If you ask ten SEOs to give you a quick list of what every site needs to succeed, they will all mention content creation strategy, but what if you’ve been executing your content strategy every month and it’s not working? Today we’ll look at some factors to look at as you decide what comes next.
The first question to ask of the current content creation strategy is: have you given it enough time? You should be adding articles to the site each week and you’ll want to give it a solid 8 – 12 weeks. If you haven’t been hitting at least a one-a-week pace or you haven’t reached the 90-day mark, you might want to give the test more time. SEO isn’t an instant gratification tactic, so you have to make sure you give it some time.
Second, you’ll want to think about quality. The owner of the strategy and the author(s) may not be objective, so have an outside set of eyes look at the content with a critical eye.
Are the articles well written?
Is there a clear keyword choice for each article?
Are the keywords reasonable ranking objectives for the site?
Are you aiming a little too high or low in terms of difficulty?
Let’s say your strategy is passing all the quality checks and still isn’t impressing the sales team. What should you think about next? It might be time to look at the results you’re seeing so far.
Are you improving your average position for the keywords you’re choosing?
Is there an increase in Organic traffic?
It’s possible that you’re improving rankings and traffic, but your users have a long buying cycle. If that’s the case, you don’t want to kill your content creation strategy if positive results are right around the corner.
If your tracking is set up well and you’re seeing some gains in ranking and traffic but no measurable sales or lead increase, you might want to check for an overall lift. Are you seeing more leads / sales than last year that are above average? That might argue for continued content creation.
If you’ve checked the boxes for time, quality and results and you can’t justify continuing the content creation strategy, scale things back. It’s not a good idea to create zero articles per year, but you can scale back from your one-a-week pace to ‘when an article makes sense’. Are you launching a new product, service or promotion? Did you win an award or recognition? All these would argue for an article, but you can scale back from four articles a month to say, one or two.
Never adding content is bad for SEO, but if you gave a concerted content creation strategy a try and it’s not paying off, find a happy medium between high content and no content…then spend your time and energy on a tactic that’s working, or test something new.