From SES San Francisco: 10 Steps to Success with Content Marketing and SEO

SES San Francisco kicked off with a bang yesterday and a couple of the sessions I attended focused on developing great content and optimizing that content, or in other words, how  to create and then distribute relevant and valuable content to your customers.

It's not enough anymore to just publish features and benefits of the products or services you sell and expect that alone to do the work to convince potential buyers. Increasingly, customers are looking for feedback and recommendations from online friends (and strangers) before they buy. The key is to optimize various pieces of content developed about your product or service, whether you develop this content or your customers develop this content for you (via ratings and reviews), so your customers find it when they are looking for it.  

We know that SEO generally helps increase conversions. If you can optimize your content so that customers can find this content when they are searching for your product or service, you have a much greater chance that they will buy from you (versus if they never found your site or content). Makes sense, right?  Here are some tips from one of the presenters to help you find success with your content.

  10 Steps to Success with Content Marketing and SEO

1. Set Goals - Develop goals so you know what success looks like once you achieve it or start to come close, and so you can work towards something concrete. 
2. Buyer Personas - Create buyer personas for your site. In other words, define who you are targeting (leveraging demographics, behaviors, research about your customer base, etc.), create personas that represent your target buyers, and use these personas to help shape your content, making sure your content meets the needs of your buyer personas.
3. Keyword Research - Understand what customers are searching for when they are looking for your products/services, both to get to your site and on your site. In addition to external keyword research--don't forget to look at referring keywords to your site--look at internal searches performed on your site (what keywords are customers searching once they get to your site) and social search (what keywords are people using to talk about your products/services in reviews and recommendations).
4. Content and Digital Assets - Once you understand what your customers need, be sure you write about these needs and how your products/services meet these needs.  Then, take inventory of the different digital assets you have and make a plan to create content that's relevant to these spots.  It's also important to create places on your site (or externally) to get your customers talking to one another. This produces great content and as we see buyer's leveraging other customers' rating and reviews more and more, this will be very beneficial to help you sell.
5. Editorial Plan - Think like a publisher.  Create a plan: determine what kinds of content you are going to offer, develop a list of keywords, figure out where you will publish these articles and how you will repurpose various pieces of content, etc.  From there, map out over a long period of time a plan to publish content that is rich in keywords and meets customer needs.
6. Operationalize SEO - Use keywords that are in demand by the people you are trying to reach.  Share keyword glossaries and train other writers that will help you develop content to use these keywords. If you have a social media team (bloggers, tweeters, etc.), be sure to give the keyword list to them. 
7. Develop Off-site Assets - It's important to build assets beyond your website on places like Facebook, You Tube, Twitter, Blogs, flickr, Industry Publications, etc.  These provide great opportunities to publish repurposed content that you have created already.
8. Socialize - Grow your social network!  You could also do a search on your competitors blogs and if they don't have any responses yet, you can comment.  Why not take advantage of their coverage and reach for your benefit?
9. Promote - When you publish something great, promote it in a way that demonstrates value.  Look for new ways to promote it and reach new customers. Don't always promote it on the same place/site as that will get stale. 
10. Measure - Be sure to measure your efforts so you can see how effective (or not) your content is and where or how you need to make improvements or try new things to achieve your goals.

Here's to creating great content and getting it in front of buyers to turn them into your customers!

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