As a content marketer, I tend to look at the dates when blog posts were published. I came across one blog where the most recent post was in February 2023 – I’m writing this article in July 2025, so nearly 2 1/2 years ago. Clearly, this blog hadn’t worked for the business. I found myself wondering why, and I decided to dig deeper. So, here’s a look at a business blog which failed, with my thoughts on how and why it failed.
A little background about the blog
This is the blog of a small legal firm, with just a handful of partners. The posts are about legal matters, and are in formal language of the kind you might associate with lawyers.
13 posts have been published in total.
- 9 were published, irregularly, between September 2017 to November 2019. This averages a little less than one post per month.
- 4 were published between mid-2019 and early 2023, again irregularly. This averages around one per year.
This schedule suggests that:
- The lawyers were managing the blog themselves rather than using a provider, who would probably have been more regular.
- By late 2018, enthusiasm and commitment ran out – quite possibly because they weren’t seeing results.
So why did this blog fail?
To be clear, I was not involved in writing or publishing this blog, nor have I asked the business owners about it. But I’ve seen enough blogs, both successful and struggling, to identify a whole range of factors which worked against this blog.
1. The business gave up too soon
It’s easy to look at this blog, count the posts, and see when they were published. That’s how I know there were 9 posts published in that initial period.
Blogs work cumulatively. It takes time to build critical mass and get results. You have to keep posting during that time.
My rule of thumb is that you’ll need at least 12 posts to get results. (Say one a month for 12 months, or two a month for 6 months.) I have managed one blog which performed really after just 10 posts – but that blog was run by me, a content specialist who knew all the tricks to make it work, not by a business owner with different expertise.
Let’s look at another chart which shows more information about this blog and the results it was getting. I subscribe to software which (amongst other things) lets me look at the search traffic of any website over time. (‘Best estimates’ rather than completely accurate numbers, but very helpful for trends over time or comparing different sites.)
Here’s the traffic data for this law firm’s website. It’s mapped over time, with the dates when blog posts were published shown as well.
You can see a correlation between publishing frequency and the amount of traffic. But notice the lag.
Semi-regular publishing stopped at the end of 2018, but traffic to the website continued to increase for another 6 months, until the middle of 2019. Then it dropped off, although still to a level higher than it had been before the blog began.
This lag is something which many business owners miss. It’s possible these lawyers didn’t realise that their blog was starting to get traction.
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The chart also shows that, while traffic was building, overall volumes were still very small. There were some other issues with this blog.
2. The blog failed because it wasn’t optimised for SEO
Since we were looking at website traffic, it makes sense to move on to SEO. By inspecting the source code for these blogs, I can see that
- There’s no metadata
- There’s no alt text on the feature images
Adding this data, with keywords included, is a basic step in optimisation. Since this didn’t happen, it’s unlikely these blogs were optimised for SEO at all.
In truth, blogs are for humans, not for SEO. So let’s take a step away from the SEO stuff and explore how the blog didn’t work for humans.
3. The format makes reading this blog feel like hard work
The blog posts themselves feel text-heavy. Yes, blogs are about words, but to keep reader engagement, you have to make them look easy. Does this screenshot look easy to you?
These blog posts are short on:
- Images. Most of them have feature images, but there’s nothing within the posts apart from that. While these are legal posts, there are sometimes opportunities to put a chart or checklist or diagram in, even if not
- Headings and sub-headings. Most of the posts have no sub-headings. Some have a handful. Overall, it’s hard to scan to find out what the post is about, let alone whether it’s relevant to you.
Additionally, the font is quite small by modern web standards.
All of these combine to make the posts look like hard work.
4. The posts are hard work to read
When you get into it and read the posts, turns out they are relatively hard work.
The readability score is between Grade 9 and Grade 15 (that’s third year of university), with most posts being Grade 10-12.
That might sound fine if you’re a lawyer, but ABS data shows that 44% of Australian adults read at Grade 10 or below. And even the ones who can read at a higher level don’t always want to. So nearly half the audience will struggle to read this.
I’ve written previously about legal writing, copywriting and readability. Lawyers tend to write for precision, not for simplicity. While that’s essential in legal documents, it doesn’t always work so well in other writing.
It’s also worth noting that many of the posts are very factual. They inform, but don’t necessarily interpret. So a reader still has to work at questions like:
- Is this article relevant to me?
- What does it mean for me?
- What do I most need to pay attention to?
This is one area where headings and/or summary chart illustrations could make the blogs more accessible.
5. There’s no specific call to action
The blog posts finish with a general invitation to contact the firm, but it’s not tied firmly to the content of each post
This could be added really easily, and there could be a call to action, saying what to do next. Now all of the articles finish with a nice little thing, saying, if you’d like to know more, please contact us and book an initial consultation. That’s fine, but it’s very soft. Sell.
For example, one blog post discusses the legalisation of same-sex marriage in Australia, and the impact on pre-existing wills. A stronger call to action could be something like, ‘Do you and your partner have wills and are they affected by this legal change? Contact us to review your existing wills, or to draw up new ones.’
One final point to note – there is no option anywhere on the website to subscribe for updates. What does this mean?
- Someone who visits for the first time and is interested but not ready to talk has no easy way to stay in touch.
- It also suggests there is no newsletter going out to existing clients and contacts. That’s a shame. Imagine going to the effort of creating those articles, then not even sharing them with your existing contacts. Ouch.
Summing up
As you can see, there are many things to think about when creating a blog. SEO, readability, formatting, calls to action. While this blog had some good and interesting articles, it still failed to generate traction, and was abandoned.
Your ideas, your knowledge and your expertise are the centre of everything. But a successful blog is not as simple as writing and then uploading to the web. It takes a bit of knowledge and a lot of hard work.
You can do it alone. But if you do, make sure you educate yourself on some of the basics. Or you might want to work with a content expert, who can take your raw material and do most of the hard work for you. In that case, please reach out!
