You’ve just finished working on an amazing piece of content that hits all your key objectives. Maybe it establishes you as a thought-leader and reinforces what your brand stands for. It might have the power to acquire high-quality leads, or maybe it’s designed to drive engagement with one of your key audience segments. Whatever the objectives behind your content and the wider business goals driving those objectives, your content won’t reach its full potential if no one can find it. Follow these 10 quick ways to boost your content, and watch its success skyrocket.
1. Create shareable, strategic content
Instead of creating tactical pieces of content as and when required, develop a content strategy packed with shareable content that works together to drive reach and success.
2. Be the first to jump on trends or breaking news
If your content is fresh and relevant, you should be able to use it to predict or respond quickly to upcoming industry trends or breaking news. As the trends and news spread, so will your content.
3. Optimize your content with keywords
A surefire way to boost your content is to make sure that when your intended audience searches for the keywords important to your business, your content ranks well. Pick your keyword of choice and make sure your copy includes it in a consistent but natural way. Include it in the page title, H tags (H1, H2, H3, and so on), meta description and alt image tags.
4. Maximize readability
People will be more likely to read and go on to share content that is well-written, well-structured and engaging. Embrace your brand’s tone and style, and create content that is a pleasure to engage with. Stock image provider Shutterstock does this wonderfully in its annual Creative Trends report.
5. Organic social media promotion
Your social media channels should house some of your most engaged audiences. Leverage this and share your content regularly; test different post formats like video versus image carousels to see which resonate best with your audiences, and which work best in boosting your content.
6. Make it mobile-friendly
For Google to take you seriously, and for your audience to have the best possible experience when engaging with your content, you need to offer a fantastic mobile experience. This includes responsive design, simple user interface and fast load time. The better the mobile experience, the more likely people are to share and boost out your content. Take a look at Booking.com’s mobile website for inspiration, which offers a simple, quick and intuitive design.
7. Use visuals
For further organic amplification via your audience, make sure your content is as visually engaging as possible. 51% of B2B and 45% of B2C marketers believe that visual assets and content are the most important types content, so bring yours to life with infographics, icons, animations, unique photography, and video.
8. Test different formats
It might be that your audience doesn’t respond particularity well to long-form blog articles, but can’t wait to share white papers or e-books. Test different content formats to discover which your audience finds most share-worthy, for optimal natural amplification and boosting.
9. Strategic linking
Are there influencers, partners or other businesses whose audiences you’d love to reach with your content? Reference, quote, and link to them in your content and they should pick up your backlink and reciprocate by boosting your content out to their networks.
10. Schema markup
Schema is data you can add to the HTML of your content to give Google and other search engines a better understanding of what it’s about. This improved clarity can enhance your rankings and how your content displays with a search engine results page, giving it an extra boost.
Organic boosting, whereby both Google and your audiences see value in your content and want others to interact with it, is a surefire sign that you’re creating fantastic content. Follow these 10 quick ways to boost your content and you’ll soon be one step closer to meeting your business objectives through content that people can’t help but share.
