{"id":140091,"date":"2022-03-27T18:46:36","date_gmt":"2022-03-27T23:46:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ahrefs.com\/blog\/?p=140091"},"modified":"2024-03-28T10:23:00","modified_gmt":"2024-03-28T15:23:00","slug":"content-marketing-for-small-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ahrefs.com\/blog\/content-marketing-for-small-business\/","title":{"rendered":"13 Content Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Content marketing is hot today.<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Look at the meteoric rise in interest over the past 20 years, according to Google Trends<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

\"1-google-trends\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Many small businesses have successfully grown using content marketing. Beardbrand, Luxy Hair, Lodge Cast Iron\u2014the examples<\/a> are endless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you\u2019re a small-business owner, you\u2019re probably wondering if you should be using content marketing for your business too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this post, I\u2019ll run through some reasons why you should do content marketing, plus 13 ideas you can apply to your small business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why should you do content marketing for your small business?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Here are three reasons why you should consider content marketing for your business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. Get more traffic<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

No matter what you sell, there are only so many people who are willing and able to buy at any given moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So if you\u2019re only targeting people who are directly <\/strong>searching for your product, your traffic will be limited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take, for example, our own toolset. We have five main tools:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

\"2-ahrefs-tools\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Altogether, these pages account for ~10,000 monthly visits, which is only around 1% of our total search traffic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

\"3-ahrefs-tools-traffic\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

If we had simply relied on those five pages, our business wouldn\u2019t have grown.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, we\u2019ve created hundreds of pieces of content that now rank on Google for more than 140,000 keywords and generate more than 930,000 search visits per month.<\/p>\n\n

\"4-ahrefs-organic-traffic\"<\/p>\n\n

This is how we\u2019ve grown our company to eight figures in annual recurring revenue (ARR)<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Improve brand awareness<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

As we\u2019ve established, most people don\u2019t look for products and services directly. Instead, they look for solutions to problems or answers to questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, when you create content around these problems or questions, you can use this opportunity to introduce your brand to your potential customers. A prospect knowing your brand means you\u2019re at least one step closer to turning them into customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s an example. Billy Blogger started a blog and is frustrated at how his blog traffic isn\u2019t increasing. So he searches for \u201chow to increase my blog traffic\u201d on Google and discovers our article<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From there, he learns that one method to get more traffic is to write about topics with search traffic potential. He also discovers that he can use our free tools<\/a> to do that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With just one article, we\u2019ve turned Billy Blogger from someone who didn\u2019t know we existed to someone who now knows our brand. Repeat that at scale, and you can see how content marketing works to improve brand awareness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. Reduce your marketing costs<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Content marketing can be cheaper over the long term.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take again, for example, the Ahrefs blog, which receives around 260,000 search visits per month. If we had to acquire all of that traffic from Google Ads, we would have to pay an estimated $355,000 per month or $4.2 million per year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

\"5-ahrefs-blog-traffic\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Considering that our content marketing team isn\u2019t paid $4 million in annual salaries, we can say that content marketing is cheaper over the long term.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recommended reading: <\/strong>Why Is Content Marketing Important? 5 Reasons<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

13 content marketing ideas for small businesses<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Convinced that you should be doing content marketing? Here are some ideas you can consider implementing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. Answer questions people are searching for<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019ve established this earlier: Potential customers don\u2019t search for your products directly, but for questions they want answered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So your goal is to figure out what these questions are and create content that matches them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How do you find these questions?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The easiest way is to enter a relevant keyword into our free keyword generator tool<\/a> and switch the tab to Questions<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

\"6-keyword-ideas\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

If you\u2019d like to see more questions, then you can use a professional keyword tool like Ahrefs\u2019 Keywords Explorer<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n
  1. Enter a relevant keyword into Keywords Explorer<\/a><\/li>\n
  2. Go to the Matching terms <\/strong>report<\/li>\n
  3. Switch the tab to Questions <\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n\n\n
    \"7-questions\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    As you can see, there are over 260,000 potential questions you can create content for. If you want to narrow the list further, set the Keyword Difficulty (KD)<\/strong> filter to a maximum of 10.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

    \"8-low-kd-questions\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    Eyeball the report and pick out those most relevant to your business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    2. Create a statistics page<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

    Journalists and bloggers are always looking for data to back up their claims. This is why businesses and websites publish data studies and original research\u2014their goal is to get mentions and links from these authoritative websites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    But as a small business, it can be difficult for you to publish original research. There is one way around it, and that is to curate data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    That\u2019s what we did when we published our post on SEO statistics<\/a>. To date, it has accumulated a total of 2,700 backlinks from 1,300 unique websites:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

    \"9-seo-statistics-stats\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    It also ranks #1 for the keyword \u201cSEO statistics\u201d:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

    \"10-seo-statistics-serps\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    Learn how we created this page and built links to it in this video series:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n<\/p>

    \n\t
    \n\t\t
    \n\t\t\t
    <\/div>\n\t\t\t