Publishing content on your website, social media pages, and via email can entirely transform your marketing power. As well as becoming the “go-to” brand for advice and industry insight, every post you publish puts you right back at the forefront of your audience’s mind.
Think about it this way: Who would you rather approach? A company that is trustworthy and well-known for strong communication skills, or a company that has been deadly silent online for months?
We know our answer.
But posting any new content piece can be nerve-wracking – what if there are mistakes? What if it doesn’t perform as well as it should?
To help put your mind at ease (and to increase your chances of attracting organic leads), we’ve pulled together our 5-step checklist which lays out exactly how to optimise and perfect your content before sending it out to the world.
Step #1: Optimise your content with keywords
It’s no surprise that, as marketers, we’re promoting the importance of Search Engine Optimization. We’ve seen first-hand how SEO can boost website traffic, and a lot of this is down to the quality and consistency of the keywords you use.
You don’t even have to go overboard. Take a look at this blog post, for example. Can you spot any keywords? Anything that seems odd, or randomly phrased, or that doesn’t quite fit?
You won’t, yet our content is always keyword optimised.
We’ve included some really important keywords that our target audience is always searching for online – organic leads, content strategy, publishing content – and we’ve done this without simply adding a chain of words at the end of every sentence (also known as keyword stuffing).
SEO is about being smart. Google’s ranking algorithm actually trawls through web pages to make sure they aren’t spammy, so when you’re adding keywords, you still have to:
- Sound like a human
- Make your content engaging, interesting and possible to read
Optimising your content with keywords isn’t about closing your eyes and blindly smashing your keyboard to add key phrases. It’s about artistically sprinkling them into your content.
How do you get started?
First, go to Google.
Before typing anything, take a moment to imagine you are a prospective customer of your own business – someone who is specifically looking for what you sell.
- How would they think?
- What might they be feeling?
- What would they be on Google for?
If you need help getting into the mindset of your consumer base, check out our persona profile for key insight and help seeing things from their perspective.
Once you’ve successfully put yourself into their boots, consider this: what would you type into the search bar?
Play around with the search function. Look at what you’ve typed in and then look at the box that says “similar questions also asked”. See which key phrases keep popping up. Then focus your content, and your keywords, around these things.
Additionally, you can also use a keyword searcher, but these can be a bit complicated to understand if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Once you’ve got your keywords, go back to your post and see where you can make improvements. Instead of “blocks of soap”, perhaps “bars of soap”. Really minor detail changes like these are going to help your SEO and Google ranking in the long run.
Step #2: Break your content into digestible chunks
If we once again look at this blog post, you’ll have noticed there are no “huge blocks of text” or paragraphs. Instead, there are single, and double sentence lines that are broken up by regular subheadings.
This makes our content easier to digest.
There’s a psychology behind the way a lot of copy is written, and it’s due to the lowering attention spans of your audience. Skim readers like to feel as though they’re making progress down the page, and it’s a lot easier to read through a full article if it isn’t published in solid blocks of text.
When publishing content, break your article up into digestible sections as this is likely to retain your audience’s attention for longer and keep them reading.
Want proof? Well, you’ve made it this far, right?
Step #3: Proofread, proofread, proofread
Speaking of proof… Proofreading is undeniably important.
Regardless of what you sell and who you sell it to, you’ll want to ensure you’re publishing content that is high-quality.
Readers are likely to leave your website or email or social platform if your writing is littered with grammar mistakes. Proofreading can help you to…
- Catch pesky spelling mistakes
- Correct phrases for clarity
- Improve your overall writing skills (so that, over time, your job gets easier the more you write and edit)
If you feel like you’re getting tired of re-reading your own writing, you’re almost at the amount of proofreads that we’d recommend.
Almost.
If you’re responsible for your own content but struggle a lot with grammar or spelling, there are plenty of easy to use, free tools out there to help.
Grammarly is brilliant for catching mistakes you might not normally notice, but remember to trust your gut. You don’t have to take every suggestion, especially if you have a casual or chatty writing style.
You’ll certainly know speech patterns better than AI, but it’ll likely be better at spelling than you and me.
Step #4: Add visuals
Adding visuals actually draws us back to step 3 – which, as you’ll remember, was about breaking up your article into digestible sections.
Giving your readers a break from heavy text consumption can help keep their minds engaged and is a great asset to many content creators, no matter how brilliant they are at writing.
Images give you a unique opportunity to make or enhance a point without long, wordy chunks of text. Infographics, for example, enable you to pull strings of data into one digestible format.
Step #5: Include a CTA
Call-to-actions are great for every business and every piece of content. Yes, every.
We see a lot of businesses fail to utilise CTAs efficiently, either because they feel self-conscious about promoting themselves or because it feels “spammy”.
Of course, if every blog, article or social media post of yours ended with the same repetitive phrase (‘Call us NOW to book your place’) – eventually you might see less and less efficiency.
But when used correctly, CTAs are highly valuable.
If you don’t feel comfortable specifically inviting people to book an appointment, for example, subtly placed hyperlinks can persuade your audience to act.
Let’s say you’ve talked about “using a brilliant lawyer” in an advice piece about compensation claims, and you happen to be a brilliant lawyer – hyperlinking “brilliant lawyer” to your own contact form can help guide your audience to you, rather than the competition.
The trick is about incorporating natural call-to-actions that provide additional value to your target audience.
Time to end with our own CTA
We’re always proud to invite our audience to act by booking a consultation with us.
If you found our advice on publishing content useful, but aren’t sure how to implement it, know this: 10X Marketing is made up of a team of content creation experts who can organize and optimize the perfect content strategy that will generate organic leads for your business.
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