• 17 Jun 2016
  • 6 Min read

What does great content have in common with chart-topping songs?

With the wealth of top-quality content on the internet, competition can be fierce when it comes to standing out from the crowd with your own content marketing efforts. If you’re looking to grab reader’s attention and earn your spot at the top of the SERP results, then you should start taking your content marketing cues from the songs that top the charts.

What you can learn about content marketing from the songs that top the charts

Content that ranks well is like a song that reaches the top of the charts: it’s different enough to catch people’s interest, but made up of the same essential ingredients as almost every other pop song.

A good pop song is likely to follow a verse-chorus-verse structure and use no more than four or five chords. This is as true today as it was 50 years ago, and if you were writing a song with the aim of having it reach the top of the charts, you’d be ill advised to do anything other than this tried-and-tested formula.

The same applies to content marketing — the highest-ranking pieces of content for any given search term share key ingredients, and if you want your own content to rank in the top spots for that term, then you’ll need to use these commonalities to your advantage.

However, if you want your content to stand out from the crowd, you’ll need to make sure it’s unique enough that people have a reason to engage with it, just as you would if you were writing a song. Read on to find out how you can find the right balance with your content marketing.

Use a tried-and-tested structure

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The songs that top the charts rarely stray from the same tried-and-tested formula — a four-minute song that features four or five chords in a verse-chorus-verse structure. Here’s the first thing the songs that top the charts can teach you about content marketing — if you want your content to rank highly, stick to a structure that’s proven to work.

What does this look like in practice?

Well, if you were writing a recipe for chocolate cake, you would search for the term “chocolate cake recipe” in Google and look at the first page of results. In this case, they all contain plenty of images, a list of ingredients, step-by-step instructions, and the finished product’s nutritional value.

Google will find it strange if your recipe doesn’t follow this format as well, as it will know that you’re missing out on something important. The search engine will therefore place your content below the pieces of content that do include these elements, as the search engine knows that user’s find them useful.

Google is now so advanced that it doesn’t just look at the structure of the content; it also considers the content’s length, its comprehensiveness, its reading level, and the length of the sentences and paragraphs within the content.

In our chocolate cake recipe example, Google knows that users looking for this kind of content don’t want an essay. Instead, they want a few hundred words, mainly in lists, written in simple language with lots of verbs. To make sure your recipe has the best chance of ranking highly on Google, you should follow this as well — all while adding enough unique value to stand out from the crowd.

Use related keywords

Another way that Google analyses your content is by looking at the copy on the page and searching it for mentions of words and phrases that are frequently associated with its topic. If your content features these words, Google will know that it’s more likely to be useful to its users, so it will place your content higher up in the results.

For example, if we go back to our chocolate cake recipe, Google is going to know that a resource entitled ‘chocolate cake recipe’ is not going to be very useful for the user if it doesn’t include the words “flour”, “sugar”, and “butter”, as it knows that pieces of content that are helpful to users always include these words.

Including these common words and phrases in your content is useful for the reader as well — imagine if you’re looking for an article explaining how to ride a bike and the highest ranking piece of content doesn’t include the words ‘pedals’, ‘handlebars’, and ‘brakes’ at all. It’s unlikely to be much use to you.

By including these associated words and phrases in your content wherever it is natural to do so, it will give further signals to Google that your content is relevant to the topic, which will increase your ranking. On the other hand, if you write a piece of content that doesn’t use the words and phrases that are most common among articles on the same topic, it’s like writing a pop song without vocals — it’s unlikely to be a hit.

Become an authority

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Artists such as Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, and Justin Bieber have spent years releasing songs that top the charts, so when they release a new single, people go out of their way to hear it. Similarly, if you become an authority in your sector, and your target audience will listen whenever you have something to say.

For example, if you run a successful food blog that already has an established audience and ranks highly for the term ‘recipes’ as a whole, then your site is much more likely to rank highly for ‘chocolate cake recipe’ as well. This is because Google will know your website is a useful source of similar information, and will therefore assume users will find your chocolate cake recipe useful as well.

So how do you become an authority and enjoy this kind of success in your field? While you can’t expect to write a hit piece of content straight away, if you dedicate resources to creating content that sticks to a tried-and-tested formula but always has something to set it apart, you’ll give yourself the best possible chance of establishing yourself as an authority within your sector.

This is going to take some intelligent planning, but in the long run, it will yield results that short-term tactics won’t even be able to begin to match.

While this can be a daunting prospect, we have plenty of resources to help you get started on the road to producing top-class content marketing, starting with parts one and two of our guide to creating content that sticks. Alternatively, get in touch with us today to discuss how we can help your business stand out from the crowd and rise to the top of the search results through your content marketing.

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