Tips To Improve Blog Performance In Just A Few Minutes

You probably have a mixed bag when it comes to blogs. Some duds, some decent performers, and some that with just a tiny bit of help – could be great. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel or create brand new content. All it takes is 30 minutes or less to make a few minor adjustments to your existing blogs that just missed the mark and improve performance. Here’s how.

Improve Click Through Rate by 100% or more in less than 30 minutes

To this you probably say, “No way!” Well hold on there naysayer, it can be done. We took a blog post that had a pitiful Click Through Rate (CTR) of 0.02% but generated 5,000+ views per month to one that has averaged a CTR of over 14% with just a few quick fixes. Our average CTR for blogs is 3%, so we took the time to look into what quick wins the blog was missing.

• Update Calls To Action (CTAs)

Blogs should have an image or line of text that prompts visitors, leads, and customers to take action and download valuable content. However, our poor-performing blog didn’t have CTAs that directed readers to any of our relevant or current content assets, such as eBooks or checklists.

• Update Links

Good content has text that links to internal and external pages that contain relevant information. While we had just updated the content of our website’s core pages, we hadn’t linked the blog post to any of our cool new stuff. This is an easy fix to improve blog performance.

We quickly reviewed the blog post and created links to relevant pages on our website, added CTAs to a new ebook we had created that covered the material in deeper detail, and added a few links to our new web pages where it was relevant. Overall we spent about 15 minutes scanning the post for linking and CTA opportunities and another 15 minutes adding them throughout the post. So, Ha! There you go – 30 minutes.

Get more organic traffic from an old, underperforming post

Anyone who has created blog content knows the pain and agony of creating an absolute masterpiece of great content, only to watch the analytics show, via Google Analytics or HubSpot, that no one is seeing it. The reality is that it just missed the mark and there is good news; it can be fixed, and usually without a ton of re-work. Here are a few key elements of your blog post that could use a boost:

The title

The best place to start is with the blog title itself. If you have a blog RSS feed email set up and your email subject line is auto-populated with the blog title, you can use this as a great indicator if that title is dud. If you are too vague or just too boring, people won’t want to read your blog post. And if they don’t want to read it, they probably won’t search for it either. If it seems like the title was a dud, spice it up. Good titles invoke urgency and curiosity, they are relevant and timely, they are short and sweet. Most importantly, don’t forget to incorporate relevant keywords in your title for a better rank in the search results.

The keywords

Review the content to see if you are targeting the right keywords. If the keyword or phrase you were targeting had a difficulty score of over 30, then a single post was not going to push you over the edge. You need to create more high value content to really own that keyword or phrase. The other scenario is the keyword or phrase has a very low search volume to begin with. We, The Whole Brain Group, specialize in working with very niche B2B and professional service firms so we see this all the time. Highly relevant keywords and phrases have very low monthly search volume so we need to adjust our expectations from getting high traffic to getting high value leads from the posts.

The page performance

When ranking your post, Google takes into account how long a person stays on a page, if they really read the page or if they leave after just a few seconds. Improve your content to get the current visitors to stay longer. Creating better content with a great experience for the readers can help. We have added quick 1 – 2 minute videos as little explainers of written copy to improve time on a page.

Low traffic blog that drives high quality leads

So you have this great piece of content that really resonates with your target audience and drives great leads. The only problem is that you only get a small number of visitors per month to the post. Let’s get more eyes on that bad boy.

Tip #1 – Amplify

Amplify the reach of that post like crazy with paid advertising. Push that content through LinkedIn and Facebook as sponsored posts to your target audiences. You already know that the post drives leads, so investing some money to get it in front of new target buyers is a wise investment. Even if the leads generated from the post decline with the expanded reach, you are likely to increase your overall followers on your social channels. So if this blog post doesn’t show too much improvement, you are still leading to better engagement and future conversions from potential buyers.

Tip #2 – Promote that blog post ALL THE TIME.

More than likely the post you have is really good for potential buyers at a later stage in the buyer’s journey. Since they are further along in the buying process you have an even smaller pool of potential buyers who will find the content relevant. So keep sharing the content, and target it during key points of the year. If your target audience has a key research period for a topic that your blog post covers, use every channel possible to get that content out there during that time.

Tip #3 – Send targeted emails

Send a series of emails to relevant prospects with your blog content in addition to sharing on your social channels. Remember that just because you promoted that blog post 9 months ago on LinkedIn doesn’t mean that every single person following your channel even saw it. If you keep updating information in the post and improving the language you used to rank higher on Google, you have a valid reason to keep sharing the post even to those who have read it before.

Get the most out of your blog content

By doing some simple diagnostics on what’s working, what’s not, then improving and repurposing what you’ve already got – you can save time and effort on your blogging. Chances are right now you already have a few posts you can revamp to re-engage your audience with better results. These tips can help deliver the results you need without having to constantly create brand new content.