Content marketing and SEO go hand in hand. Even with quality and engaging content, it’s not going to help if your target readers can’t find it, and if you want them to find your content, you need search engine optimization. But it’s not just SEO that impacts your content marketing efforts, but your content marketing strategy can also sabotage your SEO efforts.

How is that? The fact is that while many digital marketers are doing their best to create optimized content for marketing success, many are still making small mistakes that end ruining their SEO strategy. 

Here are some mistakes that you might be making and how to fix them.

1. Neglecting Your Brand Website Content

Any successful content marketing strategy combines both owned content and earned content. Earned content includes press mentions or guest-written articles or blogs about you or your brand, published on high-authority sites. These are critical for your SEO strategy when they include backlinks to your website. 

However, focusing on earned content and neglecting your website content will not be of any good to your SEO efforts. While there are many different digital marketing strategies, your website’s content needs to be of the highest quality and offer valuable information to its readers. You need a solid content marketing strategy that includes informative and engaging content. 

Maze, a Lebanese digital marketing agency is a good example in the MENA region. They have been creating actionable & lighthearted content covering everything from SEO to eCommerce.

Failing to update your website regularly and publishing quality content on your blog or site is one of the biggest mistakes that marketers make. The content should also be optimized with relevant and well-research keywords that you want your brand to rank for in search engines while ensuring that the content remains readable. Each content should be optimized for search. 

2. Ignoring the Value of Subheadings

Readers want easily digestible content. When you consider that the average reader’s attention span is only about 8 seconds, it’s easy to see why your content needs to be easy to read. 

Including subheadings helps break up your content into sections that offer readers an overview of your content. Without subheadings, few readers will read and engage with it.

Subheadings are also playing a more prominent role in determining how search engines see your content. The more digestible your content is, the more valuable it is to search engines like Google. Include relevant keywords related to your brand’s services, products, or informative content to boost your SEO efforts. 

3. Writing Short Blog Posts and Keyword Stuffing

While high-quality content has no specified rules about the number of words you can write, recent research has shown that creating quality long-form content generates higher rankings in search results. Writing short 400-words blog posts only limits your content ideas and your position of authority. The more engaging content you can create for your audience, the better.

Another mistake that marketers make is keyword stuffing. Yes, you’re doing your best to get results from your SEO marketing efforts, but keyword stuffing in your content is a red flag for search engines that your website is not trustworthy. That means lower site rankings. Instead, focus on creating optimized long-form blogs that analyze a topic in your site’s niche. 

4. Failing to Optimize Your Title Tags

Title tags are a critical part of your SEO content strategy as they specify your web page titles in search results. They tell search engines and people searching the web what your content is all about. Considering that title tags appear on SERPs and even when content is shared in social media, you must optimize your title tags to encourage higher click-through rates.

When publishing your on-site content, you need to create title tags that include related keywords that your target audiences could be looking for.

Failure to do this means you’re missing out on more potential visitors to your website. Companies that optimize their title tags can see a jump in organic traffic. Keep in mind that content on your site has to be top-quality. 

5. Forgetting to Interlink to Your Website Pages

Google uses different strategies to determine the value of your site’s content and identify related content. Failing to interlink to other pages on your website means you’re losing out on potential SEO-ranking and authority benefits. The more high-authority links you have in your content leading to your website, the more value search engines like Google place on your site. 

Focus on creating an interlinking strategy for all your content marketing efforts, through your website, social media, and guest-blogging opportunities to boost your authority in your niche.

This way, website visitors and searchers who read your content can trust you and be interested to learn more about what you do, offer, or sell. 

6. Not Focusing on Long-Tail Keywords

Short-tail keywords are great for SEO, but with today’s searchers more interested in finding clear answers and solutions to problems, search terms are changing drastically.

Long-tail keywords should be the main focus of your SEO content strategy. A close look at semantic search data today shows that searcher intent is leaning more towards longer search queries. 

Don’t just focus on the critical short-tail keywords that define your business but also include long-tail keywords and other keyword variations to improve your search engine ranking efforts. 

The relationship between the words we use when searching for solutions online and what search engines provide is changing, and long-tail keywords are defining that change. 

7. Not Creating Relevant Image Alt-Text

Image alt-text plays a huge role in your content marketing and SEO efforts. Failing to describe the appearance and function of an image on any particular page on your website is not a good marketing practice.

Alt-text is vital for ensuring easy accessibility of content to users with visual impairments and providing better image descriptions and context to search engine crawlers. 

Conclusion

Creating content without taking time to ensure that your website is optimized for both web and mobile content affects your site’s performance, and ultimately, the end-user experience.

So, do a website audit before publishing new content on your website. Avoid these mistakes to ensure your content and SEO strategies work in harmony to ensure success. 

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