There are quite a few sites creating useful or interesting content that is being let down by a lack of attention to SEO.
This means this content marketing isn’t attracting the traffic it could, or perhaps isn’t working hard enough to meet broader SEO goals.
Last week’s #semrushchat featured such an example, a site offering copywriting services, but one that needed to pay more attention to SEO.
The site in question was kreativ forditas, and had submitted itself for review by the semrushchat participants.
I’m not going to detail the whole review here, but there were a few SEO-related issues flagged up in the discussion:
Q2: Out of the top 3 issues we have detected with our Site Audit tool, which one should they fix ASAP? #semrushchat pic.twitter.com/zsdLD24bcG
— SEMrush (@semrush) 20 July 2016
Some issues are quite easy to fix. For example, meta-descriptions can be added retrospectively and, even though it’s not a ranking signal, it should help increase click throughs from search results.
One issue which interested me was internal linking, as the site had nofollowed 103 internal links, which just seems, on the face of it, an odd thing to do.
Looking at the site in more detail, it seems that at least some of the nofollowed internal links were to pages such as login pages, which don’t necessarily represent a missed opportunity. However, it did seem to signal a broader issue with linking.
Though the site had some interesting content around the practice of copywriting – content which should help it attract its target audience, and to help lift other pages on the site, it appears to have been created without much thought for SEO.
The site offers content creation, content critique and copywriting services. You would think the obvious think to do would be (Read more...) link from these articles to the sales pages on the site, thus helping them rank for target terms.
Indeed, a well-executed content strategy would use internal linking to consistently link to, for example, the copywriting sales page on the site in every (or at least most) mention of the keyword.
These links, and the anchor text used, would give a strong signal to search engines that that page should be returned for searches on the term.
Instead, very few of the articles have links at all, and those that do are generally linking to other articles. The upshot is that most of the blog content on the site is doing very little to support the sales pages.
Of course, some of this content may attract visitors to the site, which is useful in itself, but it’s doing very little to help the site’s search visibility.
Another example of this is Millets, which I looked at in a recent post on optimising for searches around festival products – clothing, essential gear, tents etc.
Its search performance is inconsistent, in part because it doesn’t use the content it creates to help with search visibility.
It has created some useful content around festivals, but isn’t linking to its product or category pages to help them perform more effectively for these searches.
All Millets needs to do is to link consistently from the content to the landing pages to help them rank more effectively and consistently for target keywords.
It’s another example of a content strategy which hasn’t considered SEO enough. As I wrote in an older post, content marketing and SEO can work together very effectively.
Content creation helps to achieve search goals, while an eye on SEO helps the content to perform more effectively and reach a wider audience.
However, creating content in isolation without considering search simply means it’s unlikely to perform as well as it could.