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Online Marketing Campaigns: Is Your Website Content Bringing Results or Just Damaging Your Reputation?

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In 2011, Google’s “Panda” got an update that had a great influence on content marketing. Because of that, content marketing has become very popular during the last few years, and website content is a valuable asset.

Most people can agree that it’s crucial to have good content if you want your independent marketing strategies to work. However, some just believe that any sort of content is good.

The reality is a bit different, though. The quality of your content depends on the value and the effectiveness it has, as well as on its type and the way you’re using it. So, there can be bad news as well. Not only is bad content prone to yielding bad results, but it can also make the matters a lot worse than they were.

The million dollar question is: how can you tell if it’s hurting or helping your marketing campaign?

Why is content important?

Before we delve any further into the matter, we have to determine why content is important in the first place. We also have to learn more about the way it can give us value:

SEO food

If you want to have a successful SEO campaign, your content has to be up to standard.

SEO will help you make your website visible to search engines. That requires a lot of things, including having to index and maximize the value of a variety of pages. So, by adding new content, you will give search engine crawlers something they can have fun with – additional material to index. Thus, the relevance of your site will grow.

Building a reputation

By adding new content regularly, you have a chance to impress both new and recurring visitors. That way, you’ll slowly build your brand’s reputation, as well as prove that you’re an expert in your field. High-quality content is almost never ignored. People will appreciate it, and they will continue to respect and even trust your brand. Moreover, the best content out there can even go viral, which means that you will draw even more traffic and get links that could enhance your domain authority.

Turning visitors into customers

High-quality content is also a way to draw leads and boost the conversion rate. With it, you can make people perform the desired action and convert them into paying customers. For example, if your website deals with bicycles, you can write about how to pick the best bike, and then add links to your most popular bicycle types at the end. That way, your article will serve as a traffic director, and it will give visitors links they can follow, and thus become customers.

But, there are traps!

All these methods will ensure that your content has some value. However, there are certain traps you need to keep in mind. People who fall for these traps are usually biased, or they don’t have the experience or the right understanding of what content is. Thus, they can sometimes produce a content campaign that will, in the end, work against them.

Here are the three most common content traps:

Quantity is better than quality

Since content can benefit you in many ways, some marketers believe that adding more content will generate more benefits. However, that’s somewhat of a myth. That method is often counterproductive; one terrible piece of content can have a seriously adverse effect on your reputation.

Use content to reach a certain goal

Some marketers believe that content exists just to convert visitors into paying customers. They see it as an advertising opportunity – not as something that will benefit them or give them more value in the long run. But, trust us; believing that content is just a long ad campaign will make you lose your audience’s trust.

If you want similar results, just strategically copy other campaigns

Finally, certain marketers see other brands generate great results with their own marketing campaigns and decide that they want to mimic their strategy. However, even though that might seem like a good choice in theory, in reality, it will make your content less valuable because it won’t be unique. Plus, it’s very difficult to mimic the essence of the original strategy in the first place, so your results won’t be similar to theirs.

Poor Content

So, now you’re probably wondering how your content can have an adverse effect on your campaign instead of generating good results and improving it. Let’s see how.

Thin content – Thin reputation

What we mean by “thin content” is non-substantial content – content that brings no value to the readers. This kind of content lacks meaningful details and information. Furthermore, it’s often short, yet not sweet, and it can also be repetitive, copied from another source or just plain superficial and shallow in meaning. So, if readers find this sort of content on your site, they will presume that you are not a great brand, and that you might be amateurs.

Thin content – Low SEO rankings

This sort of content is also bad if you want to embrace the full potential of SEO rankings. Google’s algorithm is hard to trick, and it will detect if your content is not up to standard. It will test its qualitative value according to some factors (which we know nothing about since Google keeps it a secret). And, if it concludes that a page on your website has low-quality content, you might have problems. You could get a mild penalty that will affect your entire website.

Spamming your audience

If readers determine that the content in question is written just for drawing more leads or for raising the conversion rate, they will believe that your brand is a spammer. Thus, they will not think highly of your future content, nor will they trust you. Bear in mind that content marketing should bring additional value to your readers and visitors – not take it away.

Bad targeting and alienation

When it comes to content, you have to know who your audience is and make the content according to their needs and values. If you don’t target it to the right kind of people, your content could attract the wrong audience. What’s more, it might even alienate the right readers – those who you need to visit your website and stay there for a while. This doesn’t mean that your traffic won’t go up. It will – but at a price that you cannot afford. The profitability and conversion rates will not be where you want them to be, and they might even go down.

So, what can you do to improve your results and content?

If you don’t want your content to ruin and work against your campaign, then there’s only one thing you can do: make sure it’s FANTASTIC.

If you put real effort into your content, there’s very little chance it will damage your campaign. What’s more, it will bring you even greater benefits than you might expect.

So, if you want content that has high value, make sure you are always improving it. Learn more about your audience, research, and make the content as detailed as possible. Include facts and as many one-of-a-kind perspectives and opinions as you can.

Remember – only the best content deserves to appear on your blog or website.

This Article is contributed by Brad Larkin, Brand Manager for Promotionalkeyrings.org. He enjoys sharing business and marketing topics, both on and offline.


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