Focus on User Experience
User experience, or UX for short, was the word on everybody’s lips last year. The principle behind UX is simple, creating content that is tailored for users, and not search engine robots.
One thing that many content creators forget, is that the main goal of search engines is to provide relevant content to their users. The ultimate goal of every algorithm is to ultimately bring content that is engaging and relevant to the users’ search.
And we can expect Google to do everything in their power to improve their UX by increasingly focusing on metrics such as bounce rates and time spent on page as part of their algorithm in 2017.
What does that mean to content creators? Create content with users in mind first, and provide something that will be useful to them instead of trying to manipulate Google’s algorithms.
Put More Focus on Video Content
If one thing is for sure, it’s that video content will continue to trend in 2017. Companies like Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook are constantly evolving, releasing new products and introducing new formats content marketers can take advantage of. Two of these are live streaming and 360 videos. Businesses that feel they could reap benefits from these two outlets should do everything in their power to incorporate them into their content marketing strategy in 2017.
Focus on Creative Writing
In a world where search engines are becoming more and more “human”, the quality of content has to evolve accordingly. Social signals play an increasingly important role in search engine results and it is therefore capital that content creators produce content that will be engaging and socially active. This can be achieved by creating content that is highly informative and demands attention. This can be done by paying close attention to headlines, copy, subheaders and using an engaging voice when speaking to your audience.
Use Latent Semantic Indexing to your Advantage
Latent semantic indexing works by using a variety of keyword combinations to reach the highest number of search terms as possible. While Google is doing everything it can to stop keyword manipulation, keywords are still the backbone of every search engine, and therefore still play an important role when releasing and distributing content.
Use LSI keywords wisely and sprinkle your content with relevant keywords phrases (emphasis on the word relevant here) that can be integrated naturally into your content. But please don’t overdo it as keyword stuffingKeyword stuffing is a technique that attempts to give pages higher rankings in search engine result pages by inserting the same keywords over and over again. is still a capital sin by Google’s rule books.
Conclusion
All these methods should help you achieve massive success with your content marketing efforts in 2017. But, whatever you do, always remember to put the user first, whether it’s with website design, content creation or otherwise. Algorithm changes may come and go, but ultimately, you can’t go wrong with quality content.
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