Is currying favor with Google — the 800-pound gorilla powering over 91% of internet searches — still the best way to drive online sales?
Since Google asserted online search dominance, most online marketing efforts have realigned to accommodate its guidelines. To secure a coveted top spot in the search results, you must optimize your website for mobile first, craft quality content, target the right keywords, build backlinks, and more.
The search engine processes over 40K queries per second, which amounts to 3.1 trillion searches annually. Diverting a sliver of these searches to your website guarantees exceptional success.
Thousands of highly successful businesses rely on Google’s organic traffic to generate sales and leads. True, the search engine can drive hundreds of thousands of page views and help you generate tens of thousands of leads.
But, Google is a fickle beast. What Google giveth, Google can taketh away.
This business approach works… until it doesn’t.
With Google constantly rolling out updates and algorithm changes, your placement on the top result pages is no longer guaranteed. Thousands of businesses have learned this painful lesson the hard way.
With the recent Helpful Content Update (HCU), Google effectively wiped tens of thousands of websites from the search results. Businesses lost their top-ranking slots, and some websites disappeared altogether.
How do you future-proof your business from such a cataclysmic end? Dig in to find out.
Clearly Define Your Target Audience
It’s tempting to dive into keyword research once your business website is running. Unfortunately, that’d be a costly mistake.
Before writing a single blog post or conducting your keyword research, answer one fundamental question: Who is your ideal target audience? Creating a detailed buyer persona answers this question and guides your content creation efforts.
The best online marketing content is tailored to address the needs of your target audience head-on. An effective buyer persona simplifies the process by offering insights into your buyer’s personality and how they make buying decisions.
Simply put, the best buyer personas let you in on the conversation taking place in your prospect’s mind. They help you uncover their hopes, fears, dreams, and aspirations — the intangible factors that drive buying decisions.
Once the buyer’s profile is dialed in, embark on your keyword research. There are plenty of free and paid tools to help you with that. The goal is to unearth profitable keywords and phrases your audience uses to search for solutions online.
Understanding the search intent behind every search phrase is essential. It lets you create content that adequately addresses the reader’s needs and earns their trust. It also signals to Google and other search engines that your website is brimming with helpful content.
As a result, the search engines rank your website higher on the search results pages, so more people can find your business.
Build Topical Authority
Google is increasingly gravitating toward brands. Websites associated with brands seem to be more popular with the search engine than niche websites.
That’s why you should prioritize building your site’s topical authority. Topical authority refers to your website’s credibility and expertise. Try this for size: You’re looking for a chemical-free home cleaning product. Your search unearths two possible options.
One website educates readers on how to clean their homes without resorting to harsh, chemical-filled products. It’s teeming with blog posts, buyer’s guides, product reviews, comparisons, and step-by-step tutorials to help them on their journey.
The next option is a home improvement site with a few blog posts on organic home cleaning products.
Which website would you trust?
Naturally, you would gravitate toward the one-stop website because it will likely provide all the answers you seek.
That’s the value of building topical authority. Comprehensive topical coverage helps build trust with the readers and the search engines. People will linger on your pages because they find the content practical and valuable. Search engines pick up on such trust signals and earmark your website as an authoritative source, earning higher rankings on the SERPs.
Higher SERP ranking comes with compounding benefits. It drives massive organic traffic to your website, which can dramatically increase sales and conversions. It also helps your link-building efforts.
Webmasters often link out on sites ranking at the top of Google because they trust Google’s capacity to evaluate site authority. As such, you can build a diverse natural link profile that is almost impossible for your competitors to replicate.
And that can help you dominate your niche for years.
Establish Subject Matter Expertise
With the rise of AI-powered writers, everyone can whip up a piece and post it on the internet. Unfortunately, much of the AI-generated content is subpar — shallow, clunky, and lacks substance. In most cases, it is a rehash of what’s already on the internet.
That presents an excellent opportunity for your brand. You can tower above the fluff by incorporating your first-hand experience with the subject matter. For instance, you can leverage your database to identify the most pressing problems affecting your target audience. Then, you can pepper your website with content showcasing your experience solving these problems.
Incorporating your lived experience as a professional sets you apart. It lets your brand stand out by giving you and your brand a rarified edge — proven experience. People value content written by subject matter experts because it is based on real-life experiences.
It’s often practical, easy to understand, and, most importantly, functional. People can apply some of that knowledge to their problems with tangible results.
It may seem counterintuitive, but sharing your knowledge with your audience pays off in spades. It builds trust, a core requirement for creating a cult-like brand following.
People will bookmark your pages for further reading and share them on their social handles. They will join your mailing list and subscribe to your newsletters, where you can convert them into paying customers.
Most importantly, establishing yourself as a subject matter expert lends credibility to your brand and products. People who benefit from your advice won’t hesitate to purchase your product or pay for your services. As a result, you can effortlessly command higher-than-market prices while building a huge market base.
Don’t Sell to Your Audience
Contrary to popular opinion, the ultimate goal of content marketing isn’t to sell. Given that businesses spend thousands of their hard-earned dollars to generate content, that may seem counterintuitive.
However, the ultimate goal of content marketing is to build a formidable online presence. Churning out quality content helps you create an engaged audience that’s curious about your brand and interested in your products. It helps you tell a good story that helps your audience build a positive association with your brand.
They may find your content entertaining, helpful, inspirational, or enriching. That builds awareness and compels them to engage with your brand, which is core to cultivating relationships with potential customers.
Simply put, content marketing helps prospects warm up to your products and brand so they’re receptive to your offers.
Build an Effective Sales Funnel
A sales funnel lets you turn the carefully curated content on your website into a money mint. Typically, a sales funnel represents a customer’s buying journey. It embodies your efforts to nurture a curious website visitor into a paying customer.
Content marketing lets you cast your nets far and wide. Naturally, you will attract all kinds of people to your website. But not everyone who visits your website is a potential customer or the right fit.
A sales funnel framework lets you make the distinction. It allows you to capture the details of your prospects and qualify them based on their needs. It’s much easier to close a lead when you understand where they’re on their buying journey.
An effective way to build a sales funnel is to divide your web content into three broad categories — top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. Each category corresponds to a prospect’s position on the buying journey, allowing you to tailor your content to address their needs head-on.
You may use popups with enticing offers — freebies, checklists, or gated content — to build an email list. A strong call-to-action (CTA) on each blog post prompting the reader to join your newsletter also works.
Besides capturing email addresses, email marketing solutions feature advanced capabilities to let you segment your list into buying stages. You can then target them with helpful emails to help them make an informed buying decision.
The benefits of a sales funnel are two-fold. It allows you to build an email list, own your audience, and harness the power of email marketing. People who’ll get on your list will likely love your products but may need an extra nudge to make the buying decision.
Test, Test, Test
Wouldn’t it be nice if content marketing were a one-and-done affair? Wouldn’t it be nice to simply pepper your website with high-quality, well-optimized content and watch the money come in?
Unfortunately, the online marketing scene is highly dynamic. And so is your audience. Online marketing strategies often mirror the audience’s online habits and preferences. As such, your marketing efforts must align with changing marketing needs.
Rather than rely on the latest marketing fads, use proven results to inform your online marketing decisions. That calls for testing, testing, testing. Experiment with various forms of content to determine what resonates with your audience.
Do they like long- or short-form blog posts? What topics draw the most eyeballs or engagement? Do they gravitate toward heavily researched content or heavily distilled ones? Are they party to conversational pieces with expert input?
Testing allows you to determine what your audience loves so you can offer them more of it. Luckily, plenty of free tools, including Google Analytics (GA) and Google Search Console (GSC), offer exceptional insights into your audience.
Use them to uncover your best-performing content and topics so you can create more of them. This will allow you to demonstrate your expertise while meeting your audience on their terms.
Still, these analytic tools offer insights into your traffic sources. You can determine which channels drive the most engagement and prioritize them.
Future-Proof Your Business with Exceptional Content
Google, the world’s most dominant search engine, constantly tweaks its algorithms to meet its business objectives. Unfortunately, these changes reverberate across the internet, some with devastating consequences.
Upping your content marketing efforts to prioritize your audience can help you build a formidable and profitable online presence. You can adhere to Google’s ranking guidelines while building a strong community around your brand.
Do you need to level up your content marketing efforts? Our star-studded writing bench, drawn from various professions, is on hand to help you pick up the slack. Talk to us about your content marketing needs.
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