Content marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to attract targeted traffic to your website and project it as an authority in its niche. However, there’s a right way and a wrong way to perform content marketing. Failure to use the latest strategies will result in few sales or conversions, minimizing the effectiveness of this otherwise powerful online marketing strategy. So, consider the following tips to conquer the search engines with content marketing.

Go Evergreen

Be Consistent: Posting consistently is critical to any content marketing strategy. It will let your customers know when to come back for more and also helps the search engines know you are serious. Of course, this will take quite a bit of planning and coordination on your part. For this, you will need some kind of marketing calendar tool that helps you handle all this. Crosscap offers an excellent example of this on their website that can help companies do just this.

You can still publish the occasional news article on your website, but it’s recommended that you focus on evergreen content for maximum benefit. Evergreen content is any content that remains relevant for a long period of time, typically three or more years. With news articles or other time-sensitive articles, you may generate some initial traffic, but that traffic will quickly die off as your content loses its relevancy.

Quality Counts

Some webmasters make the mistake of publishing hundreds or even thousands of low-quality content pages on their site, believing this will increase their visibility in the search engines results pages (SERPs). You’ll experience greater success with content marketing, however, by publishing fewer, higher-quality pages of content. Just a dozen meticulously crafted pages of stellar content is far more beneficial than thousands of poorly designed pages with low-quality content.

On-Page SEO

Don’t forget on-page search engine optimization (SEO) when publishing content on your website. The greatest benefit of content marketing is the positive impact it has on your site’s search rankings. According to Moz, a site’s content affects its search rankings more than any other ranking factor. When you publish content on your site, Google, Bing and other search engines will crawl it to determine what your site is about. And with this information, they can rank your site for relevant keywords associated with what it sells or offers.

To encourage higher rankings, though, you should perform basic SEO on your content pages. This includes adding meta elements, such as a title tag and meta description, as well as formatting your content with the appropriate headings and including links to other pages on your site. Overlooking on-page SEO will only hurt your ability to secure a top search ranking.

Add Visuals

Prior to publishing a new content page on your website, upload at least one image or video. Visuals such as these make content more appealing, thus encouraging visitors to read it. If your site’s pages consist only of text, some visitors may leave without taking the time to read it.

Research-Based Marketing

Consider research-based content marketing in your strategy to dominate the SERPs and overtake your competitors. This involves the use of academic papers, studies and research reports to project your business as an expert. Whether you create this research-based content yourself or simply cite an existing report from another company, it’s a great way to build trust with your audience.

As search engines continue to emphasize the importance of high-quality content, we’ll probably see more webmasters incorporating content marketing into their digital marketing strategy. Even with this increased competition, however, you can capitalize on this trend by following the tips described here.