If you have already devoted yourself to creating quality web content, you are probably wondering how to get a bigger audience for it. Often the key to getting discovered isn’t writing more, but promoting more. Here are some top tips for you to follow, so you rank better for the search terms that matter to you in the organic results.
Define your audience

Who is it that you are actually producing this content for? You need to figure out who your audience is. Having a narrowly defined ideal client is the first step of every marketing strategy. As a start you can define your target audience by: location, age, income (for individuals) and industry, size, experience (for businesses). Next up, think about their needs, buying habits, interests, frustrations, problems. Look to speak to the needs of this group with the content that you produce.
Find your audience

Wouldn’t it be nice if your target customers simply searched on Google and came across your service or product. In reality they might ask a friend, colleague or a coworker for a recommendation. They may check comparison or review websites. Or they could be searching local businesses directly through social media websites. You need to create the persona of your customer and be sure who they are – demographic, location, interests, needs, etc. If they are on social media sites, you need to be there too. However, remember the purpose of Facebook and Twitter – it’s social media, not selling media. If you want to be successful, start by being truly social. Automated content and slow responses won’t help you much. Interact with customers, offer advice and share useful content. Don’t spam the news feed with updates about your products or services all the time. Anything that looks too sales-y on Facebook puts people off. Twitter is also a platform you can use for building B2B relationships – perhaps even a more successful one than Facebook, especially if you don’t have a consumer brand. If you want to find information relevant to your business much faster, use Twitter lists.

 Make your content search-engine friendly

Search engines might be just computer programmes, but they are smart, so you need to make your content easy to understand. Here are some of the elements to pay attention to:

 

• The Page Title: Not to be mistaken for the actual heading of an article you are writing. The page title is the so called window title, because it appears at the top of the browser’s window. It has two important roles: it’s an important piece of “meta data” (the information about the page) and it’s what appears underlined and in blue in Google’s results. People scan the page title when they get Google search results, so keep it short and to the point.

 

• The Meta Description: Similar to the page title as it is also shown in search results, but it’s a longer and more descriptive piece of content. It is right under the blue underlined title, so you can use it to actually “sell” your page to visitors. This description is what can make people click through to your website. Keep it shorter than 155 characters, welcoming and friendly.

 

• Links: The links between pages are a primary web currency. The more links between your page and other relevant pages you have, the more “votes” in the eyes of search engines, which makes your page rank better. If you can’t get other pages to link to yours just yet, make sure you create links within the website itself – one page linking to another relevant one will help visitors find their way around. Make your website intuitive and user-friendly and you will be rewarded by search engines.

Keep in mind that there are more than 200 factors which are taken into account by search engines when ranking websites. Moreover, each year Google makes about 500 changes to the search algorithm which makes it even harder to stay up to date with all the rules.

To sum it up, make sure you write web content for your audience and the rest will fall into place. Stay tuned for part 2 of this article and use the comment box below to tell us how you get your content discovered.