Key Takeaways
Core of Content Relevance: Creating content that specifically addresses the needs of your audience enhances brand perception and distinguishes you in a saturated market.
Benefits of Relevant Content: Boosts branding and trust, showcases authenticity, improves search engine rankings, and drives sales and lead generation.
Creating Relevant Content: Understand and empathize with your audience, tailor content for local relevance and different marketing channels, focus on comprehensive and problem-solving content.
SEO and Relevance: Align with search intent, conduct thorough keyword research, and incorporate multimedia to boost both human appeal and search engine rankings.
What is Content Relevance?
Content relevance emerges from creating useful content that addresses specific needs of your targeted audience.
A survey highlighted that 36% of consumers have a positive brand perception when exposed to relevant content.
This implies that mentioning or recommending products organically within your content can significantly boost purchase likelihood.
Relevant content is unequivocally consumer-centric.
In today’s world, consumers are increasingly indifferent to generic content, seeking materials that resonate with their unique situations and problems.
With over 7 million articles published daily, information is ubiquitous.
Thus, content relevance becomes a vital tool to distinguish yourself from competitors.
Many businesses haven’t embraced content marketing, much less focused on relevancy.
Start creating relevant content to gain a competitive edge in the long run.
5 Amazing Benefits of Creating Relevant Content
- Branding
Relevant content positively influences how your audience views your brand.
Helping people solve problems enhances brand perception, especially when it’s done without direct sales intent.
- Trust and Authority
Content relevance significantly contributes to building trust with your audience.
In my view, trust building, second only to sales, is a crucial outcome of content engagement.
Trust invariably leads to sales, as people prefer buying from trusted sources.
- Authenticity
91% of consumers favor authentic brands.
Broad topics might not always showcase authenticity effectively.
Focusing on specific solutions to problems allows your brand to demonstrate its values and standpoints.
- Search Engine Rankings
Engaging, relevant content usually performs better in Google rankings.
People engage with it longer and are more likely to share it, which enhances search engine visibility.
- Sales and Lead Generation
Ultimately, combining all the above benefits leads to positive business results.
Content centered around specific problems naturally aligns with suggesting targeted solutions.
This strategy can result in qualified leads and even direct sales.
Relevant Content Marketing
Content marketing is all about creating content aimed at improving business results.
A significant 72% of marketers report increased engagement and leads through content marketing, highlighting its impact.
But when you infuse your content with extra relevance, it becomes a super-charged tool for even better results.
Relevant content marketing is not just an option; it’s a necessary evolution in a world overflowing with content.
To stand out, your content must offer something more – that ‘extra mile’ of relevance.
How to Create Relevant Content
Creating or enhancing the relevance of your content is straightforward yet demands time and effort.
It’s about doing more than your competitors.
For bloggers, don’t overlook your older content.
Updating old posts with new statistics, studies, or sections on recent developments can significantly boost their relevance.
Let’s delve into some strategies for making your content more relevant, whether new or old.
Know Your Audience
The foundation of relevant content is understanding your audience.
Develop an audience persona, a fictional yet realistic character based on real data and market research.
Remember, your audience isn’t just a set of numbers; they are real people with specific needs and desires.
Creating a detailed audience persona allows you to empathize with your consumers, enabling you to produce content that resonates with their needs and problems.
Locally Relevant Content
If you’re running a local business, creating locally relevant content is crucial.
Remarkably, 46% of all Google searches are for local information.
For example, if you own a shoe store near the Pacific Crest Trail, producing content like “Top 10 shoes for Pacific Crest Trail hiking” could be immensely valuable.
This type of content not only helps potential customers but also positions you to sell directly to them.
Google is more likely to direct traffic to you for local queries.
Remember, content isn’t limited to products. It can include local events, landmarks, or community news.
Your goal is to integrate your online presence with your local community, always prioritizing value over sales.
Adapt Content to Different Marketing Channels
It’s essential to respect the unique characteristics of each platform you publish on.
For instance, a 2,000-word blog post wouldn’t work the same way on X, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
On YouTube, you’d need to transform it into a video format.
Even on platforms with similar content types, like X and Instagram, tailoring your approach—such as adding a brief description on X and a longer one on Instagram—can enhance performance.
Simple tweaks, like starting posts with “Hey, Instagram…” or “Hey, X…” can add platform-specific relevance.
Always consider the platform’s nuances for the best engagement and results.
Create Comprehensive Content
Comprehensiveness is a key attribute of relevant content.
It’s beneficial to explore a topic or keyword from multiple perspectives.
When crafting content, aim to provide all necessary information for your audience to address their needs.
I often experience an “A-ha!” moment when content reveals an unexpected aspect of a topic. This is the hallmark of comprehensive content.
Creating such content not only educates but also tends to rank well in search engine results pages (SERPs), given its usefulness.
Before starting, assess existing content on the topic and strive to enhance it.
For more on creating comprehensive content, check out my detailed article on the subject.
Create Content That Solves Problems
People turn to Google for solutions.
Google’s goal is to provide those solutions, whether it’s advice on the best lawn mower, current fashion trends, or weight loss tips.
If Google fails to solve users’ queries, they might switch to another search engine.
Google’s search algorithm is increasingly adept at discerning whether content satisfies user queries.
Making problem-solving the focal point of your content will lead to appreciation from your audience.
Consequently, Google is likely to increase the visibility of your content.
SEO Side of Content Relevance
Important: This section isn’t a full SEO guide but focuses on enhancing your content’s relevance for both humans and search engines.
Creating content that appeals to humans is crucial, but it’s equally important to make it relevant for search engines.
I’ll highlight three key areas where you can boost your content’s relevance, benefiting both your audience and search rankings.
Search Intent
What exactly is search intent?
Consider the query “keto dessert recipe.” If you take a look, the top Google results are primarily recipe lists.
This indicates that users searching for “keto dessert recipe” want to find a variety of recipe suggestions.
Crafting an article solely on the principles of ketogenic desserts, regardless of its quality, misses this search intent.
Why?
Because Google’s algorithm understands that for such a query, an article without a list of recipes won’t resonate well with users. Thus, it won’t rank high.
Remember: Aligning with search intent is crucial for content relevance and ranking.
Keyword Research
Understanding your competition is vital when creating content.
For short-tail keywords with high competition, it’s unlikely search engines will rank new content or websites highly in the SERPs.
Focus on long-tail keywords to improve your chances in the SERPs.
Long-tail keywords are excellent for creating relevant, in-depth content that addresses specific problems and solutions, allowing for natural product mentions and monetization.
Conduct thorough keyword research to uncover these long-tail opportunities.
Images and Videos
Incorporating relevant images and videos is crucial.
Consider how social media platforms have evolved to understand the importance of multimedia.
No successful platform is limited to one type of media anymore.
For example, X, initially known for 140-character posts at its early beginnings, now supports longer tweets and multimedia like images and videos.
Interestingly, Instagram, a visually-centered platform, has seen success with posts that include lengthy descriptions.
In blogging, Google rarely promotes content without images.
Adding videos significantly impacts ranking factors like dwell time, average session duration, and bounce rate.