There are over 600 million blogs on the Internet today. In the USA alone, the number of bloggers in 2020 reached 31,700,000. Blogging is a fairly competitive field. You constantly have to fight for the precious attention of Internet users, which is more than half of the cases in about 15 seconds. However, the benefits of blogging outweigh the time, money, and effort involved.

Plus, blogging is a great way to build brand awareness, share interesting articles, and reach new customers. However, things are not so simple. A 2020 survey by Orbit Media found that 21% of marketers either didn’t know if their blog was adding value or not or found disappointing results. In this article, we’ll explain why blogs fail and how you can avoid them.

1. Absence of content strategy

One of the main reasons blogs fail is a lack of targeted, helpful, lead-generating content. If you’re wondering what targeted content is, then Google defines it as “original content of value to readers.” And value means any information helpful for a specific audience, for example, additional information about products and their categories in the case of an online store. You can hire a professional essay writer and designer. But you have to know what to ask them for.

The first step to creating content is making it a priority, as 72% of B2B marketers have already done. Start with a content marketing strategy.

About 2/3 of the most successful bloggers have a documented content marketing strategy, while among unpopular bloggers, only 14% prescribe their strategy, and 39% admit that they don’t have it at all.

2. The blog is not optimized for search

Search engine optimization (SEO) is not so simple. Once you decide that you have done your best to optimize your blog, as search algorithms change. You can use email marketing or social media marketing. However, completely ignoring SEO is another reason for blog failures.

You need people to find, read, and share your content, but that’s almost impossible without search engine optimization. Search remains an essential source of traffic for blogs across all industries. In 2019, 68% of internet traffic came from paid and organic search.

Fortunately, some SEO practices don’t change:

• Research keywords. Keywords are a short set of words that help search engines understand what a particular web page is about (for example, this article). Keywords convey the essence and increase the position of the blog in the search engines.
• Add alt tags for images and videos. Text is the foundation of search. You will rank well if you add descriptions to non-text elements.
• Optimize your blog for voice search. About four out of every ten Internet users use voice commands or voice search every month. Optimizing your blog for voice search will help it get ahead in the SERP.

3. Bad blog design

Imagine visiting a blog for the first time and encountering low-quality images, slow loading, and poor layout. Chances are, you won’t belong to it - and you are not alone. 90% of users leave the site due to poor design.

While appearance is important for reader retention, a well-thought-out site architecture helps search engines organize and index your blog pages (both have SEO benefits). If visitors find it difficult to navigate your blog, they are more likely to leave and never return.

UX design is a separate specialization. If you’re not ready to dive into the psychology of decision making, your best bet is to work with platforms that allow you to create websites out of ready-made templates, such as Squarespace, Wix, or WordPress. But you can improve the look of your blog by including design elements from these statistics:

• 40% of marketers consider original images such as infographics to be one of the main ingredients of content marketing.
• 90% of bloggers increase the visual appeal of their content through images.
• Infinite scrolling can reduce the bounce rate of a website (think Instagram feed).
• 52% of the world’s internet traffic comes from mobile devices. And users are five times more likely to leave sites that are not optimized for mobile devices.

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