Content marketing is a catch-all term for how you communicate, educate and sell to your customers. Used correctly, it builds relationships, your reputation, and ensures a prospect has the right information to make a purchasing decision.
But content marketing is an ever-changing landscape. What worked two years ago doesn’t necessarily have the same impact today. So, if you want to keep up with your competitors, then you’ll have to keep abreast of the latest developments in content marketing.
In this article, we’ll take a look at big four trends as content marketing tips 2020
Table of Content
Rich Snippets
Rich snippets are part of Google’s enhanced search display feature. Alongside the regular blue links and metadata, Rich Snippets adds extra information to the result.
If we look at these two results for a search performed for the popular consumer drone – ‘DJI Mavic 2 Pro review’ – you can see the difference between the results for those with Rich Snippets and those without.
Which of the two results looks more attractive to you? The result with the Rich Snippets will have a higher chance of attracting a click, as it provides more information.
So how do you set up rich snippets for your website?
Rich snippets are possible today due to a collaboration between the major search engines. They co-operated to produce a common language, to make it easy for a webpage to communicate to search engines what its content is about.
You can find the details on the website schema.org.
Using the schema provided, you can define the content on your page into standard categories, like products, FAQs, and how-tos.
Add Rich Snippets to your website by producing some code not dissimilar to meta-data. The format Google favours is JSON-LD, and there are many online generators to help you create it. Here is one developed by technicalseo.com.
Enter the relevant information into the fields on the left, and then copy the generated code from the right and paste onto your header. Adding Rich Snippets to your website is not something that will improve your search engine ranking, but the benefit of attracting additional clicks is plain to see.
EAT
E.A.T. became a hot acronym in the latter part of 2019. It stands for education, authority, and trustworthiness.
No wonder why it was destined to become one of those content marketing trends 2020. Google wants to return relevant and accurate results for a search term; particularly in the fields of health and finance. Both of these broad areas can have a damaging impact on a person, especially if they follow dubious information.
You may remember how easy it was to get people to microwave their iPhone back in 2014. So it’s no surprise that Google wants to return links to information that can be relied on.
How can you improve your E.A.T.?
Expertise. Make sure that the content you produce answers the audience’s intent behind a keyword. Be comprehensive, correct, and cover the topic from all angles. Don’t forget to illustrate the arguments for any opposing views.
Authority: You become an authority when you attract links to your content from relevant online sources. Produce expert content, and then seek out ways to get links from reputable sites. Be proactive; offer to write a guest post for a websites blog, for example.
Trustworthiness : To build a trustworthy reputation online, you will need to deliver your service well and ask for reviews from your customers. There are many third-party review services available now, such as Trustpilot or Feefo. You may even have a specialist service for your industry like Tripadvisor. If none is suitable for your venture, then you can always fall back on Google My Business.
Content Personalization.
As a content marketer and producer, you should regularly add fresh content to your website. But not all of your content will be applicable for every visitor to your site.You should develop tools to help personalize your content to your visitor’s needs. Personalization is not a new concept for the internet – Amazon and iTunes have been doing it for years. Much of their personalization comes from algorithms that look at your past purchases then serves up content it thinks you’ll like. Personalization does not have to be algorithm-driven, though. Below are two examples of websites that ask their visitors to perform their own content personalization twiddy.com
AI & Machine Learning. The Google BERT Update.
Google says that 15 percent of searches are new, never previously performed queries. So, they are continually developing new ways to ensure that the results they return are relevant.
In October 2019, Google launched its latest algorithm update known as BERT. One of the central pillars of BERT is its use of AI and Machine Learning to understand better the language used in searches.
One improvement Google added gives them a better understanding of intent for a search. The words like ‘to’ and ‘for’ that precede or follow a word can have an impact on the purpose of an enquiry.
Here’s an example.
In this example, before the BERT update, Google assumed the question was – does a US citizen need a visa to travel to Brazil? After the BERT update, Google now understands that the word ‘to’ means the user is asking – does a Brazilian citizen need a visa to travel to the US. This greater understanding helps Google serve up more relevant results to its users.
What does BERT mean for content marketing producers?
The bottom line is that Google is getting better at decoding the intent of a user’s search term. So, there is an opportunity for you to attract more traffic by creating content that answers specific questions comprehensively. Use a tool like answerthepublic.com to mine the questions that users have searched for around a topic. The example below shows the questions users have searched for on ‘content marketing’.
Answer the questions posed in the content you produce. Use the questions themselves as a header in title tags, and Google should reward you with more traffic.
The internet does not standstill – are you keeping up to date? If you haven’t been adapting your content marketing practices to these latest developments, then you could be getting left behind by your competition.
Research Keywords In line with Current Trends
Perhaps one of the most overused tips however it is still the important one. Before you write any article, there are couple of things you might want to look at – the trends and the search intent.
Looking at the trends you would know the search volume as well as indicative audience size. Use can perhaps try Google Trends for that matter:
Google Trends is a website by Google that analyzes the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages. The website uses graphs to compare the search volume of different queries over time.
There is always an intent behind the search in google. For example, buying goods or services online and or a general topic of research.
For example, before writing about COVID 19. As you can see in the screen above, the term “breakout” it means there is a high demand of search for that term. You will also notice that there are variations around symptoms, search the impact with the US map etc.
With that said we can identify a track which can be interesting to write about as far as targeted audience is concerned. Once you have identified the keywords as well as learning about the possible search intent its crucial that the content gets some form of structure.
Take inspiration from already ranked URL and its Title format.
In the image below, you can see that for a keyword “how to ride a bike”, all the meta titles contains variation of keyword mentioned like “child”, “learning” or “adult”. Thus, your title can be in these structures, preceded with “how to”, including the full keyword and the target audience.
However, be careful that your meta title does not exactly matches any of your competitors. This can be a form of plagiarism and would not help you with google ranking. You need to ensure that the targeted keywords are present with the main key phrase.
Use catch phrase in the Title that Attract Attention of the Reader’s Eye
While formulating an article title, make sure to either have a strong positive message or a negative message. Google’s algorithm perhaps can mimic the way humans think and can associate with the thinking pattern like humans. If you look at an extremely positive message like
10 best tips to protect yourself from Sun.
And then compare that to
Protect your skin form Sun by following these tips.
Both has a positive statement. However, the audience would most likely click on the direct yet positive title which is the first one.
Make Good Use of LSI Keywords
LSI stands for latent semantic indexing. To explain in simple words, they are keywords that are related to your main or target keyword. Since Google does not allow keyword stuffing, the presence of LSI is important. However, they all still should appear naturally and organic as possible.
There are plenty of LSI keyword generator tools out there. Use them to prepare a list of LSI keywords and apply them in your article. Mixing them with the target keyword proves to be excellent for ranking.
Provide Year In The Title
For various content types that are related to trends, services, or products including the current year can help. People like reading stuffs online that is more related to the current time. Stuff like COVID 19, corona, movies to watch (year), courses to take up, or books to read will work better when addressed according to the year.
Again another example could be, when you want to buy a new mobile phone, you start your search with the keywords with the combination of words like “latest phone in 2020” or “new phone 2020”. Again if you want to find out price of the same phone in year 2019 , 2018 you probably would search it using the combination like “Model Name + Price +Year” .
So having explicit year on the title will help the content being found.
Pramod Dhakal is a Tech entrepreneur at heart, a natural leader and Agile practitioner. He has spent over a decade in implementing various large scale transformation initiatives in large multinational organizations. He is an author and contributor at Hitechies largely in the technology space.
