of Google.
Even so, we can safely say that regardless how much Google as the dominant search engine perfected its crawlers and data indexing, no matter how many microchanges they’ve done, no matter how surprising they may be with any new changes, the only constant of Google’s ranking of your digital efforts is and will be in the foreseeable future your content! Now you understand where the story of content as the only remaining marketing comes.
Content vs. embellished story
Namely, the importance of content is not only that it will bring a good user experience, that you will improve page rankings or QS for example. It’s not about having natural user flow on your site. It’s not about eventually having visitors on the site who are spending their time there and deciding on further steps, and you will help them with user friendly design and well-designed call-to-action triggers. It’s not about controlling the bounce rate and so on. It’s not about someone sharing it, recommending it, linking it on their site without no follow distractions, because the team of that authoritative site really likes your content, so you also get the most valuable backlinks. To put it simply, content does a lot of work in SEO efforts – however, the highest value of content is the fact that, in today’s digital marketing marked by hyper-production, only content makes the difference. In addition, it’s not advertising, but it still sells, and sells best. It’s not PPC, yet it brings clicks. It doesn’t cost directly, and becomes the most expensive item for all companies, because it decides not only your organic search and position, but also your identity on the web. And that’s exactly what you want. Right?
This multi-layered importance of content makes it the leading marketing of today. We can freely say that if you are dealing with digital marketing, and don’t pay attention to content, you are losing the battle.
Of course, you can always break the piggybank for SEA or paid ads, and to build (bid) to your heart’s desire, but the only problem with advertising is that it’s just that – advertising. There have been a lot of articles, more or less true, about how much the average user is distracted by paid ads, or how much native marketing and content avoid such trap. While your budget can make it instant for you to place on the top of the search in your niche with selected keywords, it’s doesn’t worth much if your landing page, its copy and call to action, are not doing their job. Ah, yeah, we’re back to that. We’re coming back to it. The damned content!
Create smart, place smart
So activate your copywriting team, PR, content team, visuals, creatives and SEO, but also all other teams of the company that can whisper to you what the customer-visitor-potential buyer wants to hear, and what they are looking for. Here are some basic tips to keep in mind:
- Create new content. First of all make it original, fulfill the expectations of your visitors. You have to do it continuously. No surrender, no short victories.
- Be smart at placing content. Optimize it. Always consult your technical SEO team.
- Take care of keywords. Secure the necessary insights before creating the content, don’t do it on a whim, have a plan.
- Check the queries that bring the client to your content and make sure it meets and/or can replace fulfill their expectations. Don’t let it be a futile click, give them something, keep them on the site. Entertain them. Make the desired engagement.
- Don’t expect anything overnight.
- Include a blog on your site. If you haven’t done it already, hurry up. There is a worldwide hyperproduction, but in the region you can achieve quite good results. The benefits of a blog on your site or e-commerce store are many.
- Do not attempt to build up content for a particular keyword, by creating content that is not related to your site. Google will see through you, no matter how much you may think that black hat is cool.
- Solve all technical and SEO problems on the site. It’s incredible how many sites don’t have even the basic optimization.
- Create content that your customer-visitor would like or expect to see. But first, find out what it is!
- Create different types of content. Not just textual.
- Maximize your digital PR potentials.
Of course, much more could be written about this. But don’t forget (though you’re dealing with digital marketing) to use both offline and online with content integration, which may be current. Integrated campaigns of this type can give you great results.
(Author Savo Nikić is engaged in marketing, digital marketing, communication and PR. He specialized in these areas, with work experience in the regional and international environment, and is a professor of philosophy and related social sciences by formal education. He’s the author and soloist in the Azil 5 band. He was engaged in media and journalism.)
