Content Is King (Of SEO)
** This article is for companies with updated websites. If you haven’t updated your site in the last 5 years, this is not for you. Get a new website, then come back here.
The key to driving traffic to your website (via search engines) is content.
Obviously, my first suggestion would be to go to your customers (via The Socials) and interact with the community, educate, build trust, etc. But for the sake of this article, we will not get in to that.
Today……
Content is king.
Dilly Dilly!
So what kind of content?
Blogs, vlogs, videos, and photos.
What do you have on your site?
A few pics?
A video or two?
Four blog posts you wrote 2 years ago?
Guess what?
It’s not enough.
You need to think of each piece of content like a breadcrumb leading people to your site. The more crumbs you leave out, the better chance they are going to find you. Get it? Got it? Good.
Now that we have the “why” we can focus on the “how.”
What Should You Be Doing?
I tell my clients to focus on one thing: the thing you are already doing.
You run a business.
Things happen every day.
Good things. Bad things. Exciting things. Boring Things. Things. Things. Things.
Create your content around those things.
Take pictures of those things.
Write blogs about those things.
Create videos and vlogs around those things.
Then put them on your website (and Socials, but that’s for another time).
Make sure they are properly tagged, using key terms in your area of business, and Scadoosh! You will be crushing your SEO in no time.
Remember: bread crumbs.
How Do I Do This?
The smart answer here would be to shamelessly whore MediaMedia to you, but I won’t do that.
So……
Blogging
I am assuming you can write. I mean, you can at least read well enough to get through this article, right? Writing is pretty much the same thing. Even if you are not a good writer, if you start pumping out an article every day, or a few times a week, you will get a lot better VERY fast.
What do you write about? I don’t know, what happened today? Or yesterday? What pissed you off? What made you smile? What strategy did you use today that you did wrong when you first started? Anything and everything is a topic because you are you and you do what you do. It all applies to your business.
Everything is everything.
What does that mean? That there is at least one story from the time you get up to the time you go nighty night that you need to locate and create around! To be honest, there are probably 3-4 stories, but I don’t want your head to explode.
The goal is to empower you, not make you feel overwhelmed.
Pictures
This is pretty self-explanatory.
Take pictures. The end.
Just kidding (kind of).
Because these are going on your website, you really need them to be high quality.
For Socials, phone pictures are fine (they were made for that, duh), but please get a real camera for your website photos. I can’t tell you how many businesses I deal with that tell me they already do videos and photos, but they are only using their phone. It is usually not very good. It’s bad enough having grainy videos on your Facebook, but on your website? “Come on man!”
Here are some options (these are not affiliate links, just cameras I think are great). They are listed from least to most expensive.
Videos and Vlogs
These are more labor intensive, but the payoff is enormous if you do them right. You can’t just film everything (unless you hire someone), so treat it like your blogs. Find the interesting stuff and share that. If you can’t catch it as it’s happening, sit down at the end of the day and make a short video talking about it.
Post it on YouTube, give it all the proper hashtags and what-not, then embed it on your site! Voila!
Here are some people that post AMAZING vlogs and videos. Study them so you know how best to approach yours.
Here is some gear to get started. All you need is a camera, a mic, and a tripod.
Sony A6500 (which is great for pics too! Remember this from above?)
That’s It!!
See? It’s not so bad.
You don’t need to invent anything. You don’t need a writing team, a production company, any of that stuff. Just take what you do and share it using every type of media. Get it labeled correctly and on to your website. Build up a mountain of content (i.e. breadcrumbs) and crush your SEO.
Let me know if you have any questions. There are too many good companies out there that don’t put in the time creating content (for websites or Socials) and they eventually die out. I hate to see it, and I see it all the time. Don’t be one of those companies. You need the content to push your business just as much as you need the business to push the content.
Just do what you do best.
Be you.
- Joey