The old days of SEO were quite an easy time for most website owners, as a few simple additions or alterations to your pages and code could easily get you featured in search engines. As time has passed, however, Google and others have cracked down on these easy-to-rig systems and have implemented tough standards that judge websites based on their content (and much more). Unfortunately for some, even great content can result in poor performance when it is coupled with other bad content marketing strategies; many people are unaware of them and how they are harming their websites with search engines and readers alike. Below, we’ll point out three bad habits that you need to abandon immediately if you want your content marketing strategy to excel in the future.

Improper Syntax Examples

Google and Bing both are very critical when it comes to pinging websites for content quality, and so are your readers (at least subconsciously). It has gotten so complex as of late that they are even analysing syntax of your content. While many people encourage a more informal method of writing to ensure people enjoy reading what they see, this doesn’t mean that improper syntax is OK. Two prominent examples of improper syntax are the double space and the Oxford comma. The double space was originally needed because all characters had an equal amount of space in between them; an extra space made it clearer where sentences ended. These days, however, this is antiquated and could cause your content to suffer in SERPs. The Oxford comma debate (whether to use it or not to use it) has been going on forever, but when it comes to your content marketing, we highly recommend using it in order to clearly convey context and separate meanings in every situation.

Failing to Proofread

In many cases, we are in such a hurry to produce new content that we move on to the next project before we ever review what we have written. Rushing to publish a finished piece, it can be easy to forget to check for grammatical errors or other typos that may diminish the overall integrity and quality of the content. All you have to do is look at a popular social media conversation to find someone questioning another person’s intelligence over their inability to spell a particular word correctly. Your readers will likewise do so; some may express themselves in a similar fashion, while others will quietly come to the conclusion that your work is not professional (and likely never return). Always take a couple of minutes upon finishing each piece of content to thoroughly review it for any of these potential mistakes.

Leaving Out Sources

People want to know what you know, but they also want to know how you know it. Not only are citations good at building SEO credibility by referencing other websites, but they help convey a sense of authority to your readers as well. When you can back up concrete assertions with documented evidence, readers are more likely to turn to you in the future when they are out pinging websites in search of an answer to their questions.