Does this sound like you?
- You have been blogging for your small business website for some time now.
- You have built an editorial calendar for the same and have been sticking to the schedule no matter what.
- But the results are not good…
So, why isn’t traffic showing up on your blog? Why aren’t conversions happening?
It part it may be your writing or the fault may lie with the technical tactics that you may have ignored or wrongly applied.
So, here I walk you 6 steps that will help you unlock those areas that are currently blocking your traffic.
6 Common Mistakes Blocking Your Blog Traffic (And How To Get It Right)
1. Taking SEO Lightly
For a reader to get interested in your blog, they need to know that new content is regularly published to your site. For that, you need to make use of SEO best practices. Though algorithm changes keep happening from time to time, SEO basics remain the same.
SEO still depends on:
- Keywords
- Images
- Meta titles
- Alt image tags
- Headlines
- White space
So, this is what you should focus on:
Your goal of website optimization is to create blog content that grabs the eyeballs of your target audience and makes them stay on your site for long.
For this, you need to focus on Quality and Personalization, more than anything else. This will draw positive attention from search engines.
Google sends out crawlers to review your site based on page elements. It uses algorithms to rank your site based on KPI and page elements. Your rank will determine how your page will appear in search queries.
So, if you aren’t leveraging SEO for your blog, your content will go unnoticed. So you need to do your research and tailor your content accordingly for a higher position on Search Engine Page Rank.
If you are finding it hard, you can always take the help of an SEO agency to do that for you. SEO agencies will help you nail down the pitfalls so you can help accelerate your blog views.
2. Providing Half-Baked Blog Posts
Experts suggest keeping the post length to at least 1000 words given that they tend to perform well with the search engines.
Unless you are Seth Godin, your 200-word blog post won’t be of any use to the audience. A 200-word post won’t be able to justify the subject matter because you won’t be able to add all the required info in such a small post, let alone optimize it for SEO.
Long story short: Always, put quality over quantity. And make sure every word counts.
3. Writing Bland Posts
To drive traffic and social media shares, you need to focus on adding some personality to your posts. In other words, you need to make it engaging by adding some drama, a few anecdotes and so on.
Look beyond rehashing and spinning content. Check out Jon Morrow posts on smartblogger and Kevin J. Duncan posts on beabetterblogger for more ideas.
4. Aiming for Highly Competitive Keywords
This is a widespread mistake and one of the main reasons why a website is not getting enough traffic.
The first page of the SERPs has only ten places for each keyword. So, in the first-page search engines tend to display only trusted websites that meet their ranking criteria. Meaning, if your site is new, your pages won’t appear in the first pages, and especially if you are targeting the same keywords as them.
So, how do you go about from here if you cannot target popular keywords?
Leverage long tail keywords.
Use Google Keyword Tool to find low competition, long tail keywords.
For example:
Let’s say, you are writing about digital marketing. And the most trending keywords these days are “top trends in digital marketing” and “how to use digital marketing”.
So, if you publish a post: “How To Use Digital Marketing To Promote And Transform Your Business” most likely your post won’t drive any organic traffic since there are loads of sites that already have articles with the same title.
Instead focus on one particular point like “How To Develop A Successful Digital Coupon Campaign” and do a detailed study on the same, be assured, there are chances your post will rank better. It may not get the desired traction like the high competition keywords, but then it’s sure to draw the attention of the customers.
5. Slow Loading Time of Blog pages
You might already know this. Google considers loading time a crucial factor in ranking websites. According to recent research, 47% of readers expect a page to load in 2 seconds.
If your blog pages are not loading fast enough, the best thing that you could do is delete unnecessary plugins. Plugins make your blog sluggish, so get rid of them. Use all-in-one plugin instead, like Jetpack for faster loading blog pages.
You can also try BJ Lazy Load if you want images to load as the reader scrolls.
6. Not Replying to Blog Comments Thoughtfully
According to SEO experts, responding to blog comments draws in more blog traffic. Responding to comments adds more words on the page which is considered crucial from an SEO point of view. This could build repeat traffic for your business and increase subscriber count.
Not only that, but repeat traffic also builds over time because people look forward to new posts and become subscribers to keep themselves updated.
Jennifer Warren is a Content Crafter for GoodFirms – a review and research platform for mobile app development, web development companies and more. The company publishes research reports on a time to time basis. Lately, the company also released a research report on PPC and AI research.