Over the past few years, content marketing has been declared as the most important driving force behind SEO campaigns.
Content is king, right?
Content is important, but not all content is created equal. Be sure to focus your time and effort on content that is worth doing, instead of content that is not worth doing.
9 Really Bad, No-Good Content Marketing Practices to Stop Practicing Today
There are a number of content marketing practices that are no longer effective and you should stop wasting your time on them. This will save you money in the long run.
1. Taking a blog-only approach to content marketing
I talk to my clients every day about the importance of publishing three blogs a week. Writing and publishing articles is a crucial part of your content marketing strategy, but it’s not the only thing you need to do.
Assuming you want to learn how to write a blog post: There is no one single formula for how to write a blog post that will work for every situation. However, there are some basic principles that you can follow that will help you write a successful blog post no matter what your goals are. Here are some tips for how to write a blog post: 1. Start by identifying your audience and what they want to read about. 2. Make sure your blog post has a clear purpose or message. 3. Write in a clear and concise style that is easy for your readers to follow. 4. Use strong headlines and subheadings to break up your text and make it easier to scan. 5. Use images, infographics, or videos to break up your text and add visual interest. 6. Be sure to proofread your blog post before you publish it.
To be honest, I think entree-only meals are great. However, people tend to give me weird looks when I buy just a rotisserie chicken for lunch.
Blog posts can be a great way to directly address questions that your customers and prospects have. Providing your sales team with a wide range of resources can also be beneficial. However, you need to make sure that you are providing different types of content to your audience.
Content marketing through videos is an effective way to reach out to potential customers and shortened the sales process. Additionally, conducting surveys to generate original research reports could help create backlinks. Businesses could also explore podcasts as a content marketing strategy.
Don’t limit yourself to one type of content. Create a variety of content to reach your ideal buyers. Get the most out of your content marketing tools by using a variety of them.
2. Focusing only on keyword research for titles
Search intent is just as important as keyword research when trying to rank well on a search engine. Without a focus on search intent, you may never rank for the keywords you want or you may rank well but have poor engagement numbers.
Keyword research tells you what people are searching for and intent research tells you why people are searching. You need both to be successful.
Performing intent research as part of your SEO strategy requires you to go to Google and start learning. Plug in a keyword and answer these questions:
- What content is currently ranking high? Are the top results from companies like mine or that offer a similar product or service?
- What format/structure is the content in? Are the results leading to product pages, informational blog posts, how-to guides, etc.? This can help guide the strategy on what type of content you can create.
- What category does the keyword fall into? Understanding this will help you determine if the keyword aligns with what you can offer. If it’s a transactional or navigational search for something that you don’t offer, find other keywords.
Intent research and keyword research are both important when planning your SEO strategy. However, they serve different purposes. Intent research is about understanding what your target audience is looking for, and keyword research is about finding the right keywords to target.
3. Creating content for buyer personas
The idea of having buyer personas is still valuable, but if you rely too much on them you will end up with content that is generic and does not have a strong message.
Instead of using generic buyer personas, try to analyze the unique audience that would be interested in the content. Find out what motivates the reader and what their goals are. Also, try to determine their current situation.
Ask yourself questions like these:
- Who are they?
- What do they do?
- Why do they care about this topic?
- Why are they asking this specific question at this moment?
- If they were in front of you right now, how would they be acting?
- What follow-up questions will they have?
- What objections or resistance might they have?
The questions below come from the Content Compass, a tool that we at IMPACT use to replace buyer personas.
If you use the Content Compass, you will be able to get a better understanding of the person interacting with your content. This will allow you to position your content so that it is the solution to their specific problem.
4. Using statistics in blog introductions
In Liz Moorehead’s Blogging Tips guide, she teaches six different strategies to help anyone write a powerful introduction.
If you want to make your article more compelling, start it with a statistic that provides context or explains why the topic is important. However, be sure to attribute the source of the statistic properly, usually with a link.
I want to warn you that if you don’t do this properly, your whole article could fail.
Let us imagine a scene where you use Google to look up “How to add more hours to my day.” You find a great article with an interesting statistic in the first sentence. The article tells of a Lithuanian scientist who is experimenting with a 28 hour day.
If you click on a link to learn more about something, you might get caught up in what you’re reading and forget what you were doing before.
I see statistics in introductions as a sort of pass/fail test.
- Failing: You’re not sure how else to start an article and search online for something loosely related to your topic to prove credibility.
- Passing: Using a stat in your introduction that comes directly from an original research survey that you’ve done.
- Failing: If you imagine that the reader could become more interested in the stat (and subsequent page) than what they originally came here to learn.
- Passing: A stat that’s closely aligned to the topic of your article and creates a sense of urgency for reading your article.
We content creators don’t want our readers to leave our articles before they’ve read all the great things we’ve written, so we should limit the amount of statistics we use in introductions. If we really feel like we need to use them, we should make sure the links open in a new tab.
5. Stop writing poor content
Content is very important for digital marketing today. Sites that publish quality content that is well researched, well written, and does not stuff keywords are much more likely to be at the top of the search results.
Before the year 2000, it wasn’t even necessary for websites to have high-quality content to rank highly. Most search engines didn’t care if the content was good or bad, and usually it wasn’t very good. So searchers would have a hard time finding the great instructional and how-to articles that are so common today.
Google’s Penguin update made it so that only high-quality content would be rewarded in search results, which makes SEO essential for anyone wanting to be successful online. To create great content, start with these tips:
- Don’t make keywords the focus of the piece. Let your writing flow.
- Write around 700 – 1000 words for an amazing article. If you’re just creating static copy for a business page, the 300-word mark will do.
- Focus your content on points of interest and problems the audience may have.
- Post engaging, fresh articles frequently if you want to stay relevant.
- FYI: If a post is greater than 1,500 words, it tends to receive an average of just over 68% more tweets and around 22.6% more likes on Facebook than shorter posts.
6. Steering readers from blogs to landing pages
Conclusion sections of articles are often written with the intention of persuading the reader to take a desired action, such as signing up for a mailing list or downloading a white paper. This is typically done by providing a link to a landing page where the reader can take the desired action.
An article from an unknown company is not enough to get someone to hand over their email address.
Instead of trying to get as many leads as possible, focus on what your reader wants.
You’ll be able to find the right next step by asking yourself a simple question:
If you’re reading this article, what’s the one thing you could give that would make them click?
It could be argued that another article on the same subject would help the reader learn more about what interests them. It is also possible that having a calculator on your website would give the reader a ballpark estimate of what they would be looking to spend, without having to go through the hassle of talking to someone.
“It” refers to a link or button on a website. It should be something that is so obviously desirable that anyone who sees it will want to click it and continue to interact with the website.
7. Stop stuffing meta descriptions
Meta descriptions show up just under a site’s link on Google, giving you a brief description of the site. This helps you get an idea of where the link goes.
Before, people would stuff their meta descriptions with keywords to try to make their page come up higher in search results. But then, 7 years ago, Google said they were going to update their system so that that didn’t work anymore. Nowadays, meta descriptions don’t affect SEO, so there’s no point in filling them with keywords.
8. Stop using link networks
In the past, having lots of backlinks was a key part of SEO. Nowadays they are still important but to a much smaller extent. Ten years ago, the best way to create backlinks was to pay for them by signing up with link networks. This is no longer considered acceptable practice. Google even warns content marketers against doing this in their Webmaster guides.
Some website networks used to be profitable by allowing websites to pay for links to be posted on other websites. This created a lot of backlinks. However, the problem with this was that the backlinks came from sketchy and untrustworthy websites. Even if some of the sites weren’t bad, they were often irrelevant. For example, a shoe company might have a backlink on a cigar website or any other random site.
While backlinks are still a viable way to help improve your website’s ranking, it’s important to take a slow and steady approach when building them up. Relying too heavily on backlinks from spammy websites will cause Google to flag your site as being spammy as well, so choose your link sources carefully.
9. Stop writing for everyone but your Audience
Having creative and high-quality content is great, but what good is it if no one wants to read it? A little research to see what sort of content appeals to your target audience can make the difference between having a popular blog or one that no one pays attention to. There are keyword analysis tools that can help you get an idea of how many people in your area are searching for the topics you write about. Before you invest time and money into your content, find out if your content is something that Google (and therefore your audience) will agree is worthwhile.
Is the content you’re writing well researched? Are you using credible sources? Are you using the appropriate research tools? There are many credible sources available, so use them!
Bonus: Don’t Ignore the Value of Video
Today’s marketing practices cannot ignore the importance of video content, so companies should stop depending solely on written content. Webinars, podcasting, videos, and even slide decks are all great ways to expand your content offerings. Video is especially important because it is widely recognized as one of the best tools in the content marketing toolbox.
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