Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to be heard in the wilderness we call the Internet. Quality content, such as blog articles, is key in your efforts for better visibility and potential customer traffic. In order to be found and to be interesting, you need to create valuable content for your target groups. In this article I’ll discuss about how to use your visibility insights when creating new content.
1. The obvious: figure out a subject
Most of your readers don’t want to read articles that concentrate only in telling how good you are in what you do or how amazing your product is. Answer a question, solve a problem or provide value in some other way. Remember to think beforehand to whom you are writing. For example this article is primarily aimed for people who are interested in content marketing in general and want to learn simple tricks to enhance their content marketing skills. It doesn’t matter if the reader is just picking up with the subject or a seasoned professional. We can always learn new things!
2. Pick a few focus keywords
Based on the subject, think of a couple of keywords you want the content to be found on Google. Is the reader looking for general information about the subject or is he already close to being a customer? If you are going to discuss the subject in general, focus on keywords that could be used by people who are not looking for e.g. any exact product.
3. Find out if you already have good content on the subject
Now to the interesting stuff. In order to find out about your possible current visibility on the subject you are going to write about, add the keywords you chose to Cuutio. If you haven’t already, open a new Cuutio account (it’s free for 3 weeks, so no worries).
Add the keywords, choose your target market, create a keyword group e.g. “Blog” or “The name of my new article”. Whichever way you want to follow a group of related keywords.
After you’ve added the keywords, give Cuutio some time to index your results. Usually this doesn’t take more than a few minutes. Go grab a cup of coffee and return to see where you are currently positioned at with your chosen keywords. At this point, the most important metrics are the Position and Landing Page. The position is your current organic position on Google with that keyword. By clicking the landing page you’ll find out to which content you currently direct your visitors.
If you have insights in the Visits, Pages/Visit and Bounce Rate columns, it means your landing page is drawing organic traffic from Google. Adwords / Visits tells you if there’s an active Google Adwords ad found for you with that keyword, and how many visitors it has brought in during the selected time range. More about these features in Cuutio can be found here.
If you already have good visibility on the subject, take a minute to think about the need for new content. If you have other subjects in mind, conduct the same exercise with them and decide with which you should take action on based on your content marketing goals. Just remember that you can’t go wrong with good content. Ever.
4. Find new related keywords
If you are in a hurry and don’t have keywords on the chosen subject already in monitoring, skip this step. But if you have time, Cuutio will provide you with keyword suggestions after a few days. These suggestions are based on the search behavior of people searching on Google. Cuutio tells you which kind of related keywords they are currently using, giving you ideas about new keywords.
5. Are your competitors found?
Next step is to find out whether your competitors are doing content marketing on your subject or not. This is also easy with Cuutio. If you haven’t already, add a few of your known competitors to Cuutio, and you’re immediately able to see how they are positioned with your keywords.
6. What kind of content do the competitors offer?
Always focus on your strengths to keep your content marketing fresh and dependable. Yet it is always good to know what kind of content others offer to your potential customers. Especially if they are ahead of you in the search results. You can easily find out in Cuutio. Just click any keyword and choose ‘search engine results’ tab in the keyword’s own page. You’ll find top 100 results in your chosen market area. Red results are known competitors and green are yours. If someone is ahead of you, it’s most likely that your potential customer has visited their website before landing on yours. Keep this in mind since it gives you a great opportunity to differ from your competition!
7. Does anyone use your keywords?
This is an additional step, yet very useful. Google’s Keyword Planner is a great tool to figure out how much your keywords are searched for. Just insert a list of keywords and watch what happens. Like always, don’t stick in the actual numbers. If it’s 100, it means “not very many searches”, if it’s 10.000, it means “a lot of searches”. Of course this can vary market-wise.
8. Do some magic!
Now you have:
- Subject for the content
- List of keywords you should use
- Insights about your visibility and what kind of content your potential visitor has already seen
- Insights on how to differ from the competition
- An article or page almost ready – just write it :)
As always, remember all you usually need is good, interesting content for your readers. Aim high and publish regularly. To be able to monitor the development of your content marketing on Google, open a free Cuutio trial now.
What metrics do you measure when you create articles or other content? Leave a comment below.
