Writing Blog Posts to 'Get SEO Traffic'? Here's Why Most of Them Fail.

You have probably seen the claim that 87% of blog posts written "for SEO" fail. I cannot verify that exact number, and I would not plan a budget around it. What I can tell you is what I find when I open the hood on business blogs: the posts rarely fail because the writing is bad. They fail because of a handful of structural content mistakes that no amount of extra posting will fix.

If someone is telling you "we just need more posts to get more traffic", this one is for you.

The content mistakes that sink most SEO blogs

Here is a story I see a version of every few weeks. A business owner hires someone to "do SEO" (search engine optimization, which simply means getting found on Google without paying for ads). That person starts publishing two to four blog posts a month.

Six months later, the posts are live, the reports look busy, and the phone is no busier than before. The usual explanation is "SEO takes time, we need more content." So more posts get written.

When I audit a blog like that, I do not start by reading the posts. I ask Google three questions about each one:

Do you actually keep this page in your index (Google's library of pages it is willing to show)?

Who are you showing it to?

Did anyone click?

The answers are usually brutal. On one site I checked this week, I sampled 19 pages and Google had only 6 of them in its index. The other 13 were not losing the race. They were never entered into it.

Mistake one: Google read the post and decided not to keep it

Most owners assume that once a page is published, Google has it. Not so. Google decides page by page whether something is worth keeping, and it is getting pickier every year.

In Google Search Console (a free Google tool that shows how your site appears in search), you will often see two quiet labels on blog posts:

"Crawled, currently not indexed": Google visited the page, read it, and chose not to keep it.

"Discovered, currently not indexed": Google knows the page exists and has not even bothered to visit.

The most common cause is repetition. When a site publishes ten posts that are close cousins of each other ("Best sculptures for the office", "Best sculptures for the bedroom", "Best sculptures for the living room"), Google keeps a few and ignores the rest. Worse, that doubt can spread to the pages you actually care about. On an online store I reviewed recently, most of the product pages were missing from Google entirely, while a stack of thin blog posts about those same products were the ones getting shown.

More posts in that situation do not help. They make the problem bigger.

Mistake two: your blog is competing with the page that makes you money

Take a family law firm in Chicago (a composite of a few firms I have looked at). They have a solid page about divorce representation. Then their content plan adds "What does a divorce lawyer do?", "How to choose a divorce lawyer in Illinois", "Divorce lawyer vs mediator" and "Top questions to ask your divorce lawyer".

Each post is decent on its own. Together, they confuse Google about which page is the real answer for "divorce lawyer Chicago". So Google rotates between them, and the service page (the one with the contact form) slides from the first page to the second. Traffic to the blog goes up a little. Calls go down.

This is the content mistake I see most often on service businesses, and it is invisible unless you look at which page Google shows for each search. The fix is not deleting everything. It is choosing one main page per topic, folding the overlapping posts into it, and having every related post link to that page.

Mistake three: writing for searches that never turn into customers

The third failure is a mismatch between what the post is about and what your buyers actually type.

Some posts target words nobody searches. Others target searches that are popular but will never become a customer, like broad "what is" questions from students. And some get shown thousands of times without a single click. One site I looked at appeared more than 37,000 times for one search phrase and got zero clicks, ever. That kind of number looks great in a monthly report and puts nothing in your calendar.

Here is how I translate what owners see into what is usually going on:

If your blog looks like one or two of these rows, let's talk. I will tell you which posts are worth keeping before you pay anyone to write a single new one.

How to check your own blog in about 30 minutes

You do not need a developer for this. You need access to Google Search Console and a cup of coffee.

Open the Pages report. Look at how many of your pages are "Indexed" versus "Not indexed". If more than a third of your blog sits in "Not indexed", stop publishing and fix that first.

Open the Performance report, set the date range to the last 3 months, and sort pages by clicks. Write down every blog post with zero clicks.

Inspect the worst ten. Paste each address into the search bar at the top of Search Console. It will tell you whether Google keeps the page, and when it last visited.

Look for near-duplicates. Any two posts that answer the same question should become one stronger post. Send the old address to the new one with a redirect (an automatic forward, so visitors and Google land on the right page).

Link every post to one service page, and make sure that service page links back to its best posts.

Change one thing at a time and write down the date. Compare the four weeks before with the four weeks after. If a change made things worse, undo it.

That last step is the one almost nobody does. I have seen a site get new titles on its best pages, lose more than half of its Google visibility over the following months, and nobody connected the two because nobody was comparing before and after.

If you would rather have someone do this for you, this kind of audit is the first thing I do in any SEO engagement. When the problems turn out to be in how the site itself is built (slow pages, messy addresses, tag pages nobody needs), that is a website project, not a writing one. You can see how I run both on my process page, and the questions people ask me most are on my FAQ.

What to publish instead

I am not against blogging. I am against blogging as a reflex. A small number of strong pages, each answering one question your buyers actually ask, will beat a weekly stream of filler every time. I wrote about the formats that work best in 22 blog posts earned 20 clicks, and the short version still holds: answer pages, comparison pages and real case examples beat generic articles.

For most small businesses, that means:

Fewer posts. Two genuinely useful pieces a month beat eight thin ones.

One page per question. No cousins, no near-copies.

Every post points to a service page, with a clear next step for the reader.

Measured, not assumed. Every change gets a before and after.

The Bottom Line

The biggest content mistakes are not about writing. They are posts Google never keeps, posts that compete with your own service pages, and posts aimed at searches that never buy. Fix those three before you publish anything new, and the posts you already have will finally start working.

If you want a straight answer on which of your posts are helping and which are hurting, get in touch.