Summary: If you liked this post, check out our <a href="https://www.ducttapemarketing.com/small-business-content-marketing/">Guide to Content Marketing for Small Business</a>.<br> <a href="http://traffic.libsyn.com/ducttape/John_Talks_Content.mp3">Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch About Content Marketing for Small Business</a><br> I’ve had content marketing for small business on the brain recently so I thought I’d write about it today. “Boy, there is a topic that hasn’t been covered recently,” said nobody in a long time.<br> Here’s the thing though, I think it’s one of those topics that is misunderstood and certainly evolving. Content creation has fallen squarely into strategy as far as I’m concerned. In fact I often call content marketing the <a href="https://www.ducttapemarketing.com/content-strategy/">voice of strategy</a>.<br> Looking at your website, website’s structure, your SEO plan, and content or editorial plan, overlap significantly in the category of strategy, and while you have to address them in an integrated way, you also have to start thinking differently about content and how you’re going to use it to meet some of your business objectives.<br> Ever since the major algorithm changes that everybody talks about, the hummingbirds and the pandas, where low-quality content and dubious backlinks really got slapped, a lot of SEO people are really starting to come to realize that content is everything that drives that entire industry.<br> Then Google comes up with something called <a href="https://searchengineland.com/faq-all-about-the-new-google-rankbrain-algorithm-234440">RankBrain</a>. This is their artificial intelligence engine that learns not only about what people are searching for, but what they do when they find it, how they engage, how they dwell, and how they share.<br> In fact, one of the m<a href="https://tidings.com/vault/local-ranking-2020.html">ost important metrics or ranking factors in the future is going to be engagement</a>. So creating your content around getting engagement is not only a good thing from an awareness and trust-building standpoint, it’s also a very crucial ingredient in how content is going to be ranked.<br> Towards the end of 2017 I created a <a href="https://www.ducttapemarketing.com/guide-local-marketing/">guide for local marketing</a>, because I wanted to create content that was specific to the challenges of getting a local business to rank or to get customers. By local I mean that they are in a community and most, if not all, of their customers, are in that community and interact by coming into their store, or their place of business, or that they go out and have a sales call with that person.<br> There’s a lot of content on local marketing. It’s a really hot topic right now, and with that guide, I was able to rank number one in Google for various search terms around local marketing in about two week’s time.<br> I have a lot of pages that are on page one, about 1700 last time I looked. So obviously I’ve got a tremendous amount of momentum, and so I’m not going to suggest that just anybody can do this.<br> There are a lot of terms I don’t rank for in this approach. Identifying a term, a problem and a challenge that a prospective client has, and then putting all of my energy into getting that content to rank, is what took me from, maybe page two or three to the actual number-one spot, and this now is generating significant traffic,links, and opportunities.<br> Understanding intent<br> The key to anything we talk about with regard to content strategy is <a href="https://www.ducttapemarketing.com/understand-solve-problems/">intent</a>. What problems, questions, or goals does your client have?<br> Keep in mind that they’ll probably change along the way when they’re trying to find a product or a service like yours.
