So, you created a brand new website with an excellent design and user interface, but something’s still missing. You need to fill in your well-designed pages with content that will help your pages rank on Google search and generate traffic. One of the best ways to add great content and boost SEO for your website is to maintain a blog full of interesting and relevant posts.
Regularly updated blogs are beneficial to search engine placement. They can position you as an expert in your industry who cares about solving problems and providing information for your customers.
A great deal of work goes into creating an effective and captivating blog for your website, but once you get the basics down, it becomes pretty easy - and fun!
The first thing you need to do when starting a blog is to decide what topics you will cover. The best way to choose topics for your blog is to listen to your clients or customers. Take notes when you have conversations with them and look for the following:
Any of these can lead to great topics for creating blog posts that will be of genuine interest to current or potential consumers.
You can also discover customer pain points and interests by conducting industry-specific keyword research using a tool like SEMRush. Marketing data and analysis tools help you find high volume keywords and topic suggestions for blog content that will help drive traffic to your website. SEMRush is an effective platform because you can manage so many different aspects of your content strategy, and you can even see what your competitors are doing with their content.
Use your keyword and topic research to create a content calendar so you know what you need to write for your blog and when. This will alleviate any anxiety about coming up with a topic last minute.
When planning your blog posts, remember that consistency is key. You want to make sure you are posting around the same time each day, week, or month, depending on how often you choose to post. This way, readers know exactly when to come back for more if they like what you are posting. Additionally, regularly updated and relevant content can increase your chances of ranking well in search results.
How often should you post to your blog? This really depends on how much time you have to spend on your blog and what type of blog you want to maintain. In general, writing a blog once per month is the minimum frequency for consistent publishing. However, if you’re only posting once per month, you want to make sure your posts pack a punch by being well-researched and informative.
Some people have time to create content for their blog every day, but these posts tend to be more conversational or social and less about problem-solving or being informative. Ultimately, what you write and how often depends on the purpose you want your blog to have, but well-researched and useful blog posts tend to get the most traffic over time.
When you sit down to write your blog, make sure you have a consistent tone and voice that carries over for each blog post. Again, consistency is key. If you wrote your first successful blog post in the first person with a light-hearted tone, keep writing from that perspective and voice.
In addition to consistency in writing style, you also want to make sure you use proper grammar and SEO formatting. Utilizing SEO formatting tricks will ensure your content has a better chance of ranking high on Google searches. There is a lot of controversy surrounding what exactly Google crawlers are looking for when it comes to content, but here are some tips we like to go by:
Length: Any web page on your website should have at least 300 words to be seen as a relevant search result for users. Blog posts should be at least 500 words, but the more you can inform the reader, the better. Most professional bloggers suggest you write blog posts that are no shorter than 1500 words.
Section Headers: Break apart your content into sections with section headers, and write section headers to optimize for keywords. Your main headline (H1) should include the search keyword you want to rank for on Google searches. H2s (section headers) should also contain the keyword or related keywords, and they should support your main headline. The next level of section headers, H3s or subheadings, should support your H2 headers.
Section and Paragraph Length: Each section within your blog should be no longer than 300 words. Also, you want to break paragraphs up into small, easy-to-consume parts. This format may go against what you learned in your writing class in school, but paragraphs of 2-3 sentences are easier to take in for lower-level readers and scrollers. If you can turn a few sentences into a bulleted list, even better! Make sure you sandwich the list between full sentences or paragraphs.
While a lot goes into creating excellent blog posts that are interesting to potential customers and written for SEO, it gets easier the more you do it. Use Google Analytics to track which blog pages are getting the most hits and how much time people are spending on individual posts to get an idea of what is working and what isn’t.
The more you work on your blog, the more second nature it will become. With enough practice, your blog can become a web traffic generating machine.
A great content marketing strategy should always include blogging. Bell Media, Zeekee’s parent company, is a leading digital marketing agency focused on delivering desired business outcomes for clients, including content marketing. The content marketing team at Bell Media is always researching the latest trends for content creation and how best to get that content in front of target consumers.
If you are interested in pursuing a more robust digital marketing strategy for search engine dominance, contact Bell Media today.
