The research shows that a business blog can be a really effective marketing tool. Yet many businesses try running a blog and don’t see results. If you’re one of those businesses, it’s time to ask two questions:
- Why isn’t your business blog working?
- What can you do to fix it?
Here are some common issues, and ideas to fix them.
1. You’re not posting content consistently
Take a look at this blog. The dates of the last posts are
- February 2023
- September 2021
- November 2019
What happens if you don’t post consistently?
From a human perspective,
- Visitors to your blog can see those dates and know you’re not updating your content. That’s not a great impression to give.
- There’s no incentive to revisit for updates, or subscribe to an update newsletter.
From an SEO perspective, you’re probably not adding new content to your site. Google can’t tell whether your site is being updated or maintained. That means you rank lower in search results.
Here’s the organic traffic (traffic from search engines) to the website shown above. They were posting regularly until late 2018. You can see how that activity built traffic, how it continued to build for the first part of 2019, then dropped as no new content was published.
What can you do about it?
- The best solution is to post regularly! If you don’t have time to do that yourself, our blogging services might help.
- Speak to your web developer about removing the date of publication from the blog posts.
If you have evergreen content such as ‘Separation and Smartphone Apps’ or ‘How Divorce Settlements Deal With Family Trusts’, this works well.
If your content is more time-sensitive (‘Family Law Changes Effective from 6 May 2024’, ‘COVID-19 Rent Relief as at August 2021’), your blog will still appear outdated. - Consider refreshing existing posts rather than writing new ones, as this may be much quicker. Update statistics or research. Add a new example, or quote something which has been in the news. Google will see this as a sign of an active site and your search rankings should improve. (It’s worth reviewing the SEO optimisation of the post at the same time.)
If you have a mix of time-sensitive and evergreen content, you can also change the publication date of some of the evergreen content. You can make it appear more recent than your time-sensitive posts, giving a better overall impression.
2. You’re not promoting your blog
There’s no point in publishing a post full of fantastic insights if no one sees it!
What can you do to fix this?
Start with two simple bits of promotional activity for every single post you publish:
- Post to your social pages, with a key insight from the blog and a link to it. (Our blog packages include 4 social posts for every blog article to make this easy for you.)
- Share with your existing customers and contacts via email. (You do send an email newsletter, don’t you? If not, it’s time to start one!)
This may not drive lots of new traffic to your blog or website, but it will build relationships and authority with exisitng followers and contacts.
When you share on socials, leverage relationships by tagging someone to say they might be interested. Or quote them in the blog post and thank them for contributing. You’re more likely to get comments, or shares, which promote your blog to others outside your immediate network.
If you’re commenting on other people’s posts, or if you’re on a podcast, mention your relevant blog posts on these forums too.
Visit this article for more content promotion ideas, or download our content promotion checklist.
3. Your posts aren’t optimised for SEO
Something between 60% and 93% of all web visits start from a search engine. Statistics are slippery beasts, especially when it comes to the web, where everything is always changing, but it’s clear that showing up in search results is important.
How do you know if your blog is SEO-optimised?
Basic on-page SEO is not difficult in principle. For each blog post, pick a keyword or key phrase. (Picking the best keyword is a more complex discussion, for another time. For now, any keyword is better than none.) Next, include that keyword, key phrase or a close equivalent in as many of these places in the post as you can without forcing the language or making it sound unnatural:
- the blog url
- the blog title
- headings and subheadings
- the main text
- file names of any images in the post
- alt text for any images in the post
- the meta title (SEO title) and the meta description
If neither you nor the person managing your blog know what alt text, meta title and meta description are, your blog isn’t optimised!
See that unhappy red face in the screenshot below?
That’s the Yoast plugin telling you that your post SEO sucks. If you set a keyword and start optimising, the face will turn neutral and yellow, then green and happy.
(Yoast is just one of the SEO tools out there. It’s one of the most popular for WordPress sites. You may have a different SEO plugin, or a different website platform. Most of them make it easy to enter your metadata. Only some of them give you feedback on how well optimised your post is, or how to improve it.)
How do you fix your blog’s SEO?
You have two options:
- upskill in-house
- work with someone who knows how to do SEO
If you use our blogging service, we not only write your blog copy, we also source and optimise a feature image, and publish the blog on your site. So we handle all these aspects of SEO during that process. Plus a couple of others too.
What about optimising for AI?
In 2025, the entire SEO industry is talking about AI search, but we’re not there yet. The AI models are still evolving, probably even faster than Google’s algorithm. Unless you have cutting edge SEO already, AI is something to monitor rather than something to act on right now. Traditional search is still king, and is unlikely to disappear any time soon, or indeed ever. Think about TV and radio, or TV and cinema. You end up with a balance, and we don’t know yet what that balance will be.
4. Your blog is too much of a hard sell
A blog is a great way to build authority, relationships and trust. Sure, your long term goal is to generate enquiries and business, but note that it’s long term, not immediate. Your blog gives people a chance to get to know more about you and make friends before hopping into bed with you, so to speak.
Think about those people you meet at networking events whose conversation is sell, sell, sell. You try to wriggle out of the conversation – and the next time you’re at the same event, you avoid them.
Here’s the home page of Neil Patel’s blog, as it shows on my laptop screen. Can you see the blog content? The actual articles?
More than half the page is taken up by various calls to action – all of which lead to some way of collecting your contact details. It’s great lead generation, but it’s more than a little pushy!
Then, after all that, there’s this big Google ‘G’. Is this finally the blog content?
No. It’s another link to the enquiry form. Are you frustrated yet? I am!
Now, Neil Patel might be able to get away with this. He’s one of the biggest names in digital marketing and a global speaker. Most of us don’t have that amount of authority to throw around.
How do you fix this?
Simple. Provide value in your blog posts. And make those posts visible. Include information about your services, links to service pages and other calls-to-action, but don’t let them take over.
5. Your blog has no ‘calls to action’
This is the reverse of Neil Patel! You share lots of information, but you never invite people to interact with you or enquire.
How can you fix this?
Also simple. Include calls to action at appropriate points in the blog post. ‘Appropriate points’ include:
- The end of the blog. This is a point where people naturally have to consider what to do next. Steer them in the direction you’d like them to go.
- Where you are discussing something directly relevant to your service or product.
Let’s take an example from that first legal blog. Imagine you’ve written an article about family trusts in divorce settlements. You’ve provided some helpful information. Some who’s reading that may need a family lawyer. So why not finish the article with a gentle call to action?
‘This article gives an overview of how the law treats family trusts in divorce proceedings. For information about your specific situation, please reach out to [name of family lawyer] / [our family law team].’
Make it a link, so it’s easy. Or make it a button. Just as easy, more visible.
With all your calls-to-action, think about what you want the visitor to do next, and what they will be comfortable with. For a first-time visitor, enquiring might be a leap too far. By all means include an invitation to contact you, but give some other options as well. For example, invite visitors to:
- visit a service or product page
- download something helpful so it’s easily accessible in the future
- browse a range of products
- enter a survey or competition
- visit some other relevant blog posts
Look for ways to sprinkle different options into your post, then finish with a clear next step.
6. Your business blog is poorly formatted
Take a look at this example. Lots of white space, it’s true, but is the formatting attractive?
Easy to skim?
Can you tell at a glance what the key points are? Or whether they are relevant and helpful for you?
This is all too common when lawyers try to write blogs. Lawyers use words well, but they use them in a very different way from copywriters. For precise and accurate language, talk to a lawyer. For something easy to scan and digest? Not so much.
How do you fix this?
This particular example could easily be reorganised to include
- A header image
- Three sections of text with headings:
- Key points
- Impact on landlords
- Impact on lessees
- A call to action at the end for people wanting advice on their specific situation.
General rules to format your content include:
- Headings and subheadings make it easy for people to scan and find the parts which interest them.
- White space makes the layout less overwhelming.
- Bullet points and numbered lists are easier to digest than long paragraphs
- For long posts, include a table of contents with anchor links to each section of the blog.
- Images break the text up and keep engagement higher. Aim for one every 250 words or so.
You may wonder about the last point. People read business books which don’t have images on every page – why do you need them in a business blog? It’s because there are so many distractions online. You’re fighting harder for attention. And inside that serious, grown-up business executive is an inner child who wants to play.
Marketers know how powerful that inner child is. The best blogs – the best anything – engage the inner child as well as the executive.
If you don’t like images, go for charts, or text blocks with ‘Key Takeaways‘ or relevant quotations. Create visual interest.
7. Your content is all over the place
Let’s go back to that blog in the first example again. You can’t see them all in the screenshot, but the most ‘recent’ 9 posts are:
- New Workplace Entitlements Arising from Domestic Violence
- COVID-19 RENT RELIEF – RETAIL AND OTHER COMMERCIAL LEASES COVID-19 RENT RELIEF- AS AT AUGUST 2021
- New Changes to Off The Plan Residential Contracts For Sale
- E-Conveyancing has arrived!
- Separation and Smart Phone Apps
- When Is Trust Property Considered ‘Property’ In Family Law Settlements?
- Same Sex Marriage, Divorce and Wills
- Court Ordered Sale of Property held by Co-Owners – Section 66G of the Conveyancing Act
- Family Law Case Update: De Facto Relationships
What do these topics have in common? They’re all related to law, but they matter to very different people. I came up with the following markets:
- employers / victims of domestic violence
- commercial landlords and renters of commercial property
- people buying property
- people getting divorced
- co-owners of property
This law firm clearly works in property, family law and commercial law. They created content for all their clients – why is that a problem?
It isn’t. The real problem is that they didn’t give those clients and potential clients any way to narrow down the content to look only at what might interest them.
How do you fix this?
Another simple fix, in most software platforms. Use categories, or tags, or both. This means visitors can filter blog results to see only the ones on specific topics. You can see this on the right hand side of the NoBull Marketing blog. (Scroll up to check.)
Remember, a post can have more than one category or tag, so you don’t have to choose.
8. Your content is crap
Is that too blunt? My apologies. But it could be true. There is a LOT of crap content out there.
Whatever you post must have some kind of value. It needs to be:
- helpful
- educational
- thought-provoking
- entertaining
- inspirational
or some combination of the above.
If your posts don’t move the visitor in any way, they won’t come back. As meerkat Aleksandr Orlov would say, ‘Simples‘.
How to fix it
If all your content is really boring, more apologies, but you need help. Someone who can write interesting content for your product or service. Whatever you’re selling, it is possible to make it interesting. After all, what do meerkats have to do with life insurance?
Get in touch, and let’s come up with some content which captivates!
9. Your content is irrelevant to your audience
Here’s another possibility. Your content is actually amazing – it’s just not relevant to your target clients.
This is very important for a business blog. Attracting and engaging the wrong people gives you zero benefit. It’s more immediate and more painful for you than it is for a blog which makes money from advertising. If your revenue stream is advertising, (almost) any audience is a good audience.
Bear in mind that while your blog must always be relevant to your target clients, it doesn’t always have to be about your business.
Let’s use a wedding and portrait photographer’s blog as an example.
- A post about apertures and exposures, or one about how to remove redeye, is irrelevant to the target clients. (If you want to teach photography, on the other hand, it would be relevant!)
- A post about the best kind of clothes and make-up to wear for a photo shoot is relevant to both your business and your clients.
- A post about your favourite wedding locations is not directly relevant to your business, but is relevant to your wedding clients. (This is called tangential content.)
How do you fix this?
In theory, this is another simple one. Write about what your clients care about, not what you care about. In practice, you need to get to know your clients. If you don’t, it’s challenging to come up with good tangential content.
10. Your target market doesn’t read blogs
This is a possibility. A couple of examples:
- You sell workboots for tradies. Your target market are out on site most of the day. They access the internet by phone, so want something short and easy. Video content, especially how-to videos, or a co-promotion deal at a hardware or specialist store is probably going to work better for you.
- You offer mobile point-of-sale systems for cafes and food trucks. These business owners work long hours, not at a desk with a computer. Many are not native English speakers, or not great readers. Maybe try Instagram (they’re all on Insta posting to reach their clients anyway) or video ads.
How do you fix this?
You don’t. You give up on the blog and go where your market is. YouTube, Instagram, industry-specific Facebook groups, trade magazines, partnerships with others supplying to the industry and so on.
But before you jump to the conclusion that your target market doesn’t care about blogs, check out your competition. If even one of your competitors is running a successful blog, this is not the reason your blog isn’t working.
How many of these problems do you recognise from your own business blog?
And if you do recognise issues, what are you going to do about them? Either under your own steam (let me know how you get on) or with some help (let’s talk).
