Producing content on your website should be a simple, straightforward process that allows your content creators to focus more time on storytelling and less on the formatting and optimizations an article may require.
However, many Web Content Management Systems (Web CMS) slow down the process, as they are not properly set up for content creators or do not have the features to suit how businesses are using the web in 2016 and beyond.
Here are five of the most common pain points marketers will experience that will significantly impact their process.
1) Inability to alter the SEO metadata on content
Pay attention to your SEO. According to Search Engine Land, 51% of traffic to B2B and B2C websites comes from search engines, highlighting how essential it is to optimize your content accordingly.
Unfortunately, many Web CMS platforms don’t allow you to edit the SEO metadata on pages of your website or the blog. Metadata is a data set that provides information on other data. That sounds confusing, but it does not have to be.
Every page should be optimized in order to better rank in the search engines and a Web CMS should allow you to define certain metadata to inform Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines what the subject of a particular page is.
It is frustrating when you’re not able to update the title tag or meta description, or make the URL of an article SEO-friendly. It’s worth noting that the title tag is part of the header of a web page and helps the search engines understand the headline and focus of an article.
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The meta description is a summary of an article, but is geared for users viewing the piece in search engine results pages. The meta description helps users understand the focus of a piece and isn’t taken into consideration by the search algorithm for ranking purposes.
The URL of an article or webpage should be simple and concise, and the keywords should be focused on the main subject of an article, separated by dashes.
This lack of functionality to customize these elements can have a negative impact on getting your content more visibility from your audience using search, which is often the whole point of producing it in the first place.
2) Inability to add CTA's near your content
Your blog and website need to have calls-to-action (CTA) that lead readers to perform some type of conversion, whether it’s shopping on your ecommerce store, downloading a resource, becoming an email subscriber, etc.
Lacking the functionality to add a CTA is a major disconnect between the content you’re producing and the action you would like them to take. The answer to fixing a lacking CTA functionality: a robust Web CMS that helps marketers easily add CTA’s alongside their content.
3) Inability to crop or edit uploaded images
Visuals make your content pop. For example, 86% of buyers expressed some level of desire to engage with visual content. However, the functionality many websites have through their Web CMS limits what can be done to easily add or edit images uploaded to an article or a page.
This can quickly waste your time as you’re formatting content and leave work less polished than it would have been having had more freedom to include visuals correctly.
The ideal Web CMS allows content creators to add images of various formats like JPEG, TIF, PNG and GIF to the backend of your website to make an article or page more valuable to readers.
RELATED: Read about Evoq's content creation and editing capabilities, which include the ability to crop and resize images directly in the CMS.
Once these images are uploaded, your team should be able to crop visuals as necessary, add an alt tag for SEO purposes and have flexibility on where to place the image.
Without this level of functionality, it’s likely that you will not be able to include worthwhile images in your content or if you do so, they won’t look like they are formatted correctly. This can make your brand look out of touch with what makes engaging content worthwhile, which isn’t what any business wants.
4) Lack of proper social media integration
What can scale your content marketing efforts tenfold? Social media, but only if used with purpose. A Web CMS that doesn’t include social media integration is a missed opportunity that is potentially losing your organization additional traffic, engagement and valuable readers.
A lack of social media integration means that you’re missing social plugins to simplify sharing, plugins to follow your brand’s key social accounts or the right formatting to streamline the way your content is presented on these channels once it is shared.
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Integrating social media the right way can help make it as simple as possible for your audience to share your content with their network and easily generate more visibility from your efforts. A lack of social media integration only dilutes your ongoing efforts to build a rapport with your audience using content.
5) Inability to properly attribute an author with a byline
It is strange to publish content on your website or blog without attributing it to a particular author, but unfortunately, many Web CMS’s do not allow authors to add their byline to their work. This is not the ideal setup. This simple feature is important for helping writers get credit they deserve for their efforts and it should be displayed somewhere at the top or bottom of their pieces.
First off, it is odd for a brand to publish content with the brand as the byline, although not uncommon, as many organizations still do not get it. For example, if a team member at General Electric were to author an article and the byline said by General Electric, it seems weird as a brand is merely the made-up storyline about a business and not a person or entity that can actually write content.
It humanizes a brand when its staff and key leaders are featured as representatives of the organization and that is a good thing when trying to build trust with your audience. People trust people, not faceless brands.
Unless your enterprise is working with a ghostwriter, an external writer hired to contribute content for your team will likely require that their work be bylined in order to contribute.
RELATED: Read about our Publisher feature, which provides support for author bylines.
Not having the ability to easily credit the author for their written work will make it more difficult to humanize your brand and bring on external content contributors.
Your Turn
These are some of the more common pain points. They impact your Marketing by reducing the effectiveness of your content creation. To better optimize and format your content to save time, it is important to invest in using a robust Web CMS built to serve marketers.
What are some pain points you’ve experienced with your Web CMS? Use the comments area below to let me know.
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