Blogging is a great way to differentiate yourself from the competition, establish yourself as an authority in the eyes of Google, climb the search rankings and engage your guests. Unfortunately, it’s also really easy to get wrong.
With millions of new pieces of content being published online each day, the threshold for high quality content just keeps going up and up. On top of this, there are a few common technical mistakes you could be making that mean a lot of your guests won’t even discover your blog, let alone convert from it.
Luckily, it’s fairly easy to avoid these pitfalls if you’re aware of them.
1. Indexing Category Pages
Many blogging software packages automatically index huge category pages. Although this does successfully bring in some traffic, it’s generally only from ultra-long search queries which are strewn with keywords found across multiple blog posts. This means the traffic tends to be low quality, with lots and lots of bounces.
2. Writing Without Personality
Most of us haven’t had to write anything since school, but approaching your hotel’s blog the same way you used to tackle essays and reports results in the kind of writing your guests do not want to read.
The fact is; most people who come across your blog are simply not going to read it through from start to finish. If you want to keep them hooked, you’ve got to ditch the stiff and formal tone and adopt a more conversational style that’s effortless to read. The best way to do this is simply to write as you would talk – in simple language, with contractions, puns and even the odd joke or two where appropriate.
3. Not Including Calls To Action
The purpose of your blog is to promote and expand your business. To switch new blog visitors into paying guests, every article you publish should come with its own compelling call to action (eg, “Book your next family holiday on the Gold Coast today!”) displayed prominently at the end of the post.
4. Failing To Blog Consistently
Although adding lots of content to your site is important, consistency is just as important (if not more so) as quantity. If you publish three posts in one week and then don’t post again for another two weeks, you’ll find it difficult to form a consistent habit. Worse, your subscribers are going to get confused.
Make the commitment to plan topics ahead and blog consistently (using an editorial calendar if necessary). The companies that make a blogging schedule and stick to it are the ones that tend to reap the biggest rewards in terms of traffic and conversions.
Are you guilty of any of these common blogging mistakes? Do you have a few of your own to add? Let us know in the comments section below!
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- 3 Powerful Tips To Boost Your Hotel’s Blog Search Rankings
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