5 Rules to Keep Your Online Content Alive

Content marketing is a crucial component to your Inbound Marketing Strategy.

Blogs form the cornerstone of any good content marketing program. By adding pages to your website and using keywords related to your business, your blog will help support your SEO, or search engine optimization. They also give you a great opportunity to offer helpful information to prospects in the ‘Awareness Stage’ of their buyer’s journey.

However, when done incorrectly, blogs have the potential to derail your entire inbound marketing content strategy before it’s been able to have any positive impact.

Avoid the five critical errors below to get the most out of your content marketing blog

1. You Don’t Have A Content Calendar

For effective results, you need to blog regularly. A content calendar helps you ensure that your blogs are posted on a regular schedule and avoid long gaps between blogs or too many blogs in a short period of time.

If you have more than one employee working on your company’s blog, you should also indicate who is responsible for each blog post to make sure no posting dates get skipped and to avoid two employees working on the same blog at once.

2. Your Content Strategy Doesn’t Include Topics

Generally, all of your topics should be determined well in advance of when they’re written. This allows you to boost your search engine optimization efforts and build expertise on topics that resonate with your personas. Think of the areas where they need help, then offer your professional insights.

Posting about whatever comes into your mind on any given day causes inconsistency and also makes your blogging efforts inefficient — and possibly repetitive. For the best results, focus on one broad theme throughout a series of blogs and tailor your predetermined topics to those themes.

3. You’re Not Focusing on Your Prospects

Keep in mind the most fundamental guideline of inbound marketing: it’s not about you.

Your blog posts need to focus on your prospects and their pains. With every post you develop and write, ask yourself if it helps your prospects solve their pains. If the answer is no, you need a different post, (or maybe even a new topic).

4. You’re Ignoring The Importance Of Quality

Unfortunately, many businesses think of their blog as “just a blog.” As a result, they don’t take the time to generate quality posts. There are no shortcuts. Writing quality blogs takes time.

Building trust is crucial to guiding prospects through the buyer’s journey. Bad blogs kill trust. Avoid this by hiring good writers and copy editors for your blog posts.

View your online content as your customers would

Posting low-quality content to your website doesn’t add any value for your prospects. Plus, if you offer poorly worded posts with numerous copy errors, you actually harm any trust you’ve built with your prospects. No matter how much of an expert you are in your industry, it won’t seem that way to prospects after they read an incoherent, typo-riddled blog post.

We understand that spelling errors can happen, but if you noticed something isn’t right — correct it.

5. You Have No SEO Keyword Strategy  

Blogging directly impacts your SEO efforts. That’s why you need to know what keywords to focus on for each topic and theme. However, it’s not enough to simply use keywords and hope search engines rank your blog for these terms. Not all keywords are created equal.

While there are some instances where you may gain search engine traffic from a blog post, typically you want to use those blogs to help other pages on your site rank for your target keywords. Targeting the same long tail keywords consistently will help your website build local authority on the subject.

You’re better off having one website page you want to rank for each term. For instance, if your main source of revenue is manufacturing custom ramekins, you’re going to want to rank for the keywords “custom ramekin manufacturing” and “custom ramekin production.”

Be specific with your keywords to get noticed

Rather than just using those terms a few dozen times in your blog posts, build a custom ramekin manufacturing page with lots of details on this service on your site. Then, when you use this term within your blogs, make sure to link back to that page.

This SEO strategy helps boost the rankings of your target pages, avoids keyword cannibalization (when you have two pages ranking for the same term, hurting the overall rank of both) and helps guide your prospects through their buyer’s journey.

If you follow these basic rules for effective SEO, you can turn prevent your blog from looking like alphabet soup to the Internet engine search engines.

Be different — get noticed — survive.