@tjrobertson52

When I tell people that blogging is the most effective form of digital marketing right now in 2026, I'm often met with funny looks. "

So if you've been blogging and you're not seeing any results, I want to share the three reasons this might be happening. I'm specifically talking to people who are selling an actual product or service. If you're a publisher or anyone who relies on traffic to your website, then blogging really is in trouble right now.

But if you have an actual product or service to sell, there's never been a better time.

The most common reason blogging isn't effective for a company is they're not targeting the right terms. This is very common when the owner or someone in the company takes up blogging. You might be putting a lot of time into writing some really high quality information that your audience really needs to know about, but it's not the kind of information they're searching for.

If no one is searching for the information in an article, no one will ever find the article. And I know you have this really important message to get out, and this information needs to be known about your industry and your business, but it doesn't matter.

Before you waste your time writing content that no one will ever read, you have to figure out what people are actually searching for before they hire a service or buy a product like yours.

The second mistake people make is they don't put the term people are searching for in the title of the article. This is my favorite mistake to find, so it's very easy to fix. One of the first things we do for new clients is find all their pages with this issue, and we can typically see some very quick wins.

You might have an article called "The 5 Mistakes to Avoid After Getting in a Car Accident," but no one searches that way. "

Titles are not the place to be witty or creative. Or use the official name for things. It's not automotive window film, it's window tint.

Just think of the phrase that a person would most likely search for, and that's the title of your article.

And the third mistake is a little more complex, but it's that the article isn't optimized for search. I could make a whole course on how to optimize blog posts for search, and I think I will someday, but I'll just hit a few of the main points.

You want to use bullet points when you're listing things and tables when you're comparing things. For AI search, you want a very high fact density. Site-specific facts and statistics to back up your main points and to influence the AI's recommendation.

You need to explicitly mention your brand as a solution.

There's a lot more I could say about optimization, but the main point I want to make is that if you don't choose the right topic, and if you don't get the term into your title, nothing else matters.