Even if your business or industry may be seen as boring, that doesn’t mean that creative exciting content and search marketing ideas are off limits for your SEO strategy.
‘Fun’ content isn’t exclusive to an eccentric audience like that of the fashion and tech industries and getting excitement around your SEO campaigns shouldn’t have to be forced. SEO has just got harder, more content driven and personal. Gone are the days where optimising for key-words was priority and a well-optimised site with lots of links could rise you to the top. With Google and the big search engines getting more personal with their results, strategy has to get more personal to your customers. SEO has to change with more sharing, more engagement and more variety no matter what background your business is in.
If you are asking ‘What if my product/service isn’t exciting?’ then you are asking the wrong question. Don’t base strategy around your product, target what makes your customers excited and what they want to talk about. Creative content starts with the question ‘What can I do for my customers?’. With the main focus of helping your customers, you naturally give people a reason to like you. You can never force users to talk about you, but you can help your chances with a fresh engaging strategy that current and potential customers can relate too. Thanks to the huge growth of social media everyone’s a critic and has the access to be, but this works both ways with companies who go above and beyond with their engagement being showered with praise. Social can be a tough cookie, take a look at the Getting Social with Ricemedia blog series for tips on your social media strategy.
Similar to business growth, without knowing your industry, your SEO won’t go anywhere and (hopefully) you know it well. Understanding your demographic is key. Where are your customers? Where are they active online? By knowing this, you use your knowledge of the industry within your strategy, to help with your outreach.
No industry is boring, remember even in the slowest of the slow moving industries, any content you create and any audience engagement you undertake gives you a competitive advantage. You will be surprised how exciting your ‘boring’ industry can be!
In crowded industries where competition to rank well and produce original content is fierce, find out who is targeting the same market. How are they going above and beyond to appeal to the market? Most of us aren’t PR professionals, but we have to behave like them in some aspect, to come up with a quality strategy that shows why people should be talking about you. People are greater than links when it comes to volume, how many people are connecting to you?
Here are three actionable tips, to help you to take your strategy from drab to fab…
1. Your industry is likely to generate interesting data, that your audience would not otherwise have access to. Are you making good use of data visualisation? Present your data in a format that is easily digestible for your audience.
2. Blogging is a must now for all businesses with a focus on SEO. Creating regular engaging content that users will actively visit is difficult. Find out who the influencers are in your industry and then work on turning your blog into a hub for industry news. By mentioning these key figures, your blog will, overtime, begin to gain recognition. Active bloggers/industry professionals love being talked about and also like to shout about where they are being mentioned. This tactic also turns your blog from a regular old company news page to an industry resource. Moz Blog’s whiteboard friday has been a huge success, which attracts an audience, which includes professionals from outside of the SEO industry, who tune in every week to watch the Moz team’s latest search marketing tips and tricks.
3. Go ‘behind-the-scenes’. By allowing your customers into your day-to-day activities, you become more approachable as a business. e.g. showing stages of manufacturing a product is letting consumers see a process they otherwise would not. Use your platform to show off your company’s values and cultures. This is the sort of online ‘small talk’ that keeps an audience interested in your business.
What matters is that you take pride in your strategy, if you are excited to deliver your services to your customer base, they will respond and even be excited to use it.
