We’ve heard the stories of teenagers playing with Ouija boards and accidentally opening the portal to the Underworld. How The Exorcist has more truth to it than the Hollywood rendition leads on. Maybe you’ve even chanted into a mirror hoping to summon a ghoulish guest.

Whatever your Halloween looks like, or what terrifying tricks you may have up your sleeve, spooky season is more than just costumes and candy and being scared-silly. No, there is something even more horrifying that should make marketing novice beware.

You see, the monster under your bed isn’t the scariest thing you may encounter–your failing content marketing strategy is the real horror story. But don’t fret– we have ways to take your dead website and bring it back to life. No séance required.

5. Duplicate Content

While duplicate content will not give you a penalty from Google, (unless of course, you copy content directly from someone else’s website without giving credit–thief!) it will hurt your SEO efforts. In general, duplicate content on your website will actually confuse the Google creepy crawlers and lower the performance of all versions of the text, making you miss out on keyword ranks.

But duplicate content via page text isn’t the only thing you need to look out for. In fact, common causes of duplicate content can result from technical errors. This includes:

  • Different canonical domains
  • URL structure
  • Index pages
  • Filters
  • Taxonomies within your content management system (CMS)
  • Comment pages

4. Not Updating Content

Go to Google and search, “best ways to spend Halloween at home”. You’ll likely notice in the search results that everything on page one is dated in 2020 or 2019. This is because Google looks at the freshness of your content, thus leading to spikes in traffic.

But the time stamp isn’t the only thing that will benefit. When you update content, you can review your post title, update any links, quotations, or statistics, and even incorporate multimedia elements on the post to make that content more attractive with minimal effort. (Unlike that last-minute Halloween costume you put together… maybe spend a little more time than that.)

3. Not Creating Enough Content

From pages to blog posts, social media to multimedia, at ENX2 Marketing, we want your content to be the best it can be and be posted and updated frequently. I spend hours and hours per client trying to come up with fresh and unique ways to answer the questions and provide resources that our clients’ customer base has. Why? Because it helps them gain leads!

Search Engine Journal reports that marketers and agencies that created and posted content 16+ times per month earned 3.5x more traffic and about 4.5x more leads. So what can you do?

Dust the cobwebs off that dry erase calendar and make a content plan! Set reasonable goals for how much content you want to create over the next month and get planning. (Or, give us a call and we can do it for you.)

2. Not Optimizing for SEO (Or Overdoing It)

So you took my advice and ramped up your content strategy, pumping out blogs and pages to get some traffic to your website and feed the insatiable hunger of Google’s spiders. But then you just post it.

That’s a problem, witches.

Not only do you need good content, but you also need to optimize it for local SEO and for conversion. But how?

Take a look at the keywords in your post, chances are they’ll jump out at you purely based on the topic area being covered. But you need to hone it in. Did you take a global topic and make it local, or is it too generic and thus not relevant to your visitors?

Consider what your goals are and optimize accordingly–if it’s to get traffic to a page, thinking global is good. If it’s to make a sale, you have to make sure it fits your client’s needs.

1. Buying Bad Content

I’m a story-teller by nature. I love to read (and write) compelling content whenever I can. It can be about the traits of serial killers, or how to create a punny cereal-killer costume. But it has to be compelling. But when I search the web for whatever I’m craving, I can easily pick out the shawty work.

And, if you’re buying content, your audience will be able to tell when it’s bad, too. (And we’re talking actual content, not links. That’s some black magic… I mean black hat business.)
Writing or outsourcing for good content can help you get results. But bad content will only hurt you.

CALL THE CONTENT WITCHES AND WIZARDS AT ENX2 MARKETING

It may seem like magic how we can turn your horrific content mistakes around. But we never received our letters from Hogwarts, but we do have a trick or two up our sleeves. Call the pros today and we’ll levitate your ranks with a flick and swish of our wands… I mean, our skills.