The benefits of using goal driven content

What is the importance of goal-driven content?

Content should never be just a bunch of words filling up your website to make it look worthy of a visitor, or a way to cram in your target keywords.

Instead, you should take a goal-driven approach to content strategy. You will find that goal-driven content will work harder for you, improving your rankings more quickly and driving more traffic to your pages as a result.

Content is a huge topic filled with vague ‘best practice’ guidelines and rules which make writing or updating your site a long and laborious task that you will put of ‘till the eleventh hour.

In contrast to this, I personally think that taking the time to prepare a good content strategy will make managing your content much easier, less labour intensive, and will result in improving your website rankings naturally.

The question to consider when developing your content strategy will be ‘what sort of content should you create?’

Your website’s success (especially within search engines) will depend on regularly updated content, but it’s important that no content is created just for the sake of it.

There are three key goals that can be readily addressed with good content; Education, Persuasion and Conversion.

Education

Browsing the internet has quickly become the most common first step in a purchase process for many consumers; they are looking to gather information on the type, range, size and price of a particular product or service.

By providing all of the information required in an easy to use, informative format, you may satisfy the customer enough to stop them drifting towards the competition.

Examples of informative content may be found in downloadable specification sheets, handy guidelines, reports, press releases, articles or infographics, all of which are highly shareable too, improving your audience reach.

Persuasion

Persuasion is a key part of turning a visitor into a customer.

Persuasive content will normally be emotive and be displayed in the form of highlighting product features, expert reviews, forums and endorsements.

Key persuasive content can be incorporated into the page design to make it more prominent in the consumer research process, yet subtle at selling to the savvy consumer’s all-seeing eye.

Conversion

Last but not least, creating great content with conversions in mind can be just what you need to successfully close the deal.

This will tend to be more rational than emotive and could be created in the form of case studies, web tools, interactive demos, and price guides.

Essentially, by keeping these four goals in mind during your content strategy planning, you will make the task of content creation easier in itself, whilst also improving the quality of your site and its overall performance.

It is important to note that not all goals are essential for all of the pages, so putting a structured content plan together first will help you to map out these goals in an orderly manner.