SEO and content will always be heavily intertwined. You want to ensure that your content not only reaches your target audience in the SERPs, but also serves where they are at in their user journey and encourages them to take action.
Enterprise sites in particular can be guilty of having content strategies which have become stagnant, purely because there are swathes of content which aren’t being leveraged to reach their full potential.
Here are 5 top reasons why your content strategy is failing, along with actions you can take right now to fix it.
1. Your existing content has decayed
It can be easy to focus on creating new content and neglect what you already have on your site, especially if there are thousands of pages to contend with. As a general rule of thumb, content should be looked at every six months to check it is still up to date.
Content will show signs of decay if it has stopped bringing in as much traffic, conversions have gone down – or the information simply isn’t accurate or fresh anymore, as this can lead to site visitors (and in turn, search engines) not trusting your content.
Instead of creating new pages to discuss updates to a topic your site already has authoritative content about, it may be more advantageous to incorporate the updates into your existing content, particularly if specific pages are already performing well.
That way, when the page is re-indexed, search engines will not only recognise that the content provides comprehensive knowledge (satisfying E-E-A-T criteria) but it also assists with the QDF (Query Deserves Freshness) ranking factor.
2. Your conversion goals don’t match up with the content you have
Let’s say your Google Analytics has been set up to track specific conversion goals, such as a submitted form or a completed purchase. You may be pleased to see that recent SEO content optimisation has resulted in increased traffic to your site, but to your frustration, your conversions aren’t ticking up in tandem.
In short, the reason behind this mismatch is because your content isn’t effectively directing your audience towards making the conversion. It’s easy to pass the responsibility for conversion over to CRO or content marketing experts, but the reality is that SEO content strategy needs to overlap with these disciplines.
Dig into your analytics and analyse your user journeys. Where are the specific points where users drop off? If they are engaging well with content but not following a CTA, it may need repositioning to make it more prominent, or rewording to encourage the engaged user to follow through.
Your Core Web Vitals could also need examining. Perhaps issues such as the page loading speed and mobile responsiveness are putting people off engaging further after they have digested the content – or perhaps the dwell time is shorter than it should be because of these issues. Get the technical SEO specialists on board in this instance to troubleshoot.
3. You don’t have content for each stage of the funnel
Your site visitors will most likely come from various stages of the sales funnel. Here’s a reminder of the funnel:
- Problem: The buyer is looking for the answer to a problem they are having
- Solution: The buyer understands their problem and is seeking a solution
- Product: The buyer knows what they need and is comparing products
In order to most effectively capture each of these prospective customers, your content needs to match each step of the funnel.
Here’s an example content headline for each stage of the funnel, using the example of a CRM software company.
Problem: Top 10 CRM failures and how to fix them
Let’s pick out one of these failures – low user adoption – and turn it into a solution-oriented piece for the next stage in the funnel
Solution: 8 Tricks To Improve CRM User Adoption
Now that we’ve provided both general and specific education on the problem, the CRM software company can position itself as a solution – perhaps by offering up a case study.
Product: How [Software Name] helped [Case Study Name] increase sales by 200%
4. Your marketing personas don’t draw on sales data
If you have comprehensive analytics data to dig into, there is a certain amount of work you can do yourself to establish what your target audience is looking for. However, the most effective way you can create accurate, up-to-date marketing personas is by speaking with your sales and business development team to obtain data on what customers are looking for.
You will find that this data helps you to build on the work you’ve already done by parsing analytics, allowing you to create real pictures of the types of people who are actively engaging with your products or services. This will help you to create effective content strategies that directly answer the questions they are having.
Also, don’t forget that marketing personas should be updated if your target audience’s needs and behaviour have changed. If you were previously targeting one audience segment, but another has become a larger source of organic traffic for you, then dig into this change and adjust your content strategy accordingly to serve this audience’s needs.
5. Your content is suffering from keyword cannibalisation
Keyword cannibalisation occurs when there are too many identical or similar keywords spread throughout your site. Search engines won’t know how to rank your content as it will identify multiple similar pages which appear to sit on the same level of the hierarchy.
Sometimes you will need to perform a complete content audit to build a clearer site architecture, but in some cases there will only be a handful of cannibalised pages for you to tackle.
The best solution is to merge your content and consolidate it into one page.
- Check your analytics and figure out which page is getting the most traffic
- Implement a 301 redirect on the page which is getting less traffic
- Merge the content onto the page which is getting more traffic
- Rinse and repeat this process for all cannibalised pages
- Submit your URLs to Google Search Console for reindexing
Book a Free Acquisitions Workshop today
We can give you a comprehensive overview of how your SEO content strategy is currently performing, along with actions you can take to fix any issues you have.
Our Free Acquisitions Workshops are tailored to your company, and include bespoke advice created by experienced humans – making them higher value than data which has simply been pulled from an SEO tool.
If you’d like help with your SEO content strategy, then book one of our workshops today – but hurry, because we only have a few slots left.
