Relevant content has a huge impact on how your audience perceives advertisements and, in turn, your content monetization efforts.
According to this survey, 36% of consumers said that their perception of a brand was positively impacted when advertised next to relevant content.
Meaning, if you organically mention or recommend products in your content when it’s relevant to do so, you audience is more likely to buy them.
In this article, you’ll learn what content relevance is, and how to create relevant content.
Let’s start!
What is content relevance?
Content relevance is the result of creating useful content that solves specific problems for a targeted audience.
Relevant content is blindly consumer-centric.
At this point, consumers have become almost numb to the general type content.
They’re more and more seeking content that applies to their specific situation and problem.
Over 4.4 million articles get published each and every day on the Internet.
Information has become a commodity.
Content relevance is one of the most useful tools that can help you set yourself apart from your competition.
A lot of businesses are still not even taking advantage of content marketing, let alone “relevant content marketing.”
Start creating relevant content and you’ll dominate your competition in the long run.
5 amazing benefits of creating relevant content
1. Branding
Relevant content has a positive impact on how your audience perceives your brand.
When you help people solve their problems, they take note of that.
And when you do it without trying to sell them anything, the results get even better.
2. Trust and authority
Content relevancy actually moves the needle when it comes to building trust with your audience.
In my opinion, apart from the actual sales, trust building is the most desired outcome of content consumption.
Trust inevitably leads to sales because when people trust you, they buy from you.
5. Authenticity
Authenticity is very important because 91% of consumers prefer buying from authentic brands.
Talking about broad topics doesn’t always lend itself to showing your authenticity.
It’s much easier to be authentic when talking about concrete solutions to people’s problems.
This is where you as a brand can demonstrate what you stand for and what values you hold.
4. Search engine rankings
Relevant content tends to be engaging.
And engaging content tends to do better in the Google rankings.
People simply spend more time with it and are more likely to share it in their social circles.
This, in turn, boosts your search engine rankings and brings even more audience to your content.
5. Sales and lead generation
At the end of the day, when all the benefits above come together, positive business results are inevitable.
Relevant content tends to revolve around specific problems, which in turn lends itself to recommending targeted solutions to these problems.
At that point, it’s very likely you’ll score qualified leads for your business or even sales.
Relevant content marketing
Content marketing is the process of creating content with an end goal of improving your business results.
72% of marketers say that content marketing helped them increase engagement and the number of leads.
That is how powerful content is.
Now, add a layer of relevance to that content and you get a super-charged piece of content that yields even better results.
Relevant content marketing is a natural evolution of content marketing.
When there’s so much content out there, you need to go the extra mile to stand out.
And that extra mile could be adding more relevance to your content.
How to create relevant content?
Creating relevant content or adding content relevance to your existing pieces of content is simple, but it takes time and effort.
It requires going above and beyond of what your competition is putting out there.
If you’re blogging, don’t forget your older pieces of content.
You can always update your old posts and add relevance to them in many ways.
For example, you can add fresh statistics or studies supporting your ideas or add new sections on relevant new developments and make the piece more comprehensive.
Let’s consider a few key ideas that can help you add relevance to your new or old content.
Know your audience
One of the ways that can help you add relevance to your content is to simply get to know your audience.
Create your audience persona.
An audience persona is a fictional character that you create based on real data and market research.
Your audience isn’t some kind of a vague, undefined collection of numbers and statistics.
They’re living, breathing human beings with needs and desires.
Fleshing out your audience persona can help you put yourself in the shoes of your consumers.
When you truly know what audience you’re serving, you can start creating user relevant content based on their needs and problems.
Locally relevant content
If you own a local business, this one’s a no-brainer.
46% of all searches on Google are seeking local information.
If you own a local business, locally relevant content is your bread and butter.
Adding local relevance to your content could be as simple as creating content around local intent-based topics and keywords.
For example, let’s say you own a shoe store in the Pacific Crest Trail area.
You could start creating content like “Top 10 shoes for Pacific Crest Trail hiking” where you recommend shoes that are great for the terrain found in the Pacific Crest Trail area.
A content piece like that would bring tremendous amount of value to someone seeking new hiking shoes when they’re about to embark on a hiking trip there.
Not only would you be recommending a great pair of shoes to them, but you’d also be able to sell them a pair.
Google would happily send all the traffic and business on this topic your way.
Side note: you don’t just have to create content based on products.
It can be based on anything relevant to your community like events, people, landmarks, other businesses, etc.
You want to tie your online presence with anything and everything going on in your local community.
Keep in mind that providing value still comes first, though.
Only try to sell when it feels organic and it makes sense.
Create content relevant to different content marketing channels
Another great way to add extra relevance to your content is respecting the nuances of the platforms you’re publishing it on.
Let’s take a 2,000 word blog post as an extreme example.
You can’t publish this blog post in the exact same form on your blog, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, and LinkedIn.
If you wanted to post that article on Youtube, you would have to fundamentally change it and shoot a video around the same topic.
But even when the differences between platforms aren’t THAT big, it’s still a good idea to be familiar with the nuances of each of them.
For example, you have a 45-second video you want to post on Twitter and Instagram.
Technically, you could post the identical video on both platforms and not change a thing.
But if you added a short description on Twitter and a longer description on Instagram, the content would do better on each platform.
You would end up with two pieces of content that are seemingly identical.
And yet they would yield better results on their respective platform thanks to those little changes.
You could even add platform relevance if you started your posts with something as simple as “Hey, Instagram…” or “Hey, Twitter…”
Create comprehensive content
Comprehensiveness is another great quality of relevant content.
It’s always a good idea to cover a topic or a keyword from as many angles as possible.
When creating a piece of content, always try to provide your audience with everything they’ll need to know to solve their problem.
I don’t know about you, but I often catch myself going “A-ha!” when I learn something new in an article or a video on the topic I’m interested in.
This usually happens when the content creator attacks the problem from an angle I didn’t even think of.
In other words, they made a comprehensive piece of content.
Another great benefit of creating comprehensive content is that it usually ends up high in the SERPs if you also make it useful.
So, before starting to create the content, always check out what’s already out there and try to make your piece of content better.
This is what’s called The Skyscraper Technique.
Figuratively speaking, create content that towers over what your competitors are putting out there.
I go much more in depth on how to create comprehensive content in this article.
Create content that solves problems
People come to Google seeking solutions to their problems.
And Google does everything in its power to provide those solutions.
Be it advice on what lawn mower to buy, which shoes are trendy at the moment, or what you need to do to lose a couple of pounds.
Google simply can’t afford not to provide a solution to your problem.
Or you’ll start using a search engine that does.
This is why Google is trying hard to develop its search algorithm to be able to tell if your audience left satisfied with your content.
And the algorithm is getting more sophisticated at this task by the day.
Make problem solving your north star and your audience will thank you for it.
In turn, Google will reward you with even more eyeballs on your content.
SEO side of content relevance
Important: this part of the article is not a substitute for a comprehensive SEO guide.
I will only cover ideas that help your content be more relevant to both humans and search engines.
Anyway…
Creating relevant content for humans is not the only kind of relevance you can add to your content.
You can also make your content more relevant to search engines.
I’d like to mention three areas where you could be scoring points with both humans and search engines at the same time when it comes to content relevance.
Search intent
What does search intent mean?
Basically, if you type something like “keto dessert recipe” into Google, you will notice that virtually all of the top results are recipe lists.
This means that searchers that type “keto dessert recipe” into Google are looking for keto dessert recipe suggestions.
To write an article on what makes a dessert recipe ketogenic would be to miss the search intent.
Even if you write a masterpiece and explained exactly what makes a dessert recipe ketogenic, your article would rank high for this keyword.
Why?
Because the algorithm knows that an article on this keyword would not do well if it doesn’t have a list of recipe suggestions in it.
Keyword research
You have to consider your competition when creating content.
Odds are, the search engines will simply not push your content on short-tail keywords to the top of the SERPs if there’s a lot of competition.
Especially if your website domain or the content piece itself is new, or both.
To give your content a better fighting chance on the SERPs, you should look into creating content on the long-tail keywords.
Luckily, long-tail keywords lend themselves perfectly when it comes to creating relevant content for your audience and search engines too.
They allow you to get deeper into the subject and tackle real problems.
And tackling real problems enables you to talk about the solutions to those problems.
In other words, mention products and monetize your content in an organic way.
To find those long-tail keyword opportunities, you will have to do keyword research.
Images and videos
Using relevant images and videos in your content is invaluable.
To realize how much people like multimedia content, just think of the social media platforms and how they evolved.
There’s not a single successful platform out there that’s only one-dimensional when it comes to media it allows you to display.
Twitter only used to allow 140-character written word posts back in the day.
Now, you can not only post longer tweets, but you can also have both images and videos accompany those tweets.
Instagram, on the other hand, has become a platform where posts with longer descriptions actually work.
Written word does well on an image and video-centric content platform.
Go figure…
When it comes to blogging, Google actually hardly ever promotes content that doesn’t have at least images in it.
And adding video content to your blog posts positively impacts many direct and indirect ranking factors like dwell time, average session time, bounce rate, etc.
Conclusion
Relevant content marketing is taking content marketing and adding an extra step towards providing value to your audience.
Regardless of format or platform, you can always make your content more relevant by making it consumer-centric and value-driven.
Remember, it’s all about your audience.
Make them happy and connect them with solutions to their problems and good things will happen for your business.