If you’re contributing to a company blog, you may have learned some bad habits along the way. While most businesses and organizations need to have a blog, you may not realize that you’re doing things that are hurting your brand instead of helping it.
Perhaps you learned how to do things many years ago, and your knowledge hasn’t caught up to current best practices. Or maybe you’ve just fallen behind on updating the blog due to all your responsibilities.
From infrequently posting to poor-quality content, here are some blogging habits to avoid. In this guide, you’ll learn some of the worst blogging habits, so you can make any necessary changes to your blogging routine.
This way, you’ll hopefully get more viewers to your blog and create more relevant content for your target audience.
Where to Learn Best Blogging Practices
Before jumping into the blogging practices to avoid, you’ll want to know the resources for best blogging practices. Luckily, many resources are out there. You can check out blogging experts such as The Blog Starter.
Then, continue to research overall best practices for content writing and SEO. It’s best to keep up to date on information on the Google algorithm and continually learn from others in the field. And, if you’re blogging for your brand but don’t have a lot of experience in online marketing, check out these basic best practices here.
Habit 1: Unoriginal or Poorly Written Content
When it comes to content marketing, you need every blog post you write to be unique. If it’s too similar to other blogs, even those on your site, the blog won’t be rated highly by the Google algorithm. Along with writing unique content, you also need to ensure that every blog post is well-written. Grammar and spelling errors look bad all around, and they won’t do your brand any favors.
Along with well-written, original content, you also need to write blog posts relevant to your audience and brand. It’s best to write on topics that your audience would be interested in and offer something of value in each post.
This will vary depending on your company and overall tone, but you should still be writing content that audiences can glean valuable information from.
Habit 2: Keyword Stuffing
Over time, best practices in content marketing have changed. While it used to be that websites tried to include a bunch of keyword phrases to trick the algorithm, everything is much more sophisticated now.
While keywords are still helpful, adding too many is awkward to read and will make your blog seem less authoritative. Instead, figure out the keyword density you feel comfortable with and shoot for that. Or, if you’re new to keywords and SEO, focus first on writing good-quality blogs with helpful information.
Habit 3: Posting Very Randomly
One of the most important rules to stick to for your business blog is posting on a consistent schedule. Now, there’s some debate as to exactly how often you should post, and there isn’t a hard and fast rule here. However, whatever schedule you decide to have, stick to it.
So, for example, if you’ve decided to post a blog once per week, make sure you aren’t missing weeks at a time. Instead, you can schedule posts ahead of time for when you’ll be busy. Lack of consistency often means the algorithm will ding your blog.
Habit 4: Using Bad or Varying Formatting
Just like with consistency in your posting schedule, you should also have overall consistency in your formatting, tone, and voice. Blogs with the same font, header styles, and image sizes will look better to readers.
Along with this, it’s crucial to stay on brand. This means you want your tone and voice to stay mostly the same from piece to piece. While this might occasionally differ a little if you have a guest blogger, you don’t want to have one post that sounds super dry and business-like and another that’s very upbeat and casual. Instead, figure out the right tone and voice for your audience and stick to that.
If you’re looking for ways to improve your blogging for your brand, ensure you aren’t following any of these bad habits. You might find making a few adjustments makes a big difference.
