With the way the economy is going, it isn’t a surprise if your content advertising budget has been shaved down. Perhaps, you never had the luxury in the first place. Or every piece of content that you produce, whether it is an article, blog, e-book, or video all the opportunities to perform on its own before selecting the ones you feel are worth your while investing your paid promotion budget for. 

No matter what prevents you from going that extra mile to promote your content, you can use these resources to let your audience find your content without having to spend oodles of time and tons of financial resources. 

Prepare In Advance For Traffic

If you want people to see, hear or watch your work, Drive Traffic Media, an Orange County SEO expert, suggests before you begin to produce it consider how people will get a hold of it. It is common to downplay traffic plans and leave them for the promoting phase of the cycle, but that increases the liability that the promotion will just be a mere second thought. 

During your planning stage, you need to start thinking about where and how you will direct people to your content. Throughout this stage, most of the work consists of SEO, however, your general plan most probably will use a mix of SEO, email alerts, social promotion, newsletters, channels, and personal outreach. 

For content to be prosperous with search engines, it has to provide the information requirements of the people doing the searches. Obviously, not every piece of content is meant to be a search magnet. Nevertheless, determining how your content can accommodate your target audience’s information requirements will most probably help with your email and social promotion as well. 

Think About Search Intent

The Orange County SEO expert believes the most crucial process in the planning stage is to empathize with your readers, viewers, and listeners. What are their questions regarding the topic you want to discuss? How would they word their questions? What type of content are they searching for – transactional, navigational, or informational? 

In order to achieve this, you should spend some time brainstorming on the questions you have a feeling people might have so the person creating the content can focus on them.  

Also, you don’t have to make assumptions and use your innate intuition. You should be able to find little hints by just checking out the Google search results on the topics you probably will use. 

For instance, you could take a look at the SERP elements to find a given word or phrase. For instance, let’s say you have created an editorial plan for a gardening company that consists of posts about dandelions. Place the word ‘dandelions’ into the Google search engine, then examine the results page for clues as to what people looking for the term ‘dandelions’ might be searching for. Here is how that would look like:

Image and video carousels

From some of the video title suggestions in the carousel close to the top of the page, you can notice that people searching for dandelions are trying to find out what dandelions means for their garden’s well-being and whether they can use them as a superfood. Also, Google believes people are intrigued by video content regarding dandelions. 

Look at people also ask, related searches, and autosuggest

Just above the video results are more hints in the “people also ask” box:

What are dandelions good for?

Can I eat dandelions?

Are dandelions weeds?

Is a dandelion a flower?

Are dandelions bad for your yard?

Should I pull out dandelions? 

Don’t overlook the bottom of the SERP page to study the “searches related to” area for more questions, or also known as ideas for answers to place into your content. 

One of the easiest hints about what people are looking for is one of the simplest to ignore – this is the autosuggest feature in Google. When you type in a question or search term, Google refers to what you might be searching for. 

A good tip to keep in mind is to use SERP hints to plan out parts of your content or add them to your idea folder for future content. If you work in this manner, your content will be found before you even produced it!

Keyword Research

Examining SERPs for terms significant to your content should provide you a lot of ideas about what your target audience is thinking about. Keyword research helps you pinpoint the ideas and understand what content already ranks high for these topics. In a nutshell, it is a good indicator of how much competition you are going to have, the predicted volume of search,  relevant keywords, click-through rate, and so much more. 

Create structure content and build relationships for backlinks and social promotion

Keep in mind that the main aim of all this SEO work is to bring traffic to your website. Of course, you will need people to click on your content from the SERPs, this is when coordinating your content to their search intent helps out. However, if your content is not doing its part when ranking is concerned, your probabilities of getting people to click on your content will take a hard hit. 

When you are dealing with ranking factors, it is important to have backlinks to your content. Obviously, you can’t bring in backlinks until the content is live, but you can draft the content to be a backlink magnet. 

One of the methods of doing this is to carry out and plan content based on original research. Or else you can create content that features interviews with experts in your area of expertise. This helps to validify your post and essentially guarantees that the post will be shared since it will be promoted by the quoted experts. If you strategize your content promotion in this way, you set yourself up for optimum success. 

If you enjoy these free ways to promote your content, make sure to stick around to read part two.