It’s that time of year again. Everyone is resolving to be better and accomplish more in 2023 than ever before!
While we tend to hear a lot of resolutions that focus on our personal lives, such as resolving to eat more veggies and work out more often, many of us also have resolutions related to our business. Whether it’s attending more networking events or getting or becoming a mentor, there are a lot of things we can do to show up in our business in 2023 that we may or may not have had a chance to do in 2022.
I want to spend this article focusing on how you and your business can do a better job showing up online so you can attract, engage, and convert more high quality leads through your website. With that in mind, here are some things you can resolve to do to take your content marketing game to the next level in 2023.
Table of Contents
- Resolve to Make (and Use) an Editorial Content Calendar
- Resolve to Set Aside Time to Create Marketing Content
- Resolve to Conduct Research Before Creating Your Marketing Content
- Resolve to Distribute Your Marketing Content
- Resolve to Optimize Your Marketing Content for Search Engines
- Resolve to Repurpose Your Content
1) Resolve to Make (and Use) an Editorial Content Calendar
One of the biggest mistakes I see small business owners making is that they don’t have a consistent schedule laying out when they’re going to publish and distribute their marketing content. They blog about whatever comes to mind whenever they have the time to do so. The result is that their publishing schedule is sporadic, at best, which does nothing to earn the trust of either Google or visitors to the website. If you go months, without publishing anything, your audience will forget about you and move on to a competitor who is more consistent about putting out valuable, high-quality content.
The beginning of the year is a great time to look at your calendar and consider the best times to publish and distribute content. What topics should you cover in each month? Are their specific holidays you can tie into your offerings that you should cover in your marketing content? Are you going to be releasing any new products/services in 2023 that deserve their own content marketing campaign to announce them? Once your schedule for 2023 is set, it’s time to set your content marketing schedule for the year.
If you don’t know where to begin creating an editorial content calendar, or you just don’t have the time to deal with it, I can create a customized calendar for you.
2) Resolve to Set Aside Time to Create Marketing Content
People who don’t publish new content on a regular basis fail to do so because they don’t make time in their schedule for creating content. They figure they’ll get to it when they get to it, but they never make it a priority, especially if they don’t enjoy the writing process.
The problem with the “I’ll get to it when I get to it” approach to creating content is that there’s always something else to do when you’re running a small business. There are countless other tasks with the potential to take priority over writing blog posts. The result is that your blog posts never get written, and that website you worked so hard to get up and running is not generating any leads for your business.
Instead, come up with a publishing schedule, and once you’ve done that, come up with a writing schedule. Set aside time at least twice a month (preferably once a week) to sit down and create content for your business. It helps if you pick a certain day, a certain time of day, and a certain place devoted to creating content. That way, not only does it become part of your schedule, it becomes a habit, and habits are harder to break than resolutions.
3) Resolve to Conduct Research Before Creating Your Marketing Content
As I mentioned above, one of the biggest mistakes I see small business owners making when it comes to their content marketing efforts is that they write about whatever topics come to mind without bothering to conduct research before deciding on a topic. The result is as haphazard as their publishing schedule. They end up writing about topics that either don’t interest their audience, or if they are of interest, have already been covered by so many other blogs that they don’t stand a chance of showing up in relevant searches.
Don’t let your blog fall into that trap in 2023. Instead, resolve to conduct as much research as you can before creating any marketing content, much less hitting that “publish” button.
The first thing you need to do is conduct keyword research to make sure you’re targeting keywords that fall into the sweet spot of getting a significant number of searches each month without a significant amount of competition from other websites. Then you need to determine the search intent of each keyword.
Even though I’m sure you know the topic backwards and forwards, it’s still worth taking some time to research the topic and make sure you haven’t missed anything. Remember that making sure your content is the ultimate guide to your chosen topic is key to both showing up in searches, and getting more clicks/engagement with your content, both of which boost your SEO.
Finally, don’t forget to take some time to research your competition. What are they writing about? When and how frequently are they publishing their marketing content? I never recommend copying their content, but you can copy parts of their content strategy that seem to be working for them.
4) Resolve to Distribute Your Marketing Content
Another common mistake I see people making is subscribing to the belief that, if they build it, they will come. They think they’re done as soon as they hit the “publish” button on their blog post, when in fact that’s just the beginning. Once you’ve published a new blog post, you need to announce it in your newsletter so your subscribers can take advantage of all that handy information you just gave them. You need to distribute it on your social media channels so your followers know about it. And you need to use relevant hashtags and keywords to make sure your blog post and social media posts show up in relevant online searches, which brings me to my next point:
5) Resolve to Optimize Your Website for Search Engines
Implementing sound SEO tactics is crucial to getting in front of your target audience. When people have questions about something, more often than not, their first step is going to be to conduct an online search. If your content isn’t optimized to show up in those searches, you’re missing out on countless opportunities to get in front of your target audience, especially when they’re in the early stages of the buying process.
A sound SEO strategy requires work and attention all year long, but the beginning of a new year is a great time to check in on some aspects of your SEO strategy you might have set and forgotten about a while ago. Here are some tips for making sure Google is still getting along with your website.
1) Conduct an SEO Audit
An SEO audit is the process of using a tool to scan your website for any issues that might be impacting your ability to rank for relevant keywords. Things to look out for include broken links, backlinks that hurt (rather than improve) your SEO, duplicate content, traffic sources, bounce rate, time spent on page, etc.
Ideally, an SEO audit should be done once a quarter to keep ahead of any issues with your website that might pop up while you’re busy running your business. But, let’s face it, most people are lucky if they get an SEO audit done once a year. So if your website hasn’t been audited in a while, take advantage of the new year to get that checkup done.
If you don’t know where to begin when it comes to conducting an SEO audit, we can take care of that for you.
2) Research Your Keywords
Ideally, you should be researching keywords before writing, much less publishing, any new pieces of content. But the beginning of the year is also a great time to look through your list of keywords to make sure they’re still relevant and worth targeting.
If you’ve recently been through a brand refresh or you no longer offer a particular product or service, it doesn’t make sense for you to keep using old keywords that no longer apply to what you’re trying to do.
Likewise, some keywords become more competitive, or get fewer searches as people move on to other topics. The beginning of a new year is a great time to check in on your list of keywords and update it as needed.
It’s also a great time to try to research some new keywords to see what other search terms might have popped up over the last year that you might want to start targeting.
3) Conduct a Content Audit
No matter how hard you work to make sure all your content is optimized for search engines and relevant to your audience, there are bound to be some flops. This time of year is a great time to look through your website statistics and see which pieces of content are driving results for your business and which ones are just taking up space.
Some people recommend deleting underperforming content. I don’t always agree with that, unless the content is so outdated that it has become irrelevant. But if you think you have a great piece of content that’s just not pulling its weight, now is a great time to see what you can do to breathe new life into that content. Could it be made more interesting? More relevant? Could sharing it on your socials be enough to drive traffic to and renew interest in it? This brings me to my next tip.
6) Resolve to Repurpose Your Content
Creating content is too time consuming to let it sit there gathering dust on your website. Not only does repurposing content help you get the most out of your content, it also saves time.
For example, one blog post can be broken up into snippets to go up as social media posts. It can also be shared in your newsletter so your subscribers can get all your handy tips, tricks, and updates in your industry.
If you do videos and infographics as part of your content marketing (which you should), you can cover the same content you covered in your blog in your videos and infographics. Then you can take the audio from your video and turn it into a podcast.
Remember that different segments of your audience might want to consume different types of content, so there’s nothing wrong with covering the same topics in multiple formats. On the contrary, that’s one of the best ways to get the most out of your content.
Conclusion
I’ve seen people online claiming to be SEO strategists who say they can improve your rankings by setting up a great website and then never touching it again. As much as we all love the idea of a magic bullet that solves all our problems for us, there is no such thing as an effective set-it-and-forget-it strategy when it comes to SEO. It requires constant monitoring and updating, and especially publishing new content.
It’s a lot, I know. So if you really want a better SEO strategy in 2023, you should consider hiring a professional, such as myself. I can assess your website for vulnerabilities and make recommendations for improvement. If you don’t yet have a website, or you’re in the process of having a new one created, I can come up with an SEO strategy that will help give your new website a better chance of attracting, engaging, and converting leads sooner, rather than later. Just reach out to start the conversation.
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