Discoverable vs Engaging Content (and getting the best of both from your blog)

By Emma Baxter, Senior Writer at Stickyeyes on

A great business blog can positively impact conversions (and revenue) for a brand and uplifts are possible with a strategy that includes great quality discoverable and engaging content. Both can play huge roles in getting the most from your output – knowing what it takes will be key for your brand to outsmart the competition. 

According to Oberlo, 92% of content marketers utilise blog posts within their content marketing strategy. Databox also discovered blogging is deemed more effective now than it was two years ago by 68% of marketers.

Effective blogging will help your business website drive more traffic and in-turn, attract, nurture and convert leads. 

Communicating via your blog helps set your business apart from competitors and engages customers. It can also build interest in the services or products you provide and drive demand. 

In this guide, we’ll take a deeper look at both discoverable and engaging content and how you can get the best of both worlds to hit your KPIs.

What will this discoverable vs engaging content guide cover?

  • What is discoverable content?
    • Measuring discoverability
  • Top tips for ensuring your content is discoverable
  • What is engaging content?
    • PR-ability and influencer appeal
    • Measuring engagement
  • Top tips for creating engaging content for your blog
  • How engaging and discoverable content can work together

What is discoverable content?

Discoverable content is a fundamental component of customer relationship management (CRM). The use of tactics and strategies to manage relationships with customers is focused on making it easier to engage with your brand and discover your products. In the digital landscape, blogging has established itself as a crucial aspect of achieving this.

The concept of ‘discoverable content’ may also be referred to as ‘intelligent content’. Essentially, in order for your blog content to be discoverable, it needs to have structure, organisation, categorisation – all that good stuff. So, don’t forget relevant keywords, tagging and metadata, which can be crucial for discoverability.

Indeed, search engine optimisation is key. In more advanced arms of your strategy, data can also inform discoverability via a contextual approach to advertising. Customer browsing patterns can be used to offer up content and products based on these behaviours, for instance.

However, implementing SEO best practice can help create effective content to satisfy consumer requirements and provides a solid foundation upon which to build your marketing efforts.

Ensuring expert SEO is built into your content marketing strategy can elevate and solidify your site’s SERP ranking and gives your content the best possible chance of being discoverable. 

Measuring discoverability

Being able to measure how discoverable your content is can be crucial to informing future strategies and maintaining a successful blog.

Therefore, knowing how and what to measure is important to your business. Before we take a look at what you should be measuring, it’s equally as important to know what you shouldn’t – for instance:

  • If you cannot change it or have any positive impact on it, don’t set it as a goal.
  • Don’t set metrics that won’t benefit your business, or your clients financially. This might include going after irrelevant keywords – you might rank, but it likely won’t convert to sales.

Using key performance indicators is a vital way to measure and analyse the success of your blog content – and any other quantifiable aspect of your marketing strategy.

There are many KPIs you can measure, depending on the specific strategic goals of your business blog. These may include:

  • Revenue
  • Impressions
  • Site visits
  • Click-through-rate (CTR)
  • Clicks
  • Conversions
  • Engagement
  • Social media shares and reach
  • Organic search

Top tips for ensuring your content is discoverable

There are many ways to boost your blog’s detectability. Some top tips include:

  • Ensure SEO best practice is maintained throughout – lay a solid SEO foundation on which to build your blog. 
  • Create and implement a comprehensive content marketing strategy – this will include maintaining a regular blog content schedule your customers can rely on.
  • Focus on structure – ensure the blog site is easy to navigate and the posts themselves are simple to read and scroll. Ensure everything to do with the blog is organised, categorised and features tags and metadata.
  • Ensure your site speeds are fast – Google has previously indicated that its algorithm measures site and page speed to inform rankings.
  • Make your site mobile-first and ensure content is scrollable in mobile – almost 55% of global web traffic came from mobile in the first quarter of 2021 and by 2025, it’s predicted that 73% of users will solely use their smartphones to use the internet.
  • Follow the principles of E-A-T – The concept of E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness) is from Google’s guidelines and is what the search engine uses to assess the overall quality of a page. The depth and accuracy of content was called out by SEO professionals as being the third most important factor (24.6%) for rankings in a Statista survey.
  • Update and optimise existing content – customers can stumble upon your content years after it’s been written, ensuring you build optimisations into your strategy can help this material stay fresh and relevant.
  • Internal and external linking – both internal and external linking helps to improve your site’s visibility and helps customers and potential customers navigate it. It also boosts rankings, in fact, 17.4% of SEO professionals say it’s the most important SEO factor for search rankings.

What is engaging content?

When content is engaging, it tempts users into taking some form of action – this might be shares, clicks, likes and comments or even filling out forms or subscribing.

Effective and successful engaging content shouldn’t just have a benefit for your business, however, it should also have value for whoever is reading or viewing it. Types of consumer benefits include the content being:

  • Helpful
  • Entertaining
  • Informative
  • Interesting (telling a story)

It’s possible for this type of content to take many forms, but it needs to be laid out well – following very similar principles to discoverable content in its organisation.

The umbrella of engaging content may include videos, eye-catching imagery or even stunning, easily-digestible infographics.

PR-ability and influencer appeal

Content that contains any or all of these elements is highly likely to be PR-able. If it provides help or information, offers entertainment or tells a compelling story, it has more of a chance to interest journalists and titles that could help spread word of your brand far and wide.

Engaging an audience may be represented in many different ways, too – take the use of influencers, for instance. The global influencer marketing market size has grown to $13.8 billion. Plus, according to an Influencer Marketing Hub survey, 63% of marketing professionals will increase their influencer budget in the next 12 months. 

Utilising social media could also play a monumental role in heightening the reach and engagement of your content.

With all this in mind, engaging content provides an exciting opportunity for your brand to form meaningful connections with your customers. It’s also important to define what actions you expect customers to take as a result of interacting with your content. 

It could be easy to become caught up in the dynamism of what you’ve created without having tangible measurements to understand the results and learn for the future.

Measuring engagement

As with measuring discoverable content, it’s also key to set KPIs for your engaging output in order to understand and measure whether it’s actually, well, engaging. 

Depending on the goals you set and the aims you’re hoping for, you could choose from many KPIs to measure and analyse, including:

  • Page/video views
  • Conversions/conversion rate
  • Time on page and scroll depth
  • Bounce rate and pages per session
  • Likes and comments on social media
  • New site visits
  • Repeat/returning site visits
  • Reach

Top tips for creating engaging content for your blog

There are many ways to create engaging content for your blog – these include: 

  • Understand your audience – using data and learning from what has worked previously will help you learn what will resonate with your audience and build relationships for repeat business.
  • Ask questions – increase the engagement of your content by asking questions within blog posts and in social posts for responses.
  • Utilise social media – add social share buttons to a blog and share the content across socials yourself.
  • Use imagery and video – Twitter Business revealed that Tweets containing video experience ten times higher engagement than posts with no video. Video used within advertising creative has also been found to receive 85% more click-throughs than those without.
  • Opt-in – adding multiple opt-in options to your content to promote opportunities such as newsletter subscriptions or to be notified when a new post is live.
  • Create killer headlines – not only will writing show-stopping headlines capture attention and hopefully heighten engagement, but it can also feed into PR-ability.
  • Use influencers – consumers tend to trust influencers, especially micro-influencers and 90% of respondents to the Influencer Marketing Hub survey believe influencer marketing to be effective.
  • Drive traffic with link strategies – securing links pointing to your blog can drive traffic and lift engagement.

How discoverable and engaging content can work together

Of course, it’s possible – in fact, favourable – to make both discoverable and engaging content work together for your blog and overall marketing efforts. It’s not truly effective to make one work without the other. A marriage of the two makes for robust, yet creative methods of marketing your brand. 

By rooting your blog’s content marketing strategy in the foundations of SEO best practice, the base and structure from which you work ensures your content can be found seamlessly. Only from here can engaging, creative content be formed and deployed effectively as there’s a structured and organised home to drive all that traffic to (hopefully) convert.

At Stickyeyes, we live by these principles to create and implement premium content marketing strategies for our clients. Check out our blog to discover more gems of inspiration, or head to the CMA member page.

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