7 Reasons Why No One’s Reading Your Content And What You Can Do About It.

By Ed Hutchinson, Sales & Marketing Director, Future Fusion on

An audience is not brought to you or given to you; it’s something you have to fight for – Bruce Springsteen 

This simple yet powerful advice was brought into sharp relief last week when I read that over 90% of online content receives no traffic from Google. Zero. That’s an extraordinarily high percentage when you consider the amount of money that is invested in content creation.

Although Bruce was highlighting the lengths an artist has to go to in order to build an audience, he neatly encapsulated the challenge facing many brands today when it comes to expanding your reach: it’s incredibly hard. 

So how can you ensure that you’re getting eyeballs on your content? Here are seven common problems we frequently see, and what you can do about them.

1. You haven’t defined your audience

Trying to be all things to all people is the road to content mediocrity. Often a clearly defined audience is an afterthought when it should be the starting point. By identifying and defining your target audience from the get-go you can tailor your content specifically for them and their needs. Hopefully, this is relatively easy to define as it will be the same audience segments for whom you have created your products or services. A good example is Carwow, a company that does a great job of creating content for the in-market car audience. 

If you haven’t defined your audience, creating customer personas is a great place to start. There are plenty of resources online to get you started. And if you have any kind of website analytics set up, you will be able to use this data to start shaping your audience segments. 

businessman looking out of window not reading content

2. You don’t know how the competition is winning

To understand how your competition is winning in the search results, spend time looking at their content and backlinks and consider how you could improve on that.

Search engines reward pages for being the best answer to a user’s query, and there is no reason why your answer can’t be better than that of your competitor. Perhaps your writing is more succinct or more targeted. Whoever is in the top position today may not be there tomorrow. There are lots of tools out there, such as Sistrix and Similar, that can identify the best ranking pages, or a simple Google search in incognito will do it. 

3. You have no content strategy

Once you have identified your target audience and you understand what the competition is doing, you’re in a great place to create a content strategy. Without one, you’ll be in reactive mode and will be merely creating content in response to product releases, trending topics or, worse, because there’s a perceived obligation to write content. 

Start by understanding the value that your brand and its products and services bring to the target audience. Then think about the different stages of your funnel and what the customers need to know at each stage to move towards purchase. Maybe your product is highly commoditised, and content is used to create product differentiation or maybe it’s highly specialised and you need to educate the audience before they would make a purchase. Regardless, understanding your funnel and the products you sell will help you map out a relevant content calendar that reflects these factors.  

4. You’re targeting the wrong keywords

There’s no use having your funnel and content strategy mapped out if you’re not using the appropriate keywords at the right time. By understanding the intent of your audience, you can choose the right keywords and in doing so show search engines that yours is the best answer to the user’s query. 

Head terms tend to be high volume and highly competitive terms that are broad and signal a user at the start of their journey. Long-tail keywords are much more specific terms and, as the name suggests, tend to be longer than head terms (the general rule of thumb is more than 3-words) and suggest a user is further down the funnel. Short term fresh keywords are terms that tend to be short lived in popularity and may relate to a film release, for instance, versus evergreen keywords that are always relevant. Other keywords types include product, branded, and intent keywords. Regardless, robust keyword research should play a role in your content creation. We favour the likes of keywordtool.io, Similarweb and Ahrefs but there are lots of great tools out there that will help identify keywords important to your business.

5. You’re not getting any links to your content

Google uses links to discover web pages – they are the web in the world wide web. Think of them as a nod of approval or a thumbs up from another page or website. A link from a powerful domain or page tends to carry more weight than a link from generic or random domains and pages. Therefore, the quality and quantity of links into a page or domain are a huge indicator of how well that page should be ranked by Google.

But getting links isn’t easy, and like Bruce said, you have to fight for them. And to do that you need to create great, useful content that your audience finds useful. The best way to build links is to create content that other websites reference – as a datapoint, an authoritative opinion or source of unique information. If you can do that, the content becomes a flywheel that will naturally attract more and more links, and in doing so will aid your chance to climb the rankings.

6. You’re not updating your content

We often see brands who started out with the best intentions when creating content but then didn’t maintain it. By not updating your content on a regular basis you risk competitors stealing a march on you by offering up-to-date “fresh” content. Google loves fresh content as they perceive it to be more accurate, and things may have moved on from when you published that article in 2017. 

Neil Patel lists out some great suggestions on how to update your existing content and it is well worth the time. What’s more, you can bake content updates into your content calendar to ensure that any time there’s a product update or a new trend emerges, you are ready to make the most of it.

7. Are you keeping up with Google’s Core Web Vitals? 

Mobile first indexing and page speed scores are familiar terms but do you know about Google’s Core Web Vitals? Google announced the change to its algorithm in July 2020 and it’s expected to roll out next year. Core Web Vitals are a set of specific factors that Google will use to assess a webpage, specifically the user’s experience of the page. 

You know when you’re loading a webpage and you click on the navigation bar, but the page shifts and you’ve clicked on an advert instead? It’s incredibly annoying and Google thinks so too. The Core Web Vitals factors will measure the largest contentful paint, cumulative layout shift, and first input delay. If that sounds confusing, it’s because it is. Thankfully, Moz does a good job of expanding on these strange-sounding terms. The bottom line is that your page experience is going to be a factor in how well you rank in 2021, so getting it right is going to be super important.

This is by no means a definitive list. SEO is changing all the time, and there are never any guarantees in SEO about how well you will rank. But hopefully this is a good starting point for you to assess your content if, despite your content creation efforts, you’re still not seeing much traffic. 

 

I work for Future Fusion, the content marketing agency owned by Future PLC. We are experts at building communities around people’s passions and in doing so positioning brands at the heart of incredible content that drives transformative results.

We publish a monthly newsletter with the latest trends in content marketing. You can sign up here if you’d like to be kept informed – Future Fusion Monthly Email.

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