High-quality content was always the focal point of any website. It’s what drives the organic traffic, but it also helps convert an audience into clients.
Over the years, businesses have developed numerous content forms in an attempt to garner more attention. Some of them are seen as exclusive, follower-only publications, such as eBooks, while others are used as means of supporting other, more relevant pieces.
Besides conveying information and increasing organic traffic, online content carries another, more important benefit for the brands. It helps establish businesses as industry leaders, increasing their reputation and authority among peers and potential customers.
In this article, we’ll break down various types of web content and how your online business can benefit from them. Read on!
Landing pages
Unlike other forms of web content, you need to have quality landing pages on your site. This category includes the homepage, product pages, and all other sections of your site meant to increase conversions. Landing pages need to be visually appealing and include CTA, success stories, and, when necessary, an explainer video.
Most importantly, landing pages are meant to instill confidence in potential customers. When a person lands on your site for the first time, they want to be certain that this company is a good supplier or partner. Otherwise, they’re not making a purchase. Here are a few methods that can help you out:
- Like with all other web pages, search engines check keywords to understand the content on homepages and product pages. Although you can’t overspam certain phrases, as it will affect your conversion, you’ll still have to include the most relevant keywords.
- Building links to landing pages is extremely hard as other bloggers don’t have the incentive to link to this type of content. The only exclusions are brand and product reviews. That being said, you need to be creative during SEO campaigns. Aside from sponsored posts, you might consider organizing events so that your homepage is linked to through press releases.
- Given that search engines put more and more emphasis on user behavior, each landing page should be easy to browse and have beautiful visuals and clear text.
Due to the nature of landing pages, they’re the hardest ones to optimize. This is especially true for homepages, which require time and extensive content marketing efforts to build up. People won’t browse an unknown brand in search engines, which is why you need to improve your homepage through link building and other SEO strategies.
Similar can be said for product pages that require extensive optimization but convert at a higher rate than any other page on your site.
Blog posts
Blog posts, or articles, are the most common form of written content. In fact, websites often use them as vehicles to drive online traffic. Even if having a blog section doesn’t make sense for a certain industry, a company might add it nonetheless to attract more visitors.
The good thing about this content type is that it gives you much more flexibility. In other words, it helps you attract a target audience that you couldn’t reach otherwise. Blog articles come in various shapes and forms, including Ultimate Guides, How-To Guides, reviews and other list posts, interviews, roundups, and so on.
Here are a few tricks that will help you squeeze the most out of every blog post:
- Make sure there’s value behind every topic you wish to pursue. Content creation always starts with keyword research, during which you need to find phrases that have high volume and low difficulty. Ideally, you should put emphasis on keywords that have commercial value for your brand.
- Create clusters and funnels by connecting related articles. Prioritize Ultimate Guides and other large posts as the type of content that can drive the highest traffic.
- Web posts should be easy to read, with proper grammar and enticing information. Among others, you need to use lots of subheadings, bullets, and visuals to break up the text. After that, use various content tools to further improve optimization.
- Once the article is ready, make sure to promote it through various online channels. Getting as many links as possible will help in the search engines, but it can also provide other benefits.
The biggest issue with articles is that they don’t convert at the same clip as product pages. People who land on blogs are usually looking for information and aren’t necessarily ideal customers.
Nevertheless, blog content is vital for improving your online authority and reputation. These pieces put more eyes on your company, helping it scale faster and rank higher for certain lucrative keywords.
Expert posts
When we talk about expert posts, we primarily refer to case studies, eBooks, and white papers. Most of them come as downloadable content that you can access by following certain steps, such as subscribing to newsletters. Unlike regular articles, they delve into more complex topics that might not be suitable for regular users.
The main reason why companies create this type of content is so they can attract high-quality leads. Expert posts are more common in industries with longer buyer cycles, where clients are harder to convert but have higher lifetime value. Through these posts, you can demonstrate expertise and present yourself as a quality partner.
Here are a few considerations you need to make when adding expert posts to your site:
- First off, you need to decide whether a post is accessible to everyone or if users have to complete certain steps to access it. Accessible posts help attract a wider audience, while limited-access posts help you gather user data. Both approaches have their merits.
- If you wish to pursue this method, make sure that you’re in all the way. Creating low-quality content that doesn’t provide real value usually backfires as it demonstrates a lack of professionalism. Besides having great visuals, charts, and statistical data, expert posts often involve extensive research.
- You need to feature expert posts on as many pages as possible. Create CTAs that would lead visitors to this content.
While expert posts provide enormous benefits, they’re not always the best choice. First and foremost, they’re much more expensive than regular articles and take much more time to produce. On top of that, you need to employ real experts that would help create these pieces.
Expert posts work better for medium and large brands with established audiences. Smaller businesses usually can’t squeeze enough value as they don’t make enough leads to justify the cost of content creation.
Images and videos
Images and visuals aren’t stand-alone website content. Instead, we commonly use them to amplify the performance of other pages on our platform. They can also drive traffic through Google Image Search, Google Video Search, and social media.
In theory, you don’t need to have flashy images to make an impact online. Still, based on everything we know, pages that have several visuals convert at a much higher clip than those that don’t. Among others, you can use graphics, charts, and step-by-step images, to explain complex or dull topics.
These are the biggest benefits and best practices involving images and videos:
- The need for unique visuals increases as your brand grows. People can differentiate stock images from those made by in-house graphic designers. In that regard, having your own pics can help build authority with your visitors.
- Embedding videos into your articles can go a long way in helping you gain more traffic. You can use them to significantly increase engagement and website metrics. The best thing yet, you don’t have to create video content in-house; instead, you can grab it from the internet.
- In rare cases, images can work as stand-alone content. You can use them to create infographics and content types that barely involve any writing.
The great thing about this type of content is that you can repurpose it across different platforms. Certain visuals can serve as powerful marketing material for your campaigns. Presenting content in a visual way also helps marketing teams explain complex topics, which can result in better engagement and conversions.
External content
As the name implies, this type of posts is placed on third-party websites. In that sense, they’re not “website content” per se, but they can still be an important part of your marketing strategy. Specifically, they can help optimize existing web pages and drive direct traffic.
External content refers to any type of guest post, product review, social media and forum post, directory listing, and user-generated content. Marketing teams place them on other sites in an attempt to gain link juice, diversify link profiles, gain direct traffic, and execute certain link strategies. Some of them, like social media posts, help build followership on third-party platforms.
Here are a few things you should consider when creating these posts:
- As a brand matures, it will garner more and more attention, thus gaining unsolicited mentions from third-party sites. However, you should also put your website in a position where other bloggers are willing to write about it and link to it. The best external content is the one where you gain all the benefits without having to create the actual post.
- Marketing teams can post external content on various platforms. While a single social media post might not get much attention, you should try to spread your message around as much as possible. This is why you should use streamline the process by improving methodology and using various tools.
- When creating external content, you also have a chance to meet new influencers. Take this opportunity to introduce them to your brand and to increase the goodwill within the community. You can also generate numerous partnership opportunities this way.
No matter what you think about external content, you’ll probably have to start creating it sooner than later. Guest posts, in particular, are nowadays vital for just about any link-building strategy. Social media posts and SMM, in general, are fantastic for repurposing website content and getting more value from it.
Content strategy tips
Every content form on this list can help your content marketing strategy. Unfortunately, as you can’t use all of them, you have to develop the right approach that will combine just several of them. Here are a few considerations you need to make during the planning phase:
- Place emphasis on the strategically important pages. Learn which pages and content can have the best impact on your bottom line.
- Make sure to add a blog section and create a long-term posting plan.
- All articles should be structured as parts of clusters. Use interlinking to focus on more important content at the price of lower-relevance content.
- Try to repurpose everything you can. Social media is especially great for that.
- You don’t have to invest money in video content creation, but you should definitely embed other people’s content onto your website.
- Don’t spread yourself too thin. Using just one highly converting strategy can beat forceful diversification.
- Use specialists for each task. This is especially important for landing pages that need to be of the highest quality.
If you ever need help creating content, or you need some other SEO services, content MiroMind!