Content marketing has proven to be one of the most important aspects of a website, yet it is undermined as an afterthought by many businesses.
Today, digital content is more than the words you read; it ranges from images and infographics to videos and whitepapers and just about everything in between. Because of its broad definition, there is a chance your website is making mistakes impacting your success, but luckily, many of these mistakes can be fixed.
Here’s a list of the common content marketing mistakes you’re making on your website and how to fix them.
Designing Your Website Before Content
This “chicken or the egg” situation often comes across, especially when our clients are providing the content. When we create custom websites, we always make sure that design and content are being worked on simultaneously to ensure they both enhance the final product. That being said, we need a plan with website content before we can touch the design.
Even if the content is still in the works when we start designing, we need a content outline at the very least to begin working on the layout. This is to ensure that we are designing something that fits the content. Doing this will allow the website to showcase the content in a way that makes sense for the user instead of trying to make the content fit on a page that doesn’t work with it.
Content tends to be the most time-consuming part of a website, but if you can complete all the writing before design, you will see more success with your website.
Keeping Underperforming Content
Having more content on your website will not do you any good if it is underperforming or low quality. By keeping underperforming content, you’re giving users low-quality content to read and spending unnecessary time on content that’s not worth the effort.
Perform a content audit on your website to see how much content you can purge. It may sound daunting, but once you trim the fat off your content, it will help you in the long run.
Ignoring Meta Descriptions
All pages on your website should have a meta description for SEO purposes. Though search engines may not use titles and meta descriptions word for word in search results, they’re used to validate what someone will find on a particular page.
If you ignored your meta descriptions, you could be hurting your SEO. Here’s an example of a web page that has neglected their meta description:
As you can see, this SEO attribute helps convert a searcher to a visitor. Make sure you always custom edit your meta description for each page and post. If you’re unsure where to do this, here’s an example of where you can edit this on a WordPress website (though this will look different depending on which SEO plugin you’re using):
You Don’t Revisit Your Content
This point somewhat ties back to the second point, but revisiting your website content will do wonders for your site’s success.
Think about it: if you launched a website four years ago, created an average of three new web pages a year, and blog twice a month, you’ve added 108 new pages of content since the site launched. There is a good chance some of that content is either irrelevant or out of date, and you need to revisit all of it at least once a year.
An annual content audit is a great way to make sure you purge your site of useless content, as well as rework content to be more current or up to date with the newest information.
The websites that make content marketing a priority and leave room for improvement will win. As the digital landscape continues to change over time, your website and content need to adapt to stay competitive. Keep these content marketing mistakes in mind now and see the benefits of them tomorrow!
To learn more about website content marketing for your business, contact GreenMellen today!
