Winning the Race to the Top in the Competitive Realm of Search Engine Results

Consumers are targeted with purposeful and strategized content throughout their day-to-day lives. Whether they are being shown commercials during their favorite TV program, receiving coupons and mailers in their mailbox at home or viewing billboards on their daily commutes, everyone is exposed to the unavoidable and ubiquitous marketing machine. In order for any marketing efforts to be effective, it’s essential for the advertisers to understand their audience and provide relevant content that meets a need. We sometime use movie theaters as an analogous example when trying to explain to clients how our SEO department generates content that checks off the necessary boxes to qualify as effective. The movie theater is the ultimate content curator. If they do their job correctly, they can keep seats filled all year round. Consider this scenario: A movie theater owner was so impressed by the ticket sales generated by Sleepless in Seattle, Four Weddings and Funeral and My Best Friend’s Wedding that he decided to show the same 10 romcom files from the '90s and nothing else. It’s pretty easy to predict what would happen to that movie theatre. Their revenue from patrons would eventually become a trickle before disappearing entirely. Although the reasons for that hypothetical theatre’s failure are obvious, for the sake of this exercise it’s worth listing out exactly why:

1. Once customers see all ten romcoms they most likely won’t come back
   
2. Not everyone likes romcoms to begin with, which severely limits the theatre’s potential clientele
   
3. Even if they draw in new customers through the novelty of nostalgia, these consumers won’t provide adequate sustained return business to maintain enough revenue to cover operating costs
   
4. Consumers have a finite amount of money to spend on entertainment, and they will want to see new movies, so they’ll go to a competitor’s theatre instead
   

Most movie theaters host films of all different genres to ensure they’re reaching the maximum number of demographics and serving the highest number of niche interests possible. They are refreshing their chance to gain new and repeat customers each time they rotate old or underperforming movies out for new movies, which leads to the best thing for a movie theatre… anticipation and reputation. Anticipation is provided in part by production companies who spend millions on marketing, but is also due to the customer’s knowledge that the movie they see advertised will be available in their local theatre. The theatre will also maintain their reputation for meeting that expectation by always having the new and relevant films showing that their customers want to see. This is fundamentally the same mind set we rely on when creating content for our SEO clients’ websites. We want to ensure we are providing relevant and authoritative content on a consistent basis that is relevant to our clients’ customers. We can’t drive traffic or establish a reputation if nothing new or relevant is ever added to the equation. Many of the things we take into account when laying out a content strategy are similar to the things a movie theatre may take into account when deciding which films to show and for how long:

• Choose topics that are directly or tangentially but relevantly related to a client’s products or services
  
• Find what is trending within that specific geographic region for relevancy and search purposes (current events, weather, pop culture etc.)
  
• Strategize content pieces to fall within the confines of awareness, engagement, informational, decision making and advocacy
  
• Create content that has meaning and purpose beyond just throwing keywords on a page

By creating content about topics the customers of a business are interested in, we not only keep the business top of mind, we also establish the business as a trusted knowledge source customers can rely on for information. We don’t arbitrarily choose topics – like a movie theatre showing nothing but outdated movies that appeal to a very small segment of their potential clientele – but instead base content on the topics that are garnering the highest search volume among relevant customers right now. One of the things that sets our content apart from the work produced by many content mills is the actual value it offers. We don’t create keyword stuffed fluff that’s just intended to get crawlable keywords on a page. The blogs, infographics and slide decks offered in our SEO product are written and designed to provide value to your customers and increase your standing in the community you serve by answering questions and providing solutions that offer real value. If you’re interested in driving organic traffic through a well thought out content strategy that’s executed in a way that provides real, lasting and relevant results, contact us to learn more .