Content will continue to be a key part in SEO moving into 2014. I don't think that will ever adjust. But your strategy has to become accustomed if you're going to keep up.
Here are five ways to make sure your content will sustain in the New Year and move you past your competitors.
1. Marketing Automation to calculate It
We know, and clients know, you want good content, and for a while, that's all they wanted. But in 2014, clients will demand more than "8 blog posts published" as a KPI, and that's where marketing mechanization comes in.
For me, the benefit of a marketing automation platform like Pardot or HubSpot isn't in automating your tactics; it's in as long as a better way to report and measure how your content is working for you. You can see things like:
• Content patterns: You can see if a user is only concerned in one topic, and only serve them content that matches their benefit.
• Sales over leads: Syncing into a CRM, instead of showing clients leads your content brought, you show them sales.
2. Smarter, and individual, Content in Emails
Email marketing can be a huge enhancement to traffic and sales, but it demands creative content specially for that user: Those timeless clichés won't work anymore. You have to find a new approach.
3. Make It Available On the Move
In 2013, 63 percent of cell phone users used their phone to go online. That's doubled since 2009.
Google authorized responsive web design in 2012, and Google's Matt Cutts has lately stated responsive won't hurt your SEO, but the move to more mobile-friendly web experience brings to light a larger question with your overall content strategy.
We classify devices in three types: desktop, tablet, and mobile. But within those sections, you're at rest working against dozens of different screen sizes. Not all laptop screens were created uniformly, and the same goes for tablets and smartphones.
With most responsive design, when you scale to a smaller screen, the content on the right moves below the content on the left. But what happens when that piece of information on the left is a critical call to action? You don't want that at the bottom when it's on a dissimilar device.
You have to think about how your content will look on the dozens of different screen sizes your users use to read said content.
4. Separate Content From Link Building
For most, 2013 was the year that "content marketing" replaced "link building." If Google Trends is any signal, that will continue into 2014.
unhappily, that's not how we should look at content. If you're writing content for the sole purpose of building links, you're doing it wrong. Content – and content marketing – is a part of link building, but they're not interchangeable.
In 2014, write content for the purpose of educating and informing, not manipulating and profiting. And when it get links, it'll be even better.
5. Small Tastings Mixed With Larger Portions
A couple of years' back, we wrote a lot of content on one page because it was better at attracting search engines. In 2013, we wrote 1,500-word plus blog posts because users wanted to sink their teeth into it; the more in-depth your content, the more likely people will share it.
Summary
The key thing to keep in mind is content isn't going anywhere, not in 2014 and not ever. It's just getting modified to fit what your users want and how they're accessing it.
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