Long gone are those days, when the search engine marketers used to publish a single content on multiple platforms to gain visibility for the target keywords. Today, Google is no less than a human editor in filtering through bad content and highlighting the good ones. However, most content marketers and writers fail to realize what is good content, thus giving way to inevitably creating repetitive or poor-quality content, which is automatically rejected by Google. 

Yes! Google can do that. 

No matter how much money you spend on your content marketing endeavors, if you are unable to convince Google that the content will provide the audience with some value, everything goes waste. As Google is the number one search engine in the world, it will never compromise on its quality and accuracy, and there is no way around this fact. If you wish to make your content marketing endeavor a success, you have to develop content with the readers in mind. 

In other words, writing content for humans and not focusing on writing content for search engines. 

The marketing gurus may create a row over the aforementioned statement. They may raise a lot of questions regarding the importance of keyword density, content optimization, keyword proximity, long tail, and short-tail keywords, and more in any given content. 

No! They are not wrong either. 

These perimeters also affect the ranking of your page apart from the value its content provides your target audience with. However, what we want to say here is, these are not the only factors that affect your rank. You should never compromise on the readers’ expectations to get the ranks you want because ultimately, you won’t be able to reach there if you do. 

Let us discuss this more in detail. 

Content Marketing: Who should be your primary target?

What most SEO content writing practices fail to emphasize are the readers’ expectations. The SEO experts may argue that keywords define what readers are looking for and focusing on those can help you achieve ranks. But this is a deceptive statement. Keywords may determine what the users are searching for on Google, but they will never be able to guess why they are looking up those keywords on the search engines in the first place. 

Therefore, most successful content marketing strategies focus on research and development more than actually writing the content. The efficient content marketers, who understand the need of the hour, conduct research on similar topics and try to understand what the readers are actually looking for. You can use social listening to get an idea about the readers’ expectations before you actually start developing the content from scratch. 

Once you develop unique content that will be of some value to the readers, they will flock to your website, thus notifying Google that your content is one of those few good ones, which needs to be ranked at the top. Hence, your primary target is definitely your readers (your target audience), without whom, you may not survive in the cutthroat competition of the moment.

A few effective tips to provide more value to your readers

While expecting to get your content get ranked higher on Google, you need to keep the readers in mind. An effective way of doing that has already been mentioned above, but it is not the only way. Go through the following suggestions to know how you can develop content based on users’ expectations as well as search engine metrics:

• Main Objective: Why are you creating the content? What key message do you want to deliver? It is advisable not to deviate from the main objective while creating keyword-rich SEO content.
• Authority: Any good content is the one, which is authoritative and evokes trust. And authority can be established only when you provide some unique perspective and real value to the readers. Try providing answers to their questions. Provide useful information.  Help them in solving their problems. Don’t focus just on selling your products and services.  
• Uniqueness: Previous digital content marketing practices included paraphrasing, or simply changing an already existing content in a clever way to trick the Copyscape or other plagiarism checkers into passing the same as new content. However, the search algorithms have changed drastically over the years, making such practices obsolete. Today, if you wish to provide value and rank well, you have to develop content that provides a unique point of view and real value to the readers. 
• Mention Sources: Always mention the sources you get all crucial information from. Give credits and Google will love it. 
• Keywords: Well, no matter how much they irritate you, you have to make peace with them for the sake of ranking your page higher in the search engine results. However, make sure you do not focus only on inserting the target keywords but also on modifying the content around them so that it looks natural and not forced. 
• Google Analytics: As mentioned earlier, use behavior goes a long way to help you develop content that ranks higher besides providing valuable information to the readers. Conduct thorough research on the conversion rates for your website and check which parts of your website are preferred more by the visitors than the rest. This will undoubtedly give you an idea about what information your users seek more. 

Some of the most effective content marketing strategies that have stood the test of time focus on developing content for the people, and search engine results follow automatically. Be it social media content, blogs, articles, newsletters, or content for any website, the rule is simple – You have to provide some value to the readers, otherwise, everything will be in vain. 

Are you ready to embrace the evolution of content marketing practices in 2021?