Most marketers will agree that SEO is a tough nut to crack. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way to optimize your brand’s content to help improve engagement and search rankings that go beyond constant link building and other tedious aspects of SEO? According to Venngage’s Head of Growth, Nadya Khoja, there is!
In this rapid-fire talk from our Digital Summit GO! event in Jan 2021, Nadya details an easy-to-implement “hack” that will help brands to grow their organic traffic by a meaningful amount. Check out the full session video, which includes bonus Q&A at the end.
The Blueberry Enjoyment Probability Chart (02:41)
A source of frustration content marketers face on a regular basis is putting out a high volume of material that is not performing the way they would like it to. Khoja firmly believes that the root cause of this in many cases is that the focus is on quantity, and not on the quality of content.
She uses an example of a consumer purchasing a container of 25 blueberries, where 20 are rotten and 5 are perfect. When they weed through the rotten blueberries, it is highly likely that they will enjoy the 5 perfect ones. The correlation to marketing content, she argues, is that people will have a much higher likelihood of enjoying the quality content rather than weeding through a sea of bad content.
In a focus group, Nadya’s team learned that people are ultimately not reading large blocks of text. This is counterintuitive to the notion that long-form content is most effective for SEO, and illustrates that people are more likely to consume content that is broken into smaller chunks with visuals and breaks. As a result, more time was spent on the pages that contained this more attractive form of content.
Keeping your content focused on quality rather than quantity. Try integrating more dynamic and visual pieces into your content. It’ll go a long way toward capturing your audience’s attention and interest.
Get to the Point (06:13)
Khoja drives home the point that most people searching for content on the Internet are looking to accomplish two things: 1) to skim and 2) answer a question. These two factors are important to keep in mind.
Google results prove that content that is visual, has better headers, and less overall text that gets to the point is being prioritized in search results. Use that to help your audience get to that “ah-ha” moment as quickly as possible in your content.
Practice Strong Text Hierarchy & Summarize Your Images (09:15)
Content that performs well is likely to have a purposeful text hierarchy that delivers value quickly, is easy to navigate, and contains powerful visuals. Data shows that organic traffic spikes when pieces of content nail these three elements.
Be deliberate in how you structure your content from both a text and visual perspective to increase engagement, which results in stronger organic search performance. Nadya spotlights examples of this in the session video above.
In summary, Khoja encourages marketers to get rid of long-form text from their overall strategy and focus on direct, quality content that delivers value in a short amount of time through clean, concise text and images. If done correctly, a boost in organic search performance is sure to follow.
To hear from experts like Nadya and more, check out an upcoming Digital Summit event — including our Digital Summit at Home virtual conference on Mar 29-31, with 30+ sessions and workshops designed just for marketers from small and medium businesses.