SEO
When Does a Content Strategy Fail? 11 Factors to Blame
![When Does a Content Strategy Fail? 11 Factors to Blame When Does a Content Strategy Fail? 11 Factors to Blame](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1702891564_When-Does-a-Content-Strategy-Fail-11-Factors-to-Blame.png)
The success or failure of your content strategy is very subjective.
It can be nuanced and multifaceted due to many factors – varied objectives, long-term impact, changing goals, complex data interpretation, content attribution, and many other external factors.
But then I’ve heard many business owners and marketing managers complaining about not seeing results despite publishing 12-20 blogs a month, aggressive social media promotions, and segmented email drip campaigns.
It could be because the content strategy itself is flawed, which can cause it to fail in achieving its intended results.
And because there can be many flaws in a content strategy, I would like to highlight the critical ones that most commonly cause your strategy to fail.
1. Not Sticking To Your Target Audience
The most common yet highly critical reason behind the failed content strategy is deviating from your target audience.
While we have worked with many IT companies, we have seen this as a major issue. They usually have some of these target audiences:
- Tech Business Owners.
- Non-tech Business Owners.
- CTO or Project Managers.
- Developers.
But most IT companies follow the trends their competitors have chosen, irrespective of what their sales team wants.
- They want to sell Flutter development if their competitors start delivering that.
- If their competitors have started doing it, they want to shift to staff augmentation from custom end-to-end development.
- They want to start writing technical blogs if their competitors have written them.
It’s not their fault because they are trying to follow trends in the IT industry. But in following the trend, they unknowingly mix up all their audiences.
Deviating from your target audience can happen unintentionally due to shifts in business goals or strategies, inadequate or outdated audience research, customer base expansion, data misinterpretation, changes in industry dynamics, and more.
However, this is problematic for content strategy, because it results in content that is misaligned, inefficient, and ineffective in reaching and engaging the right people.
Why? Because:
- You create irrelevant content for other sets of audiences.
- You waste time, effort, and budget.
- This results in inconsistent brand messaging.
- You may attract the wrong type of leads or lower conversion rates.
- With all these, you cannot measure the effectiveness.
- And hence, the ROI is never justified.
A successful content strategy should be laser-focused on addressing the intended audience’s needs, building a strong connection with them, and ultimately driving meaningful outcomes for the business.
2. Missing Out On The Purpose Of Creating The Content
When planning content topics, you must know why you want to create this content. Because until you know the purpose, you can’t define its success metrics.
And when you don’t know the success metrics, your content remains orphan, cannibalized, or unhelpful.
With more such content, you only keep investing where there are no returns.
And never stick to the below as the only purpose of your content:
- Because competitors have written them.
- Because we want rankings.
- Because we want all of our blogs to generate sales qualified leads (SQLs).
- Because we think such topics would be helpful to our audience.
- Because our product team wants to focus on that
- Because our sales team wants to target this list of features to be promoted across a particular geography.
Where are the audience’s needs here?
Consider what the audience wants to read or consume while buying your products or services.
Your purpose should be divided into two:
- What do readers expect out of this content?
- What will we achieve when the user consumes this content and is happy about it?
I hope that’s clear to ensure your content strategy doesn’t fail.
3. Not Setting Up Each Content’s KPIs And Its Timeline
We know the purpose of creating content, but what if we don’t know how to measure whether the purpose was fulfilled?
That also will lead to the failure.
Most content calendars include the following basic things:
- Content topics.
- Content types.
- Target audience.
- Team involved.
- Publication timelines.
- Keywords data.
- Word count.
- Graphics requirements.
- References.
But people don’t talk enough about what each piece of content has to deliver. We never used to add any content metrics in our SEO content strategy.
Content KPIs can vary depending on the content’s purpose and your overall content strategy.
![When Does a Content Strategy Fail? 11 Factors to Blame Common content KPIs to ensure your content strategy doesn't fail](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/When-Does-a-Content-Strategy-Fail-11-Factors-to-Blame.png)
But just defining the KPIs is not enough; setting up their timelines ensures they are achieved.
Let me share what happens to your content strategy if you haven’t set the content KPIs and their timelines to achieve:
- Directionless content creation – You publish a blog post without clear KPIs or timelines. The content covers a general industry topic but doesn’t tie into specific business goals. As a result, it doesn’t drive relevant traffic or contribute to lead generation.
- Ineffective resource allocation – You invest significant resources in creating a series of YouTube videos without defining KPIs. The videos receive views, but without KPIs, it’s unclear whether they contribute to brand awareness, customer engagement, or sales growth.
- Measurement challenges – You regularly publish email newsletters to a subscriber list without establishing KPIs and timelines. You observe that the open rates and click-through rates vary across different newsletters. Still, without predefined KPIs, you are uncertain whether the content needs improvement or the variance is within the normal range.
- Missed opportunities – If you’re into the ecommerce or D2C segment and fail to define the KPIs and the timeline for your holiday-themed content, you miss out on capitalizing on the season for maximum visibility or sales. After all, there’s no point in me sharing Black Friday marketing hacks for marketers when Black Friday has already been and gone.
- Inconsistent performance – When you’re writing different types of blogs without the defined KPIs and timelines, some pieces might perform well. In contrast, others underperform, and there’s no basis for comparison or improvement. This inconsistency makes it challenging to identify what types of content work best.
- Difficulty in adaptation – While creating a content strategy for a software review site doesn’t have a timeline for updating the articles during significant software releases, it can drastically lose rankings and website traffic. Without defined KPIs and timelines, it’s harder to identify when adjustments are needed. You may not notice content that’s not meeting expectations until much later.
- ROI uncertainty – The absence of KPIs and timelines makes it challenging to calculate the return on investment (ROI) for your content efforts. You won’t know if the resources invested in content creation yield the desired results.
- Demotivation for teams – Content creators and marketers may become demotivated when they don’t see clear objectives or results associated with their work. This can lead to a lack of enthusiasm and dedication to following the content strategy.
- Inability to learn and improve – The lack of defined KPIs and timelines makes it challenging to learn which of your blogs are supposed to drive marketing qualified leads (MQLs), newsletter sign-ups, embedded video clicks, move to landing pages, SQLs, and more. So, you won’t have data-driven insights to make informed decisions and refine your strategy over time.
To avoid all the above pitfalls, let’s have a structured approach so that your content efforts are purposeful, measurable, and adaptable, leading to a more effective and results-driven content strategy.
4. Measuring Leads/Conversions As The Only KPI
We just finished discussing that KPIs are important – but all KPIs are important, not just lead generation or conversions.
However, because the top management of startups and ecommerce business owners have strict timelines for reaching the goals of specific annual recurring revenue (ARR) and turnovers, they ask their marketing teams to focus on strategizing content for generating leads or business.
But here are a few very critical reasons why your content strategy fails if you only focus on leads or conversions:
Narrowed Focus
Relying solely on leads or conversions as KPIs can create a narrow focus on the end of the sales funnel.
While these metrics are important, they don’t account for the full customer journey.
Content should address various stages of the customer lifecycle, from awareness to consideration and retention.
We got an inquiry last month from someone who was into the home lifestyle industry in the US, and they were just starting in this highly competitive market.
We took days to build a strategy for them on how to showcase them as one of the emerging brands, and they just wanted to focus on whether our strategy would sell out their extensive inventory before a year.
Being in a B2C industry, one must know that 66% of consumers are now allocating additional time to research and validate their purchases due to the cost-of-living crisis, as per the report by Akeneo.
So, if you’re not present at every stage of their research, you’ll lose them forever.
Misalignment With Content Types
Different types of content serve various purposes within the marketing funnel.
For instance, blog posts are typically better suited for creating awareness, while in-depth whitepapers may be more effective for B2B lead generation.
If lead generation is the sole KPI, the strategy may not leverage the full potential of diverse content types.
This means that even if your sole focus is driving more whitepaper downloads, you would need the below content types to support:
- Landing page content to encourage visitors to download.
- Blog posts to introduce the topics covered in the whitepapers and links to the respective landing pages.
- Email content to promote your whitepapers to your subscriber list and guide them to the landing pages.
- Social media posts to highlight the whitepapers’ benefits and encourage followers to access them.
- Guest posts or articles in industry publications to reach a broader audience and direct readers to your whitepaper downloads.
- Compelling ad copy for paid campaigns, such as pay-per-click (PPC) or social media ads, to drive traffic to the whitepaper landing pages.
No matter what content type you choose to drive conversions, you need support of other kinds for maximized output.
Higher Customer Acquisition Costs
Not all visitors arriving at your site are ready to purchase or provide their contact information.
Many are in the early stages of the buying process, gathering information and evaluating their options.
But when the sole purpose is to drive conversions, the content strategy must consider paid advertising and email outreach. Paid advertising may directly bring you instant conversions but may be more costly in the long run.
Similarly, suppose you’re in the early stages of your business.
In that case, email outreach doesn’t always bring faster results, as your prospects might feel a lack of brand authority due to the lack of other content types on different channels for their research.
This ultimately results in higher customer acquisition rates, which cannot help you sustain for long.
A successful content strategy should not focus solely on immediate lead generation.
It should be balanced with content designed for brand awareness and consideration, essential for attracting organic, social, and referral traffic, building trust, and nurturing long-term customer relationships.
5. Not Emphasizing The User And Their Content Experience
User experience – we know that it matters for your marketing success.
But what’s content experience?
Content experience refers to how users interact with and perceive content on various digital platforms, such as websites, mobile apps, social media, and other digital channels.
It encompasses the overall impression, engagement, and satisfaction that content creates for the user.
Various elements, including design, usability, interactivity, and the quality of the content itself, shape the content experience.
In short, content experience is nothing but all about fulfilling the user’s expectations from content, such as:
- Relevance – Your users interact or engage with your content only if they find it relevant to their needs and interests.
- Quality – Your users want to consume content that’s accurate, well-researched, and well-crafted to meet their needs.
- Consistency – Whether you’ve consistently added such quality content for their queries also defines whether your content meets their expectations.
- Clarity – Users seek clear and easily understandable content using plain language, structured layouts, and concise explanations.
- Interactivity – Be it compelling storytelling or media, your users should find your content interesting.
- Trustworthiness – Users need to trust the source. Transparent sourcing, evidence-based claims, and consistent brand messaging establish trust.
- Accessibility – Users with disabilities expect content to be accessible. Compliance with accessibility standards ensures a broader audience can consume content.
- User-centric design – Users anticipate user-friendly content and navigation. Prioritizing user experience (UX) design and responsive layouts fulfills this expectation.
- Personalization – Users look for tailored content experiences. Using data to deliver personalized content based on user preferences meets this expectation.
- Emotional connection – Users desire content that resonates emotionally. Creating content with relatable stories, empathy, and emotional appeal fulfills this expectation.
- Solving problems – Users expect content to address their problems. This is achieved by providing practical solutions and actionable advice.
So, if we don’t ensure that every content created from your content strategy fulfills the users’ expectations, they will never contribute to the marketing’s success.
After all, winning marketing is all about UX – delivering a fantastic user experience and fulfilling users’ expectations from the content they’re consuming.
![When Does a Content Strategy Fail? 11 Factors to Blame Winning marketing is all about UX - User Experience and User Expectations - Content strategy failure factors](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1702891562_190_When-Does-a-Content-Strategy-Fail-11-Factors-to-Blame.png)
![When Does a Content Strategy Fail? 11 Factors to Blame Winning marketing is all about UX - User Experience and User Expectations - Content strategy failure factors](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1702891562_190_When-Does-a-Content-Strategy-Fail-11-Factors-to-Blame.png)
6. Unable To Understand The User Behavior On The Page
Content strategy is not only for new topics. Hence, an inability to understand user behavior on a page reflects a lack of critical insights and data for optimizing content and achieving your strategic goals.
Hence, any content we create for our website needs to be monitored not just using GA4 or any analytics plugin, but also using heatmaps and session recordings.
![When Does a Content Strategy Fail? 11 Factors to Blame Unable to understand the user behavior on the content - Content strategy fails](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1702891562_464_When-Does-a-Content-Strategy-Fail-11-Factors-to-Blame.png)
![When Does a Content Strategy Fail? 11 Factors to Blame Unable to understand the user behavior on the content - Content strategy fails](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1702891562_464_When-Does-a-Content-Strategy-Fail-11-Factors-to-Blame.png)
Let’s talk about a few insights you only get when you monitor the heatmaps and recordings to understand the user behavior on the page:
- Incomplete forms – If your landing pages include lead generation forms, but users rarely submit them, an inability to understand user behavior means you won’t know where users are dropping off in the form-filling process. This can hinder lead generation efforts.
- Neglected content sections – On a blog post, you may have sections with important information. Still, if users rarely scroll down to read them, you’re missing out on engagement and conveying valuable insights. Without user behavior insights, your content strategy may not address this issue.
- High cart abandonment – An ecommerce site might notice that many users add items to their shopping cart but abandon it before completing the purchase. By monitoring user behavior, you can identify that users often drop off at the shipping cost calculation step. This insight allows you to make necessary adjustments, such as offering free shipping above a certain purchase amount, to reduce cart abandonment and improve the content of the shipping cost explanation.
- Unoptimized landing pages – Suppose your landing page for a webinar registration isn’t performing well, with low sign-up rates. User behavior tracking shows that most visitors leave the page without scrolling down to view the registration form. This data indicates that the content at the top of the page is not engaging.
GA4 gives you data, but the heatmaps and session recordings give you the reason behind that data. If you have high bounce rates, you can find out why you have them.
And when you have those insights, you can create content strategies that hardly fail.
7. Investing A Lot In Product/Brand Content
Like the sole purpose of lead generation, we understand the reason behind building the brand or product-focused content, which we call bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFu) content.
But investing a lot in such content can bring the below challenges:
- It can overwhelm the audience with sales-oriented messaging, leading to disengagement and alienation.
- It can lead to content saturation as you won’t find different topics to create content on.
- When users encounter the same messaging repeatedly, they may become desensitized to it.
- It can limit diversity and creativity in content creation.
- Branded content is not always searched for, so it may never drive better SEO results.
- Consistently putting out product-focused or branded content will make users build a perception about your brand and may never engage, even when you create educational content.
While product/branded content is essential for sales and conversions, an excessive focus on this type of content can lead to a content strategy failure by limiting audience engagement, diversity, and trust and missing opportunities to attract and nurture leads effectively.
So, even if you have targets for conversions, think of a balanced content strategy to make sure you don’t lose your audience for life.
8. Compromising On Quality Over Quantity (Especially After AI/ChatGPT)
You must have seen a lot of posts on LinkedIn or X/Twitter on how AI content or SEO has given them steady, hockey-stick growth.
![When Does a Content Strategy Fail? 11 Factors to Blame Compromising on quality over quantity with the increase in AI/ChatGPT can lead to Content strategy failure](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1702891562_371_When-Does-a-Content-Strategy-Fail-11-Factors-to-Blame.png)
![When Does a Content Strategy Fail? 11 Factors to Blame Compromising on quality over quantity with the increase in AI/ChatGPT can lead to Content strategy failure](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1702891562_371_When-Does-a-Content-Strategy-Fail-11-Factors-to-Blame.png)
Just publish one content per day, and voila, you’ve got 365 posts in a year with a whopping 5x organic growth.
That’s not as easy as it sounds!
Suppose you also start following this process as is.
In that case, your content strategy may fail miserably, as your industry, business, audience, and more differ from the ones who share such experiences and learnings, and not just that, it also impacts your overall brand reputation.
So, no, I’m not saying they are bluffing.
Still, a lot goes into identifying that one content topic, writing, proofreading, editing, publishing, and optimizing, such as adding keywords, avoiding keyword cannibalization, graphics, and more.
If that’s what you are supposed to do, do it, but it’s not a one-day task.
The people sharing those case studies should also have a strong content strategy in place, emphasizing both quality and quantity, despite using AI/ChatGPT.
9. No Guidance/Brief To The Writers On How To Approach The Content
Yes, content strategy is a plan, and without the right execution, it cannot succeed.
When creating the content strategy, it becomes important to share insights on what content creators should do.
Here, too, you should do it for every content topic, not just for one (or overall).
I always say that not all content creators are subject matter experts; hence, they are not supposed to be always on-point about something.
As the strategist, marketing/product manager, or business owner, you must provide those details, which can be compiled in MS Excel, Word, Google Spreadsheet, Docs, Loom, or Notion.
![When Does a Content Strategy Fail? 11 Factors to Blame Create a detailed brief for writers to avoid Content strategy failure](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1702891562_872_When-Does-a-Content-Strategy-Fail-11-Factors-to-Blame.png)
![When Does a Content Strategy Fail? 11 Factors to Blame Create a detailed brief for writers to avoid Content strategy failure](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1702891562_872_When-Does-a-Content-Strategy-Fail-11-Factors-to-Blame.png)
Such data compilation for the writers are called content briefs, and you need to share them in detail and make sure they understand what you want in the content.
Sometimes, we are not happy with what competitors have written on a topic; in such cases, we also provide the complete outline to the writers.
This makes it completely clear what they need to write, where, and how.
10. Having Miscommunication Or Misunderstanding Between Strategists And Writers
I want to say this loud and clear: Communication gaps and understanding glitches can lead to content strategy failure.
Let me give you an example of a real-time breakup with our client, which they didn’t plan and we didn’t expect.
They kept asking us to convert spoke-page content into hub-like content while they were already ranking on page 1 for the spoke-like content.
However, due to the long-term process of making that hub content rank on other relevant but competitive queries, we were not convinced as SEO pros and couldn’t deliver as they expected.
Because it’s a difficult and time-consuming process to rank hub content with highly competitive queries, we were not convinced as SEO pros to accept that change.
If we could get a clear communication behind the purpose of this requirement, the situation would have been different today.
A successful content strategy relies on effective collaboration and clear communication between these key roles to ensure that the content created aligns with strategic goals, resonates with the audience, and delivers the desired results.
11. Unaccelerated Distribution Plan
Yes! This does happen –and happens a lot – with SEO pros.
Has your SEO team ever faced any or all of the below issues?
- You published a lot of pages, but Google is not indexing them.
- You feel some pieces of content on your website took a lot of time, effort, and resources to create, and now, they hardly receive any traffic.
- You’ve been doing SEO for a long time, and you hardly have any keywords driving traffic to your website.
In any of the cases, it’s because your content strategy lacks distribution.
Our B2B clients have their marketing managers as our point of contact (PoCs) for our SEO services. It becomes frustrating sometimes for us to keep convincing some of them to share our traffic-focused content on their social media and email channels.
They believe that the content we have written or planned should be picked up by Google algorithms straightaway.
However, even Gary Illyes recommends promoting the content and increasing the brand’s popularity on social media to resolve the index bloat issues.
![When Does a Content Strategy Fail? 11 Factors to Blame Social media promotions impact the speed of indexing on search engines - Gary Illyes from Google](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1702891562_255_When-Does-a-Content-Strategy-Fail-11-Factors-to-Blame.png)
![When Does a Content Strategy Fail? 11 Factors to Blame Social media promotions impact the speed of indexing on search engines - Gary Illyes from Google](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1702891562_255_When-Does-a-Content-Strategy-Fail-11-Factors-to-Blame.png)
It was October 2022 when I recommended SEO pros focus on remarketing SEO, which mentioned how other marketing channels can contribute to SEO success. It’s high time now that you use it to your advantage.
Without an accelerated distribution plan, it can undermine your SEO efforts by limiting the visibility, engagement, and authority of your content in the eyes of search engines.
![When Does a Content Strategy Fail? 11 Factors to Blame You should know how marketing has evolved from independent channel-specific marketing to omnichannel marketing to avoid content strategy failure](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1702891562_718_When-Does-a-Content-Strategy-Fail-11-Factors-to-Blame.png)
![When Does a Content Strategy Fail? 11 Factors to Blame You should know how marketing has evolved from independent channel-specific marketing to omnichannel marketing to avoid content strategy failure](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1702891562_718_When-Does-a-Content-Strategy-Fail-11-Factors-to-Blame.png)
And when you don’t care to reach your content to your target audience on search engines, why should search engines either?
Revisit Your Content Strategy To Avoid The Above Pitfalls
Revisiting your content strategy is a dynamic and ongoing process to ensure content strategies are not set in stone.
They should be flexible, data-driven, and focused on delivering value to the audience. Identifying and rectifying these flaws can help ensure your content strategy’s success.
By continually assessing and adapting your strategy, you can maintain its effectiveness and deliver content that resonates with your audience while driving your business toward its desired outcomes.
More resources:
Featured Image: Khosro/Shutterstock
SEO
WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation
![WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/WordPress-Insiders-Discuss-WordPress-Stagnation.jpg)
A recent webinar featuring WordPress executives from Automattic and Elementor, along with developers and Joost de Valk, discussed the stagnation in WordPress growth, exploring the causes and potential solutions.
Stagnation Was The Webinar Topic
The webinar, “Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?” was a frank discussion about what can be done to increase the market share of new users that are choosing a web publishing platform.
Yet something that came up is that there are some areas that WordPress is doing exceptionally well so it’s not all doom and gloom. As will be seen later on, the fact that the WordPress core isn’t progressing in terms of specific technological adoption isn’t necessarily a sign that WordPress is falling behind, it’s actually a feature.
Yet there is a stagnation as mentioned at the 17:07 minute mark:
“…Basically you’re saying it’s not necessarily declining, but it’s not increasing and the energy is lagging. “
The response to the above statement acknowledged that while there are areas of growth like in the education and government sectors, the rest was “up for grabs.”
Joost de Valk spoke directly and unambiguously acknowledged the stagnation at the 18:09 minute mark:
“I agree with Noel. I think it’s stagnant.”
That said, Joost also saw opportunities with ecommerce, with the performance of WooCommerce. WooCommerce, by the way, outperformed WordPress as a whole with a 6.80% year over year growth rate, so there’s a good reason that Joost was optimistic of the ecommerce sector.
A general sense that WordPress was entering a stall however was not in dispute, as shown in remarks at the 31:45 minute mark:
“… the WordPress product market share is not decreasing, but it is stagnating…”
Facing Reality Is Productive
Humans have two ways to deal with a problem:
- Acknowledge the problem and seek solutions
- Pretend it’s not there and proceed as if everything is okay
WordPress is a publishing platform that’s loved around the world and has literally created countless jobs, careers, powered online commerce as well as helped establish new industries in developing applications that extend WordPress.
Many people have a stake in WordPress’ continued survival so any talk about WordPress entering a stall and descent phase like an airplane that reached the maximum altitude is frightening and some people would prefer to shout it down to make it go away.
Acknowledging facts and not brushing them aside is what this webinar achieved as a step toward identifying solutions. Everyone in the discussion has a stake in the continued growth of WordPress and their goal was to put it out there for the community to also get involved.
The live webinar featured:
- Miriam Schwab, Elementor’s Head of WP Relations
- Rich Tabor, Automattic Product Manager
- Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO
- Co-hosts Matt Cromwell and Amber Hinds, both members of the WordPress developer community moderated the discussion.
WordPress Market Share Stagnation
The webinar acknowledged that WordPress market share, the percentage of websites online that use WordPress, was stagnating. Stagnation is a state at which something is neither moving forward nor backwards, it is simply stuck at an in between point. And that’s what was openly acknowledged and the main point of the discussion was understanding the reasons why and what could be done about it.
Statistics gathered by the HTTPArchive and published on Joost de Valk’s blog show that WordPress experienced a year over year growth of 1.85%, having spent the year growing and contracting its market share. For example, over the latest month over month period the market share dropped by -0.28%.
Crowing about the WordPress 1.85% growth rate as evidence that everything is fine is to ignore that a large percentage of new businesses and websites coming online are increasingly going to other platforms, with year over year growth rates of other platforms outpacing the rate of growth of WordPress.
Out of the top 10 Content Management Systems, only six experienced year over year (YoY) growth.
CMS YoY Growth
- Webflow: 25.00%
- Shopify: 15.61%
- Wix: 10.71%
- Squarespace: 9.04%
- Duda: 8.89%
- WordPress: 1.85%
Why Stagnation Is A Problem
An important point made in the webinar is that stagnation can have a negative trickle-down effect on the business ecosystem by reducing growth opportunities and customer acquisition. If fewer of the new businesses coming online are opting in for WordPress are clients that will never come looking for a theme, plugin, development or SEO service.
It was noted at the 4:18 minute mark by Joost de Valk:
“…when you’re investing and when you’re building a product in the WordPress space, the market share or whether WordPress is growing or not has a deep impact on how easy it is to well to get people to, to buy the software that you want to sell them.”
Perception Of Innovation
One of the potential reasons for the struggle to achieve significant growth is the perception of a lack of innovation, pointed out at the 16:51 minute mark that there’s still no integration with popular technologies like Next JS, an open-source web development platform that is optimized for fast rollout of scalable and search-friendly websites.
It was observed at the 16:51 minute mark:
“…and still today we have no integration with next JS or anything like that…”
Someone else agreed but also expressed at the 41:52 minute mark, that the lack of innovation in the WordPress core can also be seen as a deliberate effort to make WordPress extensible so that if users find a gap a developer can step in and make a plugin to make WordPress be whatever users and developers want it to be.
“It’s not trying to be everything for everyone because it’s extensible. So if WordPress has a… let’s say a weakness for a particular segment or could be doing better in some way. Then you can come along and develop a plug in for it and that is one of the beautiful things about WordPress.”
Is Improved Marketing A Solution
One of the things that was identified as an area of improvement is marketing. They didn’t say it would solve all problems. It was simply noted that competitors are actively advertising and promoting but WordPress is by comparison not really proactively there. I think to extend that idea, which wasn’t expressed in the webinar, is to consider that if WordPress isn’t out there putting out a positive marketing message then the only thing consumers might be exposed to is the daily news of another vulnerability.
Someone commented in the 16:21 minute mark:
“I’m missing the excitement of WordPress and I’m not feeling that in the market. …I think a lot of that is around the product marketing and how we repackage WordPress for certain verticals because this one-size-fits-all means that in every single vertical we’re being displaced by campaigns that have paid or, you know, have received a a certain amount of funding and can go after us, right?”
This idea of marketing being a shortcoming of WordPress was raised earlier in the webinar at the 18:27 minute mark where it was acknowledged that growth was in some respects driven by the WordPress ecosystem with associated products like Elementor driving the growth in adoption of WordPress by new businesses.
They said:
“…the only logical conclusion is that the fact that marketing of WordPress itself is has actually always been a pain point, is now starting to actually hurt us.”
Future Of WordPress
This webinar is important because it features the voices of people who are actively involved at every level of WordPress, from development, marketing, accessibility, WordPress security, to plugin development. These are insiders with a deep interest in the continued evolution of WordPress as a viable platform for getting online.
The fact that they’re talking about the stagnation of WordPress should be of concern to everybody and that they are talking about solutions shows that the WordPress community is not in denial but is directly confronting situations, which is how a thriving ecosystem should be responding.
Watch the webinar:
Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Krakenimages.com
SEO
Google’s New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO
![Google's New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO Google's New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Googles-New-Support-For-AVIF-Images-May-Boost-SEO.jpg)
Google announced that images in the AVIF file format will now be eligible to be shown in Google Search and Google Images, including all platforms that surface Google Search data. AVIF will dramatically lower image sizes and improve Core Web Vitals scores, particularly Largest Contentful Paint.
How AVIF Can Improve SEO
Getting pages crawled and indexed are the first step of effective SEO. Anything that lowers file size and speeds up web page rendering will help search crawlers get to the content faster and improve the amount of pages crawled.
Google’s crawl budget documentation recommends increasing the speeds of page loading and rendering as a way to avoid receiving “Hostload exceeded” warnings.
It also says that faster loading times enables Googlebot to crawl more pages:
Improve your site’s crawl efficiency
Increase your page loading speed
Google’s crawling is limited by bandwidth, time, and availability of Googlebot instances. If your server responds to requests quicker, we might be able to crawl more pages on your site.
What Is AVIF?
AVIF (AVI Image File Format) is a next generation open source image file format that combines the best of JPEG, PNG, and GIF image file formats but in a more compressed format for smaller image files (by 50% for JPEG format).
AVIF supports transparency like PNG and photographic images like JPEG does but does but with a higher level of dynamic range, deeper blacks, and better compression (meaning smaller file sizes). AVIF even supports animation like GIF does.
AVIF Versus WebP
AVIF is generally a better file format than WebP in terms of smaller files size (compression) and image quality. WebP is better for lossless images, where maintaining high quality regardless of file size is more important. But for everyday web usage, AVIF is the better choice.
See also: 12 Important Image SEO Tips You Need To Know
Is AVIF Supported?
AVIF is currently supported by Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Safari browsers. Not all content management systems support AVIF. However, both WordPress and Joomla support AVIF. In terms of CDN, Cloudflare also already supports AVIF.
I couldn’t at this time ascertain whether Bing supports AVIF files and will update this article once I find out.
Current website usage of AVIF stands at 0.2% but now that it’s available to surfaced in Google Search, expect that percentage to grow. AVIF images will probably become a standard image format because of its high compression will help sites perform far better than they currently do with JPEG and PNG formats.
Research conducted in July 2024 by Joost de Valk (founder of Yoast, ) discovered that social media platforms don’t all support AVIF files. He found that LinkedIn, Mastodon, Slack, and Twitter/X do not currently support AVIF but that Facebook, Pinterest, Threads and WhatsApp do support it.
AVIF Images Are Automatically Indexable By Google
According to Google’s announcement there is nothing special that needs to be done to make AVIF image files indexable.
“Over the recent years, AVIF has become one of the most commonly used image formats on the web. We’re happy to announce that AVIF is now a supported file type in Google Search, for Google Images as well as any place that uses images in Google Search. You don’t need to do anything special to have your AVIF files indexed by Google.”
Read Google’s announcement:
Supporting AVIF in Google Search
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands
SEO
CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO
![CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/CMOs-Called-Out-For-Reliance-On-AI-Content-For-SEO.jpg)
Eli Schwartz, Author of Product-Led SEO, started a discussion on LinkedIn about there being too many CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) who believe that AI written content is an SEO strategy. He predicted that there will be reckoning on the way after their strategies end in failure.
This is what Eli had to say:
“Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO.
This mistake is going to lead to an explosion in demand for SEO strategists to help them fix their traffic when they find out they might have been wrong.”
Everyone in the discussion, which received 54 comments, strongly agreed with Eli, except for one guy.
What Is Google’s Policy On AI Generated Content?
Google’s policy hasn’t changed although they did update their guidance and spam policies on March 5, 2024 at the same time as the rollout of the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update. Many publishers who used AI to create content subsequently reported losing rankings.
Yet it’s not said that using AI is enough to merit poor rankings, it’s content that is created for ranking purposes.
Google wrote these guidelines specifically for autogenerated content, including AI generated content (Wayback machine copy dated March 6, 2024)
“Our long-standing spam policy has been that use of automation, including generative AI, is spam if the primary purpose is manipulating ranking in Search results. The updated policy is in the same spirit of our previous policy and based on the same principle. It’s been expanded to account for more sophisticated scaled content creation methods where it isn’t always clear whether low quality content was created purely through automation.
Our new policy is meant to help people focus more clearly on the idea that producing content at scale is abusive if done for the purpose of manipulating search rankings and that this applies whether automation or humans are involved.”
Many in Eli’s discussion were in agreement that reliance on AI by some organizations may come to haunt them, except for that one guy in the discussion
Read the discussion on LinkedIn:
Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands
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