By mbarby@hubspot.com (Matthew Howells-Barby)

Content marketing has seen a lot of changes during the past few years.

Many of these changes can be attributed to the rapidly evolving search landscape as well as a huge shift in the way people are actually discovering content.

New, more sophisticated search algorithms, changes in how people use search engines, and new ways that marketers go about actually developing their content are just a few of the contributing factors and outcomes.

All that said, many marketers still experience the same pain points that were commonplace more than five years ago:

• “I struggle to measure the ROI of the content I create.”
• We create great content, but we still don’t seem to rank high in Google for our target keywords.”
• “So, I’ve done my keyword research. Now what?”

As a response to these problems — specifically the second one — a lot of marketers will create more and more content. Unfortunately, creating larger volumes of the same underperforming content will often result in the same underwhelming results — just at a greater expense.

In fact, adding more content to a poor existing site architecture can make it even harder for Google to find and rank your content. That’s not a situation any marketer wants to find themselves in.

The answer to these problems spans way beyond the number of blog posts being pushed out each week; the real problem lies in the way that most content strategies are being developed and organized.

SEO is evolving, and marketers need to change with it.

Fortunately, there are ways to overcome these obstacles and drive high-performing results for your marketing team.

Here, we’ll discuss the changing state of search and how marketers can keep up. Continue reading this page or use the links below to jump to a specific section.

Search Engines are Changing

Before we jump into solutions for finding success in the changing world of content marketing, let’s dive a bit deeper into the driving forces behind that change.

First, we need to chat about search engines. Updates to how search engines process and evaluate content have created drastic changes in recent years for SEO. As a result, the old metrics of success aren’t as reliable as they once were.

For example, one of the ways in which content producers evaluate the performance of content is by looking at keyword rankings within the search engines. However, there’s been a lot of debate around the actual credibility of keyword rankings as a metric, and the reason for this largely stems from the fact that rank changes depending on context.

To put it simply, depending on how and where you’re searching from, you’ll see different search results, which makes it difficult to evaluate success based on keyword rankings alone.

A simple search for the term “where to eat pizza” illustrates this perfectly. If you’re searching for this query from Boston, you’ll receive a completely …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron