The opening two-pronged volley was pretty technical, citing how to improve your website and gain richer search-engine rankings, even beyond Google, by improving site speed, removing 404 errors, interlinking and being mobile friendly, and even understanding your own website’s search verticals and submitting to them. (See story here.)
Here, in the second installment, the team explains in their own words those oft-heard but poorly understood terms “Creating quality content”, “Becoming more social” and “Geotargeting for local success”:
CREATING QUALITY CONTENT
Quality content should answer the needs of the customer. It should be USEFUL, VALUABLE, CREDIBLE in the hopes that the customer will find it DESIRABLE to further engage with your audience and brand.
There are well over 200 algorithms that we know of, or suspect with Google, but it is not known for sure how many exist outside of that. However, one thing that has always remained true is that you need to create quality content and you can’t cheat Google over the long term.
As we mentioned, Thanyapura is a sports facility with an emphasis on triathlon, swimming and cycling. However, when we began to broaden our content to include fitness, wellness and weight loss we saw an overwhelming response.
This was the content our users really felt engaged with. They not only wanted to know how to compete in a triathlon, they wanted to learn about how to balance other areas of their lives as well. For example, nutrition, weight management, wellness, and mindfulness.
It became important to us to reach out to our audience with the content they found DESIRABLE. It was content they could USE in their lives and therefore, became a VALUABLE asset to them.
The more content we produced the more opportunity we had to promote additional content and build relationships with our customers. By forging relationships with our audience on CREDIBILITY, it became a natural process for our customers to funnel their interests into our many sports programmes.
The content that was DESIRABLE to them was the content that helped them to make informed decisions.
Once we began building up content, it was time to go social.
BECOMING MORE SOCIAL
The landscape of social media is always changing and evolving. At Thanyapura, our main focus was to capture audiences across a range of social media platforms, which included Youtube, Instagram, Twitter, Stumbleupon, Pinterest, Facebook, and Google+. In doing this, we had to focus on our storytelling skills and create unique and relatable content for each platform.
By building a following and loyal fan base, we became increasingly accessible to new customers as well as managing to retain our existing audience who have become ambassadors for our brand. They do this by freely sharing, commenting and liking pictures and stories we publish on our platforms, which builds our audience even more.
Social media is a wonderful tool to connect B2C (business-to-customer) and we expect this to grow over the next few months. With the growing reach, Thanyapura has experienced we expect to continue to engage with our customers increasingly using social media.
GEOTARGETING FOR LOCAL SUCCESS
It is very easy to target a very broad audience when building a content marketing strategy and neglect your local target market. The very first thing we did to address this issue was to search for Thanyapura on a local level – that is, for Phuket, Thailand, was Thanyapura FINDABLE?
Thanyapura offers a variety of sports resort activities, from cycling, triathlon, swimming, fitness and wellness.
We made sure that Thanyapura could be found when someone was searching for Asia, Southeast Asia or Phuket for any of the above activities. This did not happen overnight. It meant editing a range of content we already had and including alt tags on images, H2 headers, keyword placement and other tricks of the SEO trade.
By geotargeting our primary pages for services offered in the local area, we were able to build awareness in the local community.
In our third and final article in the series, we will look at the “next six months”, when the core focus shifted to: Partnership and content exchange ambassadors/teams; Monetization/Conversions; Video blogging; Improved Engagement; and Graphics/Visuals.