Why Your Content Is Failing

If your content marketing efforts aren’t getting the results you expected, there can be several reasons behind that failure.

Here, I’ll go over some of the most common ones and explain what you can do to fix them. Get ready to bring your content back to life!

You Only Focus on Company News

Want to know what’s even more boring than seeing a bunch of vaguely inspirational quotes on your Facebook feed? Seeing a bunch of brands relentlessly try to promote themselves and their products on your Facebook feed.

The truth is, there’s nothing wrong with getting the word out about a new product or a featured service. However, it’s also important that you make sure people recognize your company for something other than its advertisements and self promotions.

Because of this, it’s up to you to ensure that your content actually contains, well, content.

This means you’ll have to put a little more thought into the content you publish. Instead of just blogging about a product or service you offer, try branching out into topics related to your industry as a whole and writing original thought pieces on them.

After all, people don’t just search for specific products. They also search for information about current events, new innovations and industry trends, all of which you have the ability to cover.

And, once you’ve established yourself with readers as a reliable source for experience-based content, those readers will be much more likely to think of you the next time they’re in the market for a product or service you offer.

To get an idea of what you should write about other than your own company’s news and offerings, try getting a sense of what your ideal readers are searching for. Here at bizbuzzcontent, our favorite tool for this purpose is Answer the Public. When you plug a search term in, you’re presented with an easily understandable visualization of the search queries people are entering with that keyword.

For instance, plug in the term “content writing” and you’re greeted with the following graphic, as well as several others:

Once you have an idea of the types of questions people are asking about your area of expertise, you can start to form ideas for new content around the answers to those questions.

You’re Giving SEO the Cold Shoulder

We all know that content cannot consist of a string of keywords thrown together to vaguely resemble an article. Such content may initially get a few clicks, but it’ll soon be flagged by Google as low-quality, and thus bumped down in search rankings.

What some of us may not be entirely aware of, however, is that SEO (when done right) is still pretty important. Actually, scratch that–it’s very important.

In short, SEO helps search engines do their jobs more effectively and efficiently. That is to say, it allows search engines to figure out whether your site is relevant to a search or not.

One aspect of SEO involves tailoring your backend to help spiders and bots crawl your site. We’re not going to talk about that here.

What we are going to talk about, though, is how you can incorporate SEO into your content.

First of all, you’ll need to ensure that your content is useful. This means your content should accomplish its purpose, whether that’s to answer a question, teach a skill or discuss a timely topic.

Second, you’ll need to seamlessly blend keywords into your content, including the meta description and title. What’s most important during this step is choosing keywords that are actually relevant. In fact, it may be a good idea to limit the number of keywords you’ll allow yourself to use–start with two, and see how it goes from there.

Check out Jessica’s guest post for 3Q Digital to learn more about how you can implement SEO into your content. Or, if you need help identifying keywords to target, try using Moz’s Keyword Explorer tool.

You’re Not Paying Attention to Data

Unlike the latest as-seen-on-TV product, content isn’t something you can simply set and forget. Once your content is published, it’s important that you pay attention to any and all collected data about its performance.

This can involve taking a look at your WordPress stats, Facebook IQ or other similar insight and benchmarking tools.

Once you have a decent amount of stats to analyze, ask yourself the following questions:

• Is there a certain day of the week (or time of day) that my readers are most active?
• Do certain types of posts (how-to articles, lists, etc.) get more engagement than others?
• Are my calls to action (CTAs) effective?
• How many people that read our content follow up by visiting the company website or following us on social media?
• Do specific topics get more clicks than others?

After you’ve answered each of those questions, you’ll be able to form a clearer picture of which content performs best and which content falls behind. Now, simply take the information you’ve gleaned and use it to create a plan for the future. This could be a list of possible topics, a calendar specifying each time of day or a new addition to your company’s style guide.

In essence, learning what types of content worked (or didn’t work) for you in the past will help you devise a smarter and more effective content strategy for the future.

If you’d like help creating content that’s useful, relevant, SEO-friendly, exceptionally high-quality and designed to get results, you might want to consider using bizbuzzcontent’s content creation services.

Why do you think some of your content has been successful or unsuccessful? What’s your go-to trick for making your content get results? Let’s talk about it below!