In 2017, they say that if we can’t find you on the internet, you don’t exist.

For businesses, it’s vital that you can be found online.

If you run a restaurant – customers will want to read reviews, your menu, and get your phone number to be able to make reservations.

If you own an ecommerce business – without a good Internet presence, you have no business.

But, gaining visibility is a hard battle.

The Internet is a competitive landscape.

Luckily, there are some great resources out there from businesses who have already won the online visibility battle. Copyblogger.com is one of them.

Copyblogger has been teaching people how to create amazing online content since 2006.

Their valuable tips, helpful advice, and clever content writing tricks have won them the reputation of being one of the most valuable resources when it comes to content marketing.

That said, I’ve gathered some of their best tips and packed them into bite-sized bits so that you can get a taste of their style.

The Importance of SEO for Content

• Get to Know Your Users. Who are they? Where do they live? How old are they? What are they looking for? What do they need? And, most importantly, what can YOU do to help them? These are some basic questions you should answer before creating content. You should know your audience very well so you can know how to address them and what solutions you can offer them. It may seem hard to answer all of the above questions, but it is really not. All you have to do is monitor your traffic. Your analytics data can tell you a lot. Tools like Google Analytics can give you demographics points about your website visitors.
• Give Them the Best Experience. And by that, I mean make sure your website is loading fast, and people don’t have to wait too much to see your content. People on the internet don’t have patience and there is nothing more annoying than having to wait for a page to load. Studies show that the longer your page load time takes, the less likely people are to stay. Less than 3 seconds is optimal. 5 seconds or more and you’ll see a significant drop.

• Look Pretty. As in, put some effort into that interface, will you? A simple yet elegant and easy to use layout never hurts anybody. Choose the right images and the right colors to represent your brand and make your user’s experience as intuitive as you can. People do love simple things that don’t make them sweat. The entire user experience should be effortless. Combining too many ideas can make your visuals distracting and cause visitors to spend less time on your site than they otherwise would.

• Keywords, Keywords, Keywords. If you have decided to join the online community (welcome to the dark side, we have cookies and traffic, lots of both) I am sure you have heard this before: keywords are the holy grail of content (along with originality, of course.) Use them in your title, in the headlines, the title of your images, the first paragraph and meta descriptions. Be careful not to use too many because the more, the better does not apply here. You have to find the keywords that work for you, the keywords that your audience is looking. And too many makes your content difficult to read. Your content should flow naturally and not read robotically. Make sure that while you include keywords, you are writing for human readers, not web algorithms.

• Allow People to Contact You and Leave You a Review. It is crucial to have these two pages on your website since they prove that you can be trusted (and you can be found, for that matter). And most importantly, so you can show that other people trusted you and they were so happy with your product or services that they took the time to leave you a review.

• You Get One Website. Make It a Good One. To be honest, you can have as many sites as you like but I highly recommend you stick to one website per business. If you are operating in more than one city, you should create unique landing pages for every city.

If you want to learn more about SEO, what it stands for and how you can use it, check this article here.

Content Writing

• Write Original Content. I can’t say enough how important it is that your content is original. Not only you will lose your readers if you plagiarize others, but you could be penalized by Google. Google is not a big fan of “borrowed” content, and you shouldn’t be either. Why start the business if you are not going to use your own ideas in the first place? Keep it real and make people fall in love with your brand by being yourself! Because of Google’s duplicated content penalties, you won’t see a search benefit from using someone else’s content, no matter how good it is.

• Make It Easy to Read. Use short sentences, bulleted lists, subheads and anything else you can think of that will help the reader enjoy the content on your website, even more. People like to skim as they read, write for people who skim. Notice how this article has a lot of bullet points? There’s a reason for that.

• Get Personal. Use “me,” “I,” “you,” “we,” “us” and talk to your readers like you would talk to a friend. This type of writing will make the conversation more personal and will increase engagement.
• Use Stories and Numbers. Percentages and numbers will always be convincing, and stories will always be catchy. Try to keep your readers interested and make them part of your business. People connect with the people behind the brands, not with the brands themselves.

• Respond in Real Time. Try to respond to a customer’s question as fast as possible, no matter the question. If it is a question relevant to your service or product, try to give the best answer you can, especially if this is a comment visible on your website or your social media accounts. People appreciate it when brands respond to their questions fast, and it makes them trust the brand and think that if they have a problem in the future, someone will be there to help them solve it.

• Promote your content. Last but not least, make yourself seen. Share your content everywhere you can (as long as it is relevant to you, of course). Use groups on Facebook or LinkedIn, forums, Q&A sites or different chats. For example, you can go on different sites where people ask questions that you may have an answer for and you can reply with some strong arguments and refer to your website after that.

• Reach out. Try to connect with people who could be useful to your business, share ideas, make connections and even try to use cross promotion ( you promote their business, they promote yours and everybody is happy and promoted, of course).

To learn more about how to create great content, you can read this full post here.

Content Marketing Goals

• Do Your Research. For both guest posts and backlinks, in the beginning, you will be the one who will reach out to people and suggest different collaborations. Contact people from your niche who you think are relevant to your business and send them an e-mail where you either offer a guest post on their website or to link an article of theirs with an article of yours. All you have to do is be honest, don’t try to sugarcoat anything and be clear from the beginning on what their benefits will be and what you would do in return. This is a popular search engine optimization tactic, and a lot of the more popular blogs get these types of requests every day.

• Get to Know Your Audience. After you have done your research, try to know as many things as possible about the person you are contacting. Get personal, so they can know you are not sending a bunch of emails to random people, hoping to get a positive response someday.

• Sell Yourself. After you got to know a little bit about the person you are about to contact, sell yourself. In other words, you have to explain to people why your content is valuable and why they should say yes to your proposal. Don’t sell yourself short. Point out all the good parts of your website, your content or your services/product.

Continue with this article about ten content marketing goals worth pursuing.

Mobile Optimization

• Be Friendly, Especially Mobile-Friendly. Not too long ago, mobile-friendliness became a ranking factor, so if your customers are not having a very pleasant experience when checking your website from their phone, you might want to make some changes.

• Speed Is Important. And you will for sure not get a speeding ticket if your page is loading too fast. In fact, make sure it loads as fast as it can. If users have 0 patience when they are using their laptops, they have -1 patience when they are using their phone, and they are bored, waiting in line somewhere. If that wasn’t convincing enough for you, know that Google has included site speed and page load time in its mobile-friendly algorithm.

Read here a full article on what mobile optimization is really about and how you can benefit from it. Also, check out this interesting post about Google mobile penalty here.

Social Media Marketing

• First Impressions Matter. Your website is your home base. It’s one of the few places where you have control over the user experience, from the site design to the content they read. That is why it’s important to ensure that your website tells the right story about your business. Make sure your website looks clean and professional and performs excellently. You can still opt for a funky design as long as the design is clean and user experience isn’t affected.

• Determine the Face of Your Business. People don’t like talking to faceless brands on social media. That’s why it’s important to use a human face if you want your social media strategy to work. Create a persona and use it to engage with your followers. As a rule of thumb, you should aim at being human and genuine and not sounding like a corporate robot.

• Who Else Has Your Audience? The purpose of social media is to help you connect with potential customers and build relationships with them that could eventually turn into sales. It can also help you establish connections with other entities that share your audience, such as blogger, vloggers, social media influencers, and so on. Reach out to them and ask for collaborations.

• Pick a Main Social Media Platform. There are dozens of social media platforms out there, and it can become hard to determine which one you should focus on. Think about where your customers are. You might love Twitter, but if your customers spend most of their time on Instagram, then that’s where you should be.

For more great tips on how to set up an effective social media marketing strategy, continue reading this article here.

Conclusion

Just like any other thing in life, all of this is easier said than done. But if you are truly passionate about your work and want to see it grow, we recommend you to take some time and apply as many rules as you can.

To get the traffic you need (and want) is not a matter of luck, it is a matter of creativity, combined with ambition and perseverance.

You have to track your progress and analyze your results constantly and see which strategy works for you and which doesn’t.

As soon as you see your traffic grow a little bit every day, you will feel the satisfaction every online marketer feels.

And believe me; it’s the best feeling in the world seeing your hard work paying off.

If you need some help writing content and building your content marketing strategy, Copyblogger can be of great help.

Check out the reference posts mentioned above or do some research on your own to convince yourself that this is a blog that is worth your time.