We see it all the time: new clients come to us with plenty of content on their website—quality content, even—yet that content is failing to generate traffic or leads.
Even well-crafted content might not perform up to par if your content is not aligned with your overall strategy or lacks clear objectives. In the same way, even well-meaning content creators can sabotage their own content strategy by overlooking key search engine optimization (SEO) tactics or focusing on the wrong approach.
At Hennessey Digital, we’ve identified seven critical ways you might be unintentionally hindering your SEO content strategy. We’ve talked about how to optimize your content for SEO, and now we’ll shed light on these common saboteurs and how to avoid them, making sure your efforts don’t go to waste and your content is driving the results you need.
Writing Content Without A Plan
Any project goes better with a plan. Having a strategic plan for your content ensures that the pages you publish work together to boost the rankings of each piece of content as well as your entire site.
Here are a few essential factors that should be considered in your content plan:
- Site structure: When search engines evaluate your content, they use bots to crawl through your website. A clear and consistent site structure will allow these bots to categorize your content and determine its importance, relevancy, and ranking potential. Without a plan, you might create a disjoined site structure that confuses crawlers and prevents pages from being categorized (and ranking!) correctly.
- Keyword research & mapping: Keyword research ensures that you are creating unique content around keywords and topics that are relevant and have actual search volume that will drive traffic to your site. Keyword mapping also helps you avoid cannibalization (targeting the same keywords in multiple pieces of content). Cannibalization will cause your pages to compete with each other and can negatively impact their performance.
- Consistency: By planning in advance, you can ensure that your SEO efforts are continuous and not sporadic. Consistently publishing content is a positive ranking signal to search engines that you are keeping your site active and up-to-date with fresh and relevant information.
Thinking in the Short Term
Organic SEO is a marathon, not a sprint, and consistency is critical. As such, you can’t treat your content strategy like a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign. PPC campaigns are designed to be turned on and off. You need time to research and plan your strategy, create your content, and monitor the page as it begins to appear in search results. New pages often take weeks to “settle” into a ranking.
Quick, sudden changes to your content strategy will not garner immediate results. In fact, this could result in content that hurts your SEO performance. If you rush your content strategy, you risk creating disjointed, duplicate, or low-quality content. If you suddenly pause content for long stretches of time, as mentioned above, you might see a loss in rankings or traffic as search engines do not see you as a consistent source of content.
Not Knowing Your Goals
The number one reason we see content strategies shift is when clients don’t have a thorough understanding of their own goals or priorities.
Discussing priorities is one of the first—and most important—conversations I have with any client. In our first meeting, we look at the intersection of the services they offer and the locations where they offer them, and discuss what areas are most important or need the most attention. We discuss what drives the most business for our client and what areas have the highest ROI.
Based on this information, we can determine the objectives of our content strategy: not only what content we want to create, but also how we want to create it. We might take a “shotgun” approach and create content for multiple locations to establish brand visibility in those areas, or a “sniper” approach, hyper-targeting one market or service to increase conversions.
Every approach has its merits, but the best approach is the one that aligns with our client’s goals. Without having defined goals, you won’t get the most out of your content strategy. Similarly, if you are working with an agency, the best way to empower your SEO agency is to provide them with insights into your current performance and priorities.
If you’re unclear about your priorities, ask yourself these questions:
- What is my most profitable practice area, service, or product right now?
- For law firms, what is the average value of each case type?
- What practice area, service, or product do I want to be more profitable?
- Which of these has the highest ROI for my firm or company?
- Where do my clients or customers live (top cities or zip codes)?
- Are there any areas I know my competitors are not currently targeting?
- How much business growth can I handle without expanding operationally?
Writing for Yourself, Not Your Audience
Once your content plan is finalized, it’s time to get writing. At Hennessey Digital, we create meaningful and useful content that showcases Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) while also incorporating all the necessary SEO elements that search engines understand and value.
In some cases, however, in an effort to establish E-E-A-T, content can become too complex. When you are a subject-matter expert in your field, it can be tempting to want to dive into the details and explain the complexities of your work to make it accurate or more “valuable.” In the past, we have worked with clients who have wanted content to be written the way they would want to read it, without considering their audience.
Your audience is rarely experts. Using too much legal or technical jargon can overwhelm and alienate your potential clients or customers. The most meaningful content is understandable and accessible to the average person. That’s why we typically recommend writing content at an 8th-grade reading level. Simple, actionable content provides a positive user experience, which satisfies E-E-A-T and increases the chance of users converting.
Not Understanding Search Intent
In the same vein, writing content that does not consider search intent can also undermine your efforts. Search intent refers to the purpose behind a user’s search query, and falls into categories such as…
- Transactional
- Informational
- Commercial
- Navigational
If the content is not meaningful or useful to a user’s search, then they will quickly leave the page. For example, if a user arrives on an FAQ page looking for a quick answer, they will likely not stay on the page if it is full of calls to action to contact the business. Conversely, if there is too much tangential information on a transactional page, they may click away before they can convert.
These user actions indicate to search engines that your content isn’t relevant and will eventually lead to the page losing ground in the search results.
(Want to learn more about search intent and different types of content? Check out How To Optimize Content For SEO by our Senior SEO Team Lead Natasha Guy.)
Not Revisiting Your Content
One of the most significant ways to sabotage your SEO content strategy is to publish your content and consider the job done. Search results are constantly shifting which means even if your page is ranking right now, it isn’t guaranteed to stay that way forever. Certain industries such as the legal industry have particularly volatile rankings, sometimes changing from day to day.
As such, you need to regularly monitor the performance of your content and reassess your content as needed. This could be as simple as refreshing content to include more recent statistics to ensure it isn’t outdated, or completely rewriting a page to be more relevant to the primary keyword and the search intent.
Ultimately, revisiting your content ensures you’re staying on top of best practices and will better weather major core updates.
Using AI to Write All Your Content
AI is here to stay, there’s no doubt. We have spent months testing and learning the many advantages and disadvantages of using ChatGPT and other AI tools for SEO. For content, AI chatbots are capable of producing quality, readable content, and it’s understandable to want to leverage AI to start producing content at scale.
But relying too heavily on this new technology is still a big risk, for all of the reasons discussed above. AI content is often lacking in E-E-A-T signals, and any facts, statistics, or laws it does provide must be thoroughly checked. ChatGPT in particular creates content that is very repetitive and does not always meet search intent, and requires lots of human editing or rewriting with specific prompts. In addition, the content needs to be formatted, linked, and published with all the appropriate SEO signals.
Avoid Sabotaging Your SEO Content Efforts
Crafting a successful SEO content strategy requires a holistic approach and a long-term mindset. From developing a well-researched and structured content plan to understanding your audience’s needs and search intent, paying attention to these tactics is crucial in creating relevant content that drives traffic. Remember to revisit your content regularly, ensuring it stays fresh, unique, and impactful. Avoiding these common pitfalls can transform your content from just good to truly effective.
Want to learn more about how we craft content strategies that convert? As a leader in SEO and law firm digital marketing, Hennessey Digital creates ambitious, customized strategies in close collaboration with our clients. Contact us today and see how we can help your business grow.