Trends in Content Marketing for 2014

If you are already heavily invested in online marketing, then you are aware that content marketing is a sector of internet marketing that is growing rapidly each year. As Google continues to move away from ranking sites that provide little to no value to search engine users, the importance of high quality relevant content is only growing.

If you are trying to decide how to reallocate the budget that you are spending on content marketing, it pays to be aware of the emerging trends for 2014 and beyond. The key to staying ahead of your competition this year, will be to include the following factors in your content marketing strategy.

Increasing Value
The year 2014 is all about increasing value when it comes to content marketing. In 2013, there was a big shift away from creating content that is simply cheap clickbait because of the fact that this sort of content is not benefiting businesses over the long term. In fact it may cost some businesses more to create and maintain cheap, clickbait content than the perceived quick benefits that they may have received from hosting this content on their sites.

In addition, Google is increasing frowning on content that does not provide longterm value by ranking these pages lower over time. This is another reason why businesses should avoid taking this strategy as it will not help site rankings in the longterm but merely give a short term boost. Cheap content that provides no real value to users over the long term has become the equivalent of blasting a site with links (it’s not going to work anymore!).

Forget About Vanity Metrics
Focusing on vanity metrics such as visits to a page or the number of clicks on a link is no longer important if the metrics do not benefit the overall outlook of a website in anyway. If the content on a page of your site does not provide any valid reason for users to take these actions or result in any valuable outcome such as a sign up or sale, then there is no reason to continue to base the content that you create around these metrics. In addition, tracking such vanity metrics is probably wasting valuable time and resources that could be better assigned elsewhere. Instead begin to focus on tracking the metrics that matter, such as signup rates, social media sharing rates and sales conversions when creating content and optimize the content accordingly.

SEO
While well optimized content is a cornerstone of high ranking sites, the latest updates from Google have made it clear that overly optimized sites will no longer rank well in the search engines. Therefore it is important to make sure that keywords in site content are used at a minimum. This year it will be more about the message of the content rather than how many times a certain keyword appears in the content if you want to get clicks from users.

However all is not lost when it comes to optimizing content for the search engines. Internet marketing firms can still provide tips on how to optimize content for the search engines while being much more subtle about the approach in order to meet the careful balance between engagement and optimization.

Are you looking for some assistance with revamping your content strategy for 2014? If you have seen your site’s rankings decrease significantly or your visitors are simply not connecting with the content on your site, give Infintech Designs a call today and we can help you to turn things around.