You have a blog, so what? While blogging is a core tenet of content marketing and something your enterprise content team puts a lot of time and energy into, it won’t matter if no one’s paying attention. Why should your audience care about your latest blog post?
Let’s look at how to turn apathy into attention, uncovering why your blog isn’t resonating with your target market.
First, What’s Your Strategy?
Blogging inconsistently and randomly isn’t going to deliver results. Your blog should be a foundational piece of your content strategy. It’s the most valuable content channel you have because you own it. You control the content, the keywords you use, its layout, and distribution.
If your blog isn’t hitting the mark when you look at your content analytics, it’s time to rethink or create your strategy. It should include:
- Goals
- Target audience
- Topics
- SEO practices
- Cadence and production
- Parameters (e.g., length, voice and tone, linking requirements, etc.)
These are the elements that you need to flesh out in your strategy to drive better results and keep everyone on the same page. Aim to publish regularly using content that speaks to your customers’ needs, challenges, and questions.
Even if you have a strategy, that doesn’t always guarantee traffic and conversions. So, if your latest blog post doesn’t result in engagement, you need to play detective and figure out why.
Your Blog Isn’t Visually Appealing
Your content may be hitting the mark, but if your blog’s design makes the content hard to read or looks dated, you’re literally creating bounces. Layout isn’t just about a modern, clean design; it’s about readability.
Consider that many people read content on their mobile devices, so being mobile-first is key to improving organic rankings. How does your blog look on mobile? Is the user experience terrible? That could be the problem.
To improve this, you can:
- Add more white space between sections so content and images aren’t crowded.
- Use bullets and sub-headers to break up large blocks of copy.
- Insert images, videos, graphs, and more in between text to make the reading experience more engaging.
- Ensure links are easy to identify with a different color or bolding so people know they can click to learn more about that term or stat.
Your Content Isn’t Relevant
No matter what industry you’re writing in, many topics could be on your content calendar. However, just because a subject seems like a good fit for your audience doesn’t mean it is.
Instead, you must understand your buyers and what’s important to them. As we know from the last year-plus, that can all change with significant disruptions. It’s a good idea to stay in the know about your industry. You can do that in many ways:
- Get feedback from sales and customer-facing roles on what they’re hearing.
- Connect to associations and groups that represent your industry.
- Ask customers what’s on their minds through surveys.
- Track specific keywords by setting up Google Alerts or using listening tools on social media.
If you write to and for your audience, your latest blog post is sure to get more attention. The more value you provide in your content, the more engagement you’ll see. You’ll also build trust with your customers.
Your Content Just Isn’t Good
Unfortunately, this happens a lot. Many times, it’s because writers get caught up in writing for Google, not people. That’s not a good approach. The focus is on cramming in keywords, not substance.
Another reason content may lack quality is that it’s only surface level. It touches on a topic but doesn’t say anything new, provide takeaways, or answer questions. It’s just fluff that doesn’t appeal to anyone.
The third reason content may be subpar is the writing itself. Blog writing is a specialized niche. There are many great writers, but that doesn’t always translate to being great content marketers. Here are the mistakes people make in writing blogs:
- They use passive voice. It’s terrible for SEO and readability.
- Sentences are too long and wordy, so readers lose interest.
- They don’t tie in examples or data to support points, which makes them fall flat.
- The writing is too formal; most blogs take on a casual, conversational tone. It’s not a scientific report—it’s a blog.
- It has too much opinion and not enough facts. Blogs should have a point of view, but you need to make the case, not just throw out some half-baked thoughts.
If you want to improve blog writing, check out our post with a step-by-step process.
Your Blog Isn’t Targeting the Right Keywords
SEO is essential for your blogs. It’s how people will find them while searching. Unfortunately, many companies make the mistake of focusing on keywords that don’t represent how their target audience is searching, or the keywords are hyper-competitive.
For example, there’s a big difference between physician databases and medical databases. They would seem interchangeable, but they aren’t. A physician database is a consumer search term if a person is looking for a doctor. A medical database is a tool a clinician uses to help diagnose illnesses. It includes symptoms and diseases.
Thus, you need an SEO strategy that adds context to ensure better targeting. The other issue is only writing for the hardest keywords. In some industries, this is unavoidable, but you should be looking at emerging keywords or those with lower competition that still correspond to what you do and what customers need.
You Aren’t Distributing or Promoting Your Latest Blog Posts
Image: DivvyHQ
It’s great to get blog traffic from organic SEO, but that’s one channel. You’ll need to continuously distribute and promote content via social media, content amplification tools, email marketing, sponsored content, and other channels.
Distribution and promotion are just as essential as the quality, keywords, and layout. Otherwise, no one’s going to see it.
Make Each of Your Latest Blog Posts Matter
If you want to earn the attention and trust of your audience, your blog must mean something to them. It should be well written and deliver actionable insights. It also needs to include keywords that fit the topic and have strong distribution and promotion behind it.
It’s a lot to keep up with and sustain, and that’s why so many content teams turn to content marketing platforms like Divvy. Start a free trial today to see how this tool can enhance your blog.