Knowing the types of content that work best to drive greater SEO traffic and secure more backlinks is key to successful content marketing. When you start distributing this type of content, you’ll not only notice enhanced traffic to your site, but you’ll be able to generate a higher number of leads too. More importantly, you can rest assured your content is landing in front of your targeted audience.
Let’s explore types of content that driver greater SEO traffic and secure more backlinks.
Content Curation Helps You Resonate With Your Audience
Before we dive into the types of content that YOU can create to boost SEO traffic, let’s take a look at the benefits of content curation.
Content curation gives you access to a massive world of valuable content that will resonate with your audience. Generating your own unique content is, of course, necessary for effective content marketing, but you want to make sure you don’t come across as thinking you are the only source of knowledge for the topics you are outlining. With content curation, you give your community of readers the impression that you are more than willing to provide them with any type of valuable content, even if it wasn’t created by you.
Statistics show that 68% of content marketers use content curation as a core part of their content marketing strategies. Why do they do this? Because it drives organic traffic. Greatist, a startup that hopped on the content curation bandwagon, enjoys 10 million monthly visitors to its site, with 50% of its traffic originating from organic search.
Infographics Achieve Higher Levels of Engagement
Neil Patel has become one of those marketing gurus who knows what he’s talking about. If he says something works, you can bet your bottom dollar that it does. All of his postings are jam-packed with case studies, fact-checked content, and authoritative-sourced statistics. According to his article titled The Definitive Strategy for Driving Organic Traffic Without Ranking in Google’s Top 10, infographics are one of the best types of content to drive greater SEO traffic and secure backlinks.
Not only do infographics boost traffic, but they also act as a lead and sales driver. From 2010 to 2012, KISSmetrics, a behavioral analytics platform founded by Neil Patel, received 41,000+ retweets mentioning the company’s distributed infographics. It has also been noted that in a period of only two years, online searches for infographics have increased by a mind-boggling 800%.
It doesn’t matter what stage of building an online presence you are in. Infographics attract organic visitors and boost your search engine rankings. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that when you first release an infographic, you may not get the immediate traffic you are hoping for. If you’re a sucker for instant gratification, SEO marketing is not a concept that you are well-suited for.
Neil Patel says that within the first three months of releasing an infographic, it receives nearly 23% less traffic than a blog post with no infographic. However, over the course of 12 months, the infographic ends up receiving at least 35% more traffic than the regular blog postings. Further studies show that postings with infographics earn 62% more backlinks than those that don’t include this type of visual content.
Videos Are a Consumer Preference
Videos are another form of visual content that are crucial to content marketing success. This attractive medium improves SEO efforts and gives you a way to provide more content in less amount of time. In fact, one minute of video, when used correctly, equals 1.8 million words. And with 52% of mobile traffic being a search for a video, it makes perfect sense that video content is a consumer preference.
To ensure your videos provide valuable content that resonates with your audience and earns shares and backlinks, they will need to include the following elements:
- Keyword labels
- Content that solves an issue
- Fast loading time
- Hosted on your site as well as other platforms, including social media profiles
User-Generated Content Is Highly-Valued by Consumers
More than 33% of shoppers start their buyer’s journey with an online search using a search engine. The links and content they choose to click on are determined by three factors:
- Is the content unique?
- Is the content relevant?
- Is the content trustworthy?
User-generated content hits the nail on the head in regard to all of these factors. More so, because search engines base their search results on unique and relevant content, they prefer to display links with user-generated content. This means the more user-generated content you have, the more improved your search rankings will be. Even better is that online shoppers who interact with your website’s user-generated content are twice as likely to make a purchase.
There are several ways you can go about creating user-generated content, including:
- Surveys
- Contests
- Storytelling from your customers
- Crowdsourcing
Regardless of the way you go about developing user-generated content, it is important that you understand which platforms are best to share the content across. For example, if you’re a global brand, then you’ll definitely want to take advantage of sharing user-generated content on Twitter, which is a platform that supports more than 40 languages. Also, did you know that nearly 80% of the Twitter accounts are coming from people who are outside of the United States? If your aim is to reach a global audience, then Twitter can most certainly help you achieve this content marketing goal.
If you have user-generated video content that you want to share, then you’ll need to take advantage of Facebook. This social media site is suitable for people of all ages and has more than 1.5 billion people each month who actively use the platform. It’s also a platform that receives at least eight billion video views each day. (source)
Blogs Are the Key to Driving SEO Traffic
Lastly, let’s talk about blogs. There is absolutely no denying that blog postings drive SEO traffic and secure backlinks.
Blog postings can be shared across multiple platforms that serve as traffic sources, including YouTube, Facebook, Google+, Medium, and more. And sources confirm that companies that blog on a regular basis receive 97% more backlinks. Blogs are also considered one of the most credible sources of information for consumers, and companies that feature a blog on their website are 434 times more likely to receive high rankings on search engines.
To put it simply, if you don’t have a blog, you need to get one. Marketers agree that when prioritizing blogging as a core part of their content marketing strategy, they are 13 times more likely to receive a positive ROI.
If blogging is so crucial to driving the most SEO traffic and can help secure backlinks, then you need to be asking yourself what types of content you should include in your blog postings. Fortunately, you don’t have to stick to just one type of content.
Internet users hop online to find solutions to their problems. Whether it be learning how to change the oil in their vehicles or how to pinpoint the best auto mechanics in their town, they crave answers to their how-to questions. This is why including how-to content in your blog postings is a sure way to attract traffic.
As we already talked about before, infographics are an excellent source of traffic, so you should make sure you are incorporating them into your blogging efforts. If you don’t know how to create one or you don’t have the resources to create one, you can always share ones that are already floating around on the Internet. All you have to do is make sure you include a source link and add a paragraph or two as to why you are featuring it on your blog.
It’s Time to Start Driving More SEO Traffic and Securing Backlinks
All of the content types outlined above are fairly simple to integrate into your current content marketing agenda. What you need to do is sit down and prioritize which types you want to focus on first. Don’t try to integrate all of them all at once. This will be overwhelming and you’ll likely give up before you get very far. If you ever find yourself needing any help, IGW has you covered with our full suite of SEO services, from fully managed, to individual offerings like our on page SEO service, keyword research, content strategy, link building, you name it, we’ve got you covered.
