Content Marketing's Role In Attracting and Retaining Readers and Customers

In 2016 content marketing will become even more important for a number of reasons. First and foremost is its ability to amp up Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your site. Positioning your business or blog to come up on the front page of Google and other search engines is essential to people finding you online.

Online SEO is particularly essential if your products or services or only offered online. Your site or blog competes with a mind-boggling amount of other sites and the more buried down they are on the Web, the more difficult it will become to be found and the more expensive if you are relying only on digital ads.

Advertising your way to your potential customers' eyes is a diminishing factor, because not only do people as a rule dislike intrusive online advertising, there is an increasing use of ad-blockers to actually prevent unwanted advertisements, like banners and pop-ups, from appearing on a web page. With new Apple technology digital ads can also be blocked on cell phones.

What do you do? Provide your readers or potential customers with SEO enhanced content about yourself, your products and/or services. Determine what words or search terms that your readers are likely to use when looking for your type of business. Once these are determined,be careful not to "spam" the search engines with over use of your key words and phrases which will be counter-productive and not liked by many search engine algorithms. Describe your products or services in an easy to understand manner.

Write additional copy on them segmented by questions or search terms that your readers or potential customers are likely to want information about. This is not the typical FAQ list, but helpful informative articles, White Papers or even e-brochure and e-book downloads that can help your business provide a value added service. You can also benefit from key word press releases that link back to your site and can be an additional path to attract site traffic from the Web.

DotBiz Word Up: RankBrain Helps the Long Tail Searcher Find Your Specialized Content

In the last quarter of 2015 Google announced that it would begin using RankBrain, a machine learning artificial intelligence (AI) system that helps it process search results to provide more relevant results for users. RankBrain uses AI to embed a huge amount of language into mathematical vectors. If it sees an unfamiliar word or phrase, RankBrain can make a guess as to the words or phrases that have a similar meaning and filter search results accordingly.

RankBrain is not just about never-before seen queries, although they are a growing part of Google's 67% chunk of the global search market and Google's approximately 3.5 billion Google searches per day. With RankBrain Google can deliver better results for rarer search terms which sophisticated searchers increasingly use.

Google has said that never-before-seen queries account for some 15 percent of all searches. These and other phrases make up something called the ‘long tail’ search which is not a simple key word or even a couple of key words, but rather a specialized search term entered to return a more focused search result. RankBrain handles the increasing number of long tail searches that more specifically describe what a searcher hopes to find.

What this means for bloggers and other content providers is that frequency of particular keywords in your content is less important. Your copy need not and should not sound as though it is knocking a reader over the head with a particular word, even if that word is as favorable a word as chocolate.

The result will be that RankBrain can hopefully deliver searchers to your content who are in a way pre-qualified for the information you are dispensing or products and services that you are selling. For more information search RankBrain.