The dangers of publishing bad content

Transcript

Hi I’m Ben and today I’m going to talk about the dangers of publishing bad content – both newly published articles and those sitting on your blog from past marketing.

I’ll share with you how this content is actually hurting people, and thus damaging your brand and costing you potential business – all while the metrics you’re using may indicate you have a successful content strategy.

Finally, I’ll share a simple 3 point checklist that you can use to ensure your content strategy is working for your business.

Let me start by giving you an example that hopefully shows exactly how dangerous bad content can be for your business:

To be honest, this danger didn’t properly hit home for me until after my daughter was born about 7 months ago.

As a first time parent, literally everything feels new and often really scary.

And you’re constantly searching for answers to important questions about your baby.

There’s a host of companies out there who provide great content which has helped me through really difficult moments – and definitely made it more likely that I’ll purchase their products.

But search results are also filled with misinformation.

Take Huggies, for example.

They host a massive forum with posts that rank on page one of Google across virtually all aspects of parenting.

And yet the forum has little moderation, basically no quality control or fact checking and no deleting or archiving of out of date content.

This means Huggies is providing sleep-deprived parents who are searching for advice with lots of terrible information.

They’re providing concerned families that are searching about important baby milestones incorrect and out of context advice.

What’s the cost of this?

Of a lost night of sleep or of another day of worry?

I’m sure Huggies measures traffic, time on site, bounce rate and other engagement metrics to determine the success of their content strategy.

But these metrics can only look at interactions in the moment, not the real life consequences of the information or advice they’ve given.

And as marketers, it’s so easy to overlook this fact as we try to find an edge in an increasingly competitive digital environment.

And while this example is obviously very personal, the same reality holds true whether you’re writing about finance, marketing, insurance, interior design or any other industry.

How people experience your content will go a long way to how they view your brand.

So here’s what I recommend you do now:

First, ensure your current content strategy is all about quality.

In particular, if you’re giving advice in highly specialised areas, make sure it’s well sourced and if possible reviewed by experts.

Second, review all your old content.

If you’ve been in digital marketing for a few years now, you’ve likely got some old content on your site.

And in particular, if you were doing SEO four or more years ago you almost certainly have a lot of old articles.

You should review all of them individually.

Use Google Analytics to prioritise the content that gets the most traffic and then update any content that’s not up to the highest standards.

And if it’s not great content and it’s not getting any traffic, just remove it.

Finally, actively encourage your readers to comment on your articles, either through comment boxes or through posts on social media.

Make sure to read this feedback, engage with people as much as possible and update your content as necessary.

My point here is not to shy away from publishing content – quite the opposite.

I believe strongly that it’s essential to setting yourself apart from the competition.

But make sure your content meets the standard you’d put on anything else associated with your business.

You owe it to your readers and to yourself.

That’s it for now. Thanks for watching.

If you have any questions, just leave them below.

Ben Fitzpatrick

Head of Operations at Webprofits

With over five years tenure and extensive experience across all areas of digital marketing, Ben Fitzpatrick is Webprofits’ Head of Operations and a consultant for some of our largest Growth Marketing clients.

Across the business, he is constantly working with the team to innovate and improve in order to keep Webprofits at the forefront of digital marketing.