5 easy ways you can improve your blog’s performance

We all know that content is vitally important to both search engine rankings and the user journey to purchase. Blogs are also fuel for link building and social media content. All of which makes a blog which fails to attract traffic, doesn’t generate engagement and is generally underwhelming from a performance perspective frustrating. It’s a source of missed opportunity but one that you don’t have to resign yourself to putting up with. 

Try these 5 easy tactics to improve your blog’s performance and set yourself up for success heading in to the New Year. 

Accepted wisdom suggests that you need to blog as much as you possibly can and upload content as frequently as possible. The issue with trying to keep up with a frantic quantity of posting means that you may well lack a clear direction and defined strategy. 

If you haven’t created a content strategy for your blog, research suggests that those who have a documented strategy are more successful so, now is the ideal time to do just that. Take time to define your audience persona, brainstorm a topic calendar which reflects those persona interests, define acceptable blog lengths and stipulate promotional methods. 

Posting frequently can help your blog to pick up regular readers and semi-automate some of the other process which will attract traffic, such as sharing on social media and sending out emails. Set out a realistic posting frequency which you can stick too. Don’t be overly ambitious as that can derail your efforts and led to quickly giving up. If possible aim for once or twice a week initially and then scale up from there. 

Just because your blog hasn’t performed well this year, it doesn’t mean your content can’t be brought up to speed. Perform an audit, highlighting content that can be improved and repurposed. Could adding more research or extending content length create a much better piece? 

If your blog isn’t optimised for search you’ll find it impossible to attract the level of traffic that signifies your content is successful. A HubSpot experiment a few years ago shed light on the fact that many blogs are actually competing against themselves in the search engine results pages by having a huge, unorganised library of content that all targets the same search term. 

Review your blog’s SEO to see if you’re also falling foul of that rule, but also check that the SEO basics are being done well (such as using the right keywords, compressing images, using appropriate headers, alt tags and minimising page load speed, along with useful internal linking and visual content). 

It could be that your blog isn’t performing well because you aren’t promoting your content as much as you could. Devise a content promotion plan which identifies all of the ways you can share your blog content and amplify your posts. Social media and your owned channels are a good place to start but, you may also want to consider paid forms of promotion such as content syndication to help you achieve your goals.