The early days of blogging can be intimidating, especially if you’re just getting started and trying to figure things out.
What’s even more frustrating is putting in all the hard work month after month only to analyze your site and learn that no one is actually reading your content.
Look:
I’ve been right where you’re.
I have had days when the only readers I knew were my Facebook friends and Twitter followers.
My email subscribers were in single digits and social media share zero for every post I published on my blog.
Quitting blogging after the first 8 months was an option in my checklist. In fact, I had it written right at the top.
Figuring out why no one was reading my blog was another consideration. And sometimes the last option tends to be the one that makes the most sense.
Fast forward, I run blogs that attract over 20,000 monthly readers. And for someone like me who does everything on his own, this isn’t bad traffic.
So today, I’ll tell you 9 reasons why no one is reading your blog and show you exactly how you can fix these errors and grow your blog’s traffic and readership.
Let’s get started.
1. Your Content is About You, Not Your Reader
The first mistake I ever made as a blogger was to write about myself.
I treated my self-hosted blog as an online journal where I published my thoughts on places, people, things, and experiences. While writing and publishing about myself felt great in all ways possible, my content wasn’t attracting eyeballs.
My social media Facebook shares attracted a few friends and absolutely no one re-tweeted m tweets.
Here’s the problem:
When people search for anything online or on social media, they want to see and interact with what interests them. That means if your content isn’t going to solve their problem, or entertain them, they’re going to bounce back to the search page to look for something else.
The takeaway is simple:
If you haven’t studied your audience before starting a blog, you’ve done it all wrong.
This problem won’t be easy to fix, especially if you have written dozens of long-form content already. But if you seriously want to get people to read your blog, you have to learn and understand your audience and refine your focus.
At the end of the day, your responsibility as a content creator is to give the readership you’re trying to build the kind of content they want to read, not what you think is right for them.
2. Your Content is All Over the Place
I see many newbie bloggers make this mistake all the time. It’s seems like a pandemic of its kind, one that has declined to die down despite the many teaching that niching down is better than being all over the place.
Let me ask you something:
Would you seriously trust the expert and authoritativeness of blogger who writes about “losing belly fat” today and “the best gaming laptops” tomorrow on the same domain?
I bet you wouldn’t.
It raises questions about who the author of the blog is and what their intension is exactly.
The same case applies to your blog.
When potential readers come to your blog and find that your content is all over the place, they will trust you less, click away from your site, and never bother to come back again.
Rather than make your blog about random topics that you come across on the internet, you should learn how to choose a niche.
In a niche, you move away from blogging about anything and start creating content for a specific audience. For example, if you choose to blog about “baby safety”, your target audience will be moms and dads who want to know how to keep their kids safe.
You can check this guide for some of the most profitable niches that you can create your blog around and start serving your audience and growing your traffic.
3. You Don’t Take User Experience Seriously
You can have great content that answers your readers’ questions or help them solve their problems. But if your blog gives them a terrible user experience, they’ll leave fast and never come back.
Page experience is all about the first impression that you make with your blog. And you never have a second chance to make the best first impression.
Think of it like this:
Would you ever stick on a blog that serves you the right content but looks unorganized and filled with advertisements all over the place?
And what if that blogs takes long to load the content that you’re eagerly looking forward to read?
You wouldn’t spend more than 10 seconds on such a website.
It’s the same case with other readers.
If you don’t serve them the content they’re looking for the right way, they will bounce back to Google and look for information elsewhere.
Fortunately, the user experience of your site is something you can start working on right away. You should:
- Improve your site’s speed so it loads fast.
- Work on the Core Web Vital scores of your blog.
- Make your content easy to read by using short sentences.
- Add rich media, such as images and videos, to your content to boost engagement.
- Link out to authority website to improve the credibility of your research and to boost your search engine rankings.
- Make your content easy to navigate
- Link to related content in your blog posts so that readers can explore more topics instead of just exiting your site
You should do these things and you’ll see an improvement not only in your search engine rankings but also in your reader engagement.
4. Your Content Isn’t Good Enough
Have you ever read an article online and wished you didn’t look at it?
Chances are, you have landed on posts that either didn’t answer your questions or weren’t as engaging.
Now imagine someone else reading your blog post, shaking their head, and then clicking away to find something else to read.
It means your content sucks and you had better rework on those posts or you risk losing those readers forever.
Please don’t mistake great content for creativity. Because as far as blogging is concerned, great content is the one that solves a reader’s problem when nothing else they’ve tried on his or her own can.
Your writing will suck in the beginning, and that’s okay. But if you learn and understand the pain points of your readers, you can easily win their hearts, minds, and attention with every piece of content that you publish.
When you write content that your readers actually want to read, you’ll find that every piece you publish easily converts.
My guide on creating content that converts will point you in the right direction. Go read that and start refining your content right away.
5. You’re Not Doing Keyword Research
Look:
Creative writing is a good thing.
But it’s differently from writing creatively in a way that readers and the search engines value what you put out there.
In my wildest thought, creative writing only gets you to create content that entices you and your social media followers, and tends to have minimal impact on SEO.
As good as we want creative writing to look, and it indeed is to some extent, how about writing in a creative way while adding the value of SEO to your content instead?
That can make a huge difference.
I’ve been in the blogging business for over 10 years. And if there’s one thing that still stands, it’s that keyword research is very important.
The value of SEO Copywriting is something you simply can’t underestimate.
So if you haven’t take keyword research seriously before, now is the time to do so. This guide by Ahrefs will help you find low competition, high volume keywords that you can use to create great content and grow your site’s traffic.
You will appreciate the value of keyword research, partly because it makes it easy for you to find blog post ideas to target and mostly because it allows you to get into the minds of your readers.
6. Your Headlines Aren’t Interesting
People that come to your blog post read the headline first and then decide if they should read the rest of the article.
It’s stone cold harsh, but, then again, it’s the reality of things online.
You can spend an entire day or work on your PC half through the night on an epic pillar post for your next round of publishing. But if your content’s headlines sucks, no one will read your blog, at least not past the headline itself.
Successful bloggers create good headlines for every blog post they publish. You, too, can do the same, even if you’re just in your second month of content creation.
And let me be clear:
Writing great headline is an art, not rocket science.
The number one rule I want you to keep in mind is that your headlines should always tell your readers what the post in question is about.
When readers click on the headline and learn that the first paragraph answers their questions or meets their expectations, they will keep reading your piece all the way to the very end.
Don’t worry if you have no clue about how to write compelling headlines. This post by Hubspot has some great insights on how you can create awesome headlines for every piece of content you create.
7. Your Posts Aren’t Ranking Yet
Are you publishing great content and praying hard that they rank on search engines?
That’s where you go wrong.
For far too long, many bloggers have believed that creating great content is the secret sauce to ranking higher in Google.
But the data shows otherwise.
A study by Ahrefs shows a strong correlation between links and Google rankings. I’ve tested their analysis and proven for their case.
This means one thing:
If you want your content to rank and people to read your blog, you need to invest in link building with the exact same effort you invest in content creation.
I know for certain that some bloggers claim that creating link worthy content will give your site a push up in the SERPs. But unless you have a closer relationship with people in your industry, getting natural links is straight out impossible at first.
So go out of your comfort zones and start building links to your website. Done right, your link building efforts will reward you with higher rankings, good traffic, and decent earnings in passive income.
8. You’re Not Promoting Your Content
Let me put it this way:
If you’re not proactive in promoting your content, readers won’t easily find you. And that means only few people, if any at all, will read your blog.
There’s a reason why content marketing is all the rage these days. It’s the only way through which you can promote your content right into the face of the right audience.
When you put your content out there, you make it easily discoverable. If people land on your content and like what you offer, they’ll love your work and read it all the more.
There are dozens of strategies you can use to promote your content.
Tap into social media marketing and put your content right in front of millions of people. Build your email list from the get go. Leverage free traffic from Pinterest with high quality boards and pins. And don’t back down from building high quality backlinks at scale.
9. You Haven’t Optimized Your Content for Related Keywords
I said that people don’t read your blog because they can’t find you on search for given keywords.
Your blog can also fail if you don’t optimize for related searches.
To be clear, in the age of semantic search, every blog post you publish must be relevant to your primary keyword as well as related keywords.
Why is this important?
It’s important because if you don’t rank on search results for your main keywords, you can get your related keywords ranking. That way, visitors can easily find your content and engage to it.