If attracting traffic and visitors to your website is why you’re interested in content marketing, then your content should be prepared to help you achieve this goal. It’s a general knowledge that not all content are created equal.
Forget about just creating high quality content, high quality content alone won’t make your website go viral. Your content should include several elements without which your efforts will go unrewarded.
If you’re interested in creating content that will bring traffic to your website and help you generate leads, then you need to discover what elements you should include in your content for greater results.
This blog post will cover areas to look at and ways to create content that drive real traffic to your website.
#1. Optimize Your Content
Well-optimized content have more potential of attracting visitors to your website than poorly optimized content. Your content should be created to be easily understood and view-able on whichever medium you intend to promote it on.
Optimizing your content should not be about search engines alone. Search engine optimization is important but so is optimizing for social media. To see that your content is well optimized, you should take the following into consideration.
- SEO: Search engines account for a major share of targeted traffic to websites. And maintaining the #1 spot in Google for any keyword guarantees that you can get up to 33% of search traffic for that keyword. Majority of content creators neglect the aspect of optimizing their content for search engines mainly because of poor understanding of SEO. If you want to increase your knowledge of SEO, I recommend you begin here.
. - Social Media: Social media is the top source of traffic to websites today. Optimizing your content for each social media channel can be in the form of using high quality feature images, meta descriptions that summarizes your content etc. Using a social media marketing strategy to optimize your content is still the best approach to attracting high quality traffic from social media.
. - Website User Interface: With Google announcing their seriousness about website optimization for mobile devices with the launch of mobilegeddon, it’s clear that your content optimization starts from your website. The mobile friendly update is a clear indication that websites should make content consumption as easy for mobile users as it should be for desktop. How much consideration is going into optimizing your website?
#2. Create Content for Humans
Only content that benefit real humans will get traffic. Your content should be created to help humans and not designed to trick search bots or for social media click-baits. Once people sense that you offer real value through your content, they will develop the interest to visit your website more often.
Your first approach to creating content that will bring traffic is by identifying which readers are most likely to share that content. Then look for what topics you can develop the content on in order to get them to read and share it.
#3. Create Content Around User Queries
Content created around concerns that readers have expressed in form of queries or questions have huge chances of generating traffic to your website. Using queries from search engines or questions posted on sites like Quora to create content on your website will help you attract the attention of the thousands of people who will ask the same questions.
Also another source of traffic generation, you can answer the question that inspired your content by sharing the post on Quora. Answering questions can also be rewarding for SEO as more people will plug similar queries in search engines and your post is most likely to show up if method #1 above was well implemented.
#4. Use Graphics and Images
Guess what, images and graphics based content attract more traffic. Apart from the fact that your content will also rank for image search results, users will find your content more interesting if it has at least 1 image.
Stats show that content with relevant images attract 94% more traffic than content without images.
However, does the fact that images in your content can help you attract more traffic mean any image will fit? Images in your content has to be relevant to your content.
Free image sharing sites like Flickr or Niice are great sources of high quality images with free licences or CC licence. Flickr has the search feature that lets you quickly access relevant images based on your query and you can customize your search to limit results to only images with CC attribute.
To customize your search, after doing your first search query, head over to the top left side and click on the “Any License” link. Select to only return images with the “All Creative Commons” tag.
Images in your content can also be optimized by adding alt_text_tag which is great for SEO.
#5. Create Round-up Posts
While this might sound so 2015, it’s still a very effective way to create high quality content that generate traffic.
Round-up posts are content that collect ideas from various experts and influencers on a subject into a single, well-rounded post. Round-ups are powerful because your readers will be getting different views on the same topic, which helps in deepening their understanding of the topic.
When your round-up post is published, the experts you feature in it will also be sharing the content to their own followers on social media and on their blogs. This can help you attract a huge volume of traffic at once.
Below are ideas on how to create successful round-ups.
- Ask questions: Some of the best round-up posts are some form of questions where several authorities provide their input as answers.
. - Seek advice: This is similar to asking the experts a question, just that you’re merely seeking their advice or opinion on a topic. Since people are more willing to advice beginners, you can get a lot of response from this approach.
. - Round-up of top posts: Unlike where you directly ask authorities and experts to offer their input to a question or a topic for advice, you find the best content created by these authorities and put it together in a single content. Most of the authors of the posts featured in your blog post will be happy to share it around as a way to say thank you.
Now that you’ve seen some ways to create content that drive traffic, let me know if you’re going to try the tips I just shared out. If you have ideas or opinions you want to share with me on this, please feel free to use the comment section.
If you’re a brand looking for solution to your content marketing problems, you can please get in touch today.
Image Credits
Featured image (Wild Blogger on Flickr)
Images 2,3,4 & 5 are screenshots.
I’d like to say that the content has to be unique, relevant and original. It should appeal to the audience because no one will continue to read the page if the content does not excite them. Being in the SEO field for many years (I own http://www.aplus.net.nz/), I have seen what wonders good content can do to online businesses.
Very true Haiming! Thanks for your comment