8 SEO Mistakes Destroying Your Content Marketing
This article will teach you very actionable tips for eliminating common content marketing mistakes that are negatively effecting your SEO.
When it comes to content marketing, SEO is, of course, vital. However, while you may be investing time, energy and money into making your content as optimized as possible, you may actually be wasting resources on content marketing mistakes.
Below are eight of the most common SEO mistakes you might be making when producing and promoting content online:
1. Not Updating Older Content
If your response posts are solid, you can always refine the text and include niche multimedia like video or infographics. While it is tempting to focus on producing as much new content as possible, not to mention promoting that new content, allowing your old content to be forgotten about is highly detrimental to your site; this is because search engines such as Google view updated content in the same way they view new content, and this factors in to where the content is placed on the results page.
If you make sure you update old content, you can increase your site traffic by up to 15%. Additionally, there is a lot of value in refreshing content in your top performing pillar posts every few months.
2. Focusing on the Wrong Keywords
You might be vigilant about making sure your chosen keywords are used enough in your content, and your chosen keywords may very well relate closely to your company or product, but they may not be the right keywords to drive paying customers to your site.
You can search online to keep up to date with the frequency of searches of different keywords. If your company or website is fairly new, you might want to consider focusing on keywords with a low search rate or ‘score’, in order to have less competition and, therefore, appear higher up on the results page. Another thing to consider is whether the frequency of certain keywords is increasing or decreasing over time- go for the keywords that are rising in popularity.
3. Over saturating Your Content with Keywords
Keyword stuffing and keyword density became very ineffective nearly a decade ago. Inbound SEO companies only care about rankings, so they are notorious for keyword stuffing, which will hurt your rankings in the long term. Marketers care about persona-driven content to actually get readers to click the call to action button and convert into a marketing qualified lead. As long as you are putting out great quality content that people find helpful, you will find that your organic traffic growth will increase year after year.
Not only will prospective customers be put off by the keyword stuffing tactic, reducing your credibility and tarnishing your company’s reputation, but this tactic no longer increases your chances of securing a higher spot on search engines’ results pages. For example, Google has a program called Penguin, which it uses to filter out websites it deems to be lower quality, or even spam, by identifying unnaturally high frequencies of keywords in site content.
4. Making Your Content Too Short
Google does look at The second most important factor that Google considers when determining where your site should sit on the results page, is how long people spend on your site at a time. If your content isn’t long enough, regardless of how much consumers actually enjoyed the content, they will spend less time on your site. Ideally, your blog posts should be over 1,200 words.
Search engines like Google associate short visits on a site with an unsatisfactory experience; in contrast, longer content increases the chance of a person visiting a site for longer, which the Google algorithm interprets to be a more satisfactory consumer experience.
5. No Outbound Links
Outbound links help to validate the information you convey to the people visiting your site. Ideally, each of your blog posts should have 2-4 external links.
These external links show that other sites agree and support your claims, increasing the perceived credibility of what your content is saying and increasing consumer trust. Furthermore, the sites you link to may even share your post– free promotion!
6. Inconsistent Messaging
Search engines consider how much new content a site produces when considering how to rank a site. Therefore, to increase your chances of being ranked highly, you have to make sure you’re producing new content- even if it’s only one or two posts a week.
When your sales team and marketing team are not aligned on shared goals, it is a recipe for disaster that will wreak havoc on your ability to scale revenue growth. This not only applies to sales ready messaging, but also potential brand messaging mistakes, which has its own objectives relating to culture, value, insights, etc… instead of sales vernacular used by sales reps. Moreover, to maintain a place in your consumers’ thoughts, you have to be posting regularly. Otherwise, potential customers are likely to forget your company exists.
7. Focusing On Quantity, Not Quality
Whilst it is necessary to provide potential customers with new, fresh content to keep your company or product at the forefront of their mind, most of your energy should not be directed into this area.
Keep in mind the entire goal of optimizing your blog posts is in support of lead generation. As such, updating your blog posts with new and more relevant strategies, tools, tactics is vital to ensure you posts stays relevant of future readers of your blog posts.
Promoting your content should account for the majority of where you direct your energy. This includes: sharing your site on various social media; answering related B2B SEO strategy questions on sites like Yahoo! Answers and Quora, including a link to your site and; sending new content to the people on your email list.
This is because search engines like Google consider the most important factor to be frequency of site visits, when deciding on site rankings.
8. Not Reviewing User-made Content
Allowing users to produce content for your site can be a great way to increase the volume of content that you put out into the world. However, permitting users to contribute to your site can result in poor quality posts, or even duplicated or plagiarized content, with the potential to tarnish the credibility and reputation your site and company. To make use of this free resource effectively, you should require approval for posts from outsiders.
If you avoid making these common B2B SEO strategy mistakes, you are well on your way to increasing the traffic driven to your site, as well as boosting your site rankings.