5 Blog Post Style Mistakes that would be Harming your Growth

Last updated on 26 November 2024

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Are you making these blog post style errors?

Did you know you could be making grave blog post style mistakes? 

It’s true!

Think about it: when you visit a website, how long do you stick around? 

If the blog post, article or sales page isn’t nice to look at, you’re going to get frustrated and leave. That post might have had what you’re looking for, it might have solved all your problems, but it was so poorly laid out and full of junk that you couldn’t even process the information.

We want that right?

WRONG.

Of course, we don’t want that! We want people to stick around so we can help them out, or encourage them in some way, or teach them something new. 

In this blog post style guide, we’re going to take a look at 5 potential mistakes that you could be making, and some ways to fix them.

1. Your paragraphs are huge
2. There is no variety
3. There arne’t enough images
4. You’re using headings in random places
5. You’re using centre-align

1. Your paragraphs are HUGE

People love white space.

Think about it. How often do you give up if a paragraph is too long? I know I do, a lot.

And that’s not what we want when it comes to keeping people on our blogs. We want to make the experience of reading our posts as comfortable and enjoyable as possible.

Break up your paragraphs so they’re shorter, creating an easy way for the reader’s eye to move on and/or skim-read if they need to.

2. There’s no variety

Your blog post should be a Party Mix and not all Jet Planes.

We have so many great blog post style features at our fingertips, and they’re available for a reason: we should be using them.

By using tools and features such as bullet points, number lists, Headings, images and quotes throughout our posts, we not only break up space and encourage people to keep reading, but we turn our blog posts into something a bit more visually appealing and interesting.

These features and tools are great for Google to know what our post is about and what important pieces of information we want to highlight, but they’re also good for our readers. 

3. You’re not using enough images

Using images not only allows the blog post to be more enjoyable for the readers, but it breaks up the post so it’s not all text. Do you sense a theme coming through this post?

People love images. So many of the platforms we use these days are image and video-based. And while you’re long-form blog content is a bit different, it’s still important to include these elements in our posts. I could have left this post with just an image at the start of the article, and sure, that would be have been fine.

But it wouldn’t have kept you reading. It wouldn’t have meant your eye was cast down to the next time and the words beneath it.

A good rule of thumb, according to Neil Patel, is one photo per 150 words. So for an article of 1,000 words, you’d think about using about 6 – 7 images. Of course, if you post calls for less or for more, add/subtract accordingly.

4. Using Headings in random places

It’s all very good and well to want to emphasise a point, and changing your text to a Heading is one way to make it stand out. HOWEVER!

There are 2 reasons you shouldn’t use Headings randomly:

1. Google actually reads those Headings, so you need to use them for your main points
2. It’s better to break up your points with Headings that make sense, rather than just points of emphasis

In this post, for example, I’ve used Heading 3 to emphasise to Google that each of my 5 blog post style errors are the main features of this post; they’re the main point of the article and I’ve told Google that by using a Heading feature.

If I suddenly wanted to draw your attention to a really great point halfway through a paragraph, I’m not going to make it into a Heading just because it looks nice. It needs to serve a purpose.

5. Centre alignment

BLERGH. Cut it out! While centre-aligned looks great on headings and even in social media posts (I use them a lot over on Instagram!) don’t use centre/center alignment for your long-form writing.

Why’s that, you ask?

You’ll notice that if you’re reading text that is left-aligned, your eye knows exactly where to go when you come to the end of the line of text. Rather than having to guess where to go next, it automatically drops to the line below and right back there at the beginning again. When you have your text centre aligned, the eye of the reader has to jump around far too much, making it uncomfortable to read and much slower.

While centre-align can look really cool, avoid using it for blog posts’ main body of text.

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Getting these blog post style errors fixed and adjusted on your blog will make all the difference to whether people stick around or not. At the end of the day, we blog because we want to encourage, inspire, entertain and educate the people who visit. And to do so, we need to ensure that their experience here on our blog is enjoyable.

Fixing our blog post style errors is one way among many that we can do that.