Google has really been hammering home its desire to improve the quality of results of late and has really been nailing spammers and poor content of late. Relevance is now key, however what is relevance and what are these elements constantly mentioned by Google. Google constantly highlights terms such as ‘high quality content’ and ‘genuine engagement’ as factors for ranking.
–We’ve Moved On
Things have changed dramatically. Creating a web page is not about merely adding in a number of words that come out well from AdWords research. You can’t just find some relevant terms and then include them on page. You now need to add content that people want to read and that’s relevant and gets engagement.
One of the clearest ways we have of monitoring and understanding social engagement is the interaction. This is easily measured by Likes, re-tweets and page links and currently search engines add a lot of weight to these.
The social media side of websites used to be a bit part player, but is now becoming as much of a player as links and other formerly important factors. The understanding is quite easy to grasp. If people see content as useful they are willing to share it. They are willing to put their name or face to it and cite it as a useful resource or interesting read.
This means there are two ways to create better organic results. One is a paid version, where you’ve to invest to get a good ROI. This means paying to promote content constantly in the hope of increasing its chances of getting shared.
The alternative is to create genuinely useful content that people want to share and be an active participant in engaging with. So, how do you ensure that the content you’re creating will achieve the latter rather than the former and save you hassle, time and money in the long-term?
–Reader Centric Content
Reader centric content is content that clients want to read and not the sort of thing you want them to read. It’s not about just talking about your company on your blog anymore – it’s about offering intriguing content that helps and informs. Social is about building influence and offering something rather than making a sale.
Yes, going straight in for the kill may seem like a great idea, however following your industry influencers, reading information regularly and staying ahead of the curb will make for a far better blog than profit and loss reports and other boring corporate content. It’s called social media not business report media.
–Real Content and Real People
People want to see other people. People like to hear real people’s stories on the web. We would always say to our clients at Fuse Wave that businesses affect people, so show how your affect people in a positive manner.
Show passionate, real people and create interesting stories around them and their lives. Look for angles where you can include your industry or business and make it a story first and a business message second. Try to connect and then sell – don’t try to sell and then connect.
–Be Helpful
The days of not being on Twitter are over and the days of not being extremely helpful on Twitter are also over. You wouldn’t ignore someone on your shop floor looking for help, so don’t do it online.
Secondly, if they do ask a question online, responds with a helpful answer. Though people tend to offer information to a customer service contact or phone number – it’s in fact a lot easier and more helpful to offer a link to a page that answers the question.
It makes more of your resources and places you in a better position. Discuss issues online and engage the person as a human being on a one to one basis. This will establish a better relationship for business and will see long-term benefits.
Creation of quality content and trust through the conception of engaging content and quality engagement is going to become more and more important as time goes on. Getting on the band wagon now will mean reaping rewards in the future.