What do you mean by ‘content’?

Content can take many different forms, including:

• On-page content

• Social media, primarily:

  • Facebook

  • Twitter

  • Google+

  • LinkedIn

  • YouTube

• News/event updates

• Community involvement/interaction (not limited to social media)

• Reviews and Testimonials

• Blogging

• FAQs

• And many more

By looking for certain keywords—in context—in all of these platforms, a search engine will associate those keywords with you. Therefore, in a basic sense, the more you and your target keywords appear together in different ways and on different platforms can cause your website to rank higher in a search.

When dealing with content, the focus is primarily on the customer. Think of your industry as a conversation: there are those within the industry carrying on the conversation, then there are customers on the outside who raise their hand when they have a question. The goal is to make you the leader of that conversation: to be the authority within and without your industry.

To put it another way, inbound or content marketing is, according to blogger Mark McGuinness, “media content that doesn’t look like marketing but functions as marketing.” That’s the soul of the idea: to create something of high enough quality that it will sell itself when it is found organically with intent. This notion comes naturally to us in The Show-Me State!