Eric Reinach
Writing Narrative Content Effectively for Your Business
What is Narrative Content Writing? Before I delve into techniques for writing a storyline into every piece of content you possibly can,...
With our latest blog post, I'd like to take a closer look at the many platforms, services, and sites available to help with writing content these days and sort out what works from what fails to make an impact. Read on for more tips on everything from planning content to editing your writers, to making sure the final content gets properly optimized for SEO.
Without doubt the most important part of content writing for a website stems from identifying the keywords (topics) that your target audience will want to read about, and then making articles that cover these topics better than the competition in a compelling way.
From my standpoint as a Content Specialist I think the writing that most resonates with readers centers around effectively solving their problems. Although not always the case (such as in brand awareness and informational campaigns) the most effective, conversion-driven forms of content writing focuses from the perspective of answering a question and meeting the needs of someone searching for your services.
The Importance of Competition Research for Content Marketing
The first part of writing content that is effective, is reading and researching the sites and sources that are already doing well in your industry or space. Whether you prefer semrush, Moz, ahrefs, the deepcrawl app here on Wix, or other methods of evaluation tools for your competition research, make sure you perform the equivalent of a keyword gap analysis and find out what topics will be the most crucial to approach: short term and long term.
Once you've done this analysis, you can begin to craft a Content Plan, either on Google Sheets or Excel, that looks at the keywords, secondary keywords, and semantic keywords you need to cover over the coming months.
Getting to the Keyboard: Crafting Narrative Content that Shines
Now that you've identified the topics and secondary keywords (think of these as great fodder for headings, as above) as well as semantic keywords (the terms that should be touched upon in the body of your whole article, at some point, and usually naturally) you should consider an assistive tool or site like Surfer SEO or similar.
Using a Content Editor or some sort of SEO auditing tool (for existing content) can help you make sure your work has the necessary coverage needed to appeal to Google and other search engines as well. While making your work readable and authentic should come as the priority at all times, touching on the right topics and keywords to make sure your hard written article gets read is also crucial.
Writing Mobile Friendly Content: Convert with Small Screen Stories
What is the secret to writing for a mobile audience? Readable content in a visually digestible format, with images or videos that help the topic be more accessible. If your brand or business has a service area, then make sure your content mentions topics and keywords related to your region, tailored to the specific concerns people search for around you.
If in doubt about how to start, rest assured that making your web presence mobile friendly, from content to speed and performance will only pay increasing dividends as audiences move increasingly from big to small screen viewing for the majority of their day. Although for some audiences, desktop viewing remains the standard, it is truly telling the Google has switched to 'Mobile-First' for indexing and performance metric on Google Search Console.
Although platforms like Wix and Squarespace (among others) render their pages mobile-friendly by default, if you're using Wordpress or another flexible web publisher, it makes sense to search for an AMP plugin that makes your content easier to digest for mobile. Along with proper attention to smaller paragraphs, helpful graphics, and other ways to 'break up the page,' your content can be honed to perfection for small screen success!
Showing Expertise with Content
For both mobile and desktop, the format of FAQ's and bullet points remain popular with search engines and mobile viewers.
Use JSON LD Schema for rich text results that pop off the screen and attract eyes. If you're not familiar, here's a good tool.
From the very start of your site the ultimate goal of any business or brand web presence should be to attract new clients through the establishment of your firm as the authority in space. While this may seem a far cry from where you are now, you can still speak with conviction and make authentic content in the smaller areas of your expertise, especially those that haven't yet been covered as extensively by others.
Optimizing Small Interactions: The Power of Bite Sized Content!
As the last section for our posting today, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the power of even the smaller interactions your brand has as opportunities to craft content that hits home. Using tools like Sendible or Hootsuite, Hubspot or other Social media scheduling and content coordination suites can help you deliver messages that are made to fit the respective platform.
Another tool being widely adopted as an assistive content writing device that can help with everything from reviews and reputation management more generally, and even longform articles, is the AI writing platform formerly known as Jarvis and now christened Jasper.
From using it to help remove the emotion from replying to a one-star review, to adding extra length to detailed research articles, many of the larger brands use assistive devices in their digital marketing campaigns to deal with writer's block and keep consistent creativity flowing to their content at all times.
Next weekend, we'll look over more content writing tactics, with a particular focus on publishing your work in Wordpress for SEO performance.
Stay tuned to this blog space for the latest digital marketing trends with a focus on great content & organic search results..!