Nobody Reads Your Blog Posts – SEO FAQ For Entrepreneurs

You think nobody reads your blog? I hear this statement again and again when I teach my SEO training classes or give one-on-one SEO coaching sessions. Many entrepreneurs think “Nobody reads  my blog posts. What sense does it make to create more or to be on the Internet with a website at all?”

Many myths go on regarding to the topic. Some experts say to wait a little bit longer and they will come. Especially if it is a new website. If your website is a few months or a year old I hear from my students who paid somebody to set the site up for them that the way they wrote the content is just not attractive to their target market. Or entrepreneurs come to me who had successes for a long time and then suddenly, everything stopped and nobody reads their blog posts anymore.

There are many things that could prevent that our blog posts are been read. Some have a technical reason. Others are just related to the changing times on the Internet. I broke down the possible reasons why nobody reads your blog posts in three main factors I see as an SEO expert from a search engine optimization perspective:

Three Main Factors Why Nobody Reads Your Blog Posts

1st Reason Why No One Reads Your Blog Posts – Accessibility and Functionality Of Your Site

1. This especially happens to just launched sites or sites set up improperly. Everybody tells you that WordPress.org is an easy to install tool. Which in reality it refers to the WordPress theme or template you install, not to the installation process in general which needs to be set up in a professional accessible and functional way. Building your mindset to understand the WHY and WHAT is critical, especially in the internet marketing field.
2. In some cases when we speak about “nobody reads your blog posts” I experience that during the last 12 months the web developer or web designer forgot to uncheck the box that prevents the search engines to come into the site and index the content. Nobody recognized it. As I did the website audit for them we saw that there is nothing happening on the site itself, no matter how many blog posts my student posted or shared in the social media accounts. None of the blog post pages come up in organic search.
3. Filling out your meta title and meta description (fields available in the SEO plugin, not in the blog post itself) are crucial. The meta title and meta description are mainly there for the search engines to see what your blog post is all about. If they stay empty you leave it up to the search engines. In some WordPRess themes the standard installation will display your page title as your meta title if left empty.
4. An easy way to see if your site is accessible is to write the following in the Google search bar “site:” and your domain name. See if and what pages are coming up. If none, then you know your website isn’t indexed and you want to contact your web developer. Also look for the check box in the settings section of your site and see if the box to prevent the search engines from coming in is checked off.
5. If you still have challenges and can’t figure it out on your own, an SEO review and website review will help to bring you clarity and provide action steps to move forward.

2nd Reason Why No One Reads Your Blog Posts – Content & Context Of Your Posts

1. Every student I met so far and said that no one reads her or his blog posts believes that they write beautiful and engaging blog posts. In many cases they really do. I enjoy reading them a lot. Because I know them, what they want to be known for, and what they want to share with others. But … if this would be my first time to meet them I wouldn’t have any of this information.
2. Content: I like to use this example a lot. Imagine you visit your local supermarket. At the check out point you come across a magazine stand. There is one magazine with the title: Women’s Lifestyle Tips, another one that says “Women – Spain – Teapot”. Which one would you buy and why? Would you choose the first one if you are interested in women’s topics and want to change/improve/create your own lifestyle? What if I would tell you that both magazines had the same content inside, just different titles outside? Would this change your choice?
3. Being found on the first page of Google: If you think about the magazine example, which magazine has a better change to be picked up first, meaning being number one on Google? The first one, right? Why? Because it was easy to identify what to expect and you subconsciously decided if you are attracted to it or not. The search engines do the same. Reading a title with “Women – Spain – Teapot” leaves a lot of room for phantasy. It could be confusing to some, to others, they would feel not interested, or irritated about the word combination.
4. Choosing a specific blog post focus (keyword) and proving the answer to your searchers’ question makes it easier for the online visitors to pick your search result on the first page of Google over your competitor. And then when they come to your page, they are interested to read more, stay and perhaps go deeper to read other blog posts.
5. Context: Let us think about the magazine again. So it is all about women’s lifestyle tips. If you read through it and find an article about how to build a car engine would you skip it? I would. How high is the change that the average woman would read this article? I would say close to zero. The same happens online. If you switch every blog post to a totally different topic, not related to each other, it could irritated your online visitors a lot. And signal the search engines that you aren’t the expert for a specific field but for anything else. Creating blog posts relevant to the site’s overall goal is the key.
6. A simple and free way to check out how your site is seen by the search engines content wise is Alexa, the web information company. Scroll down to look at top keywords from search engines and see for what content and keywords your site is recognized. I would suggested to just use it for this purpose. When you look at the other data don’t take it 100% as a true indicator for your site’s performance. I worked with a company few years ago who had an Alexa rank of 100,000 (so lower so better) where you would think their site gets endless traffic that converts but the opposite was the case. A competitor at this time bought endless low-quality links and link it to their site. They got all this huge amounts of traffic but couldn’t convert anything and had a high bounce rate (online visitors come to your site and bounce out immediately) too. So just look at your top keywords and decide if this is the field and direction you want to be known for.

3rd Reason Why No One Reads Your Blog Posts – Test, Measure & Improve Of Your Site’s Performance

1. If my student shares with me the concern that no one reads her or his blog I ask, “Nobody reads your blog? How do you know? Is it a feeling or a fact?” Especially online we often assume because we don’t get the sales or conversions we were hoping for.
2. Looking at the numbers, not at feelings or assumptions, helps a lot to measure if, how many, and long and how much of your blog posts were read by your target audience. Nobody reads your blog posts? After seeing the data and numbers there isn’t a question anymore. You want to sign up for Google Analytics and integrate it into your site. Reviewing your monthly reports will help a lot to move away from thinking to seeing the reality so you can improve what you don’t like.
3. Do you have a call to action on your blog posts? If they read them (which you only know with an analytic tool) and you don’t see a conversion then it could be you have nothing on the blog post to convert them. Think about a great call to action for you, like bringing them deeper into your site, signing up for a download, subscribing them to your newsletter, or bringing them to your product page to promote your latest book. Choose whatever fits the blog post you created the most.