Entertainment
In fact, you do not always have to impart specialist knowledge in order to convince your prospective and existing customers of your services or to make your content interesting for them and thus also for Google. Especially with regard to the already mentioned increasing relevance of personal content, which makes a company more tangible, closer and thus reduces barriers to contact and promotes brand loyalty, you should also provide content that conveys a certain entertainment value.
YouTube and videos played there are often very conducive means to achieve all this. In general, well-tuned video content has a much higher entertainment value than text content. In addition, you can act very personally in videos on various levels – among other things, visibly as an individual. Under these conditions and because YouTube videos are very easy to implement in all kinds of internet presences, they ideally increase the dwell time or the user experience enormously. And this can – as already mentioned several times – be extremely ranking-promoting.
Relationships
Building a personal relationship with one’s own prospects and existing customers is highly relevant to success today. We have already emphasised this in several places. If your target group feels understood by your brand in all matters concerning them, and if the content conveys a certain entertaining, personal touch, your focused clientele will optimally get the impression that they really know your company. This not only promotes the regular, detailed reception of your content, but also a strong long-term bond with your brand.
Facebook and other social networks are ideally suited for playing out corresponding content. Due to the primarily private orientation of these channels, even otherwise rather conservative companies have the opportunity to provide relationship-building, personal content. This can be done, for example, in the form of direct questions to their own target group or fans, followers, etc., quizzes or behind-the-scenes photos/videos. This content should always be linked to the company website and/or blog in order to achieve maximum SEO impact.
FAQ
Since the majority of all web users in a business context – whether B2C or B2B – are looking for information and the time to absorb this information is also becoming shorter and shorter, it is also important to offer alternatives to more or less extensive factual presentations in text form. For years, videos and audio content have been increasingly popular among users and thus also with Google. At text level, the FAQ list in particular should be mentioned as an SEO factor in this context.
They offer question-answer schemes in a clearly structured, compressed form that has long been accepted by web users. FAQ lists are thus very user-oriented and ideally promote the user experience. Since these are two of the officially central intentions of Google’s work – the company wants to provide everyone with the most user-friendly, value-added and accessible web possible – the provision of an FAQ can be extremely useful for positioning one’s own internet presence in the Google ranking.
With a perfect match, FAQ lists even favour the receipt of so-called Featured Snippets. These small boxes present very useful information from websites directly on Google – before the conventional organic results. These snippets are not infrequently paraphrased with the ranking “position 0”, are particularly frequently noticed and are thus very desirable in terms of marketing or SEO.
EAT-Model (Expertise, Authority, Trust)
EAT is one of Google’s central evaluation and ultimately ranking factors. The acronym stands for the terms “Expertise”, “Authority” and “Trust”. In simple terms, the search engine measures whether an Internet presence is trustworthy or not on the basis of specific factors relating to this. How or with which content forms you can positively influence the EAT rating in your specific company case cannot be comprehensively clarified at this point. In fact, the requirements for a web presence that is as professional as possible, that acts as an authority in the respective field and that is trustworthy vary from sector to sector and from company orientation to company orientation.
In view of EAT, all information provided should offer its recipients real added value, be clearly verifiable and, at best, immediately substantiated, and allow for a transparent classification in the respective corporate context. In addition to the pure content level, frequent or less frequent sharing in social networks, good or bad ratings, existing backlinks, general usability and numerous other factors also have an influence on EAT.
Functional content
Content is always geared towards a clearly defined goal. This is one of the central premises for economic content marketing. In order to achieve your chosen goal as efficiently as possible, all of your content should have the corresponding functionality. The primary goal of search engine optimisation is to achieve the best possible positioning of your own web presence in the major search engines – and especially with the market leader Google. This can be achieved in different ways via the content that is displayed.
Functional content, like all content, must be optimally tailored to your target group and their customer journey in terms of its information base. It is also important to deliver real added value, which your competitors do not. Without taking these basic requirements into account, you will hardly convince customers to accept your content.
If you proceed purely functionally in the production of this content and in view of search engine optimisation, you primarily rely on (predominantly) technical factors. These include, among other things, optimal structuring of texts, integration of the perfect keywords, a generally good content mix of text, image and, if necessary, video and audio formats, clean programming of possibly implemented web applications and the best possible loading times. In fact, all these aspects have a direct influence on the ranking of the major search engines. For example, Google is better able to recognise well-structured texts than arbitrary blocks of text and, with the help of a suitable keyword selection, promptly assign them to appropriate queries. As a rule, both of these aspects have a considerable influence on the search engine position of your internet presence from a technical point of view alone.
Emotional content
Even emotional content – at least when it is played out in the context of content marketing – always pursues goals. This means that it must also be functional in a certain respect. However, it is primarily about addressing customers on an emotional level. The SEO focus is less on concrete methods of technical or onpage optimisation or the associated search engine behaviour. Rather, it is important to reach recipients through a personal, emotionally (positively) hitting orientation of the information.
In doing so, it is also essential to adhere to the premises of target-group and customer-journey-precise and absolutely value-added orientation. If you succeed in creating the perfect mix here, you will usually achieve a high level of emotional engagement. This means that customers who are optimally addressed tend to be more willing to act in accordance with the intention of the content. This, in turn, can involve making contact, transmitting useful data or even a direct business transaction.
In general, today’s web users in a business context – be it B2C or B2B – want less and less to be just a customer number or an IP address. As a website operator, you should optimally give your target group the feeling that their challenges or needs are really understood in your company and thus solved in a customer-oriented way.
On the one hand, all this can be extremely beneficial for your direct sales and on the other hand, it can massively push your brand building, which ultimately favours long-term strong business relationships. In addition, such processes are also highly interesting for Google and Co. In fact, they speak for a good user experience – and this is now undoubtedly one of the most important ranking factors of all.
The perfect mix
As has already been mentioned in a few places, functional and emotional content cannot be completely separated from each other. This also applies in the context of SEO. The numerous correlations given here often make it necessary to combine both modes of action or corresponding SEO methods.
For example, no matter how well SEO-tuned a text is, it will never develop its full potential if it does not take into account the ever-increasing desire of customers and interested parties in all sectors for more personality. Likewise, content that is perfectly adapted to the emotional needs of the respective target group will be found far less often if it is not designed according to the functional standards of the major search engines.
Above all, there is your own target group and, ultimately, their user experience. In fact, you can only push the latter to the maximum and thus achieve the best possible ranking result if you align your content perfectly with your customers, both technically functionally and emotionally.