If you’ve been running a blog for a while now and you feel like it might be a bit stale, maybe it’s time for an upgrade. Hopefully, you’ve been keeping track of your metrics and keeping tabs on traffic movements so you can look at what direction your blog is heading in. If you haven’t, then there are things that any blog owner can do to make their site better. Some of these changes might focus on SEO, while others could focus on the quality of the content or the user experience you provide readers. Here are 6 simple tips for improving your blog.
Remove Repetitive and Duplicate Content
Students, teachers, and even copywriters must check their work for plagiarism. Sometimes it’s on purpose, but it can be by accident as well. If you have lots of entries on your blog, you should use a plagiarism checker to make sure that you don’t have duplicate content.
Google will not directly penalize a site with content that is similar to another piece to the point of being a duplicate, but their bots will have difficulty deciding which version of that content should be a priority. So, if you want to avoid confusion, check for duplicates right now and either modify or prune any duplicate content.
Remove Content that Isn’t Working
Speaking of pruning, you should know that Google favors sites with engaging fresh content. If you have content that isn’t getting traction and is old, it could end up dragging your site’s value down. This is why you must always look at advanced metrics so you can tell what pages are getting more attention.
There are advanced tools that can help you keep track of hot pages and articles, but Google Analytics is powerful enough and will allow you to check exactly which pages people visit the most. This should give you an idea of what type of topics people want to read about.
Switch Up Content Formats
You can’t have a blog without anything but written content nowadays. Well, you can, but it will be boring after a while. Your blog should have a good mix of infographics, audio content, and video content if possible.
See if you could start a podcast and past episodes on your blog. You could then promote your blog on your podcast and vice versa. Your podcast could even become more popular than your blog and reach people who would’ve never known about your blog otherwise.
Make it Pretty
A visually pleasing blog will also manage to hook more readers. While the overall design of a blog will not make a huge difference, there is one element that you can’t afford to neglect, and it is images.
Blog images are much more powerful than people think and are not just there for decoration. There have been countless studies that show great images attract more views to your articles and keep people on a website longer.
A blog with a very simple header and big, bright, and relevant images will do much better than a blog with snazzy design elements with poor or no images. In fact, a barebone design will make the images and posts stand out much more. Spend a bit on professional images and use them to make your blogs pop and catch readers’ attention.
Improve Your Writing
Your blog’s main feature is your writing and if you want to truly improve your blog, this is what you should focus on. If you’re serious about blogging and feel like this is your calling, then going for a literature degree could be a good idea. If you don’t feel like going that far, then you could look for writing boot camps.
You can find writing boot camps both online and offline. The Learning Annex offers tons of different writing classes, so you can check your local chapter to see what the requirements are. If you can’t find a local class, then you can check out places like Masterclasss or Novelty for courses.
Some tools will significantly help improve your writing. If you aren’t using Grammarly, we suggest you do so and pay for the premium version. It is not perfect, but it will help you identify gaps in your writing that you didn’t realize.
Another tool you should use is the Readability Test Tool. It is free and will tell you how high your content scores are across various indices like the Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease index or the Coleman-Liau index, which has been used in academies for years. This will help you improve your content’s readability and make it look more professional.
Guest Posts and Interviews
One easy way to enrich your blog is to ask people who have more expertise than you or expertise in an area that might interest your readers to either post content as guests or participate in an interview. Interviews can be either in written, audio, or video form. This will allow you to delve into subjects you may not be completely comfortable with.
The easiest way to find people to guest post is to get active in the community. Look for the top blogs in and around your niche and start posting comments. Try to make your posts as insightful and valuable as possible. It’s only a matter of time before a blog owner notices you and engages with you.
From then on, you will need to use your people skills to get them to help you in some way or the other. They may not be able to post on your blog but know someone who might be interested. Or you may be lucky enough for them to consider you a friend and want to post on your blog out of the kindness of their heart.
As you can see, there are tons of things that you can do to improve your blog, and most of them are pretty simple. So, give your blog a long hard look and see where you could make it better today.
