How To Do Small Business Content Marketing in Australia
It seems like online marketing techniques change every 3 months. News articles bombard our feeds preaching the new, best ways to get traffic to your website fast.
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Each google algorithm update, a fresh set of “get traffic quick” techniques come out. Only to disappear 3 months later.
One technique though has stood the test of time. Its principles have never changed and the leads and extra customers it brings to your business is hard to beat.
This technique is called small business content marketing and if you do it right, the benefits will continue for many years to come.
What is Small Business Content Marketing?
Many years back the way to find information was to go into your local library. Borrowing a book and spending the next 3-4 weeks trying to extract the information you needed from a 500 page book.
Those days are gone and while library’s still hold a special place in the hearts people who have nothing else to do… We now turn to the internet to solve our problems.
The backbone of Search Engines is to solve our problems.
- Need a personal trainer? We search personal trainers + (area)
- Want to learn about marketing? Search small business content marketing
- Are you bored? Search Cat Videos
We also search terms like “What is the best yoga techniques” and “How do I do my end of year taxes”
These informational search terms give businesses the opportunity to capture reader interest and promote their business.
How do we capture their interest?
Imagine you owned an accounting practice. Someone in your local area searched: “How do I create a profit/loss statement?”
You have created an amazing article about this topic on your website. The article includes a step by step walkthrough, graphics and a little video on how to do this task.
The potential customer loves the article, reads through it in depth, and has a go at performing the task himself/herself.
After a few attempts the reader realises accounting is best left to the professionals. The business needs an accountant but who comes to mind first?
The team who gave them the free information.
So they visit your website again, ultimately ending in a call or email to your office.
Now that’s a simplified version of a customer’s interaction with small business content marketing. Your customer might return to your website 10 times before they pick up the phone.
“The important part is that you are visible when the customer wanted their problem solved.”
How do we do small businesses content marketing in 2016?
Gone are the days in where a business could outsource content creation on fiverr and upwork.
No longer can you pay $5 for 500 words that don’t really make sense, are stuffed with keywords, in the hope of gaining the system and outranking your competitors.
Google now ranks quality over quantity. How do we know this?
They even have a quality guideline video on how you should avoid creating bad content
What to avoid
According to Neil Patel who writes for content marketing institute this is a list of what to avoid when creating content.
- Automatically generated content
- Participating in link schemes
- Creating pages with little or no original content
- Redirects that deceive the user
- Text that is concealed or hidden
- Scraped content (copied content)
- Pages with irrelevant keywords
- Creating pages with malicious behaviour, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware
- Sending automated queries to Google
- Small or little amount of information
According to google this is what good small business content marketing should focus on:
- Make pages that focus on the user, not the search engine
- Never deceive users
- Avoid tricks that intend to improve search engine rankings.
- Make unique content that portrays your website
How to come up with quality content ideas.
Here is a super simple way of coming up with small business content marketing ideas that your customers want to read.
Start with their frequently asked questions.
What does a customer regularly ask you before they purchase your product or service?
Using those questions create an article for each one answering the question in depth.
Once you have answered all the questions you can think of, head over to the various forums on the internet and find more questions your customer is asking.
Website like Quora and Yahoo Answers are a gold mine for small business content marketing. Just insert a topic related to your business in the search bar and watch as the dropdown is populated with questions.
Creating your Quality Content
Let’s be honest, not everyone is born with the gift of copy writing. It’s something that can be learned but in the mean time there are is a few tools that can help with the process.
Heming Way Editor is an online tool that can help you edit your writing. It suggests paragraph lengths, adverbs and provides you with a ranking on how easy the article is to read.
If you want to get really in depth on learning to write. Copyblogger provides courses to help you master this skill.
Now we know what tools to use, let’s run through the steps of how to create great small business content marketing.
1. Create unique content
Google loves content that has never been created before. Unique answers to questions users are asking. Copied content will be penalised in Google’s algorithm.
It is bad practise to copy an article from an existing website and paste it on yours. This does not add value to Google’s database and you will suffer in rankings.
Even if your article has already been created in the internet world, find a way you can create a piece of content that is better than it.
For example: If the top ranking article is ‘10 ways to create a hamburger’ consider going above and beyond with an article like ’50 ways to create a hamburger’.
By creating a superior, unique piece of content. You have the best chance of taking that top spot.
2. Provide answers
Search Engines track everything a user does when they interact with a webpage. They love when a user stays on a page for a long time reading or viewing its content.
The best way to keep a user on your page is to answer their questions.
Answer them in detail. The guys over a Siege Media created this amazing infographic showing the importance of answering a question in detail.
On average an article ranking number one had over 2,416 words.
3. Use keywords
All good small business content marketing strategy must include keywords to help the search engines understand what your article is about.
By using keywords that have a high search volume, you can ensure that your customer are actually searching for the problem you are solving.
Keyword research and search engine optimisation is a beast of its own. We will not go in depth here but below is a video I created on how to find keywords for free.
4. Use data to discover trends
Writing about content that is currently trending is a great way to kick start an articles success.
Use twitter hashtags to find out what is currently trending around the world. If there is something related to your industry, piggy back off it state your point of view.
Google trends is a cool resource provided by google that shows if a keyword or topic is currently trending.
Something that is trending is far more likely to be shared. Which brings us into our next point…..
5. Make it easy to share
While there is a heated debate in the SEO world that social signals actually help google rankings. In the end it is more eyes on your content. Which means more eyes on your brand.
Make sure you have social share buttons accessible on your article. Let’s be honest, we are far too lazy to copy and paste.
6. Media is your friend
Articles ranking in the #1 position have an average of 9 images.
The new generation of internet users been brought up to expect a media rich website.
Using images is also a really great way to show google what your article is about. You can enter your keyword into the ‘alt text’ of an image.
This gives search engines (who still can’t read images) the best chance understand what your article is about and rank your web page.
Even better than images is video. If you are trying to explain a difficult point, maybe there is something on youtube that can do it for you?
Now if you have an video that you have already created that explains your point, well that’s a double whammy.
7. Test and review your content
Great small business content marketing doesn’t stop after you hit the publish button on your article.
Using google analytics we can view and track how our articles are performing. If analytics are showing that our customers are loving a certain type of content, for example if top 10 articles get more engagement than how to articles.
It would make sense to create more of the top 10 articles right? Give the crowd what they want, focus on the type of articles that your customer enjoys.
Then continue a never ending cycle of small business content marketing greatness. Using this method of attracting customers won’t give you instant results but yet if you stick to it, the long term results will speak for themselves.