Your website offers content you believe is exceptional. But despite your expectations, some of it doesn’t seem to be performing so well. As a Utah digital marketing agency, this is something we see with clients all the time. They come to us because they cannot understand why their content doesn’t perform.
It is easy to blame users when content doesn’t perform. A knee-jerk reaction with unintended consequences is often the result. Our best advice is to take a more analytical approach. Step back and analyze poorly performing content from a consumer’s point of view. Doing so might reveal some surprising reasons content isn’t making the grade.
It’s All About What Users Want
Are you familiar with the Helpful Content update Google released a couple of years ago? The point of the update was to encourage content creators to focus on users rather than Google algorithms. Their logic on this makes a lot of sense.
In order to make money, Google needs to give its users what they want. And what they want are links to content that answers a question, meets a need, explains a complicated topic, etc. Solid content that users actually want to consume will rank well on Google’s organic searches. Even if a content creator knows nothing about how Google algorithms work, creating content that people want ultimately takes care of itself.
Possible Reasons for Poor Performance
Understanding that it is all about what users want leads to the inevitable questions of why a piece of content isn’t performing well. There could be any number of reasons. We did some digging and ran across some fascinating findings from Ahrefs. The well-known SEO and marketing organization deployed their own Content Explorer tool to try to understand poorly performing content.
Here are some of the things they discovered:
1. Certain Topics Garner No Interest
Ahrefs’ analysis revealed that an astounding 96.55% of web pages never receive any organic traffic from Google. That’s amazing. In their test, they entered a longtail keyword and discovered it gets “zero estimated organic search traffic.” Why? Because nobody is actually searching that topic. When researchers looked at search volume, their longtail keyword ranked in the lowest category: 0-10 searches.
If your content is performing poorly, it could be because no one is interested in it. That particular topic may appeal to a limited audience. Or perhaps the keywords you’ve chosen are not the ones people would use when searching for information on that topic.
2. A Lack of Backlinks
It has been suggested that backlinks are among Google’s top three ranking factors. Whether or not that’s true, we do know that backlinks are extremely important. We also know that there is a clear correlation between backlink quality and the amount of traffic a site receives. What does this say about poorly performing content? It could suggest that the entire site sorely lacks quality backlinks.
3. Intent Doesn’t Match
A search engine is built to help people find information they are searching for. As such, Google and its competitors go to great lengths to try to understand user intent. Poorly performing content may be struggling because the keywords it was built around do not match the intent of the consumers who use them in their search for information.
Poorly performing content is a reality of the internet. No site enjoys optimal performance from every piece of content. Organizations should work to keep poorly performing content to a minimum. As a digital marketing agency in Utah, it is something that we give plenty of attention to on behalf of our clients.
