Content Marketing Blog mint

Content Marketing Blog

The Mighty Google Can't Read—It's An Engine, a.k.a. A Machine!

Relevance is the KEY to Writing High Ranking SEO Content

If your customer could only see the title of your last blog post, what would she know about your brand? Would the title alone be compelling enough to make her click through to find out more? Is the title clear and descriptive? Would a stranger know what the text was about without any other context? This idea of context and clarity is important to think about when you’re creating content for your website, blog, and social channels. Remember that Google, like other machines, cannot read—it can only try to guess what your content is about, from the way you lead into it—with titles, meta descriptions, headers, and keywords. Experienced SEO copywriters know how to help Google guess correctly.  

Customers want relevance. With so many messages in the marketplace, the average person isn’t going to click on a link that isn’t descriptive. It’s the difference between “shoes” and “young boy’s ballet shoes.” Shoes is a broad category that really doesn’t explain what is behind the door. “Young boy’s ballet shoes” is directed towards a specific category of shoppers who can determine if the link is relevant. The more descriptive you are about your content, the more relevant it will be towards your audience.

What Is Relevant Content and Why Should You Care?

Relevant content refers to how likely the content matches the user’s intent. If you’re shopping for ballet shoes for your son, you don’t want to sort through pages of shoes for women or girls. Relevancy directs the right readers to your content. Relevancy can be the difference between users who click on your page and users who actually make a purchase. Search engines base relevancy on elements of SEO. Users who read your content aren’t concerned about SEO, but about high quality content. You need to marry SEO and quality copywriting for relevancy to users and search engines.

Good Copywriting or Just SEO?

Skilled copywriters create content that makes people want to take an action, whether to buy something, maybe to take a test drive or simply to come into your business. Bruce Bendinger, a well-known Chicago ad executive, calls copywriting “verbal carpentry,” “words on paper,” “scripts to time,” and “salesmanship”. Good copywriting is an art. Writers with a gift to entice people to act must be part researchers, artists, psychologists, and marketers. High quality content resonates with readers.

SEO is the process of optimizing content for search engines. This is handled through many avenues, such as researching keywords, building links to main pages and backlinking from other authoritative searches. These tactics tell search engines which pages to use in search queries. SEO writers always keep Google and other search engines in mind when creating content, but it’s also important to ensure that the human readers find that content relevant and meaningful. 

How to Create Relevant Content

Many copywriters try to create content that checks all the SEO best practices without considering relevancy to the audience. Content marketing success isn’t only ranking high in search. Success is about getting the customer to take an action. Success relates to your bottom line. No matter how successful your SEO is, it’s the audience that determines your profits. Your audience consumes your content. Search engines can’t make purchases. They don’t read. High quality content that gets the attention of your customers will begin to rank for SEO.

Here are 6 tips for creating content with relevancy for your audience.

  • Know your customer. Relevancy depends on who is reading the content. What is relevant to one person may not hold true with someone else. When you know your customer persona, you can address their problems.
  • Understand user intent. User intent drives keywords. You can’t develop a list of keywords without knowing why your user is searching. Most users want to do something, know something, or go somewhere. Understanding the goal of the user can help you use keywords that are relevant.
  • Use keywords to develop and create content. Although keywords are the basis for SEO, your users use keywords to find information online. Keywords need to relate to the user, and using good SEO helps your content get found by search engines.
  • Put your keywords into your meta descriptions. Meta descriptions tell your reader what your page is about. Using keywords in the meta descriptions help the reader know that your content is relevant. Use some style and pizzazz in your meta descriptions to entice your audience to click through.
  • Solve a problem. Great marketing solves a problem for the user. When you show your audience how you can help them, they’ll find your content relevant. You’re not creating content to showcase your brand, but to solve problems.
  • Relevant content is timely. Content that was relevant a year ago is out of date. Customer behavior has changed over the past year. Customers have different priorities. Even in the same year, customer focus changes. The customer who wants your product for their own use in June may be looking for gifts for their friends in December. 

Creating relevant content keeps good SEO elements in mind, but ultimately, it’s about the reader. Readers want to know what they’re going to read about. Relevant content improves the user experience. Search engines want to know what to rank for and relevancy to your audience helps them understand your content better.
Contact the MintCopy team for high quality content created by the best copywriters who have the perfect blend of creativity, marketing experience and SEO knowledge.

Use our online form to get in touch. You can also follow us on Facebook LinkedIn, and Twitter to stay up-to-date with the latest content marketing trends.

Resources:

Share


Recent Posts

Sheetal Pinto - 6/7/2023 06:00

Picture this: you're out on a beautiful sunny day, casting your line into the deep sea of marketing. But instead of using a regular old worm, you're armed with the mighty power of content. Content marketing is like the perfect bait that attracts your target audience and hooks their attention.

Sheetal Pinto - 5/25/2023 06:00

In the past month alone, our team has worked with more than a few small businesses all fired up to jump on the content marketing bandwagon. Because guess what, they have heard of ChatGPT and other ‘magical’ content creation tools that fill them with confidence that they too can dish out content like a pro. Of course they can, with one caveat though—digital content, whether created using generative AI or by professional copywriters must serve a human audience for whom it proves undeniably valuable. So, we’ll take this opportunity to go back to the basics and cover the essentials of how to function effectively in the realm of digital content marketing.   

Sheetal Pinto - 5/11/2023 06:00

What Kind of Material Should I Read for Business Insights?

Reading is like the spinach of the writing world, except instead of bulging muscles, it gives you bulging vocabularies! The more you read, the more you absorb the written word and the better equipped you are to string together coherent sentences that engage, convert, and transform. It's like a superpower, except instead of flying or shooting lasers out of your eyes, you can craft an epic tale that will make people laugh, cry, and question their existence all at once. So don't skip your literary greens, folks. Your writing muscles will thank you!
Are you struggling to write compelling content for your business? Don't worry, you're not alone. But before you hit that panic button, remember what Stephen King said, "If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that." Yes, that Stephen King. The horror writer. If he can dish out writing advice, so can we! And the advice is simple: read. Here are 3 reasons to build a reading habit.

Sheetal Pinto - 4/13/2023 08:11

Affordable Content Marketing for SMBs - FREE eBook

Every small and medium sized business has unique challenges. Building a strong customer base is a common struggle for SMBs. The content writers at MintCopy have put together content marketing best practices and useful tips to help your content marketing efforts deliver the right results. Download this free eBook - our essential guide to creating content that will transform the way you attract and engage customers.

Sheetal Pinto - 3/30/2023 06:00

How to Avoid Making these Mistakes in Your Content

When you invest time and money in creating content for your website and other digital assets, you want to ensure you get a good ROI. Whether you hire a content agency, write content in-house, or hire a freelance copywriter, it’s important to monitor how published content is performing. Content that isn’t ranking well on Google might be ridden with mistakes that turn customers away and deter positive engagement. Here are three common content mistakes made by copywriters that could be keeping your content from reaching its full potential.

Sheetal Pinto - 3/16/2023 00:00

Content Marketing Best Practices that Garner Attention

Remember the movie, “Field of Dreams”? It made popular the phrase, “If you build it, he will come”. Shoeless Joe and other baseball legends may have magically appeared on a cornfield-turned-baseball diamond. However, when it comes to content marketing, your audience will need more than a field of dreams to attract their attention. If you’re trying to get more traffic to your website, don’t wait for your local SEO efforts to direct your audience. Give them a hand with these proven content strategies.

Sheetal Pinto - 3/2/2023 06:00

How to Use a Pillar Page to Improve your Content Quality

Consider the dictionary meaning of ‘pillar’ – “a firm, upright support for a superstructure”, also defined as “a fundamental precept”. Your content marketing campaign is your ‘superstructure’ that requires a ‘firm, upright support’. That’s the key function of content pillar pages. Without these essential supports, your ‘content superstructure’ will neither stand strong, nor will it attract the right attention.

Sheetal Pinto - 2/23/2023 06:00

Two Proven Ways to Organize Products with Similar Keywords

In business, cannibalization typically refers to a loss of sales. A company introduces a new product that displaces sales of an older, usually more outdated, product. Instead of having an increase in sales, the market growth remains stable. What does this mean in the world of SEO and content marketing? Keyword cannibalization occurs when two products have similar keywords or phrases and confuses the search engines about which page is right for which query. Instead of competing with other businesses for search traffic, you’re competing with your own web pages. Here’s why keyword cannibalization is bad for business and how you can overcome it.

Sheetal Pinto - 2/9/2023 06:00

How to Optimize your Content for a Global Audience

The global market is much smaller than it once was.  Statista reports over 5 billion internet users globally, or about 63.1% of the population. Reaching out to a broader market can help your business grow, but it’s not as simple as updating your website in a new language and simply hoping your audience finds you through search.

Sheetal Pinto - 1/26/2023 06:00

How to Build a Functional Content Marketing Funnel

Most people don’t wake up and think, “oh, today is the day I buy my new mattress,” unless they’ve researched different brands and checked pricing at different stores. Modern customers often take their time with major (and even minor) purchases. Using that information about today’s shoppers can help you design a content marketing map, or funnel, that guides the customer to your product.