Building the perfect marketing strategy for your business takes time and effort. When you want to stand out on search engines to gain more leads, it's only natural to invest time and energy in a quality search engine optimization strategy. But no SEO strategy can hope to survive without maintaining an aggressive, informative organic marketing campaign.
There are two primary components of great organic marketing: the relevant, keyword-driven pieces of blog content posted on your company's website and the beautiful infographics that go along with them. In fact, nearly 92% of marketers claim that content creation is either somewhat or very important as your business develops their marketing strategy.
Both of these aspects of SEO marketing work hard to get your website more attention on the internet, both by search engines and potential customers alike. Here's how these two essential SEO properties work to market your business -- and how they should be used together to truly make an impact.
Blog content: The case for long-form blogs
Blog content is essential to providing fresh, new content for your website. By updating your blog often, you're ensuring that your website is getting crawled by Google bots more often. After all, a stagnant website won't appear higher on Google's search engine result pages. Those businesses that update their websites with relevant content look better in the eyes of the search engine. As such, it isn't uncommon for a burgeoning business to post short pieces of content at frequent intervals. When they're layered with other SEO marketing strategies, including keyword optimization and internal linking, they look even better.
With plenty of hard work on your blog and more than a little research online, you can eventually establish your business as a reputable source of information in your field. This might take a while, but it's worth it in the end, right?
A better way to gain media attention is by providing long-form blog content. But what is long-form content and how does it differ from your typical blog post?
The length of long-form blog content varies depending on who you ask, but most marketers agree that a piece of long-form content should exceed 700 words in length (for example, this post). These pieces of content are industry-relevant and provide detailed information for your business's target audience. They will often utilize marketing strategies such as keyword optimization, backlinking, internal linking, and the same old things you're used to implementing in your regular blog posts.
The only difference? The length.
Even though many marketers, writers, and internet specialists claim that the attention span of readers is becoming shorter and shorter, readers are still invested in reading long-form content. We are deprived of information in the modern era, chewing on the bones of information without getting to the real meat of an argument.
Marketers have found that long-form content offers valuable results for your online business, primarily in the form of user engagement. Not only are readers more likely to stay on your website's page for longer periods of time, but they're also more likely to share your quality information across social media platforms. This means that Google (and other search engines) will crawl your site more often, noting the obvious bumps in shareability and decreased bounce rate. This will help build your website's reputability, eventually resulting in a higher domain rating.
Paired with other SEO strategies, including keyword optimization and link building, long-form content is a tour-de-force that shouldn't be ignored in your marketing strategy. Though these pieces take a little more time and effort to craft, they are worth the energy in the end. Some marketing analytics services have managed to improve their conversion rates by 30% or more by adding long-form content alone.
Infographics: What do they do for your business?
Infographics are a great addition to any piece of content. These visual graphics display a series of pictures and accompanying facts that are relevant to your line of business. It seemed like every business used infographics back in 2012, but few knew how to use this important piece of marketing in the right way. After all, infographics should be a concise summary of dense information or complex ideas. The truly innovative content creator will utilize an infographic to tell a coherent story.
When used correctly, your user engagement has the potential to skyrocket. But why do so many people love infographics? Here are just some of the reasons infographics are an invaluable resource for marketers and small business owners:
- People love images, ensuring that they'll stay on your page even longer.
- The human brain process images faster. In fact, some studies note that the brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text.
- They're easy to understand.
- They're more shareable among friends and colleagues than a big block of text.
It's apparent that people adore the use of infographics. When used correctly, infographics can boost conversion rates, increase your reputation online, and garner more user engagement than blogs without striking visuals.
These two forms of SEO content are great for your marketing strategy separately. Put together, this type of "long-form infographic" is a Titan.
The case for combining the two
Infographics are all the more relevant when you pair them with a quality piece of content, especially if this long-form blog is rich with valuable industry information. Better yet, when these infographics and visual assets are used throughout a long piece of content, they help keep the user engaged as they swim through a sea of text. Simply put, the occasional image serves as a break for the reader. Why do you think newspapers feature images? Why have online slideshows become synonymous with clickbait? Infographics work hard to keep a piece of content interesting and exciting, not only spurring shareability, but also establishing your business as a valuable source of information.
When used to promote hard-to-understand products, this strategy can land you higher conversion rates. But even using this essential combination in your blogs can help boost user engagement across the web. After all, it isn't uncommon to combine a variety of SEO strategies on your mission to become an industry leader in your field. Your blog will look better, you'll improve your SEO strategy, and more people will be willing to share your content. It's a win-win no matter how you look at it. Even simple infographics will ensure that your blog content performs better than your posts without an image.
A picture is worth a thousand words, but your thousand-word long-form blog can greatly benefit from the presence of an infographic. For more information on the benefits of infographics, long-form blog content, and a combination of the two, get ahold of us. After all, your dream is our mission.