Jillian Johnson, March 18, 2014
Many SEOs will recommend that your business have a blog for the many benefits that it will provide, such as improving SEO and helping you to connect with your audience.
But what if you already have a blog and it's getting no attention? The content is there, but it appears to be gathering dust and not readers.
As someone who has worked for a professional SEO company for over three years now, and has been a blogger for more than seven, I'll shed some light on a few of the reasons that your blog isn't being read.
You're blogging about yourself.
If you want to spend time typing up a storm about your products or services and business, then start a company news blog or write a press release. The truth is that most of your audience doesn't want to read this stuff.
Your content is incredibly important and will have a significant impact on your ability to build relationships with your audience. Nothing will turn readers away faster than a blog that is really just an extended advertisement.
Your blog should provide value to readers so that you can turn them into customers. You want to create content that matters to them, so try to find topics that are interesting and informative.
You can write well, but your content has no personality.
You know how to spell and your grammar skills are stellar. Awesome. But your content is bone dry and has no life to it.
Keep in mind that you're writing a blog post, not a college thesis paper. Write conversationally, share a personal story, offer your own tips or create a how-to piece.
Your content really needs to spark. Get creative! Write something that will jump out at your readers and keep them interested. Devote time to gathering content ideas from coworkers, online forums and websites, or consider using an idea generation tool.
You're publishing inconsistently.
You wrote a blog post, published it and sparked the interest of readers. Great. When will you publish the next one? Not sure when you can get around to it? Plan to publish one a day? Well, in either instance, that's a problem.
You need to be consistent with publishing.
Your audience will only come back if there's new content available for them to read. To help yourself keep track, consider setting up a publishing schedule to follow. However, don't go overboard by publishing blog content on a daily basis. While fresh content drives website traffic and improves your keyword rankings, your blog posts won't receive as much attention if new material won't stay at the top of your blog for more than a day.
No one can find your blog.
If no one can find your blog, how do you expect them to read it? First, make sure your blog is optimized -- this will make it more visible online and bring readers your way (it also helps with keyword rankings). The more optimized content you produce, the more chances you have to be found by search engines. Also, add a visible blog icon on the homepage of your site, and post your blog's URL on your social media platforms.
What are some other ways that you can help capture the interest of blog readers?
