Ever Green Content Marketing Best Practices

In 2023, content marketing remains a top strategy for maintaining brand relevance and driving organic traffic to your website. Despite the various forms that content can take, it is crucial to adhere to several best practices to ensure its discoverability.

To this end, this article will explore some enduring best practices in content marketing and highlight some emerging trends.

Below are seven best practices that content marketers should keep in mind in 2023:

Using The Customer’s Voice In Your Content

In content marketing, incorporating the customer’s perspective is a fundamental and paramount best practice. It is imperative to align your content with the specific needs and desires of your target audience.

Failing to do so could result in missed opportunities to reach your desired audience, even if your offerings align with their needs.

Conducting thorough keyword research is essential for creating effective content. To ensure that your content is relevant and valuable to your audience, it is crucial to use the specific phrases and terms that people are actively searching for. This approach is key to crafting content that resonates with your target audience.

Create Content Using The Hub & Spoke Content Marketing Model

For Google, it has always been crucial to rank websites that exhibit expertise and authority in a particular domain.

A surefire way to showcase your expertise and knowledge to both Google and your customers is by creating a vast body of content centred around the topic.

The hub and spoke content marketing model is an excellent way to achieve this goal. This model is closely tied to the use of the customer’s voice because you must ensure that the content you produce meets existing demand.

Although the hub and spoke model is not novel, it remains an essential aspect of content marketing.

Using this approach, you can establish your authority around a hub, which typically relates to your main business lines or services. The spoke content typically consists of questions that link to the hub or different stages of the buyer’s journey.

By catering to users in various stages of their search and demonstrating your expertise around a topic, you can enhance your authority in Google’s eyes, resulting in increased organic traffic, better keyword rankings, and higher conversions for your business by submitting a blog post for publication on blog websites

Create Content Based On Result Types

It’s no secret that Google’s search engine result pages are no longer dominated by ten blue links. With the emergence of new types of results, the SERPs have become increasingly cluttered with diverse result types.

As with keyword targeting, it’s critical to structure your content in a relevant way that appeals to Google’s algorithms, resulting in your content being surfaced and displayed prominently.

One result type that has gained enormous popularity in recent years is short-form videos, ranging from 10 to 30 seconds or up to 5 minutes.

With platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels, short-form video content has taken the internet by storm and even appears as a result type on Google.

When creating content for your website, it’s crucial to consider what’s already appearing on Google and what your competitors are doing.

Visual content and imagery can make your content more appealing and shareable on social media, which can increase your visibility on Google Images, the second most popular search engine.

Audio content, such as podcasts, has also emerged as a significant medium for content consumption in recent times.

When creating content, it’s essential to gauge how users are consuming content and what is appearing on Page 1 of Google.

Based on this evaluation, consider whether you can create content for these mediums to increase your visibility on Google.

Measure Your Content For ROI

Although not a new trend, measuring the ROI of content marketing remains a best practice and a crucial aspect to justify the value of organic traffic and SEO efforts.

Unlike paid media or email marketing, measuring the ROI of SEO or organic traffic can be challenging. It’s therefore crucial to establish clear metrics for measuring the success of your content and demonstrate how it contributes to the organization’s objectives.

To gain more support for SEO and content marketing, you need to demonstrate how your content is driving user engagement and conversions.

It’s recommended to set up reporting before creating content, using either enterprise SEO services or smaller tools.

This enables you to measure your content’s performance and target keywords’ rankings on Page 1, leading to an increase in organic traffic and conversions.

By consistently measuring the ROI of your content, you can prove the value of SEO efforts and demonstrate how they contribute to bringing users to your site today and in the future.

AI-generated Content Is Here, But Don’t Fall For The Hype

AI-generated content is now more accessible than ever, but it’s important not to get carried away by the hype.

Many new technologies, such as VR, AR, and NFTs, have been touted as the next big thing, but they have yet to become mainstream disruptors.

While AI has the potential to make our lives easier in many ways, it’s essential to exercise caution when using AI services like ChatGPT for content creation. It’s recommended to use AI for research, creating schema, or content ideation, but not to rely entirely on AI-generated content.

Google’s recent E-A-T guidelines update includes an additional “E” for experience, which highlights the search engine’s focus on authoritative content.

This update seems to be a response to the rise of AI-generated content, as Google wants to ensure that users receive accurate information from credible sources.

It’s crucial to create helpful and satisfying content that’s written for humans, not just search engines.

While AI can assist with content creation, it’s important to avoid relying too heavily on it, as demonstrated by CNET’s failed attempt to use AI for mass content creation, which resulted in numerous errors.

Re-Optimize And Repurpose Your Outdated and Underperforming Content

Is it time for new content? Not necessarily. By monitoring your site’s current content, you can identify opportunities to re-optimize or repurpose outdated or underperforming content.

Conducting a content audit is one of the best ways to accomplish this and determine which content is performing well and which could benefit from a refresh or optimization.

It’s not necessary to reinvent the wheel if the content is already of good quality but could benefit from targeting different keywords.

By evaluating your existing content, you can identify content gaps that require new content or identify content that can be consolidated to improve its performance.

In the past, working with clients has revealed multiple blog articles on the same topic that were not performing well. Instead of creating new content, repurposing existing content can be a more efficient use of time and resources to improve its performance.

Auditing your site’s content will always be a best practice, as it uncovers hidden gems and identifies updates, optimizations, or new content that can benefit your site.

Break Down The Silos Between Teams Internally

While not a specific best practice for content strategy, it is essential for any company that creates content to follow this best practice.

Creating content for your site involves many moving parts. It is often thought of as the content team’s job, but other teams, such as design/product, development, legal, and hired SEO teams, are also involved.

In an enterprise, all of these teams need to work together to achieve the same goal: attracting more people to your website and encouraging them to convert. You can streamline your organic marketing processes by making them more efficient.

Regularly meet with other departments and establish processes for creating new content and optimizing existing content. By doing so, you can increase efficiency and ensure that everyone understands their responsibilities throughout the process.

If you do not define each team’s responsibilities beforehand and explain why they are essential, they may not prioritize the right things, resulting in delays in the content creation process.

The best content marketers work to break down silos, ensuring that content is published effectively. Communication, education, and organization are crucial to achieving this.

In Conclusion

Adhering to these seven best practices can ensure the quality of your content now and in the future. It’s crucial to be proactive with insights gained during content creation and communicate with internal teams about areas where their support might be required.

Content marketing is an effective method for organizations to attract website traffic, educate consumers about services, and build brand trust.

While AI will remain a popular topic, it’s advisable not to make any drastic changes regarding content creation. Ultimately, accuracy and content written by humans for humans are more important. These best practices may seem familiar, but they are essential and should be prioritized over chasing the latest trends.

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