If there’s one thing I’ve learned about building a content strategy and actually doing content marketing, it’s that it takes time. If you’ve been sold on content marketing, you probably know that it’s an investment - of your time and creativity.
Writing articles takes time. Seeing the results takes time. It’s a process. It may take days, months or even years to bring that prospect through the top of the sales funnel all the way down to becoming a customer. It’s content that will get them there. The more informative the content, the better the chance you’ll be able to qualify them as a lead. But also, the higher the quality of content, the better it’ll be for your search engine rankings. Search engines like content that’s valuable to the end-user.
There Is No ‘Quick Fix’ But There Is Hope
The old(er) days of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) saw a lot of digital marketers gaming the system a bit to get higher rankings for keywords. Google has cracked down on that, saying that there is no ‘quick fix’ to get to page 1 of search results. Getting there requires publishing quality content that helps searchers answer their questions and solve their problems.
Remember: The emphasis is on the searcher. Are they going to find what they’re looking for by reading your blog post?
While there is no ‘quick fix’, that doesn’t mean all hope is lost. It just means you’ll have to keep writing to build and nurture relationships with prospects. However, the best thing about content marketing? It works.
Quality Content Matters To Your Ideal Customers
Those who publish more get more leads. That’s what matters at the end of the day, right? You want more business and more sales. Google likes quality content, as I’ll explain in a bit. Those who publish more get more leads because, assuming they do content marketing well, they’ll rank in search engines for keywords profitable for their business.
Publishing quality content drives more leads. According to research by HubSpot, companies with 100 to 200 web pages will generate 2.5 times as many leads compared to those who have 50 pages or fewer.
This means having a blog and consistently blogging. But don’t blog garbage - create meaningful content of value to your ideal customer. They are the ones that matter in the end. You’re investing time into content marketing so that you can attract them.
So try going outside the box. On the LocalTrifecta blog, I wrote a post examining the history of content marketing. While historical events in our industry have been chronicled individually, I thought it’d be good to compile those into one post to show the average business owner that big companies did content marketing in their early stages over 100 years ago. For the business owner, they see that big companies were once at their size, invested in producing content and had monumental results - that’s valuable knowledge for the average SMB owner or manager.
A piece by Robert Bruce called “The Great Chef and the Falling Restaurant” is an example of really going outside the box. Bruce uses an abstract analogy to prove his point. It’s effective because he does so in a story format - almost fable-like. And who doesn’t love a good story?
Since people love great content, there’s no reason to not offer it - regardless of whether you’ve produced content in the past or not!
Content Marketing Results Will Come With Time
Too many business owners want to get top rankings fast. As I mentioned, there is no ‘quick fix’. We also can’t predict how quickly Google will crawl your website. But more content likely means more links and more links means Google will get to your website faster. This means links on other sites - Google wants to see who is talking about your business and if more are, then all the more reason to rank you higher. If more people are talking about your content and your business and linking to it, there’s a greater chance your content will get crawled faster (and ranked higher).
BUT, this doesn’t mean you need to get as many links as fast as you can and try to get all the tricks to get to the first page of Google. Getting quality links is important - this means links from good sites. Good sites will have requirements you need to meet to get your link there. Plenty of link building opportunities exist out there. All of this is a process and it takes time.
Here’s Some Advice
Promises are made all over the Internet. With respect to content marketing, here are some promises that you should absolutely avoid:
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If any company tells you they can get you X amount of links for dirt cheap, chances are those are really bad links that will reflect poorly on your business in Google’s eyes.
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If anyone says they can get you to the first page of Google in a short amount of time, chances are they’re using ‘black-hat’ SEO tactics.
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If someone says they can produce good, quality content for under $50 per piece, chances are the articles will be of extremely poor quality. This is bad for your business.
Taking any of these offers would hurt your rankings in some way, shape or form. So if the results aren’t coming as fast as you think they should, resist the temptation to outsource it overseas for cheap. If you do go the outsource route, please please please do your homework on the companies you are considering. Look at what they do, what they promise and what they’ve done.
A Suggestion
If you’re not seeing results and are curious as to what might be wrong, consider looking internally. Perhaps your content strategy isn’t as targeted as you need it to be. Maybe the breadth and variety of focus keywords you want to have is too wide. It’s always a good idea to review your strategy after 6 months. This is when you should start to see traffic increases, assuming you’re doing plenty of quality blogging and guest blogging.
Don’t just take it from me - we’ve seen this first hand from clients of ours. But of course, I’ll detail that in a future blog post. Stay tuned.
Until then, don’t give up. You content marketing efforts will yield quality traffic and leads if you’re publishing great content that your ideal buyers will find valuable.
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About the Author:
Ramesh Ranjan is the Inbound Marketing Specialist at LocalTrifecta Internet Marketing, where he helps businesses across Metro Vancouver increase sales and revenue through Inbound Marketing. His marketing heroes are Marcus Sheridan, John Caples and John Carlton. In his off time, he can be found playing roller hockey in Richmond, blogging on his personal website, and at the top of the office hockey pool. You can follow and connect with Ramesh over Twitter and Google+
