I’ve noticed two things lately. One, is that these posts don’t really provide any answers. They’re more about questions than anything else. The second one is that they’re frequently inspired (or at least sparked) by discussions I’ve been participating in on Google+, the latest and greatest social network. (Is it really the greatest? That’s a question for another day.)
Anyway, a recent post and its comments set me thinking about content marketing, and the challenges businesses, particularly small businesses, face in an evolving online marketing environment.
What Is Content Marketing?
Technically, content marketing is defined as any format which involves the creation, publication and dissemination of media content for the purposes of generating leads or sales. The guys who know what they’re doing in this industry will tell you that all marketing is content marketing. And they’re right.
In modern online marketing though, content marketing has come to mean something else in addition to the technical definition.
The rise of social media in the last few years, and a more recent focus (by Google of course) on the possibilities of using it’s myriad interconnections to establish trust and credibility that will eventually (almost undoubtedly) become essential for “organic” optimisation, has led to an unprecedented drive to create great content for the purposes of encouraging shares and likes and retweets and 1’s.
Today, content marketing means the creation of content that is so valuable, so interesting, so engaging, that people will want to interact with it and share it. But it’s not that easy.
Creating Great Content
So, you know you have to create great content. What is great content? Good question.
I’m not sure myself. I suppose we could define it circularly by saying great content is content that your audience wants to share. But that still doesn’t help. So…research. Study. Know your audience, to paraphrase Sun Tzu. Find out what they’re interested in, and give them more of it. Spend more time creating content, and less time promoting it.
Those are the general guidelines. But it’s still not that easy.
Because most websites, and most businesses, are bad at creating content. They ‘re not content writers or creators. They’re not experts in marketing or advertising. In many cases, the only thing they know about their clients is that they buy the product or service that the business sells.
Of course I’m not talking about the huge brands here. I’m talking about the small business owner. The guy who repairs roofs. The guy who offers a tutoring service, or who sells office furniture.
Businesses Are Not Content Creators
Even before Hummingbird and Panda, we’d encourage people to add content to their sites for SEO purposes. Nothing terribly difficult, we’d say. Just write an article or two every month for your site, about things that are relevant to your business and your customers.
We’d offer to do it for them if they wanted, but they’re almost invariably opposed to paying for it. And that was for pre-panda SEO site content. Not bad, but just good enough for those days. Which meant it was relatively cheap.
The inevitable outcome of this content they created for themselves (when they even bothered to do it) was “articles” that consisted of a few (usually poorly constructed) sentences and maybe a poorly scanned .pdf for people to download. I’m sure you can already see the problem.
And this leads me into my conclusion…also known as the last question…(Ok, it wasn’t the last question…some things occurred to me even as I was writing the next paragraph.)
Content Marketing & Small Businesses
That sort of content wasn’t good enough 2 years ago, and it’s sure as hell not good enough now. We know that. We’ve known it for a while already. But where does that leave the small business?
How can they hope to compete organically with guys who have a budget to pay people to create content for them? Who have the time (or staff) to make, disseminate and promote this great content?
The short answer is that they probably can’t. And usually my advice for these guys is to stick to search advertising, and stop worrying about organic rankings. They can drive more traffic in a shorter time, and for less money, by investing in PPC and not worrying about constantly providing great content.
(Well, you still need good and relevant content for your AdWords campaign, but at least it doesn’t have to be an ongoing content creation process.) It might not be a long term strategy, but it sure can be effective.
An SEO Divide?
Even writing this, it suddenly occurs to me to wonder if there is a divide (or if there is going to be a divide) between SEO for big brand type items, and small business.
I don’t see the roof repairer (any roof repairer) hitting the social networks, creating compelling, share-worthy content, and promoting it to push his ranking up. But Google isn’t going to stop providing results on searches for “roof repairs” just because there aren’t social signals.
So…maybe for your small business, the answer is the same as it always was. Have highly relevant on-site content. Maybe a bit of semantic mark-up here and there. Maybe you don’t need to have shares and engagement to rank for the primary terms for businesses like that.
Or maybe it’s just too soon to tell.
Right now, a broad search for roof repairs on google.com brings up a wiki answers article, and a howstuffworks article as the first 2 organic results. They look like old-school article marketing style pieces, and the sites they reference are sites that show up only a few positions lower. I’ll have to try again at some point, to see if there’s any change. But I just don’t see industries like this getting out there and creating engaging content to help themselves rank.