The Content Marketing Weekly provides insights you wish you knew before. This week’s edition includes news on bad SEO, bad content and bad practices. Oh, and, there’s some good news for those who adequately invest in content marketing, too.
13 Outdated SEO Tactics That Should Terrify You
Halloween is over, of course, but you’d be surprised just how often SEO monsters crawl out from underneath marketers’ beds at night. That is to say, old habits die hard.
SEO in 2018, however, is designed to reward sites that ditch bad tactics. So the question becomes, “Why do so many marketers still believe in SEO ghosts?”
This post on Search Engine Land walks through several practices that are either pointless or are downright detrimental.
“So this SEO copywriter walks into a bar, grill, pub, public house, Irish bar, bartender, drinks, beer, wine, liquor”
— L.A. Weekly (@LAWeekly) January 10, 2011
Here are some of the highlights:
- Exact-match domains. Remember those? –> (thebestcontentmarketingwriting.com)
- Manipulative linking.
- Guest blogging with abandon.
- Writing for bots, not humans.
- Keyword stuffing.
Are you still adhering to any of these exercises? We hope not.
Read the other SEO no-gos here.
Google: Improving Low-quality Content is Better Than Deleting It
If you’re taking over the reins of an existing site or you’ve received the go-ahead to revamp your content marketing, you might be better served making small improvements rather than deleting pages wholesale.
Says who?
Google that is.
Search Engine Journal recounts a recent Google Webmaster Hangout with John Mueller, senior webmaster trends analyst at Google.
Basically, if the content you have on your site serves a specific purpose, keep it. There is an inherent value in purpose-driven content regardless of its performance. You just need to re-optimize it for your current needs.
Better #content = better leads. These 12 tools can help improve your content quality right now: https://t.co/Q2b6hIzGic #ContentMarketing pic.twitter.com/UDxrEZmh6E
— Brafton (@Brafton) October 3, 2017
On the other hand, if you have an enormous number of pages that historically were auto-generated or that are not salvageable, deleting them while including proper redirects is an option. Just know that replacing these pages from scratch can be more time-intensive than simply optimizing pages and may not lead to better results.
Learn more about this discussion here.
Global Content Marketing Market 2017-2021
Through 2021, the total value of the content marketing market is expected to expand 16 percent each year. Thanks for asking.
That’s according to a recent report from Technavio, a research firm.
The benefits of content marketing are well-known, but for business leaders still skeptical of this model, it’s clear it’s not going away anytime soon. In fact, it’s becoming more pervasive and more necessary than ever.
As the report notes, the key pillars of content marketing are higher conversion rates, greater brand awareness, increased trust and cheaper costs compared to traditional advertising. And the proliferation of vendors capable of handling all content marketing tasks for companies is growing as well.
The sky really is the limit.
Read all the other key findings from the report.
5 Mistakes Sabotaging Your Content-Marketing Success
For all of the advantages of content marketing, you’re only capitalizing on them if you do them well. The bare minimum just won’t cut it.
After months of ramping up content production, marketers sometimes expect immediate results. Yet, production is only a small sliver of marketing. And that’s where many fall short.
Entrepreneur recently expounded on a few of the ways marketers trip over their own feet. Do any of these examples remind hit a little too close to home?
- Content without promotion.
- There’s no way to generate the type of traffic and impressions you want if you don’t promote and distribute your content. Marketers need a dedicated workflow that goes beyond production. Producing content is a beginning step, but what comes after is often the defining benchmark that matters.
- Content without automation.
- To help you produce, promote and measure a content marketing program at scale, you’re going to need the help of automation. There are plenty of platforms across every channel that assist with this. Automated email and social media management are two of the most common ways to maximize your team’s time and drive results.
- Campaigns without testing.
- Everyone loves the word “campaign,” but few know how to run one from start to finish. You should be measuring results in real time, making tweaks where needed and reporting on the success or failure of the initiative. That’s how you lay the groundwork for future campaigns.
- Production without quality.
- In the race to get content out the door, quality often suffers. But even a single poorly produced asset can have long-term ramifications since readers may only visit your site once – if you don’t wow them on first impression, they could be gone forever.
- Marketing without analysis.
- To stack up and outpace competitors, you need to monitor their movements, identify their weaknesses and target strategic opportunities. Comparing yourself to the competition is a good thing, as it provides you an easy gauge of how well you are doing.
See you next week!
