If we want our traffic to convert to sales or higher brand awareness, we must improve our content past "good enough." Here's why.

Most online content feels like stale crackers.

Sure, it hits the spot. If you're starving, it might help you feel less weak in the knees for a while. But then you will use that cracker-induced burst of energy to get yourself to some good food. As fast as possible.

When the only question we ask ourselves while planning and creating content is, "How do we rank for this search query over the articles already there?" we are settling for the lowest acceptable quality standard.

We are willingly reducing our meals to the equivalent of a disappointingly soft bite into the Ritz that has been left out on the dining table for more than a week.

Why do we treat those soggy content bites as the absolute pinnacle of professional achievement?

We can do much better than replicating our competitors' stale posts.

Imagine the crunch of properly good content – exploding with the flavor of new ideas, filling our readers' brains with possibilities and creating a fresh memory that they will return to whenever they feel the hunger of needing the exact solution we provide.

If you want to make content that genuinely stands out, stop trying to create the least stale cracker. Consider creating some actually tasty meals.

To do so, you need to ask:

"Why would readers / listeners / viewers care about what we're saying? So, what?"

Too many marketers treat content as a laundry list of facts and claims.

We plan our posts by assembling a couple of statements that, we hope, are unique and relevant, like:

"50% of SEO professionals are worried about AI"
"SaaS is undergoing a rapid shift"
"AI will change how organizations analyze their data"
"To grow your email list, you should promote it on social media."
And then... What do we do?

Once we assemble a good enough fact list, we often throw it in a content blender (by sending it to a writer as a "content brief" or pasting it into a content optimization tool) and hope for the best.

But that doesn't work. You can't assemble a memorable article by throwing together facts, just as you can't plan a delicious meal based exclusively on nutritional labels.

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Content creation, content strategy, SEO, content audits, content planning, content marketing, B2B, SERP, search ranking, thought leadership

Article by Mariya Delano.