“Content is King” is a familiar phrase in the marketing world and for good reason. Bill Gates coined the phrase in 1996 in an essay and it rings even truer today. However, we need to take it a step further than that and produce fresh, relevant content to truly have Content that is King. Continue reading to learn how to produce fresh, SEO-driven content that boosts search engine rankings, website authority, website traffic and lead generation.
How to create fresh content that resonates with prospects and customers
Keeping your content fresh and up-to-date is essential for search engine optimization. On top of that, new content is even more important for technology companies because in the world of tech, products are continuously being updated and innovated. It is really easy to get a release cycle or two behind your own technology on your website that describe all of the latest and greatest features!
Include your sales team in the content conversation
When updating your website with engaging content, it is important to include the Sales team in the conversation. Sales has direct contact with your prospects and customers and can give you the terminology, phrases, and key messaging points that resonate with your target audience.
Ask the product development team’s take
A step tech companies don’t do often enough is including the Product Development team in marketing conversations. Product Development will be able to explain what is up and coming at your company, go into depth about the benefits of their latest release and showcase the true impact of your product.
Add user manuals and technical content on your tech website
Oftentimes, tech companies find it tricky to decide whether or not to include user manuals and help guides on a public-facing website. However, we always think it's a good idea to have that content available, as it’s amazing for lead generation! We suggest gating this content behind a form so you can capture strong leads on your website. However, since search engines like Google cannot crawl gated content, it is important to have your content offer’s landing page optimized so that it is able to be found via search engines.
How to SEO-ify your fresh content
SEO is a constantly changing practice and unfortunately, Google doesn't like to let anyone know what its algorithm is (and it almost never announces when it's going to change!) However, it is important that you routinely keep an eye out for updates so that your site is optimized to its best advantage!
Here are five best practices we recommend tech companies follow:
Write content that is the ideal length
We used to say that 250 words was a rule of thumb to even show up in the rankings. While that’s still true, your tech company has a much more likely shot of showing up in the rankings if the content is 1200 plus words! We use a tool called SEMRush to do keyword and ranking research and also, determine ideal content length for each content topic. That way, we can ensure that we’re developing content that is SEO optimized to rank well in search!
Write a strong title tag and meta description
Your title tags and meta description are highly important for your content to be found via Google or other search engines. Title tags are clickable headlines that show up in search results and are essential for SEO. We highly recommend keeping the title tag under 60 characters and include target keywords for best results. Meta descriptions are also extremely important because they are a brief summary of your content that shows below the title tag. We suggest keeping your meta description 155 characters or lower to avoid Google truncating your description!
Make your content more visually appealing
Google watches how users interact with your content. Having a strong user experience is key to improving your search rankings. We suggest using subheadings (H1, H2, H3) to help make your text accessible to readers. Also add relevant videos, images and screenshots to illustrate your thoughts. Finally, don’t be afraid of white space! White space makes your content more readable and helps to keep your audience engaged with your content!
Don’t forget to use internal linking
A best practice we recommend to our tech clients is utilizing internal links on your website. This helps Google to get an understanding of the content on your page and develop an information hierarchy for your website. Internal links can significantly boost your ranking and it is a step we suggest you utilize on all content!
Check out these resources to keep up on SEO trends
For those of us who are not search engine professionals, it can be confusing to figure out what blogs or new sites to follow in order to keep up-to-date with major changes to Google's algorithm or changes in the SEO world. We suggest reading Search Engine Journal and Google’s Search Engine & SEO blog to learn the latest trends. SEMRush and Databox great tools we use for our tech clients and they also post great digital marketing and SEO-related content on their blogs that we would recommend you put in your digital marketing reading rotation.
