Five Reasons Why People Aren’t Reading Your Content

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They Can’t Find Your Content

If you were selling your car for $100, you wouldn’t get a single buyer if no one knew about the sale. The same philosophy applies to your content. From hit blogs to major e-commerce sites that draw millions of hits a month, every hit site became popular because others could find it. Making your content easy to find should be your first priority, and you can do that in three ways.

  • Good SEO and LSI techniques: Search engine optimization and latent semantic indexing are vital to letting readers find you. If you were your customer, what would you type to find your site? Incorporate these keywords naturally into your content. Note that word “naturally,” because it’ll come up again.
  • Social media presence: Word of mouth is a tremendously valuable tool that turns customers into marketers. If they love your blog post, your readers will share it and draw traffic to your site.
  • Fresh, original content: Google penalizes stale or duplicated content and rewards freshness. Start a blog that feeds fresh content to your site regularly and give your search engine rankings an upward nudge with every informative or entertaining post.

You Write for Machines, Not People

In the Wild West days of Web 1.0, a site owner only needed a certain keyword density to draw traffic. That’s what the worst of them did, regardless of whether those keywords made any sense in the content or for the site. Search engines’ algorithms are vastly more sophisticated now, and writing has to appeal to people. Give your readers something valuable and let the keywords happen naturally.

There’s that word again: natural keyword use. It’s at the heart of SEO and LSI, and it simply means giving your readers useful content that just happens to coincide with common search terms. Keywords should feel like an integral part of the landscape instead of a glaring billboard disturbing the scenery. Speaking of billboards, that brings up the next big reason why no one’s reading your content.

You’re Writing Advertising Copy

Running a business means investing in advertising, but not everything you produce should feel like an ad to your readers. Ads masquerading as blog posts and articles have the same effect as emails that tell you about winning a contest you didn’t enter: they instantly get shut out. Readers have a mental spam filter, and openly advertorial content trips it.

Think about what you search for and base your content on what you’d like to read such as how-to articles, news posts and useful tip lists. Offer visitors webinars, white papers and videos that give them something instead of demanding their attention with ads. Your customers are smart people; they’ll get the hint if you offer a great solution without pushing it.

Your Content Has No Style

Writing has a voice, and just like singing voices, some can barely carry a tune while others can sell out Carnegie Hall. To get your business content to stand out and win more visitors to your site, you’ll need to sing to them. Great writing can make just about anything engaging for your readers. Best-sellers have been written about taxidermy, Twinkies, and table salt, so it’s unlikely that your niche is any less fascinating. There’s no such thing as a boring topic – only a boring writer.

Your Content Is Wrong

Your readers want to consider you an authority. When you present content that’s misspelled, poorly formatted or factually inaccurate, you’re denying those readers what they want. Don’t shortchange yourself with an unreadable wall of text or mistakes, especially when a particularly egregious gaffe can go around the Internet in seconds. You want visitors, but not because you’re the latest unintentional comedy hit.

Don’t wonder why no one is reading your content; fix it by publishing content that’s impossible to ignore.

© Business Content, Inc. 2012 All Rights Reserved.

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