This is the problem with search engine marketers who believe they are using “content marketing”. They find or develop a formula for publishing content and they hammer that formula into the very fabric of their Website. Real content marketing cultivates relationships with new audiences that were previously unaware of your business. The majority of legitimate online content marketing is built around social media campaigns and “native advertising” these days. If you’re just publishing articles on your blog or using guest posts, that is NOT content marketing.
The most common formula for faux content marketing calls for publishing something every day. The most aggressive formula marketers publish at least one guest post AND at least one self-hosted article every day. And many people who invest thousands of dollars in this strategy complain that it doesn’t work, doesn’t work well enough, doesn’t work fast enough, or brings in the wrong kind of visitors (they don’t convert). So let’s take a look at some of the problems with publishing every day.
Who Are You Publishing For?
What distinguishes one daily Web publisher from another? That list of criteria begins with the intention behind the site. Are you seriously striving to be a news organization with professional reporting and editing or are you just publishing news articles? How much effort do you invest in finding and reporting on news? Are you just getting ideas “off the wire” and handing out writing assignments? If so, then you are not running a news organization.
But news is not the only reason why people publish on a daily basis. You may have a passion for cooking, and so you could write about the meals you prepare every day (think of the somewhat controversial Julie and Julia blog). Or maybe you just think you’ll make some money from publishing recipes so you hire some folks to write recipe articles for you.
In addition to cooking people can be passionate (or business-like) about politics, fishing, restoring old cars, shopping, dieting, living a healthy lifestyle, J.R.R. Tolkien, and sports. Or a million other topics. If someone has built a niche with passion, other people have decided they can crash that niche to make a profit.
You may find excellent writers who know their topics and churn out great stuff, but the majority of Websites that are in it just for the money are not built on editorial guidelines that pursue passion and precision.
So it begins with who the Website is really for: you or your audience. That makes a big difference in how effective your content strategy proves to be.
What Are You Trying to Say?
When someone truly cares about what they publish they almost always have a reason for writing whatever they say. That reason may be ephemeral, such as an angry reaction to a recent event (maybe a dumb Tweet or an unpopular decision by national leaders). Or the reason may be that they are on a personal journey of discovery. Or you could find yourself in the position of being “the answer person” and you feel compelled to respond to all the questions people ask you.
If you don’t know why you’re going to publish your next article, other than that “it is about a good keyword”, you’re lost and drifting on a sea of pointless content. Chasing keywords is effective for producing bland content. It doesn’t get you far when you’re trying to produce something useful and exceptional.
Forcing yourself to publish something every day because you have a list of keywords is not an optimal strategy. If you’re not producing optimal content then you’re not optimizing for search. To put it another way, let’s suppose you get an article to rank no. 1 for a targeted keyword in Bing, Blekko, Google, and Yandex. If that is all you accomplish you have wasted a great opportunity.
Really good content ranks well for many different expressions. If you put a thousand words into an article you should not even be thinking about keywords because you cannot possibly track and measure all the queries for what those thousand words are relevant.
If all you are trying to say with your content is “KEYWORD GOES HERE” then you are taking the least efficient and least effective path to building a popular Website through content.
Great (even just good) content is not, never has been, and never will be about keywords.
Whether you hand an assignment to a freelancer or write the article yourself, you should care about what the article is going to say. It should mean something to you.
What Structure Have You Chosen for Your Content?
If you can easily answer this question that means you are using a formula. Some Websites earn a lot of page views in spite of their formulaic content. It helps to be popular, to have an advertising budget, and to have relationships with other sites that regularly feature your content. But mostly it helps to have an advertising budget.
There are a few pop entertainment Websites that place teaser content in an advertising network every day. I know they do this because I occasionally click on the teaser ads. The experience is usually disappointing and I know it will be disappointing in advance but once in a while they pique my curiosity. For these sites it’s a numbers game. They have the money to buy the advertising. If they had to build their audiences on their own they would fail (and, frankly, some of them change domain names often enough that I suspect they don’t do well with organic search at all).
Structured content is one of the latest buzzwords to circulate in the SEO blogosphere. I see more references to Schema.Org every week, mostly in the context of “how to become an entity” in Google search. If your goal is really to be an entity, you’re going to be very, very disappointed with the results of your work. Unless your name is Katy Perry not many people will be searching for you.
There is more to brand building than “being an entity” in Google search. That should be the least of your concerns.
Although there is nothing wrong with structuring content, you should only do it because that helps visitors understand what you are doing, not because there is some search engine optimization advantage to it. I use minimal content structure on my most successful Websites because it’s the content that matters, not the structure.
A Daily Article Should Last for All Time
I do occasionally publish ephemeral content, such as an announcement about an upcoming event, or maybe to let regular readers know why I have not written anything in a while. But I don’t like this kind of content. I may figure out a way to keep people informed via a widget rather than devote an entire article to something that won’t matter in two years.
Two years is an important milestone for any article. Several years ago I made the point that I want to write content that would interest me 2 years into the future. In the 2011 article “How Well Does SEO Theory Stand the Test of Time?” I responded to a reader inquiry about how well that works out for me. Since that time I would say I have written most of the articles on SEO Theory, the Reflective Dynamics Blog, the Plumbing SEO Blog, the SEO Theorist blog, and lately the Web Hosting Services blog with that two-year time frame in mind.
Sure, I have also advised people to develop a ten-year plan for SEO but that goes well beyond the words you put on a page. It’s really tough to predict what will be relevant and useful in ten years, although in 1999 I wrote in a Web forum discussion that I thought it would be better if people just concentrated on creating good content rather than trying to figure out what would get past the search engine filters every month or two.
15 years ago most Websites received the majority of their traffic from non-search Websites; that is, through links placed on other Websites. As more people came online and as more Websites were published the search engines became more important. Earning those legitimate links became less important to competitive Webmasters who wanted fast traffic. But a deep link on a Web page that receives and sends traffic ensures that older content continues to receive visitors.
In a world where search is driving more traffic than links on other Websites you still want to create content that continues to receive traffic long after it is published. The longer the lifespan (measured in terms of page views or unique visitors) of an article, the greater the return on investment tends to be. Averaging 1 penny per day doesn’t seem like much (that is $3.65 per year) but if an article earns $36.50 in ten years it may pay for itself. Sleeper articles can wake up years down the road and bring in good revenue as well, but they have to be relevant to whatever people are searching for at the time.
In SEO You Do Not Publish for the Day
Search engine optimization, when applied to content, does not rely on a given number of articles per day or week. You can boost traffic temporarily by increasing your publication rate but to be optimal you have to publish content that attracts interested, relevant traffic on a continual basis. It doesn’t have to be spectacular traffic; it just needs to be consistent, dependable traffic.
If you’re chasing the same keywords everyone else is chasing then sooner or later your content will be pushed down in the search results. Taking the time to create content that people will always search for mitigates that effect through relevance to multiple queries, usually lower traffic queries, that bring in more traffic over time. One of the best performing pages on SEO Theory, for example, discusses subdomain SEO practices and questions; in fact, there are multiple articles on this blog that deal with questions like when to use subdomains for SEO. Those articles remain very relevant today.
Not every article is perfect. And some articles that work very well may suddenly fall out of favor with the search engines. In 2008 I wrote an article on both using “subdomains for SEO” and “SEO for subdomains”. It did very well in Google’s search results until Google decided a few years ago that using a keyword in the page title more than twice was no longer acceptable (the original title of the article was “SEO for Subdomains – Subdomains for SEO | SEO Theory”.
But that lesson just underscores how important it is to NOT depend on keywords; rather, you want the content itself to become what people search for, rather than to create content on the basis of what you think people are searching for.
Your content should not be designed just to bring in traffic today or for the rest of the year; it should be designed to bring in traffic for as long as people want to know about that topic. Practice creating enduring value in whatever you publish and over time you will need to spend less money on advertising for mediocre, short-lived content.
Author: Michael Martinez
Courtesy: www.seo-theory.com
