What is it that makes a blog post successful? That magic ingredient which converts website visitors from readers to customers? From those who glance through your content to those who are really engaged with it?

In order to find the answer, we take a look at some of the most common errors made by businesses of all sizes…

Use one word when one word will suffice!

In life there’s always going to be those people who use five words when one would suffice; make sure you’re not one of them when it comes to your blog. Write down the pertinent points you want to communicate before you even put pen to paper! It’ll keep you on the straight and narrow and avoid you writing a book, rather than a post!

Not engaging with your target audience

When it comes to creating content, avoid talking about you and your business; this isn’t a sales pitch so the reader isn’t going to want to hear one. The real thing that’ll make your blog post work and engage is by adding value to the reader; giving them something they really want to know or is helpful.

Drop the jargon

We work in a technical industry and many of you will too, but not everyone will be down with the lingo! Keep it simple, and avoid using acronyms — they’re not big and they’re not clever — speak in a language that everyone can engage with.

If a 10-year-old can understand it, you’re on to a winner!

You’re writing for Google

So you’ve done some reading and you’ve been told that the ideal key word density within your article is somewhere between 6 – 12%.

You’ve now gone away and started dropping in key phrases to make sure you’re hitting that mark.

Stop!

The best thing from a search engine perspective you could do is actually write your article naturally, without thinking about anything technical. You’re going to include key phrases naturally because that’s the topic you’re writing about anyway! And in doing so you’re going to keep the most important person happy; the human that’s actually reading it!

Don’t go too long!

Although there is no definitive answer, because it often depends on your topic, we’d recommend keeping blog posts short and sweet, but not too short!

Less than 300 words and you’re probably too light on content and more than 500 words, you’ll be getting too wordy. We advise between 300 and 500 words, but the overall success and length should be decided by how much value the content is to the visitor.

Blogging few and far between

Having a blog is like having a car; it needs fuel to work. The more fuel you put in your car, the longer it will go for. The principle is the same for a blog; the more content you publish the better your chances are of it being a success.

You need to be posting at least once a week for it to make a noticeable difference in the amount of traffic you’re generating to your website and to boost your search engine rankings.

Not using images

An image paints a thousand words. The saying should be enough to encourage you to include an image in your blog! If it doesn’t then perhaps the fact that adding at least one image per blog post can increase the amount of clicks it gets by 96% might!

Right place, wrong time

You’re posting at least once a week, but still not noticing a difference?

According to SearchEngineLand, publishing during daytime hours can directly increase readership of your blog and the number of visits. Data suggests the optimum time is Monday morning at 11am.

Obviously if you’re creating more than one blog post per week, don’t save them all for Monday morning, schedule them over a series of mornings.

And remember that the evening is still prime time to be promoting on social media!

For information on how we can help you build a content strategy that brings home the bacon please give us a call on 01566 232323 or email hello@mihidigital.co.uk