Looking to strengthen your marketing strategy? SEO has a very important role to play. [Luckily for you] we got the latest pointers on optimising your marketing and content strategy at the brightonSEO conference.
From writing content for regulated industries to leveraging organic search on social media and reusing content. Read on – our insights are waiting!
Content creation in regulated industries
If you want to create great content that meets compliance standards, follow these steps.
1. Get to know your regulators
This helps to show familiarity within your industry and benefits your positioning.
2. Understand why the regulations are in place
Get to grips with what the right thing for your customers, business, and industry is.
3. Match your tone to the topic
This builds your customers’ confidence in making informed financial decisions. It’s also an opportunity to conduct customer research and answer any queries that might arise around a core product.
4. Build relationships with the relevant teams
This is particularly important for the ones responsible for administering regulations. Get to know their service levels and factor this into your planning.
5. Reframe warnings as product features
By being smarter about how you work these features into the copy, you avoid negative customer perceptions.
6. Keep the fundamentals in your sights
Whoever you’re writing for, approach the work with the same empathy, imagination and depth of research as writing for a company with strict regulations.
Researching your audience on organic channels
The search journey continues to grow and develop. So much content is consumed outside of Google – TikTok alone has 1.5 billion users consuming and searching for content every day. This makes it a great asset to inform your content strategy.
As marketers, we should also be researching keywords on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, Reddit and X. This is where the search journey begins before moving to Google for more specific searches.
You can research seed keywords on TikTok [otherwise known as blue comments] and adopt the language used on your website for product and page names.
Building the world through storytelling
To build the world for your audience, begin by showing their current situation and the goals, motivations and challenges that influence this.
You then need to address their pain points and “unsell the status quo” by presenting an alternative option. This solution should talk about the “new world” and be backed by results that demonstrate what you expect to achieve for them.
As always, finish with a clear call to action (CTA) that shows your audience what they need to do to follow this journey.
Leveraging subject matter experts for EEAT
There are three methods for leveraging experts.
Get the experts to create content
This takes less of your time [in theory] and is a scalable and low-cost method. However, subject matter experts aren’t marketers and won’t write like one. It’s your job to provide them with editorial and brand guidelines, decent briefs and a content champion for guidance.
Get the experts to approve your content
Writing the content yourself gives you full editorial control but offers little genuine expertise and requires more internal writing resources. This isn’t a problem if you have the internal capacity to develop strong skills in research, using authoritative citations, and drawing on case studies.
Collaborate with the experts
You might prefer to blend your skills, relevant insights and experiences. This process takes longer and requires more writing resources. The approval process can also be challenging, but it leverages the skills of both parties effectively. Collaborating effectively requires clear pre-briefs and strong interview skills to extract the required information – so get practising.
Reusing content
If you want to optimise and reuse your existing content, start with an audit.
Your audit should evaluate metrics, meet EEAT standards, and assess whether your content meets its intended purpose and aligns with user intent. By reviewing your content at least once a year, you’ll understand what works well and what needs improvement.
We can help you kickstart the process with a free SEO audit.
Creating content that converts
To drive conversions, you first need to understand your audience. There are several ways to do so, including:
- Analytics tools
- Customer profiles
- Panel discussions
- Customer feedback.
Use these methods to gain qualitative insights into your customers’ perceptions, desires and pain points. They’ll convert when they’ve established trust and transparency with your brand, so apply these learnings to:
- Contextual CTAs that tell the reader exactly what comes next
- Expert takes and tips on product lists that build authority
- Highlighting exclusive deals that entice and encourage action.
Have you enjoyed our recap of brightonSEO 2024 so far? That’s right, there’s more to come.
Stay tuned for part two where we share our technical learnings. If your website and page rankings can’t wait until then, claim a free SEO audit today.
