Category Archives: Content Strategy

Is user generated content good for content marketing and SEO?

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User generated content for content marketing and SE

Until a few years ago, there was lots of buzz about user generated content. I remember lots of websites used to talk about it. Social networking was catching up and lots of content was being generated by users, without getting paid for it, for websites like YouTube and Digg.

Even smaller websites were encouraging people to leave comments in the comments section and online forums hoping that it would improve their SEO due to highly focused content generation.

User generated content can consist of reviews that people leave on your website, videos, photos, questions and answers and comments. With every new question, with every new comment, a new URL is generated, and it gives Google and other search engines something new to crawl and index.

One thing is undoubtedly clear: user generated content is one of the fastest and cheapest ways of generating targeted content and consequently, boosting your content marketing. Through user generated content

  • You are letting your users, visitors, customers and clients tell your story and participate in your evolution.
  • You let people talk about your brand instead of the marketing message coming from you.
  • Other people, not directly connected to your business, increasing your brand presence.
  • People themselves talk about the pros and cons of working with you.
  • User generated content, especially if it is favourable to your business, provides you ongoing social proof.
  • Your prospective customers and clients find user generated content more trustworthy. According to a Nielsen study 92% of consumers trust organic, user generated content more than traditional marketing messages.

It also gives the search engines lots of content to crawl and index, on an ongoing basis.

This Search Engine Land blog post says that though user generated content can help you, it can also be counter-productive and hence, whenever you plan to make user generated content an integral part of your content marketing strategy, you need to make sure that it helps your SEO efforts, and doesn’t hurt them.

How to incorporate user generated content into your content marketing?

Using user generated content for content marketing isn’t a random exercise that you can immediately kick-start by installing a few plug-ins into your website. You need to keep in mind that unsupervised discussions can take tangential turns and turn into uncontrollable disasters.

But the question of uncontrollable disasters happens only when you have enough content to cause you trouble. So, first, you need to figure out how to make people, how to enable people, to generate content for your brand. Here are a few things you can do:

  • Allow people to leave comments: This facility might already be there on your blog or website if you’re using a content management system like WordPress. Many Webmasters turn this feature off because of the comment-spam problem, but if you can establish a mechanism to monitor your comments, this is one of the finest ways of getting user generated content on your website.
  • Install a discussion forum: Online forums and discussion boards are one of the oldest mass conversation channels on the Internet. Even when there were no browsers, there were discussion boards. Online forums can have very rich SEO-centric content especially when your forum catches on and people begin to use it on a regular basis. Again, spam can be a big problem.
  • Allow people to post blog posts on your website: Many websites allow visitors to set up an account and post content. You can let them submit entries as drafts and later you can review them and publish them.
  • Start a review section: In this section people can leave reviews on your products and services, just like Amazon has it.
  • Start a Q&A section: Questions and answers are favourites of the search engines. This is because most of the searches were carried out in the form of questions – you ask a question and Google provides you the answer. In a Q&A section the questions and answers are already there.
  • Allow people to upload images and videos: This can be an expensive affair because images and videos mean more online storage space and more bandwidth. But if you can afford it, you can generate lots of traffic to this type of content. One-fourth of Google searches are images.

The main problem with user generated content is of course, moderation and protection against spam. Spam bots can post thousands of comments in a single day, bringing your entire website down and irreparably harm your SEO. In fact, this is one of the main reasons why people shy away from installing online forums on their websites. Otherwise, you would find them on every website.

My personal suggestion is, stay away from installing an online forum unless running a forum is your primary activity or you have a dedicated department to oversee the conversations.

The most useful forms of user generated content in terms of both content marketing and SEO are inviting people to write blog posts for your website and encouraging them to participate in the Q&A section. This way, you can control the flow and direction of your content.

Secret to effective content writing: understanding customer’s pain points

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My every content writing project begins with an understanding of the pain points of, not my own clients, but the customers and clients of my clients.

Email describes my content writing process

Writing for your customers and clients

When I’m writing content for your business, whether it is your website content, your blog, your newsletter, your case study or your e-book, although you are paying me and I’m writing for you, the audience is YOUR customers and clients.

Why effective content writing means understanding customer’s pain points?

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Effective content writing by knowing customers pain points

By the end of the day, everyone is looking for a solution to his or her problem.

If you are an app developer, your client is looking for an app developer she can totally depend on in terms of writing perfect code and finishing the project on time, within the stipulated budget.

She may also be having problems looking for an app developer who can work in the technology stack she needs.

As an app developer, you need to tell your prospective clients that you have just the right app development solution they are looking for.

Similarly, what are the pain points of my clients when they approach me for my content writing services?

  • They need well-written, high-quality content on their website or blog.
  • They want to generate more business and hence, they need content writing that converts.
  • The need to improve their search engine rankings for their target search terms so, they need content that is search engine friendly and optimized.
  • They need someone who can write content consistently and with a consistent level of quality.

These are the main pain points.

These are needs. Why am I calling them “pain points”?

It’s just another way of saying what my clients need and what they stand to lose if they don’t get what they need.

A pain point is a specific problem your prospective customer or client is facing.

For example, if you don’t get a professional content writer who can improve your conversion rate as well as SEO, you stand to lose business.

That’s a terrible thought. Hence, a pain point is, not being able to find the right content writer.

In terms of my content writing services, the pain points can be further explained as:

  • Not getting a good writer within their budget.
  • The current writing is lousy, ineffective, and even unprofessional.
  • The current content is not selling and increasing business.
  • They need to publish more content but are not able to do so.
  • They or their current content writer cannot strike a perfect balance between quality content writing and search engine optimization.
  • The email campaigns generate no response.
  • The blog posts generate no traffic.
  • There are no queries from their website.
  • People don’t share the content on social media.

As a content writer eager to get business, my job is to address all this pain points and explain to my clients that they are going to get solutions to their problems when they hire me as a writer.

The same applies to your content.

For effective content writing, you need to understand what you provide, how you help people solve their problems, and what solutions you deliver.

For your content writing to be effective, it needs to be multifaceted.

When people are on your website, they should be able to easily understand what you’re trying to communicate.

Your writing should be able to convince them.

To be able to generate traffic from search engines, you must optimize your content according to the queries your target audience uses.

If you provide hair treatment services people won’t just look for “hair treatment services”, although, in this case, they may look for exactly this search term.

But anyway, they may also look for something like “how to stop losing hair”, or “treatment for dandruff” or “help with alopecia” and so on.

Hence, if you are writing content for a hair treatment services website, you need to write content addressing all the pain points of prospective clients.

Is knowing pain points only relevant to content writing?

Not at all. Yes, knowing the pain points of your customers and clients certainly helps you make your content writing effective, but every product or service in the market succeeds when it is addresses the right pain points.

Take for example word processing.

The developer of a word processor needs to know what difficulties the users face when working on documents.

If the developer goes on his own tangent and instead of focusing on the text he begins to obsess with graphics and video, he is not providing what his users are looking for – quality proofreading, formatting, real-time collaboration and inserting other design elements into the document.

Pain points play an important role in the success of every product or service.

Even your house takes care of the pain points of your need to live somewhere comfortably and feel protected.

How to know the pain points of your customers and clients for better content writing?

This is not as easy as it sounds. But you can do the following:

Talk to people

Talk to people and note down how they talk about the problems and hurdles they are facing in their day-to-day lives, especially pertaining to a particular facet of their lives that may be impacted by your product or service.

You need to make this interaction an integral part of your content writing and content marketing strategy. Constantly talk to people and understand how they converse about your industry in general and your product or service in particular, and then use that language to write your content.

Seek advice from Google

Google isn’t just good for searching for information. Once you search for a string, it also presents you with numerous suggestions to improve your search.

The image shows Google search options

Google search for effective content writing

For example, if you search for “effective content writing”, at the bottom Google also gives you the following suggestions you may like to try:

  • content writing format
  • how to write content writing samples
  • marketing content writing examples
  • introduction to content writing
  • content writing tips for beginners
  • content writing tips for beginners pdf
  • content sample
  • content writing tutorial

These suggestions may seem totally disconnected for this particular phrase, for your phrase, they may give you an insight into what other searches people are using to find information on your product or service.

Keep a tab on social media

People use social media to vent out.

Even when they are not venting out, they are constantly posting interesting and thought-provoking questions and these questions can lead you to better understanding the pain points your customers and clients have.

You can use Quora, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to track conversations about your product or service (or whatever social networking thing is going on right now).

Concluding remarks on effective content writing and understanding pain points

Content writing is all about improving conversion rate and drawing targeted traffic from various sources including search engines.

People convert (become your customers and clients, or subscribers) when they are convinced that you are offering the right solution to their problem/pain point.

This means addressing the problem at hand and presenting a solution through your writing.

Even on Google, if the searcher doesn’t feel that you are offering the right solution, he or she won’t click the link and visit your website.

Similarly, unless people are satisfied with your solution, they won’t share your links on their social media profiles.

Understanding pain points of your customers and clients also helps you come up with highly useful content on an ongoing basis. This is because, your customers and clients are always going to have one or another problem and you constantly need to provide solutions.

Why your business needs more written content

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Your business needs more content writing

You know what? Written content isn’t going anywhere no matter how avant-garde video and infographics become.

I provide professional content writing services.

Every day I get queries and phone calls from business owners and entrepreneurs who want content for their businesses.

From my website they can easily make out that I provide written content: I don’t provide graphic design services or video production services.

I provide content writing services.

Nonetheless, they have this strange attitude: fine, they have no option but to contact someone for their writing needs, otherwise, they don’t believe writing is worth paying for.

That’s why many would-be clients balk at my rates.

No, I don’t mean that my rates are outrageous – my rates are just enough to make my content writing services affordable to a wide spectrum of business owners while allowing me to make a decent living.

Would I like to charge more? Of course. That’s a different story and right now I’m not going into that.

The point that I’m trying to make is, publishing written content is inescapable, whether you like it or not, and not just any sort of written content.

You need quality content writing.

Constantly, you need to provide something really valuable.

This is because, if you are not providing valuable content, then there are scores of other businesses providing more or less the same products and services as you, providing valuable written content.

Hence, it’s your loss if you don’t. Your choice.

Why does written content matter in the age of video and graphics?

When we need to prove that something matters, we either resort to some research and statistics, or we give our own reasoning.

Statistics are good, and psychologically, they are reassuring, and they also tell us what the rest of the world is doing about a particular trend or tendency.

This Entrepreneur article refers to Zazzle Media’s 3rd annual State of Content Marketing Survey that shows that there has been a 78% increase in the content marketing spend since 2018 (this is May 2019).

This is no surprise, because, a greater number of businesses are discovering the benefits of content marketing.

The interesting finding was, 98% content marketers surveyed said that written content is their main output to achieve content marketing success.

Written content in the form of webpages and blog posts is going to be the main priority for 77% of the market is throughout 2019.

Why written content is important?

Search engine algorithms use text as main source while evaluating your content for ranking

With much more advanced artificial intelligence it is becoming easier to tell what is there in a video or a photograph, but programmatically, when it comes to analysing content, text, or written content, still rules the roost.

Most of the search engine algorithms are more comfortable analysing your written content and then ranking your content accordingly.

You can focus more on video and graphics and then bet on the possibility that in near future search engines will be able to analyse videos and graphics and then rank your content based on the information given in those video and graphics, or you can put your money and effort into publishing lots of written content that is already preferred by the search engines.

Your choice.

Voice search converts voice to text and then text to voice to help you find information

Here is my web page on copywriting for voice search.

You must be aware that in recent years there has been a big shift from PC/laptop to mobile phones.

Even to search information people use their mobile phones and often, people who are not used to typing all the time, speak into their phones.

Voice-controlled devices like Amazon Eco and Google Home have further boosted the use of voice commands and using voice to find information on search engines.

Technology to convert voice to text and then text to voice is quite old now. Every basic mobile phone allows you to convert your voice to text and vice versa.

Hence, on the web, and also, on my own blog, you will find lots of information on how to optimize your content writing and copywriting for voice search.

For voice search to work, when you issue a command, for example, telling Google to find you something, whatever you have said is turned to text, and then the text string is used to find the information on the search engine, and when the information is found in the form of text, the information is turned to voice and communicated to you.

The backbone of the entire operation is, the ability of the technology to process text.

If you don’t have text, there is nothing to process.

Many people find reading more convenient compared to watching videos

In the times of abundant bandwidth and highly efficient screens, watching HD videos and graphics might be fascinating, but reading written content is convenient, and more satisfying.

Reading is more personal and less invasive. You don’t need extra tools to read.

Someone wants to check out your website to know what all services you provide: he or she will prefer to read about your services rather than watching a video or a collection of graphics.

Though, I’m not saying videos and graphics are not important – they are – but they have a limit.

We have been reading since childhood. The habit is embedded. Everybody prefers to read.

Written text is more accessible

Written content makes your content accessible across multiple devices.

All the screen readers can read text.

All screen sizes can accommodate text accordingly.

You can copy/paste text in any basic text editor to read it or edit it.

It is the lightest form of content.

Does any form of content writing help you?

Depends on what you want to achieve.

If you want to publish lots of junk content, who am I to tell you not to do so? Go ahead.

For better search engine rankings and for a good conversion rate, your content writing needs to be purposeful, relevant and of good quality.

Search engine rankings these days are all about efficiently providing information people are looking for.

You see, search engines like Google don’t produce and publish their own content. They have outsourced the service to the masses.

But, if they don’t provide good information to people’s queries, they lose users.

Hence, let’s focus on Google for a while, the search engine is not going to rank your content well simply because you have “strategically” used keywords and hyperlinks.

It ranks your content high only if you provide information people can really use.

To help Google achieve that, a group of 300 odd maths PhDs is constantly working on the algorithm.

If you think you can beat these maths PhDs with some SEO tactics without ever intending to publish high-quality content, well, as I said, who am I to tell you not to do so?

Valuable statistics to help you formulate a successful digital marketing strategy [infographic]

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The biggest quality of digital marketing is precision, and precision can be attained by having the right numbers with you.

I have received this nice infographic from Serpwatch.io that explains 7 trends in the form of statistics that you must follow in order to carry out successful digital marketing. Since the infographic is very long, instead of publishing the entire file here, I’m just using the top portion and you can click the image to go to the actual infographic:

7 trends for implementing a successful digital marketing campaign

7 trends for implementing a successful digital marketing campaign

As a content writer who is often hired for quality content to improve SEO, I find the first portion of the infographic interesting. It says

  • Google is responsible for 94% of total organic traffic
  • 75% people never scroll past the first page of search engine results
  • 80% people ignore paid search results (shows how important organic search engine rankings are) You may read Organic search engine optimization with content writing
  • 57% B2B marketers state that improving the keyword rankings generates more leads compared to other marketing efforts
  • Leads from search engines have 14.6% conversion rate
  • 50% of search queries are 4 keywords or longer – How to incorporate longtail keywords into content writing
  • 70% of the clicks are taken by the top 5 search results – it makes a big difference if you can improve your search engine rankings
  • The first page on Google on an average has 1890 words – the importance of longform content
  • Websites get 300% more traffic from search engines compared to social media websites

Do check out the original infographic.

Content writing for different stages of your sales funnel

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Content writing for different stages of your sales funnel

Content writing for different stages of your sales funnel

In this blog post you will learn how to do content writing targeting different stages of your sales funnel.

Every business has a well-defined sales funnel.

Your sales funnel is the journey that your typical customer or client takes, the various stages he or she goes through, before he or she eventually buys from you.

Unlike traditional marketing and advertising which is uni-directional, content marketing is multidirectional.

For better targeting, you need to do content writing for different stages of your sales funnel.

Typically, your sales funnel consists of the following people:

  • Those who are totally unaware of your existence.
  • Those who know about you but aren’t sure whether they want to do business with you or not.
  • Those who know about you, would like to do business with you, but haven’t yet made up their minds.
  • Those who know about you and want to do business with you.
  • Those we have already done business with you.
Importance of content writing throughout the sales funnel

Importance of content writing throughout the sales funnel

Before the first category, you can also have people who neither know you and the sort of product or service you promote, nor they have any idea how their problem can be solved (assuming they are even aware of the fact that they have a problem).

For example, someone having problems with his or her search engine rankings but has no idea that this problem can be easily solved with high-quality content.

Read 5 Reasons Why Content Writing Is Important for SEO.

Why it is beneficial to do content writing for different stages of your sales funnel?

Everyone is trying to get more customers and clients.

It’s crowded out there.

More crowd means tougher competition.

Although constantly targeting customers and clients makes sense and sooner or later, you need to get onto that, but there is a vast number of people who may become your customers and clients but right now they are either unaware of what you are offering or they are dillydallying due to one reason or another.

Coming back to the example of someone having troubles with his or her SEO but doesn’t know that the problem can be solved with high-quality content.

To target this person, I need to write content (the above link that talks about the importance of content writing for SEO) that explains why good quality content is needed for better search engine rankings.

What about the person who knows that he or she needs good content for better SEO but isn’t sure of hiring my services?

For this person, I need to write content that showcases my content writing skills, especially vis-à-vis improving search engine rankings.

For the person who knows that he or she needs my services and is inclined towards becoming my paying client, I need to write content that constantly keeps in touch while he or she makes up his or her mind, through continuously writing quality content.

What about someone who has already availed by content writing services?

To him or her, I need to constantly show that I am reliable, I am available, and whenever he or she needs my services, he or she can contact me.

You can have similar content writing stages for your own business.

Here is an interesting write-up on How to format content marketing for the B2B conversion funnel.

The blog post has this graphic to explain the sales funnel for a B2B business scenario:

Content marketing for the conversion funnel of B2B market

Content marketing for the conversion funnel of B2B market

The importance of awareness and educational content writing in the context of the B2B market is magnified.

Before making B2B decisions, managers and executives prefer to go through lots of material because the stakes are very high. In the initial stage content writing may involve

  • Articles and blog posts that offer very specific solutions for very specific business problems (good content for SEO, for example).
  • Very niche, vertically focused answers to industry-specific questions.
  • Case studies and white papers.
  • Resource guides and FAQs.
  • Tutorials.
  • Research data.

Similarly, even in the B2B market, content writing for the sales funnel will be different for different stages.