Building quality content for your brand or blog’s audience requires a large amount of research, time and knowledge. As the nature of search engine optimisation has continued to evolve over the years, so has the need for content. Specifically, attention to detail, consistent publication of content and a relevance to your target audience.
As the nature of content creation has become more technical, so has the tweaking that many bloggers and writers employ. Unfortunately, this can sometimes backfire: in the pursuit of better SEO outcomes, writers sometimes make technical mistakes that can harm content performance.
In order to help you avoid this fate, let’s discuss a few of these simple content mistakes that can completely unravel any great SEO strategy.
Putting Keywords Before Content
In the pursuit of a strong SEO strategy, some brands focus intently on keyword research. While absolutely necessary in order to dominate in any niche, putting the cart before the horse in this situation can lead to disastrous results.
If your content strategy revolves around forcing content topics and choices to fit within a select grouping of keywords that you believe are opportune, then your content may suffer as a result. Finding ways to insert various keywords and phrases into your content offerings can make the content feel forced or unprofessional, which can cause issues with both readers and search engines.
Ultimately, make sure that your keyword selections are relevant and fit the content you want to create, and not the other way around.
Recycling Content Too Often
The act of repurposing content – turning older content into new posts, podcasts and other types of media – is a tried and true strategy for bloggers and brands. For many niches, there is only so much content and so many angles to cover before your veritable fountain of ideas begins to dry up. With that being said, brands must always strive to deliver new content whenever possible.
Your fan-base expects new content on a regular basis. While not every new post or piece of content needs to be unique, excessive repurposing leads to lacklustre engagement and interest from your audience. Building a solid SEO strategy via content is time-consuming, but the more original content you produce, the more engagement you can expect.
Failing to Include Tags and Descriptions
Even the very best content on the web can’t be adequately classified by search engines without a bit of help. This is why title tags, meta data and descriptions are so valuable in the pursuit of better SEO.
These elements help optimise content in ways that will ensure search engines most accurately classify your content in various SERPs. In addition to the items mentioned above, image tags and alt tags further help send signals to search engines about any additional multimedia included in each post or page. Writing great meta descriptions is also essential in improving SEO outcomes, so make sure that you don’t forget about them!
Building great content is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimisation. Without it, the vast majority of online brands and websites are doomed to failure. However, major mistakes made during the content creation process can derail any plans for greater visibility in search engines, so be sure not to make the mistakes outlined above when building your content portfolio.
