SEO is dead and if you solely rely on SEO for getting traffic to your website then your business will starve due to dearth of traffic. To sustain an online business, you need qualified traffic which can convert.

Recently Google has been changing its algorithm every other day. Some changes usher huge changes other go un-noticed but whatever the changes are, they are implemented keeping the end-users in mind. So as an online business owner, marketer or a blogger what should you do to quench your thirst for traffic and leads?

There are hundreds of online marketing guides, white papers, case studies available over internet which can help you learn about SEO or online marketing but when It comes to practicality they are not of much help. What should you do in this scenario? Are there no ways in which you can succeed in getting referral traffic through search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo or DuckDuckgo?

Yes, there are ways. You can still leverage search engine to direct traffic to your website but for that, you need to combine content marketing, SEO and social media.

Otherwise, no can help you in getting free traffic except if you are very much popular on social media platforms and fans are crazy about your every update.

How to create a fool proof ROI based content strategy for your website?

The mantra is simple: You need to know your target audience. Try to think who are going to be your prospective customers or if you have a existing clientele, analyze them. Say, you are a cosmetic company which sells beauty products to girls.

Your target audience is every female in the demographic range of 16 to 45. I don’t mean that people below this age range will not buy from you but your 98% consumption will be driven by 16-45 segment.

Now you can further compartmentalize the generic group in two segments: 16-35 and 35-45. Besides you can also target males in the range of 20-40 who are most likely to buy cosmetics for their girlfriends, fiances or wives. Now, since you have identified your audience, you need to find out where they hang out on the Internet.

What kind of website they visit? Do they prefer Pinterest or Twitter? What kind of content they consume? What kind of videos they watch on YouTube or Daily motion?

The more you know your audience the better you will be able to attract them and sell them. Try to find out their pain, their problem which you can solve through your product.

Most of the young age girls, want to look slim and beautiful and they watch often search “How to Look beautiful” or “How to loss weight”  on Google or YouTube etc. These are just examples they search millions of other thins too ranging from cute to naughty. Hehe, don’t giggle. Keep on reading what to do next after you have identified your audience, their favourite hangouts and their problems.

After you have identified your target audience and their favourite hangouts, now its time to prepare a killer content strategy based on your research. Content strategy just not need to be plain text, it can be an infographic, video, blog, how-to guide, tutorial, white paper, case study etc.

Let us visualize the idea by continuing our example. For the cosmetic company, you have identified your audience and you know the ins and out.

One great tip: When you produce any kind of content, keep the genuine interest of your audience in mind. At SEO Corporation, we always urged our clients to have a solid content marketing strategy in place and whoever followed our advice, saw tremendous growth in their company.

I don’t want to disclose the names coz most of them are still with us and I don’t want our competitor pitching and irritating that client un-necessarily. The very client gets 220,000 unique visitors to his website in a month just by implementing our suggested content marketing strategies.

Can you imagine, how much time did we take to build his traffic from zero to 220,000? Just six months!! If you are into online marketing, you know the value of this insane amount of traffic for a new website. All said, let us come back to our topic.

Produce tutorial videos on looking beautiful or getting slim or write blog posts or create info-graphics. Or you can create podcasts or webinars for your audience.

But how can you know which keywords are they using to search the information related to their requirements? Use Google Trends. Say, you type beauty tips or any other keywords, you can see which keywords are being trended. Facebook also launched a trending topic a few days back. Although It does not give you exact figures it gives you lots of ideas.

After you have chosen the keywords. You can decide whether you want to write a blog or produce a video.

Tips for blogs: If you have decided that you are going to write a blog then keep the following things in mind:

1)  Write a killer headline. No one will read your blog or even click on your blog’s links if your headline is not seductive. You can create headlines like “Top 10 Beauty Tips to Look Young”, or “How to Loss Weight in less in than 30 days” etc. Solve a problem and you will be loved, recommended and shared.
2)  Write long, detailed content: Have you seen Wikipedia articles ranking for every $#%@ term. You know why? Wikipedia articles are long, detailed and impartial and full of facts and credible links. Create 2000+ word content. Search Engines are smart enough to know that nothing substantial can be written in 500-word articles or blogs so write long blogs and articles. Create tutorials etc.
3)  Write frequently: Frequency is very important. If you don’t write consistently. Then you will won’t see much improvement. A research conducted by HubSpot concluded that COMPANIES THAT BLOG 15 OR MORE TIMES PER MONTH GET 5 times MORE TRAFFIC than companies that don’t blog and COMPANIES THAT INCREASE BLOGGING to 6 FROM 3 5X/MONTH 8X/MONTH  ALMOST THEIR LEADS.

THE AVERAGE COMPANY WITH 100 OR MORE TOTAL BLOG ARTICLES IS MORE LIKELY TO EXPERIENCE CONTINUED LEAD GROWTH. Want to read why every business should blog? Then read this blogpost with info graphics.

Video: YouTube is the second largest search engine. People tend to consume rich media more and more. Create creative and informative videos and never forget to optimize them for YouTube. But do you know that you need skills to rank on YouTube to ranging from crafting Title, description and tags? Read how to do video SEO here.

Info-graphics: Create info-graphics. Info-graphics attract lots of link love and they tend to be shared more.

Some more articles which will help you prepare a killer content strategy are as follows:

1)    The Ultimate Guide on Content Marketing
2)    How to Use Pinterest for Business