The Top 4 Content Marketing Services for Your Business Website

The internet is content - content displayed on trillions of webpages, transferring of content from in-home applications to databases storing quadrillions of rows of content, formatting of content to look like cards and tabs on social media platforms, platforms that exist just to crawl content, order it and return it to people searching for it.

Your website has content to a certain degree, and it has a place in the internet. It's crawled every day by thousands of automated bots or web-crawlers. It's indexed in thousands of databases and servers belonging to the biggest companies in the world (e.g. Google, Bing/Microsoft). It's served on search engine result pages to hundreds, thousands and potentially millions of users every day.

Your site's content is important. It can bring new users to your website. It can be shared on social media to people all over the world. It can educate users and transform them from site visitors to prospects, leads and eventually paying customers for your company.

Your content can make you a knowledgable expert in the eyes of your audience and give you a leg up on your competition.

But content and the creation of it can be one of the most intimidating marketing tactics for your website. How do you know where to start? What's right for your business and specific situation in your industry?

You can and should seek help from experienced individuals and agencies to ensure that whatever your content marketing strategy is, the time and money invested into it will return business-growing results.

Below are some content marketing services that you could consider for your business.

1. Content strategy

If you're struggling with where and how to start in content marketing, you should consider a service to help you develop a solid content strategy.

Content marketing tactics should be treated like any business or marketing strategy in that you need to have a good understanding of your company's situation before getting started. For example ...

What are the goals of your business? And, subsequently, what would then be the goals of your content marketing?

Does your business sell products or services? Are you currently featuring a new product offering? If that's the case, the goals of your content, at least for a while, might be to create content that explains how the product works, explains the needs for it and benefits that it provides.

Does your business sell services that the general public is familiar with for the most part? Then maybe your content should be focused on deeper dives into the pluses of your services. Can you cause the readers to learn and understand a new, deeper perspective about the need for your services?

You can see how the type of content you create is greatly influenced by what your company's current goals are.

Who is your audience? Both the audience of your sales and website?

Do you offer a business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) product or service? That might change the tone and writing style of your content, and the topics you may decide to write about.

For example, B2B companies might recognize that their primary audience is other businesses, and middle- to upper-management at those businesses. If that's the case, the writing may a bit more formal and technical.

However, if your audience consists primarily of consumers, and maybe people who consume your content while looking for a hotel to stay at on vacation, the tone would be completely different. It would probably be upbeat and fun, and the content might be "The Top 10 Beaches to Check Out" - something that's definitely NOT very technical.

What are your expectations? Do you need results immediately, or do you have the benefit of being able to play the long game? Are you expecting a new post to deliver 10 new customers within the first week? Do you expect to only have to write 1 new piece of content every 6 months? Or prefer to focus on quantity over quality?

All of these questions are important to ask, and important to have a proper understanding of. And each situation is different. I would never recommend that a company just read one of these blog posts and then start spending thousands of hours and dollars on a content marketing plan without first getting a consultation from an expert.

But hopefully this will at least get you thinking about what sort of help you should expect to receive from an individual or agency providing you with a content strategy service.

A successful content marketing service will help you to gather an understanding of your current business situation, how that will affect your content creation execution, how you can go about executing your strategy and what to expect from your program.

2. Content creation

Maybe you already have what you think is a solid plan for the content you'd like to create for your website, but you just don't have the time to invest into creating the content yourself. If that's the case, you may want to look at possibly hiring an agency to help with actual content creation.

There are a number of ways that you can go about paying for content creation services. You can go low-cost and hire an individual or company that might only charge $50 or so for a 1,000-word piece of content. The problem with this is that you'll likely need to edit this content a bit yourself to make sure the English is proficient and quality is good.

You can go for quality above all else and pay up to $200 or more for a 1,000-word piece of content, but the quality would probably also be pretty high so you wouldn't need to provide much editing.

You can try to leverage an artificial-intelligence platform. This would probably be the most cost-effective option, honestly, but would require a much higher level of editing and proofreading.

Another option would be to hire an individual or agency to manage the whole content creation process for you, including finding writers and proofreading. The cost for this would probably be on the higher end, but it would be a hands-off approach.

The two most important elements here are that in the end you'll have a high quality piece of content, and a good expectation of the content that will be returned to you. For example, for $500 per month, how many articles and words are being promised to you? 3 articles at 1,000 words per piece? Make sure you know what to expect.

A successful content creation service will provide you with high quality content, or content that you'd be able to transform into high-quality, at a consistent, agreed-upon rate of production.

3. Content analysis

Maybe you have no issue with creating new content, and have a lot of content on your site already, but you're not sure how it's performing. Is it doing anything to create new prospects or customers for your business?

If you're not sure, then you should consider a content analysis and reporting service for your business.

As much as I preach the importance of creating new content, I don't believe that you should do it blindly. You should have a plan of creating content with bi-weekly or monthly performance reviews. You should know if people are viewing and consuming your content, at what rate, for how long, and what they're doing afterwards.

The end goal isn't to visit your blog post. The end goal is to turn that website visitor into an actual business prospect and customer. Which posts are doing that best? And how do those posts differ from the ones that aren't?

You should also review your content in terms of what content is ranking most highly in search engines, and which content is being shared most often on social media? A lot of this might be related to the topic of the post, or perhaps how the title and/or page description is written.

There's a lot of solid data behind the text that appears on the screen, and it can and should be analyzed so that you can learn how to do it better, and turn readers into loyal customers.

A successful content analysis service will give you the real-business impact of your content creation, help you to understand where to improve your content and save you from wasting any more time or money on content that doesn't create customers.

4. Content optimization

A content optimization service might be able to help with improving your existing content, or even helping you to write better content currently and in the future.

If your site has content or you're starting a new content creation program and want to be sure that it's optimized for success, you should consider a content optimization service.

Just because a piece of content isn't performing well, or as well as you'd like, it doesn't mean that it should get thrown away. In fact, that web page might just take more time, or maybe it just needs a few tweaks.

Content on a webpage can be modified in two ways - the way it's written in an attempt to improve user readership, and technical components to improve its search engine optimization and ranking in search engine result pages.

There are a number of strategies that you can use to improve how your content is written. For example, you can improve how you start each piece of content by adding hooks to the first few sentences which grab the readers and entice them to continue on reading.

Your headings could grab user-attention better by creating interest.

You can focus on writing shorter sentences and shorter paragraphs with more line breaks.

This is an area that I'm working on as well - there are so many ways to improve your copywriting.

Your content should also be modified for search engine optimization. Did you know that heading tags like H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6 aren't just to make the text appear in different sizes?

Actually, they're meant to be used as page and section headings, with H1 being the most prominent but used only once on the page (like the content's title), H2 is the subheading for H1, H3 is the subheading for H2, and so on.

This impacts how bots crawl your webpages, and also impacts readability for users with accessibility concerns.

Also, your content should contain relevant keywords and keyword phrases that might be used by users searching for specific queries in search engines. It's important to sprinkle these throughout your content. It's also a good idea to use other similar words, or modifiers in place of the exact keywords every time.

Just because the article has been posted doesn't mean that it can't be improved. In fact, it's a good idea to have a plan to review and modify your content on a regular basis, or hire an individual or agency to do it for you.

A successful content optimization service should help you to get more benefit and better performance out of your existing content marketing and even provide you with examples for how to improve the writing of your new content in the future.