The importance of quality content in the marketing strategy of a company is no longer in question. It is a growth generator that allows to attract visitors without resorting to aggressive advertising that has shown its limits. However, one of the challenges faced by almost all companies with a website is the difficulty to constantly find interesting content (blog post topics, social media posts, google search suggestions…). They want to satisfy their audience’s needs and get them to act. This is further complicated by the fact that the company has to combine this with the many day-to-day tasks required to run the business and retain existing customers. In this comprehensive guide, Invicta provides practical advice on how to successfully implement this essential step for your digital growth. We’ve also listed some tools to help you come up with content ideas.
What is good content, anyway?
In order to set up a content marketing strategy based on the regular publication of interesting content, it is necessary to ask ourselves what good content is from a business point of view. Good content can be defined as an editorial element that is sought after by a target audience. It can be found easily and its reading or exploration satisfies a specific need, prompting the visitor to take action (sharing, buying, commenting, like…). It can be a text such as a blog post, a video, an image, an infographic… The quality of the content is also evaluated according to the channel through which it will be distributed. For example, quality content published on a blog may not be suitable for use on social platforms or in a newsletter sent to leads. It will therefore have difficulty reaching its objective.
Knowing how to create good content is the starting point for identifying interesting thematic ideas that can impress your audience and move them to action.
The different content models
There are essentially two different types of textual content you can publish on your website depending on your goal.
Content optimized for SEO
Google is currently the most used source of information by consumers. They are looking for information about a product or service, to find the solution to a problem or the answer to a question. To provide the best possible information to users in all circumstances, the giant of Mountain View has implemented algorithms. These algorithms take into account different criteria to judge the relevance of the content available on the Internet.
Each site manager must therefore produce quality content with high added value to hope to be highlighted in the search engine results pages (SERP). This is what optimized content for SEO consists of. It is a text written with the aim of responding to a specific search intention of the Internet user. The semantic field must be rich in order to allow search engine algorithms to easily associate it with the targeted request. This content has a strong added value for the audience, because it respects all the quality criteria of Google:
- text size,
- absence of plagiarism and over-optimization,
- use of keywords,
- satisfaction of the user by a precise answer to his concern…
Optimized content is the one that offers better performance in an inbound marketing strategy. It allows you to outperform the competition and generate qualified traffic to your blog or your sales pages. This is the type of text you should publish if you have an e-commerce site with a blog, or a showcase site with pages to present your services.
Informational content
Simple informational content is text written to fulfill an informative search intent. Like optimized content, it can offer the opportunity to cover a topic in a comprehensive way, offer tips or present instructions on how to use a product. The difference here is that no in-depth work is done to integrate keywords and enrich the semantic field. This content is therefore less effective on the SERP of search engines than an optimized text. However, it remains very useful for Internet users who can find answers to their concerns.
At Invicta marketing, we offer both models of content: optimized and premium. Our writers are committed to providing you with quality content, regardless of your industry and business specifics. Invicta’s SEO copywriting services are specifically designed to help you rank among the top results on Google. We ensure that the search intent associated with each of your keywords is respected and accurately addressed during the content creation process. This process is focused on both human reader and engine satisfaction. Before delivery, a team of in-house proofreaders checks each piece of text. We make sure that the sentences are correct and that the optimization is of high quality (without keyword stuffing or abusive techniques).
To ensure efficiency and performance, most of our texts (optimized and premium) are accompanied by at least one image. Having purchased the rights to these images, they are most often chosen by our team, but you can also provide them yourself for integration. An optimized or premium editorial project? Do not hesitate to contact us to discuss it.
How to vary your content
Identifying content ideas to feed your website or your social networks is one thing. Knowing in which format to present them to really impact your audience is another. Indeed, there are a variety of content formats to choose from depending on the nature of the information you want to publish.
Different word length and sentence structures
Coming up with content ideas isn’t really helpful if you don’t then choose the ideal word count to properly cover each topic. Indeed, it is important to take into account the search intent associated with your keywords to define the length of your texts. Other important elements to take into account are the search volume (the number of times the query is made per month) and the trends.
Word count is very important in content marketing. Content that is not of the right length for the search intent it is addressing is simply doomed to fail. It will lag behind competitors’ content and won’t help you achieve your ultimate goal of impacting your audience and getting them to take action.
Is your content idea associated with informational, transactional or commercial search intent? The most important thing is to study the SERPs and see what Google and users really want. This will help you determine the length of your articles. For example, for a transactional page, long content will not necessarily mean conversion.
Keep an editorial calendar
The editorial calendar is one of the most important tools when setting up and executing a content marketing strategy. It allows you to plan publications over a given period of time and offers the possibility to avoid slack periods that can be characterized by a lack of inspiration. With an editorial calendar, you can identify ideas and integrate them directly into your schedule several weeks or months in advance. This way, you won’t forget them.
On an editorial calendar, you should mention for each idea found :
- the keyword to work on,
- the source,
- the content that will be produced,
- the channel through which the content will be published (blog, sales page, social platforms)
- the person in charge of creating the content,
- the objectives.
A well-made editorial calendar guarantees you time savings and a constant content production in the short and medium term. The tool also helps you to have a global vision of all your content (already published and to come) in order to perform various analyses.
Tips to generate content:
By now you know how important good content and planning is to your content or inbound marketing strategy. Invicta gives you 10 tips for coming up with new ideas for topics to develop on your site and your next blog post and have the best content strategy!
1. List your customers’ common questions
Listening to buyers and prospects is a very reliable way to come up with interesting ideas. Since they are the targets of your content marketing strategy, they are in the best position to give you clues about their concerns. So refer to your sales people or sales team to get a list of questions that your buyers or consumers interested in your services or products frequently ask. You may also find useful data in the comments section of your social media pages. Some sorting can then be done for curation of the most relevant questions.
2. Develop your company’s areas of expertise
If there’s one area in which you’ll almost never run out of inspiration, it’s one in which you have real expertise. Your company’s areas of expertise are a great way to keep your blog fresh with articles that are both comprehensive and varied. To find more content ideas, don’t hesitate to ask company executives or people directly involved in the product or service design process. Based on the information you get from these contacts, you can develop a list of topics to include in your editorial calendar.
3. Analyze your competitors’ blogs
Competitor websites analysis is an effective way to identify content to publish on your site. The goal is not to copy all the topics that your competitors develop on their blogs, but to use them as inspiration for your decision making. By analyzing the keywords they target and the topics they cover, you will have an idea of the content that works best in your field. Creating new topics will then be easier.
4. Do market research in your field
Your competitors’ blogs aren’t the only ones that can inspire you to create interesting content. Everyone in your field of activity can be a source of inspiration. That’s why a marketing watch is very important. It consists in staying attentive to the news that emanates from your company’s environment in order to draw relevant elements for your activities. Make a list of partners, blogs on similar themes, competitors or influencers whose news is related in one way or another to your activities. Ideally, you can centralize the monitoring with a content aggregator to easily sort and annotate ideas to integrate on your site.
5. Anticipate trends in your market
In a competitive environment such as the web, anticipating trends is essential to avoid being overtaken on the SERPs. It’s also a great opportunity to get content ideas and get ahead of the game. There are many tools that allow you to identify the most popular themes over a given period of time as well as the most searched terms. Google Trends is one example. Analyzing hashtags on social networks also offers the possibility to see emerging trends that you can surf on to create traffic generating content.
6. Subscribe to newsletters in your industry
Newsletters from other companies in your industry are a useful source that can help you find inspiration for new content. Don’t overlook them. They’re also part of the competitive intelligence you need to stay on top of what’s happening in your industry. Spying on newsletters also offers the possibility to collect some practical information such as the length of competitors’ texts, semantics, illustrations used, format and editorial style…
7. Create a mind map
In content marketing, mind mapping is a process that allows you to start with a general (or main) concept or theme and then break it down into ideas and sub-ideas. At the end of this exercise, you get a mind map with main branches and sub-branches to explore. If you are about to launch a new site, this is the best time to create a mind map to define the site’s tree structure. You can also do this for an existing site to find keyword-related content.
8. Tap into foreign sources related to your business
Foreign blogs can be a real source of inspiration for your content creation if you know how. Start by making a list of the main foreign sources (e.g. English-speaking) related to your field of activity and select the ones that regularly publish articles. You can set up a strategy to not miss anything of their new publications: subscription to a newsletter, subscription to an RSS feed… In some fields of activity, foreign sources are often ahead of the game on certain information. Use this to your advantage to provide quality content to your audience.
9. Survey your community
Surveys are another way to directly gather the opinions and concerns of your community. You can set this up via social media or other specialized survey sites. This strategy helps you get relevant ideas that are just waiting to be developed.
10. Update and remix your old articles
It’s not a necessity to constantly innovate, have the most engagement or the latest trending content ideas when running a blog, or a business website. On the contrary, updating old blog posts and use the same topics can be very effective from time to time. To do so, you need to identify among your archives the texts whose data or statistics are outdated, but which are still of interest to your audience. These articles can be republished or divided into several other texts with updated data.
Best tools to you find new content:
Identifying ideas is much easier when you have the right tools. Here are the solutions that can help you create content ideas for your new blog posts, help you with your keyword research
Google Alerts
A notification service launched by the Mountain View giant in 2003, Google Alerts offers the possibility to track specific keywords or terms (your choice) on the web. This service also allows you to receive an alert by e-mail each time a targeted term is used. You can configure the frequency of the alerts, the sites you want to use as a source, the language, the geographical area and the number of results (the most relevant or all). It’s an effective tool for marketing intelligence on strategic keywords in your field.
Google Forms
Google Forms is one of the most practical tools to collect data directly from your community. It can be used for a survey or to send a questionnaire to specific targets to better understand their needs. You have the possibility to conduct anonymous surveys or to collect the contacts of survey participants. The collected data is available in real time on the interface of the tool.
Google Trends
Google Trends informs you about the most popular queries over a given period. It is useful to quickly identify trends and hot topics. You have the possibility to see the trends for different geographical areas and languages.
AnswerThePublic
To provide marketers and webmasters with suggestions for topics to develop, AnswerThePublic leverages data from Google and Bing. Starting with a main theme or topic, the tool generates an exhaustive list of “why”, “how”, “what” questions. AnswerThePublic’s suggestions correspond to the most popular searches of Internet users on the engines. You can export them in CSV format or as an image for further analysis.
People Also Ask
People Also Ask (PAA) is a Google feature that you can take advantage of to find content ideas. They come in the form of a list of questions that appear after certain queries and link to additional information that the user potentially needs. Creating optimized text around these Google-generated questions is a great way to improve your SEO.
Semrush
A very comprehensive tool, Semrush is ideal for identifying your content ideas. It is useful for :
- check the queries,
- know the search volume of each keyword,
- analyzing competing sites…
It can help you find keywords to work on.
Related searches on Google
Related searches are keyword suggestions that Google offers to users at the bottom of the SERP. These are automatically generated queries based on a number of criteria: popular queries, user preferences, geographical location… They help you find additional ideas to flesh out your pages and reinforce the relevance of your site to your main theme.
In Conclusion…
Finding content ideas is therefore a process that requires creativity and a good sense of observation. A good marketing intelligence is also necessary to keep up with the latest trends. Do not hesitate to contact Invicta marketing Agency to entrust your SEO writing to professionals experienced in this task.
