Is Your Website Content Killing Your ROI?

Content Marketing the Wrong Way Loses Customers and Google Rankings

If your website isn’t getting the traffic and click-throughs it used to, it may be because your content is still playing by the old rules. Check out these 3 strategies that worked well once upon a time, before search engines and site visitors wised up.

1. Aiming for visitors, not sales.

This concept is a holdover from the heyday of passive income websites. The sole purpose of those sites was to be a billboard for banner ads, so the sole goal of the website content was to bring in the visitors to see the ads. The content on such websites was largely gibberish packed with the keywords (search terms) likely to be used by their target audience; but it achieved its goal.

However, this is not, and never should have been, the goal of a business website. If it’s going to pay for itself, you need conversions: visitors who will stay long enough to learn about and buy from your business. To do that, you need intelligible, useful content that keeps people reading. In any case, Google has changed its algorithms so that keyword-packed sites are now penalized by being kicked to the bottom of the search results pages.

2. Bulking up with weak or copied content.

Text for the sake of text, either purchased at cut rate prices from a provider who knows nothing about your business or simply plagiarized from another site, was once an accepted SEO tactic. Again, the mistake was assuming that increased traffic would automatically lead to increased sales. To be effective, content marketing must keep visitors engaged, informed and loyal. If they’re disappointed or bored with what they read, they’ll perceive your business as low value as your site. (Especially if they already read it on your competitor’s site!) Another thing to keep an eye on is the quality of the writing itself: spelling, grammar and syntax. You don’t want prospective customers to think that you dropped out of school in the 5th grade.

3. Setting it and forgetting it.

It used to be enough just to have a presence on the internet. The website was created and then simply left for people to find through search engines or links. But now that there are billions of sites competing for a share of audience attention, a static website will fall by the wayside.

Content marketing today means constantly providing new reasons for people to come back to your site. It could be as simple as a short weekly blog. Or having your tweets and Facebook posts automatically displayed on your site (and vice versa). If appropriate for your product, you could post how-to videos or user reviews. There are many ways to keep your content unique, fresh and valuable to your visitors.

That’s how content marketing builds brand recognition, generates sales leads and increases revenue … in short, delivers a great return on your investment.

Let’s chat about your next web project!