Content Writing Mistakes That Is Hurting Your Business
Content is KING. If you want to get traffic and conversion, you need to be consistent in producing quality, unique, fresh and relevant content. In fact, according to the report made by the State of Inbound, 53% of marketers put content creation as a top priority in their digital marketing plans and over 29% of B2B marketing budget goes on content marketing accounts.
That’s how powerful content is.
But why are there still businesses who fail when it comes to content marketing?
Well, perhaps these common content writing mistakes are the reasons.
If you are a business owner, an aspiring content writer, or a seasoned one, you should be aware of these common content writing mistakes to make your digital marketing more effective.
Content Writing Mistakes
Mistake #1 – Duplicating Content
Whether it is a blog, product description, review, research, snippet, etc, you should never ever copy or duplicate other people’s content. If you do so, you are hurting your business and putting your search ranking in a compromising situation.
Google hates duplicated content. So if you keep on copying other people’s content, you are saying goodbye to your Google search ranking.
Moreover, your readers won’t really feel the connection with your brand since these duplicated content do not show your original brand’s voice.
If you want to increase your website traffic and conversion, you need to invest in creating original and relevant content. This will help you utilize SEO best practices and increase your search rankings as well as cultivate a strong branding and customer relationships.
On the other hand, if you need to copy a certain portion of a blog or content, you need to put or link back your source to the original owner.
To know if your content is original and not plagiarised, you can check your content using Plagiarism Detector. This is a free tool that will assess your content for any duplicated parts. It will also give you a rundown of how many words your content has as well as its reading time. The free account allows you to check up to 1000 words. If you need more, you can sign up for the premium account.
Another tool that you can use to know if your website has duplicated content is Copyscape. Just paste the URL of your website on the field box and it will run a quick check. Here’s one for dgstrategists.com.
Mistake #2 – Not proofreading your content
In efforts to be more responsive and prioritizing speed, most content writers often forget to proofread their content before publishing. Whether it is a blog, website content, social media captions, emails, etc, underestimating the impact of typos can show unprofessionalism on your part.
When people see typos on your content, they will think that communicating with them is not that important since you were careless in sending messages.
Moreover, blog content with typos loses credibility that will immediately reflect on your brand. Remember, if you are after traffic and conversion, you need quality content to show that you are an expert in that topic or industry. But if your content has grammar lapses or typos, readers will be easily turned off from reading you.
So remember to be extra careful in publishing and sending content and make sure that there are no tiny errors left unchecked.
If you need help in checking for your content, you can download the Grammarly app on your computer or phone. If you are using Google Docs or typing on the internet, you can just install a Grammarly plugin.
Mistake #3 – Writing quality website content
Businesses need websites to market their products and services as well as put their brand on the internet. And websites need content. Your website is nothing if it does not have enough content to speak for itself. Business owners who launch websites without content are just wasting money.
If you are about to launch a website, make sure you have enough quality content to showcase on your major pages – home page, services, page, about page, and contact.
Without content, it would be hard for your website visitors (who are possibly your customers ) to know about you. Moreover, it would be hard for Google to place you on their Search Results if they don’t have enough information about your website.
That is why it is important to invest on producing quality content for your website so you can get your money’s worth.
If you want to check the quality of your website content, you can install the Yoast Plugin. Before you publish your content, Yoast will show all the things that you need to know, SEO-wise, and suggest ways on how to improve it. It is a very good tool that we often used here on Digital Strategists to make sure all our blogs and website content are optimized.
Mistake #4 – Skipping descriptions on social media
Social media is a very important tool in increasing your website traffic. With social media, you can just share your website or blog links so your content can be accessible to anyone within your network. However, not everyone will click your shared link most especially if they know nothing about it. Well, yes they can see the thumbnail and the title, but that is not enough. You need to craft one to two sentences about the link you shared so your network will have a glimpse of what the content is all about.
Moreover, these captions will also help you boost your link’s click-through-rate. If your followers found your description interesting, they will be intrigued to know more and click the link. That is why when sharing links from your website, avoid skipping the description box. Before hitting the share button, put some words there to introduce your content.
Mistake #5 – Writing for everyone
You may think that writing for everyone is a good strategy. But it is not. In fact, it is the most common writing mistake that people make. They think that if they write a piece that is intended to be read by everyone, they will increase their chances of getting traffic. But this is not true.
It is like shooting a ball in a hoopless board. You are just shooting everywhere.
When you write content, you need to think about your audience, your business’ target market. You need to know how they think, their interests, their problems, their issues, and how, your brand, can provide solutions to these.
By thinking about your audience, it would be easy for you to create content with a voice that resounds to them.
Like for example, we, at Digital Strategists, create content with small business owners as our target market or audience. With them in mind, we make sure to provide easy digital marketing solutions that they can do. We also avoid stuffing our content with terms that are too technical for them to understand. By this, they are able to enjoy reading our content as well as get something valuable from it.
Mistake #6 – Stuffing your content with keywords
Yes, keywords are important in every content. With keywords, you are helping Google to rank your page or blog on relevant searches – thus the point of doing SEO. And since keywords are the key to rank on Google, most people stuff so many keywords on their content thinking that it will be the best way to rank on top. But that is a big mistake!
Stuffing so many keywords on your content makes your content difficult to read. It also loses its, quality, value and relevance to your audience. Moreover, Google can detect low-quality content and can penalize your website for it.
So the key here is to limit your keywords and focus on the quality. Google loves quality content and can reward you with a good search ranking spot if your content can provide quality and value to your audience.
If you are unsure if you are stuffing too many keywords on your content, the Yoast plugin can help you with that.
Mistake #7 – Neglecting proper formatting
Did you know that reducing text by half the words can improve your content usability by 58%? Also, if you have an easy to scan layout it can improve usability by 47%? That is according to the study made by the Nielsen Norman Group.
This means that format plays an important role in the quality of your content. In short, if you want to increase the traffic and decrease the bounce rate of your content, you need to pay attention to your formatting.
A common mistake of most people is that they write without thinking about the overall look of the content when published.
Here are some content formatting best practices that will help you increase readers’ time on your page:
- Using headlines and subheadlines
- Breaking down your content into a list
- Putting relevant and quality images in between your content/blog
- Breaking up your paragraphs (2 or 4 sentences)
- Using simple sentences
- Using white spaces
- Using the right font type and size
Wrap Up
These are just some of the common content writing mistakes that you should avoid if you are after increasing your website traffic and conversion.
Again, the key to a good website is consistent production of quality, relevant, and fresh content. If you are launching a website and need help with your content, we have content writing experts that can assist you.
On the other hand, if you think that content is king and is a vital part of every digital marketing plan, we can help you produce quality blogs on a regular basis.
Just message us at dgstrategists@gmail.com or click the Facebook Messenger Chat button below.
Keep writing!
May you have more clients to come,
The Digital Strategists Team