The importance of investing in content marketing for your SEO strategies in 2016. Content is now recognised as the most significant digital marketing trend.
Content marketing has been an integral part of any SEO campaign that has been successful over the last few years. However, 2016 is set to be the year that quality content really proves its worth.
A recent poll by ClickZ to accompany their Intelligence Digital Trends report, shows content marketing as being the ‘most significant digital marketing trend for your company in 2016’ with 24.6% of the vote. Data & analytics was runner-up in the poll with 12.7%, whilst there was a third place tie as marketing automation and social media both received 11.1% each.
Google’s Relationship With Content
Key engineers and representatives from Google have spent a lot of time educating webmasters and SEO experts about the importance of using quality content on a website and how they will penalise sites that have little or no original content. The recent Google Search Quality Guidelines also highlighted the weight given to the balance of main content and supplementary content on a page. Having an ‘unsatisfying amount of main content’ can also impact negatively on the ranking of your webpages.
So with these major hints from Google, it comes as no surprise that SEO agencies are attempting to utilise content marketing as one of their key SEO tactics.
Content Marketing Challenges For 2016
However, pollsters have identified some significant challenges for the marketing of content in 2016. Although 4 in 10 people state that their organisation believes in the importance of content, they also reveal that their business has no dedicated content team in place. Instead, the tasks associated with the creation and management of content typically fall under the duties of the marketing department. There are also reports of laborious sign-off processes which do not suggest that content marketing is being given the priority attention that it deserves.
Investment In Magazine Style Content
Whilst SEO campaigns have spent 2015 focussed on the deployment of content to help increases in SERPs, it is thought that this year will zone in even further on producing spectacularly high levels of quality content. The measure of success will not be so much on metrics such as traffic, pageviews or social network likes. Instead, companies will aim to use content to engage with site visitors and to create a wider community audience who will repeatedly visit a website as it will have content of value to offer them.
Some companies, such as Topshop, are already invested in creating a new style of content website that offers visitors something more resembling a magazine. It is thought that many sites will take this even further by hiring top class freelancers and using content studios to create their own style of online digital magazines.
Companies who wish to invest in SEO campaigns for 2016 need to make content creation the focal point of their strategies. However, it is simply not good enough to churn out content for the sake of it anymore. Content marketing has evolved and companies will need to inject personality into their writing and build a rapport with their audience to create a loyal following who will keep returning to their sites.
Danny Hall co-directs FSE Online, one of Essex’s leading SEO companies. Danny specialises in technical SEO supported by high quality content and stylish web design.