This is a guest post from Pete Handley, an SEO consultant and expert. He writes article and blogs for Vertical Leap UK.
Content marketing is an effective strategy in so many ways for companies; it is highly economical, can boost traffic to a website, helps build authority and credibility for clients, and works efficiently with SEO efforts.
However there are four key challenges content marketers face in fully optimising their well-written and authentic content.
Find the most appropriate outlet for the content
Firstly, content that is relevant and written by a professional journalist is great – but if it isn’t published in the right places, then it won’t be able to achieve what it was set out to do.
Marketers must work hard to identify the most appropriate outlets for their content, and establish a community or network of followers – fellow industry professionals who are genuinely interested in, and willing to comment on, the most-common subjects of the content.
Stay Committed
Secondly, many start up their content marketing campaigns, but don’t stick with it. It is a commitment, and requires ongoing work in order to make it as effective as possible. There should be several integrated channels – such as social media content, blogs, evergreen and news, each of which serving its own purpose – and all need to be properly managed in order to form a cohesive campaign.
Make as much use of the content as possible
Thirdly, many marketers find it difficult to repurpose content effectively. However it is really relatively easy; for example, video content can be transcribed, and published as an interesting interview on a different source.
Another way in which to repurpose is to create an entirely ‘new’ article from previous information; for example, taking the results of 10 interviews with industry professionals, and creating one large ‘how-to’ article, incorporating each of the specialists’ advice.
Integrate it with SEO
Lastly, the partnership between content marketing and SEO is an important one; that can often get overlooked, thus making marketing the content much more difficult. In order to optimise content for SEO purposes, specifically-chosen keywords are generally used, and the content shaped around them.
These keywords are usually phrases searched for by Joe Public, and as such, when a search is made using them, the content appears in search results. This can help to increase the audience of the content, and help to market the company for which it has been written.
