Content Marketing Challenge: Staying True to Your Words

The war for search engine rank might not be over, but at least it’s clear now that Content Marketing is winning. While that’s a wonderful thing for marketers who never gave up on producing valuable content, content with the audience’s experience in mind, it certainly doesn’t diminish the challenge. Content marketing seems exciting at first, and sometimes you’re lucky enough to get a client with exciting content.

Unfortunately not everyone who has business goals also has excitement as a resource they can leverage; sometimes the content at hand is quite boring and monotonous. That’s when content marketing separates the weak from the strong, it rewards those who can stay true to their words.

Search engine robots have the job of deciding who gets ranked in search engine results. The words that are on a webpage determine how the page is ranked. That’s what the search engine robots look at, the words. They can’t guess and they can’t infer. They are only now getting smart enough to use synonyms. To get a page to rank for a search term, the search term needs to be published on the page in an optimal way, used multiple times, used in the title, and used in the headings.

Web 2.0 Promises and Perils

WordPress and other web 2.0 tools have allowed subject matter experts to become web publishers, putting the power to create web content easily where it can be leveraged the best, by the people who know and understand the content that’s worth sharing. This new power lets people who live and breathe a subject speak about that subject until the audience turns blue. When that happens the SEO juice flows – the keywords that need to be exercised on the site get the attention and frequency to really get the robot’s attention.

No every subject matter expect maintains the momentum necessary to keep the SEO juices, the positive effects of publishing frequent and relevant content, flowing long term. Some come out of the gate strong but then peter out after several articles or posts. And unfortunately the subject matter experts most in demand have the least amount of time to devote to promotion. That’s when the professional content marketer comes in and helps meet the need for volume and frequency of content publishing.

The problem is, unless you’re living and breathing ever day within the steel fastener industry, steel fasteners get boring quick, especially to a marketer who understands little about the subject.  The content can often suffer when that happens, and take different directions that won’t benefit the search engine rank of the site. That’s because the marketer fails to be disciplined, fails to use the right words repeatedly.

It’s hard to keep talking about steel fasteners, talking about them as much as is needed. What’s even more difficult, in most cases, is knowing how much you should use the words. Where do you learn what usage count is ideal?  The chore of gauging how much the important key terms are used in your own content is possible, but not a trivial task to get right. Blog posts that follow will demonstrate how term usage can be gauged using manual and automated techniques.

Do you find that remaining true to your words, in your content marketing efforts, is a challenge?

Do you face other challenges being accurate with your marketing content?

Please share your experiences with us.