Does a new year mean new content marketing best practices? Yes, no.
As we look back on the new year, there are new things to consider when it comes to your content marketing strategy, but many things haven’t changed.
Content marketing is one of the best ways to keep your brand relevant and continue to drive organic traffic to your site.
Content creation comes in many forms, but if you want people to find it, there are still a lot of best practices you need to implement to make sure it’s implemented.
In this article, we’ll cover some best practices that content marketers should continue to follow, as well as some hot topics emerging in the content world.
Here are seven best practices for content marketing in 2023.
- Make the most of the voice of the customer.
- Create content using the hub-and-spoke content marketing model.
- Optimize your content for the type of result.
- Always measure the ROI of your content.
- AI-generated content is here, but don’t let the hype fool you.
- Re-optimize and reuse old/underperforming content.
- Break down silos between internal departments to move faster.
1. Use testimonials in your content
Using testimonials in your content has always been a content marketing best practice and the most important one.
You need to make sure your content matches what your customers are actually looking for.
If you don’t do this, your target audience may be looking for what you’re offering, but you may never reach them.
Keyword research is fundamental to creating any content, and an important part of creating relevant content is making sure you are using phrases that people are actually searching for.
2. Create content using the hub-and-spoke content marketing model
Google has always focused on ranking websites that indicate they are authoritative on a particular topic.
There’s no better way to show Google and your customers that you know what you’re talking about than by creating lots of content on that topic.
One of the best ways to do this is the hub and spoke content marketing model. This content marketing model is related to using voice of the customer. This is because you need to make sure the content you are creating is in demand first.
This isn’t a new model to the world of content marketing, but it’s essential and going nowhere.
A hub-and-spoke model allows you to build authority around a hub, typically one of your main lines of business or services.
Spoke content typically consists of questions related to the hub or different parts of the buyer’s journey leading to the hub.
This way, you can target users in different stages of their search and make sure Google understands what you’re talking about when they visit your site.
By creating hub-and-spoke content for a particular topic, you can increase your credibility with Google about that topic and increase the amount of organic traffic, keyword rankings, and conversions for your company.
3. Create Content Based on Result Types
We’ve known for a long time that Google is no longer 10 blue links.
However, new types of results always appear in Google. As a result, search engine result pages are very crowded with different types of results.
Just like making sure the keywords you’re targeting have search volume, you also need to make sure that you’ve structured your content in a way that’s appropriate for Google to display and display your content.
Several result types are very popular this year, the biggest being short-form videos.
Short-form videos typically range from 10-30 seconds or up to 5 minutes.
With the rise of TikTok and Instagram Reels, short-form video content has become all the rage and even appears on Google as a result type.
When creating content for your site, check what’s already on Google and what your competitors are doing.
Visual content and images can make your content more digestible and engaging to share on social media. This is also a great way to appear on Google Images, his second largest search engine after Google’s main search page.
Audio content such as podcasts is also a great way for people to consume content today.
When creating content, you need to understand how Google feels that people are consuming this content based on what they see on Page 1 on Google. Then assess whether you can create content for these media.
4. Measure the ROI of your content
This isn’t necessarily a new trend, but it’s another one that will always be a content marketing best practice.
It’s hard to tie ROI to anything in SEO or organic channels. It differs from paid media and email marketing, which are usually more explicit in terms of accessible CPC, conversion rate, and other key metrics.
Therefore, it is imperative to clearly define how to measure the ROI of your content and prove that it drives results for your organization.
The best way to get buy-in for SEO, or why your content is useful, is to report how your content is bringing more users to your site or helping them convert.
We recommend using an enterprise SEO platform or small tool to set up your reports before creating content. This allows you to measure how your content is performing, such as your target keyword is currently ranking on page 1. Organic traffic and organic conversions.
By doing this consistently, you can communicate how being proactive with SEO is worth it. Because you can continue to drive users to your site today and drive traffic to the same content indefinitely.
5. AI-generated content is here, but don’t let the hype fool you
It’s all happening! AI-generated content has finally reached the masses, but don’t let the hype fool you.
There are so many acronyms these days, such as VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality), NFT (non-fungible tokens), and people believe they will break through and become the future.
But none of them became the mainstream disruptors they were marketed for. At least not yet.
AI will be around for the long haul because it can make life so much easier in so many ways.
While there are use cases where AI services such as ChatGPT are used for research, schema creation, or content ideation, we do not recommend letting these services create the entire content.
Google recently updated its EAT guidelines to add an ‘E’ to the experience. This shows Google’s continued focus on authoritative content, and it’s important to show users that you know what you’re talking about.
The new “E” for experience seems to be an attack on AI-generated content. This is because we want our users to get correct information from reliable sources. This is similar to his YMYL algorithm update at the time.
Google’s helpful content updates have finally finished rolling out and are impacting websites with frustrating or unhelpful content. This is because many websites are starting to create content primarily for search engines rather than humans.
Humans need to write content for other humans.
Use AI to help you create content, but be careful not to do this at scale like CNET did. Because people have already backtracked on this effort after noticing various errors in the content itself.
6. Re-optimize and reuse outdated/underperforming content
New year, new content? Well, not always.
By monitoring the performance of your site’s current content, you can identify if you have the ability to reoptimize or repurpose old or underperforming content.
One of the best ways to do this is through a content audit to get a better understanding of what content is working well and which content needs a little update and love this year.
Especially when your content is already high quality but can benefit from other targeting keywords, there’s no point in reinventing the wheel.
By evaluating your current content, you can identify content gaps that require new content to be created, or find content that can be consolidated to improve performance.
Countless times in the past when working with clients, I’ve found three different blog posts focused on the same topic, none of which worked. Instead of wasting time and energy creating new content, try reusing and improving some of your site’s existing content.
Auditing the content of our site is always a best practice, uncovering many hidden gems while updating, optimizing or creating new content that the site may benefit from. It’s the best process to do because you can identify it.
7. Break down silos between teams internally (if you haven’t done so already)
This is not the best practice for content strategy, but it is the best practice for companies that create content.
Creating content on your site requires a lot of moving elements. Most people think it’s just the content team, but there’s also the design/product team, the development team, the legal team, and even his SEO team.
Any company, especially a large one, needs to ensure that all these departments work together to achieve the same goals. That means driving more people to her website and getting conversions. There are many ways to improve your organic marketing process and make it more efficient.
Establish processes to meet regularly with other departments to create new content and optimize existing content. Increase efficiency and ensure everyone understands their responsibilities throughout the process.
If you don’t predefine each team’s responsibilities and explain why they’re needed, the department may not prioritize the right things and slow down the content creation process.
A good content marketer works to break down these silos so that content can be published effectively. Communication, education, and organization are a big part of this.
The conclusion is
By following these seven best practices, you’ll be well on your way to managing your content in 2023 and beyond.
Overall, you should be proactive with the insights you find when creating content and discuss with your internal teams how you might need their help in this process.
Content marketing helps organizations continually educate consumers about the benefits of a particular line of service and convince them that a brand is the right fit for their needs, thus helping organizations find the best way to drive traffic to their site. One.
AI will be a hot topic this year, but when it comes to creating content, don’t get too drastic with this development just yet. At the end of the day, it’s more important to make sure your content is accurate and written by humans for humans.
You may have heard these best practices before, but that doesn’t make them any less important.
Instead of focusing on the hot new stuff every year, focus on understanding these basics first.
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