So, your last blog site flopped. You invested a lot of time, money and effort into creating it. However, it simply never gained any traction, nor did it produce any of the leads or SEO clout you hoped for.
That’s ok. This time things will be different. They say that when you lose, don’t lose the lesson. And a non-productive website can be an amazing source of lessons.
Here are 4 things you can probably improve on the second time around.
Better Hosting
Did you go with a cheap or free website hosting company last time? That perceived cost-savings measure can actually cost you a lot of money in the end.
Cheap hosting is notoriously unreliable from a performance and speed perspective. You will lose about half of your visitors right away if your site doesn’t load in 3 seconds.
This places high importance on choosing a reliable host and setting your site up to succeed from the very start. If you’re currently in the planning stage, you might want to host your website at HostPapa this time and go with a more reliable company.
A More Defined Niche
A lack of focus is probably the #1 blog and podcast killer on the web today. Too many people pump out quality content that never finds any traction because their focus is too broad. This can be incredibly frustrating. You know you’re creating quality, but it’s just not catching on anywhere.
Niche is incredibly important. The more specific you go, the better. Say you want to start a beauty blog and focus on hair. That is an incredibly competitive space, so it can be hard to get noticed amongst all of that noise. You may want to try going hyper-specific by focusing on hairstyles for brides, or something like that.
A More Focused Keyword Strategy
The focus on finding a niche will also help you gain more SEO traction as well, which will boost your traffic.
Staying with the example above, there are over 800 million search results for “hairstyles.” Your odds of toppling the highest-ranked sites are very low. However, if you lock into the wedding hairstyle market, you can discover a number of lower competition search terms that still have a high enough search volume to go after.
You can find these keywords by taking a deep dive into your industry with Google Keyword Planner, ahrefs, or SEMRush.
A More Mobile-Friendly Experience
Your mobile experience has never been more important, from both an SEO and usability perspective.
Google has now fully rolled out mobile-first indexing, which means being mobile-friendly is now the bare minimum. You need to be mobile-optimized to truly do well.
You need to ensure that your blog looks amazing on a phone, as people read your content on the train or in line at the store. If they struggle with tiny buttons or with cumbersome ad overlays, you can kiss them good-bye.
You don’t need to spend more time or money this time around to build a better blog. You simply have to be more mindful of things like hosting, keywording and mobile design.
If you can focus on these things, your blog will go from a cautionary tale to a success story.
Originally posted on September 10, 2019 @ 1:57 pm