Your website is the lynchpin of all your online marketing efforts. It doesn’t matter how great your off-site link building campaign, social media marketing or content marketing campaigns are—without a great website based on great content to hold it all together your visitors are going to leave as quickly as they arrive. Your website has a matter of milliseconds to catch and hold someone’s attention, which means you better live up to their expectations and give them the information they want quickly! A few poorly designed content components and your site will struggle to keep visitors engaged.
Is your website making these content mistakes that can hurt your SEO?
1. No call-to-actions
Is no one filling out your contact form or signing up for your company newsletter? Have you tried asking them? Too often site owners worry about creating the perfect lead form, hoping to find the magic word count that will inspire thousands to fill it out. If you aren’t incorporating call-to-actions in your content, how will your visitors know what you want them to do? Ask and ye shall receive!
2. Too many ads
There is nothing wrong with trying to monetize your site, but please don’t stuff it with ads to the point where it looks like one giant classified. No one wants to read around a dozen ads when visiting your site to find one piece of information. It looks incredibly spammy, pushes your own branding below the fold and has a negative impact on the overall user-experience. Your content and messaging is much more important!
3. Unfocused content
Step 1: Tell them what you’re going to tell them. Step 2: Tell them. Step 3: Tell them what you just told them. This classic approach to public speaking and presentation giving should also apply to your webpage content. Stick to as few main points as possible on each page of your site. You don’t want to overload your visitor with irrelevant information. Plus, since keyword research is conducted on a page-by-page basis, unfocused content means too many keywords. Don’t worry about hitting a word count; just get the message across as best as possible.
4. Thin content
On the flipside of unfocused content you also have to be wary of thin content. Are there any pages on your site that you can condense or consolidate so relevant information is all in the same place? You don’t want to make your visitors hunt for the information they need. It’s better to have a few well-written pages with flushed out ideas than a dozen pages with only a few sentences on them.
5. Stuffed with keywords
Rule one of content marketing—write for humans first! You never want to write for the search engines because chances are you’ll be guilty of over-optimizing your content, which includes keyword stuffing. While it’s important to optimize your content and target related keywords, you don’t want to overdo it and make your content unpleasant to read.
