Content Marketing – Creating Content to Help You Get Found

Content marketing has become one of the most important marketing activities you can do as a small business. Regardless of your industry, people are searching for quality information to help them make decisions, solve problems or keep up with what is happening in the world. Providing valuable information for your reader gets their attention and encourages them to continue to listen.

Content Marketing - Writing for the Web

There are two ways to provide relevant content:

• Write great content
• Curate great content

Curating Content

Content curation is finding, filtering, organizing and sharing relevant content from many sources for your readers so you make it easier for them to get the information they need without doing the work. If you do this well in addition to writing your own, you become a valuable resource for your prospects and clients and keep them listening to what you have to say. The social media tools like Twitter and Facebook, make most of us curators in some respect. If we read something we feel is interesting to our audiences, these tools make it easy to share this knowledge to others.

Writing Great Content

Writing great original web content is hard, but worth the effort. Creating this great content that is compelling and relevant for your reader while written to be found and indexed appropriately by the search engines doesn’t come naturally to most people. Sometimes these two goals seem to contradict each other because humans want to read something that makes learning the topic simple, while search engines care about keyword phrase density and links from authority sites.

If you are a small business owner just starting to step into the world of content marketing to enhance your online and social media efforts, you may want some help writing that powerful and compelling prose that will be found and indexed correctly by search engines.

Check out a simple SEO software product called Scribe SEO, a service that helps you optimize your content for search engines. I had heard about it for a while, but when I read a review by Patsi Krakoff whose business is all about writing for the Web, I went to check it out. I’ve been blogging for awhile, but I learned a few things with this product that has helped me structure my information better for the search engines while keeping a human audience focus.

Scribe analyzes your content and provides a substantial report to help you make modifications for better search engine rankings and more traffic without detracting from its appeal to the human reader. Scribe SEO comes in a few flavors depending on your platform of choice. The WordPress plugin integrates all Scribe’s nice features right into your WordPress dashboard. There are several good reviews of Scribe SEO and a couple of negative ones as well. But they offer a 30 day trial to test out the product, which should allow you enough time to see the value of it for your needs. The monthly fees for Scribe SEO are reasonable and well worth it if it makes your content more visible in the search engines.

It only takes using it with a couple of blog posts to see the value if you are not an SEO expert. If you blog at least once a week, this is worth trying out to get an understanding of the process needed to write content that ranks well.

Have you tried Scribe SEO yet? If so, what do you think?