Businesses in all industries need content for their websites. However, creating content doesn’t mean you’re going to get anything from it. While you can invest a huge amount into getting content on your website, if it isn’t done correctly, it isn’t going to do very much. Your efforts can be easily wasted if you don’t understand what makes content marketing effective. Fortunately, understanding some of the most common content marketing mistakes can help you avoid making them yourself. Here are a few content marketing mistakes your business should watch out for.
Not Making Data-Driven Decisions
Before you create any type of content, you should feel confident that it has the potential to yield the results you want. If you’re just making guesses as to what content your website should have, there’s no reason to expect it to perform well. You might be publishing content that no one is looking for and your audience isn’t interested in. Data is an important part of effective content marketing, which includes researching the best keywords and topics.
It’s also important to assess the content you already have to determine what has been the most effective. If something isn’t working, you need to know so you can avoid repeating it. Reviewing your existing content can help you continue to improve your strategy over time and find what works best.
Not Creating Evergreen Content
Depending on the industry you’re in, you might have frequent timely topics to cover in your content. While this allows you to take advantage of the interest in trending topics and show that you stay up to date on your industry’s current events, this shouldn’t be the only type of content you have.
Trending topics only attract users for so long before the traffic they bring drops completely. Because of this, you also need to create evergreen topics that will continue to bring users to your site. This doesn’t mean forgoing timely topics completely, but including evergreen topics in your content strategy can help bring in a consistent flow of users for the foreseeable future.
Not Publishing Content Consistently
There’s no doubt that creating high-quality content takes a huge amount of time, and many businesses don’t have this. You might think that publishing a new piece of content whenever you have the time is enough. However, to make your content marketing as effective as it can be, it’s best to maintain a consistent publishing schedule.
Frequency is important for users and search engines. By publishing content regularly, you can keep your audience loyal and engaged. If you’re waiting too long to create any new content, people will lose interest and won’t wait for you. A consistent publishing schedule allows you to build brand awareness and bring in a steady amount of traffic over time. Keeping your website active by publishing new content also helps it get crawled and indexed more frequently, which can help your content show up in the SERPs.
Not Sharing Content
Content marketing helps you bring in more organic traffic through search engines, but you shouldn’t rely on people finding your content in the SERPs. If you want people to see your content, you need to put in more effort and not hope that they’ll just find it themselves. This includes sharing it across multiple social media platforms. Sharing your content introduces it to a much wider audience and gives you the chance to attract more traffic than you would from organic search results alone.
Not Creating Content with a Certain Audience in Mind
When you’re creating content, you aren’t doing it for everyone. It might seem best to make things as generic as you can to make them appeal to more people, but many of those people won’t actually be interested in your business. There’s a specific audience for every business, and each is made up of different demographics with different interests. If you want people to be interested in your content and eventually your business, it needs to appeal to them specifically.
Not only should you know who your audience is, but you also need to create different content for your audience depending on where they are in the buyer’s journey. Some will have only just discovered your business, while others might be ready to make a decision, so they need different types of content that will speak to them the most.
Not Optimizing Your Content
While you might have well-written, informative content, not as many people can benefit from you if it isn’t optimized for SEO. Not considering SEO when you create content means that it likely won’t end up ranking very highly, even if it has something beneficial to offer. Optimized content allows your content to get seen in the SERPs and rank above other competitors, so you can’t have content without it. SEO and content marketing go hand in hand. If you want your content to be successful, you’ll also need to invest in SEO.
Avoid These Content Marketing Mistakes with ENX2 Marketing
Content marketing takes a significant amount of work, and many don’t realize everything that it actually entails. If you aren’t careful, you could end up missing some of the most critical aspects of content marketing, and the content you produce will fall short. Content marketing services ensure that you’re getting everything you need for your website’s content and you don’t have to worry about doing any of it yourself.
Contact ENX2 Marketing to learn more about our SEO services today.