Creativity Vs Optimization: What Works Better for Content Marketing?

This article was written as part of the SEMrush Big Blogging Contest

Creating content that hits the mark and attracts traffic is a difficult task for content writers. These days brands are taking a fresh approach to proactive content management. Most brands are paying a lot of attention to optimizing content that involves execution. However, the companies are also want to expand their brand name, in these type of scenario content marketing is the best way to grow your brand name in digital media and get unique searches.

Above in the statistics, you can see how important Content marketing is for digital marketing. So, it is always said that building content and gathering the follower is not so much easy it involves lots of patience. Apart from patience, the first question that pops up into everybody’s head is: “Could building an optimization strategy be the way to achieve your desired online results?”

Nowadays, being a content marketer is not an easy task, just a couple of things you have to pay attention to;

• Make sure you deliver creative writing.
• Create relevant content.
• Know your audience.
• Optimize the text that you have written.

How to balance creativity and optimization?

Creativity and optimization work together. Until now you must be having a question “how creativity and optimization can be balanced?” to make you understand in details below we mentioned some critical points.

LIST OUT IMPORTANT KEYWORDS

Whenever you are writing content, it is essential to list out all relevant keywords, related to the topic, first. Do a keyword search and use the results in your content. There are a lot of tools available explicitly designed to help you find the keywords you are after. Tools such as SEMrush, Google Keyword Planner and Soovle are some free examples that do a perfect job.

Once you have your list of keywords, prepare your text for implementation of these words. Don’t just dump the keywords in your writing but try to weave them in naturally. Simply draining in all of your keywords reduces the quality of your text and will affect your website ranking in the end.

KEEP TRACK OF COMPETITORS

Keeping track of the competition and what they are currently up to is an essential element of your day job as a content marketer. Be smart and use successes of others but try to avoid mistakes made by others. Technology has made things easy nowadays there are a lot of pages and sites available in the online media which will help you in getting information about your competitors.

Some things that you have to keep track of while checking the competition:

• How many keywords does the competitor’s website use?
• What are the topics they usually cover?
• What are minor topics they write about that support their general coverage?
• Check if their coverage is complete and correct.

See, if your contender sites are making any mistakes or if their coverage is incomplete, try to fill the gap. This will keep you a step ahead of your competitor, and you will have some unique content which they even they don’t have. So, it gives you a chance to grab it and kill it.

Never forget to check how their content is performing and how many engagements are recorded. Then, also check which articles or blog posts and the blogs are performing best on engagement, social shares, and link-building. Don’t forget the most critical point; check the SERP (Search Engine Result Page) of the page, article of the blog post.

If you want to make all these things work then having a proper content optimization and accordingly planning the content marketing strategy becomes very crucial.

INCLUDE ALL THE AUDIENCE ISSUES

As remember, before jumping into a conclusion and start to work, it always better to know what your audience wants and what are they looking. Lessening the stress and pain of your audience should be your aim.

Customers are the path to success, for all the efforts that you invested, if people find your article to be good enough then the audience will share it for sure. This automatically increases the article reach and will gather more viewers. Eventually, the number of people reading your content increases, then the bot in Google will assess that your content is capable enough to rank higher.

Hence, it is always an excellent idea to concentrate on the problems of the viewers because if we solve the audience problems then only people will come to us and still make sure SEO content strategy revolves around this.

Use different channels to communicate with users. Before you start conveying, check all those channels where you will find active users. To make your work bit easy we mention some of the channels below which are used by a lot of people:

• Quora
• Reddit
• GrowthHackers
• Zest.com

The viewers are using these channels a lot to get good contents, other than these there are few other social media channels where you can find good content.

Initially, if you follow these channels, you will get to know what are the topics people are interested to read. Not, just the topics you even get the idea about what is the language the writers are using and at what time which type of content is trending, and what people are interested to read. All these things are very relevant which you have to keep in mind while writing content.

HAVE CREATIVE AND ENGAGING CONTENTS

According to the surveys, it is recorded that Humans have very less concentration, so it becomes imperative for your content to be engaging. Even a goldfish has attention up to 9 seconds which is more than that of the Human beings. This clearly shows that users may come to your blog but can return without checking your content. Also if some of the viewers may visit your blog but doesn’t read full content, just read the headlines and close it.

So, before you start to write a content keep in mind about the Skimmers and try to write a creative and engaging content, that will avoid the bounce rates. Use the Italics fonts, bullet points, include required keywords, and subheadings.

Highlight all the critical points, write short sentences and short paragraphs because if you have long paragraphs, people lose interest quickly. Place all the relevant issues in the beginning, middle and at the end.

INCLUDE IMAGES, FACT, FIGURES

As it is said, images speak millions than the words does. It is essential to use relevant pictures. If you have a content that has only words, then it doesn’t attract people. While using this images, videos, gifs keep the people stuck to the blog. Not just the photos even the Facts and Figures are important it improves the Search Engine Optimization.

Content gets rich support through the images, facts, and figures, and the results here are positive. A compelling, inspiring content with events, characters, and models involve people deep into it. Nowadays, people believe more on the facts, images, figures and understand the facts better than normal content. There are a lot of top websites like Pew Research Center and Statista that provide the facts and figure about everything in the world. While for pictures you can take a look at the free image sites like Pixabay, Pexels, Unsplash.

Nevertheless, you can find various ways to include images like product image, infographics, gifs, blog images, anything you can use that is related to your topic. It goes similar with all the figures and facts. While coming to data include the infographics because no one wants to see boring statistics.

So, this sums up that creativity and optimization in content marketing, both are important and should be taken care.

Conclusion

Creativity and Optimization both operate collectively. In a content, if Creativity and optimization are balanced, then it gives immense and excellent results. So, both works best for content marketing of any brand.

If you want us to add some more important points which we missed, you can comment or email us!

We will feel delighted to include it in the blog!

Siva saikumar

Working as Digital Marketing Manager at Softscripts