Content marketing is competitive, there are no two ways about it. With so much content on the internet being published every day it can be hard to get traffic in to your own. Google is constantly changing and evolving the way it set its standards for search rankings. Content that you put out needs to be SEO-friendly, otherwise it’s either going to have negative or no effect on where you rank in search engines. Due to the constantly changing landscape, something that was previously beneficial to you might now be a negative. Here are the things that you should be avoiding when putting out content:
· Being Too General
General information articles are content that is put out in order to let the consumer know the basics of a topic. It doesn’t look at the topic from any niche angle and will just give descriptions that are generic and uninformative. There are two key reasons as to why this sort of content does you no favours. The first of these is that this sort of content will have already been used many times before – it has become stale. You are never going to outperform websites such as Wikipedia that have got this sort of content locked down. The second reason to avoid it is that new technologies are making it easier for people to access basic information.
· Being Too Short
There once was a time when short content was seen to be a huge advantage to content marketing. Every new page created (no matter how short) would be indexed by Google, all you had to do was make sure you done some keyword optimisation and pump out as much content for as little effort. But times have changed. Posts that have over one thousand words will now see more shares and generate more links than smaller articles.
· Don’t Recycle Material
It was previously common practice to either use your own old blog post or a competitors post and change it ever so slightly and repost it. This would then be passed off as new material. But times have changed and this will no longer work. It has become too competitive in the field and any recycled material won’t have a positive impact.
· Do Not Use Clickbait
Clickbait is the term used when a post has a title that implies something uses a title to generate a buzz but the actual content inside the article has no desire of matching this. It is used more commonly today by tabloid newspapers but can still be seen by content marketers. This is not good practice. Consumers have become disinterested with clickbait and search engines and social media don’t like it either. Using it is a lose-lose scenario.
· Content Marketing: Content For The Sake of It
Generating content that is only there to fill up space is not good practice. In order to improve yourself and how you rank you should constantly be putting out interesting, passionate content. Articles that are churned out without any real interest won’t do any good whatsoever.
