If your content strategy isn’t bringing you any increased rankings, then there’s probably a good chance you’re doing something wrong. Your strategy should be engineered to increase your search engine rankings, bring you new fans and followers, or help you build new connections or authority within your niche.
Consumers are becoming more educated than ever. As a result, they’re reading more content than ever. This means that wherever your content outposts lie across the web they need to be high quality. You never know when or where a reader is going to come across something you’ve written and come back to your site.
As the web becomes more oriented towards user experience, your content needs to keep up. Content is becoming more and more humanized, and the search engines are trying to lead this charge.
When you look at Google their customers are people who use their search engines. So, naturally, they’re going to try to serve them at the deepest level possible, which means providing the most relevant search results.
If your content strategy isn’t in line with this way of thinking it’s going to have a negative impact on your rankings. If a big part of your business relies on ranking well, then your business is going to be in for a rude awakening.
In this post we’re going to look at how your content strategy may be killing your rankings and what you can do about it.
Lack Of Keyword Understanding
Even with all the algorithm changes, keywords still play a valuable role in SEO. There are usually two sides of the fence that your content strategy will be on.
The first involves having no understanding of keywords. This means you’ve done zero, or very minimal keyword research, and your posts don’t include or optimize for any keywords. A complete lack of involvement of keywords will ensure that you don’t rank for the keywords you want to rank for. Of course, the main focus should be providing high quality content, however, if there is no focus on keywords it’s going to be difficult to rank.
The second involves over-optimization. This is where every single element of the post is optimized for a specific keyword. This could include having an extremely high keyword density, having anchor text that’s only a single keyword, and placement of the keyword in all your heading tags. This is obviously too much and will have a negative impact on your rankings.
The obvious solution is to walk down the middle of the road. Make sure you’re doing a little bit of optimization, but not to the point where it looks unnatural.
Focusing On Spam Over Value
At the end of the day the most high value content will win out. If your content strategy is all about quality over quantity, you rankings are going to be impacted.
A lot of content strategies focus on guest posting for every site imaginable. Usually, this means they’re going to be using low-quality or spun content and will solely be guest blogging for the sake of backlinks.
Recent updates have started to crack down against spammy blogging, which means this practice won’t be around much longer.
A safer option, which will continue to have a positive impact on your rankings is to blog for relevant blogs and provide high quality content.
Forgetting About Engagement
Great content is all about engagement and telling a story. If you’re just writing in order to crank out keyword stuffed copy or for the sake of backlinks your readers are going to be able to tell.
By publishing content and stories that people want to share and link to you’ll naturally start ranking higher, as these are factors in having good SEO.
Google has actually been valuing more long-form, in-depth content that is very valuable to the user. So, start providing immense value to your readers and you’ll be setting yourself up for SEO success.
No Focus On Headlines
Headlines are extremely important to good SEO. Headlines are the first thing the user reads, which will help them decide if they’re going to read the rest of the article.
If you have poor headlines, there’s a good chance no one will even open your blog post. Which means your writing definitely won’t garner any social shares or links.
The foundation of all great blog posts begin with quality headlines. Do yourself a favor and start educating yourself about what makes great headlines work and then imitate what you see. After a little bit of study and practice you’ll start to see how you can adapt headline structures to fit your audience.
After a while you’ll be creating creative headlines that compel people to click and share your work.
Forgetting About Social
Social media and social sharing is going to continue to have a growing impact on SEO. If you’re not sharing your posts across social media, or giving people a way to share your content, then your rankings aren’t going to be as high as they could have been otherwise.
Social influence is even gaining a bigger role in the importance of rankings as well. Start to infuse your content marketing strategy with social media and you’ll be taking positive strides into the future.
Content marketing and SEO work well together. By avoiding the mistakes above you’ll ensure your rankings remain strong or increase, and you’ll continue to see the positive results of your efforts.
No comments:
Post a Comment