Content Marketing’s 4 Pillars of Success

One of the most important services a digital marketing company can offer is content marketing. If you are not sure why, do a little research into how Google has adjusted its search algorithms over the years. What Google has done has made on-site content more important than ever before. To succeed, you need to produce content that Google wants.

What does Google want? They want content that is created for users rather than algorithms. They want content they can serve up to users with full confidence that it will meet the needs and intent of a particular search. It all revolves around what I refer to as content marketing’s ‘four pillars of success’. Here they are:

1. High Quality Content

By its very nature, content marketing relies heavily on the quality of the content being presented. But be careful not to jump to conclusions about what constitutes quality. According to the experts at Webtek Digital Marketing, quality is measured in several ways:

• Spelling and Grammar – The first line of distinction for quality content is mechanical. Quality content is free of spelling and grammar errors. When content creators do not make an effort in this particular area, they come off as very amateurish.
• Valuable Information – High quality content offers valuable information. It offers information users can do something with. If there is no value to a piece of content, it is useless as a marketing tool.
• Relevance – Lastly, content needs to be relevant to something that users are searching for. A piece on hockey sticks posted on a roofer’s website is irrelevant. People searching for roofing services don’t care about hockey sticks at the moment.

Content quality should never be compromised. Google ranks for it, so it must be important.

2. SEO Optimized Content

In addition to quality, content must be designed around basic SEO principles. That means making judicious use of keywords in a way that seems natural and normal. It also means making use of strong page titles, proper meta descriptions, and other tools that will increase search engine visibility.

3. Scheduled Content

The third pillar of successful content marketing is scheduled content. By this, I mean that publishing new content occurs on a schedule to ensure that updates are consistent. Google algorithms are designed to pay attention to how frequently sites are updated. The more frequent the updates, the better a site ranks.

There is no magic number in terms of scheduling. However, common sense suggests a minimum of one update per week. Producing more will never hurt, as long as the previous two principles are observed with each piece.

4. Calls to Action

One of the general goals of marketing is to drive sales. Brand awareness is another. In either case, most pieces of content should have some sort of call to action attached. A call could be an invitation to purchase something. But it could also be an invitation to sign up for a newsletter, leave a product review, or just about anything else.

Calls to action are designed to engage consumers. If you are not engaging, you’re not marketing effectively. This does not mean that every piece of content needs to have a call to action. It is to say that calls to action should be the norm.

The four pillars of content marketing success will make or break a marketer’s efforts. Nail all four and success will be yours. Ignore them and your content marketing efforts will suffer. Content marketing is a strategy that should be implemented in a way that resonates with both Google and users. This is what the four pillars are all about.