If you’re a blogger, you’ve probably felt like you’re writing to people who just aren’t there. We’ve all felt that way at some time or another. Trust me, it happens. But keeping your chin up may not always be enough.
If your analytics are showing low traffic volumes, you have some work to do. And it’s important that you get started quickly. Fortunately, we have found a few solutions to some of the most common reasons blogs get broken.
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1. Audience
One of the first challenges to fixing a broken blog is figuring out exactly who you’re talking to. Your audience is extremely important, and your job is to provide them great information and a great experience. After all, if you don’t know who they are, you can’t determine why they aren’t clicking.
While you can invest in professional audience research, there are better ways to do this.
A few simple, low cost solutions are available to you, and only require a small amount of work. For instance find other blogs in your topic. That way you can explore what they’re talking about and who is interacting with them. You can also brainstorm blog ideas with team members who are in close contact with your customers.
Finding the right audience is the first big step to fixing your blog.
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2. SEO
SEO isn’t some dark magic or mysterious way to game the system. Actually, it’s the opposite. Search engines are trying to meet the needs of searchers. They want to provide the most relevant results for queries.
That being said, you need to help search engines direct more traffic to your blog.
That’s the whole point of SEO, to find ways to help Google provide your blog as a relevant result for keyword queries. To do this, you have to make your blog as audience and search engine friendly as possible.
Keywords are extremely important. They need to be used in your headlines, image alt text, URL structure, and hyperlinks. Keywords are the way search engines find relevant topics. Having a good backlink strategy is also important.
This isn’t everything you need to know though. SEO is a complex field of study, and it would take books to thoroughly discuss the topic. However, we do have some recent posts about SEO which can help. You can find those here and here.
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3. Be Concise
There isn’t a magic number for how long your blog posts should be. It would be great if there was, but that’s too easy. However, there are plenty of opinions on the issue.
For instance, Seth Godin has made a name for himself by writing ultra-short blog posts. But others, like the people at SerpIQ, have found that 1,500 words tend to rank higher in Google searches – so longer is better. Don’t get hung up on length.
Instead of focusing on creating long blog posts, you should focus on creating authoritative, quality content. It’s much more important to provide Make sure you are providing your audience with blog posts that are as long as they need to be.
Don’t be longer or shorter than necessary.
If you’re blogging for a company, you have to make sure that you are providing real business value. You’re an investment – meaning you need to provide a return on that investment. By taking just a few, simple steps, you can improve the performance of your blog.
