Your SEO sucks because of these blogging mistakes

Most website owners see SEO as a complicated specific activity, that requires a large contract and a dedicated agency-level support.

Blogging, however, is viewed as a simple process that’s easy to do.

However, a blog is a powerful SEO tool that can both bring you tons of organic SEO traffic and hold your site down in Google’s result pages.

Here’s a list of the most common blogging mistakes we’ve seen our clients do over and over again. Avoid these and stay consistent with your blogging – and you will see more and more organic traffic and leads on your site.

1. Not directing your blog posts at a customer persona

If you write your blog posts just because you “have to” or “everyone does”, your blog is unlikely to be too successful.

Instead, come up with a portrait of your average customer. List their goals, motivations, challenges, and frustrations. Expand the portrait by putting a list of things they like, online communities they frequent, and topics to follow. What are they likely to be interested in? What will make them convert and become your customer?

Spend at least several days defining your customer persona before you start blogging to avoid this mistake. We’ve put together a customer persona template every small business owner could use.

2. Not adding any internal links

Your site’s “money” pages are the main conversion point. Those are service description pages, product listings, reviews, comparisons, large informational pieces and so on depending on the niche you’re in.

Your blog should serve as the primary link building tool. The posts you publish should be expanding the content pool of every “money” page.

Every supporting post should be linking to a money page that it expands or completes. This serves 2 SEO purposes:

• increased topical relevance
• extra link power.

Keep in mind the topical relevance one – there is no point in linking from each and every post to each and every “money” page. Make sure to “silo” or sort your content by topic, and only link from relevant posts to appropriate conversion pages.

As for the link power – experience shows that you can be a lot more aggressive with keyword-rich anchors with internal links. That is good news – so make sure to stick your dream keywords into the anchor text of your internal links.

3. Having no content plan

You need to have a clear vision of who you are blogging for, what your message is, and what & why your competitors are doing.

Even if you just put together 10-12 future topics that you need to cover within a month or two, that’s better than nothing.

If you want to have a detailed content plan that’s put together with marketing, SEO, and conversions in mind, use our content plan creation services.

4. Sticking to your content plan without re-evaluation

This may sound counter-intuitive to the previous point – yet it’s true. As you publish more and more blog posts according to your content plan, these things happen:

• industry changes & news get released
• your site starts ranking for unexpected search phrases.

To follow your industry pulse make sure you follow thought leaders on Twitter & Facebook – and monitor relevant communities on Reddit, Steam, and other forums. Setting up Google Alerts is always a good idea too.

In order to detect lucrative keywords your site may be ranking for make sure you inspect your Google Search Console data. We’ve written about doing that extensively here.

5. Not being consistent.

We wrote about this before – consistency is the most important thing about blogging.

Among other reasons to never skip a post – Google loves authority sites. To determine if a site is authoritative, Google bot analyses what real authority sites (think huge magazines and newspapers) are doing. First and foremost, authority sites keep publishing content.

Search engine bots crawl authority sites more and more often and put their content higher above the content from sites that post rarely.

Do not leave money on the table and publish content even if you think it’s not perfect. The more you publish, the more indexed content your site amasses – the more of an authority it becomes in your niche.

6. Over-complicating things

The Internet is full of marketers trying to confuse small business owners that blogging for traffic is extremely complicated. Don’t worry about all the funnels, custom goals, storytelling, and other woo-woo.

Make up your mind on who you are blogging and what your message would be. Have a plan to push your services in every post. Get started and keep up with your own pace.

Now go and slay!