Content Marketing Is A “Google Tax”

We all know how annoying content marketing can be. It takes hours, it’s really expensive, and it was something that simply didn’t exist in the past. These days, though, if you want to improve your SEO and get noticed online, it’s something that your business just has to do.

But why?

It all comes down to the way that Google has set up its search platform – the most popular platform on the web. Google has decided that it knows that its users want, and that’s content. As a result of this, companies have to churn out masses of content every month, not to please their customers, but to please Google’s bots that trawl their websites every few days.

Pleasing the Google algorithm has become the be all and end all for some companies and small businesses. They spend most of their marketing budget looking for ways to satisfy the algorithms (which are horrendously complicated) in order to funnel customers towards their blog or site. It’s almost like Google is charging businesses a tax, just for operating on the internet, and it’s enough to send most entrepreneurs mad.

Google has also inadvertently made the problem of content marketing even worse. Thanks to the incentives in their system, every business now has to produce thousands of lines of text and hundreds of pictures for social media and their blogs every month. Because of all this competition, getting your company’s marketing material to actually stand out in an ocean of online content is very difficult. In other words, even when you do produce the content, it’s unlikely that anybody will even bother looking at it. The competition has stifled the ability of your marketing material to do its job.

Where does this process end? According to research provided by Forbes, more than 70 percent of B2B businesses said that they were producing more marketing content than they were a year ago. As we go forward, businesses will realise that content creation is a race against other companies in their industry. We’re likely to see thousands of articles published every day on the same topic as businesses jostle for position in the search rankings. As more articles are pumped out, businesses waste time away from their core goals, which is bad for consumers and the economy in general.

The good news, though, is that smart companies are finding shortcuts to reduce the cost of the “Google tax.” Here are some marketing techniques that they are using.

Don’t Force Good Writing

Writing is a whole brain activity. As such, it requires you to be in a semi-relaxed state to do your best work and for the writing itself to flow. But all too often, marketing managers and entrepreneurs will allocate set times of the day to work on their material. If you pick the wrong time, your creativity will be shot, and you’ll produce dull, boring work. If you really struggle to come up with interesting material on a daily basis, you can turn to freelancers.

Always Focus On Your Audience

Another way that companies end up paying more Google tax than they should is because they don’t produce content that their users are interested in. Google’s search algorithms are always on the lookout for the most relevant topics for the people who use its search engine. So when companies produce content that people don’t like, Google punishes them.

Suppose, for instance, that you run a hotel and that you want to promote it online. You could write a blog about your plans to expand your staff roster, but it’s unlikely that a post on this subject would attract new customers. Online hotel marketing should instead focus on what people can do if they stay at your hotel. For instance, if your hotel is located in the Bahamas, you could do a post on all the things that there are to see and do in the region.

Create Pieces That Generate Repeat Traffic

The best blogs aren’t just those that entertain or inform, they’re the ones that leave people wanting more at the end. There needs to be some sort of incentive for a person to come back to your blog in the future.

Why? Because the evidence suggests that the more times that a person is exposed to your blog, the more that they will begin to trust you and your business. A great example of a blogger getting repeat visits is Neil Patel’s $100,000 Challenge series. This was a series of blog posts aimed and challenging people to make $100,000 over the course of a few months. It proved very successful at driving traffic to Patel’s website.

Link Your Content To Influencers

You shouldn’t try to isolate your marketing from the rest of the internet. Instead, you should try to create as many links as possible, especially with influencers. A great way to build a successful relationship with influencers is to reach out to them whenever you mention them in a blog post. There’s a good chance that they’ll respond in kind, linking to your site and increasing your traffic.

Blog Consistently

Another way companies end up paying more Google tax is by blogging sporadically. They’ll produce a load of content over the course of a month or so and then leave their blog unattended. Google doesn’t like this and punishes blogs that it thinks are out of date. According to a Hubspot survey, 82 percent of businesses who blogged every day gained at least one customer through their blog. That number dropped to 57 percent for people who only blogged once per month. It might be an effort, but spending a few minutes every morning to update your blog is a good idea.

Go With Short, Simple Titles

Verbose titles are great for news outlets who want to make a point. But for a business optimizing content for the internet, they’re not such a good idea. Try also to avoid “clickbait” titles, as these will end up ruining the perception of your business. Stick with simple themes, like 5 Ways To Boost Your Content Marketing.