Since the beginning of the last decade, content marketing has changed dramatically. The days of writing hundreds of very short articles just to attract search engine traffic have passed. Those 250-300 word articles used to work since the goal was to get as many search engine visitors as possible and make them opt into your email list or send them off to some sort of offer.
Content marketing has evolved a lot more over the past decade. Those old tactics no longer work. Search engines realized that their users were complaining about all of the low quality content they indexed, so they changed their algorithms.
You could have done that on your own, right?
But you wanted specific information that would teach you exactly how to knit a baby blanket!
That’s the kind of thing search engines were battling, and it was making people not want to visit sites like
Google and Bing because they weren’t finding quality information.
Google responded especially strongly, coming down on sites so hard that many lost their rankings overnight and some were even banned. Even major sites like HubPages, Squidoo, and most of the article directories lost nearly all their search engine traffic overnight.
Google’s algorithm now looks for things like word count, the age of the site, and many other factors to determine ranking, and content must be higher quality than ever in order to have a chance of ranking.
Of course, you don’t have to get any traffic from search engines to do well with content marketing, but since search engine traffic is widely known to be some of the highest quality given the fact that users searched for something specific when they land on your site, it’s obviously a good idea to try to get all of it you can.
A successful digital marketing strategy in today’s world is all about the customer experience. Recent studies and polls have clearly demonstrated that marketers agree that interactive content outperforms static content when it comes to gaining an audience’s attention and keeping them on the site for longer periods of time.
Over the next few days, we’re going to talk about some of the best ways to structure your content marketing plan in order to get traffic from as many sources as possible.
Since it’s no longer a good idea to focus mainly on search engine traffic, we’ll take a look at ways to create content that can get you traffic not only from search engines, but also viral/social traffic and other sources.