Your company blog can help you achieve a lot of your most pressing marketing goals like establishing your team as industry thought leaders, fostering trust in your brand, and building and nurturing a steady stream of highly qualified leads.
But that’s only if you’re getting eyeballs on your content.
If you’re not getting enough views, or if your visitors are bouncing within seconds of landing on a post, then your once-promising traffic-driver will quickly become an expensive and time-consuming hassle (and that’s when most marketers pack up and invest elsewhere).
But before you pull the plug on your blog, keep in mind that blogging leads to 55% more site visitors, according to HubSpot. And, in 2019, marketers who prioritized blogging saw 13X more ROI than those who didn’t.
If you don’t see an uptick in blog traffic or leads from your blog, there’s a good reason.
Here are five of the most common reasons you aren’t seeing an uptick in blog views or leads.
Imagine you decided to host a huge party (in pre-pandemic times, of course). You arranged catering, scheduled a band, hired a bartender and decorated your home to the nines, but you failed to invite a single person. The night of the big event arrives, but no one shows up.
That (rather depressing) example is a perfect illustration of what you’re doing when you go through all the effort to create content for your blog, but you don’t promote it. Sure, optimizing your posts for search engines will bring in some traffic, but unless you’re ranking at the top of Page 1, it’s not going to be enough to justify the investment in your blog.
If you’re blogging, it’s absolutely critical to distribute content via email and promote it across social channels (then encourage everyone in your organization to re-share to maximize your reach).
Despite ever-changing algorithms and an increasingly saturated playing field, search engine optimization is still essential to driving blog traffic. Over time, all those well-optimized, high-quality pieces of content you’re publishing will help boost your chances of climbing in the search rankings. And if your content is so insightful and information-rich that people can’t help but share and cite your work, it’ll help improve your domain authority, too, which will further boost your site on search engine results pages (SERPs).
The best way to ensure SEO consistency is to develop an optimization checklist and never publish anything until it’s ticked every box.
I’m an avid reader, and there are few things I love more than a good book. There are also few things I loathe more than wasted time, so if a book doesn’t hook me within the first couple of chapters, I’ll toss it aside.
Your blog readers are the same. They’re busy and inundated with messages from every angle. If your blog posts aren’t enticing, compelling and well-written, then your visitors will bounce. And if the writing is really bad, they may lose trust in your brand.
Of course, not every blog post needs to be a Pulitzer Prize winner, but it does need to be engaging, easy to consume, and, at the very least, follow basic rules of style and grammar. The more enjoyable your posts, the more return blog traffic you’ll generate.
(Need some direction? Here are a few ways to spice up dry topics.)
It’s easy to assume you know exactly what’s troubling your audience, especially if you’ve been working in your industry for a while. But there’s a chance you’re wrong. And even if your assumptions are correct, you may be overlooking finer nuances to their challenges.
If you want to keep people on your blog long enough to convert them into a lead (or help convert a lead into a customer), you need to provide real, meaningful value. And the best way to provide value is to prove you can help them overcome the exact obstacles they’re facing.
Talk to your sales team to find out what pain points customers have mentioned recently, or hold a few interviews to learn your audience’s challenges in their own words.
Last but certainly not least, remember that mobile browsing accounts for more than half of all web traffic worldwide, according to data from Statista. So, if your blog doesn’t render well on mobile devices, you could be driving away 50% or more of your audience.
Not only does a bad mobile experience prompt people to bounce, but it also impacts where you fall on SERPs (mobile-friendliness is one of the factors search engines consider when determining how to rank your site).
Take time to check out your blog on various mobile devices and browsers to ensure you’re providing a good experience across the digital landscape.
Your blog’s success depends on the amount of traffic and leads it’s bringing to your company. A blog that’s mobile-responsive, full of well-written, optimized, and relevant content, and appropriately promoted and distributed, can be a traffic machine with tremendous ROI potential. So, if you’re not generating the results you want, you now know what to do.
