So your blog post is not working – what can you do?
One of the biggest mistakes people make when they start blogging is to think that all they need to do is write it, post it and then watch the hits roll in.
But that rarely (if ever) happens.
Actually if you are like most people your blog post will simply sit there in some kind of electronic limbo, waiting to be discovered.
So why does is this?
Well here are my top six reasons why your blog post is not working.
The TLDR version:
- You haven’t told anyone
- Your blog doesn’t match the title
- You haven’t got any incoming links
- You haven’t got any outgoing links
- Your topic isn’t useful
- Technical difficulties
You haven’t told anyone
So this is the biggest reason why nobody has read your post and the easiest to solve.
You just haven’t told anyone.
If you have a customer/client list then send out a link to your blog.
If you have social media accounts for your firm then make sure you put out some posts publicising your article.
Just don’t hide your light under a bushel, as the saying goes.
Your blog doesn’t match the title
Search engines have got smart over the last few years and your blog post is unlikely to get a high Search Engine Results Page (SERPs) ranking if your blog title doesn’t match what you are actually talking about.
Your typical search engine looks at the title, then checks for Latent Semantic phrasing to see if it matches.
For example, if you write a blog post called ‘5 ways you can save inheritance tax’ and you don’t mention tax, inheritance or death once in the body of the article then you’ll have a problem.
See this post about LSI here.
You haven’t got any incoming links
Incoming links are the lifeblood of a good blog so getting these from reputable sites is incredibly useful.
Links from customer sites are good but what you really want are links from sites that have a high Domain Authority. You can check DA on Ahrefs
Get five or ten links from sites with DA of over 50 and you’ll soon see your search placement rise and with it, your hits.
You haven’t got any outgoing links
So here’s a thing – the search engines want to know that your post is useful and relevant for the people that find it.
One of the ways that it does this is to look to see if you pass on any authoritative links to your readers.
Thinking about inheritance tax again, links to the .gov site has a DA of 93 and is very relevant to the subject in hand.
Your topic isn’t useful
It’s important to make sure you are writing about useful subjects.
It’s all very interesting to write about what you had for dinner but if you run an accountancy practice then it’s not massively relevant or useful to your readers.
Think about the sort of questions your clients ask regularly and write about those or check out questions on Answer the Public.
Technical difficulties
It’s easy to put off readers (and the search engines) by having a page that doesn’t render well or loads slowly.
You could also have technical issues that cause your blog post to be invisible to the search engines.
Make sure your site is working properly and your images are resized to be as small as possible whilst still looking good.
A blog isn’t of any use if nobody ready it
It can be the most dispiriting thing if you spend time and effort writing a blog post and yet it doesn’t get seen.
The answer is a combination of technical, SEO and content items that give you a post that will get read, shared and promoted up the SERPs.
But one final thought – don’t worry if your first post gets no readers at all. Blogging is a skill like any other that needs practice and I’m sure with a bit of time you’ll be getting readers and shares with the best of them.