Bad Content Can Effect Your Online Presence and Website Ranking on Google

Content Marketing is arguably the most important tool to generate leads and traffic for your business. It’s the best way to communicate and relate to your customer base effectively. More than ever before customers are more informed and can control their buying experience.

Content can be entertaining, educational or it can be both. Which route you want to go depends entirely on the message you’re trying to get across.

You could also make it both entertaining and educational electing to touch on several different points in the buyers journey. Making a purchase is a process. It starts with a need or a problem to solve. This is called the awareness stage.

The next step is the consideration stage. This is when the buyer has defined the need for a solution to their problem. The final stage is the decision stage which is when the buyer has settled in on a solution strategy.

Different types of content can fit into each stage and speak to people in different ways. Some people may be completely oblivious to decision stage content because they are still in the awareness stage. The goal is to make content that fits into all three of these phases.

There are some things that can hurt your content marketing strategy that are common among business owners.

1. The Wrong Department

In the early days of both social media and search marketing these tasks were often passed off to teenagers. It didn’t pay well and business owners are always looking for ways to save money especially when just starting out. Instead, the business owner would promise a good reference in exchange for figuring out the nuances of the internet. This worked at the time but in today’s digital marketing landscape it’s proven ineffective.

To this day business owners still like to pass off their content marketing to the IT department or web developers. Content marketers are a different breed. This makes sense to a business owner because the IT department and web development department are clever and solution oriented. They should be able to write content that gets the attention of Google bot, right?

That doesn’t mean it will transfer over into content marketing. In the early days these two departments could join forces and successfully rank a website. Google now penalizes  techniques that worked in the past that they viewed as exploiting their search algorithm. Content marketing can help your website outrank your competitors if done correctly. It will be ignored by search engines if done incorrectly and may even get your website a penalty. Google Penguin and Panda are designed to push spam to the Internet’s darkest corners and the best content to the very top of search results. If you get penalized by Google there may be no coming back from it. You’ll have to contact Google, wait for them to review your case and then wait until the next update to get re-indexed. By then the damage could already be done financially.

Using automated systems and keyword stuffing can negatively effect your website and it’s rank. Surprisingly, there are those who still try and game Google’s system. It used to work like gang busters but now it’s only a matter of time before Google finds these websites and de indexes them Even then, that small window of opportunity is enough for some to exploit.

Writing out quality content that speaks to people at different levels will boost your ranking in multiple different ways. It also has staying power, potentially generating leads and revenue for your business from the moment you publish it.

2. No Plan

If business owners treat their content marketing as an afterthought, customers will do the same with their business. Content marketing is an opportunity to relate to and speak your customers language in a way where they will choose you over your competitor.

If you also aim to inform and educate your customers as much as possible they will also become more pleasant to deal with. The old way of selling and marketing was to keep your customers in the dark. The less they knew the easier it was for a company to sell. It’s the opposite today. People are turned off by this tactic and can usually sense it right away.

Bad content not only has less of a chance of getting found, it also risks never being found. The next Google Penguin update is aimed at pushing bad content down and bringing the best content up through the ranks. The algorithm has gotten better at understanding what makes content useful and what is spam.

The best content marketing plans will resemble something similar to a newspaper or magazine. There should be a research and planning stage. Once the content is written it should then be edited and molded. It should address all the issues that covers your specific niche.

Look at a magazine like men or women’s health. You see similar subject matter every single month with a few adjustments. You don’t need to re-invent the wheel or write the worlds greatest novel. All you have to do is write on subjects people are interested in that can also help people.

Before it’s published there needs to be places where people will see it and interact with it. For a magazine that would be an airport, grocery store, book store or other related places.

For a website, that would be your social media channels you spent time building up followers on. Those channels have to be primed and ready to go. Great content can build an audience for you. Bad content will simply turn people away.

3. Lack Of Versatility

A lot of businesses only want to focus on one form of content. All of their content is articles and text based. By doing this they are completely ignoring a demographic that only interacts with images. These are your visual learners who’s brains make snap judgments depending on the pictures they see.

The truth is a lot of us judge a book by it’s cover and an image is a good way to capture someones attention. You can also create image based content as well on top of putting an image in an article.

This image based content in the form of info graphics, photos or graphs will attract a demographic you’d otherwise be completely invisible to. It will draw people in. When people see a block of text sometimes it turns them away. An article takes time to read that some people don’t have. Reading isn’t something everyone enjoys either.

By creating images you can let people know if it’s worth reading or not. It will give people an opportunity to make a positive snap judgment about who they are going to do business with. A snap judgment doesn’t have to be a negative experience. It can work in your favor and should be a large part of your entire approach.

If you’re wondering how your business can create useful, informative and lasting content we can help. Our team of content marketing experts can help you build a content marketing plan that is designed to not only generate leads but also sell.