Earlier this year I wrote about how to scale content efficiently in your organization. In that post I pointed to three important elements of content that often go unmissed – culture, process, and ownership. As content production and publication statistics rise in 2015, just how do successful business stand out from the crowd and scale efficiently?
We are entering the season of content and SEO prediction, forecast, and theory, yet many businesses still do not understand that content quantity for SEO does not always equate to long-term brand health and that “without culture, process, ownership, and accountability content scale will fail.”
Be Aware of Creating Content Spam
Go as back as 2012 and you will see that as the SEO market changed, and content marketing became a focal point, Google change drove many SEO professionals to rethink their marketing strategies and shift to content production. However, becoming a content marketer requires much more than simply changing your job title from SEO to content on LinkedIn.
Many organizations view content marketing as a predecessor to old-school SEO and “content spamming” is becoming the new norm for some.
The production of content for quick-ranking wins, a spike in traffic, a low-quality lead, and inter-departmental wins (*see who owns content) not only has short-term results, but long-term consequences for your brand such as:
- Loss of brand vision and message (mature vs. off-brand immature content)
- Loss of control of key product/marketing messaging and positioning
- Low-quality leads and opportunities – false positive reporting and diminishing returns
- Long-term loss – Panda penalties
- Disparity across the organization – conflicts on ownership
Think back to the old days of black hat SEO where search engines could be “technically gamed” and short-term wins would be the norm. Content spam could be viewed similarly with “content spam” being the “technically gamed.”
Neil Patel from Kissmetrics explains more about the balance between technical SEO and content in this article here.
Avoiding Content Marketing Spam: Content & SEO Culture, Process, Ownership
