Reading Time: 3 minutesConsumers utilize search engines more than any other tool to find services or products they are seeking. What’s more, most of them never look beyond the first page of results. If you want to enhance your brand awareness, demonstrate your credibility, and engage with new potential clients, you must ensure your content is unique, valuable, and relevant enough to appear prominently for your target audience.
Consider the information below to learn about the three types of content that can hinder your rankings. Then, read up on your best potential solutions.
1. The Problem: Boilerplate Content
Boilerplate content refers to text fragments or website building blocks that are reused without undergoing substantial changes from the original text. This content often summarizes general data, including company name, specialization, and contact information. Unfortunately, presenting the same boilerplate content throughout your site reduces the relevance of each page’s main content, makes individual pages less engaging to potential clients and distracts from the page’s overall focus. Worse, Google’s crawlers can view this content as duplicate content, downgrading the quality of your page and hindering your rankings.
The Solution: Substitute It
Replace boilerplate content with unique content concerning topics relevant to your company. Do not continue to focus on the same content across multiple pages, as this becomes tedious to human readers and can drive potential clients away. Instead, choose distinct content based on the interests of your intended audience and the overall purpose of the page. Then, adjust keywords so they are specific and fully optimized for ranking.
2. The Problem: Too Much Thin Content
Thin content is defined as content that contains shallow, low-quality information that does not offer added value to consumers. When content is all “fluff” with no value, it overwhelms your audience with text, creates confusion around what is important, and frustrates them because they are unsure about how to proceed. Worse, it underwhelms your audience when it comes to providing valuable information about your product or service. Thin content also seriously undermines your marketing goals because it fails to capture the attention of consumers, missing opportunities for engagement and conversion.
The Solution: Improve It
Post more insightful content on a less frequent basis. Pay attention to the predominant interests of your audience so you can develop tiered content strategies and implement them in a way that appeals to readers and helps them meet their goals. Include data when possible, to provide context for your message and verify your claims. Be sure to segment your posts so they are digestible enough that users can easily understand, even if they are only skimming.
3. The Problem: Old, Irrelevant Content
As time passes, even the most engaging and well-written content will eventually become outdated. Regardless of whether old content continues to attract consumers, it is vital that you revamp and rewrite as needed to keep your message current. In addition, updates can keep your content appealing and to ensure you appear informed on your subject matter. Analyze old content to distinguish between information that helps your rankings, information that harms them, and information that has no significant impact either way.
The Solution: Rewrite It
The goal is to create purposeful content by solving a new problem or addressing an old problem with a new and innovative approach. Your content should drive traffic and engagement, encourage sharing, and generate conversions. Rewriting effectively means choosing the message you want to emphasize, adding current information that supports this message, and organizing it in an intuitive way. You can cut outdated sections, expand others as you receive additional information, and even merge multiple posts into one comprehensive page.
When you find yourself confronting disappointing search engine rankings, one of the content types described above may be to blame. By utilizing these effective strategies to improve your content, you can more effectively engage your audience. In time, better content creates new value and influences potential customers to continue along the conversion path.
