“Content is king” is a marketing adage relevant to all business growth strategies. If you are promoting your brand online, you need to provide high-quality content — both for search engines and for the humans that interact with your website and social media profiles. 

When it comes to posting content — whether it's blog posts, video advertising or customer testimonials — you need to update your marketing output frequently. But you can't just post any old piece of content and expect it to boost sales and search engine rankings. If your content doesn’t provide value to your audience, you are just wasting your own time (and theirs). 

In this article, we will look at why high-quality content for SEO matters, and how you can leverage content marketing for international business growth strategies.

What makes for high-quality content for SEO?

SEO (search engine optimisation) is ensuring your offering – in this case content – contains information relevant to a user’s internet search. Search engines such as Google rank the websites they display based on keywords and how suitable and satisfactory a page is likely to be to a user.

For example, if you're searching online to buy a pair of trainers, you will click on pages that list trainers for sale. You will be less likely to click on pages that show pictures of kittens sitting in trainers (well, maybe you might, but only after you're done shopping for your new trainers). 

Buyer intent tends to rank highly in search engine results pages (SERPs) — but, buyer intent is not the be-all and end-all of high-ranking content. 

Not every marketing message you create has to be an overt sales pitch. Sometimes you need to answer potential customer questions instead. You might also decide to entertain website visitors (with a punchy tone of voice, or strategic GIFs), drawing them back to visit your site multiple times.

This “pull-back factor” is where high-quality content comes into play. You need to know which demographics of the population are likely to buy your products, and provide them with everything they need to know to be inspired to purchase. Then, hopefully, your content can influence them to come back and buy from you again and again.

You can create lifetime customers using many different types of content marketing. For example: 

• Email newsletters
• Social media updates
• Blog posts and guest blog posting (where a brand writes on another blogger's website) 
• Video advertising 
• Press releases

If you produce various types of content, search engine bots will believe that your website is an authoritative source of information on a subject –– particularly if links to your content appear on other popular websites.

Establishing your brand online as an authority on a particular topic takes a lot of time and energy. Still, the efforts to create high-quality content for SEO are worth it. 

When search engines rank websites highly, click-through and conversion rates generally increase. In short, content marketing is crucial if you are new to the industry or looking to expand into international markets.

Content marketing in business growth strategies

As your business grows, you can start to collect data on your customers and flesh out a content marketing strategy that speaks to your audience's interests and needs. 

For instance, on Facebook Insights, you can see other brands your followers like. Create ideas for pieces of content that attract people with similar interests and convince them to visit your page. 

When you are marketing for the first time to a different audience segment (in a foreign country, for instance), analytics tools are invaluable. With no prior knowledge of what an international audience might like or want from a brand, audience research eliminates the guesswork in producing content marketing ideas that attract new customers.

Adapting old content to suit new audiences

When marketing to a new audience segment, you will need to produce new content regularly, but it doesn't mean that your existing content gets left by the wayside. You can always give old pieces of content a new life. 

Take, for example, a blog post you wrote a couple of years ago that helped readers choose the best pair of trainers for their needs. The first thing you can do to refresh this content for a new batch of readers is to check if the links still work and if they take you to useful sources. In cases where links are broken, find replacement links that match the description. 

You can update other relevant information, such as listing the brands that famous tennis players or athletes wore when they won more recent competitions. You can also translate your copy to suit the cultural preferences of your new audience segment. For instance, if your Australian customers are big fans of the Australian Open tournament, switch out less-relevant references to Wimbledon. 

You do not need to start from scratch every single time you want to put out a new piece of content. You can find tools online that make both the ideation and execution of your content marketing strategy easier.

Automated content marketing tools: a help or a hindrance?

AI copywriting assistants help website owners create and fire off quick content marketing materials. 

Tools like Jarvis and CopySmith, for instance, provide content templates that are easy to mesh with your ideas, and they turn around posts in minutes, rather than hours. You can also find AI translation tools, which translate huge chunks of writing into multiple languages in seconds. 

However, as handy as these tools are, you will likely still need to invest in the help of a translator or copywriter to make sure your AI messages are well-written and impactful. Audiences favour content that speaks to them personally. Auto-translate and writing tools help you get the work done quickly, but they don't offer the same level of creative finesse (or accuracy) as a real-life marketing expert.

Use WorldFirst to pay for high-quality SEO content

When starting on your journey in developing high-quality content for new markets, make sure that you can pay for the help you outsource from international translators and copywriters. With a World Account, you can pay your freelancers quickly in dozens of currencies. 

Build solid relationships with content creators abroad with forward contracts, which let you lock in a favourable exchange rate for a period of up to 24 months – make sure that you are never paying more than you need to for help with your SEO business growth strategies. Find out more about the World Account.