Even though social media is often in the spotlight, business blogging is still vital to your marketing success. Unfortunately, some companies have lost focus on original content creation-thinking that social media is all that matters. Although social media is a potentially powerful marketing medium, you cannot optimize social media marketing without creating original, high-quality and highly shareable content. Social media success results from attracting a wide captive audience with your original, high-impact content as the lure.
Aim to produce content that is so relevant and valuable that it will compel your website visitors and blog subscribers to share it on social media. Your company should share and publicize original content on all the major social channels, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. The creation of highly shareable content should be your primary marketing objective. While a successful marketing strategy calls for the creation of high-quality, information-rich and share-worthy content first and foremost, SEO considerations are still critical. SEO is becoming more and more closely tied to the social reach of your content. Each time your content is liked on Facebook, tweeted on Twitter, +1ed on Google+ or shared on LinkedIn, it receives a social stamp of approval-increasing its reach and magnifying your opportunities for higher rates of traffic and lead generation and enhanced SEO. Consistently creating highly shareable content is a major challenge-requiring commitment, creativity, deep insight and real-time industry knowledge.
There are many advantages of maintaining a high-quality, information-rich company blog, including increased lead generation and conversion, amplified exposure for your content and greater brand recognition. According to HubSpot, companies with blogs attract 55% more website visitors and generate 97% more inbound links and 434% more indexed web pages than companies without blogs. The more frequently your company blogs, the more traffic and leads you will be able to produce. On average, publishing 20 blog posts each month attracts over five times more website traffic than publishing less than four posts per month. Companies that publish fresh blog content 20 times per month also generate four times more leads than companies without blogs.
In addition, blogging prevents your website from going stale, which is highly advantageous to SEO. If you want to rank highly on your targeted keywords, fresh content is of paramount importance. Furthermore, creating Google-friendly content could greatly multiply the reach of your company blog-helping you outdo your competition. Excellent content creation is a serious undertaking. If you're unable to produce such content within your organization, consider hiring an inbound marketing agency or a talented freelance writer. If you are up for tackling the challenge of high-quality business blogging internally, identify your best writers and task them writing fresh blog content frequently. The value of high-quality business blogging is substantial.
There are a number of ways to ramp up the reach and exposure of your content, including syndicating it on websites like Social Media Today and Business 2 Community and sharing it on the big four social networks-Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. Posting your content to popular social bookmarking sites, such as Digg, StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us, can be another source of increased exposure. While taking these steps to promote your content will no doubt be beneficial, it is critical to address the issue at the core-ensuring that you produce the kind of content that compels a great deal of social content curation. If you can create highly shareable content, others will promote it for you. Publish relevant, information-rich and share-worthy content, and your search rankings will inevitably improve, as Google is increasingly informing their algorithms with social signals, such as +1s.
13 Google-Friendly Content Guidelines
To achieve maximum impact with your company blog, create content according to Google best practices. Set up a Google+ company page, and enable Google Authorship-properly linking all your relevant content from across the internet to your Google+ page and setting up author verification on your company blog and wherever else you and your team publish original content. Google uses sophisticated algorithms to determine which content search users find most compelling, valuable and share-worthy-while also offering an overall positive user experience. Google aims to rank such content highly in their search results. If you want your content to be highly ranked, follow these guidelines, which were informed by the Google Webmaster Central Blog.
1. Your company content should be trustworthy.
2. It should demonstrate thought leadership and genuine interest in the subject matter.
3. Content must be free of spelling errors, typos, and grammatical and editing oversights.
4. Content should be original-avoiding redundant content on the same topics with only slightly altered keyword variations.
5. Content should not be created with only SEO in mind; the style and substance of content must appeal to your website visitors and blog subscribers.
6. Your content should be information-rich, cover relevant industry trends and not merely push your own products or services.
7. Your content should provide better value than other pages in related search results.
8. Content should be objective and present multiple viewpoints.
9. Your content will be more highly ranked, if your blog can gain recognition as a trusted authority on your most covered topics.
10. Content should be comprehensive and broad, while also providing insightful and in-depth analysis.
11. If readers find your content so valuable that they bookmark and share it with their contacts, it will boost your SEO.
12. Your website and blog should not be so jam-packed with ads and CTAs that they distract visitors from focusing on your content.
13. Your website and blog must be neatly organized and visually appealing.
Follow these Google-friendly content guidelines to create content, which demands to be read, viewed and shared widely on social media, because it is high-quality and provides significant value to readers. Strategic content marketing can enhance SEO, dramatically increase website traffic, and seriously magnify lead generation and conversion. Without high-quality content creation, you will not generate the social signals that Google is using to inform their search ranking processes.