11 blogging mistakes to avoid if you want your wellness business to grow

Starting a blog for your business and keen to sidestep the main pitfalls? We hear you. As professional copywriters who help entrepreneurs, we’ve mastered the art of blogging that drives results. You can too, by avoiding these 11 blogging mistakes.

1. Skipping search engine optimisation

Oh, boy, this is a big one. Our Senior Content Alchemist Lou has learnt from personal experience that not doing any SEO is a major blogging mistake to avoid.

One of Lou’s previous jobs was as a fitness instructor at a small, independent gym. She was also in charge of the gym’s marketing and blogging.

However, this was long before she joined the Finer Things Editorial team and became an SEO maestro. So, the blog posts she wrote weren’t optimised for search engines.

The posts made great shareable content amongst the gym’s online community. But they weren’t getting seen online. She hates to think how many members the gym missed out on attracting because she wasn’t doing SEO. Now, SEO is a crucial part of her blogging strategy.

We reckon that, next to the actual writing, SEO is the most important aspect of blogging for your wellness business. It’s essential for improving the visibility of your blog in search engines like Google. Without SEO, you’re unlikely to grow your audience and attract your ideal clients.

As a minimum, you should include relevant keywords in your blog posts.

There are also various ways you can optimise your wider website for search engines. We recommend checking out the website wizards at MageRage if you’re curious.

2. Not posting often enough

This is an important blogging mistake to avoid for any wellness entrepreneur who wants their blog to drive business growth.

This might sound harsh but don’t listen to anyone who says blogging once a month can get you a good return on investment. Blogging less than once a week just isn’t likely to generate a boost in website traffic.

The global wellness industry is now worth around £2.8 trillion, and there’s a lot of competition out there. We want your business to grow. So make sure you’re blogging at least once weekly to get results.

3. Blogging inconsistently

The next blogging mistake to avoid is uploading posts without any kind of consistent schedule. We bet you’ve seen businesses of all sizes make this blogging blunder. They have a blog on their website that they last updated five months (or years) ago.

Consistency is key to blogging. Audiences tend to lose interest if you’re not producing consistent content. Plus, an abandoned blog can have a distinct ‘deserted ghost-town’ atmosphere that might put off prospective clients.

To avoid this blogging mistake, we suggest creating a content calendar and sticking to it. A consistent schedule will help you hook blog visitors with fresh, insightful content.

4. Forgetting internal links and backlinks

A fairly simple blogging mistake to avoid is not linking to other content in your blog posts. Include at least three links to relevant blog posts or pages from your own website.

Effective page linking enhances your website’s structure and encourages readers to stay longer by guiding them to relevant content.

You can also show Google your blog is credible by collecting backlinks (aka getting other sites to link back to yours). One way to do this is to sign up for online directories in your industry or local area.

5. Not linking to reliable content

While we’re on the topic of linking to other pages, we recommend including links to credible sources in your blog posts.

If you’re writing up-to-date, accurate health and wellness content, you’re probably including external links to credible sources anyway. For instance, linking a source for a statistic to a medical paper or a quote from an industry expert.

Some people don’t include links to other websites because they’re worried this will drive traffic away from their site. But this is a blogging mistake to avoid. Including links to reliable sites can help SEO and improve your blog’s credibility. And it can help you build trust with readers and potential clients.

Quick tip: Make sure each link opens in a new tab or window to avoid readers leaving your blog.

6. Ignorning readability

Anyone can write. But not everyone can write well. Ignoring readability (i.e. how easily people can read your blog posts) is a key blogging mistake to avoid.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re writing about dietary advice, natal charts, or business coaching. Long sentences, chunky paragraphs, and complex jargon can turn readers off.

On average, people spend 52 seconds on a webpage. You don’t want to do anything that could shorten your readers’ visits to your blog.

Try following these simple guidelines to avoid this blogging mistake and improve the readability of your blog posts:

Keep sentences short (less than 20 words) and easy to read.
Ensure most paragraphs are no more than four lines long.
Use header tags to break up your content. Wherever possible, sections should be no more than 300 words long.

Readability tools can also help you enhance your blog posts. We like to use Hemingway to check sentence length and passive voice. If you have a WordPress website, the Yoast SEO plugin can offer helpful feedback, too.

7. Thinking everyone will read your blog posts immediately

If you think readers will flock to your new blog post as soon as you’ve uploaded it, think again. People publish 70 million new posts on WordPress sites each month. Most of these posts take time to rank organically in search engines.

Avoid the blogging mistake of believing your post will go viral immediately. Google will need some time to get you flying high.

Instead, focus on promoting your blog posts on your other marketing channels. Share links to your posts on your social media and in your email newsletter to drive visitors to your blog.

You can also repurpose each post into new content for your digital marketing channels. Be sure to refer people back to the original blog post to increase web traffic.

8. Not writing an effective headline

Avoid the blogging mistake of writing any old headline for your blog post. Only 2 out of 10 people who read your headline will click the link to read the rest of the blog post. So your headlines need to be compelling.

To improve your click-through rate, focus on creating clear headlines that offer solutions to your ideal client’s pain points.

We recommend you include a focus keyword near the start of each headline, too. This will make it easier to earn clicks from people who are looking for content relevant to that keyword.

9. Failing to capture leads

Each reader who visits your blog post is a potential lead for your wellness business. You don’t want them clicking away from your website before they’ve taken some kind of action that gets them closer to working with you.

Failing to capture leads is a common, but important blogging mistake to avoid. Include calls-to-action (CTAs) in your blog posts to give readers an extra push towards converting.

Maybe your CTAs ask readers to sign up for your email newsletter or to book a free call with you. Just remember: You don’t want to overload your readers with CTAs. We suggest including one CTA per blog post to avoid decision fatigue.

That doesn’t necessarily mean you only ask readers to do something once. It means picking one action you want them to take and reminding them about it throughout the post.

10. Underestimating the time and effort blogging requires

Many wellness business owners underestimate the time and effort that goes into creating quality blog posts.

It takes 3 hours and 51 minutes to write the average blog post. Depending on your blogging skills or the depth of the topic you’re covering, it could take you even longer.

Producing consistent, high-quality posts is crucial for growing your blog.

If you underestimate the effort required to blog successfully, you’re likely to give up a few weeks into blogging. Or you might resort to uploading low-quality content that doesn’t provide any insightful or engaging info.

You can avoid this blogging mistake by giving yourself enough time to comfortably research, write, and upload each blog post. We suggest setting aside a dedicated chunk of time for blogging each week (or each month if you’re writing your blog posts in batches).

Blogging is a big commitment. But it can produce big wins when done right.

For example, within 16 months of launching a blog for one of our clients, they had 65 page-one Google keyword rankings. 22 of those keywords ranked at number one and beat major brands.

If in doubt, give yourself more time than you might need to write a blog post. A bit of breathing room allows you to go back and proofread your content, too, so you’re not frantically uploading posts filled with errors.

11. Assuming your blog will take off overnight

Assuming your blog will take off overnight is an often-overlooked blogging mistake to avoid. Blogging is a long-term strategy. If you’re uploading a new blog post each week, you’re likely to see steady progress and larger growth in 12 months.

A year may sound like a long time to wait for a return on investment. But investing in blogging now can generate long-lasting results. Assuming you want to be in business a year from now, it’s a great idea.

Some of the top-ranking blog posts have been appearing in the top spot of Google results since 2001. That’s more than 20 years of lead generation in a single blog post.

Our blog campaigns are proof that your wellness business can benefit from blogging in the long run.

One of our client’s blogs attracted over 600 users a day within two years of its inception. Another client saw approximately 18,000 page views a month within 18 months of us taking over their neglected blog.

We’ve found that time flies when you’re blogging, and a year can go by quickly. The sooner you start creating blog posts, the sooner your wellness business will start reaping the benefits.

About Finer Things Editorial

Finer Things Editorial writes for businesses that help others achieve abundance, whether in the form of profit, self-love, or physical health. Our content helps these businesses attract their dream clients, so they don’t have to chase them. Having taken businesses from 0 to 1,000+ primed-to-buy website visitors per day, we take businesses from unknown to really known.