One of the perks of working for an agency is that we get to work in a lot of different industries and topics. When working through content I often see the same blog mistakes being made across many different blogs.
With a few simple fixes to your blog, you can increase reader engagement, conversions, and ultimately dollars being made.
It’s no secret that blogging takes a lot of hard work and patience.
It’s definitely difficult to work hard and not see the results that you’re expecting from a post simply because you’re making one of these mistakes.
As a starting point, after reading this blog, conduct a blog content audit and see if one of these mistakes is occurring on your blog.
What is a Blog Content Audit?
A blog content audit consists of looking through specific blog articles and pages on your website in order to identify top opportunities that can improve all of your key performance metrics.
There are plenty of articles on how to conduct a proper content audit on your blog, including these:
The goal of this post is to let you know about 5 of the most common mistakes that occur on blogs so you don’t make them yourself.
Start by looking at your top 5 most popular blog posts. (The ones that are bringing you the most traffic to your site).
Identify if you’re making any of these mistakes and move on to the next post.
You’ll have an amazing, high converting blog in no time.
5 Blog Content Mistakes to Avoid
1. No Clear Call To Action on any Blog Articles
One of the biggest mistakes that I see being made is a lack of a call to action (CTA) on any blog posts.
Think of it like this…
Your blog is most likely you largest traffic generator of traffic on your entire website.
It’s like if you had a sales page for your product that you’re sending traffic too, but you didn’t have any information on it about how to buy.
No buttons…
No links…
Nothing.
A sales page without a call to action is just a page. Likewise, a blog without a call to action is just words on a page.
There’s no reason to not have a call to action with a related offer on your blog pages. If you’re putting out valuable content, give people a chance to get more of it.
If you have no call to action on your posts, you may as well guarantee that you won’t see most of those visitors again.
You might think that having a CTA on your blogs is too “salesy”.
With that said, you don’t need to sell anything on your blog, in fact, I encourage you not to sell on your blog. Invite people to get more content based on what they’re searching for.
If they’re looking to learn how to meditate, offer them a guide to learn how in exchange for a PDF.
Most sales will (and should) take place in your email funnels.
Bottom Line: Add a related CTA to your blog posts. You’ll be glad that you did when your email list size increases.
2. Call to Actions That are Outdated (Not Evergreen)
This point kind of goes with my first point, but I think that it merits its own number.
Let’s say that you have an event next week that you’d like to promote on your blog to send to your followers.
You work hard creating a blog post to tell your followers that you have a one-time event or webinar happening on this date and time, and to mark their calendars.
The event happens…
Your blog post stays the same…
You see, there’s another problem here:
Yes, it’s great that you gave your following a call to action to follow, but it wasn’t evergreen.
Now that your event has happened, people that stumble on that blog post will have nowhere to go. They’ll see that your post is outdated.
They’ll be confused…
They won’t click through to another page.
What’s even worse is that you may take down the page from your event and break the link that you put into the blog post resulting in a 404 page.
This opens up another blog SEO can of worms, but the bottom line here is that you don’t want broken links in your blog posts.
It’s TOTALLY fine to create a blog to promote an event. Just be sure to update your call to action to something that people can follow, or simply remove the blog post once the event has ended.
3. The Wall of Text User Experience
Have you ever had to read something with no spacing between paragraphs?
Sometimes writers do this to intentionally disrupt your reading, but most of the time, a wall of text ends up on a blog due to laziness or ignorance.
The main thing you need to know about a wall of text is that you literally can’t or will not read it.
Here’s a wall of text on Abraham Lincoln from Wikipedia:
“Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was an American statesman and lawyer who served as the 16th President of the United States from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. Lincoln led the United States through its Civil War—its bloodiest war and perhaps its greatest moral, constitutional, and political crisis.[2][3] In doing so, he preserved the Union, abolished slavery, strengthened the federal government, and modernized the economy. Born in Hodgenville, Kentucky, Lincoln grew up on the western frontier in Kentucky and Indiana. Largely self-educated, he became a lawyer in Illinois, a Whig Party leader, and was elected to the Illinois House of Representatives, in which he served for eight years. Elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1846, Lincoln promoted rapid modernization of the economy and opposed the Mexican–American War. After a single term, he returned to Illinois and resumed his successful law practice. Reentering politics in 1854, he became a leader in building the new Republican Party, which had a statewide majority in Illinois. As part of the 1858 campaign for US Senator from Illinois, Lincoln took part in a series of highly publicized debates with his opponent and rival, Democrat Stephen A. Douglas; Lincoln spoke out against the expansion of slavery but lost the race to Douglas. In 1860, Lincoln secured the Republican Party presidential nomination as a moderate from a swing state, though most delegates originally favored other candidates. Though he gained very little support in the slaveholding states of the South, he swept the North and was elected president in 1860.”
Did you read a single entire line? Or just the first 4 words and skip down here?
The same happens with blog content…
As opposed to the text broken up into shorter, more readable paragraphs:
“Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was an American statesman and lawyer who served as the 16th President of the United States from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865.
Lincoln led the United States through its Civil War—its bloodiest war and perhaps its greatest moral, constitutional, and political crisis.[2][3]
In doing so, he preserved the Union, abolished slavery, strengthened the federal government, and modernized the economy.
Born in Hodgenville, Kentucky, Lincoln grew up on the western frontier in Kentucky and Indiana.
Largely self-educated, he became a lawyer in Illinois, a Whig Party leader, and was elected to the Illinois House of Representatives, in which he served for eight years.
Elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1846, Lincoln promoted rapid modernization of the economy and opposed the Mexican–American War.
After a single term, he returned to Illinois and resumed his successful law practice. Reentering politics in 1854, he became a leader in building the new Republican Party, which had a statewide majority in Illinois.
As part of the 1858 campaign for US Senator from Illinois, Lincoln took part in a series of highly publicized debates with his opponent and rival, Democrat Stephen A. Douglas; Lincoln spoke out against the expansion of slavery but lost the race to Douglas.
In 1860, Lincoln secured the Republican Party presidential nomination as a moderate from a swing state, though most delegates originally favored other candidates.
Though he gained very little support in the slaveholding states of the South, he swept the North and was elected president in 1860.”
This happens with blog content all the time. The main thing to remember here is that a blog is not an essay. A blog is a conversion tool for your business.
Most people who read blogs are skimming the content.
Your use of white space, spacing, line height, and font all make a difference with how readable your information is.
This is ESPECIALLY true now more than ever with over 85% of Americans reading news on mobile devices.
Your content needs to be clear and readable.
Blogs also don’t need to be confined to traditional rules of paragraph structure. Keep your sentences short, and to the point.
A good rule of thumb is to have a blog ‘paragraph’ no longer than 4 lines of height.
4. Poor Navigation on the Blog
Another common blog mistake I see is a poor design of blog navigation or the lack of a blog sidebar.
You spend so much time writing blog articles, but on most blogs, you’re only able to see your ten most recent posts.
Once a user is on your website they have no way to see your best content unless it happens to be on page 1 of your blog.
I recommend separating your blog posts into categories allowing users to search for topics based on category.
Another simple fix for a bad navigation is to use a sidebar widget plugin to display your most popular and recent posts.
insert image
This will create a better user experience for your customers.
5. Not Optimized for Mobile
The fifth and final blog mistake that you might be making is having a blog that isn’t optimized to promote a good experience.
Most websites are optimized for mobile but there might be steps that you can take to improve this experience.
You might have a mobile optimization problem if:
- Intrusive pop-ups are triggering on your site that are difficult to navigate away from, or redirect you to another site.
- You have social share buttons blocking parts of screen navigation.
- You haven’t optimized your blog for AMP – Google Accelerated Mobile Pages.
- You don’t have a call to action in line with your content (you’re only relying on your sidebar or popups to generate subscribers).
More and more people are consuming content on mobile, which means it’s super important to have a blog that is easy to read, share, and subscribe to.
After reading this post did you identify any opportunities for improvement on your blogs? Let us know what you think in the comments section.
If you want to learn how to create engaging blogs that convert for your business, click the button below to get 5 simple blog post templates for free.