11 blogging mistakes to avoid if you want your wellness business to grow
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 (SEO). 2. Not posting often enough. 3. Blogging inconsistently. 4. Forgetting internal links and backlinks. 5. Not linking to reliable content. 6. Ignoring readability. 7. Thinking everyone will read your blog posts immediately. 8. Not writing an effective headline. 9. Failing to capture leads. 10. Underestimating the time and effort blogging requires. 11. Assuming your blog will take off overnight. 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.…