Of course, we all know the importance of content in the digital age.

“Content is king,” goes the old expression, and this means that if we are to make sure that our website is conveying our brand, business, or our personality properly, we’ve got to ensure that the right content is peppered throughout the website, but what does this actually entail? What can we do to ensure that we are delivering on all counts?

Preventing duplicate content

Duplicate content is an interesting thing because while you may think that your website doesn’t necessarily have duplicate content in terms of blogs, it’s critical to recognize that content that is accidentally duplicated can have an impact on how your website ranks. There are so many different things that we can do to reduce duplicate content, but one of these is to do with the website crawlers and actually optimize your crawl budget. 

When it comes to optimizing your crawl budget for SEO, there are many strategies, including preventing crawlers from accessing certain pages of your site, such as admin pages and duplicate content, so when we look at our website and see if there’s accidental duplicate content, for example, the same sentences on a call to action, it’s important to make some of these little tweaks to ensure that we are keeping our content completely original.

Repurposing content

One of the most overwhelming aspects of keeping up to date with the content mill is putting as much information on your website as humanly possible. If you are putting blogs out every single day, this can be a lot of work for the content creators, and if this is you, having to come up with different ideas time and time again is naturally a lot to deal with. While there are a lot of tools that can help you these days, for example, ChatGPT can give you some inspiration by providing different ideas for content that you wouldn’t have necessarily thought of, you can also repurpose content in other ways. 

For example, if you’ve got content on your website that is evergreen, for example, something that focuses on the year’s best SEO tools, you can then update this with every single passing year, which is a lot less work and will ensure that you are refreshing your content and repurposing it effectively. 

Another way to repurpose your content is to put them into different contexts. A blog can easily turn into a video blog or a piece of audio. Repurposing your content is an easier way to make your content go further, but you’ve got to make sure that you are putting out enough content to guarantee that people are not feeling short-changed because you are just saying the same thing in a different format. Additionally, when it comes to repurposing content, you may want to go back and look at overall blogs and very simply restructure them. If you didn’t follow any white hat practices originally and you have a chunk of text that has no discernible breakdowns, this will also help you to repurpose your content more effectively.

Look at your images

You can get images from free providers like Pixabay, but it might be worth making a few changes to your images to help you stand out further. You might not have any inclination to study photography; however, it will invariably make a massive impact on the quality of your images if you are creating something far more appropriate for your content. This is especially true for selling things. 

There is a fine art to photographing products, and there are so many providers that can help you with this, but if you are doing a blog that’s just all about you, rather than opting for stock images, having something far more personable will go a long way to making that content feel more engaging.

Stop selling

This is something that is almost hardwired into any content writer of a certain ilk. The problem is that when we feel that we are inclined to sell things and put those calls to action at the end of every article, it means that it stinks of the hard sell. One of the most important things in creating content that works with people is to highlight that a service is going to fill a gap in their lives, but it is their prerogative to find more information. 

We shouldn’t be forcing people to buy things. In today’s society, it very rarely works. This is why natural backlinks are more important to SEO than ever. People don’t want to be sold to, but they want to see an expert that they can trust. Trust is pivotal, and if you can position your content in a way that establishes you as a leader in your field while providing those useful items of information that follow the EEAT guidelines, you will be able to showcase your abilities and educate people rather than sell to them.

Do you know your audience?

A very simple question but if you are working at finding the best categories for overall performance and engagement, you should go back to the drawing board and find the right people who will consume this content. One of the biggest mistakes people make, especially in terms of selling products, is thinking that their buyer personas stay the same throughout the business lifecycle. 

This isn’t necessarily the case because you will need to stop and test, and then refine everything so you can understand who you are selling to. This will have a far better impact on the content and the purposes it should serve.

It’s harder than ever to create amazing content for the web because, very simply, there’s just so much out there. There’s a lot to be said for following some of these strategies, but you also need to remember that content is a massive subject that will constantly evolve. It’s always about making sure that we are engaging with those people who will invariably buy our services, and as time goes on, we need to learn how to make our website far better at being a place that is not just selling services or products, but is a genuinely helpful location to someone, whether they buy a product or not.