After reading about the value of content marketing to increase traffic to your website and boost rankings, perhaps you have entered the foray and tried it. As a newbie, there are many mistakes that you can make. Here are some to be aware of so that you can avoid them and land at the top of your game instead.
You must have enhanced your site with captivating banners, fast loading speed, and high tech AI-powered bots to boost the progress and performance of your site. What if you still lack traffic on your site or receive a huge bounce rate? The reason lies here; your site fails to serve its purpose. The reason why the target audience will navigate to your site is not to witness your creative design skills or how efficient your backend developer was but to know what you do and how you do. The curiosity to your brand will drive them to the site. Therefore, considering content to be the guiding beacon of your brand, one should focus on the right and appropriate content creation first. Your content is the core and fundamental brick of your business.
1.Typos and Content Mistakes
This is by far, the most harmful problem but the one that is most easily corrected if you are focused and fastidious. When there are spelling and grammar mistakes the reader gets the feeling that the author of the information is simply uneducated or nonprofessional. When there are flaws or wrong information, the reader will not trust any further or future content.
“You get only one chance!” “Just like you can only have one first impression, the first time you present yourself predicts the future of your success.” -Barbara Hales, M.D.
Conversely, a well-written article projects knowledge, authority in the field and authenticity, garnering trust.
2. You Are NOT in Sync
One of the most glaring ways that cause a huge bounce rate and lack of traffic to your site is that you are not relevant to your target market or your content is not aligned with the services that you provide. As many as 6 out of 10 online clients feel that the brands they are viewing are irrelevant to their needs or do not take their interests into consideration.
For those who write content on anything, simply to populate your site, forget that there must be a strategy for the content. Content marketing centers around educating your viewers, entertaining them and engaging them. Consider the topics that would be of interest to your market and provide an engaging idea about your product or service. List your goals. Do you want:
- Leads (more clients/patients)
- Conversions (clients calling for your services)
- Increase in website traffic
- Search Engine Optimization
3. Not taking length into consideration
Studies show that longer content length is actually read more often (greater than 800 words) and viewed as more authoritative. In terms of search engine optimization, a longer, well-written piece can boost your SEO rankings.
However, if you have compelling content that both engages and educates your audience, you will get the attention that you desire, more so than the word count alone.
4. Boring and Mundane Content
Is your content boring? Are you adding new and interesting material or is it same-old, same-old. This can be responsible for lack of interest by your audience. You need more creativity and engagement with your viewers.
Talk to them as though you were facing them in a room instead of talking down or at them. You were surely spiral downwards if you don’t attract their attention.
Getting attention is becoming a more difficult thing to do as time goes on and new techniques evolve to do so. Consider infographics, lists, GIFs, videos, tutorials contrarian articles, case studies, animation and connections to social media.
Look at sites that enable you to easily create videos (as in the Tuesday Tip given to you yesterday discussing BombBomb.com)
5. Consider quality and What you would want to hear
No one wants to hear or read articles that are salesy and obviously want to promote products and services without being selfless first. Can you imagine proposing to someone without courting them and getting to know them first? Sounds ridiculous doesn’t it? The same thing applies with content marketing.
Content should be valuable enough to convince readers about the authenticity, value and reliability of the business or practice. Make your content useful and show why it is the solution to the problems your audience is struggling with.
6. Stuffing Keywords and Producing Gobble-Gook
For the sake of optimizing your site for search engines, you will want to take your keywords into consideration. These are words by which your audience is searching for you and your services. However, if each article is written with keywords being reiterated without adding actual information, or adding value, the information becomes ludicrous and unreadable. Using overstuffed content can actually be harmful to your search engine ranking. Consider using keywords as a small percentage of the words within your article (i.e. For 500 words, 2% is indexed)
7. Not Taking Your Clients Interests into Consideration
Take a look at your patient/client’s demographics. Ask yourself, what is my client interested in? What services are relevant to each person that I have as a client. What motivates my clients? Content should be based on this. It educates the reader and develops a desire to obtain the services or products.
Carry out surveys and ask your clients what it is that interests them. What are the problems that they are struggling with? What are the same questions that you are fielding throughout the day? These are all good starts.
Check out forums, chatrooms and social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. See what your audience is discussing and asking. Providing solutions both on your site and social media sites makes you more visible brings your brand in top searches. The key here is to be relevant and in sync with your services.
Conclusion
Writing content involves strategy, addressing the needs of your audience, and creating a piece which they find valuable and relevant to them in their daily life. Take care that your content is errorless and avoids the mistakes that we just discussed.
