Search engines are changing how they grade and rank content, and this can result in them downgrading or blacklisting your site. Other content marketing mistakes will hurt your website’s rankings or its reputation. Let’s look at the five content marketing mistakes that will kill your business if you make them.
Not Creating New Content
A large number of blogs fail because someone posts a few times and then abandons it. Don’t let your content marketing strategy fall into the same trap, releasing a flurry of articles and then letting them sit.
When you are dealing with an engaged customer base, you have to keep putting out content to keep them engaged. If you are running out of ideas, research the questions they are asking tech support, customer service and each other. Then create content that answers their questions while referencing the brand and your products.
Blogging Inconsistently
You should also aim to blog consistently so that you set expectations for how often new content comes out. You are free to put out more content than the baseline, but a steady flow of new content is more important than spurts of new content. The other advantage of a steady pace of content coming out is that search engines will be able to index all of the new content. If you upload too much content at one time, the search index may not be able to index all of the new URLs in the limited time it allocates to your site for it to be crawled.
Not Updating Your Content
Search engines reward updated content, even if it is changing the images and improving the key search term density. Remember that updating titles and tags not only improves the indexing of the content but makes it more crawlable by search engines, too. Fail to do any of this, and search engines will downgrade your content’s rankings unless it goes viral and, unusually, stays popular.
Not Auditing Your Content
An SEO audit looks at how your content rates relative to the key search terms you want it to dominate and the search terms your core customer base is using. You need to perform these audits to determine if you need to update the SEO of your content to refer to the new terms customers are using. A good SEO audit will also identify SEO opportunities, low cost search terms you could easily dominate, or what is bringing in traffic from a customer segment you didn’t know existed. In that case, the question is whether or not to update existing content or create new content to serve that customer segment.
Grade School Mistakes
Search engines will downgrade your site if it has too many grade school level grammar and spelling mistakes. The negative penalty for clunky grammar more than offsets your SEO strategy. What can hurt you just as much is the negative impression visitors get when they see mistakes like “your” instead of “you’re”. If you make misspelling or grammar mistakes in your title or first paragraph, it will hurt your SEO because people will bounce off the site so fast that search engines read it as an indication that your content is not what visitors are looking for.
Summary
The worst of the five content marketing mistakes you can make is grade school level errors in grammar and spelling. Posting once or twice and then abandoning content creation is a guarantee of failure. Posting in spurts can hurt you, whereas posting constantly and regularly is far better for your customer engagement and search engine ranking. Audit your content to see what has changed about traffic sources and key search terms and update your content periodically based on these findings or your site will drift into irrelevancy.
