SEO Whats not working in my content marketing strategy?
The needs of internet marketing have become quite demanding with many businesses trying to meet its high engaging content requirements. Content is everywhere you look and there are audiences everywhere loving reading and learning from it! It should come as no surprise that content is the basis of almost all marketing tactics. Did you know that approximately 94% of small businesses build their main marketing strategy through content marketing? With so many businesses all working towards creating engaging content that is going to be read, shared, and have a unique perspective, it’s easy to see how this has made for a competitive content battle in each industry.
Have you attempted content marketing, but have been disappointed by your unaccomplished positive expectations? Well, don’t be dismayed. There are many other businesses in the same boat. Don’t give up though, content marketing is one of the best ways to grow your customer and revenue. So, here are four reasons why your content marketing may not be performing and more importantly, tips on what can fit it!
1. You don’t have a well defined strategy
You’ve probably heard the saying “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” Without a proper strategy, a set of KPIs to quantify results or any analytics mechanisms to capture the results and track the progress. You’ve already limited your progression because you don’t have anything to base your outcomes on. Submitting blogs, adding posts, obtaining followers and sending tweets are fantastic, but without a strategy you’re really just hoping for the best.
To craft stimulating content that engages users, you must have a clearly defined strategy that should be aligned with your business goals. Whether you want to raise brand awareness, increase website traffic, or obtain greater customer conversion rates, your strategy must incorporate KPIs in conjunction with short-term and long-term goals. Ensure that your marketing goals coincide with your business goals to have a clear understanding of the purpose of your content, your target market, and the kind of content that gels with your business style.
2. Content needs to be unique
These days, almost all businesses are online and have some kind of digital presence. Therefore you need to have unique content. How do you construct unique content?
You need to spend time researching the topic and understand the online evidence that supports the knowledge you are conveying to the audience. If you don’t research your topic then you can easily sound like you don’t understand the topic well enough and this causes customers to lose interest. They can also associate a poorly articulated topic with the quality of the business.
When users leave your site, they are tracked as to how long they spent time on the website. If they leave your content too quickly, search engines determine the content to lack engagement and cause your SEO ranking to drop.
Your content needs to captivate, engage, and most importantly, deliver value to readers by presenting solutions to typical pain points in your business niche. A user struggles to read a content item from top to bottom without some other engaging resources. Videos, Infographics, images, diagrams, and excerpts are all very beneficial ways of maintaining the audience’s attention throughout your content.
3. You are your best content advocate
You’ve put in all this time and effort to create some fantastic and engaging content. Now it’s time to market it. Many companies leave the content on their website and wait for people to find it on the web. Of course, good search engine optimisation is a way to get your audience to view and read the information you have compiled. However, the more traffic that lands on that page the more SEO will improve its ranking. There are lots of platforms that give the audience a sneak peek or interest a reader to come and read your content.
Here are some suggestions of ways to promote your content and get more traffic to your website:
- Social media (Facebook, Twitter, Google My Business, Reddit).
- Email newsletters.
- Adding internal links to your articles.
- Pitching to influencers and bloggers in your market.
- Submit it as a guest post to bloggers in your niche.
- Submitting to a popular blogging site, such as Medium or LinkedIn Articles.
- Featuring links to your content when commenting on other blogs and forums.
4. You need to optimise your content for SEO.
Content is a significant portion of your SEO plan. This means that if your content is not SEO friendly, it’s likely to not rate highly with searchers looking for similar content. It is important to know that Google has been exposed to marketing techniques that manipulate results to help web pages rank higher. In 2020 google has a much smarter search capability and flags dishonest manipulation techniques. These are known as black hat tactics, and Google will often penalize a website for using these techniques. Read more here.
Keyword stuffing is the process of trying to fit an unnatural amount of keywords into a piece of content. It is a frequent mistake that companies will make in their content creation, in addition to using non-monetary keywords, and not utilizing meta tags.
Start by looking at some resources to find out what people are searching for and how many searches those key terms are likely to generate traffic. This involves understanding the competition for specific keywords and determining the type of audience you are going to attract. Once you know these keywords, use content and meta tags that can be optimized to draw more visitors to your blog. Search engines always intend to deliver the best content to users, so if your content is valued then other sites will link to it, increasing the possibility of achieving more high-quality, reliable links from relevant businesses.
It is important to note, that there are many other possibilities why your content isn’t performing, however, the above points are the most common reasons content fails to engage. The age-old saying you get what you pay for (or use effort) applies wholeheartedly to online marketing. You need to research the topic, your target audience, the keywords they are searching for, your immediate competition, the best in the business, and this will help you generate content that will result in an engaged and impressed audience.
If you’ve hit your limit on getting content marketing right and you want to see results, connect with the team at Pro Digital Marketing who will be able to point you in the right direction. Call 1300 998 778 or visit our website for more information: prodigitalmarketing.com.au.
