Content Marketing for Your Audience is SEO that Never Sleeps

In the fantastic Star Trek Voyager series, a Borg designated Seven of Nine is ‘rescued’ and disconnected from the collective. This causes her great distress, as the voices in her head suddenly fall silent.

This weekend I think I understand how this feels. Most good SEO news sources are corporate blogs, causing a sort of giant blogging vacuum to open up once the weekend rolls around. Not being one to disappoint, I realise that this void might actually represent an opportunity in disguise.

Content Marketing is About Giving Your Audience What They Want

SEO never sleeps, takes a break or any kind of holiday. This is doubly true of content marketing. The information blogs and websites contain might be better thought of in the more traditional supply and demand model – the more writers for a topic, the less readers per writer there will be and (therefore) the more difficult it is likely to prove to find your niche. Perhaps there are very good reasons for choosing the timing of your blog posts?

Content Marketing is About Timing

In many ways, the key to SEO content marketing lies in predicting the future. Foreseeing upcoming trends and identifying the need for particular articles before others have a chance to supply them, enabling you to manoeuvre yourself into a prime position ready for when the readers come. Getting there first is easier when you only have a couple of competitors to worry about.  Once you have the top spot, it will become increasingly difficult for newcomers to challenge your position.

One Case Study

On another site I run, I endeavour to provide the solutions to a popular Lucasarts game series called the Tales of Monkey Island before anyone else. By making the solutions available on the day of the games release, not only does this make it easier for me to get into the top position in Google for phrases I suspect people will be searching for, but I actually generate traffic I would have missed if I had released exactly the same article only a couple of days later.

The graph below shows the traffic generated for these solutions, shortly after the release of the latest episode on the Friday the 30th of October 2009.  The shaded area indicates extra traffic that only the speedy writer can achieve.  If the solutions were published only a few days after this, the traffic would go to someone else.

Traffic For Game Solutions After Launch on the 30th October 2009

When it Pays to be Different

In a nutshell, it pays to be different.  Whatever you can contribute that others will struggle with, is something you can turn into a great traffic source.  Being the first to provide will ensure others are constantly playing catch-up and will be lucky to scrape second place.  Going with the crowd is likely to get your voice lost amongst other  similar messages.  But if you jump to the left while everyone is jumping  right, someone is bound to stop and take notice!

Tags: audience, competitors, content, content marketing, manchester seo, SEO