In the realm of SEO, content is king. Following this mantra, many online marketers struggle to produce high-quality articles for their website blog. Yes, interesting, informative articles are important for your website SEO.
But there is one flaw to this approach:
Content isn’t just articles!
Content includes everything you’ve got to offer from videos, podcasts, gadgets, tools, toys and more. If you want to make your life easier, it is time you started to diversify your content.
Why Diversity Matters for SEO
In the past, SEO experts advised website owners to regularly post articles on their websites because it would help them get crawled faster and give them more opportunity to get keywords onto their pages. This still holds true today, but the search engines are more reliant on off-page SEO factors than on-page factors in determining rankings. Thus, you’ve got to really focus on your link-baiting efforts if you want to have long-term SEO success for your website. High-quality articles once were great link bait. Not anymore! There are already so many uber-quality articles online that even an article you obsessed over for weeks may not get you too many backlinks. Instead, trendy content like infographics are the ones getting the backlink love.
Ways to Diversify
A couple months ago, Adam Setzer wrote an article about small business marketing for Search Engine Watch which focused on diversifying SEO. He gives two great examples of (boring) businesses which used unusual content to get lots of backlinks and thus get up on the SERPs. The first was a magnet company which invited social media users to show them funny magnet pictures and bizarre inventions including magnets. The second example was for a company which sells and services church buses which got attention by hosting a contest on social media sites in which youth groups could get free bus rental time. Your marketing tactics don’t have to get this creative to diversify. Even mundane efforts like creating a free mortgage calculator at your website can get loads of high-quality backlinks. Make a free game, a free app, an infographic, a video tutorial…