Having a blog as part of your digital marketing campaign is one of the simplest yet most effective ways of connecting with your website’s visitors and gaining their trust, whilst at the same time boosting your search engine rankings, given Google’s love of high-quality content.
Unfortunately, despite the benefits of having a blog, not every business can realise them, and this is often down to flaws within the blog in question. If you have a blog and are perplexed as to why it is not producing the many advantages to your business that it should, then read on as we have outlined five of the most common blog issues that might be causing the issue.
Your Blog Content Is Not Good Enough
We will start with the most common problem blogs have and that is the content therein is simply not good enough. Having spent the time, effort, or marketing budget to get traffic to your blog, it is unforgivable that when that traffic gets there, the content on offer is sub-standard, boring, uninspiring and induces them to do nothing other than click away.
If you do not wish to write the content yourself, then you can hire freelance writers who can create superbly written blog posts for just a few dollars. That small investment will produce massive returns in terms of ranking, building trust and retaining visitors.
Your Blog Has No Perceivable Focus
Whilst you should be publishing blog posts with a variety of titles and subject matter, they should all be under an overall category umbrella that is relevant to your niche. Without this focus, not only will it confuse those who arrive, but it will also confuse Google’s algorithm. If Google cannot fathom what you are trying to rank for, then it is not going to give you any of the high rankings you seek.
Your Blog Is Not Optimised For SEO
Whilst having a focus for your blog will help rankings, if your blog is not optimised using tried and trusted SEO principles, then you are still going to struggle. Each blog post should be written with keywords in mind, and these should appear within the tile and within the post itself without over-egging this. Other optimisations include having H tags, metatags, image alt texts, and an optimal length of the blog post, which should ideally be 1,000 to 2,250 words.
Your Blog Posts Are Too Promotional
Whilst occasional blog posts can be promotional, and you can have a tagline with a promotional link at the end of each one, if all you do in every one of them is promote products and survives, you will achieve little. People come to blogs looking for information, to be entertained, and to determine if they trust the business to which the blog belongs. These are all achieved by publishing quality content, not continuous promotions.
Your Blog Post Publishing Schedule Is Too Infrequent
You must bear in mind your blog is competing for attention with social media, emails, video sites like YouTube, and a variety of other online marketing channels. As such, there is little to be gained by publishing a post every month. That is too big a gap between them and likely to see a drop in interest. You should aim for a minimum of one post each week, but if your schedule and budget allow, a blog post every day should be your ultimate target.