Today Meg will be discussing how to find content to create and share as part of your marketing strategy. We've included a transcript of the video below for your convenience!
Today we're going to talk about keeping SEO in mind as you build out your content strategy, and then we're going to go to a few different websites to see where we can generate some great ideas for our content.
We're really talking about a content strategy here, which is anything that can help you get people to visit your site and also keep them on your site. Get them reading, get them interested, get them sharing with their friends--all of these are signals to Google that your site is a great site and one that they should be ranking better.
So how do you choose the content that you're going to share with people? I'm going to focus today on competitor research and also mining for topics. So what I have pulled up right now is called Open Site Explorer, and it's from Moz. The site I'm about to pull up is actually not someone I would consider a direct competitor: it's modcloth.com. This site is much, much too big and too popular to be an actual competitor for my small vintage clothing business. So the competitors that you're really going to want are people that are also small businesses or who speak to the same audience that you speak to. So we have a list of their inbound links here, so I can see here that Techcrunch has written about Modcloth, they have an article on social media here, they have an article on "women in business" because Modcloth is a woman-owned business. I ideally would be able to go through this whole list of 50 links and find the articles that are more specific about the products that they sell. Maybe there's a Pinterest board of cute dresses, maybe there's a blog post about "5 different vintage styles that have been brought back for 2016". Those are really the ones that I'm looking for, because then I know what people who are writing about the products are interested in. So mining your competitors' backlinks is a really great strategy to see who is linking to them and why, and to try to go for similar content because you know that's the kind of stuff that people want to share and link to.
Another thing that I really like to use is quora.com. Quora.com is a website where people go to ask questions and then other people who have been tagged with this area of expertise answer them. So I really like to use it for content ideas. If I search for something like "vintage clothing", I can find the questions that people are asking about this. The top result we have is "how does something become vintage", which is a really interesting question and I wouldn't have thought about that. So maybe I can write a blog post explaining more about that. Someone is asking "where can I sell a vintage t-shirt in New York?". Oh here's one: "when and how did the tradition of Dapper Day at Disney Parks begin?" So I have no idea what Dapper Day is, but maybe I can write a post about it because it sounds kind of fun and interesting. You get the point here: it's just a goldmine for unique, interesting content because you can essentially just take their question and answer it. And more and more these days people are using what's called, "semantic search", where they will literally type a sentence into the search box as if they're talking to a person. If I was trying to learn about Dapper Day, I would literally say, "where does Dapper Day come from?", or "what is the history of Dapper Day?". So if I'm asking a question like that and then there's a blog post on the Vintage website responding to this question, it's a perfect marriage and there's a really good chance that I'll stumble across that blog post.
Another way to generate ideas obviously is to go through other forms of social media. See what people on Reddit are talking about because Reddit is a lot like Quora in that you can find communities of people who are interested in vintage clothes. All of this will send the right signals to Google that this is a site that people want to be on, and a site that they should prioritize to give to people.
So by now you should have a pretty good foundation in place with your metadata, and your keywords, and your content. Next time we're going to talk about measuring the success of your hard work, so be sure to tune in.