Bad SEO content is like a weed that just won’t stop from damaging your search rankings no matter how hard you try. It is also a stealth factors that is easy to miss and hand to find once in your system. When you are working as hard as you possibly can on getting those high ranks in searches, to see them not take full effect or to deplete just because your content wasn’t right is a pain all SEO Experts would rather not go through. If you do let the problem get out of hand with bad content shot all over your website and the internet, well, your website ranking is only going one direction, DOWN!

Search giants like Google have been making their searches much more transparent identifying any and all bad content with constant updates. It is almost to a point now that no content is better than bad content. At least you will save the effort with no content and not scratch your head over no ranking results with bad content. Modern SEO is surely much evolved from what it used to be as newer techniques still involve phrases like “Content is King” but give it a modern twist “Good Content is King”.

Here are a few bad SEO content techniques that you should have cut out already, if not, be sure to do it right now!

1: Limiting to Only One Target Keyword per Page with No Variations

In the past content has gotten away with one keyword targeted per page with variations of it either ignored or spread out over many different pieces of content. Consider a keyword or key phrase “how to make a latte”. Content writers and SEO experts used to separate all its variations rather than using it naturally in the same piece of content.

Separating keywords in the manner makes it insignificant for semantic search that focuses on the topic of your page and not keywords repeated in content when it comes to accessing its relevancy to user search intent. Search engines determine a page’s topic through related terms, target keyword, synonyms and keyword variations that can be found all on the same piece of content.

How to Remedy This?

Content that is relevant to the topic of your page usually works best with search engines. Crawlers have gotten intelligent and can actually determine the relation between content itself and page’s topic. The focus keyword should be used in your content along with its variations naturally spread throughout the same piece of content. Good keyword variations can be acquired from Google itself like:

• Open Google search page --> Type in your target keyword --> Scroll down to the bottom of first page and find additional related keywords that you can use in your content.

2: Writing Short Blogs (Under 1000 Words) and Expecting Them to Do Wonders

Gone are the golden days when content used to be 500 or 600 words on a blog and still used to rank well with search engines. Google interprets short content to be thin, shallow and underdeveloped. If you think blogs under a 1000 words can rank well providing your quality links, you are living in the past.

No matter how much some people would like to believe that “some short-form blogs do really well in search!” this can actually be a case but its probability and attached ifs and buts are so many that writing or finding a short blog that succeeds is almost impossible. In general truth, long-form content would win over short-term content 9 times out of 10, no question about it.

BuzzSumo analyzed over 100 million articles and concluded that most shared ones were actually in excess of 3000 words and a high percentage of them being 1000+ words as well. Here’s a graphic of their analysis:

Backlinko studied 1 million blog posts and concluded that there is a direct relationship between long-term content and high Google ranking positions. Here’s their analysis:

What Is the Best Remedy with This?

Well researched, narrative and storytelling contents for blog posts that are as long as possible (without going bonkers that is) are best. Dive deep into your chosen topic and go in its absolute detail highlighting every point to get more out of your content. Look at it this way, longer content being more comprehensive, can answer user’s questions and queries in a much better way making them stay on your page for longer, this is exactly what Google wants.

3: Irregular or Inconsistent Content Posting Is Never great

Blog posts are like clockwork. They should be regular with consistency flowing right through them when it comes the number of them and their frequency. One blog post here and one blog post there is never a great idea at all and will not set you in Google’s good books at all. Posting blog posts erratically and irregularly like this will not let you:

• Provide fresh content for Google
• Create more ranking opportunities for your website with more targeted keywords and indexed pages at all
• Build steady authority with users by not giving them what they need on a regular basis.

Regular blog posts with consistent frequency are required when you need more traffic and possible leads landing with high ranking search results. HubSpot, a great digital marketing expert conducted a study on blogging frequency data from over 13,000 marketers and agencies and came to a conclusion that websites and pages that blogged regularly and consistently over 16 times a month, took away the best pile of traffic containing effective leads. They compared these results with bloggers with 0-4 times a month frequency and found that consistent bloggers took away 3.5 times more traffic and also about 4.5 times more effective leads.

What Should You Do?

The answer is really simple with this one. You should set up a blog cycle and schedule to strictly follow. If you are an SEO Company working on a client website, be sure to ask your content writers to blog regularly more than 16 times a month to create better SEO ranking for your targeted keywords. This will build your content cache and land you in a good spot with Google.

4: Going for More Quantity with No Quality

This one is an automatic given with most SEO experts. With so many Google updates concentrating on the quality of content and not so much its quantity, most of us are already aware of the fact that we need to improve quality and not only focus on quantity.

Google also employs some search quality evaluators or raters if you will. This is done specifically to determine quality of a site or page from a human viewpoint. Not only does this allow them to analyzed websites and pages better but they also use this data to improve the functionality of their search algorithms. These raters or evaluators base their evaluations on facts like:

• Does the content on a page achieve its intended purpose
• If the content has expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-A-T)
• If webpages have an adequate amount of Main Content (MC) and more.

It would be not be accurate to say that you can just get away with fewest amount of good quality content. There should a right balance between the two. You should write good quality content in a suitable quantity for Google to rank it higher. Not too far ago, good enough quality or in plain words average quality blog posts with not so efficient and authoritative content could be ranked with links in them. Today, with so much more quantity of content being posted by all your competitors, Google has shifted attention towards quality more.

The simple thing to keep in mind is that if you wish for your website to be ranked on the first search page or anywhere near the top spot, your content quality in blogs and everywhere else needs to be better than what websites and pages ranking on those spots have. If you are unable to maintain quality an visitors have no reason to read your content, regardless of how much content you post, your website or page will not get anywhere.

5: Ignoring SEO Content Issues Including Low Text-to-HTML Ratio or Duplicate Content

You would be surprised to know that nearly 66% websites in some ways have the issue of duplicate content and get penalized because of that. SEMrush, a trusted digital marketing agency also revealed this to be a severe problem that is generally overlooked by website administrators.

Other general problems indicated are low word count for on-page content, which is one of our highlighted ones already and also low Text-To-HTML Ratio. All these problems are concerned with your content strategy and can land you in a position you don’t want to be.

What You Can Do?

Fortunately, this duplicate content and also lower count content are some of the easier fixes. Duplicate content is generally easy to find using any good quality tools and you can just copy and paste your on-page content in a word file to know exactly how many word it contains. Google’s own tips and tricks also help a lot with duplicate content.

These were all fatal content errors that can potentially hurt your SEO rankings. Some of these are easier to detect and sort out where others are much more complex required true SEO Professionals to help website managers out. The SEO Company Lahore available in www.seo.com.pk is an SEO pioneer in Pakistan and we have been serving clients from all over the world. If you are spending countless hours trying to get your website ranked at top spots and are not getting any results, your website or page is maybe plagued with one of these content problems. Chat with us now or call us on the given number to find out how we can make your keywords rank high with proper error free content strategies getting you possible business leads as many as you desire.