You follow the Content is King philosophy. Accordingly, you’re diverting more energy to create high-value blog content, researching and optimizing for the right keywords in parallel. Your content covers best practices and guidelines, including posting new content more frequently. But your traffic keeps dropping!
Blogging isn’t just about exercising your writing talent. It is a crucial aspect of digital marketing, with the goal of boosting web traffic. If your blog isn’t accomplishing this, you’re wasting resources, including the data consumed in research and the bills you pay for your Spectrum internet Deals. And the reason could simply be some significant gaps in the process or how you understand it.
If you’re making any of the 10 common mistakes below, stop them immediately! They could be hurting your web traffic and thereby hurting your website ranking. When blogging, always avoid the following:
Prioritizing Quantity Over Quality
It is easy to start churning out content to meet your blogging frequency needs. Of course, Google’s search engine algorithm does value the quantity of content on your website. But, it is very important to not compromise the quality of the content you post for quantity. Poor quality content won’t add to your SEO goals. Instead, it could impair your progress, especially if the content offers no value to the reader/visitor on your website.
No Effort on Audience Research
For bloggers, it is crucial to generate content that resonates with an audience and encourages them to engage with it. But for this to happen, the blogger needs to understand the audience they are writing for. Audience research can help you narrow down the type of content you should be posting. Specifically, the kind of content that is in line with their interests or needs. Otherwise, posting about anything and everything will only get you a fraction of the engagement that you need. And without that engagement, your web traffic (and rankings!) may begin to drop.
Not Including CTAs in Your Blogs
Most blogs on your website aren’t there just to give users something to read. You want to give them actionable information. And, by extension, you want them to act on that information. Whether you want them to convert into a lead, a purchasing customer, or simply a regular recipient of your newsletter, blogs should encourage the desired action. But most users will instinctively not follow that action unless asked to. This is where a CTA or a call to action can help! It encourages the readers to do more than just read the blog. It offers a simple way to take action, and makes it very easy for the writer to do so.
Focusing Too Much on SEO and Not Users
Many bloggers make the mistake of meeting SEO guidelines to the letter without thinking of the user or reader. This is an inherently flawed approach. Meeting Google’s ranking criteria is important, yes. But that is only half of the outcome. Unless you offer user-focused content, you won’t derive anything actionable from your blog. Google’s rankings are important when it comes to getting your blog or content more visibility. But Google is not going to click on a CTA for you. For that simple reason, audiences/users demand as much attention as search engines.
Too Inconsistent With Writing and Posting
Of course, the quality and meaningful value of content is important. But that does not negate the need to post consistently and regularly. This does not necessarily mean you have to post a specific volume of content every day. But it does mean you need to be regular with your posting in order to keep building interest and engagement. If you’re taking too long between posts, you risk losing engaged members of your audience in the duration.
Excluding or Deprioritizing Guest Blogs
Many people believe guest posting is no longer relevant from a ranking standpoint. But this may not always be the case. Excluding guest blogs from your website cuts you off from a very important aspect of blogging: offering expert/deep knowledge on a subject. You shouldn’t be accepting guest blogs from everyone, true. But you should consider reaching out to industry gurus or experts that have a great deal of experience to offer. This is something you may or may not be able to offer on your own. So why not get someone with the necessary knowledge and insights to do it for you? Especially when you can benefit from the increased traffic.
Using the Wrong Keywords
Optimizing your content for the right keywords makes a lot of difference to what you can accomplish with that content. But finding the “right” keywords is not simply deciding on some relevant words to use. It involves a lot of research, including locating the keywords or key phrases. When choosing the ones to optimize your content for, pay special attention to search volume, keyword relevance, and of course, the search competition over the keywords or key terms.
