A Guide to Identify & Fix Your Underperforming Content
Content fuels your digital strategy, including SEO. Even though your content gets old, it is found that it still generates 76% of your website traffic. As a marketer, it might sound strange, but it fits perfectly when you analyze it. When your old blogs get ample shares and promotions, more and more of your customers tend to read them. This, in turn, increases your rankings and online visibility.
Have you ever wondered what it will take to succeed in your SEO in 2022? The answer is – QUALITY CONTENT. A sound SEO strategy comprises of better backlinks, relevant keywords, and concise website content. A unique and engaging content automatically improves your user experience. You can also generate high-quality backlinks, thus improving your overall website traffic.
Strategizing your content is a dynamic and continuous process. And keeping yourself updated with changing content trends is equally essential. It can help you understand the market, your users’ needs and structure your content accordingly.
Also Read: How AI-Powered Chatbots Revolutionize Customer Engagement
Here are some types of content that will dominate in 2022 and will help you in targeting your audience effectively:
1. Explainer Videos
Using explainer videos is a great way to increase the exposure of your brand. Nowadays, customers are more likely to watch short, animated, and informative videos than reading text, which will be a growing form of content in the future. You can aware, engage, or even pitch your services with explainer videos.
2. Instagram Stories
Stories have become a prevalent type of content for real-time marketing. Your users can feel more connected when you can host a live event to aware your users about a sale, new products, etc. on your Instagram stories. Instagram also offers you to view engagement stats, which you can help steer your marketing efforts in the right direction.
3. Infographic Content
Infographic content can benefit your business in several ways. It allows you to present your information in an engaging manner. Infographics let you add stats, images, and text in such a way that it creates an impact on your users. Your content becomes shareable, digestible, that helps build your brand.
Underperforming content is basically a content that fails to achieve your desired ROI. You can classify it into two types.
- An old content of yours that received huge traffic and visibility in the beginning but is no longer profitable now.
- A piece of content that has never generated profits, engagement, and visibility for your brand.
Now that we know what an underperforming content is let’s explore why your content doesn’t do well despite your best efforts.
A. Length of Your Content Is Less as Compared to the Ideal One
Improper length is the foremost reason for underperforming content. Your content length plays a significant role in keeping your readers hooked to a subject matter.
The ideal length varies as per different businesses and their niche. However, 2,100-2,400 words are considered to be a perfect blog length for SEO content in 2021. You can find your ideal length using the “top ten average” method, i.e., simply calculating the average length of your top ten blog posts.
When your reader gets a shallow overview of a topic, your content does not fulfil their expectations and gradually lose interest. On the other hand, when you strive to deeply explore your topic and provide valuable insights to your customers, it tends to perform better.
B. Your Content Isn’t as Up-To-Date or Engaging
Another reason for underperforming content is when your content is not fresh and updated. Nowadays, you can reap the benefits of some recent content trends, including personalized content to communicate better with your users, diversified topics to avoid redundancy, interactive content like quizzes, surveys to make it engaging for your readers, etc.
Updating content is vital to keep it relevant for your readers. You should keep your website content updated and the facts and figures used in it too. Fresh content attracts your readers, and thus makes your content perform.
C. Specific or Seasonal Content
Posting seasonal content can also be a reason for your underperforming content. Seasonal content is related to any past events or subject matter, which often doesn’t interest your target audience after a certain point in time. Thus, you should aim to publish updated and the most recent content as per your niche.
D. Plagiarized Content
Lack of originality in your content is one of the significant reasons for underperforming content. It not only diminishes your reputation but also drops your SEO rankings. You can also face legal issues, and thus, you should always check for plagiarism to maintain your content’s authenticity and credibility.
E. Not Optimized for Targeted Keywords
The next reason for underperforming content is non-optimized keyword content. When your content lacks the relevant keywords that you want to focus on, it impacts your rankings. Such content also fails to address your audience’s needs, making your content irrelevant to them. Moreover, Google and other SERPs do not prioritize your content, and in turn, affect your rankings.
F. Missing CTA or Not Added Proper CTA in the Content
An ineffective or missing CTA, i.e., call to action, also leads to underperforming content. CTAs give agenda to your content and help you to assess the reaction of your audience. An interactive CTA also helps to improve your user experience and conversion rates. Thus, when your content lacks a concrete CTA or doesn’t have one, you miss an opportunity to create compelling content.
G. Not Having Power Words in the Heading
Lack of power words in your title fails to catch your reader’s attention. Power words affect the emotions of your audience and, thus, can make your content viral. On the other hand, a plain heading without power words fails to generate curiosity in your audience. In most of the cases, your readers become disinterested in reading further, resulting in underperforming content.
H. Covering Multiple Topics in a Single Copy
Google is more conscious of content intent than ever. It is imperative to have a properly structured content that comes out as a well-weaved story to the reader. You cannot think about creating a cocktail of many raking topics anymore. You must keep your content focused on just one topic along the entire content length.
1. Understand Search Intent
Aligning your content strategy with your user’s intent is the first step to improve your underperforming content. Make sure that your blogs, posts, or ad copies meet your end user’s needs. It will hold their attention, and they tend to read your content until the end.
To understand what your audience is looking for, you can assess your keywords properly. They can help you answer a specific query of your target audience, thus improving your underperforming content.
2. Make Sure Your Page Can Be Crawled and Indexed “Properly”
Another critical step to fix your underperforming content is to check your webpages for indexing and crawling. You can inspect your Robots.txt file, and XML sitemaps to ensure that Google fetches relevant and correct content from your website.
3. Map Your Pages against the Right Keywords
Keywords are responsible for making your content relevant to your users. Ensure that your content is stuffed with the right keywords naturally so that it matches your user’s search intent and ranks higher. It will not only help your content to rank better, but also get more social shares.
4. Look and Feel: Give Importance to Readability
Readability simply makes your content easy to understand. There are various ways to increase it, which ultimately can fix your underperforming content. Make sure that your tone and language are aligned to your readers. You can also avoid long sentences, jargon, and passive voice to make your content clear and readable.
Presently, many businesses face the problem of underperforming content, which impacts both their brand visibility and ROI. However, once you understand its reasons, you can automatically figure out the key areas you need to work upon while planning your overall content strategy. The above guide can aid you in improving your underperforming content effectively.
