Where is your content heading in 2014? 5 top things to keep in mind

Ask Google, what single factor they focus on more than anything else on a website to give it more ranking points? The answer will be “Content”. Yes, the information rich and unique content. In SEO circles it’s indefatigably repeated time and again that “Content is the King”. No denying that. In fact no one will, as year on year there is no other option in the vicinity to confront that and the phrase is now almost losing its meaning. But in practice, why only Google? For any other search engine of repute, content is still the king of the arena, which can make or break a website in a matter of few rounds of the crawling bots! Moving ahead, so in 2014 content will continue to rule all SEO initiatives like ever before and this is not going to change anytime in near future. Your SEO strategy has to adapt to this to keep one level up with your competitors and that’s going to be the challenge. Here you can take note of five points which will definitely ensure your content’s success and help you to steam ahead in 2014,

1.    Marketing Automation- know your content

People have started realizing the power of content marketing and in 2014, clients will demand more than a few posts as Key Performance Indicator (KPI). Marketing Automation, like Pardot or Hubspot, is a platform that not only helps in automating your marketing tactics, it equally helps you with a way to report and measure how your content is working for you. This platform can give you information like:

• Content patterns: where you can see a user’s choice of a particular type of content and then feed him with that type of content
• Sales over leads: Syncing with a CRM, you can show actual sales instead of client leads, your content have generated

2.    Personalized Email Contents – the smarter way

Email marketing, though has become a poor cousin of other prominent digital marketing channels, can become a recognizable traffic and sales generator. By customizing emails and targeting individual users, this can be a winning mantra of 2014 in bringing customers to your website.

3.    Mobile Content- A thing you better keep in mind

While we see the number of mobile device users is increasing by the day, we look back and see in 2013, 63 percent of the mobile phone users were using their device to go online. So when delivering content for three different types of platforms, viz. desktop, mobile and tablet one thing you need to keep in mind that not all of these devices have same screen size. To make a site responsive and present content uniformly as desired will be a challenge for the designers to live up to. As of now for a responsive site, the content on the right side goes beneath the content on the left side when we resize the window. You will have to find a way to present your call-to-action button if that happens to be on the right side and do not show up nicely when you resize your window.

4.    Keep Content separate from Link Building- Do not push your content for building link

Link Building is already a passé and if you go by Google Trends this is not going to change in 2014 either. “Content Marketing” has already replaced “Link Building”. But Content should not be looked at from that angle- for building links. In fact you should write unique content for adding value to a site, for the purpose of informing and not for manipulating and earning. It’s not going to harm you on the way if you get some useful backlinks, anyway!

5.    Think Micro- small bytes of information is the order of the day

There was a time when people used to look for information of say, 1500-2000 words. The perception was that the bigger packaged more valuable information to read and share. But in 2014, you hardly get ample time to sit back after you finish your day job and read one blog for 20 minutes and then share it! No one has that time today. Instead we enjoy small bytes of information, not necessarily unique content, that are coming on your Facebook or Twitter as a chunk from a bigger post elsewhere. We enjoy this kind of stuff to read on the move and share if we like to read that further at our leisure.

So to summarize, we can say that Content will still remain the King in 2014 and so forever. It’s only how Content is getting adapted to users’ requirement and taste. The onus is only on us to see how we serve the concoction on a user’s plate.