The 6 Biggest mistakes SMEs make with their blogs
By: Stuart Walker
Tags: Business Marketing, Blogging Tips, Sme Marketing, Business Blog, Copywriting Tips

There are six major mistakes that SMEs make when they are writing their blogs and in this post, I’ll highlight these and give you some ideas that will help you to make sure your blog avoids them all.

For the TL;DR community here are the six biggest mistakes that blog writers make;

1 Lack of consistency

2 No central theme

3 Forgetting SEO

4 Not publicising

5 Not including images

6 Not including internal links

#1 Lack of consistency

Google loves consistency of posting.

For example, posting one blog once a week is much better than posting 20 and then not doing anything for six months.

If you want proof that this is a common mistake then have a look at your competitors’ websites.

The ones that are ranking well will have regular postings that may not be massively long but tend to come out on the same day each week.

The sites that aren’t doing well will have 6 blog posts all written in April 2018 and nothing else!

The remedy; make an appointment with yourself to always post something, say first thing on Tuesday morning and then stick to it.

#2 No central theme

This is another common issue and one that I see time and again.

Having a central theme around your posting makes you much more likely to appear high up in the search rankings and as a result drive business.

I always say that you are far better to be a subject matter expert about one tiny part of your business than try to write a little something about everything

The remedy; chose a tiny part of your business that your customers are interested in and then do a series of posts that contain everything about that tiny part. Only then should you move on to another tiny part.

#3 Forgetting SEO

SEO is a phrase that crops up again and again in marketing but it is surprising that so many blog writers forget about it.

SEO isn’t difficult and getting it right can make a massive difference to your ranking so making the effort is well worthwhile.

The remedy; use an SEO tool like Yoast to help you get your posts right and Google keyword tool to work out what you want your keywords to be.

#4 Not publicising

You’ve written your post, you’ve published it, but no-one reads it.

Although Kevin Costner might think that ‘if you build it they will come’ this isn’t true with blogs.

The truth is that once you have written your blog you need to get the word out so make sure you have some reliable methods of publicising your posts.

The remedy; At the very least you need to post a link to your company LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter pages and get your staff to like and share. Use your company mailing list and maybe even consider using sponsored posts on Facebook.

#5 Not including images

Nobody likes to read a massive page of just text.

Not only does it put your readers off it looks dreadful and unprofessional so break it up with some images.

Having images on your page makes it more interesting and helps with dwell time but make sure you set alt-tags to help with your SEO.

The remedy; if you have some pictures of your business, you or your people at work or the products in action then great, if not then use stock images that you can get from places like Pixels.

#6 Not including internal links

Search engines visit your pages and find your other pages by following links.

If you don’t have links to other content on every blog then the spiders won’t be able to find the content and so won’t rank it.

If you have links in your blogs readers will also follow them and read more content which helps with your bounce rate.

The remedy; get into the habit of including links to related content within the body of your blog. Don’t rely on menus or widgets to do this as they are rarely as effective.

Simple remedies for a big effect

As you can see all of these problems have a simple solution and really just require a little bit of organisation when writing your blogs.

Using these tips will make your blogs more readable and will help them to rank higher with the search engines.

Put them into operation today and see your hits climb!