In the content marketing world, SEO is constant topic of discussion. As a cost-effective way of organically bolstering brand awareness and generating leads, SEO plays a critical role in content marketing. After all, search is still the primary way people find content.
Although a strong SEO strategy is a necessity for content marketers, it’s one of the most difficult tactics to perfect. In fact, only 14 percent of companies rate their SEO efforts as “very successful,” according to research from Ascend2’s “SEO Marketing Benchmark Report.”
For many companies, a lack of specific skills and understanding are the main reasons why they can’t achieve desired results from SEO. Even worse, these impairments can lead marketers to sabotage their SEO efforts. Marketers must be wary, therefore, of making mistakes that can end up hurting their content marketing efforts. Below are the three most common SEO pitfalls to avoid:
1.Optimizing for the wrong keywords: Optimize your content for keywords that are closely aligned with your core competencies, chief differentiators and unique selling propositions. If you’re stuck on choosing the best keywords for your content marketing strategy, consider using Google AdWords, a keyword planner that helps users search for new keywords that may garner search volume and competitiveness. When implementing keywords into content, be sure to avoid overusing them. As a rule of thumb, try not to exceed more than one keyword per 100 words, and only include in titles if appropriate.
2.Poor quality of content: Optimizing the wrong keywords will poorly position your content for search rankings, giving search users the wrong impression of subject matter expertise as well as brand consistency and credibility. Because of this, Google rewards companies that focus less on the “algorithm game” and more on creating original, engaging, share-worthy content.
To rank on the coveted first page of Google, you must ensure that your content is pristine—that is, original, relevant and insightful as well as free from grammatical errors, typos and misspellings. For instance, you wouldn’t dream of republishing a variation of a blog posted two months ago, would you? If you’re struggling to continually publish high-quality writing, a content strategy vendor can help by identifying innovative new ways to tell your brand’s unique story and building you a comprehensive editorial calendar.
3.Bad backlinks: Hyperlinking is a tried and true tactic for bolstering the credibility and searchability of content, but it’s your job to differentiate a good backlink from a bad one. Examples of the latter include:
- Spammy sites: Even if a Web page boasts quality content, it can look like spam (or even a virus) if it’s poorly built.
- Irrelevant sites: There’s nothing worse than clicking on a link that brings you to completely unrelated content; it makes you feel duped. Whatever words you choose as your link should be a truthful representation of what the reader can expect to see.
Other backlinking factors that can affect SEO include the positioning of the link, or where it lives on the Web page; the length of the link (shorter is always better), and not linking to certain sites when needed. For instance, all market research or statistics should be properly accredited and backlinked; otherwise, a reader has no way of knowing whether a piece of data you have provided is substantial or forged.
The world of SEO is ever-changing and complex. Avoiding these three common obstacles can help you improve and modify your SEO efforts as needed to create a strong overall content marketing strategy.
Edited by
Brooke Neuman
