When it comes to increasing traffic, SEO is your best friend. Whether you need new customers for your business or you are trying to build a following for your blog, you need to optimise your site for search engines.
There are a lot of ways to improve SEO. A lot of it involves researching keywords to find out what your target audience is searching and give them related content. But what kind of material should you be writing? Here are the top five types of content that perform strongly on search engines.
How-To Guides
Tutorials and how-to guides are extremely helpful when it comes to search engine optimisation. People who need a question answered head straight to Google. By answering frequently asked questions through your blog content, you can bring them straight to your site.
Create helpful blogs for your target audience. For example, law firms can bring in potential clients by creating guides answering questions like “How to get a divorce” or “Common questions on bankruptcy answered.” Try to target your blogs at questions average people search on Google.
Top 5 and Top 10 Lists
Top lists also perform well when it comes to getting hits. These are useful for a couple of reasons. You can give people a list of the absolute best products, tips, or whatever else pertains to your subject. Because people are attracted to articles they can skim through quickly, they are more likely to search for “Top 10” or “Top 5” than, say, “Top 13.” Both short and long guides can be useful. People may want to scan through a Top 3 list or study an in-depth Top 50 guide of everything they are seeking.
Infographics and Statistics
When it comes to writing, backing your words up with statistics makes your content much more authoritative. For example, did you know posts with images produce a whopping 650% higher engagement rate than those without them? Those are the stats according to an Adobe Digital Index study.
Infographics are especially useful for this reason. Not only do graphics deliver information colourfully and engagingly, but they are also much more likely to get shared on social media and go viral.
Statistics are especially useful for businesses. Finding research that supports what you are offering and presenting it in visual form can be great for attracting clients.
Visual Content
Visuals offer brans the chance to enhance and clarify their message with creative visuals and solidify brands identities.
Infographics are fantastic, they can communicate data in a visually compelling way. It is a great way to combine text, images and design to represent complex data but they are not the only form of visual content. Research by Moz discovered video-based blogs attract up to 3 times as many inbound links than text posts.
The bottom line is, the more information you can present in visual form the better. Blogs often support what they are saying with relevant YouTube videos and images to break up the walls of text. You will keep readers around for longer if they have something to look at other than words.
Current and Relevant Content
When a big news story breaks, blogs need to jump on the opportunity. By tailoring content to trending topics that people are searching right now, you can get ahead of the competition and get hits.
Content can be a really effective and influential tool when it comes to marketing. But, in order to catch the consumers eye and keep their attention, your content has to be relevant with a purpose that your audience can relate to. It also helps to produce seasonal content as people might search for the best summer drinks, or activities to try this summer. Come winter they will be looking for Christmas saving tips. Some kinds of topical content can die out fast, but seasonal content can attract more hits each year.
Conclusion
No matter what kind of business or website you are running, stay on top of your SEO. Look out for keywords that are gaining traction and topics that people are searching. Experiment with these five kinds of content and see how well they work for you- chances are you will like the results! Find out more about content marketing on our website!
