5 Tips to Stop SEO Mistakes Limiting Your Content Marketing

As well as gaining trust, authority and credibility for your business, content marketing is a fantastic way to build relationships with customers and prospects, positioning you as a thought leader in your business sector. But what if avoidable SEO mishaps are holding your content back from relevant search results?

Where content marketing is concerned, your first aim should be to create engaging and relevant material that will attract and retain your target audience. Your second should be to make your content easy for your target audience to find.

1. Make Sure Your Content Isn’t Too Short

If your blog, for example, is only four sentences long, it is highly unlikely to be able to provide the reader with all of the information that they need. More detailed content is more likely to be able to answer the user’s question, so appear higher up on search results pages.

2. Or Too Long

The average reader’s attention span is really quite short, so aim to capture and recapture the reader’s attention throughout the article.

Though it is important to provide your readers with informative, useful content, it is equally as important to avoid ‘content fatigue’ by boring your readers with long paragraphs of text with no content breaks. Try using lists, subheadings and images to make the content appear more inviting and less taxing to read.

3. Make It Visual

While long pages of content will cause search engines to rank your content unfavourably, incorporating images, videos and design elements can help search engines favour you content over that of your competitors.

4. Spelling & Grammatical Errors

Though not strictly SEO factors, simple spelling and grammar errors harm your readability and credibility, greatly reducing your chance of gaining referrals from other sites – one of the best ways to get your content to the top of the search pages.

5. Make Sure You Have Optimised Meta Data

Even a well-thought out article that has struck the keyword balance perfectly can be kept back from the top search results. Though these aspects of SEO seem more technical, they are easy to get right – the correct use of titles, meta titles, meta descriptions, etc. can be the solid foundation to successful content marketing.

Though content marketing should not be restricted by your SEO goals, it is very easy to use the apparent overlap to your advantage. Strong SEO paired with relevant and engaging content can prove a great way to generate new users and potential new customers. So what are you waiting for?