Being present on the Internet is all well and good, but today it's no longer enough. Companies are competing on all fronts, and it's vital that they stand out from the crowd. There are several ways of doing this. One of them is the creation and production of relevant, useful content. After all, the lifeblood of a website is its content. In the following article, we'll be talking about content strategy, which is essential to the success of online publishing projects. It requires specific tools and techniques. But which ones? Here's an overview.
What is content?
In the web industry, anything that conveys information is called content. It can be textual, visual or audio. It plays a vital role in a site's SEO. It is said to be optimized when it contributes to a site's ranking in the first results of a search engine. Poor-quality or duplicated content is always penalized by Google and other algorithms.
What is the right content strategy?
A good content strategy means producing exactly the kind of content that your target audience really needs or wants to find on the web. It makes it possible to create consistent communication across different channels, and to develop realistic, sustainable publishing programs.
Unlike traditional advertising, which immediately appeals to the consumer with a short message, content strategy favors original, instructive, longer-form content. Articles, posts or videos must provide added value for the web user, not just promotion.
The aim of content strategy is obviously to improve a company's visibility and generate more traffic through better referencing.
How do you create content?
Producing content on a regular basis is tedious, time-consuming work. Unless they call on the services of web copywriters or communications agencies, small business owners can adopt certain techniques and use a few tools to make the task easier.
1. Key words
The choice of keywords is the basis of good content. Keywords must be relevant to the activity, product or service to be highlighted. They must be used judiciously, neither too much nor too little. Use synonyms and lexical fields to avoid repetition.
How do you find your keywords? Type a word into the Google search bar and watch the results. There's also Ubersuggest, a free keyword suggestion tool, Your Text Guru and Answer The Public, among others.
2. The watch
To keep abreast of what's happening in your market, it's a good idea to set up a competitive watch on the Internet. This way, you can find out what's trending and keep an eye on the competition.
Google Alerts lets you create free keyword alerts. All you need is a Google account. You'll receive an alert whenever a topic related to your keywords is discussed on the web, even in the news.
3. Message structure
The nature of the content (guide, landing page, blog, about page...) needs to be identified before creating a sort of "skeleton" for the article. You need to establish a plan with headings and sub-headings, so that when you read the plan, you'll be able to understand the main message and the common thread. Internet users "scan" text more than they read it. This is why structure is so important: a main heading with an introduction, several sub-headings, possibly subdivided into sub-sections.
4. Editorial staff
Once you've found the right keywords, checked their relevance, identified the topics and planned the text, it's time to write. The content must be appreciated by both the web user and the search engine spiders.
There are a few rules to follow:
- no keyword stuffing
- rich vocabulary without spelling mistakes
- short paragraphs for easy reading
- a font that's easy to read
- words and expressions in bold
- attractive images to illustrate the message
- short, clear videos
- internal links to other pages on the site to keep visitors coming back
- external links to popular, credible sites (in a new tab!).
Writing aids include Antidote (pay-per-use spell-checking software), Synonymo (synonym dictionary) and Cordial.fr (grammar, conjugation and typography site), among others.
It's impossible to ignore graphic design when it comes to enhancing content, whether on social networks or in marketing campaigns. It's a proven fact that people retain more of what they see (80%) than what they read (20%). Adobe software, Canva, Mojo for Instagram or free or paid image banks will do the trick.