We all know by now that content is key to online success. What probably weighs heavy on most of you are content demands. How many of us look forward to thinking up topics, writing catchy titles, researching our subject and putting together a post worthy of sharing with our audience?
Judging by the size of the third-party content writing industry, my guess is very few.
But content drives SEO, in fact, since SEO is about ranking for search terms and search terms are words… SEO and content are one and the same.
If you want your business to be seen, you need to keep up with ever-growing and complicated content demands.
But what can you do to ease the strain? To boost your productivity and keep up to task with today’s changing trends, follow these three pro tips.
Build a schedule of creative reuse
A lot of people hold the mistaken view that, once a post is out in the ether, it’s reached its peak. Going back to amend and reuse old posts is cheating right? Would anybody even want to read that? The short answer is, yes!
To become prolific in the content production steaks, get creative with how you revisit and revamp old content. Many of these examples of creative reuse will be familiar to you. In fact, posts like these are incredibly popular with readers.
- Create follow-up posts to older topics, e.g. ‘The Best Website Builders of 2017 Revisited: What’s Changed?’.
- Stitch together multiple, old, related posts to create a new series with a unifying theme. Add one new piece for every 2-3 older ones to create more value for your audience.
- Transform one form of content into another, e.g. podcasts from blogs and videos from podcasts.
Professional content writing departments schedule each post they create for at least one round of reuse. If you want to save time and improve the ROI of your efforts, you should adopt their strategy and rifle through your old content too.
Get more out of what you’ve got
SEO is always changing. What worked a year ago, isn’t necessarily the best strategy now. Go back into all of your old posts and optimize them for today’s SEO standards. For example:
- Remove examples of ‘keyword stuffing’
- Add multiple, high-resolution images or mixed-media elements to each of your posts that don’t have them to increase their readability
- Add internal links between related posts at relevant points
- Revise your ‘calls-to-action’ to make them relevant to your current marketing strategy
- Update your titles and meta descriptions to suit your current audience
A few points of caution… If your site is getting a bit old, make sure you don’t overload it with data-munching media because you will slow down your page loading and negatively affect user experience. If you do notice a slow-down, instead of removing all of your newly discovered media, try switching to a better free web-host provider better able to handle your site’s growth.
Regular is better than never
The most important thing to remember is that you don’t need to post as much content as the big guns to rank well for your audience. What you do need to do, is be consistent.
Posting inconsistently will lose you, followers. But, even if you are only posting once a week, you will maintain a healthy and engaged audience (as long as your posts are relevant and engaging).
To maintain or increase your SEO ranking, search engines will want to see regular ‘updates’ to your website. Daily is best, but at least two to three times per week will work.
Not all of these updates need to be adding fresh content. You can make subtle changes like updating meta-data or responding to the comments on your blog posts. The key thing you need to signal is that your site is active.
To maximize the payoff from your content efforts, set yourself a realistic posting schedule and stick to it. If you do, both the search engines and your followers will reward you for it.
Final thoughts…
It’s safe to say every business owner who operates online has, at one time or another, felt frustratingly overwhelmed by content demands. But by getting a bit creative with your strategy and time, you can keep up with the race and reap the rewards. And you won’t have to make massive changes to your budget or your schedule to do it. Good luck!
LINKS
- https://www.searchenginejournal.com/best-content-types/194679/
- https://www.webfx.com/internet-marketing/updating-your-seo-for-new-year.html
- https://www.ukwebhostreview.com/free-web-hosting/
- https://www.mcnuttpartners.com/importance-posting-fresh-content-seo/
