Why People Don’t Read Your Blog Posts (And How to Fix It)

It takes a lot to run a business or a blog, so the last thing you want is for all your blogging efforts to come up short. If you’re not seeing the traffic to your website that you’d like to see, there might be a couple of reasons why people don’t read your blog posts.

Let’s take a look at four reasons, and how you might go about fixing them.

4 reasons people don’t read your blog posts

1. You’re not writing what people want to read
2. You’re not optimising for search engines
3. You don’t know your audience
4. You’re not sharing your content

You’re not writing what people want to read

One of the biggest mistakes I see bloggers making is writing about what interests them rather than what interests their audience. And this can be hard to wrap your head around sometimes – why wouldn’t people want to read what I like writing?

It’s not because they don’t like it per se, it’s because it’s not helpful for them.

We need to be writing blog posts that are in our niche, that are enjoyable for us to write, but also that our audience is interested in reading.

Good news is: you can do both!

How to fix it

Remember why you have a blog to begin with. Are you blogging for business and bringing those people in? Is it to make affiliate sales? Is it purely to showcase your expertise? (Amazing!)

Once you’ve got that in your mind, write down a list of topics within your niche that you love talking about. Which of these are going to help you work towards your goals? Which of these can you see being valuable for your readers?

You’ll then want to do some research into the kinds of words people are using to find your ideas and optimise your content so that people can find it.

Which brings us to …

You’re not optimising for search engines

It took me a good couple of years to actually learn what SEO was and how to apply it to my blog. But when I made that change and started to optimise my content for search engines, that was when things really started taking off for me.

Now, having been at it since 2009, things are a lot better on that front.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, and in short, it’s the things we do to our blogs or websites, and the things that we write, the words that we use, for our content to be found by people on search engines like Google.

If you’re not optimising your blog posts for search engines, how are they going to find them? How are they going to recommend them to searchers looking for the information that you hold?

They’re not. Or they’re going to struggle to do so, in any case.

How to fix it

Get familiar with SEO. You don’t need to be a whiz-kid at it – you’ve got plenty of other things on the go! – but having a basic understanding of SEO and how to tweak your blog and your blog posts will increase the chances of people landing on your blog posts.

There are lots of guides and courses out there for SEO, but here are some quick-fire things to think about:

• Keywords: What words are your potential readers and/or clients using to put into Google to find answers to their questions? These are the words we want to be using in our blog posts

• Structure: Blog post structure is actually really important. You’ll note in this blog post I’ve used different headings, which indicate the hierarchy of points, I’ve mixed it up with images, I’ve included links, and even used bullet points. All these things help.

• Mobile responsiveness: This is a biggie in the times we live! So much of what we do is on our phones, so we need to make sure that our blogs and our websites look good and are functioning well on mobile. This is all part of optimising our sites for search engines.

• User experience: How user-friendly is your blog or website? It is fast running? Easy to navigate? These all help.

Recommended reading: How to make your website more visible on Google

You don’t know your audience

Another mistake I see a lot with blogs is that their writers don’t know their audience. This relates back to point one, but if you’re not really clear what you’re audience is looking for, then how are you going to create content for them?

If you run a shop offering bouquet arrangements, your audience is going to be very different to a business selling gym equipment or books.

Knowing your audience not only helps you with what you’re going to write, but it also means you’re attracting the right readers and, in turn, the right potential clients.

How to fix it

Think about the things that you offer, if you’re a business, or the kind of things in your niche that you might be writing about … who are the people who will benefit from your content?

Going back to the florist – perhaps your ideal client is actually brides looking for bouquets for their weddings. That’s what you specialise in.

What kinds of things are those brides going to be looking for on Google?

Things like what flowers are in season, what colour combinations go nicely with navy, flowers vs foliage. They’re thinking about simple vs elaborate bouquets. Or a mix of flower types vs just one flower type. They’re probably up to a task on their never-ending list of things to do.

You’re already getting a sense as to who this bride is. She’s your ideal audience. Write for her.

You’re not sharing your content

Upping your SEO game is something that is really going to help you bring in the blog traffic, but we need to do a little more than rely on one source of traffic.

If you find that people don’t read your blog posts, it might be that you’re not sharing your content further afield.

And there are plenty of ways that you can share your blog posts with the world.

How to fix it: 4 ways you could share your blog posts

1. Social media: If it’s relevant to your social media accounts, talk about your blog posts!
2. Pinterest: If you’re on Pinterest, make sure you’re utilising it! It’s a wonderful way to drive traffic and readers to your blog.
3. Email: If you have an email list, make sure you tell your audience about your blog post. Give them a sneak peek of what they can learn, or summarise the post and let them know that they can find a more detailed version on your blog.
4. Guest posting: One way to get your blog posts in front of a different audience is by writing guest posts that sit on someone else’s website. As the author, your blog will often be linked up somewhere on the post, which will take people to your blog. While it might not be blog-post specific (sometimes it is!), it’s a great way to get your name out there a little bit more. Check out this post about writing your first guest post.

At the end of the day …

Figuring out why people don’t read your blog posts can take some deep dives into analytics, it can involve a reshuffle of the ways that you’re going about your content creation, it can involve some changes.

But at the end of the day, we want people to be able to find our content. We want to be able to help people, give them tips, entertain them, inspire them … whatever your purpose or reason for doing what you do is.

We want that. So we need to make sure we’re doing what we can to make that happen.

How do you go about promoting your blog?