Steven J. Wilson — March 9, 2020 Your creativity is a fragile bridge that can deliver loads of traffic to your business or crumble and fall before your content even has a chance.
You need to be creative when developing your content strategies across the platforms your business uses to break through the noise and truly stand out.
You understand this, we all do even if we don’t fully understand how to best utilize our creativity for our campaigns.
You and your team spend hours planning, strategizing, and executing creative pieces of content that you hope will bring floods of traffic to your website and generate leads for your business.
The problem many businesses face is that they rely to much on their bias and creativity. They don’t focus on the other vital aspects needed to have search engines understand and deliver their content to their target audiences.
Step 1. Create The Right Type Of Content
This is where you let your creativity shine. This step is where you should focus on strategizing and creating unique and helpful pieces of content for your target audience.
No one understands the business better than you do. So, let that shine and develop content that truly delivers value and ultimately increases revenue.
Sounds easy enough, but this is where many business owners let their creativity get in the way.
- Be sure to keep your creativity in check. Create content not only specific to your industry but topics that have the potential to turn into leads.
- Focus on your headline. It is the most read part of your content, and if you don’t grab people’s attention and make them want to read more, your content will not perform as well as it could—more on optimizing your headline later in the article.
- Make sure your content is comparable to what’s popular. If the top content on the front page of Google has, on average, 1,200 words, eight images, one video, and loads of statistics, then make sure your content includes similar details.
Getting this right can give your creative content the advantage.
Step 2. The Second Layer of Content
This is where the most significant issues generally occur. Content creators often forget or neglect the second layer, which is necessary to dominate search algorithms.
If your goal is to get search algorithms to favor your content and show it to people actively searching for what you have to offer, you have to get this right.
During the content creation or First Layer stage, you are focusing your efforts on the humans who will be consuming your content. For the second layer, you have to focus on what the search algorithms need to understand and favor your content.
Optimizing for the Second Layer
When optimizing your second layer, focus on these critical areas to help search engines understand and deliver your content to searchers looking for what you have to offer.
Keyword Research
When you are finished creating your content, you have to be willing to make some adjustments to your content.
Even if you have the best piece of content out there, getting this wrong will result in no one ever seeing your hard work.
Having your keywords in the areas mentioned below is what search engines need from your content.
Let’s take a look at how Brian Dean, with Backlinko, effectively used the second layer to target, ‘keyword Research,’ and secure the #1 position on Google.
Titles
After you found keywords that you know your audience is searching for, be sure to add them to your Title.
It can be a challenge to make this works as you have limited characters, but the results from getting this right are too significant to ignore.
URL Structure
Adding your keyword in your URL is necessary to help search engines know that your content is relevant to that keyword.
You can see that Backlinko also used his target keyword in his URL.
Meta Descriptions
This is necessary, as well. I’m sure you’ve noticed when you are searching for something on Google that you will see the highlighted keywords in the meta description.
H1, H2, H3, and H4 tags
When you are breaking up your content with your H tags, adding your keywords will help search engines understand how deep you are going on your content.
You don’t need to do this for every section, but you want to add them where it makes sense.
In The Content Body
Only when natural and makes sense should you use your keywords and variations of it within your content.
Backlinko did a great job of utilizing the target keyword in their content.
Image Optimization
You should also help search engines understand the images on the page by using your keywords and variations in your image file name and alt tag.
You can see that Backlinko also utilized this vital detail.
Schema Markup
Schema Markup is one that is gaining attention but still not entirely used by many businesses out there.
Schema mark up is a solution created by the major search engines that help them better understand the content on a page.
If you are not familiar with schema, there are some easy to use schema markup generators you can use to quick markup your content.
If you want to implement schema on your site Schema Markup generator by TechnicalSEO is an easy to use solution. You can also use Structured Data Markup Helper by Google as well.
At this point, you are just taking your already optimized content and adding to your schema to help search engines further understand your content.
As you can see from Backlinko’s results that these necessary additions to your content can help you rank with search engines.
Step 3. Creative Content Alone Isn’t Enough
This hurts many content creators by assuming that your creativity will be enough or assuming that since they have this great piece of content, that will be enough.
You still have to put in the work and help search engines favor your content.
Getting backlinks, social shares, and user engagement are all things you should focus on the help your content succeed.
The way people interact with your content is a significant ranking factor amongst search engines.
Finishing up
It not about just creating content that gets views and likes. The goal should be to use your creativity to create something that helps you generate more leads for your business.
Get these steps right, and you are on your way to generating leads on autopilot.
It is truly some of the most satisfying results you can get!
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