We are all inundated with content on a daily basis. We see snippets of articles, blogs, graphics, videos and more when browsing LinkedIn, and receive content in both our work and personal email inboxes. At times, the volume of material we’re exposed to can become overwhelming.

The question becomes, “How do I sort through this digital ‘noise’ to find trustworthy sources of information to help me make better decisions?” 

Why good content matters

As executives in the financial services industry, you may be asking yourself, “How can I get my message to my target audience and help move them closer to becoming a loyal customer?”

The simple, but proven, answer to this question is quality content. And, in this digital marketing era, good content is more important than ever. Digital marketing allows you to reach exactly who you want when you want with your unique message. Additionally, you have the ability to measure the impact of your content immediately so you can continue to make adjustments to get the best ROI over time. Since content is no longer static, you’ll want to make sure your assets and strategy can evolve quickly.

In this post, we’ll talk about what qualifies as good content and why it matters for SEO and the reader experience.

What makes content, good? 

Before we dive in and explore how quality content helps you grow your business, we need first to identify good content.

 There are several characteristics good content shares. Good content:

• Answers a question

• Is conversational

• Is engaging

• Is helpful

• Provides a unique perspective

According to a report generated by Social Media Examiner, more than half of marketers – 58% - claim that original content is their most valuable digital asset.

Content is the product of a thoughtful digital marketing plan which is based on the company’s objectives. That plan will determine how each piece of content fits into the broader strategy.

Keep in mind content exists across your digital platforms and comes in many formats. We often think of blog posts when discussing content. But content can also be informational videos, social media posts, email campaigns, text ads, landing pages or white papers.

How content impacts SEO

Having high-quality content helps your site rank better in search engines making it easier for people to discover you.

The top listings in a Google search get about 33% of traffic while the second gets 18%, and the third gets 11%. If your site lands on the first page of Google search results, you will see about 92% of the traffic, while the second page only sees around 5%.

Like a fine wine, good content increases in value over time. One in ten blog posts is “compounding,” meaning that organic search traffic to these posts increases over time. Although these posts only make up 10% of the total content on a blog, they generate up to 38% of overall site traffic.

How can you ensure what you’re producing doesn’t get missed? Web crawling programs look for title tags, H1 tags, meta descriptions, URLs, internal links and alt text on images to help categorize the content. Backlinks are also important for SEO ranking. The better your content is, the more backlinks it will receive, which translates to a higher ranking in search results.

Content Consistently Adds Value 

If someone spends an average of 15 seconds on any given page of your website, you want to make it count. The chances that website visitors will place a phone call or provide an email address will increase if you use content to enhance the user experience.

If someone reads one of your blog posts, you want to provide exactly what he or she is looking for and make the information easy to access. This means you want to break your text into sections, use bullet points and incorporate bold and italicized ideas for emphasis.

Incorporating images into the blog post and linking to external sources when there is a need to back up a fact will also enhance the user experience.

The Content Evolution

Generating good content that resonates with your prospective audience takes work. Companies need to evaluate Google Analytics and their websites to see how search engines are ranking their content. Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress websites is a great tool to help companies understand the readability of their content and provides suggestions for how to improve content for SEO.

Once you understand how your content performs, you can set up an improvement plan. Compare how website pages rank and optimize content for on-page SEO.

Conduct a site audit. Is the current content up to date? Can you make it more compelling? Be sure to drive traffic to specific pages that are critical to your business.

Finally, determine what additional content would be compelling to your audience. Take a look and see if you can create and incorporate content around keywords that your competitors aren’t ranking for.

A best practice is to revisit your analytics every month to understand how the shift in your content strategy is working. Creating quality content is an ongoing process that will help you meet your business goals. Investing in quality content will have real, long-term benefits.