Every business needs a website with high-quality content to build their online brand and rank for those crucial keywords. Perhaps you have doubts about your own site's content. Here are three signs that your blog, as the Brits say, doesn't cut the mustard...
#1 Blog articles never get passed the ideas in the first paragraph
We've all had this experience as consumers: We find an interesting article with an engaging title, so we click on it and start to read. For the first few lines, it's engaging, but things go downhill pretty quickly. The story goes into too much detail about one example, repeats itself with a pointless conclusion, and then ends without ever delivering on the promise made in its headline.
One of the hardest parts of writing is starting on a new section or topic in the text. When writers who are scared of this feeling, get close to starting the next point and paragraph, they suddenly feel 'inspired' with 5 additional extra points for their first paragraph — that they just have to add. This, unsurprisingly, keeps happening until they reach their holy 1000 word limit, then it's a sprint for the post button and onto the next article. The end product of this process is a lopsided article that never really goes anywhere or achieves anything.
Experienced content writers know that this is a tendency to procrastinate is in all of us and that there will always be an element of discomfort when starting something fresh, but this uncomfortable feeling can be reduced with effective planning. A good technique for avoiding this problem is writing H2 titles to provide the article with a skeleton and then going from there. Then a writer knows where they are jumping to next when they get towards the end of a point. Writers who can't make a plan because they have no idea what to write, just need to read on.
#2 You've Never Shown Your Blog to Anyone
If you treat your business's blog is like a dirty secret that you would never talk about or show to anyone. There is a good chance that it needs rethinking. You are an ambassador for your blog if you won't fight for it: no one will. Find someone whose feedback you trust and value, then ask them to take a look at your blog, ideally when you are in the room. This will help you get a better idea of how your blog comes across. You may be pleasantly surprised, but at the very least reading your content, when someone else is in the room, will always make hidden faults you hadn't seen before, magically appear, so you can work on those.
If you don't like sharing your blog, because deep down you feel like you don't know what you are doing, you may also want to check out the blogs of your biggest competitors — rankingCoach users can use the app to find and track their biggest competitors. Seeing what the competition is up to will give you some good examples, better ideas for benchmarks and will give a better clue of what the expectations for a blog in your industry are.
Spend a little time looking at other articles on search engines. It's very likely that you are not the first person to try and write an article to optimize for that term.There will be a fair few other articles already out there on the subject. They can give you plenty of ideas on the key areas to cover and also key topics that they might have missed that you can target for your niche. So type the title of your article into Google and see what comes up.
#3 You've Gone Overboard with Keywords
It's great to see a well-written business blog with keywords in all the right places, but just because your aim is to get visitors through search engines doesn't mean that keywords are more important than anything else. If the content, you want to rank for, is so stuffed with keywords that it makes the article difficult, repetitive, or boring to read this will hurt your rankings, not help them.
The readability of your content is also a ranking factor for Google. Googlebot is clever enough to distinguish between content generated by robots and well-written content, as well as picking up on spelling and grammar mistakes. So shaky content won't do you any favors with Google and it certainly won't make visitors want to stay on a website, which is the whole point. Remember, customers clicking straight off your website will negatively impact your bounce rate which is also a ranking factor.
To avoid these problems, resist the temptation to crowbar the same keyword into every sentence. As long as these keywords appear in the H1 some of the H2s and the body of an article a few times then this will be enough, especially if your H2 titles take the forms of questions that a user may ask a search engine
If you are still not sure, read your article aloud or use sites like natural readers to help you hear how it sounds. If after removing most of the keywords, you have pretty much nothing left, you need to think a little deeper about the purpose of what you are writing. Content written for SEO is often most effective when it is helping to provide a solution for a problem that customers have.
For example, a website selling tires for mountain bikes may write an article with the title: Top Tips for Finding The Best Winter Tires for your mountain bike.
When the author of this article has finished writing it, they shouldn't be measuring success by counting how many keywords they have successfully stuffed into it. They should be asking themselves, does someone looking to find the right winter tires for their mountain bike now have a better idea of what to look for?
Regardless of form, medium, or content, effective writing is always about understanding the purpose of what you are writing and fulfilling it. So don't just think about the technical side of things or getting it done as quickly as possible. Focus on serving the user and providing them with content that is useful.
We hope this article helps you to improve your site's content.
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