Winning customers faster with content marketing (Part 1)

Website owners need more than just traffic to increase their customer base, reach their sales goals and achieve their marketing objectives. More specifically, business owners need an increase in targeted traffic. Targeting specific types of traffic in which visitors are closer to making a buying decision and becoming a lead is key.

Let’s dive in with some details on how to find these people and direct them to your website.

The basics

Content Types

Think of the internet as a vast ocean of content. This content comprises pictures, video, text and audio. Text makes up the largest share of content on the internet while video is the fastest growing type of content with loads of opportunity!

Links

In the early days of the internet, people found websites using directories (instead of search engines) and, more specifically, people used directories to find links between websites. The more links pointing to a particular webpage, the more traffic that page had the potential to receive. This strategy still works today and is amplified by the use of search engines.

Developing these links benefits you as a website owner in two ways:

1. It builds automatic trust with your visitors because another website “recommended” your site with a link.
2. It provides a new traffic source.

Think of each new link as a small source of traffic that may help you gain one or two visitors each month. This new link will continue to be a traffic source for the life of the link. As other sites continue to link to yours, these small traffic sources will really add up! This traffic will then begin to build links on its own without any additional efforts on your part. To add even more fuel to the fire, search engines will notice links across the internet pointing to your website, and your search engine rankings will improve. With higher rankings in the search engines comes another large influx of traffic.

Keywords

When I speak to prospects or clients about keywords, they generally have an idea of the words they would like to target in their digital marketing campaigns. More often than not, this is the wrong approach. The business owner is usually trying to rank for highly competitive keywords that are already owned by much larger companies with near unlimited resources. The good news is that there is so much untapped opportunity in keyword choices!

There are different types of keywords to choose from:

• Short-tail keywords: digital camera, LCD TV, insurance agent, auto repair
  Short-tail keywords are difficult to rank for and user intent towards the top of the sales funnels in the Awareness category. People that perform searches using short tail keywords are mostly looking for information and not yet ready to buy.
• Medium-tail keywords: Canon digital camera, Sony LCD TV, Precision Tune Auto repair center
  Medium-tail keywords are fairly easy to rank for and user intent is at the evaluation stage of the sales funnel. These visitors have decided on a brand and are finalizing their decisions based on brand comparisons.
• Long-tail keywords: Canon power shot digital camera 2MP, 17 inch LCD TV free shipping, my car is making a funny sound
  Long-tail keywords are easy to rank for and user intent is towards the bottom of the sales funnel, close to the “I am ready to buy something!” category.

As a business owner, you will want to choose your targeted keywords carefully. Just spit-balling a few that you think are relevant to your industry is NEVER the right approach. You could spend thousands of dollars and more than six months trying to rank for a highly competitive short-tail keyword that provides little to no ROI for your business. With a little research and planning, all of this wasted time and money can be avoided.

In Part 2 of this series, I will discuss how to identify the appropriate keywords that your business should be targeting for optimal ROI and growing customers fast.