Digital Marketing: Step Three - Content Creation vs Link Building
What types of content should I create? What are people interested in learning about or reading? Those are great questions and a great place to start. I recommend reviewing your search traffic date and by going to Google Trends to see what types of search inquiries are being searched as they pertain to your area of expertise. If you're creating content already, you can review your social media insight data . Real-time trends and feedback from your online engagement will help guide you in your content creation.
Topics for content will likely fall in one of three categories:
Learn and improve
This type of content is designed to optimize your customers' tasks or workflow. You are attempting to make their lives better by more fully utilizing your product (feature education, etc.), or even by offering assistance. The main goals of this content type are to build authority, drive connections, and increase engagement.
Explore and discover
Customers wanting to get creative and find new ways to use your product are looking for this type of content. For this group, building relationships is going to be tantamount; these relationships will breed ideation and community.
Question and answer
This type of content serves to meet customer support needs. Something has gone wrong, and customers seek a solution. This can range from a detailed forum thread on resolving a technical issue to a simple question and answer on how to make a product return. Your main goal is to drive answers.
“An orphan page is the one that is not linked to by another one of the site (i.e. that cannot be reached from anywhere on the site) and thus cannot be found by a search bot unless it is linked to externally.”
For small businesses, using local hosting sites to link to your site is going to be the first step in your link building campaign. Managing all of these local listing can be a full time job. Where do you start? Which ones are worth your time? We can help you with that! A holistic approach to your digital marketing is going to give you the greatest leverage over time, however, finding a balance that fits you and your business is what will make or break your efforts. As a small business owner, you need to view yourself as a small publishing house - who creates and markets their own content.
“Links on the Internet form a relationship between pages and sites that are hugely important to both search engines and marketers. Search engines, like Google, use links to crawl the web, discover new pages, calculate the popularity of those pages, and also determine the relevancy of results to a searcher’s query.”
Think of link building as a way for your content and your webpage to gain relevancy. The more links to your site, the better. Internal and external links are currently important parts of the SEO equation. The hardest part is getting started. It doesn't have to be perfect, you just have to be consistent and relevant!
If you're looking at Marketing Your Ecommerce Store, I recommend this article: ECOMMERCE GUIDE.