The website you or your company maintains has a blog section, but perhaps one or more of the content postings is not performing as well as it should. There are simpler solutions than scrapping the content en masse.
By the end of this article, you will be able to detect when there is a problem and spot a problem before it becomes an issue, saving you time and money in equal measure.
Is the content REALLY underperforming? There’s a huge difference between a blog that will never reach its intended potential and a blog that just has not reached its potential yet, so it’s important to understand the difference.
Set Realistic Goals
Before trying to find the perpetrator of poor site engagement, instead, understand that some blog content just does not perform for several months.
Pamela Vaughan of HubSpot conducted a study and found that 76% of their blog site engagements and views came from older posts (30+ days old) and 92% of their business contacts and leads (which were blog-generated) came from older posts, as well.
The main takeaway is to set realistic and achievable goals for your blog content, giving it a grace period of a few months or more before it starts gaining the desired momentum.
Methods for Detection
To find the problem, you need to know where to look, and it might not always be in the places you might imagine. Here are the main things to consider:
Poor or Zero Direct Engagement
Though a post might have good traffic, it can still have bad/no direct engagement. The overall reason for this could be a problem with the call-to-action (CTA) or that the content is not exactly what the end-user wants.
Zero Organic Traffic
This means the post isn’t getting organic traffic because your content is not optimized effectively.
Downgrade in Organic Traffic
When it has a sudden drop or stop in organic traffic, the problem might be loss of traction in social promotion, a lack of referral links on other highly visited sites, or its standing in the organic search rank has shifted significantly.
Bad Metrics
If people are not spending a lot of time on your content and exiting quickly without going to other sources linked in the content, the content itself has bad metrics. You want your audience to stay for a bit, enough not to get bored and want to exit the site fully.
Great Social Promotion but no Follow-Up
People are sharing your content, but it’s not getting a lot of engagement. This could be because your post itself is catching eyes, but there’s no call to click, so to speak.
Fixing the Problem Effectively
There are still ways to make floundering content work, and the solution comes in the form of optimization. Here’s what you should do:
Revamp Long-Tail Keyword Usage
If a user is looking for “roofing repair companies” and the site content is for “vinyl siding installation and repair,” they will not engage. While the content might have the tag “home repair,” and the user wants “home repair,” the content does not match the specificity the user needs.
Content Adjustment to Mirror User Objective
Along the lines of the previous keyword revamp is the content itself to match the user’s intent. Try understanding what your audience is looking for and try targeting the content to reflect that desire.
Utilize Catchy Headlines
One of the key elements in Google’s ranking factors is clickthrough behavior. To achieve that clickthrough, you need to grab interest immediately.
Powerful Meta Content
While the overall Search Engine Optimization (SEO) value of meta content has lessened over the years, it still has intrinsic worth. Including the entire keyword in the meta description and having attention-grabbing questions are all great ways to improve engagement.
Audio-Visual Elements
Use the power of media to your advantage by adding pictures, graphs, videos, and sound clips to your content to paint a better picture of what the content is trying to convey.
Combination of Content
If you have two or more blogs in the same school of thought, consider combining them to create a more comprehensive and richly compelling narrative for your audience.
Clustering of Content
Consider the overall topic as a figurative book and each blog post as a specific chapter to create a greater effort in bite-size pieces lending to the same subject.
Linking
Keeping your audience in one spot by not linking other sources makes it seem like the article is more an opinion than a fact-based analysis.
Call-to-Action (CTA)
A good call-to-action gives your audience clear instructions on what to do next, whether it be to share the content, comment, or call/contact for a consultation. Omitting an effective call-to-action leaves the reader in the dark on the purpose of the content itself.
Try out these simple tricks and tips for detection, correction, and prevention to make sure even the most underperforming content on your site reaches its maximum potential and sees growth in engagement.
