Content marketing is a creative business strategy used to market brands. Although it’s relatively new, it’s been incredibly effective in attracting online traffic and creating brand awareness. With that said, content marketing will only yield considerable results when carried out correctly. If a company doesn’t adhere to the rules of ‘good’ content marketing, it will fall off by the wayside and fail to generate traction. And that begs the question, ‘what is good content marketing?’
Creating relevant content, with an apt selection of keywords (also known as Adwords when used in the context of advertisements), to effectively attract audiences, falls under the umbrella of good content marketing. The key to effective content marketing is the selection of pertinent keywords and their natural placement. However, many times marketers forgo the fundamentals of content marketing and resort to keyword stuffing to get traffic.
But that doesn’t happen; instead, their site’s rankings drop significantly, leading to lower visibility on search engines.
Keyword stuffing- the practice of filling up an article or blog post with too many needless keywords- doesn’t just reduce a brand’s visibility on search engines but can even get the page removed from search engine result pages (SERPS) as a penalty. Now that we have briefly looked over the possible perils of keyword overload, let’s figure out when regular keyword placement turns into a stuffing.
How many keywords are too many?
The metric used to determine the ideal number of keywords in a copy is called keyword density. It is the percentage of times a keyword is used in a post. Although there’s no etched-in-stone keyword density value, Mr. Google suggests a 2% usage of keywords per copy.
While the most commonly used keyword-stuffing method is adding unnecessary keywords to the text of a copy, there’s also another slightly subtler way of increasing the number of keywords in a post that typically goes unnoticed. This covert keyword stuffing tactic entails using selected keywords in the page’s meta and alt tags and using the same font color as the background (essentially making words invisible for readers, but keeping them detectable for search engines).
Whether a brand uses the blatant or the discreet form of keyword stuffing, in any case, it will reduce its chances to gain visibility on search engine result pages (SERPS).
Keywords are supposed to put a page higher up on search engines, but that will only happen if they are placed naturally and have low competition. That is, keywords having little competition are more easily detectable, hence enable higher visibility.
When marketeers excessively use irrelevant keywords or Adwords to boost their brand’s search engine ranking, they severely damage the quality of content. A meaningful article must be crisp and deliver the necessary information, which won’t be possible if a writer forcefully inserts words to gain traction.
To fully benefit from keyword usage for search engine optimization (SEO), organic placement of low-competition, relevant keywords is essential. Corporations need to make sure that the content they put out is information-rich and includes all the necessary keywords, without losing coherence.
