1. Your content isn’t good enough
Content is king is a famous quote from Bill Gates, and there is a lot of truth behind the short statement. To be able to reach people with useful information and provide them with the answers they are looking for you need to create great and unique content. The best way to get this right is to get to know your audience – what content do they respond to? And what format – video, blog posts, or infographics?
Effective content targets audience pain points and demonstrates how that service or product will help solve the problem.
Getting this right will not only be appreciated by your audience, but it will also be great when search engines crawl your pages – Google rewards unique content.
Some other criteria for great content include:
- Your content speaks directly to what your audience cares about, in the same language and tone they speak in. It serves the needs of your audience.
- Make it clear and easy to understand. This also includes easy to scan by adding clear headers, subheaders, images, and bullet points.
- Include examples that illustrate ideas better.
2. You don’t have a content strategy
You might think that the best strategy is to post as much and as often as possible, but this is not a very smart technique. By not having a clear content strategy it’s easy to fail. Why? Because you haven’t taken the time to figure out what works for your target audience.
When creating a strategy, a good first step is competitor research – check what competitor content has already been successful and learn from their failures and successes. Mimic and emulate their successes (without stealing or copying!) and find out where they went wrong and what content didn’t fulfill its purpose or just didn’t tickle the audience interest.
Once you have created a strategy, you should do monthly site audits to see your most successful content and see how you can continue to build upon that.
3. Your content is too promotional
When creating content, you need to always have your audience in mind. This means you need to create content that they will enjoy and interact with. If you try to squeeze in too much brand content, you’ll lose your audience. You need to speak to the audience as people and not possible customers or converters, the content you post should be authentic and focus on how your service or product can solve a problem they have or improve their life.
This could be done with evergreen how-to content, educational guides, white papers, infographics, and case studies, for example.
4. You don’t analyze your content
The whole process of coming up with content topics, producing content, optimizing, and amplifying it, is not only a time-demanding task but also a waste of time if you don’t analyze how the content is doing. This part goes hand in hand with what we brought up regarding content strategy. It is important to analyze and do monthly audits to see what content works well for your audience.
If you are planning a series of content articles, measuring your success is very important. You can’t keep up with the same strategy if you don’t have any proof that it’s working well for you. However, it is also important to know that it can take months for organic search results to show, so in some cases, you must be patient.
5. You’re only using text format
Content is so much more than just text. Articles and landing pages are of course very important but a wall of text isn’t going to keep readers on your site. Today people’s attention span is extremely low, and your bounce rate will be sky high if you don’t excite people in the first second of them landing on your page.
You need something that stands out and captures the audience’s attention. Today the most popular and most consumed content form on the internet is video and you can say the same thing in a 60-second video as with a 1500-word article. There are several ways you can include video in your content – make “how-to”-videos, include short interviews, or share behind-the-scenes footage of your company. Video can help you boost brand awareness and generate quality leads.
Small things to look over when your content is failing:
If you suddenly find yourself on page 3 in the SERP after having first place on page 1 just a few weeks ago, it could be because you have neglected your SEO strategy for a while. Look for these things for a quick fix:
- Are you adding the keywords your audience use in searches in your content?
- Has Google updated its algorithm? This can throw off SERP results.
- Is your website 100% responsive and easy to use? Is it fast and user-friendly?