At the Sydney Hills Business Chamber breakfast this morning we were treated to a fabulous presentation by Tony Eades from The Brand Manager. In part, he talked about the increasing importance of mobile friendly content and creating content that satisfies the “micro-moments” of our potential clients.

Oddly enough I only heard the term “micro-moments” recently, but the concept itself was certainly a familiar one – that of creating content that people find when they perform a search because they want to know something, do something, buy something or go somewhere.

For a good while now we’ve helped clients to identify likely micro-moments (I think I like that term!) by undertaking keyword and topic research to identify “long tail keywords” that suggest a buying intention (present or future). It’s a process that helps ensure you’re creating content that your target audience are likely to be searching for in their moment of need – whether that’s a need for initial information, a need to compare, a need to buy, go, or do.

What Google says

The Google Guide to micro-moments mentions:

“Ultimately, showing up gets your brand in the game to be chosen, not just seen. By being there, your brand has the chance to address consumer needs in the moment, help move someone along their decision journey and deepen their loyalty.”

The Guide is well worth reading. You might also enjoy the Google micro-moments video.

For those looking to increase the visitor numbers to their business website, we highly recommend creating this type of content when planning your content strategy, whether you’re focusing on blog content and social platforms, or you lean more towards video, webinars and podcasts.

Free and inexpensive tools you can use

If you’re a small business and not yet able to recruit a content marketing manager or outsource to a content agency, here are some excellent free or affordable tools you can use to plan your content:

1. Keyword Tool IO is an easy to use tool that can help you to identify potential long tail keyword queries that address your prospective clients’ micro-moments. For example, when I use this tool it tells me that about 390 people a month (in Australia) search for how to write a media release.

As one of our services is writing media releases, I might do well to create some content that answers that question. (I must say, it’s interesting to know that about the same number of people search how to write a love letter!)

The free version of this tool has some limitations, so consider the paid version.

Don’t overlook the FREE tool Google Webmasters. This can provide you with a tremendous amount of information about how your website is doing, including how your pages rank for particular keywords – i.e. whether they’re coming up on page 1, 2 or 50 of the search results.

That’s handy information if you know what to do with it, which in this context is this: looks for terms that are bringing you organic traffic even though your site is not displaying on page one of the organic results for those terms. Long tail keywords often show up here – and you might be able to tweak a thing or two like internal links, the page meta description, and/or the content on the page in a way that will help that content come up on the first page, thereby increasing traffic coming in via those keywords.

Now to the writing!

Of course, all of that planning and thinking goes on before you put pen to paper, or press the record button, to create your content. If you are doing your own writing and using this strategy for your blog, remember to…

…and to:

• Create a headline that’s strong enough to tempt people to click through. Keep it short and punchy, but give readers a clear idea of the nature of the article. It’s not always easy to do all of those things at the same time, but you’ll often be able to improve on the first heading that comes to mind if you spend time on it.
• Make sure your content lives up to expectations created by your headline – you’ll lose credibility with would-be readers if they click an interesting headline only to discover that the content doesn’t deliver anything of value or isn’t quite what the headline implied.
• When you upload your content, be sure to complete the meta description and include the selected keywords. Keep in mind, this description displays beneath the headline in results, so write this in a way that tempts people to click through – for example, by telling them what they’ll learn or gain, or clearly describing the information they can expect to find.
• If there’s other blog content on your site related to the topic, consider linking to it, and/or from it to the new article.
• Once you’ve published, promote! Jump on your social media platforms and send or schedule an update about your article/post.

Throughout all your hard work, never forget that your overall objective is to supply prospective clients with the information they need during those micro-moments when they decide to search for it.