So, you’ve been writing and publishing content for your business’ blog for sometime and, yet, you’ve still haven’t seen any significant rise in traffic?
This is very worrying for you. You’ve put a lot of time and effort into producing good content and you’d expect a return for your efforts. More than just a spike in traffic, you’re hoping for an increase in leads or sales for your products or services, expecting your blog will generate this new business for you.
Now, you just want to know one thing; why?
In this blog, we will look at why your blog isn’t bringing in the traffic you want and how you can turn it around.
One of the key factors to why your content and your blog is underperforming is because it is not relevant to your audience and does not give them value. Whenever an individual reads your blog and consumes your content, they need to feel like they’ve received something for their time.
That’s why blog posts that are thinly veiled sales pitches or simply dull, are not going to engage your audience and are less likely to have any value to them. You need to look at the blogs you are publishing and ask, is this valuable to someone?
A great way to ensure that your audience is getting value is to ask, what do they need to know?
One way that you’re not producing valuable content is through timing. This works on various levels to the time of year, time of the week or even the hour of day you click publish.
A good example when it comes to timing your content, is a costume shop. It would be ridiculous if they kept vampire capes and witches’ brooms out in the middle of December. It’s not relevant to their customers. When is that content relevant to your readers?
So when reading your blogs, ask yourself, are they being published at the right time?
A great tool is to just have a content calendar or plan. This is simply a calendar with key days and events within your industry, allowing you to pinpoint what content you need to create and when you need to publish. Buzzsumo, a content tool, can tell you the best days to publish content too.
Irregularly published content is another factor to keep in mind. Ideally, you’re expecting your audience to be returning to your blog and your site for your content. If your publishing is erratic and irregular, how can they expect to trust and rely on your blog if you publish unpredictably?
As you start publishing regularly at a certain time of the week, you’ll find that it helps you build a following with regular readers coming back each week to read your content.
I should not have to tell you that you need to be on social media, using it to promote your content and engage with your audience. But often companies aren’t using social media as effectively as they can.
Are you making your content more discoverable on social media?
This can be a question of, are we on the right platform? If you’re a fashion retailer, are you on image based social media platforms? Such as Pinterest and Instagram? Perhaps your industry is B2B, do you need to be on those platforms? You would want to focus more on LinkedIn.
Being on the right social media and promoting your blog through it, helps you be more relevant to your audience as they will already be there and you will be approaching them through the right media.
Another thing, don’t be afraid to engage with other people on social media. Most brands simply post their own content or news and that’s it. This defeats the point of social media, you need to socialise and engage with people to get the most out of it. Think of the 80/20 rule: 80% of the time promote others and 20% of the time promote yourself.
I mentioned earlier that you should ask, ‘what does your audience need to know?’ when creating content. Why not just ask them directly? One of the best things about social media is that you have a platform to contact and engage with them directly.
Businesses and blogs who have a basic knowledge about SEO and are able perform basic on-site optimisation, have an edge over their competitors when it comes to generating more traffic to their blog and website. Having a blog or site more searchable will give you a vital advantage.
So, do you know SEO? And have you applied any optimisation to your blog?
If your answer is no to both, that’s okay. We’ve written a helpful guide to explaining what is SEO and a blog post with a useful checklist for on-site optimisation.
Meta titles & descriptions are important elements to your optimisation. They’re read by Google and help determine your ranking within the search results (so important we mention them in the guide and the blog!) More than that, they’re what the potential audience sees first so must be enticing.
You Are Caught in Content Shock
Content shock, or content saturation, is simply that there is too much content being published and publishers are struggling to have it read. A simple case of supply outweighing the demand, the demand being the audience and supply being content. The supply is constantly growing as more business’ realise the value blogging brings but the audience’s ability to consume content is fixed. There is a limit to how many hours in a day that an audience can consume content.
It has come to the point where money talks; where big corporations and companies pay for social media advertising to drive traffic to their content.
If your blog is in a niche field or industry, this might not affect you as much and allows you to control that market easier but if your blog is around a broad topic or industry, you may be feeling the crunch of content shock.
So how do you combat content shock?
One tactic is to create and focus on a sub-category, looking at niche areas that aren’t covered by your competitors. Carving niche areas opens up new opportunities for your blog and for a new demographic.
The bottom line is, that you need to be creating higher quality content that is relevant to your audience. There could be hundreds of blog posts produced on a subject but if your post answers your reader’s pain points, you are going to stand out and draw them in.
These four points are the key factors you need to keep in mind when writing and publishing your content, especially if you feel it is not performing as well as expected. When you start asking whether your blog is relevant to your audience, socially discoverable and SEO friendly, you will start to see a positive change in traffic. If you’re interested how Ricemedia can drive traffic to your blog or website, get in touch today.
