THOSE OF YOU WHO HAVE BEEN WORKING FROM HOME MAY HAVE FOUND A LITTLE EXTRA TIME ON YOUR HANDS.

Maybe that has led you to make some DIY home improvements, or perhaps you started taking your marketing team's advice and began writing more. If so, then you already know the benefits of content marketing.

As a brief reminder for all our readers, content marketing is the industry term for why CMOs like us at Incite Creative want you to write four blogs a month. We recommend that our clients hold webinars, compile ebooks, post on social media, and make loads of personalized videos. The reason for this madness is because creating and distributing valuable, relevant content helps attract and retain your target audiences. As a result, you increase your brand awareness and ultimately drive revenue. More than pitching your products and services, you're proving something of real value, and it gets readers/viewers engaged.

But let's face it. All that writing is hard. There's, of course, writer's block, but a good marketing team will provide you with an editorial calendar and tools to help you cope with that. But you then need to sit down and write a compelling piece of content that's at least 500 words and is interesting for readers and attracts the SEO web crawlers. It isn't easy!

Well, I can’t let you off the hook entirely, but I do have some tips for how your website can rank higher by writing smarter.

In addition to writing new content each month, or instead of a piece of new content, you can make your existing content rank higher by merely updating it. No, you can't just change a few words here and there, it will take more effort than that. But it's certainly faster and easier than writing a brand new blog, case study, or web page. So why not fold this strategy into your monthly content marketing initiatives?

Here’s how to get your website to rank higher by writing (or editing) smarter:

1. Use Google Analytics to determine which blogs or web pages are performing best but may not have the best click-through rate (lower than 5%)
2. Determine what keywords are the most relevant and generating traffic to your site
3. Audit your content and determine where there are opportunities to adjust and improve your existing content by:  
   • Deleting no longer relevant content or redirecting it to a more appropriate page
   • Incorporating the best performing keywords, including any newer or more relevant ones, into your content including your title, headers, and the top 100 words overall
   • Adding links (that open in a new page) to authority sites to give your content additional credibility
   • Adding images and optimizing them
   • Adding videos and optimizing them
   • Making your content actionable
   • And of course, making sure your content is easily accessible across all devices
   • Using Google Search Console to recrawl and reindex the URL where your content resides

Hopefully, you're not too overwhelmed by the list above because you should be taking those same steps, to no small extent, when writing new content. But I just saved you a lot of extra time and effort because you're tackling existing content. As a result, your content will be more relevant, get more engagement, and rank much higher than it otherwise would.

If you don't have a marketing department to help you tackle the steps outline above, don't worry. As you may suspect, this is one of our areas of expertise, and we'd be happy to help you. Give us a call at 410-366-9479 or email us at info@incitecmo.com. 

Happy writing and happier editing!